Category Archives: Culture

Body Typed

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Jesse Epstein has a series of documentaries called Body Typed, which explored the idea of body image and how these various representations of the body impact us.

The first, Wet Dreams and False Images. . .

The Second, The Guarantee. . .

And the third, 34x25x36. . .

These are all high quality films that effectively explores beyond the cliche “too much perfection is bad for us” criticism and questions this kind of perfectionism as a form of worship. It’s interesting. You should watch it.

In fact, you can see 34x25x36 in its entirety at PBS Video as well as an interview with Jesse Epstein herself.

Ralph’s Rants & Rhetoric

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I’m still not used to seeing Ralph Nader’s name in my inbox.  Sure, I signed up for his listserv, but that has yet to stop me from thinking that Ralph has searched me out personally because he knows how much I enjoy a rant, especially those that mercilessly attack greed and corruption.  Of course, Ralph and I don’t agree on everything, but his essays are eminently reasonable and meticulously researched.

nader_ralph

Last week, however, I almost wrote Ralph back, letting him know how much one of his emails hurt my head and heart.  He succumbed to cliché and alliteration (a poisonous combo, for sure) by titling an essay, “Between the Rhetoric and the Reality.”  He didn’t explicitly extrapolate on the shaky binary, thankfully, but such a juxtaposition is sure to raise hairs on most rhetoricians.  Wayne Booth started collecting headlines like this years ago (perhaps to mollify his irritation) and shares a few in the preface to The Rhetoric of Rhetoric:

“Impoverished students deserve solutions, not rhetoric.”

“[What I’ve just said] is not rhetoric or metaphor.  It’s only truth.”

“President Bush’s speech was long on rhetoric and short on substance.”

We’ve all seen the likes of these lines, so I’ll not needlessly deride them with a long response on how rhetoric is most productively viewed as epistemic (it simultaneously describes, discovers, and creates knowledge) or how language fundamentally shapes our perceptions of reality.  Instead, I’m here to let you know that Ralph redeemed himself yesterday (for the most part*) with an email titled, “Words Matter.”

He begins by ridiculing the journalists who uncritically adopt words that are finely calibrated to affect the way we think about an issue or concept.  His examples are rather thought-provoking, so I thought I would share:

Day in and day out we read about “detainees” imprisoned for months or years by the federal government in the U.S., A-detainee-from-Afghanist-001Guantanamo Bay, Iraq and Afghanistan. Doesn’t the media know that the correct word is “prisoners,” regardless of what Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld disseminated?

The raging debate and controversy over health insurance and the $2.5 trillion spent this year on health care involves consumers and “providers.” I always thought “providers” were persons taking care of their families or engaging in charitable service. Somehow, the dictionary definition does not fit the frequently avaricious profiles of Aetna, United Healthcare, Pfizer and Merck.

“Privatization” and the “private sector” are widespread euphemisms that the press falls for daily. Moving government owned assets or functions into corporate hands, as with Blackwater, Halliburton, and the conglomerates now controlling public highways, prisons, and drinking water systems is “corporatization,” not the soft imagery of going “private” or into the “private sector.” It is the corporate sector!

“Free trade” is a widely used euphemism. It is corporate managed trade as evidenced in hundreds of pages of rules favoring corporations in NAFTA and the World Trade Organization. “Free trade” lowers barriers between countries so that cartels, unjustified patent monopolies, counterfeiting, contraband, and other harmful practices and products can move around the world unhindered.

* This redemption is only partial, I’m afraid.  Despite the correct articulation that “words matter,” Ralph’s proposed solution is to use “words that are accurate and [can be taken at] face value.”  He calls for “straight talk” and “semantic discipline.”  Such an appeal reflects his earlier rhetoric/reality split by suggesting that we “cut the rhetoric” and get down to the “real” stuff.  His framing suggests that there are right words and wrong words, with the right words being more ideologically or politically neutral.  Demanding that we return to the dictionary as a source of authority and clarity is about as persuasive as Dukakis in a tank.  So here’s the deal, Ralph: I promise to vote for you when you run in 2012 (or 2016, since you’ll probably be there, too) if you read the following works and give this troubled binary some serious reconsideration:

-) The Rhetoric of Rhetoric

-) Image Politics

-) “Rhetorical Perspectivism” in Contemporary Rhetorical Theory

What is the vernacular avant garde?

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There was a great piece in the NY Times this weekend, “Uploading the Avant Garde,” in which Virginia Heffernan considers the presence, among YouTube’s many microgenres, of what she calls “the vernacular avant-garde.” I’ve never heard this phrase before, and I dig it. What does it mean to put those words in tandem? According to the OED (of course):

Vernacular (adj)

1. That writes, uses, or speaks the native or indigenous language of a country or district.

2. a. Of a language or dialect: That is naturally spoken by the people of a particular country or district; native, indigenous.

