Chapter Three
43-44: “…although most would argue that this shift [from Fordist to post-Fordist modes of production] represents an extension of the forces of modernism—an inevitable development of the trajectory of twentieth-century capitalism rather than a new stage of it—its disruptions nonetheless call for radically new responses at every level of our experience.”
Mass consumption, mass production, standardization (products, assemblage, management)
45: “In this scheme, very few managers were required to display creativity or imagination in the implementation of their areas of expertise.”
46: “regime of flexible accumulation” (post-Fordism) = movement, international, technology, dispersion, travel, need for clear communication skills
47: Berlin describes the ‘gig economy’: “…even less secure part timers, casuals, temporaries, and public trainees. These jobs are the most unstable and offer the least compensation. While obviously some employees might enjoy the flexibility they provide, the effect for most workers is discouraging in terms of wages, insurance coverage, pension benefits, and job security.” **”isolation”
50: a degree is “no more than a certificate qualifying a graduate to compete”
54: “We must…measure our efforts against a larger institutional objective.” ***What does this look like today?
54: ***THis passage seems key to me. What does Berlin say we “need”? “Students need a conception of the abstract organizational patterns that affect their work lives—indeed, comprehensive conceptions of the patterns that influence all of their experiences.”
“Students deserve an education that prepares them to be critical citizens of the nation that now stands as one of the oldest democracies in history…The insistence that students also be prepared to become active and critical agents in shaping the economic, social, political, and cultural conditions of their historical moment has been a valuable commonplace in the nation’s educational discussions.”
55: “….eloquently proclaimed in the American pragmatist John Dewey. Here the interests of the larger community and the integrity of the individual must be paramount [to the end goal of money making/profit]. This is true whether we are discussing the activities of government or of large corporations. THis educational scheme is designed to make human beings and their experience in a community the measure of all things—in this, as Susan Jarratt (1991) indicates, echoing the sophist Protagoras. In short, education exists to provide intelligent, articulate and responsible citizens who understand their obligation and their right to insist that economic, social, and political power be exerted in the best interests of the community. If pursuing this objective somehow renders our students less acceptable to employers, then the flaw can hardly be located in the students or their schools. To use the term proffered by Henry Giroux (1998), the work of education in a democratic society is to provide ‘critical literacy.'”
56: “While there is no denying that many of our young people arrive at sophisticated strategies for negotiation the messages of the media on their own…negotiating these messages is too important a part of daily life to be left to chance. In this age of spectacle, democracy will rise or fall in our ability to offer a critical response to these daily experiences.” ***Multimodal turn (NLG also 1996)
57: “A key argument this is book is that English studies as a special role in the democratic educational mission.”
“The mediator between the realm of what we know to be true and the realm of what we know to be virtuous was historically found in the liberation of public discourse–As an Aristotle, for example.”
58: “Kant’s Insertion of the aesthetic in place of the rhetorical was quite self-conscious on his part, since can’t, never guilty of democratic sympathy’s, was extremely distrustful of public discourse as a means for resolving political questions. This Kantian wariness of rhetoric has been a permanent fixture of the English department, which has historically forwarded the aesthetic text, the rhetorical characterized as merely scientific and so lacking in human dimension or as failed art and so inherently suspect.” **killer dichotomy here really makes no room for Berthovian triadicity.
59: “Thus, in choosing the texts we are to read, and in providing the interpretive strategies we are to use in responding to them, English studies plays an immensely important role in consciousness formation.” *** What narratives (new) can the English department provide students to help them respond to the complexities of their quotidian experiences?
So triadic hermeneutics, AB might argue, is an interpretive strategy appropriate for the teaching of all aspects of literacy (reading/writing as aspects of composing). Aligned with Berlin, AB recognizes the “immensely important role in consciousness formation.” ***But she (along with Freire/Montessori) recognize the power of inherent consciousness. We do not provide consciousness. We cannot teach it. We can only shape the conditions that might evoke it. The pedagogical imperative informed by this condition differs greatly from one dedicated to “choosing texts the texts” and “choosing the interpretive strategies.”
