socratic modernism
A series of disconnected thoughts as possible source material for a future project.
- The postmodern turn has been described as the rhetorical turn in critical and cultural theory.
- Socrates, as we know, was opposed to rhetoric.
- Although post-modernism is not defined via opposition to modernism (that is, pomo is understood as intensification of modernism, not its antithesis or undoing … or even, really, its successor per se), I wonder whether there can be drawn some analogy like the following: Socrates:rhetoric::modernism:postmodernism?
- If Socrates/Plato inaugurates a certain narrative of Western philosophy that culminates/is apotheosized by the Enlightenment and modernism, how does that tradition stand in relation to an (assumed) more sophistic postmodernism?
- More pressingly, if we are (as has been rumored) post-postmodern (add as many “posts-” as you see fit), does that mean we are similarly post-rhetoric? What would it even mean to be post-rhetorical?
- If we are post-rhetoric (whatever that comes to mean), what resources are left to the liberal tradition? A tradition based on pluralism, reason, and argument would thus seem to be likewise exhausted by a post-rhetorical turn.
I’m open to any comments as these ideas, nebulous as they are, begin to take shape.
rhet-comp’s big break (part i)
I’ve been kind of at a blogging standstill lately. I don’t really want to blog about all the fascinating developments in my personal life (capsule summary: I had one! Then I didn’t! Then I did! Now I don’t! Only I kind of do!) and I’m since I’m still in the early stages of working on the C&W project, I don’t really feel like writing too much about that (though it seems to be succumbing to the same malaise that’s been effecting my scholarship all year). It is fun on occasion to post bits about how much I hate NOM and Catcher in the Rye, but it’s been far too long since I’ve posted in earnest anything resembling actual scholarship.
So I’ve decided to serialize my recent essay for RR’s course on composition theory. I’d be interested to broaden its scope a little and maybe use nuggets of this piece as the starting point for a future article, so comments are welcome, invited, and encouraged. The serialization will proceed whenever I remember to update it. The piece is called “Rhet-Comp’s Big Break: Notes on Composition’s First Principles.” It’s essentially a Frankensteinian stitching together of a response to Downs and Wardle’s “Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions: (Re)Envisioning ‘First-Year Composition as ‘Introduction to Writing Studies’” (CCC 58.4, June 2007) and an attempt to put Susan Miller and Raul Sanchez in conversation with one another. I think either of the two parts works, but frankly, I’m not completely satisfied with how the two parts come together. It works, more or less, just not the way I’d like it to.
Part one of the serialized draft begins after the fold.
and so it goes
I’m submitting a panel to the 4Cs with JG, WD, KL, and MK. Here’s my bit:
Speaker 1: Invention: The Crowded House of Writing as a Social Process
The idea of the individual writer as an isolated fount of rhetorical invention has been challenged by research about social and community literacies (Flower, Gee, Grabill), collaborative learning (Bruffee), post-process theory (Kent, Foster), and the so-called “public turn” in composition (Mathieu, Weisser), but this work assumes stable social realms understood variously as “discourses,” “communities,” or “publics.” Conversely, work in a variety of fields—business (Howe, Tapscott and Williams, Brafman and Beckstrom), information science (Shirky, Weinberger), critical theory (Hardt and Negri, Terranova, Virno)—have pointed to the efficacy of temporary, contingent groups such as crowds or the multitude to respond to short-term, immediate problems; that is, they seem to respond to Muckelbauer’s interest in “what particular concepts can do” (44). This paper seeks to argue for the productive potential of contingency by asking how research on crowds and crowdsourcing can be remixed into what we already know about invention as a social process.
Meh. We’ll see what happens. On the whole, the panel is strong, remixing the canons of rhetoric, and my colleagues have told me they think the proposal is decent, but I’m just phoning it in at this point. I’ll be glad to get to Cornell this summer: I think a change of scene and a summer of intellectual vigor will be good for me. Please don’t read that as saying my friends and colleagues don’t provide plenty of i.v.—I love you all dearly even when I am acting like a total hatebag, as I have been lately. But I think Cornell will be good all the same, and I will return to you renewed and revived.
And because I don’t see the point in the half-truths anymore: I was seeing someone, I ruined it, the end. My fault entirely. What a surprise.
