First Day, Fall 2012

Somehow it is already the first day of classes for 2012. I am not sure where my summer went.
I am excited to teach a new grad class this semester, New Media Production. The course differs from the other grad courses I teach, where the focus is on traversing and networking a complex set of readings and ideas. This course emphasizes production--learning how to use tools to do new things. If I am nervous about anything, it is that the class has over 20 students in it, with different comfort levels regarding technology.

The course also seeks to historicize the term new media, defining in light of the convergence of postmodern theory and network technology. We're opening with two staple essays for me--Ong's "Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought" and Heidegger's "The Question Concerning Technology." The Heidegger sets up our early work with Ulmer; I frame Ulmer's concept of electracy as an attempt to wrestle with Heidegger's provocation of technology/logos. (I flush out this strain of thought more in the syllabus' course description, "The Becoming of Electracy"). I've taught Ulmer's Internet Invention with undergraduates before, but I am really excited to teach the MyStory genre with graduate students.

I am also teaching an undergraduate Expository Writing course. Leahy and I completed a manuscript for Computers and Composition that outlines our rationale for teaching web writing. The abstract to that article reads as follows:

Collaborative digital tools, online communities, and the evolution of literacy create opportunities in which writing for an English class and writing for the "real" world no longer have to be two separate activities. We believe seizing such opportunities requires rethinking the desire to teach writing—a move toward what has been termed postpedagogy. We align the interactive and collaborative affordances of web writing with a postpedagogical model of learning focused on inventive practices grounded in kairotic interactions.

I'm going to give the students the article to read in preparation for our next class--the first half of the article is fairly theoretical, focusing on why institutions insist that writing (narrowly defined as academic essays) is "teachable." To rephrase Heidegger: "the correct instrumental definition of writing still does not show us writing's essence [...]" ("QCT" 313). The second half of the essay argues for organizing a class dedicated to the idea that writing cannot be taught, but can be learned. Learning writing requires attending to writing outside of the instrumental-institutional expectations. The dynamic, participatory web affords us opportunities to discover writing in the wild.
Working on the syllabus for both courses reminded me that I have a blog, and that it has been very lonely. Sorry blog.

Web writing, postpedagogy, social expressivism, and Grassi

Leahy and I have been writing an article on web writing. Here's one of my conclusions (I think I have 3 write now) for the theory section:

We began this explication of social expressivism by highlighting Socratic traces in Elbow’s expressivism and end by referencing Ernesto Grassi’s concept of ingenium and metaphysic of the public sphere. We hope this shows that the questions of web writing and (post)pedagogy aren’t new, even if they are emphasized by our explorations of new media. They are the fundamental questions of Greek history, handed down through centuries, via multiple and transforming institutions, in the shadows of which we continue to dwell, teach, and write.

What is Rhetoric?

Our FYC program writes and publishes their own textbook every year. This year, they asked me to write a short introduction addressing what rhetoric is and why one might study it. Here's my answer (probably rife with errors, it could use some quality revising).

Why Study Rhetoric?

I have been tasked with the question “why study rhetoric?” Crafting a response to this question is in fact tricky, because “rhetoric” has referred to different things in different eras. In today’s popular parlance, the term is often analogous with “bullshit,” to grab the title of Harry G. Frankfurt’s recent sequel to his earlier book, On Truth. “That’s just empty rhetoric” the pundits say in response to the politician’s apology. But this perks me to ask: “is there full rhetoric?”

In what follows I will answer this question by briefly sketching the art of rhetoric’s complex history. My history is in no way comprehensive—I hope to give a long view of a very complicated, and conflicted, intellectual conversation about the purpose of education, people, and language.

Few people are aware that, until only about 200 years ago, rhetorical training comprised the first three years of higher education (and practically all of elementary and secondary education). But , even though it was the focus of education, “rhetoric” hasn’t been one stable thing for the last 2,500 years. In fact, what I hope to tease out in this brief historical overview is how rhetoric’s uses change in connection to an era’s dominant information-communication technologies.