Chapter Four
Berlin’s focus is on “social conditions,” the ways they inform everyday literacy experiences, and how English departments prepare, perpetuate, shape, respond to, etc. the relationships between student, his material conditions, and text.
61: “Postmodern theoretical discussions radically alter our conception of the nature and function of signifying practices, of language in its broadest designation. Language is no longer a set of transparent signifiers that records an externally present thing in itself, a simple signaling device that stands for and corresponds to separate realities that lend it meaning. Language is instead a pluralistic and complex system of signification that constructs realities rather than simply presenting or reflecting them. Our conceptions of material and social phenomena, then, are fabrications of signification, the producers of culturally coded signs.” ***This seems very important to me. Clearly, Peircean triadic hermeneutics reflects this “post-modern” (not post modern, apparently) conception of signification. It does so by structuring “probability” into the process of signification. I guess Berlin rejects triadic hermeneutics as able to…or a useful means of understanding a “pluralistic and complex” signification system?
I can kind of hear Foucault in this. I mean… if “material and social phenomena” (including systems of oppression, rejection, imprisonment, etc.) are “fabrications,” then they can be re-fabricated or de-fabricated, theoretically; opportunities for liberation.
61: Saussure (1966): “The prime influence of structuralist formulations in Europe, first demonstrated the way language functions as a set of differences…This sound contrasts necessary for meaning in a given language are thus arbitrary selections from the entire repertoire of sounds available to the human vocal system and constitute only a fraction of the possibilities. This principle of structural significance– that is, meaning as a function of the relation of contrasting elements in a larger structure– is also found in the vocabulary and grammar of the language. Thus, a term has meaning because it stands in oppositional relation to other terms of its class– for example, other nouns. A term’s meaning is also significant by virtue of its contrast in relation to other structures within a sentence. For example, in English a noun appears in distinct position and form in relation to the position and form of a verb in making a meaningful sentence.”
“The revolutionary conclusion of Saussure’s work was that signifiers have meaning as a result of the relation to other signifiers in a structured system of signs, not by virtue of the relation to external signifieds.” *** Of course this is a killer dichotomy. I can see why AB appreciates the triad.
“Languages stuff organize and communicate experience in different, arbitrary, and unpredictable ways.” ***It’s the “arbitrary” that gets me. Why necessarily so? This is the quicksand patch of deconstructionism. Not useful.
62: “Levi-Strauss (1963) demonstrated that, just as a sound or term or grammatical marker has meaning by virtue of its contrastive relation to other elements in its category, so do the key signifiers of a culture fall into binary relations with each other in formation of cultural grammars or codes of behavior. For example, the term man in a particular society derives its meaning from its binary relation to some other terms or terms in the society’s language, not the biological characteristics of a person. Thus, terms are socially indicated not produced by simple material determinants…His work finally demonstrated the ways these important terms form narratives– what he called myths – the govern the behavior of a culture in its everyday operations. These narratives indicate what is important to the life of the culture and instruct its members in behavior appropriate to their place in the social hierarchy.” ***I wonder how Freire’s approach to language differs from this.
62: Then Barthes (1970s) puts Levi-Strauss to test in Mythologies. “He demonstrated ways that signed form semiotic systems that extend beyond natural language to all realms of the culture – film, television, photography, food, fashion, automobiles, even professional wrestling…Writing as a Marxist, Barthes was especially interested in displaying the dominance of bourgeois ideological categories of thought and action.”
