1) Great Experiment
2) Family Planning
Friday, February 26, 2010
Week 5 Reflection
Well, this week has been an insane week for me and, thus, it wasn't the best week for my work in this class. I really enjoyed, though, reading the Wells' article and I found myself wanting to spend more time with the readings from this week that I certainly didn't last week.
In terms of the wiki work, I mainly engaged in minor revisions this week. I really want to see us add more to the wikis, to make them something else and, although I've added new pages, and even inserted multimedia links, it seems difficult to unsettle them at this point.
I continue to see Twitter as mainly a tool that allows social cohesiveness to our class--which is great. Yet, I don't really see it as a tool that is allowing us to discuss the texts in any sustained way. Again, though, providing a social sense to our class is definitely valued work.
The discussion questions and my participation on the discussion board this week was definitely postponed. By now I usually have replied to at least two or three more questions than I have. However, I plan to keep active throughout the weekend to engage other late posters in some dialogue on the texts.
Not much else, I guess...just trying to look ahead now to next week...
In terms of the wiki work, I mainly engaged in minor revisions this week. I really want to see us add more to the wikis, to make them something else and, although I've added new pages, and even inserted multimedia links, it seems difficult to unsettle them at this point.
I continue to see Twitter as mainly a tool that allows social cohesiveness to our class--which is great. Yet, I don't really see it as a tool that is allowing us to discuss the texts in any sustained way. Again, though, providing a social sense to our class is definitely valued work.
The discussion questions and my participation on the discussion board this week was definitely postponed. By now I usually have replied to at least two or three more questions than I have. However, I plan to keep active throughout the weekend to engage other late posters in some dialogue on the texts.
Not much else, I guess...just trying to look ahead now to next week...
Persuasion in a Peanut Shell: Burke, Gearhart, Rak and Wells
This weeks readings all focused, in one respect or another, on ways of complicating the traditional ideas about persuasion (for example, the ideas advocated by Toulmin and P & O-T). Burke's notion of identification achieved this complication by focusing on how utterances are always partial in their relationship to truth and to reality (some of these ideas were present, for example, in last week's notions of rationality, perhaps). Anyway, identification, for Burke, is always a product of the surroundings, the context, the positioning from which it emerges and, therefore, one cannot index Reality but rather reflect and these reflections are always subject to change. While I read Burke, a lot of the ideas that I'm familiar with from social constructivist works and phenomenology/ethnomethodology seemed to be present so as I re-read Burke, I'd like to figure out where the overlaps and distinctions are between these sets of ideas.
Gearhart, directly citing her objection to the traditional views of Toulmin and P & O-T instead suggested thinking about traditional forms of persuasion intending to change others' opinions as a form of violence. Gearhart relates these ideas to pedagogy by suggesting that models of teaching that insist on imparting knowledge are a form of violence. Gearhart is suggesting a form of dialogue that provides listening and mutual support and tolerance of others' ideas without the intent to change others' minds; however, Gearhart seems to imply that if we put ourselves in these kinds of contexts, we will inevitably be changed through the process. In connection with Burke, I certainly saw a higher degree of relativity and tolerance for plural and multiple truths in Gearhart than I recognized in the readings for last week (as these, even when flexible, seemed to rely on fairly rigid taxonomies); however, the one caveat to Gearhart's argument as pointed to in our discussion forum, is that Gearhart's way of seeing persuasion itself could be read as fairly inflexible.
In a similar strain, Rak's article makes a case for blogs as liberal kinds of spaces that move beyond a simple diary format; however, that are nonetheless often enacting privileged statuses by using untroubled notions of queer identities. Rak argues that blogs could have the affect of re-creating group boundaries and distinctions. In this sense, Rak's article, like some of the other things we've read, warns against the over-emphasis of assuming that newer, digital forms simply erase the baggage carried around in our other social contexts.
Finally, Wells' article take up issues of invention and form and the relationship between these two and political and social progress. Wells argues that the narrative features in the MOVE Report work against traditional narrative conventions of commission reports and, therefore, the HOME report is able to invent a new kind of narrative commission report with fragmented bullets which (re)create a (lack of) responsibility in that political, cultural and civic climate. Like the other readings for this week, Wells' work does focus on the local but in a different sense: instead of asking us to nuance persuasion by looking at local contexts, Wells' article seems to be asking us to look at the very local and structural formal elements of texts and a means to think about the broader political relations that we are enacting, creating and responding to through these texts.
Gearhart, directly citing her objection to the traditional views of Toulmin and P & O-T instead suggested thinking about traditional forms of persuasion intending to change others' opinions as a form of violence. Gearhart relates these ideas to pedagogy by suggesting that models of teaching that insist on imparting knowledge are a form of violence. Gearhart is suggesting a form of dialogue that provides listening and mutual support and tolerance of others' ideas without the intent to change others' minds; however, Gearhart seems to imply that if we put ourselves in these kinds of contexts, we will inevitably be changed through the process. In connection with Burke, I certainly saw a higher degree of relativity and tolerance for plural and multiple truths in Gearhart than I recognized in the readings for last week (as these, even when flexible, seemed to rely on fairly rigid taxonomies); however, the one caveat to Gearhart's argument as pointed to in our discussion forum, is that Gearhart's way of seeing persuasion itself could be read as fairly inflexible.
In a similar strain, Rak's article makes a case for blogs as liberal kinds of spaces that move beyond a simple diary format; however, that are nonetheless often enacting privileged statuses by using untroubled notions of queer identities. Rak argues that blogs could have the affect of re-creating group boundaries and distinctions. In this sense, Rak's article, like some of the other things we've read, warns against the over-emphasis of assuming that newer, digital forms simply erase the baggage carried around in our other social contexts.
Finally, Wells' article take up issues of invention and form and the relationship between these two and political and social progress. Wells argues that the narrative features in the MOVE Report work against traditional narrative conventions of commission reports and, therefore, the HOME report is able to invent a new kind of narrative commission report with fragmented bullets which (re)create a (lack of) responsibility in that political, cultural and civic climate. Like the other readings for this week, Wells' work does focus on the local but in a different sense: instead of asking us to nuance persuasion by looking at local contexts, Wells' article seems to be asking us to look at the very local and structural formal elements of texts and a means to think about the broader political relations that we are enacting, creating and responding to through these texts.
