Who's to Blame?

This week's tasks were two-fold: a straddling last and this week's texts with the resource exploratory and reading additional materials. I'd like to discuss first--before I engage with the resources or texts--about how my patterns of learning and understanding were disrupted by the resource assignment this week. I realize that this exercise was supposed to either better my understanding of the texts involved in ways I couldn't have achieved before or simply expose me to various methods of reading and types of interpretation. However, this focus on Wollstonecraft and Bacon led to my mental distance from Vico, Campbell, Grassi, and Kant, and I don't feel as if I could engage with these texts as I have done with others in the past. I fear this has caused what could potentially be a continuous need to play "catch up" or to revisit "old" texts without paying the proper attention to the current ones. Our work in class together helps me to unpack these texts, and while our discussions confuse me greatly, I also (generally) develop a better sense of what I've read and what I think about what I've read.

Confessions aside, this experiment, as Sarah and I called it, was somewhat helpful in providing me with another way of reading a text, one that I'm not sure works for me but nevertheless. I didn't, however, have the urge to count the "hits" of a term like most of the other groups did. I wonder why that is--possibly because I don't necessarily attribute value to quantity (kind of an oxymoron-esque term). This sort of follows with various author's assertions about quality over quantity--using one word instead of several implies intellect and the understanding of the true essence of words (Erasmus [I believe] and Locke, among others). What matters to me is the definition of that term and the context in which it was used. Perhaps then what I'm more concerned with is the author's argument and not how they use(d) the words. That was the point of this assignment, however, so I gave it my best.

During the production of our exploratory 3, I focused mainly on the Alex Catalog and Google Ngram Viewer, and I found it difficult to discern an argument, obviously in Google Ngram Viewer (because it only shows frequency and not context or the authors), but also in the Alex Catalog. The visual map showed only the words (not even terms which would be more useful) that were used in conjunction with the original term (science, reason, passion, sensation, and education). These connections can show implicit relationships between terms, but I think that using the visual mapping alone asks that you assume too much of the text. If I were to actually use (and by this I mean use it without being prompted to do so--using it of my own accord to help me) this resource with a reading, I would want to read the concordance results first, make some connections and find the argument using that, and then use the visual map to reinforce or support my own understandings of the text. But to remind us, our methods in the exploratory were merely for experimentation and to highlight a different element of our available resources.

The use (and therefore development) of the term audience is slightly shifting from Perelman and O-T's "The New Rhetoric" to Campbell's "The Philosophy of Rhetoric" or vice-versa depending on if you're looking at this issue chronologically in terms of publication date or the order in which we read these texts. All three authors also emphasize the importance of a good speaker, but also argue that there must be a good audience as well. By good, I mean that they are able to participate and understand the matter being given to them. The speaker must also keep in mind the particulars of each audience and speak to their knowledge level and their interests. P&O-T talk about the universal and particular audience as does Campbell. Campbell attributes qualities to audiences as a whole (men in general) and men in particular. Campbell brings in an element of empathy that is to be expected in the speaker, while P&O-T doesn't touch on this (in my memory).

At the risk of jumping ahead, John Locke, I would argue, lessens the responsibility on the audience and their understanding. He realizes that words are imperfect because they have multiple significations for multiple people, even at various times or days and the orator needs to find common strands of understanding and meaning in his words with his audience, as in the example of the liquor conversation. This complicates the role of the orator and puts pressure on them to choose words carefully if it is within a philosophical discourse. The responsibility of the orator is to speak to the level of the audience to make them understand, similarly to Quintilian who said that he would speak to the level of each rhetoric student instead of assuming they could handle more.

This blog was sort of split into two parts. Similarly, I see the opinions and arguments of audience, participation, and meaning splitting. Who do we blame miscommunication, lack of action or understanding on? The orator, the audience, or even the language itself?