What is Rhetoric?

I’ll claim that there are three different historic uses of rhetoric—each corresponding to a different era and communicative media (progressively: orality, literacy, and post-literacy or electracy). In the era of orality, before written language, rhetoric operated primarily in terms of persuasion. The job of the rhetorician involved captivating and purposing human attention, either to remember history, celebrate achievements, encourage change, or consider legal matters. In the era of literacy, rhetoric formally concerned itself with interpretation (what is called hermeneutics). The job of the rhetorician involved carefully reading texts and engagingly sharing the products of that reading. Religion, history, and law where no longer contained is stories and speeches—now they found their homes in letters and books. The rhetorician was tasked with writing, reading, and interpreting these new technologies. In the contemporary electrate era, rhetoric emphasizes the importance of ethics, focusing on responsibility and relations. Under this developing rhetoric, the task of the rhetorician is to analyze social systems and maximize opportunities for engagement, sharing, and diversity. These aims, I would argue, are affordances made possible by digital connectivity (through radios, telephones, televisions, computers, mobile phones and whatever comes next).

How Far We Going Back? Way Back…

Rhetoric’s first major appearance in the West was in ancient Greece. Ironically, our knowledge of this time period comes almost exclusively from books, since the Athens of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Isocrates, and Gorgias represents the moment when orality and literacy operated side by side. Most famous of the Greek thinkers on rhetoric was Aristotle. Aristotle’s teacher, Plato, had famously castigated rhetoric as manipulation and trickery, arguing that if philosophy is medicine for the mind, then rhetoric is merely baked goods—quite tasty, but ultimately unhealthy. Rhetoric, Plato asserted, kept people trapped in a cave, in which they could not differentiate between good and evil, truth and falsity.

Aristotle’s response to his teacher was a bit pragmatic: sure, in a perfect world, we could do without rhetoric. But in a real world, one composed of human necessities and desires, permeated with joys and fears, rhetoric is a necessary evil. Aristotle argues that philosophy focuses on discerning matters of absolute truth and falsity, while rhetoric explores “greyer” issues of probability and possibility. Contrary to Plato’s ideal, matters of politics are almost always “grey” matters; therefore, we need rhetoric to help navigate the inevitable ambiguities of complex, social problems. Furthermore rhetoric, for Aristotle, is inoculation against maliciousness and trickery. It forefronts the obligation of all citizens to protect themselves against corruption in order to maintain a healthy civic body.

Aristotle’s rhetoric attuned students to two major elements of public persuasion: the appeals and the topoi. Aristotle identified three primary appeals and attached each to a particular performance. Logos, an emphasis on logical argument, pertained mostly to deliberative, or what we might call political, matters. Ethos, the study of communal values and individual character, was the principal material for juridical rhetoric. Finally, pathos, the fostering of human emotion, most concerned epideictic, or ceremonial rhetoric. Topoi, which literally translates as “places,” refers to Aristotle’s system for finding common argumentative positions and propositions, and learning how to situate a set of circumstances within these inventive parameters. Aristotle’s topics might seem elementary today (generate a definition, make a comparison, highlight a contradiction, etc), but these elements were first explored in writing in Ancient Greece and revolutionized public discourse.

While, historically, Aristotle and Plato loom as the largest figures in classical rhetoric and philosophy, it is important to highlight that they were not the dominant intellectual figures in their own era. Sophistry, recent scholarship has shown, represented a far more robust intellectual movement than Plato’s representation. It is unknown how much of Aristotle’s rhetoric was in fact plagiarized from the (illiterate?) sophists who preceded him (unlike Plato and Aristotle, the sophists didn’t seem to believe in writing things down; it might be that, as dedicated oralists, they distrusted writing as cold and distant from human memory). For the sophists, rhetoric didn’t simply describe a real world existing independent of language; rather, rhetoric—by focusing human attention and energy—produced the world. Independent of language and human energy, the world does not exist. Humans, through their interactions with each other, with objects and technologies, with animals and plants and sunshine and coal and words and images and jellyfish, call worth the world in which they dwell. As such—contra Plato—there is no philosophical “Truth” to be found outside of the realm of human judgment and language, no Ideal realm opposed to this one, no outside to our “cave.”

