Rhetorical Theory/Bruno Latour Video Series

So, I have not posted in quite some time. I have, however, been busy. I have been making additional episodes of Rhetorical Theory/Bruno Latour. These episodes are now appearing as a series at Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture. In addition to the introduction and the three numbered episodes previously posted here on my blog, there are now five more episodes up at Enculturation, with more episodes coming soon. My thanks to Casey Boyle for pulling this together.

Rhetorical Theory/Bruno Latour Episode #3: The Strong Defense

With this episode, I continue with my provocations, attempting to assemble rhetorical theory and Bruno Latour in mutually beneficial ways. In this episode, I discuss what Bruno Latour adds to Richard Lanham's Strong Defense of rhetoric. I conclude that in addition to offering a strong defense of rhetoric, Latour offers an equally strange one as well.

Rhetorical Theory/Bruno Latour Episode #2: Attitude

With episode two ("Attitude"), I continue to assemble rhetorical theory and Bruno Latour in mutually beneficial ways. In this episode, I discuss what rhetoric has to offer Bruno Latour: specifically, I employ Kenneth Burke's notion of attitude to highlight the importance of "how" or of "mode" in the work of collectives.

Rhetorical Theory/Bruno Latour Episode #1: Show Your Work

With this first numbered episode, I continue with my provocations, attempting to assemble rhetorical theory and Bruno Latour in mutually beneficial ways. In this episode, I discuss what I am calling Latour's insistence to "show your work": that is, to not assume as already existing that which we are always working to create. Additionally, this call to "show your work" highlights all those humans and nonhumans who take part in such work.

Rhetorical Theory/Bruno Latour

A very short video outlining why I think the work of Bruno Latour is important and necessary for rhetoric and composition. I'm going to try multiple versions of this. I'd like to have several possible "elevator pitches" for Bruno Latour.

Having Your Day Made

RSA Twitter Feedback

Posting this mostly for myself. RSA 2012 was a great time, and the Twitter scene was very much a part of it.

RSA 2012: Reframing Deception

RSA 2012 is but two weeks away! Here is a preview trailer of my talk, "Reframing Deception: Rhetorical, Psychology, and Agency." It's a version of a paper I have recently co-authored with a colleague in psychology, Maarten Derksen. The talk is part of a panel on Reframing the Brain: Indentification and the Rhetoric of Neuroscience chaired by Jordynn Jack. It's a loaded panel, and I am excited to be a part of it. The panel (H.12) is on Saturday, May 26, 2012 at 11:00am.

Abstract

Speaker #3 frames deception through the combined lenses of rhetorical theory and experimental psychology, thus performing an important interdisciplinary gesture: to study the human experience culturally and scientifically. It introduces a specific strain of rhetorical theory to experimental psychology in order to make claims for the emergence of human agency, and to rethink and recast a term common to both rhetoric and psychology, namely deception. Speaker #3 argues that agency is emergent in experimental conditions as it likewise is in moments of rhetorical encounter. It reads this understanding of agency through psychological experiments in priming, which attempt to demonstrate how subtle context cues unconsciously shape human behavior and in so doing reveal the bare mechanisms of the human mind. Examining work on rhetorical ecologies (Edbauer), identification (Burke), and ambience (Rickert) on the one hand, and experimental social psychology on the other, this presentation argues that deception cannot simply be identified as something that one person does to another, but rather is an emergent phenomenon within and across moments of encounter, whether they be complex rhetorical interactions or tightly controlled psychological experiments.

The Shape of the World to Come: Toward an Object-Oriented Environmental Rhetoric

Short talk given at Saint Louis University. To celebrate our outgoing chair, faculty were ask to give short presentations on research made possible or supported by our chair. Here is my talk, which I think is a fairly succinct description of my current research project.

Outwitting Squirrels

Mostly, this makes me laugh, but I do like the idea of this as a textbook akin to How To Argue and Win Every Time. It presents squirrels as equal partners in a rhetorical enterprise.

