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POETIC : REVISING NOTIONS OF POETICS AND RHETORIC FOR

THE FIRST-YEAR CLASSROOM

by

TEGGIN SUMMERS

(Under the Direction of Christy Desmet)

ABSTRACT

Derridean notions of rhetoric’s pharmacological influence in and the

Nietzschean description of poetic’s creative and rhetorical power have not been traditionally acknowledged in the field of composition. This dissertation shows that under Derridean and Nietzschean , rhetoric and poetics are theoretically inseparable. Viewing rhetoric and poetics as one fluid process holds for first-year writing: a revised conception of poetic rhetoric challenges traditional humanistic distinctions that offer limited understandings of the roles that rhetoric and poetics in the formation of . I argue further for a new of writing, the poetically rhetorical essay, which would operate paralogically and resist humanist approaches to writing. Poetic rhetoric is best envisioned in the electronic writing environment where the potential within posthumanism and hypertexts provides an ideal framework for the qualities in writing that are at once full of possible meaning and empty of coherent truth.

INDEX WORDS: Derrida; essay; first-year composition; humanism; Nietzsche;

poetic; poetically rhetorical essay; posthumanism; rhetoric

POETIC RHETORIC: REVISING NOTIONS OF POETICS AND RHETORIC FOR

THE FIRST-YEAR COMPOSITION CLASSROOM

by

TEGGIN SUMMERS

B.S., Virginia Tech, 2001

M.A., Virginia Tech, 2003

A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate of The of Georgia in Partial

Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree

DOCTOR OF

ATHENS, GEORGIA

2008

© 2008

Teggin Summers

All Rights Reserved

POETIC RHETORIC: REVISING NOTIONS OF POETICS AND RHETORIC FOR

THE FIRST-YEAR COMPOSITION CLASSROOM

by

TEGGIN SUMMERS

Major Professor: Christy Desmet

Committee: Michelle Ballif Nelson Hilton

Electronic Version Approved:

Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia December 2008 iv

DEDICATION

This dissertation is dedicated to my husband, Bob Summers, and my son, Taylor

Summers: to Bob, for encouraging me to begin this journey and supporting me along the way, and to Taylor, for having the courtesy of waiting until I was close to finished to

make his entry into this world. Together, you provide the light of my life. v

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to acknowledge the influences of my professors, Dr. Christy Desmet,

Dr. Michelle Ballif, and Dr. Paul Heilker, on the work of this dissertation. The scholarship of these professors has had a profound impact on my own views toward and learning. The efforts of these professors have contributed to my positive academic experience, and have fueled my productive and illuminating journey, and for that I am deeply grateful. vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... v

1. INTRODUCTION ...... 1

Rhetoric Versus Poetics: Distinctions Worth Revisiting? ...... 1

Classical Conceptions of Poetics and Rhetoric ...... 8

Ideological Implications of Humanism ...... 14

Humanism, Rhetoric, and Poetics ...... 20

Poetic Rhetoric and Its Revisions of Old Distinctions ...... 25

Poetic Rhetoric, First-Year Composition, and the Genre of the Essay ...... 27

Poetic Rhetoric in the Electronic Environment ...... 38

Conclusion ...... 41

2. POETIC RHETORIC AND ITS REVISIONS OF OLD DISTINCTIONS ...... 43

Basic Principles of Poetic Rhetoric ...... 43

Poetic Rhetoric as a Form of Third Sophistic Rhetoric ...... 46

Poetics, Rhetoric, and ...... 52

Poetic Rhetoric as it Operates Through ...... 56

Poetic Rhetoric’s Resistance to a Metaphysics of Presence ...... 59

Embracing Poetic Rhetoric Means Accepting a Loss of Subjectivity ...... 66

Poetic Rhetoric as Creative and Generative ...... 70

Implications of Poetic Rhetoric ...... 72 vii

3. POETIC RHETORIC IN THE FIRST-YEAR COMPOSITION CLASSROOM .... 75

Poetics, Rhetoric, First-Year Composition, and the Genre of the Essay ...... 75

Rhetoric and Poetics as Subjugated Other ...... 79

Development of First-Composition: Building Up Walls Between Poetics and Rhetoric

...... 84

Deconstructing the Walls Between Poetics and Rhetoric: Poetic Rhetoric in First-Year

Composition ...... 98

Pedagogical Considerations of Poetic Rhetoric: The Poetically Rhetorical Essay ..... 105

The Poetically Rhetorical Essay: An Example ...... 125

Final Thoughts on the Poetically Rhetorical Essay ...... 130

4. POETIC RHETORIC IN THE ONLINE ENVIRONMENT ...... 135

An Against Print Typography ...... 135

An Argument in Favor of the Electronic Writing Environment ...... 141

Reviewing the Disruption of Distinctions Between Rhetoric and Poetics ...... 152

Digital Technologies’ Enactments of Poetic Rhetoric ...... 155

Multiple Modes of Poetic Rhetoric ...... 161

Electronic Essay ...... 174

5. POETIC RHETORIC: POST HUMANISM AND THE COMPOSITION

CLASSROOM ...... 181

Challenging Humanist by Resisting the Rhetoric and Poetic Dichotomy ... 181

Poetic Rhetoric: A Disruption of Oppositions and the Birth of Prosetics ...... 185

