schizzes and flows

All That We Cannot See

That’s title of the dissertation as it stands today, with the subtitle being “Rhetoric and Ethics in the Age of Wireless Computing.”

Here’s an overview of the project I wrote for the proposal:

This dissertation examines a long-standing problem within the history and theory of rhetoric—namely, rhetoric’s believed potential to conceal or render invisible aspects of the world and therefore reduce, limit, or distort altogether what rhetoricians can or cannot know about the world and themselves in the world.  This problem can in part be traced back to Plato and his many condemnations of rhetoric and its privileging of contingent knowledge (doxa) over ideal or absolute truth (episteme) and persists today in more contemporary scholarship—even among those critical of Plato—wherein rhetoric’s epistemic capacity to reveal truths of world, whether contingent or not, is embraced and upheld as reason to continue studying and teaching the art, often at the expense of any direct engagement with the idea of concealment as such.  In each of these cases, then, suspicions persist regarding rhetoric’s potential for concealment and its involvement more specifically with what I describe in this dissertation as “the invisible.” 

This potential for concealment, however, may not be as problematic as previously or currently thought.  Re-reading the history of rhetorical concealment through phenomenological philosophy and the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty in particular, I argue that rhetoric’s complex relationship with concealment and the invisible more specifically may, in fact, distinguish it as an art most equipped to help rhetoricians understand the role and place of rhetoric in today’s technologically saturated and mediated environments.  While the desktop computer remains a staple in much of the business and networked world, a significant shift is currently underway in the area of wireless computing to design more mobile and spatially embedded devices that have the potential to elude users’ conscious attention by withdrawing into the perceptual backgrounds of everyday lived experience.  By examining these devices in terms of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment, emplacement, and intercorporeality, I argue that we can begin to recover for/through the history of rhetoric a more nuanced and generative theory of the invisible that may enrich current understandings of rhetoric and ethics and their places in an increasingly—and paradoxically—solitary and mediated life-world. 

And the chapter titles:

1.  Introduction (Boring!)
2.  The Secret Blackness of Milk: Rhetoric, Concealment, and the Hum of the Invisible
3.  Toward a Rhetorical Phenomenology of Human-Technology Relations
4.  Rhetorical Being-in-the-World: Agency and Rhetorical Situation in the Age of Wireless Computing
5.  A Sort of Dehiscence: Ethos, Flesh, and the Extended Rhetorical Self
6.  (i)Touching-Touched: Ethics, Alterity and the Future of Rhetoric
7.  Conclusion: Rhetoric and the World Without Us

I already have a good bit of Chapters 3 and 4 complete, and plan to use my upcoming CCCC paper on episteme, complexity theory, and writing technologies to address some of the conclusions I’ll drawn near the end of the dissertation (namely, that an attunement to the invisible in rhetoric suggests a need to reexamine the importance and usefulness of ontology and even metaphysics in rhetorical theory, albeit from a decidedly posthuman orientation).

That leaves Chapters 1, 2, 5, and 6 to think and write through.  And as much as I’d like to dive in and wrangle with the more interesting or manageable parts—such as the stuff on ethos and agency—the linear workhorse in me just won’t let that happen.  So this morning I started working on page 1, chapter 1.  Boring, I know, but I just can’t see doing it another way. 

Relatively Speaking

This ain't bad at all for February in Madison...

Parable of the Cave in Clay

So it turns out I have a blog...Who knew?

I'm planning to post more frequently in the coming weeks.  News about the dissertation (now officially in dissertation mode) to share.  And, of course, there's that CCCCs paper coming up...

In the meantime, here's an interesting take I recently found on Plato's famous metaphor of the cave, complete with award willing claymation:

Watson Conference 2008

I'm back from Louisville after a mostly successful conference.  Saw some really excellent papers, met some new folks, and sampled a few local bourbons (the Makers Mark, btw, was my favorite).  I'm considering reworking my paper for Philosophy & Rhetoric, although I admittedly don't have high hopes that they'll take it.  Still, since I'm revisiting Bitzer's famous '68 essay on the rhetorical situation, and since a number of responses appeared in that journal's pages, it makes sense to direct it that way (many thanks to CRM for recommending this move).

