CCCC's Recap #1: Expanding Rhetorical Publics: the Zoo, the Cemetery, and the Chapel"

While at CCCC's, I had the pleasure of attending Steven Mailloux, D. Diane Davis, and Michelle Ballif's panel "Expanding Rhetorical Publics: the Zoo, the Cemetery, and the Chapel."

Mailloux's talk "Human Acts, Divine Publics" wonders whether it is possible to imagine how a human might share a rhetorical relation with the divine (rhetorical, here, stipulating the potential for a two-way relationship). To me, the most engaging part of his talk concerned his discussion of the role of pathos in Heidegger, that, via Heidegger's reading of Aristotle in "Existential Constitution of the There" in Being in Time, the first work of rhetoric isn't necessarily identification (ethos), but rather the establishment of a mood (pathos); an affective register from which we can share a world.

Davis's talk "Human Acts, Animal Publics" challenges the Cartesian distinction that self-referentiality, in the form of autobiography, distinguishes the Human. Besides the fact that science increasingly acknowledges the self-referential capabilities of other species (an aside she makes in her conclusion), poststructuralist conceptions of language reveal we are never in command of our own self-image, but always in the process of chasing "the animal that therefore I am." This line of thought isn't primarily intended to achieve animal rights (which would simply lead to another conversation and drawing of lines--which animals? etc.). Nor is it a matter of eliminating the desire to draw lines (echoing Derrida's distinction between the necessity of human laws and our obligation to honor the absolute Law of hospitality). It is a matter of drawing so many lines that the act of line drawing diminishes Humanism's power to cause epistemological and material violence.

Ballif's talk "Human Acts, Dead Publics" explores how we might derive a post humanist rhetoric and ethics from the figure of the vampire. Working from Derrida's claim that we learn to live, finally, not from life but from death. First, like Davis, she urges us to let go of the chimera of representation and strain to listen to our spectral borders, unsure of the certainty of ourselves and our ears. Furthermore, she strives to make us recognize how much our conception of ourselves is tied to the horizons of our being, to death and the beyond. Finally, Ballif advocates that learning to live finally is an ethical move that necessitates stepping to and beyond the impossible border between life and death.

Question and Answer

On Facebook, someone asks: "Come on people, is it so hard to have manners?"

I would say "yes" because having manners rests on a recognition and prioritization of the other person. So much of our contemporary technological life aims at the obfuscation of other people (iPods, iPhones, e-readers, nintendo DS, etc), at filtering the external world out and amping my internal world up. It takes more and more effort to keep oneself tethered in reality, to acknowledge the face-to-face with others.

I am thinking of D. Diane Davis' discussion of Nancy in the introduction to her Inessential Solidarity. She reminds us that Levinas's primordial concept of the face-to-face "is a relation of nonindifference, Levinas tells us, that pivots neither on shared meaning nor on identification but on an obligation, an imperative that precedes understanding [...] You might whip out your Blackberry or plug into your iPod or feign sleep or complete absorption in your magazine, iPad, or Nintendo DS, but the active refusal to be responsive is a response and so no longer simple indifference" (11). I am tweaking this a bit, suggesting that our contemporary technologies obliviate the other--such that the encounters that trigger the "conscious" responses of avoidance (of avoiding my responsibility toward the other, my hospitality, my repaying the debt) Davis articulates do not present themselves to consciousness. Of course, we still are left with the conscious decision to put these technologies away, and to invest our time in the presence of others. But such investing can be hard, hard work. Worthy work, though.

Davis on Derrida; What Levinas Offers Latour

Via Blogora, a video lecture by D. Diane Davis on Derrida, deconstruction, gratitude, and debt:

Derrida and gratitude: thinking always has a debt. "The image of the trail blazing subject, self sufficient and completely independent is, of course, a metaphysical figure. But it is always a figure or for some traditions ideal" […] "But what Derrida marks constantly is that he does not stand on his own. He stands on a mountain of debt and conditions of possibility."

Davis resists labeling deconstruction as a simple textual methodology--but I think her discussion of close reading and the encounter with an aporia comes close to framing deconstruction as a method, albeit a "choratic" one (to use Hawk and Rickert's term). In other words, Davis' framing of deconstruction marks it as a fluid form of approach that cannot--and does not aim to--guarantee a certain result. Davis stresses: "Thinking is not knowing."

I tend to think of deconstruction in more spiritual terms--that it becomes a spirit for navigating the world (and not just reading texts). Like Davis, I am drawn to the notion of undecidability. In my grad class this week, I contrasted Augustine and Plato against Lanham's notion of "strong" rhetoric, McComiskey relativist, Consigny's anti-foundational, and Jarratt's materialist explications of sophistry. On the one side, Truth is derived through a certain methodology (biblical hermeneutics, dialectic) and then transformed by rhetoric (audience analysis, arrangement, style, delivery). On the other side, truth is something produced through what Lanham calls social dramas, it cannot be decided in advance and cannot be considered "certain" (although, Lanham stresses, this does not mean it is either arbitrary or trivial--human dramas set the bounds of existence).

