blah blah ginger, blah blah blah...

Once I got past Jameson's claim of supremacy of Marxism over all other theories (Marxism is the brand of theory that nine out of ten Marxists recommend), I was able to nestle into the warm bosom of (anti?) sociopolitical repression.

The main point in Jameson my brain glommed onto was that necessity creates dependence, just like how a domesticated animal comes home after a quick jaunt around town because it knows where its meal is coming from. It was also the reason that tribes were created: we keep each other warm, safe and fed, and we'll choose the most intelligent, and the best hunters, among the group to run everything. It made sense then, and it makes sense now. The only difference is that now it's sort of humiliating. We are willing slaves ("crumbs, crumbs, crumbs!").

I, in spite of this realization of gentle enslavement, prefer Althusser's off-brand version of Marxism (what is voluntary slavery, after all, if not compromise). There's that notion in physics that every action must have an equal and opposite reaction, but since when are things so clear-cut? A single moment in time is created by a confluence of events leading up to that moment, and each piece of art (especially writing) has an infinite amount of influences. The French Revolution didn't start because Marie told them all to eat cake.

Indeed, we are all a product of our times and economic status, and what we write about tends to reflect this. Marxism is definitely one of the better lenses through which a piece of literature can be read. We are, after all, severely repressed, and repression tends to produce some of the best (if not most interesting) art.

Post-modernism helps reduce blood pressure

Barry and Jameson both point out that the modern period was an artist's way of dealing with the anxiety of their particular time, and it seems that this anxiety was dealt with through a deep and meaningful interpretation of the world.

Post-modernism, on the other hand, deals with this anxiety by jumping into the pool of superficiality and rampant consumerism, by simply ignoring that there is any anxiety by a complete and total disconnect. The post-modernists seem to be saying that there is no way to go back, there is no way to improve the present, all we can do is deal with the now, and the now is so depressing that we have to do a little airbrushing. The new superficiality also seems to escape this anxiety by over-emphasizing reality and by making a joke of it.

I am the Walrus, goo goo g'joob

In the mind, all things are possible, and in the mind, all things that could be, might be or should be become signifiers. To know whether what we think is the signifier or the signified is the real trick; a trick I still haven't mastered.

The metaphor of "ordinary language" as the soil and of there being a displacement made me think of a bulb. Derrida uses the words "rupture," and that made me think of something very similar to the destabilization of the image of reality. You have a bulb, planted in the ground, then you apply some water and all of the life inside the bulb bursts out and spreads until the bulb is no longer the center. The roots take up a life of their own and they grab hold of the ground, but the life doesn't stop there, it pushes its way up to the surface to the sunlight, where it learns to feed itself without having to explain why it does so. Essentially, I see poststructuralism and deconstruction as a way to get out of the damned cave.

And the things outside are scary, and messy and chaotic.

The professor I mentioned before in the previous blog gave a lecture on the limits of our perception, and he "blew my feeble clerk mind." I was so freaked out and I blithered on so much that the professor called me later that day to make sure I was all right.

For so long the idea of a cohesive universe was all that kept me together, and I think that, since that time, I have felt distinctly uncomfortable with the world. There are moments, of course, that stick out, and that moment, when nothing had changed except for my perception, was a defining moment in my life.

I like how Derrida emphasizes (or, perhaps, I emphasized the words myself) the words "concept" and "thought." Perhaps that the "desire for a center" is what created structure rather than an actual center. Maybe the center was an idea that had to be believed in so that it could "function" in order to spawn countless other "sign-substitutions." Or perhaps a center has to be believed in so that we can feel at ease with the world.

Yet Derrida does not exclude himself from the "conception, the formulations, the gestations, the labor," because we cannot actually choose to live beyond the cave and still operate in kind society, because society, and language, is constructed on order and cohesion (which is why I think Derrida can be so incomprehensible).

Centering

This blog is in response to Barry’s questions on page 8 of Beginning Theory.

I first decided to study English because I enjoyed reading and writing. Simple. The stories that we read in high school, though more limited than what I was exposed to in college and after, were new to me. Until I reached high school, my reading was mostly limited to R.L. Stein, Christopher Pike and Anne Rice.