Transitional Objects

I've been thinking more about carpentry and my son. Yesterday I blogged about the book When Air Moves and a few days ago about his "collection" of twigs, leaves, chunks of brick and stone, and pines cones. This line of thought is motivated, of course, by fatherly affection, but also by the argument, which emerges from the work of Jane Bennett and Ian Bogost, about the importance of a certain kind of naivete and wonder when it comes to approaching objects as objects. And then Ze Frank told me about transitional objects (or "comfort objects"). In this brief post, I want to make a case for transitional objects as a form of carpentry and so amenable to OOO. I also want to briefly use transitional objects to attend to the affective elements of carpentry and OOO.

To Wikipedia (big deal, wanna fight about it):

In human childhood development, the term transitional object is normally used. It is something, usually a physical object, which takes the place of the mother-child bond. Common examples include dolls, teddy bears or blankets.

Donald Woods Winnicott introduced the concepts of transitional objects and transitional experience in reference to a particular developmental sequence. With "transition" Winnicott means an intermediate developmental phase between the psychic and external reality. In this "transitional space" we can find the "transitional object."

Will's transitional object: Reindeer, his tiny stuffed reindeer. By my rhetorical carpentry-infused reading of Winnicott's transitional object theory, Reindeer is a specific object that attunes Will to the withdrawal of objects in general.

At first glance, this approach to objects looks correlationist. Objects are what they stand-in for, mean or represent for humans. One immediately thinks of evocative objects, the main feature of which is the argument that "objects carry both [human] ideas and passions" (although Graham Harman has argued that we can read evocative objects as amenable to OOO as well). OOO, in contrast, is interested in objects in and of themselves, distinct from what they might mean for us. Certainly, we can easily read transitional objects this way. But I think, for the moment, we might benefit from seeing them as more than this, and we can do that through the idea of carpentry. Again, I go to JB:

Rhetorical carpentry would construct objects (and conversations among objects) in order to demonstrate approximations of the strange, alien conversations happening around us. ("The Decorum of Objects")

It's in light of carpentry that "transitional objects" does real work for OOO. More from Wikipedia (listen, I just thought of this):

When the young child begins to separate the "me" from the "not-me" and evolves from complete dependence to a stage of relative independence, it uses transitional objects. Infants see themselves and the mother as a whole. In this phase the mother "brings the world" to the infant without delay which gives it a "moment of illusion," a belief that its own wish creates the object of its desire which brings with it a sense of satisfaction. Winnicott calls this subjective omnipotence.

Now, bear with me for a moment: could we not see "subjective omnipotence" as correlationism—the idea that the world is only ever what I am always able to make of it—in its most extreme form? What a transitional object does, then, is help the child break out of this subjective omnipotence, which is a powerful, painful, and necessary experience.

In a later stage of the development the child no longer needs the transitional object. It is able to make a distinction between "me" and "not-me," and keeping inside and outside apart and yet interrelated. This development leads to the use of illusion, symbols and objects later on in life.

So while transitional objects could easily be read as correlationist (and perhaps work will need to be done to make this less likely), what I see these objects as are objects that attune us to the strange withdrawal of all objects, including mom and dad, doggie, rocks, trees, and even Reindeer. What OOO/OOR needs and wants is for people to hold onto these transitional objects well after childhood, which some adults do. We always need transitional objects. What carpentry suggests is that we make transitional objects in the philosophical work of dismantling more sophisticated, adult, and dangerous forms of "subjective omnipotence."

Finally, and in a round about way, I also find transitional object theory compelling because it attends to the affective dimension of carpentry. Correlationism isn't just an abstract, disembodied idea that some (or many) people have; it is a whole way of being in the world. Carpentry, then, must surely provide not just ways of engaging the strangeness and withdrawal of objects but also ways of coping with the transition to an object-oriented ontology itself. Carpentry's objects must also be security blankets and stuffed reindeer.

Note: Eileen Joy, co-editor of O-Zone, has a short essay at In the Midde that dicusses transitional objects: "Willingly Playing the Role of Thing: The Hope of Persons as Transitional Objects"

On Feeling Naive (as an Experimental Rhetorical Carpenter)

This post is an aside about feeling naive while doing the work of rhetorical carpentry.

Because we are colleagues, I had the pleasure of discussing my "Alien Relationships" experiment with Devin Johnston, whose Creaturely and Other Essays both partially inspired the experiment and provided the text I sampled in it. (Creaturely is surely an alien phenomenology.) Talking with him over a beer, I described how I felt composing the project and how anxious I was about making it public (and for more reasons than just fishing for a complement). I said that I felt silly and awkward. I felt like a naive sophomore enrolled in his first creative writing class.

