The Epistemology of Legos

            I post in the shadow of Megan’s well-written voice impugning binaries.  In the spirit of contrast, and because the experienced minds of Fish, Pirsig, and Ramage are not daft to the shortcomings of categorical thinking, it behooves me to consider the benefit of binaries.  In making the case for these stark distinctions will hopefully defend and shed light on the rhetoricians we have thus studied.

            So, let’s talk Legos.  Nearly everyone has memories of the classic puzzle-toy; many involving the painful discovery of a lost one via the soft sensory tissue of the feet.  But what did we do, when we were serious about creating something?  We organized them in piles—color, shape, function (wheels, shutters, joints), etc.  We organized them to more effectively build them.  The creation that manifested from careful sorting and choosing was inevitably more creative and complex than the simple piles on the carpet. The title of a category never exhaustively defined the entirety of its contents, like “curvy pieces,” but was enough to allow effective selection when creating.

Process.

            To me, this is the benefit of binaries.  We define homo seriosis and homo rhetoricus not because all individuals must align with one category or the other, but because the parting line enables examination of two dominant viewpoints regarding rhetoric.  Doug once noted that “Economics posits impossibly rational humans as its baseline for analysis.”  That is, the model is not so much existent or perfect, as it is a tool to analyze—to think.  Consider that Classical and Romantic are two ways of discussion, not two definitions.  Distinguishing “square” from “groovy” is imperfect, like my childhood piles of Legos were imperfect (I never knew to which group the half-brick/half-curve pieces belonged), but allows us to build, to create, and to discover new ideas about rhetoric— about ourselves. 

            I am no proponent of confining boxes; I do not disagree with the danger and fallibility of strict categories—male and female, for one.  The spectrum exists, but would there be valuable specialized female psychologists if we were entirely against categories?  These professionals study the dominant traits within

Choosing perspectives...

women not to confine them (as many are feminists themselves) but to create a framework of understanding saying, “these behaviors are what we often see at play,” to enable further thinking and examination.  In considering the painted distinction of homo seriosis and homo rhetoricus, it is essential to lean conversation away from bad versus good, and instead consider how these categories are working—what they offer as tools to examine rhetorical situations.  Pirsig noted that irritation is symptomatic of a deeper issue (pg. 6.)  Indeed, our aversion to binaries reveals our vast difference and uniqueness as individuals, which is great!  But, to again quote Pirsig, “If you tried to solve all the mystery, you’d never get the machine fixed” (pg. 99.)  Would the conversations and observations we’ve had thus far in class been inhibited or hindered if we lacked categories from which to build thoughts, impressions, and ideas?  Would our rich discussions been enabled if we lacked the ideas put forth by Fish, Ramage, and Pirsig?  How long would it take to read a textbook titled, The Exhaustive List of Rhetorical Perspectives?  Such a book will never exist, because it would be infinite.  Romantic and Classic views of thinking are tools we can use to deconstruct and rebuild our personal machines of rhetoric.   Megan noted that in her perspective, individuals can “switch between classical and romantic based on the situation they've been placed in.”  Fish writes, “Truth itself is a contingent affair, it assumes a different shape in the light of differing local urgencies and the convictions associated with them” (pg. 126.) 

So choose pieces you like, from the piles of homo seriosis and homo rhetoricus.  Use the binaries as tools to facilitate the building of great conversations and great pieces of writing. 

Anjeli D.

50 Shades of Rhetoric

In my many experiences with Fish (which have been at least once a semester since entering the writing program) I've always had a hard time with the idea of categorizing people in two different and mutually exclusive categories such as rhetoricus and seriosus or classical and romantic. Fish suggests that people must be one or the other, and Pirsig mentions something similar to this on pages 74-75 as well, "Persons tend to think and feel exclusively in one mode or the other and in doing so tend to misunderstand and underestimate what the other mode is all about."

While I see where both of them are going here, I still cannot entirely agree. I am a firm believer that we cannot be just one of the two, but that we are all a little bit of each (classic and romantic, serious and rhetorical) in certain moments. I find that people tend to fulfill the roles that people need them to fulfill at a given point in time, and in doing so they can switch between classical and romantic based on the situation they've been placed in. I think that rhetoricus has the full potential to step in seriosus' shoes and take a peek from the serious man's point of view, and that think that seriosus (while being entirely resistant to stepping in the rhetorical man's shoes) could do the same. We may have the tendency to see from one side more frequently, but I don't believe that we are firmly just one and not the other.