The first real piece of literature that I read was Gone with the Wind, and I loved it. I hadn’t realized that books could entertain as well as educate (which is what rhetoric is supposed to do, no?). Over the next few years I read Arthur Miller, Shakespeare, Homer, Mark Twain and several other big names, but I never gained an appreciation for them until college.

What my experience with literature has taught me (which also pertains to what I thought was absent) is that everything has multiple sides to it, not just one, and not just two, and that each side could be equally as valid as the others. It taught me that there are multiple ways to think about anything, to view anything, and it taught me that, without an open mind, it is impossible to appreciate anything.

I had one particularly brilliant professor in my first two years of college who taught me all of these things, and who refused to teach in the way of the New Critics. While studying any piece, we studied it from any angle that there was, and I learned history, philosophy and even science while in his classroom (though he made it quite clear that it was fairly impossible to study the author when it came to Shakespeare, since authorship is so frequently controversial).

Ultimately, I think that any reading of a text is important, and valid, but with New Criticism books are studied as if they were holy or unbroken; there is no context, and I think that literature without a context is difficult for many people to appreciate. I could read all of the entertaining young adult horror novels without a context, but what did I learn? Not much.

In Praise of Satire

Many of the philosophers, orators and rhetors that we have read so far have pretty much agreed on the fact that rhetoric is supposed to educate and delight an audience: "to invent arguments that move audiences as well as instruct them" (127), and I believe that satire does both. At the same time, satire acknowledges the other side of the argument through "embellishment" and contrast, in a very Agricolaean way.

Erasmus was a satirist, and perhaps the most interesting of the rhetors we have studied so far. I also agreed with his line of thinking: possibility rather than certainty, exploration and argumentation rather than judgment, and though his works were satirical, he did not tell others what to think, he merely gave them an opportunity to liberate themselves from ignorance. 

Ramus, on the other hand, seems to take the opposite tact. He believes that there are certainties, there is Truth. Yet the methods of finding this Truth seem to assume a lot of things. In my experience, topics that are immune to argument are either irrational or they conform to alleged Truth, and not necessarily because it is actual Truth, but because it has been engineered to be irrefutable, through circular logic and the like. I much prefer Erasmus's take on argumentation: the world is fundamentally unknowable, and "only probabilities are by and large accessible to anyone" (126).

Over the last few weeks we have been arguing a great deal about the idea of true eloquence and the ideal orator as a good man. Erasmus, like Quintillion, favored the idea of "eloquent persons of character" (120), and I think that Erasmus was lucky enough to find exactly the sort of man to fulfill Quintillion's prophesy (despite all of our accusations of extraordinary naivete). Thomas More was a good speaker, a good advisor and a very good man. He was also good humored, and did not seem to take himself too seriously. Though history is (supposedly) full of good men, I would think it difficult to find a man as good as More was. It is, however, interesting (and very sad) that More found his neck on the same block as people of half his worth. 

This, perhaps, is a very tragic example of what happens to good men. It also might explain why so many others in that time period were publishing for wealth and fame. It was probably safer.

And All That Jazz...

The Rhetorica ad Herennium is a fundamental guide on how to swindle a crowd. While reading that and Cicero’s excerpts I was reminded of the musical Chicago and the character Billy Flynn. Billy Flynn is exactly the kind of orator/defense attorney that is encouraged in these texts. In ad Herennium, the truth is not even secondary to the delivery; it isn’t mentioned at all. And the outcome of a particular dispute is not determined by the veracity of a particular argument, it is determined by who can best “razzle dazzle.”

With the trick of amplification and diminution, which Cicero suggests in De Inventione, Billy underplays Roxy’s responsibility in the murder of her lover, Fred, and overplays Fred’s malicious intentions toward Roxy. If the murder had really been self-defense, then the law would support such action, says Cicero, and Billy represents the murder as such. Cicero, admittedly, touches on morality, but only as a way to appeal to an audience, and he certainly does not champion ethics as vehemently as Quintillian does.