63: Critical challenge: Derrida
“For Derrida (1976), differance describes the relations of terms in binary opposition to each other…For Derrida, the term is detached from it signified, indeed, so much so that it is always and evermore different from what it represents. This detachment means that signifiers are never in contact with things–in–themselves, but are constructions totally formed of their own operations. In other words, a term has significance only in relation to the term with which it is contrasted and is not in any way related to the signified it claims to represent.” **It is the absolutism here that seems like such an indulgence.Impractical.Theory
“This principle leads to Derrida’s critique of ‘logocentrism,’ the insistence that the spoken word is in direct contact with reality, establishing the presence of a genuine signified, while the written word offers only a distant shadow of the real. Derrida denounces this founding principle of structuralist linguistics. [That there the spoken word is closer to “reality”?]…This makes writing the primary form of language, because writing demonstrates the system of differences on which meaning is based. In other words, in examining the larger system of language necessary to write and read, we come into contact with the principal of difference that underlies all language. Writing becomes a metaphor for differance, displaying the systemic nature of language and its total reliance on other elements within its confines and its total difference from that which it is supposed to represent. Writing comes to stand for the very act of making meaning in language.” ***Isn’t this a feature of triadic hermeneutics? Is the “stand for” important here? I do not understand why the distinction between the spoken word and the written word becomes so important here. Seems to me ABs work (ala Richards, Peirce, etc.) would rather echo in this notion of writing as making meaning, not get relegated to charges of being “retrograde”… confirmation rather.
64: Derrida’s second & third use of the term “differance”: “..to scatter or disperse, is meant to demonstrate that significance is never in a term itself but in its relation to another term. Thus, meaning is never found in the presence of a single term but in its relation to a term not present, an absent term… Signs, therefore, are always traces of other signs, never offering the presence of the signified.” ***This seems the departure from triadic hermeneutics. The interpretant is a person, complex and full (an ‘actor’ comprised of a multitude of ‘actants’ comprised of multitudes of ‘actants,’ etc…). Derrida and the postructuralists dehumanize meaning-making; Richards’ triadic hermeneutics centralizes it. Whether or not the post-structuralists are right doesn’t matter.What does matter is how useful their understanding. Of course they are not merely describing a system, or nature; the work of this theorizing is creative and affecting. Might as well value pragmaticism 🙂
64: “A signifier’s difference from it signified and from itself, its gathering and dispersal of signification, and its deferral of meaning make up the inevitable operation of all language acts. This process is aleatory and thus unpredictable, beyond the control of any person or group. Just as a speaker never has the entire significance of a term available to consciousness even as he or she uses it, a speaker can likewise never predict the significance the term will have for an audience, since listeners will receive it differently. We are thus all spoken by language as much as language is spoken by us. In short, language has an uncontrollable life of its own.” ***But so much is shared. Perhaps control isn’t what is valued. I don’t understand the ‘thus’ here…. I do appreciate the idea that language speaks me and has a life of its own. But this isn’t a conclusion exclusively drawn from this deconstructionist’s view of language. Derrida’s thinking is an utter unraveling that celebrates a sense of inevitability over practicality. (and… f your binaries…)
64-65: “He also argues against the notion of a unitary concept, seeing in all concepts that free play of linguistic difference. A concept signifies by virtue of what it does not signify,which is not present and, indeed, can never be totally brought to presence. Derrida also faults this privileging of orality over literacy because it fails to realize that all signification is based on the operation of the system as a whole , a system best discovered in the scheme of writing.” *** “Discovering ‘the system of meaning/signification’ via writing; not meaning itself? We aren’t ‘making meaning’? or is this just both/and?
65: “This in turn points to his [Levi-Strauss’] continual preference for nature over culture, locating in ‘primitive’ societies the relation of natural truths corrupted by civilization. For Derrida, the nature-culture binary is still another attempt to locate presence, the foundation for some essential truths that are the same everywhere and always. It is finally simply another device to locate some external origin for humanly constructed knowledge.” *** Knowledge? What is ‘knowing’ for Freire?
65: “The structuralist and poststructuralist conceptions of signification have dramatic consequences for our understanding of the self and its formation. The unified, coherent, autonomous, self–present subject of the Enlightenment has been the centerpiece of liberal humanism. From this perspective, the subject is a transcendent consciousness that functions unencumbered by the social the material conditions of experience, acting as a free and rational agent that educates competing claims for action. In other words, the individual is the author of all his or her behavior, moving in complete freedom in deciding the conditions of his or her experience.”
