Reflection on course goals, teaching, assignments, and readings

After class today, I started to think about why I decided to give you all such difficult, long, and obscure texts. As I have said several times, these texts are hard even for me with my extensive background in philosophy, cultural studies, literature, and to a certain extent, politics. Part of their difficulty, as many of you pointed out, stems from their length. I agree with all of you that it is more realistic (from a teaching/learning/pedagogy) standpoint to decrease the length of the readings per day, breaking them up or potentially omitting large sections that I can then summarize.

Allow me to think quantitatively for a minute, here. We have had approximately probably about 2 hours (maybe) to discuss each reading, if I give more time to the readings than say lecture or in class activities. While the blog posts (mine and yours) as well as my responses supplements this, I realize that this is not the same as "live" discussion. The Foucault, for instance, is probably about 30-40 pages of a "normal" book (even though its only about 25, give or take, in Ways of Reading).

In graduate seminars, we generally discuss a 250-300 page book in 3 hours. That said, we rarely cover the entire book in 3 hours, something that has frustrated me as someone who really enjoys discussing the little details of the book. Furthermore, its a graduate seminar, so most of us are expected to be able to discuss teh book as a whole.

But rarely do we discuss the particular "rhetoric" or "writing" of the book itself, which is ostensibly what 1102 is supposed to use the readings for.

So what is my point and why am I talking about my graduate seminars? My point is that the major reason I assign all of the text (and don't break it up) is to try and help you in your selections of information/citations and how to make it meaningful. When you do research, some research articles (at least  peer reviewed ones) will be 20-25 pages long  and if you have to cite 8 sources, that is 20x8 = 160 pages of material that you have to sort through to find a few points to include in your 2700 (10-12 page) research essay. If you use books, you need to try and wade through information/text in order to find a point that you can use to support your own argument. This is not easy I tell you, as someone who reads hundreds of pages a semester.

This process of selection, however, is not as difficult as wading through something like Foucault, a complex, abstract, philosopher/historian/theorist that I still have not "mastered" (nor ever will--no one has). Most books/articles will have indexes, abstracts, and sometimes breaks in the article indicated by section titles. These are tricks that you will need to learn in order to manage the amount of research necessary to produce your own work.

Furthermore, I recognize that the majority of us do not encounter such complex texts on an every day basis. The longest piece of writing we are apt to read nowadays might be a two-three page article on the huffingtonpost, but most of writing comes in headlines, soundbites, videos, images, or textbooks (a form of writing that is structured to help students understand meaning). Selection seems determined less by the complexity of the information and more by the amount of the information, each of it easily understandable--for the most part.

The texts that we have looked at disrupt our normal processes of interpretation of meaning and on could make the argument that they may not be rhetorically effective for even a general, educated audience such as yourselves and the public at large (I would include myself, but a lot of these texts fall under my academic specialty --theory/philosophy).

To recap, if we only have 2 hours (approx) that we can devote to an explication to these texts and they are not broken up into sections (such that then the questions might become: what makes this section of Foucault different from the section we discussed yesterday, last week, etc) and texts in the Ways of Reading complicate interpretation and are not representative of the type of research you will encounter and do encounter on a day to day basis, which is more 'accessible' to a certain extent, rhetorically speaking), then it would only be logical to conclude that the readings introduce upon the stated goals of the course in its title: Rhetoric and Academic Research.

In other words, first, if we cannot even understand the basic concepts we are working with, it is doubtful that we will be able to discuss the rhetorical choices of these authors nor will be able to discuss how you can "use" these rhetorical strategies in your own writing or how the rhetorical choices made by the author affect what he or she is trying to say. Second, if our readings are in both meanings of the term, the "exceptional" works (meaning, not the norm but also those that exceed the norm in meaning and richness), than the readings do not prepare you to encounter a typical academic research article.

If you were (or are) working in the realm of theories of power, Foucault is useful to know and indeed you may encounter his name again; if you are working with art criticism, history, and media theory, Berger is an essential voice in the field; but the sad (?) truth is that the complexity of someone like Foucault is greatly reduced in academic texts because they are, like you (and me) readers more often than producers of those "primary" texts that are so rich with meaning that people keep reading and re-reading them.

