Progress One Step, Slip, Slide At a Time

"he spent the whole year under his desk" she said to me as I was unpacking my books and sorting out my materials. I wanted to yell "and you FREAKIN let him!" but I didn't I just listened and nodded as she flapped her laundry list of complaints and reasons why what we do didn't matter anyway. I walked away from that school knowing no matter what that child, my student, did not spend our year together under his desk and that's progress.

Progress whatever it is with all its value laden definitions means only one thing to me, movement forward, forward at an angle, in circle, slipping, skipping, running and sliding home. I've read our doubts, questions, and pleas for more and new discourses that will lead to a better day. But as I read our posts one resounding theme speaks to me... Janna's " I’ve been evolving as an instructor through trial and error and best practices shared via co-workers. This is an answer I need to keep working on! Brian's " That I could have that completely unoriginal moment all to myself, then turn it into something new – though not altogether new – to share with a few others who might do with it what they will." Aime's "It used to bug me that it seems we've been having the same conversation for 2500 years. Now, I think it's a good thing." Dr. Kells's "Hence my admonition to every graduate student who walks through my door, "Dont wait for a PhD to begin doing useful work. Don't wait for permission to change the world" Deb's However (to return to my student’s quote), maybe when interested individuals create a shared community of knowledge/episteme regarding the serious issues of the day, then the power structures that are in place may have to turn to the epistemic community as a repository of knowledge-driven ideas to actually enact or decide policy. and Gen's "Well I’m running my first full marathon in two weeks on Oct. 9^th. Here’s hoping my feet take every kairotic moment and move me towards the finish line so I can get that free post-race beer"

AND THAT'S PROGRESS FOLKS!.

Coherency may be an issue

"How we came together is a tangle of moments and intersections that were serendipitous at points" --Richard

I have been thinking alot about this since last semester when I read Barbara Johnstone's Linguistic Individual. The idea that life is not a story, but that we make it one and how we make it a story reveals and constructs our identity. I think we are hard wired to do this, much like seeing an image of a rubber duckie in the clouds. Where there is chaos, we make order and think that we have made truth. I don't think we like anything that reminds us too strongly that order, certainty, and security are as nebulous as a rubber duckie made of clouds. I think the pragmatists saw that while these ideas of order and certainty are important, life happens anyway and we have to deal with it. Our stories are as Genevieve said of her story, "Fluid, always moving, always shifting, forever negotiating and re-imaging." Too much order and control traps us like Orwell in Shooting an Elephant. We end up shooting the elephant because our story won't let us risk chaos by choosing something outside the framework.

Weighing in on Rachael’s Dietary Choices…Again

By now, Rachael, you’ve decided whether or not to eat that can of sweet corn for dinner and have moved on to dessert. My apologies for any indigestion bringing this up again may cause, but I am stuck on your questions: “…if things are relativistic rather than foundational, who is responsible? Where is the power? The authority?...Who/what the hell holds the power of persuasion? If everyone does, than how do we explain the development of authority?”

I am frustrated. I’m a citizen of this “great” democracy, but I feel more like a victim of greed and corporate capitalism. I try to tell myself that “for the people, by the people” means something and that my vote is my voice, and that my voice matters in shaping the present and the future. In this way, I hold power, I have some control. I tell myself this, but I don’t really believe it. I know there has to be more, but I don’t know how to get to that more.

The sophists recognized education as key to democracy, but not everyone was a recipient of this education. Not everyone held the power of persuasion. Pragmatic experience enhances deliberation. Education is still important, but experience plays a role in education, too. So if this is true, why do I still feel like a victim?

I have education. I have experience. But do I truly have power?
Deb said in her “a nitnoid for now…” blog, “The community is a space created in order for rhetorical actions to occur…maybe when interested individuals create a shared community of knowledge/episteme regarding the serious issues of the day, then the power structures that are in place may have to turn to the epistemic community as a repository of knowledge-driven ideas to actually enact or decide policy. Currently, we rely too much on our politicians.”

How big does this community have to be before the power structures seek it out?
For over a week now, protesters have been marching on Wall Street – Occupy Wall Street protest. It wasn’t until this weekend that the mainstream media picked up the story after there were instances of police violence. The police, of course, say their actions were justified, but there seems to be some video proof to the contrary. Is this the formation of a community, and will it be dismantled before it has time to truly form? If the mainstream media is not covering such groups, do these groups really exist for the rest of us? Maybe we don’t just rely too much on our politicians, but on our media, too.

This brings me back to one of Rachael’s questions: “Where is the power?”

Right now, a can of sweet corn would be comforting, even if it isn’t considered an acceptable dinner, or late night snack. Deciding to eat it regardless might just make me feel powerful – at least for as long as it takes me to eat it. Then, I’ll just feel guilty – and victimized by my own choices.

When I was thinking about the Metaphysical Club, I too kept thinking about all the times I sat on my best friend Telly's porch listening to the Jimi Hendrix and "shouting philosophical axioms at the stars." Every Thursday night while I was at UDel, a group of five of us would get together to workshop poems. We started simply to toughen our skin a bit before we dealt with the criticism we were bound to receive from our Poetry Writing professor the following day. Nonetheless, five grew to seven, seven grew to 15, until we had more than 50 people, every Thursday night, littering the stairwell, the front porch, the back porch, the kitchen, the living room (we even put a chair in the fireplace). While it transitioned from being a workshop to more of an open mic night, we attracted people of all different backgrounds who were united by one thing: their love for language. Whether it was sang, slammed, read or rapped, words became our gateway to creativity.

Telly wrote a poem that I performed for Chuck's class last year called "Speech Therapy." In it, Telly (his real name is Ryan Shea) discusses growing up with a stutter and how his current use of slang was also viewed as an impediment by his speech therapist. He writes:

"What could I possibly gain from a dialect so rudimentary? To answer: I say word. I mean truth. I say word up like a command resurrecting these vertities, bringing back to life this dead language, I say word is bond. I am making a promise. One that will be kept. Swearin' 'cause these phrases are sacred oaths. I tell her I can code switch, appease those who cannot comprehend this vernacular, but this language nursed me. Baptized me creole and accepted my pigeon-toed tongue. Understand--slang is my taste buds blooming. Said that slang sure nuff is some fine poetry. I tell her it is from the heart and the hip and the hilted shoulders of our saunter. I tell her word is one resounding something: a person, a place, an idea, an action, amplifier, descriptor, modifier. I tell her word is one resounding YES! A light penetrating the shadows cast by our tongues. I tell her I always speak bad, but I always mean good."