Susan Wells's "Narrative Figures and Subtle Persuasions: The Rhetoric of the MOVE Report"
In "Narrative Figures and Subtle Persuasion: The Rhetoric of the MOVE Report," Sue Wells traces the ways in which a commission report on racial violence (as per the title, the MOVE Report) makes use of narrative structures in ways that frame this violence in politically benign ways--mitigating the responsibility of those who participated in senseless violent acts. By utilizing form toward particular ends, the report (and writers/reviewers and readers) are able to (re)structure a narrative of racial violence by relying upon formal features such as the fragmentation of narrative, the naming of characters and a specific use of hierarchy and subordination. These structures, Wells argues, allow for incongruous and problematic politics of such an event to preside comfortably, pleasurably, within a text pointing to and underscoring the political imperatives of paying attention to the importance of form, not simply as means to push forward with social justice in rhetoric and composition studies, but also to provide insight into how structures, if we do not carefully and critically attend to them, can be used to rationalize violence and injustice.
Wells states the following regarding the MOVE Report and the main project of her article:
This essay reflects upon that failure of both ideological and narrative coherence, seeing it as an expression of the commission's political and discursive situation, a situation that was difficult and contradictory. I will examine how this situation marks the element of the text, moving from relatively formal questions-How are characters named? How are episodes connected?-to a discussion of what counts as a good reason within the bounds of the text. My interest is to show how provisional are the boundaries between formal questions and political questions in this text; here, nothing is more deeply political than the text's representation of subordination (Wells 209).
Here, Wells writes about the bind between the formal and the political and how those are bound up in constructing reason within a text. As Wells moves through her chapter, she argues that along with attending to issues of form and the ways in which form implicates us into political situatedness, our analyses could benefit from the theoretical tools of the Frankfurt school and of literary critical theory. Before introducing Horkheimer and Adorno's notion of 'instrumental reason,' Shes states:
The creation of such a subject, the repealed proffering of multiple solutions, and the definition of the discursive situation as a problem are not accidents of production. The system of reason articulated within the report is neither universal nor transcendent; this piece of administrative writing articulates the maxims and rules of evidence of instrumental reason (Wells 220).
Here, Wells is suggesting that the MOVE report is simply not an accident of generic form but rather instrumentally and strategically makes use of textual aspects of narrative such as hierarchy, chronology, naming and causal relationships to assert particular politically multiple and situated bullet-ed narratives that resist assigning cause or blame. Although Wells is not suggesting that the report is the result of the fully conscious actions of any one writer, she does stress that the report specifically rejects conventions of commission reports in order to maintain the necessary fragmentation. On page 223 she writes:
The conventional report format, then, is subverted to the demands of narrative. The formula of segmentation, which could have fragmented the audience, here allows the document to recreate a new audience at each finding. A hierarchical report organization allows the Commission to present narrative movement as logical support, to lend the force of events moving through time to the movement of its own argument (Wells).
This section, for me, post compellingly points to one of Wells' central claims: that the structure of the narrative itself creates logic, creates reason to a situation that otherwise struggled to gain a narrative due to the social, political and cultural complexities that surrounded it. Here, Wells is claiming that their is a direct link between invention and social structure and, although Wells' example tends to show how social structure can certainly be maintained through the invention of new forms, we can also imagine how we might make similar arguments that social structure and inequalities could be shifted through invention/play with like narrative features or textual forms.
Although Wells' work was most interesting to me because of the implications regarding invention, form and shifts (or lack thereof) in social structure, I was also interested in a more marginal point that Wells makes toward the end of her text regarding pleasure. She writes the following:
Second, contemporary narrative theory raises the issue of pleasure, which is perhaps the most valuable prize that the rhetoric of inquiry could take in a raid on the arsenal of theory. Taking pleasure in a text is not the same as liking it, or identifying with it, or thinking that it is correct. It is an act of the reader, and a rhetorician who raises the question of pleasure has left his privileged spot at the speaker's elbow and taken an anonymous place among the audience. There, relying only on the intensity of his impolite whisper, the rhetorician addresses to whomever stands nearby an urgent and inconvenient question."Why do you want this to go on? Why do you want it to end?" In the case of the MOVE report, the pleasures of continuing and ending are local pleasures of containment and explanation. They arc ways of placing a disturbing event securely in the past, and of guaranteeing that it will not be repeated (Wells 228).
This notion of pleasure seems particularly useful because it gives us a way to think about why experimentation, when it is working well, can provide a sense of pleasure in allowing us to achieve particular aims; yet, it also, I feel, provides a way of thinking about why new forms of invention are needed. If we are seduced or persuaded into texts that provide us with pleasure but feel the need to make other kinds of arguments that may not be as easy to make with available forms or arrangements, then we need to gain a better sense of form and audience to make new kinds of texts that also are pleasurable for readers as a means of providing alternate social possibilities.
Wells states the following regarding the MOVE Report and the main project of her article:
This essay reflects upon that failure of both ideological and narrative coherence, seeing it as an expression of the commission's political and discursive situation, a situation that was difficult and contradictory. I will examine how this situation marks the element of the text, moving from relatively formal questions-How are characters named? How are episodes connected?-to a discussion of what counts as a good reason within the bounds of the text. My interest is to show how provisional are the boundaries between formal questions and political questions in this text; here, nothing is more deeply political than the text's representation of subordination (Wells 209).
Here, Wells writes about the bind between the formal and the political and how those are bound up in constructing reason within a text. As Wells moves through her chapter, she argues that along with attending to issues of form and the ways in which form implicates us into political situatedness, our analyses could benefit from the theoretical tools of the Frankfurt school and of literary critical theory. Before introducing Horkheimer and Adorno's notion of 'instrumental reason,' Shes states:
The creation of such a subject, the repealed proffering of multiple solutions, and the definition of the discursive situation as a problem are not accidents of production. The system of reason articulated within the report is neither universal nor transcendent; this piece of administrative writing articulates the maxims and rules of evidence of instrumental reason (Wells 220).