I know some good texts to read arguing in favor of critical pedagogy. Can anyone recommend the texts to read for the counter-arguments? I need to see if there’s a way to better articulate my opposition to it, and I’m hoping some decent readings will give me the way in.
in defense of not listening
I remain dissatisfied by the ending of Faigley’s book. In part, this is because I think what Faigley represents as an ethical and political necessity can be seen, counter to his claims, as posing a political danger. In the final chapter, Faigley reads Lyotard and Young in order to posit an ethics that is dependent on the subject’s moment of articulation rather than on a foundational, transcendental sense of the good. In doing so, however, Faigley ends with a resolution that seems counterproductive to what he reads in the work of Lyotard and Young.
Faigley indicates that he sees some form of resolution emerge through his reading of Lyotard and Young. In linking these two theorists together, Faigley locates a response to Seyla Benhabib’s charge that Lyotard “does not offer a way of theorizing inequality nor does he suggest how subjects are to be located” (238). On the contrary, Faigley argues, reading Lyotard and Young together allows for “conceiving at a microlevel how urban subjects encounter boundaries in both crossing social divisions and in the personal experience of negotiating among many competing discourses” (239). Faigley contends that Lyotard points to a “politics of articulation” in
Lester Faigley's Fragments of Rationality
which the composing subject is never free from the ethical obligations of her rhetorical choices. This ethical imperative obtains whenever the subject articulates a position or enters a discourse; the subject selects from the available linkages between competing and incommensurate claims of value, knowledge, ideology, and must articulate both a subject position from which to speak and a statement that works within the limits determined by the available linkages. The ethics of articulation therefore “requires a momentary delay of those linkages and a questioning of their ethical implications”. Faigley closes his final chapter by invoking Lyotard to argue that “ethics is also the obligation of rhetoric. It is accepting the responsibility for judgment. It is a pausing to reflect on the limits of understanding. … It is finding spaces to listen.”
Faigley’s resolution here remains for me unsatisfying. I admit that the call for “finding spaces to listen” that closes his book strikes a false note for me; in part, it is that I think that the particular phrasing suggests a warm-and-fuzzy optimism to which my own temperament is not disposed. More particularly, though, I would argue that the call for listening as an ethical imperative carries with it a risk of being silenced, a risk that Faigley’s description does not adequately address. While I accept Faigley’s larger point about the ethical implications of articulation, I also believe that he errs in insisting on the ethics of listening. As Faigley describes it, this listening can only occur before the subject speaks, before a position and an ethical stance are articulated. This is all well and good, but it also assumes that the other subjects in the “language game” have agreed to abide by those rules—which, Faigley’s own reading of Lyotard’s differend suggests, is not a reliable assumption. Rather, by arguing for this caesura in the moment of articulation, Faigley places the subject in the unfortunate position of risking the opportunity to articulate itself, since there is no guarantee that the other language gamers will respect the ethical subject’s urge toward contemplation and interrogation. To listen, here, is to not speak, and the ethical subject could easily thus be mistaken for the silent subject, the complacent subject, the consenting subject.
Although by now it bears the mark of overuse, we can here recall Edmund Burke’s aphorism that “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” I would suggest that this is exactly what Faigley forgets, that seeking that moment’s delay can be dangerous: while good questions, evil acts. Rather, although it is a more daunting task on the levels of practical politics, pedagogy, and theory alike, what Faigley’s error points to is a twofold necessity. First, as Lyotard argues for in The Postmodern Condition, we must continue to work to make the rules and boundaries of both our own and others’ language games explicit so as to ensure equitable participation across incommensurable language practices. Second, we must recognize that both the process of explicating language games and of articulating differ(ence/ends) must by necessity occur in situ and in media res. The delay that Faigley urges on us assumes that the subject can withdraw from discourse in order to interrogate it, but if the theories of postmodernism and poststructuralism have asserted nothing else, it is that such withdrawal is an impossibility. Instead, we must interrogate and question the ethical implications of articulation while in the midst of articulation, without the ethical luxury of a contemplative remove.
