Lingua Fracta

I had every intention of posting this months ago but kept putting it off because I’m mildly intimidated by the awesome combination that is Collin + this book. Because I enjoy it so much, though, I think it’s appropriate for this to be my inaugural post for my summer-reading-for-exams extravaganza!

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Though perhaps tempting to critique and disregard print culture and the tradition from which it emerged (as it seems many are wont to do), this certainly isn’t Brooke’s purpose in Lingua Fracta: Toward a Rhetoric of New Media. Instead, Brooke carefully shows the value of the tradition and the classical rhetorical canons as they are reconsidered through the lens of new media. This rearticulation is an attempt to “restore the dialectical character of the rhetorical canons” that positions them as dynamic and changing rather than rooted and fixed (Brooke xiii). Without reimagining the canons for new media, applications to technological pursuits are superficial and restricted.

And though he doesn’t throw out the canons, Brooke does warn against disciplinary dependency on print, arguing that our insistence on print “if it persists unchecked, will slowly bring us out of step with our students, our institutions, and the broader culture of which we are a part” (23). In order to redirect this dependency, Brooke argues that we need to shift both our unit of analysis and our rhetoric from a focus on text to the medial interface. The interface, he argues, emphasizes the importance of process:

A turn toward the interface as our unit of analysis would be an acknowledgement that it is not necessary that these processes culminate in products (which can then be decoupled from the contexts of their production), but rather that what we think of as products (books, articles, essays) are but special, stabilized instances of an ongoing process conducted at the level of interface. 25

Brooke’s emphasis on process here is imperative for an understanding of the canons as dynamic and of reformulating disciplinary conceptions of texts as fixed. Brooke rearticulates the five rhetorical canons—invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery—and remediates them through a more inclusive lens of new media that shifts them away from their static categories.

1. The first remix is a shift from invention to proairesis, which includes the possibilities of reading and writing practices beyond print.
2. The second shift is a move from “arrangement as sequence” to “arrangement as pattern” (92), which complicates our understandings of a text as something that must be composed, read, and understood from start to finish.
3. Style is the third remix, which Brooke rearticulates as perspective because new media necessitates a shift away from the reader’s perspective of a fixed text to consider the “multiple and partial perspectives needed to understand and assess a digital text (114).
4. The fourth remix revitalizes memory in terms of persistence, the “practice of retaining particular ideas, keywords, or concepts across multiple texts” (157), which becomes more complicated with the infiltration of information readily accessible through technological resources.
5. The fifth and final remix shifts delivery to performance, which imagines delivery as performative—it is not simply a matter of delivering a text to a reader but performing that text in a way that ensures circulation.

These canonical remixes are important to emphasize because each reexamination very carefully shows the value of the traditional categories in ways that are more appropriate and useful for new media contexts.

It is also important to emphasize here the integral role that the trivium plays in Brooke’s argument. The classic trivium is composed of the fixed categories of grammar, rhetoric, and logic. Brooke argues that “the trivium should be rethought as layered ecologies, that each element of the trivium describes not a separate discipline, but a different scale for thought” (27-28). This claim underpins his argument for remaking the canons while speaking to the larger issue of the interconnected and layered ways we can consider the different roles of technology as ecology.

Following other calls for a consideration of ecology as metaphor (Cooper, 1986; Spinuzzi, 2003; Edbauer, 2005), Brooke sees it as an opportunity to focus on the “temporarily finite set of practices, ideas, and interactions without fixing them in place or investing too much critical energy in their stability” (42). An ecology destabilizes our idea of fixed products, making room to consider the potentiality of the dynamism of texts, and Brooke’s revised trivium consists of the ecologies of code, practice, and culture.

An ecology of code accounts for the multimodal processes—visual and aural, spatial, textual—that work together to create a dynamic interface (48). The ecology of culture looks carefully at the range of relationships and discourse communities in local and global contexts (49). It is the ecology of practice, however, that is highlighted as “conscious, directed activity” that “produce[s] a particular discursive effect” (49).

I want to pause for a moment to suggest that it is this form of practice that many discussions of technology lack. The ecology of practice is an opportunity to understand the “changes wrought with and by new media” (47), and this ecology is a framework for reimagining both the rhetorical canons and our understandings of the author and text.

Through his examination of the canons, Brooke claims that a “rhetoric of new media, rather than examining the choices that have already been made by writers, should prepare us as writers to make our own choices” (15). Such a claim reinforces the supposition that reinvigorating both the trivium and the canons is useful for imagining new technologies and texts that are dynamic and forward-thinking. It acknowledges that instead of analyzing writers and their texts as fixed identities and products from a readerly perspective, we can instead shift our focus to our own role within the process of meaning-making.

Such a shift calls into question the author/reader binary in which an author creates a print text (a stable product) that is then consumed by a reader. Instead, a rhetoric of new media as situated within an ecology of practice reimagines the author/reader relationship, which also makes room for a reconsideration of the composition process itself. 

This discussion necessarily invites Richard Lanham’s discussion of the dissolution of authoritative and canonical print texts and the tenuous relationship between creator and critic, a discussion that Brooke frequently cites. In the introduction of The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts, Lanham describes the dynamism and interactivity of the electronic text as volatile, arguing that to “volatilize text is to abolish the fixed ‘edition’ of the great work and so the authority of the great work itself. Such volatility questions the whole conception of textual authority” (xi). That is, new media (for Lanham, the e-text) disrupts the idea of canonical Great Books, which calls into question the author.

This volatility not only questions the authority of the single Author but also challenges our understandings of the static content in a book. We see such volatility in all aspects of the rhetorical process and production of new media texts—from the composition to the arrangement and production to the text’s circulation. At all of these stages, new media pushes on the fixed notion of what it means to compose and be a composer, what a text is and has the potential to be.

Wikipedia as Praxical Application

Wikipedia (not without its own faults) can be a useful example here to imagine how these different canons intersect and push on our ideas of the author and text. Brooke argues that proairetic invention supports practices that are not “closed, idealized, and privatized” (Brooke 74) and refuses the historically romanticized notion of the single author of an authoritative text. Although Wikipedia may not be practicing what it preaches, it does make itself known as a space that is open to contribution, that is always in process, and that is made up of the labor of multiple authors.

Wikipedia offers itself as a text that is patterned. Though it could be read sequentially from top to bottom, we often use it to find particular information—skimming through, clicking hyperlinks, skipping from section to section. Like Brooke’s example of the database, Wikipedia only provides ordered information when it is acted on by a user (101). That is, the user chooses how to read/navigate it.

New media necessitates a shift away from the reader’s perspective of a fixed text to consider the “multiple and partial” perspectives needed to understand and assess a digital text (Brooke 114).

