An Inconvenient Tangent

I’m teaching a course on documentary this term, and today my students were watching/analyzing An Inconvenient Truth. I picked this doc because we’re talking about the use of personal narratives in/and public rhetoric, and I’m kind of fascinated with the “Al Gore Show” woven throughout the film.

For the most part, of course, we see Gore’s slideshow presentation and listen along with his (rapt) audiences. (As one student suggested, the director lays the prophet robe on Gore a bit heavily.) But every so often, that lecture is interspersed with Gore’s reflections and anecdotes about how he came to be offering that slideshow. And at those junctures, his voice changes, becomes low and intimate, the footage becomes soft-focus or creatively aged, and the pathos becomes a bit heavy-handed.

… as a student’s sudden snort made abundantly clear. It was the snort of a burgeoning rhetorical critic, and it confirmed my hunch about some of the risky, even reckless rhetorical choices Gore and the director made in that movie. And the personal quest angle isn’t the only one. I wonder whether the warm fuzzy fatherly feelings would work on audiences alienated by his Bush jokes? Or are we to assume that no one who voted for Bush (that’s a lot of people) belongs in this doc’s audience?

More as my students figure this all out…

The End is Nigh . . .

Stanley Fish’s column in the New York Times yesterday focused on the astute scholarship of Dr. Frank Donoghue, Associate Professor at The Ohio State University, and his most recent book, The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities. 

The topic in the cross-hairs is the fate of the modern university and the axis that the conversation hinges on is one of economic and social utility versus a special sort of “inutility.”  Fish wants us to see the university as most valuable when it doesn’t intervene “in the social and political crises of the moment” and argues here as well as in his book, Save the World on Your Own Time, that the university should not view itself as instrumental, that is, “valued for its contribution to something more important than itself.”  I’m not so sure that Donoghue would get behind this; his critical project is more about clearly articulating the problem than it is about offering solutions.  In fact, if you were to ask him, as I once did, he will probably offer you the same chuckle that I got.  He said, “Solve it?! You can’t solve it.  It would be like trying to ‘solve’ capitalism.”

What might be interesting for readers of this blog–those interested in rhetoric, composition, literacy, and other really cool schtuff–is that our discipline, I would argue, is often at the center of these issues.  Whether it’s the idealized rhetoric of the liberal arts institution that universities still troll out in their television spots or the economics of the required first-year writing course and its attendant issues of tiered labor and corporate management theories, the stuff many of us do every day (and how we defend it) is inextricably bound to the issues that Donoghue explores.  I urge you all to read this book and arm yourself (yes, I am quite conscious of the militarized rhetoric) with a strong historical knowledge of how we arrived at this point. The end may be nigh, but that means a beginning is near as well . . .

I killed Rudolph

Yesterday as I was meeting with some students from my first-year writing and rhetoric class (which focused on analyzing narratives), they were joking about how their newfound rhetorical awareness had been messing with their minds. (And yes, I know that some of this was no doubt revealed with their yet-to-be-posted grades in mind.) One comment in particular gave me a warm holiday glow. To paraphrase:

“You ruined Rudolph for me. Here’s this guy who’s different from the rest, and marked physically by that difference — so he’s ostracized by the crowd, disrespected and disregarded… until, that is, he can help out some rich white authority figure. And then suddenly he’s embraced and accepted, just because he can contribute to their power. That’s some b.s.”

Rebel Rudolph (by shiny red type, Flickr)

Hell yeah, it is! Don’t get me wrong — I love Christmas specials. And Christmas songs. I’m a sucker for sparkly lights, eggnog-induced cheer, and the Island of Misfit Toys. But sorry, Santa — I’m an even bigger fan of critical college students.

Side note: Did you know “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” was actually created as a marketing ploy by a department store? Yet, as Snopes.com points out, the original was rather less problematic in certain ways: Rudolph was not a resident of the North Pole, just an average reindeer with loving and supportive parents. He was well-adjusted and confident long before Santa stumbled upon him in a moment of need. Fascinating revision from there to the current version, right?!

Rudolph and his lady friend (by voteprime, Flickr)

Reading Harlot between the lines . . .

I just came across this quote from Margaret Marshall’s 2004 monograph, Response to Reform: Composition and the Professionalization of Teaching:

[W]hether we aim to publish our scholarship directly to a public audience or to use our scholarly expertise to participate in public situations, we are not always well prepared to do so and the reward structures of higher education do not encourage such activity.  Composition, though, is particularly well suited for making such forays into public venues because its interests in literacy, language, and the cultural structures that support these activities have so many possible public connections.  Composition has a great deal to gain by considering how such public work could be represented appropriately within institutional and professional terms and structures.