Here, Wells is suggesting that the MOVE report is simply not an accident of generic form but rather instrumentally and strategically makes use of textual aspects of narrative such as hierarchy, chronology, naming and causal relationships to assert particular politically multiple and situated bullet-ed narratives that resist assigning cause or blame. Although Wells is not suggesting that the report is the result of the fully conscious actions of any one writer, she does stress that the report specifically rejects conventions of commission reports in order to maintain the necessary fragmentation. On page 223 she writes:
The conventional report format, then, is subverted to the demands of narrative. The formula of segmentation, which could have fragmented the audience, here allows the document to recreate a new audience at each finding. A hierarchical report organization allows the Commission to present narrative movement as logical support, to lend the force of events moving through time to the movement of its own argument (Wells).
This section, for me, post compellingly points to one of Wells' central claims: that the structure of the narrative itself creates logic, creates reason to a situation that otherwise struggled to gain a narrative due to the social, political and cultural complexities that surrounded it. Here, Wells is claiming that their is a direct link between invention and social structure and, although Wells' example tends to show how social structure can certainly be maintained through the invention of new forms, we can also imagine how we might make similar arguments that social structure and inequalities could be shifted through invention/play with like narrative features or textual forms.
Although Wells' work was most interesting to me because of the implications regarding invention, form and shifts (or lack thereof) in social structure, I was also interested in a more marginal point that Wells makes toward the end of her text regarding pleasure. She writes the following:
Second, contemporary narrative theory raises the issue of pleasure, which is perhaps the most valuable prize that the rhetoric of inquiry could take in a raid on the arsenal of theory. Taking pleasure in a text is not the same as liking it, or identifying with it, or thinking that it is correct. It is an act of the reader, and a rhetorician who raises the question of pleasure has left his privileged spot at the speaker's elbow and taken an anonymous place among the audience. There, relying only on the intensity of his impolite whisper, the rhetorician addresses to whomever stands nearby an urgent and inconvenient question."Why do you want this to go on? Why do you want it to end?" In the case of the MOVE report, the pleasures of continuing and ending are local pleasures of containment and explanation. They arc ways of placing a disturbing event securely in the past, and of guaranteeing that it will not be repeated (Wells 228).
This notion of pleasure seems particularly useful because it gives us a way to think about why experimentation, when it is working well, can provide a sense of pleasure in allowing us to achieve particular aims; yet, it also, I feel, provides a way of thinking about why new forms of invention are needed. If we are seduced or persuaded into texts that provide us with pleasure but feel the need to make other kinds of arguments that may not be as easy to make with available forms or arrangements, then we need to gain a better sense of form and audience to make new kinds of texts that also are pleasurable for readers as a means of providing alternate social possibilities.
Friday, February 19, 2010
Arguments on the Internet: Three "How to Win" Guides
Because I'm running really short on time this week to post about anything more substantial, and because I've found the "10 Golden Rules" piece so interesting, I thought I'd post some examples of some popular "How to Guides" on winning social arguments.
Below are three examples of popular media/blog "How to Win Arguments on the Internet" pointers that I found interesting in the assumptions that are made regarding argument, "rationality" and audience.
Click here or here or here.
These three examples, I think, raise a tension for me in this week's readings which, of course, are prescriptive ways that we should see argument. These sites/posts, for me, echo a question that Nic asked in the discussion--what if people are arguing for the sake of "winning"? How does this change what argument is and the extent to which we can engage in it more "rationally" and mindfully? We had an extended discussion about the structures of argument in f-2-f environments versus online environments and I think these lists raise some interesting questions as to how many of these strategies have offline equivalents and which exist solely in online spaces. Additionally, I find the fact that I ton of these lists exist interesting in and of itself because it indicates that people (even those who don't have what some might consider "rich" or "deeply engaging" arguments online) seem to be fishing for the tacit rules, or the ways in which power in created in these spaces.
Lastly, I'm interested in what these three pieces assume about audience that sort of goes unspoken. How can the audience assumptions in these pieces be challenged by the either of the texts this week?
Below are three examples of popular media/blog "How to Win Arguments on the Internet" pointers that I found interesting in the assumptions that are made regarding argument, "rationality" and audience.
Click here or here or here.
These three examples, I think, raise a tension for me in this week's readings which, of course, are prescriptive ways that we should see argument. These sites/posts, for me, echo a question that Nic asked in the discussion--what if people are arguing for the sake of "winning"? How does this change what argument is and the extent to which we can engage in it more "rationally" and mindfully? We had an extended discussion about the structures of argument in f-2-f environments versus online environments and I think these lists raise some interesting questions as to how many of these strategies have offline equivalents and which exist solely in online spaces. Additionally, I find the fact that I ton of these lists exist interesting in and of itself because it indicates that people (even those who don't have what some might consider "rich" or "deeply engaging" arguments online) seem to be fishing for the tacit rules, or the ways in which power in created in these spaces.
Lastly, I'm interested in what these three pieces assume about audience that sort of goes unspoken. How can the audience assumptions in these pieces be challenged by the either of the texts this week?
Week 4 Reflection
Here are some updates regarding my thoughts about the various "spaces" in our course along with new goals for continuing to be engaged in meaningful ways:
1) Twitter
I tried taking notes on Twitter but found it too challenging to take notes in ways that were meaningful enough (and not completely boring) to others. They did help me trace my online reading, but because I don't want to be "hidden" by my colleagues, I think I'll just stick to plain old paper and pencil. I currently see the function of Twitter as more of a "social" aspect of class; yet, I think we could be doing more with it. This week, I'm going to try and create just a few "Twitter" notes about the readings that will (hopefully) be much more appealing to read but will offer a early-week reminder of what I found interesting.
2) Wiki
This week, I started another new page on the wiki (that I haven't had time to write much in) and also worked a lot on actually restructuring the writing that was there. This was challenging, but things are shaping up (and loosening up) just enough now that this arrangement work didn't feel too terrible. I hope next week I can continue this work and shed a bit more of my wiki-arrangement-shyness.
