Bringing down the Lego House and Building It back Up

This week, I’ve decided to go a little bit off track. Instead of a reading response, I am writing about a matter that’s been in the back of my mind for a while now. This may come off more as a rambling than an actual coherent reflection, since I am going off on a particular issue that came up as I went deeper and deeper into the Rhet/Comp field. Earlier this week, while I was reviewing some class readings, I was brought back to a question I have continuously asked to both myself and the texts we’ve been reading: must all questions have answers, and must we have a solution for every problem? Regarding Rhet/Comp in particular, must we necessarily find a way to integrate all discursive practices into one harmonious package?

I would like to argue that we don’t. Rhet/Comp is a complicated and diverse place. It is made up of cultural, discursive, pedagogical, methodological tensions that give for the most interesting and complex of discussions, out of which numerous questions, debates and ideas arise. Our class is the living proof of this. But Rhet/Comp is also a field where problems sometimes seem to take center stage and coming up with a neat solution that caters to the needs and opinions of everyone often seems like a priority. One of those problems, which we’ve discussed amply in the World Rhetorics course, is how to understand, acknowledge and integrate different rhetorical practices into the teaching of writing. But do we really have to answer the “how to” question? Can’t we just question? We strive so hard to come up with answers and solutions for problems that it feels that we sometimes stifle the discussion by reducing it to a puzzle we have to complete by the end of the course.

Problems do not have to have neat, harmonious solutions. Questions don’t always need to have complete, all-encompassing answers. Sometimes, it is alright to say “I don’t know,” because it keeps the discussion alive, it allows new voices to join in, new ideas and knowledge to accumulate, intertwine or even challenge other ideas and previously established forms of knowledge. It’s good not to know whether the cat is really alive or dead, because then there is space for unconventional possibilities, multiple states of being, more than one way of looking at a particular subject.

By saying that we don’t need to have an answer for everything, I’m not letting people off the hook to not discuss the subject. On the contrary, I am saying that teachers, students, scholars, everyone, should actively pursue dialogue, one where the goal is not to say who’s right or wrong, or come up with a framework where everybody’s opinions and theories can somehow be integrated into one artfully constructed Lego house. Instead, we should pursue a type of dialogue where the goal is to share different ideas and perspectives, to learn about all the different ways of looking at that blackbird – or at different rhetorics in this case – and acknowledging that they are all valid. Of course, this won’t work if the person is actually looking at a parrot and thinking it’s a blackbird.

This is, I believe, a perspective that could successfully be implemented in the classroom. Instead of simply discussing different rhetorical practices in class, the teacher should promote a discussion where these tensions are acknowledged and actively debated by students themselves. Many of them may not even be aware that such tensions exist. So, teachers should lay the problem out in front of the students and see what type of Lego house they will build with it. In the end, the teacher should openly acknowledge that there is no one solution to this issue. Both teachers and students should be encouraged to say “I don’t know” more often and continue from there.

Updating the Oldsmobile in the Digital Landscape

Porter’s article seems to matter now more than ever, as communication is heavily mediated by digital codes and the technological conventions of social networks. In “Recovering Delivery for Digital Rhetoric,” he argues that delivery, one of the five canons of Greek rhetoric that pertains to the way that we convey our discourse, in speech or in writing, is increasingly becoming the most important element of the rhetorical act. Throughout the article, Porter attempts to revive the concept of delivery within the current digital landscape as techne, a form of knowledge, and develops a theoretical framework that covers five main topics: body/identity, distribution/circulation, access/accessibility, interaction and economics.

Porter starts out with an overview of delivery as a rhetorical component from the classical period to its disappearance with the advent of the printing press. He compares Aristotle’s notion of delivery as a public speech that did not require “artistic labors,” such as, for instance, invention and style, to Cicero’s valorization as an important emotional and persuasive tool (3). He mentions the effect that the printing press had on the concept of knowledge itself, but also on how delivery came to be perceived as a result of mass written production of texts (4-5), as the emphasis on writing made delivery a secondary, or even useless, technique. Porter then goes on to explore the role of delivery in technologically mediated communication.

I found the body/identity relationship particularly interesting (my MA thesis will actually focus on this subject), as Porter emphasizes the importance of both physical and virtual representation, defining the body as a sort of “performance” or “text” through which we communicate and persuade (8). In this context, a change in the bodily representation means a change in the way the message is conveyed. Better yet, the body becomes, in a sense, the message, the information. Discourse becomes, then, it seems, deeply ingrained in bodily identity. Even in the virtual spaces – cyberspaces, as scholars used to call them in the 80s – one is never completely free from some sort of bodily identity, or from issues of gender, race, sexual preference and age (8-9). Although digital spaces have opened up a set of possibilities for identity formation and representation, users are still limited by real, physical issues that influence the way they choose to present themselves.

Porter also brings up the issue of audience and how to tailor delivery to achieve the strongest impact. This will depend on a negotiation between the writer and audience of the four other elements that compose the act of delivery: distribution – how you choose to “package” the message, – access and accessibility – who you make it available to by the media you choose, – interaction and interactivity – how you engage with others and the technology you use, – and economics – the value we/others attribute to the rhetorical product.

Porter raises very interesting issues about delivery. The most important one has to do, I think, with the level of accessibility and availability of the technology and of digital spaces of communication. He points out that, despite common belief, digital media/rhetorics are still very much limited to what can be considered a “privileged minority” that has access, the physical ability or even the skills to use them. This leaves a vast majority of people out of what are now becoming the prevalent modes of communication. This leads me to ask, then: can this shift in the way we produce and deliver discourse (from the physical act of writing to the codes and multimodality of the digital environments) actually make rhetorical composition more of an exclusionary activity? Or is there a way to gradually increase access/accessibility to integrate and reach those who are outside the digital landscape?