Lanham argues that print text strives for “unselfconscious transparency” (Lanham 4), but the electronic text is malleable, self-conscious, authorial: “The textual surface has become permanently bi-stable. We are always looking first AT it and then THROUGH it, and this oscillation creates a different implied ideal of decorum, both stylistic and behavioral” (5). The result of this toggling is the dissolution of the creator and critic (6). Though Brooke agrees that the transparency of text exists along an oscillating continuum, he adds, “our own position along that continuum is never static” (Brooke 133). That is, a rhetoric of new media must also consider how we look at and through interfaces “from a particular position” (140). For a discipline that is hyper-aware of author and reader subjectivity and the importance of our cultural and social positioning, this addition is crucial and makes a lot of sense in relation to some of the discussions related to Wikipedia that have occurred recently.

Feminist Wikipedia Edit-A-Thon by Adeline Koh

In terms of persistence, Wikipedia is interesting for considering how we tell, record, preserve, and share information. Brooke argues that as a practice, memory is “the ability to build and maintain patterns” (157), a sort of toggling between what we retain and what we must necessarily forget to make room for new information. Such a claim connects to skimming: there are so many (academic) texts and time constraints that we are inevitably forced to skim, recognizing patterns of a text more than individual details of that text.

And finally, Wikipedia is interesting to consider in terms of its performance. Delivery is not simply a matter of delivering a text to a reader but performing that text in a way that ensures circulation. Brooke focuses on circulation within the context of medium, which emphasizes the role of writing technologies within delivery and the process of circulation rather than the product itself (176). This shifts attention away from the final product, the Text itself, and asks us to consider the authors’ role within the production and delivery of that text.

Concluding Thoughts

Brooke argues that “the canons speak to the need for invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery, but our available information technologies (from voice and gesture to YouTube and MySpace) both constrain and enable the way that those needs are actualized in discourse” (196). I would add to this, too, that our knowledge of writing technologies also constrains our pedagogical applications of the value of the canons.

Rhet/comp is in a tenuous space where we recognize the importance of new media and new writing technologies but haven’t yet consistently applied that value to either scholarship or classroom practices. Brooke offers practical applications for how we can apply these new media theories to our research and teaching practices, which necessitates a disciplinary shift in how we understand and value both the Author and the classical conception of the Text. In many ways, these shifts reflect the recent turns toward multimodality (a word Collin may not necessarily like)—promoting collaboration between students, assigning projects that necessitate students exploring a range of literacies and technologies.

Ultimately, we must position technology not as an add-on, either in the classroom or in scholarly contexts, but understand and appreciate the value of writing technologies in their own contexts, to “move from a text-based rhetoric, exemplified by our attachment to the printed page, to a rhetoric that can account for the dynamics of the interface” (Brooke 26).

 

Brooke, Collin. Lingua Fracta: Toward a Rhetoric of New Media. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2009. Print.

 

Reflections of a Second-Year Ph.D. Student

The alternative title for this blog post is “The End of Coursework, aka the End of an Era.”

As of May 14th (the day grades were due), I am officially finished with coursework…forever. Twenty-one years of taking classes, and I’m finished (minus a couple informal classes for writing my prospectus and dissertation). It’s both a super good and super weird feeling, and a great way to end my second year.

Like last year, I thought it might be nice to reflect on some of the highlights:

The HASTAC forum I helped organize!

 

• Teaching in the Writing Program. I taught WRT 105 (“Reimagining the Normal”) in the fall and WRT 205 (“Everyday Representations of Dis/Ability”) this past spring. It was nice to be back in the classroom after a year off and really interesting to teach content-focused courses. The curriculum at WVU is process-based and not inquiry-driven, so it was a shift to choose a productive inquiry with engaging articles.

• J teaching in the WP. My partner teaches at SU now, too, which makes our lives significantly less stressful (20-minute walk to campus instead of a 1-hour commute). It’s also fun to be teaching the same classes as him again, so we can talk through ideas and activities.

• Consulting. Like teaching, it was nice to be in the writing center again this year. Working in the writing center at WVU was a significant factor in my decision to pursue a Ph.D.

• Conferencing. I went to IWCA in the fall (first time in CA!), CCCC and SUNY COW in March, and I’m gearing up for Computers and Writing in a couple weeks. 4Cs was actually one of the best conference experiences I’ve had so far. We had a well attended panel, I received thoughtful questions both during and after the presentation, and I went to a lot of good sessions—even though I have no desire to go back to Vegas.

• Joining more organizations. This fall, I became a HASTAC scholar and organized a forum around dis/ability this semester. I was also invited to join the (national) IWCA graduate student committee and served on the (Syracuse) writing center committee.

• Producing a podcast. I like working on projects, and even though I don’t listen to podcasts (audio doesn’t hold my attention), I’ve enjoyed working on This Rhetorical Life so much. We’ve published some awesome interviews with folks in the field who are doing impressive work, and we’ve received positive feedback about the project.

The podcast initiative I co-produce!

Tomorrow, I start teaching my summer WRT 205 course, which I’m looking forward to because I’m using the same inquiry but redesigned the core assignments in ways that I think are more aligned with my own values as a teacher.

I’m also taking my comprehensive exams this summer, so most of the content on the blog will be exam-related as I read and take notes for August.

Two years down, two to go!

 

Preventative Mastectomies & Overcoming Rhetoric

The first thing I read this morning while in bed, covers pulled up to my neck, eyes squinting at my phone, was Angelina Jolie’s new op-ed that is taking the internet by storm: “My Medical Choice.”

When Sharon Osbourne had preventative double mastectomy surgery last fall, I was amazed. I was teaching a course themed around Reimagining the Normal and showed the article to my students. In the interview, Osbourne said, “I didn’t even think of my breasts in a nostalgic way, I just wanted to be able to live my life without that fear all the time.” If I’m not mistaken, Osbourne made the choice to have the mastectomy without the reconstructive surgery, which is a brave choice for any woman—particularly a celebrity in the spotlight. Which is why this morning, I was certain that I had misread the article stating Angelina Jolie—the ultra-woman of celebrity women—had chosen to have a double mastectomy.

What does it mean for an international sex symbol to choose to have her breasts removed, the very things that we often use to measure a woman’s femininity and sex appeal?

If nothing else, it’s certainly a bold move—a move that bucks the idea of the perfect and natural and untouched breasts and a move that might inspire some women to take similar measures. As I read the op-ed, though, I felt increasingly uneasy.

May 8th was the 4th anniversary of my mother’s death, and her birthday at the end of the month is now looming nearer. My mom had breast cancer in the early 1990s and underwent a single mastectomy and partial hysterectomy. Despite annual checkups, the doctors did not detect the ovarian cancer that she was diagnosed with in 2005. It was advanced stage, “been there for years,” they said. She died in 2009, a week before my college graduation.

When I was in college, I would occasionally drive my mom to her doctor’s appointments. One day, the doctor asked me if I planned on having kids. Flabbergasted by the question, I said I didn’t know. I was told that I should make up my mind soon; otherwise, I should consider having a full hysterectomy.

