11/13: Dissections – The Body in Hand

November 6, 2007

 

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  • 1. Sharon  |  November 13, 2007 at 10:03 pm

    Misreading the Fist

    Always historicize.
    –Frederic Jameson

    Academics might be reluctant to accept a simple and seemingly obvious reading of the Joe Louis monument that makes use of rhetorical discourse to explain how objects mean. This reading invokes the understanding that people who produce cultural artifacts, whether material or immaterial, often tie the production of an artifact to its purpose. Notwithstanding discussions in public discourse that tie the monument to the concept of Black Power, the Joe Louis memorial is a commemorative monument that honors the successful career and of Detroit boxing champion Joe Louis. Joe Louis, the grandson of slaves and the son of sharecroppers, moved to Detroit with his family in 1924 where he became the pride of both the Black and white community as a heavyweight boxing champion. Winning most of his fights by knockout, he was known to pack a powerful punch. The bronze arm that stands at the corner of Jefferson and Woodward can be taken as an illustration of his tremendous upper body strength, which Louis said he developed lifting heavy blocks of ice for an ice company that employed him in his teens.
    The Joe Louis Memorial is a civic monument that was designed to commemorate the life of Joe Louis. It is not a stretch to say that as a result of its installation at the corner of Jefferson and Woodward it has become a symbol of civic pride. When Congress awarded Louis Congressional Gold Medal in 1982, they stated that he “did so much to bolster the spirit of the American people during one of the most crucial times in American history and which have endured throughout the years as a symbol of strength for the nation.” Joe Louis has been named one of the 100 greatest punchers in the world. Beyond that, Louis, ascending from humble origins to a place of national prominence, may have opened up a space in the cultural imagination for the recognition of the contributions of working class people to the country. During World War II, Joe Louis, as a representative Detroiter, was a hero to the nation. He was not only a sports hero, he served as a soldier in the ward. Sportswriter Jimmy Cannon characterized Louis as “a credit to his race – the human race” signifying the rhetorical distance that Louis’ accomplishments traversed in instilling a sense of racial harmony in a nation that was divided over the issue of race. Joe Louis, once a working class hero, is now a historical figure who represents the pride of Detroit. Perhaps since we now distanced in time from the excitement that Louis’ athletic accomplishments aroused in the nation, we are less likely to feel connected to that sense of pride that we may once have been inclined to project into that monument.
    Although Robert Graham may not have not explained what idea he was trying to articulate in the creation of this artwork, we can gain some sense of this idea by trying to remember the feelings of national and civic pride that the life of Joe Louis may have inspired in others. Graham has created many other commemorative bronze works that are displayed around the nation. In 1999, he created the Charlie Bird Parker Memorial that stands in Kansas City, Missouri. This is not to say that civic pride is the only viable reading of the meaning of the memorial, but it does offer an alternative reading that may help to explain an unacknowledged and perhaps unconscious motivation of its victimization.
    As a student of rhetoric, I am often tempted to view vandalism and graffiti either as an art form or as an act that has a logical intention behind it. My tendency to view graffiti in this way causes me to forget that vandalism is often an act of aggression that results from anger. It seems plausible that the vandals may have been angry over the death of the white police officers and aimed that anger in the general direction of the city of Detroit, choosing the Joe Louis monument as the reservoir and vehicle of their affectation. They seem to me more like bullies than rhetors, enacting the denigration of an emblem of city pride in an effort to demonstrate an inarticulate form of criticism of the city. That seems too simple an explanation. Further, it would not be of any great surprise to me, if I were to learn that the vandals had been drinking at a nearby bar just prior to vandalizing the monument. This explanation would have given Marback’s reporter a catchy and attention-grabbing phrase for a headline: Anger in Detroit, although this phrase is expected, obvious, and trite.
    In The Transmission of Affect Theresa Brennan writes about the kind of affect that generates violence. She explains that “aggression may be fuelled by the attempt to relieve oneself of the weight of another’s exploitation” (67). She ties this concept of aggressive expression to a theorization of class politics that gives “working class anger” a particular designation when she explains that “working-class participants are carrying the affective refuse of a social order that positions them on the receiving end of an endless stream of minor and major humiliations, from economic and physical degradations in the workplace to the weight of the negative affects discarded by those in power” (67). Although here Brennan is writing about the violence that arises in group formations, she is also explaining how anger arises from the uneven distribution of power between groups. Aggression is the cathartic expression of this negative affect. The vandals themselves probably lack an understanding of their own actions as well as the source of whatever affect they may have experienced that made them think that pouring white paint on the Joe Louis monument would be an intelligent and good thing to do, although it seems apparent that their decision to deface a monument located in the city of Detroit, along with the placement of the photos of the slain police officers near the monument, indicate that they were likely dissatisfied in some way with the city and/or its administrators. We may feel sympathetic towards the vandals if we were to read their act of vandalism as an uneducated expression of feelings of helplessness about the issues of violence associated with the city of Detroit as well as in the world at large. It is possible that the vandalism of the statue, the dumping of the negative affect on an emblem that is representative of city pride, is the projection of the vandals’ “helpless and unbearable passivity” onto that object (13). Brennan’s theorization of the affective source of aggression provides a rich background for understanding how it is that “objects project back to us our own subjectivity” (Marback 20).
    In an Associated Press Article, Sarah Kurush reports that one of the vandals alluded to the fist being “representative of violence in Detroit.” In her effort to tie the act to racial issues Kurush wrote that the monument was seen by many people as an assertion of black political power and triumph over injustice.
    What is of interest to me is the anxiety that is produced over the misinterpretation of the clenched-fist image and perhaps the misreading of the import of the Joe Louis monument. In “A Brief History of the “Clenched-Fist” image, Lincoln Cushing traces the history of the image of the clenched fist. “A persistent symbol of resistance and unity, “ he explains, “the clenched fist (or raised fist) is part of the broader genre of “hand” symbols that include the peace “V,” the forward-thrust-fist, and the clasped hands.” The clenched fist was initially displayed with a peace symbol. It wasn’t until the 1960s that the image of the clenched fist developed militant connotations. Cushing explains that in 1968, graphic artists took the fist symbol in new directions. “This “new” fist stood out with its stark simplicity, coupled with a popularly understood meaning of rebellion and militance.” About the Joe Louis monument, Phil Patton writes about the ambiguity inherent in Graham’s sculpture. The design of the sculpture was initially criticized for its abstract representation of Louis and his accomplishments. Because of its ambiguity, writes Patton, “it evokes the whole history of boxers as symbols of black empowerment and expression.” The anxious responses to the monument seem to arise from its connection to militancy.
    Marback writes, “while we do have some choice in our experiencing, there are some objects that so provoke us, so persist in their singularity, inviting more and varied embodied responses they become controversial, exemplary, or puzzling (Fist 23). The Joe Louis monument is such an object. It is a sad testament to the state of our culture that the overall response to a work of art that is ambiguous in its construction because it is meant to evoke contemplation is one that is oversimplified and reveals our basest tendencies and impulses. Perhaps in time, we will be better able to acknowledge that for some people in America, achievement is the result of great struggle and less likely to construe every instance of the expression of that struggle as threatening.

