Notes: “Toward an Expanded Concept of Rhetorical Delivery: The Uses of Reports in Public Policy Debates” by Carolyn D. Rude

Though Rude’s framework is focused on reports and public policy, there are aspects of her text that can contribute to my own work. Most importantly, Rude explicitly calls for broadening our understanding of delivery and recognizing how essential it is to the rhetorical process. One important way she calls for this expanded notion of delivery is through temporal concerns. Specifically, Rude points to how any specific rhetorical document continues to be delivered beyond the initial utterance. Considering temporality is one of the major concerns of delivery I am theorizing, her framework here could prove very useful.

Notes:
“Adapting the knowledge developed in corporate and academic settings will require awareness of the long-term nature of social change and the incremental nature of rhetorical acts. The concept of rhetoric itself may expand beyond the usual classroom focus on individual instances (the document, the speech) to accommodate persuasion over time: delivering a message repeatedly and in different media, actively seeking out audiences, and promoting action in response to the message. The publication is not an end in itself but a means to an end of change in policy and behavior.” – 272

“More influential than a single report was the cumulative effect of multiple reports and other initiatives over time.” – 272

“What such an application emphasizes is the rhetorical situation as a relatively short moment in time. What is does not foreground is the situation in which multiple documents and other rhetorical acts may work together to change values and policies. When change is complex, the work of rhetoric – invention, reasoning, presentation, and persuasion in the interest of establishing good public policy – requires vision beyond the single document. Rhetorical theory is robust enough to accommodate a long-term process of change and not just the single instance. But first the rhetorical situation must be understood as long-term, comprehensive, and complex.” – 273
(Note: In response to rhetoric traditionally focusing on “the development of single instances of discourse” – 272)

“[Delivery] illustrates well how the process of rhetoric continues even when a single piece of discourse may seem complete. Delivery understood as taking the document and its argument to the audience may in turn enlighten the earlier stages of development, including invention” – 273

“In suggesting an expanded concept of delivery, I do not wish to abandon the concept of delivery based on publication but rather to stretch this concept to accommodate related rhetorical acts over time.” – 273

“John Frederick Reynolds observes in the preface to his 1993 collection, Rhetorical Memory and Delivery, these ‘problem canons’ of memory and delivery ‘have never received the kind of widespread critical attention they deserve’ in contemporary times (vii). Still, only four of the eleven chapters in his collection focus on delivery” – 274

“Delivery as visual design includes typefaces and paper choices, page layout, and use of visuals. Delivery as medium recognizes options of video, electronic communication, and communication technology as well as print. These analogies to visual design and medium reinforce the important concept that until an idea becomes public (through publication or through delivery of a speech to an audience), it cannot influence an audience to act. The presentation of content influences its availability and reception. Performance has the power to make concepts understandable and to convey urgency. Delivery is essential to persuasion.” – 274

“Publication-based definitions of delivery in written discourse tacitly imply that publication is the goal and end of the writer’s work…What is missing from such definitions in a sense of where these rhetorical acts fit into rhetoric broadly conceived as influencing policy over time.” – 274

“Delivery understood as a finite act, ending with the performance or publication, neglects (or at least does not emphasize) the impact of the publication on the rhetorical situation, the exigence that called the publication into being.” – 274

“[Aristotle’s] use of vulgar, right, justice, and corruption in his description reveals the close relationship between ethics and the concept of delivery.” – 275
(Note: In response to Aristotle’s treatment of delivery in On Rhetoric.)

“The ethos of the message bearer influences the reception of the message. Ethos may derive from standing in the community or from credentials, academic or experiential, but it also requires assurance of the independence of the speaker or writer.” – 275

“The focus on invention, arrangement, and style supports the current-traditional model of writing instruction, with its priorities on the text and correctness. Limiting the realm of rhetoric to the three canons restricts its function and risks making composition an academic exercise rather than an opportunity for civic engagement.” – 276

“The current definitions [of delivery] raise issues of image, access to information, and responsibility for establishing a voice in the public arena as well as to visual design. The need for effective delivery may raise suspicions of corruption of truth, but the alternate perspective is that delivery may be a vehicle of justice. Memory and delivery both represent the connections of the speech or publication to the world beyond the text.” – 276

“The report is a tool of social action as well as a publication, and delivery is strategic action as well as visual design and medium.” – 279

“Getting more people involved in carrying the message to ever wider audiences may be part of what we come to understand as delivery.” – 282

“Change of values and of infrastructure cannot happen until citizens and policy makers decide to make them happen. The message will fail if it is conceived to be contained by the single speech or the single publication. Rather, the message is delivered in multiple media by multiple voices over time. Although visual design and typography may capture the original sense of delivery as a visual act, the activities that distribute the information to various audiences over time may better capture the original sense of delivery as an oral act. The visual and oral components give presence and urgency to the ideas. Seeking out the audience rather than waiting for the audience to read a document dramatically increases the chances that the content will be understood and used. The rhetors are more engaged with the audience than the publication model of delivery presumes.” – 283

“Delivery means accuracy and integrity of the information, representation of information graphically to clarify and not distort information, visual signals to make information accessible and comprehensible and to motivate readers, and the ethos of the author. It also means choice of medium.” – 283

“Examination of practice suggests a complex idea of delivery that includes visual design and medium of the publication but also looks beyond the publication to its uses as a tool of strategic action. Delivery is an active address to a complex audience that does not reside in one place at one time.” – 283
(Note: This statement could be huge in relation to my own work. It deserves some ruminating on to see exactly where it is going to fit, but I think this summarizes Rude’s call for expanding delivery nicely in a universal way.)

“A correct and accurate text is valued, but it is not enough. A user manual must be usable; a proposal must win support; a website must make searching methods transparent and intuitive to people who visit.” – 284

“A concept of delivery that extends beyond publication may help students and professional writers get to this understanding of the relationship of texts to social action. This understanding, in turn, opens possibilities for extended roles for them in civic engagement, not just as editors and grant writers, but also as leaders and strategists who can imagine the information needed to determine a good course of action an envision the strategies necessary to persuade decision makers. In short, it helps to develop our students into rhetoricians, responsible not just for accurate texts but also for promoting good public policy and for good outcomes from their work in publication.” – 284

“The increasing complexity of the rhetorical exigence, the audience, and competing arguments on this worldwide stage all argue for a concept of the canons that can expand beyond the single speech bounded by time and place.” – 285
(Note: Also a crucial statement, particularly for my argument for delivery’s consideration of and interaction with temporality)

“a broad definition [of delivery] invites an increased sense of ethical responsibility for the publication and its uses. Even if the writer is not personally responsible for the outreach and use implied by this broad definition, awareness of the uses of discourse in policy and practice encourages students and writers to look outward beyond the page and to aim for something even more significant than accurate representation and effective typography” – 285

“Delivery can be a vehicle of understanding and justice.” – 285

“Professional writers continue to be responsible for accurate and usable texts, but at the very least they need to understand the consequences of those texts for immediate and extended audiences, for the present and for a possible future, for other related texts, and for the values that constitute a society.” – 285

“Delivery in the sense of information graphics and typography can distort if the writer does not commit to accuracy and integrity or know good principles of representation. Delivery can also be the vehicle by which good ideas reach an audience who can use them for the public good. The writer’s responsibility extends to resolving the exigence that calls the publication into being – to civic engagement.” – 286

“The writer’s responsibility may extend beyond publication. The writer is part of a collaborative team and may not be personally responsible for taking the document into the field, but the writer works with an understanding and vision of a publication within the web of related publications and activities.” – 286

“Instead of erasing delivery from the canons, this perspective puts delivery squarely back into the center of the work of rhetoric, even when the medium is written discourse rather than speech.” – 286

Quotes taken from: Rude, Carolyn D. “Toward an Expanded Concept of Rhetorical Delivery: The Uses of Reports in Public Policy Debates.” Technical Communication Quarterly 13.3 (2004): 271-288. Google Scholar. Web. 12 August 2013.

Notes: “Encoding/Decoding” by Stuart Hall

There are two ideas in Hall’s work here that I am particularly interested in. I like that Hall posits that we as human beings tend to render something into narrative form in order to understand its significance; our understandings of the world are coded in story. I personally tend to think this way, that we (humanity) understand ourselves and the world(s) we inhabit through narrative. But this little personal philosophy that is echoed in Hall is secondary. The prime takeaway from this piece in relationship to my thesis is the use of codes. Encoding and decoding could prove useful when considering delivery during the composition process. How am I going to encode my message? How do I anticipate others reading my message? How do I anticipate others using my text? These and other questions emerge when considering encoding/decoding as it relates to delivery.

Notes:
“Traditionally, mass-communications research has conceptualized the process of communication in terms of a circulation circuit or loop. This model has been criticized for its linearity – sender/message/receiver – for its concentration on the level of message exchange and for the absence of a structured conception of the different moments as a complex structure of relations. But it is also possible (and useful) to think of this process in terms of a structure produced and sustained through the articulation of linked but distinctive moments – production, circulation, distribution/consumption, reproduction.” – 51

“a continuous circuit – production-distribution-production – can be sustained through a ‘passage of forms.'” – 51

“The ‘object’ of these practices is meanings and messages in the form of sign-vehicles of a specific kind organized, like any form of communication or language, through the operation of codes within the syntagmatic chain of a discourse” – 52

“The process thus requires, at the production end, its material instruments – its ‘means’ – as well
as its own sets of social (production) relations – the organization and combination of practices within media apparatuses. But it is in the discursive form that the circulation of the product takes place, as well as its distribution to different audiences. Once accomplished, the discourse must then be translated – transformed, again – into social practices if the circuit is to be both completed and effective. If no ‘meaning is taken, there can be no ‘consumption.’ If the meaning is not articulated in practice, it has no effect. The value of this approach is that while each of the moments, in articulation, is necessary to the circuit as a whole, no one moment can fully guarantee the next moment with which it is articulated. Since each has its specific modality and conditions of existence, each can constitute its own break or interruption of the ‘passage of forms’ on whose continuity the flow of effective production (that is, ‘reproduction’) depends.” – 52

“the discursive form of the message has a privileged position in the communicative exchange (from the viewpoint of circulation), and that the moments of ‘encoding’ and ‘decoding,’ though only ‘relatively autonomous’ in relation to the communicative process as a whole, are determinate moments” – 52

“In the moment when a historical event passes under the sign of discourse, it is subject to all the complex formal ‘rules’ by which language signifies. To put it paradoxically, the event must become a ‘story’ before it can become a communicative event.” – 52

