Rhetoric, through everyday things

Rhetoric, through everyday things

1. INTRODUCTION

   • thing -> generates invention (ontology) -> enables practice
     • we do not simply point at things but act alongside and with them
       • the thing names less an object than a particular subject-object relation
         • things provoke thought, incite feeling, circulate affects and arouse in us a sense of wonder (hey! The Romantics)
           • things are vibrant actors- enacting dffects that exceed human agency and intention
             • Non-human turn: Grusin: things are rhetorical
               • thingness of things: the way things are and the rhetorical force they wield in relation to us and other things (2)
                 • There are power=relationships: page 7 some actors are stronger than others
               • active agents
                 • When we assume that words matter more than matter, we assume that things matter only in the metaphoric or symbolic sense (4)
               • object v thing Object is symbol thing is thingy (5) Thing is a gathering around matters of public concern...
                 • thing as a verb: rhetoric also factilitates the gathering of people and things around matters of concern and matters of interest (5)
               • every object is a private reality (7)
                 • Latour says objects things are what they are because of their relations and alliances with other things (7)
       • co-constitutive relations between humans and things -> but don't forget thing on thing relationships! (6)
         • things have a depth to their being that is never fully revealed or exhausted in their dealings withother things or human beings (7)
   • Artistic proofs v nonartistic: Aristotle and Quintilian: material matters
   • actor network theory
     • follow the actors themselves
       • allows us to trace the suasive nature of things as they materialize relationally within larger networks and systems of meaning
   • INTRA-activity: things are defined by their relationships with other things rather than language and signification alone (8)

2. rhetoric: the study of human symbol use (outdated now!!)

   • so now what? how do we begin our inquiries from differnt places (Faucault and Philips) with different attunements and different assumptions about what it means to be rhetorically in the world
     • BETTER def: the art of being between: of being between things and yet also being their means of connection (5)
     • rhetoric lacks its own vocabulary for understanding ontological encounters (10)

3. rhetorical ontology: the study of being or what is ..... rhetorical onology highlights how various material elements- human and non interact suasively and agentially in rhetorical situations and ecologies

   • WHAT new questions are these authors asking about the history and practice of rhetoric?
     • how to do things with things (11)
     • how do we listen to and be persuaded by encounter with others? What changes in our understanding of persuasion does listening to strange strangers entail? Chapter 1: Listening
     • what different understanding of rhetoric would we have with a different history? Chapter 2 Implicit Paradigms
     • How are facts about brain sex science are rendered and reified by and through partnerships between human and nonhuman agents? HOW does bad science stay that way? Chapter 3: Brain Sex Science
     • Cooking = rhetoric? Flat Ontography: everyone/thing is rhetorically equal Chapter four
     • Chapter 5: What does it mean to build, maintain, and live with nonhuman writers in our human world? (69)

4. rhetoric is a discursive mode for constructing and evaluating knowledge and truth claims: epistemic practice (3)

   • problem: human-centered
     • words have mattered more than matter (4)

5. epistemology emphasize knowledge about things and thus about their meaning and cultural significance for us ONTOLOGY stresses relational BEING

   • ontology is an ongoing negotiation of being through relations
     • the means by which things come into relation and have effects on other things in ways that resonate strongly with existing and emerging understandings of rhetoric (9)
       • The need to share, to expose, and to spread ontologies harkens to a need to participate in and be persuaded by other modes of being (10)
     • paying due attention to strangers whose opinions can infect us with new propositions- this is the new ontology of persuasion
       • Everyday persuasion as paradigm (36) Every THING in our culture is rhetorical (38) EVERY THING is rhetorical (39) everything is necessarily immersed in (and constituted by) multiple persuasive (turning) forces in these different settings. things are immersed in and constituted by differential forces of turning
         • publication = E courts and they only want to publish differences so even if the similarities are dominate in findings, the divergences will be dominate in discimination (53)
           • i propose reimagining cookery as flat ontography as a strategy for revitalizing inquirey into the ontology of all rhetorical elements and the material realm in particular . I contend that a revitalized inqury of this manner helps us reconsider rhetoric as deeply material and principally concerned with the complicated material relations circulating among the humans and nonhumans that assemble our worlds.

6. thing theory

   • new materialism
     • object-oriented ontology
       • actor network theory
       • OOO