    ,

  • 2. Clay Walker  |  November 14, 2007 at 4:14 pm

    So I started writing a post on my blog about Walter Benjamin stemming from my other class and half way through I realized I was really writing a new introduction to my already existing response to this week’s readings. So I went with it. Sorry, it is long, but I think it weaves a path through my own thinking about the issue of how awareness might relate to affects.

    In section XV, the last in the canonical edition of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin develops how “the greatly increased mass of participants has produced a change in the mode of participation” or how “Quantity has been transmuted into quality” (239). In this section, Benjamin takes up the formulation of architecture as an important site for thinking through how the masses engage with the art object.
    Buildings are appropriated in a twofold manner: by use and by perception – or rather, by touch and sight. Such appropriation cannot be understood in terms of the attentive concentration of a tourist before a famous building. On the tactile side there is no counterpart to contemplation on the optical side. Tactile appropriation is accomplished not so much by attention as by habit. As regards architecture, habit determines to a large extent even optical reception. The latter, too, occurs much less through rapt attention than by noticing the object in incidental fashion. This mode of appropriation, developed with reference to architecture, in certain circumstances acquires canonical value. For the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history cannot be solved by optical means, that is, by contemplation, alone. They are mastered gradually by habit, under the guidance of tactile appropriation (240; emphasis added).

    I am drawn to Benjamin’s emphasis on the role of the tactile experience, by which I take in a larger sense the experience of affect/feeling, in developing awareness of an object. By awareness, I mean an understanding of the object that pertains to the ways in which the individual relates to the object. Because this awareness, or understanding, is relational, it cannot be accomplished by contemplation alone, but through habit or a process of tactile appropriation. The invocation of habit recalls Aristotle from his Rhetoric:
    We may lay it down that Pleasure is a movement, a movement by which the soul as a whole is consciously brought into its normal state of being; and that Pain is the opposite. If this is what pleasure is, it is clear that the pleasant is what tends to produce this condition, while that which tends to destroy it, or to cause the soul to be brought into the opposite state, is painful. It must therefore be pleasant as a rule to move towards a natural state of being, particularly when a natural process has achieved the complete recover of that natural state. Habits also are pleasant; for as soon as a thing has become habitual, it is virtually natural; habit is a thing not unlike nature; what happens often is akin to what happens always, natural events happening always, habitual events often. Again, that is pleasant which is not forced on us; for force is unnatural, and that is why what is compulsory is painful, and it has been rightly said “All that is done on compulsion is bitterness unto the soul” (1369b 34- 1370a 11; emphasis added).

    Another source for thinking about habits and awareness drawn from Giorgio Agamben lies in the writing of Max Kommerell:
    Initiation must be distinguished from both teaching and doctrine. It is both less and more … And if it is life that initiates, it does not do so thanks to holy institutions but, precisely, outside them. If the state could still teach, if society could still educate and the Church could still sanctify … then life would not be able to initiate. This is life, purely worldly, purely earthly, purely contingent – and precisely this life initiates. For life has been given a power that is otherwise exercised only in sacred domains. Now life is the sacred domain, the only one that remains (Kommerell “Wilhelm Meister,” qtd in Agamben 84).

    In this Kommerel selection there is an echo of Benjamin’s argument that contemplation alone cannot develop the sort of awareness that Benjamin discusses. In his forthcoming article “Unclenching the Fist,” Richard Marback offers another inroad to thinking about how our (habitual) relationships impact our understanding or perception of the world:
    Intention, meaning, and significance are not givens. They reside nowhere. They are provocations we enact. Through our gesturing, handling, moving we are provoked in the world to each other. Perceiving certain of the features of our presence we make a sense of the world, of other people and other things. We make sense of ourselves as present to and with all that occupies us. We grasp the matter that matters (Marback, forthcoming).

    Through our inter-relational provocations we interject and receive through interpretive acts the intentions, meanings, and significations that don’t reside anywhere, but flow through the currents of our actions. Through our (immaterial; non-matter) perceptions (again, based on our relational provocations), “we grasp the matter that matters.” Clare Hemmings gives a similar perspective through a critique of affect theory in her essay, “Invoking Affect: Cultural Theory and the Ontological Turn.”
    Judgement links the body and the social and gives both interpretative meaning … [Audre] Lorde reinvents her body as hers not theirs, a body connected to other bodies by shared judgements of the social. Those judgements constitute a political history that reshapes social meaning, creating recognizable and intelligible alternatives to dominant signification … affect might in fact be valuable precisely to the extent that it is not autonomous (Hemmings 564-5).

    To work toward the tactile perspective, or the affective awareness of how the individual provokes or expresses meaning (intentions, significations) through relationships that are affective, Hemmings argues we have to conceive of affects as not autonomous, but forces that connect bodies to other bodies through ontological judgements. In my last citation, I turn to Manuel De Landa’s lucid treatment of Deleuze and Guattari’s chapter “The Geology of Morals” in A Thousand Plateaus in his article, “The Geology of Morals: A Neo-Materialist Interpretation”:
    much as sedimentary rocks, biological species and social hierarchies are all particular cases of a stratified system (that is, they are all historical products of a process of double articulation), so igneous rocks, ecosystems and markets are self-consistent aggregates (or meshworks), the result of the coming together and interlocking of heterogeneous elements … if we waited long enough, if we could observe planetary dynamics at geological time scales, the rocks and mountains which define the most stable and durable traits of our reality would dissolve into the great underground lava flows of which they are but temporary hardenings … Similarly, our individual bodies and minds are mere coagulations or decelerations in the flows of biomass, genes, memes and norms … Finally, since according to this way of viewing things what truly defines the real world are neither uniform strata nor variable meshwork but the unformed and unstructured morphogenetic flows from which these two derive, it will also be useful to have a label to refer to this special state of matter-energy-information, to this flowing reality animated from within by self organizing processes constituting a veritable non-organic life: the Body without Organs (10-11).

    To make use of affects as I have suggested, affects must not be autonomous, but plugged into the systems of social and cultural hierarchy, judgement, understanding, meaning, discrimination by which we individuate ourselves, each other, all humans and non humans through the relationships and patterns or behavior that we construct or provoke or elicit or perform. Through these habits, we establish social systems or associations, or relationships, or masses, or assemblies that organize, hierarchize, individuate, dividuate humans and nonhumans in stratifications that we seem to understand in cognitive or conceptual or ideological terms, but which are actually based and grounded in habitual and affective relationships or negotiations of power. The borders are slippery at best. There was an effort led by Jules Gilliéron to generate a dialectical linguistic map of France early in the 2oth century as the science and discipline of linguistics formed itself (created borders). In this study, researchers went from village to village to document the linguistic characteristics of that particular dialect. The result was that although there was little change from village to village as one moved south from Paris toward Italy and even across the political border into Italy, when one looked at the atlas as a whole, there remained generalized and oppositional poles, binaries or dyads of French language in opposition to Italian language. Borders are slippery on the ground, we work to buttress these shiftings, these sand dunes with ideological or conceptual categories that may have less to do with the relationships we provoke then we think or have thought.

