Richards, I.A. and Ogden, C.K. “The Meaning of Meaning”. Bizzell, Patricia and Herzberg,
Bruce. The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Timesto Present. Bedford/St.
Martin’s: Boston. 2001 (1273-80).
“Symbolism is the study of the part played in human affairs y language and the symbols of all kinds, and especially of their influence on Thought” (1274).
“Language if it is to be used must be a ready instrument” (1275).
“The root of the trouble will be traced to the superstition that words are in some way parts of things or always imply things corresponding to them, historical instances of this still potent instinctive belief being given from many sources” (1276).
“We have not here in view the more familiar ways in which words may be used to deceive. In a later chapter, when the function of language as an instrument for the promotion of pruposes rather than as a means of symbolizing references is fully discussed, we shall see how the intention of the speaker may complicate the situation” (1277).
“Another vairiety of verbal ingenuity closely allied to this, is the deliberate use of symbols to misdirect the listener” (1277).
“Those who allow beyond question that there are people like themselves also interpreting signs and open to study should not find it difficult to admit that their observation of the behavior of others may provide at least a framework within which their own introspection, that special and deceptive case, may be fitted” (1278-79).
“The method which recognizes the common feature of sign interpretation has its dangers, but opens the way to a fresh treatment of many widely different topics” (1279).
Richards, I.A. and Ogden, C.K. “The Philosophy of Rhetoric”. Bizzell, Patricia and Herzberg,
Bruce. The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Timesto Present. Bedford/St.
Martin’s: Boston. 2001. (1281-88).
“The old Rhetoric was an offspring of dispute; it developed as the rationale of pleadings and persuadings; it was the theory of the battle of words and has always been itself dominated by the combative impulse” (1281).
“It is no bad preparation for any attempt at exposition—above all of such debatable and contentious matters as those to which I am soon to turn—to realize how easily the combative impulse can put us in mental blinkers and made us take another man’s words in the ways in which we can down him with least trouble” (1281).
“All thinking from the lowest to the highest—whatever else itmay be—is sorting” (1283).
“Our risk is to confuse the abstractness we thus arrive at intellectually with the primordial abstractness out of which these impressions have already grown—before ever any conscious explicit reflection took place” (1285).
“The context theorem of meaning would prevent our making hundreds of baseless and disabling assumptions that we commonly make about meanings, over-simplifications that create false problems interfering with closer comparisons—and that is its main service” (1286).
Warrants and assumptions?
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Monday, May 10, 2010
Sedgwick, Eve Kosopsky. Touching Feeling
Sedgwick, Eve Kosopsky. Touching Feeling : Affect. Pedagogy, Performativity. Duke
UP: Durham, NC. 2003.
“Affects can be, and are, attached to things, people, ideas, sensations, relations, activities, ambitions, institutions and any number of other things, including other affects. Thus, one can be excited by anger, disgusted by shame, or surprised by joy” (19).
“’ affects may; be either much more casual than any drive could be or much more monopolistic. . . Most of the characteristics which Freud attributed to the Unconcious and to the Id are in fact salient aspects of the affect system. .
.Affects enable both insatiability and extreme lability, fickleness and finickiness (52)’” (21).
“The conventional way of distinguishing shame from guilt is that shame attaches to and sharpens the senese of what one is, whereas guilt attaches to what one does” (37).
Perhaps, but I think it more straightforward when one considers shame to be attached to what one thinks others will think of one and attaches guilt to what one thinks of oneself.
Quoting Silvan Tomkins
“’It was a short step to see that excitement had nothing perse to do with sexuality or with hunger, and that the apparent urgency of the drive system was borrowed from it co-assembly with appropriate affects as necessary amplifiers’” (100).
Quoting Silvan Tomkins
“’I would account for the difference in affect activation by three variants of a single principle—the density of neural firing. By density I mean the frequency of neural firing perunit of time. My theory posits three discrete classes of activators of affect, each of which further amplifies the sources which activate them. These are stimulation increase, stimulation level, and stimulation decrease’” (102).
Wonder if I need to read Sylvan Tomkins?
UP: Durham, NC. 2003.
“Affects can be, and are, attached to things, people, ideas, sensations, relations, activities, ambitions, institutions and any number of other things, including other affects. Thus, one can be excited by anger, disgusted by shame, or surprised by joy” (19).
