Yo, everybody needs to check out this pun and feel their soul die so I'm not alone in this.

Hmm, not something I usually think of in terms of computers, but it actually makes sense--binary language really does mean binary, even if we compound it out enough to conceal that.

I feel this is less "orality" and more "surly Russians"

Two things: first, in other writings by Ong where he uses this situation, he cites the loss of Roman baby talk, a purely oral, mostly feminine form of the language that we have forever lost to history. Second, this also reminds me of Nina Baym's "Melodramas of Beset Manhood," and her assertion of the male "literature" and female "best seller" and how historically they've been opposed.

I feel this is one of those "gif" situations where pronouncing it "S-Q-L" or "sequel" can lead to much gnashing of teeth where disagreements occur.

Looked it up--we've got this as an ebook in the library. Text is the literal text of the book, and different variations have different texts, but the same story. The fabula is the "world" the story takes place in--so if there's a revelation in flashback, the fabula is how the story holds together that that flashback information was always in the story world, even when the reader didn't know what was up.

This is a 2007 paper, so it might be worth taking this example--data and narrative in economics--and consider it in the context of the 2008 Housing Crash. One of the thing that's struck me with retrospectives on the event is how much it emphasizes that the crash came from bad models as much as greed--it was an over reliance on (badly sourced) data instead of heeding things that seemed off as much as the story of willful ignorance of data in favor of a rosy narrative.

The class on The Rhetorical Situation brought up discussion on the evolving notion of "weather" as a changeable, even rhetorical, thing. Moving to integrate database and narrative as symbionts makes a connection between data and delivery/appeal.

So an interesting thing about this article is that i's part of a set of articles, all responding to the same essay by Ed Folsom about the Whitman Archive. Jerome McGann (big name in digital humanities) slammed it, saying he didn't understand what a database was. Meredith McGill criticizes a number of things he claims his archive can do. Hayles is actually pretty friendly to Folsom, and in his response, he mentions he wants to make use of her "natural symbionts" phrasing.

Generally, a pretty cool book about new media, even though it's old enough to start making college visits.

This is apparently not so certain now. There have definitely been some independent syllabaries and the like, and it's possible that there were more independent proto-alphabets at the time.

I feel the situation with this has evolved in the past few years in how we look at "technology." Ian Bogost has an article about this, and how Facebook is called a tech company, while General Electric, which extensively develops new technology, is not. Technology has left behind the factory and gone into the cloud, but all of those places are technological.

YEAH

Ong's using "thing" in the sense of a material object, but it'd be worth looking at this line in the context of "thing" and "ding"

Former SLU faculty and a really remarkable guy. I've been trawling through the archives and interviewing former colleagues and students of Ong for an ongoing project, and I'm continuously struck by the personality that comes across. You don't really see it in his published works, but his lectures have these corny, not-really-a-joke jokes ("it's agreed that these epic poems were either written by Homer, or by another man of the same name") in them. Also, this essay is a good example of him touching on history, archaeology, musicology, ancient Greek, and a bit of Freud, so if you're like me and a hugely disorganized mess of interests, Ong's a lot of fun.

Seriously, if you get the chance, check out the archives, digitized or the whole thing. You can find his poetry from before the US entered WW2 all the way to discussions about flame wars in the early 90s.

The inverse of the "Whopper Virgin" approach.

Although I would say the next few lines have a nice parallel with Canguilhem tracing how anatomical understandings of human body parts, though generally a constant of the last 6000+ years, "evolve" from new technologies that we can apply to our own bodies.

Interesting to play this off the phrase "microaggression," a term for the casual, unrealized degradation of a minority group. The micropolitical emphasizes the smallness of the action, but also the way in which these tensions stem from frequently nonrealized and "nonconscious" ideas. Unlike microaggression, though, micropolitical emphasizes a broader network of interactions, relationships, and dynamics, which might be helpful in sidestepping the inevitable defensiveness that follows the phrase.

Thinking more on Kathryn's point above, "practice makes perfect" is a phrase that presupposes a "perfection" that is rooted in the practice. After all, practicing my lines for Shakespeare (btw Happy Late B-day, Will) isn't me just bellowing words, it's rehearsing against a script. So in the original phrase, practice makes perfect as made by practice

Oh, hey, that's you, ain't it?

Although I wouldn't overstate it's importance to contemporary rhetorical practice, "Reflection" is the third, and kind of also the final, step in the Ignatian paradigm of teaching. It's very much a process of looking back at past experiences and actions and reassessing them, and I'm interested in how those practices work with Boyles' warning that excess metacognition can become a bad habit of division.

It's funny to me that the previous 7 of the 8 habits are terms any high schooler would recognize, then "metacognition" at the end. I suppose we should put up some "Pass It On" billboards for "Metacognition"

Last year, as an incoming graduate student, I had to sit through a bunch of talks about my health insurance and, discomfortingly, the rules on dating undergrads. Anyways, one of the talks was by a vice-dean of something trying to encourage more interdisciplinary fraternization. But he asked us, which profession writes the most? Apparently, it's engineers, from all the paperwork, memos, and other communication.

I actually have no idea if that anecdote was true, but it does seem in-line with Latour's point.

Plus, while we think of ants as a hierarchical species (Queens>Drones>Workers, etc.), Queens really only exist to pump out eggs and don't give any oversight or leadership. The entire colony functions as a complex society without anything resembling discrete, individual deciders.

And both have a key connection to Satan, Prince of Lies.