“Thus the transposition into and out of the ‘message form’ (or the mode of symbolic exchange) is not a random ‘moment,’ which we can take up or ignore at our convenience. The ‘message form’ is a determinate moment; though, at another level, it comprises the surface movements of the communications system only and requires, at another stage, to be integrated into the social relations of the communication process as a whole, of which it forms only a part.” – 52

“Further, though the production structures of television originate the television discourse, they do not constitute a closed system. They draw topics, treatments, agendas, events, personnel, images of the audience, ‘definitions of the situation’ from other sources and other discursive formations within the wider socio-cultural and political structure of which they are a differentiated part. Philip Elliott has expressed this point succinctly, within a more traditional framework, in his discussion of the way in which the audience is both the ‘source’ and the ‘receiver’ of the television message. Thus – to borrow Marx’s terms – circulation and reception are, indeed, ‘moments’ of the production process in television and are reincorporated, via a number of skewed and structured ‘feedbacks,’ into the production process itself. The consumption or reception of the television message is thus also itself a ‘moment’ of the production process in its larger sense, though the latter is ‘predominant’ because it is the ‘point of departure for the realization’ of the
message.” – 53

“It is this set of decoded meanings which ‘have an effect,’ influence, entertain, instruct or persuade, with very complex perceptual, cognitive, emotional, ideological or behavioural consequences. In a ‘determinate’ moment the structure employs a code and yields a ‘message’: at another determinate moment the ‘message,’ via its decodings, issues into the structure of social practices.” – 53

“The degrees of symmetry – that is the degrees of ‘understanding’ and ‘misunderstanding’ in the communicative exchange – depend on the degrees of symmetry/asymmetry (relations of equivalence) established between the positions of the ‘personifications,’ encoder-producer and decoder-receiver. But this in turn depends on the degrees of identity/non-identity between the codes which perfectly or imperfectly transmit, interrupt or systematically distort what has been transmitted.” – 54

“What are called ‘distortions’ or ‘misunderstandings’ arise precisely from the lack of equivalence between the two sides in the communicative exchange” – 54

“At either end of the communicative chain the use of the semiotic paradigm promises to dispel the lingering behaviourism which has dogged mass-media research for so long, especially in its approach to content.” – 55

“The television sign is a complex one. It is itself constituted by the combination of two types of discourse, visual and aural. Moreover, it is an iconic sign, in Peirce’s terminology, because ‘it posseses some of the properties of the thing represented.’…Since the visual discourse translates a three-dimensional world into two-dimensional knowledge planes, it cannot, of course, be the referent or concept it signifies…Reality exists outside language, but it is constantly mediated by and through language: and what we can know and say has to be produced in and through discourse. Discursive ‘knowledge’ is the product not of the transparent representation of of the ‘real’ in language but of the articulation of language on real relations and conditions.” – 55 [sic]

“Naturalism and ‘realism’ – the apparent fidelity of the representation to the thing or concept represented – is the result, the effect, of a certain specific articulation of language on the ‘real.'” – 55

“The operation of naturalized codes reveals not the transparency and ‘naturalness’ of language but the depth, the habituation and the near-universality of the codes in use.” – 55

“what naturalized codes demonstrate is the degree of habituation produced when there is a fundamental alignment and reciprocity – an achieved equivalence – between the encoding and decoding sides of an exchange of meanings.” – 55

“The articulation of an arbitrary sign – whether visual or verbal – with the concept of a referent is the product not of nature but of convention, and the conventionalism of discourses requires the intervention, the support, of codes.” – 56

“Every visual sign in advertising connotes a quality, situation, value, or inference, which is present as an implication or implied meaning, depending on the connotational positioning.” – 56

“Codes of this order clearly contract relations for the sign with the wider universe of ideologies in a society. These codes are the means by which power and ideology are made to signify in particular discourses.” – 56

“The so-called denotative level of the televisual sign is fixed by certain, very complex (but limited or ‘closed’) codes. But its connotative level, though also bounded, is more open, subject to more active transformations, which exploit its polysemic values. Any such already constituted sign is potentially transformable into more than one connotative configuration. Polysemy must not, however, be confused with pluralism. Connotative codes are not equal among themselves” – 57

“The different areas of social life appear to be mapped out into discursive domains, hierarchically organized into dominant or preferred meanings.” – 57

“We say dominant, not ‘determined,’ because it is always possible to order, classify, assign and decode an event within more than one ‘mapping.’ But we say ‘dominant’ because there exists a pattern of ‘preferred readings’; and these both have the institutional/political/ideological
order imprinted in them and have themselves become institutionalized.” – 57

“Thus to clarity a ‘misunderstanding’ at the connotative level, we must refer, through the codes, to the orders of social life, of economic and political power, and of ideology. Further, since these mappings are ‘structured in dominance’ but not closed, the communicative process consists not in the unproblematic assignment of every visual item to its given position within a set of prearranged codes, but of performative rules – rules of competence and use, of logics-in-use – which seek actively to enforce or pre-fer one semantic domain over another and rule items into and out of their appropriate meaning-sets.” – 57

“No doubt misunderstandings of a literal kind do exist. The viewer does not know the terms employed, cannot follow the complex logic of argument or exposition, is unfamiliar with the language, finds the concepts too alien or difficult or is foxed by the expository narrative. But more often broadcasters are concerned that the audience has failed to take the meaning as they – the broadcasters – intended. What they really mean to say is that viewers are not operating within the ‘dominant’ or ‘preferred’ code.” – 58

“In recent years discrepancies of this kind have usually been explained by reference to ‘selective perception.’ This is the door via which a residual pluralism evades the compulsions of a highly structured, asymmetrical and non-equivalent process. Of course, there will always be private, individual, variant readings. But ‘selective perception’ is almost never as selective, random or privatized as the concept suggests.” – 58

“since there is no necessary correspondence between encoding and decoding, the former can attempt to ‘pre-fer’ but cannot prescribe or guarantee the latter, which has its own conditions of existence. Unless they are wildly aberrant, encoding will have the effect of constructing some of
the limits and parameters within which decodings will operate.” – 58

“But the vast range [of messages] must contain some degree of reciprocity between encoding and decoding moments, otherwise we could not speak of an effective communicative exchange at all.” – 59

“We identify three hypothetical positions from which decodings of a tele-visual discourse may be constructed.” – 59

“The first hypothetical position is that of the dominant-hegemonic position. When the viewer takes the connoted meaning from, say, a television newscast or curet affairs programme full and straight, and decodes the message in terms of the reference code in which it has been encoded, we might say that the view is operating inside the dominant code.” – 59

“The second position we would identify is that of the negotiated code or position. Majority audiences probably understand quite adequately what has been dominantly defined and professionally signified. The dominant definitions, however, are hegemonic precisely because they represent definition of situations and events which are ‘in dominance,’ (global). Dominant definitions connect events, implicitly or explicitly, to grand totalizations, to the great syntagmatic views-of-the-world: they take ‘large views’ of issues: they relate events to the ‘national interest’ or to the level of geo-politics, even if they make these connections in truncated, inverted or mystified ways. The definition of a hegemonic viewpoint is (a) that it defines within its terms the mental horizon, the universe, of possible meanings, of a whole sector of relations in a society or culture; and (b) that it carries with it the stamp of legitimacy – it appears coterminous with what is ‘natural,’ ‘inevitable,’ ‘taken for granted’ about the social order. Decoding within the negotiated version contains a mixture of adaptive and oppositional elements: it acknowledges the legitimacy of the hegemonic definitions to make the grand significations (abstract), while, at a more restricted, situational (situated) level, it makes its own ground rules – it operates with exceptions to the rule.” – 60

“Negotiated codes operate through what we might call particular or situated logics: and these logics are sustained by their differential and unequal relation to the discourses and logics of power.” – 60

“We suspect that the great majority of so-called ‘misunderstandings’ arise from the contradictions and disjunctures between hegemonic-dominant encodings and negotiated-corporate decodings.” – 61

“Finally, it is possible for a viewer perfectly to understand both the literal and the connotative inflection given by a discourse but to decode the message in a globally contrary way. He/she detotalizes the message in the preferred code in order to retotalize the message within some alternative framework of reference…He/she is operating with what we must call an oppositional code.”

Quotes taken from: Hall, Stuart. “Encoding/Decoding.” Google Scholar. PDF
(Note: I cannot find where this particular except was exactly published. May have to find another copy of this to work from if I use this for thesis.)

Notes: “Nostalgia and Its Discontents” by Svetlana Boym

Boym’s discussion of restorative and reflective nostalgia could prove useful in connecting memory into my own work with delivery. Nostalgia could possibly be a tool used by rhetors to deliver information in a particular way. I think Boym’s work might have a place in the ethos of delivery; quite possibly restorative nostalgia could reflect upon a negative ethos, while reflective nostalgia is a positive ethos? There is work to be done here; I’d like to follow up on this when the time is appropriate.

Notes:
“The word ‘nostalgia’ comes from two Greek roots, nostos meaning ‘return home’ and algia ‘longing.’ I would define it as a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy. Nostalgic love can only survive in a long-distance relationship. A cinematic image of nostalgia is a double exposure, or a superimposition of two images—of home and abroad, of past and present, of dream and everyday life. The moment we try to force it into a single image, it breaks the frame or burns the surface.” – 7

“Contrary to our intuition, ‘nostalgia’ came from medicine, not from poetry or politics.” – 7

“First, nostalgia is not ‘antimodern’; it is not necessarily opposed to modernity but coeval with it. Nostalgia and progress are like Jekyll and Hyde: doubles and mirror images of one another. Nostalgia is not merely an expression of local longing, but a result of a new understanding of time and space that makes the division into ‘local’ and ‘universal’ possible.
Second, nostalgia appears to be a longing for a place, but it is actually a yearning for a different time—the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams. In a broader sense, nostalgia is a rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress…
Third, nostalgia, in my view, is not always retrospective; it can be prospective as well. The fantasies of the past, determined by the needs of the present, have a direct impact on the realities of the future. The consideration of the future makes us take responsibility for our nostalgic tales.” – 8

“nostalgia is about the relationship between individual biography and the biography of groups or nations, between personal and collective memory.” – 9

“In this understanding, nostalgia is seen as an abdication of personal responsibility, a guilt-free homecoming, an ethical and aesthetic failure. Nostalgia produces subjective visions of afflicted imagination that tend to colonize the realm of politics, history, and everyday perception.” – 9
(Note: In response to the traditional Historian view on nostalgia)

“Modern nostalgia is paradoxical in the sense that the universality of its longing can make us more empathetic towards fellow humans, and yet the moment we try to repair that longing with a particular belonging—or the apprehension of loss with a rediscovery of identity and especially of a national community and unique and pure homeland—we often part ways with others and put an end to mutual understanding.” – 9