Plato, Aristotle, and the sophists greatly influence the practice of rhetoric in the Roman Republic. In Cicero’s Rome, one might argue, rhetoric reached its high point, since the entire education system was designed around rhetorical training and performance, preparing students for the rigors of participating in the Roman Senate. Consider Quintilian’s response to Plato’s castigation of rhetoric:

Under such a mode of reasoning, neither will generals, nor magistrates, nor medicine, nor even wisdom itself, be of any utility; […] in the hands of physicians poisons have been found; and among those who abuse the name of philosophy have been occasionally detected of the most horrible crimes. We must reject food, for it has often given rise to ill health; we must never go under roofs, for they sometimes fall upon those who dwell beneath them; a sword must not be forged for a soldier, for a rubber may use the same weapon. Who does not know that fire and water, without which life cannot exist, and (that I may not confine myself to things of earth,) that the sun and moon, the chief of the celestial luminaries, sometimes produce hurtful effects? […] And so, although the weapons of eloquence are powerful for good or ill, it is unfair to count as evil something which it is possible to use for good” Institutes of Oratory II.xvi.9- 10).

Rather than thinking of rhetoric as even a necessary evil, Quintilian’s analogies suggest that it is a vital, necessary good (and, like many things that are good for us, it becomes poisonous if misused).

A more contemporary development for persuasive rhetorical theory is Kenneth Burke’s notion of identification. Nutshell: any act of persuasion requires a rhetor to create an identity that can be shared between speaker and audience. Very often, “I can’t agree with that idea” is a function of a deeper, subconscious “I can’t be that person.” Thus, 20th century rhetoric has dedicated significant attention to how rhetorical performances create habitable identities. Much of contemporary advertising, politics, art, and culture hinges upon crafting, connecting, challenging, and collecting our different identities.

From the Ear to the Eye

The second movement in rhetoric might be as old as the first—although I would want to properly mark its inauguration in the work of St. Augustine of Hippo. Unlike Aristotle’s Greece or Quintilian’s Rome, Augustine’s Holy Roman Empire was a feudal monarchy rather than a democracy or republic. There was little reason for the populace to learn rhetorical persuasion, since the day’s political and social organization offered few opportunities for deliberative engagement. But the rapid increase in literacy—particularly the increasing centrality of the Bible in legal, political, and social life—called for robust training in textual interpretation. It is quite difficult for anyone living in the 21st century to imagine a time when reading was considered a technology, but it was an unwieldy complex technology for the majority of people in the middle ages.

Augustine tackled these problems by formalizing methods for textual analysis. He took the tools for audience analysis developed by oral-persuasive rhetoric and applied them to reading texts. His focus was on resolving ambiguities and conflicting passages. This version of rhetoric would be called “hermeneutic” and is particularly invested in the development of literacy. The printed word calls for close interpretation in a way that orality does not (Ong)—allowing for critical reflection, abstraction, and intense precision. Augustine’s rhetorical system was not only designed to help priests deal with conflicts in biblical meaning but also drew on persuasive rhetoric to help priests engagingly deliver their interpretations to their parishioners. The Humanities reading strategies are all descendents of St. Augustine of Hippo’s early treatises on signs, language, and human feeling.