By explicitly invoking the theater with the actor image, Latour shifts the metaphor to one that involves not only the monologue and the monologuer, but also the director, stage designer, the props master, and the stagehands. Compared to my earlier invocation of Boal and Theatre of the Oppressed, Latour seems to emphasize Brecht's Dialectical/Epic Theatre, which wears it's stagedness on its sleeve. I try to recommend my 1900 students check out the theater on campus, because so many of the under-examined elements of presentation are clearly explicit choices.

We're finally moving from the "pretty sure this author is still alive" to "Pretty sure this author is still alive"

So, uh, take that Barthes

I'm looking at this in the context of McLuhan's argument for technology as an extension of the human being. It seems to me that Barad also sees the "human" as extended beyond the materially contiguous body, but also in terms of reverse, humans as an extension of worldly processes, extended through us. The "person" stops being a discrete, immiscible beings, but "specific local parts" operating in "mutually implicated" elements of the world.

This concept stands much more in line with Hume's take on human consciousness as another bundle of sensory impressions instead of Descartes' cogito (with this video as a refresher). If a "human" is the phenomena of collision and configuring of boundaries, there isn't a core "you" that exists outside these interactions between the human and nonhuman.

Something Latour does in We Have Never Been Modern is highlight Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes as both scientists and social theorists, in spite of later, Modern divisions between the fields. He sees them differing in both fields on the same issue, related to the air pump and whether impartial observers or mathematical calculations as the verification of knowledge.

Could make a connection to Booth's move to "cast some doubt on doubt". We've gone so far in one direction, we've forgotten that we were headed in a direction in the first place.

Thinking about this in terms of Augusto Boal's Theater of the Oppressed, and the use of theater games to help people understand situations through performance, rather than through tools like discussion. He terms the participants "spect-actors," moving them from outside spectators to inside participants through various role-playing games.

Particularly, Barad's line about "unexamined habits of the mind" draws my attention. Boal's spect-actor is often caught in moments of invisible theater, having an emotional response to a (later revealed to have been staged) event, then forced to examine those responses.

When I made my last post about the Gaia Hypothesis, I'd already read this part, but I only just now realized that the Daisyworld simulation is actually really relevant to this. It's a model of a planet that has only white and black daisies (high and low albedo, so one reflects light and cools the planet, and the other does the reverse), and how the two species can unintentionally create and preserve homeostasis on the planet simply by following the light.

I feel that Ong addresses this, though? He draws a lot from McLuhan's point that fascism emerged from radio broadcasts, and while skimming my Ong books, I'm not finding much on the telephone, he certainly looks at technologically-mediated orality as something distinct from the usual paradigm?

Though not in the Burke we read, he does make a point that between Cicero and Augustine, there's a meaningful shift in Rhetoric from "to move" (movere) to "to bend" (flectere). Muckelbauer adding the Presocratic "to turn" makes for an interesting track between the three. Turning and bending both leave the subject in the same "place," but a bent subject is changed while a turned one pivots. Although, I am also open to the possibility that translation from Ancient Greek and Latin to English might be leading me down a less-than-useful path.

James Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis originated slightly before 1967, but he was working for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, so in many ways, he already was working off a mental image of the Earth seen from the outside.

Sidenote, but I first encountered the Gaia Hypothesis because the game SimEarth (which is built around modeling and playing with the concept) had a whole essay about it bundled in the game. I was way too young to really grasp the game without blatantly cheating (which feels like a worrying allegory), but I really remember the essay, along with SimCity's hidden essays on urban design and the character of cities. I'm trying to think if any video game since the Sim series has had a similar connection to an academic discipline.

If you go to a parking garage and look at spaces that are adjacent to the concrete pillars, you'll see that most drivers give way more berth to the pillars than the car parked next to them. This, logically, makes no sense--if I scratch the pillar, I'll ding my car's paint job, but it I scratch the neighboring car, I'll not only ding my car, but I might be on the hook for damage to my neighbor's. And when it's a beat-up Taurus with rust holes, there's no logical sense for why I'm more cautious to the pillar. But under Latour's model, the pillar, with it's solid, imposing concrete, makes the better argument to be careful, even "making the weaker case the stronger" as rhetoric has been accused of earlier in this class.

In Rhetorica, we us "a group of friends trying to reach consensus on pizza toppings" as our go-to hypothetical for a scene of deliberative rhetoric.

This draws me back to an annotation I made all the way back to Vico about the history of Rhetoric and its connection to autocratic states. Under the Aristotelian model, that doesn't make sense (though Kathryn's response opens up the door for a pressure-valve of rabble rousing).

I'm not versed in The History of Sexuality, but I know it's been quoted in this class before: can someone fill me in on what Foucault means here?

And just after Thursday's class gave such an appealing description of it!

I've alluded to this earlier, but I'm fascinated by the saga of Juicero, a 400 dollar kuireg for juice, only you can hand squeeze the juice out of the packages. Which means that the only function of the Juicero itself is to connect that package with an internet database that tells you when the juice is expired. What's really interesting, though, is the investors grumbling that they wouldn't have invested in juice packs--internet of juice is sincerely what they wanted in the world.

The speaker at the Ong symposium this year was all about how digitization of books encourages a singular location and instance of a book, and all the problems that entails. That's interesting with this essay, and how Facebook and Google work to encourage a singular instance of a person. Google+, for all it's glaring issues, let you cultivate multiple categories of friends who could see X, Y, or Z, but I only have one facebook profile, for professional colleagues, family, and friends. Youtube doesn't like that I have two Gmail accounts, and tries to switch up which one is ending up on my user history. The language of control suggests guidance, someone directing the system, but there's also the risk of how blind, automated systems guide us.

Cannot remember if this was a real thing on Facebook or not, but it sounds super real.

