Today’s Plan:
- Your Questions
- Thinking Through This Stuff
- Homework
What’s your favorite word
Wow. Tough one. I use “however” a lot, probably because I am trying to see another side of a thought as soon as I’ve traced out one side.
Reflecting on this question after having written this whole thing, I’m going to say “know.” I like to play with double entendre. You’ll see.
Do you actually like the Matrix?
You tell me when we’re done today.
BUT there is only one Matrix movie. You cannot convince me otherwise.
Do we have to have 16 codings of straight coding or does that include reviewing?
The latter. Your initials should have appeared 16 times.
What is the purpose of coding and adding the jobs to the spreadsheet? It makes sense but it also doesn’t. So I feel like I just need clarity.
Why do we have to code so many jobs? 1/2 the jobs quoted I don’t care about doing.
Hmm. Let me tease out three purposes to the first project (which covers the coding and writing the report). (I ended up teasing out four).
First, I want you to learn what jobs exist for writers. You should be strategizing now for how you will earn a living after you graduate. The primary purpose of a University education does *not* concern getting a job; if you are here because you want a job you’ve made a terrible choice. Go to trade school and learn how to do almost anything else (welding, nursing, installing heating and air conditioning, plumbing, auto-repair etc). But, since most of you are majoring in English, I doubt I need to explain this. A University education is about exposing yourself to the fundamental questions of human existence and the myriad ways we approach answering them (hence your liberal arts requirements, so you see the range).
HOWEVER, this doesn’t mean we should ignore the idea of jobs. They are good. Eating and sleeping in a nice warm place etc etc are nice. So, one way to think of the first project is exposing you to a range of ways that you can earn some money and get some health benefits after you graduate.
Second, many of you know how to do textual analysis. But textual analysis is not the only way to do textual research. The kind of research we are doing with coding is much closer to market research or demographic research you might do after graduation. Very rarely is someone going to hand you a 400 page text and ask you to suss out nuance. But they might hand you a pile of materials and ask you to identify keywords and patterns.
Third, most of you are not familiar with actual collaborative research. Too often group projects become something like “okay, I’ll do the first 3 pages and you do the next 3 pages etc and Billy won’t do shit so one of us will do Billy’s 3 pages the night before the paper is due.” As I’ve said before, that is not what will happen in a real job. You will be working as part of a team, contributing to a larger project. You’ve been doing this the past few weeks–while getting a bit of experience using a tool that I imagine is a bit unfamiliar to you (Google Sheets) and a methodology–as I said above–that’s a little different (has anyone here done this kind of social science coding before?)
Finally, I want all the things above to feel meaningful. To feel meaningful, you have to have a legitimate and sizable body of data. By collaborating effort, you have a larger body of coded data than you could have produced on your own.
What is your favorite book?
Phew. I don’t have time to think of one book. Here’s a list of stuff in a rough chronological order of how I read them:
- Dragonlance Series(middle school, 8th grade)
- Hitchhikers
- I’ve read every Agatha Christie Poirot novel
- Gullivers Travels (undergrad)
- Every Jon Irving novel up to around 2003 (World According to Garph stands out)
- Every Vonnegut novel
- First Game of Thrones
- Every Louise Penny Gamache novel
What is the meaning of life? 😉
42 😉
Where is a good place to start reading about rhetoric?
Roberts-Miller, Demagoguery and Democracy. Short, accessible, illuminating.
As you are from Boston, what are your thoughts on The Town or The Departed
I meekly admit I have not seen either movie. While cliche, I think Good Will Hunting captures a quintessential tension in Boston between [intellectual] Cambridge and [blue collar] Dorchestah. What makes Boston such a unique city is that people of many different stripes actually live in the city. And, because the city is so geographically small, all of these stripes are squeezed together.
But, for two guys who grew up in Boston, Damon and Affleck’s accents are really disappointing.
Thoughts on how our school systems need to change regarding the video we watched (divergent and creative thinking)?
I’ve published about 4 articles on this topic and could talk about this for a month. Let me try and offer two paragraphs.