“The danger of nostalgia is that it tends to confuse the actual home and the imaginary one. In extreme cases it can create a phantom homeland, for the sake of which one is ready to die or kill. Unreflective nostalgia can breed monsters.” – 9

“technology and nostalgia have become co-dependent: new technology and advanced marketing stimulate ersatz nostalgia—for the things you never thought you had lost—and anticipatory nostalgia—for the present that flees with the speed of a click.” – 10

“Nostalgia inevitably reappears as a defense mechanism in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals.” – 10

“My hypothesis is that the spread of nostalgia had to do not only with dislocation in space but also with the changing conception of time.” – 12

“I distinguish between two main types of nostalgia: the restorative and the reflective. Restorative nostalgia stresses nostos (home) and attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home. Reflective nostalgia thrives on algia (the longing itself) and delays the homecoming—wistfully, ironically, desperately. These distinctions are not absolute binaries, and one can surely make a more refined mapping of the grey areas on the outskirts of imaginary homelands. I want to identify the main tendencies and narrative structures in ‘plotting’ nostalgia, in making sense of one’s longing and loss. Restorative nostalgia does not think of itself as nostalgia, but rather as truth and tradition. Reflective nostalgia dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity. Restorative nostalgia protects the absolute truth, while reflective nostalgia calls it into doubt.” – 13

“Restorative nostalgia is at the core of recent national and religious revivals. It knows two main plots—the return to origins and the conspiracy. Reflective nostalgia does not follow a single plot but explores ways of inhabiting many places at once and imagining different time zones. It loves details, not symbols. At best, it can present an ethical and creative challenge, not merely a pretext for midnight melancholias. This typology of nostalgia allows me to distinguish between national memory that is based on a single version of national identity, on the one hand, and social memory, which consists of collective frameworks that mark but do not define individual memory, on the other hand. The rhetoric of restorative nostalgia is not about “the past,” but rather about universal values, family, nature, homeland, truth. The rhetoric of reflective nostalgia is about taking time out of time and about grasping the fleeing present.” – 13

“To understand restorative nostalgia, it is important to distinguish between the habits of the past and the habits of the restoration of the past. Eric Hobsbawm differentiates between age-old ‘custom’ and nineteenth-century ‘invented’ traditions. New traditions are characterized by a higher degree of symbolic formalization and ritualization than were the actual peasant customs and conventions after which they are patterned. There are two paradoxes here. First, the more rapid and sweeping the pace and scale of modernization, the more conservative and unchangeable the new traditions tend to be. Second, the stronger the rhetoric of continuity with the historical past and emphasis on traditional values, the more selectively the past is usually presented.” – 14

“Restorative nostalgia knows two main plots: the restoration of origins and the conspiracy theory. The conspiratorial worldview reflects a nostalgia for a transcendental cosmology and a simple premodern conception of good and evil.” – 14

“Restoration (from re-staure—re-establish) signifies a return to the original stasis, to the prelapsarian moment. While restorative nostalgia returns and rebuilds one homeland with paranoic determination, reflective nostalgia fears return with the same passion. Instead of recreation of the lost home, reflective nostalgia can foster the creation of aesthetic individuality.
Reflective nostalgia is concerned with historical and individual time, with the irrevocability of the past and human finitude. Re-flection means new flexibility, not the reestablishment of stasis. The focus here is not on the recovery of what is perceived to be an absolute truth, but on the meditation on history and the passage of time.” – 15

“Restorative and reflective nostalgia might overlap in their frames of reference but do not coincide in their narratives and plots of identity. In other words, they can use the same triggers of memory and symbols, the same Proustian madeleine cookie, but tell different stories about it…restorative nostalgia ends up reconstructing emblems and rituals of home and homeland in an attempt to conquer and spatialize time, reflective nostalgia cherishes shattered fragments of memory and temporalizes space. Restorative nostalgia takes itself dead seriously. Reflective nostalgia, on the other hand, can be ironic and humorous. It reveals that longing and critical thinking are not opposed to one another, as affective memories do not absolve one from compassion, judgment, or critical reflection. ” – 15

“Reflective nostalgia does not pretend to rebuild the mythical place called home; it is ‘enamored of distance, not of the referent itself.’ This type of nostalgic narrative is ironic, inconclusive, and fragmentary. Nostalgics of the second type are aware of the gap between identity and resemblance; the home is in ruins or, on the contrary, has just been renovated and gentrified beyond recognition. It is precisely this defamiliarization and sense of distance that drives them to tell their story, to narrate the relationship between past, present, and future. Through that longing, they discover that the past is not that which no longer exists, but, to quote Bergson, the past is something that ‘might act, and will act by inserting itself into a present sensation from which
it borrows the vitality.'” – 15
(Note: see footnotes 12 and 13 for citation info for quoted material)

“reflective nostalgia opens up multiple planes of consciousness.” – 16

“Immigrants understand the limitations of nostalgia and the tenderness of what I call ‘diasporic intimacy,’ which cherishes non-native, elective affinities.” – 16

“Inability to return home is both a personal tragedy and an enabling force.” – 16

“While restorative nostalgia returns and rebuilds one’s homeland with paranoic determination, reflective nostalgia fears return with the same passion. Home, after all, is not a gated community. Paradise on earth might turn out to be another Potemkin village with no exit. The imperative of a contemporary nostalgic is to be homesick and sick of home—occasionally at the same time.” – 18

Quotes taken from: Boym, Svetlana. “Nostalgia and Its Discontents.” The Hedgehog Review 9.2 (2007): 7-18. Google Scholar. Web. 07 August 2013.

Notes: “Why Napster matters to writing: File sharing as a new ethic of digital delivery” by Dànielle Nicole DeVoss and James E. Porter

I wanted to make sure I collected my quotes from this text close to the Lanham text as well. While DeVoss and Porter don’t directly engage in Lanham the way Brooke does, there is still a relationship here that needs to be traced. Many of the copyright and intellectual property issues DeVoss and Porter navigate here speak directly to the predictions made by Lanham. Lanham saw that a print-based model for copyright would prove insufficient and problematic for digital texts and called for reconceiving our systems to account for this; DeVoss and Porter echo this call and offer a model for understanding the ethics of distribution based on networking, particularly P2P networks.

Also, this echoes Trimbur and his work on the circulation of writing based on a Marxist model of circulation.

Notes:
“Rather, the Napster crisis represents a profound cultural shift. Napster matters because it signals a new ‘digital ethic’ of text use and file distribution that runs counter to the usual expectations that have governed the sharing and use of print texts (Jesiek, 2003). Composition teachers need to understand that ethic, which is not just confined to music and movie files shared across peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. The attitudes and expectations students have learned in digital filesharing environments enter our classrooms, influence students’ production and understanding of print texts (not to mention electronic texts), and affect their conception of the rhetorical situation.
From a rhetorical perspective, Napster represents a crisis in delivery, the often-neglected rhetorical canon. Napster has fundamentally changed the national landscape regarding the digital distribution—and thus the delivery—of documents. Napster should matter to writing teachers because it represents a paradigm shift: from an older view of writing as alphabetic text on paper, intended for print distribution, to an emergent and ill-understood view of writing as weaving digital media for distribution across networked spaces for various audiences engaged in different types of reading. Writing is no longer just alphabetic text—writing is also audio and video. And writing is also hypertext and the delivery of multimedia content via the Internet and the Web. And writing is chunks of tagged text and data floating within databases and underneath the Internet in P2P spaces.” – 179

“There is also an economic shift, a shift in terms of the rules and ethics governing the sharing and distribution of writing, what rhetoric has traditionally called delivery. And so delivery is critical to our focus because the revolution is not just hypertext and it’s not just the Internet and it’s not just new media. There is a consequent revolution that has to do with the fundamental rhetoric and ethics of delivery and distribution the very reasons why people write and share their writing in the first place.” – 180

“digital filesharing forms the basis for a new ethic of digital delivery, an ethic that should lead us to reconsider our policies regarding plagiarism and that, in general, we should consider when developing digital composition pedagogies.” – 180

“We thus use the term ‘post-Napster’ to symbolize the death of Napster as it was originally conceived: a space for free filesharing and for consumption not framed by costs and fees but by an ethic of open distribution and collaboration.” – 182

“First, there is widespread confusion as to what constitutes appropriate use of copyright-protected materials—what is owned in spaces where information is freely and openly shared, what is allowable within and across networks that allow entire movies (including those not yet released to theaters) to be downloaded in a matter of hours. Not surprisingly, there is also deep confusion as to what is ‘right’ when using the words and works of another, what ‘counts’ as writing when chunks of text—both text-as-code and text-as-content, not to mention myriad other creations, such as audio and video files—can be copied and digitally moved into a different context and a new document, and where the lines between one person’s work and another’s become electronically blurred through linking practices and by scripting and coding approaches. What is allowable ‘remixing?’ What is Fair Use of digital audio and video? What is a copyright infringement? What is piracy?” – 182

“the cultural and ethical battles lines have been clearly drawn. On the one side we have the fierce protectors of long and strong copyright control of digital material (like the RIAA), arguing that copyright is a necessary mechanism for protecting vested economic interests. On the other side we have an emergent culture of young people (mostly) who live in (and, at times, create) networks encouraging widespread sharing and distribution of digital material. The clash is between a view of the Internet as a mechanism for delivery of goods to market versus a view of the Internet as a public living space.” – 185

“When rhetoric asks questions about audience and purpose—’What is my purpose for writing?’, and ‘who is my audience?’—it is also implicitly asking questions about delivery, economics, copyright, and credit.” – 185

“Think of copyright not as merely an abstruse legal matter. Think of it as a set of guidelines governing the relationship between writers, readers, and publishers. From that standpoint, copyright is—or should be—an essential question of delivery and a key topic of rhetoric.” – 185

“What is important to recognize is that copyright law ‘was created as a policy that balanced the interests of authors, publishers, and readers. It was not intended to be a restrictive property right’ (Vaidhyanathan, 2002). Authors and inventors would enjoy the fruits of their labors ‘for limited times’—and then the writing and discoveries would be freely available for use by society ‘to promote the progress of science and useful arts.’ Copyright law, then, is essentially characterized by a balance: between (a) creating a system of incentive by rewarding the author’s labor and (b) encouraging benefits to society from the flow of information that can stimulate new ideas, inventions, and creations.” – 185

“Copyright law was not framed as an absolute, God-given property right of the individual creator, but as a temporary right.” – 186