necessary fictions
In Rescuing the Subject, Susan Miller attempts the project of reclaiming a space for the writing subject as distinct from the speaking subject of the oral rhetoric tradition. For Miller, Composition’s disciplinary identification with the rhetorical (oral) tradition occludes the possibility of a fully theorized writing subject, that is, a subject who
. . . lives … in a complex textual world. … This writer, who is admittedly a fiction whose existence is never called into play outside a theoretically conceived writing event, both originates with, and results from, a written text. … And the perduring significance of these performances has little to do with the writer’s personal status, his or her intended “meaning,” or any other absolutely predictable condition of writing. It is always in question. (15)
I understand Miller to be invoking the writing subject as a necessary fiction for the preservation of textual and political agency. That is, Miller conceives of the writing subject both as a bulwark against the mise en abyme of deconstruction, poststructuralism, and the postmodern and as a democratizing challenge to the universalized Enlightenment subject. As she writes later in the same chapter, writing is medial node between stability and fluidity; “[i]t is a living fiction of, not an achievement of, stability” (19). Thus conceived, Miller seems to argue, the writing subject enjoys both the rhetorical possibilities of the decentered subject of postmodernity and the political agency of the coherent Enlightenment subject.
Susan Miller, Rescuing the Subject
While I accept Miller’s point that Composition Studies has uncritically imported much of its conception of the writing subject from the traditions of oral rhetoric, I am left unconvinced that the subject is thus rescued. Or, rather, I do not think that Miller’s caveat of the writing subject as a living fiction is the panacea she seems to indicate. To be fair, Miller does emphasize that Composition Studies’ theory of the subject is situated awkwardly between modernism and postmodernism (12-4). In this, she does anticipate postmodernism as a liberatory body of theory—within limits: she notes that “[t]hemes in theory, philosophy, and literary criticism point to proposing a new way to rescue this writer” (10.) Still, I would contend that Miller significantly misreads postmodernism’s history of the subject in ways that problematize her claims to be rescuing the subject.
If we look especially to the work of Foucault (who, tellingly, Miller does not cite), what poststructuralist and, later, postmodernist theories of the subject teach us is that the subject’s relation to discourses and language acts has always been a fraught one. Foucault, in his genealogical later works like Discipline and Punish and Technologies of the Self, has shown that the subject has always been the product of competing and conflicting discourses of power. In postmodernity, however, the teleologies of those discourses—the metanarratives of Lyotard’s Postmodern Condition—are problematized and confronted with challenges to their assumed naturalism and rationality. The subject is not newly fragmented by postmodern theory, but rather is exposed as always having already been contradictory, irrational, and irrevocably bound up within language.
This, I want to argue, creates a problem for Miller, in that the idea of the centered, rational subject has always been a “living fiction.” That is, we cannot read the history of the subject through postmodernism as describing an originary whole that is later fragmented under the pressures of deconstruction. Miller’s argument that the efficacy of the agentive subject is rescued by distinguishing between the threatened modernist subject preserved in original rhetoric on one hand, and the reclaimed writing subject she describes on the other, is ultimately a false choice, dependent on a misreading of what postmodernism teaches about the history of the subject. To the extent that the tradition of oral rhetoric has worked to prevent the theorization of the writing subject, I grant that the distinction to which Miller wants to draw attention is an important one. All the same, Miller’s reading oversimplifies what postmodern thought (especially Foucault) reveals about the subject: it was never in need of rescuing. What does need rehabilitation, however, is a theory of agency of the subject that accommodates how we now think of the subject. In this, Miller’s project is valuable but problematic: While calling attention to the nature of the writing subject does serve to draw attention to rhetoric’s problematic commitment to the self-present speaking subject, Miller does not read the history of the subject carefully enough to see that what distinguishes the modern from the postmodern subject is not the living fiction of stability, but the all the more necessary fiction of agency.
i am a racist technocrat
This week’s post from Pruchnic’s seminar, in response to Adam Banks, Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground.
I Am a Racist Technocrat
Or,
Will the Real Slim Shady Please Sit Down?
I am not the person to respond to this book because I have little investment in identity politics—and what investment I do have makes me seem like a reactionary, anti-diversity rube who thinks that certain folk are gettin’ uppity when they start talkin’ ‘bout how they ain’t got access. And really, that’s not me. My qualms about identity politics stem from the fact that I want to argue for the constructedness of whiteness as unmarked but the rules of the game are against me. Yes, I understand that categories like African American, woman, subaltern, homosexual are constructed as Other from the perspective of an assumed heteronormative, unmarked white rational masculine subject position. But my interest is not in defending the HUWRMSP as somehow “victimized” by the discourses of legitimation for other subject positions so much as is it rests in arguing that we should recognize the constructedness of all subject positions—but the last time I suggested such a thing in a seminar I was roundly derided.
