I don't find Bitzer and Vatz mutually exclusive. I think Bitzer might be arguing from his frame within Vatz's idea of rhetoric, but Vatz himself doesn't allow for rhetoric to be a specific idea, even one as vague as his. Bitzer deals with possibility while Vatz deals with potentiality. It's easy to say that Vatz's must be the correct idea because it's broader, but is it nearly as helpful as Bitzer's?
As far as the rhetorical situation Bitzer describes goes, I also don't see as many problems with it, maybe because my tenure does not depend on whether or how violently I disagree with something. Whether we like it or not, each rhetorical situation involves exigence, constraints and an audience. Vatz's rhetoric involves constraints that we invent personally, but as we move through life, our Bitzerian identification or Vatzian interpretation is going to have the exact same result. That bear is a definitive threat! vs. That bear will certainly eat me if it gets close! mean the same thing: run away.
Likewise, whether we invent the situation of pollution or not by naming it "pollution," X company will continue to dump industrial waste into X river, and frogs are actually mutating. Sure, we could interpret that positively as a sign of the return of Xenu or whatever, but they are mutating. They are changing, and the situation is a situation, different than it was before and noticeable. You are not going to get into that fishing boat and try to bring them all round to veganism. You cannot invent that much situation or get rid of that much constraint. The reality of these men, and of your persuasive ability is not stronger than their interpretation of their situation as a fishing-only one, despite the historical example of certain fishers of men who shall remain nameless.
But you also can't say that the appropriate response to a situation is one that "fits," because many, many situations could potentially "fit" -- we know when we find one that does, but we never know how many we didn't find. Sure, Winston Churchill found himself a lot of "finest hours." But it doesn't give him enough credit to say that he found them just as they were and had the mystical ability to find the appropriate response. He was an amazing rhetor, and another rhetor could have found a totally different response to the situation which may have fit just as well. The only thing this means about Bitzer is that his "rhetorical audience" is too constrictive -- sure, the people who it was possible to persuade were persuaded by Churchill. But other people had a different fitting response. I see this most clearly in the abortion debates: to pro-lifers, the appropriate response is a violent one, since it is being committed as an act of lethal violence. To pro-choicers, the appropriate response is a peaceful one, since abortion is an action which brings peace to fraught women's lives. Who's right? We'd have to figure out whether abortion is right first. Are there two situations or one? How many appropriate responses?
It's silly to pick a side. I think what would work best for most people is to build from both ends -- select situations you recognize/interpret as in need of a rhetorical solution, but select situations which you personally can affect rhetorically. Constraints are negotiable, but not infinitely negotiable for anyone. Maybe Jesus would be able to convince the fishermen to go vegan; I can't. But at the Library Fair yesterday, which my boss did not tell me would be happening until she e-mailed me to turn up for my shift at PCL plaza and to "expect to get messy," I did successfully convince a bunch of people to make silly putty by hand, most of them people who were dead set against it once they figured out what we were doing. Their constraint was that they had to work in an hour; I negotiated that constraint by suggesting they wash their hands or get a friend to spend ten minutes rolling goo between their hands for "snap factor." I couldn't unconstrain everyone, but I could obviously unconstrain some people, because the situation required me to unless I wanted to face extreme librarian wrath.
Basically what this comes down to is that, perhaps, it's both the size of the ship and the motion of the ocean.
For my final project, I'd like to shamelessly borrow material from my thesis, even though it's going to be really boring.
I'm doing a content analysis of about ten years' worth of NWSA Journal, a major feminist journal known for interdisciplinary work. My theory about feminist scholarship, which I'm so far confirming, is that quantifiable and rigorous research methods have become less important to feminist scholars than what is often called "embodied knowledge" or "experiential knowledge" -- the narratively cast personal stories of various women and the emotional and affective responses those stories garner from an audience, whether live or academic.
I think this obsessive focus on testimony allows feminist scholars to distinguish themselves in a discipline which emphasizes coalitional and cooperative action over individual achievement -- since feminist scholars learn that good feminists don't seek attention but still as humans crave it, they invent ways to cast their personal experiences as meaningful. This usually takes the form of 20- and 30-page articles about one women's studies professor's experience of being unable to find a steady job with benefits after she left graduate school, which was recast as a metaphor about the negative effects of globalization. By pretending to talk about globalization but really talking about herself, the scholar was able to redirect Brennan's "living attention" to herself.