“Here [Sandra Day] O’Connor makes very clear that the purpose of copyright is not to reward authors. Rather, rewarding authors is a means toward an end, and that end (‘the primary objective’) is ‘the progress of science and useful arts.’ In short, copyright serves society. What is significant in O’Connor’s statement is that it presumes that copyright and Fair Use favor progress—what is good for society trumps the rewards to a select and small group of creators. Yet, O’Connor’s statement also recognizes a balance: It is important to credit the work of creators in order to motivate creations that benefit society.” – 186

“Copyleftists may favor the broad public use of information, but recognition of the source of creation is core to filesharing; P2P users hardly ever violate this ethic.” – 186

“Authorship and origin, perhaps murky (as the examples above illustrate), are still core to this emergent digital ethic.” – 187

“More importantly, however—and most importantly for this article—Napster has birthed a new digital ethic, a new understanding of intellectual property and ownership for millions of people around the world.” – 187

“A core value in filesharing spaces is credit, respect, giving proper creds.” – 187

“Music aficionados value the work of the artists but resent the price-gouging practices of the producers/distributors.” – 187

“Enter the Internet, and suddenly there is a mechanism in place for broad, immediate, and flawless reproduction of sound. And now the recording industry is in trouble—because the value they add to the product is no longer necessary.” – 188

“The industry is not in trouble. The music and recording industry in the United States is actually thriving in spite of this new technology that would seem to render it obsolete.” – 188

“However, Sony Corporation v. Universal City Studios, Inc. was a core case in determining the Fair Use of technologically captured information. The Supreme Court, ruling in favor of Sony, explained that any individual may reproduce a copyrighted work for a Fair Use” – 188

“Even under their worst-case example, ‘it would take 5,000 downloads to reduce the sales of an album by one copy. After annualizing, this would imply a yearly sales loss of two million albums, which is virtually rounding error, given that 803 million records were sold in 2002.’ (Schwartz, 2004)” – 188, footnotes

“Even before Napster, since the embrace of the World Wide Web by commercial interests in the late-1990s, we have been in the midst of a copyright war—an intellectual property and Fair Use war over digital information. This war puts in opposition two different views of copyright and Fair Use of information, two different economic models of development, and, ultimately, two different rhetorical ideologies” – 189

“The proponents of strict copyright controls favor a view of information as a tangible product; they recognize (rightly) that the technological capability of the individual networked computer is an immense threat to their proprietary control of audio, video, and other forms of digital information.” – 190

“But the copyright changes they are advocating will affect print distribution as well as audio and video filesharing; these changes will limit educational use of electronic material; they will limit the ability of students and teachers to access information for research; and they will stifle criticism, especially criticism of corporate behavior, consumer culture, and economic policy (Benkler, 1999; “Copyright, Plagiarism,” 1998; Gurak & Johnson-Eilola, 1998; Heins, 2002; Kranich, 2004; Mann, Barlow, Stefik, & Lessig, 1998; Schiller, 1989).” – 190

“Given their view of the Internet, these content controllers need to constrain digital producers (e.g., writers) and push them into a passive consumer role, which they do through two means: (1) through the design of passive point-and-click websites and other ‘interactive’ media, which are an attempt to condition user response toward consumerism and (2) through lobbying, legislation, and threats of litigation, which are attempts to control the renegade audience, the illegal hyperlinker, and the rampant music downloader.” – 190

“They portray the individual participant as a ‘hacker’ or ‘pirate’—the insurgent whose acts of production are really acts of theft. ‘Good users’ are those who passively consume, respect intellectual property, and pay per use. ‘Bad users’ are those who produce parody websites, or who hyperlink without permission, or who distribute and download content without paying for it.” – 190

“As they see it, the Internet is occupied by a wild race of inhabitants—hackers, pirates, and cyberpunks who embrace anti-American slogans such as ‘information wants to be free’ and ‘let the music play’—dangerous electronic vandals with no respect for intellectual property, corporate security, or economic growth. They show no respect for property lines; they ‘steal’ audio, video, and texts and redistribute them wantonly, thus showing disdain for an economic model that insists on measuring the value of information by its cost. They co-opt images for their own political and satirical purposes. They disrespect MickeyMouse. These cyber radicals—we might call them ‘digital content producers,’ perhaps even ‘writers’—see the Internet as a free space to be ‘surfed’ by all for purposes of enjoyment, recreation, political discussion, and education. They have a primitive notion of space and property, a naive conception of economics, and an outmoded sense of what will motivate content production.” – 191

“On the other side of the political spectrum we have small business, small Web publishers, librarians, and public interest groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, which hold to a very different view of the Internet, seeing it as a public commons, as a freely accessible space for citizens to share information and exercise their right to participate in the shaping of public policy. They are working actively to protect the potential of the Internet as a democratizing space…Theirs is a pro-active and policy-driven approach to technology that aims to change the terms in which technology development is typically couched.” 192

“These others (we might call them the ‘cyberlibertarians’) want networks—especially the Internet, which is the network—preserved for the public welfare; they want a ‘free net.’ The Internet of course is not free: It was originally created and has been paid for by U.S. citizens’ tax dollars and is thus, in some senses, a publicly owned, shared space. This public advocacy approach represents an attempt to create a certain kind of public space. That is, these advocates are attempting to influence technology design, not via technical approaches to system design, but via law and technology policy—to create the kind of Internet that would promote the emergence of a critical, involved, participatory audience” – 192

“Lessig argued that a robust public reserve is vital to innovation, creativity, and originality. New work grows out of old work” – 192

“This cyberlibertarian notion of the cultural commons has much in common with the rhetorical principles that we know as collaboration and intertextuality. People do not make new works out of nothing. They borrow and intertextually stitch and massage fragments into new works. Writing is not an isolated act of individual genius, as the romantic view of authorship would have us believe (Porter, 1986). The act of writing is fundamentally collaborative, fundamentally social, and fundamentally reliant on an existing repertoire of ‘texts’ (broadly defined) existing in a community or culture.” – 193

“But piracy does have its own limits, rules, ethics and those are the conventions that we need to understand within the realm of digital writing.” – 193

“We are also arguing for an expanded notion of delivery, one that embraces the politics and economics of publishing: the politics of technology development as they impact production and distribution, and the politics of information” – 194

“A renewal of interest in delivery requires that we take up the question of ‘economies of
writing.’ Economics has to do with money, but not only money. It has to do more broadly with value, exchange, and capital; with production and consumption of goods; with giving, receiving, and sharing; with purpose, desire, and motivation; with the distribution of resources, products, and services; and with the systems of understanding that people rely on when they engage in such activities. Writing—all writing, we would say—resides in economic systems of value, exchange, and capital, and we want to recommend that rhetorical theory take up questions regarding ‘economies of writing.'” – 194

“The development of Internet writing in its various manifestations (Web sites, email, multimedia, instant messaging) is dissolving the traditional gap between writing and publishing.” – 195

“You have on your desk, sitting in front of you, the capacity to compete with the publishing regime, even to overthrow it. You have a networked computer with a copy–paste function, with the capacity to download and upload files, and, if you have broadband Internet access, with the means to distribute and access a wide variety of information (text, graphics, audio, video) globally, quickly, and relatively easily.” – 195

“Delivery is the canon that could allow us to connect concerns about, say, audience and Web design with questions about the economics of publishing and the politics of information—and it provides a space for teachers and scholars of Rhetoric/Composition to contribute to the debate about information law and policy, including the intellectual property debates.” – 196

“In the digital, copy-and-paste, information-rich, post-Napster age, we must renegotiate our personal and institutional approaches to plagiarism. If we don’t do so, we will flounder in the face of digital possibilities rather than take advantage of them, and we will miss the moments in which we can best cultivate critical, appropriate understandings of delivery and digital ethics among ourselves and the students in our classrooms.” – 197

“The plagiarism policies and detect-and-punish approaches of many writing teachers and almost all academic honesty policies align well with approaches to information as owned, controlled, and carefully distributed.” – 198

“Clearly, even in the face of postmodern approaches to authorship and changing dynamics of collaboration and text production, removing another author’s name and replacing it with your own is wrong. But there’s also nothing in the ‘Protection of Scholarship and Grades’ document that suggests that teachers very narrowly define collaboration, prohibit the appropriate use of sources, or consider it part of their academic work to ferret out possible plagiarists.” – 198

“In fact, Rhetoric/Composition has a long legacy of discussions and tools available to us so that we can better understand issues of intellectual property as they affect our worklives and our teaching.” – 199

“Lunsford(1999) suggested that we tackle the difficult work of creating, enacting, and promoting ‘alternative forms of agency and ways of owning that would shift the focus from owning to owning up; from rights and entitlements to responsibilities […] and answerability; from a sense of the self as radically individual to the self as always in relation’ (p.535). Lunsford’s claim provides an initial framework for creating space in today’s digital, corporate, globalized world for the subjectivity of writers, writers who own up, who attend to the responsibilities they face as writers, and who answer and are answerable to the texts that they produce” – 199

“The Fair Use doctrine limits the exclusive rights of copyright holders, allowing certain individuals to fairly use copyright protected work. Fair Use fits well as a framework from which we can encourage students, as Lunsford suggested, to focus on owning up and to approach writing tasks with an understanding of the responsibilities of being answerable for one’s choices, uses, and citations.” – 199
(Note: See footnotes on this page for further discussion of Fair Use)

“Plagiarism is, we argue, beside the point; the key issue of digital ethics in a post-Napster world is sharing and Fair Use. As we see it, the purpose of writing is not to reward the author, or for the author to gain prestige, credit, wealth, and fame. Author reward is a means and not an end. To borrow some language from the U.S. Constitution, the purpose of writing is to promote, for the common good, the progress of the sciences and useful arts; to improve society; to help people live their lives; to expand their knowledge, to excite their imagination, to ease their anxieties; to help them live, grow, survive, and thrive. In other words, the ultimate aim of writing lies in its ethical effects: to improve society, inform individuals, expand knowledge, assist communities, and so on.
Given this sense of aim, an ethic of Fair Use based on reciprocal filesharing promotes these broad goals, not a negative ethic of plagiarism and punishment, but a positive ethic that promotes collaboration, sharing, and Fair Use. Writing is an act of sharing and borrowing as well as of creating. When ever you write, you borrow ideas, phrases, images, sounds, details from others—and then you weave those pieces into a new cloth and onto new fabric and with new threads and that becomes ‘your’ writing.” – 200

“The ethic we describe here requires an acknowledgment of collaboration—and in that respect the new digital ethic is not so very different from the old print ethic, or at least it doesn’t seem to be different. However, the difference lies in the purpose for acknowledgment.” – 200