Very few of us will write like Foucault (including me) and many people outside academia find him, like you may have, impenetrable, dense, convoluted, overrated, obscure (pick your pejorative adjective), but some of us (me included) might write about Foucault or use/cite Foucault. However, that may not involve an explication of  his texts, carefully constructing meaning (many people have already done this work).

This is what makes videos and images so great to teach. Still, we must balance this with a reading of written texts because it is necessary to integrate these written texts in order to support one's argument.

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Possible strategies for future courses and/or later this semester

But it is hard to decide what "level" of texts to present. On the one hand, giving news articles only presents us with a journalistic style and rhetoric. op-ed articles are good, but in a way lack the complexity, depth, and breadth of research than an academic article. Academic articles tend to be specific to the academic discipline and address issues that may only be meaningful within that paradigm or if one is familiar with the more 'primary' texts of the field. More 'personal' essays (some of which are in Ways of Reading) may include elements that the writer uses skillfully that may not be acceptable in an academic article or that beginning writers may not use as effectively--perhaps this is why Bartholomae and Petrosky recommend imitating the style. Fiction, although it usually contains implicit arguments, can be even more ambiguous about its "meaning" or the argument its making than the theoretical work we have engaged in. Not to mention, many of you are not literature majors and this technically is not a "literature" class. I do not want this course to be a repeat of your high school literature and language courses and I'm sure you don't really want that either.

The honest truth is that you will learn about the conventions of writing in your discipline; I am not fluent in many of these conventions. These conventions would also lead to a construction of different assignments than analysis, synthesis, annotated bibliography, and research paper. Due to university/department conventions, goals, and restrictions, I am obligated to constrain myself to these major assignments. But more importantly,  since many disciplines require data, experiments, illustrations, measurements--aspects of your discipline I am ill equipped to teach you--I cannot think of how I would construct such assignments that would fit our allotted time schedule.

And so perhaps this is why the course is labeled Rhetoric and Academic Research rather than Rhetoric and Academic Writing. While research processes may be similar (at least when one is researching textual sources, which, regardless of your discipline, you will have to do) the writing produced from this research has its own conventions for making meaning and displaying data.

Therefore, rhetoric can be explained through video clips, images, various different written documents. These should be texts with relatively clear arguments, 'ordinary' language (not necessarily colloquial), and of moderate length given the time we have in class to work on them. This could allow me to choose different articles that we have not discussed in class for our major assignments, but which are "comparable" to the genres and lengths of texts we have discussed in class. Of course, this risks the assignments having less to do with classwork and thus may provide less continuity and unity to the course as a whole (but perhaps this was always a forced unity). On the other hand, as long as these other texts were analogous in theme, it would seem less like the class exercises did not contribute to a larger understanding.

Perhaps introducing something new that we do not discuss in class in addition to 2 articles that we do discuss in class might allow for some tension to form in theses and in the essays in general. Perhaps the two articles in class can be shorter whereas the third one will be longer and more complex, forcing students to figure it out with one another--on the blog or otherwise. Perhaps this would help create tension in the thesis or in the interpretations of the articles. This would also free up more time for other activities besides discussion of texts.

Heidegger and Burke on Communication and Rhetoric

Both Heidegger and Kenneth Burke get talked about a lot in a particular group of scholars in rhetoric and composition (Thomas Rickert, Byron Hawk, Victor Vitanza, just to name a few). I have just introduced myself to Burke intensely in the past few weeks and its making me think about whether Heidegger’s thought is useful for my current work. Both Burke and the (early) Heidegger seem to be ‘humanists’ in a certain sense of the word and both of them believe that language sets man apart from animals (after all, if logos is associated with reason, logos meaning “word,” then man is the animal who uses words), but both of them look at language in a different way, Burke eventually arguing for “symbol-using, mis-using, and making” creature and Heidegger eventually posits language as a kind of metaphysical entity primordially linked to Being. Let us begin with Heidegger.

