Among the Republicans

Prepping for my role as a blogger during the upcoming RNC, I read Among the Republicans by V.S. Naipaul, a reflection upon the 1984 Republican National Convention. Interesting is the extent to which Naipaul focuses on the rising New Right religion, in a sense that resonates with Burke's identification:

The invocation was being spoken, by a rabbi; and the piety seemed correct. The occasion, with its magnification of man, had a feel of religion. Not religion as contemplation or a private experience of divinity; but religion as the essence of a culture, the binding, brotherhood transcending material need. That, rather than political debate, was what people had come to Dallas for.

Of course, the "transcending material need" anticipates Thomas Frank and Andrew Gelman by a few decades. And what does this new religion offer? How to explain its success?

The fundamentalism that the Republicans had embraced went beyond religion. It simplified the world in general; it rolled together many different kinds of anxieties—schools, drugs, race, buggery, Russia, to give just a few; and it offered the simplest, the vaguest solution: Americanism, the assertion of the American self.

This echoes what I wrote in my essay on the 2004 election; that Bush's rhetorical success rested on his ability to reframe complex problems in simple terms, and especially on his ability to draw on a powerful notion of a beleaguered but stedfast "us" righteously opposed to a debase, highbrow, and/or polyvocal them (a bunch of sophists, really).

Education in Ruins; a War of Nerves

I've talked about my love for Bill Reading's The University in Ruins on this blog before. Today I came across a disturbing news item on Facebook that made me think of Reading's warning, a warning echoed by Mark C. Taylor in The Moment of Complexity: that if, after the decimation of the Modern Enlightenment project (Lyotard, etc), educators failed to provide a robust and compelling justification for education, then one would be constructed for them. Kant's institution sealed faculty from public scrutiny, provided they obeyed State laws. The old motto: "think but obey." That was the deal Kant and Humbodlt struck for institutions of higher learning in their seminalConflict of the Faculties--the public stays out of curriculum, and the educators stay out of politics.

Increasingly, however, the State (the polis) has rescinded this contract. The fiasco in Texas regarding history textbooks in 2010 was a clear shot across the bow: no longer will faculty be free to determine what gets taught in classrooms. Those decisions will now be made outside the discipline. With the deconstruction of the Modern University, and its goals of universality and assimilation, goes the forcefield that shielded academics from the realm of politics. Of course, there's more going on here: the radical shift in Universities from centers of conservative values to liberal critique, the massive increase of students attending University, the increasing polarization and invective of political discourse in the electric era, etc. My point is simply that the classroom is no longer isolated from politics. In fact, the classroom is a political hot spot, if the events in Texas, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Florida tell us anything.

Now we can add New Hampshire to the list. Huffington Post:

The Tea Party dominated New Hampshire Legislature on Wednesday overrode the governor's veto to enact a new law allowing parents to object to any part of the school curriculum.

There's a small part of me, a Levinasian part, that argues we could interpret such a law as inviting alterity--forcing educators to consider different perspectives. But that voice is drowned out by another part of me, screaming that school is supposed to be a center for challenging beliefs, encountering difference, and inspiring change. Again, we call them the liberal arts for a reason (and have all the way back to Cicero, who saw oratory as the art of adjusting the convictions of the republic).

But there's another aspect here that really bothers me--the lack of respect it affords educators to determine what should be taught. The article indicates that parents are responsible for paying the costs of alternative curriculum--but think of the amount of time and energy that will be dedicated to Intelligent Design (which, I would argue, is one of the real intentions here--not "whole language" or "everyday math"). FTA:

Hoell stressed the new law could allow parents to address both moral and academic objections to parts of the curriculum. The lawmaker said he could imagine the provision being utilized by parents who disagree with the "whole language" approach to reading education or the Everyday Math program.

"What if a school chooses to use whole language and the parent likes phonics, which is a better long-term way to teach kids to read?" Hoell said to HuffPost.

What about the fact that education, both curriculum and pedagogy, is an intense area of study and that those who shape curriculum have years, if not a lifetime, of training? As if we needed more evidence of how little respect some people have for the difficulty of educating well. As if education didn't require expertise. The emphasis placed on standardization and assessment by No Child Left Behind and the Spellings Commission influences, at least implicitly, how we teach. But, to me, the events in Texas and now New Hampshire are much more invasive--directly assaulting what we teach.

We should see this for what it is. Burke would remind us that this is war, a logomachy over the logos guiding our nation's identity. It is a war from which the Modern University provided academia amnesty. In the 21st century, it is a war we must be willing to fight.

Let you alone! That's all very well, but how can I leave myself alone? We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?

Fahrenheit 451

Internet Metaphor

I posted a link to this NYT article to Facebook, but I wanted to keep this paragraph someplace where I could find it:

Then again, the Internet is a new kind of barometer for keeping track of exactly how old you feel: how many things you don’t get, how many mini-Internet worlds you can’t find the door to; exactly how many crickets in the world you can no longer hear chirping. Unlike in generations past, when (I imagine) you just kept doing what you and your same-aged friends did, and aged into obscurity in comfort on a cloud of your own tastes and generational inclinations, until you died either thinking you all were still the coolest or not caring anymore about being cool, these days the Internet exists in part to introduce you to all these things you didn’t know about, but in part to remind you how much there is out there that you’ll never know about. The Internet is basically like being at a house party and trying to find the bathroom and opening up a door to a room where a bunch of kids are playing a game or doing a drug or having an orgy (metaphorically) or something and you get all flustered and say, “Oh, my God, I’m sorry!” and they all look at you like, “You pervert,” and you quickly slam the door shut. Everywhere you go on the Internet there are rooms you don’t understand, people playing games you don’t know the rules to, teenagers doing drugs you’ve never heard of and can’t even pronounce. And you just walk through the halls of this house party, aging in fast forward, until you open the one last door at the end of the hallway and it’s Death. Ha, ha.

