Rhetorical Theory 2.1

Posted on January 12, 2015 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

In today’s class we will focus our attention on Plato’s castigation of rhetoric. You have read the Gorgias dialogue and the Apology. I want to supplement these readings and open our discussion by introducing Plato’s (in)famous “Allegory of the Cave,” from the seventh book of his Republic. Then we will discuss the Apology and the Gorgias. This discussion will follow the reading grid we have set up. I want to pay particular attention to 1) the metaphors for/surrounding rhetoric Plato introduces and 2) the tension between Plato’s Socrates and Plato’s Callicles.

Finally, I will end class by pointing to Plato’s more charitable consideration of rhetoric in the Phaedrus dialogue.

At some point I want to differentiate Truth and falsity from truth and lie, episteme from alethia, truth in literacy from truth in orality.

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, The Final Judgement

In his longest work, The Republic, Plato compares the journey and development of the philosopher to a prisoner escaping a cave. (http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/allegory.html)

Already we can see a disdain for mere appearances, and a desire to move beyond normative culture to the Truth. This parable continues to fuel many critical philosophies, which frame themselves in terms of the Matrix‐as a move beyond base ideology and into the realm of Truth.

Plato’s Gorgias

Here’s the passages from the reading that I want to discuss today

  • Apology
    • Socrates’ wisdom: 21b / 23b / *33b*
    • Socrates’ methods: 23d / 30b / *38a*
    • Socrates’ aversion to politics: 31e
    • Socrates and the birth of critical philosophy: 39c
  • Gorgias
    • Favorite line by Gorgias 449c
    • Where Gorgias gets in trouble / what does oratory make? 450b-c
    • Plato’s Gorgias offers a Platonic understanding of rhetoric 452e
    • Gorgias: rhetoric is a weapon *456d
    • Socrates and Gorgias: the doctor or Dr. Oz? 452 / 456b-d
    • Callicles’ “unthinkable” thesis: 483d-e
    • Callicles: philosophy as a child’s game 484c-e
    • Socrates’ method- straight out of Ong–advanced terminology
    • Who is the elitist? (Answer: they both are) see 491b
    • Socrates’ and individualism/libertarianism 491d / 504e
    • Paging Nietzsche 491b
    • Socrates’ distrust of politics 521e / the cerpuscular tale

As a response to Plocrates’s argument that rhetoric is a weapon that promotes injustice (480c), I offer the Quintilian:

There follows the question as to whether rhetoric is useful. Some are in the habit of denouncing it most violently and of shamelessly employing the powers of oratory to accuse oratory itself. 2 “It is eloquence” they say “that snatches criminals from the penalties of the law, eloquence that from time to time secures the condemnation of the innocent and leads deliberation astray, eloquence that stirs up not merely sedition and popular tumult, but wars beyond all expiation, and that is most effective when it makes falsehood prevail over the truth.” 3 The comic poets even accuse Socrates of teaching how to make the worse cause seem the better, while Plato says that Gorgias and Tisias made similar professions. 4 And to these they add further examples drawn from the history of Rome and Greece, enumerating all those who used their pernicious eloquence not merely against individuals but against whole states and threw an ordered commonwealth into a state of turmoil or even brought it to utter ruin; and they point out that for this very reason rhetoric was banished from Sparta, while its powers were cut down at Athens itself by the fact that an orator was forbidden to stir the passions of his audience.
[…]
Doctors have been caught using poisons, and those who falsely assume the name of philosopher have occasionally been detected in the gravest crimes. 6 Let us give up eating, it often makes us ill; let us never go inside houses, for sometimes they collapse on their occupants; let never a sword be forged for a soldier, since it might be used by a robber. And who does not realise that fire and water, both necessities of life, and, to leave merely earthly things, even the sun and moon, the greatest of the heavenly bodies, are occasionally capable of doing harm.

Here is a link to my intro lecture on Plato for Historical Rhetorics.

In Socrates’ exchange with Gorgias, he makes the following comparisons:

cosmetics : gymnastics :: sophsitry : legislation
pastry baking : medicine :: oratory : justice

Because rhetoric satisfies itself with “mere opinion” instead of absolute Truth, Plato views it as a set of tricks (or knack) rather than an art, what the Greeks would call techne.

Ong gives us a rationale for such suspicion‐although he might not have consciously recognized it, Plato was enchanted by the power of the literate sign. Let’s take a minute to conceptualize, roughly, how language works.
Language operates via signification‐the exchange of signs. The sign breaks down into two parts‐the signifier (the symbolic/material component, such as “dog”) and the signified (the meaning). As Ong’s essay stresses, writing externalizes and visualizes this process.

Of course, there is an amount of slippage between signifiers and signifieds. One of the first things you realize when you start to consider language is how we do not have direct access to signifieds‐we live, and are reliant, on signifiers. Furthermore, Plato’s ambitious philosophical goals include transcending (moving beyond) the material register (the signifier, the world) to contemplate (or see) the Ideal forms of things (pure signifieds). Ironically, we can refer to this transcendental realm of pure Ideas as the “Real” for Plato, since he believed this world was just a transitory illusion. The Real world, the world that matters is the world of Ideas/Ideals that exist beyond this material register.

His central method for this movement toward Ideal Forms is dialectic‐a back and forth questioning in which one moves beyond what is probable to arrive at what is essential. Hence, Platonism is often referred to as essentialism.