Poetic Rhetoric’s Influence on First-Year Composition and the Genre of the Essay . 189

The E-Essay and Poetic Rhetoric in the Electronic Writing Environment ...... 199 viii

Beyond Humanism: The Posthuman Qualities of Poetic Rhetoric ...... 203

REFERENCES ...... 208

APPENDIX ...... 216

A “INERTIA” ...... 216

1

1. INTRODUCTION

The most immoderate presumption of being able to do anything, as rhetors and stylists, runs through all antiquity in a way that is incomprehensible to us. They control ‘ about things’ and hence the effect of things upon men; they know this. A precondition to be sure was that mankind itself was educated in rhetoric. Basically, even today ‘classical’ higher education still preserves a good portion of this antique view, except that it is no longer oral but its faded image, writing, that emerges as goal. The most archaic factor in our culture is the view that through books and the press is what must be learned by education. However, our public’s basic education stands so incredibly lower than in the Hellenistic-Roman world; that is why results can be achieved only by much clumsier and cruder means and everything elegant is either rejected or arouses distrust – or, at best, it has only its own narrow circle. Friedrich Nietzsche, “History of Greek

Rhetoric Versus Poetics: Distinctions Worth Revisiting?

It might be simple enough to just acknowledge that, in general terms, the poetic

represents , in its multitude of forms. If we were to accept this, we might affably agree that rhetoric employs a poetics and that poetics are existent in rhetoric because rhetoric utilizes language arts. I think that this is one acceptable way of viewing those two terms, and it

is a way that many people have gone about considering rhetoric and poetics for a long time. This

dissertation, however, stands to complicate such descriptions. It notes that we often equate

poetics with and that over time we have come to see rhetoric and poetics as two distinct

fields. Additionally, in this dissertation, I aim to complicate the traditional notions that language

is a means to poetic or rhetorical ends as well as the idea that rhetoric and poetics serve

humanistic, ideological goals and purposes. The significance of this argument is its acknowledgement that when are considered as tools used for a specific purpose, they 2

can then become objectified and exploited as the means to ideological and sociological ends. As

I discuss throughout this chapter, humanism can have noble attributes, but it can also bring about

catastrophic consequences. Many scholars – Tony Davies, for example – note the relationship between the Nazi regime and humanistic impulses to rule for the greater good and to create and perpetuate an ideal form of humanity (51). While desires for goodness and ideality may appear innocuous and even noble, they can have disastrous effects because of their extreme nature and their inability to fully appreciate the complexity and diversity of the human condition.

Ultimately they operate to raise certain individuals and classes to higher socioeconomic status and power at the expense of other individuals and classes that end up being exscribed to the margins and finally considered as “Other” by those in higher societal positions. When people view rhetoric and poetics as useful means towards humanistic ends, they begin to view and manipulate language in ways that can maintain hierarchies at the expense of individuals in lower socio-economic classes. As this approach to viewing language and text becomes entrenched in our university systems, it can encourage an unquestioning acceptance of our societal value system and class hierarchies. It can also condone the idea that language, and

hence rhetoric and poetics, operates as a “thing” that can be manipulated and exploited, which offers a limited view of the complexity of language. My aim in this paper is to question such humanistic impulses and acknowledge that rhetoric, poetics, and language operate through a

cyclical creation and deferral of meaning that has an ambiguous and illusory nature. Even as

they create meaning, their creation is a fabrication: it is creation in its most creative sense.

Through the acknowledgement that meaning is deferred there is an acceptance that meaning

cannot be pinned down and stated as definitively “true.” Rhetoric, poetics, and language in general operate more as fluid processes that cannot be tied down and manipulated; rather, 3 rhetoric and poetics inherently exist within a language that forms the world in which we live and that even creates our notions of self and identity. Ultimately, then, what is at stake in my argument is an of the way that rhetoric and poetics create, inform, and shape our notions of self and, in , the world around us.

This chapter suggests that rhetoric and poetics have often been subjugated under humanism, where the two concepts are seen as tools that can be added to language to achieve humanistic goals. While both concepts have been relegated to a subservient status, scholars within the fields have worked to legitimate their disciplines. Since the two fields are often viewed as binary opposites, we ultimately see that scholars in the field of poetics, or literary study, legitimate their discipline by privileging it over the field of rhetoric and composition study. The subjugated positions of both fields, and the privileging of poetics over rhetoric maintain the humanist qualities of privileging , order, eloquence, and good taste over , uncertainty, illusion, and play. notes that Grammatica, which encompasses and , subsumed and dominated rhetoric, and he also notes that

Grammatica itself operated in a servile position to (The Semiotic Challenge 92-93).

