Rhetoric II: Week Three (Haraway, Ahmed, and Covino)

Before I get to this week's writing assignment, I want to share some reading notes and thoughts that I found helpful for my comprehension as I moved through. I love what William Covino's doing, in "The Classical Art of Wondering."  It's instantaneous gratification: here's some immediate evidence of shifts from classical to modern.  Here are some ways of considering how our understanding of rhetoric has shifted, as framed through contextualized interpretations of ancient texts.

• Covino: Have we actually imposed more taxonomy, categorization, and rules on classical rhetoric in modern times than was there in Ancient Greece? (Product of positivist scientific thinking/discourses...)
• Covino, on Plato: "Understanding the Phaedrus as a unified system of discourse principles, or as a lesson about love or wisdom or beauty, we mimic the limitations of Phaedrus himself, the boy who would rather acquire and memorize facts and concepts than ask questions" (13). Making P. into no more than a lesson on discourse inhibits our own wonder in reading the text. An example of "critical blindness to ambiguity" (14).
• Covino: "Writing depends upon the concealment of ambiguity for its persuasive power.... For Plato, writing which pretends to be clear, factual, and final in its pronouncements—plain writing—lies" (19).
• Covino: "The art of rhetoric is an art of invention, of hypothesizing different variables informing a speech situation, and reflection on how the situation is affected" (24).
• Covino: "The art [of rhetoric] lies not in the completion of a text, but in the transfiguration of one text—one system of possibilities—into another" (25).
• Covino: "The activity of rhetoric is not the filling in of discursive forms; it is, rather, the formation of forms, via shifting among categories of understanding with a persistent whimsy, in order to create a temporary scaffold for constructions of even greater complexity" (28). Speculation; inquiry.  Wonder can be used (as a heuristic?? is this the word I want?) to create even more meaning and/or complexity.  Inquiry opens up more possibilty, evolution of terms.
• Covino: "Aristotle tends to ambiguate the content of his most decisive pronouncements, pronouncements neatly schematized by those who savor utilitarian rhetoric" (32).
• Covino: "Memory makes meaning, and acts to conjoin multiple perspectives across time" (40).
• Covino: Ciceronian rhetoric is an "irresolute interplay of viewpoints" and "drama of perspectives" (44).
• Covino: Wonder allows us to make more eloquent speeches, as we are "unconstrained by some purpose or end or stance" (44).

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Assignment: Analyze one paragraph or short set of paragraphs from the reading material. Address what’s being said in the excerpt and then attempt to discuss how it is representative of a larger argument or line of thinking apparent in this week’s reading.

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As I got about a third of the way through Covino's piece on wonder (specifically, page 20), I was struck by the following line:

"Socrates, the fool/tease/teacher/lover of boys-words-truth here allows/resists/invites/succumbs to the compulsion/naivete/coquetry/violence of this student/lover/'other'/wretch."  

Here, I see Covino embodying with the text the playfulness that he argues for embracing in ancient rhetorical texts like the Phaedrus. Here the language use and sentence structure shifts from very academic to somewhat whimsical.

More importantly, the juxtaposition of contradictory terms in this first line of the paragraph (note especially "allows/resists/invites/succumbs") demonstrates the kind of ambiguity that Covino argues for seeing in rhetorical texts.  Instead of imposing an objective, positivistic, rule-governed, and/or overly taxonomic view on these texts, Covino argues for abandoning our "critical blindness to ambiguity" and allowing ourselves to follow the philosophy of wonder. Who exactly is Socrates in the Phaedrus? What is it that he’s doing? How could we characterize Plato?

Covino goes on to address these very questions, scare quotes to similar rhetorical effect:

• "As the dialogue continues, possibilities for naming what the characters are 'about' increase as the context of the classroom discussion expands."
• "Incongruous realms and identities comprise the 'grammar' of Plato's writing, which tends to multiply rather than conceal the varieties of meaning."

These scare quotes signify that the answers to what the characters are about and what grammar governs Plato's discourse is unstable. Meanings for character motivations and beliefs might be multiple; perhaps asking what they are about is not even a definitively answerable question. And perhaps the grammar of Plato's writing is not a scientific, rule-governed system that can be easily identified by characteristics: perhaps it is ambiguous, playful.  Perhaps we might have to muse on the possibilities of meaning in the writing, instead of assigning an assured tone, an absolute stance.

On the next page, Covino goes on to consider the word about in more detail, in a way that seems to align with my analysis here: "that 'about' may be reconsidered not as a preposition restricting an object, but as a verb, as a synonym for doing, or making as in 'out and about'" (21).  The use of scare quotes around the word about would support such an alternate reading of the word's definition and use.

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Thoughts on and quotes from a short passage by Sarah Ahmed, "Feminism and Wonder."

• Ahmed: "What is ordinary, familiar or usual often resists being perceived by consciousness. It becomes taken for granted, as the background that we do not even notice, and which allows objects to stand out or stand apart" (179).
• Ahmed: "Wonder here seems preimsed on 'first-ness': the object that appears before the subject is encountered for the first time, or as if for the first time.... So wonder, as an affective relation to the world, is about seeing the world that one faces and is faced with 'as if' for the first time" (179).
• Ahmed: Seeing the world as if anew is not an impulse for erasure, but instead "allows us to see the surfaces of the world as made, and as such wonder opens up rather than suspends historiocity" (179).
• Ahmed: "Wonder is about learning to see the world as something that does not have to be, and as something that came to be, over time, and with work" (180).  Involves learning.
• Ahmed: Wonder + embodiment. "The body opens as the world opens up before it; the body unfolds into the unfolding of a world that becomes approached as another body" (180).  Feminist pedagogy as "the affective opening up of the world" (181).
• Ahmed: "nothing in the world can be taken for granted" (182). Wonder means not letting the world become familiar, commonplace, or in the background—Ahmed uses wonder to interrogate, examine, and/or open to new possibilities.
• Ahmed: "Wonder keeps bodies and spaces open to the surprise of others" (183).

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Thoughts on and quotes from Donna Haraway's "A Manifesto for Cyborgs."

• Haraway's argument: "the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings" (581).
• Haraway: "They [cyborgs] are about consciousness—or its simulation" (584).
• Haraway: "So my cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities that progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work" (585). (Transgressed boundaries = Foucalt?)  How will Haraway argue that these possibilities are part of needed political work?  Maybe possibilities ~ wonder?
• Aha: "...not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints" (585).
• Collectivity is a myth.  Struggle against unity.

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I'm not sure if I'd like to analyze a second passage for my response paper this week, but I'll at least present it here and see if some thoughts come to me as I read.  Donna Haraway also plays with ambiguitites in her “Manifesto for Cyborgs.” She writes:

From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet, about the final abstraction embodied in a star wars apocalypse waged in the name of defense, about the final appropriation of women’s bodies in a masculinist orgy of war. From another perspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints.  The political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point. Single vision produces worse illusions than double vision or many-headed monsters. Cyborg unities are monstrous and illegitimate; in our present political circumstances we could hardly hope for more potent myths for resistance and recoupling. I like to imagine LAG, the Livermore Action Group, as a kind of cyborg society, dedicated to realistically converting the laboratories that most fiercely embody and spew out the tools of technological apocalypse, and committed to building a political form that actually manages to hold together witches, engineers, elders, perverts, Christians, mothers, and Leninists long enough to disarm the state. Fission Impossible is the name of the affinity group in my town. (Affinity: related not by blood but by choice, the appeal of one chemical nuclear group for another, avidity.) (586)

Briefly, I’ll observe that this paragraph (like most others in this manifesto) is thick; there are many ideas, and she plays with the idea of a few standpoints.