3) Discussions/Reading
I totally put myself at a disadvantage this week by starting the readings later than usual and having a really difficult time (like crazy difficult) becoming engaged in the arguments. Ugh. I really need to finish the readings by Monday and work through the rest of this post-Monday slowly and throughout the week. I notice that we all seem to cram our posts in at the last minute and, obviously, I'm sure that greatly impacts the quality of discussion. However, one interesting consequence of this is that I feel we are all pretty much online for most of Friday so, in some ways, it feels like we are together in our space on Friday! Another week of hoping not to be working up until the last minute...!
1) Twitter
I tried taking notes on Twitter but found it too challenging to take notes in ways that were meaningful enough (and not completely boring) to others. They did help me trace my online reading, but because I don't want to be "hidden" by my colleagues, I think I'll just stick to plain old paper and pencil. I currently see the function of Twitter as more of a "social" aspect of class; yet, I think we could be doing more with it. This week, I'm going to try and create just a few "Twitter" notes about the readings that will (hopefully) be much more appealing to read but will offer a early-week reminder of what I found interesting.
2) Wiki
This week, I started another new page on the wiki (that I haven't had time to write much in) and also worked a lot on actually restructuring the writing that was there. This was challenging, but things are shaping up (and loosening up) just enough now that this arrangement work didn't feel too terrible. I hope next week I can continue this work and shed a bit more of my wiki-arrangement-shyness.
3) Discussions/Reading
I totally put myself at a disadvantage this week by starting the readings later than usual and having a really difficult time (like crazy difficult) becoming engaged in the arguments. Ugh. I really need to finish the readings by Monday and work through the rest of this post-Monday slowly and throughout the week. I notice that we all seem to cram our posts in at the last minute and, obviously, I'm sure that greatly impacts the quality of discussion. However, one interesting consequence of this is that I feel we are all pretty much online for most of Friday so, in some ways, it feels like we are together in our space on Friday! Another week of hoping not to be working up until the last minute...!
Friday, February 12, 2010
An Overview of Audience: Working to Complicate Trait-Views of Audience
Jack Selzer's article focuses on the notion of discourse communities as a ways to disrupt more traditional notions of "audience" often associated with what Julie called on our discussion board, the "pipeline" approach (this is what we often see in market and statistical research). Selzer accomplishes this by locating the composer within the discourse community. In other words, while traditional theories of audience have often situated the audience and the rhetor in separate spaces, Selzer blurs this relationship and therefore encourages us to acknowledge this more dynamic sense of composing and viewing/reading texts.
While Selzer's work blurs the boundaries between audience and composer by locating the composer in the discourse community of the audience, Porters work accomplishes this by focusing on the relationships between production and consumption in a temporal sense. That is, by privileging the spaces in between production and consumption, Porter is able to, like Selzer, focus on consumption and production as two sides of the same coin.
Bennett also extends the critique of statistical senses of audience by critiquing opinion polling. Bennett proposes three active audience views of readers.
Ang's piece moves in a similar direction as the Selzer, Bennett and Porter in that Ang writes against the assumption that market research methodologies aren't adequate to gauge a sense of audience as complex. Ang offers contextualizing methodologies such as ethnography as a way to work against the flattened senses of audience that exist when audience merely becomes a list of traits. Yet, Ang is aware that ethnography, too, is bound to miss complexity as it offers us so much contextual data to grapple with. A contextual sense of audience, for me, doesn't blur the boundaries to the same extent as the work by Selzer and Porter.
Sundet and Ytreberg, for me, made the most compelling argument in that they suggest that despite the convergence of producers and consumers in our contemporary society, participation or the blurring of these lines don't necessarily guarantee the kinds of positive associations that we link with activity. Additionally in Sundet and Ytreberg, I thought that technologies themselves were used as a means of complicating senses of audience. In the rest of the texts, I felt like the end goal was to focus on audiences as active rather than passive and that this seemed like a positive end in and of itself; yet, Sundet and Ytreberg complicated not only how we conceive of audiences but also were successful in complicating the social and cultural implications of new ways for thinking about audience.
While Selzer's work blurs the boundaries between audience and composer by locating the composer in the discourse community of the audience, Porters work accomplishes this by focusing on the relationships between production and consumption in a temporal sense. That is, by privileging the spaces in between production and consumption, Porter is able to, like Selzer, focus on consumption and production as two sides of the same coin.
Bennett also extends the critique of statistical senses of audience by critiquing opinion polling. Bennett proposes three active audience views of readers.
Ang's piece moves in a similar direction as the Selzer, Bennett and Porter in that Ang writes against the assumption that market research methodologies aren't adequate to gauge a sense of audience as complex. Ang offers contextualizing methodologies such as ethnography as a way to work against the flattened senses of audience that exist when audience merely becomes a list of traits. Yet, Ang is aware that ethnography, too, is bound to miss complexity as it offers us so much contextual data to grapple with. A contextual sense of audience, for me, doesn't blur the boundaries to the same extent as the work by Selzer and Porter.
Sundet and Ytreberg, for me, made the most compelling argument in that they suggest that despite the convergence of producers and consumers in our contemporary society, participation or the blurring of these lines don't necessarily guarantee the kinds of positive associations that we link with activity. Additionally in Sundet and Ytreberg, I thought that technologies themselves were used as a means of complicating senses of audience. In the rest of the texts, I felt like the end goal was to focus on audiences as active rather than passive and that this seemed like a positive end in and of itself; yet, Sundet and Ytreberg complicated not only how we conceive of audiences but also were successful in complicating the social and cultural implications of new ways for thinking about audience.
Week 3 Reflection
This week has been a very odd week for me thus far. I feel like I'm finding my way in (and realizing the limitations of) Twitter. Also, I feel like I was able to be more of an active presence in the discussion this week. As I stated in one of our meta-forums, the questions style of discussion helped me to generate ideas in a way that I thought would be useful for others to deal with. However, my engagement in that forum sort of leaves me burned out for the night and I'm seriously trying to gain momentum to post by blog post on the readings...my brain seriously feels deadened right now!
I'm still struggling with the wiki. I did add a page today but I'm feeling reluctant to make changes to pages that feel like they belong to others. I know I have to get over this but it just feels so strange.
