xii: “We cannot attend to what is salient concerning materiality without necessarily also extending our sweep to the ambient environms and the numerous objects therein, all fo which help scaffold our ability to generate what is salient. In other words, ambience takes on the order of a medium (not mediator), as Jen-Paul Thibaud argues, being a necessary constintuent of percpetion, thought, and action [AND THE SIGN] and therefore influencing the shape , direction, or ‘style’ in which they issue forth (10).” ***This is Berthoff & Montessori (less so Freire?) Is “attending to ambiance” = to crafting an environment? I think I can argue that it is TO SOME EXTENT, but an important one. The one we can control (a bit).
“Indeed we can more narrowly specify what attending to ambience might entail. The project suggests we take as provisional starting points the dissolution of the subject-object relation, the abandonment of representationalist theories of language, an appreciation of nonlinear dynamics and the process of emergence, and the incorporation of the material world as integral to human action and interaction [AND LEARNING], including the rhetorical arts [and the pedagogical ones]” (xii).
OMG… this is Berthoff + Montessori to a “T”: “…I hope to show at least some of the limitations of basing rhetorical theory and practice on a mundane view of materiality and various dualities, such as subject/object, mind/body, and nature/culture (physis/nomos). the perspective I offer as an alternative has multiple names and sources, but I gather them together as ‘ambient.’ Thus, terroir figures and materializes an ambient perspective to the extent that it brings together nature and culture, earth and body, the materiality of the produced, fermented grape and the sensibility of the wine culture, discourse, and gathering” (xii.)”*** Nexus
“I am claiming that rhetoricity is the always ongoing disclosure of the world shifting our manner of being in that world so as to call for some response or action.” *** Our conscious and subconscious being in the world, then, is just one aspect of ambience (one moment in one place in time). “‘World’ as thought through Heidegger’s work would be the mutually achieved composite of meaning and matter; what is disclosed—that is, what presents itself to us through our doing, saying, and making—is disclosed as already fitted into material environments and holistic forms of significance.” ***So there is a measure of subjectivity here? Berthoff would say that what we end up writing was there from the beginning; we are always starting in a middle. “(And as I will discuss, we cannot relegate discosure solely to human beings; all engagement, by and through all things, brings some amount of disclosure, albeit as conditioned by what and where something is.)” **Okay, “disclosure” is a key term here. It is wonderfully resonant with Berthovian/Montessorian/Freirean praxis; environments (or ‘lessons’) arranged so that certain “saliencies” emerge or “disclose” to students as they interact with them (in a “prepared environment” ala Montessori). “World in this sense is not just the material environs, that is, the ‘mundane’ bedrock of reality, but also the involvements and cares that emerge within and alongside the material environment and that in turn work to bring to presence the environs in the mode that they currently take. World, then is simultaneously immanent and transcendent to each agent—and that includes nonhuman elements.” ***ALLATONCENESS!!! This is triadicity with a “material” twist? “But world also includes its own withdrawal from involvements, relations and meaning, though without thereby becoming any less ‘real.'” ***Latour’s “plasma”? Field of potentialities? “In a world of infinite possibilities…” (Dennett)? “Disclosures are always partial, enmeshed in what presents itself but also buoyed up by what withdraws.” ***TRIADIC… Chaos is the language we bring to ambiance, Chaos is METHOD, language generating from the field of potentiality present in the World at any given moment to each agent. ”
Rickert’s focus is on rhetoric as a form of communication and persuasion, not as a form of meaning making. On one level it’s important to understand these as not-separate; but thinking with the notion of meaning-making as distinct from communication & persuasion results in interesting potential for pedagogy, a way of operationalizing much of what Rickert identifies in his important term, “ambiance.” I will argue that this has already been done, to some extent, in the work of Ann Berthoff and Maria Montessori, and that understanding a Berthovian methodology as tapping into “ambiance,” and Berthoff’s appreciation of Montessori as acknowledging a pedagogy already operationalizing “ambiance” via materials, begs for a reconsideration of Berthoff’s praxis and its potential for teaching in digital spaces. For as often as we have recently acknowledged that “we have always been multimodal,” and warned against conflating “multimodal” with “digital,” we must also acknowledge the digital as material, affecting environs more now than ever, and contributing to modes and moods of all of our teaching spaces, whether we like it or not, whether we’re aware of it or not, or whether we teach to, with, or in spite of it, therein lies much pedagogical potential. Oh… And Freire, too: (see below)…
xiii: “The transformations [not in subject but in ‘World’?] that are accomplished through rhetoric can and often do lead to actions, however one understands rhetoric to proceed. That is, performing rhetorical acts does not require completely grasping all that is entailed in the performance. Getting a better grasp, however, offers insight, opportunity, and other advances—about rhetoric, about human being, about the world.” ***Is this COGNITION? “So it is important to point out that all rhetorical work stems from our being together in the world, including how we see ourselves going forward in that world….Rhetoric does not just change subjective states of mind; it transforms our fundamental disposition concerning how we are in the world, how we dwell.” *** ISN’T THIS FREIREAN? “I use the term dwelling here to mean how people come together to flourish (or try to flourish) in a place, or better, how they come together in the continual making of a place; at the same time, that place is interwoven into the way they have come to be as they are—and as further disclosed through their dwelling practices.” ***How we form (meanings)… Forms finding forms…. “From this perspective, issues pertaining to the affects (the pathes) and the role of material environment are elevated in priority; they are no longer simply complementary to rhetorical theory but rather absolutely integral to it.” **And A PEDAGOGICAL NECESSITY.
xiv: “An ambient rhetoric is inseparable from considerations of emergence.”