My son's "collection" as he calls it. Full of sticks, leaves, pine cones,
and chunks of stone and brick, this collection is full of wonder. Ian
Bogost argues that wonder has two senses: "it can suggest awe or
marvel" and "it can mean puzzlement or logical perplexity" (121).
"The act of wonder," Bogost writes, "invites a detachment from
ordinary logics, of which human logics are but one example" (124).

As a successful creative writer, Devin's perspective is especially valuable. So I was rather pleased when he said how glad he was to hear that I was feeling that way: feeling silly and naive indicates productively (if not successfully) moving out of your comfort area. He then went on to describe his own process of writing the essays in Creaturely: how hard he worked to get the essays to approach, without appropriating, other creatures.

This conversation helped me a great deal and I share it because I think it might be helpful to others interested in experimenting with rhetorical carpentry. Carpentry is going to be hard, it's going to feel silly and weird: carpentry will be naive and full of wonder, which Bogost makes much use of in Alien Phenomenology (see the above picture taken of my son's "collection"). My conversation with Devin has also got me thinking about the possible value of team-ups or at least of leaning on our colleagues. I think carpentry might be an interesting, if not inherently, interdisciplinary venture. How might rhetorical carpentry be a good way to make things together?

Carpentry of the Sublime

In response to my post "Rhetorical Carpentry: An Experiment", both Scot and Steve raised helpful and (as this post demonstrates) generative questions about intent and language with respect to carpentry as a means to reveal or engage objects as aliens with ontological weight all their own. I want to continue responding to their questions (and to Scot's question about the sublime in particular) here.

Scot writes:

However, I'm also suspicious, particularly of [Morton's] reading of Longinus and the sublime. I'm just not sure this maps onto OOO very well, at least not without some poetic work on our parts to endow objects with intuitions and the possibility of being surprised or thrown out of synch. For Longinus, the sublime really boils down to language and taste

In response, I want to first spend some time with Morton's reading of the sublime and then come back to what I feel is a key move for OOO scholarship. In short, I think misreading is a fundamental move for object-oriented philosophy. I want to summarize Morton's reading of Longinus and then defend it based precisely on Scot's suspicion of it.

Tim Morton's essay "Sublime Objects" identifies two forms of the sublime that don't work for OOO and one that does (Morton also discuss object-oriented rhetoric there, but I don't want to get into that just yet).

Of the two dominant theories of the sublime, we have a choice between authority and freedom, between exteriority and interiority. Both choices are correlationist. That is, both theories of the sublime have to do with human subjective access to objects.

In this regard, Morton speaks to Scot's uneasiness with the idea of the sublime. Morton continues:

Both sublimes [the Burkean and Kantian] assume that: (1) the world is specially or uniquely accessible to humans; (2) the sublime uniquely correlates the world to humans; and (3) what’s important about the sublime is a reaction in the subject. (217)

This is a sublime that is all about what objects mean for us and not what they might be in and of themselves (or for other objects). The sublime as it works here is uniquely human and it's reactionary. What OOO requires of the sublime is a little less of both. A little later, Morton writes

What we require is an aesthetic experience of coexisting with 1+n other entities, living or nonliving. What speculative realism needs would be a sublime that grants a kind of intimacy with real entities. (219)

Google Earth Building Maker for Saint Louis Arch.
Morton argues that Google Earth counts as Longinian sublime:
"it transports us to real places" (227).
The building maker function within Google Earth is perhaps carpentry of the sublime.

What OOO needs and what carpentry needs to make are intimate relations with other, real entities: more than human reactions and more relations rather than just reactions (in brief, I'm using reaction here to indicate a lack of intimacy). This is the sublime carpentry of Harman with his stress upon allure and vicarious causation. It is not, Morton argues, the Kantian sublime where the "aesthetic dimension is an experiential condom that shrink wraps objects in a protective film" (220). The sublime we (can) get from Longinus, Morton argues, is just the opposite. In the intimacy generated by this sublime we engage with an object's "withdrawnnes" (226). What is in interesting here is that in risking intimacy the weirdness or strangeness of the object shows up. Morton essentially argues that by bringing the object closer we see how really far-out it is.