Barthes’s description of Grammatica as being linked to , , eloquence, and literary study shows the connection between Grammatica and humanist qualities. Because the relationships between the disciplines show a hierarchy of domination, we can also see that this system involves the control and maintenance of power. This chapter also shows that because of its relationship to power, humanism can have disastrous effects on society, and these negative consequences can involve the fields of rhetoric and poetics when they are dichotomized and subsumed under humanism. 4

Because he offers insight into both bourgeois culture and language systems, Roland

Barthes’s discussion of rhetoric is valuable to our discussion of rhetoric, poetics, and humanism.

Barthes offers a careful and thorough discussion of the relationship between rhetoric and poetics, beginning with its inception with the Greek scholars and following through more modern views on the two fields and paradigms. His discussion anticipates my argument that rhetoric and poetics have been subjugated to logic and philosophy from the inception of Western thought until more modern times, when those concepts have been more critically reviewed and considered. In his text, The Semiotic Challenge, Barthes makes the claim that rhetoric, poetics, and literature are one and the same in many ways. He ultimately argues that it is the system that exists within all of these categories that takes precedence, rather than each part on its own. He notes, “Rhetoric must always be read in the structural interplay with its neighbors (Grammar,

Logic, Poetics, Philosophy): it is the play of the system, not each of its parts in itself, which is historically significant” (46). We see here that Barthes is tracing the system in which rhetoric and poetics interact with grammar, logic, and philosophy. Even as he incisively notes the ambiguity and complexity associated with rhetoric and, to a certain extent, poetics, he ultimately argues that the fields of logic, philosophy, and ethics dominate rhetoric and poetics. He also shows that rhetoric and poetics are distinctly connected and at times indistinguishable. Perhaps most importantly, though, Barthes concludes that rhetoric and poetics are inextricably bound up with political :

all our literature, formed by Rhetoric and sublimated by humanism, has emerged from a

politico-judicial practice:… in those areas where the most brutal conflicts -- of money, of

, of class -- are taken over, contained, domesticated, and sustained by power, 5

where state institutions regulate feigned speech and codifies all recourse to the signifier:

there is where our literature is born. (92-93, italics in original)

The important argument that Barthes makes here is that both rhetoric and literature, which I

would also consider poetics, are bound up with structures of power, and within these forms of

power, rhetoric and poetics have been pushed into subordinate positions. He also makes the case

that they have been sublimated by humanism, thus associating aspects of humanism with

elements of power, such as money, property, and class. In noting their subordination, we can see

that rhetoric and poetics are often viewed as being useful for achieving humanistic goals that

have the potential to subjugate entire classes of people in order to maintain class hierarchies.

It is this argument that I intend to both pursue and complicate throughout the following

project. I contend that literature, which I discuss as poetics, and rhetoric are traditionally viewed

as operating in servile positions towards humanistic goals and that these goals are ideologically

loaded. Additionally, viewing them as distinct fields with distinct purposes, as is done in many

English programs across the country, potentially subscribes writing programs and students to a

of values that need to be revisited, questioned, and reformed.

I suggest in this chapter, and in Chapter 2: Poetic Rhetoric and Its Revisions of Old

Distinctions, that we consider breaking down the binary opposition between rhetoric and poetics

and instead consider a third possibility that is poetic rhetoric. This is a term that encapsulates the

poetically rhetorical process that flows through language and through our structures of meaning.

Poetic rhetoric breaks down dichotomization, thus resisting the rational, humanistic impulse to

categorize and exscribe that which does not fit into a prescribed organizational scheme. Through this process, poetic rhetoric shows multiplicities of meaning. Additionally, because poetic

rhetoric is imbued with an unstable form of logos, it enacts a process of creation and deferral of 6 meaning. Poetic rhetoric is a creative force, but it is one in which meaning is never stable and never truly authentic. Meaning, therefore, is something that is illusory and fictitious.

Additionally in this chapter, and in Chapter 3: Poetic Rhetoric in the First-Year

Composition Classroom, I further my discussion of poetic rhetoric by relating it to the first-year composition classroom. I note that by teaching rhetoric and poetics as separate fields and as tools that can be applied to language, as so many first-year writing programs do, we may be tacitly promoting or facilitating a humanist within the university. In response to this I propose we consider teaching a new form of the Montaignean essay that I have termed the

“poetically rhetorical essay.” This form of the essay embraces some elements of the traditional

Montaignean essay, such as its antischolasticism and heteroglossia, while resisting its more humanistic qualities, like its social epistemology and notions of a stable self. Moreover, the unique quality of the poetically rhetorical essay I describe is its excessive creativity. I suggest an essay that is so creatively excessive that it illuminates the fictionality of non-. This type of creativity would seek out multiplicities of meaning, and it would constantly defer meaning so that there would be no definitive element of truth within the piece; rather, the essay itself would be a composite of many tiny .

