We argue that learning to dwell with new media and its technologies entails a harkening to their ontological weight and rhetorical agency
There are, I think, strong links to Boyle's chapter on practice here. That is, I think Boyle offers a way to think through how such a harkening might be practiced.
ays claims on us
What to make of this phrasing here?
A thing, as opposed to an object, is an entity that is more than a resource or means
This is an important distinction for rhetoric. Rhetoric is more interested in things as they are relational and dynamic: this allows for a more "rhetorical" version of reality. A common sense notion of "reality" tends to assume a world full of objects. A famous example of such a realism is the philosopher who kicks a stone.
have generated
This is already a key assertion.
“It seems like everything used to be something else, yes?”
This is a key phrase for the posthuman. This might help kpolizzi think through Barad's statement of relations with relata, perhaps.
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.
Linger here a bit: the distinction is an important one.
an erotic edg
Eros and rhetoric. Recall the Phaedrus.
The posthuman thus offers astyle of theorizing or weapon invention in which disciplinary boundariesbecome sites of connection rather than enclosures of autonomousinteriorities
Reading this piece again, the disciplinary implications really struck me. Although, it should be a surprise. Imagine Muckelbauer's definition of rhetoric as being his definition of the discipline of rhetoric. Rhetoric, in this context, is always trying to not finally discipline itself.
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.
Compare with the Matrix.
And as such, everything is ... rhetorically
This is a productive way to (re)imagine rhetoric in the terms of posthumanism.
perhaps figures of speech are simply very determined, linguistic instances of a larger rhetorical tropology of persua-sive turning.
Now, what does this notion of turning get us, and how does it address what Micks has earlier said about persuasion?
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.
This is the part that really speaks to/of/for posthuman rhetoric. A rhetoric without this distinction, which, folks like myself have argued, is the split that circumscribes rhetoric. And it is this split that is at the root of so much of what and how "we" think.
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.
Note this, which is quite provocative. What do we actually think persuasion is?
But why stop there?
This is one of my favorite things about this piece: the refrain of but what stop there? Think about it this way: much of what we have read over the course of the semester has been a series of articulations of reasons to 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.
What are some implications of this reversal.
hings are a little more complicated with epideictic rhetoric,
Epideictic rhetoric is very compelling precisely because it's temporal and spatial weirdness.
a combination of the two
But is such a combination that same as two combined?
rhetorician
Rhetor or rhetorician?
Biesecker 127
How precisely does she do this?
Essentially
hum...
defining exigence
Why do we need one defition?
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
What do we get when we mix in the other takes on the rhetorical situation?
How Uber Uses Psychological Tricks to Push Its Drivers’ Buttons
Persuasion
The very presence of this social fabric is a new kind of “central standard” or “absolute” which is, perhaps paradoxically, sewn from ambiguity.
BOOM!
o embrace ambiguity is to necessitate the participation of a diverse body of individuals.
Nicely put!
but rather it is a space
Syncs nicely with Kevin's microresponse.
The first week of this class
I like this move.
Burke keeps ambiguity alive, keeping many doors open for interpretation
Nicely put.
he rejects
Hum. "Reject" seems a rather unambiguous response. Indeed, Burke writes against this sort of debunking in favor of discounting.
ambiguity as a space. Burke seems to believe ambiguity must be explored;
This is a pretty cool insight.
To Woolf, women are already under assault, and an assault made silent by exclusion of the ambiguous and the rationally settled fact.
Nice linkage here.
Ok then.
lol
Burke also takes Richards and Ogden’s understanding of the importance of context in meaning further.
I like this point here: even context is an effect rather than a cause. This is something that, in part, Derrida takes up in his treatment of context.
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.
The paradox of community's substance.
Nietzsche
yes.
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.
This has me thinking of Nietzsche on forgetting.
Although she does not seem to come to any sort of conclusion about the essence of “woman,”
The paradox of substance, as Burke might say.
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.
Nicely put.
implication of words
Nicely put. The focus becomes not simply on what words express or signify but upon what words do.
potential dangers of co-optation.
Cixous anxious of rhetoric's consubstantial powers.
Cixous suggests that such diffuse, flowing, open writing parallels the ways women experience erotic sexuality.
Some more embodiment as it bears upon rhetoric.
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.
She sees them as something akin to *subject positions" that can be occupied by either "male" or "female" bodies.
In "Signature Event Context," Derrida in fact attacks the idea that "context" can help to account for meaning.
In more recent rhetorical theory, context has come in for some critique. This is to say, Derrida's own critique of context doesn't necessarily make him "antirhetorical."
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.
Very important caveat here.
This effort to reach past language to the reality it names is what Derrida calls "the metaphysics of presence."
*The metaphysics of presence" has been haunting us all semester.
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.
Some possible connections to Lanham and his use of social drama.