I keep thinking of the line, "I tell her word is one resounding YES!" This make me think that as long as we're communicating, as long as the conversation is happening, and can be translated into something with meaning...we're all participating in a metaphysical club. Whether it's the Chinese food delivery man in NYC or the stoned kid on Telly's front porch, if we're talking, we're getting metaphysical.

Choosing a Gift

It's interesting reading about people's various Metaphysical Clubs that they have discussed in their posts. I have my own Metaphysical Club, as well. The group is rather interesting and comprised of an odd assortment of personalities. A Neo-Platonist, a Sophist, a Realist, an Idealist, and an Existentialist... walk into a bar?

Well, the breakdown may not be exactly like that, but there are several people who have core philosophies that are in complete opposition to each other. We have been friends for around 13 years. From low moments (unexpected deaths and emergency surgeries) to high moments (graduations, weddings, and births) we have shared a great deal. How we came together is a tangle of moments and intersections that were serendipitous at points. Janna said, in her post, "I’m still fumbling with who should be in my full metaphysical club," made me start thinking about how these groups form.

Sometimes, like in our classes, we get thrown together. Some of us in this class may keep in touch, and we may not. We may be able to add to our Metaphysical Clubs, or even create new ones, but how do we make those initial moves? If we knew more about each other, we may not want to be within each others' clubs, but that may defeat the purpose. How do we get placed into situations where we can meet people that will push us on a variety of levels (hopefully from a variety of directions) to improve ourselves, at least as we each see improvement.

As Genevieve noted in her rather heartfelt post, we must, like her, stay "Fluid, always moving, always shifting, forever negotiating and re-imaging my story." If we become too rigid, too certain of our place in the universe, we become static, stagnate, and ultimately lose the ability to have conversations with those outside of our own Clubs.

Dr. Kells' question helps to pull some of these ideas together:

"A gift that has the power to change us awakens a part of the soul. Be we cannot receive the gift until we can meet it as its equal. We therefore submit ourselves to the labor of becoming like the gift" (The Gift p. 51).

My question for next week is: "If the metaphysical club is the intellectual/spiritual space or context of the circulation of the gift, what then is the gift?"
Our Clubs help to keep the conversations going when so many people seek simply to answer their own question with finality and be done. Too many people to not put more questions out into the world; they find an answer that rings true for them and are satisfied with this. The gift, if ever there was one, is the ability to fly in the face of certitude and add more questions to the conversations, both private and public, and challenge beliefs through discourse.

Afterall, how can anyone be certain of their answers when they haven't experienced all there is to experience, and seen reality from all the different angles--fairly impossible for our limited human existence which is all we have. There is always a new Fig out there to taste.

Kairos, Death, Running, and Possibly Beer

Janna, your post really made me think about how we deal with tragedy. I have had some similar experiences and I’d like to take this post to discuss how they have impacted me. My husband passed away two years ago this Wed Sept 28^th. My son was five months old at the time and I was faced with taking care of a baby and trying to figure out how to stay afloat financially and emotionally. He had been sick for a while but it was still a shock and I had no idea how I handle this without completely falling apart, which did happen at times especially those first few months. At first I found comfort in everyday routines. Any sort of repetitive action like doing the laundry or mopping the floor helped me to keep my mind straight. Mindless activities are a great way to zen out. There are a lot of people you have to call and business you have to deal with when someone dies. I got very organized and spent days calling banks, mortgage companies, credit card companies and government offices. I don’t know how many times I fought with incompetent people over the phone but it was a lot and that became part of my routine and I got very good at it. My friends saw this anger in me and about a month after my husband passed away they suggested I start running to release some of this frustration. I did a 5k on Halloween that year and I thought I was going to die but I finished it. At some point, and I don’t really know exactly when, maybe it was the morning of the 5k, but at some point, spurred by tragicomic hope and no other choice I decided to throw myself into rewriting the mythos of my life. I had thought my life story was finished. I was a high school teacher, a wife, and a mom but I had to come to terms with the fact that now I was a widow. I don’t like that word mostly because I feel like it doesn’t fully explain the situation and I think a label changes everything about a person-in both good and bad ways. But the fact remains that I am a widow and this has changed me. For the past two years I’ve thrown myself into running. I started slow, only a 5k here and there but every little step I took repositioned me. I did my first half-marathon in the summer of 2010 and my second in the fall of that same year. I was really slow and it was really embarrassing but again I finished. Running has reshaped my life and I think of it as a kind of metaphor for a pragmatic approach to everyday rhetoric. You have choices to make while running-some small some big. Your body must move across the path in a fluid movement shifting slightly here and there to account for differences in the landscape. You learn quickly through experience how to run so your knees don’t hurt, or how to run uphill while still conserving energy, or how to use other runners as pacing guides without looking like a creeper- that took me a while to figure out. After my husband’s death I had to learn how to navigate life in a similar fashion. Fluid, always moving, always shifting, forever negotiating and re-imaging my story. I realized that our life stories are never over, even after death. So what is my story now? Well I’m running my first full marathon in two weeks on Oct. 9^th. Here’s hoping my feet take every kairotic moment and move me towards the finish line so I can get that free post-race beer.

Figs and Connections

First, I would like to congratulate Brian on his first fig. It stunned me a bit to realize that there are folks who have never tasted a fig – these little morsels have been magical, mysterious and enchanting to me for as long as I can remember. I even have a fig tree growing in my front yard that was started from a cutting, so I am told by the “Fig Man” from whom I bought it, that was taken off one of the fig trees that once grew in the court yard of the old Alvarado Hotel in down town Albuquerque. Why this odd little fruit has such a hold on me, I have no idea – the Fig Man says that some people are just vulnerable to them in some spiritual, dare I say metaphysical way.