The emphasis on interpretation and reading developed by Augustine is amplified in the Enlightenment. While the development of the study of vernacular literatures (such as English, Italian, and French) call for robust interpretive tools, the scientific foundations of the Enlightenment call for a form of rigid argumentative reading and writing (to facilitate the sharing of new knowledge across universities, countries, and continents). Enlightenment rhetoric develops an emphasis on clarity of expression and structural procedures (such as the thesis) that remain fundamental expectations for scholarly writing to this day.

The emphasis of hermeneutic rhetorics transform significantly in the 20th century. Rather than searching for the one, ultimately True reading of a text, scholars began investing attention into multiple readings of a text, noting that all reading involves a degree of writing by the reader. Theorist Roland Barthes refers to this as wreading a text. This pluralist shift in interpretation is generally referred to as a facet of postmodernism, which can be hastily described as an increased distrust of objectivity, an interest in diversity, and an aversion to essentialist, binary systems of classification (i.e., right vs. wrong, man vs. woman, white vs. black). Ironically, rhetoric finds itself back in an Aristotelian/sophistic world of grey ambiguities.

From the I to the Alliance (and, hey, there is an I in alliance)

The third and final rhetorical movement I want to cover develops out of this subjective wreaderly approach to hermeneutics. It attempts to move beyond “human centric” activity—one that begins to pay attention to how ecologies produce humans as much as humans produce environments. In a sense, this introduction is a function of this third movement, since one of my presuppositions concerns the relation between the media we use and the ideas we explore (such that using writing generated an entirely new set of intellectual concerns, using computers and the Internet will generate new questions). It is factually accurate to say that, once upon a time, humans created television. From this third perspective, however, I would argue that it is equally accurate, today, to say that televisions create humans.

This third movement, still in its infancy, strictly concerns itself with neither persuasion or hermeneutics. Rather, it concerns maintaining ethics, in the sense that it seeks to ensure that humans learn to attune themselves to all the voices, objects, and forces that permeate decisions. Given the increase in complexity of political, economic, social, and educational institutional systems, we require new ways, and attitudes, of ensuring all voices receive representation. This third rhetoric, that which I am naming ethical rhetoric, a rhetoric of alterity, ensures that all entities are accounted, represented, and—most importantly (and what distinguishes this somewhat from hermeneutic activity) are offered the opportunity to respond. Others have called this rhetoric dispensation learning how to listen. In my remaining space below, I would like to focus on one theorist of this new rhetorical movement.

Sociologist Bruno Latour’s 21st century work addresses the growing disconnect between academic research and political problems. Latour sees this disconnect as a rhetorical problem attributable to the rise of the 19th century research University (itself created in the image of Plato’s metaphor of the Cave). The research University positioned itself outside of the realm of politics, as an institution seeking knowledge for knowledge’s sake. This protected the research university and its faculty from religious or political persecution. However, it also distanced the university from political activity, since to be an academic meant to be something of a hermit, holed up in a library or laboratory and far from public forums.

Latour’s work advocates a resurgence in Greek and Roman notions of rhetoric to combat this disconnect. His emphasis is on the importance of fostering alliances between ideas, people, and things (since, for Latour, something is real only to the extent that other entities recognize its reality). Latour insists that Plato was wrong—there is no outside to the Cave, there is no such things as an abstract, Ideal truth beyond the realm of human decision making. For Latour, rhetorical training isn’t simply a matter of dragging the unenlightened to the Truth. Rather, it is a matter of collecting participants in one place to work out what will be accepted as true. The differences might sound subtle, but they have incredible impacts on how we view the relations between higher education, rhetorical training, and political activism.

Rhetorical scholarship in this third movement retains persuasion (how to foster partnerships) and hermeneutics (how to read social systems) and adds to it an emphasis on inclusion, participation, and responsiveness. It focuses less on the products of an individual I, and more on the possibilities contained within any collection of we’s. If orality focused on persuasion, and if literacy focused on interpretation, then it is the radio, television, and especially the Internet that has peaked rhetoricians interest in ethics, alliances, networks, and relations.

So, Why Study Rhetoric?