But all of this isn't exactly an answer to all of Scot's question, which was also concerned with Morton's reading of Longinus. The timing of Scot's question is actually quite nice. Jim Brown will shortly be presenting at The Nonhuman Turn Conference, which looks amazing. The subject of his talk is rhetorical carpentry, and it begins with an explicit misreading of Thomas Farrell's definition of rhetoric in his essay "Sizing Things Up: Colloquial Rhetoric as Practical Wisdom": "Rhetoric is the art, the fine and useful art, of making things matter." We can easily imagine what Jim, and by extension object-oriented rhetoric, could do with this definition, which is not at all what Farrell does or would even want to do with this definition. As I was reading Jim's paper, I immediately thought of what Harman does with Heidegger: he deliberate mis-reads him, or at least reads Heidegger against Heidegger's own grain. I am wondering if we could grant much the same to Morton (I must admit I am not familiar enough with Longinus to assess Morton's reading of him): that is, could we see Morton's reading of Longinus as a productive mis-read?

And from there, we could go on to argue that mis-reading may very well be a key component of OOO, OOR, and carpentry. Farrell's definition of rhetoric, Heidegger's analysis of tool-being, and Longinus's sublime are all objects that most assuredly withdrawal from their authors as well as their readers. We are only ever working with their exhaust. Getting intimate with these definitions as objects that withdraw from us as objects might teach us valuable lessons about the withdrawnness of objects generally. For example, this kind of mis-reading might very well sync with Bennett's recommendation in "The Force of Things: Steps toward an Ecology of Matter": "I have also suggested that a playful, naive stance toward nonhuman things is a way for us to render more manifest a fugitive dimension of experience" (366). OOO's methods must bear some resemblance to it's lessons.

Rhetorical Carpentry: An Experiment

Having recently finished Ian Bogost's Alien Phenomenology, or What It's Like to Be a Thing , and having recently been asked to give a workshop on new media production for a poetry course taught by a colleague, I have produced my first attempt at what Bogost calls carpentry. Jim Brown, adding in an explicitly rhetorical dimension (which the title of this post nods appreciatively toward), best describes the goals of this production when he writes

"Rhetorical carpentry would construct objects (and conversations among objects) in order to demonstrate approximations of the strange, alien conversations happening around us" ("The Decorum of Objects").

This attempt at rhetorical carpentry also works out of the methods I am currently developing for my Fall 2012 Problems in Rhetoric: Animal, Vegetable, Mineral course, which will explore nonhuman and nonsymbolic rhetorics. As I write on the course site, "we are not simply interested in what objects mean or represent; to this end, we must have ways of 'writing' objects that likewise resist this tendency. Such is the hope of this collection of methods."

The main goal of this experiment is to reveal nonhuman/nonhuman relationships as they take place alongside human/human and human/nonhuman relationships. Furthermore, I want to reveal that all such relations are always with aliens, so to speak. Each thing (what Bogost calls a unit and what others call an object) is more than the sum total of its relations. Objects remain withdrawn from all relations.

Here is my thinking behind the elements of this production (feel free to come back to this discussion after you have watched the video):

• Each image "captures" nonhuman relationships (there is more than just the vent in each picture)
• The Instagram filter (I took the pictures on my iPhone) blurs the edges allowing for focus on the vent and its relations
• Sound is of vents but it is disconnected/foregrounded as a sound effect separate from its normal status as background noise (think of Brown's "alien conversations")
• The text, one line from Devin Johnston's Creaturely and Other Essays is about a relationship with a house. Additionally, the relationship described is about more than control (i.e., reducing the house to its inhabitants) but is instead something reciprocal or on the same ontological level.
• Timing of the slides:
• compels viewer to attend to the whole scene.
• focuses on the words themselves, which certainly exist in relationship with other words but also remain disconnected and alienated from the sentence of which they are apart (this separation is made manifest, I hope, by the time delay between each word).
• allows for otherwise connected or related objects to become disconnected and thus become independent and alien objects

So, here you have it. Be gentle. I have spent my adult life being analytical, but I have recently discovered that this mode alone will not do. As Tim Morton argues in "Here Comes Everything: The Promise of Object-Oriented Ontology":

Longinian ekphrasis is not about the reaction of the (human) subject, but about rhetorical modes as affective-contemplative techniques for summoning the alien. (171)

"Alien Relationship" combines text from Devin Johnston's Creaturely and Other Essays, images taken using the Instagram App on my iPhone, and a sound effect ("white noise in the house" from klankbeeld at freesound.org).