6. Of arts, or features of these: Native or peculiar to a particular country or locality. spec. in vernacular architecture, architecture concerned with ordinary domestic and functional buildings rather than the essentially monumental.

Avant garde

1. The foremost part of an army; the vanguard or van.

2. The pioneers or innovators in any art in a particular period. Also attrib. or as adj. Hence avant-{sm}gardism, the characteristic quality of such pioneering; avant-{sm}gardist(e) (-{shti}st), such a person; also attrib.

And so this seems clear enough: we have the home-grown innovator, the local pioneer. But in our current use of vernacular, we usually mean folksy, populist, “normal” ways of communicating, whereas avant garde is all about pushing those norms to provoke and even alienate mainstream popular audiences… So, yeah, I’m still not sure I get how those work together. How can we define such a concept? ( I heart semantics.) Like porn, do we just know it when we see it? Anyone?

So of course I googled the phrase and found few results beyond a couple of uses in reference to avant garde jazz and vernacular architecture… Except, that is, for a couple of  blogs and a SNS who’d posted the same link and video:

Networked Performance

Since the latter part of the twentieth century, and especially in new media artistic practice, we have witnessed a shift from the representational idiom — where art is viewed mainly as a means to represent the world — to the performative idiom — where the practice of art is considered an active negotiation with the world it seeks to address.*

Networked Performance is real-time, embodied practice within digital environments and networks; it is, embodied transmission.

Performance involves the moment of action, its continuity, inherent temporality and relationship to the present.

DocumentTech

DocumentaryTech is a collaborative effort to talk about what makes for the best in the art of the documentary. As a joint project by The Rhode Island Film Festival and several sponsoring universities, we’ll talk about technique, technology, distribution and funding.

Dance-tech.net

Using the most advanced social software platforms and internet rich multimedia applications, dance-tech.net provides movement and new media artists, theorist, thinkers and technologists the possibility of sharing work, ideas and research, generating opportunities for interdisciplinary collaborative projects.

I don’t have much profound to say about all this. I think the phrase is fascinating and worthy of play. And I think it’s cool that there are such fascinated/ing people out there instigating such play.

Yay interwebs.

Tweet Me Right

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Ben Stiller tries to explain Twitter to Mickey Rooney. I find Twitter to be a rather interesting creature. I’m kind of a Facebook gal myself, and even at that I only update my status about once a week, so Twitter has never been something that I got overly interested in.

I mean, I’m sure there are some people who post really interesting musings to themselves and all that, so I can see the purpose for it there. An extremely quick exchange of interesting ideas and all that. However, it’s the absolutely useless things that nobody cares about that are rather, well, annoying. For instance, is it really necessary to give a morning/evening/night greeting?

Anyway, I digress. So, Mickey Rooney is listening to Ben Stiller about this whole thing. And we all expect the traditional, “oh my, what is this new fangled invention response,” right? But, Mickey doesn’t fall for it. Oh no, he’s pretty calm and collected. This makes me happy, because I get a little tired of that stereotype. I’ve met as many young people as old who approach technology like it’ll give them a brand new rash and met some older folks who geek out on new gadgets.

Okay, yeah, so my grandmother still doesn’t know how to answer her cell phone, but she’s got one! And I bet Mickey does too!

via NPR.

Hair today..

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I’m becoming kind of fixatated on hair. It started with my students, and mostly the guys. There’s a trend towards funk. I don’t mean P. Funk style, though one can certainly see there some roots (puns are cool, you know it) in George Clinton’s glorious mane. George Clinton by IndyDina and Mr. Wonderful. jpg

Okay, I’m not saying that this look is hot right now — but certain variations on the theme are. This makes me feel old to say, but college students do keep one somewhat attuned to the hip/ster look of the moment. And these days, I see a lot more variety in guys’ hair — one student has a Two-Face thing going on, another has a wild layered shag that requires constant handling; the faux hawk is still around, and frosted tips are coming back. And these aren’t even emo kids I’m talking about.hairstyle www.tazz.com

That’s what I find most interesting–the diversity of it all, and the way that no style seems clearly identifiable with any particular ideology. I dig it, in the same way I like watching this generation of college men, or at least some, being far more, well, liberated in their performance of gender.

Today’s NYT contains an article by David Colman about this very issue, noting both the historical use of hair as identification and the present play with those very notions:

Once upon a time — say, 40 years ago this week, when long-hairs thronged to Woodstock by the hundreds of thousands — you got a hairstyle to show the world your affiliation, to brandish a cultural identity defined by your musical tastes, your political views or how depressed you were. But such literal interpretations of hair appear to be utterly passé, even if the hairstyles themselves are not.

And check out this slideshow.