I start with this preface only because I’m thinking through some issues in relation to Banks’s work that are inevitably shaded by my antipathy toward identity politics. I want to emphasize my interest in the constructedness of all subject positions because I am troubled by Banks’s use of what might be read as an essentialized Black subjectivity in his chapter on the website BlackPlanet and African American discourse tropes. Banks argues in favor of Smitherman’s earlier claim that Black English is intimately tied to a unique “Black” experience; Banks, via Smitherman, maintains that “Black English, as expressed through its oral traditions, represents distinctively African American worldviews” (70). As Banks would have it, the Black worldview, expressed in both oral and literate Black English, can be understood as a scene of resistance and political liberation struggle:
The continued focus of many on the oral in Black English, then, is not a resignation that written English is somehow the exclusive domain of Whites . . . but a matter of remaining true to the roots of the language, no matter what forms it might take now. Maintaining that focus is also an act of self-determination, of resistance, of keeping oppositional identities and worldviews alive, refusing to allow melting pot ideologies to continue to demand that Black people assimilate to the White notions of language and identity as the cost for access to economic goods or a public voice in American society. (70)
This passage is worth citing at length because we here see what I am suggesting is problematic. Yes, Banks does write of Black identities, but not in the sense of a variegated multiplicity of Black subjectivities; rather, the “Black Experience,” it would seem here, is yoked to “authentically” Black literate and oral practices as the site of resistance to (monolithic) White notions of discourse and the subject. Later in the chapter, Banks gives in a little bit, admitting that “the names [of BlackPlanet members] reveal complexity and diversity in notions of exactly what constitutes a Black idenity”; Banks, though, still insists that there is such a thing as a discretely identifiable Black subject, for “all of the users [of BlackPlanet] . . . participate in and claim a Black identity for themselves” (75). I’m left wondering which argument Banks wants us to believe: that the Black subject is a space of contested, negotiated meaning, or that there is something we can call “Black identity” in a non-problematic, non-essentialized way?
And now, a left turn. I know I’m kind off the technology trope here, but really the technological argument Banks is making seems fairly innocent. We need to redefine the Digital Divide; see “access” as a rhetorical problem that can be understood across multiple levels; and read the Civil Rights struggle as a technological, rather than a “merely” legal one? Okay. I’m on board. Back to my left turn.
What makes Banks’s claims about Black English and Black identity so challenging is that it seems to tie racial identity to discursive production, in either the oral or literate genres. It is not difficult to consider two test cases (incongruous though they may be) for the claims Banks is making here. The first is the 313’s own Marshall “Eminem/Slim Shady” Mathers. In his track “The Way I Am,” Em taunts his white critics who accuse him of appropriating a traditionally Black art form: “And I just do not got the patience / to deal with these cocky Caucasians who think / I’m some wigger who just tries to be black cause I talk with an accent . . . .”. Here, Em makes, in a roundabout way, an argument similar to the Banks/Smitherman postulate: what his critics deride is a (perceived) wish to be Black, to be other, but Em refutes that haterade because, he argues, he naturally talks with an “accent”—which here, we might conjecture, means that Em—child of South Warren, friend and student of the Black population across the 8 Mile border—is a native user of Black discursive traditions and therefore, is not a “white nigger” but has some claim to Black experience by virtue of his participation in Black discourse genres. And while I am not Black, I can imagine taking some umbrage at such an argument (even while being dazzled by Em’s flow and mastery of the rap genre); that is, does participation in, and mastery of, the discursive production equate to Black identity?
Alternatively, Barack Obama offers the other test case. While such questions have since grown silent (or at least much quieter), Obama’s candidacy was plagued in its early days by the question of whether he was “Black enough.” Take, for example, the opening to a story from Time magazine from 1 February 2007:
But this is a double-edged sword. As much as his biracial identity has helped Obama build a sizable following in middle America, it’s also opened a gap for others to question his authenticity as a black man. In calling Obama the “first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” the implication was that the black people who are regularly seen by whites — or at least those who aspire to the highest office in the land — are none of these things.