Now, on to some scenes from Louisville:

Exploring downtown Friday afternoon.

I didn't catch what building this is, but it dates back to the late 1700s.  Very cool.

Random red penguin adorning a building downtown.

Louisville Slugger factory and museum.  Also, biggest bat in the world.

A special exhibit in the Louisville Slugger museum on, um, the Presidents' balls.  Here are Bill Clinton's.

The lobby of the Muhammad Ali Center.

Rik, the Colonel, and a bucket.  Ah, Louisville... 

Update

Thanks to everyone who emailed or called to ask about my absence.  It was a tough summer.  Had some health problems.  Had to finish prelims (successfully I'm happy to say!).  But things are starting to look up again, so look forward to some new posts soon.  There is, after all, a dissertation to write now...  

Remembering Carlin

I was sad to read about George Carlin's unexpected death today.  I've been a fan of his since I was a teenager.  What I dug most about his stuff then, of course, had less to do with his truly impressive understanding of rhetoric and the absurdities of language and more his irreverence and (apparent) distaste for all things excessive and outrageous (as it turns out, Carlin was actually one of the sweetest and most generous people in show business, always willing to talk and listen to fans who would stop him on the street). As I got older and (maybe) a bit wiser, and as I began to think seriously about how language functions and has an effect on how we understand ourselves and our world, I began to notice this other side of Carlin's act, the one he's being most remembered for today.  

Here's a taste of that later (and much darker) Carlin.  Of all of his 1980s and 90s satires, this is probably my favorite.  I love the way he sets the audience up here, getting them to buy into the excesses he seems to be selling only in the end to turn the tables on that enthusiasm, demonstrating why such an attitude is the problem in the first place.  (Like any of Carlin's routines, of course, this isn't for everyone, so be advised.)   

        

More Travels

Last week Jhondra and I took our first vacation together in five years, spending seven days with friends in DC and taking in some of the less touristy sights and (most importantly) taking a break from school, work, and (as it turned out) terrible flooding in the midwest.  Perhaps the most memorable highlight, for me at least, came early in the trip when J and my friend surprised me with tickets to REM at Merriweather. Thankfully, the weather cooperated that night, giving Stipe and company some relief from the oppressive heat as they rocked a terrific blend of old and new material.  Later in our trip, we heard some more great music at Baltimore's annual Honfest, a John Waters-inspired block party featuring eclectic dresses and hairstyles and, as it turns out, some of the best local rockabilly going.    

Here are some other highlights from the trip:

The day of the REM show we hiked around the Potomac's Great Falls, a few miles north of downtown DC.

Later that afternoon, we drove over to Glen Echo Park, a century-old amusement park that's been converted into an artist colony and national park.  An impressive collection of Art Deco buildings, including a fully restored carousel.

The National Building Museum, downtown.  This is where Hillary Clinton gave her concession speech a few weeks ago.  An absolutely stunning space.         

Watching the Orioles at Camden Yards.  IMHO, still one of the best venues in all of MLB.  Unfortunately, though, it wasn't the O's day, loosing to the Pirates in extra innings. 

On the way back to National Airport, we stopped by National Harbor, a mixed use collection of upper scale chain restaurants and hotels right off the Beltway near the Wilson bridge.  Not much to say about this place other than that the sand sculpture was pretty creative... 

RSA 2008

I'm back from Seattle after a terrific conference (isn't RSA the best?). Lots of great food and conversation. Thanks to all who came out to celebrate my birthday Saturday (and thanks as well for the many celebratory drinks). Now, it's time to get back to work and flesh out these prelims essays before leaving again for DC next week.

 

The view from our room on the Westin's 32nd floor.  Jealous, aren't you?

Inside the Seattle Public Library.  Seriously, one of the coolest buildings ever.

The Pike Place Public Market (and the largest crab legs I've ever seen).

Typical Seattle weather: departing cruise ships in Elliott Bay.

A bit sunnier now, with some spaceship thing in the background.