We tend to think education as a passing of knowledge–I pass something to you. I check on whether you learned it. If you didn’t, then either I didn’t pass it right or you didn’t catch it right. This is not how I think learning works, and is certainly not what higher education should be.
Ultimately, my job should be to challenge you. To confuse you. I should challenge you to do something, NOT tell you how to do it, then assess you on your ability to teach yourself how to do it. To measure/analyze your ability to solve a problem. That might sound unfair or illogical, but it isn’t. It is establishing the conditions in which you have to figure something out for yourself. That’s called learning (and, as Cicero once said, “the greatest impediment to those who want to learn are those who want to teach”).
I co-published an article with one of my grad students once, and she called my teaching style “trying to get students to walk a line between productively confused and hopelessly lost.” Maybe not in this class, in here I think I do a pretty good job of making my expectations clear (tell me if I’m not). But this adequately describes what I am to do in a lot of my classes. Those of you who have had me in other classes might see the difference. The technical, pedagogical term for this aim is “disequilibrium”: I want to make you uncomfortable, since learning happens as you learn to recalibrate yourself in response to unfamiliar conditions. I am not training monkeys. Rather, I am trying to unleash thinkers. Thought is painful, disorienting, scary. It questions and challenges the world in hopes of precipitating change.
We need more classes that aim less at transferring knowledge and more at cultivating creativity. This means we need less classes that grade you less on whether you got something right and more classes that reward you for failing at something hard–for trying something new and scary and “impossible.” FOR SIMPLY PUTTING IN THE EFFORT RATHER THAN REWARDING SUPPOSED MASTERY.
That took 4 paragraphs, not 2. I guess I failed a bit.
How do we take this class and not, like, fall into despair? These are a lot of less than fun things you’re laying down.
Look, there’s a reason a lot of philosophers and artists and writers talk about how being intelligent can make you lonely. Ignorance, after all, is bliss.
And I don’t offer answers to a lot of the questions I raise. I don’t think “we” (rhetoric as an intellectual discipline, Westerns as a culture, humans as a species) have those answers. My hope is simply to attune you to the depth of the question, the dangerous desire for a simple and Final solution, and the need for us to interrupt that desire.
And I do this because I believe it is necessary for our continued existence–as a people, a society, a planet. I wish I could think of something witty to write here, and I thought about throwing in a Matrix line about “how deep the rabbit hole goes,” but, like, the past three years have really strip-mined my optimism and exuberance.
Welcome to the desert of the real.
What should we value more: our rhetorical influence on others? Or ourselves?
Yes.
Har, har, I know. But it is not my job to tell you what to think, only to open paths on how to think. Whether education is ultimately a path to self-reflexivity or civic duty or to a lucrative career is not a decision I should make for you.
Is there a deep connection between ethos, pathos, logos, and persuasion?
Is it easy to tear apart our brain, body, heart, desires, socioeconomic status, personal history, family influences, friends, failures, and dreams?
Is logos a bandwagon fallacy?
Does ideology make us dumb?
Hmm. Logos can mean a lot of different things. I think I answer this below. Here I will propose: we shouldn’t fall into the fallacy of believing that we can divorce what and how we think from who we are. Objectivity is a dangerous chimera.
When I woke up this morning, my aunt shared a post on Facebook:
There’s a lot of these kinds of essays out there–“Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds.” Notice–“less than fun”–that I’m the only person who liked or commented on the article. Here’s my comment:
This article touches upon a lot of things I explore in rhetoric classes: that our worldview (ideology), socio-economic position, emotional health, etc over-determine what we can see, believe, and accept.
Intelligence and education signal for me the ability to recognize that the way things are is not the only way they “naturally” must be, to recognize that everything is always more complicated than we believe it, and that we must battle against a natural inclination to be fearful of change and difference.
You say “rhetoric is a virus.” How can that help us write our papers? What makes it a virus?