So like Kaylee, I can't quite wrap my mind around why it is common practice to not only limit people to two categories of people, but also to place the "two" types of people in contrast with each other. I find that this is one of the greater struggles I have with considering this part of rhetoric. In fact, on page 82, Pirsig writes "Once we have a handful of sand, the world of which we are conscious, a process of discrimination goes to work on it. This is the knife. We divide the sand into parts. This and that. Here and there. Black and white. Now and then. The discrimination is the division of the conscious universe into parts." My immediate response to that was to write in my purple pen, "But what about the people who see the gray?" By this I mean, that I simply don't understand why it has to be just one thing or another. Yes, there is a great divide between black and white, and yes they sit on opposite ends of a spectrum, but that's just it--they are on a spectrum.



Take this gradation between black on the left and white on the right, there are infinite variations of grey that fall between the two extremities. If things have to be "black and white" as Pirsig puts it, then why are there so many varying shades of grey that make up the space between black and white? I simply cannot believe that the two colors would be opposites if there weren't middle group in which people could fall near or far or smack in the middle of the two ends. Furthermore, why do we so often choose to ignore them when talking about the way people look at the world? It's almost as if we purposefully turn a blind eye to the existence of the gray area.

I feel like this is at least a little bit of what I took from Kim's post. It's as if we can immediately label people as Type A or Type B, but in reality they are not always all Type A or always all Type B. Each person can have natural tendencies toward one or the other but they are not always one way in every situation. We can be both logical and artistic. We can exist within ourselves as both a thinker and a doer. And sometimes to most compelling people we encounter are the ones who hold what we personally deem the best qualities from either side, classic and romantic. I know that this probably sounds redundant to what I said last week--about how not every rhetorical situation calls for the same response--but that's simply how I currently understand the way of the world and the way of rhetoric.

Also, Kaylee, I also adored the quote from page 42, "Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousand and thousands of these ghosts from the past." It's both chilling and inspiring, although I can't quite say I understand exactly what Pirsig is getting at in his narrative on the whole just yet. We shall see.

My handful of sand

As I mentioned in class, Fish can’t seem to escape the contextual constraints surrounding his theory. Pirsig, conversely, seems to delve into who/what we are when we aren’t necessarily trying. This quickly brings me to intentionality, a snag that I keep encountering in my definition of rhetoric. Is someone (or something) still rhetorical when they don’t intend to be? Is it even possible to deliberately eschew rhetoric, or is that a form of rhetoric in itself?

In relation to Kim’s post, I wonder if her friend is internally working hard at emulating those traits as part of her personal rhetoric, or whether that is simply the natural. As Persig astutely observes, we don’t “have” a personality, we “are” a personality.

Two quotes in the reading so far made me pause, put down the book and reflect for a while on the concept of perception—which is somehow simultaneously highly personal and a shared experience.

“But one does not convert individuals into mass people with the simple coining of a mass term.” (pg. 25)

“Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past.” (pg. 42)

“We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape around us and call that handful of sand the world.” (pg. 82)

Truthfully, I’m still working through how these quotes can be related to rhetoric; I feel as if I’m just scratching the surface. I do wonder—why must rhetoricians like Fish create a blaring dichotomy between rhetoric and logic when the human mind can often alternate between these two ways of thinking?

I keep going back to an example a professor used in an Honor’s seminar class my freshman year that attempts to reconcile fields of scientific and “groovy” thought:

He said something along the lines of, “just because we know the scientific processes that cause the colors of a sunset or the biological reason that flowers bloom does not make these things any less beautiful—if anything, the ability to consider life’s many phenomena on multifarious levels makes them all the more beautiful.”

Pirsig seems to think that these two forms of thinking, classical and romantic, cannot overlap without losing some of the beauty of one form or the other.

I can’t quite decide with whom I agree.

This all seems a little nebulous and unclear, but so are my thoughts on the topics at hand. I’m hoping that I will have a firmer grasp on (narrator) Pirsig’s views the further we get into the narrative, as the group moves steadily westward.

A Juicy Contradiction

Last week Megan concluded her blog with a realization that already trumps the “logic” typically scaffolding binaries of our culture’s thought in place (nice move!). She states that no two rhetorical situations call for the same hat, and she thereby automatically shuts down the possibility that we always have just two options to respond with in rhetorical exchanges. This week’s prompt asks us to draw on personal experiences that more or less crumble categories our cultural genealogy loves to prolong about Rhetorical People/Serious People, homo rhetoricus/homo seriosus, and Classical or Romantic People. I honestly don’t believe the first half of this prompt is flawlessly achievable, but I will do my best! I say this because as soon as I start trying to categorize someone, my mind automatically jumps to the ways in which they just won’t fit neatly. Buuuut, gotta get ‘er done!

