Self-ish
Odd things always converge in the world conversation of blogging. It seems that Shauna and Daniel are trading places. What makes this game even more interesting is that Daniel has left Shauna with some canned posts to use as she is currently struggling with a writer’s block. So, who is who? Stepping into someone else’s personality template is an interesting idea indeed.
Part of “Elegies for the Book,” one of Lanham’s essays in The Electronic Word, relates directly to the “self” question in electronic communication. I really like his point of view:
Something in this repeated discussion about self and society in the electronic classroom and, by extension, in electronic society needs to be set straight. The central self is threatened not by a lively social self but by a lack of one. Electronic networks permit a genuinely stylized public life, one with formal roles that we can play that are not isomorphic with our “real selves.” They allow us to create that genuine social self which America has discouraged from the beginning. Our Clarity-Brevity-Sincerity theory of style has been a theory of identity too. We have in America always resisted a formal public self and society: that represented the kind of European insincerity America meant to escape. For this reason, American academic utopias have always tried to do away with the false authoritarian relationships between student and teacher and to speak without the “rhetoric” of polite public conversation.I think private selves are developed through conversation. We take what we want and leave the rest, perhaps finding our boundaries as Ray aptly describes it. Sustaining conversation requires certain common grounds of “appropriateness conventions,” in other words, politeness, which can only be developed through social interaction. One camp seems to view hypertext as the ultimate in individualistic (or at least anti-authoritarian) rudeness; the other, the ultimate in social politeness. I suspect that Lanham is right to suggest that the real power lies in the oscillation between the two.
But this rhetoric allows us to have a genuine private self. The one extreme creates the other; the oscillation between the two creates the complex Western self. If computer networks allow us to play roles with no fear, so much the better. We should push them in that direction. We needn’t worried that the private, central self will be impoverished. Private selves are created by public ones.
Oh, and it does bear mentioning that the CBS style is actually descended from the Scots— Alexander Bain in particular— who was also one of the first rhetorical theorists who focused on writing rather than oration. He's the guy responsible for such things as "thesis statements" and the five paragraph model of the essay, rapidly embraced by America in the twentieth century.
well that was interesting :)you know, daniel's canned posts came before my writers block. and i am more blocked up as in stuffed to the gills with snot and flu virus, as opposed to writers block.
-----COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Pascale Soleil
EMAIL:
URL: http://radio.weblogs.com/100595/
DATE: 06/11/2002 11:28:00 PM
Oooh, you said one of my favorite words -- "conversation." A key statement in my formal manifesto reads "Anything worth doing is a form of conversation." I'm intrigued by your notion of the private self's identity being formed through conversation. I need to think about that a bit. ++++++++ At some point I also want to take up your reference to the messaianic role of the artist. +++++++ Too much food for thought. Gotta go burp!
-----COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Turbulent Velvet
EMAIL:
URL: http://www.ufobreakfast.com
DATE: 06/13/2002 11:09:00 PM
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Jeff,
I've been enjoying your discussion a lot. I've learned a lot arguing in my head with Lanham for awhile now.
But I think the point about "politeness" above indicates a blind spot in rhetorical theory generally, and that's emotion. The ethical question--the way we treat each other rhetorically--doesn't really map onto formal questions very well, does it? I can imagine someone being fair in all three ways: the clarity-brevity-sincerity way and the sophist-constructionist way and the oscillating way between. I can also imagine someone being an asshole in all three ways. (In fact, as appealing as Lanham's "oscillation" solution seems to be at first, it's nonetheless true that the tactic of switching off between two definitional systems is the quickest and easiest way to be an asshole: heads I win, tails you lose.)
When we start getting at the ethical issue, I think there's a reason why we start reaching for words that have a vaguely emotional referent (like "politeness")--even though we convince ourselves that we're talking about a purely cognitive or formal quality (like "boundaries" or "appropriateness conventions"). The reason is that ethics is largely grounded in what kind of emotions we privilege, what kind of emotions we wish upon others, what kind of emotions we wish to promote in culture as the basic processing template for dealing with intellectual issues or with each other.
Lanham's critique of the CBS philosophy is good up to a point. But sometimes I think he is conflating two issues with the CBS construct and perhaps being unfair to the people he criticizes. When someone insists on "sincerity," is this always a formal-stylistic-epistemological demand? Could it sometimes mean something like: "In your performance, promote social affects X and Y and beware promoting social affect Z."
I'm not sure yet what affects I would plug into this formulation. But I wonder if the imperative of "sincerity" is not really a demand for transparency but rather--for some people--something like a requirement of reciprocal decencies: "do not exploit another's rhetorical weakness without just cause" or "do not encourage the viral spread of petty malice" or "do not encourage people to experience each other as exploitable objects." Or even "first, do no harm."
Could you see a different issue lurking beneath the rhetorical taxonomies here? The emotional vector seems to me orthogonal to the rhetorical distinctions that Lanham wants to draw like "look at/look through" "philosophical/ethical" and so on.
Ethics seems to me primarily a matter of emotion scripts. Some people think that promoting hostile emotions is--in general and as a calculated gamble--more likely to promote the social good (these emotions humiliate those with evil views before they have a chance to do harm, they create strong individuals, they prevent decadence). Some think that promoting the emotions of irony promotes the good (irony creates reflexive distance and undermines the grip of violence) while some think that promoting the feeling of compassion will promote the good (compassion reduces distance and promotes interidentification, and therefore clarification of grievances.)
In brief: "ethicists" on all sides want specific feelings in place as much as they want specific rules or beliefs or procedures. They want to promote certain feelings in advance of context. (And they all deny this: each will be the first to condemn the other side for wanting "mere" feelings rather than rules or beliefs or procedures.)
Emotion scripts may be formed early in life, and all the more indelible for that reason. But even if they're not fixed during childhood, they're built up out of idiosyncratic life events which have a tremendous, sometimes traumatic, psychological grip. In cases where people's emotion scripts diverge strongly, you're not likely to see any agreement, ever--and rhetoric can't build much of a bridge because part of the friction has little to with the specific topics under discussion. It has to do with the emotional "rules" that the other person will project onto any question.
With regard to the discussion above: what I see is that the rhetorical promotion of one's preferred emotional "ethic" could be achieved through the rhetoric of "sincerity," or "performance," or "oscillation." And if that's true, then one can't identify "rhetorical ethics" with one of these rhetorical procedures as opposed to the others.
-----COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Ray
EMAIL: raydavis@kokonino.com
URL: http://www.bellonatimes.com/
DATE: 06/15/2002 1:27:00 PM
I'm pig-ignant about the history of rhetoric, but T.V.'s stately plump comments certainly bring needed clarity to the lay use of "rhetoric."
I would merely add that the emotional dimension is not always as stable as T.V. for the purposes of argument makes it out to be. There are one-trick ponies and steady draft horses when it comes to rhetorical scripts (the canonical academic paper-writer, for example), and there are similarly single-minded folk as regards emotion scripts (the Troll and the Attack Dog, to name a popular comedy team). But many of us switch our emotional goals about as often as we switch our discursive tactics, and usually without really noticing either. (After all, it's all "me" talking, and I'm not lying, and so unity is guaranteed. Hilarity ensues.) And some of us (fiction writers, priests, and politicians among them) consciously -- for structural or other reasons -- switch which feelings are being sincerely promoted ("K-Mart shoppers: Special on Compassion in Aisle 9").
Ethics must be able take such switching into account.