Finally, I end the dissertation, and this chapter, with a discussion of poetic rhetoric in the electronic writing environment. In Chapter 4: Poetic Rhetoric in the Online Environment, I acknowledge that print texts hold the potential to operate in poetically rhetorical ways and that electronic texts and environments can often facilitate humanist agendas. However, I ultimately focus on the poetically rhetorical ways in which the electronic writing environment operates.

Networked texts, MOOs, wikis, and blogs can all operate through creation and deferrals of meaning, and through that deferral of meaning they can disrupt and resist humanist ideologies. I 7

take these ideas one step further into the writing classroom with the suggestion for an electronic

poetically rhetorical essay. The e-poetically rhetorical essay would both create meaning and disseminate it in ways that show the instability of all of our structures of meaning. The electronic writing environment makes this more possible through the instability within its very own binary makeup. Because of the additional complexity posed by electronic media, networked texts never present the same text twice, as is often the case with traditional print media. The binary code that underlies all electronic environments and writing offers the illusion

of control when in fact the meaning that is created through electronic writing is very much a tiny

fiction that takes on multiplicities of meaning, and the e-poetically rhetorical essay inhabits these

spaces in such a way as to emphasize their creativity.

As I conclude this chapter, and my dissertation, I emphasize the for my argument. While it may be difficult to consider poetic rhetoric within a first-year writing paradigm, and while it may be that the would be better served in an upper level writing course, it is also necessary that we spend some time in composition courses introducing students to the concept of poetic rhetoric. First-year writing courses are often considered “gateway” courses, and most students are required to complete them. In addition to this, many view the composition course as responsible for preparing students for other college courses and for the professional world. These descriptions of the writing course show how it is infused with a humanist ideology. Teaching poetic rhetoric would offer students a chance to consider one way that the university operates and would encourage students to question the foundations behind their education. It would promote an avoidance of unquestioning acceptance of others’ ideologies and emphasize students’ abilities to create their own ideas of “meaning” and what it

“means” to them. This meaning would, of course, be poetically rhetorical and it would also 8

illuminate for the students the idea that they may be characters playing roles within the story of

language.

Classical Conceptions of Poetics and Rhetoric

It should come as no surprise when I note that rhetoric and poetics have traditionally, since classical times, been viewed as separate fields of study and discourse. While and

Aristotle both viewed rhetoric and poetics as related, yet distinct, forms of and

entertainment, these descriptions have carried over into modern and contemporary studies of rhetoric and literature in today’s colleges. Jeffrey Walker not only helps us see how rhetoric and poetics were conceived of as distinct during classical times, but he also makes a strong argument as to why these two fields were not as wholly separate as we have come to believe. In Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity, Walker notes how rhetoric is considered a literary art and yet is distinct in its field of practical application. According to him, the ancient Greeks described rhetoric as a

“philosophico-literary art of eloquence” that operated as “a medium of ideological suasion and contestation in the of speech and literature” and also applied to civil and political from the emperor’s court down to local officials (118). He shows here that even as rhetoric was considered a pragmatic tool within the courts and legal systems, it was also valued as a stylish art that provoked thought and persuaded . Rhetoric’s equation with

“philosophico-literary art” shows that rhetoric and poetics are not entirely distinct fields, even though they are often treated as having different purposes. Walker traces the deep connections between rhetoric and poetics by tracing the lyrical praise and blame that infuses Greek oral and poetry with persuasive properties. He also shows their interconnectedness by noting the eloquence attached to rhetoric. As he says, for the Greeks, “the greatest poetry is that which most resembles rhetoric (by having its discursive power), and the greatest rhetoric is that which 9 most resembles poetry (by having its stylistic power)” (120). This shows the complex relationship that existed between rhetoric and poetics. It also notes that even though the two fields were considered to be distinct, the boundaries between them were often blurry.

Additionally, Walker makes the strong assertion that “The idea that poetry in general and lyric poetry in particular ‘makes ’ has typically been foreign, even counterintuitive, for

Western literary-critical thought for most of the twentieth century” (168). This argument denotes the fact that poetics were considered as distinct from the persuasion-oriented field of rhetoric.