This leads me to the presentation that popped up first on Deb’s TED offering. Thoughts about connection, worthiness and vulnerability shared by Brene Brown were familiar and provocative - especially the vulnerability aspect. I have spent a good long while trying to learn the how to moderate the committee in my head that always generates disabling cacophony when I feel inadequate. I know that this feeling is a culprit – an abettor of actual inadequacy but, geez, is it persuasive. A rhetorical analysis of that voice is clearly in order. But, the thing that really caught my attention in Brown’s remarks was the little nugget about how we try to make everything uncertain, certain, and in doing so limit connection. This intolerance for uncertainty – which seems to me the same as vulnerability – leads to the non-pragmatic attitude; to the quest for Truth; to a passion for conviction that shuts down questions, doubt and conversation. I have a theory that by the time we get to be about twelve or thirteen our tolerance for ineptitude has been exhausted. We are just sick of not knowing how, and begin to reject anything that we are not reasonably certain about. By the time we are in our twenties, that commitment has been thoroughly made and uncertainty has become ensconced as THE fundamental other in our lives.


Thinking about the Metaphysical Club members in this context makes them seem fairly heroic to me. They mightily challenged certitude and while vulnerability is not apparent in their writing, their lives suggest that they felt it keenly. Holmes never again spoke about the crucible of his awakening to the dangers of conviction after the Civil War ended. Peirce wrestled with mental instability and found no solid footing after he left Johns Hopkins and the Costal Survey. James suffered with depression and, Renaissance man or not, was known for indecisiveness. Not knowing, trying something new, risking awkwardness or discomfort or, God forbid, failure is the quintessence of vulnerability. Excruciatinly uncomfortable, it is something to get past as quickly as possible. But, as Brown suggests, we are hard wired for struggle. The pragmatic attitude uses vulnerability to build mental muscle and shuns the idea of doing battle with mental loins girded in Truth. Psychic strength can mimic physical strength, though, as it helps us find balance in this contingent world that pushes against our minds like gravity does our bodies. True, going about without Truth is messier, more uncomfortable and inconvenient, but it is evidently not without substantial rewards. Figs and connection, for two, offer delightful, nurturing respite along the way.

Screw the Dishes

Screw the dishes, laundry, vacuuming, grocery shopping, pain, regret, emotional atrophy and bills. It took a summer of lounging, cheap reads and my sister drawing me into meaningless and meaningful conversation to revive a life worth examining. She is my club and now I'm ready to expand it.

Interpellation, Phantasm, Nomos, and the Collective Conscious

"What occurs in the phantasm is the implantation of the world of human meaning and all that that entails in terms of desire, sexuality, gender, and social status on a body hitherto driven by little else than pre-programmed biological need. In the phantasm the whole chorus of family legends, cultural traditions, folk-tales, gossip, myths, hover around the neonate and the uncoordinated body with its pulsations, rhythms, imbibings, excretions, thrusts, and recoils and seek to order, mark inscribe, claim and articulate it"(Musselwhite 110).

Social Transformations in Hardy’s Novels David Musselwhite 2003 Palgrave MacMillan

Graduate School as a Metaphysical Club

As I scroll through your postings for this week, I am reminded that graduate school has been and continues to be a "metaphysical club" for me. The life of the mind is a wonderful and dangerous activity that should not be endeavored (completely) alone. This kind of intellectual work is a gift-giving circle. A fact too easily lost in the shuffle of academic competition, job searches, tenure review processes, and disciplinary turf wars. Lewis Hyde says it best:

"A gift that has the power to change us awakens a part of the soul. Be we cannot receive the gift until we can meet it as its equal. We therefore submit ourselves to the labor of becoming like the gift" (The Gift p. 51).

My question for next week is: "If the metaphysical club is the intellectual/spiritual space or context of the circulation of the gift, what then is the gift?"

Chapter 1: Meredith Jones Norman, aka Granny, The Woman with the Magic Pockets and the Patience and Humor of the Dalai Lama

My mother grew up during the Depression in Hobucken, North Carolina – a coastal farming community. She is the smartest person I have ever known. As a young girl, she had an older sister who was actually her mother. She became a widow before she was old enough to collect social security and worked outside the home for the first time in her life at that time. She grew up with one “real” sister, and when she was in her seventies, she met a second sister (the youngest of the three sisters) who had been put up for adoption when Mom was a young adult. She had a complex life, but many would say – including her – that she had lived simply. Simply?

Until the third grade, I lived with my family in Marathon, Florida. My father was a commercial fisherman and was gone from home frequently for weeks at a time. While he was gone, Mom supported the family - 14 kids although not all 14 at once – with the money Dad left her. This money had to last until he made it back home. Mom never knew when that might be, and although she never said and I never considered it in the naiveté of my youth, she wasn’t sure that he would ever come home. When I was in the third grade, we moved to Sneads Ferry, North Carolina. Dad died a year later. By this time, I was the only child at home. I never did without, and she never complained. The woman knew how to stretch a dollar and to do it without anyone ever realizing she was worried about how she was going to do it. I grew up on pot roasts, butter beans, and spaghetti with meat sauce (very cheap meat and very cheap sauce). I crave cabbage, Mom style.
My mom loved to learn and loved to write. She told me that school was my privilege, not my right, and encouraged me to do well and praised me when I did. I think she would have loved to have gone to school past high school, but she had kids to raise. When she wasn’t raising her own, and often when she was, she was raising grandchildren. She never complained.

My mom was extremely patient. I was the youngest and possibly the most mild of the baker’s-plus-one dozen. She never spanked me and rarely yelled yet somehow she engendered a desire to behave and excel. In junior high, I often went to concerts with my two best friends. These concerts were hours away. My friend’s mom or brother would take us, drop us off, and pick us up later. My mom wasn’t just patient, she was a nurturer. She gave me room to become myself, even if she had to sit up nights and worry.