“The new digital ethic has a different orbit of delivery, ethic of use, of territory, and of ownership.” – 200

“we believe it is a positive ethic of filesharing and not how it is usually described as a criminal act of piracy.” – 201

“The ethic we are describing here corresponds to Pekka Himanen’s (2001) and others’ positive notion of ‘hackers’ as programmers and other information developers who believe that ‘information sharing is a positive good, and that it is an ethical duty of hackers to share their expertise by writing free software and facilitating access to information and to computing resources wherever possible” (Himanen, vii).” – 201

“Teaching a positive ethics of sharing is important to teach a balanced approach to and understanding of copyright, not just to teach respect for others’ work (granted, this is important) but also to teach respect for access, for Fair Use, and for the public domain—in other words, the flip side of copyright, the side that we don’t hear about from the recording industry or the MPAA. Yes,we need to teach students to ‘avoid plagiarism’ and to respect the labor of others, but we also just as vigorously need to teach students to defend and contribute to the public domain, to encourage Fair Use of others’ material, and to share their work as widely as possible.” – 202

“Teach not just a rhetoric of audience and purpose, but an “economics of rhetoric” in
conjunction with a theory of digital delivery.” – 202, emphasis in original

“Our composition pedagogies need to emphasize the question of value—of why it is people write, produce, interact, and disseminate ideas in writing on the Internet. Perhaps this is one of our most important next steps and future directions as a field. We need to continue to delve into the various digital spaces in which people shape their identities, exert subjectivities, and write themselves into the world. And we also need to dig deeper into the structures and laws at play in these digital spaces to better understand how it is ownership can be rewritten and Fair Use can be protected.” – 203

Quotes taken from: DeVoss, Dànielle Nicole and James E. Porter. “Why Napster matters to writing: File sharing as a new ethic of digital delivery.” Computers and Composition 23 (2006): 178–210. Science Direct. Web. 05 August 2013.

Notes: “Perspective: Notes Toward the Remediation of Style” by Collin Brooke

I wanted to post this right after posting about Lanham since Brooke’s piece is in conversation with Lanham’s. Brooke expands upon Lanham’s bistable model of looking at vs. looking through a text to include looking from, creating a tristable model instead.

One large takeaway is that Booke makes note that this is a multimedia version of a chapter in a longer work. While Brooke creates a version of a chapter that is multimodal, I plan on creating a chapter that is multimodal, that won’t exist in a traditional form. However, the way he notes this could be a model for digital publication of that chapter (look into submitting to Enculturation?). The inclusion of the notes page that explains how this presentation works may be helpful in aiding how to interact with the text, but I’m also concerned that explaining how it works takes away from discovering how the text functions.

I’ve highlighted the portions of the slide I’m particularly interested in with either a green underline or box (for an entire “paragraph”).

Notes:

Screenshots taken from: Brooke, Collin. “Perspective: Notes Toward the Remediation of Style.” Enculturation: Special Multi-journal Issue on Electronic Publication 4.1 (2002). Web. 12 August 2013.

Notes: “The Electronic Word: Literary Study and the Digital Revolution” by Richard A. Lanham

What’s interesting about Lanham’s text is his general accuracy in hypothesizing how we would engage with technology. He clearly understood that the emergence of electronic texts would call for redefinitions of what it is to do English. This is particularly complicated because technology begins to blend all modes of art and communication together. Specifically, Lanham is concerned with the following question: How does one engage with reading, writing, and teaching literature in a digital age? For Lanham, the answer is a turn to studying and teaching the underlying rhetoric(s) of communication.

Notes:
“Digitized communication is forcing a radical realignment of the alphabetic and graphic components of ordinary textual communication.” – 265

“perhaps the most immediate, certainly the most immediately felt, effect of the electronic word has come in the area of intellectual property. Copyright law emerged to establish a market for printed text. In a world of electronic word and image, literally every fundamental principle of that law, and hence of that marketplace, must be renegotiated.” – 266

“‘Reading’ would not, except in its learning stages, be a self-conscious, rule-governed, recreative act but an intuitive skill exercised on the way to thought.” – 266

“The best style is the style not noticed; the best manners, the most unobtrusive; convincing behavior spontaneous and unselfconscious.” – 266

“Electronic typography is both creator-controlled and reader-controlled” – 266

“I can create and maintain a purely transparent verbal surface, but I need not. And as literary scholars above all should know, where the verbal creative spirit has room to play, play it will.” – 267

“Desktop publishing, as this kind of razzle-dazzle is called, has turned a lot of commercial practices and relationships upside down along with our traditional notions of literary and cultural decorum. The textual surface is now a malleable and self-conscious one. All kinds of production decisions have now become authorial ones. The textual surface has become permanently bistable. We are always looking first AT it and then THROUGH it, and this oscillation creates a different implied ideal of decorum, both stylistic and behavioral. Look THROUGH a text and you are in the familiar world of the Newtonian Interlude, where facts were facts, the world just ‘out there,’ folks sincere central selves, and the best writing style dropped from the writer as ‘simply and directly as a stone falls to the ground,’ just as Thoreau counseled. Look AT a text, however, and we have deconstructed the Newtonian world into Pirandello’s and yearn to ‘act naturally.’ We have always had ways of triggering this oscillation, but the old ways-printing prose consecutively and verse not, layering figures of sound and arrangement on the stylistic surface until it squeaked-were clumsy, slow, unchangeable, and above all author- controlled. And we used them sparingly because the final aim was stable transparency. Make these changes electronically and the oscillations alter radically in frequency and wavelength. The chain reaction goes critical. The difference is profound.” – 267

“The whole work thus snowballs into electronic orality, changes and grows as it moves from one screen and keyboard to another.” – 268
(Note: This is in reference to interactive fiction, but I think this can be applied to non-fiction as well. It touches upon collaborative, digital texts in general.)

“Into all these interactive environments the literary imagination, the fictional impulse, enters vitally. The personal computer has thus proved already to be a device of intrinsic dramaticality. This dramaticality will now inform a reader’s re-creation of electronic literary text.” – 268
(Note: May have to read more Lanham. This is not only helpful with electronic element of thesis, but he is also touching upon performativity/theatre connections I wish to establish.)

“An ever-varying chameleon text forever eludes definitive explanation, as the Decons would have it, but it also invites rearrangements that would allow the Cons to have their way with it” – 269
(Note: Decons/Cons = Deconstructionists/Constructionists)

“No ‘final cut’ means, finally, no conventional endings, or beginnings or middles either” – 269

“We have been made to see the assumptions that come with a book more clearly: it is authoritative and unchangeable, transparent and unselfconscious, read in silence and, if possible, in private. And we see the particular kind of literary and cultural decorum, and hence self and society, it implies much more clearly too. This self-consciousness about the codex book will prompt basic rearrangements in literary history, and these rearrangements may not be restricted to the age of print” – 270

“Literary history, that is, like literature and literary criticism, is being changed both forward and backward.” – 270

“So used are we to thinking black- and-white, continuous printed prose the norm of conceptual utterance, that it has taken a series of theoretical attacks and technological metamorphoses to make us see it for what it is: an act of extraordinary stylization, of remarkable, expressive self-denial” – 271

“Obviously these pressures will not destroy prose, but they may change its underlying decorum. And perhaps engender, at long last, a theory of prose style as radical artifice rather than native transparency.” – 271

“Imagine a major “textbook,” continuing over a generation, continually in touch with all the teachers who use it, continually updated and rewritten by them as well as by the ‘authors,’ with the twenty-four-hour electronic bulletin boards and the other one-to-one devices of communication such a network inevitably stimulates. Imagine a department faculty collaborating to produce a full on-line system of primary and secondary texts, with supporting pedagogical apparatus, to be collectively updated and enhanced; it might encourage a real, and nowadays rare, collegiality.” – 272

“Nowhere does technological pressure fall more intensely than on the relation between the arts. Digitization gives them a new common ground, a quasi-mathematical equivalency that recalls the great Platonic dream for the unity of all knowledge. Digitization both desubstantiates a work of art and subjects it to perpetual immanent metamorphosis from one sense-dimension to another.” – 273

“This changed essential location pushes images some distance toward the ontological status of words.” – 273

“Digital equivalency means that we can no longer pursue literary study by itself; the other arts will form part of literary study in an essential way.” – 273

“Creator, notator, editor/critic, and performer all fuse into the same creative source.” – 274

“Once an image has been digitized, it can be metamorphosed endlessly.” – 274

“In the digital light of these technologies, the disciplinary boundaries that currently govern academic study of the arts dissolve before our eyes, as do the administrative structures which enshrine them. It is not only the distinction between the creator and the critic which dissolves, but the walls between painting and music and sculpture and architecture and literature. Might not they all, like a Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk, finally find a common literary reality as drama, just as Cage so long ago predicted? The very volatility of it all, the relentless dramaticality of such continual modeling, might bring it about.” – 275
(Note: Ties into performativity. People understand world through drama and performance.)

“And because all the arts face the same technological pressures, they are going to find, create, new relationships through that technology, through their new digital equivalences.” – 275

“But the shock created by aleatory techniques marks only the beginning of the change in attitudes required by the digital metamorphosis of the arts and letters. For the same technological pressures on how past literature will be ‘read’ and metamorphosed in the reading will bear upon the art and music of the past.” – 275

“The digitization of the arts answers both desperations. What will emerge finally, I think, is a new rhetoric of the arts, an unblushing and unfiltered attempt to plot all the ranges of formal expressivity now possible, however realized and created by whom- (or what-) ever. This rhetoric will make no invidious distinctions between high and low culture, commercial and pure usage, talented or chance creation, visual or auditory stimulus, iconic or alphabetic information. And rather than outlaw self-consciousness, it will plot the degree of it in an artistic occasion.” – 276

“If a style works, if it creates the transparent illusion, it is decorous.” – 276

“We can define an artistic occasion in terms of object, perceiver, reality perceived, or animating motive. A text or painting can present itself as ‘realistic,’ a transparent window to a preexisting world beyond, and thus fall at the left end of the ‘Object’ spectrum; or it can present itself frankly as an invention, as pure fantasy, and thus choose the right extreme. We can choose to read or view in the same way: either we assume that the object is ‘real’ and stand to the left, or that it is ‘art’ and stand to the right. The object will invite a certain placement but we can decline the invitation, ‘read’ a fantasy as if it were a realistic description of a world as yet unknown, if we like. The social reality presented by the object can be pure human biogrammar, an act as natural and unthinking as a mother’s love for her child, or as self-conscious as an actress playing the same scene, or it can be some kind of ‘ordinary reality’ halfway between. We can plot the motival structure which animates the object we see, or our viewing of it, or the creation of the object, on a spectrum which runs from the most intense competition for hierarchical ranking to the most spontaneous, gratuitous behavior which we perform just for the hell of it, because the performative muscles want to fire; careerism at the left, saintly simplicity at the right. Ordinary life, or perhaps I should say ‘Ordinary Life,’ mostly falls in the middle of these spectra.” – 276