Every time I go to the doctor now, I get asked if I want to do the genetic screening. But I’m also told that if I do, and if I do have that gene, my insurance might drop me.

The fear, for me, is that even if I’m tested and carry the gene, that doesn’t necessarily guarantee me of anything. A family member’s sister found out that she carried the gene for ovarian cancer and very recently underwent a preventative hysterectomy. After the procedure, the doctor found traces of ovarian cancer cells, and she will be starting chemotherapy soon.

Jolie writes in the piece, “Cancer is still a word that strikes fear into people’s hearts, producing a deep sense of powerlessness. But today it is possible to find out through a blood test whether you are highly susceptible to breast and ovarian cancer, and then take action.” Cancer strikes fear into people’s hearts because it’s a fearful thing, and maybe this is why I take issue with this piece.

It’s the same overcoming narrative that we hear and see elsewhere. It’s the billboard on the side of I-690 that says “I overcame cancer. So can you.” It’s the idea that if I have a hysterectomy, I’ll be fine. It’s the idea that you have the power to get a preventative double mastectomy if you choose, not factoring in whether you have insurance, whether your insurance will cover it, and whether you will still be at risk for cancer—which Jolie openly admits can be caused from a number of factors.

Images like this are meant to be inspirational but also imply that we must try harder to overcome, that it’s as simple as “throwing a curve ball.”

When I read things like this, they hurt because, with any rhetoric of overcoming, there is the reminder that some people do not overcome—positioning them as weaker, less able. People with advanced stage cancer don’t last long. My mom had 55+ chemotherapy treatments over four years and a full dose of radiation in late 2008. She was diagnosed a couple weeks before my high school graduation in 2005 and died a week before my college graduation in 2009.

When I read articles like this op-ed, I want to cry and punch things and roll around on the ground because overcoming rhetoric obscures the material realities of people who cannot and do not overcome cancer. The idea of “I did it and you can too” obscures the fact that my mom (and people like her) did everything in the books to try to beat it. That should not discredit their attempts and experiences.

Reflecting on her own children, Jolie writes, “It is reassuring that they see nothing that makes them uncomfortable. They can see my small scars and that’s it. Everything else is just Mommy, the same as she always was.” It’s the idea that you have to be as normal as humanly possible in order to make cancer seem as not-scary as possible. There are risks to reconstructive surgery, sure. My best friend’s mother had breast cancer when my friend was in elementary school. She had reconstructive surgery to appear more “normal,” and the cancer returned. She died.

But there’s also this larger notion that women must have their breasts in order to be women, to be “Mommy,” to be the same as always. My mom had a huge scar that ran across her chest, and it didn’t make her any less of a woman or mother. Instead, from a very young age, it imprinted in me the idea that I need to be careful about what I do, that I need to be careful about screenings and dietary choices and even where I choose to live, that I need to be sure all of my doctors know about my medical history.

It may sound silly, but I was shocked when I saw the tagline for this article because I thought, for a few minutes at least, that Angelina Jolie—the symbol of all that is woman—had a double mastectomy without the reconstructive surgery.

Jolie should be applauded for her decision because it’s a brave and smart decision, but this “I’m just like you” rhetoric obscures the fact that no, she’s not. I’m sure many women don’t know the preventative options available to them, but many women simply don’t have those options. And if they do, they may not have access to the resources and very best doctors that someone with Jolie’s capital surely does.

Women, as much as they possibly can, need to be educated (and educate themselves) about their bodies and what they can do to keep those bodies safe. These glossed-over stories about overcoming, however, can do more harm than they can good to an unknowing reader. It was disability activist Laura Hershey who wrote, “It is an uncomfortable truth … that actions which are intended to help a certain group of people may actually harm them” (230).

And the idea that women must maintain their breasts in order to appear “the same as always” is just as hurtful. When my mom was dying, you can bet I didn’t give two fucks about the scar across her chest or the ovaries missing from her pelvis. Women shouldn’t be expected to worry about saving their lives and still looking “good” and “normal” because cancer isn’t good and normal.

Life is more important than normal-looking breasts.

 

Hershey, Laura. “From Poster Child to Protestor.” Critical Encounters with Texts: Finding a Place to Stand. 8th ed. Boston: Pearson Learning Solutions, 2012. 229-42. Print.

 

Podcasting, Peer Review, and Disciplinary Street Cred

“How do you value this work and articulate that value to others?”

A deceptively difficult question and one that resonates most for me from the Q&A during our This Rhetorical Life presentation at SUNY COW. The question was in part how we represented the podcast initiative on our CVs—something that I was excited to answer after recently reading Cathy Davidson’s “How and Why to Make Your Digital Publications Matter.” Shortly before the conference, I had updated my CV to include a digital projects section. And though perhaps it would lend more street cred to fit them into traditional categories—This Rhetorical Life could be academic service, maybe—I wanted them to stand apart, for better or worse, as their own unique form of publishing. My talk centered on the idea that digital projects (and This Rhetorical Life in particular) should “count” as scholarly publication.

That question also had underlying concerns about how we represent our digital work to our departments and to the larger discipline. Even though I’ve read articles discussing the role of digital scholarship (Ball, 2004; Cohen, 2010; Fitzpatrick, 2010; Burgess and Hamming, 2011; Fitzpatrick, 2011; Nowviskie, 2011), the idea of digital publication—even as scholars discuss it and enact it—still seems so far away. Perhaps it’s just the extremely gradual process of moving away from already-established structures.

It was interesting going back to Fitzpatrick’s piece on MediaCommons this week—something I had read before—to see how her 2007 argument still very much resonates today. In fact, during my SUNY COW presentation, I feel like I was trying to make similar arguments for the potentials of dialogue in digital scholarship.

Selfe and Hawisher’s exploration of the methodologies of peer review in its historical and contemporary applications was also useful for illustrating these gradual shifts. And, interestingly, there was something less certain about this piece than other things I’ve read about changing peer review processes (maybe because my first introduction to the conversation was through Hacking the Academy). When discussing the way peer review processes are affected through digital publication, for example, Selfe & Hawisher argue that “the identity of authors is almost impossible to remove entirely from electronic projects,” which means “referees now are aware of the identities of project authors” (674). This seems like a positive and a negative. It comes after a declaration of the flawed “anonymous” peer review process (which creates unbalanced hierarchies and may not truly be anonymous), but new issues of subjectivity and partiality also arise. Similarly, they explain that “the process of revising and editing mediated projects takes longer and is more involved than for print manuscripts” (675), which means the reviewers need to have more technical expertise. While this makes sense, it also seems to suggest a more time-intensive process.

This makes me think of my initial reactions to Fitzpatrick’s piece: Who has time to do open peer review? I’m interested by the idea, but what’s the incentive for reviewers over a long period of time? Even Fitzpatrick’s piece had minimal comments. What happens if an open peer review only solicits two commenters?  And as some of the commenters on Fitzpatrick’s piece discussed, do you value the comment of a PhD in that field over a less credentialed commenter with a just-as-valid point? Even Selfe and Hawisher note that the editors they interviewed were concerned with “scholarly integrity” (689).