I would like to write an 8-page research paper exploring the reasons why feminist scholars privilege embodied experience and personal narratives over more traditional and frankly more useful research methods. I will analyze the ten years' worth of NWSA Journal I conveniently have on hand and attempt to make connections between the text and the ideas we read about this semester concerning the transmission of affect, the desire for living attention, rhetoric as a form of energy, and the emotional/affective construction of borders. As I vaguely mentioned in my last post, I think borders can be a reaction to the tension of unity as well as a producer of contrast tension -- since women's studies is a discipline which privileges the destruction of borders and the rejection of any kind of definition, those within the discipline might strive to distinguish themselves through pathos-laden personal narratives rather than conducting "real" research.
"Given that the event became an object that allowed certain forms of violence and detention of others in the name of defense, we need to ask: what role does security play in the affective politics of fear? Importantly, security is bound up with “the not”—what is “not me” or “not us,” as Michael Dillon has suggested. Security is not simply about securing a border that already exists, nor is fear simply a fear of what we are not. As I argued in the previous section, anxiety and fear create the very effect of borders, and the very effect of that which “we are not,” partly through how we turn away from the other, whom we imagine as the cause of our fear. Borders are constructed and indeed policed in the very feeling that they have already been transgressed: the other has to get too close, in order to be recognized as an object of fear, and in order for the object to be displaced. The transgression of the border is required in order for it to be secured as a border in the first place. This is why the politics of fear as well as hate is narrated as a border anxiety: fear speaks the language of “floods” and “swamps,” of being invaded by inappropriate others, against whom the nation must defend itself. We can reflect then on the ontology of insecurity within the constitution of the political: it must be presumed that things are not secure, in and of themselves, in order to justify the imperative to make things secure."
This kind of sounds like Brennan's backformation of the self-with-others as natural; we feel "alone" because we are normally packed into groups of people. My major problem with that kind of assumption is that we can also feel crowded, overexposed, which implies we have a normal state of aloneness from which we have been shaken -- we can be too strongly affected, to the point where it is uncomfortable.
Ahmed's point about borders is a compelling one, the kind that fills my liberal heart with little flowers and rainbows. Borders, in and of themselves, challenge crossing and define difference; borders are the difference in and of themselves. Without borders, we all slide together in a big happy heterogenous soup of difference.
The problem with the happy soup for me is that each person is aware of the naturalness of borders, or their apparent naturalness. Each person comes equipped with an internal observer, who, no matter how much independence seems socialized, appears to be inborn. Psychologists theorize the crap out of when this separation of self from the mother must happen, but everyone knows that it does. Artificial or not, we construct a border or run across a border very young, and everybody does it.
What is the difference between nature and culture at this point? Can any state be said to be "normal" or "natural" for a human? Brennan suggests that humans naturally affect each other and clump together, but our reliance on visual information and habit keep us thinking of ourselves as separate. Ahmed suggests that borders are fake, with the implicit second statement that removal of these borders removes the tension of difference. But people construct or are equipped with an internal observer in order to relieve the tension of togetherness -- couldn't borders be constructed to relieve a tension we don't have as much academic contact with, the tension of unity?
One of the most difficult things for many academic writers, especially feminist writers, to do is shut up about themselves and truly commit their writing and scholarship to the unified betterment of mankind. Unsurprisingly, most writers actually want to talk a whole lot about themselves, and for feminists this often translates to pretending your essay about your experience in grad school is some kind of embodied metaphor for globalization. Everyone knows, somewhere, that this isn't coalitional academic activism, but publishing these kinds of essays allows feminist scholars to relieve themselves of the pressure of being all women, writing for all women, researching for a selfless greater good. It lets them grab a substitute for the individual achievement everyone seems to crave in one form or another as soon as they're born. Everyone's seen the episode of Friends where Phoebe discovers that she only likes doing charity because it makes her feel good, makes her the center of attention. Rather than humans tending towards oneness and constructing borders, or the traditional route of tending towards borders and bringing ourselves toward unity, what if the "natural" state for everyone is balance?
I have problems with the idea of the "natural" for an intelligent species. I don't think there's any way you can say what's natural for a human to do, because our habitat, our lives, are unnatural in the way we normally think of nature. No state of nature like that suggested by John Locke can really exist for humans, because we spontaneously organize. If we're not the strongest, we find ways to make ourselves valuable to our communities. Theology, medicine, and voodoo all become natural survival adaptations as much as they are cultural constructions, because they're how we make our living.