Let us think of a dog again. When we look at a dog, we can begin to identify a number of characteristics. But which of those characteristics belong solely to a dog? Which of those characteristics are essential to being a dog? What is the essence of a dog? This kind of dialectical investigation into something’s essence is further developed by Aristotle and often referred to by the term “ontology.” Plato believed ontology could reveal how everything in the world had a proper place‐the goal of philosophy becomes identifying the proper essence of everything, understanding to what category of Being it belonged, and making sure that the world was ordered in the proper hierarchy. The proper task of the philosopher, then, involves a kind of critical engagement that distinguishes the eternal, the essential, the universal, the objective from the transient, the accidental, the specific, the subjective.

There is another consequence to this thinking. At the conclusion of the Gorgias dialogue, Plato debates with Callicles regarding the value of thought. Callicles, foreshadowing Socrates’s death, reminds the gadfly that his intelligence is useless if he cannot convince his peers of its utility and veracity, to which Socrates responds that he cares not as to whether a single other person accepts his thinking, for we waits for a higher, divine judgment after death. While this notion of judgment after death might seem commonplace for us now, it was quite revolutionary to Greek culture. In fact, it is upon this notion of final judgment that Nietzsche will later castigate Socrates and Plato for shackling the “true” Greek spirit under the Jewish resentment (a line that Hitler will find quite useful when used out of context decades after Nietzsche’s death).

More on point for the present moment: the debate between Socrates and Callicles is a debate about what tasks a theorists should commit herself to. This debate rages on throughout the next millennia–it is a debate we still engage today. Think of a high school curriculum: what do we teach? What courses? What skills? How might a high school curriculum differ if it was generated by Callicles and not by the Platonic tradition (in actuality, most high school curriculum can be traced back to the Romans, who inherit the various Greek traditions; they designate the 7 liberal arts: Rhetoric, Logic, Grammar, Arithmetic, Music, and Astronomy).

The Phaedrus

In his later dialogue, The Phaedrus, Plato recognizes the necessity of rhetoric‐but only if rhetoric comes after philosophic, dialectical procedures. In other words, rhetoric is what we use to communicate a message after we have determined the truth. And what marks the center of the now acceptable rhetorical art? Plato:

Since the nature of speech is in fact to direct the soul, whoever intends to be a rhetorician must know how may kinds of soul there are. Their number is so-and-so many; each is such-and-such a sort; hence some people have such-and-such a character and others have such-and-such. Those distinctions established, there are, in turn, so-and-so many kinds of speech, each of such-and-such a sort. People of such-and-such a character are easy to persuade by speeches of such-and-such a sort in connection with such-and-such an issue for this particular reason, while people of such-and-such another sort are difficult to persuade for those particular reasons.

The orator must learn all this well, then put his theory into practice and develop the ability to discern each kind clearly as it occurs in the actions of real life. Otherwise, he won’t be any better off than he was when he was still listening to those discussions in school. He will now not only be able to say what kind of person is convinced by what kind of speech; on meeting someone he will be able to discern what he is like and make clear to himself that the person actually standing in front of him is of just this particular sort of character he had learned about in school‐to that he must now apply speeches of such-and-such a kind in this particular way in order to secure conviction about such-and-such an issue. When he has learned all this‐when, in addition, he has grasped the right occasions for speaking and for holding back; and when he has also understood when the time is right for speaking concisely or appealing to pity or exaggeration or for any other of the kinds of speech he has learned and when it is not‐then, and only then, will he have finally mastered the art well and completely. (271d-272b)

What kind of (ethical) problems might this insistence create?

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New Media 1.2

Posted on January 8, 2015 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

Here is the schedule for our second meeting:

  • Theory: Walter Ong’s “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought”
  • Practice: Working with Photoshop
  • Homework: Reading / Reading / Coding

Walter Ong

Things I want to address:

  • Technology, artificiality, cybernetics
  • Knowledge as abstract, objective (difference between Knowledge and know-how)
  • Apparatus theory
  • Ong’s claim that computers extend the trajectory of literacy; secondary orality [ironically, technology reprioritizes local context even while it fosters the “global village”]

Here’s a link to my stock lecture on Walter Ong.

Practice: Working With Photoshop

Since the first project asks you to manipulate images, I wanted to dedicate some class time to working with Photoshop. I have sent out a .zip folder containing several images. You should download this folder to your desktop and unzip it.

We will be editing these files in class, learning some of the standard tools and language for working with images.

File Formats:

  • .jpg is a compressed file format. This is the most common format on the web
  • .png is a more robust format that allows for transparency and maintains multiple layers
  • .gif is a format that supports animation. We will work with .gifs later in the semester

In class we are going to quickly run through a range of tools in Photoshop. I will roughly be following the online guide provided by the UNC Health Sciences library. We should address:

  • Image Size / Canvas Size. Working with pixels.
  • Cropping
  • Brightness/Contrast
  • Layers
  • Lasso work
  • Text
  • Clone Stamp

You should also know that you have access to many powerful softwares at home via the USF Application Gateway.

From Ong to Ulmer

It is difficult for me to provide a quick overview of Gregory Ulmer’s work, because his project is quite complicated. But I want to provide some kind of introduction, however brief.

Ulmer’s work is in part inspired by Ong–in fact, it picks up where Ong left off. If Ong explicates the impact of literacy, then Ulmer’s work begins by hypothesizing what the impact of electracy might be. He finds the basis of this hypothesis in the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, a poststructuralist and postmodernist who challenged Modernity’s investment in logos (abstract, universal, Truth).