For Heidegger, Dasein is separated from other animals because “being is an issue for it” (Being and Time 32). But this is not to just say that being strives to persist in its own being (Spinoza’s conatus) or that we are motivated merely by self-preservation, but rather that “Understanding of Being is itself a definite characteristic of Dasein’s Being” (32). Heidegger argues that this makes Dasein the only ‘ontic’ being that is  ‘ontological’. We question our own being, our own acts, etc.  Heidegger’s task is to question the “meaning of being.”  In order to discover this, Heidegger uses Dasein (the inquirer) as a paradigm—what is the meaning of our being—our human being: “Therefore, fundamental ontology, from which alone all other ontologies can take their rise, must be sought in the existential analytic of Dasein” (Being and Time 34). Since Dasein uses language, Heidegger takes our language as a starting point. This is one of the strengths of Heidegger’s work—he literally asks what the meaning of the copula “is” is: When we say that something “is” this, what do we mean? The scientific ‘state-of-mind’, which is also the way philosophers have thought about this forever is that the ‘is’ is a substance. The world is a space which contains substances and objects. This thinking of “is” reduces the object (or the person) to what Heidegger calls “presence-at-hand,” which is a certain way we can look at objects. However, for Heidegger, and for Burke, the world is not just ‘there’, we are engaged in it and indeed see things in terms of its use. It is this kind of pragmatic view of Heidegger that a lot of rhetoric and composition people focus on—that and his concept of the world (something we may return to in another post).

Burke too believes that the ‘is’ covers up a mode of being (an act) rather than revealing a substance in itself. Burke asks in the Rhetoric, “)—“is [Plato] not here seeking for the verb, “to be a house,” as the universal in which every particular “being-a-house” would participate?” (Rhetoric 153). This is why Heidegger asks the question of being, because for him, the primary act is being. This is Heidegger’s task from the get-go. For Burke, however, we cannot look into the ‘to be’ in order to find the ‘meaning’ of Being as such. But by going from the idea of “this is this” to “to be a ____”, which is an act and attempt to put it back into a meaning for Burke is somewhat pointless. This is because Burke is primarily interested in actions, which are related to ethics, something with which we all know Heidegger had his issues. This is because, I think, Heidegger tries to place the emphasis on the side of Being rather than the side of action. In other words, whereas pragmatic thinkers like Burke and Dewey want to infuse instrumentality with a sense, (late) Heidegger wants to argue that ‘thinking’ itself is an act that somehow transcends practice and action. As if thinking was something different than acting! (is it?) This is the power of Burke and, I think, Dewey: thinking/acting may be instrumental, but not merely instrumental (see Dewey’s Reconstruction in Philosophy). Heidegger wants thinking to be the primary activity (also seemingly obvious in his metaphors of ‘dwelling’, ‘house of being’, etc.). In his “Letter on Humanism,” Heidegger writes, “The answer is that thinking is neither theoretical nor practical. It comes before this distinction,” which seems all well and good until he says “such thinking has no result. It has no effect. It satisfies its essence in that it is” (259).

           

For Heidegger, especially in his later work, language reveals the world in ways (again, we have to look at the Heideggerian language of ‘alethiea’—this is present even in Being and Time)—for Burke? It argues the world (strange way of putting it, I know). Language only uses us insofar as each word is infused with moral content regarding our actions. But let us return to Heidegger’s Being in Time and see if we locate where this difference comes from.

Dasein (we) understand ourselves in terms “of a possibility of itself: to be itself or not itself” (33). This implies a kind of freedom for human beings (a term that will be made much of by later existentialists, like Sartre).This does not mean that we are unconditioned—this is a mis-reading of much existentialism. However, this does seem to imply that our actions are most related to what we are—our authentic being—rather than acting on the world. We will see what Heidegger thinks as most “authentic.”  My question, as I delve into one of the most useful and complicated sections of the first part of Being in Time, Ch. 5 “Being-in as such,” is: how is Heidegger’s ‘fallenness’ and Burke’s several characterizations of ‘original sin’ different? What are the rhetorical and ethical implications in Heidegger’s articulation of understanding, assertion, discourse, idle talk, and curiosity, and, most importantly, communication?

