Reading Responses Responses
Student: Throughout the whole reading I sat there in a WTF stupor. Ong’s writing is very paradoxical, using an alien technology of writing to describe that writing is bad, but then saying that since writing is apart of technology and future that writing is good.
Me: So, here’s my thing with Ong. He isn’t stating that writing is bad, but rather that writing is artificial. We tend to think of artificial as bad (we think of it in dialectical opposition to “natural,” which is good). Isocrates would argue that natural humans are savages (and pretty much every time he uses this term it is overloaded with racist assumptions). But I don’t want to stray here. For Ong, artificial isn’t “bad,” but it does signify that writing, an artifice (Latin for workmanship), is a tool–one so useful and powerful that it transforms the brain of its users.
That is, Ong is arguing that learning to read and write physically rewires ones brain and socially transforms the way one perceives what it means to be a human being, what constitutes “thought” and “reality.” Plato’s notion of reality reflects how written words work. There is a signifier that I write here–say bunny rabbit. That material signifier is icky, but it is our only path to think about the thing it signifies, the glorious concept of a bunny rabbit (that, ironically, isn’t a material thing!).
So, to clarify, I don’t think Ong is paradoxical, but he is trying to account for the paradoxical irony underlying Plato’s condemnation of writing. How can you believe in a transcendental, Idealist ontology and not like written words?
I’d like to see more of your responses drill down and close read particular ideas. Some of your responses here feel like drive by quotes–you are taking a fragment of a sentence. And the way you are presenting it divorces it from the context of the original author’s argument. Get a bit closer and try to think about what an author is arguing, and how a particular sentence/element in that argument is significant. At this point, you might also be able to identify how it connect/compares/contrasts with another reading we’ve done.
Student: …Socrates was being a hypocrite to a degree. In the section between Gorgias and Socrates, Socrates debates against Polus and Gorgias, and had asked Polus to explain his answer while “curbing [his] long style of speech” (Plato 806). So here, Socrates had bluntly asked Polus to shorten his own debate to answer a question posed to him. Yet later on in the Gorgias reading, Socrates himself has a monologue! When it comes time for Callicles and Socrates to have their discussion, it eventually gets to the point that Callicles, in addition to Gorgias and Polus, is tired of discussing with Socrates and suggests he “go through the discussion by [him]self, either by speaking in your own person or by answering your own questions” (Plato 850). In response, Socrates ends up going on his own monologue to continue the discussion, even after he had asked Polus to shorten his answers. I had never really pegged Socrates to be a hypocrite, or to be so self absorbed in hearing himself speak to call him anything similar, but the reading has put this firmly in my head.
As I’ve said before, I don’t think this is a mistake on Plato’s part. I think this might be Plato at his most rhetorical (making the master of dialectic “descend” into a long speech). If I am right, and this isn’t Plato deconstructing himself, THEN WTF IS PLATO TRYING TO DO HERE? WHO IS HIS AUDIENCE AND PURPOSE? There’s a paper in there–one that points to a kind of rhetoric he’s trying to suppress. Hint: Plato. Hates. Democracy. Hint hint: Aristotle *might* help us why Plato thinks democracy is destined to fail.
Student: Cavarero makes a much more obvious analogy for rhetoric when she says, “It is the word (logos) that educates the soul to recognize its true nature,” (28). She has identified that Penelope has recognized her true nature and utilizes her time and space to create her own time and space. She revolts in the simplest of ways, undoing what others have done. Rhetoric is used in the same way, simply weaving together what others “have undone with philosophy,”(29). Penelope is an orator who has been separated from the adventurers and the ‘men’, but uses her time and space to fight the destiny that’s been place upon her.
That line from Cavarero is a great catch. But I’m not quite sure I follow the explication. What is the true nature of the soul? And why does logos, which she defines as the “word,” lead us to that knowledge of the soul. I *think* I might be able to trace out this explication, but I want you to do it. You are on the precipice of brilliance here.
As a hint–what if Cavarero and Plato share a similar understanding of the word (that is, Ong’s notion that the written signifier leads us to consider signifieds, meanings, not as embedded in the immediacy of the real world, but in an abstract, non-tangible, perhaps non-masterable realm–words that defy our attempts to control them!). What if she doesn’t resist? Doesn’t succumb to the
paradox?
Student: The way Cavarero offers a new view of Penelope, and the ways in which Cavarero tries to get us to see Penelope in a new light, is what rhetoric is. Rhetoric is an offer to a new perspective or idea.