Ulmer searches for a more imaginative and creative approach to language and language instruction. Why does American education have such an investment in teaching the research paper? Why don’t we invest more energy into teaching creative expression? These are some of the questions that motivate his work.

His solution to these questions involves developing complex systems of invention (how we generate thought). Invention is one of the five core canons of rhetoric. At the beginning of the reading selection from Heuretics, Ulmer references one of these systems: the CATTt (an acronym for Contrast, Analogy, Theory, Target, tale). We won’t be using the CATTt system, but I am interested in his theoretical approach to invention, and his ideas on how cybermedia (as he identifies it in Heuretics) affords new methods for inventing and expressing (ourselves).

Homework

For homework, I would like you to do some theoretical reading, some technical reading, and practice some coding

Read Ulmer’s chapter on “Hypermedia” from Heuretics [PDF], Read Ulmer, “Electracy: An Introduction”

Remember that your first project asks for a web installation that remediates and explicates Ong and Ulmer.

Skim Robbins 3-20. Make sure you can answer all the questions on page 20. Read Robbins chapter 4 “Creating a Simple Page.”

I want you to use what you learn from Robbins’ 4th chapter to code up 10 pages of .html. Pay particular attention to Robbins pp. 56-57 for setting up a page. Ignore style sheets at this point–I only want “naked” html. Make sure you validate your .html using the W3C validator. Select 10 quotes from Ong’s essay. Create 10 html pages with a quote from the Ong on each page, an image on each page, and a link from one page to the next.

Good luck!

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Rhetorical Theory 1.2: Walter Ong

Posted on January 8, 2015 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

We’ve got a number of things to address in today’s class:

  • First, I want to introduce four terms to help us think about philosophy, rhetoric, and language
  • Second, we need to discuss the Ong reading
  • Third, I want to go over my cursory introduction to the Ancient Greek rhetoric
  • Fourth, my quick guide on how to read theory and the homework

Four Terms Germaine to a Discussion of Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Language

They are:

Metaphysics
In short, metaphysics is our sense of what exists “beyond” the physical world. It also asks how we can approach said beyond.
Ontology
Ontology is the most complex of these three terms, since it can have different meanings in different contexts. Loosely, it answers the question “what is real?” How do we know what is real is real? Often (after Aristotle), the West approaches ontology via categories and classifications. As Ong notes, classification is a ramification of literacy. Thus, we can conclude that Western ontology is correlated–if not caused–by the development of literacy.
Ontology is often the attempt to identify what something is.
Epistemology
Epistemology is the study of knowledge. What is knowledge? Is it itself a thing? How can we know something? To what extent can we know something? Epistemology traces its origins back to Plato and Socrates. And, again, Ong show us that the development of literacy radically alters epistemology
Ethics
Ethics addresses the processes through which we make decisions and navigate problems and (and other people).
It is important to differentiate ethics from morality. Ethics deals with general principles (process), while morality seeks to produce concrete mandates (products). Note that this is my way of parsing the terms, and would likely be challenged by others.

Ong Discussion

Let’s talk about Ong’s best sentences.

Here is a link to my stock lecture on Ong.

A Cursory Introduction to a Few Folks Central to the History of Rhetoric

Here’s a quick overview of the theorists we will be working with over the next few weeks.

Socrates (469-399)

Socrates’ nickname was the gadfly, a Greek term for agitator or tormentor. Socrates’s philosophic method involved asking someone questions until you could lead them to a contradiction. The purpose of Socrates’s philosophy often wasn’t to discover the Truth, but rather to reveal our essential ignorance. Socrates: “I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.” Plato has Socrates repeat this sentiment in his famous Apology: “I am wiser than this man; it is likely that neither of us knows anything worthwhile, but he thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas when I do not know, neither do I think I know, so I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know” (22d).

It is hard to know exactly what Socrates believed on many topics because he was not a writer–in fact, his most famous student, Plato, documents his suspicions toward literacy and writing in the Phaedrus dialogue. We do know, however, that he was skeptical of politics, especially of those who crafted political and legal speeches. Additionally, he was skeptical of democracy, since he did not believe the typical person had the intellectual or spiritual character required to lead. We do know that, after a despotic period in Greek history, the people of Athens tried Socrates for “corrupting the youth.” He was (in part due to his own obstinance) condemned to death–but he chose to die a martyr to Truth rather than give into “rhetoric.”

Plato (424-328)

Without doubt, Plato is the most important philosopher in the history of Western thought. Alfred North Whitehead offers this quip:

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

Most of this importance can be traced down to his prolific writing–and to the effects that the act of writing had upon his thinking. We might say that he is the first literate thinker, and thus, serves as the foundation for 2000 years of literate culture (hence the Ong reading).