    Perhaps we should think about the ways that cultural institutions try to buttress or exaggerate these ways of being or relating rather than thinking about the ways affects and relationships support or locate or identify the effects of such cultural institutions. When we take a wider perspective on the various and complex relationships through which our cognitive processes of meaning making and judgement structure boundaries that seem reliable, we must work not to see poles but slippages, zones of coagulation or zones of drifting- sand dunes that we can climb up to get a better view, but are transient shifting with the wind. How do we grasp ahold of the immaterial, the non-matter that matters? How can it give us a purchase on understanding the ways in which our bodies/minds are related to, distinguished by other bodies/minds, other bodies, other minds? How can we use it in our analysis, in our pedagogy?

  • 3. Kim Lacey  |  November 14, 2007 at 5:12 pm

    It is fascinating to theorize the hand as this week’s readings have done. Our hands connect us to so many different situations—they participate, in the gesturo-haptic Rotman-inan sense, by bringing us in contact with something or someone else. Richard Marback’s handout of the South African “Urban Landscape” shows us Mandela’s open hand, Bohta’s shaking finger, and Buthelezi’s flicking off the crowd as an imagined triptych of hand statues. There are always the classic photographs of newly allied politicians coming together through the gesture of a handshake. After the clock runs down, teams shake hands or high-five each other as a courteous recognition of sportsmanship. But we assume that these gestures are read the same, that the language behind them is universal. There are countless travel guides warning tourists that gestures are often not culturally translatable. In Agamben’s essay, “Kommerell, or On Gesture,” this is his point. Agamben, channeling Kommerell, states that gestures “the stratum of language that is not exhausted in communication and that captures language, so to speak, in its solitary moments” and later that “speech is originary gesture” (77,78). Gesture, taking the place of speech, is derived by language, or at least by a lack of it. We use gestures almost involuntarily to clarify our speech when we cannot find the words. The problem with this is that sometimes, these words behind the gestures do not always translate, as in the previously noted examples.
    I am here reminded of our conversation about proclaiming one’s identity, and the problems with stating “I am ‘this.’” When we want gestures or symbols to be read in a certain way, we are encountering this problem, as we assume that there’s a common, understood language behind it all. The correct interpretation of an identity is where the surprise happens. Like the cross-dressed man whose dress is not ‘good enough,’ the male biological sex is uncovered and ‘he’ realizes that what he says he actually is, actually is not. (And from that sentence, I can tell the Stiegler wore off on me a bit!)
    Richard Marback’s essay “Unclenching the Fist” shows that nothing can be simply explained by a gesture. The AP reporter was hoping for a certain response and a specific meaning of the white paint, but as Marback’s response illustrates, one cannot find congruent meaning for every gesture. On this, Marback quotes Massumi by stating that “before and after [an object] becomes an object, it is an inexhaustible reserve of surprise. The real is the snowballing process that makes a certainty of change” (20). I read this implying a few different ideas: first, the fist pre-paint symbolizes various responses to its existence. In New Philosophy for New Media, Hansen argues repeatedly that the different instillations discussed in the text project affective responses onto (into?) the viewer. Hansen calls this experience “affectivity”: the capacity of the body to experience itself as ‘more than itself’ and thus to deploy its sensorimotor power to create the unpredictable, the experimental, the new” (7). This experience, then, is similar to Massumi’s characterization of an object’s projectivity—objects expel surprised meaning onto each viewer. Massumi’s notion of surprise is the multiplicity of responses from a singular object. The fist can represent Black Power, it can represent racial segregation, and it can be splashed with white paint and immediately mean something different. One object (one gesture) can supposedly represent one meaning (as the AP reporter’s question signified), although the reading/interpretation of the object is where the surprise sets in.
    Question for the class: Pop-cultural gestures such as LiveStrong bracelets (and all the copycat ones) gesture towards something specific (they actually spell out what they’re representing). How do these consumerist gestures misconstrue its meaning? Are these bracelets different from the ProductRed, etc. campaigns? (I realize now that, as I’m posting this, we’ve hammered this question out in class many times in the semester. I guess the question came automatically…maybe I’ll think of another one for the response-response…)

  • 4. Kim Lacey  |  November 14, 2007 at 5:18 pm

    Oh, and if I had read my response in class,I meant to pass around the comic that I mentioned in my response. What great luck that by Google-ing it, I found Richard Marback’s blog, complete with an image of the ‘fist of paint.’ The link is below.

    http://detroitrhetoric.net/wordpress/?cat=20

  • 5. jack McIntyre  |  November 14, 2007 at 8:52 pm

    I don’t understand The Geology of Morals. Despite this, or perhaps because of this, I’m convinced I have to read A Thousand Plateaus in full. I wish I could read it before I write my paper; I think it might be relevant in a really interesting way, but I’m not sure I have time to take on such an ambitious reading project right now. So I’ll use this essay to speculate about how it might be relevant (assuming I understand it, which as I already said, I don’t).

    In my paper I intend to describe a particular interpretation of Christianity based on fundamental instability, confusion, doubt, and ambivalence. To explicate this interpretation I will rely on two of Derrida’s later works, the “poem” The Grand Inquisitor told by Ivan in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, and the writings of the 2nd and 3rd century theologian Tertullian (I won’t go into why I’ve chosen these figures here). This interpretation of Christianity is not terribly insightful or original, and it is not the point of my paper. I am interested in describing and developing this interpretation so I can apply it to contemporary theory, especially Rotman’s ideas about parallel processing and gesture-haptic writing and its implications for God and the subject, and possibly addressing how this form of Christianity might be an effective form of resistance to what Nealon laments.

    Now it seems that A Thousand Plateaus is relevant. DG: “The Strata are judgments of God: stratification in general in the entire system of the judgment of God (but the earth, or the body without organs, constantly eludes judgment, flees and becomes destratified, decoded, deterritorialized) (40)”. This tendency of the BwO and Earth to flee is elaborated upon later: “Since the associated milieu always confronts a milieu of exteriority with which the animal is engaged and in which it takes necessary risks, a line of flight must be preserved to enable the animal to regain its associated milieu when danger appears… A second line of flight arises when the associated milieu is rocked by blows from the exterior, forcing the animal to abandon it and strike up an association with new portions of exteriority, this time leaning on its interior milieus like a fragile crutch” (55). DG’s point here seems to match exactly the conception of God I am interested in developing and deploying: the systems of stratification, the judgments of God, are avoided; survival often demands that the individual avoid them, and certainly comfort demands this flight.

    Derrida describes the for him profoundly religious gift as “not impossible but ‘the impossible.’ The very figure of the impossible. It announces itself, gives itself to be thought of as the impossible.” 7 The true gift must not be acknowledged as a gift by the giver or receiver, even as pleasure taken in the act of selfless giving. It must not involve taking or keeping. The restrictions are extensive, hence “the impossible”. This is exactly the case with DG “judgments of God”; accepting the “judgments of God” means not fleeing in the face of danger, whether exterior nor interior, and not retreating into exterior or interior “associated milieus”. In the most extreme case it means extinction, something like suicide, but NOT suicide as an escape, rather suicide which fully embraces that which it would otherwise escape; suicide in conventional terms is another method of flight. In the face of this danger, possible extinction, a creature without “line of flight” from the judgment of God must not even allow itself the internal comfort of faith, morality, etc. If one says in the face of the judgments of God something like “I love God and therefore surrender myself to God’s judgment,” one has employed a religious line of flight, and avoided God.

