Law creates rhetoric, or rhetoric creates law? Philosophy of law generally presupposed that law is objective. Lanham's argument makes a good case that law presents itself as objective, even though it can't possibly ever be.

My 1900 students, having just read Ong, would disagree, but I think she is right--I hear words as I read. I write better after I have heard the words spoken.

This separation of the inner self (human) versus how others interpret your humanity is still audience focused (as mentioned above), but seems antithetical to feminism. One of the ways to receive equal treatment is to be respected--to "seem" good or, at least, worthy of respect.

Translation: be your own woman. This seems even more relevant in an age of social media.

What would Ong say about this??

In other words, don't write like an academic--or a lawyer.

sisterhood

This bothers our modern sensibilities, yet the hirearchy of needs dictates that we don't dismantle social structures that help us survive. Ironically, it's the people who can survive without regard for those structures (i.e., the wealthy and powerful) who often do the dismantling. Or, as my father would say, "don't sh*t where you eat." Unless, of course, you can eat somewhere else...

As someone who has, in the past, been wholly dependent on the financial resources of an unreliable man, I cannot even begin to express the way this demeans personal dignity and independence.

The rooms where nuns live in their convents are called "cells." I think this might also be true for brothers/monks but I am not sure.

Teacher code name for "doesn't want to be here." or "Pain in the ass."

Didn't Kant give an essay the same title??

I understand this is only a cursory remark about his positions, but the idea seems off to me. I can "know" my kids loves me when she says so. I can "know" my father died when my brother calls to tell me. Why can't I "know" something spiritual that I learn in the same way? The nature of the knowledge (spiritual or otherwise) does not change the method of knowing.

If only I had been so wise...

If at first you don't succeed... repackage it and sell it somewhere else!

Sigh.

The naturalness of women.

Don't get me started.

Now to figure out a definition of culture... sensus communis? Faces and places? Bound by language? Bound by values? It's like rhetoric--it doesn't want to be defined.

What is, "another definition of rhetoric?"

If knowledge is based on argument and conviction, then my 14 year old is the most knowledgeable person on the planet!

True and not true. I cannot speak a thought to someone else unless I have a word for it. However, I do have thoughts that as yet do not have words. Do we get stuck on thoughts, however, unable to progress onto a successive thought, if the current thought has no name? I don't know, but I think it's an interesting concept to mull over. And, once again, calls to mind the movie Arrival.

Oxford reference: "Not common sense in its ordinary meaning, but in Aristotle (De Anima, II, 1–2) and following him Aquinas and others, a central cognitive function that integrates and monitors the delivery of the other distinct senses, as when a shape is both seen and felt."

Kant discusses this concept extensively, but his definition is closer to "common sense" than Aristotle's.

I wish we had more courses available to us in sociolinguistics. I think the social and psychological aspects of knowledge and comprehension are really interesting.

Lawyer and teen know-it-all jokes aside, I can see real potential that this statement is true. Making an argument requires testing it to see if the argument remains logical and consistent under varying circumstances. The problem must be thought through to its logical conclusion. That is the entire process of law school--thinking through problems and developing legal principles in response to those problems.

Is that like Pelosi saying "You have to pass the bill to find out what's in the bill?"

I had to come back to this when I had a memory flash-back. My oldest daughter had Polio before we adopted her from China. For years she had to wear a full leg brace (KAFO) to keep her from hyper-extending her weak and somewhat underdeveloped leg. At first people assumed the brace was temporary, but eventually she started calling it her "bionic leg." It worked. People laughed. It opened up a conversation about her leg rather than making it an object of negative conjecture.

So, to diffuse ideas about disability, difference, and "other," she took on the identity of a cyborg, which acted rhetorically and psychologically on herself and others to diminish the "other" distinction. Calling herself a cyborg became a rhetoric of inclusion.

As opposed to the robots in WestWorld: they look human, they have skin and blood, but the emphasis is mostly on the code that makes them behave in certain ways.

I wouldn't say that I consider the "hosts" in WestWorld to be cyborgs--they are not part machine, part human-- they are all machine. Or is skin the definition of human? How much human material does it take to be cyborg?

That's a pretty big "if," though.

Swales' discussion of discourse communities makes this really clear--and is a good pedagogical tool to introduce the concept to undergrads. Here is a link, but the copy is pretty crappy: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED286184.pdf

This seems unnecessarily narrow. Yes words have the power to represent preexisting things, but words also define things not yet in existence.

Ong talks about this on Orality and Literacy--if an idea is written down, it is understood as being more "real" than ideas that are spoken. I wonder how this translates into digital communication?