"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
Really think through this, gang.
That is, he treats author, meaning, and knowledge as a function of discourse, not as its source.
Discourse itself is the rhetor.
ince the demise of the Sophists
Connections back to deep rhetorical tradition.
a world of choices
The world as constituted by choices.
In morals, for example, reasoning is neither deductive nor inductive, but justificative.
A very important point being made here.
it is always "situated.
We will explore in more detail, later on in the semester, what a rhetorical situation is.
Philosophy and Rhetoric
And it is still kicking.
who expected rhetoric to act on the imagination to se-cure the triumph of reason.
Weak defense.
Philosophy, as a con· sequence, lost its status in contemporary culture
It is worth pointing out the in terms of PR, philosophy isn't doing any better than rhetoric..
views that are familiar in existentialism.
I.e., essence doesn't not precede existence.
t is not this but rather the idea of the unicity of truth that has disqualified rhetoric in the Western philosophi-cal tradition.
Bingo. The truth, in Western philosophy, is singular and whole, and so rhetoric is nothing but trouble.
oth Descartes and Plato hold this idea because of their rejection of opinion
Opinions must be mutually exclusive for Plato and Descartes.
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
Weak defense.
In some cases there are detailed rules drawn up for establishing this contact before a question can be debated.
To recall Lanham, some dramas are more formal than others.
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.
...hmmmm....
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
Making something happen.
In its contemporary form, demonstration is a calcula-tion made in accordance with rules that have been laid down beforehand.
It is a closed system. Like a sport with rules.
For almost ten years Mme L. Olbrechts-Tyteca and I conducted such an inquiry and analysis.
They did field research, in other words.
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?
Muckelbauer the problem: every attempt to answer this question.
subjectivism, which, as far as values are concerned, leads to skepticism for lack of an intersubjective criterion; or an abso-lutism founded on intuitionism.
Think other than the subject/object binary.
n other words, is ~here a_ logi~ of value judg-11 SOM\.· ments that makes tt possible tor us to reason "'\, about values
We will come back to this question in Wayne Booth
Recent his~ory has shown abundantly the sad excesses to which such "'4., an attitude can lead
Indeed.
There is no value which is not logically arbitrary."
It is a claim made: existence precedes essence, as it were. Rhetoric comes first.
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 connect back to Perelman's discussion of Aristotle, forensic rhetoric always calls back to epideictic rhetoric.
to awaken a disposition so to act
What both Burke and Richards call attitude.
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.
This goes to Kevin and Emily's questions (over on Burke) on effectiveness.
that, namely, of b1:inging abo~t a consensus in the minds of the audience regardmg the values that are celebrated in the speech.
It is useful to think of epideictic rhetoric through Nietzsche.
The same view was taken of the rhetoric of the Roman Empire
What might rhetoric be in an empire?
Lack of clarity concerning the idea of rhetoric is also apparent in the article on the subject in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1969 ed.)
Always dancing around the question of definition.
"a mon-strous aberration"
sophist_monstrous_aberration
"the once and future queen of the i~ a. human sciences"
Gendered formulation.
by the secular experience of the jurists
A move similar to the one Lanham makes.
This implies putting classical epistemology and metaphysics into question.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is postmodernism in a nutshell.
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.
This a return to the early citation of Gorgias.
led finally to 1 [\ immobility and conformism in law, morality, politics, and religion
Serious burn here, politically.
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.
Read in light of nietzsche.
Only the existence of an argumentation
Spend some time with this passage.
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
Some nice connections to Lanham and his "social dramas."
creates an unbridgeable gulf
And think of the violence that emerges from within this gulf.
is to withdraw them beyond the realm of discussion and argu
Bingo: black box them up.
This rejection does not, of course, imply that we deny the effect of experience or reason-ing on our opinions
Again, an emphasis upon effect.
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.
Gang, spend some time with this articulation of their argument, which is bold and striking.
Note their use of combat as the key verb. Strong stuff that calls to mind Nietzsche.
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.
Moving against the strong presence of Rational Man.
insist on this point, arguing that there are no self-evident propositions and no "previously given natural order.
Strong Defense of rhetoric under construction here.
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
Nicely concluded.
Design should denaturalize the standard body.
Interesting.
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
This is great.
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.
And the shift from is to do is to move from philosophy to rhetoric (in some many words), which they render here as the political.
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.
Nicely put.
we just don’t presume to know it (yet).
The double negative captures that the limit is not practical (or epistemic) but is ontological instead.
Affirming an ignorance of something presupposes that what is ignored could be actually known.
Bingo!
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.
This is a fantastic flip.
Many still refer directly to Dreyfuss’ anthropometric data and models.
Lemos connection.
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.
Ambiguity as "resource"?
Katarina Damjanov
She has written some other things that look great.