For Heidegger, we are most authentic when we are most concerned with our own being—when we are reflecting on our possibilities. The state-of-mind (or ‘mood’) of Fear/anxiety/dread (pick your translation of the German) calls us to consider our freedom of possibilities—it takes us away from our ‘involvement’ in the world and lets us reflect on our state in the world. But this is only one side of Dasein, the other being understanding. Richard Polt’s Heidegger, an Introduction explain’s Heidegger’s sense of understanding

But consider our everyday experience of getting to know someone by asking what she does. She answers ‘I am a sculptor’…The statement ‘I am a sculptor’ means (if it is a truly revealing statement) that the possibility of sculpting is an important possibility for her. She understands herself and her world largely in terms of  it…her very identity is formed by her ability to sculpt. In general, our Being is an “ability to be” or “can be. (Polt, 69)

Thus, although this makes a lot of sense, it formulates our being-in ‘as such’ as a process of identity formation—what we want to be. We might also want to look at this in terms of Burke's "occupational psychosis" that he discusses in Permanence and Change. Before we move into Heidegger’s treatment of our interaction with others, let us look at Heidegger’s articulation of Interpretation, which is related to our primordial understanding. I am directly copying from a précis I wrote on Heidegger’s chapter in college:

The as-structure

“That which has been circumspectively taken apart with regard to its “in-order-to”, and taken apart as such—that which is explicitly understood—has the structure of something as something” (Heidegger, 189). For example, we see the hammer as something to hit nails with. The hammer is already interpreted and understood before we perceive it as “ready-to-hand.” Heidegger wants to make sure we understand that this means that an interpretation is not something “added” onto a present-at-hand, but that anything we encounter in the world is already interpreted as something with which we concern ourselves.

The fore-structure

Richard Polt says that the explanation of the 3 main terms here (fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception) is rather vague in Heidegger: “but the main point is that, in various ways, we must already have a ‘take’ on something, as we say, before we can interpret it” (Polt, 71). (If the reader wishes to delve into an attempt at distinguishing these terms and an excellent concrete example, see Gelven’s Commentary pgs 94-96).

Meaning

Meaning is not another way to understand interpretation, but rather it is the term for both the as-structure and the fore-structure together: “When entities within-the-world are discovered along with the Being of Dasein—that is, when they have come to be understood—we say that they have meaning” (Heidegger, 192). Only Dasein is meaningful (Heidegger, 193) because meaning is not a property attached to something present-at-hand, but is inherently related to Dasein’s being. Because Dasein is the only being that can have meaning, it is the only thing that can be meaningless (this is different from “unmeaning,” which characterizes present-at-hand things as “essentially devoid of any meaning at all” (Heidegger, 193).

Michael Gelven points out explicitly how different this is from traditional conceptions of meaning: “For such a rendition of meaning places the focal point of meaning not in the words, but in Dasein” (Gelven, 96). In this next section Heidegger will tell how assertion (statements in words) are derivative of this sort of meaning of Dasein.

Michael Gelven makes a good point. For Heidegger, meaning (and Interpretation) is not in ‘words’ but in Dasein. Words form assertions. Assertions are derivative from Interpretation. Communication can only happen in the realm of assertion, but look at how Heidegger claims assertion mainly describes:

Heidegger defines assertion as “a pointing-out which gives something a definite character and which communicates” (Heidegger, 199). Heidegger explains that the reason assertion is derivative of interpretation is that there is a change in the as-structure: “In its function of appropriating what is understood, the ‘as’ no longer reaches out into a totality of involvements. As regards its possibilities for Articulating reference-relations, it has been cut off from that significance which, as such, constitutes environmentality. The ‘as’ gets pushed back into the uniform plane of that which is merely present-at-hand” (Heidegger, 201). Assertion thus covers up the readiness-to-hand of an object and reveals it merely as a presence-at-hand with a certain “property” rather than involved in a totality.