I’m still not sure there’s any single answer to this question. In closing, I would suggest that you might be interested in studying rhetoric if you want to influence social decision-making, improve your ability to read, analyze, and respond to arguments, and/or combat tyranny and social oppression. And that, I believe, is no meager “bullshit.”

Here, Hear Ulmer (Or, U Might Learn Electracy, Really)

Today professor Ulmer visited University of South Florida to give a talk on electracy and have a discussion with our graduate students. I had the pleasure of introducing Professor Ulmer. Here's my introduction (I have some notes from the talk that I will post tomorrow).

Here Hear Ulmer, or U Might Learn Electracy, Really!

I consider it an honor and a pleasure to introduce Professor Gregory L. Ulmer.

Professor Ulmer visits us from the University of Florida, where he’s a professor of English and Media Studies and participates in a number of critical, aesthetic, and institutional projects concerning electracy, a term he coined to target the transformation of agency and the public sphere by television, hypertext, new media, and digital communicative technologies.

The explication of electracy and generation of inventive methods for electrate netizens are the central concerns of his two most recent projects— his 2005 Electronic Monuments and 2003 Internet Invention. He offers an anecdote early in Internet Invention I find particularly relevant to our own kairotic moment (as scholars and teachers in the humanities living during the political, economic, and social challenges in Wisconisn, Michigan, Ohio, and likely coming to a Florida near you).

In the opening to Internet Invention, Ulmer relates telling his pragmatic father (proud possessor of a degree in Civil Engineering) of his decision to change his major from Economics and Political Science to English. The decision was not well received. For his father, “real work added value to the world by taking something and making it useful to society,” something to which the poet had no claim. This personal scene provides a sense of the purpose that unites all of Professor Ulmer’s work—the line between art and instrumentalism, between exploring our values and creating objects we value. This search continues to inspire scholars and teachers in rhetoric and composition; Ulmer’s post-pedagogy and electracy influence recent projects by Thomas Rickert, Sarah Arroyo, Byron Hawk, Jeff Rice, Bradley Dilger and others. [Learning and discovery only begin when we stop teaching, when we allow students to write and stop telling them what’s right.]

Ulmer’s electrate methods explore the relation between the personal and the public: exemplified by the two genres central to his electrate EmerAgency: the MYstory and the MEmorial. His methods are reflective of feminist research methods elaborated by Sullivan and Porter; they work in hopes of a new discipline of H/human(ities) that, instead of aiming at the work of self-fashioning, invites a playful self-exploration (what I might call, channeling Levinas—self-de/Facing).

Aristotle's theory of argument (the topoi) is built around the idea that we inhabit common "places" of argument. And, of course, one thing that 20th century theory, philosophy, rhetoric, sociology highlights is that, peeling back the layers of our psycho-social onion, we are arguments “all the way down” (or, as professor Ulmer puts this, that “Problems B Us”). Ulmer's work in Internet Invention stresses this--the four components of the Mystory [career, home, entertainment, school] interrogate four different personal-cultural domains (to stick with the geographical discourse). Ulmer's mapping of the subject points to the places common to our childhood, our school, our entertainment, our neighborhoods. The question his work poses is: where else might I have gone? Where else might I go? Where else might I will-have-been?

The value of such a “geographic” approach is that it allows introspection without the immediacy of critique. There is no default command to criticize in Ulmer, and those with more traditional expectations of cultural studies often object to the work on these grounds. Here I would agree with Thomas Rickert, who emphasizes that the questions brought to Ulmer's work by those in Cultural Studies "demonstrates the extent to which Ulmer has achieved a real advance" (Acts 116).