“We can plot the range and, with a dynamic electronic version of the matrix, the frequency of the oscillation as well. We can, that is, do what experimental humanism has spent much of the twentieth century striving to do-substitute experiment and observation for authoritative critical guesswork.” – 277

“It stems from the play impulse. Or from ludic contention. It is good only when you don’t notice it or, in Wildean inversion, only when you do. It is ‘real’ only when it refers to the world of myth, or to self-conscious social drama, or to the mixed reality of ‘ordinary life’ in between. Meaning is always in the reader, always in the text, or always in between. Such exclusive fixes across the matrix have always been hopelessly inadequate to the full range of artistic expression, but the digitization of the arts shows us how silly they really are.” – 277
(Note: It = the arts)

“Electronic media make us aware of just how complex a measurement of bistable decorum can be. Indeed, always has been. But the parameters of this matrix are now user-definable. We will be able not only to see them more clearly than heretofore but to manipulate them.” – 278

“For bistable decorum is not only the premise of electronic text, it has been the fundamental premise of rhetorical education from the Greeks onward.” – 278

“Rhetoric becomes, through the digital equivalences such a matrix can plot, a general theory for all the arts. And thus the central structure for a central curriculum in the arts and letters.” – 278

“Technological change, then, is forcing disciplined literary study to look outward to the changing literacy in the world around us. If the codex book is being revolutionized, surely we must ponder this process. We cannot preserve Western culture in pickle. It must be recreated in the technologies of the present, especially if these technologies prove more condign to that preprint part of it which is oral and rhetorical. And surely we are impelled to this outward view by even the most fashionable and inward of our current activities, literary theory in all its manifestations. Theory is really rhetorical practice, as we are becoming increasingly aware, part of a returning rhetorical paideia which began with the didacticism of Futurism and Dada and has been colonizing the humanities and social sciences ever since.” – 279

“Preoccupation with game and play, which figures so strongly in experimental humanism from Futurism to the present day, has surrounded the computer from the beginning.” – 279
(Note: This is in support of Lanham calling the computer the “ultimate postmodern work of art”)

“At the center of the electronic word stands a denial of nature; copia can be kept and yet given
away.” – 280

“Our whole ethics of quotation, and the stylist formulae that embody it, is called into question by electronic media.” – 281

“To litigate a copyright case you must have a ‘final cut,’ a fixed version, upon which to base your arguments. What if there isn’t any? The dilemma goes to a yet deeper distinction. Intellectual property in words may never have been rooted in a substance, an essence, but we could fool ourselves most of the time that it was.” – 281

“The electronic word has no essence, no quiddity, no substance of this sort. It exists in potentu, as what it can become, in the genetic structures it can build. It is volatile not only in how it is projected onto an electronic screen but in how it works in the world. In both places, its essence is dynamic rather than static. How do we invest an intellectual property in an intellectual potentiality? Not in what something is but what something may become, the uses to which it may be put?” – 281

“Electronic information, as Stewart Brand has said in The Media Lab, wants to be free. To make sure that it does flow freely in the world of literary study, we will have to create a new marketplace based on a new conception of intellectual property and copyright protection, and make sure that the Constitutional guarantees of free speech made good in the print world prevail here too.” – 282

“Whatever happens, our sense of what ‘publication’ means is bound to change. We will be able to make our commentary part of the text, and weave an elaborate series of interlocked commentaries together. We will, that is, be moving from a series of orations to a continuing conversation and, as we have always known, these two rhetorics differ fundamentally” – 284

“The electronic word democratizes the world of arts and letters in far more ways than I can sketch here, but the political direction of the technological force is strong and unmistakable; value structures, markets ideological as well as financial and theoretical, will be reassessed.” – 285

“The electronic word, as we have seen, asks this question-What business are we really in?-in equally forceful technological terms. It also suggests at least some tentative answers. If our business is general literacy, as some of us think, then electronic instructional systems offer the only hope for the radically leveraged mass instruction the problems of general literacy pose. If we are in any respect to pretend that ‘majoring in English,’ or any other literature, and all that it implies, teaches our students how to manipulate words in the world of work, then we must accommodate literary study to the electronic word in which that world will increasingly deal.” – 285

“The computer modeling which now stands central to social and scientific thinking of all sorts is a dramatic, that is to say a literary, technique through and through. Such techniques, used throughout the creative thought of a society, imply precisely the self-conscious dramatic conception of public reality which we now see advanced across the whole spectrum of the social and humane sciences.” – 286

“Pixeled print destabilizes the arts and letters in an essentially rhetorical way, returns them to that characteristic oscillation between looking AT symbols and looking THROUGH them which the rhetorical paideia instilled as a native address to the world” – 286

“That characteristic grasp has been bistable, alternatively unselfconscious and purposive, and self-conscious and contemplative. It is this Thucydidean alternation of speech and narrative patterns and psychologies which has undergirded classical literature almost from its beginnings” – 286

“Experimental humanism aimed to convert the Arnoldian foregone conclusions into an open-ended experimentality; to galvanize the silent and impassive audience into interaction; to invoke the medium as self-conscious condition of the message; to expose scaling changes as movements to a different register of meaning; to precipitate game and play out of pompous purpose and plead directly to them; to readmit chance to the role it has always played in the human drama; to make war on taste in order to find out what kind of censor it really was; and through all these radically to democratize the arts. To return us, that is, from a closed poetic to an open rhetoric. The electronic word, as pixeled upon a personal computer screen, reinforces all these purposes, literalizes them in a truly uncanny way.” – 287

“They are asking us to reconceive literary study, to think of it as permeating society in the way literary rhetoric has always done in the West, but with new technologies and through new administrative arrangements. We are being asked to explain just how the humanities humanize.” – 287

“We are free to think about, and plan for, literary creation and literary study in ways more agile, capacious, and hopeful than any generation has possessed since literature began to figure in human life. And we must do so, we must learn to think systemically. Technology is sending, finally, the same message being broadcast by society’s demands upon us and by our own thinking: We must take into our disciplinary domain the world of general literacy upon which literature depends, a world whose existence up to now we have simply assumed.” – 288

Quotes taken from: Lanham, Richard A. “The Electronic Word: Literary Study and the Digital Revolution.” New Literary History 20.2 (1989): 265-290. JSTOR. Web. 10 August 2013.

Notes: “Actio: A Rhetoric of Manuscripts” by Robert J. Connors

I was hoping and expecting this to be something that it wasn’t. While it may not be super helpful in my own theorization, it may come in handy during my lit review to show how narrow delivery has been viewed in the past (article is 30 years old and feels dated).

Notes:
“In this paper I wish to examine the concept of actio as it relates to the writer. The canon of delivery has to do simply with the manner in which the material is delivered. In written discourse this means only one thing: the format and conventions of the final manuscript as it is sent in, handed in, or given up.” – 64 (emphasis in original)
(note to self: Connors’ view is exceptionally narrow. Format and conventions are part of how writing is delivered, but style, mode, form, and temporality are also part of this.)

“That question of effectiveness has to do with ethical appeal, for the realm of actio is the realm of ethos much more than of logos or pathos. By presenting the reader with a legible, neat, pleasing manuscript, the writer is creating an image of herself for that reader, an image that can support or sabotage her message.” – 65

“Attention to the tenents of actio can make certain that both writer and speaker are able to present their messages in the most effective way.” – 72 (sic)

Quotes taken from: Connors, Robert J.”Actio: A Rhetoric of Manuscripts.” Rhetoric Review 2.1 (1983): 64-73. JSTOR. Web. 2 August 2013.

Response: “Composition and the Circulation of Writing” by John Trimbur

I like that this article is predicated on the idea that the current composition models in schools doesn’t necessarily serve how we want our students to think about and engage in writing. I’m not sure Trimbur really gets to any real conclusions in order to help mitigate this, but his insistence on including how writing circulates into the composition process is important. It’s a clear call to prioritize delivery.

Notes and reactions:
“My point here does not have to do with what amounts to a fair policy on late papers but rather with what is contained in my usual response or, better put, what is silenced when I say ‘I don’t want to hear it.’…If my response is a typical one-and I believe it is reasonable to think so- then we might stop to consider what is at stake and the extent to which such pedagogical practices erase the materiality of writing. To say, as I have, ‘I just want the paper,’ suggests that the student’s words alone are what count and to identify writing with the creative moment of composing, thereby isolating an education in writing from the means of production and delivery.” – 189
This is problematic. I think back to my own composition instruction, and there have been countless moments where I’ve uttered this response. Granted, working with high schoolers, deadlines were more so a function to teach responsibility, accountability, and time management: life skills many students, sadly, do not receive at home. But the side effects of such an imposition on the writing process are profound. It pulls focus to the content of the piece and hides questions and concerns of production.
One contention I have with how Trimbur frames this, however, is that he separates production from delivery in this statement. I don’t see delivery as being different from production in such a way. Questions of production often become concerns of delivery. This isn’t to say that every question related to production is in the realm of delivery; rather, delivery is a central concern in any rhetorical consideration, and many questions of production are questions about delivery. In other words, inherent in any concerns of delivery are questions about production.

“the isolation results in part from the pressures and limits of classroom life and the overdetermined social relations between teachers and students. But there is also a conceptual separation of the canons of rhetoric operating in writing instruction that has isolated delivery (and memory, as well) from invention, arrangement, and style.” – 189
This is something I will have to look into deeper. Part of my thesis will be to look back at historic understandings and portrayals of delivery. No doubt this canonical separation has affected an understanding of what it is to compose. I think part of my work will be to show how there is a give and take between the canons, a flow, a symbiosis, that is centered around delivery.

“By privileging composing as the main site of instruction, the teaching of writing has taken up what Karl Marx calls a ‘one-sided’ view of production and thereby has largely erased the cycle that links the production, distribution, exchange, and consumption of writing. This cycle of interlocked moments is what Marx calls circulation.” – 190
Trimbur uses circulation and delivery interchangeably in his article, and this is the excerpt to best support his reasoning. I personally think they cannot be used interchangeably, because circulation is simply one aspect of delivery. That being said, concerns of circulation ARE concerns of delivery, so I understand Trimbur’s choice. However, I would caution against using these terms interchangeably outside the context of this paper because delivery is concerned with more than just circulation.