This really brings up the central rhetorical question of intention and reception — which one “counts” in terms of a text’s “meaning”? If I were to interpret my students’ ‘dos as representative of beliefs or values, I might be way off base. But then again, it’s quite likely I wouldn’t  be the only audience with such an interpretation, and that such readings would influence, well, “reality.” So what would the hair mean? As Colman concludes, “To turn an old ad slogan on its head: Not even his hairdresser knows for sure.”

Rhetoric and Food for Thought

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For a skinny kid, I think a lot about food.  Not so much the tastes and textures, but the politics, value-systems, and rhetorics that surround its place in culture.  There is a developing food movement in this country; it’s comprised of many sub-movements based around the concepts and practices of “organic,” “sustainable agriculture,” and “slow food,” with “local” similarly occupying a prominent position.

We’ve not only seen the items on our supermarket shelves change over the past few years, we’ve witnessed the surrounding rhetoric shift in places and intensify in others.  With the introduction of genetically modified foods in the early 1990s, the expansion and entrenchment of industrial farming and monocrop culture, and the consolidation of powers that control the entire system, the message that accompanies food has increased in significance, adopting narratives of progress in some sectors, while remaining obstinately old-fashion in others.  For example, listen to Michael Pollan kick off the powerful documentary, FOOD, Inc., with a quick, but incisive rhetorical analysis on some of the persuasive techniques used to sell food:

(Perhaps y’all could chime in with some of your favorite rhetorical approaches and we can keep this conversation going . . .)

Of course, our movement is mirroring those elsewhere throughout the world.  It’s distinct, however, given our consumer-centric society and place in the hierarchy of consumption (we comprise about 5% of the world’s population and consume roughly 1/3 of its meat).  Food Sovereignty Movements are in nascent stages across Africa, Europe, and South America.  Soon enough we will also be in a position where one must declare (as ludicrous as it sounds) the right to grow food and have a say in where the rest comes from.

Currently, however, the word “organic” is the dominant term in our food conversations.  The term carries vast and various associations and values that go far beyond a simple label indicating how the food was raised.  Here’s some fodder for you rhetoric junkies: The Daily Show’s look at the White House’s organic garden reveals a struggle over which values will get associated with organic.  Enjoy watching while I go hunt down some articles on the rhetoric of “organic” for a future blog post . . .

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
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Haughty Taughty Meets A Tweaker

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I’ve always wanted to walk through a fridge. You know, Chronicles of Narnia wardrobe style. And if I wanted to travel to New York, then I could do that with the Black Acid Co-op exhibition by Justin Lowe and Jonah Freeman. This walk-through art display takes you through scenes of meth labs and others. There’s a slideshow from The New York Times I recommend checking out. The exhibition site says this:

Black Acid Co-Op is the moniker for a counter-culture enclave embedded in the metropolis. In this incarnation, the artists shift the focus from the production of illegal drugs to sites of sub-cultural groups and how they are situated in the larger urban environment. The installation will expand on the notions relating to the connection between counter-culture and industrial society resulting in a spatial collage that extends itself into a vast architectural setting.

Despite the strong contrast of scenes, the entire installation will feel as if it is a unified system of spaces, interconnected and functioning together. Ducts, wires and tubes traverse rooms creating a semblance of an organism: architecture as body, electricity as capillaries, and volumes as organs. And the intended use of many of the sites will feel transformed or hybridized: factories have become homes, kitchens are used as drug labs, the radical chic living room is frozen in a museum, the high-rise is carved into makeshift maze to evade the law.

I love art work like this–Art work that immerses the spectator and brings him or her into a completely different world only to realize that this is a real world too. Ah, the duplicitous meanings formed are fantastic. Non?

Via Vitia. Thanks!

Rhetoric Quote of the Week

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From the Governator:

We in California have made a big move forward in that area because the people of California have approved $42 billion of infrastructure … I think that was a really big, big step forward schwarzenegger03and I think that the federal government has to do obviously the same thing.

The important thing is that we look at how do we get the people enthusiastic about the subject? Because the word infrastructure means nothing to the majority of people of America. We have to come up with a sexier word than infrastructure. So the key thing is that you have to go out and promote and market this the right way like with everything in policy.

[In California] we went out and didn’t talk about infrastructure but we talked about are you angry about getting stuck in traffic every day, and you cannot spend enough time with your family and with your children? That really aroused anger in most of the people and we said vote yes on those propositions.

“Sexier,” of course, is synonymous here with “persuasive.”  (And you wondered why we named the journal Harlot of the Arts.)  To be persuasive is to be sexually appealing and alluring on a visceral level.  A successful rhetor will no doubt get pleasure out of, um, skillful application.  But also look at how quickly he switches frames: “you have to go out and promote and market this the right way.”  The economic rhetoric here fits easily with, “sex sells.”

Perhaps we’ll get Arnold to write a piece for Harlot . . .