I recently met a fellow student who initially struck me as the epitome of a homo seriosus. Even after a semester of an INTENSE course on rhetoric, this student persisted with notions that all meaning is constructed by language only (outdated theories of Structuralism, which Fish refers to circa 130-133 of “Rhetoric”), and that he just didn’t see “the point” of rhetoric. This young man even self-proclaims his “social deficiency,” and is always the first to deny emotional intelligence on his part because of his rather steadfast intellectual mind (are those things mutually exclusive?). Seems to fit the description of a homo seriosus perfectly, right? Well, not really…to me, at least, because I see in him a very human need of love and acceptance, something that seems a constant insecurity in his conversation though he won’t say it explicitly—he asks for it in shaded, guarded ways, like complementing someone else just in hopes to hear praise in return. Everything about that type of interaction is rhetorical, even manipulative on some level. Also, his very self-proclamation of lack of social intelligence is evidence that he is self-aware of his own deficiency, which means he is actually quite intelligent about his own emotional makeup. This guy reminds me of a classic case of what Pirsig explains “a source of trouble” because “Persons tend to think and feel exclusively in one mode or the other and in doing so tend to misunderstand and underestimate what the other mode is all about (Zen 74-75). My next example shows not only someone who I believe has this exact awareness that Pirsig describes, but also the enjoyment she gets out of life because of it.

One of my best friends, Torrey, explicitly defies self-explanatory categories in a very self-aware way. Since the first couple of days I met this girl, I had to constantly think of the Starburst slogan: “a juicy contradiction,” and before this post gets totally weird, let me explain why: I was naturally drawn to explaining her as a paradoxical person because of all my current colleagues, she is by far the most representative of someone I just want to chill with on a Friday night, despite the fact she is wickedly smart and a wonderful teacher to her Writ 101 sections. I really admire that she can be on-it intellectually, yet socially affluent enough to work a room and never break a sweat out of nerves or insecurity. She definitely embodies the paradoxical nature of existence that work like Pirsig, Fish, and Ramage illuminate about how binaries are totally insufficient; we can be emotionally-intelligent creatures and still enjoy learning theory just for theory’s sake, for example.  Torrey stands out as an instance of this to me because she is wise and self-aware enough to know she needs to be a little bit of everything: rational, logical, reasonable, but also free-spirited, flexible, and open-minded to—as she calls it— personal revision. I am drawn to people like this because they seem to live much more peaceful and fulfilling lives than people who try to live dogmatically by categorizing and labeling themselves (Just let it fucking be, yo!). Oh, and the reason why she reminds me of a “juicy” candy is just because she is so much fun to be around that we are commonly dubbed double-trouble when we are together—whoopsie. Nothing dry or too homo seriosus about that lady!

Understanding Rhetoric . . . Or maybe just getting a slippery grip on it

Like Kaylee, I feel like I don't really have a true grasp on what I take "rhetoric" to mean. I feel like every time we come to some conclusion, some meaning, I lose grip on what I thought I knew about the thing and start getting a new and much more slippery grasp on rhetoric. And so it seems it must go. Don't feel alone in your struggle for understanding rhetoric Kaylee, I don't think anyone REALLY gets it even if they sound like they do . . . You never know when you're going to encounter something that totally shifts your view of rhetoric and tears all of the things you thought you knew to pieces! It seems to happen to me a-freaking-lot.

As with Kaylee, I tend to believe that rhetoric must come from human intention and creation. Although, this could simply be the way I think of the subject today, tomorrow I might see it in an entirely different light . You see, simply defined, I work on the idea that rhetoric is human interaction and communication of all forms. It doesn't necessarily have to be alphabetical. The odd thing is, is that if rhetoric doesn't have to revolve around the use of words yet it does have to be intentional, how can we say that animals are not intentionally communicating among each other? Here I am just playing devil's advocate to my own understanding of rhetoric, but you see the snag? Even in a definition as broad as the one I am working with as of late, there is still room for broadening it and making it even more discombobulated. I am not against the expansion of my own current working definition of rhetoric, but including animals as rhetors just seems a bit too far out there for me at the current moment.

For me, Ramage drew a more agreeable response from me in regards to the way rhetoric is presented and the way that I tend to see rhetoric. Much like Anjeli, I found myself highlighting certain things that really seemed to align with or expand upon my thoughts on rhetoric. One passage that really resonated with me was on page 10, "Rhetoric rejects the idea that the world consists entirely of true things that are real and untrue things that are illusory and that reason is the process by which we sort them out and rid the world of error and illusion. For rhetoric, the world is full of overlapping partial truths and the task of reason is to figure out which is truest--most meaningful, most effective--in a given situation, setting the others aside for the time being, possibly holding them in reserve for a different occasion when on of the may be the more appropriate choice." Of all of the things Ramage states in the first chapter, this is the truest for my current understanding of rhetoric.