Mulling this over: words can, in a sense, be material--we can record them on paper or other tangible things. Letters are symbols but they have narrowly defined meanings. Letters combined can become words that represent material things.

Performativity is, by its very nature, ephemeral, even if it is in some sense material (bodily, as discussed above). The premise, then, seems to be that if discursive practices are performative, they naturally challenge power because power can only be obtained upon something longer-lasting. Or, alternatively, that performativity challenges power because the understood meaning(s) cannot be represented by words.

Doesn't the assumption that words have power act to give words more power?

Is Aliens in Underpants Save the World anthropocentric?

Some fungi are more equal than others.

I see nothing but political rage on both sides of the aisle.

It wasn't until I read this sentence that I felt like I finally knew what was going on in this article.

We just read Kant in literary theory--and Lauren Terbrock-Elmestad just told me that this class and that class would intersect nicely.

sheknows

So, the mapping of knowledge in which she engages helps serve the purpose of identifying topics to study and discuss.

keepitsimplestupid

Would this be synonymous with drug trafficking? Human trafficking? Stolen art? If you think about it, rhetoricians are smugglers. We hide among the words.

I have had a couple of 1900 students who would answer that it's akin to an Inquisition-era torture device.

In other words, a reference to visual rhetoric:

Jacobellis v. Ohio, SCOTUS, 1964. Justice Potter Stewart, concurring: "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [of hard-core pornography]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that."

https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/378/184.html

Taken one step further, it seems that Muckelbauer believes the definition of rhetoric to depend on the rhetorical situation: the purpose of the definition, the audience to which you are giving the definition, the context in which you are defining it and the text/genre/method through which you are defining it. Rhetoric is, therefore, circuitous.

"Rhetoric is the strategic study of the circulation of power through communication." --Jay Dolmage Disability Rhetoric

Is that pithy enough?

This may have been the belief in classical times, but if it ever was true, it is not true anymore. In my work as a political hack, we would discuss this frequently. Appeals to logic, in the political realm at least, rarely work. How do you get a bill passed? Present testimony from someone with a horror story and claim that the bill will "fix" this problem. How does a candidate get elected? By engaging the emotions of their constituents--laughter, horror, grief--one or all. The rational appeal, if there is one, has to be subtle. Here's an example that comes to mind--I present it in my 1900 class: https://youtu.be/WCqFCCgU1xk

In all the talk about Plato and Ong and writing as a technology that preserved words through time, it's too bad that very few of the words deemed worthy of preservation were written by women... what to do about a cannon that can't be inclusive because, in the unlikely event that there were females who recorded their theories of rhetoric, no one ever thought to keep them around?????

I keep coming back to this because the psychology seems to me to be key. Whether rhetoric is persuasion or eloquence or style or the happenstance of saying the right words at the right time, to some degree or another we are always examining the effect of the words--do they compel agreement? Action? Rejection? The mind-to-mind connection is the rhetorical moment.

This actually works. I have done it many times. Far better than imagining the audience with no clothes....

The reference here is physical, but it reminds me of a bibliographic digest as well: in its noun form it has meant "a collection of writings" since the 1550's. The verb form has meant to "assimilate" and to "separate, divide, and arrange" since the 14th century.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/Digest

In another of our readings there were comments about physical/sensual references to rhetoric. The written word has always been replete with corporeal allusions--law, in particular, relies on them heavily.

Has anyone seen the movie The Circle? I don't recommend it, but its an adaptation of this concept: Emma Watson's character clips on a body cam and goes totally visible--online all the time--after her creepy mega media company's public spy camera catches her illegally "borrowing" a kayak after the boat rental shop is closed. She shames herself and allows the public to hold her accountable 24/7, online. Unsurprisingly, this kind of public techno-piety doesn't go well for her.

I think it's one thing to engage in a meta-cognitive exercises, or even Ignatian spiritual exercises to be more self-aware, but who wants to write to always be ashamed of yourself??

Then again, by taking it down the road of The Circle or the blog Juliet mentions is really a narcissistic exercise--the celebrity of shame.

A precursor to McGee's theory of "ideographs." Use SLUth and search the title: The "Ideograph": A Link between Rhetoric and Ideology.

Actually the jury does that. The Court only finds facts if it's a bench trial.

Definition: low, base, undignified, lesser than.

Proponents of legal realism would disagree. An example would be Oliver Wendell Holmes in Buck v. Bell, which decided it was constitutional for a state to sterilize purported mentally disabled people against their will, even though this has NO constitutional basis whatsoever. The outcome of the case was determined before the briefs were ever filed because Holmes and other eugenicists decided the outcome that was supposedly best for society regardless of constitutional protections for freedom, liberty, and cruel and unusual punishment.

Oh that these were the only two kinds of rhetoric...