Plato never forgave the death of his teacher–and that death drives his disdain toward rhetoric (see especially his Gorgias dialogue. In that dialogue, Plato records (?) Socrates’ comparison of rhetoric in terms of “pastry baking.” This is a long passage, worthy of examination:

And now I will endeavour to explain to you more clearly what I mean: The soul and body being two, have two arts corresponding to them: there is the art of politics attending on the soul; and another art attending on the body, of which I know no single name, but which may be described as having two divisions, one of them gymnastic, and the other medicine. And in politics there is a legislative part, which answers to gymnastic, as justice does to medicine; and the two parts run into one another, justice having to do with the same subject as legislation, and medicine with the same subject as gymnastic, but with a difference. Now, seeing that there are these four arts, two attending on the body and two on the soul for their highest good; flattery knowing, or rather guessing their natures, has distributed herself into four shams or simulations of them; she puts on the likeness of some one or other of them, and pretends to be that which she simulates, and having no regard for men’s highest interests, is ever making pleasure the bait of the unwary, and deceiving them into the belief that she is of the highest value to them. Cookery simulates the disguise of medicine, and pretends to know what food is the best for the body; and if the physician and the cook had to enter into a competition in which children were the judges, or men who had no more sense than children, as to which of them best understands the goodness or badness of food, the physician would be starved to death. A flattery I deem this to be and of an ignoble sort, Polus, for to you I am now addressing myself, because it aims at pleasure without any thought of the best. An art I do not call it, but only an experience, because it is unable to explain or to give a reason of the nature of its own applications. And I do not call any irrational thing an art; but if you dispute my words, I am prepared to argue in defence of them.

Pastry baking, as I say, is the flattery that wears the mask of medicine; and cosmetics, in like manner, is a flattery which takes the form of gymnastic, and is knavish, false, ignoble, illiberal, working deceitfully by the help of lines, and colours, and enamels, and garments, and making men affect a spurious beauty to the neglect of the true beauty which is given by gymnastic.

I would rather not be tedious, and therefore I will only say, after the manner of the geometricians (for I think that by this time you will be able to follow):

cosmetics : gymnastics :: sophsitry : legislation
pastry baking:medicine:: oratory : justice

And this, I say, is the natural difference between the rhetorician and the sophist, but by reason of their near connection, they are apt to be jumbled up together; neither do they know what to make of themselves, nor do other men know what to make of them. For if the body presided over itself, and were not under the guidance of the soul, and the soul did not discern and discriminate between cookery and medicine, but the body was made the judge of them, and the rule of judgment was the bodily delight which was given by them, then the word of Anaxagoras, that word with which you, friend Polus, are so well acquainted, would prevail far and wide: “Chaos” would come again, and cookery, health, and medicine would mingle in an indiscriminate mass. And now I have told you my notion of rhetoric, which is, in relation to the soul, what cookery is to the body.

In the Sophist dialogue, Plato’s Socrates maintains that rhetoric/sophistry is an art of acquisition, that it fails to create anything (219c, 226). This is an important point–one that gets at the very heart of the philosophy vs sophistry debate in ancient Greece. Is there a real world out there to which we have access? Or is the world made real through language? In short: nature or culture? Platonic philosophy seeks to (re)present the world in its pure, transcendental, universal, static, True form–in other words, it seeks to strip away the misgivings of culture to return to the natural. From such a position, rhetoric can often be interpreted as mere “bullshit,” political nonsense that intends to manipulate and control us, and thus keep us further separated from the Truth.

As I said in the introduction, Plato never forgave the execution of his teacher, and it left him extremely opposed to democratic government. His long treatise, the Republic, calls for an extended intellectual oligarchy.

Protagoras (490-420)

Historians note that, though they have come to dominate Western history, Socrates and Plato were not the cheif intellectual movement of their day. In fact, Socrates’ diatribe above was part of a project by Plato to discredit competing philosophical systems and promote his own school and thought. One reason why Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle have come to dominate the philosophical tradition is that we have large amounts of their thought recorded in writing. As we shall see this semester, the same cannot be said of the sophistic philosophers.

Protagoras was one of those philosophers. History has only handed to us a few brief fragments of his works–recorded by other philosophers and historians. Protagoras’s most famous fragment comes from Sextus:

Protagoras, too, will have it that of all things the measure is man, of things that are that they are, and of things that are not that they are not, meaning by ‘measure’ the standard of judgment […] And for this reason he posits only what appears to the individual, thus introducing relativity… Now what he says is that matter is in a state of flux […] He says too that the reasons [logio] of all the appearances are present in the matter, so that the matter is capable, as far as lies in its own power, of being everything that appears to everybody. Men, however, apprehend different things at different times according to their various dispositions.

Gorgias (458-380)

We will read about Gorgias more later this semester. For now, I want to highlight Gorgias’s treatment of rhetoric. Like Protagoras, we have very few Gorgian fragments (although instead of single lines, we have whole essays). His most famous piece is his “On Helen,” in which he invents arguments for why Helen should not be held accountable for causing the Trojan War. In his defense, he offers the following description of the powers of language (logos):

Speech is a powerful lord, which by means of the finest and most invisible body effects the divinest works: it can stop fear and banish grief and create joy and nuture pity. I shall show how this is the case, since it is necessary to offer proof of opinion of my hearers. I both deem and define all poetry as speech with meter. Fearful shuddering and tearful pity and grievous longing come upon its hearers, and at the actions and physical sufferings of others in good fortunes and in evil fortunes, through the agency of words, the soul is wont to experience a suffering of its own. But come, I shall turn from one argument to another. Sacred incantations sun with words are bearers of pleasure and banishers of pain, for, merging with opinion in the soul, the power of the incantation is wont to beguile it and persuade it and alter it by witchcraft. There have been discovered two arts of witchcraft and magic: one consists of errors of soul and the other of deceptions of opinion. All who have and do persuade people of things do so by modling a false argument. For if all men on all subjects had both memory of things past and awareness of things present and foreknowledge of the future, speech would not be similarly similar, since as things are now it is not easy for them to recall the past nor to consider the present nor to predict the future. So that on most subjects most men take opinion as counselour to their soul, but since opinion is slippery and insecure it casts those employing it into slippery and insecure success

Isocrates (436-338)

Isocrates founded the most prominent school in ancient Athens–in fact, much of our idea of education today can be traced back to his padeia. Isocrates was among the first to argue that language, logos, rhetoric established humanity, rather than plagued it.