While sometimes it seems that rhetoric is an all-encompassing umbrella, to me it seems more like a fashionable man putting on a different hat to suit the occasion spending his time beneath the umbrella of partial truths. No two occasions call for the exact same outfit, nor do any two occasions call for the same truth that rhetoric offers. I just found that profoundly instrumental in helping me to further get a firmer grip on the way that I see and understand rhetoric. I wouldn't say my grip is strong, or secure yet, but maybe a little less slippery than it was before I walked into this class and indulged in these readings! (PS today's rhetoric hat, I decided, was a nice bowler hat!)

"An [un]organized attempt to discover ambiguity"

Actual representation of me studying rhetoric.

Phew. Here we go again.

Placing all the elements of rhetoric under one umbrella definition is comparably insufficient to suggesting the creator of the universe can be reduced to a singular being, a single name. 

The deeper I venture into the study of rhetoric, the more I see it as a “theory of everything” rather than a mere component of writing—which is very difficult for me to wrap my head around. I may be a little behind the others in my group in feeling as if I actually understand rhetoric.

Angeli's post displays the difficult multiplicity of rhetoric that Ramage is trying to unpack. He’s trying to get us to take the rhetorical turn not only in our writing, but also in our lives.

Ramage suggests that words are simply the tip of the rhetorical iceberg, in comparison to the meanings, connotations and intentionality that lies beneath.

Speaking of figures of speech, Kennedy had some interesting points about the “energy” that the reader associates with metaphors and tropes, and that the writer intentionally conveys this energy when they record their thoughts. Kennedy’s argument hinges on the idea that rhetoric is energy.

Not only does Kennedy suggest that this rhetorical energy transferred, but that it is what compels us to speak in the first place, and that the exigence we experience internally as humans led to the development of language, storytelling and expression.

As Kim mentioned, equating rhetoric to energy seems far too broad and impossible to grasp. However, unlike Kim, I believe that rhetoric is limited to humans and human creations and that a certain degree of intentionality must be present to make an object or action rhetorical. The act of rhetoric could certainly be defined as concentrating energy into characters (writing), speech or body language, which convey that energy to others.

Although I find his explanation of rhetoric in the animal kingdom compelling, I don’t necessarily agree that animals are rhetorical. Kennedy doesn’t leave much room for biological drive, and its here (in my opinion) that his argument verges on pseudoscience.

However, the first sentence of Kennedy’s piece is perhaps the single greatest phrase I have read about rhetoric: “After spending much of my professional life teaching rhetoric, I began to wonder what I was talking about.”

I feel the same way about my own study of rhetoric.

While both Kim and Angeli seem to have eloquent, intelligent and coherent ideas on the issue, all I have to offer in terms of rhetoric at present is a tangle of confused notions. Each semester of learning rhetoric seems like starting over and re-learning the term in context.

I’m (hopefully) getting there…

Response to Anjeli's Metamorphosis, Cookery, and Justice

In her insightful post discussing a former rhetorical showdown, Anjeli mentions that relative, contingent information suits the cause of her friend, “the better arguer,” and thereby that information becomes the opponent’s “truth.” I really enjoyed that Anjeli took on this baffling facet of rhetoric that seeks to generate relative truths, similar to what Ramage explains as the indelible task of Rhetorical People who get between Laws of Contradictions, as opposed to the Serious People. It seems a precarious task at best…constantly generating the wisdom to know we can’t always have all the answers, and even when we do, there are intangible properties of conversation that virtually or perceptually trump the existence of a more “accurate” truth simply because it was “better argued,” as Anjeli shows us. I think what most intrigues me about her reaction to this phenomenon, though, is the inclination to associate rhetoric’s properties with an allegiance to subjective knowledge. I mention this because where I currently come from, in the conversation of rhetoric, is a very uncertain place of what constitutes subjective knowledge, or if such a category is even adequate to describe the nature of epistemology as it morphs into relative rhetorical truths. Hold tight, brb…

I was a bit amused to encounter George Kennedy’s work in this first week of class after initially being introduced to him in another work: “Play of Sniffication: Coyotes Sing in the Margins” by Natasha Seegart. Though Seegart laments the limited attention Kennedy’s article received for its expansive and inclusive definition of “rhetoric as energy,” she also explains in her work a reason why perhaps this definition didn’t hold prolonged sway—it was simply too expansive. General physical laws of the universe shows us that all matter is comprised of compressed energy, and thereby the definition of rhetoric as energy is sweet for its open invitation to the playground, but it is not realistically helpful because literally everything would be rhetoric. Seegart alternatively defines rhetoric as a “relational force of signals,” which, to me, captures the expansiveness rhetoric deserves, without creating futile, limitless boundaries.