“In writing instruction, however, delivery has been an afterthought at best, assigned mainly to technical and professional communication and associated largely with such matters of document design as page layout, typography, visual display of information, and Web design. Delivery, that is, appears for the most part to be a technical issue about physical presentation whether in oral, print, or electronic forms.” – 190
So here we have a second concern of delivery. Traditionally, delivery is concerned with “physical presentation.” Add to this circulation/distribution, and we already can see how delivery touches a vast majority of the composition process.

“Public forums are diffuse, fragmented, and geographically separated. Speech is both literally and metaphorically broadcast through expanded means of communication. To my mind, delivery can no longer be thought of simply as a technical aspect of public discourse. It must be seen also as ethical and political-a democratic aspiration to devise delivery systems that circulate ideas, information, opinions, and knowledge and hereby expand the public forums in which people
can deliberate on the issues of the day” – 190
This could be helpful in my thesis. If we look at the content/information itself as being primarily concerned with logos, than it’s through delivery that ethos and pathos are mitigated. The same content can be delivered in multiple ways, and how that content is delivered is shaped by ethical and emotional appeals. More so, these appeals are dictated largely by the audience in question, which complicates the equation further.

“My argument is that with the democratic evolutions of the modern age, delivery must be seen as inseparable from the circulation of writing and the widening diffusion of socially useful knowledge” – 191
Agreed.

“While these kinds of assignments do begin to address the problem of circulation in interesting ways, they depend nonetheless on a dichotomy between schooled and “real” writing that rejects
the private space of the classroom/home in the name of an unproblematical, immediately available public writing…Moreover, counterposing the ‘real world’ to the classroom draws upon a gendered separation of spheres that fails to see how the public and private merge in the domestic space of the middle-class family.” – 195
This is in response to “real world” writing assignments. While the family metaphor feels a bit much to me in this essay, what this quote does highlight is the merging of public and private space, which goes well beyond middle-class families. Given current technological conditions, I would argue that the lines between public and private space have blurred, problematizing these categorizations in ways previously impossible. For example, from the privacy of one’s own home, an individual can engage with social networking; this brings the public sphere into the home. Conversely, technology with app integrations allows for an individual to interact with elements of his or her home (lights, thermostat, even deadbolts) using a smartphone from anywhere in the world, granting control of the domestic even when working within the private sphere. With the boundaries complicated as such, the idea of writing as either a private OR public activity is antiquated. Instead, we need an understanding of texts that focuses on its dual nature of being both public and private at once. What does this mean for “school” and “real world” writing?

“The problem remains: how to imagine writing as more than just the moment of production when meaning gets made. How can we see writing as it circulates through linked moments of production, distribution, exchange, and consumption?” – 196
Composing with delivery in mind forces the composer to engage in the process of production, distribution, exchange, and consumption.

“By Johnson’s account, the notion of circulation enables us to see how cultural products pass through a range of meanings and uses as they are taken up at various points in the social
formation.” – 196
And this range of meanings should be anticipated, to a degree, by the composer. This echoes what DeVoss and Ridolfo dub “Rhetorical Velocity.”

“Imagining cultural forms and products circulating through a continuous cycle of relatively autonomous but interlocked moments has some important consequences. For one thing, it enables Johnson to challenge the assumption that the meaning of a message or cultural product can be inferred directly and unproblematically from either its moment of production or its textual manifestation without taking into account the conditions of circulation… And it also calls into question the tendency inherited from literary studies to constitute cultural forms and products simply as “texts” that can be analyzed, critiqued, and demystified by the expert readings of specialist critics” – 197
I agree with the first part of this statement: the meaning of a text cannot be inferred simply from the product itself. The process of meaning-making must account for conditions of not only circulation but composition as well. Meaning is not isolated within the text itself (like the new critics believed). It is a complex process that involves a wide variety of considerations. However, I do think all cultural forms and products are texts that can be analyzed and critiqued (though not necessarily demystified). Now, this analysis doesn’t have to be done by an expert; in fact, the one of the primary aims of education should be teaching people how to read and analyze all forms of text because this is essential to navigate daily life. But everything we are surrounded by communicates a message, thus it is a text in some form.

“My point is that by fixating at one moment on the circulation of cultural forms-by imagining culture to be a ‘text’ capable of being read-cultural studies writing assignments and classroom practices once again (and in loco parentis) called on the active meaning-making student to
give an interpretive account.” – 199
Yes, but interpretation is imperative to how we understand the world. Period. We should be calling upon students to make meaning in their interpretations, but this action hardly fixates on one moment. On the contrary, in order to make meaning, in order to interpret, one must engage in an endless series of moments that begins before the textual product itself ever comes into existence, and once it does, extends infinitely into the future, growing and changing in time.

“By assigning all the agency to the audience, the ‘new revisionists’ have made it virtually impossible to mount any kind of critique of the media-to ask, for instance, how corporate control of the means of communication promotes certain cultural forms and marginalizes others, not to mention how the ‘active audience’ itself is packaged and sold as a commodity (the ‘market share’
of viewers) to advertisers. The problem is not just that the ‘new revisionists’ have overemphasized the agency of the audience and popular practices of consumption. In effect, by doing so, they have severed the relation between production and consumption altogether, viewing the use of cultural norms and products in isolation from the social conditions that formed them” – 201
Yes, this does highlight the danger of assigning all agency to the audience. What needs to be addressed is how the audience’s agency changes. It’s clearly not the same for every text, and I would assume that form, mode, and temporalities govern the degree of agency for a given audience.

“In his formulation, the ‘active audience’ is not always ‘right’ or ‘in control.’ Instead, for Hall, viewers’ responses are open but not indeterminate, bounded by the pressures and limits of messages encoded at the point of production according to the prevailing ‘knowledge-in-use concerning the routines of production, historically defined technical skills, professional ideologies, institutional knowledge, definitions and assumptions, assumptions about the audience and so on’ (“Encoding” 129). Hall hypothesizes three by now familiar positions viewers take as they respond to encoded messages: a dominant-hegemonic position from which the viewer ‘is operating inside the dominant code’ (“Encoding” 136); a negotiated position from which decoding ‘contains a mixture of adaptive and oppositional elements’ (“Encoding” 137); and finally an oppositional position from which decoding ‘detotalizes the message in the preferred code in order to retotalize the message within some alternative framework of reference’ (“Encod-
ing” 138). – 202
This could be very useful, particularly in determining the extent of an audience’s agency. Add this to the reading list.

“One of the striking features of Hall’s encoding/decoding model is how it seeks to represent the receiver as an active agent without giving up on the effectivity of ideology in the process of communication” – 202
See comment above. Also could be useful for navigating the relationship between audience, author, and text.

“But, for Hall, as well as Berlin, the literary legacy of cultural studies and its residual textualism continue to weigh heavily on their work, and the acts of encoding and decoding, writing and reading, production and consumption remain the privileged moments of analysis without adequate attention to the systems through which cultural products and media messages circulate or the transformations they thereby undergo.” – 203
Yes, there is a lack of adequate attention paid to delivery systems, but this isn’t because of textualism. The text still must remain central because communication happens through the text. We need to incorporate into our understanding of how a text is composed and functions concerns of how it is delivered and how delivery impacts the composition and function.

“Marx wanted to explain the various moments in the circulation of commodities- the cycle of production, distribution, exchange, and consumption-not as a series of separate events taking place in a predetermined order over time but dialectically, as mediations in mutual and coterminous relations that constitute the capitalist mode of production as a total system.” – 206
Note this. A dialectic approach may be helpful to include in my work.

“The process of production determines- and distributes-a hierarchy of knowledge and information that is tied to the cultural authorization of expertise, professionalism, and respectability” – 210
Nice little soundbite. Don’t know if I’ll use it, but I want it here just incase.

Quotes taken from:
Trimbur, John. “Composition and the Circulation of Writing.” College Composition and Communication 52.2 (2000): 188-219. JSTOR. Web. 30 July 2013.

Further reading from this article (citations copied from article as is):
Hall, Stuart. “Encoding/Decoding.” Culture, Media, Language. Ed. Stuart Hall et al. London: Hutchinson, 1980. 128-38.

Response: “The World of Wrestling” by Roland Barthes

I am a huge wrestling fan. “Like…WWF and stuff?” Exactly. But not just WWE (as it is now called); small promotions, large promotions, independent wrestling…it matters little. I am simply enamored with the sport/art/medium of storytelling.

But my obsession with wrestling isn’t just for personal entertainment. The rhetorical situation of wrestling is a complex, fascinating amalgamation that is not just worthy of continued study. Wrestling’s simultaneous use of visual, linguistic, kinesthetic, and aural modes of communication make it the perfect medium to stand as the basis for understanding a theory of rhetoric that is focused on multimodal composition.

But before I can begin to theorize exactly how this will fold into my work on re-defining delivery, it’s important to turn to those who have come before me. Roland Barthes’ “The World of Wrestling” is the perfect jumping off point to begin theorizing. It’s also a unique text because one, he is focused on French wrestling (not American or even other European promotions), and two, the artform has both changed yet remained the same since he published this piece in 1972. For the purposes of this post, I plan on simply collecting my initial notes and reactions in one place that I can turn to as I develop these idea further.

Notes and reactions:
“True wrestling, wrongly called amateur wrestling, is performed in second-rate halls, where the public spontaneously attunes itself to the spectacular nature of the contest, like the audience at a suburban cinema.” – 15
This is still absolutely true of independent wrestling today!

“The public is completely uninterested in knowing whether the contest is rigged or not, and rightly so; it abandons itself to the primary virtue of the spectacle, which is to abolish all motives and all consequences: what matters is not what it thinks but what it sees.” – 15
Yes to the first part; the audience does not care that the outcomes are predetermined. This is a condition of the spectacle itself. However, the degree of agency possessed by the audience could complicate this last bit. It does matter what the audience thinks if they are unhappy with how talent is being utilized and what the outcomes are; if these are out of line with what the audience expects from the characters, this relationship becomes complicated. In this case, it matters what it sees AND what it thinks.
Side note: Does the agency of the audience change with its size and range? For instance, does the WWE live audience have more agency because the product is being broadcast globally (often live)? Does a small, independent wrestling audience have less agency because the number of affected patrons is smaller?