Somehow, once we put things into ‘words’ and sentences, Heidegger argues that the as “no longer reaches out into a totality of involvements” (199). Somehow, assertions are cut off from the non-verbal world of experience and the assertion transforms Interpretation into presence-at-hand. On one level, I think Burke would agree with this. Indeed, his project is to restore the actions and moral implications (and really ‘force) in words and sentences—but Heidegger does not consider this aspect. Sure, the ‘as’ structure or the ‘action’ of a hammer is covered up by asserting something about the hammer: ‘the hammer is steel,” but assertion (and communication) is not merely descriptive and it is not always signifying. For Burke, assertions (language,words) are tied up with the non-verbal in a forceful way rather than as a kind of ‘derivation’. Heidegger’s “assertion” contains no force. John Muckelbauer argues in The Future of Invention that rhetoric as persuasion is a “constellation of forces,” and is not “primarily concerned with understanding or even with the effort to prevent misunderstanding” but as a consideration of its effects (Muckelbauer 18). If we remember, late Heidegger in Letter on Humanism privileges thinking as something which participates in being rather than acting in the world. Thus, Heidegger leaves no room for a consideration of effects of thinking (this is different from considering the consequences of an act).

In order to really get at the problem with Heidegger putting aside persuasion, we have to move into his discussion of communication. I quote an extensive passage from Being and Time:

‘Communication’ in which one makes assertions—giving information, for instance--is a special case of that communication which is grasped in principle existentially. In this more general kind of communication, the Articulation of Being with one another understandingly is constituted. Through it a co-state-of-mind gets ‘shared’, and so does the understanding of Being-with. Communication is never anything like a conveying of experiences, such as opinions or wishes, from the interior of one subject into the interior of another. Dasein-with is already essentially manifest in a co-state-of-mind and a co-understanding. In discourse Being-with becomes ‘explicitly’ shared; that is to say, it is already, but it is unshared as something that has not been taken hold of an appropriated. (205)

This is a hard passage. But what I think Heidegger is getting at is how communication involves a primordial sharing among Da-sein. But the funny thing about this mit-sein, this publicness of Dasein in the world, is that Heidegger characterizes this as a fallenness and inauthenticity. Heidegger writes, “Thus Dasein’s understanding in the ‘they’ is constantly going wrong in its projects, as regards the genuine possibilities of Being. Dasein is always ambiguously ‘there’—that is to say in that public disclosedness of Being-with-one-another where the loudest idle talk and the most ingenious curiosity [my italics] keep ‘things moving’” (Heidegger 218-219). Heidegger is quick to add that this ‘fallenness’ isn’t ‘bad’ but is just part of how the world is. However, one senses his reservations for this public being-with-one-another. It seems that Burke describes this ‘fallenness’ in detail, which is the rhetorical situation. For Heidegger this ‘being-with’ actually masks other intentions: “Being-with-one-another in the “they” is by no means an indifferent side-by-sideness in which everything has been settled, but rather an intent, ambiguous watching of one another, a secret and reciprocal listening-in. Under the mask of ‘for-one-another’ and ‘against-one-another’ is in play” (219). Even though Heidegger says that this is the pre-condition for care and the possibility for understanding, it still seems as though Heidegger does not think this is the goal/purpose of Dasein. The they-self is where people are at odds and yet, at the same time, ‘with’ one another.

For Heidegger, as I’ve already pointed out, the point of communication and understanding  is to reveal the world so as to genuinely understand things. This comes out in his understanding of ‘ambiguity’ as part of the ‘they’ self:

“Ambiguity deals with the impossibility to tell what is genuine understanding and what is not: “When, in our everyday Being-with-one-another, we encounter the sort of thing which is accessible to everyone, and about which anyone can say anything, it soon becomes impossible to decide what is disclosed in a genuine understanding and what is not” (Heidegger, 217)

            For Burke, language is not primarily related to meaning, understanding, and being, but to actions. Heidegger points us in the right direction, arguing that we must move away from our everyday understanding, but makes the mistake that the criteria of judgment should somehow be ‘understanding’ or meaning. What Burke makes clear, is that language is used and has force and related to moral acts. Later Heidegger moves more and more into an understanding of language as such, which he finds in poetry.  Michael Gelven writes, “We understand language as language only as poetry.” Language is primarily understood as something that we “use” to express ourselves, but, it is only when someone speaks well that we recognize language as language and not as a “tool.”     

But this is precisely what Burke is arguing against: even poetry contains motives that relate to the realm of acts and morality. Poetic language is weighted language: no words are ‘neutral’.