    My question: is this what DG meant when they refer to God? Why do they refer to God at all? How is a concept of God useful in A Thousand Plateaus? The conventional explanation for why humans invent God is that God is some kind of psychological comfort, a way with dealing with uncertainty, mortality, etc. GD’s God is inaccessible, terrifying, a deification of madness. I could venture an answer to why such a God interests Derrida, and Dostoyevsky, and in a more complicated way Tertullian, but when it comes to GD I’m baffled (again, I should probably read the book…)

    PS
    I didn’t fully catch/understand what Dr. Pruchnic was saying about DG’s judgments of God in class, but I think it had to do with treating the inanimate and animate in somewhat the same way. Meaning that the judgments of God are what we call “forces of nature” or “natural law” (ie gravity) when they are applied to animate objects? If anyone caught Dr. Pruchnic’s point, or understood it better than I did please let me know; I’m quite interested in this.

  • 6. jared  |  November 14, 2007 at 9:54 pm

    7007 Response #10

    Jared

    I ended our class with Dr Marback last week by asking how we might feel about an embodied and empathetic politics that would require us to forgive Dick Cheney while gently stroking him. Since this weird moment I’ve been thinking about more peculiar, but distinctly political, gestures that involve touch. One circumstance in particular that my wife and I often talk about is making certain gestures in teaching. She wants to hug her grade one students. The board of education designated a safe zone for touching students that is a circular area half way up the deltoid to the collarbone. Even with this safety standard now in place, if my wife wants to touch a student, we joke that it would be best if she use a ruler to gently tap the safe zone.

    The hand is an appropriate icon for our humanity. Giorgio Agamben, reflects Nietzsche’s belief that humanity has lot its gestures to a sacred domain, and asks us to look at how gestures can resituate this sacredness in the worldly, earthly, contingent domain of everyday life— and politics, which he says is the “full, absolute gesturality of human beings” (83). According to Agamben, this politics has no name other that its Greek pseudonym, which he is barely able to utter–philosophy.

    Certainly the current political powers here are gesturally inept — or ham-fisted if you will. After the wildfires in California, Bush and company made a concerted effort to get George out West to the scene of the crisis quick–and it appeared that this was primarily so he could be seen on TV hugging people. The team of compassionate conservatives figured they had learned something from their arms length response to Hurricane Katrina. After Katrina in an article which was headlined: The Gulf Between Rhetoric and Reality the Washington Post questioned whether Bush would ever “show true compassion, comprehension and leadership today by wading — literally and figuratively — among those who are still suffering? Or will it be a series of hermetically sealed photo ops?” (Sept 2, 2005).

    This distancing is perhaps not only explained by the gulf created by our mediated politics. Steigler gives us some insight into why and how our politics have lost touch with the meaning and potential in gestures (why it’s become gesturally ham-handed). Despite using phrases like: “Being is the being of a being… In order to accede to the question of the meaning of being, one must start from a being without thereby reducing being to the realm of beings” (240) –he also more clearly articulates how Heidegger’s radical distinguishing of the who from the what has led to understandings of existence/Dasein that are divided –neither present-at-hand nor engaged in questioning the relationship of substance and subject. Steigler proposes that what is missing from Heidegger’s attempts to give a concrete explanation of being– as something distinct from anything specific and concrete– is the Epimethean or always/already interaction between being and material objects, like art or technology. Steigler sees the human, temporality, and various techne as part of an inseparable dynamic process; and he claims that “the destiny of the who (Dasein) is ‘tied’ to intraworldly being, that is to what: it is what is ‘included by its facticity” and that Heidegger’s assenting to “originary temporality is to think prior to everydayness” (243).

    Dr Marback’s handling of The Fist and the incident of vandalism attends to this everydayness while giving us a much better vocabulary to deal with this politics than Agamben’s barely utterable philosophy. “Unclenching the Fist” cautions against falling back on textual vocabularies and strategies; and suggests ways that the materiality of rhetoric leads us to look past these options for answers while asking “not just what a text means but, more generally what it does… attending to what gets done …to physical actions… to the things that get done with discourse as well as attention to the things with which and through which discourse works.” In other words we must, and I quote: “keep object and agency and interpretation together” and this “turns our attention away from isolatable agency and identifiable significance, away from the ambition for sovereignty toward the energy and activity of embodied expression, the sensation of being open and responsive to concern, worry, and passion, as it emerges on the surface of that which matters and that which has matter, our embodied encounters with objects in the present.”

    To get to my question… You explain this move to give up assertions of isolatable agency for the contingencies of vulnerability very well through your discussion of the Fist, but I’m still somewhat unclear about the role of empathy—particularly in politics You state that “it is a feature of the object itself as a thing within an order of things that evokes from us all empathic responses. [and that] We are all intimately familiar with our empathy for objects…” So…How do you figure empathy can play a role in politics that avoids being hijacked by ideologies like compassionate conservatism, or simply overly mediated? Does this come as part of a structural change requiring a larger change in the ethics of privilege, or do you feel that embodied empathetic acts may encourage deeper change from the ground up?

    If so what do you think this asks of us as teachers?

    Follow ups,

    Do you see the potential for more empathetic, embodied and vulnerable gestures becoming normalized in social life and in politics?

  • 7. mlmcginnis  |  November 15, 2007 at 1:11 am

    I am in the process of learning to read rhetorically; that is, my hope is not just to glean content from things I read but to also understand how the work has been invented, or alternately, to look for lessons for my own invention in the works we read.
    I mention this not as a gesture of self-aggrandizement, but rather by way of calling attention to something in Marback’s essay that I read as a call to invention. In fact, Marback’s work informs this sense of invention in two ways. First, Marback offers—if not a critique of material interpretation—a cautionary word against it. Confronted with the implacable materiality of an artifact, our familiar hermeneutics break down. “. . . [I]f meaning cannot be read straight off the monument”—and here I would suggest we can understand Marback to be implying materiality qua materiality—“then interpretation is even harder to discern. Questions about a meaning originating either in people’s intentions or in signifying structures satisfy less and provide far fewer answers because they spiral endlessly away from the object of interest itself” (6). While I don’t think Marback is condemning interpretation as such, he makes a valuable point in insisting that interpretation as we commonly understand it is a counter-material practice; interpreting the Fist for Marback means reducing an object’s surplus of meaning to a simple axiom: the Fist means Black Power, the vandalism means racism, and so on. Marback—like Roland Barthes in his essay on the Eiffel Tower—implies a need for invention and writing that resists the siren call of hermeneutics in favor of the projective space of heuristics. I might say then, that Marback’s essay is demonstrating a way to navigate between the reduction of the material into language and the pre- or a-linguistic response to the material artifact. Which is to posit a possible axiom for thinking about my own writing: between discourse and affect lies invention.
    If that is Marback’s first lesson of invention here, what is his second? I would suggest that what Marback argues for is a renewed experience of kairos, one that reasserts the necessity of an embodied experience of rhetoric in favor of a discursively over-determined rhetoric. Marback thus describes

    the interwoven spaces, objects, and agents of embodied rhetorical activity. Gestures of embodied rhetorical activity . . . are expressive because they are so attuned with and do so resonate with the world of our experience. They are our experience. . . . We are aware of it in our bodies. We sense it and want to make sense of it. (5)