My mom once used my brother’s sports car to drag race down Marathon’s main street; my brother got a speeding ticket later that day for this event. In her fifties, she tried to grow a marijuana plant because she was curious. She once got back at a young marine for picking on her “grandma driving.” Stopped next to him at a stop light, she looked at her friend in the passenger seat and said, “Watch this.” She put her car in reverse and eased back slowly. She watched the young marine grip his steering wheel tightly. He thought his car was moving. One of her favorite questions was “How’s your hammer hangin’?” She only asked men this. I didn’t figure this out until well into my adulthood.

It seems almost cliché to talk about my mom this way. It reminds me of questions like “Who is your hero?” Us momma’s kids say “My mom.” Mom wasn’t intellectual in the typical sense, but perhaps she would have been if she hadn’t made the life choice to marry a fisherman and raise a large family. In the end, her choices made me feel safe, valued, and respected. This is how I want my students to feel, and I make choices in my classroom to help create what I deem to be a nurturing environment.

I’m still fumbling with who should be in my full metaphysical club because honestly, up to this point, I’ve been evolving as an instructor through trial and error and best practices shared via co-workers. This is an answer I need to keep working on!

On the Infinite, Infinitesimal Significance of Firsts, Figs, & Metaphysical Clubs

Last night I ate figs for the first time. In their small green plastic basket the figs, ripened to a deep purple, looked more like dwarf red onions. My wife chopped them up into a spinach salad with orange slices and a dressing of olive oil, honey, lemon and salt. A fig, I discovered, is earthy sweet like a date, the pulp a thick jam laced with countless tiny seeds that deliver a soft crunch. Although I knew I wasn’t the first to ever eat a fig, I felt myself in complete ownership of the experience, and I wished life were more replete with such authentic, tangible discoveries.

I turned thirty in July, which is not so significant in itself, though it does mean that over a decade has past since I last attested to any kind of authenticity. From birth through adolescence I couldn’t help but understand myself as the unassailable center of all things. In my teens I began to question, but I imagined my questioning much as Columbus must have imagined his first steps onto the island of Hispaniola. Never mind the tall, unfamiliar dark-skinned figures that seem almost a part of the landscape as they stare quizzically at you, kneeling in the wet sand, muttering your indecipherable proclamations.

In my early teens my friends and I stayed drugged up all night, working away at the various ontological, epistemological, and ethical Rubik’s cubes we had assembled from nothing but our own rebellious curiosity. By sixteen I had read the Beats and become aware that I had been playing the part of Jack Kerouac before I knew he existed, and he Baudelaire or Rimbaud. And in the wild crooning of the hero of my early teens, Jim Morrison, I was gaining a sense of a tragic arc resembling my own life’s at-that-time-pointless trajectory. It was the beginning of the end. My friends and I weren’t the first to lie on rooftops, shouting philosophical axioms at the stars, and regardless of whether we all burnt up in the atmosphere like Morrison or Kerouac or Cassidy, we wouldn’t be the last.

Luckily, I grew out of Romanticism and into a more grounded sense of my place in history. By the time I graduated with my Bachelors, I suspected my life would be comprised of one humbling unveiling of prior genius after another, and I learned to appreciate the more modest revelations of one struggling to find his footing amongst giants, never mind standing on their shoulders. And so I find it quite a pleasure to read accounts like Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club, with its narrative of philosophical inquiry unraveling in a manner that bears a great resemblance to my own, although the lives of those doing the inquiring were very different. And although I would never claim any kind of autodidactic genius allowing me to reach the same conclusions at which the likes of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, Charles Saunders Pierce and John Dewey took lifetimes to arrive – neither would I dismiss the likelihood that such “metaphysical clubs” exist in all places and times, and arrive at very similar conclusions, with or without the validation of a Harvard diploma.

And that’s just it: Menand carefully balances his descriptions of his protagonists as idiosyncratically genius with the indispensible personal and historical context that made them – and allowed them to make themselves – who they were, as well as what they’ve come to represent in our collective imagination.

Ours is a time of pluralism. Yeats was right: the center could not hold. Luckily for the average human (maybe or maybe not so lucky for the average oligarch), plurality can be a good thing. It’s never been harder to carve out a significant niche for oneself, to project one’s voice above the crowd, or to make any kind of claim to indispensability or originality. In a global sense, we are coming of age. No more room for teenage delusions of grandeur. But that doesn’t make the individual revelations of our teenage years any less profound. Nor does it prevent us from applying what we come to know in the immediate, local situations in which we find ourselves, to make a difference in the lives we touch. Just as the world is shrinking, it is multiplying into an incalculable amalgam of overlapping communities, and we are learning as a species to be as aware as possible of all possible worlds while making the best of the only one we’ll ever surely affect for better or worse. In that respect, just as the world is comprised of an infinite number of metaphysical clubs, the world is all one metaphysical club to which we all hold membership, and in which we are all learning less to speak and more to listen and make room.

So it is with humble appreciation that I reflect on the few minutes I spent eating figs for the first time. That I could have that completely unoriginal moment all to myself, then turn it into something new – though not altogether new – to share with a few others who might do with it what they will.

140 years later....

The idea that knowledge must be social was one of the essential ideas that led to the forming of the Metaphysical Club at Cambridge in 1872. Today, almost 140 years later, one venue outside the bounds of academia that I think represents the spirit of the original club is the online and live TED talks. TED/Ideas Worth Spreading (www.ted.com/) began in 1984 as a conference to unite people from the worlds of technology, entertainment, and design. However, since its inception the realm of TED has expanded to include just about all areas of human inquiry and is devoted to spreading and sharing knowledge and ideas. Much like the original Metaphysical Club, the TED forum includes community, conversation, conferences, and initiatives. And very much in the spirit of Peirce, Dewey, Holmes, and James the tenor of the TED community conversation tends toward discussions that regard how we bet on the future.

A pragmatic approach to inclusion into a Metaphysical Club

dissoi logoi

Which membership has the most pratmatists?