I think this is the root of why I don't like it when Brennan and Ahmed suggest that if we could list a little more toward one side, we'd be better off because it would be more "natural." There is no human natural except that which each person negotiates half by himself and half with his community; trying to define it for everyone is obviously going to make nearly everyone feel desperately unnatural.
One thing about this article bothers me, and it's the one-to-one ratio the author takes in transforming rhetoric from a place to a process even as he insists that it is a network of processes. "We do rhetoric, rather than (just) finding ourselves in a rhetoric. By extension, we might also say that rhetorical situation is better conceptualized as a mixture of processes and encounters; it should become verb, rather than a fixed noun or situs." Even as the author acknowledges that multiple actions make up this rhetoric (and any place), he doesn't account for the fact that rhetorics, like cities, are almost always more than the sum of their parts.
It's simple to imagine a theoretical city as a series of processes of import and export, travel around the city, random contact with others -- basically, what it takes for everyone to get through their day, made up of multiple stops, journeys and meetings along the way. But these actions are different every day. Sure, Sears is going to important five bajillion HD radios every day and the radio station is going to play the ads for them five bajillion times every day, but each person's path around the city alters each day, each week, each month. In spite of this, New York doesn't stop being New York -- the version we see in Mad Men is still recognizably and somehow spiritually related to the modern city we think about, visit, live in, or do. It's aged, but it's the same city, in that I am the same person I was when I was four -- vitally different, but intimately connected and interrelated.
On the other hand, many people argue that Austin has stopped being Austin. The processes are different; it's not as weird anymore. Something altered between 1990 and today involving different people, different work, different land use and public structures, which took the alteration too far; something was added to the mix that changed everything in a different way than the expansion and change of New York changed New York.
The problem with pinning down a rhetorical situation, or rhetoric as an activity, is that its existence as a network does make sense, but this network is constantly changing shape and constituent parts. How can something with a different structure, at a different time, for a different audience, in a different place, still be rhetorical in the way that the Edbauer piece was rhetorical? Not only is rhetoric not the sum of its parts, but it's the same sum out of different parts every time, like New York.
Back on the other hand, maybe rhetoric is a simple verb which creates its own rhetorical situation out of opportunity. A homeless prophet is not going to be able to create his rhetorical situation out of scratch, but there are many different kinds of situations we would identify as primed for powerful rhetorical action -- the Wisconsin protests, Libya, a sympathetic professor's office hours. You have to do a lot of the initial work of creating the situation -- gathering people together, putting them in the right frame of mind, etc -- but you also rely on extant factors, like you being the kind of person someone would listen to or the presence of a large rock to stand on. Rhetoric builds from both ends, with different materials at each end every time. Rhetorical situations exist halfway into the possibility of the grid: they're not actually there yet, but we can see how we would make them out of what's available., halfway between possibility and potentiality.
EDIT: not that it matters since I clearly got something very abstract from it, but I read "Unframing" instead of "Executive Overspill."
Though feminists made highly visible gains early in the 60s and 70s, the movement foundered somewhere in the 80s and 90s, leading to a “Backlash” culture described in detail by Susan Faludi. Feminism has a fraught relationship with media representations of women, especially comic book heroines, who can represent the best and worst of a given society’s ideas about women. But fixing or changing media representations isn’t always a panacea to sexism, and social gains don’t always change media representations – in a big way, art and society are nearly as sexist as they were in the ’50s.
I began with an image of Marilyn Monroe because she unites ideas about American history, pop culture, and the archetypal woman in the 50s. She also makes a great starting point for feminism of the last 50 years, since she embodies the tension between using one’s glamour for personal advancement and becoming a slave to beauty. From her, I move to a similar starter image in comic book history; Wonder Woman, despite her cosmic power, found a way to get trapped by a man and lost her power; meanwhile, another woman steals him as Wonder Woman strikes a pinup pose. This image obviously implies that Wonder Woman needs to keep a better handle on romance, maybe with less world-saving, but it’s also an image out of time; it’s more likely to infuriate or amuse my audience than convey its original message, which helps evoke the tone of feminist consciousness and frustration with sexism that will serve my point later.