    Marback here echoes Debra Hawhee’s description of Gorgianic kairos. As Hawhee explains, kairos “marks a particular quality of discourse, once that doesn’t necessarily pass through the mind to obtain meaning, but rather operates at the level of the body, on the level of effect or sensation—inciting pain or pleasure” (83). What kairos offers, to both Marback and Hawhee, is an immanent experience of rhetoric that is complicit in a mutually responsive engagement between the agency of the rhetor and that of his object: rhetoric and materiality enfold one another, embrace one another, suffuse and supplement one another. If invention lies between discourse and affect, then kairos is where all three join and become re/active and re/productive.
    While I find Marback’s two lessons about invention valuable, I am left with a lingering doubt. If my characterization of Marback’s work is accurate, what can we expect of the offspring of discourse, affect, and invention—what comes of kairos? It is easy to answer “writing”, but—as both Marback and Hawhee here caution—there are limits to what writing can accurately capture; in particular, Marback insists, materiality pushes against writing’s limits of representation and insists relentlessly on itself. What do we write, then? Are we left writing asymptotically, finding ways to approach materiality discursively without ever meeting it? Or do we answer Brian Rotman’s call for a new writing that incorporates the material—to write, not sensationally, but to literally write sensation? Or, as Giorgio Agamben contends, must we write such a project off as impossible when confronted with the “speechless dwelling in language . . . .the unsayable” (78)?

  • 8. Andrea J. Vought  |  November 15, 2007 at 3:31 am

    Note: This response was partially amended throughout, post-class.

    In the section of The Fault of Epimetheus entitled “The Tool as Image-Consciousness,” Bernard Stiegler writes: “A tool is, before anything else, memory: if this were not the case, it could never function as a reference of significance. . . . The tool refers in principle to an already-there, to a fore-having something that the who has not itself necessarily lived, but which comes under it in its concern” (254). And although he doesn’t distinguish here, Stiegler elsewhere in the essay discusses three different types of memory: primary, secondary, and tertiary. Rhetorically speaking, this notion of tools as memory is key, especially considering that the canon of memory has recently (I use this term loosely) come under fire. Although I generally eschew the rigidity of Aristotelian rhetoric, I nonetheless find the division of the canons—all five of them—to be an important part of composition, though certainly not the only facet of the process. (POST SCRIPT: After reading a few more chapters in A Thousand Plateaus, I see how D/G would be relevant here too, but I will save that for my conference paper) Yet memory (and delivery too, though its inclusion in this particular seems largely irrelevant) is slowly disappearing from the writing classroom. I realize that my appropriation is a departure from Stiegler’s argument, but to take his words as metaphor has some interesting implications for the teaching of rhetoric today.
    Objectively (if we can actually be “objective”), this slow disintegration of the last two canons seems to be a necessary side-effect of our “becoming” cyborgs—as Stiegler indicates, “memory” is not merely the primary memory of retention or the secondary memory consisting of recalling information or images. And indeed, our mechanical prostheses can memorize and deliver for us—computers have memory, of course, but they can also record voices, replay them, and even “deliver” written works in a human-esque voice. Although these voices are still noticeably machinic in terms of timbre, they have vastly improved since the voices in earlier computer programs.
    But if we look at canonical memory in terms of the passage above, then it seems relatively easy to reincorporate memory back into the teaching of composition with the canons. The “already-there” to which Stiegler refers could be the aggregation of all of our past experiences and—importantly—that of which we’ve read or heard about in the past, even if that information has not been useful to us yet. In this way, the progymnasmata and the pedagogy presented by Quintilian would be useful too. In his On the Teaching of Speaking and Writing, he advocates copious reading of different genres and authors, both good and bad, to build a vast repertory of sources. This copia, which could also be collected in later centuries into commonplace books, would help students gain knowledge of various topoi so that they could speak or write on them later. Of course, they
    It is key, too, that Stiegler understands that the temporality of time is misunderstood in terms of primary, secondary, and tertiary memory: “the historial conception of temporality such as it constitutes the who would demand that the already-there that is not lived but inherited, constituted outside any perception, is nevertheless constituted of presence as such—and this is why temporality cannot be conceived in terms of the ‘now’” (248). And we too inherit works of our academic, creative, historical predecessors. Certainly, as we are reading, taking notes, critiquing, et cetera, we are aware of—that is, we perceive—that we are engaged in those activities. However, when we are reading another essay or writing another paper, we may recall snippets of things we’ve read before. We may not be able to place the work or the author at the time, and we will surely absentmindedly incorporate parts of other arguments we have stored in our cranial memory (we will surely have more elsewhere, in makeshift digital commonplace books and Post-Its sticking out of the pages of dog-eared theory books) and so these arguments are arguments “now”—on paper (maybe; or at the very least, potentially) and in our minds too—they are present, certainly, but they are not necessarily present at all times or in all situations. Perhaps to elaborate and complicate an example given by Stiegler: we do not recall works we’ve read in the same way that we hear high-pitched sirens and honking, not as a cacophony of individual noises, but as the memory—the recollection and reappropriation—of an ambulance, fire truck, police siren, etc. But as we read, we draw connections among important passages. For example, now that I’ve begun working on the conference paper for this class, I am especially alert while reading for works or passages that will be pertinent for my research. As such, much of my memory of the essays and books I’m reading is Perhaps D/G would call this forming a new rhizome, each topos a shifting plateau, incorporating new plateaus and connections with each new work read or discussed with others. But it is this grouping of sentences, phrases, and chapters which ultimately constitute our “memory” of a specific work or theoretical idea, among other things.
    Just as we remember the sound of an ambulance devoid of other “background” noise like car motors or the heavy machinery of construction crews in the distance, it seems that we do the same while reading, studying, writing. Now that I’m into my second page of response, I realize I’ve drifted from my original point: to bring this back into the composition classroom. But in a way, I think I’ve done what Deleuze and Guattari advocate: start in the middle, work toward the fringes, fill in the gaps, reach new plateaus. But to wrap up, if a conclusion is even possible, thinking of canonical memory in a rhizomic way as Deleuze and Guattari do, foundationally would allow space for (if only obliquely) the dynamism of Sophistic rhetoric, the practice of gathering copia, and also progymnasmata (part of which includes the koinoi topoi or common topics) in the rhizomes of the composition classroom.