In addition to discussing the classical distinctions between rhetoric and poetics and reclaiming poetics as a valuable rhetorical presentation of persuasive arguments, Walker shows how both fields end up being subordinated to grammaticization (the codification of language into formal rules, with an emphasis on conformity). He notes that with the onset of grammaticization in late antiquity, both rhetoric and poetics become devalued, and he argues that modern forms of rhetorical poetics seem to work to solidify and verify current popular ideologies, to maintain current community identities. He is discouraged by the advent of what he sees as

rhetoric that serves mainly to ratify and intensify the group’s identity and solidarity and

that therefore mainly serves the purposes of a factionalized identity politics, without

having much capacity for speaking across boundaries persuasively or for mounting a

culturally significant epideictic eloquence that does more than simply reconfirm the

group’s existing pieties and hierarchies of value. (330)

As Walker describes grammaticization, we see a humanistic emphasis on formal rules of language and conformity. Walker’s discussion of “existing pieties” and “hierarchies of value” also relates to humanism in that many humanists believe that they are operating for a “greater good,” and any notions of hierarchies and values will also necessarily imply elements of power 10

that are often associated with humanism. This quote indicates that as these humanistic ideals

become more valued in , rhetoric and poetics are seen more as tools or forms used to

promote conformity and maintain hierarchies of value and power. Through his use of the phrase

“epideictic eloquence,” Walker connects rhetoric with an element of that can be considered

poetic, and he shows that through their subordination rhetoric and poetics become tools for

maintaining the status quo.

While Jeffrey Walker offers a historical discussion of poetics and rhetoric with a final ideological suggesting the degraded roles of rhetoric and poetics, Roland Barthes provides a more ideological discussion of poetics and rhetoric. He shows us the blurred distinctions between the two fields and how they are ultimately subjugated to more humanistic ideals, such as logic, conformity, and class standing. Barthes acknowledges the distinction

between rhetoric and poetics that was emphasized with Aristotle, and he notes how the two terms

have been considered as less dichotomized and more united during the early history of rhetoric.

In discussing Aristotelian rhetoric, Barthes says, “Techne rhetorike deals with an art of everyday

, with public discourse; the Techne poietike deals with an art of imaginary

evocation...it is the opposition of these two systems, one rhetoric, the other poetic, which in fact

defines Aristotelian rhetoric” (The Semiotic Challenge 20-21). Noting this dichotomy that is so

pronounced with Aristotle, Barthes also discusses the ways that scholars following Aristotle have

considered rhetoric and poetics as more synthesized. Barthes notes that scholars ranging from

Ovid to Plutarch have tried to unite rhetoric and poetics (27). Even as scholars attempted to

unify rhetoric and poetics, they typically did it to achieve their own agendas. For example,

Plutarch attempted to read the poets rhetorically in order to read them morally (27). 11

Even as rhetoric and poetics were considered as having a deep relationship with each

other, they are also fields that have struggled with legitimacy against Platonic valuations of

philosophy and logic; they both, especially rhetoric, end up being subjugated to what Barthes

calls “Grammatica” and “Logica.” Barthes describes Grammatica as being “the science of speaking well and writing well” (36). As he describes it, Grammatica is often the approach to language that dominates rhetoric. In fact, it supersedes both rhetoric and poetics as it deals with

formal and imaginative elements of language. He says that Grammatica “includes grammar and

poetry, and deals with ‘precision’ as well as with ‘imagination,’” yielding very little to Rhetorica

(36). Grammatica, in Barthes’s estimation, is also associated with ethics and human wisdom. I would argue that ethics and human wisdom are similar to the emphasis that humanists place on morality and man’s ability to use reason and logic. Barthes states that rhetoric maintains its validity throughout the fourth and fifth centuries; however, “Rhetoric does not prevail for long; it is soon ‘squeezed’ between Grammatica and Logica: it is the poor relation of the , destined to have a splendid resurrection only when it can revive as ‘Poetry’ and more generally as ‘Belles Lettres’” (33). We see the complexity that existed between rhetoric, poetics, and the humanistic subjects of Grammatica and Logica here. First we should note that since

Grammatica contained poetics, poetics was seen as both superior to the subjects beneath

Grammatica and inferior to that which contained it. Additionally, rhetoric is being subjugated to

both Grammatica and Logica, which I think we can associate with humanism because of their

emphases on order, rationalization, and control. Moreover, Barthes is arguing that rhetoric

remains subjugated until it makes a return as poetry with the humanistic emphasis on good taste,

eloquence, and conformity. In this sense, we see that while both rhetoric and poetry seem to be

subordinate to more humanistic subjects, rhetoric is also seen as servile to poetics. 12

Barthes also notes that during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Logica dominates both

Rhetorica and Grammatica. He continues to say, “Logica, or the science of interpretation,

comprehends Grammatica (expression), Dialectica (education), and Rhetorica (persuasion);

once again, as if to set the mental in opposition to nature and to grace, language absorbs it entirely” (42). He says that as rhetoric took the position of instruction, it fell further into disrepute:

This discredit is occasioned by the promotion of a new value, (of , of ideas,

of sentiments), which is self-sufficient and does without language (or imagines it does

so), or at least claims no longer to use language except as an instrument, as a ,

as an expression... Rhetoric, if it is tolerated… is no longer a logic at all, but only a color,

an ornament, closely supervised in the name of the ‘natural.’ (43)

In addition to being subordinate to Grammatica, rhetoric is also inferior to Logica, which I

equate with philosophy, rationalization, science, and, ultimately, humanism. As Barthes notes,

the logic of evidence takes precedence over rhetoric. In this instance, rhetoric is described as a

tool that can be added to language.