Another aspect of the course that I need to work on is being able to post brief synopses of the articles we've read and make connections. I want to engage all of the material in more depth and my desire to do so, I know, is holding me back from just taking from the readings what I can. So, mainly, I still think I need to continue working on my goals for last week because, although I think I was able to jump in a bit more this week, there is still a lot I could do better.
One strategy I think I'll use to meet my goals more fully this week is to attempt to log on every day (even if for some days I can only be on for an hour). This, I think, will help me in increasing my interactions with others.
Ah, so much meta-stuff involved in this class and still I feel like I'm leaving something out!
I'm still struggling with the wiki. I did add a page today but I'm feeling reluctant to make changes to pages that feel like they belong to others. I know I have to get over this but it just feels so strange.
Another aspect of the course that I need to work on is being able to post brief synopses of the articles we've read and make connections. I want to engage all of the material in more depth and my desire to do so, I know, is holding me back from just taking from the readings what I can. So, mainly, I still think I need to continue working on my goals for last week because, although I think I was able to jump in a bit more this week, there is still a lot I could do better.
One strategy I think I'll use to meet my goals more fully this week is to attempt to log on every day (even if for some days I can only be on for an hour). This, I think, will help me in increasing my interactions with others.
Ah, so much meta-stuff involved in this class and still I feel like I'm leaving something out!
Using contemporary notions of audience to dispupt the division between textual analysis and production...
Lately, I've been working on sorting out, making connections between, and making arguments about the connections between the "analytic" work that I do and the "creative" work that I do. Of course, unlike the Miller blog that we read earlier this semester, analytic work always involves creativity and creativity, I believe, either consciously or subconsciously involves an element of critique/analysis (even if this is really implicit). Things that are beautiful and moving are also doing other kinds of work and things that are doing consciously analytical work still have "forms," no matter how seemingly neutral those forms are often taken to be by many people within our society.
Because I've been thinking a lot about these issues, I've been struggling with why people who do more "analytic" kinds of work don't acknowledge the forms they choose for doing this work and why people who do creative work don't like to talk explicitly about their work as doing something critical, especially something theoretical. Personally, I understand (for the most part, anyway) the histories of Western culture that have developed that allow us to believe that these two acts are divorced from one another. Distinctions between the mind and body where made early on in Greek societies and these examples can still be used to account for differences in how we treat texts that are beautiful and moving and those that engage us intellectually. I've seen very smart people rely upon these distinctions and even though I care deeply about combining these, folding them upon one another, I often find myself tempted to fall back upon these culturally prevalent age-old distinctions.
I believe that there is something immensely valuable from moving toward spaces where we recognize the convergences of these two kinds of seemingly separate work. This, then, is where I see the work on audience as so potentially valuable because analysis, like audience, isn't merely passive. Analysis is a form of creation, *is* creative, just as production also necessitates situating ones self as an audience member (thinking about how ones text will be received).
One interesting side effect of the split between analysis and production is that people who do analysis don't think very much about why they are able to create what they create. They often attribute their desire to participate and become a part of things with learning a series of textual conventions, entering into a discourse community, etc; however, creative work often privileges an inherent "drive" or creative impulses. Hence, this split between analysis and production has led to two very different ways of thinking about the impetus to create different kinds of texts. For creative works, we often don't see this drive framed as something explicit or explicitly political (although these texts certainly often have these effects or resonances). For analytic works, we often see explicitly stated political motives and agendas but little detail for how these works are crafted or shaped through process. That makes me wonder, what these two areas could say to one another if we looked, side-by-side at their ways to approaching creativity. How might we use approaches to audience to help bridge our thinking about textual production and analysis? Because audience studies--especially those for this week--tend to disrupt the idea that there is such a thing as "an" audience or people who merely consume or produce, it is a key idea that I hope to thread through these questions.
This week, I listened to this talk given by the author Elizabeth Gilbert, an author that I would probably never read. I listened to the lecture because it was recommended to me by a professor whom I very much respect and who claimed the lecture, even in its relative simplicity, was helpful for the ways she thought about creativity. In the lecture Gilbert argues that the notion of "a genius" removes the pressure from individuals who create and mitigates this pressure because of the ancient belief that a force, god, or deity is responsible for the production as well. Of course, for many reasons, this lecture goes against the sensibilities I've acquired in my training in sociology, linguistics and rhetoric and composition about creativity and notions of "genius" and responsibility; however, I'm wondering about how, when we are converging creative and analytic work (not in actuality as they are already entangled, but as they exist as fields) how we'll contend with interesting differences like notions of "creativity" as they arise. In terms of Gilbert's notion of "a genius" as an outside force that speaks to someone would be a useful construct; however, I question to extent to which this notion disrupts creativity as something that belongs ultimately still to an individual (after all, Gilbert claims that a dialogue with a genius (i.e. spirit of some sort) is a dialogue between that spirit and the author.) This notion of "a genius" along with the social baggage that it carries, is one that tends to prevent creators from being encouraged to think about their composing consciously, or state it explicitly.
It is true that I take issue with notions like Gilbert's but I also think that this notion of creativity does capture something that ideas of acquiring a discourse in composition, or learning to produce analysis, fails to recognize. And that is desire, and pleasure. I think that often we talk about acquiring discourses from institutional and social critique purposes; yet, we often fail to motivate students to engage in these processes of critique with enthusiasm (even when I succeed at this, I feel it is less of my doing than a students pre-realization of their situatedness and their preparation to engage in the work of critique. In that way, I wonder if the kinds of critique that happen in creative works are more available to students in some way...they certainly seem more engaged in this kind of work, even when it becomes co-opted by for-grade assignments in the classroom. So, I guess my final question here that I'd like to keep thinking about is how might a convergence of these notions of creativity offer us something richer? Is it possible for these to re-converge, to put these in dialogue? I hope so, and, for now, I'm going to keep trying.
Because I've been thinking a lot about these issues, I've been struggling with why people who do more "analytic" kinds of work don't acknowledge the forms they choose for doing this work and why people who do creative work don't like to talk explicitly about their work as doing something critical, especially something theoretical. Personally, I understand (for the most part, anyway) the histories of Western culture that have developed that allow us to believe that these two acts are divorced from one another. Distinctions between the mind and body where made early on in Greek societies and these examples can still be used to account for differences in how we treat texts that are beautiful and moving and those that engage us intellectually. I've seen very smart people rely upon these distinctions and even though I care deeply about combining these, folding them upon one another, I often find myself tempted to fall back upon these culturally prevalent age-old distinctions.