The “not Black enough” trope takes two forms: first, the argument that Obama isn’t “Black enough” is due to his immigrant heritage: not the child of slaves, but the child of an immigrant student and a white (native) mother. He is African comma American, but not African hyphen American. The other version of the trope, expressed here in its most odious form by conservative hack pundit Warner Todd Huston, is that what makes Obama insufficiently Black is his relationship to “the low trending culture developed by the native born:”
Obama isn’t “black enough” not because he might have an immigrant background but because he is educated, eloquent, smooth, and associates with whites. He eschews the thug, rapper lifestyle, the discounting of education and the general downgrading of achievement that is currently accepted by popular black culture in America today.
So, Blacks do not distrust Obama because he is an immigrant and therefore not “black enough”. They distrust him because he is able and successful, smart and educated so that is what makes him not “black enough”.
While I am not qualified to rule on Obama’s “Blackness quotient,” I can still say that I find both versions of the trope distressing from a critical point of view. Here, we have the corollary of the Banks argument; what makes Obama “not Black enough” is his background, and, in particular, his acceptance of “mainstream” or “standard” White discursive forms. While the Huston quote goes some distance to validate Banks’s argument that African Americans are often written off as being uneducable or irredeemably illiterate, Huston’s argument—distasteful as it may be—posits, like Banks, an essentialized Black identity.
The argument I am trying to make here—to the extent that I am making one and not just thinking through some issues—is that any essentialized Black identity becomes problematic. It is either a derogatory assessment of “us people,” or a blanket acceptance of “us folks.”
got me an idee-er
Partially in response to reading Johnson-Eilola’s Datacloud for JP’s seminar (followed this week by Rice’s Rhetoric of Cool), and partially in response to leafing through a book whose title and author escape me at the moment (for a project in RM’s seminar), I’ve been toying with the idea for a piece called “New Media Composition in the Corporate University: An Historical and Polemical Essay.” The central question of said piece is to bring together threads of thought about the contemporary, post-Fordist corporations and modes of work with ideas about the appropriate forms of New Media work in the comp classroom. I’m sure someone’s beat me to it, though–the idea’s just been stirring in my head for the last day or so. The title, as some of you will doubtlessly recognize, alludes to Crowley’s Composition in the University.
I’m open, as always, for possible sources for such a project is anyone’s got any.
talkin’ edward p.j. corbett dissertation blues
Apologies to Dylan for the bastardization of the title.
I’m waiting for feedback on the first finished draft of the MA from my advisors. As I’m waiting, I asked a fellow grad (and new GTA, congrats!) to take a look, since he and I have some similar interests but also enough differing views that I was interested to see what he might make of it.
Actually, that paragraph isn’t really necessary, ‘cos this isn’t about his response so much as it is something I wrote to him in response to a particular comment he made about the draft (a suggested revision he was right about, btw).
I mentioned to him that (in addition to the several other ideas I’ve mentioned before), one thing I might be keen to do for a diss to look at the way the categories of “rhetoric,” “resistance,” “social change,” “protest” et cetera might be challenged by recent developments in critical theory. I had explained that had I read Hardt/Negri’s Empire, Virno’s Grammar of the Multitude, and some of the interviews in Critical Intellectuals on Writing before beginning, my MA would likely be a very different beast. Still focused on the bed-ins, but with a different spin on them entirely. (I am heartened, though, by seeing that much of what I build to in the current draft is largely anticipated by these works, so there is clearly a framework for it).
I find the open hand/closed fist metaphor (and its various permutations, like Byron Hawk’s here) to be worth further investigation. This is not surprising, I suppose, given my earlier interest in metaphor, my exposure to theories of the body & critical theory via Pruchnic, and my (limited) work with Marback, whose own essay on Corbett-Browne inspired some of own use of that debate.
Just flitting thoughts. In closing, my own remix of Dylan iconography:
Pardon the crap photo-edit job: it's my first foray into such things.
bookses
Here’s the list of books I’m working on reading right now:
- Hardt and Negri, Empire. I’m committed to reading 50 pages a day, which means I should be done with this bad body on Wednesday. Comments to follow.
- bell hooks, Talking Back. Yes, I know I struggled with Teaching to Transgress, but I thought I owed her another chance.
- Olson and Worsham (eds.), Critical Intellectuals on Writing. Excerpts from JAC interviews. Not nearly as exciting as it sounded.