“’ affects may; be either much more casual than any drive could be or much more monopolistic. . . Most of the characteristics which Freud attributed to the Unconcious and to the Id are in fact salient aspects of the affect system. .
.Affects enable both insatiability and extreme lability, fickleness and finickiness (52)’” (21).
“The conventional way of distinguishing shame from guilt is that shame attaches to and sharpens the senese of what one is, whereas guilt attaches to what one does” (37).
Perhaps, but I think it more straightforward when one considers shame to be attached to what one thinks others will think of one and attaches guilt to what one thinks of oneself.
Quoting Silvan Tomkins
“’It was a short step to see that excitement had nothing perse to do with sexuality or with hunger, and that the apparent urgency of the drive system was borrowed from it co-assembly with appropriate affects as necessary amplifiers’” (100).
Quoting Silvan Tomkins
“’I would account for the difference in affect activation by three variants of a single principle—the density of neural firing. By density I mean the frequency of neural firing perunit of time. My theory posits three discrete classes of activators of affect, each of which further amplifies the sources which activate them. These are stimulation increase, stimulation level, and stimulation decrease’” (102).
Wonder if I need to read Sylvan Tomkins?
Saturday, May 8, 2010
Hardt, Michael. “Affective Labor”
Hardt, Michael. “Affective Labor” boundary 2 26.2. (1999).
“The productive circuit of affect and value has thus seemed in many respects as an autonomous circuit for the constitutions of subjectivity, alternative to the process of capitalist valorization” (89).
“Affective labor is one face of what I will call ‘immaterial labor,’ which has assumed a dominant position with respect to the other forms of labor in the global capitalist economy” (90).
“We might call the passage from the second paradigm to the third, from the domination of industry to that of services and information, a process of economic postmodernization, or rather informatization” (90).
“The processes of modernization and industrialization transformed and redefined all elements of the social plane” (90).
“Humanity and its soul are produced in the very processes of economic production. The processes of becoming human and the nature of the human itself were fundamentality transformed in the qualitative shift of modernization” (91).
“The jobs, for the most part, are highly mobile and involve flexible skills. More importantly, they are characterized in general by the central role played by knowledge, information communication, and affect” (91).
“Most services ineed are based on the continual exchange of information and knowledge” (94).
“Interactive and cybernetic machines become a new prosthesis integrated into our bodies and minds and a lens through which to redefine our bodies and minds themselves” (95).
“The other face of immaterial labor is the affective labor of human contact and interaction (95).
“To one degree or another, this affective labor plays a certain role throughout the service industries, from fast-food servers to providers of financial services, embedded in the moments of human interaction and communication” (96).
“Categories such as ‘in-person’ services or services of proximity are often used to identify this kind of labor, but what is essential to it, its in-person aspect, is really the creation and manipulation of affects” (96).
“What affective labor produces are social networks, forms of community, biopower” (96).
“Whereas in a first moment, in the comperterization of industry, for example, one might say that communicative action, human relations, and culture have been instrumentalized, reified, and ‘degraded’ to the level of economic interactions, one should add quickly that through a reciprocal process in this second moment, production has become communicative, affective, de-instrmentalized, and ‘elevated’ to the level of human relations—but of course, a level of human relations entirely dominated by and internal to capital” (96).
“Where the production of soul is concerned, as Musil might say, we should no longer look to the soil and organic development, nor to the factory and mechanical development, but rather to today’s dominant economic forms, that is, to the production defined by a combination of cybernetics and affect” (97).
“Biopower is the power of the creation of life; it is the production of collective subjectivities, sociality, and society itself” (98).
“What is created in the networks of affective labor is a form-of-life” (98).
“More important, biopower is the power of the emerging forces of governmentality to create, manage, and control populations—the power to manage life” (98).
“The productive circuit of affect and value has thus seemed in many respects as an autonomous circuit for the constitutions of subjectivity, alternative to the process of capitalist valorization” (89).
“Affective labor is one face of what I will call ‘immaterial labor,’ which has assumed a dominant position with respect to the other forms of labor in the global capitalist economy” (90).
