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Weeks #1-2e, Continued: My Lecture NO.tes used for the Seminar, Wednesday, 2000, January 19th & 26th.
Previous Notes #1d | #1c | #1b | (#1a) |
Continued>>
 A Theory of Change: from Human to NonHuman. Hayles et al. |
Let's turn now to N. Katherine Hayles's mapping of three waves of change. Let us not forget that 'rhetoric and composition' is/are about making changes, bringing about changes! About varying predispositions! About turning ourselves on our heads! Or becoming-headless (as in 'acephalous,' Acèphale [Bataille])! Moving from Human to Non-Human is becoming-headless. And Hayles, like others, is considering the conditions for the possibility of the Non-Human.
So let me repeat: Rhetoric is an art, theory, and practice of bringing about psychological change, or in other words, about establishing the conditions for the possibilities of ourselves and other people seeing the world differently. (This is basically the definition that Richard Young--one of my mentors--gave to a reporter for the student newspaper at Carnegie-Mellon U. back in 1978-79, when I was studying rhetorical invention and composing processes there. I've added the last clause "about establishing the conditions...." The phrase "psychological change" has perhaps a bad ring to it, making the whole process sound like "brain washing"! But everytime we communicate to or with people--even if nonverbally--we are attempting, say, to persuade them or to inform them about something they presently do not assent to or have information about. We are attempting to get them to act in some way. If if they already agree or know, they are being persuaded or not, which is still a state of persuasion, that we know or do know or understand what it is that we are talking about. There is the additional persuasion that none of us knows or understands anything! Not even this statement! But when carried to this logical extension--as some would say--this would be foolishness.
Rhetorical theories are also general theories of change. For example, Sir Karl Popper's notion of problem solving is a rhetorical theory of change (P1-->TT-->EE-->P2, etc.). Or Kuhn's structure of scientific revolution(ary breakthrough) is a rhetorical theory of change (paradigm shifts). Or Michel Foucault's idea of episteme (3 + a new one that is imminent) is similarly such a theory (epistemic shifts). Or Paul Feyerabend's epistemological anarchism, in his concern also with the growth of what is called knowledge, is again a theory of change (counterinduction). (BTW, PF writes: "...without a constant misuse of language [or introduction of noise!] there can not be any discovery, any progress" [Against Method, 1st Ed. 27]). All of these, then, are theories of change on the largest level, but they focus on how human beings come to see themselves as bringing about the growth of knowledge. In part. For in each there is an element or elements of other forces at work or play. The non-human. E.g., Popper writes of an epistemology without a knowing subject [i.e., without human consciousness], which he refers to as a "third world" (See KP's Objective Knowledge; cf. Michael Polanyi's Personal Knowledge.) The others also have similar ways of making the development of knowledge not solely or exclusively the result of human endeavor.
And Katherine Hayle's theory of rhetoric?! Of Change?
At no time does KH, as most of the others above, present herself as a rhetorician. Of course. (In the 1st Ed. of Against Method, the subject indexer, Alex Bellamy, included the subject "rhetoric" and listed pages 1-309, the total number of pages in the book! But anyone who reads the three editions of PF's book has got to know that PF is talking the basics of different kinds of rhetorics throughout. That is, "anyone" who has some even rudimentary notion of what the world "rhetoric" has meant, even if demonized by Plato and his followers.) Hayles, like other human beings who would make a plea or theory about how things have come about or are going about, here and there, etc., is nonetheless a rhetorician. (For the strongest definition of rhetoric as being practiced by non-human entities, including crystals, see Geo. Kennedy's "A Hoot in the Dark.")
Hayles, like all of us, cannot but resort to rhetoric, however, not initially to persuade or inform us--contrary to what I ever slightly suggest above--but to see (to theoreyeze) beyond the available means of persuasion about material-virtual worlds, to see beyond what is available; for what is available keeps us from seeing (theoreyezing) as she would want us to see. Something New. Which she sees. And what she sees is a new way of Seeing. Which can serve as an alternative account of What has been taking place. (Interesting idiom, right?: "what has been taking place/topos.) Taking conceptual starting places. And giving new conceptual restarting places? Old/New?
