Tracing Rhetorical Movements

Example: As you discover the world you live in, you begin to create yourself within that world, and in the process, you might discover who you truly are, and then create the world around you.

For my non-Western invention reading, I chose a chapter from Stories in Red and Black: Pictorial Histories of the Aztecs and Mixtecs by Elizabeth Hill Boone. The book as a whole analyzes the ways the Aztecs and Mixtecs of ancient Mexico recorded their histories pictorially, creating a universally understandable language in an effort to preserve their narratives. While the entire book does not focus on developing a theoretical foundation for understanding Aztec and Mixtec invention, it does discuss their inventive practices in a way that I had hoped would allow us to see how invention might be considered outside of the Greco-Roman tradition. However, as I began writing about what I’d learned, I realized that elements of “what we think we know” from our readings so far in the class are present in this ancient culture’s inventive practices, or at least highlighted by Boone’s analysis of their inventions. This may also be because my experience with theorizing invention is thoroughly ingrained in the Western tradition, so I’m having trouble thinking outside the box. The chapter that best related to invention was Chapter Three, “Writing in Images”, which begins with Boone’s explanation of how Aztec and Mixtec manuscript painting can be considered writing. She identifies three types of figural representation that the Aztecs and Mixtecs used: • pictorial representation, or “images of people, things, and events that have a recognizable visual resemblance to what they represent” (33) • ideograms, On a basic level, we might understand that their inventive practices involved reproducing what they saw, since the visuals were or “single images [that] convey larger or unportrayable ideas, concepts, or things”, and • phonetic referents, or “images or pictorial elements that…almost always appear in place names either as a main sign or as an accessory element that qualifies the principal glyph” (35). On a basic level, we might understand that these inventive practices involved reproducing what the rhetors saw, since the visuals were so closely related to the meaning they were representing. However, Boone’s analysis reveals that invention in this culture was much more complex than that – the Aztecs and Mixtecs were not only preserving their historical narrative by portraying figures and events, but also as a means of communicating and enacting their political and social agendas. I identified several areas of “what we think we know” from previous conversations in our class in the Aztec and Mixtec inventive practices and inventions themselves, such as the relation of invention to other canons of rhetoric. For example, Boone notes that the manuscript paintings “held memory and other forms of knowledge” (28), aligning invention with memory. Later on, she discusses the “reading orders” of the painted manuscripts [e.g. a story moves in the direction of time, where “time marches regularly forward, the year count broken only to allow the painter space to elaborate a major event” (61)], which aligns invention with arrangement. It’s arguable that the concept of figural representation in general relies heavily on arrangement, especially considering the combination of pictographs, ideograms, and phonetic referents that were used together to create meaning. Additionally, as Boone explains the purpose of their painting as a form of writing, she explains that these inventions “recorded the past, preserved the prognosticatory guides that suggested the future, and documented the many features of the present” (28). The products of their ancient inventive practices demonstrates how invention for the Aztecs and Mixtecs came out of the “known”, but provides opportunity to imagine the “unknown”, as mentioned by Miller and McKeon. Ultimately, while my initial understanding of the Aztec and Mixtec practices of invention was almost a form of transcription, as they painted representations of what they saw and what they knew, I realized by the end of the chapter that in doing so, they invented an actual visual language that can be broadly understood across time and culture.

