The Schema, The Cyborg, and The Logic of the Reach

Jason, Ashley, and I constructed our schema with an eye to merging our early readings, later readings, and class discussion.  A few weeks ago in class – perhaps at the beginning of our finals strand – Dr. Graban made the comment that it was almost like she had grafted the final strand’s readings on to the course.  That phrase – grafted on – stuck with me, so when Ashley suggested that we use the human body as a visual metaphor for our schema, the concept of the cyborg just made sense.  One of the most engaging things about the cyborg is the idea of the organic and inorganic hybrid, that both elements are essential to the cyborg body but do not seem to be entirely synthesized.  If I understand the concept of the cyborg correctly, neither the organic nor the inorganic elements can be removed from the hybrid body, but both remain at least partially distinct from the other.  It seemed that our readings had a similar relationship.

From the beginning, then, the schema was designed to emphasize the relationship between later groups of readings (those in the final strand) and the earlier ones.  We were, in a sense, grafting the later readings on to the earlier and drawing attention to them.  The significant difficulty with this grafting process was not necessarily choosing the visual metaphor, creating the overarching questions, or categorizing the readings (although those things were by no means easy), but putting each element together in order to emphasize the hybrid nature of the course.  In particular, mapping the questions on to the parts of the body presented a challenge because we were concerned about what those placements might imply.  Some of them, for example the placement of feminism in the eyes because of the texts’ emphasis on perspective, made sense, but others were less obvious. In aligning a question with a specific body part, what might we be saying about that question’s relationship to the body?  What, based on the body’s symbolism for other theories, might we be inadvertently implying?  In the end, we used the hands to represent questions about the functions of rhetoric – “What are the roles of rhetor and audience?” and “What is the province of rhetoric?” – because the hands seemed best fitted to denote action or invention and because the two questions seemed to complement each other.  Or, at least, the texts within those two categories seemed to cover similar, though not identical, ground.    The legs came to represent questions of language and the relationship between style and content for much the same reason.  The two questions seemed related both the each other and to what we came to view as the foundational question:  “How do we define rhetoric?” 

The image of the digitized Vitruvian man - as much as the placement of the questions – allowed us to make the claim that the final strand, along with our class discussions, allowed the class to cyborg the rhetorical tradition.  Because the image of the Vitruvian mans is so well known, the alterations to it were obvious.  Thus, the altered portions of the image could represent and call attention to the questions addressed in our final strand.  The fact that the Vitruvian man is meant to represent the ideal human proportions further allowed us – as many of the authors in the final strand, particularly Vasaly, Miller, Stroud, and Haraway, tried to do – to problematize the rhetorical tradition and to call attention to the more diverse perspectives added in the final strand.  I do not want to imply here that the rhetorical tradition presented in the first two strands is in some way negative, just that it has an uneasy and in some ways problematic relationship with the texts in the final strand.

In terms of specifically schematizing Baudrillard, Vasaly, and Miller, it is interesting that they are categorized in various places throughout the schema.  Vasaly and Miller were placed with the earlier texts because, although they were concerned with other issues, they questions at the core of their texts were concerned with foundational issues about rhetoric. Baudrillard, because of his focus on the ecstasy of communication and the way that the individual becomes almost hypermediated, was categorized as a text dealing with the digital.  This is not, of course, a perfect fit, but the placement does fit in terms of the metaphor of the cyborg.  In describing the way that the individual comes to be hypermediated and informed by the screen, the image, and the hyper-real, Baudrillard identifies something similar to the inorganic becoming mixed up with the more organic self.  Baudrillard may, in a sense, be discussing how the self becomes a kind of hybrid or cyborg. 

That claim is, of course, still a reach but, as I have some to see over the course of a semester that included multiple schemas (in this class and in others), schemas sometimes operate on “the logic of the reach,” as no metaphor is going to perfectly encapsulate everything.  I do not make that statement as a cop-out, but as a way of saying that, in creating a schema, we are forced to make decisions about the document’s logic.  Some things get left out or deemphasized when that logic is imposed.  For example, when we created the six questions/categories that were mapped on to the cyborg body, we chose ideas that stood out to us as being particularly important to the course or that we had returned  to multiple times in our discussions.  As such, there are ideas that we discussed that did not make it on to the schema itself.  For example, one of our questions deals with the relationship between rhetoric and feminism.  We might have been better off to articulate that question as the relationship between rhetoric and the other.  Abe and Erin used this verbiage in their schema, and I wish we had thought of it for ours, as “the other” could potentially allow us to schematize for both gender and culture.  Even still, this impulse to revise once again illustrates just how much the schema focused on the readings from the latter half of the semester.  Compared to the whole, we had very few readings that focused on feminism or the digital, and yet, on the schema, these categories hold equal weight with categories we discussed across longer periods of time and in more texts.