Difficult to capture, but Frank Gehry's Experience Music Project

The Task of the Translator

I’m (finally) taking the foreign language proficiency exam this afternoon. Even though I’ve been taking a crash course in Spanish grammar this semester—and even though all of my colleagues assure me I’ll pass—I’m still nervous as hell. A little on the exam: unlike some other departments, the English department doesn’t allow us to choose the text—that’s left up to the language instructor. And since most people outside of English department think we just sit around all day reading novels, that’s often what we get: Marquez, Allende, etc. Now, maybe in certain cases fiction’s easier to translate than scholarly prose, but my admittedly limited experience suggests otherwise. To put it simply, I’ll take boring academic-ese over metaphoric and idiomatic expressions any day of the week (at least in this context).

Of course, it all comes down to accuracy and how fluent the instructor/grader expects you to be. On this front, I think there’s some wiggle room, enough at least to keep me from totally freaking out. Still, I keep thinking about what Benjamin says about translation. If only I could get this kind of latitude this afternoon:

Fragments of a vessel which are to be glued together most match one another in the smallest details, although they need not be like one another. In the same way a translation, instead of resembling the meaning of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s mode of signification, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel. For this very reason translation must in large measure refrain from wanting to communicate something, from rendering the sense, and in this the original is important to it only insofar as it has already relieved the translator and his translation of the effort of assembling and expressing what is to be conveyed. In the realm of translation, too, the words [in the beginning was the word] apply. On the other hand, as regards the meaning, the language of a translation can—in fact, must—let itself go, so that it gives voice to the intentio of the original not as reproduction but as harmony, as a supplement to the language in which it expresses itself, as its own kind of intentio.

Doppelgängers

Two things have come up recently that have me thinking about the uncanny experience one has in the presence of his or her double or doppelgänger.  First, I’ve been watching two videos of my teaching in the Writing  Center as part of my on-going training and professionalization.  Or, more accurately, I’ve been on-and-off watching these videos because, well, the whole experience is just a little weird.  I mean, I get the idea of video reflection—the way it removes, as much as possible, the radically subjective perceptions many of us hold about ourselves and our teaching, thereby giving us an opportunity to see our practices for what they really are (an ideal to be sure, but that’s a different post).  So I get it, but I can’t for the life of me concentrate on such things when I’m brought face-to-face with the image of a person that on the one hand resembles me and yet on the other seems so totally other as well.

Second, and perhaps a little less extreme: While listening to Byron and Thomas’s Re/inter/views with Vitanza this morning, I found myself in the presence of another kind of double, in this case in the form of VV reading, revising, riffing on questions Adam and I drafted about B and T’s respective book projects.  Again, a similar feeling of estrangement, of disturbance, only this time the voice speaking was and was not my own.  The interviews were great.  And really the questions were only designed to get the authors talking, which they did wonderfully for much of the time.  Still, with every question came that unshakable sense of the unheimliche.

For Freud, of course, the double holds a particular relation to the uncanny.  The appearance of one's doppelgänger—one's face/voice present in the form of another—opens a space for the return of the repressed by way of the disturbed recurrence of the same.

Here's Freud:  The double constitutes “the appearance of persons who have to be regarded as identical because they look [or sound] alike.  This relationship is intensified by the spontaneous transmission of mental processes from one of these persons to the other—what we would call telepathy—so that the one becomes co-owner of the other's knowledge, emotions and experience.  Moreover, a person may identify himself with another and so become unsure of his true self; or he may substitute the other's self for his own.  Finally, there is the constant recurrence of the same thing, the repetition of the same facial features, the same characters, the same destinies, the same misdeeds, even the same names, through successive generations...Its uncanny quality can surely derive only from the fact that the double is a creation that belongs to a primitive phase in our mental development, a phase that we have surmounted, in which it admittedly had a more benign significance.  The double has become an object of terror, just as the gods become demons after the collapse of their cult.”          

Yeah.

(Btw, I don’t mean for my discussion of VV interviews to sound like I’m smarting from any perceived lack of recognition.  Quite the contrary in fact: in my view, Adam and I have received more than enough credit, perhaps even too much credit.  Just sayin’.)