While the reading you did last week on rhetoric is far from
comprehensive, it hit most of the central concepts of this area of study. I
would stress the most important of these as situationality (versus
universality) and exigence. Understanding that how to
interact/communicate/persuade depends on a situation which has given rise to a
perceived need for that interaction--and thus constrains it--explains much of why writing works the way
it does. (If you didn't see my summary post on rhetoric, might be worth a look.)
In a full-on rhetorical theory class (such as ENGL 450) we
would spend a lot more time on the deeper philosophical implications of
rhetoric that we’ve touched the edges of here -- the nature of knowledge as
experiential (built through interaction among people) rather than purely
objective or subjective, and the inadequacy of absolutes and universals in
meeting contingent situations. (Creating a kind of relativism that makes many
people uncomfortable, until they’re shown that "absolutes" were always
subjective and relative too, and merely claimed not to be in order to gain
power.) Some of these issues will inevitably arise as we study other themes in
the class, so we’ll come back to them in practical ways; in the meantime, it’s
good to know they’re there.
For us as writers rather than philosophers, though, the
study of rhetoric remains most fruitful in response to a writer’s two biggest,
ever-present questions: What makes writing good? And, how should I write this? Out
of these we can find an answer to Mandy’s question: Do writers need to really
understand “the nature of writing,” or can they just write? Writers always just
write, but part of writing is having those first two writerly questions. Using
rhetoric to understand the nature of writing simply tends to yield more usable
answers to them. Rhetoric tells us, you’re supposed to go into a writing
situation asking “What will make this writing good?” and knowing that the
answer will be different than the last time you asked the question. Rhetoric
explains why your professors keep giving you conflicting advice, answers, and
grades on writing, and why that is not broken but rather why it’s inevitable. (And it is the deeper, philosophical role of rhetoric that might
then prompt us to ask, Why did you believe for so long that there was supposed to be consistency, universality, absolutes, across writing
situations, instead of immediately recognizing that quality is contingent upon
exigence and situation? Why would you ever have believed that two different
teachers should give you the same grades on your writing if they read it in two
different situations?)
In your discussion this week it’s seemed that the rhetorical
theory has raised questions about some other assumptions we have about writing,
too, especially originality and individual authorship. Obviously, Porter’s work
challenges our traditional sense of an “Author,” that sole inspired writer who
thinks up the whole story from scratch. (I didn’t, interestingly, see any of
you question Porter’s motives for writing this piece -- that is, I didn’t see
us treating Porter or any of the others as rhetors writing rhetoric.
Hmmm.) Earlier writing technologies
(codex books, for example, as well as addresses to the Roman Senate) emphasized
the individual aspects of writing, and the technologies we study in this class
now emphasize how writing always was never just an individual pursuit. Present
technologies expose the interaction and collaboration that have always been at
the heart of writing. How might it help you to believe this about writing?
Because it might change the way you go about it.
Several of you created a question for me that -- well, I’ve
grappled with the question before but not quite considered it in these terms,
and I think it may help me in some scholarship I’m working on right now. That’s
the question of whether computers, algorithms, software, and tech tools should
be considered rhetors themselves. Opinion seemed to run mostly on the side of
No, which is probably a fair starting point. But as I deepen my own study of
how people interact with texts that are mediated and even created by machines
(we’ll look at this later in the course), it seems probably very fruitful to
use a rhetorical framework that asks, in what ways are these machines, these “inanimate
objects,” rhetors and in what ways are they not? It’s just another angle on the older question of
how humans, as rhetorical beings, “project” rhetoric onto non-humans. Really
good stuff, and your work has given me some fresh angles of vision on it.
Lastly, it seems in classes like this I never get as much chance/time
as I’d like to talk about persuasion, because there’s so much else to study.
I was happy to see a lot of questions and discussions from you around this. In
the shortest possible form, I have a suggestion I’d like you to look for as you
study persuasion around you, based on the pisteis (logos, pathos, ethos). I
want to claim that when something is persuasive to you, the ultimate root of
that persuasion is identification: you see in the person trying to persuade
you values, beliefs, and ideas that you already agree with. (Arguments are
persuasive when they line up with ideas we already agree with.) When we see in
the rhetor our own existing values, beliefs, and ideas (that they’re merely
connecting their own claims to), it’s like looking in a mirror: we look at the
rhetor and we see our best selves, and that is (naturally enough) attractive
and persuasive to us. This post is already long so I won’t explain how each of the
pisteis relate to identification, but maybe later. Just look around you to see
if you could buy my claim, and if so, try to see how that identification is
established. You’ll see logos, pathos, and ethos.
I’ll end this, then, by going back to the root question of
rhetoric: how do you know what you know, why do you think what you think, and
how do we construct knowledge and change our minds through interaction? That may seem to many of you like a strange frame
in which to put “writing,” if you’re thinking about literature and fiction, but
maybe this will help: people are storytellers, “homo narrans.” We know, learn,
and think, in stories. Stories, too, are rhetorical, human interaction through
symbols.
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