How does someone see a new configuration in a Gestalt? How does someone turn the switch? How do we lead people to turning the Gestalt switch? Everything that we will read this semester will deal directly or indirectly with this question, this concern. Next week, when we read Richard Rorty, we will be bombarded with this question and possible answers to it.
But how can I (vjv) get you to see all this? I am not just a teacher, professor, but a theo eye zer [gods see[e]rs!] also. Gilles Deleuze, from Nietzsche, possibily explains the connections between "gods" in the etymology of the word "theo eyezer" and the word "forces":
There is no event, no phenomenon, word or thought which does not have a multiple sense. A thing is sometimes this, sometimes that, sometimes something more complicated--depending on the forces (the gods) [or wills to power, perspectives by incongruity] which take possession of it. (bold emphasis mine)
The word "gods" is equated with forces or "wills to power." In contrast, then, God would be a "will to truth" while a paganistic set or setless of gods would be expressions of "wills to power." The crucial difference between the two is that "gods" have no "metalinguistic position" from which to speak or see. They are, of course, a notch or two above the post-lapsarians Tiresias and Oedipus. (See J-F Lyotard and J-L Thebaud, Just Gaming 42-43.)
Hayles surveys very quickly some of the names I have mentioned in the paragraphs above. She tells us that she is concerned with a theory of change (historical development) and what has contributed to it. She is most concerned with "why it seems possible, at this cultural moment, for virtuality to displace materiality." She writes: "I will argue that the claim for the self-sufficiency of a virtual world of information is deeply problematic, for this illusion, like everything that exists, has its basis in the very materiality it would deny." But she is arguing for a great deal more than this claim; she is arguing for a model of change--which includes materiaity--or in her own words is arguing for what she refers to as three waves: specifically, those of
 "homeostasis" (the ability of an organism to maintain itself in a steady-state, an equilibrium), of
"autopoiesis" (i.e., self-organization of the body, reflexivity), and of
"virtuality" (in which emergence, or evolution, becomes unpredictable; in which human becomes post-human).
It is the case that she in part inherits this model, but it is mostly hers to defend, though she presents it for the most part as exposition. I find this model of change somewhat similar to, yet a reading on, a possible casuistic stretching of, the communication triangle/s that we have previously discussed. So yes, as I did with Kott, etc., I will do again: VVhich is to pass this model semiotically across our previous discussions of models of How change comes about. (Lest we forget, the previous models were/are also ways of accounting for different approaches to teaching students to write and speak effectively, or for different curricula for the teaching of writing, or different ways of inviting students to turn the Gestalt switch, either through invention [P-->S] or a radical form of discover [(S)-->P].)
That the model is about maintaining stability yet change from within and from without should be clear to see in such terms as "maintaining a steady state," "self-organizing," "emergence," and "evolution."
The overall structure of a communication triangle--which again is a graphical account or map of the components and constituents of commun(icat)ing--allows us to see what is necessary for a successful communication, allows us to see just how a relative stability among the parts is needed, if not always desired.
An Inside Aside:
I have tried in the article "Three Countertheses" (in Contending with Words) to explain precisely how over-emphasized (inflated -in-value) and ethically-politically (ethnocentrically and anthro- pocentrically) dangerous the CT can be and is; for it excludes the conditions of the possibility of speaking as a listener. This distinction, too, can be easily deflected, reappropriated in the Triangle's on terms, and therefore not seen. The decoder--as listening Buber- or Rogerian-like, and then engaged as and in a new speaking--is not the the potential or actual "speaker as listener." With the loss of the middle voice we have become but(t) blind, and in our blindness we are no seers. The condition for a pragmatics that is excluded (middle) in the CT would be one-cum-a-radical many based on a neo-paganism. (See my article and Lyotard's Just Gaming and The Differend).