“A boxing-match is a story which is constructed before the eyes of the spectator; in wrestling, on the contrary, it is each moment which is intelligible, not the passage of time…Wrestling therefore demands an immediate reading of the juxtaposed meanings, so that there is no need to connect them…wrestling is a sum of spectacles, of which no single one is a function: each moment imposes the total knowledge of a passion which rises erect and alone, without ever extending to the crowning moment of a result.” – 16
It is this demand to immediately read and make sense of the juxtaposition of modes of communication that positions wrestling as a possible model/example for an understanding of how multimodal composition functions. I love the wording of wrestling being a “sum of spectacles,” moments that are complete in their communication but work together to tell a complete story. However, I do think there is a crowning moment of a result, but that result isn’t necessarily for the participants of the fight; rather, the “crowning moment of a result” is for the audience. Much like the theatre of ancient Greece, everything culminates to that cathartic moment; the release of built up tension, pressure, and anticipation. I would argue that this is a crowning moment of a result; it is simply that the result has been determined ahead of time to make the audience feel a particular way.
And how do you craft the story to move the audience in such a way? Delivery! It all comes back to delivery…

“The function of the wrestler is not to win; it is to go exactly through the motions which are expected of him.” – 16
Questions of agency abound here. Who has the agency: The performer? The audience? The promoter? In what combination? Are there different types of agency to consider?

“Wrestling…offers excessive gestures, exploited to the limit of their meaning…a man who is down is exaggeratedly so, and completely fills the eyes of the spectators with the intolerable spectacle of powerlessness.” – 16
Could prove too be a useful soundbite.

“This function of grandiloquence is indeed the same as that of ancient theatre, whose principle, language and props…concurred in the exaggeratedly visible explanation of a Necessity.” – 16
Barthes has also observed the classic principles of theatre present in wrestling. This quote works well with the previous as a good soundbite. Wrestling is a spectacle of excess, so every action must be done to the extreme to leave little to no room for misinterpretation.
Side Note: Subtlety in wrestling? This would be an interesting writing project: talk about how subtlety functions in a form that is not designed to be subtle.

“Each sign in wrestling is therefore endowed with an absolute clarity since one must always understand everything on the spot…the public is overwhelmed with the obviousness of the roles.” – 16
Not sure this is the case anymore. This issue is something that has changed since the public acknowledgement that wrestling outcomes are predetermined. Before this, I do think the roles of the wrestlers were obvious and needed to be. Now, audience agency no doubt comes into the question. Because every member of the audience (of a certain age; I’m sure children do and should believe in the illusion of the spectacle) is in on the story, if a particular wrestler is being misused or pushed in an unfavorable way, the audience has tools available at its disposal to “change” the story, and thus change the roles.
Examples: John Cena – Though he is the face of the company and the quintessential good guy, in many venues, he’ll draw the most boos from the crowd. This is because the audience is tired of the obviousness of his character and is craving just a bit more “reality” from the character.
Stone Cold Steve Austin – Though his actions were those of a bad guy, he became the most popular wrestler on the planet and consistently received the largest cheers because he was so good at the role he played. He wasn’t getting recognized for his work, so the audience, through their participation, forced the promotion’s hand. His character remained the same, he still performed actions that a bad guy would, but this made the audience cheer even more. Here this “obviousness” of the role becomes clouded. (We can also see this happening currently with Dolph Ziggler.)

“classical concept of the salaud, the ‘bastard’ (they key-concept of any wrestling-match)” – 17
Good to note.

“the passionate condemnation of the crowd no longer stems from its judgement, but instead from the very depth of its humours.” – 17
Note: this occurs in a discussion of the physical appearance of the wrestler and how his very look contributes to how his character should be interpreted. The physical is absolutely part of the “obviousness”; a poor “ring look” can contribute to the failure of a character.
Forces at work here: multimodality, visual rhetoric reinforced by kinesthetic rhetoric, reinforced by oral and aural rhetoric.

“It is therefore in the body of the wrestler that we find the first key to the contest.” – 17
Ties into previous quote/comment.

“Wrestlers therefore have a physique as preemptory as those of the characters of the Commedia dell’Arte, who display in advance, in their costumes and attitudes, the future contests of their parts.” – 17
I don’t know why I never made this connection! The connections to classical Greco-Roman theatre are obvious, but there are so many parallels to Commedia as well, particularly in character construction! Absolutely build upon this in the future.

“The physique of the wrestlers therefore constitutes a basic sign, which like a seed contains the whole fight, But this seed proliferates, for it is at every turn during the fight, in each new situation, that the body of the wrestler casts to the public the magical entertainment of a temperament which finds its natural expression in a gesture.” – 18
Kinesthetic and Visual modes of communication are primary in wrestling; the oral/aural and linguistic elements ultimately serve the physical.

“Wrestling is like a diacritic writing: above the fundamental meaning of his body, the wrestler arranges comments which are episodic but always opportune, and constantly help the reading of the fight by means of gestures, attitudes and mimicry which make the intention utterly obvious.” – 18
See previous quote/comment.

“What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself. There is no more a problem of truth in wrestling than in the theatre. In both, what is expected is the intelligible representation of moral situations which are usually private. This emptying out of interiority to the benefit of its exterior signs, this exhaustion of the content by the form, is the very principle of triumphant classical art.” – 18
I would say this is another difference between when Barthes was writing and now; given the breaking of kayfabe and the presence of real personalities coinciding with character, sometimes if that passion is missing from a real persona behind the character, the audience will not connect. Or the opposite, if the passion is genuine, than the wrestler will connect no matter what the story dictates (i.e. Daniel Bryan, Stone Cold Steve Austin).
This being said, can a wrestler “fool” the audience with a convincing image of passion, even if it is not genuine? Yes. But I think it’s much, much harder in today’s social conditions.

“the wrestler’s gesture needs no anecdote, no decor, in short no transference in oder to appear true.” – 19
Ties back into previous observation that a wrestling match is made up of intelligible moments that build into a “sum of spectacles.”

“What is displayed for the public is the great spectacle of Suffering, Defeat, and Justice. Wrestling presents man’s suffering with all the amplification of tragic masks.” – 19
Connection to theatre. Beyond Greco-Roman and Commedia, I think this quote in particular also brings in ties to Medieval theatre and morality plays. Barthes does make some connections between wrestling and religious rhetoric, but I think theatre may be the connecting factor in this discussion.

“a concealed action that was actually cruel would transgress the unwritten rules of wrestling and would have no more sociological efficacy than a mad or parasitic gesture. On the contrary suffering appears as inflicted with emphasis and conviction, for everyone must not only see that the man suffers, but also and above all understand why he suffers. What wrestlers call a hold…has precisely the function of preparing in a conventional, therefore intelligible, fashion that spectacle of suffering, of methodically establishing the conditions of suffering.” – 19
Illusion of suffering, ties back into necessary obviousness of the gesture.

“wrestling is the only sport which gives such an externalized image of torture. But here again, only the image is involved in the game, and the spectator does not with for the actual suffering of the contestant; he only enjoys the perfection of an iconography. It is not true that wrestling is a sadistic spectacle: it is only an intelligible spectacle” – 20
Ties in with previous quote/notes.

“what wrestling is above all meant to portray is a purely moral concept: that of justice: – 21
Ties into theatre discussion.
Side note: Could be a fun side project to explore the outright references to justice that occur in wrestling. Primarily, right now with The Sheild’s success as a faction, calling themselves the “hounds of justice” and making justice their primary concern for ever appearing in the WWE.

“The baser the action of the ‘bastard’, the more delighted the public is by the blow which he justly receives in return.” – 21
Eye-for-an-eye reciprocity. There must be a balance to the actions in the ring (scales of justice?).

“Wrestlers know very well how to play up to the capacity for indignation of the public by presenting the very limit of the concept of Justice, this outermost zone of confrontation where it is enough to infringe the rules a little more to open the gates of a world without restraints.” – 21
Ties into previous two quotes/comments.

“wrestling is above all a quantitative sequence of compensations…This explains why sudden changes of circumstances have in the eyes of wrestling habitués a sort of moral beauty: they enjoy them as they would enjoy an inspired episode in a novel, and the greater the contrast between the success of a move and the reversal of fortune, the nearer the good luck of a contestant to his downfall, the more satisfying the dramatic mime is felt to be.” – 22
Ties back into the audience’s cathartic moment.

“true wrestling derives its originality from all the excesses which make it a spectacle and not a sport.” – 23
I just really like this soundbite. May not get used, but I want it available for quick access.
That being said, I believe it is a spectacle AND a sport. Ever watch two wrestlers grapple? Improv a match, or even just a sequence of moves? Wrestlers are athletes participating in a sporting event. It’s just that his even has very specific rules, one of them being that the story comes first.

“The rhythm of wrestling is quite different, for its natural meaning is that of rhetorical amplification: the emotional magniloquence, the repeated paroxysms, the exasperation of the retorts can only find their natural outcome in the more baroque confusion.” – 23
Ostentatiousness, excessiveness, obviousness. It is a spectacle because of this aspect of the show; it is a sport for the physicality.

“in America wrestling represents a sort of mythological fight between Good and Evil (of a quasi-political nature, the ‘bad’ wrestler always being supposed to be a Red). The process of creating heroes in French wrestling is very different, being based on ethics and not on politics.” – 23
This statement is worth revisiting and researching further. Given the intense global communications of the 21st century, does this still hold? No longer are our villains foreign; in fact, those who target foreigners can be bad guys now (Zeb Coulter). Granted, the Coulter example is also inherently political, so it may not be the best example. However, I think this example shows a move in American wrestling to also create Good and Evil characters based on ethics instead of (or in addition to) politics.

“Such a precise finality demands that wrestling should be exactly what the public expects of it. Wrestlers, who are very experienced, know perfectly how to direct the spontaneous episodes of the fight so as to make them conform to the image which the public has of the great legendary themes of its mythology.” – 24
Delivery.

“In wrestling, nothing exists except in the absolute, there is no symbol, no allusion; everything is presented exhaustively.” – 24
Ties into discussion of obviousness. Also ties into musing about subtly.
Is this complicated in 21st century wrestling? Again, is this different now that the audience has information about the “real” life of a wrestler? Can absolutes exist is such a time?

“What is portrayed by wrestling is therefore an ideal understanding of things; it is the euphoria of men raised for a while above the constitutive ambiguity of everyday situations and placed before the panoramic view of a univocal Nature, in which sign at last correspond to causes, without obstacle, without evasion, without contradiction.” – 25
Love this quote. Not sure how I’ll use it yet (too many possibilities!), but I have a feeling it will be used at some point in my scholarship.

“In the ring, and even in the depths of their voluntary ignominy, wrestlers remain gods because they are, for a few moments, the key which opens Nature, the pure gesture which separates Good from Evil, and unveils the form of a Justice which is at last intelligible.” – 25
See previous comment.

Quotes from: Barthes, Roland. “The World of Wrestling.” Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972. PDF.