Did anyone see any zombies at the mall this weekend? Smell any stink bombs? Was there a special Critical Mass in your neighborhood? Trickster performances? General harlotry?
I’m curious, because today concludes Carnivalesque Rebellion Week 2010:
A few people start breaking their old patterns, embracing what they love (and in the process discovering what they hate), daydreaming, questioning, rebelling. What happens naturally then, according to the revolutionary past, is a groundswell of support for this new way of being, with more and more people empowered to perform new gestures unencumbered by history.
Think of it as an adventure, as therapy – a week of pieing and pranks, of talking back at your profs and speaking truth to power. Some of us will put up posters in our schools and neighborhoods and just break our daily routines for a week. Others will chant, spark mayhem in big box stores and provoke mass cognitive dissonance. Others still will engage in the most visceral kind of civil disobedience. And on November 26 from sunrise to sunset we will abstain en masse – not only from holiday shopping, but from all the temptations of our five-planet lifestyles.
“Buy Nothing Day” has been celebrated for over a decade now, a protest against the celebration of consumerism known as “Black Friday.” I’m a fan of the alternative, and not just because of how much this scares me:
Buy Nothing Day has a lot of appeal, and I know plenty of people who observe it for reasons more or less anti-consumerist but not necessarily proactive. This year, though, Adbusters seemed to be kicking it up a notch. Then again, carnivalesque rebellion doesn’t come from a journal, but from local jammers…
So, my fellow local rhetoricians, what did you see?
Another cool new digital project, coming out of the University of Cincinnati this time, is The Failure Project:
The Failure Project is a digital public archive of failure narratives that aims to generate and circulate healthy conversations about failure. Too often in our schools, our workplaces, and our community organizations, failure is stigmatized to such a degree that students, teachers, artists, musicians, scientists, and innovators are unwilling to take risks in their intellectual and creative endeavors. This is the wrong attitude.
What would our schools, workplaces, and communities look like if we weren’t afraid to fail? What would our world look like if we took bigger risks?
The Failure Project is about conversation. It’s about taking risks. It’s about you connecting with others over shared experiences of failure, making failure a speakable, de-stigmatized part of our lives. Our hope is that, through this archive, we can begin to see failure as something to celebrate rather than fear, as something to experience productively rather than as a final pronouncement of who we are and what we’re capable of.
I love the idea of this, and not just because it feels somehow akin to Harlot. My research and teaching are all about how individuals and communities construct and share rhetorical narratives, stories with a persuasive bent. This project made me recognize how rarely I’ve encountered stories of failure, or rather, stories that conclude with failure. Indeed, even this call for failure narratives seems to imply that they are/should be angled in the direction of success.
The subtitle of the project page is that popular Samuel Beckett line — Try again. Fail again. Fail better. — which got me thinking about whether, or at least how often, we can let a story actually end without some compulsion towards any kind of happy ending. Even Beckett, not the most cheerily optimistic guy, seems to be suggesting progress, improvement through persistent effort.
But I’m not sure I buy it — Beckett was more likely, I’d guess, to be advocating failure on a more massive scale (epic fail?) than to be suggesting baby steps towards success. But then, again, does his line becomes a narrative of progress, of success at failing? Before I get any more tangled, my question is kinda simple:
How often do you come across or tell a story of failure
that doesn’t get a positive spin, even just “lesson learned”?
Are there some communities or cultures
in which failure narratives are more/less allowed?
There’s a new blog coming out of Carnegie Mellon that looks exciting:
The Silver Tongue is written by a group of rhetoric scholars committed to providing smart, entertaining insight into the language that shapes our everyday lives.
Although many people associate rhetoric with deceptive or “slimy” communication, we believe that rhetoric is the way things get done in a democracy, that communication and persuasion are desirable alternatives to force. We cannot solve social problems without understanding, and we cannot achieve understanding without rhetoric.
And you can see, there’s considerable overlap with the mission of Harlot, right down to the name–Silver Tongue takes a term that’s often used with tinctures of derision (or at least skepticism), and reclaims it for a positive, productive notion of rhetoric. The warrant offered for the project’s instantiation is one that Harlot is familiar with:
If rhetoric really matters to the public, as rhetoricians often claim, then we have a responsibility to aid the public in making sense of it.
There are, of course, differences between the projects; but it’s exhilarating to see more and more ventures that seek to build bridges between popular audiences and the academy.
Congrats to those of The Silver Tongue and best wishes for success with the project! The more of us working for these admirable goals, the better — perhaps down the road there will be opportunities to collaborate!
A portent that the field may be returning to the faculty psychology days of yore? I give you an excerpt of Mark Frauenfelder’s review of Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion:
…
How is it that door-to-door salespeople, marketers, car dealers, politicians, strangers, con artists, and cult leaders are able to persuade people to do things that they wouldn’t ordinarily do? That’s the question Robert B. Cialdini asked himself after falling victim to a huckster’s influence one time too many. But instead of shrugging his shoulders, this professor of psychology decided to study the phenomenon and find out if there is a set of common techniques used to convince people to hand over their money or time against their better judgment. And he discovered that indeed there was, and wrote a book about it called Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.