- Virno, Grammar of the Multitude. I’ve read most of thise bfore, but now that I’m into Hardt/Negri I want to revisit it. Also, it looks like it might be on JP’s fall syllabus, so a refresher would be in order anyway.
- John Muckelbauer, The Future of Invention: Rhetoric, Postmodernism, and the Problem of Change.
So, the last book I’m reading as preparation for likely/possible inclusion as our next Rhetoric Reading group text (though when that will be, I don’t know, esp. if Whirlball takes precedence). I’ve only read the intro and first chapter, but I’m already kind of puzzled at one of Muckelbauer’s main claims–not so much the content of the claim, but the structure of it.
Muckelbauer begins with the argument that, even in postmodernity, our notion of change is still bound to a modernist, Hegelian dialectic insofar as “change is always and everywhere the effect of overcoming and negation” (x). This is a point he returns to in Chapter 1, writing that, despite the attempts of pomo theory to overcome dialectical binaries, there is nevertheless a fundamental binary to which pomo theory remains committed:
While most contemporary critiques are directed toward realizing some particular change–whether in social dynamics, institutional structures, or eben just in intellectual landscapes–most also fail to attend to the implications of the movement of change that drives such work. Another way of saying this is that depsite the incessant and justifiable concern for problematizing a whole series of binary operations throughout the social field, the one binary that has remained firmly intact is that between “the same” and “the different.” (3)
His project involves engaging the question of change and the problematic surrounding it, but “engaging these questions has less to do with simply accepting or rejecting the content of any particular proposition and more to do with altering the style through which we engage in the everyday practices of reading, writing, and responding” (x-xi).
So far, I’m on board. Postmodernity has yet to exorcise all the ghosts of the modern era, and we need a change in practices–invention practices, for us rhetoricians–to move beyond the dialectic. Moving on.
In various arguments, Muckelbauer argues, the move to negation/overcoming typically takes one of three forms:
- Advocacy: Emphasizing a Traditionally Privileged Concept
- Critique: Advocating a Traditionally Underprivileged Concept
- Synthesis: Valorizing the Indeterminate “in-between” (6-9)
I take the first two here to be fairly self-explanatory. The third is glossed as follows:
Through concepts such as “intersubjectivity,” “hybridity,” “dialogue,” or the recently popular terminology of “networks” and “ecologies,” this response focuses on the indeterminate space between positions. … What warrants attention is not the content of the nodes, but the generative, ambiguous space tht exists between them, the blending of contingency and universality, the conjunction of interpretation and knowledge, the indistinguishable aspects of subjectivity and sociality. Thus, rather than simply reproducing an oppositional structure, this indeterminate in-between attempts to offer a way of disorienting the repetition of dialectical change.
An yet, in the very effort to redner this is-between, the existence of poles are still presumed. The disorienting, synthetic move is already oriented by the positions it synthesizes. … The indistinguishable blending that occurs . . . assumes that there is a distinguishable separation somewhere other than the boundaries. In short, to demonstrate the indeterminate or ambiguous in-between is to simultaneously reproduce the oppositional dynamics that characterize the nodes or poles “between” which something exists. (9)
No, I’m no expert on network theory (though my first Latour book is on its way from Amazon), but I think from what I’ve gleaned second- or third-hand about networks is that Muckelbauer is unfairly tossing “networks” into the phenomena he’s describing here. My sense (largely from Rice, though from Shaviro’s Connected and from Galloway’s Protocol as well) is that a network doesn’t exist between two points; that (duh?) is not a network but just a link, a connection, a binary. The network is built from an infinite number of infinite links, from one subject/object to multiple others. A binary is not a network, no matter how much Muckelbauer wants it to be so here. I take his point about “synthesizing” arguments, but I think that he reveals a lack of understanding here about networks.
(Update–I just brought in the mail; my first Latour book has arrived from Amazon–yay!)