Isocrates viewed Socratic and Platonic philosophy–and its search for transcendental Truth–as an overly abstract project. Such intellectual work failed to live up to his litmus test: will this help me in the courts, the forums, or in everyday life? He saw rhetoric not as an exercise in duplicitousness or as pastry baking, but rather as a civic commitment to making decisions in real time. Responding to Plato, he writes:

They characterize men who ignore our practical needs and delight in the mental juggling of the ancient sophists as ‘students of philosophy,’ but refuse this name to those who pursue and practice those studies which will enable us to govern wisely both our own households and the commonwealth–which should be the objects of our toil, of our study, and of our every act. (343)

Isocrates was Gorgias’s student–and while he doesn’t share his (sophistic) love of agitation and awe, he does share his commitment to democracy and acting with uncertainty.

Aristotle

Aristotle was Plato’s student, and a prolific writer. His works–more even than Plato’s–form the basis of Western metaphysics, philosophy, ethics, and politics. We will discuss Aristotle in greater detail in the coming weeks; for now, I will say that while Aristotle is skeptical toward his mentor’s transcendental leanings, he shares with him a prioritization of truth (logos) and a dubiousness toward rhetoric and the linguistic arts.

Homework

This weekend I would like you to read Plato and make contributions to the Rhetorical Theory Reading Grid.

  • Read Plato’s Gorgias (only the sections w/ Gorgias and Callicles. You can skip the middle section dealing with Polus. Jowett’s introduction is optional, but might be helpful if you have no experience of ancient dialgoues)
  • Read Plato’s Plato’s Apology.

    • Remember to print these dialogues out; do not attempt to read them on-screen.

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Rhetorical Theory 1.2

Posted on January 6, 2015 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

Somethings to address on our second class session:

  • My suggestions for reading theory
  • How to use twitter effectively
  • My lecture notes for Ong (blogpost)
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Listening, Passivity, and/as Ethics

Posted on November 22, 2014 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

This morning a tweet caught my attention:

I haven’t read Albers and Harste before, so I’ll have to track down their work. This caught my attention because I have been thinking about the institutional purpose of composition lately: why do we teach writing? It’s a simple question, and I do not presume that it has a straightforward answer. The other day on twitter, I forced a binary in an attempt to tease something out, asking:

I got a few responses on twitter and facebook, and we discussed the topic briefly in my New Media Production seminar. Two different people saw through my sophomoric ruse and offered: “To shape writers who can impact audiences?” Touche. It is a smart response to a simple prompt. But I would say that it has as its ultimate telos an audience, an other. Which, given my interest in civics, ethics, Levinas, responsibility, hospitality, etc. is good. No complaints. Another FB friend offered an insightful comment here, too, asking/suggesting: “Is composition confined to the human? If not, then composition’s primary purpose may be to impact the world.” And I don’t mean to say composition (or rhetoric)’s effects are aimed at only other humans. Certainly there is room for a materialist composition that traces impacts across networks to all manner of actants, whether animal, vegetable, mineral, or ethereal.

But I’ve been working on a piece that deals with what I call listening, the ability to attend to the needs, presence, demands, intrusions of other(s) (and, again, those others need not be human or even animal). I’m drawing on a pretty wide range of theorists here, both those within R/C (Jim Corder’s work on narrativity and argument, Thomas Rickert’s work on ambiance, Diane Davis’ work on pre-original rhetoricity and “foreigner relations,” Jenny Rice’s recent work on forcing students to engage publics foreign to their own “passions”/investments, my own work on rhetorical support and recognition) and those outside it (Levinas’s work on the face and ethical interruption, Cavarero’s philosophy of vocal expression, Lingis’s work on pre-ontological community). But the common thread is how we can cultivate responsibility, recognizing that it is not an innate ability, but a muscle that must be trained, sustained. In short, my thesis for quite awhile–my original movement toward Levinas–is that knowledge alone is insufficient to address our (non)human problems. We need something Other than knowledge/Being. Other than the ability to communicate to the Other. We need to know how to listen to her, how to cultivate a very active inactivity, what Levinas might term a “fundamental passivity that mirrors the fundamental passivity through which the Other animates Being,” or, at least, something along those lines.

And I think this something has led me back to the question of the primary purpose / first principle of Composition (and Rhetoric) as disciplines. In my New Media Production class this semester, we worked through Ulmer’s MEmorial project from Electronic Monuments. One student, who had formerly worked with Ulmer and his Mystory project, noticed the difference between the two: how the former aims for an audience, while the latter exists for the student, the student as her own audience.

And, in conjunction with Ulmer, the mystory, and the idea of a student as audience for her own Facing, I was re-reading Cixous’s Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. I was thinking of another MA student, whose thesis looks to re-examine the impact of poststructuralist style on Composition Theory. I led the student to Vitanza’s “Abandoned to Writing” and its enigmatic question of “what Writing wants.” Cixous:

I said that the first dead are our first masters, those who unlock the door for us that opens onto the other side, if only we are willing to bear it. Writing, in its noblest function, is the attempt to unerase, to unearth, to find the primitive picture again, ours, the one that frightens us. Strangely, it concerns a scene. The picture is not there without a reason. Those who have been in contact with this opening door perceived it in the theatrical form of a scene. Why a scene? Why is it a scene? Why will it become the scene of a crime? Because we are the audience of this scene: we are not in the scene; when we go to the theater we are not on stage. We are witnesses to an extraordinary scene whose secret is on the other side. We are not the ones who have the secret.

