We argue that learning to dwell with new media and its technologies entails a harkening to their ontological weight and rhetorical agency

ays claims on us

A thing, as opposed to an object, is an entity that is more than a resource or means

have generated

“It seems like everything used to be something else, yes?”

There is an enormous difference, for example, between the postmodernclaim that we have moved from the regime of the real into that of thesimulacrum and the posthuman claim that the real is structured bysimulacra.

an erotic edg

The posthuman thus offers astyle of theorizing or weapon invention in which disciplinary boundariesbecome sites of connection rather than enclosures of autonomousinteriorities

eXistenZ

short, eXistenZ does not render the human as an object that connects toother objects, but as an effect or moment of multiple “inhuman” connec-tions—connections that are always on their way elsewhere.

And as such, everything is ... rhetorically

perhaps figures of speech are simply very determined, linguistic instances of a larger rhetorical tropology of persua-sive turning.

And that, to me, is its advantage-allowing for the possibility of flattening out the nature-culture distinction that is absolutely fundamental to the field.

But for the sake of provocation, I would be inclined to go a step further and say that, despite the emphasis of our field for over two millennia, it is actually extremely rare for one person to persuade another solely with an argument, re-gardless of whether the argumentative paradigm comes from Aristotle, Rogers, Toulmin, or any other.

But why stop there?

That is, perhaps our paradigmatic image of rhetoric would become such everyday instances of persuasion, and Aristotle's forensic, deliberative, and epideictic species might just be highly spe· cialized and idealized instances of this commonplace practice.

hings are a little more complicated with epideictic rhetoric,

a combination of the two

rhetorician

Biesecker 127

Essentially

defining exigence

Finally, it is important to mention that the preexisting situation controls the rhetorical response in the same sense that the question controls the answer and the problem controls the solution

Derrida'sGtas

Anzaldua persevered

How Uber Uses Psychological Tricks to Push Its Drivers’ Buttons

The very presence of this social fabric is a new kind of “central standard” or “absolute” which is, perhaps paradoxically, sewn from ambiguity.

o embrace ambiguity is to necessitate the participation of a diverse body of individuals.

but rather it is a space

The first week of this class

Burke keeps ambiguity alive, keeping many doors open for interpretation

he rejects

ambiguity as a space. Burke seems to believe ambiguity must be explored;

To Woolf, women are already under assault, and an assault made silent by exclusion of the ambiguous and the rationally settled fact.

Ok then.

Burke also takes Richards and Ogden’s understanding of the importance of context in meaning further.

So, while ambiguity of the term “community” opens up the possibilities of all of the meanings of “community,” it can very easily break down everything we think “community” means. 

Nietzsche

The social aspects of language and communication provide yet another level of danger in ambiguity, not only in the criticism of it, but also in the assent to it.

Although she does not seem to come to any sort of conclusion about the essence of “woman,”

The ambiguity of language, of rhetoric, allows women the opportunity to employ it in a way that is personal to them and to express what they want to express, independent of the male interpretation of rhetoric.

implication of words

potential dangers of co-optation.

Cixous suggests that such diffuse, flowing, open writing parallels the ways women experience erotic sexuality.

Cixous sees masculinity and femininity as culturally constructed for each individual from birth, and hence as having profound psychological implications that she is most interested to explore.

In "Signature Event Context," Derrida in fact attacks the idea that "context" can help to account for meaning.

But in con-structing his analyses, Derrida resists the trap of claiming that he has at last found the right way to understand the relationship of language to idea.

This effort to reach past language to the reality it names is what Derrida calls "the metaphysics of presence."

There is no transcendental continuity to knowledge. in misty origini,, in ex-perience, or in the speaker. Knowledge is the function of a material discourse in a social order.

"Thus conceived, discourse is not the majestically unfolding manifesta-tion of a thinking, knowing, speaking subject," says Foucault, "but, on the contrary, a totality, in which the dispersion of the subject and his discontinuity with himself may be determined."4

That is, he treats author, meaning, and knowledge as a function of discourse, not as its source.

ince the demise of the Sophists

a world of choices

In morals, for example, reasoning is neither deductive nor inductive, but justificative.

it is always "situated.

Philosophy and Rhetoric

who expected rhetoric to act on the imagination to se-cure the triumph of reason.