To get to the second, "strong" rhetoric, one must operate within an uncertain, undecidable metaphysic. This is why I am particularly drawn to Levinas, since his metaphysic incorporates a relation to transcendence that neither eliminates the possibility of transcendence (as people like Lanham and, more recently, Latour have done) nor insists upon its certainty. God as enigma, perpetual, perpetuating question--Levinas's phenomenological ethics do not seek to produce a knowledge (or a method of knowledge) as much as what Aristotle might call a disposition (what Aristotle marks as the first part of a rhetorical performance that sets the mood): how does one act in the shadow of a perpetual, unanswerable question? Tentatively.

Of course, to those of an absolute foundationalist position, Levinas's appreciation for uncertainty might seem heretical. I do not think, in other words, that Levinas presents us with a solution to the problem of transcendence, faith and politics. But I do think, by acknowledging the transcendental as a question, he contributes to our understanding of the intellectual and political, philosophical/scientific and humanit(ies)(arian), right and might divides that Latour argues plagues our contemporary moment.

Latour and Risk

From Pandora's Hope::

Speech implies by definition the risk of misunderstanding across the huge gaps between different species. If scientists want to bridge the two-culture divide for good, they will have to get used to a lot of noise, and, yes, more then a little bit of nonsense. (17)

And, for a nice parallel, D. Diane Davis' opposition to philosophic logocentrism from Breaking Up [at] Totality:

An ethics of decision in a world that has lost its criteria for responsible action begins with straining to hear the excess that gets drowned out, sacrificed for the clarity of One voice, One call, One legitimate position. A post-humanist ethics ought not be about shutting down the flow but about opening it up, pulling back the stops. (19)

Risk and nonsense, nonsense and risk.

Week One, Spring 2011

Our first week of classes is coming to a close. My New Media class read Walter Ong's "Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought" and will be remediating the essay into (x)html this weekend. I haven't read that article in a few years (gasp), since I finished the dissertation (which contains a chapter essentially dedicated to Ong); I forgot how darn concise yet incredible that essay is. Written after a nearly 30 years studying the epistemological and ethical impact of writing upon human consciousness and sociology, it is a 14 page tour de force. Stylistically, it is quite quotable, and I think that's why it will lend itself to the kind of intense condensation that my remediation project demands (reducing the 14 page essay to a series of ten sentences and images).

My visual rhetoric class meets only once a week, and that is a tricky format for an undergraduate technology driven class. Their first project (due next week) asks them to perform a rhetorical analysis of an image (whether an advertisement, an artwork, a book cover, a movie poster, whatever. Nothing revolutionary there. I do ask them, however, to mediate the analysis as either a Prezi, a movie, or a flash presentation. Last semester I did two to three (student choice) of these projects, and they got much better each time. This semester I am only doing one--but there's a number of other cool projects I want to try. Their first reading is from Presentation Zen Design, and I must say, I really like this book so far. It combines concise instruction harmoniously with a minimalist design scheme, practicing what it preaches.

In terms of research, I spent the first week back working on my book review for TCQ (I'm reviewing Selber's collection Rhetoric and Technologies; short, short version--go order a desk copy, its great). I also spent a few hours working on a second book review of Davis' Inessential Solidarity for JAC. Working on the reviews was a nice way to ease back in to the semester. My rough draft of the Selber review is checking in around 3500 words, the final version needs to be around 1800. So, I've got some cutting to do this weekend.

I'm also excited because this week I joined an interdisciplinary project at USF centered in our new School of Global Sustainability--Resilient Tampa Bay. The group seeks to foster connections between academics at USF (from english and communications to civil engineering and the sciences) and community stakeholders from around the Tampa area. My new media class will help design a new website for the group after their 3rd conference this February; my visual rhetoric class will work on designing a complete branding for the group. Should be fun and productive.

Well that's my first week back. Hope everyone out there is able to get through the snow. I've got one last letter of recommendation to compose this afternoon (at least, I hope it is the last one), and about 7 to submit online. Then I might actually take a few hours to (gasp) read a few journal articles.

Maniacal Laughter

I've always really liked the title to Davis' work Breaking Up [at] Totality for its playfulness and visual pun (follow the link to see the cover). Of course, I also enjoy the Gorgian-Cixiousian sentiment of the book: laughing in the face of the world's [in]sanity. I have a student reading Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals this semester, and so I am reading it as well. I like to think of Davis' title along side Nietzsche's clear description of his "gay science":

For cheerfulness--or in my own language gay science--is a reward: the reward of a long, brave, industrious, and subterranean seriousness, of which, to be sure, not everyone is capable.