Poststructuralism: “The speaking, acting subject is no longer considered unified, rational, autonomous, or self–present. Instead, each person is regarded as the construction of the various signifying practices, the uses of language and cultural codes, of a given historical moment. In other words, the subject is not the source and origin of these practices, but is finally their product.This means that each of us is formed by the various discourses and sign systems that surround us.” ***And that is all. (Dumb. If there is NO coherence, there is nothing to recognize … re-cognize.)
***Aside.To what extent is Derrida’s “breaking down the artificially imposed boundaries of nature – culture” etc… related to Latour’s ANT?
67: And now… Foucault
“Foucault depicts individuals as the instruments of impersonal institutions, structures designed to serve their own interests, not the interests of those who pass through them. Human subjects are thus products of power–knowledge formations. In other words, discursive and non-discursive structures are organized to create conditions of knowing that produce regimes of power. Reason and truth are shibboleths that conceal the irrational forces of domination and discipline that rule human institutions.” ***Okay, I buy that. How does this square with Freire’s theory of language? Does it matter?
and Lyotard…
**Does triadic hermeneutics square with Enlightenment epistemology? Where does it fit in?
67: “Lyotard proposes that these be replaced by the ‘petit recit,’ a limited and localized account that attempts to come to terms with features of experience that grand narratives exclude.”
68: conservatives, “leftists”/Marxists reject postmodernism. “Such dismissive reactions, however, cannot be given too much credibility, since I am convinced they will eventually fall by the side as workers in English studies begin to see the important consequences of postmodern theory for their discipline.”**Wow. That’s a pretty myopic statement. Or filled with conviction (adj for “conviction” needed). Leaves no room for AB, for sure.
68-69. The Harvey quotation reminds me of S.L. Starr’s multiplicity/monster/ hybridity/impurity
69: “postmodern anti-epistemology” (goodness I loathe postmodernism)… And yet money feels terrifically postmodern. Held together epistemologically by a system, however unlikely and precarious, by socially ascribed (inscribed in us) inherited “knowledge”…
69: “Thus, the value of money, like the meaning of a signifier, is never totally determinate in flexible accumulation, instead always residing in a relation that can never achieve full presence.”*** It’s this idea of “full presence” that’s b.s. essentialism. Each moment is the “full presence”; it’s just not a single, external, concrete thing. It’s hybrid, monster, impure. Time matters. Time is interesting here. Not mentioned. Not important. This is definitely an important difference b/w Berlin and AB. Berlin speaks of it in terms of “space-time compression” leading to new living and working conditions (outward relationships).
70: “Self-identity is established through the visual symbols associated with the commodities of the image. Images of commodities thus become the free-floating signifiers of subject formation that advertisers convince us lead to the fulfillment of ‘basic’ needs and desires, both of which are themselves often concoctions of media advertising.”
71: Berlin is interesting. His career, it seems, is made by creating categories so that he can dismiss some and identify with others. He doesn’t simply take an idea and go with it; he creates ideas and distinguishes himself. He never names what he’s doing; his creations are iterated as descriptions of reality. ABs work is quite different in this way? The way she iterates triadic hermeneutics—the triadic paradigm—is in terms of practicality, not “reality.” ABs concern is with usefulness: How does X change the way we teach? Affect the way we teach? It’s so much simply than the business I’m reading now… What can explain people’s explanation to me that her work is too difficult? (JH!) Or too theoretical? Maybe it’s because people don’t read enough of her work? They just read little bits? One book? (And not Sense, which I think is the clearest, most comprehensive explanation.)
Berlin describes three reactions to the postmodern: 1) “ludic postmodernism” which is free of the burden of dealing with the consequences of instability (voyeuristic); 2) Strait up rejection; “those who deplore the postmodern inducements of the city”… “Faced with the fragmentation and indeterminacy of daily experience, many turn to a reactionary politics that calls for a return to a time of secure and stable values—whether the values of a small town or of ‘the real America’ or of an earlier economic era.”