  • 9. Jule  |  November 15, 2007 at 4:08 pm

    Jule Wallis
    Embodied Rhetoric
    11/12/07
    Embodied rhetoric, as defined by R. Marback, is highly affective, demanding response and action in the viewer: “Gestures of embodied rhetorical activity…are expressive because they are so attuned with and do so resonate with the world of our experience. They are our experience.” Specifically, surfaces that produce responses such as anger, fear, anxiety, coercion, or so on, make the viewer uncomfortable because we become aware that we are not in control of our affective response. The object unsettles our sovereignty and forces us to come face-to-face with our subjectivity.
    What types of embodied rhetoric produces this immediate, bodily, affective response? In Marback’s article, it was Monument to Joe Louis; a monument that “defines—at the same time it defies—the city’s racial segregation.” Are there other forms of embodied rhetoric that “embodies a rhetorical authority over the urban space of Detroit which resides with the people made to occupy that space?” I believe so, and this embodied rhetoric can be defined as graffiti. Graffiti produces a visceral response within viewers. While defiantly defined as “art,” by those who produce it, graffiti is often seen as anything but. From the internet ads that promise to remove offending graffiti from building surfaces, to divisional walls that are graffiti resistant, and finally to the proliferation of news reports that decry the criminal production and association of graffiti vandals, graffiti is “a surface reflecting responses, the perceivable object comes to matter less than the interpretations it occasions.”
    Why this negative affective response to graffiti? It seems strange, since graffiti does not pose immanent danger, is unable to physically harm the viewer, and is often produced as pieces of political art. The fear graffiti produces, then, must come the viewer interpretation. Graffiti produces the affect of fear because of its locality. Graffiti indicates the proximity of the ghetto, vandalism, economic instability, to mention a few. Thus, graffiti’s power and significance comes not only from its embodied rhetorical materiality, but also from its interaction with the viewer. The viewer infuses the rhetorical object with affective power. Thus, as asserted by Marback: “We project onto objects their objectivity through our claims to sovereignty over them. Objects project back to us our subjectivity. While projectivity can provoke it can also evoke.”
    Thus, if we are to understand embodied rhetoric, we need to not only understand what it means or attempts to say, but what it does affectively, what it produces within the viewer. Graffiti, as an art form, has been produced in response to economic, political, racial, etc. tension in urban spaces. Yet, graffiti is consistently viewed in a negative light, thus further infusing urban art and its location with harmful and stagnant interpretations. Thus, as Marback exhorts, if we refuse to explore our affective subjectivity towards embodied rhetoric we will be stuck “without any productive way of saying why people insist on bringing the same interpretation over and over again, an interpretation that then lingers and resonates and transforms the object into that particular fetish.”

    Question: You state that “by fixing some projective point” or by “claiming that” the object “represents this or that…we may make sense of the object, but we do so at the cost of displacing our sensation of it. We narrow and limit the object’s projection. We narrow and limit our potential for engaging it differently.” How might this be applied to graffiti, and what is it that graffiti artists might be attempting to say with their art. And is it possible that graffiti is being appropriated by others to produce a narrow and limited affective response to graffiti. For example, if graffiti elicits such a visceral and negative response, is it possible that graffiti could be used to delineate social and economic borders? Could graffiti be utilized in order to bring forth fear and complicity within suburban and urban neighborhoods?

  • 10. Michael Cipielewski  |  November 15, 2007 at 8:44 pm

    Rock, Paper, Scissors

    I cannot help but think of The Fist, that monument of Detroit rippling out as the exemplar of nowness, a warning, our own version of a Wushu greeting (think Kung Fu, think palm covering a fist, thumb-up), the “spirit” of which also makes its own ripples in I Survived Detroit and All I Got Was This Shirt clothing cascading down Jefferson Avenue in torrents of vicarious suburban might, the rhetorical agency of distance. This “spirit”, this essence, this contrivance and instrumentum (Heidegger)

    Does The Fist not enact some bandwidth of its own, actively emotional, affective, through which the viewer is able to see? The Fist is like a window to “the other side”, the other side wholly not belonging to the viewer, or the artifact, but a vested experience of both. The window only allows what it allows, that is, we do not look at The Fist and think to ourselves, “Waffles”… or maybe we do. I mean bandwidth in this sense, a probability of reaction in a spectrum of reactions. Indeed, The Fist is more than a “featureless [repository] of consequential responses”, for though it may evoke a “predictable” response from the Detroit cultural divide (how many other supposed hate crimes have been committed since the “whitening” of The Fist?), but the grand scope of cultural groups – is there a singular view of what The Fist does? Does a Japanese tourist see what the Floridian sees? The Brit and the Brazilian? No, and I think this is Marback’s touchstone; the embodied event, the unique experience of the fist.

    “Cashman’s talk of unclenching The Fist by covering it in white paint betrays a characterization of the monument as vital, as more than medium carrying people’s responses to it. It is a living thing animated with agency, desire, feelings, and intentions.”

    Artifact vitality seems directly linked to affective response for Marback. That is, an affective feedback loop – the factish, the intent-laden, agency-ridden artifact loops around to bite the viewer on the ass, or in this case, punch her in the gut. This goes back to all the distributed agency/consciousness blah-blah. But The Fist enacts agency and intent far beyond that of a “static” object, per-se. Itself contains a manner of conscious decisive questioning, a recalibration of the viewer and itself simultaneously; we do not engage The Fist, nor does The Fist engage us; instead, we enter into a visual dialogue.

    We seem uncomfortable with the unknowable vanishing point, the point where “features of both world and bodies [are] in awareness of each other.” But back to bandwidth; the vanishing point metaphor allows an approach to The Fist that should be, at very least, satisfactory; the convergence of lines to a singular point (in this case, the point where the artifact’s projections and our interpretations of it meet) is gradual, slow, two or more lines growing closer at interval. Though it may not be possible to “get under” what The Fist does in an ontological sense, but remaining at the surface to see instantiations of experience, of agency, and the like. Just as the persona is characterized as fragmented, partial, whole, comprised of many pieces in constant re/adjustment with the environment they embody, then I would extend that sort of experience and existence to The Fist; it is just as fragmented, just as cracked as we are. I would also say that the “essence” of it as a simulacra need be explored thoroughly.

    Post-ish: My response, as is, did not posit questions, so here they are, with a bit of elaboration: Would we have the same experience with it were it, say, Joe Louis’ belt, or a boxing glove? These two examples would hold different parameters of understanding and experience altogether. The Fist, albeit bronze, reminds us too much of ourselves, our own bodies speak to us through The Fist while it adds its own commentary of the tensions of ethnic stratification in our hometown. The suburbs cannot help but look at The Fist as exemplification of a view that permeates them; Detroit is dangerous, and I survived. As Marback stated, “Unclenching the Fist” is not a fallback on something that is (apparently) well-known: we are the most ethnically stratified metropolitan area in existence. This is just a “tip of the iceberg” so to speak, and the whitening of The Fist is not reducible to mere racism, nor is it a matter of the viewer completely negotiating the meaning of any artifact such as The Fist. But Marback brings into question ways of seeing, the manner in which a sub/culture views the artifact, or if there is even a manner to look at perspective pervasively.

    So: Is there normativity in the suburban viewer? The country? The world? What else is in the historicized and ethnocentric visual dialogue?