Codifying our discussion from today

As we were talking in class today (9/14/2011), I jotted down a note that has been rattling around in my brain. I think there is definitely more to this, and I am not sure where it may go, but I wanted to throw it out there for people to discuss.

If certitude leads to violence (Holmes) or death of morality (James), and certitude is a feature of a Platonic ideal of Truth (because if you "know" there is an absolute "Truth" to the universe, and you "know" you have "It", that would make you certain...) than attaining that Truth would be of the utmost importance, and how one got there (violence) would not matter, because it is the Truth. Whereas, in a "truth" based model, more like Holmes and James, an uncertainty principle (to borrow a term from Science) has no ultimate Truth to attain.

Therefore:
Truth = the ends justify the means
truth = the means justify the ends

Thoughts?

a nitnoid for now...

One of my English 101 students, who is from South Korea, included this quote in his paper as he reflected on the hard times he spent in the military there: “There is a famous saying by Chang-Ho An, a campaigner for the independence movement: ‘One who has the responsibility is the owner of history; conversely, one who does not have responsibility is a guest of history.’” Over time, this truism has been reformulated and echoed in and through various cultures and communities. In general, people today are probably highly likely to feel like guests of history—unable to point to themselves as agents in the causal chain of events. How did the Sophists, with their concept that virtue is teachable, deal with issues of present and future responsibility? Jarrett points out that the “voice inside one’s own head (if that had ever been the case) [had become] more like a voice to which occurred responses or questions in the mind of the listener” (41). This transition became a shared community experience (nomos) through exchanges in poetry and drama. (Paul Woodruff notes this also in First Democracy.) The community is a space created in order for rhetorical actions to occur.

All well and good back in the days of the polis, but perhaps, as McComisky alludes, postmodern epideictic rhetoric “does not praise the socially constructed virtues that characterize a ruling class ideology or criticize (blame) the vices that work against that ideology” to represent what has been left unrepresented (93). Instead, it seems as if individuals are on a narrative quest (through assorted media and means) to contextualize the elements of unity and coherence in their own independent, individualistic worlds. However (to return to my student’s quote), maybe when interested individuals create a shared community of knowledge/episteme regarding the serious issues of the day, then the power structures that are in place may have to turn to the epistemic community as a repository of knowledge-driven ideas to actually enact or decide policy. Currently, we rely too much on our politicians to be the owners of history.

Searching for what I don't know

There is so much I don't know. Right now, I think I'd like a good solid time line of ancient Greece. I need a visual to help me better see the context. So, I think I'm going to do some historical research. I plan on reading The Greek Sophists. At various times troughout my education from elementary school to now, I have been presented with Greek plays, Athenian democracy, Homer, Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates, the Sophists (though very briefly and they were presented like used car salesmen), but I don't think I've ever seen all of it laid out together. I'm not sure why this is important for me, but it is. I'm fascinated by the Sophists because when I read them, and to a large extant much of Greek writing, I don't feel like I'm reading something ancient. I reject this notion that we (meaning humans) started at point A and our moving towards point B a long some sort of continuum. I have to reject it because I have a hard time accepting that we improved by moving from Gorgias to guys like Morton and Agassiz. It used to bug me that it seems we've been having the same conversation for 2500 years. Now, I think it's a good thing.

Sophistic Questions

Analysis of history shows that large personalities tend to run together. Whether this is a result of history's perspective, or some human tendency, I am hardly qualified to say. For example, if you look at Einstein's writings and biography, he crossed paths with Marie Curie, George Bernard Shaw, Lorentz, and many others. Sometimes people at odds philosophically can be quite close in friendship or other ways.

One of the concepts I would like to know about the Sophists would be their relation to their contemporary counterparts. Yes, Plato jabbed deftly at Gorgias in his writing, but did they have any kind of working relationship outside this? What kind of interactions did the Sophists have with their antisophistic brethren?

Another idea that is intrigueing is the notion of "truth" vs "Truth" and how this argument has advanced, evolved, and stayed similar through the years. To what extent did the sophists adhere to this tenant? Western Civilization, at its core, inculcates the idea of an attainable Truth, and steady movement toward it. For good or ill, we are raised in this framework, and even our arguments for truth tend to be framed in the idea that we can beat the Truth with the correct argument (a hybrid T/t truth?) What did the individual philosophers lumped together as "sophists" believe about "Truth"? What were their ideas about the existence or non-existence of an ultimate Truth? And pragmatically, does it really matter what they thought, or are the interpretations we are working with what is important?

How did these people conduct themselves within the auspice of the oikos? Did their truths extend into the idea of the Dominus of the house being the master, or were they more open to a shifting of roles?

I may be rambling at this point since I took some Benadryl to help fight off a cold.

Canned Corn and Rants on Gorgias

I've been thinking all weekend about writing something intelligent for tonight's blog on the parts of the Sophistic Tradition that we want to examine further. And while I have been applying Brian's WWGD (What Would Gorgias Do) strategy to as many real life problems as possible, I'm finding him to be of little use in the case of deciding what to have for dinner or how to tackle this pesky RSA proposal. No matter what I apply WWGD to, I find myself asking something like, "Who said that a can of sweet corn is an unacceptable dinner?" I know you're all thinking, "Duh Rachel, dieticians" but really, the point is, when things are foundational rather than relativistic, how do we, as unique individuals go about deciding what is foundational? And the even bigger question is, if things are relativistic rather than foundational, who is responsible? Where is the power? The authority? Relativism and foundationalism have the same general problem, neither effectively determine where the power comes from.

With Plato we have this looming absolute truth that dictates where the power lies and who has it, but with Gorgias (the real, non-Plato dramatized Gorgias), the power lies in persuasion. And while I'm inclined to agree with him, in part, I also wonder when the last time I actually had a dietician tell me that a can of sweet corn would be an unacceptable meal choice. Never. So did the dietician convince me not to eat the corn? did someone create a panopticon and did I convince myself not to eat the corn? did my place mat as a child that had the food pyramid on it convince me not to eat the corn? did the Jolly Green Giant convince me not to eat the corn?

Who/what the hell holds the power of persuasion? If everyone does, than how do we explain the development of authority?