I believe that there is something immensely valuable from moving toward spaces where we recognize the convergences of these two kinds of seemingly separate work. This, then, is where I see the work on audience as so potentially valuable because analysis, like audience, isn't merely passive. Analysis is a form of creation, *is* creative, just as production also necessitates situating ones self as an audience member (thinking about how ones text will be received).
One interesting side effect of the split between analysis and production is that people who do analysis don't think very much about why they are able to create what they create. They often attribute their desire to participate and become a part of things with learning a series of textual conventions, entering into a discourse community, etc; however, creative work often privileges an inherent "drive" or creative impulses. Hence, this split between analysis and production has led to two very different ways of thinking about the impetus to create different kinds of texts. For creative works, we often don't see this drive framed as something explicit or explicitly political (although these texts certainly often have these effects or resonances). For analytic works, we often see explicitly stated political motives and agendas but little detail for how these works are crafted or shaped through process. That makes me wonder, what these two areas could say to one another if we looked, side-by-side at their ways to approaching creativity. How might we use approaches to audience to help bridge our thinking about textual production and analysis? Because audience studies--especially those for this week--tend to disrupt the idea that there is such a thing as "an" audience or people who merely consume or produce, it is a key idea that I hope to thread through these questions.
This week, I listened to this talk given by the author Elizabeth Gilbert, an author that I would probably never read. I listened to the lecture because it was recommended to me by a professor whom I very much respect and who claimed the lecture, even in its relative simplicity, was helpful for the ways she thought about creativity. In the lecture Gilbert argues that the notion of "a genius" removes the pressure from individuals who create and mitigates this pressure because of the ancient belief that a force, god, or deity is responsible for the production as well. Of course, for many reasons, this lecture goes against the sensibilities I've acquired in my training in sociology, linguistics and rhetoric and composition about creativity and notions of "genius" and responsibility; however, I'm wondering about how, when we are converging creative and analytic work (not in actuality as they are already entangled, but as they exist as fields) how we'll contend with interesting differences like notions of "creativity" as they arise. In terms of Gilbert's notion of "a genius" as an outside force that speaks to someone would be a useful construct; however, I question to extent to which this notion disrupts creativity as something that belongs ultimately still to an individual (after all, Gilbert claims that a dialogue with a genius (i.e. spirit of some sort) is a dialogue between that spirit and the author.) This notion of "a genius" along with the social baggage that it carries, is one that tends to prevent creators from being encouraged to think about their composing consciously, or state it explicitly.
It is true that I take issue with notions like Gilbert's but I also think that this notion of creativity does capture something that ideas of acquiring a discourse in composition, or learning to produce analysis, fails to recognize. And that is desire, and pleasure. I think that often we talk about acquiring discourses from institutional and social critique purposes; yet, we often fail to motivate students to engage in these processes of critique with enthusiasm (even when I succeed at this, I feel it is less of my doing than a students pre-realization of their situatedness and their preparation to engage in the work of critique. In that way, I wonder if the kinds of critique that happen in creative works are more available to students in some way...they certainly seem more engaged in this kind of work, even when it becomes co-opted by for-grade assignments in the classroom. So, I guess my final question here that I'd like to keep thinking about is how might a convergence of these notions of creativity offer us something richer? Is it possible for these to re-converge, to put these in dialogue? I hope so, and, for now, I'm going to keep trying.
Friday, February 5, 2010
Week 2 Reflection
Goals for next week:
1) To use twitter as a kind of note-taking as I read
2) To discuss earlier and more often on the reading (at least 7 posts)
3) To address people in the course that I don't know as well
4) To work on the wikis by thinking more about re-arrangement
Not much else at the moment except hating myself for finishing the work right before the deadline. Ugh.
1) To use twitter as a kind of note-taking as I read
2) To discuss earlier and more often on the reading (at least 7 posts)
3) To address people in the course that I don't know as well
4) To work on the wikis by thinking more about re-arrangement
Not much else at the moment except hating myself for finishing the work right before the deadline. Ugh.
Weather bracelets and Ponoko and the teeming void and the social of DIY making ...
A lot of people have a mother that made cookies. Mine did, too. Sometimes. She might make them in between sewing an entire collection of gigantic dinosaurs for a window display or painting large canvases with 3-D objects protruding out of them. When I was seven, my mother learned to use power tools and, for much of our youth, she was out in our gararges (we moved a few times) making furniture or reworking huge objects made of metal or wood. Even today, because she can't use a computer, she will often ask me to "look on the internet" for large metal grommets or a particular kind of hardware or stain or upholstery fabric. My mother, in short, is always making things, has always made things. She has made a some (but very little) money off of the things she's made, but she doesn't stick with anything long enough to develop a "product" or a static style. When Etsy came about, though, I really thought that my mom would finally have a market for the things she made. For a while, she had hope, too, I think. But the more I learned about Etsy and like sites, the more I saw it shift and, for the most part, come to value a particular kind of aesthetic (one, I might add, quite in line with commercial tastes), I realized that Etsy was, like any face-to-face community, not as tolerant of variances in style or taste. Don't get me wrong, I like the things on Etsy, and I like that I can supposedly "feel good" for not supporting corporations. But I like Nordstrom, too, and corporations have become, it seems, increasingly savvy at letting you know that if you spend so much you are helping kids in Africa with AIDS get medicine or, more recently, feeding the hungry in Haiti. What is the difference, then, between buying things from Etsy to do "good" or things from Nordstrom to do "good"? This is a question that always comes up for me and one, that, is more complicated to answer than what it may seem.
The blog I read for today, then, was the teeming void blog, and after reading a few entries, one that caught my eye was an entry on a 3-D printed weather bracelet that reflected weather patterns. This post fit into the overall project of the teeming void because the posts their are largely regarding a data aesthetic.
Although the idea of data as aesthetics is quite interesting to me, what impressed me most about this post is a link I followed to a site called Ponoko where, apparently, you can have 3-D objects printed for you and laser-cut. There was another post on the teeming void, where the author tested this out by ordering some laser-cut wood pieces.