“A third response to the postmodern is more promising, calling on postmodern difference to forward ‘a fragmented politics of divergent special and regional interest groups’ (Harvey 1989, 302).”
“…an effective democratic politics must somehow call on the very abstract and systemic thinking that the economic and cultural conditions of postmodernism call in to question. The same must be said of the kind of reading and writing practices taught for these conditions. A literacy limited to the mastery of atomistic skills renders students incapable of responding to the complex conditions that go into influencing them and the ‘global village,’ to use the current designation, in which they live.” **Berlin does not recognize AB’s theory of language (Freire’s) as addressing or suiting a postmodern condition. WHY NOT????
“My position is that postmodern theory contains within it important challenges to our traditional notions of reading and writing that we ignore at our own peril. At the same time, even as we answer these challenges we must not suspend our counter-critique of its consequences, particularly for school and for society.”
72: ” If the perceiving subject, the object perceived, and the community of fellow investigators are all in large part the effects of linguistic practices, then every discipline must begin with a consideration of the shaping force of discourse in its activities.”
73: “Even the physical sciences are coming to understand the rhetoricity of their own activities..” (Kuhn, Feyerbend, Haraway….)
**How does AB’s work and the work of triadic hermeneutics “provide space for the indeterminacy…[that] must now be taken into account in all our speculations and actions”?
73-74: Berlin’s summation of Smith’s Discerning the Subject (1988) reminds me of SLStar: …Smith argues for the organization of the subject as a contradictory complex of subject formations that makes for a negotiation among different positions. It is neither possible to remove all conflicts among these formations nor freely choose among competing alternatives Instead, a dialectic among them is created…”
“Since each agent enjoys a unique set of interacting formations, each of us has a “specific history” (58). In other words, we are indeed different from each other, although never completely unique.” *** ‘Common stuff” = humanity?
74: “This concept of the subject as a dialectical process of subject positions within a specific social history as well as within a broader shared social history accounts for the possibilities of agents actively changing the conditions of historical experience (and in a way which recalls, or at least resonates with, Burke’s conception of rhetoric as the achievement of persuasion through identification).” ***So AB’s ‘dialectical process’ squares with this, seems to me, only “acts of mind” inform each other to create “meaning”… Is this the same thing as “to create a subject”? I don’t see why not. What is the relationship between “the subject” as understood here and “meaning making”? Both AB and Berlin are concerned with politics (see: Freire). So how does the work of each of these scholars get moved into such different and seemingly competing arenas? Is it the “lure” of postmodernism? And now that we’re post-postmodernism…?
74: Jarratt’s “Rhetorical Feminism” (1991): ***Oh good! Scholarship that addresses the definition of “gender”!!” This summary of Jarratt’s appreciation for feminist response to deconstruction includes “the subject” as “position”; a s/he declaring a ‘rhetorical stance’—making choices, consciously, understanding choices not made when choice is made. *** This seems utterly aligned with Freire/AB, only their focus is on philosophy of language.
Then this: “While the subject is constructed of ‘a complex of concrete habits, practices, and discourses,’ she will select ‘gender as a position from which to act politically, while at the same time rejecting a universal, ahistorical definition of gender’ (70).” **Gender as a position. “Alcoff argus for the position of woman as a resistant site from which she can act against her oppression, an agency possible because historical discourses seek to control the category of the feminine without allowing it to utter its own discourse. It thus arrives at an awareness of its own denial as subject, and from this stance outside official discourse resistance becomes possible.” *** This is on the level of “discourse” not “language.” Also notice the extent to which the goal is metacognition; awareness. Common ground with AB.
75: “A postmodern conception of the subject requires that the dialectic of subject formation and the strategic selection of standpoints be the result of encounters with a diverse set of subject positions, cutting across the entire range of the social and intellectual spectrum.”