  • 11. Kim Lacey  |  November 15, 2007 at 9:44 pm

    That’s true, Michael, since I don’t think another representation of Joe Louis would ‘provide’ the same experience. But we can turn to another Detroit landmark that does use the body–I’m thinking of the Spirit of Detroit whose focal point, we could argue, is also its hands (or, at least, what the statue is holding in them). Thinking of these two sculptures in such close proximity to each other downtown questions the normativity of the suburban viewer in distinctly different ways. Firstly, in terms of the fist, the exploitation of ’surviving Detroit’ enforces the controversy over the ‘fist of paint’ as many suburban-Detroiters won’t go ‘down there’ (that is, unless there’s a Superbowl) and when they do, they feel like they’ve overcome some fear (or some bullshit like that). Conversely, does the The Fist ’scare off’ suburbanites? When we look at the Spirit of Detroit (granted it was never vandalized, and it only changes its appearance by sporting giant jerseys) is it supposed to be welcoming to suburbanite visitors? I don’t know, nor will I make any gesture (ark ark ark) to claim to know the answers, or interpretations. On a side note, it’s always strange to see metro-Detroiters taking pictures in front of a jersey’d Spirit of Detroit, but I can’t recall ever seeing anyone being photographed in front of the fist…hmmm…

  • 12. Katrina Newsom  |  November 15, 2007 at 10:09 pm

    In order to further understand Marback’s essay, I pull out an article written by Neil Lazarus title “The Fetish of ‘the West’ in Postcolonial Theory” in which he talks about the ways in which postcolonial theorists and writers often times use the same rhetorical strategies of their opponents to oppose the Western hegemonic views of the ‘other’. Because of this, Larazus concludes that the postcolonial theorist or writer fails to adequately oppose those hegemonic views and that in fact they further reinforce those views by engaging in their opponents’ rhetorical strategies. He continues to argue that the engagement of these marginalize views by the use of the same rhetorical strategies of the colonialist inadvertently maintains that those oppressive views are in fact valid, if not true. Lazarus argues that in order for the postcolonial theorist or writer to be effective in her/his opposition, s/he must throw away the rhetorical strategies of the colonialist. In other words, the theorist or writer has to disengage. S/he simply must find a different form of rhetoric. In this context, I believe that when Marback attempts to answer the question posed by the report, “Does The Fist represent Black Power, he is correct when he states, “Yes, so long as someone insists it doesn’t and wants to unclench it”(27). Similarly, I believe that Neil Lazarus also is stating that postcolonial theorist’s opposition to the rhetoric used to formulate the identity of the marginalized other not only becomes an act of acknowledging those claims but also, helps to create and recreate them over and over again.
    I vaguely remember the incident of the two white males defacing the Monument of The Fist in Detroit. Of course, the immediate response to such acts would be that it was racially motivated. However, I think that Marback’s essay of this act helps to deconstruct the normative binaries of black/white and urban/suburban that would allow this act of destruction to “make sense” (Marback, 3). I agree with Marback that deeming The Fist as a representation of Black Power easily explains the motives of the two men. In order for this response to “make sense” then the Monument of The Fist would have to mean Black Power. The reasons the men gave for painting The Fist with white paint as Marback informs was because The Fist represented a violent image in a city that is believed to be violent (3). Their goal was to “unclench the fist” (3). Yet, the interesting thing of it all was that their affective response was violent. As Marback states, “We can easily sense the blatantly inflammatory nature of their act” (2). Extending this argument, Marback informs us that the act of defacing The Fist was not induced merely by the men’s interpretation of the object, but also because of the projective nature of the object itself. He further assesses that, “Objects propel us and repel us and even compel us.” (16) So here, we can see how the convergence of the “monument and vandals projectively engaged each other (16). Yet, I would like to get his take on the rhetoric that resonates within the fact that the object was defenseless to the violent act of those men. What rhetorical inferences reside in the act of defacing a fist that is unable to punch, or to grab the mops used to pour the white paint in hopes to change its form? Furthermore, what does the use of white paint say to us? Why not red paint that could easily symbolize the flow of blood the falls from the victims of violence including the two slain white
    Officers?

    PS:
    After hearing Dr. Marback’s reason for writing the essay in which he stated that he wanted people to extend their thoughts beyond the immediate visceral response they experienced when looking at the sculpture, my immediate response was to question that notion. Yes, I agree that it is important to extend oneself beyond the immediacy of one’s emotions, but arguably it is in that moment where truth resides. After that moment has passed, a person can begin to rationalize their initial response. They can apply reasons to their prejudices. However, it is arguable that people who desire to remove the negative connotations that come to mind when experiencing something that would normally cause them to disconnect and/or reject the other could benefit from Marback’s work.

  • 13. Jen  |  November 16, 2007 at 12:38 am

    When I think of rhetoric, the first thing that comes to mind is the strategies of argumentation, leading unsuspecting victims into an analogical trap that forces a surrender to an idea. I do not envision sculpting a piece of art whose meaning I refuse to name. However, that seemed to be the goal of Robert Graham, who described his sculpture of The Fist, as follows: “People bring their own experiences to the sculpture. I wanted to leave the image open, allowing it to become a symbol rather than making it specific” (Marback). I couldn’t imagine a student explaining to me that what they were trying to say in their argumentative paper was open to interpretation. However, perhaps this is more realistic than saying that everything I present in my paper will lead you back to my thesis. This does not consider the interaction between an audience member’s perceptions, memories, and unprocessed experiences and the words on the page and how that baggage can affect the future of the text’s identity. For example, thanks to Christian Fundamentalists the identity of the Harry Potter series has been forever changed.

    I do not think I would have had the language to analyze or discuss rhetorical vulnerability before reading affect theory. This was the term that I most gravitated towards in Richard Marback’s article, “Unclenching the Fist.” Though Marback doesn’t define or name affect theory, he cites Brian Massumi when discussing vulnerability. We are vulnerable when we let go of our need to claim our own agency over objects, trying to name them and know them through our preconceived notions, instead of allowing ourselves to experience the affect the objects have on us and what they bring to the surface without our consent. “Objects are not objective, they are projective.” To truly experience or recognize not only objects, but individuals, there is a loss of control, an open exposure of where change can happen. In an interview with Mary Zournazi, Massumi stated, “When you affect something, you are at the same time opening yourself up to being affected in turn, and in a slightly different way than you might have been the moment before.” By Graham’s sculpture being an open image, it not only affected its audience but was affected by their interpretations as well.

    It’s hard to imagine wanting to unclench a fist made of bronze. However, though no blood pumped below the curled, sculpted fingers, there was a vitality contained within that fist. Of course, the vitality was not in the fist alone, as Marback writes, “We fail to recognize meaning and significance are in the moment, in activities of interacting with others with and through objects.” The vitality was in moments like the one between the fist and the two men who believed that the fist was a violent threat against the white population in the greater Detroit area. Its rhetorical vulnerability was exposed then as white paint splashed over the sculpture and flyers proclaiming white power were lain at its feet. This interaction is what mattered. What Brett Cashman and John Price didn’t realize was that the sculpture was more than a object; it could not just be made into something new by paint or even if it were possible, unclenching the fist. Marback writes, “When we fail to give objects their due, when we oppose persistence of object to insistence on interpretation, we fail to consider that any object of rhetoric—or for that matter anything rhetorical—might be more than a mirror reflecting some idea that precedes it, shines through it, and exists despite our best efforts to change it.” I interpret this to be a loss of control, which relates to how Hannah Arendt describes a public action as an event that we have no ability to manage as soon as we perform it.

    To relate this to affect theory, there is no fixed identity to an object, only layers of potential experiences. Its affective resonances (as a fist) combined with the tragic shooting of two cops led to an emotional capture of anger, anger towards a symbol that celebrated violence to Brett Cashman and John Price. What I am left feeling after this example is both excitement, as one object can create ripples of discourse throughout communities, and a small tinge of fear, as anything we put out in this world could be co-opted and twisted to portray a very different image than we intended, such as a promotion of urban violence.