This is a 2008 book, but by then, we were already seeing a shift away from related, three-dimensional spaces, like forums and a chatroom, towards walls and feeds. Video games still keep the image of the "cyber world," but the internet's gotten much flatter since I first started browsing.

They seem to be picking up on a trend that would be exemplified in the Apple Watch, which was designed as part of a push to interface your home network of digital systems (TV, thermostat, $400 Juicer) through your phone, and controlled through a device strapped to your body.

This is an interesting choice of photo--the bridge is contained in the top half and the right third of the photo, and the angle/compression/lighting is making it hard to discern the particulars of the bridge. Other photos are obviously available), so I assume it's to emphasize the bridge as an element of the city, rather than one that emphasizes it as an architectural span over water.

I feel that this is the significant turn from last week's readings. Continuing from attempts from Biesecker et al. to disrupt the rhetor-opponent-audience triangle, posthuman rhetoric is looking beyond the exclusively human dynamics of that triangle.

"Differance obliges us to read chicken-egg discourses as processes entailing the discursive production of birds..."

Not to echo Kathryn, but I do feel that this answer is a little unsatisfying.

Returns us to the concepts of Personalism, though I feel Frankl would argue we don't really think of the audience as another "I" as a default.

Oh. Actually, now I get all the strike-throughs when he writes about erasure

Continuing the noble tradition allegedly started by Corax and Tisias of rhetorical arguments being proved by making them.

Rhetoric is not just the ability to argue a point, but to identify the point you wish to argue in the first place.

Consigny quotes Bitzer's note that rhetorical situations may be "loosely structured" on the last page, and I'm interested in this quote as Consigny's response to that. How stable and determinate are these real issues? The criticism of Bitzer really seems to capitalize on the unknowable totality of a situation, so identify the situation is always incomplete. Do we bomb Iraq as a response to a fear of looking weak, a need for MIC profitability, or a sincere perception of danger? Even smaller cases, like with Bitzer's primitive rhetorics, the command to fulfill a task could always have ulterior motives the issuer isn't even wholly aware of.

This, though, I think is pretty interesting. It reminds me of the issues with organizations like the Federal Reserve, who need to cloak everything in secrecy because speaking of the the thing changes the thing.

I would say that Aiken's situation wasn't in Vietnam, it was in the US and it was that the Vietnam War was unpopular. Sure, you can contest if that's a discrete situation, but Aiken's responding to something, not seeking something out.

Making a lot of money? National pride? Belief in the superiority of liberal capitalism? A historical perspective that focuses on the difficulty the American military had mobilizing in the 19th and early 20th century? A sincere fear of the outside world and belief that strong military spending can protect them?

I may be missing Vatz point, but I don't think Bitzer would define "positive modification" as an absolute unquestioned good, but that someone has to have some cause for desire. The MIC has a load of very obvious reasons behind it, reasons I might not personally agree with or be persuaded by, but it has a whole bunch of really obvious "positive modifications" that can be found.

Surprised nobody's beat me to this post, but Phenomenology is the philosophy of consciousness and experience. Like the video summary of Hume v. Descartes, phenomenology looks at things and consciousness as "bundles" of experiences, though more than Hume's pure sensory approach, since it includes the larger elements of "experience" as well.

I've been thinking about the internet arguments, mentioned in class, where neither side seems interested in persuasion, and instead just sort of perform their side's argument. On the Internet, audiences are vague, shadowy things (I'm fond of the forum term of the "lurker," someone who reads the forums but doesn't post, and might not even have an account) that come across these arguments through retweets and crosslinks from friends-of-friends. These audiences are the actual target of these arguments, either to rally the base or to persuade moderates to take a more extreme side because they break the situation down into a binary between the one side and the enemy. Every content aggregator article that contains the word "eviscerates" demonstrates that this is a popular form of argument, but does it actually have a situation? Or is its audience entirely fictional?

It's interesting that "primitive" is the keyword here, we still use basic, monosyllabic commands and signals in our technological, complex society when we're in similar circumstances (for instance, signaling someone for backing up a truck with "Keep going" and "STOP"), and nowadays we have a greater presence of voice commands in technology ("Okay Google Navigate Home" "Siri Call Jenna"). But at the same time, this line really speaks to me as a teacher, when I annotate a student's paper and try not to just write "Interesting" or "Don't do that," and try to contort it into a full paragraph of advice, because that's What Advice Looks Like. Even if it's just "I laughed at your joke"

As I understand it, this guy but rhetorical

Booth quotes Russell a lot, so I'll link Russell's teapot here. Basically, maybe there's a teapot orbiting the Earth? But if a believer in that teapot was trying to persuade someone to believe in the teapot, the burden of proof is to prove it, not disprove it.

Apparently, my old grade school is no longer using the ITBS. My mom's a third grade teacher; I've never heard anything good about it as a diagnostic or assessment tool.

Kathryn's post on the next page kind of builds on this, but this parable shows the Monkey's use of signifyin(g) as a means to manipulate the Lion by turning his confidence (the product of his strength) to his own limitations, and with it, defeat.

"The Signifying Motherfucker" would have been a very different title.

This is something that seems relevant to The Well Wrought Urn and the heresy of paraphrase, which argues that poetry can't be treated as reducible to quotes and snippets of text.

Ah, we've entered the era of prefixes in parentheses

This is interesting with Kathryn's note that she doesn't translate her mother's tongue. Is Nune speaking English to Gloria?

Something familiar from the Cixous reading. And much like Cixous, Anzaldua has an active, boisterous voice in her writing.

This is the origin of the name of the political group, La Raza.

With my earlier post about Anzaldua paralleling her body with her language, here, she uses that connection with other bodies connected by language and imagination.