His methods can be disorienting at times, involving complex networks of anagrams, acronyms, puns and neologisms. But disequilibrium is the goal—only by transgressing commonplace expecations (rhetoric’s insistence upon the Aristotelian topoi) that we can move to inhabiting new (dis)positions (vital possibilities of the Timaean chora). Get off the beaten path. Rhetoric makes spaces, for welcome, confrontation, creation, relation. Ulmer argues in Applied Grammatology, how Derridean deconstruction aims “to submit ‘reality’ to the extremes of human imagination” (27). Such a re-imagination “might have” Ulmer qualifies, “the power to guide transformation of the lived, social world” (Of Grammatology 27).

An Insignificant MyStory (Part 3)

In between posts with Casey today, I did manage to get some work done. Particularly, I'm working on prepping for my summer course. I will be teaching a 6 week upper-division expository writing course. Usually, I teach expository writing as digital citizenship (essentially a course in feminist research, digital ethics and social construction). This semester I am trying something new--Gregory Ulmer's Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy. As the title intimates, Ulmer's pedagogy is not caught up in traditional interests with the thesis and the paragraph. Rather, it is a creative attempt to translate these kind of structural units into digital practice (they are respectively replaces by the assemblage and the image). It is very hard for me to summarize Ulmer's project with an justice to its philosophical ambitions and pedagogic invigorations in a sentence or two. So instead, a display. Although I am a bit suspicious of this work (across Levinasian lines, Ulmer is drawing on Heidegger and Derrida, and while Levinas and Heidegger-Derrida share an interest in interrupting hegemonic epistemologies, they also differ on the role of the other and the obligations of the self), I admire it.

The book's assignments all aim at designing what Ulmer dedicates a wide image, a kind of psycho-social cognitive map that helps a student recognize multiple (and likely hidden) elements of their identity. There's four primary lens through which students image-ine their identity (referred to as the Popcycle of the Mystory). These categories have resonance to literary modes articulated by Frederick Jameson. They are:

• Literal = School "This history represetns the memory of the collectivity"
• Allegory = Entertainment "The discourse learned is that of cultural mythology encountered in popular genres" [Ulmer notes in several places that this could be religion for some people. It is meant to target the locus of cultural identification--what teaches you who you are supposed to be?]
• Moral = Family "The individual is considered in terms of his/her family upbringing, with the language being the one learned in the home (English, Spanish, Creole) and the discursive regime being the habits and customs specific to that family"
• Anagogy = Career [Disciplinary knowledge] "The collective meaning of history is determined in mystory ... by the world view embodied wihtin the specialized knowledge that one acquires as an expert in some given career field... This knowledge is the means by which one earns one's livelihood (work), but the knowledge of an avocation may be used instead. (81-82)

In preparation for teaching the mystory, I have been creating one. Its quite fun--and exhilarating. My initial experiences emphasize that Ulmer has discovered an exteremly effective methodology for encouraging creativity.

Today I spent time on the third assingment:

Make a website documenting the details of a movie of TV narrative some part of which you still remember from your childhood years. (127)

Ulmer notes that books can be used in place of cinema and television. He also explains:

the first purpose of the documentation is to record the part of the story that you remember. Once you have inventoried the remains of the work in your memory, view it again and record what you notice in this fresh viewing. The memory is the site of a sting, in Barthes's sense [...] When reviewing the work, note especially the problem or conflict organizing the drama, and the way it is resolved. Memory tends to form around problems, whether the problems are large or small. All narratives are structured by conflict (the protagonist confronts a problem).

In preparing for my summer course, I work on my Mystory for an hour at a time. I also tend to break up my work into categories a bit as I go (I think this kind of genre/structure might be beneficial to undergrads). Here's what I produced in my first hour focus on Assignment 3. (Sorry, I lost the links in the cut and paste, Google Site's HTML function is hopelessly bloated).

What I remember

For my story, I choose an old cross-over series of Marvel comics: the mutant massacre. This story line crossed over several interrelated titles: X-Men, X-Factor and The New Mutants. I rarely read comics these days, although I'll pick through a few issues or a graphic novel every year. But I read quite a few comics during my youth--and whenever I think about all those comics, sitting in the bottom of my guest bedroom closet, this is the series that comes to mind.