7. Chapter One: Listening to Strange Strangers, Modifying Dreams

   • Marilyn M. Cooper
     • ecological thought: thinking of interconnectedness (17)
       • persuasion happens when we pay attention (17)
         • to every THING
           • our whole experience is composed out of our relationships to the rest of things and of the formation of new relationships constitutive of things to come (25)
       • What habits of listening....
         • divergence: more productive focus for thinking about encounters with others (18)
         • Speculative thought is a polite form of persuasion (18)
           • assemblage seeks to turn what seem to be contradictions among propositions into productive adventures (18)
           • Strangers: divergent interests and abilities (20)
           • transforms our habits in ways that enable us to entertain new propositions (20)
       • habits of experience: wagers concerning the world (Faucault- no guarantees)
         • guarantee the legitimacy or endurance of certain positions
           • persuasion succeeds not through mastery but through polite modification of dreams and the acquisition of new habits (19)
             • respect for others beliefs allows listeners to consider different positions
               • ONTOLOGY: the polite introduction of a new possibility invokes particular and personal forms of knowledge and juxtaposed with the structures of a listener beliefs, the new proposition can lead to a transformation of habits (20)
       • listen to things
         • let things be
           • find new ways to listen (Philips_
             • allow the stranger to become interesting
               • insisting on conscious intention in the communications of nonhumans is just another way of refusing to listen (22)
                 • find connections; respect them (24)
                   • respect and regard open up possibilities through paying attention to the specific other emotionally and physically as well as cognitively (25)
               • allow time; assume intelligence (22)
             • be open to the world: rather than listening from one's own space of meaning
               • attunement: being open (24)
           • attend to the stranger in that time and place
           • let our attention be captures, not willed
         • believe you can listen to a stranger and stranger communicates (20) -> Faucault How do we live differently?
         • listening is equal with speaking in promoting thought (20)
       • change of attitude towards things
     • theoretical and methodological questions that emerge when we adopt an ontological approach to rhetoric (11)
       • Rendering and Reifying Brain Sex Science: Chapter Three (42)
         • exploring the rhetorical ontologies from which claims about brains can be made
           • explore one way in which facts about brain sex science are rendered and reified by and through partnerships between human and nonhuman agents (42)
             • scientists are often unreflective about ideologies that inform their scientific inquiries (43)
               • bad science is that which produces results that are far less rich than they should be given the available scientific tools and linguistic structure as well as the reasonable possibility that human biological sex features diversity!!!! (43-4)
                 • the selection of hypotheses and research tools both major loci where biases can be introduced into science (44)
                   • Bad science stays that way because of language's epistemological limitations (44) (When it enters public domain)
                 • bad science is not just a problem of ideologies, but also a problem of rhetorical ontologies. (46)
                   • publications thrive on differences so THAT is what is published- even if the minority conclusion
                 • whatever effect we are measuring, the best supported hypothesis is always that the unknown true effect is equal to the observed effect (51)
           • Null Hypothesis Significance Testing (NHST) is a statistical method for testing whether the factor we are talking about has the effect on our observation. (hcistats def)
             • inference is both rhetorical and ontological (HOW?) 43
             • NHST is a rhetorical ontology that disciplines scientists to see difference and significance in particular ways (43)
               • methods such as neuroimaging and statistical analysis, do in part to their disciplining materiality, exert suasive force (43)
           • rhetoricians of science and medicine understand that these details are important because t hey are not neutral tools that humans use to construct knowledge about other objects (46)
             • material objects exert suasive influence, and that rhetorical agency comes from a "material-semiotic network" (47)
               • LANGUAGE
                 • the tendency to approach meaning as a function of either objects or language use leads to an inablity to account for the simultaneous capacity of language to be constrained by and shape objects (48)

8. Implicit Paradigms of Rhetoric John Muckelbauer (30) Chapter 2

   • Aristoelian paradigm: Speaker and Audience
     • deliberative: decision (future)
       • forensic: past
         • epideictic: pressent
           • rise and fall of study of rhetoric occur with rise and fall of democratic forms of government in the West
     • Formal
       • if we look at rehtoric differently- rhetoric becomes a pratcie in which eveyrone is engaged all the time (36)
         • everyday persuasion becomes our paradigm
           • things are now rhetorical!
             • sounds, images, physical structures etc
               • nature, animals, rocks, everything is rhetorical (39)
                 • heliotropism: the movement of plants towards the sun (39)
                   • perhaps figures of speech are simply very determined, linguistic instances of a arger rhetrical tropology of persuasive turning (like the plants) (40)
     • writing is less perfect rhetoric than speaking (34)
       • privileging of intentionaly and consciousness over unconscious
         • even some speeches do not have calls to action per sae

9. Alinea Phenomenology: Cookery as Flat Ontography: Chapter 4 (55)

   • food is fun!
     • no label on ingredents- eater guesses and experiements
       • ontograph: a record of things juxtaposed to demonstrate their overlap and imply interaction through collocation
         • thinking rhetorical ontologically evades and counters a correlationist priveleging of human perception as the condition for nonhuman existence by attending more to a nonhierarchiacal understanding of existence (56)
           • FLAT ontography: everyone/thing is equal
             • all the parts are important
               • OOO: objects are complicated aliens without probing
                 • its about relationships
                   • it is upon this axis of affecting and being affected that we see how objects can equally exist without always exisint equally..... ontography in rhetoic workds to account for its own reple
           • ontography: a sort of list or litany that maintains its compoents' distinctness by way of an organizational grid yet hints at their interobjectivity by placing them side by side, readied for combination
             • Lamb 86 arrives at the table without an imposed narrative (64)
               • full knowledge of complex systems always evades our grasp
                 • flat ontography guides our treatment of all individual units as the rhetorically efficcious materials they are even long before we decide tounderstandthem as such (66)

10. PART II: Writing Things: explores the thingness of writing as both an artifact of study and a mode of rhetorical invention

    • Writing Devices: Chapter 5
      • ontology: writing devices lie at the "center" as integral components of haw and when infrastructures assemble(69)
        • nonhuman actors assume lives of their own
          • trace and analyze; creating and maintaining: methodology?
            • collecif: - a means of rethinking agency: emphasis on relations and actor's heterogeneity- which make up a network and create positions from which an actor or many actors can perform (70)
              • agency is an emergent property of relationships rather than one contained within humans (70)
                • actor's identity is always unstable
                  • multiplicity
                    • While an actor might retain the same form or shape to to the naked eye, as space shifts from one region to another the actor becomes something else! (70)
                      • what matters is not the technology itself- but the social or economic systems in which it is embedded (70)
                        • space...... where does writing come into play?
                          • central to our work is the tracing and analyze of existing systems.... focus on how we can build and introduce better writing devices to work within human systems
                            • Deleuze:network is all boundary (70)
                          • if writing performs reality, then it also can adjust the relations that produce reality!! (71)
                            • Big Head Carp: many written tools: regulations, letters, new relases- etc (72)
                          • the chief rhetorical constraints in assembling and maintaining spaces of dependence (locations that actors depend upon to preserve their essential self interests) are rhetorical constructs of a public that the service is answerable to. (73)
                          • Lacy Act: Legislation with a life of its own that certainly affects the space and actors (73)