So you know how we talked about how Cixous writes like she's giving a speech and Derrida's essay is actually a lecture script, so he signs it? I love that Anzaldua is writing her essay as though she's speaking from before the point it's published. She situates herself in a very particular and pseudo-impossible time here.

This line is gold.

Easy connection with Rickert and the notions of shamanistic transcendence of the body.

Which causes some other interesting issues, because many Brazilians don't identify as "Hispanic," because they're of Portuguese descent. I remember seeing a shirt for sale at a Mexican culture festival on Cherokee that had an insistent "Mexican: Not Hispanic, Not Latino" on it, with a fairly length explanation, for a shirt, as to why they wouldn't go by the other terms.

Yeah, it's that "La Cucaracha." The wikipedia page has a really interesting set of all the different versions associated with different corrido figures and political movements.

The smaller text and indent implies its a quotation, but she doesn't cite an author? Am I missing something here?

Though I'd like to also use this annotation to say I really like what Anzaldua does with these quotations--they're not just serving as headers, but interstitched throughout the sections. Some of the earlier ones were much more loosely connected to their sections, too, which has an interesting effect for the reader.

Play that off with Douglass whose body was a text and his text was compromised from his body, here, Anzaldua parallels insulting her language with suffering physical harm.

For as difficult as it was making sense of the postmodern writers, Anzaldua's patois raises some really interesting and unique issues for my reading. I have two semesters of Spanish from half a decade ago, plus google, but also talking with my San Antonian wife, and the difference (or differance) between the results with these words is interesting.

I really like that this section, that is very much concerned with location and identity, starts with identifying the mouth and tongue as a location for rhetoric. It also identifies it with a metaphor of wealth, that there's an internal treasure that is being pulled from her.

Seems like a line important to underscore, and phrased in a very nice way.

This line is interesting, and loaded. Because we can't ever absolutely know the other's perspective, we have to construct a fiction, and a perspective that we believe lends them every possible liberty might still be us painting the other with a broad, uncharitable brush.

Reminds me of Viktor Frankl and Personalism, "Seeing everyone as another I." Here's a link about it, it was a very big philosophy with Pope John Paul II.

e. Particularly, with Corder's later point, it reminds me of Frankl's experience meeting with a fellow concentration camp survivor, this one being a survivor of the Soviet Gulag, telling him about a fellow prisoner who had been a leader, inspiration, and hero among them, and kept them alive. He names him, and his hero prisoner happened to be one of the guards from Frankl's camp, a particularly brutal one.

I'm reading this article very much from the perspective of a former B2B telemarketer, which is the extreme opposite end of the therapist-client relationship. 1) People (especially gatekeepers) hate telemarketers, and 2) people hate spending money, especially when someone else is trying to get them to do it. So much of our strategy was about sidestepping, trying to reframe the situation so it's now outside of their steadfast narratives and making it seem like we're building understanding and mutually helping each other out. Though it's pure deception--my product was terrible and those jackasses with the pocketbook could burn for all I cared.

I almost want to call up my asshole former boss, a former stockbroker from New Jersey who was all about the hard sell, and chat him up about this.

Very relevant for the 1900 class, explaining to students that you can't just drop a study or a pile of numbers on an opponent--logos is an artistic appeal, you have to go to what seems rational.

Folksy!

Connection with Nietzsche's construction on running water Yeah, it's only made out of spiderwebs and isn't invincible, but it's quite literally good enough for government work, and we can build a civilization on it.

Effectively, we never stop doing rhetoric, and rhetoric never stops being done to us. With the prior note, our personal identity, rather than being a remove by which we can judge these rhetorical influences, is made up by these contrasting and deflecting influences.

I wonder how broadly Booth interprets stakeholders in these questions. Obviously, Jews have a place in the Holocaust question, but in something like Global Warming, which has a vague-but-global effect, could you create a real consensus?

Booth really emphasizes "common sense" as "the sense that is common between parties," rather than the gee-shucks folksy wisdom it's often defined as.

Well, that's a jumbled set of phonemes. Seriously, try reading it out loud, that last syllable is a mess.

Could connect this with Ebert's earlier-discussed approach of rating a movie in terms of "what it's trying to be." Denies the idea of a linear continuity of quality with art, which sits at the heart of Blair's notions of taste.

Pretty sure this is Colonel Sanders with different facial hair.

Have we seen an aside like this before? This forward seems to be written a little differently than what we've seen before, which might be appropriate for a postmodern.

Clément's making a move similar to St. Augustine and the Spoils of Egypt, which allows Christians to make use of Pagan rhetorical traditions, because there's no reason not to take them, but more importantly, Rhetoric doesn't belong to them.

"Are you master of the situation? 'He that ruleth his spirit is better than he who taketh a city.' Now is your chance for mastery."

Connection to Spinoza's "What Can A Body Do?"

Just wanted to highlight a good line. Also, a good example of Cixous' style, as I noted in my earlier annotation.

Fancy word for "penis envy," which is a concept that did need a fancy word. Interesting Google results!

Another line building on the use of texts to construct the self, and I'm interested in her move to go from "flesh and blood" to baking bread to this autumnal estuary. Less of a singular organism to a networked ecosystem, perhaps?

I thought that was the whole point of Dora? At the end, Freud pretty much admits he's been projecting his ideas onto her, because he wants to be desired, and she's much more of an agent than he originally thought. I'll give some credit to Sigmund, though: Mr. K pretty explicitly sent Dora to him in order to shut her up and take back her accusations, but Freud believed her story from Day 1. That's not a common thing today, much less early 20th Century.