The LXD (legion of extraordinary dancers) is a new web series on Hulu. This series endeavors to tell a story comic book style. There is the wise old man who narrates all his wisdom at the beginning of each story and then we see how each person or group came to be included in this “Legion of Extraordinary Dancers” while unraveling the dark and dangerous bad guys at the same time. So, essentially we have this conflict between these two groups of dancers (think hip-hop West Side Story) who we have not yet been seen doing much battle, but a little bit. For example, the webisode “The Uprising Begins:”
This particular use of dancing as combat reminds me of the Zulu Nation, the primarily ’70s/’80s to today hip-hop movement which called for more dance offs, rap offs, and DJ competitions and less gang violence. It’s even in Guitar Hero. If you’ll notice from the following clip, the difference I see is that Zulu Nation used dance and hip-hop as a form of uniting the community:
The LXD specifically creates a chasm between two groups of dancers rather than uniting them in the joy of dance. You can see this in the story line of “Antigravity Heros.” Two friends find some special warehouse that gives them the ability to dance like no one has danced before. When one friend is invited to the LXD and the other friend’s invite gets stolen, there is jealousy in the “other friend’s” face. The emergence of one of “The Uprising’s” main characters implies that this guy is going down the evil path and will most likely be facing off against his friend at some point.
Now, the series is still going, so I can’t say that it’s foreshadowing because I haven’t seen the entire series, but having seen many a narrative played out, that is my educated guess as to how it’s going to go. Also, at the beginning of this clip, the two friends practice a form of capoeira, which was a form of dance that involved fighting/martial arts type of moves (and let me tell you from personal experience, it is not easy). Choosing a form of dance where these two friends appear to be fighting just tells me that they will be fighting/actually dancing competitively against each other in the future.
So, the idea of dancing rather than fighting is not a new one and the acting in this series is not the best I’ve seen by far, but I find the intent to recreate this idea important. It’s as if we as a society want to express our aggression, struggle, and conflict, but without the permanence of actual death. I’m interested in seeing how this story will play out–will there be the continued trite binaries of good vs. evil, right vs. wrong, etc. or will there be unity in a shared enjoyment? Is this purely a simple dancing super hero comic book or an exploration of our own humanistic desires?
An interesting commentary on the rhetorical moves in LeBron’s TV special:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/matt-taibbi/blogs/TaibbiData_May2010/179533/83512
Perhaps I haven’t been looking too hard to find commentary that says otherwise, but I’d swear I haven’t come across one positive statement about LeBron James and his “Decision” to leave the Cleveland Cavaliers for the Miami Heat. I’m not talking about the decision itself but rather of its execution. If we momentarily ignore the truism that says all publicity is good publicity and look at the merits of the various PR campaigns associated with the event, we might find it safe to say they’ve been a slight disaster. (I’m trying to soften the criticism a bit.)
Dear Cleveland, All Of Northeast Ohio and Cleveland Cavaliers Supporters Wherever You May Be Tonight;
As you now know, our former hero, who grew up in the very region that he deserted this evening, is no longer a Cleveland Cavalier.
This was announced with a several day, narcissistic, self-promotional build-up culminating with a national TV special of his “decision” unlike anything ever “witnessed” in the history of sports and probably the history of entertainment.
Clearly, this is bitterly disappointing to all of us.
The good news is that the ownership team and the rest of the hard-working, loyal, and driven staff over here at your hometown Cavaliers have not betrayed you nor NEVER will betray you.
There is so much more to tell you about the events of the recent past and our more than exciting future. Over the next several days and weeks, we will be communicating much of that to you.
You simply don’t deserve this kind of cowardly betrayal.
You have given so much and deserve so much more.
In the meantime, I want to make one statement to you tonight:
“I PERSONALLY GUARANTEE THAT THE CLEVELAND CAVALIERS WILL WIN AN NBA CHAMPIONSHIP BEFORE THE SELF-TITLED FORMER ‘KING’ WINS ONE”
You can take it to the bank.
If you thought we were motivated before tonight to bring the hardware to Cleveland, I can tell you that this shameful display of selfishness and betrayal by one of our very own has shifted our “motivation” to previously unknown and previously never experienced levels.
Some people think they should go to heaven but NOT have to die to get there.
Sorry, but that’s simply not how it works.
This shocking act of disloyalty from our home grown “chosen one” sends the exact opposite lesson of what we would want our children to learn. And “who” we would want them to grow-up to become.
But the good news is that this heartless and callous action can only serve as the antidote to the so-called “curse” on Cleveland, Ohio.
The self-declared former “King” will be taking the “curse” with him down south. And until he does “right” by Cleveland and Ohio, James (and the town where he plays) will unfortunately own this dreaded spell and bad karma.
Just watch.
Sleep well, Cleveland.
Tomorrow is a new and much brighter day….
I PROMISE you that our energy, focus, capital, knowledge and experience will be directed at one thing and one thing only:
DELIVERING YOU the championship you have long deserved and is long overdue….
Yeah, well, according to the LA Times, the eggs have hatched and, to the surprise of no liberal, these gay penguins make just as good parents as any straight penguin couple. I’m just waiting for this to be used as an argument for LGBT rights. Personally, I think it’s a good counter-argument to the “it’s not natural” spiel, but that may just be me.
