Various course discussions, prompts, and writing exercises:
Rhetoric is? What is it? Or, better yet, what does rhetoric do? The latter more pragmatic orientation: that’s what we want to invoke. Doing things with words. Words doing things with us. True, classical rhetorical strategies of invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery, as prescribed to rhetorical adepts for millienia, often insist on definition. Definition is itself a rhetorical strategy. But when you enact definition (rather than simply listing it), you are faced with the impossibility of this ontological bugbear “what is rhetoric?”
I’ve come to understand rhetoric as the way language is both facilitated and understood. Briefly reading through the syllabus, I think it’s going to be interesting to study it in terms of ancient Greek writing as (from what I understand) that’s where a lot of philosophy originated. I think it’s important to study rhetoric, in this case I guess I mean the way we communicate, why we do, and what that yields, because it seems like it’s a sort of foundation for people. Outside of studying rhetoric in terms of origin, I’ve learned that it’s important to continue to study rhetoric because it allows us to hone in on different ideas and realities that often need dissecting, For example, by reading and writing about the contextualization of gender, that might expand into identity as a whole and the way that is applied to society in different proportions, both generally and interpersonally.
Rhetoric, Kairos, and the Rhetorical Situation
It was interesting to undertake this past week after reading the ‘Kairos and Rhetorical Situation’ and, to kind of bounce off what was mentioned, relate everything through acknowledging its rhetorical situation. For a specific example, yesterday at work we had a coffee quality control day, and we retouched on testing flavor profiles and common aromas we smelled. Because the coffee industry, like anything, becomes more political and complex the more you learn and read about it, we discussed the centralization of a certain narrative in terms of the types of flavors people are more keen to name. There’s starting to be a discussion about this in other industries like wine, but in short the flavors people test on for wine and coffee and use to ‘score’ for quality is very Eurocentric. And, for example, someone who enters into this industry from a completely different location isn’t going to have the same flavor vocabulary; but that doesn’t mean they are wrong or that they should be out of touch. This was such a distinct conversation that was only provoked by the situation, context, and the people within it. What was also interesting about it was it opened up a rabbit hole of other rhetorical situations, like the conversation about the topicalization of foods that are associated with vacations or at the least are valued only adjacently to food that would be ‘normal’ to us.
Discussing peer projects and greater themes and questions within their work
Questions: What happens when we delete source material? Can we ever truly "delete" something when it is put out there for the world to remix? Is there a superior version of this song, a best version? What happens when we take things at face value and assume that covers are originals? What happens when we do not label covers as covers? Any thoughts on : the fluidity of music, subtle messages in music, universality of music as a language, and the rhetorical situation of music?
I think it would be really interesting to read about the concept of echo’s of original art and the way those reproductions or remixes or recentions either change the art itself, the influence the art has on society/culture, or the way even the original art is now perceived because of the trajectory of its reproduction/change. If you take that concept outside of music I think Andy Warhol would be an interesting person to relate that to, and Olivia Laing has a book called The Lonely City that talks about him/that a lot.
Comparing and contrasting oratorical performances in the contemporary moment of elections. Doing genealogical method: we can focus on propaganda through the ages and sharpen a rhetorical focus that way.
Has anyone read the Topeka School by Ben Lerner? there's a part where he talks about a debate tactic I think known as "the spread," which might relate to what Dean's talking about, where the speaker instead of being substantial or meaningful essentially talks as quickly using many different ideas so that the person debating them can't really keep up/answer every question.
Freewrite: you are the authority.
I feel as though I am sort of a meta-authority, a sense of authority interiorly situated within outstanding authority of the exterior world and what it already consists of. I don’t think that in terms of a lack of free-will or autonomy, but more so in terms of influence and the inability to have an absolute authority within other contributing factors and entities. A good example of this is the presence of established systems, and the way that individual people have to act within them, even despite disinterest in participation or even the highest extent of removal, a person still is always within that system. Examples of this are communes, creating their own smaller societies (in the United States) that still physically exist within the larger system, despite their own rules, standards, and structures and smaller systems even if those structures and systems are bigger to them. Technically, they are still within the system of the United States, and despite the interference with the agents of that overarching system, they are still subject to it, whether it’s physically distanced, manipulated, or disregarded. For a much smaller instance, myself, I believe I have authority (while I often might not value, trust, or act on it) within my individual reach regarding what mostly affects or influences me, in terms of what I have the ability to control, change, or alter.