Philosophy, as a con· sequence, lost its status in contemporary culture

views that are familiar in existentialism.

t is not this but rather the idea of the unicity of truth that has disqualified rhetoric in the Western philosophi-cal tradition.

oth Descartes and Plato hold this idea because of their rejection of opinion

Truth, it was held, presided over a dialectical discussion, and the in-terlocutors had to reach agreement about it by themselves, whereas rhetoric taught only how to present a point of view-that is to say, a partial aspect of the question-and the decision of the issue was left up to a third person

In some cases there are detailed rules drawn up for establishing this contact before a question can be debated.

This is why every society possesses institutions to further dis-cussion between competent persons and to pre-vent others. Not everybody can start debating about anything whatever, no matter where.

The new rhetoric, like the old, seeks to persuade or convince, to obtain an adherence which may be theoretical to start with, although it may eventually be manifested through a disposition to act, or practical, as pro-voking either immediate action, the making of a decision, or a commitment to act

In its contemporary form, demonstration is a calcula-tion made in accordance with rules that have been laid down beforehand.

For almost ten years Mme L. Olbrechts-Tyteca and I conducted such an inquiry and analysis.

Could we not undertake, in the same way, an ex-tensive inquiry into the manner in which the most diverse authors in all fields do in fact reason about values?

subjectivism, which, as far as values are concerned, leads to skepticism for lack of an intersubjective criterion; or an abso-lutism founded on intuitionism.

n other words, is ~here a_ logi~ of value judg-11 SOM\.· ments that makes tt possible tor us to reason "'\, about values

Recent his~ory has shown abundantly the sad excesses to which such "'4., an attitude can lead

There is no value which is not logically arbitrary."

The application ot: this p~in~iple t? a~tual situations, however, reqmres cntena to 10d1cate which categories are relevant and how their members should be treated, and such decisions involve a recourse to judgments of value.

to awaken a disposition so to act

In fact, any persuasive discourse seeks to have an effect on an audience, although the audi-ence may consist of only one person and the dis-course be an inward deliberation.

that, namely, of b1:inging abo~t a consensus in the minds of the audience regardmg the values that are celebrated in the speech.

The same view was taken of the rhetoric of the Roman Empire

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

"a mon-strous aberration"

"the once and future queen of the i~ a. human sciences"

by the secular experience of the jurists

This implies putting classical epistemology and metaphysics into question.

A critique of the idea is self-evi-~ 1,,A;vi-t dence, '4 showing that it vanishes as soon as it is ,'!-cw-necessary to go beyond subjective intuition-as .yh.c., soon as one wishes to communicate it through a · {)loc,r-language which is never compelling- tends to show that the choice of a mode of expression, if it is not arbitrary-and it rarely is-is influ-enced by reasons which come from dialectic and ;YMA-between the necessary and the arbitrary is rea-ov~ {rhetoric.

led finally to 1 [\ immobility and conformism in law, morality, politics, and religion

Gorgias' reply was not long in coming; he showed, by a three-part argumentation, that Being is not, that if it existed it would be un-knowable, and that if it were known this knowl-edge would be incommunicable.

Only the existence of an argumentation

But an agreement on the reality or objective truth. And its starting point, t-1,tlbf \\ lyJ.STJ--j-use of terms, no less than an agreement about the in making this contribution, is an analysis of conception of reality and the vision of the world, those forms of reasoning which, though they are even though it may not be disputed, is not indis- indispensable in practice, have from the time of putable

creates an unbridgeable gulf

is to withdraw them beyond the realm of discussion and argu

This rejection does not, of course, imply that we deny the effect of experience or reason-ing on our opinions

We combat uncompromising and irreducible philosophical oppositions presented by all kinds of absolutism: dualisms of reason and imagina-tion, of knowledge and opinion, of irrefutable self-evidence and deceptive will, of a universally accepted objectivity and an incommunicable sub-jectivity, of a reality binding on everybody and values that are purely individual.

reduction of all the techniques of proof to formal logic and the habit of seeing l I nothing in reason except the faculty to calculate.

insist on this point, arguing that there are no self-evident propositions and no "previously given natural order.

By putting Spinoza in a jersey knit cotton T-shirt, we can critically imagine designs where the body and its environments exist in a different relation, one that stands outside of the violence that both of them meet in now

Design should denaturalize the standard body.

to this T-shirt, all bodies are T-shirt-able, all bodies can inhabit the space of a T-shirt, though how they inhabit it will be largely determined by the individual body

By shifting our focus from what a body is to what a body can do, we can begin to explore the political—sometimes violent—relations of bodies, objects, and environments that are produced and maintained through standard design practices and knowledge.