When academics fail to engage public audiences outside our disciplines, when we ignore the implications of our scholarly work, or when we keep our teaching safely out of sight, we help turn universities into mere bureaucracies that use intellectual labor as a commodity, ceding our professional aspirations as the price for speaking only to ourselves.  But because this is the way things usually are in the current world of higher education, does not mean this is how things out to remain.  For me and many others who know the history of the teachers who came before us, too many years have been spent gaining the standing to speak to not now choose when and how we will do so.

Rhetoric in the News . . .

Here’s what you might find on the BBC newspage if you’re cruising around tonight:

It doesn’t give much insight into the rhetorical skill of Obama, offering up only the obvious, like pairing his intonations with sermonic delivery (here referred to as “churchy”). What irked me a bit was a missed opportunity by Ekaterina Haskins, the selected academic expert on rhetoric, to correct the popular (pejorative) understanding of rhetoric. Haskins, who is cited as being a professor at Iowa, but from what I can tell is a professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic (but received her doctorate from Iowa), is quoted as follows:

Rhetoric always has the connotations of being about appearances rather than reality but he doesn’t sound false. He plays with the patriotic abstractions that allow for a certain kind of rhetorical manoeuvring and fills them with specific concrete examples.

While there’s a chance that the BBC snagged a quote out of context, I was disappointed to see the Appearance/Reality binary that rhetoric is so frequently and so unfairly thrown under reinforced and left mostly unchallenged. It is implicitly suggested that rhetoric is more than the connotations that typically accompany it, but her quote actually uses them to prove her point. I’m not sure that “he doesn’t sound false” debunks the Style/Substance divide that rhetorical studies have attempted to overcome for sometime now.  I’ve read a few pieces of Haskins’s scholarship (she’s a classical rhetorician, focusing on Isocrates) and it’s very smart stuff, so I’m surprised by this missed opportunity.

One of the goals of Harlot is to engage the public with an understanding of rhetoric that transcends this limiting conception. While I don’t want to speak for the project, I teach rhetoric as epistemic.  In other words, rhetoric simultaneously describes, discovers, and creates knowledge.

My thoughts two days later:

Am I just ornery?  Perhaps I’m being crabby and should be appreciative of the fact it doesn’t outright slam rhetoric as being useless and deceitful?  This is the view that the Rhetoric Society of America has taken.  Here’s a recent email from them:

Harlot, as I see it, will continue to work to make rhetoric an integral part of every informed citizen’s life, going beyond an understanding of rhetoric as good or bad, to rhetoric as something indeliably necessary.

post-election reflection

Whether or not you’re happy with the results of the 2008 Presidential election, you might be troubled by this:

Rick Shenkman, associate professor of history at George Mason University, recently published Just How Stupid Are We?: Facing the Truth About the American Voter.  Below is a YouTube video he created and shares on his blog, aptly named howstupidblog.com.

How much can we trust all the rhetoric about how stupid Americans are?

Most accusations of American anti-intellectualism, ignorance, and unreason come from academics.  So, I’m wondering what nonacademics think.

• Just how stupid (or not) are Americans?
• How do we react to such accusations/arguments?
• Does this year’s election support or refute Shenkman’s argument?

Meh.

According to Yahoo News, “meh” has just been added to the Collins English Dictionary. I support this.

You know, I do have to wonder about the usefulness of adding colloquial language to dictionaries if that particular colloquial phrase is merely a trendy, faddish kinda thing. It’s not like I go around saying that so and so is the bee’s knees or anything. (Okay, I’ll admit to using supposedly “outdated” phrases like that just for fun at times, but as a predominant form of communication? No.)

So, will “meh” actually make it to the stature that other words such as “cool” have? Of course, I don’t know for sure, but I’d say yeah. Even if it doesn’t remain “meh” specifically, but transforms into “eh” or “uh” or something like that, it’s still a form of common communication that’s being used more and more readily. It’s often instantly understood too. Even without having a specific definition in some fancy British dictionary, the gist of the meaning is understood. It just works well.

Even I’ve been susceptible to its influences:

facebook status update

Oh, yeah. For Realz.

I mean, I could try to properly describe the kind of ambivalence and indifference that I was feeling, but “meh,” to me, is more of an expression of that indifference rather than a description of that same feeling. Ya feel me? “Meh” is like the actual tear, whereas saying “Kaitlin is indifferent” is like the word “crying.” Prospective readers understand so much about my particular state with just that one word without me going on and on about it.

Perfecto.

