Thursday, November 21, 2013

Problematic, or Problematized?

How to sum up an entire semester’s worth of reading in a single schema, followed by a single blog post? Going into the schema project, Jennifer, Ashley, and myself were well aware of the fact that any attempt to graft our readings onto a single visual theme would fall short in any number of ways, but inevitably decided to take the obviously problematic approach of using the body. In many ways, this problematizing was in intentional, as we wanted to represent the move towards the modern and digital in our readings through the cyborg, as Haraway’s piece represented a clear turning point for our readings and a push towards a cyborged rhetorical theory course. It was by working through these obvious problems in mapping some of the major questions we’ve tackled in rhetorical theory onto a human body that I was more clearly able to understand the theorists and texts we’ve read.

The first, most obvious issues came in the actual biology of the Vitruvian Man we selected to build our theory on, and the obvious complication of idealized bodies and gender that come from this representation. Convenient as it is to place the foundations of rhetoric at the feet for the sake of visual and thematic simplicity, this also provides a clear challenge to the disabled communities and privileges the “ideal” body by default. Similarly, one noteworthy change from even the “real” Vitruvian Man is the minor censorship you’ll notice in the, shall we say, “private” area. Thus, mapping our theory readings onto this body inherently privileges masculinity and presents an (unintentional) absence of female representation (not for lack of trying, I’ll add). Then, of course, there’s the obvious contention with this being a model by DaVinci for the proportions and architecture of the human body, privileging the strong, sculpted body, leaving folks like myself out out in the process, and anyone without the ideal size and proportions to their arms, legs, muscles, and build. Some obvious cases of resonance emerge in spite of the dissonance, however, such as the actual cyborging of the body, showing a human body using technology without it necessarily being attached to their body. Similarly, building on Haraway’s metaphor of perspective and sight, the question of “What is the Relationship Between Rhetoric and Feminism?” finds  suitable resting place on the eyes of the Vitruvian Man.

Bringing things to the “modern day” of our course, however, I see some unintentional parallels to Susan Miller’s work coming out in our schema that bear exploration. My reading of Miller’s work strongly suggested that our trust in the rhetorical canon is built up culturally, and as a result of being the looming culmination of centuries of writing on rhetoric, argument, and philosophy, we take it at face value as valid and more-or-less complete. Like our cyborg, however, we see how quickly these connections can break apart. The shortcomings of our cyborg, in fact, provide helpful commentary on our Millerian trust in the rhetorical canon. First and foremost, more representation here as male as opposed to female references a very real deficiency in the rhetorical canon, one represented almost exclusively as male. Our earlier readings of Asphasia make clear that women held, or could have held, crucial roles in the development of rhetorical theory and argument, yet receive almost no attention at large. Similarly, the othering of Olbrechts-Tytecha is obvious in every time the work is attributed to Perelman alone in casual discussion of the piece… maybe because of that long, tricky-to-say name being the second, or perhaps more accurately because her role in the development of The New Rhetoric was never given its proper due. This extends further into readings like Trihn and Anzaldua, both showing the power and pain of being “othered,” and yet, the rhetorical tradition as represented in our cyborg does precisely that.

Thus, I would like to submit that our problematically designed cyborg actually provides a meaningful reflection on a larger view of the rhetorical canon; a body of texts that historically privileges based on gender, ethnicity, location, social strata, and much more. While we have developed a trust in the canon over time, our recent readings served (for me at least) as a reminder not to inherently trust the content and structure of the canons of rhetoric. Our panhistoric vision of the course has allowed for breaks from the “tradition” of rhetoric in many ways and allowed for deviations from the canon with texts like Asphasia’s and earlier attempts to cyborg the course and content found in our third exploratory. Nonetheless, the canon of rhetoric as a biased, detached, problematic, and reclusive entity is well-expressed through our visual theme. This was not intentional, to be certain, as it was designed as an easy way to see and understand the concepts of our course by mapping them onto parts of the body that allow for the audience to quickly and easily disseminate the ideas and content. However, the entire process of assembling and mapping our questions made clear to us that there are some very real problems with mapping the content of our course onto the human body, perhaps the largest of which is how to represent rhetoric in human form, especially as a series of texts produced by human hands.

In short, our mapping and development of rhetorical theory in our schema is at once problematic, and meant to problematize. There are clear shortcomings in the mapping, however, these shortcomings even serve as commitment to the theme and illustrative, as the idealized white male representation we inevitably used represents the very flaws of the rhetorical canon itself. Our course has allowed for problematizing the canon through its approach, but as seen in Miller’s work, the canon itself is clearly still holding strong as a relatively static body of texts, almost begrudgingly including the “other,” but never fully incorporating them as a body that remains largely idealized and male. As an embodiment of these shortcomings, our schema could be seen simply as problematic or in tacit endorsement of these elements of the rhetorical tradition, however, its continued design was made with these problems in mind and inevitably embraced in the design itself to reflect the problems in the rhetorical canon at large. In this way, the schema helped us not only to situate the readings based on core questions/concepts, but also to provide some larger meta-commentary on the rhetorical canon at large and illustrate some of the ways our course way able to deviate from this and problematize it,

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