We've talked a lot about embodied rhetoric for women, and the importance of acknowledging a rhetor's body, actions, and delivery as much as their words. But I'm also interested in this because Cixous' writing style is extremely animated: this almost sounds like a speech.

Also, this reminds me of Kathryn's comment on Sarah Mallet using her seizures to legitimize her preaching.

A little Whitman-esque? "I am large, I contain multitudes" and all that.

Alright, so a rejection of a nihilistic rejection of meaning, but at the same time, I'm not sure I'm so following his point on how to achieve that.

My guess: like with the signature example, just because we don't have a master-reference doesn't mean we can't make pragmatic associations, but it does mean we can't assume there exists a master-reference, and any system that assumes it (e.g. Sheridan's "correct" enunciations, Blair's belief in naturally-inclined taste) is inherently leading to failure. Deconstruction breaks down those structures... but I'm still lost as to what comes next. Bail me out, here.

I appreciate the gesture, Jacques.

An additional flourish on the signature, to make it more distinct and personal. I've been pretty lost for the past 5 pages, but I do like this signature metaphor. We sign things nearly as often as people in the 20th Century did, but we've gotten a lot sloppier thanks to shoddy e-signing on credit card machines. Still, I can look at my signatures and identify them as mine, even though there's no master-signature for me to compare them against. There's a scene in the novel The Talented Mr. Ripley where the bank investigating the disappearance of Tom Ripley does a signature analysis of his recent checks, but they underestimate how long Dickey's been impersonating Tom, so that they're comparing those checks against earlier forgeries.

I kind of get the "abracadabra," but no idea what this is referencing. Google is turning up a song? Le vert est ou turns up less. Is it just a nonsense phrase selected for being a nonsense phrase?

It's interesting with examples of current undeciphered writing, such as the Voynich Manuscript and the Beale cipher, since it implies they're all crackable so long as they are not nonsense. The following sentence feels like something important to that, that languages are constituted as an iterable network, a sustained internal logic.

Another interesting option for people with more of a STEM background, but this notion of deriving as it applies to language and literature is interesting. Derrida calls it "decomposition," and I get the resonance in that word choice, but I think the mathematical metaphor of finding f'(x) of a language function is an interesting crossover.

Connection from my very first micro-response, this notion of absence and distance is interesting with writing that is intended to reflect back at you, as with Athanasius' journals or the shaman walls of Rickert

My STEM background pretty much ended with AP Bio, but I don't think scientists would even attempt a strict definition of context--ceteris paribus is only for modeling purposes, and independent variables can be accounted for, but never universally. Georges Canguilhem, who we encountered in the Lemos reading, has a bit in Knowledge of Life that goes through all the ways what applies to one organism doesn't necessarily apply to another organism.

I would define polysemy here, but I think that would be missing the point.

One possible meaning of the word, though, is a word that has multiple meanings. I can't find any other meanings, which seems like a remarkable oversight

In French, there's no difference (and now you see the pun!) in how "differance" and "difference" are pronounced, they're homophones, and also there are like two other puns going on in the nonsense language that is French (quatre-vingt, I'm looking at you), none of which translates into English.

I think it's really important for reading Derrida to grasp that this is a guy who loves punning and language play, because pretty much all of this is going to be spinning donuts on the concept of stability.

I have never been able to reconcile this with Ong's approach, that even writing involves sounding words out in your head. The text here is making it out that Derrida's only using it as an example, that both are equally at a remove, which, fair enough, but I'm not seeing how writing has primacy over speech. Bail me out here, y'all.

I prefer the "there is no outside-text" translation, cause Spivak's translation makes it sound like a criticism of things like these annotations, when really, he's just saying there's no outside reference, as the text explains in the next sentence. But I've always found the outside-text to be a clearer way of getting that across.

I presume he's having a laugh at someone's belief in a universal audience

I do not want to learn his methodology at all

"All right. But on my way, I'm going to be doing this" "If you get hit, it's your own fault"

This makes me think of figures like Väinämöinen, the epic hero of the Finnish Kalevala, who defeats his enemies via song and sings castles into being. We can do that today, only more in the way of "I speak today on behalf of H.R. 1070, the 'Seriously, Let's Build a Castle Act'" instead of commanding the rocks through song. But the concept is one and the same.

I take this with the notorious "I did not intend my statement to be interpreted as racist" defense, but I also feel it could be run backwards, in that you should praise even accidental brilliance as much as you'd condemn accidental error.

Obviously, Burke is writing this in anticipation of Jurassic Park, which is pretty much entirely about this section. There's a pair of paleontologists whose dig financing is contingent on them legitimizing a theme park. There's the capitalist who claims to just want to tell a story while cutting corners on safety equipment. Jeff Golblum's in it. Hell, the fact that it's an industrial disaster movie dressed up with "Man treading in God's domain" just makes it all the more apt.

Interesting with the bit I had on Tim Kreider. Art is not just better propaganda, it can never not be propaganda.

When I argue with my cat, for instance, I am really just shouting at myself.

I am considering this in the context of my elaboration on Willard--communication always dwells in a gray space, between allies and enemies. Sometimes your enemies recognize and understand your terms better than your nominal allies do, because they understand your goals as something to be stopped, while sometimes your allies are more interested in being a part of a movement than in what the movement's actually about.

This and the parenthetical, written only 5 years after Hitler's suicide, seems really important for how we perceive Hitler (and all authoritarians). We have a tendency to accept their own logic, to assume that Hitler was a commanding, forceful leader instead of someone often suffering from internal indecisiveness and inter-organizational sniping. "Made the trains run on time" and all that, even though Hitler and Mussolini's fascist regimes were consumed by bureaucratic infighting and disorder.