While Barthes acknowledges that near the end of the fifteenth century, “ are

primarily poetics (art of making verses)” (44), he also argues that by the nineteenth century,

“rhetoric survives only artificially, under the protection of official regulations; the very title of

the manuals and treatises changes in a significant fashion...Literature still stands warrant for

rhetoric, before smothering it completely; but the old rhetoric, in its death throes, is rivaled by

‘psychologies of style’” (45). This indicates that rhetoric is not only subjugated to philosophy

and logic, but that slowly over time poetics takes a place of privilege in the . At least, at

some point, it supersedes rhetoric. 13

However, Barthes notes that, historically, rhetoric has taken on multiple evaluations and descriptions. The field is surrounded by ambiguity and fluctuation, and it is this perspective, I find, that resists attempts to classify and limit the concept of rhetoric. From this perspective we can see rhetoric as operating along the lines I will describe as poetic rhetoric. Barthes notes that the contrary descriptions of rhetoric

show clearly the present ambiguity of the rhetorical phenomenon: glamorous object of

intelligence and penetration, grandiose system which a whole civilization, in its extreme

breadth, perfected in order to classify, i.e., in order to think its language, instrument of

power, locus of historical conflicts whose is utterly absorbing precisely if we

restore this object to the diverse history in which it developed; but also an ideological

object, falling into ideology at the advance of that ‘other thing’ which has replaced it, and

today compelling us to take an indispensable critical distance. (47)

This description of rhetoric’s ambiguity also emphasizes the fact that our descriptions of rhetoric are ideologically loaded. When we view rhetoric as a skill or subject to be mastered and applied, rather than as a multiplicitous process, we limit its meaning to one whose foundation is that of

Platonic ideology. This system values classification, order, and a logic that assumes knowledge is accessible and that the self is stable and controllable. Barthes is asking us to take a critical distance and a questioning approach to this view. He notes that because of our drive for classification and mastery, rhetoric “has exhausted itself trying to hold within a necessarily more and more discriminating network the ‘manners of speaking,’ i.e., trying to master the unmasterable: a true mirage” (85).

As Barthes shows, there is a deep and abiding relationship between rhetoric and poetics; over time scholars have considered the similar ways in which the two concepts operate. We 14

have also come to a point where the two terms are viewed in a binary way. The rest of this text

will argue that rhetoric and poetics operate off of the same unstable logos that disrupts Platonic

notions of logic and order.

Ideological Implications of Humanism

Barthes suggests, then, that rhetoric and poetics are bound within an ideological system.

Whether literature was formed by rhetoric, or rhetoric by literature, is a topic that deserves its

own study and is, in fact, a topic to which much scholarship is devoted. It should be clear by

now, however, that both rhetoric and poetics have been manipulated and have come to be

considered means towards ideological ends. As Barthes points out, the two concepts have been

sublimated by humanism and exist within a nexus of sociological issues. Because I see the influence of humanism as one that has a direct connection with the organization of college writing programs, it is important to consider the notion of humanism and its connection with rhetoric and poetics. Within writing programs that teach rhetoric and poetics as separate and distinct fields, it is especially important to consider the ideologies associated with the creation and maintenance of such distinctions. Because English departments are often organized around such humanistic qualities as good taste and eloquence, we can note that their separation and approach to rhetoric and poetics reaffirms humanistic values, especially when they view rhetoric and poetics as tools that can be added to language in order to achieve certain ends or goals. Our approach to rhetoric and poetics as distinct tools can ultimately end up perpetuating humanistic values like totality and . It is not my intention to offer a history of humanism here, nor is it my intention to trace the relationship of rhetoric and poetics to humanism throughout an overarching historical epoch. Rather, I am more interested in considering contemporary responses to humanism and exploring the ways these considerations relate to the roles of rhetoric 15

and poetics in English departments today. This is a topic I discuss in further detail in Chapter

Three: Poetic Rhetoric in the First-Year Composition Classroom. Ultimately, it is my contention

that, through contemporary criticisms of humanism, we may come to view the humanistic

agenda as one that values totality over true diversity, negation over affirmation, and uncritical

notions of the stable, accessible self over acknowledgement of decentered selves in flux.