“The comprehensive role of signifying practices in constructing the relations of subjects to the material and social conditions of experience can also be construed in a manner that need not induce despair. From the position of rhetoric, the notion that material conditions are constructed through signifying practices is not surprising. Kenneth Burke (1966) some time ago argued for the difference between the sheer physical motion of the material, and the symbolic action of the human.”
76: “…experiences of the material are always mediated by signifying practices. Only through language do we know and act upon the conditions of our experience—conditions that are socially constructed, again through the agency of discourse.” ***What does ‘through the agency of discourse’ mean? means that the symbol, the word, the construction of the sign (sign system) acts upon the construction of social conditions.
77: “The meaning of the messages of those in power can be understood only by examining what gets left out of their discourse, the marginalized and excluded others of their pronouncements.” ***How does this square with Freire’s theory of language? Seems to me it’s merely a dimension of same view. Will be interesting to see what Berlin does with pedagogy.
78: “To abandon the attempt to make sense of these [material] forces in the unfolding of history is to risk being victimized by them.” **One could argue ‘is to be victimized by them’ if “making sense” is being in your full humanity, because that’s what we do—make sense, form meanings. Perhaps this is one difference between Berlin and AB: AB’s orientation stems from an acknowledgement that meaning making is what we do naturally. Berlin’s view is “out there” in the realm of the sociohistorical. ABs (Freire’s/Montesori’s) in the body, in the human body, in biology, in the senses.
78: “The postmodern turn demands that the role of such narratives [master, ruling, meta-narratives] be acknowledged, while cautioning against the temptation to posit any as essential or universal. All are provisional and contingent, always subject to revision or even rejection.” ***How does ABs triad suit this notion of narratives? Does the notion of a composing self somehow violate this idea of provisionality and contingency? I think it builds provisionality and contingency directly into the signification process, on a micro-level. Yeah… I don’t understand Berlin’s rejection yet.
80: The Ebet quotation is revealing. She focuses on purpose: the postmodern wielded to “disassemble the dominant cultural policy…which tries to restrict and stabilize meaning” (ludic); repurposed (or further-purposed) “resistance postmodernism…insists on a materialist political practice that works for equal access for all to social resources and for an end to the exploitative exercise of power (887).” “Materialist” here seems divorced from “signification” practices and thus pedagogical practices. Ebert even suggests Freire’s “problem posing” tactic: ‘Instead it needs to inquire into the power relations requiring such suppression ” (889). ** The ‘it’ here is unclear, as Berlin has inserted the quotation, though I’m guessing Ebert refers to an ideal use of the postmodern.
Ebert’s description of the role of signification in “resistance postmodernism,” as summarized by Berlin, focuses on the sociohistorical formation of a subject providing ‘meaning’ in the system of communication. Isn’t this triadic hermeneutics? Only focusing on the subject (the interpretant—term, image, person) instead of the elements constructing it? Seems to me this is a satisfying delimiting of that usefully captures provisionality and contingency without dissolving into un-useful infinite regress.
81: Postmodernism identifies all things as complex relationships in and of themselves and with and between all other things. ANT. ***Perhaps it’s Berlin’s insistence on “never resting secure in any transhistorical and universal mode of thought”… never seeking Truth or Reality that is ‘essential’ (of essence), that is “out there” pure, unmoving, discoverable.. that turns him off of AB’s work.
Chapter Five
83: “Social-epistemic rhetoric…[its] roots are in the social constructionist efforts of pragmatism that first appeared around the turn of the century, but it offers a dramatic departure from its forbears.” **Pragmatism ala Pierce?
“Social-epistemic rhetoric is the study and critique of signifying practices in their relation to subject formation within the framework of economic, social, and political conditions.”
84: “…method is at every turn rhetorical, by which I mean he considers ideology in relation to communicators, audiences, formulations of reality, and the central place of language in all of these.” ***I really like this particular packing of rhetoric-as-method
85: “Moreover, these activities call on a social hermeneutic, measuring the value of a text in relation to its importance to the larger society.” ***This assigns “social hermeneutic” to the realm of text, not language. Departure between Berlin and AB
86: This passage seems to address the reasons Berlin dismisses Berthoff finally as ‘retrograde.’ He identifies the pragmatism of the early 20th century—specifically Deweyian—as placing the ‘meritocratic class’ in service of the community in order to cultivate democracy. “Fearful that an elite might prevail against the claims of the community, this rhetoric saw the critical examination of the subtle effects of signifying practices as key to egalitarian decision making.”