First of all, if anything I said today helps you write your paper I’ll be fucking amazed. That’s not what these readings and activities aim to do. I dedicate a few classes in 201 to theoretical readings so that you understand that there is a complex, intellectual history and discipline underwriting Professional Writing Studies. It isn’t just prescriptive rules. BUT, you might find yourself in a job in which you need to persuade someone of something. Understanding how persuasion works (less as a direct operation and more as a covert subterfuge) might prove useful.
And–I hope this resonates with what is above–sometimes we need to take a break from the pragmatic for some intellectual wandering, because that’s what differentiates a University education from trade schools (not that there’s anything wrong with trade schools if that’s what you are looking for–but you are paying for the intellectual wandering whether you want it or not).
How is rhetoric like a virus? Very often you catch an idea without ever seeing it get near you. It is working inside you before you consciously know it is there. It strips you of agency–you don’t decide to get sick. We aren’t often comfortable thinking about our beliefs–gun control, abortion, taxation, sexuality, who we love–as things we do not choose (but I will adamantly argue that none of those things is a “choice”). There’s an ethical postulate in there somewhere.
If rhetoric controls power does race affect the “ethos” of said power?
Ethos is entwined with race in myriad, complex ways–beginning with how we even define race and all of the ensuing complexities. For instance, we know that race is a sociological construct that is completely invisible at a biological level, but just because it is a social construct does not mean it does not have incredibly powerful “real world” effects (Ta Nehesi Coates’ “A Case for Reparations” remains the single most powerful thing I have read on structural racism and its 21st century effects). Nor does it mean that we can simply exist “not seeing race” or “post-racially.” Should we even see those things as ideal? Or does a post-racial Ideal eventually lead to a homogeneity that requires the erasure of difference (psst, that’s code for “genocide”)? A desire to return to the real world.
Ever read the 3 body problem?
No, but I’ve explored some quantum science. I’m assuming this is in there to complicate my over-simplistic presentation of the sciences. Fair! Bruno Latour makes a distinction between the complexity, nuance, and thoughtfulness of the sciences and the unfortunately, logical positivistic reduction of Science (usually philosophized by bad scientists and philosophers).
Thinking Through Rand and Kris’ Questions
Rand asked if we can push ethos and pathos out of the way and strive to become more logical. This “was” philosophy’s response–although that changed a lot. Why? Because it is in a sense thinking that what got us into the problem can get us out of it (i.e., that the perils of late capitalism can be remedied by an even deeper commitment to capitalism; the dangers of guns can be remedied by more guns, etc). The problems introduced by logical positivism cannot, in my mind–and the mind of phenomenological, sociological, feminist, network, affect, etc theorists–by remedied by a deeper commitment to logical positivism. The problem here is at root in a logical positivistic mind set. This does not mean a commitment to discerning truth is in itself bad. But it does mean that such a commitment becomes toxic when it represses other essential elements of our human condition.
It becomes especially dangerous when “logic” gets framed as transcendental, universal, abstract, “natural.” This is where we attempt to argue that there is *one* correct way to live, and divorcing ourselves from community and emotion can point the way.
Kris asked me a complicated question–one I struggle to recall the exact contours to–but it was something about how we escape the tyranny of identification, belonging to a community–doesn’t prioritizing community put us on the path to fascism. My answer, unfortunately, is “yeah.” Or (once again in the language of Victor Vitanza, “nes and yo.” We must recognize that our human existence is predicated on this sense of us/them. It is biological, hardwired into the way we encounter others (our threat detectors are always up). It is soft-wired into the way we inhabit the world. We negate and divide. Let me offer two passages from Vitanza:
What is wrong with the negative?
While the negative enables, it disenables. As I’ve said, it’s mostly a disenabler because it excludes. […] The negative—or negative dialectic—is a kind of pharmakon, and in overdoses, it is extremely dangerous. (E.g., a little girl is a little man without a penis! Or an Aryan is not a Jew! And hence, they do not or should not—because in error—exist) The warning on the label—beware of overdoses—is not enough; for we, as Kenneth Burke says, are rotten with perfection. We would No. That is, say No to females, Jews, gypsies, queers, hermaphrodites, all others. By saying No, we would purchase our identity. Know ourselves. By purifying the world, we would exclude that which, in our different opinions threatens our identity. (12-13)
That passage poses a challenge: do we structure our definitions, particularly our definitions of our communities on criteria that seek to include or exclude? How do we tell the difference? How do we say “yes” to those who might scream “no”? Who will to kNOw us out of existence? (i.e., I kNOw homosexuality is a sin, I kNOw transgender is a liberal fallacy, etc).