Those of us who enjoy critical questioning (whether in the tradition of American novelists or French theorists or Buddhist spiritualists or Greek sophists, Casey?) know that not everyone enjoys cracking up [social institutions, traditional ideas of morality, progressive visions, ideological assurances, cultural predilections, the self]. Not everyone sees deconstruction as positively as Nietzsche frames it in the opening aphorisms of his Genealogy: as opening the (re)inventive possibility.

Funny Doesn't Belong There

I often find myself trying to come to terms with my love of rhetoric; to the point that I try to find traces of this love littered throughout my entire life's narrative. One such trace, I tell myself, is my lifelong love of the cover song and the remix. Since I was a kid, I have always enjoyed the playful cover or parody--like the Lemonhead's "My Name is Luka," Dynamic Hack's "Boyz in tha Hood," or even Alien Ant Farm's "Smooth Criminal."

So, I tell myself, this clearly expresses an early appreciation for the kairotic dimensions of context. I appreciate a playful re-appropriation. I also can appreciate it as a deconstructionist--something that alerts us to silent norms, to expectations. Such an alert must be respectful, even while playful. For instance: laughing at a funeral. The laugh at a funeral might defy social convention, but it does so (hopefully) as light-hearted remembrance and as painfully playful nostalgia. It manifests the often neglected cliche: a proper funeral celebrates a life rather than mourns a death. So, you can laugh at a funeral. You cannot order a pizza.

I think the playful cover song, one self-conscious of its recontextualization, represents this kind of properly un-kairotic laughter (to borrow DDD's term). This laughter attempts a self-consciousness tempered by obligation--to the original, to the moment, to something other. All this came to mind today thanks to Mxrk's sharing the Jim Lehrer piece:

Davis > Derrida > Levinas

Today's reading: John Muckelbauer's "Rhetoric, Asignification, and the Other: A Response to Diane Davis" and D. Diane Davis' "The Fifth Risk: A Response to John Muckelbauer's Response". Muckelbauer challenges the assumption that any discourse or pedagogy can claim ethical or political superiority, all share "a different orientation into the impossible wager of discourse" (he is specifically discussing the hermeneutics of Mailloux, the Levinasian alterity of Davis, and the possibility of a third position). Muckelbauer's conclusions performs well his argument that rhetoric, as an art, is not solely concerned with what can be told or shown--it is also very much a matter of feeling.

That is, one of the crucial lessons of Levinas's and Davis's work may well be that, rather than being the telos of rhetoric, judgment may simply be the residue of asignifying, rhetorical processes. But none of these discourses would have any heightened purchase on those processes, as each of them is nothing more (or less) than a different orientation into the impossible wager of discourse, some of which are driven by the desire to criticize or advocate, and some of which are driven by the desire to immanently interrupt the operations of critique and advocacy. In the end, perhaps the best that one can hope for is an impossible encounter with the other on the necessarily impure terrain of the same. Of course, this hope cannot tell you what to do. It cannot tell you what to denounce and it cannot tell you what to endorse. Then again, perhaps it can.

It is the precarious placement of the perhaps--itself an interruption--that interrupts the desire for a Certain judgment. Sweet. And, of course, reading his conclusion made me want to write this post...

I find stomach rejecting Muckelbauer's conclusion--its a bit queezy and tied up in knots, but my head hasn't quite caught up yet (and this returns to his opening point: that rhetoric is more than reason, its sense). This might have something to do with sleep deprivation, who knows. But, while we might not have a stable foundation from which we can make decisions of absolute supremacy, this does not mean we cannot hypothesize from the mists. I believe our orientation toward discourse can affect its political and ethical impact; and Davis' picks up on this when she writes/cites that for Levinas "ethics is not some 'proper response' but this interruption of the self by the other, each time, in which 'the I loses its sovereign coincidence with itself, its identification' ("Trace of the Other 353)." This does not mean that we can extract one ethical program from Levinas' work--rather, we are provided with a first principle, one that eschews egoism and synthesis.

The following comes from the conclusion of Davis' response to Muckelbauer:

Judgment with an eye to justice has no illusions of finality; it is a tentative gesture that is offered without clarity or certitude, both as a test and an invitation. In Otherwise than Being, Levinas writes: "This book interprets the subject as hostage and the subjectivity of the subject as a substitution breaking with being's essence. The thesis is exposed imprudently" (Otherwise than Being 184). Derrida notes that for Levinas the thesis "is therefore not posed, it is imprudently and defenselessly exposed, and yet that very vulnerability is ('this weakness is necessary,' we will read a little later on) the provocation to responsibility for the other, it leaves a place for the other in a taking-place of this book where this here no longer shuts in upon itself, upon its own subject" ("At This Very Moment in This Text Here I Am" 31). As Avital Ronell puts it, "rather than flexing a thetic muscle that would buff up under the light of truth, Levinas offers a discourse vulnerable to its own sense of exposure, frailty and uncertainty" ("The Sacred Alien: Heidegger's Reading of Hölderlin's 'Andenken")