 This brings me back to the binary of objective and subjective knowledge because I absolutely concur with definitions of rhetoric that attribute agency to not just human subjects, but virtually anywhere a “signal” can exist. Notions of subjective and objective knowledge are constructs of human perception, but what precedes these constructs are faculties of the mind, or signals sent, that are able to conceive of such a construct in the first place, and therefore I don’t believe either category is fully adequate to describe the nature of knowledge as both can be rhetorically conceived. I also believe this means we have to attribute rhetorical agency to the faculties able to construct knowledge, allowing us to explore the constructs of rhetoric in the first place. If we know “there is no recipe (EVER) that can guide the slow-food cooking” (Ramage 31) of rhetoric, then there is something undeniably subversive about claiming the constant truth of inchoate recipes describing knowledge, and therefore rhetorical objectivity and subjectivity implode.

--Kimbo Hoover

Metamorphosis, Cookery, and Justice

“A Hoot in the Dark” is a rather apt title, as our beginning pages present Rhetoric as large, significant, and amazing, but shadowed from a clean-cut description. Thumbing back over the pages, following is a selection of the numerous definitions of Rhetoric I underlined:

· “…The energy inherent to communication: the emotional energy that impels the speaker to speak…” (Kennedy, 106)

· “…the diffusion of energy and the growth of information in communication.” (K, 117)

Moving on to the less Gambit-ty ones… (energy diffusion, anyone?)

· “Rhetoric…has to do with the production/interpretation of symbolic acts and usually has to do with persuasion.” (Ramage, 1)

· “Every symbolic act, including some that appear not to be symbolic…” (R, 9)

· “…a voluntary association of people on a more or less equal footing engaging in symbolic activity both for pleasure and enlightenment.” (R, 9)

· “Making the determination of what is possible in ‘any given circumstance’—in this particular time and place, for this particular audience in response to this particular sort of symbolic art—is what constitutes method in rhetoric.” (R, 16)

· “…an organized attempt to discover ambiguity and to use those discoveries to leverage new possibilities for meaning.” (R, 20)

· “A complex dialectical process in which two different ways of seeing the issue are tested against one another.” (R, 26)

· “…a means for generating ethical goods.” (R, 28)

Answering the prompt, the examples of rhetoric offered throughout the pages connect with my previous understandings, in that rhetoric is linked with persuasion and truth-deciding. The examples and readings, however, also altered my sense of the topic we prepare to undertake.  My foremost ideas of rhetorical persuasion were strongly methodic, but as I see through the differing presentations of rhetoric, it is not so much a cookbook with rules (ahh, cookery metaphors) as it is a cabinet from which to draw a plethora of different processes, ideas, means, manners, and styles, and apply them discretionarily, appropriately, and creatively. My mother often said, “Circumstances change things.” This communicates rhetorical purpose for me—that truth and the methods of revealing it are in motion, but worth finding still.

A story about rhetoric (I presume the prompt meant story loosely, as in narrative or

Ethics aren't always situational,
but take it from Cyanide and Happiness that context is key.

paradigm, but I’m telling a “real” story) that comes to mind occurred nearly six years ago, in my awkward tweenage times. I was arguing with a friend about something quite irrelevant now (implications of a graphic on my t-shirt), and became frustrated and flabbergasted upon recognizing that although I was right, she was the better arguer. At the time, it left me feeling defeated and caged. Now, it leads me to question the acquisition of knowledge and epistemological processes. If I was “proven wrong” at the time, did it actually alter my rightness? If I convince an assembly of people of something false, does it somehow become right? It is truth to them, and it is not difficult to argue that knowledge is subjective. Therefore, can untruth undergo a process of metamorphism and become truth? Weighty stuff.

Concurrently, I want to address the idea of “bad” rhetoric. If rhetoric is used for shameful means, does it inherently become criminal? Doubtful. I believe the same way a firearm can accomplish justice or create terror, we must look to the holder. We are here to study an art that allows us to understand: “The world is full of overlapping partial truths,” and the role of rhetoric and reason “is to figure out which is truest—most meaningful, most effective—in a given situation, setting the others aside for the time being, possibly holding them in reserve for a different occasion when one of them may be the more appropriate choice.” (Ramage, 10)

Ornithology isn’t my specialty, but I am excited to examine elements of this creature rhetoric.