In the story, many mutants have taken to living in the tunnels under New York City. Rejected by society-at-large, on account of their difference, they chose to withdraw themselves. While I forget the particularities of their motives, a group of mercenary mutants is contracted out to massacre the mutants living under the city.

The X-men work alongside other mutant heroes (X-Factor, The New Mutants) to stop the genocide. I remember particularly that Wolverine kills his nemesis Sabertooth in a very anti-climactic way. Unfortunately, there's very few other specific details I remember.

Why I Am Selecting It

For as long as I can remember, I have been haunted by genocide. It motivates my scholarship. It is what directed me to academic study. How could a group of people murder another group of people? How could they desire the extermination of an entire people? Such questions are amplified by the Nazi Holocaust. For here, it is not a simple matter of greed (at least, I don't think it is). It is not competition for resources or longstanding political conflict (such as what I understand of Riwanda). This is not to diminish the horror of other atrocities, which I realize it might. Rather, this is to amplify the cold, technical precision of Nazi death camps--more factories than camps. Places that manufacture death.

As an eleven year old, I was drawn to this story line. This was not Spider-Man beating an enemy set on world domination or on acquiring wealth. Those are simple human motives, motives, I speculate, that any eleven-year-old could understand. But hate at this intensity, hate as a motive, that is something that didn't show up in Spider-Man, Scooby-Doo, the Incredible Hulk or any of the other stories that I recall from my youth. Yet one of the pivotal moments of the 20th century was nothing but pure hate.

As I write this, I can think of other places where pure hate shows up in 20th century aesthetics. Tolkien's Sauron, for instance. Wikipedia offers up an interesting tidbit from Tolkien:

Tolkien noted that "it had been his virtue (and therefore also the cause of his fall ...) that he loved order and coordination, and disliked all confusion and wasteful friction." Thus "it was the apparent will and power of Melkor to effect his designs quickly and masterfully that had first attracted Sauron to him."

Order and coordination. Industrialized death. Efficiency. For as long as I can remember being alive, I have been suspicious of these terms. IBM and the Holocaust does nothing to sway me otherwise. Here, quite literally, accountability and efficiency are the servant of industrialized murder, all in the name of world order.

I will never forget the line by Wiesel in Night, reflecting on eating soup after watching the dreadfully prolonged hanging of an adolescent. "That night, the soup tasted of corpses." The taste lingers.

Further Research / Loose Notes

Wikipedia has a page dedicated to the storyline. I am going to hold off on reading it until after I have re-read the stories (mainly to avoid spoilers).

Unanticipated: Intentional vs. Functionalist perspectives on the Holocaust (found in Wikipedia while searching for Order as a theme of Mein Kampf). There is a separate page dedicated to the debate. The intentionalist argument, I would guess, is more well-known: that Hitler's intentions for killing the Jews traced back to his earlier writings/thoughts. Put simply, he always envisioned the genocide. This is referred to as the straight line to Auschwitz. The functionalist argument, which I had never heard before today, seems a bit more probable to me (it is also a more rhetorically-ecologically complex argument, which I find appealing). This argument is based off of evidence that Hitler originally envisioned a deportation of all Jews to Madagascar. Once the war on the Eastern front disrupted transportation, the "storage" of Jews began to pose a serious problem. Detainment facilities were short-term (ewww...) solutions. For functionalists, the idea for genocide developed after a few, localized massacres at these camps.

The final solution wasn't an initial plan, but rather an unfortunate, unanticipated, accident. This is referred to as the "twisted path" or the "crooked path" to genocide. This is also, unfortunately, an electrate model of creativity. Ulmer's work approaches composing in terms of linkage (assemblage, maintaining disorder) rather than linear Order (synthesis). But, in the word's of Shakespeare's Prince, "all are punish'd." Thinking tastes like corpses.