Kate Soper notes that all antihumanisms contain some element of humanism in that they

often focus on “intellectual clarity” and “emancipation.” I would have to acknowledge that my

project is not altogether exempt from that criticism. I am seeking out some kind of clarity or

new understanding. I am also trying to find a new way to view the self. While my assertions

might maintain that the self is never wholly complete or authentic, it is impossible to deny the

fact that on some level I am trying to liberate our formerly constricted notions of the self. In addition to this, when I suggest, in Chapter 3, that we might consider a revised notion of the essay as a genre for conceiving of poetic rhetoric, I must acknowledge that the essay genre has

traditionally been seen as one that authenticates notions of the self. I do not have an easy answer

for these caveats I am offering, except to consider Foucault’s suggestions in “What is an

Author.” He asks, “How, under what conditions, and in what forms can something like a subject appear in the order of discourse? What place it occupy in each type of discourse, what functions can it assume, and by obeying what rules?” (118). This is the way I would like to approach the terms I work with throughout this text. What conditions do I see humanism operating under within the field of composition? What functions do poetics and rhetoric assume within writing departments? And, perhaps most importantly, how do these conditions and functions influence the roles of language and subjectivity in our discourses and in our classrooms? 16

In order to approach and deliberate over these questions, it is important to gain a brief

understanding of how humanism has approached the notion of the subject, and for this purpose I

will give an overview of some contemporary descriptions of humanism. This will require me to

discuss the topic from a historical viewpoint, even though I am admittedly not going into all of

the historical depth a topic such as “humanism” deserves. As any scholar who has discussed

humanism suggests, the term itself has a rich and complex history. It has taken on so many

meanings that it has nearly lost all meaning as well. In Humanism, Tony Davies describes

humanism as encompassing beliefs of racial superiority, emancipation, and notions of

individuality (19). He notes that it can also operate as a unifier of classes or can resist classic

notions of Christianity (19). He argues therefore that there is no singular definition of

humanism. Instead, he describes humanism as having various descriptors, ranging from civic

humanism to romantic humanism, and he also notes that the while the Nazis operated off of

certain humanistic principles, so too did their victims possess humanist qualities (130-31). And

yet, with the ambiguity and inconsistency at work in these attempts to define and describe

humanism, it is necessary to come to terms with a basic description of the term, even if we note

that this description will fall short of adequately encompassing the rich history of humanism.

Speaking of the early history of humanism, Davies argues that the term “humanism” had

no real meaning in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. He notes, however, that, there was a form of study that was referred to as “the studia humanitatis or ‘study of humanity’” that had a foundation based on “Ancient Greek and Roman authors and the application of Platonic,

Aristotelian and Ciceronian ideas and values to contemporary life, and the people who taught it

or wrote about it sometimes referred to themselves as umanisti or ‘humanists,’ a purely

functional term that conferred no particular prestige” (94). In “The Radical Tradition of 17

Humanistic Consciousness,” Robert Torrance notes that the term “humanista” was coined in the fifteenth-century and that it derived from the words for “human” and “human being.” He notes that the humanistas studied “grammar, rhetoric, history, and philosophy” (169). He also states that the humanists were well known for their revival of ancient Greek and Latin texts and that the humanists participated in the “” of learning that took place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Not only did humanists study humanity, but they also involved themselves in the “the that lay outside the humanist’s domain, yet were themselves revitalized by his discoveries, as by those of his predecessors in the earlier ‘renaissance’ of the twelfth century” (169-70). From these brief descriptions we can see that the humanists’ pursuits were academic and founded in the areas related to humanity. Humanists are considered to be influenced by ancient Greek and Roman scholars, like Plato and Aristotle.

These interests in what it means to be “man,” in humanity, in subjects related to humanity, in the of the ancient Greeks and Romans all have ideological implications for society and society’s organization today, and these implications can operate in both positive and negative ways. I will focus on the negative ways in which humanism, with its emphasis on rationality and control, can impact society. As Tony Davies notes,

On one side, humanism is saluted as the philosophical champion of human freedom and

dignity…On the other, it has been denounced as an ideological smokescreen for the

oppressive mystifications of modern society and culture, the marginalization and

oppression of the multitudes of human beings in whose name it pretends to speak, even,

through an inexorable ‘ of enlightenment,’ for the nightmare of fascism and the

atrocity of war. (5) 18

When advocates attempt to speak for others, they run the risk of speaking over them and further subjugating those in lower socioeconomic systems, especially when the advocates believe, through their set of ideological values, that they are morally right and rationally justified. Some people may do this unwittingly, while others may know that their agendas stand to marginalize people in order to achieve their goals. Davies quotes Symonds who contends that, “The essence of humanism consisted in a new and vital perception of the dignity of man as a rational being apart from theological determinations” (qtd. in Davies 22). In Breaking Up [at] Totality: A