So, no illusion here. I am in fact interested in shaping writers in order to impact the world. And I think, as I work more on ethics, and continue to define ethics as a passivity (and a dedication to justice, to strife, to the barnyard–but that is another article–coming out in Philosophy and Rhetoric next year), I’m thinking more about a Composition that takes the self as its audience, that gets to know its ghosts, its death, its horizons, its secrets.

As I said in the beginning, I haven’t read Albers and Harste, and so I don’t know what kind of writing they are reclaiming, or who they are reclaiming it from. But I do know that I am not interested in making the writer feel stronger, traditional commonplaces of empowerment. I think I am interesting in a very particular kind of weakness. Or perhaps being a bit playful, I am interested in what Latour identifies as a might mightier than might. And that is the might willing to acknowledge its weakness.

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New Media Week 13

Posted on November 20, 2014 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

Today we have several things on the docket.

Digital Projects

Today is a good time to check in on the final digital projects. I know many of you are interested in revising your MEmorial for inclusion in the article. Let’s talk about a timeline. I think something like this:

  • Final video due on Thursday Dec 4th
  • Postmortem Questions due on Saturday Dec 15th
  • Jam Session, Monday, Dec 17th: working through postmortem responses, dividing up responses for synthesis
  • Revision meeting: Monday, January 5th: get together to read through the manuscript, webify everything; submit

Potential Postmortem Questions

  • What do you see as the purpose of Ulmer’s MEmorial genre? What passages from Electronic Monuments would you point at as a productive starting point for explicating the genre?
  • What is the purpose/who is the audience for your MEmorial? What led you to this project?
  • What is your favorite part/element of your MEmorial?
  • What was your previous experience working with either web languages or digital video before this class? What have you found the most challenging aspect of working with digital video for this kind of project?
  • How did you approach transforming your website into a video? What were the challenges? How did you resolve them?
  • Ultimately, do you think a website or a video is a better medium for the goals of a MEmorial?

Web Presence

I want to spend a bit of time tonight looking around the web at academic websites. What do they look like? What kinds of materials do people include? What kinds of materials will you want to on a job search?

Let’s start there, looking at the sites of

Working With WordPress

The basics:

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Rhetoric & Gaming 13.2 / Planning Your Board Game

Posted on November 20, 2014 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

Previously I shared a few resources for Project 4 (Creating a Board Game). Today I want to clarify my expectations for the project and make sure that you all have a group to work with (though you are more than welcome to work alone).

Grading Criteria:

  • The game is actually playable
  • The game has instructions. Instructions should include:
    • Objective
    • Component Description/Glossary (if necessary)
    • Set-up
    • A round of play (player turn, etc)
  • The game speaks to 3 of McGonigal’s 4 criteria for a game:
    • Goal
    • Rules
    • Feedback (what I reframed as strategy or meaningful choice)
    • Voluntary Participation

Chet raised a question as to the quality of the materials. I’m looking for something that shows investment and development. But I recognize not everyone is a craftsman or an artist. Still, given the availability of digital tools, you should have something that looks nice. Cards should be printed on card stock. There’s plenty of online software to help print card backs. If materials are hand-drawn, and not digitally printed, then they should be clean and polished.

The rules are important. On Tuesday, December 2nd we will play test games in class. This will be a usability test. We will give a group your game and instructions and they will report on playability. SO YOU NEED TO HAVE A FUNCTIONING VERSION OF YOUR GAME BY THE 2nd. That will give you two days to make revisions before I grade them on Dec 4th.

Here’s what I need from you in class today: each group (or person, if you are working alone) needs to create and share a Google Doc that:

  1. States the names of all members working on the project
  2. Gives a short (100 word max) description of the game. Think: marketing, what you might put on the back of the box
  3. Gives a “pitch” for the game. I want a single sentence, followed by a short (150 max) description. Think: genre, how you would describe the game to a potential investor.

When we look at these pitches, what we see is that they all in some way address making a comparative–they place the project in the context of a genre (it’s like Alien’s underwater…). This is what you want to do: to either fix an existing game, or talk about how your game reskins/conceptualizes an existing game.

Take my favorite game, Dominion. Dominion is in some ways a hard pitch, because there wasn’t any other “deck building” game in existence at the time. Now there’s many. But the pitch might have been: “People enjoy deck-building. Dominion turns deck-building into a game.” It is simple, to the point.

Or, think of the Fantasy Flight’s recent revision of the Descent board game: “People love miniature games, but often they are too complicated or too long. We transform a 4 hour game into a 45 minute experience.”

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Rhetoric and Gaming 11.2 / Gamification, Procedurality, and ARGs

Posted on November 6, 2014 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

The majority of today will center around my presentation on Gamification, Procedurality, and ARGs (Alternate Reality Games).

First, however, I wanted to share some language and resources for making a game. I’m freestyling this, so hopefully you can help me make it better.

Like any endeavor, making a game benefits from developing a more technical language. Technical language gives you “heuristics,” or ways of thinking about any activity, that you might not otherwise have.