What interests me about Ponoko, then, and the ability to custom order these kinds of things, is it gives the common person access to a kind of technology that was once only available to the owners of the means of production. (It is also interesting to note that the aesthetic on Ponoko is one that is less commercially polished, unlike Etsy or Nordstrom). This gives me a sense, then, that is technology (even though it is still a consumable product) has some interesting potential for allowing people to make things that were not formerly possible. My mother, for example, would often search for industrial materials but be impeded in her projects by what was on the shelf at Ace Hardware or K-Mart.
As interesting as the weather bracelet idea is, though, I think it points to another issue that came up in our discussion this week: access. Even though Ponoko is on the internet and, in theory, accessible to a lot of people, this certainly doesn't guarantee its accessibility in other senses of the word. A person who is savvy enough and has enough cultural capital to consider "data aesthetics," for example, can experiment with the making Ponoko provides; yet, someone like my mother cannot. Even more so, the raw technologies would perhaps have made it possible for someone like my mother to mass-produce her work by standardizing 3-D, lazer-cut parts; however, that process would likely shape her craft work into something else, something more co-opted and less clunky, less hers.
The blog I read for today, then, was the teeming void blog, and after reading a few entries, one that caught my eye was an entry on a 3-D printed weather bracelet that reflected weather patterns. This post fit into the overall project of the teeming void because the posts their are largely regarding a data aesthetic.
Although the idea of data as aesthetics is quite interesting to me, what impressed me most about this post is a link I followed to a site called Ponoko where, apparently, you can have 3-D objects printed for you and laser-cut. There was another post on the teeming void, where the author tested this out by ordering some laser-cut wood pieces.
What interests me about Ponoko, then, and the ability to custom order these kinds of things, is it gives the common person access to a kind of technology that was once only available to the owners of the means of production. (It is also interesting to note that the aesthetic on Ponoko is one that is less commercially polished, unlike Etsy or Nordstrom). This gives me a sense, then, that is technology (even though it is still a consumable product) has some interesting potential for allowing people to make things that were not formerly possible. My mother, for example, would often search for industrial materials but be impeded in her projects by what was on the shelf at Ace Hardware or K-Mart.
As interesting as the weather bracelet idea is, though, I think it points to another issue that came up in our discussion this week: access. Even though Ponoko is on the internet and, in theory, accessible to a lot of people, this certainly doesn't guarantee its accessibility in other senses of the word. A person who is savvy enough and has enough cultural capital to consider "data aesthetics," for example, can experiment with the making Ponoko provides; yet, someone like my mother cannot. Even more so, the raw technologies would perhaps have made it possible for someone like my mother to mass-produce her work by standardizing 3-D, lazer-cut parts; however, that process would likely shape her craft work into something else, something more co-opted and less clunky, less hers.
Thursday, February 4, 2010
On Politics, Power and Persuasion: The New Roles of Rhetoric
Because it is difficult for me to do a quality synthesis of all of the texts in one post, following some of you, I'm writing my response this week in pieces so that I can do a better job of responding for my own archival purposes of thinking about these texts. In other words, when I write with many texts in mind, I often find that I write in ways for the purpose of folding in all of the texts, rather than doing each of them justice and making connections that are more meaningful to me and, I hope, for others.
***
So, in this post, I'll start by discussing the Crowley and Miller & Charney texts and discuss what I take to be a tension between their their notions of rhetoric and, more specifically, the role of persuasion. While Crowley's text is written as a critique of a particular notion of rhetoric as conservative, I'm interested in how Crowley imagines the function of rhetoric and how that may be cutting across some of what Charney & Miller suggest about the role of persuasion and how me might most usefully understand persuasion's role in rhetoric.
In her article "Communications Skills and A Brief Rapprochement of Rhetoricians," Sharon Crowley responds to Nancy McKoski's claim that rhetoric is regressive. McKoski's claim that rhetoric is tied to conservatism is troubling to Crowley because she rejects the evidence pointed to by McKoski (that rhetoric is tied to New Criticism, Neo-Thomism, Neo-Humanism, etc.) to support this claim. Crowley also finds McKoski's valuing of the social sciences as relatively more progressive problematic because she states, "rhetoric can be put to all sorts of political uses. It is true enough that for most of its history rhetoric was deployed by members of elite classes as a means of preserving their economic and social privilege. But it has also been used, as it was by Mary Wollstonecraft and Frederick Douglas and Martin Luther King, Jr., to dislodge oppressive political and cultural practices" (99). What Crowley goes on to do, then, is to juxtapose McKoski's claims that rhetoric is conservative and a supporter of the status quo with the institutional and disciplinary positioning of rhetoric and rhetoricians as marginalized or subordinated. Crowley seems to be doing this work in an attempt to get rhetoricians within both English and Communication departments to see the importance and mutual dependence of each others' work despite the disciplinary divides and to, in an analysis that seems almost Marxian, urge rhetoricians to look to the places in their own departments where rhetoric is being constructed with disciplinary baggage that is not necessary. For Crowley, rhetoric, a field that gives us access to critique of power structures through being able to "determine when and how an argument is fishy," is in danger and this danger stems, in part, from the ways in which rhetoricians are being positioned and positioning themselves within institutional and departmental apparatuses.
In their chapter, "Persuasion, Audience and Argument," Miller and Charney frame their insights with the concept of persuasion arguing that all texts, of course, are persuasive. What was most interesting for me in this chapter, was the break down of approaches to persuasion that occurred from pages 591-592. This breakdown was interesting to me because I've seen these approaches in various texts I've read and embedded within the kinds of arguments that people make; however, considering Crowley's text, I'm particularly interested in Crosswhite's rhetoric of reason or what Miller and Charney term, "descriptive approaches to rhetoric" and how those fit within Crowley's stance on the place of rhetoric within English and Communication arguments.