So, yeah. It deserves to be in the dictionary. And that’s not so “meh.”

More Trickster Rhetoric . . .

These quotes come from an excellent piece by Malea Powell, “Blood and Scholarship: One Mixed-Blood’s Story.”  I read the spirit of Harlot throughout these lines . . .

The only way for the mixed-blood to survive is by ‘developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity,’ and by turning those contradictions and ambiguities into ‘something else’ (Anzaldua 79).  Anishinabe writer and theorist Gerald Vizenor would have Indian scholars/mixed-bloods play trickster, to use our knowledge of the language and structure that compose the narratives that bind us as instruments to cut away those same oppressive stories.

Vizenor celebrates the humor and play room that are made available to crossbloods (what I’ve been calling mixed-bloods) in the simultaneity of our positions on the margins of American culture combined with our iconographic centrality against which much ‘American-ness’ is imagined.  Sharp humor (yes, sharp like a weapon) and radical temporal figurings (we are always at the past and the future in the present, and visa versa) help Vizenor to posit the trickster as a space of liberation.

For me, the trickster is central to imagining a ‘mixed-blood rhetoric.’ The trickster is many things, and is no thing as well.  Ambivalent, androgynous, anti-definitional, the trickster is slippery and constantly mutable.

I find the trickster in every nook and cranny of daily life as a mixed-blood.  But, more important, I see the trickster at work outside of Indian-ness as well, in the contrarinesses that inhabit the stories that tell, and un-tell, America and the Academy.  The trickster isn’t really a person, it is a ‘communal sign,’ a ‘concordance of narrative voices’ that inhabits the ‘wild space over and between sounds, words, sentences, and narratives‘ (Vizenor 196).

Trickster discourse does ‘play tricks,’ but they aren’t malicious tricks, not the hurtful pranks of an angry child; instead, the tricks reveal the deep irony that is always present in whatever way we choose to construct reality.  Trickster discourse is deflative; it exposes the lies we tell ourselves and, at the same time, exposes the necessity of those lies to our daily material existence.  Trickster discourse asks ‘Isn’t the world a crock of shit?,’ but also answers with, ‘Well, if we didn’t have this crock of shit, what would we do for a world?’ The trickster asks us to be fully conscious to the simple inconsistencies that inhabit our reality” (9).

More trickster rhetoric to come . . .

A Little Plug (‘N Play)

Gauti Sigthorsson posted his Screen Studies Conference presentation creatively titled “Home is Where My Archive Is.” It runs about 20 minutes and is most definitely worth the listen. If not for the actual complications Gauti brings up, but also for sentences like: “you’re functioning as my 3D PowerPoint presentation.”

Promiscuousness of Promiscuity

I just started going through a book called The Information Society Reader, a collection of foundational readings on the study of the Information Society, and a few pages into the editor’s introduction I had a déjà vu moment with this oddly familiar statement:

It can seem that the [concept of “Information Society”] is used with abandon, yet as such it is capable of accommodating all manner of definitions. Readers should look carefully for the definitional terms used, often tacitly, by commentators in what follows. Are they, for instance, emphasizing the economic, educational or cultural dimensions when they discuss the Information Society, or is it technology which is given the greatest weight in their accounts? One might then ask, if the conceptions are so very varied and even promiscuous, then what validity remains [. . . ]? (p. 10)

Webster, Frank (Ed). (2004). The Information Society Reader. London: Routledge.
(Or click here to see the text in Google Books)

Is this warning not incredibly similar to those we hear about the study of rhetoric? Varying definitions, an undefined scope of study, questions of validity? Lately I’ve felt lulled into a (likely) false state of security. How many times do we hear of academic programs stating with pride that they are interdisciplinarity, crossdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity? Promiscuity is a characteristic more and more fields of study display with some pride. This crossing of borders has become something of an academic movement, but all movements have a beginning and usually an end, or even if it has lifecycles and never entirely dies out, the times when it tapers out can be painful – as the history of rhetoric can attest to.

What’s interesting to me about the study of the Information Society is that its inception has been some sort of uber-manifestation of interdisciplinarity. It’s flowed and found nodes of connection in the same manner as the Network Society itself. It’s almost like the global community’s entry into the Age of Information is what has made this move toward interdisciplinarity possible in the first place (both in terms of technology and of an emerging climate that condones and even celebrates such behavior), and it’s quite fitting – if not problematic – that the field purporting to study this new age should mirror it as well.

But I can’t help but think there’s bound to be a tide building against such breadth and promiscuity. And if so, I wonder when its time will come, what it will look like, and what the alternatives may be.