He notes shifts in this rhetoric in service of democratic ideals throughout the 20th century, but claims these approaches are ‘flawed’: “While this rhetorical approach emphasizes the communal and social constitution of subjectivity, it never abandons the notion of the individual as finally a sovereign free agent, capable of transcending material and social conditions” (86). ***Freire would disagree with this? Berlin’s iteration here places a high value on transcendence. Change is not transcendence. Freire/Berthoff/(Montessori?) argue empowerment of the disempowered (which is change, not transcendence) is possible (not inevitable) only when conscious awareness (conscienticizao) of the social-constructedness of language (and other structures) is achieved.
86: “Furthermore, although it does look to democratic political institutions as the solution to social problems, it lacks a critique of economic arrangements, arguing for the political as primary and in the final instance determinative.”*** Not Freire, for certain. Nor AB!
88: “Yet we cannot escape discursive regimes, the power-knowledge formations of our historical position. Political agency, not individual autonomy, is the guiding principle here.“***Perhaps this is the major split b/w Berlin and AB/Freire
89: “Only through language do we know and act upon the conditions of our experience.” ***Man as animal symbolicum… How has this changed via multimodal turn? “Thus, the subject that experiences and the material and social conditions experienced are discursively constituted in historically specific terms.”
89: “In an effort to name experience, different groups constantly vie for supremacy, for ownership and control of terms and their meanings in any discourse situation.” ***Including ours, of course. The ‘battle’ frame here… necessary? inevitable? how does Freire’s differ? The term ‘effort’ makes a difference I think. Implies an extra-natural movement, force. To name, of course, is natural. This ‘vie for supremacy’ happens then on group level?
89: All meaning is ‘ideological formulation’? “Following Volosinov and Gramsci, he [Stuart Hall] argues that language is always an arena of struggle to make certain meanings—certain ideological formulations—prevail.”
89: “Social-epistemic rhetoric is in accord with this perspective, pointing out that rhetoric was invented not because people wanted to express themselves more accurately and clearly, but because they wanted to make their positions prevail in the conflicts of politics. In other words, persuasion in the play for power is at the center of this rhetoric, and studying the operation of signifying practices within their economic and political frames is the work it undertakes.” ***But this assumes a known Knowledge, a fixed position to negotiate, a conscious awareness, acceptance/championing of that position. This is definitely a departure from AB/Freire!
Seems to me that considering practical, pedagogical imperatives (even socio-political ones) changes what is valued in the discussion, shifts the terms of discourse in striking ways. Thus the conflict b/w Berlin and Berthoff here?
This chapter sees Berlin identifying the impure subject; we are all amalgams of competing interests, affiliations, desires, fears, identities, etc. Very Star-esque. But Berlin identifies a particular imperative for the social-epistemic rhetoric: 90: “The work of social-epistemic rhetoric, then, is to study the production and reception of these historically specific signifying practices. In other words, social-epistemic rhetoric enables senders and receivers to arrive at a rich formulation of the rhetorical context in any given discourse situation through an analysis of the signifying practices operating within it.” *The focus is on rhetorical situation.
“Thus, in composing or in interpreting a text, a person engages in an analysis of the cultural codes operating in defining his or her subject position, the positions of the audience, and the constructions of the matter to be considered. These function in a dialectical relations each other, so that the writer must engage in complex decision making in shaping the text. By dialectic I mean they change in response to each other in ways that are not mechanically predictable—not presenting, for example, simply a cause-effect relation, but a shifting affiliation in which causes and effects are mutually interactive, with effects becoming causes and causes becoming effects simultaneously.” ***A rare and surprising, rather off-handed, acknowledgement of allatonceness. Here in discussion of ‘dialectic….’ beautiful.