Let me back up for a moment to discuss how Miller and Charney seem to be fleshing out prescriptive versus descriptive approaches to rhetoric. Firstly, Miller and Charney describe "truth-seeking theories of argumentation...which have traditionally had a strong prescriptive bias". While many "truth-seeking theories" seem quite dated, there are also ethical standards, for example, focusing more on "empowerment and justice than on truth (591). Feminists, in a different strain, can argue that any form of argument or persuasion is "an act of violence" (591); yet, not all feminists hold this position. After discussing these (and other) prescriptive approaches to persuasion and argumentation, Miller and Charney go on to offer descriptive approaches (those of Crosswhite, for example). Descriptive approaches to evaluating argument seem fruitful because the evaluation of the arguments is based in the audience. I'm interested in descriptive approaches to rhetoric; yet, I wonder about their potential to fold out into relativism (although I won't go into that here).
Given Crowley's position on the role of rhetoric and the function of and place of it in the university, I'm interested in how what she asserts seems to be hinged upon an ethical notion of argument that is more closely aligned with truth-seeking rhetorics than descriptive rhetorics. To be clearer, Crowley seems to be suggesting that there is an emancipating function of teaching rhetoric; that rhetoric can be used to subvert oppression and that, like she says in her concluding paragraph, to be able to "determine when and how an argument is fishy". Despite the appeal of descriptive rhetoric, then, is there something about the ethical ways in which rhetoric functions within contexts such as the university that seem to be less context based and connected to universal-ish kinds of ideas about ethics (although universal isn't the right word because ethics, of course, are also hinged on context)? I guess my point here is that although thinking about rhetoric in descriptive ways seem most appealing to me sometimes, because it seems to afford more nuances, I can see the necessity of holding on to a sense of ethics as Crowley does.
I'm interested, too, in what sense of persuasion seems to underpin the other articles we've read thus far and how that all factors into the history of rhetoric as it is so often narrated to us.
***
So, in this post, I'll start by discussing the Crowley and Miller & Charney texts and discuss what I take to be a tension between their their notions of rhetoric and, more specifically, the role of persuasion. While Crowley's text is written as a critique of a particular notion of rhetoric as conservative, I'm interested in how Crowley imagines the function of rhetoric and how that may be cutting across some of what Charney & Miller suggest about the role of persuasion and how me might most usefully understand persuasion's role in rhetoric.
In her article "Communications Skills and A Brief Rapprochement of Rhetoricians," Sharon Crowley responds to Nancy McKoski's claim that rhetoric is regressive. McKoski's claim that rhetoric is tied to conservatism is troubling to Crowley because she rejects the evidence pointed to by McKoski (that rhetoric is tied to New Criticism, Neo-Thomism, Neo-Humanism, etc.) to support this claim. Crowley also finds McKoski's valuing of the social sciences as relatively more progressive problematic because she states, "rhetoric can be put to all sorts of political uses. It is true enough that for most of its history rhetoric was deployed by members of elite classes as a means of preserving their economic and social privilege. But it has also been used, as it was by Mary Wollstonecraft and Frederick Douglas and Martin Luther King, Jr., to dislodge oppressive political and cultural practices" (99). What Crowley goes on to do, then, is to juxtapose McKoski's claims that rhetoric is conservative and a supporter of the status quo with the institutional and disciplinary positioning of rhetoric and rhetoricians as marginalized or subordinated. Crowley seems to be doing this work in an attempt to get rhetoricians within both English and Communication departments to see the importance and mutual dependence of each others' work despite the disciplinary divides and to, in an analysis that seems almost Marxian, urge rhetoricians to look to the places in their own departments where rhetoric is being constructed with disciplinary baggage that is not necessary. For Crowley, rhetoric, a field that gives us access to critique of power structures through being able to "determine when and how an argument is fishy," is in danger and this danger stems, in part, from the ways in which rhetoricians are being positioned and positioning themselves within institutional and departmental apparatuses.
In their chapter, "Persuasion, Audience and Argument," Miller and Charney frame their insights with the concept of persuasion arguing that all texts, of course, are persuasive. What was most interesting for me in this chapter, was the break down of approaches to persuasion that occurred from pages 591-592. This breakdown was interesting to me because I've seen these approaches in various texts I've read and embedded within the kinds of arguments that people make; however, considering Crowley's text, I'm particularly interested in Crosswhite's rhetoric of reason or what Miller and Charney term, "descriptive approaches to rhetoric" and how those fit within Crowley's stance on the place of rhetoric within English and Communication arguments.
Let me back up for a moment to discuss how Miller and Charney seem to be fleshing out prescriptive versus descriptive approaches to rhetoric. Firstly, Miller and Charney describe "truth-seeking theories of argumentation...which have traditionally had a strong prescriptive bias". While many "truth-seeking theories" seem quite dated, there are also ethical standards, for example, focusing more on "empowerment and justice than on truth (591). Feminists, in a different strain, can argue that any form of argument or persuasion is "an act of violence" (591); yet, not all feminists hold this position. After discussing these (and other) prescriptive approaches to persuasion and argumentation, Miller and Charney go on to offer descriptive approaches (those of Crosswhite, for example). Descriptive approaches to evaluating argument seem fruitful because the evaluation of the arguments is based in the audience. I'm interested in descriptive approaches to rhetoric; yet, I wonder about their potential to fold out into relativism (although I won't go into that here).
Given Crowley's position on the role of rhetoric and the function of and place of it in the university, I'm interested in how what she asserts seems to be hinged upon an ethical notion of argument that is more closely aligned with truth-seeking rhetorics than descriptive rhetorics. To be clearer, Crowley seems to be suggesting that there is an emancipating function of teaching rhetoric; that rhetoric can be used to subvert oppression and that, like she says in her concluding paragraph, to be able to "determine when and how an argument is fishy". Despite the appeal of descriptive rhetoric, then, is there something about the ethical ways in which rhetoric functions within contexts such as the university that seem to be less context based and connected to universal-ish kinds of ideas about ethics (although universal isn't the right word because ethics, of course, are also hinged on context)? I guess my point here is that although thinking about rhetoric in descriptive ways seem most appealing to me sometimes, because it seems to afford more nuances, I can see the necessity of holding on to a sense of ethics as Crowley does.
I'm interested, too, in what sense of persuasion seems to underpin the other articles we've read thus far and how that all factors into the history of rhetoric as it is so often narrated to us.
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