And speaking of morality... I have a feeling that it it too early in the semester to start railing about Marx theory and feminism (especially involving a society that is so completely stratified), but I’m going to do it, anyhow. I’ll start with the former theory and work forward (since I really only have one female remark to make about the texts).

One only has to see or read The Satyricon in order to see how highly the “humane and cultivated” Romans valued “all forms of virtue.” I also find it interesting that, throughout history, the wealthy have underestimated and undervalued the lower classes. I believe that morality is actually more real amongst the lower classes, because they have less to gain by false morality. The higher the classes get, the more creative are the crimes, the more fluid the morality. As Quintillian said, “There is always the risk of falling into the common fault of condemning what one does not understand.” Even as an afterthought, Cicero characterizes morality as belonging solely to an educated and superior class.

Perhaps I misconstrue. (?)

All I have to say about feminism relates to Philodemus. I’d be willing to bet that he never thought it possible that mere "foolish" women would be reading his words.

Captain Logic vs. Princess Emotion

The central theme of these readings seems to be pathos vs. logos. The first verbal sparring match we see is between Agamemnon and Achilles, which is super-charged with emotions: anger, pride, etc., and this argument is—essentially—settled by Athena. It is understandable why Achilles, a brilliant warrior, would take offense. However, Achilles does not handle the situation very well and behaves like a petulant child: "if you won’t play fair with me, I’m going to take my toys and go home!" One of the ways that Diodotus approaches his audience in The Peloponnesian War is by appealing to their sense of intelligence and self-preservation. If Achilles had handled his dispute with Agamemnon in this way, he might have yielded better results. As Diodotus says, “The two things most opposed to good counsel are haste and passion” (Matsen 25).

Though war is rarely the stage on which reason and cool-headed thinking prevail over blood-thirst and anger, there are those (such as Odysseus) who are able to keep their heads, and it is the thinkers who tend to come out on top: Achilles is killed in battle, Agamemnon is killed in a tub and Odysseus saves the day with an idea and gets to live a long and interesting life.

The same problem of emotional irrationality can be applied to Cleon. His speech is choked by emotion. I think that while passion can rile people up and get them to move, it can easily dissipate, so what Diodotus proposes is more logical. He would like for the Athenians to consider the fact that revenge, and the erroneous idea that the death penalty curbs violence, is not a good enough reason to put a great deal of people to death.

Cleon, on the other hand, is too much the warrior and not enough the thinker. His inability to grasp the possible results of bloody actions makes him unreliable and, thus, makes his speech less effective than that of Diodotus. In leaving out the possible (and logical) outcome of a mass execution, Cleon fails to comprehend that his proposed actions, as Diodotus points out, will hurt rather than help the state.

Isocrates faced the same dilemma, though he seemed to be on the losing side of the battle. His accusers were ruled by self-interest, and nothing rules self-interest like emotions. Isocrates’s arguments, on the other hand, seemed entirely logical. First off, when a perfectly good boat goes out to sea and gets torn to bits, whom do you blame? It’s not the boat maker, for heaven’s sake. It could be the captain or the crewmembers, Poseidon, the Fates, but the not boat maker. People can twist anything good into something rotten by allowing their emotions to bleed into their logic.

Second, he brings up the problem that, apparently, is age-old. If children do not choose to discipline themselves and apply themselves to getting an education, it does not matter how good the teacher is, the child will fail.

A larger aspect of what I think Isocrates and a lot of other teachers faced (and still face) is fear. For some reason (and this is just my own observation), people tend to be more afraid of those who are mentally acute than anything else. If a person is financially superior, they are despised, if a person is morally superior, they are revered, if a person is physically superior, they are praised (and paid disgusting amounts of money), but if a person is mentally superior they get beat up on the playground. Isocrates points out that people are encouraged to exercise their bodies in order to be healthy, and yet exercising their minds (through philosophy) is disdained. This goes back to what Diodotus said, “[If a man] realizes that while he cannot speak well in a bad cause, he can at least slander well and thus intimidate both his opponents and his hearers” (Matsen 25). If people cannot match a man intelligently, they'll go straight for the petty insults.