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.
nice
The robot, as the soulless machinic replacement of our body and labour, does not exist because this figure
I love this because it suggests a different way of being related to rovers. More entanglement and less distance.
Gilbert Simondon
Casey is gonna love this part.
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.
not just "agency" but "creative agency"
sculpt
great word here. Reminds me of Kim Stanley Robinson
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.
nice
Curiosity will halt to rest in the environs of Mars. - 3 -
great opening paragraph
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.
Who does rhetoric?
concrescence
Somebody define this please!
we forget this
Nietzsche
primordial
Burke connection.
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
Hum. Only children?
nor would another complete outfit necessarily improve matters, even if it were ten times as complete
No easy way out of this.
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
Think of Willard here.
The fundamental and most prolific; faJ.lacy is, in other words, that the base of the triangle given above is filled in.
This is the key claim here.
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.
Gender is not simply expressed through language, but arrives to us already baked into the language. It's not so much that language can be used to sexists ends, but that language is already gendered and so engenders sexism.
But almost without exception they are shown in their rela-tion to men.
The Bechdel Test. Note the nod to Woolf.
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
New forms of relation will emerge in and around their fiction.
will now be discharged by women also
New rhetorical work to undertake.
of environment and suggestion upon the mind, we in our psychoanalytical age are beginning to realize
Work upon places and bodies produces lasting effects. We are already inscribed and emplaced.
My time is up; and I must cease
this hal
This resonates with Douglass and the securing of places to speak and write.
Inwardly, I think, the case is very different; she has still many ghosts to fight, many prejudices to overcome.
This speaks to the pervasive power of rhetoric to shape subjectivity. Rhetoric that moves inside us.
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.
This is pretty compelling in that it might suggest that one cannot know what a woman is before they have done the rhetorical, discursive work.
Historian of rhetoric l "-~ a...-~ George A. Kennedy contemplates animal communication as rhetorical
See Burke, p 1299 ("Barnyard") and 1327 (the animal trainer).
The goal of rhetoric, then, is to reveal that all discourse is rhetorical and lhal no claims arc self-evident.
A strong defense formulation.
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.
This is an amazing and telling detail.
or this reason, the reader has an active role in producing the mean-ing of the work.
Part of the resistance to this view is the implications for judgement and canon formation: implicit in this assertion is that there are no bad books only bad readers.
Words do not have literal meanings that travel with them wherever they go, he says.
Word aren't train cars.
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.
As we discussed in class (2.21), this is an outgrowth of the Enlightenment in many respects. Well, that combined with the Industrial Revolution.
Friedrich Nietzsche
On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense
DO NOT FORGET THE TITLE OF THIS PIECE AS YOU (RE)READ THIS PIECE.
nothing but metaphors for things.
Anybody else reminded of Hume's bundles here?
as a tool built to emphasize construction instead of combat
Lovely.
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.”
Fascinating connection here.
This pleasure, however, results from forgetting that language consists of metaphors.
By using the telescopic metaphor (similar to Nietzsche)
Fantastic linkage around vision, which was important the Enlightenment. It's also interesting how metaphorical Willard's articulation of the truth: the "full-orbed revelation" doesn't necessary have the ring of science to it.
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.
Poetry is really good rhetoric.
Other things equal,
This is a phrase he uses a lot, and suggests much about how much he has to vacuum-seal his argument here.
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.
Scott's annotations are pretty tight.
translate words into thoughts.
The form/content distinction gives rise to the thought/language distinction as well.
further superiority possessed by Saxon English
Maybe a little racist?
No phrase can convey the idea of surprise so vividly as opening the eyes and raising the eye-brows
Elocutionary connections.
whatever force is absorbed by the machine is deducted from the result.
Herbert's black box of rhetoric.
soA lated dogmas
Still a fan of this: could it be that rhetoric offers precisely this: contextual, isolated dogmas? Not dogmas that reach anywhere and everywhere, but dogmas that apply only in specific places.
Edited by Fred Newton Scott.
This one comes pre-annotated.
a book rather than a man
Interesting linkage between writing/print/ethos/identity.
The greatest genius of all is, of course, he who \~ economizes a reader's attention at the same time that he stimulates his energies:
Composition as perpetual motion machine.
machinery
Industrial metaphor.
other merits will be of little avai
What does this say about things like voice and also affective dimensions of writing? Does something have to be intelligible to be effective?
conformity to good taste
paging David Hume.
before we thoroughly know our own meaning
Would we ever speak? Think about what kind of model of human subjectivity is at work here.
by language,
Note this aspect of the definition, which closes off other forms to rhetoric. Recall Rickert here.
Rhetoric may be defined as the art of efficient communication by language
I always knew that Kplynch was a secret Sherman Hill fan!