Thinking with Carl Von Clausewitz's theory that war is an extension of a nation's politics, the dialectical synthesis of the political sphere and physical violence.

All this talk of grounding is going to be really important when we get to Derrida and deconstruction. Burke seems to believe in the grounding, the scene, but it's often mutable, unstable, and ambiguous. Derrida's just gonna drop the bottom out and see how it falls.

I'm quite fond of this line. First, it addresses the usual rejection of the symbolic in fiction that you get from people about books and movies, but second, it really gets to blurring divides, in fiction and reality, that I see a lot of with Burke's later takes on literature/poetics and rhetoric.

It also includes a pun that makes this unnecessarily confusing, which is just so apt.

Unfortunately, he never wrote the third "of Motives" book that would let us see his right side profile.

Burke is important for a lot of reasons, but really, to me, he's the guy who explains why Harry Potter fits into the Rhetorical Tradition, and I can't think of anything more important than that.

The sophists were accused of making small things seem great and vice versa, which seems particularly relevant for this. Hearing great language for small things might be trickery, or it might be that the speaker has a perspective that sees the subject as itself a great thing

Point raised by Fr. Ong in The Presence of the Word "With the appearance of what we have called the sound-sight split in Latin, that stream of the language which developed into the modern romance vernaculars remained in use in the home, but the other stream known as Learned Latin, which moved only in artificially controlled channels through the male world of the schools was no longer anyone's mother tongue, in a quite literal sense." There was an active language-world for women in ancient Rome, but its one that was not recorded, and is now lost to time.

The cartoonist and essayist Tim Kreider wrote a piece (which, like a lot of his work, now seems to be gone from the Internet) arguing that, as a political cartoonist who has to balance political demagoguery and creating art, that the divide is fake. "Art" is not only more artistic, it also makes better propaganda than "propaganda." Political cartoons are a great example of how the balance between the two can work yet how rarely it does.

Her suicide note to Leonard is devastating, especially when you read it with his diary entires from the time.

Might be a good tie to Lauren's post on Grimke and the rhetorics of silence and private discourse.

I'm hoping that the reading from Derrida we're doing later this semester clears this up, because I had no idea what he meant with this in On Grammatology.

This But the word "country" is replaced by rhetoric. I'm no meme wizard I can't do it myself.

There's a line in Burke's Rhetoric of Motives about how literally everything had a trope title. Initially for pragmatic reasons, but later for ornamentation.

I don't really know my tropes that well, couldn't really define Zeugma or Hyperbaton without consulting Silvae Rhetoricae. I don't know if that's that much of a loss, but I do respect people with an encyclopedic knowledge and recall of figures of speech.

A view that-looks to the left-ah, goddamnit.

But yeah, I might be the only graduate assistant who's excited to teach 1900, and actively miss it while I'm teaching this lit course.

There's a lot to be said of how The Rhetorical Tradition picks and summarizes its texts, but I will say, for this section: they've done some killer opening lines.

N-to-the-sche's reputation precedes him, the bad boy of philosophy and his legendary moustache, and it gives the cliche a portentous weight.

The important thing seems to be the self-consciousness. Nietzsche (swear to God, if the quiz asks us to spell that name, I swear to God) is trying to avoid the "I identified the problem, and thus, I've solved it." The image of unmasking their pretensions has the dangerous risk of thinking that the mask is something outside the norm, and that there's something stable underneath it that's been revealed.

For my own state of mind, I refuse to believe this is something that can happen.

Just highlighting a damn good line. Proverbs 16:32 if you're interested in throwing it down on the table yourself.

This is universally good advice for political movements. Looking into past movements and what to appropriate for contemporary use, you see a lot of focus on discipline, like here, and a reality that you have to train your members in the precise message, even if they're generally, even enthusiastically, on your side.

I've been toiling away in the online Ong Archives, and this seems to really call for a pairing. I'm wary to commit to it, because I have no idea about the sort of literacies and its gender divide at the time, but the division of facts from lived experience is something Ong points to as part of the shift from manuscript to print culture. Still, with women barred from much of academia, most of their written life would logically come from novels and letters more than textbooks and manuals.

She's got us there, gents

Chunky word to mean "your sacrifices need priestly intercession to count"

I'm a big fan of this argument matrix thing here. By sandwiching other scripture between two Paul quotes, it's not like it's just pitting one quote against another and declaring them contradictory. Which is vital, because Willard, like just about everyone we're reading this week and the last, do want to uphold the spiritual authority of the bible. It tries to show it in a process, shifting from the contradictory to the reconciliation--it shows that there's more going on.

Isn't the point of conciliatory rhetoric to build a strong foundation that makes slow but permanent gains towards an end goal? You'd think the fire breathers would be the ones who inflame the audience whose interest swiftly cools once they're out of the room.

Also, the Germans

There's already a print annotation on the move forward to network theories, but what really strikes me about this is an earlier note from LoLo about collaborative and invitational rhetoric, and these co-ops seem like a laboratory for developing them. If nothing else, I'd love to know more about the dynamics of these, being something akin to the modern Writing Center but for developing a spoken voice.

We've had some discussions over when does Feminism start/proto-Feminism end, and it reminds me of Mary Wollstonecraft, who's generally considered to be the last woman to found feminism with her book Maria: The Wrongs of Women at the end of the 18th Century. The central focus of the book is a woman's legal non-entity and how a man's wantonness can abuse that. The history of the legal construction of a woman is something that should not be overlooked here.

I know a Servite nun who's working to make rice communion available for people with Celiac's. There's a lot of surprisingly unwavering literalists that spring up on the assumption that you can't change any part of the ritual, even if it's already been removed from its original style.