Wheras for Heidegger, we are the “preservers” of being, we watch over language, we attempt to preserve its mystery, Burke de-mystifies. Heidegger dreams of poeisis: “And art was called simply techne. It was a single, manifold revealing. It was pious, promos, i.e. yielding to the holding sway and the safekeeping of truth” (339). Perhaps it is this ‘pious’ attitude that Burke seeks to de-mystify. Its not that piety in itself is bad—on the contrary--but rather than adhering to the piety of a kind of destined and unified truth/Being, Burke seeks to break these pieties by “perspective of incongruity” (see Permanence and Change). There are many pieties: “Piety is the sense of what properly goes with what” (74). And a new piety involves the displacement of an old piety, which involves exhortation. This is why for Burke, assertion really is an ‘assertion’—it exhorts someone to see something a certain way. I love these lines by Burke:

Morals, shaped by the forms and needs of action, become man’s most natural implement when exhorting to action. As implicit in censorial words, they are the linguistic projection of our bodily tools and weapons. Morals are fists [my italics]. . .From this point of view, the moral elements in our vocabulary are symbolic warfare. (P&C 192)

Our ‘fallnness’ for Burke, our ‘categorical guilt’, is not inauthenticity, or impiety towards the revealing of truth, but rather in our material (though non-verbal) relations to one another. Indeed, language as such has an implicit hierarchy. It is this hierarchy that Burke calls the ‘social mystery,’ which, though not the only mystery, “gains in depth, persuasiveness, allusiveness and illusiveness precisely by reason of the fact that it becomes inextricably interwoven with mysteries of these other sorts” (Rhetoric f277). It’s in classification and the motives for each class (not necessarily economic class) that creates a hierarchy. Burke writes in the Rhetoric, “The ‘invidious’ aspects of class arise from the nature of man not as a ‘class animal’ but as a ‘classifying animal’” (282). Thus, persuasion, conflict, and appeal in language would still exist in a ‘communist’ society (as indeed, we have seen by historical example). This is because, so long as we use language, there will be a principle of hierarchy. Language is not descriptive or revealing of reality, but “hortatory.” Language, in its essence, is not to describe, but  to convert to a certain point of view or orientation: “Spontaneous speech is not a naming at all, but a system of attitudes, of implicit exhortations” (P&C 177).

If this is true, then the ‘state-of-mind’ that Heidegger finds within Dasein is transferred to language itself. Language itself, as a creation by man (and woman), has prejudices and motives. As such, language is always ethical and concerned with actions.  

At this point, I’d like to look at two later essays of Burke: “The Definition of Man” and, especially, the brilliant and dense, “A Dramatistic View of the Origin of Language.”

Here are the 5 statements Burke makes about man:

1. Man is the symbol using animal

2. Man is the inventor of the negative (or moralized by the negative!)

3. Man is separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making

4. Man is goaded by the spirit of hierarchy

5. Man is rotten with perfection

(See Language as Symbolic Action pg 16 for a summary)

To me, this is a powerful definition. Burke elaborates on most of these, but particularly the use of the ‘negative’ in the penultimate essay of Language as Symbolic Action. In this essay, Burke traces the negative “as such” back to its possible origins. For Burke, the use of the negative is the essential distinction between the verbal and the non-verbal (LSA 420). Although he allows that, following Bergson, there is no negative in nature (everything is positive), Burke locates the importance of the negative in morality:

a Dramatistic approach would look for the ‘essential’ instance of an admonitory of pedagogical negative—and it would find this to perfection in the negatives of the Ten Commandments. Hence we would ‘start’ in the thought of the negative command” (422).

We can understand how this might be problematic for someone like Victor Vitanza. The mention of “pedagogical negative” and the Christian connotations of Burke’s work (whereas Vitanza draws on Lyotard’s ‘pagan’ philosophy). But I think Burke makes a very convincing case for the negative as a useful aspect of language. As Raul Sanchez pointed out to me the other day, there are a lot of thinkers who are trying to get passed dialectic, which also means getting past the negative. But can we get passed the negative—and—if the negative really is the ‘genius’ of language, do we want that? Burke writes at the end of “A Dramatistic View of the Origins of Language,” “In their positive,  material nature as powers, our many might new technological devices cal for a corresponding set of admonitory controls, or negatives, which are best sanctioned how?” (LSA 479).

