This returns us to our earlier observation via Kittlerthat we tend to ascribe agency to people rather than to things. The concept of the fourfold asks us instead to reflect on the ways technological things gather and emplace, and on how rhetorical action is threaded through people and things to build a sense of home in places, even those that-being mobile, dynamic, and/or "virtual"-are seem-ingly the antithesis of what makes a place.

Such deep-rooted transformations are also challenging, and a great deal of work in new media, and technology in general, treats its unsettling effects.

“You have to play t h e g a m e t o f i n d o u t w h y y o u ’ r eplaying the game. It’s the future, Pikul.”

ograms—that is, of course, unless theprogram is figured as a “user’s manual” listing only one order: “Use!”

Alongthe way, Harold’s reading demonstrates how feminist notions of corpo-reality and abjection can effectively hack rhetorical studies. That is,Harold defers the typical moralizing move of judging the film or the issuesit portrays and instead uses the film to diagram what forces such as drugsand abjection do.

6THERHETORICALSITUATIONamanyquestionsgounansweredandmanyproblemsremainunsolved

Inordertoclarifyrhetoric-as-essentially-related-to-situation,weshouldacknowledgeaviewpointthatiscommonplacebutfundamental:aworkofrhetoricispragmatic;itcomesintoexistenceforthesakeofsomethingheyonditself;itfunctions

WhenIask,\Vhatisarhetoricalsituation?,Iwanttoknowthenatureofthosecontextsinwhichspeakersorwriterscreaterhetoricaldiscourse

I take the converse position of each of Bitzer's major state-ments regarding this relationship. For example: I would not say"rhetoric is situational,"^* but situations are rhetorical

Thus rhetoricis a cause not an effect of meaning. It is antecedent, not subse-quent, to a situation's impact.

No theory of therelationship between situations and rhetoric can neglect to takeaccount of the initial linguistic depiction of the situation.

Clearly the adjectives intowhich a "situation" are communicated cannot be the "real situ-ation"; they must be a translation.

It is against the background of a more general relation between the formulations, against the background of a whole verbal network, that the effect of context may be determined.

A task that consists of not-of no longer-treating discourses as groups of signs (signifying elements referring to contents or representations) but as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak. Of course, discourses are composed of signs; but what they do is more than use these signs to designate things. It is this more that ren-ders them irreducible to the language (langue) and to speech. It is this "more" that we must re-veal and describe.

Which means that one cannot speak of anything at any time; it is not easy to say something new; it is not enough for us to open our eyes, to pay at-tention, or to be aware, for new objects suddenly to light up and emerge out of the ground. But this difficulty is not only a negative one; it must not be attached to some obstacle whose power ap-pears to be, exclusively, to blind, to hinder, to prevent discovery, to conceal the purity of the evidence or the dumb obstinacy of the things themselves; the object does not await in limbo the order that will free it and enable it to become embodied in a visible and prolix objectivity; it does not preexist itself, held back by some ob-stacle at the first edges of light. It exists under the positive conditions of a complex group of rela-tions.

If a committed doubter says to us that he will not accept the valued fact of man's rhetorical na-ture, we see now that he cannot avoid illustrating it as he tries to atgue against it: we discuss our doubt together, therefore we are.

Let us forget, then, for a while, the strangely compelling, seemingly self-evident notion that we know with one part of our minds or souls or selves or bodies, and will or feel with some other part. We can then search for what we agree on, what we meet in, where we are together.

But if there are good reasons for confi-dence in the values of discoursing together, then we can get about our business, whatever that may be:

Rhetoric is love, and it must speak a commodious language, creating a world full of space and time that will hold our diversities

, I'll still insist that argument-that rhetoric itself-must begin, proceed, and end in love

In argument, the arguer must, with no assurance, go out, inviting the other to enter a world that the arguer tries to make commodious, inviting the other to emerge as well, but with no assurance of kind or even thoughtful response. How does this happen? Better, how can it happen? It can happen if we learn to love before we disagree