Another thing I found looking up Poetry-to-Prose was a website on the Earl of Oxford and how he couldn't possibly be Shakespeare through poetry analysis (more of an insult than analysis--they just switched his poems to paragraph form and said it was basically prose). But I believe it's along a line we already brought up with conspiracy theories, that Shakespeare's writing style conceals his identity and makes alternative theories plausible.

Also relevant for Spencer, but we don't really teach the figures of speech so much. If I recall correctly, they were a big deal for Ramus, because it allowed more classification and division, so it might be due to his relative influence.

I have never heard of this before. Not entirely sure why'd you do it? Googling isn't turning up all that much except other people talking about how to do it. Did turn up a program for automatically converting the other direction, which is pretty interesting.

Another connection with Blair, here. Though while Blair identifies a universal nature to attune to, Spencer sees a number of natures, but they are still naturally correct for their particular circumstance.

We've had some earlier discussion on dividing "Memory" out of the Rhetorical Canon, and Spencer seems pretty opposed to requiring the use of an audience's memory in oratory. We've also discussed in class Socrates' warning that literacy would be the pharmakon that destroys memory, and I think this is an extension of that idea.

This is coming from memories of High School Latin, but I recall that Cicero used to use this sort of rhetoric all the time. Since Latin puts the verb at the end of the sentence, he'd have long sentences with extensive clauses that built intensity while keeping you guessing as to what he's calling for. It was really annoying to translate.

It's interesting how natively some of these things come to us, even though the order of language is based mostly on arbitrary cues, as demonstrated by how other languages don't follow these rules. It reminds me of Blair, who concluded that there had to be some sense of taste because he "knew," and his audience "knew," that they had to have some means that made them better than the foreigners.

Ain't that just a beautiful phrasing. "Sesquipedalian," btw, just means "long words," which is, itself, the epitome of sesquipedalianism

I feel swear words are the logical conclusion of this line of thinking.

Good lord, I had no idea the Economist was that old.

More fire imagery. Big in Christianity, but also a good metaphor for how rhetoric lets passionate fervor pass from the speaker to the audience.

Plus, since I'm already thinking of Spike Lee joints, the intense heat of Do the Right Thing and the sense that eventually injustice will boil over into explosive force is a vivid image.

The middle initial seems unusual. A half-step more liberal than "Mrs. Husband's Name," but not as far as just taking the last name. It seems like an unusually specific level of semiotic change with marriage.

There's a similar trend with Douglass, who had to define his own last name, a move that involves constructing his own semiotic identity. It certainly seems like something that would go double for a Womanist perspective, due to misogynist and racist pressure against them having a stable name-identity.

This is only loosely related to Grimke's personal struggle, but I do want to point out that the women's suffrage movement did retaliate measure-for-measure. Edith Garrud, the woman in the cartoon trained her fellow suffragettes in judo and ambush tactics against the police that included barbed wire traps and escape artistry.

Rabbi Eliezer has the best talmudic story, and everyone should read it. The short of it is, there's a dispute about the cleanliness of ovens, and R. Eliezer is on one side and the rest of the court is against him. He works three miracles, up to and including calling down the voice of God, and R. Joshua actually manages to stump God through knowledge of the law, and God has to back down.

But he story really gets great is because he refuses to incline to the majority, the council excommunicates him. They take incredible care to break the news gently and respectfully, and, because of their courtesy, his fury is only so great to destroy a third of the crops and incinerating only the people within eyesight.

He was also a super-conservative voice at the time who had a lot of other important moments (and the referenced low opinion of women), but really, when you've got a story where God gets outflanked and a guy gets so mad his eyes incinerate people, I am going to turn to that story.

Adding this to my #WhatIsRhetoric

Connection to Campbell, and also, just about anyone who's ever followed organized religion.

Alongside the earlier discussion of how Rhetoric has been historically feminized, I think of the motto of the state of Maryland, "Fatti maschii, parole femine," or "Manly deeds, womanly words." Physical action is masculine and forceful, language skills are womanly, often sneaky, cowardly, or other bad things.

Enough to afford a Room of One's Own, at least. Relevant to what we'll be reading later with Virginia Woolf that Grimke and Douglass needed some kind of financial support (inheritance, wealthy abolitionist patrons) that lets them develop as writers/speakers.

I do like the contrast in imagery here between the "Head of the Church" and the "Tongues of Fire." You could make it into a philosophy/rhetoric divide, the contemplative, authoritative part v. the part that actually does things and gets results, but I don't think it'd hold up terribly well for Palmer. Somebody might be able to spitball on this?

Huh, wow, when I made my last post, I really thought the Junia Controversy was a much more recent issue in exegesis.

I do like the imagery of fire for Rhetoric and oration: it transforms, it acts on things without having it's own materiality (using a more classical model of the world that doesn't include plasma), and, like language, our mastery of it is what separates us from animals.

"Marge, just about everything is a sin. You ever sat down and read this thing? Technically, we're not allowed to go to the bathroom."

Chapter 5 seems like a City of Ladies styled listing of evidence for women, but then it's followed by citing how men are approving of these examples. Most of it probably can be accounted for by assuming she primarily has a male audience in mind, though it also seems more in line with Astell's polite, stable approach to the dialogue than Pizan and Grimke's more direct attacks.

1 Cor. 14:34-35, specifically. However, in Romans (Paul's final epistle), 16:7, he addresses Junias as an "outstanding apostle." Junias is not a historical name, so it's believed to be a later edit of Junia, which is a woman's name. So there's quite a bit of uncertainty and ambiguity of how gender roles in the early churches were handled, and what Paul's exact feelings on the matter were.