My second image is of a group of women at a feminist rally in the 60s – there are many women, most smiling, holding up banners, providing a point of identification for those familiar with feminist history and a sense of togetherness and solidarity. The comic book cover, featuring a Wonder Woman for a new generation, builds on this sense, but the ridiculous grooviness and now-laughable optimism of the art contributes to a sense of silliness that I hope will translate into futility down the line.
My next pair of images is the famous photograph of the “freedom trash can,” also known as the origin of the bra-burning myth of the second wave. No women actually burned bras; they simply threw them, along with girdles, pantyhose, and makeup, into a trashcan outside the 1968 Miss America pageant. But my audience probably doesn’t know that, so this image will evoke the beginnings of feminist craziness endemic to the late second wave. The comic book cover I paired it with represents the media’s almost immediate return to sexism after their short-lived dalliance with feminism; unlike the previous “new Wonder Woman,” this Wonder Woman is back in the sexualized bondage for which she was so famous in the 50s, being stalked by “The Beauty Hater.” As feminism began its anti-beauty crusade, they lost favor with the media, who preferred glitzier, more marketable damsels in distress to feminist heroes who didn’t convince many boys to buy comics. This pairing of images stimulates dissatisfaction with both 70s feminism and the 70s media industry – one is too idealistic, one frankly exploitative, and the movement isn’t quite getting anywhere anymore.
My next image is of Madonna, the poster girl of the 1980s, ripping lacy lingerie out of her low-slung skirt and mugging at the camera in a tight crop-top that reads “healthy.” This symbolic paradox was as specific to the 80s as bra-burning was to the late 60s and 70s; in the “post-feminist” 80s, embracing one’s sexuality was supposed to be a feminist thing to do. Unfortunately, many women, Madonna not least among them, occasionally crossed the line from healthy self-expression into pandering to the male gaze; it was easy to “accept” your body when this body was the trim, blonde media ideal. This photograph is anything but “healthy,” like the next shot, a play on the iconic Breakfast Club poster. Unlike The Breakfast Club, the Teen Titans had only one female member, and having her take Claire’s supine position instead of Allison’s equal footing with Brian implies that she’s there to be eye candy. The men are hunched or turned slightly away from the camera, but Wonder Woman’s body is on full display for the viewer, implying that that’s all she’s there to do. While this image would pass unnoticed as pastiche if it stood alone, its placement in my presentation creates a sense of feminist degradation – whatever we were doing in the 70s, we’re not doing it any more, and that’s not necessarily progress.
My final pair of images are larger and set next to each other rather than in a round; the Time cover, which shows a historical feminist progression similar to mine, ends with Ally McBeal and the question “is feminism dead?” My next image, one of Power Girl instead of Wonder Woman, is supposed to imply the answer “yes.” Though Power Girl shouts “it’s Ok! POWER GIRL is here!” her breasts are the visual center of the cover, as they often are. Power Girl is like all the worst parts of Wonder Woman shoved into a modern blonde package – even within the world of comic book heroines, PG’s breasts are huge and obscenely foregrounded, and the dippy look on her face doesn’t do much to reassure me that she’s bringing something else to the table. Her name, Power Girl, is supposed to evoke empowerment, but this image only makes me depressed and darkly amused because I realize that comic books haven’t come far at all – they’ve hardly moved. We exchanged one pinup for another, and nothing really changed. I chose to use Power Girl instead of a modern Wonder Woman cover to suggest the generational transition that took place in feminism, from the second to the third waves, which was supposed to accomplish so much. As many third wave feminists are realizing, that generational shift has mostly depoliticized the movement, in large part because of our obsession with the media.
My title is split into two clauses, the first appearing before the images and the second appearing after them. By doing this, I hope to underline that even though surface shifts are gestured at, very little about women’s treatment in the media has truly changed. I want to inspire my audience to have less faith in the media’s ability to change hearts and minds. To most of my audience, this depressing sense of unchangeability and lack of progress should serve to make them less focused on correcting the real world by correcting the media – Power Girl clearly isn’t a real improvement on Wonder Woman. Positive media representations of women won’t stop sexism on their own. Only actual women, like those in the photographs from the 60s and 70s, can do that.
the New Wonder Woman cover, http://www.comicnoize.com/2010/06/30/those-who-forget-the-past/
Virginia Slims ad, https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiRBG02yIPKIAN9OU83GP92_9y2-E4w52ltEzTEnE0dhZaXT0iKPzhDW0NuSVUXTVC4ginyfWTV2uV6ga_GEq4yyuvXiIXNZ6_oEI4r19h2cSoPBdN-YzEe3zzPbOiuj9RwWMKbn3aogvr/s400/Virginia+Slims+Wonder+Woman.jpg
So I thought Descartes' Error was impenetrable because of the neuroscience, and I told myself it would get better. I thought Brennan was impenetrable first because she writes like a tool and later because apparently she died before edits, and I told myself it would get better. Now I crack open this Massumi crap and I become more convinced with each passing day that rhetoric needs less to do.