In “Open Access Publishing and Scholarly Values,” Dan Cohen argues, “Writing is writing and good is good,” regardless of the publication medium. Because there is so much content available to us, we tend to prioritize based on prestige (reading particular top-tier journals) rather than content. For example, I try to read from CCC or RSQ because they have disciplinary currency, although I’m also drawn to the work published in alternative journals like Harlot. This isn’t to say that I don’t appreciate the work that’s done in journals like CCC, but it does put pressure on the value of digital publication.

So to attempt to tie up some of my loose ends, I offer a podcast example. Last Friday, we posted the live-recorded panel “Feminist Perspectives on Living a Rhetorical Life in a Transnational World,” a 57-minute podcast that features conference-length talks and responses by Rebecca Dingo, Eileen Schell, Dana Olwan, Anna Hensley, and Tim Dougherty. Each of these talks were well cited, rhetorically pointed, and timely analyses of contemporary issues. Every time I listen to it (or read it), I’m blown away by how thoughtful each speaker is. Could any one of them get those papers published in an academic journal? For sure. Could they count the opportunity as an invited panelist? Definitely. Because we published it for This Rhetorical’s Life website, could they count it as a digital publication? Is the information less valuable to the field if it isn’t peer reviewed?

 

 

Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. “MediaCommons: Scholarly Publishing in the Age of the Internet.” MediaCommons. 29 March 2007. Web.

Selfe, Cynthia L., and Gail Hawisher. “Methodologies of Peer and Editorial Review: Changing Practices.” CCC 63.4 (2012): 672-98. Print.

 

Multimodal “Craft” Workshop

Inspired by the workshop I attended at 4Cs, I knew I wanted to incorporate a multimodal workshop into my classroom during the last unit. In the last unit of our standard curriculum, we do a translation project that visually (and digitally) translates the final essay. It felt weird to put those constraints on the assignment, though, particularly because my course inquiry is about dis/ability, and limiting students’ modes of expression seemed contradictory. Because I figured digital projects would be the default, I wanted to give my students an immediate opportunity to revisualize their arguments in a tactile way. I was so pleased with how they took up the assignment and represented their arguments that I wanted to share the lesson plan & some of the photos (I told them the photos would be used for my website).

Collage of in-process and final products that included arguments about sports, representations of disability in the media, the politics of “helping,” music and depression, and parenting.

So here’s the layout (which is a condensed version of the 4Cs workshop):

1. Write about one or two items that you brought (5 min). Like the workshop, I asked everyone to bring five items to class with them. To write about the objects, I posed the following questions: What is the significance of this item? What is its purpose? What could its purpose be?
2. Exchange one item with your group (5 min). Everyone sat in groups to help exchange ideas, and I wanted them to try to incorporate at least one unplanned object in their compositions. I also had supplies that they could use.
3. Compose (45 min). I gave them the majority of the class period for this and asked them to consider these questions: What can these objects communicate that your essay couldn’t? What are the potentials and limits of these objects? How can they work together or in opposition to tell a story?
4. Peer Review (15 min). I wanted them to do a “speed dating” peer review where people displayed their objects, talked through their process, and tried to let their peers guess the arguments. But everyone worked at such different paces that I didn’t want to cut anyone off. So instead, I gave them the option to do the reflection in class if they finished early.
5. Write a rhetorical reflection (homework). How did this activity make you rethink your argument? What were you able to accomplish? What issues did you encounter? Did this workshop give you any ideas for how you’d like to revisualize or “translate” your argument? What’s the takeaway?

Many of them made great connections with what they did in class to their argumentative essays. For example, the photo in the bottom right corner of the collage is an argument about the stigma against disabled parents. Her composition displays a sippy cup that represents the “parent” (which looks physically different from the other characters), a child in the middle, and a smaller angrier character on the other side. There is a black tie around the baby that represents the tug-of-war between parents and social workers.

Of course, there was some pushback (“Is this college?”) but overall was a productive activity that broke up our usual routine and gave students an opportunity to do some hands-on composing—something that isn’t always easy to incorporate into a writing classroom.

 

“Cultures of Discourse: Marxism and Rhetorical Theory”

Aune presents a conundrum here: the repression of Marxist theory within rhetoric and, reciprocally, the repression of rhetoric in Marxist theory. If mentioned at all, he argues, rhetoric is pushed to the “margins of serious discourse” (539). And although rhetoricians have taken up ideology, the crux of Marxist discourse—class struggle—has been largely ignored. Aune warns that though a focus on ideology can open up space to talk about oppressions more broadly (including race, gender, ability), this centralizing of ideology, which is frequently substituted for class struggle, “runs the risk of making oppression largely a linguistic or cultural matter” (540).

Before addressing these tensions, Aune provides some background of Marxism, outlining some key tenants:

1. “Labor” is a central, if not the central, characteristic of human beings.
2. The mode of production in a given social totality—the level of development of productive forces in addition to the type of work relations that accompany those forces—is a determining factor in establishing that totality’s social “being.”
3. All hitherto existing societies have been characterized by a class struggle over the control or allocation of the surplus from production.
4. The level of development of the productive forces determines, in the sense of setting boundary conditions for, the sort of class structure and class struggle in a given social system.
5. Because the productive forces tend to develop over time, “history” is generally predictable in terms of the succession of modes of production.
6. That class which controls the mode of production in a given society tends to repress, either through the threat of violence or through promoting a particular set of beliefs in the legitimacy of the existing order, radical alterations in control of the productive forces.
7. Capitalism has outlived its usefulness as a mode of production; that is, it helped develop the productive forces to their currently high level, but its chronic crises, and its wastefulness of natural resources and human talent, mean that it will pass away eventually.
8. The precise mode of capitalism’s passing away will vary, depending on the political assumptions of the various schools of Marxism. 541

These are important to outline because I certainly don’t have any Marxist theoretical background, and starting with a foundation of the theoretical tenants is useful for understanding what Marxism has to offer rhetoric (and vice versa). I feel like Aune’s argument takes off when he states that Marxism has a rhetorical problem: “either the classless society is inevitable and scientifically grounded with individual choice being irrelevant, or the classless society comes about through the persuasion of individuals and thus ceases to be grounded in scientific laws of history-laws that, as Kenneth Burke ([1950] 1969b) has pointed out, are a major source of Marxism’s rhetorical power in the first place (p. 101)” (542). That is, Marx didn’t account for how the working class as an entity struggles and gains power—an issue we read a little about a couple weeks ago regarding the discourse of social change.

Aune does acknowledge, however, that other Marxists have articulated the function of rhetoric. Specifically, he offers Terry Eagleton’s definition of rhetoric as a process of analyzing the material effects of language and of traditional rhetoric as “the textual training of the ruling class in the techniques of political hegemony” (101 qtd. in Aune 544). The problem with these definitions, Auge argues, is that they are more focused on academic critique than practice or advocacy.