Object-Oriented Agonism

Is agonism, defined as productive strife, a way to think about object-oriented ontology in terms of rhetoric (to operationalize it for rhetoric)? There is much to be gained from OOO, but how do we make it speak to rhetoric while keeping it intact so that it might impact the field. That is, my goal is not to make OOO safe for rhetoric but rather to let OOO infect and affect rhetoric. This situation is rather like OOO itself as Graham Harman describes it: how do we activate allure so that we might get some vicarious causation, some relation between OOO and rhetoric? So, obviously, metaphor (or analogy): vicarious causation is agonism understood as productive strife.

Harman speaks of the "tension between an object and its multiple parts" (GM 222). (This relates to the fourfold or the quadruple object: the axes of object and relations and the object (at all) and its specific parts.) Importantly, causation for Harman is attributable to the fact that while the fullness of the object withdraws, (sometimes) some of its "multiple notes do not recede" (222). This exhaust (the notes that do not recede), as I understand it, is the point of articulation for causation itself. If there where not notes that failed to recede, then each object would forever remained sealed off from all other objects and nothing would ever happen. Causation (and relation) is possible, in part, because of an object's own internal tension or strife, which in these cases is a productive strife that enables the formation of new objects and relations. And we can always move up or down levels (and maybe even side to side), as Harman argues that relations only ever occur inside another object: agonism is what allows for agonism, which tautology as it is, speaks to agonism's productive and vital role in relations (human and nonhuman alike--Burke's barnyard as a flat ontology).

"Emoji Tumbler 1." My early attempt at what
Ian Bogost has called ontography

In addition to the value of this connection between vicarious causation in Harman and agonism in rhetoric in terms of an effort to partially and provisional translate OOO/OOP for rhetoric (given that full translation between objects is never possible), it also informs rhetoric and potentially renews its emphasis on agonism. I sometimes feel that while agonism does get attention as a research topic (see the work of Hawhee in particular and an article I co-wrote with Jeremy Tirrell on agonism and cognitive science), it is not always celebrated enough as a value in and of itself. In an admittedly straw-man move, I see the field as over-invested in things like stasis, consensus and deliberative rhetoric. (This investment is also a big part of the reason that an object-oriented rhetoric will have a hard time getting traction in the field.) What we might get from the vicarious causation between OOO and rhetoric I just described is a renewed commitment to agonism, to strife, and to the epideictic (in contrast to deliberation). The praising and blaming of things puts Harman's allure front and center, and allure is what allows objects to relate at all. Without allure to activate vicarious causation, as Harman writes, "we would be stranded in a world of mutually isolated monads" (222). And this possible world is surely the downside of stasis.

Kenneth Burke and Object-Oriented Rhetoric

Continuing to chew on an object-oriented rhetoric, I had this lovely run-in with Kenneth Burke this morning (from A Rhetoric of Motives):

Here are ambiguities of substance. In being identified with B, A is "substantially one" with a person other than himself. Yet at the same time he remains unique, an individual locus of motives. Thus he is both joined and separate, at once a distinct substance and consubstantial with another.

As we think of the place in rhetoric in object-oriented ontology, speculative realism, and new materialism (Barnett's discussion of metaphor, Brown's use of decorum, Bogost's procedural rhetoric, Reid's force and relation), I'd like to also ponder identification/consubstantiality as useful terms here. Particularly, they are potentially helpful in negotiating the relation/withdrawal tension (or, as I feel it, the Latour/Harman tension). UPDATE #1: In the comments to the post linked here Reid's force and relation, the connection to Burke gets made as well. "Read the comments," I remind myself. UPDATE #2: This connection I made this morning was also made by Nathan Gale (about a year ago).

Reading the above passage, I immediately thought of Harman's Guerrilla Metaphysics and that book's chief task of describing how objects relate.

Object-oriented philosophy has a single basic tenet: the withdrawal of objects from all perceptual and causal relations. This immediately implies a single basic problem: how do relations occur?