Me: I like the idea that rhetoric offers a new perspective. One of my graduate instructors used to say that rhetoric isn’t the art of persuasion, but the art of change. What is unique about Cavarero is that she is doing philosophy (in the sense of exploring how to live a life) without doing Philosophy (that is, tracing out abstract/universal “first” principles of pursuing the True way to live a life).
Student: Cavarrero breaks them down into the men’s worlds of thought and violent action and the women’s world of repetition and creation- helps us know not only where we stand in the world, but what options we have in order to defend our place and even create a new one.
Can we “de-gender” the two approaches to living in the world? Can we say that one seeks to impose itself upon the world, either through physical violence, war, action OR through the symbolic violence of essential, pre-existing categories/oppositions (i.e., “a human is either male or female?)” Or does the act of degendering here perform an abstraction that runs counter to the heart of Cavarero’s argument (hint: what is her argument?)
Student #1: I was really caught off guard by the transition from the repetitive telling of Penelope’s predicament and it’s in depth analysis to the topic of death and how it represents the untying of one’s soul from their body. I was having some difficulty in understanding the author’s point of the essay, and then she immediately jumps into Plato without any warning. It was incredibly abrupt and made her point even more confusing for me to understand since I already have some difficulty in understanding Plato. I honestly felt that the jump from Penelope to Plato could have been explained in a clearer introductory paragraph. However, the connection was made much clearer when the author states that
“…by leading one’s thinking toward eternal objects suitable to pure thought (pure ideas), philosophy unties the soul from the mortal body. Therefore those who lament the fact of death, which is the definitive untying of the soul from the body, are bad philosophers.Exactly like Penelope, they retie (or wish to keep tied) what they have already untied with philosophy, in an endless labor that fails to progress in a single direction, and therefore renders futile whatever work has been done” (23).
With enough context given about Penelope, it becomes easier to understand what Plato is trying to say about philosophers in his thesis: despite retying or maintaining a tied ideology doesn’t matter because it was already untied; you cannot do what you have already undone.
Me: Nes and yo? Keep grinding.
Student #1:One of the main concepts that stood out to me reading Aristotle’s Rhetoric was the use of binaries to put forth and understand a concept. This, I noticed, isn’t a concept exclusive to Aristotle, but rather the use of binaries is seen in other Grecian texts such as the translations of Archilochus’s work: “We know health by illness, good by evil, satisfaction by hunger, leisure by fatigue” (Davenport 374). We see a similarity in Aristotle’s framing of emotion: “since becoming calm is the opposite of calmness” (121). Anger, a concept Aristotle previously defined, ascribes entitlement to its opposite by stating that those in power are “superior to a poor man” and a ruler feels superior to whom he rules, an orator superior to one unable to articulate his/her/its thoughts (117). Is this simply how humans better understand concepts? Or, is binary thinking (binary, I say, as opposed to—ironic that I use it here—a more nuanced understanding of something) a more Eurocentric idea? Indeed, the text follows a system that the introduction noted as “pairs, arranged chastically in what may be loosely described as positive/negative friendliness/hostility, fear/confidence… (114). This may very well be less than productive commentary, but something I noticed evident in several of these works.
Student #2: Throughout McComiskey’s work, I felt general satisfaction because his arguments put into words why I hate Plato so much. I do not like Plato because he views every thing as a binary: true knowledge vs. opinion, instruction vs. persuasion, and language vs. content to name a few. I simply cannot comprehend how someone who is hailed as such a “smart” guy can only view the entire world as nothing more than a series of dichotomies.
Me: Like you, I am always suspicious of people who “end” arguments with binaries.But, as a sophist, I tend to “enter” arguments with binaries–I find them useful ways to enter into a discusssion/problem/field. Binary opposition has dominated Western philosophy for a few millennia. However, the process of exploring an issue should always produce other positions, stakeholders, agents. The goal should be to grasp the complexity of an issue, to see how a real world issue always “deconstructs” the neat binary, not to try and make the world to conform to the categories we try to force upon it.
Student: Epideictic rhetoric also leads us to the importance of great ethos: “Epideictic rhetoric . . . magnifies the importance of ethos over logos primarily because it does not argue to win . . .” (117). This part of the passage is fascinating because up until this point, most rhetoric is utilized to win arguments.
Me: I include the Sullivan reading precisely because not all rhetoricians agree that rhetoric’s primary purpose is to argue or persuade. Sullivan (and Isocrates and Lanham and Grassi) suggest that it has other importance.
