Palmeri & Rutherford’s “‘The Things They Left Behind”
“Recently, composition and rhetoric scholars have argued for an ontological turn in the field…” (96). OMFG… Seriously? another “turn”? Let’s see… We have a “genre turn” (Barwashi & Reiff 2010), an “affective turn” (Nelson 2016), “the digital turn” (Dyehouse, Shamoon, Pennell 2009), “the multimodal turn”… of course… (Palmeri, etc. 2012), the famous “social turn” of Faigley’s 80s, the “archival turn” (Hayden 2017)… It’s difficult at this point to take any talk of “turns” seriously for me. Our “turns” are not helpful, I’d argue (with Yancey), particularly in forming a disciplinary identity. Ah, yes, of course, there’s “The Posthuman Turn in Composition” (Lucia 2018). Actually, I could take just about any term, plug it into Google scholar with a “Rhetoric and Composition” “…. turn” and “voila!” This on-the-brink ness is akin to Booth’s charge of “novomania”… We still got it.
Late State Notes
For Chapter 5: “Learning seen as disposition to form structures and an understanding of limits as enabling: why aren’t these ideas guiding our practice” (TLS 75).
(TLS 63) “… dialectic ad dialogue are consonant ad cognate simultaneous and correlative.”
“Peirce and the Third” Berthoff (TMB)
“Peirce characteristically begins not with the classification of signs as promised—Icon, Index, and Symbol—but with his cenopythagorean categories which, in Quaker style, he had named Firstness, Secondness, Thirdness. They were the modes of being [Latour], ways that both ideas and things exist in the world, and though the analysis of just how they are related involves Peirce in noting degrees and reciprocities which must be named and adjusted, he manages to proclaim more than once that for his ideoscopy, it is Thirdness which is all-important, chiefly because it allows him to define a sign: ‘A Third is something which brings a First into relation to a second…A sign is a sort of Third…A sign is something by knowing which, we know something more (S. and S., p. 31)'” (59). **The third is the mediator/mediation/relationality. It is relationality emerging/formationing into being.