Ultimately, Aune offers four themes that summarize his argument and articulate a tentative Marxist rhetorical theory:

1. The Marxist representative anecdote of human beings as producers rather than simply as symbol-users may help correct the “trained incapacity” or “occupational psychosis” of rhetorical theory. By foregrounding the role of labor in constructing our human world, a Marxist approach to communication may help revitalize the criticism of public discourse.
2. By foregrounding class struggle rather than public consensus, a Marxist rhetorical theory may be better able to explain broad historical shifts in rhetorical practice and pedagogy than do existing theoretical alternatives.
3. Traditional rhetoric, in privileging common sense as a starting point for the construction of enthymemes, may provide a needed corrective to Marxism’s tendency to view the common sense of a culture merely as a rationalization of that culture’s relations of domination.
4. Uniting Marxism’s traditional concern for economic democracy with rhetoric’s traditional (if at times ambiguous) concern for political democracy may provide a narrative structure for a new politics, one that views revolution as a struggle against racial, sexual, and economic oppression and against the specialized languages of expertise, which have characterized “liberal” reform in this century. Marxism needs to correct rhetoric’s avoidance of the category of labor in the construction of the social world, while rhetoric needs to correct Marxism’s one-sided focus on labor at the expense of other forms of domination.

This article was first published in 1990, and I assume Aune was laying a framework here for other rhetorical scholars to build from, even though—to steal a move from Jason—Google Scholar tells me his article was only cited 10 times. Regardless, I feel like the field has taken up Marxism and labor issues in productive ways. A few examples from some of the fine faculty at (and alum from) SU: the labor politics of first-year writing (by Tony Scott in his book and in this podcast for This Rhetorical Life) and contingent faculty (by Eileen Schell and Patricia Stock), the dynamics of community publishing (by Steve Parks and Paula Mathieu), the rhetorical theorization of political engagement (by Seth Kahn and JongHwa Lee), etc.

I think the most useful thing about Aune’s argument, for me at least, is the acknowledgement that we can’t separate ideology from its material counterparts—the practical considerations of action and labor.

 

 

Aune, James Arnt. “Cultures of Discourse: Marxism and Rhetorical Theory.” 539-51.

 

SUNY COW 2013

Yesterday, some of the This Rhetorical Life podcast crew presented at the 2013 SUNY Council on Writing (COW) Annual Conference about the podcast’s founding while raising critical questions about what the medium can mean for the future of the discipline.

I started with a discussion of how podcasts take up and complicate calls for multimodal composition. Ben talked about how the immediacy of a podcast mixed with its dialogic nature invites Comp Rhet into current political discussions. And Karrieann talked about the various issues that arise in relation to “voice” (dialect, multiple Englishes, inclusion and questioning of diverse voices).

Below is the presentation I gave.

***

“Podcasting as Alternative Publication Medium: An Enactment of Multimodal Scholarship”

I have to make a confession that might be a strange way to jumpstart this panel, but here it is: I don’t listen to podcasts. I have a really difficult time focusing on audio, which is why I never know the words to my favorite songs and cannot, for more than a few minutes, focus at conferences without a handout or a specific task—like note taking or tweeting. This is why you all have handouts today.

I’m co-executive producer of This Rhetorical Life, though, and I came to this project interested in participating in a project that would help create and distribute disciplinary information through a digital medium. I’ve worked on other podcast projects before, particularly within the context of writing centers, and believe strongly in their value as disciplinary resources.

My contribution to this panel, then, is an offering—the possibility of podcasts as an academic genre, a space to share research, an opportunity to produce multimodal scholarship.

To start, a clip from a podcast with Jason Palmeri about his recent book, Remixing Composition: A History of Multimodal Writing Pedagogy. In this particular snippet, Palmeri discusses multimodality’s status in the field and how it might be viewed by teachers at a variety of levels:

To a certain extent, multimodality has definitely become, I think, much more accepted across a wider group of the field at this point then it was when I first began this project. And yet, I still think it remains a perennial challenge to support teachers in making that turn in their pedagogy across the field. And also I think there’s still the tendency to equate the multimodal with the digital, and as long as we do that we’re definitely leaving out wide flaws of the field that are teaching in locations in which intensively working with digital technologies may not be, and/or may not feel, possible for a variety of reasons. So I think that’s a challenge, although I think there are a lot of scholars in the field right now who are definitely pushing the boundaries of what the multimodal could be. So I think about Jody Shipka’s book, and I think about Adam Banks’s work and a whole host of other scholars. I think that’s opening up the conversation. I still think a lot of work remains to be done.

Especially in the process of writing the book that I wrote, I was pretty conscious of the fact that actually people in the field have been saying we’ve been focusing too narrowly on alphabetic literacy and we ought to open and consider alternative forms of communication for about 40 years. And yet we’re still having to call for it. In some places, alphabetic literacy is still sedimented at the core of the field. So I think, it’s not like we’re ever going to suddenly wake up one day and be in a kind of totally transformed environment where multimodal composing is absolutely central to how composition is taught in every location, though I’m optimistic, I guess I would say. It’s continuing to grow, and more importantly what I’m seeing is—I’m seeing a wider group of people who are interested in multimodal composing who wouldn’t necessarily—and teaching multimodally—who wouldn’t necessarily identify with computers and writing, for example, as their research area. But I think it’s starting to become a practice that more people are accepting as just part of what it means to teach composition.

I chose this episode and this specific passage for a few reasons. It begins to push past the focus of multimodal composition as predominantly a pedagogical concern. It is an example of discussing multimodality through multimodal scholarship. And it reimagines the medium for scholarly publications.

So let me break those down a little into three “refrains,” as Palmeri might put it.

ONE: Our disciplinary interests in multimodality must extend to our scholarship.

That is, our disciplinary focus on multimodality is predominantly pedagogical, interested in new media composing within classroom contexts. Similarly, the scholarship on podcasts, at least within the broad field of writing studies, is predominantly focused on classroom and learning spaces. That is, podcasts are used as tools by instructors to record classroom lectures, by students for producing new media assignments, and by writing center consultants for creating mini-lessons about writing and research.

As Palmeri notes in that clip, the interest in multimodal composing is growing, and I would like to push for growing interest in how we can use technologies like podcasting not just within our classrooms but also within our scholarship—which leads to the second refrain.

TWO: If we want to increase the importance and value of the multimodal, we must do so multimodally. To borrow an old cliché, we have to practice what we preach. Out of the 42 Rhetoric and Composition journals catalogued on the Council of Writing Program Administrators website, only 6 accept “new media” texts (Kairos, Computers and Composition Online, Enculturation, Harlot, Technoculture, and—arguably—Present Tense. And even though we’re seeing more examples of new media texts, there are still just as many texts being published about multimodality and new media in traditional print journals and books.