“We might call the passage from the second paradigm to the third, from the domination of industry to that of services and information, a process of economic postmodernization, or rather informatization” (90).
“The processes of modernization and industrialization transformed and redefined all elements of the social plane” (90).
“Humanity and its soul are produced in the very processes of economic production. The processes of becoming human and the nature of the human itself were fundamentality transformed in the qualitative shift of modernization” (91).
“The jobs, for the most part, are highly mobile and involve flexible skills. More importantly, they are characterized in general by the central role played by knowledge, information communication, and affect” (91).
“Most services ineed are based on the continual exchange of information and knowledge” (94).
“Interactive and cybernetic machines become a new prosthesis integrated into our bodies and minds and a lens through which to redefine our bodies and minds themselves” (95).
“The other face of immaterial labor is the affective labor of human contact and interaction (95).
“To one degree or another, this affective labor plays a certain role throughout the service industries, from fast-food servers to providers of financial services, embedded in the moments of human interaction and communication” (96).
“Categories such as ‘in-person’ services or services of proximity are often used to identify this kind of labor, but what is essential to it, its in-person aspect, is really the creation and manipulation of affects” (96).
“What affective labor produces are social networks, forms of community, biopower” (96).
“Whereas in a first moment, in the comperterization of industry, for example, one might say that communicative action, human relations, and culture have been instrumentalized, reified, and ‘degraded’ to the level of economic interactions, one should add quickly that through a reciprocal process in this second moment, production has become communicative, affective, de-instrmentalized, and ‘elevated’ to the level of human relations—but of course, a level of human relations entirely dominated by and internal to capital” (96).
“Where the production of soul is concerned, as Musil might say, we should no longer look to the soil and organic development, nor to the factory and mechanical development, but rather to today’s dominant economic forms, that is, to the production defined by a combination of cybernetics and affect” (97).
“Biopower is the power of the creation of life; it is the production of collective subjectivities, sociality, and society itself” (98).
“What is created in the networks of affective labor is a form-of-life” (98).
“More important, biopower is the power of the emerging forces of governmentality to create, manage, and control populations—the power to manage life” (98).
Thursday, May 6, 2010
LeFevre, Karen Burke. Invention as a Social Act.
LeFevre, Karen Burke. Invention as a Social Act. Southern Illinois UP: Carbondale, IL. (1987).
“Invention is regarded as an unfolding, a manifestation of an individual’s ideas, feelings, voice, personality, and patterns of thought” (2).
“invention is powerfully influenced by social collectives, such as institutions, bureaucracies, and governments, which transmit expectations and prohibitions, encouraging certain ideas and discouraging others” (2).
“I think that composition studies too often tend to treat rhetorical invention as an isolated phenomenon occurring in the composition class, while overlooking the import of ‘invention’ in its broader sense” (4).
“Language is regarded as at best a vehicle to represent a material object or a process or a scientific abstraction, and at worst, an obstacle or appendage, a necessary evil that conveys some approximation of things or ideas that exist prior to or beyond words” (6).
“Francis Bacon, who in the seventeenth century voiced a complaint that the word ‘invention’ was being improperly applied: ‘for to invent’ Bacon wrote, ‘is to discover that we know not, and not to recover or resummon that which we already know’; in Bacon’s view rhetorical invention wsa generally (and properly) regarded not as an act of creation but rather of remembering or locating knowledge that people already possessed” (6).
“More particularly, composition theory and pedagogy in nineteenth and twentieth century America have been founded on a Platonic view of invention, one which assumes that the individual possesses innate knowledge or mental structures that are the chief source of invention” (11).
“One would expect the predominant ideology of a society and its received views about the nature of human thought to affect and reinforce one another. Thus it is not surprising that the work of Soviet psychologists such as L.S. Vygotsky and A.R. Luria stresses a reciprocal relationship between social activity and individual cognition, accomplished by language” (19).
“Luria bases his study on the assumption that consciousness is not something given in advance but is shaped by social activity and used to restructure conditions as well as to adapt to them. His experiments with Russian peasants confirmed his hypothesis that an individual’s mental processes and self-perception depend on, and change with, social history and social practices such as education and the organization of labor” (19).
Even if women believed in themselves the constant social practices and the conduct books would shape their view of self within society to be docile and subservient.
