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.