Many, particularly self-identified digital humanists, have been quick to criticize this trend.

In 2004, Cheryl Ball—editor of Kairos—published “Show, Not Tell: The Value of New Media Scholarship,” arguing that online publications tend “not to break print-bound conventions” (404). Ball also distinguishes between scholarship about new media and new media scholarship. Scholarship about new media “uses print conventions such as written text as the main mode of argument” (404), whereas new media scholarship “uses modes other than only written text to form an argument” (404). More specifically, new media are texts that juxtapose semiotic modes—eg. sound with written word—in forms that are not linear nor alphabetic (405).

This Rhetorical Life both supports and complicates this idea. It is new media scholarship in the sense that it offers rhetorical arguments predominantly through an aural mode—sound. At the same time, This Rhetorical Life is both a new media project and a multimodal project, and I do distinguish between these two terms. Often, new media or digital is conflated with multimodality (as noted by both Jason Palmeri and Jody Shipka), but it is important to recognize the differences, that multimodal texts do not necessarily have to be digital. In many ways, through the transcripts posted with every episode, This Rhetorical Life is also a multimodal project because it offers both sound and written text and need not simply be a digital initiative (although it is distributed online).

Ball emphasizes that new media scholarship isn’t linear. Many of our podcasts are interview-based, which, though they are listened to linearly, could be read from question to question—or, like I did, different points could be pulled without disrupting the larger “argument” of the texts. In fact, I would argue that our podcasts, though scholarly endeavors that offer rhetorical analyses and information relevant to our field, don’t have central arguments in the same way as traditional scholarship, which leads me to the third—and perhaps most complicated—refrain.

THREE: Technologies like podcasting can allow us to reimagine the medium for scholarly publications, moving toward a more accessible model of scholarship.

When I re-read my proposed title in order to brainstorm for this presentation, I felt like hitting my head against a wall. I kept reading the words “podcasting as alternative publication” and asking myself, What was I thinking? Podcasts as publications? And certainly I don’t mean to suggest that we should think of podcast projects in the same way that we think of scholarly monographs, but I do think we could imagine them as publications that are useful resources for the larger discipline. In fact, many have argued for the value of digital projects (Collin Brooke and Alex Reid have discussed academic blogging, for example).

In print scholarship—and here I mean specifically traditional argument-based written texts—we engage with the ideas of others, but we don’t really dialogue with those ideas or those authors. Podcasts enact a literal dialogue among scholars about ideas. For example, in the Palmeri podcast, a fellow PhD student in the Composition and Cultural Rhetoric program had a conversation with Palmeri about his text. That podcast in particular, even though it was only published in February, has already been used in graduate classrooms as a supplement to Palmeri’s book. This podcast has gained currency as a valuable publication. And because it is in direct dialogue with the book and the author, it reimagines the book review as a genre—offering a new space and new mode for dialoguing with scholars about their work.

In this same vein of reimaging publication media, I think podcast projects lend themselves productively to discussions of open access publishing. In a Rhetoric, Composition, and Digital Humanities course that I took in the Fall of 2012, we read Hacking the Academy, the online book crowdsourced in one week in May 2010. I thought of the arguments those interdisciplinary scholars were making when thinking through this idea of podcasting as publication.

One contribution I think is particularly useful to consider here is Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s blog post titled “On Open Access Publishing,” wherein she argues that open access publishing has an ethical imperative “to ensure that less affluent institutions and individual scholars without institutional support are able to gain access to current research.” And though this point about current research is something that Ben is definitely going to take up, I just want to note here the idea of ethical scholarship. Coming from a background in professional writing and interests in disability studies, my interests in this project—initially just to provide disciplinary information digitally—has also been interconnected with making this information as accessible as possible, from the adaptive WordPress theme we chose for our website to the full-text transcripts of every podcast. Personally, I try to make all the scholarly work I do public—posting full text copies of conference presentations to my blog and making my reading notes public. I think this is a particularly important concern for This Rhetorical Life as a potential resource for the field (and even for audiences beyond the field).

Another useful way to consider This Rhetorical Life as an open access publication is Dan Cohen’s post called “Open Access Publishing and Scholarly Values.” In his post, Cohen appeals to disciplinary values in an attempt to persuade scholars to be more accepting to non-traditional scholarship. There are three points here that I think are definitely transferable:

1. “Writing is writing and good is good,” regardless of the publication medium. That is, we tend to regard the work of particular journals, such as CCC based on their reputability, and because there is so much content available to us, we tend to prioritize based on reputation (reading particular journals) rather than content. When we do this, we further marginalize the quality content that doesn’t make it into these journals.
2. Another point Cohen makes relates to my point about practicing what we preach. He argues that as humanities scholars, our work focuses on “uncovering and championing the voices of those who are less privileged and powerful, but here we are in the ivory tower, still preferring to publish in ways that separate our words from those of the unwashed online masses.” Hyperbolic? Yes, but perhaps rightfully so because the hyperbole just adds to the disconnect of intention and practice.
3. The last thing I want to draw attention to here is the idea of circulation. Cohen argues that the largest hidden cost of academic publishing is the invisibility of that work. That is, when we publish in scholarly journals, we publish for a very particular, very small audience. The day we announced This Rhetorical Life on Facebook, February 28th, the website had 300 views and 118 unique visitors referred from Facebook. We posted an episode late yesterday afternoon and the Facebook post about that episode had 222 views by midnight last night. When we hosted our transnational feminism panel last week and I live-tweeted the event (@TRLpodcast), we got an influx of new followers within that hour. Perhaps none of this is surprising, but it is a powerful testament to the power of online publishing (and of social media, but that’s its own beast).

And so I’ll end where I began. If we are serious about creating accessible scholarship that puts scholars in dialogue and offers audiences multiple modes of information—if we care about creating scholarship that is relevant and useful to the field—we need to take on, and support, projects that may not be recognizable as traditional scholarly endeavors, projects that—as Fitzpatrick says—“do the risky thing.”

Thank you.

 

How the Internet Is Making Us “Stupid” One Meme at a Time

This afternoon at the 2013 SUNY Cow luncheon keynote, Richard Miller delivered a talk titled, “Who’s This For? Audience in the Classroom without Walls.” Among other things, Miller addressed the challenges of motivating students to be interested in the topics we assign (and even that they choose) within our composition classrooms—to be interested in anything. Part of this challenge, he argued, is a result of the Internet and the distractions of 21st-century digital environments (paging Cathy Davidson).

This keynote was part illusion to newness (we’re in a new era where everything we know about learning and composing is brand-spanking new), part appeal to tech innovation (we have all of these new composing software and publishing tools), part fear-based rhetoric (if we don’t adapt quickly, we will become irrelevant to our tech-savvy, uninterested students). Although I think many scholars have spoken to all three of these points—both in agreement and through critique—it is this last point that I want to focus on, the fear that often accompanies the introduction of new technologies within our disciplinary spaces.