Deleuze and Guattari, who you're familiar with if you read the introduction or if you've ever seen someone incredibly pretentious refer to "becoming-(insert anything here)," had this interesting idea which kind of said that if an idea was complex enough, truly complex, it shouldn't be understandable by the layman. No idea which was accessible to many people was powerful enough to do much of anything; there's a reason we treat our own colds but go to doctors to cure cancer, and why Law & Order:SVU probably does less for rape prevention and litigation than a lobbyist. Big things are too complicated, too powerful, for us; they require expert attention. So, said Deleuze and Guattari, should be the social sciences. They went so far as to intentionally confuse their language, hoping that this would ensure that the only people who could read the work and get anything out of it were smart enough to really access their ideas' power. Intelligent readers weren't going to cherry-pick off the surface and then publish headlines like "SCIENCE PROVES: WOMEN ARE SMARTER THAN MEN."
Actually, the people who ended up using Deleuze and Guattari the most were high school debaters, who cherry-picked interesting phrases and made them mean whatever they wanted. The people who truly wanted to work with the ideas put forth wrote D&G readers that restated everything they'd said, but more clearly and more usefully. This is why Deleuze and Guattari's meritocracy of rhetoric is really damn stupid.
Writing, though a blunt instrument for communication, is about clarity. Sure, it's about beauty, it's about information, it's about a million things. But it's pretty much about clarity. Good writing is clear as a bell. That doesn't mean all good writing is a bulleted list, but good writing, whatever else it does, gets something across, and the intensity with which we feel that something is a marker of how purely the affect was transmitted. In early school, we know who the good writer in class is because she uses correct grammar. Before maturity, this is one of the best markers of good writing that we have because few writers have settled into the voices that will make more complex subjects easy to write about in the future. The writer with the best grammar, in a class full of people who do not know what verb agreement is, is the clearest -- literally. We can understand her because she writes according to the rules.
Later in life, we know who the good writer is because we know exactly what he's talking about. Now that almost everyone's caught their grammar up to a mutually comprehensible level, clarity turns into word choice, paragraph structure, and more complex rhetorical figures. We know who the good writer is because it doesn't take us ten years to ferret out his point. We know him because he has the skill to transmit even the most complex ideas clearly -- he does not use the complexity of his argument as an excuse to obfuscate. He doesn't think his ideas are so new and different that we don't even have language for them yet; he knows for a fact that we do because he used language when he was thinking about his ideas. Most importantly, he doesn't pretend his argument is more complex than it is by confusing us on purpose (which I suspect is what D&G were after). Maybe he gets creative with metaphor, but these serve his point; literary figures thrown in to give a passage some "color" are distractions, but the good writer knows when and how graphic images may be more helpful to a viewer than a cut-and-dry definition.
Mr. Massumi, I get that your ideas are revolutionary, I really do. But I do not understand a goddamned thing you say. Maybe this is because you use phrases and single words instead of complete sentences, but Toni Morrison does that too and I know what she's talking about. Teresa Brennan, clunky though she was, wrote in complete sentences -- confusion with her came more from her elevated and inconsistent vocabulary, but she set down exactly what she wanted you to take away and for the most part it worked. Massumi is doing something else. I think he might be enjoying himself too much, if that makes any sense. For him, his idea is full of drama, and his language serves that drama; in practice, no one but him can see the drama because no one but him has several advanced degrees in rhetoric. Either he failed to transmit the intensity of his affect or the intensity is specific to him, but either way, he failed in a specific way as a writer.
This whole blog probably makes me a filthy functionalist, but academic writing is terrible and I'm sick of it. I look forward to the three-paragraph version of this information that Dr. Davis will have to translate for us in class, because I'm sure it was interesting.