Ladies Clowns and Can Someone Tell Me When Racism Ended?

In 1999 during her one woman show I’m the One that I Want, Margaret Cho said, “I’m not going to die because I failed as someone else. I am going to succeed as myself.” She was referring to the cancellation of her sitcom, which was the first sitcom to star a Korean American. The producers of this now defunct television show forced her to lose weight for the role to appeal to American audiences. Cho explains that they wanted her to seem more American, to fit an American ideal of what Asian women look like. They told her to “Be more American, less Asian, but not too much. Be Asian, but not too Asian.” Ironically she was meant to play herself. Cho lost the weight but was hospitalised for kidney failure, her show was cancelled due to low ratings, and she was broke. Four years later Cho wrote I’m the One that I Want and has had a very successful career playing her self on stage for the past twelve years. I used to be a stand-up comic. I performed at some clubs in England and even won 2nd place in a gong show at The Comedy Store in London about seven years ago. I was never gonged off the stage so I felt pretty successful. During my MA program I studied traditional clowning and commedia dell’arte. I literally clowned away during grad school. Eventually I wrote a one woman comedy show and performed it at a few music festivals in the English countryside. I got tired of mucking about in mud and performing for drunk kids waiting for The Killers to get on the main stage (this was circa 2005 when The Killers were cool) so I stopped touring and began deconstructing my performance process. I’ve always been fascinated with the subversive nature of comedy, so the focus of my MA thesis was on working towards a feminist aesthetic through the use of comedy as a political tool in performance- a means of subverting oppressive patriarchal structures. I used performances from great comediennes like Joan Rivers, Lily Tomlin, and Cho and critical theory from Butler and Mulvey to work out a theory of feminist performance and the importance of the Self gaze and its power over narrative and meaning. I am only now seeing connections between my work in feminist theory and McComiskey’s concept of neosophistic rhetoric. My show and subsequent thesis was a graffitic immemorial discourse- a reworking of the patriarchal narrative structure defied and re-contextualised, a new gaze, a new auteur.

I turn my attention now on issues of race but the problems are somewhat similar- what does it mean to subvert power structures and does subversion create meaningful change? In “On the Rhetoric and Precedents of Racism,” Victor Villanueva asserts, “Multiculturalism hasn't improved things much, not even at the sites where students are exposed to such things. Maybe the relatively low numbers of people of color on our campuses or in our journals-or the high numbers at community colleges with disproportionately few of color among the faculty-reinforce racist conceptions. The disproportionately few people of color in front of the classrooms or in our publications, given the ubiquity of the bootstrap mentality, reifies the conception that people of color don't do better because they don't try harder, that most are content to feed off the State” (651). After reading Villanueva, another student and I posed these research questions in a class last spring:
• Have more people of color published in rhetoric and writing journals in the past decade?
• Are more people of color receiving PhDs in the field of rhetoric and writing?
• Are more people of color receiving tenure-track positions in the field of rhetoric and writing?
In response to our questions, the instructor of the course said that this inquiry was not interesting or relevant and that racism was not an issue in academia and especially not in the field of rhetoric and writing. I must have blacked out when the problem of racism was resolved. Was this in 2008? Or 2009? Those years are a little fuzzy.

I want to explore connections between neosophism, comedy, and racism. There are spaces of contention that cannot be articulated except through the use of comedic structures. Click here for an example. I see comedy as a way to subvert and redefine oppressive structures and as a means of rebuilding and re-imagining possibilities.

“Abracadabra to Zombies”

Abracadabra to Zombies

Disclaimer: Since I can’t magically obtain within a few weeks the knowledge to skillfully write a refined academic discourse about these ideas I’m fleshing out, I apologize in advance.

Somewhere in the space between temporal and the spiritual lays humanity and some more definitions and space having to do with ephemeral and perpetual. I could go on and on or I can tell you that I took this title from The Skeptic’s Dictionary an online database of terms redefined by “the skeptic.” Humorous skepticism has always kept me in smiles and before ever considering going back to school and taking a course in rhetoric, I toyed with the boundaries of fantasy, reality and self-actualization. In age of social networks, the shaping of our profiles on these websites muddies a boundary between reality and fantasy that is to me one huge bog with scattered sinkholes. Just in the last couple of weeks, have I begun to see some sort of connection to the Sophists.

Using this entertaining database of definitions, I looked up avatar. The following is the entire definition. Forgive me for not paraphrasing, but I just couldn’t leave any word out:

Avatar

An avatar is a variant phase or version of a continuing basic entity, such as the incarnation in human form of a divine being. Avatar is also the name of a New Age self-help course based upon changing a person's life by training the person to manage his or her beliefs. According to Jack Raso, "Avatar's fundamental doctrine is that people have a natural ability to create or 'discreate' any reality at will. This alleged ability stems from a hypothetical part of consciousness that proponents call 'SOURCE.'"

According to their promotional material,

Avatar awakens you to a natural ability you already have to create and discreate beliefs. With this skill, you can restructure your life according to the blueprint that you determine. One discovery many people on the Avatar course make is that what you are believing is less important than the fact that you are believing it. Avatar empowers you to realize that there aren't "good" beliefs and "bad" beliefs. There are only the beliefs that you wish to experience and the beliefs you prefer not to experience. Through the tools that the course presents you with, you create an experience of yourself as the source, or creator, of your beliefs. From that place, it's very natural and easy to create the beliefs that you prefer.

These notions seem so obviously a mixture of the true, the trivial and the false that one hesitates to comment on them. If there are no good or bad beliefs then how did the people at Avatar come upon the belief that their course has any value? And what difference does it make whether anyone believes in Avatar belief management techniques?

BWHAHAHAHAAAA!!... That’s my Facebook comment on The Skeptic’s definition. Then a “like” and I’ll move on to the next post. With that laugh and a like I’ve willingly given my friends some insight to who I am or have I? So what connections have I made? Well, I’m not entirely able to communicate that yet, however I am pondering these questions. Does the Sophists’ questioning of truth and the skepticism towards all truths allow for self- actualization or a reinventing of one’s self? Through fantasy, can one find a new reality or the reality one wants? A man is a measure of all things, what if one focuses, “likes,” or chooses to promote certain things all in the name of “This is ME.”?