And then there is the ideological problem in that branch of rhetoric and composition known as "social-epistemic rhetoric." (See my early notes on Berlin at Wk1c or, even better, see the notes for the Berlin Seminar.) This now dominant theoretical branch (or single way of seeing that would call itself plural in its attempt at a programmatic discensus) of R/C would have to speak in great part against the notion of Hayles's second wave, that is, "autopoiesis," especially if the concept were appropriated by or even in passing identified with the "Expressionist" (the so-called neo-Platonist) school in r/c. While the social-epistemic rhetor places high value on the decoder (audience), remember that the expressionists place equally high value on the encoder (speaker). There is every reason to believe that the social-epistemic rhetor would have to see the third wave, "virtual," as a mystification or state of false consciousness or the result of a fetishistic practice.
(At present, no one that I know of in the field of rhetoric and composition as practiced in English departments has picked up on autopoiesis. A few people who associate themselves with Gilles Deleuze have only toyed with the idea. And as far as I know, only a few people in rhetoric and communications as practiced in speech-communication are working with the idea.)
Not only has R/C not dealt with the issue of autopoiesis, it has also not dealt with the virtual. (Oh, pleazzzzzze, don't write back asking me if I've not heard of the 4th or 5th C or of the C&W Con!!!) And it will probably not deal with either for a long time since it can, as I've said, easily think that its major paradigm of the CT does in fact allow for both of these waves. (Nothing is more self-protective, stability- and blindness- maintaining, than a paradigm. But nothing can stop the switch from having been turned! The times [kaierotics], they are a-turning! Spinning to dizziness.) |
The Homeostastic structure (form) of the CT is foundational, though historically (as it is today) the structure with its various parts and possible emphases has become a "skeuomorph" (i.e., "a design feature, no longer functional in itself, that refers back to an avatar that was functional at an earlier time" [Hayles 447]). Am I exaggerating? (Perhaps so, in disorder to get to an understanding that the night of the living dead is not just a B-movie, but our plight in R/C. 'Things' live on in their and our death.  ) Most people in rhetoric, after all, would fundamentally disagree with my characterizing the CT as having losts its overall functionality. It is the case, as I have demonstrated in the previous discussions, that CTs still can explain how communication occurs, right? I would have to maintain now at this point in our discussions, however, that it can only explain communications as part of a historical process (i.e., a series of previous avatars); it can only point to earlier onto-theologies (primarily monotheistic) and epistemologies (primarily philo-sophic and not sophistic). What it was designed to do was to explain "information processing" only. What we have done with it is to extend it by analogy to our own needs of communication (as in writing) process(es) to product. So as to efficiently process our students into products of exempliary literates.
The map (or Fig. 1) on p. 444 (not 666) is a new trio, a new "triad of terms" (443):
But--to make the graphic fit with my notes--I had to turn it clockwise; therefore, you will have to turn your head a 90degrees clockwise way. (I am working on a perl script that will change the graphic counterclockwise every odd day of the week!)
Given the terrible things that I have said about my profession--the oldest and way older than the so-called oldest profession--given the heuristic things that I have said,
How can we use Hayles's new triad in rethinking the future anterior of the field of rhetoric and composition?
How does this new triad allow us to think about our field (or if you insist, discipline!) in ways that we have yet to think in, or about it?
VVrestle with this Devil or Angel, and then ... Let us know your thoughts. (In other words, as you see, or learn to re/see, through the term inistic screen of this new triad ...
Here there is a question, call it historical, of which we are only glimpsing today the conception, the formation, the gestation, the labor. I employ these words, I admit, with a glance toward those who, in a company from which I do not exclude myself, turn their eyes away in the face of the as yet unnameable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of the non-species, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity. (Derrida, "structure, sign, and play..." 265) .)
My notes will eventually be forthcoming on the Derrida-DeMan (derridaughters') un(af)fair scandal.
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My notes for Wk3-->>
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