Alternatively, to not know what a body isn’t does more than suspend or delay normalizing conceptualizations of the body. It refuses such total claims of body knowledge at all.

we just don’t presume to know it (yet).

Affirming an ignorance of something presupposes that what is ignored could be actually known.

Rather than conceptualizing bodies from the position of not knowing what they are, we should begin from the position that we don’t know what bodies are not.

Many still refer directly to Dreyfuss’ anthropometric data and models.

Therefore, contained within Spinoza’s question is the radical idea that we not only don’t know what a body can do, but that we don’t even know what a body is.

Katarina Damjanov

ambits

They disposed of the concept of the machine as a mere servile tool or the uncanny entity taking our labour from us to enslave us, introducing instead the idea of the technical as a prosthetic auxiliary in which the ‘interiors’ of its human makers are exteriorised and embodied, and whose performance consequently changes the morphology of the human.

The robot, as the soulless machinic replacement of our body and labour, does not exist because this figure

Gilbert Simondon

they are set to advance the creative agency of the robotic, becoming vehicles via which the posthuman could be inscribed beyond the terrestrial confines of the globe.

sculpt

We are evolving the bodies of these robotic agents to adapt to an alien environment on our behalf, and in doing so, we are enhancing their potential to mediate our presence and practices in outer space.

Curiosity will halt to rest in the environs of Mars. - 3 -

By "rhetorician" I mean the deliberate rhetor: the man who understands the na-ture and aim and requirements of persuasive expression and who uses them more or less consciously according to the ap-proved rules of the art.

concrescence

we forget this

primordial

just as children commonly believe that there is a little man inside the skull who looks out at the eyes, the windows of the soul, and listens at the ears

nor would another complete outfit necessarily improve matters, even if it were ten times as complete

Jesus did not say "Lay not up for yourselves trea-sures upon earth." He said "Lay not up for your-selves treasures upon earth where moth and rust doth corrupt and where thieves break through and steal. " And no sensible American does. Moth and rust do not get at Mr. Rockefeller's oil wells, and thieves do not often break through and steal a rail-way. What Jesus condemned was hoarding wealth

The fundamental and most prolific; faJ.lacy is, in other words, that the base of the triangle given above is filled in.

One goes ()Acl Sb *-into the room-but the resources of the English =L..a.1-t;Ar,, s language would be much put to the stretch, and ~,i" SA'1 whole flights of words would need to wing their way illegitimately into existence before a woman a,~c,...,\-could say what happens when she goes into a It.~~ room.

But almost without exception they are shown in their rela-tion to men.

Their men and women will not be observed wholly in relation to each other emotionally, but as they cohere and clash in groups and classes and races

will now be discharged by women also

of environment and suggestion upon the mind, we in our psychoanalytical age are beginning to realize

My time is up; and I must cease

this hal

Inwardly, I think, the case is very different; she has still many ghosts to fight, many prejudices to overcome.

Ah, but what is "herself'? I mean, what is a woman? I assure you, I do not know. I do not believe that you know. I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill.

Historian of rhetoric l "-~ a...-~ George A. Kennedy contemplates animal communication as rhetorical

The goal of rhetoric, then, is to reveal that all discourse is rhetorical and lhal no claims arc self-evident.

When, in The U.,·e.,· of Arg11111e111 ( 1958), Toulmin asserted that for-mal logic: should not be regarded as superior to probabilistic argument in establishing truth, his Cambridge friends felt that he had abandoned philosophy al-together. His graduate advisor, he says, "was deeply pained by the book, and barely spoke 10 me for twenty years.

or this reason, the reader has an active role in producing the mean-ing of the work.

Words do not have literal meanings that travel with them wherever they go, he says.

Specialization and departmentalization in the modem university dispersed the many traditional intellectual concerns of rhetoric to other disciplines such as psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and literary studies.

Friedrich Nietzsche

On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense

nothing but metaphors for things.

as a tool built to emphasize construction instead of combat

Kplynch identifies Nietzsche’s thesis as mankind building an impressive dome of concepts but on weak foundation, and Willard is concerned with the deeply pragmatic implementation of this issue. I noted her advice to would-be suffragettes, “Don’t take too much for granted.”

This pleasure, however, results from forgetting that language consists of metaphors.