Burke explains the negative as an idea as opposed to an image. Why? Because Bergson’s argues that we cannot picture nothing—we have to picture something that ‘means’ nothing. This leads Burke to argue that ideas do not have to be “things,” rather, ideas are in “the realm of action” (430). This is not to say that once a negative is expressed, it does not also include an image: “ ‘Thou shall not kill’ is in essence an idea, in its role as imagery it can but strike the resonant gong: ‘Kill’” (431). This gives me an interesting take on Hegel’s determinate negation: not-kill contains the image of kill, but the idea of a command. This is why not-A, when expressed in words, is something completely different than the ‘opposite’ of A, or ‘nothing’.

Heidegger does not consider ‘ideas’ in this way. In Being and Time, he argues that “even a command is given about something, a wish is about something” (205). Rather than emphasize the ‘something’ (which is the ‘image’), Burke emphasizes the command (and thus the rhetorical, persuasive aspects).

I will probably return to Burke, Kant, Bergson, and Deleuze in my next post, but I think this is enough for now. I think I can also see how this later essay of Burke’s could lead many rhet/comp people into an exploration of Levinas (see Diane Davis). 

Works Consulted/Cited (abridged because of laziness)

Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives

Burke, Kenneth Language as Symbolic Action

Burke, Kenneth. Permanence and Change. 

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. 

Heidegger, Martin. "Letter on Humanism." Basic Writings. 

Muckelbauer, John. The Future of Invention. 

"Natural" Selection?

In the above clip, George Carlin, one of my favorite comedians  discusses "saving the planet" in the context of environmentalists, nature, and pollution.  He claims that "the planet has been through much worse than us," and goes on to cite many examples, attempting to put "environmentalism" in perspective. The reason I post this video here is that I want to to say a little about how we rhetorically (visually and verbally) construct "the natural."

In "Framing the Fine Arts Through Rhetoric," Marguerite Helmers analyzes and exhibition of Homer, the American artist, called "Facing Nature."  The curators of the museum decided to contextualize Homer's paintings in an artificial natural environment, complete with nature sounds and 'audio tour'.  Nature is thus framed as something that is pre-existent and represented, but it is really something artificially constructed as the background for Homer's artwork. The exhibit reinforces its artificiality by mimicking some of these artificially constructed environments in commodified form in the museum gift shop. Helmers believes that in this exhibition and in another painting, Joseph Wright's An Experiment on a Bird in an Airpump, Nature is culturally constructed as "the state for human action, on which dramas of command, conquest, domination, and exploitation are played" (83). The exhibit's title "Facing Nature" becomes strange when we consider that an exhibit's title designates the subject, but here the 'art' subject is Homer's painting and 'nature' serves only as a framework. As Helmers puts it, "within the space of the exhibit, Nature is the occluded term: We are facing culture as we sit on the benches and gaze at the oiled sea" (83).

This passive and humanly constructed view of nature is reinforced by advertisements that 'gender' natural spaces, as Diane Hope's essay, "Gendered Environments," demonstrates. Nature is either associated with 'feminine' beauty and passivity, which may also set the stage for "relationship narratives" (159). Or, alternately, as a force to be reckoned with (read: dominated) by a male figure. For instance, Hope points out that in vehicle ads there are rarely humans represented--nature is the locus for a lone figure's adventure and control (161). By associating a wide array of products with images of a (gendered) natural world, these images justify consumer resignation to environmental degradation as 'natural' while reinforcing essentialist notions of gender (162). Although the exhibition discussed above does not explicitly point this out, it plays into the same narratives of these advertisements by suggesting that true 'nature' is as eternal as the artistic representation of it. As we are bombarded by images of untained nature, we tend to believe that nature is immune to human agency and is something that will 'always be there'.