The focus of the article is on the way that the Internet "ages" us. I think the scope can be changed however, to suggest how much the Internet potentially exposes.

Rotten With Perfection

Burke fans will probably enjoy today's offerings from one of my favorite sites, Slaughterhouse 90210.

Yeah, We Already Knew That

Via the Blogora today, a piece in Newsweek on evolution and irrationality. It probably shouldn't irk me that the piece makes no mention of rhetoricians, but it does (its got philosophers and cognitive scientists, but no rhetoricians). Its clear the article wishes for a rational world (which, if I remember my Jonathan Swift, isn't necessarily utopian), but at least it concludes recognizing (somewhat) the priority of human emotion.

I wish, however, that the article lived up to its title and endorsed our "fallen" emotional flaws as a necessary component to social and cultural development. I was writing today about Burke and Alphonso Lingis--respectively the ideas that identification requires division and that the construction of a "universal rational community" requires the exclusion of the strange(r). In both cases, there is a recognition that the violence of exclusion is essential to any act of defining, and the hope that we can acknowledge such an act--live up to it, so to speak.

Burke, Sophistry, and Ecological Rhetoric

I wrote this in response to a graduate students' project on Kenneth Burke. I didn't want to lose it, so I'll stick it here:

Burke shares quite a bit with the Sophists because they both believe that rhetoric is metaphysical, rather than representational. That is to say, language doesn’t simply report on an already existing reality; rather, language participates in bringing reality into being. This does not mean that all reality--for Burke or the Sophists-- is merely language (a critique often thrust upon poststructuralists); there is a material world out there. But we do not have direct access to that material world, we always engage it through our consciousness, through our culture, through words, ideas, preconceptions, expectations, moods, ideologies, identities, technologies, locales, dispositions, injuries, etc.

Burke, Purpose, Rubric

Taking a break from work I have to finish, I grabbed Burke's Grammar of Motives off the shelf. I found this great paragraph from the chapter "Agency and Purpose" challenging notions of neutral instrumentalism (that our instruments measure without purpose or perspective, that they measure substance rather than create it). My next major project concerns increasing assessment and standardization, and I think I'll use this passage juxtaposed against the call for rubrics:

Though our laboratory instruments may transcend human purpose, they exist only as the result of human purpose. And we might even say that they perform satisfactorily without purpose only because they have purpose imbedded in their structure and design. An instrument like a thermometer has its purpose so thoroughly built into its very nature, that it can do its work without purpose, merely by continuing to be itself. (281)

Exerting purpose simply by being there, such that purpose (power, force) becomes invisible.

New Media Rhetoric and Wikipedia

I thought I would share my conference proposal for International Society for the History of Rhetoric conference. I have a feeling its probably a bit too contemporary (ie, it mentions computers) for this conference, but there's no harm in trying. The talk would be building off of what I'll be discussing at RSA later this month: though that talk focuses on the complex ways [non-Platonic/Aristotelian] in which Wikipedia establishes credibility. I'll post links to that material later. I guess my preoccupation with wikis extends from their complete "newness"- there's really nothing in history that compares to the magnitude to which they precipitate, harness, and purpose human interaction and thinking. Anywho, here's the proposal:

In We the Media, journalist turned new media proponent Dan Gillmor argues that digital technologies present us with an entirely new form of communication; in addition to “one-to-one” communication (which we can identify with dialectic) and “one-to-many” (rhetoric), digital technologies offer “many-to-many” communication (26). As Gillmor demonstrates through an examination of contemporary blogs, forums, wikis, and social aggregators, audiences are no longer exterior, static entities to be acted upon. They are now far more active agents in a far more dynamic communicative process.

I argue that this developing communicative medium will further push rhetoric to break away from its Platonic / Aristotelian preoccupation with objective truth and persuasion. As audiences gain more response ability, rhetors will have to work with audiences rather than upon them. The dynamism of digital communicative environments, in addition to their emphasis on collecting intelligence, will call for a rhetoric more concerned with fostering collaboration than producing terminal synthesis.

This does not mean that rhetoric should abandon all discussion of persuasion, only that its focus needs to expand to include non-synthetic negotiation of difference. I will offer as example of this dual need a presentation of Wikipedia. The “article” dimension of a Wikipedia entry reflects a traditional interest in truth and knowledge production. But every Wikipedia entry is more than just its “article”: it is a massive collection of pages, including a lively “discussion” section and a history of all changes made to a page. Every knowledge object becomes embedded in a web of social relations. These other, more social, dimensions to each entry symbolize the ways in which “many-to-many” communication is changing our information landscape and suggest how rhetoric needs to augment persuasion with an interest in cooperation.

I will conclude by arguing this transformation is anticipated in the work of Burkian rhetorical theorist Jim Corder. Throughout the mid-1980’s Corder argued that the work of rhetoric extended beyond persuasion to something more akin to “love.” Designed to deal with the intensified wrangle of the digital barnyard, a rhetoric of cooperation builds off of Corder and Burke by emphasizing that the ends of rhetoric aren’t always concerned with persuasion—sometimes they are concerned with keeping the conversation hospitable, active, and inviting.