In Pursuit of a Beautiful Idea

“Like many beautiful ideas…democracy travels through our minds shadowed by its doubles – bad ideas that are close enough to be easily mistaken for the real thing. Democracy has many doubles, but the most seductive is majority rule, and this is not democracy. It is merely government by and for the majority” (Woodruff 3). I was shaken by this statement in Paul Woodruff’s First Democracy. I’ve questioned the strength our political system for many years but blamed the politicians for the failure of this system. As citizens, we often believe that we have no real voice. When our party is not the majority in office – and oftentimes even if they are - our interests take second seat to majority or political interests.

Plato was skeptic of the sophists because he recognized the potential for abuse of rhetorical skills for personal gain. After all, at the core, sophists were human, and greed is a very human characteristic. The minority could, possibly then, prevail if the rhetoric was eloquent enough. The interests of one individual could take precedent over those of many because the many could be easily manipulated. But ancient sophists like Protagoras also recognized the humanness of the sophists and the citizens the sophists often engaged and their human potential to do the right thing, to make good judgments for the betterment of many through a sophistic education. For him, political excellence required all men, and these men were capable of learning good judgment. Participation in this process has potential to give voice to both the majority and minority. If as democratic citizens we do not yield to the most plausible (eikos) by exercising good judgment (euboulia) we remain stagnant as a society, not moving forward toward our mutual betterment or personal Truth.

Woodruff says, “Democracy, I believe, is a dream. The ancients did not fully realize it, and neither have we. The job of thinkers is to keep the dream alive, come what may. And the job of doers is to keep trying to approximate democracy as well as circumstances will allow” (vi). The sophists offer a way to keep the dream alive, a way to respond to the circumstances (kairos) in order to pursue this dream, whether we examine sophist pedagogy or its shortfall.

Sophistic Self-Authorization & Mystery

My fascination with the Sophists--these self-authorizing gypsy intellectuals, these opportunists, these protean demystifiers of institutional power--began with my first Classical Rhetoric seminar in graduate school in 1993. I attitribute, in part, the gnarly and wonderful mess that has always been my professional life to this underlying passion for the sophistic tradition.

Hence my admonition to every graduate student who walks through my door, "Dont wait for a PhD to begin doing useful work. Don't wait for permission to change the world." My scholarship, service, and teaching are always saturated with some level of "tragic-comic hope." A vortex of generativity situated in the Bermuda Triangle of mythos, nomos, and logos where serendipity and grace trump power. It has always been this way for me.

The sophists were the tricksters, the mythical coyote of the Greek rhetorical tradition. They remind us that we need to dance in the magic of rhetoric. Aristotelian codification is a handy system of convenience. Socratic rhetoric is a cautionary tale about the troubling contradictions of our humanity. Sophistic is how we go about the business of day to day living inventing the world around us.

Tactic vs. Strategy: Turning Tables, Expelling Moneylenders, & Exploding Binaries with Neosophistic Rhetoric

Last night a very old friend called me to tell me he had found Jesus. Or more accurately, I called him in response to a text he had sent me two days before, following up on another unanswered text he’d sent me the previous week. So maybe he didn’t really just want to tell me he had found Jesus – or maybe he had been wanting to tell me for over a week. Before dropping the J bomb, he recounted a few other conversations he’d been having over the past several days with other old friends of ours about the question of faith, so it’s entirely possible that he had either been working up to this point for some time or rehearsing his declaration for just as long. Because he confessed that he had never declared his faith to anyone before as he did to me last night on the phone, however, I’ll assume the former. I told him that I respected and admired his commitment, particularly if he can take it up and make of it a life, to quote Lincoln, "touched . . . by the better angels of our nature."

I think my friend’s declaration of faith was intended not only to galvanize that identity but to evangelize, as he must have known me to be much too skeptical to preemptively concur or be swayed likewise, and in that recognition I also detected a kind of mischievous testing of his own faith – as if he knew that by calling me he would encounter a challenge. And so he pursued his rationalization further until I felt I could no longer agree with qualification but point out the radical divergences between his philosophy and my own. So after clarifying that I could not accept the existence of a benevolent deity who had conceived of a world wherein suffering existed – regardless of the merits of free will – and qualifying that I had not ruled out the possibility that such a deity exists, but rather choose not to validate it in the way one refuses to recognize a child throwing a temper tantrum – I explained my more provisional understanding of the existence of god as inseparable from our creative and pragmatic capacity: if god is everything, then god is also colored by our capacity to imagine god, so that god might be love but is also our incapacity to love completely.  If we are an intolerable, warring people, then god will be an intolerable, warring god. If we are an oppressed people, then god will be a rescuer of the oppressed. Etc. God, then, is a measure of our creative potential to imagine the actualization of our species’ maximum potential. In other words, through our understanding of god, we create ourselves in the image of our own potential.

This, in turn, raises important questions about imaginative potential directly related to neosophistic rhetoric and what we hope it will accomplish. At the foundation of a conscious exercise of this potential is the Gorgianic notion that “logos is not a representation of the external, but the external becomes the signifier of logos” (B3.85). How liberating we might at first find this construction to be, but ultimately we are still constrained by our own imaginative potentials, which are constrained by logos, which is constrained by our experience of the external world with all its social relations. And those relations still appear to operate within a binary system of oppressor/oppressed.