The Futurama Fry meme (not sure if just getting older and bitter or if this generation is really as dumb as it seems) seems particularly relevant here.

I chuckled when, during one of many jokes, Miller told us that he teaches apocalyptic-themed courses, “if you can believe it.” Indeed I could—particularly after the apocalyptic tones undergirding his presentation that seemed to foreshadow the ills of the Internet on our students, our teaching, and our cultural knowledge.

I’ve been troubled by this all day, so I thought of this keynote while reading Barry Brummet’s article “Burke’s Representative Anecdote as a Method in Media Criticism.” Brummet argues that a particular focus of Burke’s work is to show how the different parts of literature occur and recur as responses to particular situations, which then give us examples for how to live those situations (479). Through dramatism, when something is represented to us, that representation is a summation of the thing’s existence, and the dramatic—perhaps translated here as simply performed—responses of individuals make up the essence of human action (480).

tl;dr

What is represented to us through media influences how we perform our daily lives.

Another component of this situation is the representative anecdote. Brummet defines an anecdote as the “dramatic form which underlies the content, or the specific vocabulary, of discourse” (480). Another way to think about it is as “a lens, filter, or template through which the critic studies and reconstructs this discourse” (481). The representative anecdote, then, is a reflection of particular cultural values, concerns, interests (482). It underpins media discourses and offers us a lens through which to analyze the discursive effects on audiences.

The final component that needs to be mentioned here is xeroxing:

Xeroxing is the duplication and replacement of humans with evil, inhuman copies that are difficult to detect. The act of duplication occurs in a scene of rapid change and decay. This act of duplication is carried out through technological conspiracies. The replacements themselves are marked by a poverty and uniformity of purpose, the sign of a loss of humanity. (486)

Xeroxing returns to the idea of fear. Brummet writes, “With a fear of change comes a sense that change means decay” (486), a tidy connection back to Miller’s keynote. So let me break that down a little.

Xeroxing as a representative anecdote is the narrative of technology as this new thing that is changing everything. As Palmeri notes in Remixing Composition, new technologies tend to be regarded in two extremes: overexuberance and fear (6). In this afternoon’s keynote, fear reigned supreme, taking particular form within the meme (Miller’s example was lolcats).

Through the meme, we can trace Brummet’s argument. For example, xeroxing through the process of duplication exists within a culture of 1) rapid change and 2) decay. Aside from viral videos, no other media are as rapidly changing as memes. It seems like there are 100 new viral memes each week, and the meme by its very nature is ever-evolving as new users adapt them to craft new arguments. However, as heard in today’s keynote, this influx of memes also marks decay of intellectual interest—purposeful misspellings, silly jokes, an obsession with finding and watching the newest and funniest thing. That is, the meme signals a loss of humanity, a loss of the composition student as we (think we) used to know her.

Xeroxing also “expresses that fear of The Enemy” (488), which presents another interesting tension. Brummett notes that antagonists are portrayed in the media as flat caricatures, and the articulation of the Internet-as-enemy follows this representation. When we position the Internet at large as the enemy of intellectual inquiry, we flatten its multidimensionality and, thus, the opportunity that it provides students. If students are interested in memes, why not create a culture jamming assignment where students actually have to create memes surrounding a particular theme or criticism?

“iAddict”: An FYC student jams the myth of the digital native (image & explanation from bgsu.edu)

Through xeroxing as a representative anecdote, Brummet argues that “audiences are armed to accet, reject, or attempt to change the real course of events depicted in the media” (491). If the audience are our students, presumably pre-occupied with memes, then they are agents attempting to change the course of events through the production and dissemination of memes. If the audience are fearful instructors, however, we are doomed to failure if we are determined to reject these interests as anti-intellectual or unproductive to the classroom.

We set ourselves up for failure if we think that the Internet and students’ use of the Internet is inherently anti-intellectual. Part of this fear-based rhetoric of changing technologies is that it doesn’t give enough credit to either the technologies discussed or the students who act agentively within these spaces. Yes, I’m sure many students spend countless hours on YouTube simply consuming media and many of them tweet during class. But so do I.

Does that mean I’m anti-intellectual?

No.

It may simply mean that we need to reconsider the way we attract student attention, motivate students within and outside the classroom, and appeal to interests and learning styles that may be better met within this “digital age.” It may also mean that, as Brummet notes in his conclusion, that we should be more mindful of future discourses that propagate this xeroxing.

 

 

Brummet, Barry. “Burke’s Representative Anecdote as a Method in Media Criticism.” 479-93.

 

#4c13 Roundup

The Riveria Casino & Hotel, home of 4C13

Despite the fact that it was in sensory-overload Las Vegas and despite the fact that my sinuses exploded from our cigar-filled casino/convention hotel, this year’s #4c13 may have been my best conference experience thus far. I really enjoyed the pre-conference workshop I attended, I felt really confident about my presentation, and I got a lot of constructive feedback about the work that I do–both during our panel session and throughout the rest of the conference.

It was very humbling.

Also always humbling is the work that others do and share at conferences, and although I didn’t attend nearly the number of sessions that I would have liked (thanks sinuses!), I managed to squeeze in some really great ones:

• D.03 Embodiment, Disability, and the Idea of Normativity
• H.23 Ethically Engaging Difference: Rhetorical Empathy, Insider-Outsider Rhetoric, and Representations of Disability
• I.27 Minding the Publics and the Work of Composition: Disability: Dysfluency, and Neurodiversity
• K.15 The Digital Rhetorician as an Agent of Social Change
• Committee on Disability Issues

I also talked with some really great people–managing to introduce myself to Jason Palmeri and to interview Cindy Selfe for This We Believe. I had the chance to pass out some of our fly postcards promoting This Rhetorical Life. And even though I didn’t make it to the Disability Studies SIG this year, I was so glad to have the opportunity to sit in on the Committee on Disability Issues again, which is such a great space to talk about the disability- and accessibility-related issues relevant to Cs and the larger discipline.

Las Vegas from the top of the Stratosphere

Because the sessions I went to were so limited (and because we took a redeye home Friday night), I was so grateful for the Twitter conversations (#4c13 + #dis) that kept me in the loop of the sessions I couldn’t attend. They were so useful, in fact, that I created a Storify archive of those tweets:

["Disability-Related #4c13 Sessions: A Story in Tweets"]

Even with all of these excellent experiences, great conversations, and ideas brewing, I must admit I’m glad to be back in Syracuse. Flashy lights, constant streams of smoke, and open containers on the sidewalk just aren’t my bag. Although even I can’t deny that the view from the top of the Stratosphere was breathtaking.

Catch you on the flip side, Vegas. See y’all in Indy. #4c14

 

Role of the Leader in Social Movements

Some figures emerge from social movements as leaders of the people, whether they choose or accept these labels or not: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Desmond Tutu. Some movements are leader-less, their power decentralized and dispersed: the animal liberation movement, radical environmentalism, Occupy. Though I have read his essay before, I was intrigued by this tension between a leader-driven social movement (Simons) read next to a leader-less movement (Kohrs Campbell).