I want to start by expanding and explicating McGonigal’s four criteria for a game:

  • Goals
  • Rules
  • Feedback
  • Voluntary Participation

For heuristic purposes, I am going to skip over her 4th criteria (though, in terms of ARGs, that’s where I will start). Instead, I’ll start with rules. Here I want to introduce two interrelated terms that I use to think about rules: are they elegant and are they accessible. The latter term speaks to how difficult it is for a new player to begin playing a game. For instance, Kings of Tokyo is a pretty accessible game. It is in part accessible because it builds off of the Yahtzee genre–throw dice, build three-of-a-kinds, score, pass turn. I use the term “elegance” to denote the simplicity of a game’s rules and base design. Most games that are accessible are also elegant. But not always. Take, for instance, the card game Dominion or the dice game Quarriors!. Both of these games have very elegant rules. In Dominion, a players turn consists of only three stages: Act, Buy, and Clean up (it’s easy as A-B-C…). But Dominion isn’t necessarily accessible, since the game play requires you familiarize yourself with all of the various action cards (or, in Quarriors!). For new players, this can be a bit overwhelming.

Also, just because a game is elegant in its rules, doesn’t mean it is shallow in its strategy. Strategy is my way of explicating McGonigal’s notion of feedback. That is, I look for games that allow me to make meaningful decisions. Dominion excels at this, because every game I attempt to build an engine by buying cards that synergize. The game itself provides feedback, by demonstrating whether my card selection worked or whether it was flawed.

The most sophisticated games (and the games that I gravitate toward) allow you to theorycraft, or to strategize approaches to the game. To keep with my example, in Dominion the most simple strategy is called Big Money. So, here is another question to ask of a game: to what extent does theorycrafting, or advanced strategy, impact winning? To what extent is winning determined by luck? Finding a balance between theorycraft and luck is an important part of building a successful game. To clarify: sophistication speaks to the choices I make during gameplay. How many different choices can I make?

Depth of mechanics is important, but game designers have to make choices about how deep they want a game to go. How many rules are there/ How complicated are the rules? Depth, I would argue, is directly opposed to accessibility. Put crudely, the larger the rule book, the less acceptable a game probably is. Although, games can have different “approaches” to rules. Take, for instance, Dungeons and Dragons (which technically isn’t a game, but work with me here). There are very different approaches to playing a pen and paper RPG. For some, DnD is a story-telling and role-playing game, in which the rules are mere suggestions in place to help develop a meaningful world for characters to inhabit. At it’s most pure realization, DnD in this format doesn’t really need dice–the dice rolls aren’t the final arbitrator of what happens as much as a “heuristic” tool providing the story tellers with some random constraints to invent their stories (think of the way that improv comedians use props in the middle of a skit). At the other end of the spectrum, players can approach DnD as a realistic strategy game. This version is far more rules driven, in which gameplay is usually oriented around generating dice. In a rule driven DnD campaign, the dice are God. They determine everything that happens, and every choice a player makes ultimately serves to influence various die rolls (combat rolls, saving throws, treasure checks, range modifiers, skill checks, etc).

Let me present one more example game with this language in mind: Magic the Gathering.

  • Accessibility: Magic is an increasingly unaccessible game. This is because the game has been in existence for almost 20 years, and each iteration of Magic introduces not only more cards, but more mechanics. Also, Magic’s central mechanic–the stack–basically requires a PhD in nerd gaming to understand. It is nearly impossible for two people who have never played Magic to sit down and play without either a) someone else who thoroughly knows the rules and/or b) the Internet and several hours to query rules questions (and parse out the virtually impenetrable Magic discourse).
  • Elegance: While extremely confusing in terms of accessibility, Magic’s core game play is fairly elegant. For instance, a turn of Magic has clear phases.
  • Sophistication: Magic is probably one of the most sophisticated games in existence. There’s so many different approaches to play the game that theorycraft is endless. You can literally spend a dozen hours building a single-deck, and, during gameplay, I am presented with critically important choices every turn. In order to be a competitive Magic player, I need to have a very deep understanding of the current meta (metagaming) in order to win. But this depth of knowledge isn’t enough–I also have to become very adept at reading board strength and making smart decisions during game play. Magic allows for very smart, nuanced, responsive decision-making.
  • Depth: I have already suggested that Magic has considerable depth. In fact, I would argue that Magic is, without equal, the deepest game ever created. At this point there is almost 12,000 unique cards in existence. Period. Even though these cards can be broken down into various functions (ramp, scry, tutor, wipe, etc)., there’s an unmatched amount of variety in the card pool. Of course–this is one of the reasons that the game can seem so inaccessible,

    • My hope is that this language: accessibility, elegance, sophistication, and depth, provides you with lenses both for thinking about the games you play and for the game(s) you want to design. Ultimately, of course, a successful game has to be “fun,” and, as I hope the DnD example indicates, different people can find different things to be fun (some of you probably enjoy playing Monopoly, and I don’t want to think that there’s something cognitively wrong with your brain because of that). My hope is that contemplating these ideas while making your game will help you understand what you find fun (luck? strategy? deceit? cooperation?) and design accordingly.

    Resources for Making Games

    As we begin project 4, I want to point your attention to a few resources.

  • The Game Crafter. This is a great site for ordering and designing game materials. The drawback: I could not find a timeline for how long it takes them to process custom orders (of say, playing cards or game boards). But they offer a very straightforward process for designing a game. They also have a walkthrough for getting started.
  • Litko is another online store that sells tokens and materials. Note that they take up to two weeks to process and order, and then between 3 and 10 days to ship an order. This means that you would have to order game tokens very soon (or plan on purchasing the 3 day shipping).
  • Decromancy offers a great tool for those interested in creating a card game. While the game costs 19.99, they offer a one-month free trial.
  • nanDeck is another very popular software for making card games. It has a community that includes templates for making MTG and other existing card games.
  • MakePlayingCards.com looks like it has a very stream-lined system for creating playing cards. Pricing seems reasonable. And they can produce your cards in 2-3 business days.