This is rather ambiguous, and Harman's task in the book is account for relations.

It needs to be shown how relations and events are possible despite the existence of vacuum-sealed objects or tool-beings.

Burke is at work with the same ambiguity.

The thing's identity would here be its uniqueness as an entity in itself and by itself, a demarcated unit having its own particular structure.

And here:

A is not identical with his colleague, B. But insofar as their interests are joined, A is identified with B. Or he may identify himself with B even when their interests are not joined, if he assumes that they are, or is persuaded to believe so.

For Burke, identification has a pragmatic value: rhetoric is the use of language (Burke isn't not wholesale amenable to an object-oriented rhetoric) to induce cooperation. Identification, as rhetoric, is necessary and made possible by division. We are only ever able to do anything together (produce effects) by virtue of those moments we identify or become consubstantial with one another, remaining, as we are, "demarcated units." What's useful here is how, I think or hope, such a connection between Burke and Harman is mutually beneficial. Identification describes (accounts for) the activity of bringing into relation discrete, demarcated, vacuum-sealed things. The need to cooperatively produce effects or to be affected compels us toward relations. Harman's object-oriented philosophy calls our attention to identification as fundamental to all relations and not just human relations.

I am obviously in the early going here, but I thought it worth noting. What's to gained, the question we are fruitfully asked in many places on digital digs, by describing nonhuman as well as human relations in terms of identification and consubstantiality? Is rhetoric a way to think about how objects relate or could rhetoric also be the plasma in which relations are possible? As objects divide (Burke) and withdrawal (Harman) from one another do they create the possibility and the need for rhetoric?

Identification is affirmed with earnestness precisely because there is division. Identification: is compensatory to division. If men were not apart from one another, there would be no need for the rhetorician to proclaim their unity.

Mini Podcast: Object-Oriented Environmental Rhetoric

Here is a short, two-and-a-half minute podcast about my current research project, about which I have previously blogged. Here is a link to the discussion of William Cronon I mention in the podcast. I used Audioboo, a free application for the iPhone. Enjoy!

listen to ‘Object-Oriented Environmental Rhetoric’ on Audioboo

2012 CCCC Paper (Working Draft)

I am just about set for CCCC here in St. Louis (home field advantage is big at academic conferences). Here is my working draft, which connects (in under 15 minutes) the work of Walter Ong, S.J., and Andy Clark in order to construct a more interdisciplinary cognitive science.
2012 CCCC Paper (Working Draft)

Bruno Latour and Leslie Knope

Juxtapositions are frequently fruitful. I am not sure where this one is going, but it's pretty sweet.

I've been re-reading Bruno Latour's Aramis and re-watching Parks and Recreation. Shot in the documentary style of The Office, the show increasingly strikes me as a performance of what Latour describes in Aramis as a "relativist sociology": "It does not know that society is composed of, and that is why it goes off to learn from others, from those who are constructing society" (200). Parks and Recreation is a portrait of government in action. Leslie Knope, of the Love of Local Government.

The show, at its finest, performs the work of negotiation and compromise that, in part, shapes civic life. In re-watching these moments with Aramis by my side, I can't help but see Leslie through Latour's eyes:

Bureaucrats are the Einsteins of society. They make incommensurable frames of reference once again commensurable and translatable. The protocol of agreement, red-penciled and ratified, starts moving again, going from one reference body to another, tracing a path along the way, a succession of fragile catwalks that make the agreement harder to break each time, because it is now weighed down with the word of the State.

Final shot of "Harvest Festival"

Part of the reason I love the show is its tempered faith in bureaucrats. Leslie Knope, the deputy director of the Pawnee, IN, Parks Department and star of the show, is an earnest, hardworking civil servant. She does her job amidst the incommensurability of democracy, balancing the angry feedback she receives at public forums, this disinterest and/or lack of faith in government, the libertarianism of her boss, budget constraints, etc. (The episode in Season Three when Leslie and the Parks Department pull-off the Harvest Fest may provide one of the most satisfying endings of a sitcom episode ever.)