Look to the Paragraphs and the Discourse will look to itself;
This has a nice ring to it, and it speaks nicely to the idea of form as inventive (even though the author might resist it).
Numerous attempts have been made, and arc still making, to methodize instruction in English Composition
From definition to deployment.
somelhing to do.
Rhetoric as something 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.
A great contemporary example of this?
THE EARTH-BORN ARGUMEN
I am not sure what to do with it yet, but I am in love with this phrase.
"Behold, I make all things new;" "the letter killeth, the spirit giveth life."
Building on my annotation on this as a section title. Given the etymology of a word like spirit, which can suggest breathe, there is yet another connection to oratory here and the preference for it over literacy. Oratory breathes life into discourse where print would kill it to make it stand still.
Men reason in the abstract, women in the con-crete. A syllogism symbolizes one. a rule of life the other.
Philosophy : male :: rhetoric : female
It is a whimsical fact that men seem comparatively willing that women should enter any profession except their own
This links up with her work in the Labor movement as well.
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.
Another, very interesting move here. Her interlocutors keep planting themselves on apparently firm ground, and each time they do, she dances around them.
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
Willard is actually, along the way, sublimely unpacking logic as the firm foundation it was being treated as. These are, she argues, the preferences male ministers hold: defend them on those grounds instead of appealing to abstract principles. "Their hierarchy is man-made from first to last." This isn't to critique it as such, but to point toward the rhetorical work being done here. In this, Willard resonates, perhaps surprisingly, with Nietzsche here.
THE LEITER KILLETH
If I ever get my fake band back together, this will be our album title. The phrase does really important work as well, in marking the transition of rhetoric from a primarily oratorical understand to a literate one. I joked in class that we now Plato is a bad guy because we still have all of his writers, and that we know that sophists are good because the opposite is true. I still hold to this, but it is also true that sophists seem to have left behind fewer, permanent and lasting texts. Writing stabilizes (or creates the feeling of stability), and so, it killeth. It allows, as Nietzsche might say, us to forget.
come lo public voice
"Come to public voice" is an interesting turn of phrase in light of last week's discussions of materiality.
1862
This is taking place during the Civil War.
I possess nothing but moml capability
A moral agent.
Why sit ye here and die?
BOOM!
"Ladies' Department."
Come here for abolition and hosiery. ;)
William Lloyd Garrison
Who is this ghost haunting our readings?
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.
See how he marks his own transition here with respect to literacy, which is a strong theme throughout these texts.
right hand broken
This is an important moment for my own understanding of Douglass and his significance for rhetoric.
mobocrats
What a great term here.
The way had been prepared for us
Making space for speech.
This slatemcnt soon became known in Maryland, and I had reason lo believe that an effort would be made to recapture me
To perform his ethos puts him at risk.
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;
A strange elocution lesson to be sure. But think, then, on how much more loaded Douglass's elocution would have been.
"with my diploma wri11e11 m, my lwck!"
What an phrase. To think of this of writing ought to inform our thinking on composition and its rhetoric.
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.
Again, the body is always crucial here in ways even beyond the elocutionists we read earlier.
holy fire
A reference to fire that echoes Palmer's.
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.
This really is an incredible passage The whole category of nature, the body, and attitude are thrown open. Douglass is attuning us to the way that bodies and hearts and minds are composed rhetorical: that is, socially through practice. Nothing is automatic and irreversible. The province of rhetoric is being expanded here.
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
Important distinction. Inside vs. outside. Personal vs. social. Several ways to unpack this.
"Argumentative Composition,"
A crucial move here. The move to delimit so as to define rhetoric.
and even in-sisted on Virtue-' as an essential qualification of a perfect Orator
Direct nod to Quintilian and the "Q" Question.
some wrilers have spoken or Rhetoric us 1he Art of Compoi.itio
This is linkage I find compelling as composition is not reducible to writing.
Speaking are of course applicable equally to Writing,
What exactly is the relationship of speaking to writing? Certainly not a seamless one.
manifestly turning on the different senses in which "Art" may be un-derstood
Again, to define rhetoric is to also have defined other related terms as well.
"an offshoot of Logic''
One important way of thinking through and about rhetoric is to make juxtapositions: what is the significance of this one?
i11.\'tru111e111al arts; and, as such, applicat,/e
The language of instrumental and applicable certainly suggests a weak defense at work here.
John Locke
No other than John Locke.
who would rather let souls perish, than that the truths of the gospel should be delivered by women
Here are your choices, shitheads!
from that sphere
Sphere appears again.
Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman
Think about the formal significance here: private letters as public texts. Recalls Foucault but also works within gendered genre conventions.
physical abuse, marital rape, and forced pregnanc
Material abuse.
unexpected difficulties engaging halls in which lo speak
One needs a place from where to speak. Douglass had similar spatial struggles.