Relevant to Astell, which not only says it's theologically appropriate for women to be rhetors, but one of the key elements of good preaching is something not specific to a gender. It's also an argument I still hear as part of the movement to ordain women in the Catholic Church.

Interesting how "the facts" are contrasted against real oration in this section. Douglass identifies that there's something more--and essential--that he's not telling when he just sticks to the facts. He loses credibility with his audience for it, but it's worth it because, if nothing else, it keeps him from becoming bored. But I think there's also the matter of how the self is rhetorically constructed. It's illustrated with the point at the end of the paragraph, where Douglass asserts that he alone can decide what manner of speech is authentic to him.

Resonance with Rickert and Foucault, but I like the parallelism here: as an autobiography, Douglass constructs himself rhetorically, and within the text, Garrison rhetorically disseminates Douglass. There's an interconnectivity of body and speech here that's very interesting.

Proud to inform everyone that Dictionary.com has slightly advanced the clarity of the "abolition" entry.

Douglass really underscores how there's no natural basis for slavery, that it requires instruction and reinforcement at every level. This seems to fit well with Locke, who would be similarly opposed (perhaps not to the same degree) to the dominant arguments that slavery was a natural function.

It's odd how the completely abhorrent racism lends particular credence to the argument in favor of the humanities. "Even the worst people imaginable grasp the importance and liberating power of education!"

We've had a number of authors advocating for education (Vico, Astell, etc.), so it's also good to see someone threatened by and terrified of it.

"Jeremiad," a lamentation in the style of the Book of Jeremiah, which means a denunciation of the immorality and wickedness of a contemporary society.

How appropriate after we had a class on conspiracy theories.

Those of you who've never checked out archconservative internet communities like Free Republic or The Blaze haven't seen the staggering litany of accusations against former President Obama's oratory. Ranging from teleprompter/empty suit accusations to accusing him of near-supernatural trickery or hypnotism to explain his popularity.

One of the things I note with embodied rhetoric is that Douglass and the abolitionists weren't the first movement to face physical violence for their beliefs, but they were a movement where physical violence could not be distanced from their advocacy. Douglass not only uses his scars as a rhetorical tool, that scarring is significant to the construction of his own identity. I'm looking to Harriet Wilson's Our Nig, particularly at the end where the protagonist, Frado, contrasts herself against her husband, a fugitive slave who's touring the abolitionist lecture circuit, and notes his "back showed no marks of the lash, erect as if it never crouched beneath a burden." The scars of slavery aren't just a demonstration of his condition, they're a part of how his identity was formed.

A man who has done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more

When you're named "Byron," you're kind of tied to the Romantics. From googling, is this from his book A Counter History of Composition? I'd be interested in looking further into this.

A thing for us to look forward to for next week, but I am unironically hype to learn more about this idea. There's all sorts of resonances this is already setting off with me--I'm thinking in terms of credit scores, twitter follower counts, and other mathematical means to codify the level of influence/respectability, it seems like there are some interesting connections down that way.

Interesting word choice, here, particularly with the history of it's opposite, the "outside agitator". Though, in this context, it does make me wonder if there's a more technical difference, that Nell may have exclusively focused on Bostonian issues, rather the the more national scale or other activists.

I made an earlier note on this, but it really can't be understated how important the Temperance Movement was in the triad of women's movements in 19th Century America. I feel it's overlooked because, unlike slavery and women voting, it's an issue that failed, and we generally support its failure today, but it still had an important role in organizing women in the 19th and early 20th century. Plus, Carrie Nation is one hell of a historical woman that is unfortunately too often overlooked.

What's interesting to me is the general intersection of the lot. The National Parks Service has a chart that shows a general outline of three movements and how leadership worked across them. It's worth taking a moment to look at, especially with the first line in this paragraph and the contemporary reality that many liberal and leftist groups today tend to trip up with intersectionality.

As Dr. Lynch is fond of recounting, even when women's colleges became a thing, Rhetoric was not part of the curriculum, and Composition was considered the women-appropriate substitute. Also, we're a century away, but the impact of pragmatic concerns on women's rhetoric will come back with A Room of One's Own.

Surely, Gorgias or one of the other Sophists has metaphorically identified Rhetoric and alcohol.

I'd like to connect this with Latour's notebooks, specifically my comment here that defends the slow, tedious, low tech approach.

To continue from my comment on Blair, I'm curious about the way technology and the extension of a sense encourages this way of thinking. Galileo's ability to pull away from the crowd's general wisdom (or perhaps, COMMON SENSE????? ) comes from a telescope that extends his sense beyond any ability by practice.

Interesting with Campbell's 4-stages of persuasion. Is this a weak defense take on (mis)information, or does it raise its own problem by not informing, but rather confirming

Breaking the rules, but I always think to the story of the AIDS-denying journal, Continuum), particularly for the line, "ceasing publication because all the contributors had died of AIDS-defining clinical conditions."

Campbell's "probable and plausible" can be brought into play here. Particularly with the Watergate example a few paragraphs down: literal "conspiracies" are a plausible thing, born out of experience and memory.

Can't imagine Blair's Polite Society would think too highly of that

Hugh Blair's attitude towards invention seems to be at play here. Social scientists are not seen as part of the knowledge building process, but as part of the advancing of that knowledge towards an end.

Y'know, I don't take this as so much of a slam. Like the note I made on Blair, the genius is the guy with little skill and low expectations who manages to pull of something half-decent, or even great, out of nowhere. It's surprisingly uplifting from a guy who just explained all the ways you can mess up proper eloquence.