If there is to be hope, we have to see each other, to know each other, to be present to each other, to embrace each other. What makes that possible? I don't know. We can start toward these capacities by changing the way we talk about argument and conceive of argument

When the therapist understands the feelings and thoughts that seem so horrible or weak or sentimenal or bizarre to the client, when the therapist understands and accepts the client, then the therapist frees the client to explore deep experience freely. As each understands and accepts the other, then they may move toward the truth

For, being preoccupied with some particular type of evaluation, we may come to feel that one particu-lar set of criteria has a unique importance, and accordingly be tempted to pick on the criteria proper for the assessment of things of some one sort as the proper or unique standards of merit for all sorts of thing, so dismissing all other criteria either as misconceived or as unimportant.

The argument from analogy is extremely im-portant in nonformal reasoning. Starting from a relation between two terms A and B, which we call the theme since it provides the proper subject matter of the discourse, we can by analogy pre-sent its structure or establish its value by relating it to the terms C and D, which constitute the phoros of the analogy, so that A is to B as C is to D.

The example leads to the formulation of a rule through generalization from a particular case_ or through putting a new case on the same footmg as an older one.

The part played by the audience in rhetoric is tC"\,\.u crucially important, because all argumentation, ,H.......-ct in aiming to persuade, must be adapted to the au-s .. i,j,s dience and, hence based on beliefs accepted by oti-the audience with such conviction that the rest of ~ o..., the discourse can be securely based upon it

Then, too, I agreed with the criticisms made by various types of existentialists against both positivist empiricism and rationalistic idealism, but I could find no satisfaction in their justifica-tion of action by purely subjective projects or commitments.

Lack of clarity concerning the idea of rhetoric is also apparent in the article on the subject in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1969 ed.)

Also, many of the "observations" afe but implications of the particular terminology in temzs of which the observations are made. In brief, much that we take as observations about "reality" 0.,.. may be but the spinning out of possibilities im-bn ... b "11,. plicit in our particular choice of terms.

In this sense, there is nothing abstruse in the statement that the offspring both is and is not one with its parent-age.

Thus he is both joined and separate, at ,.....~t-c, once a distinct substance and consubstantial with ~~i1 .. ~41 another

Yet it is so fertile a source of error, that only by learning to recognize its nature from within could we hope to detect its many disguises from with-out.

At the very best, we admit, each time you \I scrutinize a concept of substance, it dissolves into thin air. But conversely, the moment you relax your gaze a bit, it reforms again.

Hence, instead of considering it our task to "dispose of" any ambi-guity by merely disclosing the fact that it is an ambiguity, we rather consider it our task to study and clarify the resources of ambiguity.

When they might become difficult, when we can hardly see them, through having stared at them too in-tensely, we can of a sudden relax, to look at them as we always have, lightly, glancingly. And hav-ing reassured ourselves, we can start out again, once more daring to let them look strange and difficult for a time.

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Words distorted by English are known as an-glicisms or pochismos.

. Standard English

Anzaldua has said that from an early age, she felt at odds with her family, who did not approve of her love for reading, writing, and drawing and who were shocked by her emerging lesbian identity.

Signifyin(g) in jazz performances and in the play of black language games is a mode of formal revision, it depends for its effects on troping, it is often characterized by pastiche, and, most crucially, it turns on repe-tition of formal structures and their differences.

privileged

NGSTON HUGHES

consis-tent system with a coherent and regular grammar

yo' mama (or "ask yo' mama" -stock responses)

A trope is, literally, a turn. In traditional rhetoric, tropes turn words away from their "literal" meaning to a metaphorical one.

Standard (white) English (often used ironically)

the British public's tolerance for poor orator

Beacon Hill

The rhetorical occasion always inclu<lcs an audience. and the speaker must consider the motives that arc likely to influence audiences of the three types of speech.

everything is data

technê tou biou

Not because there have been so many different incarnations of the word that it seems unjust to simply pick 1 or 2 to the exclusion of countless others.

The simple fact of its recurrence in so many different venues is something worth noting, since I doubt that, for instance, biologists are routinely asked "what is life?" at job interviews or anthropologists asked "what is man?" at a bar.