    Postscript:
    I found Mike’s question, “Would we have the same experience with it were it, say Joe Louis’ belt, or a boxing glove?,” to be interesting. For myself, it would not change my experience of the monument as I always read it and experienced it in relation to sporting events, as that was the only thing that brought my familial community to Detroit from the rural North. However, I think that this question raises a better question about the limits and definition of rhetoric. In our class with Marback, this is a central question: what can be rhetoric? Would a boxing glove be a form of rhetoric? Or does there need to be a provocative element, such as a fist?

  • 14. inferentialkid  |  November 16, 2007 at 3:50 pm

    Inferentialkid posting for Crystal

    Why oh Why Not the Rhizomes? Wait…I Know Why. We’re in Pruchnic’s Class. :)

    It is somewhat known that the chapter on Rhizomes in Deleuze and Guattari’s book: in “A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia” is probably the easiest section to read and thus the most often quoted and referenced in academic circles. Some might even venture to say it is the most popular section. It is no wonder then that Dr. Pruchnic would not assign that portion of the reading. No. No. No. What would we be thinking to open such widely read texts? What could we possibly learn from reading sections of a book that may be readable????

    Rather, under Dr. Pruchnic’s instruction we read the ambiguous, obscure rarely-read pieces by prominent rhetoricians, theorists, authors, etc. Who reads Nietzsche’s Birth & Tragedy? ENG 7007, that’s who! Who reads Foucault’s Discipline & Punish? Bodies in Persuasion, baby!! Since I am still clinging to the hope that Dr. Pruchnic will only skim this, and I will pass this class, I shall stop my rant here. Yet, I have abandoned my sarcasm in these formal, incredibly difficult to write responses (prior to this course I thought one page responses were relatively easy writes; I have proved my theory wrong this semester!!) since our first response, and in this way cannot hold back any longer! The section, “The Geology of Morals” was a (how can I put this mildly, somewhat nicely…) difficult piece to read, and I can’t imagine what Eric’s life has been like the past seven days in preparation for his presentation (Eric, your wife hasn’t filed for divorce has she?). At any rate, in whatever ways strata vary and differ from each other, however they are segmented, articulated or constructed is, for the most part, lost on me and my research focus. The forms and substances of the epistrata and parastrata (what are these again?) and their content and expression are still flying high (I mean real high– hawk high) above my head next to the molar and molecular assemblage of the abstract machine and the metastrata (I think I’d better drop out now…why prolong the agony?). For this reason, since I could make some semblance of sense of the rhizome theory, I jumped on the bandwagon (much to Pruchnic’s chagrin I suspect) of the “Thousand Plateau’s” readers who have come before me, and therein did my best to tie in Rhizome theory with my research focus on disabilities in education. Peering through my veil of shame and admitted stupidity, I write my sincerest apologies to my peers for my inability to comprehend our assigned essay. But, I do hope this afforded you some time to chuckle…

    Deleuze and Guattari discuss consciousness in post modernism in their book “A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia”. They extend their theoretical analysis of postmodernism consciousness to the very physicality of their book, suggesting and inviting readers to engage in a non-sequential reading of their essay. This organic anti-structure is linked in that one part exists as a whole. In this way, the book is written as a rhizome. A rhizome by definition is a horizontal root like stem which produces roots below and shoots them upward above the surface. In this way, then, every part of the rhizome is connected. And, because the different parts of the rhizome are connected, although a rhizome may rupture, it is not destroyed. This rupture is merely a disruption– a disconnection– just as the chapter/sections in this essay are disruptions– disconnections in the rhizome in its continuity of moving, flowing, accommodating itself to the pierces, tears and splits– always and only to reunite, come together, never separating. This is exemplified in the physicality of the Deleuze and Guattari book in that the chapter/sections are disruptions– disconnections– rhizomes of the totality. Neither the rhizome nor the essay rely on historical development, yet, like postmodern consciousness, remains interconnected across infinite categories and circular networks. There are circular connections in the endless differences. Essentially, the non-linear structure proposed by Deleuze and Guattari sounds a lot like a lava lamp. It clumps, flows, bubbles, separates and rejoins, but even when disjointed, it’s still part of the same whole “organizism.” And, they’re soothing to look at… In this organic spirit, people also have the ability to be disconnected, disrupted, possibly ruptured but never destroyed in their movement and adjustment to remain whole.

    I’d like to apply this rhizome theory to the higher education developmental education classroom. The rhizome constantly reinvents itself, evolving beyond the disruptions and disconnections– maintaining an intact version of itself, adjusting and embracing the challenges. In this spirit, higher education classrooms must embrace the disruptions and disconnections created by learning disabled and high functioning Autistic students. If classroom environments and teaching techniques could re-think the classroom consciousness in terms of what is possible and what is success students would be more successful and less inundated. An example of this re-assemblage of our thought process occurrs when we are taught what habits “good” students adopt in our classrooms: they listen intently, engage in discussions and questions and take active notes. But do all “good” students have to do this? Aspergers students are notorious for fidgeting, doing something with their hands like playing their Gameboy during a lecture rather than participating in said “good” students’ habits. Yet, when asked if they’ve ‘gotten’ any of the information, they can often repeat it back verbatim to their professor. It is within this space we must re-think our standards of what is possible and what, exactly is success). In essence, if teachers could create an environment, using teaching techniques based on the theory of the rhizome, instead of labeling students disabled or abnormal, we may find more creative ways to teach and learn. Asperger students’ identity is often defined in part by their relentlessness in pursuits, as their intelligent mind lends itself to near obsession on a topic until it is resolved or reached. In this sense, although the Asperger body and mind is continually repressed, it is continually reappearing. Thus, we would be better served as educator professionals to embrace Asperger students and learn how best to help them learn, rather than refusing to acknowledge their pursuit of (as well as right to) a higher education in the name of abnormal– a term which can only co-exist with normalcy through their simultaneous construction and connectedness. Still, the problem within higher education does not lie with the Asperger student but rather with the constraints of the contemporary classroom and teacher and the mergence of those to create the student-teacher-classroom problems for the Asperger student. Because contemporary society normalizes the body and the individual, my goal here is to help instructor’s de-normalize their perspective of students through the theory of rhizomes. In his book “Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness and the Body” Lennard Davis writes “The concept of a norm, unlike that of an ideal, implies that the majority of the population must or should somehow be part of the norm. The norm pins down that majority of the population that falls under the arch of the standard bell-shaped curve” (29). By being held to and in an attempt to adhere to the bell-shaped curve, Asperger students are not given the flexibility required for them to be successful. Rather, if students and teachers alike adopted a more organic structure to teaching techniques, materials and learning strategies, the norm may not have to pin down anything, and the rhizome-like student and teacher may be moving and flowing without destroying the other. The idea of a ‘deviant’ or a ‘less than ideal’ is defining disabled people in terms of what they lack, what they are not instead of describing what they are, how they are abled and what they do have and possess– something required if we were to analyze Asperger students through a rhizome lens. The crux here, as Davis also points out is that these standards divide the entire human population into two categories: standard and non-standard. Teachers must do away with their eugenic gaze and do their best to encourage the Asperger’s peers to do the same. As Davis concludes, “One of the tasks for a developing consciousness of disability issues is the attempt, then, to reverse the hegemony of the normal and to institute alternative ways of thinking about the normal” (49)….thus, rhizome theory! :)

    If Im no longer in attendance on Tuesday nights, you’ll know why :) .

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