Chapter 4 - “[email protected]” “Sound is thus crucial to our integration into social and material environments; its ambience is essential to our sense of the world and how we are in it, how we find ourselves” (139). This chapter makes the argument that music is an illustration of ambient rhetoric and not just “auditory cheesecake”. "As a rhetorician...I am suspicious of the separation of form and content that structures this narrative: Windows is a transparent, functional entity allowing us to conduct our business...and the startup music is the flourish, the rhetorical ornament dressing up Windows’s transparent instrumentality. And basically the same narrative is often used to dismiss rhetoric, which is too often seen as the decorative frill dressing up the language to make it more pleasing, persuasive, or seductive but in the end unimportant and even pernicious because it impedes the facts we can transparently represent in communicative linguistic utility. This narrative dates back at least to Plato, who used it to trump rhetoric with philosophy, and it rouses my suspicions if it is applied to understanding why Windows has startup music. Something else is at stake. More precisely, I am going to argue that examining something as small as an operating system’s startup music can open a window on understanding our relationship to computers and computer software. Microsoft Windows and similar entities are not just operating systems or software we use; rather, they constitute an actual environment, and in so doing, they require an extension of our modes of comportment to include more complete reflections of the human" (131-2). Rickert asserts that, “if music does affect us deeply, then we must see that music involves rhetoric” (132). He goes on the reemphasize the compositional, broadly construed aspect of rhetoric, which could be argued is much the same as music. “Asserting that music affects us begs the question of how it in fact does so. Here, then, I address how a musical snippet involves and inflicts a user--how, that is, it helps environ a situation in which various modalities of suasion become possible” (132). Rickert goes on to say, “Ultimately I will conclude that an ambient rhetoric opens rhetorical study to music differently than previous accounts have allowed” (132). Three dominant arguments about music (132): “Music must be properly modulated and controlled” because it influences human emotions. “Its interdeterminancy and lack of semantic content make music a limited art; determinate symbolic arts are superior and preferable” Music is “ornamental to human life but not essential” In response, Rickert states that “There is something amiss when music evokes such paradoxical positions, described simultaneously as powerful, indeterminate, and inessential” (132). Rickert endeavors to understand how Microsoft’s music, which only lasts a few seconds, can evoke all that Microsoft intended and how it affects us and our view of the world around us. Music does not emerge in isolation; cultural discourses emerge to shape and cue meanings (135). Although music seems to elicit similar responses across cultures, it can affect and mean beyond a basic palette of emotions (136). It can also, after losing its initial cultural meaning, take on another. Still doubting? Think back to the tragedy of 911. What did “God Bless America” mean before and after? What was another patriotic song for most singers before that tragedy became so fraught with emotion after that it proved a challenge to sing it without tears. The Wedding March, another example, was initially written by Mendelssohn as part of his musical version of Midsummer Night’s Dream. It provided the music for Titania’s parody wedding to the donkey eared “mechanical”, but has through the years become our norm for brides to walk down the aisle. “Ride of the Valkyries” was written as part of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, a cycle of operas with characters from Norse mythology. Those operas became popular with the Nazi’s during World War II, so now when most of us hear that particular piece, we think of Nazis. But it isn’t just cultural context that Rickert seems concerned about. The very spaces we use have ambient sounds like the caves at Lacaux or a house on the beach or near a river. Musicians have known this for a long time. Choirs have often used the idea of surrounding the audience, with choir members lining the floor level and the balcony to surround their listeners with sound. Disney does a great job using this particular musical and yes, ambient device, in the Candlelight Processional at Epcot during the holiday season. So how does music affect our world and our relations with media? How are our grounding assumptions reconfigured about interactive media? This is another aspect of Rickert’s examination of Microsoft’s use of startup music. Rickert explains that, “the startup music for Windows 95 constituted one part of a suite of sounds and images designed to foster a better relationship with the software. The startup music cues us to this relationship” (138). Rickert continues to detail the effect of startup music through the different versions of Windows over time, explaining that “rhetoric here is tied to experience particularly the modulation of mood, that is, our affective ground tone” (142). In this way, he argues that “putting rhetoric in this musical key shifts us away from rhetoric’s more customary epistemological frame to an ontological one. Rhetoric is assembled, in an architectural sense, and integrated into a mode of life--a way of being, as it were” (142). In the end, Rickert argues for a wider sense of all modalities and senses and how they work in the world and influence us, even create the embodied world we live in. “Put differently, such rhetorical design organizes an experience, not so much to persuade in any direct sense, but to attune and inflect our sense of bodily inhabitance and cradle of intelligibility within which we comport ourselves” (154-155).

Brooke, 66

I found it interesting that in "Inventing Scenes," one of DeWitt's first steps in inventing his new curriculum was "start[ing] at the end" (219) by drafting the assignment sheet for the final project. This made me think of our new rhetoric vocabulary word "telos", or the notion of an "end”, which for Aristotle was "tied to principles of origination" (Atwill 169). From imagining the final product and the specifications for completing such a task at the end of the course, DeWitt was able to begin his invention of the course. I did this kind of reverse invention with my own lesson plans for ENC 1101 and 1102 by conceptualizing the the end products of each unit and what I expected from them, and then working backwards to scaffold my lesson plans around what my students would need to know/learn/be able to do in order to achieve the learning goals present in this end products.

DeWitt, p. 218

I don't know how much discussion my question for this week will facilitate, but I'd at least like to prompt everyone's thinking about this, especially those who are interested in pedagogy/involved in teaching. Leff says that "perhaps the main task before us is to establish a curriculum for rhetorical studies"(209), and his article sets up a good foundation for how this would be useful. He does mention that there have been some moves towards this kind of curriculum (on a related note, the Department of Writing & Rhetoric has been working to get a B.A. in Writing & Rhetoric approved for UCF!) but doesn't go into detail about what these "independent programs in rhetoric" involve. If you could design a curriculum for rhetorical studies, what would it include? What have you learned so far in your studies and in this class that you would highlight?

Michael Leff, "Up from Theory"

Richard McKeon, "Creativity and the Commonplace" I used to just think there was just "in context" and "out of context" ... this complicates that a bit.

Richard McKeon, "Creativity and the Commonplace"

Richard McKeon, "Creativity and the Commonplace"

Socrates on the "perfect" rhetorician