I'll grant anyone, for the moment, any joke or insult about civil servants and bureaucrats. Yes, yes. But I ask, in light of the kind of sociology that Latour proposes, what does such a view, nearly ubiquitous outside of Parks and Recreation, get us? How do we benefit from demeaning such work (other than getting exactly what we deserve)? How do we learn to do it better by dismissing it out of hand? In rushing to judgement, we glass over the decided-ness of what we hold near and dear. We short-circuit democracy.

I'd argue that lurking beneath such a short-circuiting contempt is what Latour calls "classical sociology":

There are norms, and thus there are deviations with respect to the norm; there are reasons, and thus there is irrationality; there is logic, thus there is illogicality; there is common sense, and thus perverted senses; there are norms, and thus there are abnormality and anomie. (199)

When I watch Parks and Recreation I am not watching a documentary where "the actors are informants," telling what they did so that we can pass judgement (although certainly this happens: I can easily imagine a classical sociological viewing of the show). For me, I am watching government in action. Parks and Recreation is not a show where common sense, and logic, and reason are outside measures applied to political behavior; it is, at its best, a show where common sense, logic, and reason are all the end results--the effect--of political behavior. For instance, the reasonableness of the park Leslie wants to put in the vacant lot (this is the primary arc of season one) cannot be known ahead time: its reasonable-ness, its sensical-ness, its feasible and, finally, its reality are precisely what is being worked on. To borrow from Latour, things like logic and common sense "follow; they do not lead. They are decided; they are not what makes it possible to decide" (184).

As Leslie says of her first public forum (which goes terrible and to great humorous effect): "God I loved it. I loved every minute of it!"

Introducing the "Sphere"

As I frequently read outside of rhetoric in my research, I am always interested in and often frustrated by treatments of "rhetoric" in those works, which is generally some version of Richard Lanham's Weak Defense: rhetoric is a specific kind of speech used to dress-up or dress-down content (I read discussions of "political rhetoric," "rhetorical devices," "rhetorical ploys," etc,). Generally, my response is "Hey chief, walk across the f-ing hall and talk to the person (or, if you're lucky, people) in your department or in your division who does this!" This is my disciplinary response, which is both reactionary and, I hope, well-earned. When I talk of philosophy, for instance, I can name people who are both currently publishing in it and who are also alive. I'm no expert; I don't know the intricacies of their discipline; but I am aware of and feel obliged to admit, acknowledge, and address it. So the reason for my frustration here what I take to be a general lack of interest in, engagement with, and respect for the current field of rhetorical theory or rhetorical studies. There are many explanations for this (and some are, admittedly, "our" fault), but I'm not after that today.

"Inventing The First Wheel: A Stone Age Rock Wheel."
John Lund. http://www.johnlund.com.

There is also, and this might even be worse, another reason for these kinds of oversights. I suspect that some of the authors I am talking about here are not as ignorant, uninterested, and disrespectful as they seem. (I know, I am being exceptionally nasty here. Just go with it.) Let me put it this way: one of the reasons I am drawn to much of this work (in philosophy, anthropology, cognitive science, literary criticism) is that it speaks so much to rhetoric as I (and others) know it. All of these disciplines and fields have so much to say about the contingency, the relationality, and the generally suasory operation of things: anthropology mustn't draw sharp lines between nature and culture; cognitive science needs to examine the roll of conventional practices in the development of cognitive capacity, philosophy needs to acknowledge the place of affect in treatments of reason. All these are arguments one can find within each of these disciplines. Thus, my admittedly less-than-generous reading of an absent, generous engagement with rhetoric is a recognition that since the Sophists, we have been over "this" again and again. Critical Affect Studies? Read Gorgias' Encomium of Helen! Such scholars as I have been reading want to make wheels in a market always already full of them. 

So what remains to be done:  

1. Rhetoric must then be a specific kind of discourse. If it's more than that, then I've got a lot of reading to do.

2. Behold, I have invented the sphere! Pay no attention to Sophist selling wheels down the hall.

Again, I embrace, read, and utilize such areas of research. And I would never argue that they are re-inventing the wheel. But a trip to patent office wouldn't kill them, would it? And I don't think there is much value in claiming, as I appear to be doing, that "we were here first!" It is about both giving credit where credit is due and, more importantly, about the value in learning from one another. Some sort of intellectual exchange is in order. For Plato, Gorgias. For Descarte, Giovanni Battista Vico. For Kant, Johann Georg Hamann.