“I am thus arguing that rhetoric is less a symbolic practice or an extraction exercise than an art buoyed up by and delivered over to ambiance.”
“Transformations go hand in hand with difference in habitation, and how we dwell. I wonder why such a sweeping transformation in our conversations has not yet grabbed hold of us as profoundly as it could have. Where is the deeper sense that such world change does in that change human being and hence also our sense of world and how we are to dwell in it, a sensibility that comes forth not as a discursive leitmotif dotting our scholarly and pedagogical activities but is an ongoing event calling us to question, to think, and to practice differently then heretofor?” ***I do wonder what is Rickert’s theory of language.
xv: “I argue for a richer, more dynamic, and materialist understanding of rhetoric that declines to zone rhetoric within symbolicity (and I am congruent with Diane Davis, who also sees rehtoric as prior to symbolicity).” **What does this posit about the definition of “rhetoric” then? On the level of meaning-making? Not communication? I think so!
“Rhetoric is not, finally, a shift in the mental states of subjects but something world-transforming for individuals and groups immersed in vibrant, ecologically tuned environments.” ***What AEB does is offer an understanding of language that operationalizes this notion of ambient rhetoricicity and molds it into pedagogical employment. Montessori does this, too, via materials and “environments”, and FREIRE, of course!
xv: MONTESSORI
“In terms of materiality, ambience grants not just a greater but an interactive role to what we typically see as setting or context, foregrounding what is customarily background to rhetorical work and thereby making it material, complex, vital, and, in its own way, active.” ***Turning a teachers’ awareness to the DYNAMIC nature of things and environments AND THE ROLE OF THE ENVIRONMENT IN TEACHING/LEARNING leads me to several thoughts: 1) There is so much that a teacher cannot control within an environment, this is always the case. But there is also much a teacher can control in an environment. This includes materials and design. “I explore this ambient dispersion and entanglement of agency, considering how it transforms important concepts in rhetorical theory and suggesting ways it can benefit thinking about invention, persuasion, agency, technology, and social action. I am, to put this reductive late, arguing that we must come to see that “the human” or human arts cannot exist in a manner ontologically distinct from material and informational spaces, including technology…Doing so necessitates an ecological shift in what it means for rhetorical agents to inhabit and interact in an environment. This theoretical move from rhetorical subjects to ambient environments connects to scholarly studies in computing, music, cultural and media studies, philosophy, artificial intelligence, and information science…” AND PEDAGOGY!!!
“This [typical] paradigm [recognized by the field] acknowledges context primarily as a discursive, social, and cultural formation within which a rhetorical agent works to achieve the effects she or he intends, but as I stated earlier, in an important sense the agent precedes that context; the context is simply the situation within which rhetorical activity occurs, a backdrop for rhetorical work and not a robust participant in itself” (xvii). ***To what extent does traidicity account for what Rickert identifies as unaccounted for and essential in this “typical” “mis” understanding of rhetoric?
“Materiality is appearance as shaped in advance by culture, and only in this guise, where valence is established with ’emotion, conviction, and judgment,’ is it rhetorical” (xvii).
“Thus the world also takes part in attunement. It is not a subjective or individualist pursuit. Attunement reflects ambience in that both terms bring the world into rhetorical performance. For an ambient rhetoric, rhetoric cannot be considered solely human doing; we’re only participants, albeit particularly important ones” (xviii).***AEB operates from this set-up; focus on the human subject as animal symbolicum within the world that is constantly being named and renamed.
“As Diane Davis has intimated, moving rhetoric out of an exclusively human domain forces us to understand persuasiveness as prior to symbolicity.” ***Okay, but if the purpose is to consider learning, human learning and teaching, then meaning-making as opposed to persuading is key? We do not need to go “prior” to animal symbolicum?
“Attunement further includes the material environments we inhabit and thus describes a fundamental rhetoricity invoked by our originary weddedness to the world, as well as the ongoing pursuits that transpire with in it. Attunement is not an I fitting into the world in order to do, say, and make, but an I-world hybrid already replete with an a priori affectiveness. Rhetoric emerges in being there in the world, ambiently” (xviii). ***THIS IS Montessori & AEB
“The networking, digitizing, and externalizing of information does not challenge us to develop a new battery of practices but has already transformed rhetoric in ways we should strive to understand, theorize, and advance” (xviii).
“Postmodern theory, media studies, and deep ecology, of course, have already done much to galvanize new conversations and introduce new theories and concepts” (xviii).***New? Growing from the “novomania” of the 90s? A legacy of postmodernism…
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