91: “Writing and reading are thus both acts of textual interpretation and construction, and both are central to social-epistemic rhetoric.”
92: “Dislodging the Binaries”
**Of course, triadicity does this. Why do we need postructuralism? We need it to dislodge systems of discourse that result in creating and reinforcing hegemony and suffering? Can the triad do this? Perhaps it works on a different level or dimension of the same effort?
“Thus, language never acts as a simple referent to an external, extralinguistically verifiable thing-in-itself. It instead serves as a terministic screen, to use Berke’s phrase, that forms and shapes experience. That is, it comes between the receiver and the perceived in a way that shapes the interpretation.” ***Isn’t this triadicity? The interpretant shapes the interpretation/the message/the rhetorical experience.
Here is Berlin’s “contribution”?: “Note, however, that this structuring of experience is never undertaken by a unified, coherent, and sovereign subject who can transcend language. No single person is in control of language. Language is a social construction that shapes us as much as we shape it.” ***But we can be ‘unified, coherent, and sovereign’ in a sense, through consciousness of language? I think coscientisizao is key here. And it’s what Berlin doesn’t confront, consider, fold in from AB’s work.
I wonder if Berlin ever felt a response re: the Berthoff/Laurer debates? Did he register the Freirean ‘problem posing’ pedagogy vs. the ‘problem solving’ approach as Berthoff perceived it, aligned with a social-epistemic rhetoric & triadic hermeneutics.
93: “Producing and consuming are both interpretations (as all language is interpretive), requiring a knowledge of semiotic codes in which versions of economic, social, and political predispositions are inscribed.” **This is totally aligned with Freirean theory of language. The imperative then is conscienticizao. Conscious awareness of the codes. Conscious shifting and challenging of the codes.
“These codes are never simply in the writer, in the text, or in the reader. They always involve a dialectical relation of the three, a rhetorical exchange in which writer, reader, text, [media?] and material conditions simultaneously interact with each other through the medium of semiotic codes.” ***The interpretant: how does it inform this understanding of rhetorical situation?
***Would be interesting to study the rhetoric of aesthetics in the abortion debate. 96-97… The Jay quotation in 97 resonates beautifully with today’s political situation in US: “The modern subject is thus more aesthetic than cognitive or ethical; he is the site of an internalized, but illusory reconciliation of conflicting demands, which remain frustratingly in conflict in the social world. As such, the aesthetic functions as a compensatory ideology to mask real suffering, reinforcing what the Frankfurt School used to call’ the affirmative character of culture.’ (49)”
Phronesis: practical wisdom
99: “…and instead ‘follows aesthetic judgement in arguing from analogies, which preserve differences even as they search for common ground’ (54) [Lyotard’s ‘Just Gaming’]”
99: “However provisional our organizing categories of investigation may be, to be without them is to be victimized by the categories of others.”
99: “The aesthetic experience can encourage the perception of the differences of the other while not destroying the conception of community. The kind of judgment encouraged by this intersubjective and communicative conception of the aesthetic finally ‘mediates the general and the particular rather than pitting one against the other’ ([Arendt] 55).”
100: “The English studies class will promote a variety of reading practices tha twill finally encourage the uses of the aesthetic in the service of a politics of democratic openness and tolerance, a politics dedicated to discussion and the discovery of difference, of the excluded other that our interpretive strategies often conceal.” **Problem posing pedagogy
“Our business must be to instruct students in signifying practices broadly conceived—to see not only the rhetoric of the college essay, but also the rhetoric of the institution of schooling, of politics, and of the media, the hermeneutic not only of certain literary texts, but also the hermeneutic of film, TV, and popular music. We must take as our province the production and reception of semiotic codes, providing students with the heuristics to penetrate these codes and their ideological designs on our formation as subjects.” ***This is the work of AB and Freire. The triad is such an heuristic. Did Berlin ever investigate it as such?
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