In “Requirements, Problems, and Strategies: A Theory of Persuasion for Social Movements,” Herbert W. Simons attempts to theorize and analyze the role of persuasion in social movements through the lens of how they are led. In order to theorize these social movements—defined as “an uninstiutionalized collectivity that mobilizes for action to implement a program for the reconstitution of social norms or values” (386)—he establishes a framework:

These imperatives constitute rhetorical requirements for the leadership of a movement. Conflicts among requirements create rhetorical problems, which in turn affect decisions on rhetorical strategy. The primary rhetorical test of the leader—and, indirectly, of the strategies he employs—is his capacity to fulfill the requirements of his movement by resolving or reducing rhetorical problems. (386)

The role of the leader, then, is to balance the internal demands of the movement’s people with the external demands of the larger structure in order to ameliorate (somehow) the rhetorical problems of the conflict. This is a conflicted place to be both ethically and practically.

A leader faces rhetorical dilemmas that range from identifying with the movement’s people to distorting or concealing information from them in order to maintain support to balancing the people’s needs without relinquishing power (388-390). How a leader develops strategies to address these dilemmas depends on the leader, who falls on a continuum: moderate, intermediate, militant.

A moderate leader (and strategist) embodies reason, civility, and decorum (390). If the moderate leader—in a Burkean sense—attempts to create identification between the movement and larger power structure, the militant leader relies on division (390). Interestingly, both leaders attempt to use intermediate strategies “to obtain the following advantages of each while still avoiding their respective disadvantages” (391). An example of this is energy. Simons describes militant supporters as energized and moderate supporters as controlled. If militant supporters become too aggravated and start taking power into their own hands, the militant leader must balance the needs and desires of the people and employ a more intermediate strategy to re-gain control.

The final key element here is the difference between power-vulnerables and power-invulnerables. Simons defines “power-invulnerables” as “those who have little or nothing to lose by publicly voicing their prejudices and acting on their self-concerns” (392). Typically, I think of these people as allies or even (less positively) as people who get caught in the cross-fire in some way—people who may not have direct interests or stake in the movement.

Women in the women’s liberation movement had a lot to lose. In “The Rhetoric of Women’s Liberation: An Oxymoron,” Karlyn Kohrs Campbell takes a different approach than Simons—one that I see much more in line with the Disability Rights Movement (DRM).

Campbell argues that “the rhetoric of women’s liberation is a distinctive genre because it evinces unique rhetorical qualities that are a fusion of substantive and stylistic features” (397). So Campbell seeks to carve out a different kind of rhetoric for the women’s liberation movement. Indeed, Campbell claims that “insofar as the role of rhetor entails qualities of self-reliance, self-confidence, and independence, its very assumption is a violation of the female role” (398). The same can be said for the rhetoric of the DRM because if we assume the rhetor to be an engaged citizen—a rhetorical agent—this, too, is at odds with the image of the disabled citizen who has been denied access to the civic realm and who (most frequently with mental and intellectual disability) has been stripped of rhetorical agency.

There are even similarities in the struggles for economic (the disabled represent the largest unemployment group), social (members of the DRM attempt to redefine social assumptions), and sexual (forced abortions and compulsory sterilization still occur) equality.

Though Kohrs Campbell argues that women’s liberation rhetoric easily meets classical rhetorical standards, she argues that such reformist demands are “substantively unique, inevitably radical, because they attack the fundamental values underlying this culture. The option to be moderate and reformist is simply not available to women’s liberation advocates” (399). This is an interesting connection to Simons and “power-vulnerables.” Because women have such deeply bodied and radical investment in these issues, they can’t occupy moderate space. I would argue the same is true for those participating in the DRM—the issue is so deeply bodied, in fact, that is a life or death issue. When the disabled don’t have access (to economic equality, health care, rights that positions them as human beings, relationships and families and a sexual culture), they risk prejudice, the inability to afford necessary medications and services, and hate crimes.

Moving backward for a moment, it’s also important to flesh out what Kohrs Campbell means when she claims that women’s rhetoric is substantively and stylistically different. I’ve already addressed the substantive issues (violating sex-appropriate norms), and she defines stylistic features as “characteristic modes of rhetorical interaction, typical ways of structuring the relationships among participants in a rhetorical transaction, and emphasis on particular forms of argument, proof, and evidence” (400). This is where I began this post: the notion of rhetorical interactions and leader-less social movements.

Kohrs Campbell focuses on “consciousness raising,” which “involves meetings of small, leaderless groups in which each person is encouraged to express her personal feelings and experience” (400).

There is no leader, rhetor, or expert.

And the goal is to make the personal political, “to create awareness (through shared experiences) that what were thought to be personal deficiencies and individual problems are common and shared, a result of their position as women” (400). Here the differences of women’s rhetoric become clearer: rejecting a singular expert leader, valuing narrative and personal experience, risking self-exposure, emphasizing dialogue.

And so, she concludes, the rhetoric of women’s liberation is ultimately an oxymoron:

It is a genre without a rhetor, a rhetoric in search of an audience, that transforms traditional argumentation into confrontation, that “persuades” by “violating the reality structure” but that presumes a consubstantiality so radical that it permits the most intimate of identifications. It is a “movement” that eschews leadership, organizational cohesion, and the transactions typical of mass persuasion. Finally, of course, women’s liberation is baffling because there is no clear answer to the recurring question, “What do women want?” On one level, the answer is simple; they want what every person wants—dignity, respect, the right to self-determination, to develop their potentials as individuals. But on another level, there is no answer—not even in feminist rhetoric. (408)

Still shot of Disability Rights Movement protest (Lives Worth Living, pbs.org)

And here I conclude with the DRM. In many ways, the goals of the group are immensely personal/political. There is a desire for equality, for basic human rights. But as Kohrs Campbell mentions, there is an interesting tension here because there is no single answer to the question, “what do the disabled want?” All members don’t have the same experiences and intentions, so they can’t have the same political goals. And because disability includes such a wide range of lived experiences and material realities, there’s a danger in overgeneralizing when characterizing the needs and goals of the disabled.

There is also a risk in having a leader of the DRM because, again, the disabled community is so vastly different. Tanya Titchkosky has noted this when she critiques the handicapped logo as the universal symbol of disability—because it only speaks to a limited portion of the community.

What interests me, then, particularly in terms of a leader-less disability rights movement, is this: How do leader-less groups, such as the disabled community, productively organize (and seek to deconstruct) particular identity categories if they don’t identify with those categories? 

 

 

Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs. “The Rhetoric of Women’s Liberation: An Oxymoron.” 397-410.

Simons, Herbert W. “Requirements, Problems, and Strategies: A Theory of Persuasion for Social Movements.”  385-396.