So Muckelbauer’s project then, is “Moving Beyond the Dialectic” (10). He is careful to note that, although this seems like it is a simple matter of “overcoming” the dialectic, “any effort to overcome binary logic or move beyond the Hegelian framework simply reproduces this framework” (11). As he notes further down the page, “any attempt to refuse dialectical change or to move beyond it is necessarily destined to remained trapped within its repetitious negation and trapped by the ethical and political dangers it eables (11-2). The solution, Muckelbauer argues, is to instead invent a practice of “affirmative change” that is “irreducible to this repetitous dialectic of negation”. Here’s where things get a bit crackers for me:
Now, it is extremely important that this affirmative change not be thought of as something that is simply different from dialectical negation–such a gesture would repeat the very problems it wants to address (“that was the old version of change; this is the new one”). Instead, the key challenge for responding to “the problem of change” is to both articulate and demonstrate an affirmative sense of change that is neither the same as dialectical change nor different from it. (12)
I grant that I’m only 15 or so pages into a 150-odd page book. I grant that Muckelauer has not yet come to the promised passages of “articulation and demonstration.” But . . . but . . . isn’t he still, for all his protestations, working within the dialectic? Instead of the binary same/different, stable/contingent, he’s substituting affirmative/negative. Oh, this change is qualitatively not-same as negation, but it’s also not-different. So, it’s kind of a . . . synthesis . . . of the two, an indeterminate in-between?
I don’t get it. I think what he’s done is wanted to make an argument for a particular practice of reading, writing, and invention, then yoked it to a critique of the dialectic. But I think he’s still doing what he claims he’s not. I understand the problematic he’s trying to address, but I don’t think his proposed “affirmative change” is different non-dialectic (at this point), just because he says it is. I give him credit for anticipating my critique–which I admit it fairly obvious–but his answer to it at this point seems to be something like “‘Cause I say it’s not, that’s why.”
Hmm. More updates on this story as we get them. Back to you, Tom.
starting point
The other day I had a tiny idea, but one I want to at least record here in case I do something with it later. Consider this a starting point, a tentative foray, a thought out loud.
Here’s Aristotle:
It is clear, then, that rhetoric is not bound up with a single definite class of subjects, but is as universal as dialectic; it is clear, also, that it is useful. It is clear, further, that its function is not simply to succeed in persuading, but rather to discover the means of coming as near such success as the circumstances of each particular case allow. In this it resembles all other arts. For example, it is not the function of medicine simply to make a man quite healthy, but to put him as far as may be on the road to health; it is possible to give excellent treatment even to those who can never enjoy sound health. Furthermore, it is plain that it is the function of one and the same art to discern the real and the apparent means of persuasion, just as it is the function of dialectic to discern the real and the apparent syllogism. What makes a man a ‘sophist’ is not his faculty, but his moral purpose. In rhetoric, however, the term ‘rhetorician’ may describe either the speaker’s knowledge of the art, or his moral purpose.
…
Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. This is not a function of any other art. Every other art can instruct or persuade about its own particular subject-matter; for instance, medicine about what is healthy and unhealthy, geometry about the properties of magnitudes, arithmetic about numbers, and the same is true of the other arts and sciences. But rhetoric we look upon as the power of observing the means of persuasion on almost any subject presented to us; and that is why we say that, in its technical character, it is not concerned with any special or definite class of subjects.
Here’s Malcolm X:
One of the first things that the independent African nations did was to form an organization called the Organization of African Unity. […] The purpose of our […] Organization of Afro-American Unity, which has the same aim and objective to fight whoever gets in our way, to bring about the complete independence of people of African descent here in the Western hemisphere, and first here in the United States, and bring about the freedom of these people by any means necessary. That’s our motto. [...]
I’m interested here in the two uses of “means.” Not that the word is used significantly differently (though surely Aristotle and Malcolm are talking about different means) but I’m interested instead in the similarity of the phrases used: “in any given case the available means” and “by any means necessary”. What would happen–as a thought experiment–to remix the two?
Aristotle remixed:
Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing persuasion by any means necessary.
Malcolm remixed:
. . . bring about the freedom of these people by observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. That’s our motto . . . .
I’m not sure what the effect is. In part, I find, it is difficult to separate my own association of “any means necessary” with the agenda of militant Black nationalism; likewise, my association of Aristotle’s definition with the promise of rational deliberation makes it hard to assess what the Malcolm Remix might be saying. If anything, Malcolm here seems kind of toothless, while Aristotle–while suggesting a much broader rhetoric than he usually does–picks up an alien air of threat, of possible violence. Of course, these evaluations are colored by my understanding of the two remixed phrases.
I’d be interested in any thoughts. Maybe this isn’t as promising a move as I’d thought . . . hmm.