Student: I found the distinction between foundational epistemology and relativistic epistemology very helpful and, obviously, very central to the argument here. Knowing what little I do about Plato and Platonic Forms, the line “Humans can only think about things; they cannot think the things themselves” (209), helped me understand the difference between Platonic forms and foundational epistemology, and relativistic epistemology.
Me: Your discussion of McComiskey hits on a key point–how do humans access reality? Do we have access to “things” or “ideas about things”? Can we measure the distance between things and our perception of them? The philosophy that most directly attempts to measure that distance is phenomenology (Hegel, Heidegger–the former thought we could get really, really close to things-themselves, the latter thought that our “mood” would always keep them at something of a distance). Sophistic rhetoricians would argue that distance includes / is amplified by language, an (im)perfect mode of communication often involving imprecision or arbitrariness on the part of the speaker/writer and interpretation (and perhaps ignorance, ill will, or excitement) on the part of the listener/reader.
Student: Quoting Aristotle: “That rhetoric, therefore, does not belong to a single defined genus of subject but is like dialectic and that is useful is clear — and that its function is not to persuade but to see the available means of persuasion in each case, as is true also in all other arts.” (1355b)
Me: I have always been curious about Aristotle’s statement that the function of rhetoric is not to persuade, but see the available means of persuasion. I mean, how can we use that statement to explicate Aristotle’s (tortured) relationship to rhetoric? Which rhetoricians we have studied would support the idea that rhetoric is persuasion? Who sees it as something other than persuasion?
One thing that really confused me and made me go “wtf” comes from page 27. Ong states that “Writing separates academic learning from wisdom, making possible the conveyance of highly organized abstract thought structures independently of their actual use or of their integration into the human lifeworld” (27). This was very difficult for me to wrap my head around. I believe that essentially Ong is saying that because writing must be learned while knowledge is simply accumulated throughout life, that you can be wise without academic learning.
Me: This is a tricky one. Perhaps the Lanham helps us get at this. Let’s think about what it means to study economics in college. If you study economics, you will likely study a lot of abstract economic theories for how the economy should work. These theories will often themselves be reliant on theories of human motivation. Things like the theory of the Invisible Hand and classical economics (no government interference). Or Keynesian economic theory (government spending to key demand/growth). Or Labor Theory (i.e., “Marxism,” that governments (the people) have to fight for a greater value for their labor). But, a lot of the time, you won’t spend as much time as you might think crunching numbers and tracking policy. Because any economy is such a complex mess of networks, relations, agents, powers, histories, etc etc, it is virtually impossible to “prove” that any of these theories are right. That they work. Scholars in economics do make those arguments–but almost always in service of advocating for a theoretical approach to economic growth/policy. Make sense?
If we weren’t literate, we wouldn’t come up with abstract theories of motivation. We would count money and maybe invent ways of counting money faster.
You could study rhetoric by closely reading a bunch of key performances and analyzing them to see why they succeed or fail. What specific phrases, literary techniques, syntax makes us feel, identify, or think? Or, hear me out here, you could read a shit-ton of dense theory. Irony ~ alert.
Student: There was one section I found particularly interesting and it’s on page 16. Cavarero writes, “This space which she carves out from day to day is home, is rootedness…their sense of belonging comes first, and this makes other things possible.”
Me: Hmm. What if I proposed that rhetoric is the art of creating a sense of belonging? Belonging to whom? to where? to what (idea)? What theorists resonate with the idea that we need a sense of belonging? Which theorists are okay with thinking about groups of people? People who think they belong together? Super advanced question that maybe Corder helps us answer: what are the *dangers* that we might associate with belonging?
Corder
Jim Corder, “Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love”
My standard questions:
- Group One: [sections 1-3]: What does Corder mean by the idea that we make narratives? Why do said narratives complicate traditional notions of argument and rhetoric?
- Group Two: [sections 4-6]: How can we describe Rogerian method? Why is Corder skeptical that such a method can be useful to rhetoric?
- Group Three: [section 6-7]: Looking at section 7, would your frame Corder as an optimist or pessimist? What do “we” have to learn (and who are the “we” of this section’s final paragraphs)?
- Group Four: [Section 8]:What do we make of section 8? Why is this story here? What does it exemplify or reinforce?
- Group Five: [Section 9]: What does it mean to be “perpetually opening and closing” (29)? How can such a position help us be better? How does it tie to the other advice offered in this section?
I have a thing for us to read.