“The individualistic view of rhetorical invention goes hand in hand with conventional ways of acknowledging inventors of material objects, ideas, and texts” (30).
“The inventing ‘self’ is socially influenced, even socially constituted, according to a variety of theorists such as George Herbert Mead, Martin Buber, Clifford Geertz, and Wayne Booth” (33).
“Invention builds on a foundation of knowledge accumulated from previous generations, knowledge that constitutes a social legacy of ideas, forms and ways of thinking” (34).
So, if previous generations were constantly being told to be docile, subservient, and less intellectual in stands to reason that it is handed down, with or without the knowledge of women today.
“Invention is powerfully influenced by social collectives, such as institutions, bureaucracies, governments, and ‘invisible colleges’ of academic disciplinary committees” (34).
“Framed in terms of unhelpful oppositions they imply that ‘individual’ and ‘social’ can be neatly separated and that one can be said to cause the other. What I am suggesting however, is that they be regarded as dialectically connected, always codefining and interdependent. A change in the individual influences social dimensions, which in turn influence the individual” (37).
“Aristotle defines rhetoric as the art of finding the available means of persuasion, which means that it must involve others who are to be persuaded” (45).
Women reading conduct books.
“This ‘clustering’ of creative thinkers has led some to conclude that creativity is not merely a chance manifestation of biological or psychological factors, but is subject to environmental influence” (66).
“Invention is regarded as an unfolding, a manifestation of an individual’s ideas, feelings, voice, personality, and patterns of thought” (2).
“invention is powerfully influenced by social collectives, such as institutions, bureaucracies, and governments, which transmit expectations and prohibitions, encouraging certain ideas and discouraging others” (2).
“I think that composition studies too often tend to treat rhetorical invention as an isolated phenomenon occurring in the composition class, while overlooking the import of ‘invention’ in its broader sense” (4).
“Language is regarded as at best a vehicle to represent a material object or a process or a scientific abstraction, and at worst, an obstacle or appendage, a necessary evil that conveys some approximation of things or ideas that exist prior to or beyond words” (6).
“Francis Bacon, who in the seventeenth century voiced a complaint that the word ‘invention’ was being improperly applied: ‘for to invent’ Bacon wrote, ‘is to discover that we know not, and not to recover or resummon that which we already know’; in Bacon’s view rhetorical invention wsa generally (and properly) regarded not as an act of creation but rather of remembering or locating knowledge that people already possessed” (6).
“More particularly, composition theory and pedagogy in nineteenth and twentieth century America have been founded on a Platonic view of invention, one which assumes that the individual possesses innate knowledge or mental structures that are the chief source of invention” (11).
“One would expect the predominant ideology of a society and its received views about the nature of human thought to affect and reinforce one another. Thus it is not surprising that the work of Soviet psychologists such as L.S. Vygotsky and A.R. Luria stresses a reciprocal relationship between social activity and individual cognition, accomplished by language” (19).
“Luria bases his study on the assumption that consciousness is not something given in advance but is shaped by social activity and used to restructure conditions as well as to adapt to them. His experiments with Russian peasants confirmed his hypothesis that an individual’s mental processes and self-perception depend on, and change with, social history and social practices such as education and the organization of labor” (19).
Even if women believed in themselves the constant social practices and the conduct books would shape their view of self within society to be docile and subservient.
“The individualistic view of rhetorical invention goes hand in hand with conventional ways of acknowledging inventors of material objects, ideas, and texts” (30).
“The inventing ‘self’ is socially influenced, even socially constituted, according to a variety of theorists such as George Herbert Mead, Martin Buber, Clifford Geertz, and Wayne Booth” (33).
“Invention builds on a foundation of knowledge accumulated from previous generations, knowledge that constitutes a social legacy of ideas, forms and ways of thinking” (34).
So, if previous generations were constantly being told to be docile, subservient, and less intellectual in stands to reason that it is handed down, with or without the knowledge of women today.
“Invention is powerfully influenced by social collectives, such as institutions, bureaucracies, governments, and ‘invisible colleges’ of academic disciplinary committees” (34).
“Framed in terms of unhelpful oppositions they imply that ‘individual’ and ‘social’ can be neatly separated and that one can be said to cause the other. What I am suggesting however, is that they be regarded as dialectically connected, always codefining and interdependent. A change in the individual influences social dimensions, which in turn influence the individual” (37).