Operating within such a binary is to operate on the oppressor’s terms. Bruce McComiskey adopts Michel de Certeau’s use of the terms strategies and tactics to distinguish between the oppressor’s ideological paradigm (strategy) and the attempts made by the oppressed to subvert that paradigm through postmodern epideictic rhetoric, what McComiskey coins graffitic immemorial discourse. The example McComiskey offers is the Darwin fish, which ironizes the Christian Icthys by the addition of feet, which in turn is ironized by Christians with the addition of a larger fish labeled “TRUTH” devouring the Darwin fish. The point is, this kind of tactical subversion might place the oppressed in a temporary role of power, but it leaves the provoking oppressive ideology intact. Martin Luther King, Jr, proclaimed in Stride toward Freedom, “A voice echoes through time saying to every potential Peter, ‘Put up your sword.’” But that voice doesn’t clearly articulate what to do next. King recognized that “to accept passively an unjust system is to cooperate with that system,” but even Jesus got frustrated enough to react to the presence of the moneylenders in the temple by turning their tables over and physically ejecting them from the premises. That lesson appears to teach us that sometimes, such tactics of inverting the binary are all the oppressed have. But King rejected this lesson in favor of a notion of nonviolent resistance characterized by Christ’s more nuanced final act of rebellion.

Susan Jarratt relates to the problem of feminism on similar terms when she admits that in a tactical approach, “Each individual must agonistically take sides with the full knowledge that any position involves unpalatable political choices, acts of exclusion.” But she looks for hints of a more strategic response in the writing of Cixous: “Because she envisions a possible future in which difference is not tied ontologically to sex, her practice can be described as strategic rather than essentialist.” But it’s fair to wonder whether Cixous can ever really do anything more than “[attempt] to undo [hegemonic discourse] in an act of resistance and subversion.” Victor Vitanza might claim she is successful. His hope for the Third Sophistic is that through an act of affirmative (strategic) rather than negative (tactical) deconstruction, the rhetorician can explode the old hegemonic binaries of an oppressive logos. It’s possible that this is already happening, but its success is limited by our capacity to recognize it, internalize it, and act upon it.

Long before Jarratt, McComiskey or de Certeau were using the terms tactical and strategic to describe the inversion/explosion of binaries, American poet Thomas McGrath was using the terms to describe the same activity of subverting the oppressor on the oppressor's own terms through ironic or straightforward, pithy Brechtian doggerel and pamphleteering on the one hand, and on the other, a complete reimagining of the terms of engagement – an explosion of the binary. Mcgrath argued that one shouldn’t rely solely on one or the other – that there was a time and a place for both. His shorter poems, such as those included in Longshot O’Leary’s Garland of Practical Poesy, are tactical; his epic of 20^th century leftist resistance in America, Letter to an Imaginary Friend, strategic, if such strategy is at all humanly possible.

The trouble with the strategic approach is that we don’t know we’re capable of it until we’ve done it. We learn by doing. Our imaginations evolve by struggling toward the possibility of imagining. And all the while we might be grasping at straws. All the while we might be chasing false idols, looking for evidence that the promised land is closer than before when really we’re still stuck in the same old Platonic quagmire, chasing after an ideal that can’t ever really exist. But maybe that’s not such a bad thing anyway. Maybe one constraint of the strategic approach is that the strategy forever continues to unfold in front of us as we implement it. And a strategy isn’t successful unless it informs the grand strategy of existence, enacts a paradigm shift, transforms reality.

At the center of this distinction between tactical and strategic is I think the primary crux of a sophistic/pragmatic approach to rhetoric and to life, because it raises questions about what is possible. If we’re limited forever by binaries, then we ought to find a way to swim in the pond to which our swimming has been relegated. But if the limit is only our vision, and the horizon is ever extending into the distance, then, well, that changes everything.

Nitoid on appropriating Sophistic thought:

In an article entitled "Dissoi Logoi, Civic Freindship, and the Politics of Education" by Stephen Gencarella Olbrys (full cite to follow in my webliography), the author advocates dissoi logoi as a way through the ideological aporia vexing our current political landscape. He sees rhetoric as "a means to treat seriously and to respond to . . . calls for spirited intellecutual diversity and the problematic question of training in citizenship." He takes dissoi logoi from a binary - arguing both sides of the argument; from a metaphor of balance - implying a "one-to-one correspondent need to establish a right-leaning opinion for every left-leaning one" - to a pluralistic model that "insists upon active and performed engagement with multiple perspectives rather than a mere awareness of, limited exposure to , and eventual isolation from oppositional perspectives."

This reminded me of Jarratt's comparison/contrast of hypotaxis and parataxis in histriography, and can be seen as a practical application of her theory on recasting and appropriating sophistic thought in a pluralistic society. A "dialogue" between/among theorists and practitioners on the appropriation of sophistic thought might be an interesting exercise.

Nomos. I like the image of nomos being a zipper pulling mythos and logos together. Because everyone is negotiating nomos, there are multiple paths for the zippers. The image is of a dress that can be modified 100 different ways.

Logos

Mythos made of Legos.

hmmm Mythos, Logos, and Nomos

Mytho, Logos, Nomos, Historicity & Skáldfífla Hlutr, the Rhymster's Share

The Reluctant Co-Creator

At first, I really didn't see a flaw in Jarratt's definition of the sophist (and overall pedagogy). However, there is a problem with the notion of the sophist as "composer" and his/her audience as "co-creator." Jarratt says that the sophist's audience is "fully aware of the craft, its potentially volatile effects, and its ultimate importance, both in defining knowledge for the group and leading them toward wise action" (60).

On premise, I wholeheartedly concur with Jarratt; for me, audience seemed to be an undervalued participant in Plato's definition of rhetoric. Plato views the sophistic audience as victims of rhetoric; rhetoric is something done to the audience. The criticism might be directed to the sophists themselves and their "art," but it doesn't speak well of the audience either. It discredits its ability to discern deception from deliberation.

The sophists - through Jarratt's lens - respect the audience and purposefully include it in the rhetorical process. Although today's audience members may have the capacity to be co-creators in the rhetorical process, I'm not convinced they have the desire to be co-creators. In all honesty, I'm not convinced that every audience member has the capacity to be a co-creator, let alone the desire. This flaw undermines the democratic fabric of our society. A reluctant audience threatens "the continual renogotiation of nomoi through rhetoric" (53).

However, this "flaw" in Jarratt's definition is really a consequence of chronic historical misrepresentation of rhetoric. This is what happens when history is recounted only through the marginalizer's lens.

Tragicomic hope on steroids?

Mythos...Logos...Nomos