    • Gamification, Procedurality, and ARGs

    With the time remaining in class today, I want to address SuperBetter and McGonigal’s arguments regarding the potential for gaming. Here’s a link to a presentation I delivered last year at the 2013 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC’s) entitled Postpedagogy, Gamification, and sf0.

    Homework

    Work on those research papers!

    Read Mark Rosewater’s “Ten Things Every Game Needs”

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    New Media Production Week 10

    Posted on October 30, 2014 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

    WEEK 10. How is it already week ten? This requires that I reassess all the hopes and dreams I packed into the syllabus in order to identify what we can actually accomplish in the time we have remaining. I have distributed a handout that maps out our remaining classes.

    Project 4

    Tonight we have two goals. First, we’ll talk about your Shipka assignments. Second I will lay out the possibilities for our 4th Project. The 4th project will be due in class on December 4th.

    There’s myriad possibilities for what you might do for this project. Here are a few ideas.

    First, you can do your Shipka assignment. I don’t like to give an assignment that I have not done myself. It is hard to imagine the pitfalls unless you have actually tried it out first. Alternatively, you could find a partner and do each other’s Shipka assignments, giving the creator some valuable feedback.

    Second, you can choose to transform an existing conference presentation into a more dynamic, multimedia presentation. Of course, this doesn’t have to be something as developed as Michael Wesch’s “The Web is Us/ing Us,” but it could be! You could either narrate the paper set to images, of find a way to remediate the argument of the paper into a different media/form.

    Third, you could turn a syllabus into an infographic (using Photoshop, InDesign, or even template software). Or, you could convert a syllabus into a (cool) website. Here is a list of resources on infographics.

    Fourth, you could produce a new media manifesto. This was an original assignment for this course that I had to cut. The inspiration for this piece is not only Wesch’s work, but also something like Prince EA’s Why I Think This World Should End. Really, the manifesto could be any kind of definitional or argumentative performance.

    Fifth, you could dedicate a month to building content in your blog. Warren Ellis, Morning Computer. Write a blog post, however long, every day on anything you want.

    Sixth, you can remediate your MEmorial into a video.

    Project 5

    There is one additional project I would like you to complete this semester–and that is further developing your WordPress sites. We’ll work on this a bit in class in the coming weeks. In the end I would like your sites to have:

    • A teaching portfolio
      • A teaching philosophy (250 words or less)
      • A sample course syllabi
      • A unique project
      • A multimedia resource (a powerpoint? handout? what do you have to share?)
    • A research portfolio
      • An about page or research narrative/trajectory
      • A digital CV
      • A PDF CV
      • A sample conference paper or abstract (academia.edu?)
      • What else?
    • A coursework page: this was something that a few universities requested when I was on the job market–a detailed list of relevant coursework with brief course descriptions.

    And we’ll read Collin Brooke’s post on “The Strength of Weak Media.”

    Homework

    For next class, please read Bogost 1-98 and McGonigal 1-77. While I realize this is quite a bit of reading, neither should be too impenetrable (though the Bogost can be dense in a few places) and this is the last reading assignment I will give this semester.

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    Rhetoric and Gaming 10.1 / Research Resources

    Posted on October 28, 2014 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

    Today’s class has two primary objectives. First we will discuss the McGonigal reading. I think McGonigal opens interesting pathways into (re)thinking the value of games. Then we will move into the research project that I introduced in our last class.

    There is a short quiz on McGonigal on Canvas. Then we will spend 30 minutes or so addressing the reading. I will ask each of you to point us toward two sentences worthy of discussion and consideration. We will finish this discussion with a write-up* (these write-ups will be part of the research project).

    Research Resources

    First, a list of academic game journals you should consult:

    While not peer-reviewed, one article from the following sources can count for 15 pages toward your research total. You can ask me to approve additional pages.

    Once you have discovered a useful article, do two things.

    • First, look at the works cited or references list. Identify a few sources worthy of checking.
    • Second, put the title of the article into Google Scholar.

      • You can collect sources from outside of this list, however I will be insistent that your 180 pages* of research come from peer-reviewed* sources. Your research project can (and probably should) involve non-peer reviewed sources, but those won’t count toward your 180 page requirement.

      Note that not all of these resources will provide full text access for free. But, chances are, you can get full text access if you go to the journal via the USF library. Ask me how to do this if you don’t know how to access a journal via the library website.

      Homework

      There’s two things I would like you to do for homework. First, I would ask you to produce a 200-250 word proposal that outlines your research project. This proposal needs to address: 1) what you want to study and why and 2) what you have already looked at–what sources you have already read and which other sources you would begin reading. You don’t need to have a complete sense of the 180 pages you will read for your project, but you should at least have a sense of what the first 60 or so will be (so, say, the nest three sources you will consult).

      As you are looking at sources and preparing to write your proposal, please start a google doc for keeping track of your research. Share this document with me (insignificantwrangler at gmail dot com). This should be a place where you keep track of what you have read.

      Obviously, I hope the links and cursory examinations we conducted in class today help you achieve the second objective. But you should spend some more time following up.

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