This at first seems to be the view that George Carlin is advocating in this video clip. He seems to be outright claiming that nature will not go anywhere, but he does say that we initially screwed up the planet by 'interferring' with nature. Although there are still some unresolved tensions in his imagining of nature/'the planet', the power of his rant is giving the planet agency: "the planet will wipe us off like a bad case of fleas." The planet is not a passive background, but personifies it as a thinking being, "viruses! viruses might be good". Though he gets a bit 'mystical' at the end, his satirical take on nature avoids the silliness that seems to be involved in some of the more mystical and new agey rhetoric of nature--at least to me.

Commodified nature explored in these two essays comes to a head in Dickinson and Maugh's essay "Placing Visual Rhetoric: Finding Material Comfort in Wild Oats Market." I've always had some issues with organic and natural food stores and Dickinson and Maugh finally give me a well thought out reason for it. In the same way that the exhibition and advertisments do, Wild Oats hides their underlying consumer ethic. I'm not saying, and I don't think D&M are either, that Wild Oats are bad for doings this, but I think it does reveal some interesting contradictions. For instance, WO wooden shelves, baskets of bulk food (initial unpackaged), and food (in packages) labeled "natural" or "organic" all contribute to the idea that the consumer is not separated from the food. Selecting, packaging, and labelling makes it seem as though the consumer is actually doing something to get the food, even though it is clear that the store is just as convenient as the Publix. To increase this feeling, they have a full service stop that has butchers, fish mongerers, etc. where people can buy fresh cheese and meats. To a lesser extent, this is what Publix does with their meat as well at the 'deli', which seems like a better idea than getting the pre-packaged meat (even if it is the same publix brand meat). The difference is that Wild Oats draws on nostalgic images of older more "authentic" consumption that ultimately mystifies the "social injustices" that inevitably must take place for stores like this to exist (271).

While most of what I have written is summary, I'd like to apply some of these insights to this commercial for McDonalds salads that I found quite disturbing on a couple of levels. The video begins with black text on a white background and it says "Life is not black and white." The ethnicity of the woman in the commercial is a light brown (black, but yet, white enough to appeal to 'white' viewers) except at the beginning when she is filtered through a black-and-white screen. While this might be stretching it, it seems that an underlying ideology in this ad is that whether you are black and white or in between we can all agree on a "green" McDonald's salad. This is reinforced by a very very quick last line at the end of the video, "Green's the new black, dontcha know" said in a particular dialect that seems to indicate the commercial is subtly targeting African Americans. After this black-and-white scene with the woman frowning,  the woman looks up and both yellow M (the Mcdonalds arches) and branches start to spread across the screen as she says/sings (this kind of 'rapping' tone is another thing that seems to be targeted to a stereotypically hip hop culture--or actually, now that i think about it, it is the rhetoric of a slam-poem)  "My mood is lush and green." As she says green, there is the word "green" imposed on a darker green grass and the woman lays down on top of it and smiles. The juxtaposition of the M arches and leaves merges McDonalds with nature and the word green on green grass reinforces the words and images. Its very interesting that the woman says my "mood" is lush and green--its as if not just her diet but her whole consciousness is oriented toward the McDonald's salad or that the McDonald's salad induces a "green" consciousness. The next shot is the woman walking in the grass as she raps "In the field greens, the kind in Mcdonald's salads." The fact that grass is not used in McDonald's salads (or is it?) does not matter because the scene in the grass morphs into a screen full of fresh looking lettuce leaves, then very quickly switches to hands holding cherry tomatoes, romaine lettuce, and something else. While these are showing the woman raps as the shot once again switches to a background of lettuce leaves and the words the woman is saying, "gorgeous green beauties," remains on top of them, associating the salad with these powerful words. When the three salads are shown, the names of the salads are also in green (but notably, different shades each time--emphasizing the diversity of the greens). Everything is centered on the words "green" as another shot features the woman smelling a flower, with the word "green" on a green background and her rapping "I fill my green noon with McDonald's salads," with the last words of the "poem" proper "and I'm tickled pink," showing the woman in a dress--though I almost wrote 'girl' because she really is portrayed as more of a girl in this one image.

I guess it was only time before McDonald's realized they should appropriate literary forms associated with "alternative" consciousness (and slam poetry thrives on imagery and rhythm) to sell their salads.