Discussing state of first project draft
Google Doc: Abstract/considerations
The circumstance for why and what I wanted to learn about and analyze stemmed from an actual lived instance or more accurately a friendship with a person, so I felt that it would be better communicated to write it in that way while underlyingly implementing the research I’ve been reading and finding. Also because the content I’ve been reading and intend to discuss at least in part is largely abstract and can get pretty existential, I thought it would be a more concrete way to structuralize my writing and ultimately my thoughts.
Who is your primary audience? Your secondary audience? What specific modes (in design, material composition, tools and technologies, delivery systems, and interpretive senses) do you engage in your process and utilize to engage your audience? What genres of invention (narrative, definition, ethos/logos/pathos, etc) do you analyze, explore/experiment with/subvert in your draft? What specific techniques of storytelling, argument, or invention do you utilize in your draft? In your process and in your genre experiment + analysis, what did you do that you liked best? Where in your writing would you like to receive the most critical attention? In terms of ideation? Style? Mechanics? Something else?
Determining audience is something that I’ve always struggled with. However, I’m able to realize that it’s a necessary pretext to developing a piece of writing more clearly and intentionally. Something that helped me was actually in Gresham’s Writing for Publication course, where she had us select a few possible publications we could try to submit our work to. Having publications in mind, or at least ones that could be applicable, helped me better situate my writing because it allows me to better understand an audience as a product of my understanding of what I want the writing piece to be, rather than determining the audience as an outright intention that is more likely to overwhelm me than just understanding it as an undertone. For my first project, my primary audience (I don’t know if this counts) unintentionally was kind of myself. I didn’t really intend to write specifically about what I did, and it ultimately was something that felt very self-involved and it benefited me a lot to put together, organize, and then read for myself. My secondary audience I guess would be peers within the course, or a relative publication that I actually didn’t consider with this project like I normally do. For the rhetorical analysis project, I plan to use Susan Sontag’s “Regarding the Pain of Others”, so my primary audience would instead be peers, and my secondary audience would be more relative to a literary journal, or a publication/website like LitHub, since the essay is more literary and it’s its own sort of analysis of an additional piece of writing by Virginia Woolf.
What topic(s), questions, texts, experiences, new/old research, and course-based interactions/discussions led you to your chosen frame and issue of focus?
My project became oriented out of a class discussion from week 4 or 5, when we read various texts regarding rhetoric and meaning, like the Heart Sutra, Gorgias, and one text from Nietzsche. As a class we were discussing the way these various writers discussed or validated meaning, and someone brought up the “if a tree falls in the forest” phrase/question. We didn’t talk about it extensively, but I became really interested in the question’s structure. This was still closer to the beginning of the semester, and I had a few friends I would share reading assignments with in order to read and talk with me about them to help me digest the material. At first, I had different intentions for what I anticipated for the project. One of the friends I swap reading material with is someone who is very, very smart, to the point where it can often seem self-destructive. Originally, I thought exploring the concept of validated meaning would lead me to write something that objectively analyzed individual meaning in order to validate it from a different perspective, something that would help people like my friend not get so stuck in their head. It ended up being sort of inverted. As I started reading different critical theorists, I became more aware that this project would be better communicated through interjecting a narrative, and how narrative in itself was going to be one of the guiding factors of the concept I ended up working with. The more I read, the more the project changed. Ultimately, it has a similar tone to what I originally thought I’d produce, but it manifested a bit differently than I expected. The issue of focus here would be, I guess, circumstantial purpose, and the frame I think would be my personal experience further framed by several pieces of writing I read.