“Aristotle defines rhetoric as the art of finding the available means of persuasion, which means that it must involve others who are to be persuaded” (45).
Women reading conduct books.
“This ‘clustering’ of creative thinkers has led some to conclude that creativity is not merely a chance manifestation of biological or psychological factors, but is subject to environmental influence” (66).
Saturday, May 1, 2010
Stewart, Kathleen. Ordinary Affects
Stewart, Kathleen. Ordinary Affects. Duke UP: Durham, NC. (2007).
“Ordinary affects are the varied, surging capacities to affect and to be affected that give everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergences” (2).
“The give circuits and flows the forms of a life. They can be experienced as a pleasure and a shock, as an empty pause or a dragging undertow, as a sensibility that snaps into place or a profound disorientation” (2).
“Their significance lies in the intensities they build and in what thoughts and feelings they make possible” (3).
“Ordinary affects, then, are an animate circuit that conducts force and maps connections, routes, and disjunctures” (3).
“Models of thinking. . .They miss how someone’s ordinary can endure or can sag defeated; how it can shift in the face of events like a shift in the kid’s school schedule or the police at the door” (4).
“each scene is a tangent that performs the sensation that something is happening—something that needs attending to” (5).
“The ordinary registers intensities—regularly, intermittently, urgently, or as a slight shudder” (10).
“The first step in thinking about the force of things is the open question of what counts as an event, a movement, an impact, a reason to react” (16).
“Potentiality is a thing immanent to fragments of sensory experience and dreams of presence” (21).
Potentiality and anticipatory guilt.
“Affects are not so much forms of signification, or units of knowledge, as they are expressions of ideas or problems performed as a kind of involuntary and powerful learning and participation” (40).
“Ordinary affects highlight the question of the intimate impacts of forces in circulation. They’re not exactly ‘personal’ but they sure can pull the subject into places it didn’t exactly ‘intend’ to go” (40).
“The affective subject is a collection of trajectories and circuits. You can recognize it through fragments of past moments glimpsed unsteadily in the light of the present like the flickering light of a candle” (59).
“Ordinary affects are the varied, surging capacities to affect and to be affected that give everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergences” (2).
“The give circuits and flows the forms of a life. They can be experienced as a pleasure and a shock, as an empty pause or a dragging undertow, as a sensibility that snaps into place or a profound disorientation” (2).
“Their significance lies in the intensities they build and in what thoughts and feelings they make possible” (3).
“Ordinary affects, then, are an animate circuit that conducts force and maps connections, routes, and disjunctures” (3).
“Models of thinking. . .They miss how someone’s ordinary can endure or can sag defeated; how it can shift in the face of events like a shift in the kid’s school schedule or the police at the door” (4).
“each scene is a tangent that performs the sensation that something is happening—something that needs attending to” (5).
“The ordinary registers intensities—regularly, intermittently, urgently, or as a slight shudder” (10).
“The first step in thinking about the force of things is the open question of what counts as an event, a movement, an impact, a reason to react” (16).
“Potentiality is a thing immanent to fragments of sensory experience and dreams of presence” (21).
Potentiality and anticipatory guilt.
“Affects are not so much forms of signification, or units of knowledge, as they are expressions of ideas or problems performed as a kind of involuntary and powerful learning and participation” (40).
“Ordinary affects highlight the question of the intimate impacts of forces in circulation. They’re not exactly ‘personal’ but they sure can pull the subject into places it didn’t exactly ‘intend’ to go” (40).
“The affective subject is a collection of trajectories and circuits. You can recognize it through fragments of past moments glimpsed unsteadily in the light of the present like the flickering light of a candle” (59).
Friday, April 30, 2010
Gross, Daniel M. The Secret History of Emotion:
Gross, Daniel M. The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle’s Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science. Chicago UP: Chicago IL. 2007
“The contours of our emotional world have been shaped by institutions such as slavery and poverty that simply afford some people greater emotional range than others, as they are shaped by publicity that has nothing to do with the inherent value of each human life and everything to do with technologies of recognition and blindness” (4).