By using the telescopic metaphor (similar to Nietzsche)

Thus poetry, regarded as a vehicle of thought, is especially impressive partly because it obeys all the laws of effective speech, and partly because in so doing it imicates the natural utter-ances of excitement.

Other things equal,

pencer fails to sec how this fact 1e[[s against his the-ory. ( 1) 11,c Frend1man, uccuslomed 10 the substantive-adjec-tive order, will anticipate the coming 1mir, or some other ud-jcc1ivc, as soon ns he hears the word clrcval. Hence in his case the nascent image of a wrongly-colored horse wi[[ not tend to uri~c. 11,e peculiar intonation of the substantive will probably give him a hint as 10 whether the adjective is or is nut to fol-low. (2) In the case of the Englishman, the won! "black" may lead the hearer to anticipate same other substantive than "horse"; he may c)(pect "sheep," or "mun," or "eye," to follow, since 11[[ 1hcsc things muy possess the quality blackness (f-.N.S.

translate words into thoughts.

further superiority possessed by Saxon English

No phrase can convey the idea of surprise so vividly as opening the eyes and raising the eye-brows

whatever force is absorbed by the machine is deducted from the result.

soA lated dogmas

Edited by Fred Newton Scott.

a book rather than a man

The greatest genius of all is, of course, he who \~ economizes a reader's attention at the same time that he stimulates his energies:

machinery

other merits will be of little avai

conformity to good taste

before we thoroughly know our own meaning

by language,

Rhetoric may be defined as the art of efficient communication by language

Look to the Paragraphs and the Discourse will look to itself;

Numerous attempts have been made, and arc still making, to methodize instruction in English Composition

somelhing to do.

hence it is natural to women to make all feel themselves included in the motherly uttemnce that not only remembers but recognizes all.

THE EARTH-BORN ARGUMEN

"Behold, I make all things new;" "the letter killeth, the spirit giveth life."

Men reason in the abstract, women in the con-crete. A syllogism symbolizes one. a rule of life the other.

It is a whimsical fact that men seem comparatively willing that women should enter any profession except their own

If they would be consistent, all ministers who accept the evolution theory-and a majority of them seem to have done so-must admit that not only was woman made out of better material than man (which they doubtless will cheerfully grant!), but that, coming lust in the order of cre-ation, she stands highest of all.

The same writers who exhaust the resource~ of language to deride the dogma of apostolic sue· cession rigidly enforce that of the male pries!· hood, for which the Bible give.<; them just as little warrant

THE LEITER KILLETH

come lo public voice

1862

I possess nothing but moml capability

Why sit ye here and die?

"Ladies' Department."

William Lloyd Garrison

I had usually depended upon my unsystematized knowledge am.I the inspiration of the hour and the occasion, but I had now got the "scholar bee in my bonnet," and supposed that inasmuch as I was to speak to college professors and students I must ul least make a show of some familiarity wilh letters.

right hand broken

mobocrats

The way had been prepared for us

This slatemcnt soon became known in Maryland, and I had reason lo believe that an effort would be made to recapture me

Be yourself;" said,Collins, "and,telLf.our story." It was said to me, "Better have a little of the plantation manner of .speech than not;

"with my diploma wri11e11 m, my lwck!"

I trembled in every limb. I am not sure that my embarrassment was not the most effective part of my speech, if speech it could be called.

holy fire

She al first lacked lhe depravity indis-°"'f'~v,·~ pensable lo shutting me up in mental darkness. It Afi was at least necessary for her to have some train-"1~dl~rv'1 ing in the exercise of irresponsible power, to -o11,.bw. " make her equal to the task of treating me as though I were a brute.

I ventured to designate respec-tively by the terms "Inferring," and "Proving"; i.e., the a.scertai11111e111 of the truth by investiga-tion, and the establishme11t of it to the satisfac-tion of a11othe

"Argumentative Composition,"

and even in-sisted on Virtue-' as an essential qualification of a perfect Orator

some wrilers have spoken or Rhetoric us 1he Art of Compoi.itio

Speaking are of course applicable equally to Writing,

manifestly turning on the different senses in which "Art" may be un-derstood

"an offshoot of Logic''

i11.\'tru111e111al arts; and, as such, applicat,/e

John Locke

who would rather let souls perish, than that the truths of the gospel should be delivered by women

from that sphere

Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman

physical abuse, marital rape, and forced pregnanc

unexpected difficulties engaging halls in which lo speak