I got the question “Does ideology make us dumb?” Nes and Yo again. Ideology is the operating system we need to navigate the world, the hard choices in life, our fears and misunderstandings and failures. It certainly limits what we are capable of seeing. The philosopher Kenneth Burke calls this a “terministic screen”–and reminds us that “a way of seeing is a way of not seeing.” Example: when a forest ranger goes into the woods, does she see more than you? Our learned terminologies, like/a part of our “ideologies” open to us ways of seeing, which also come with ways of not seeing. Unconscious blindness.
There is always a dangerous desire to repress or deny that our ideology is a human, social, construction. An invention that helps us get through the day. A conjecture. Our best effort. So, a second Vitanza quote. This one speaks to a question I didn’t answer above, about how science and the humanities both seek absolute truth. Yes! Vitanza points to the study of language, once called philology. He notes the fantastical investment with which scholars in philology imagine that, by pinning down the true meaning of language, they might “purchase a home of us in language […] a will to mastery over language that would have us forget uncanniness and its affect on our material conditions” (157). He concludes:
My position is that we are not at home in our world/whirl of language. Any and every attempt to assume that we are has or will have created for human beings dangerous situations. (157)
Let me be clear: I am not saying we can live without truth, without really believing in things, without communities and labels and names. We need these things both spiritually and pragmatically. We simply need to remember that this need can turn toxic when we limit who gets to name, what is worthy of a name, when we forget that we, through the act of naming, are making (or eliminating) what is real.
Sure, ideology can lead to terror and death. But I also want to argue that it opens up to us so many other good things. Collaboration. Sharing. Investment. We cannot exist alone–I mean this both literally and figuratively. And whatever libertarian dream underwrites so much of American culture, America is a product of cooperation, sharing, sacrifice, and dedication to a common promise, a common existence. Ideology, then, isn’t just something bad that divides us. It is also the very energy, the thing, that allows us to come together to be divided in the first place. Isocrates used to famously argue that it was the one thing that divided us from “beasts” (which, unfortunately meant both animals and other cultures)–Vitanza often argues that Isocrates’ intense nationalism, his belief in the spirit of Greek ethos and/as cultural identity, lays the first bricks of the road that leads to Auschwitz and Dachau. I find resonance in both of these positions.
But the tyranny of logical positivism, of Platonic philosophy, is that something must be defined as just one thing. Something is or it is not. Either/Or.
The goal of sophistry, feminism, postmodernism, posthumanism (the label changes and does not matter so much as the spirit of the commitment one must make to move outside the deliciously simple sway and allure of positivism) includes embracing the both/and. To see everything as many things. Multiplicity.
To respond to Rand’s initial question–“shouldn’t we be more logical?”– I answer: maybe? Yes if more logical means basing our decisions on all available, credible information. But not if “being more logical” requires more universality, homogeneity, negation, exclusion.
What we really need isn’t more “brains.” What we need is more empathy. In talking with Kris, I described a shift in thinking that I mark as “postmodern.” We can come to think of our ideology as a home. Do we lock our doors? Do we dig a moat? When we think of the strange, or what philosophers would call “the other,” do we build a wall to keep them out? To maintain the distance? Or do we open our doors? Pave a path? Try to cross the gap?
When you encounter the different, chances are your gut reaction is “whoa that’s weird?” That split-second reaction is often instinctive. The shift is to, in the space of a breath, reflect upon our reactions and ask “hmm, that’s different? Why don’t I do that? Why don’t more people do that? The shift in which I place my optimism isn’t necessarily from ignorant to knowledgeable. The ethical failures of the contemporary world cannot be entirely blamed on a lack on information. The shift is from exclusion to inclusion.
Homework