“Following Aristotle and Hume, it is useful to think about how the scope of anger afforded a social subordinate is strictly limited to the vanishing point in a world where pride is also limited (as it is, for instance, in Hume’s and Fielding’s Britain, where pride is considered a function of property and strictly limited by custom and law to a narrow segment of the population)" (5).
Emotions have as much to do with social standings as with personal feelings. The women of the conduct books were allowed pride over limited areas of their life. Their social standing (created by family or marriage) their appearance (luck) and their use of manners. Socially they were limited in the emotions they were “allowed” to partake in.
“Aritstotle’s Rhetoric and Thomas Hobbes to outline a “political economy’ wherein passions are (I) constituted as differences in power, and (2) conditioned not by their excess, but by their scarcity” (6).
“Even the recent theoretical turn to “constitutive rhetoric” typically fails to integrate the rhetoric of emotion with the effort to develop a more sophisticated model of persuasion that situates rhetoric in culture rather than in the intention of the orator or author” (10).
“giving up the category of emotion completely would make some important theoretical work and even some historical work impossible” (19).
“The contours of our emotional world have been shaped by institutions such as slavery and poverty that simply afford some people greater emotional range than others, as they are shaped by publicity that has nothing to do with the inherent value of each human life and everything to do with technologies of recognition and blindness” (4).
“Following Aristotle and Hume, it is useful to think about how the scope of anger afforded a social subordinate is strictly limited to the vanishing point in a world where pride is also limited (as it is, for instance, in Hume’s and Fielding’s Britain, where pride is considered a function of property and strictly limited by custom and law to a narrow segment of the population)" (5).
Emotions have as much to do with social standings as with personal feelings. The women of the conduct books were allowed pride over limited areas of their life. Their social standing (created by family or marriage) their appearance (luck) and their use of manners. Socially they were limited in the emotions they were “allowed” to partake in.
“Aritstotle’s Rhetoric and Thomas Hobbes to outline a “political economy’ wherein passions are (I) constituted as differences in power, and (2) conditioned not by their excess, but by their scarcity” (6).
“Even the recent theoretical turn to “constitutive rhetoric” typically fails to integrate the rhetoric of emotion with the effort to develop a more sophisticated model of persuasion that situates rhetoric in culture rather than in the intention of the orator or author” (10).
“giving up the category of emotion completely would make some important theoretical work and even some historical work impossible” (19).
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Brodkey, Linda. “On the Subjects of Class and Gender
Brodkey, Linda. “On the Subjects of Class and Gender in ‘The Literacy Letters’”
“What Foucault and other poststructuralists have been arguing the last fifteen or twenty years is considerably easier to state than to act on: we are at once constituted and unified as subjects in language and discourse” (677).
“The question then is how to read what students write. And at issue is the unquestioned power of a pedagogical authority that insists that teachers concentrate on form at the expense of content” (678).
“Those who occupy the best subject positions a discourse has to offer would have a vested interest in maintaining the illusion of speaking rather than being spoken by discourse. Postermodern rhetoric would being by assuming that all discourses warrant variable subject positions ranging from mostly satisfying to mostly unsatisfying for those individuals named by them” (679).
“Discursive resistance requires opportunities for resistance. Altering an institutionalized discourse probably requires an unremitting negative critique of its ideology, a critique that is most often carried out in the academy by attempting to replace a particular theory (e.g., of science or art of education or law) with another” (679).
“What Foucault and other poststructuralists have been arguing the last fifteen or twenty years is considerably easier to state than to act on: we are at once constituted and unified as subjects in language and discourse” (677).
“The question then is how to read what students write. And at issue is the unquestioned power of a pedagogical authority that insists that teachers concentrate on form at the expense of content” (678).
“Those who occupy the best subject positions a discourse has to offer would have a vested interest in maintaining the illusion of speaking rather than being spoken by discourse. Postermodern rhetoric would being by assuming that all discourses warrant variable subject positions ranging from mostly satisfying to mostly unsatisfying for those individuals named by them” (679).
“Discursive resistance requires opportunities for resistance. Altering an institutionalized discourse probably requires an unremitting negative critique of its ideology, a critique that is most often carried out in the academy by attempting to replace a particular theory (e.g., of science or art of education or law) with another” (679).
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