Rhetoric of Laughter, D. Diane Davis notes that “All Enlightenment beliefs hinge upon the validity of the transcendent subject – the capability of the subject to transcend ‘his’ situational and sensual elements to reach a state of disembodied, rational thought” (35). Davies also describes the virtues of nineteenth-century humanism as “rationality, in human , courageous individuality” (47), and he also relates such rationality as having possible disastrous consequences. Davies notes that the atrocities committed by the Nazis were not the result of an irrational barbarism, but rather of a rational coolness of . He says, “The cool framing of objectives, the logical planning of complex systems, the orderly deployment of technology and resources: all these testify to a piece of demographic engineering as measured in its symmetry, as eloquent in its appalling fashion of individual genius and enterprise as the Parthenon itself” (51). Davies also describes the two main precepts of humanism as being “the sovereignty of rational consciousness, and the authenticity of individual speech” (60). Again, we see the logic of rationality taking a top place in the humanistic priorities, and we also see an emphasis on

“authentic individual speech.” Along with emphasizing logic and control, some humanists value the notion of a stable individual who can speak authentically. This conviction would run counter to the idea that selves may be decentered; people may not know their true selves; true selves may 19

not exist. In addition, the humanist would value the idea of authentic speech, which confirms

Derrida’s argument that writing has been denigrated in place of speech and that people who

value speech over writing believe that one is able to say what one means, thus having a

knowledge of some kind of transcendent truth or meaning that can then be fully communicated

to others. All of this stands to aid people in positions of power who use these beliefs to maintain

their positions in hierarchies of power. They value the eloquence of speech and use it to argue

for the validity of their own notions of knowledge and self. While they are able to use these ideals and arguments to further their socioeconomic standing, they do this at the expense of those whom they subordinate and marginalize. The emphasis on scientific reasoning and objectivity

facilitates the tendency for the humanist to objectify all that comes under his or her purview, and

when people begin to objectify ideas and other people, they exert their own power over those

under their consideration.

The subjugation of people that can occur within humanist thought can have disastrous

consequences for society. Davies comments: “‘Enlightenment behaves towards things’,

remarked Adorno, ‘as a dictator towards men. He knows them in so far as he can manipulate

them’...The who promoted the humanistic values of enlightenment enjoyed a close if

sometimes uncomfortable relationship with power” (120-21, italics in original). Davies also

adds that,

All humanisms, until now, have been imperial. They speak of the human in the accents

and the interests of a class, a sex, a ‘race.’ Their embrace suffocates those whom it does

not ignore. The first humanists scripted the tyranny of Borgias, Medicis and Tudors.

Later humanists dreamed of freedom and celebrated Frederick II, Bonaparte, Bismarck,

Stalin. The liberators of colonial America, like the Greek and Roman thinkers they 20

emulated, owned slaves. At various times, not excluding the present, the circuit of the

human has excluded women, those who do not speak Greek or Latin or English, those

whose complexions are not pink, children, Jews. It is almost impossible to think of a

crime that has not been committed in the name of humanity. (131)

Davies’ description of humanism here brings into stark relief the negative implications of

humanism and the exclusionary and even disastrous effects it can have on society. These

consequences are amplified when we consider the possibility that our education systems

perpetuate humanist ideals.

Humanism, Rhetoric, and Poetics

The ideological implications of humanism exert themselves over all of the fields of

knowledge that come under their gaze. This especially pertains to the field of language studies

and specifically to rhetoric and poetics. With its emphasis on rationality and authentic individual speech, we can see humanist values that approach rhetoric and poetics as a means to an end, where rhetoric stands to persuade and both concepts operate to teach eloquence and to perpetuate high socioeconomic status. We can see how scholars put rhetoric and poetics to work for humanist goals in the ways that they value such qualities as eloquence and literary education. As

Nietzsche says, educators, especially those dealing with rhetoric and poetics, “control ‘opinion about things’ and hence the effect of things upon men” (“History of Greek Eloquence” 43, italics in original). Through this paradigm, however, rhetoric and poetics end up being subordinated to

humanistic ideologies and agendas. When Nietzsche says that today’s classical higher education

still holds an antique view, we see that this includes humanist qualities that were valued by the

Greeks, such as class hierarchies and social status, as maintained through power and domination. 21

When we think of humanism from a classical and historical perspective, we might note

that humanistic emphases on values such as good taste and eloquence hold deep ties with

language and literature. As Tony Davies notes, “Above all, early humanism is a question of

language because of its central preoccupation with eloquence” (79). Davies notes that within the

humanist curriculum, much value was placed on eloquence and that knowledge was not viewed

as significant until it had been verified and shared through written and spoken communication.

Davies goes on to show the deeper importance of eloquence to humanists: “If, as was often said, man is the speaking animal, then we exist most fully not in the intimate interiority of private thought and feeling, but in the communality of linguistic exchange...The human being is fashioned and defined in language, and belongs inseparably, in its public and private aspects alike, to the medium of discourse” (79). Viewed from a humanistic perspective, the type of man

who is shaped through the language that humanism employs will continue to perpetuate those

ideologies and goals of the people who define and control what defines eloquence and social

standing. We can see that within the humanistic curriculum, the text, and hence literary

education, held in a place, or given a place, of extreme value: “What those readers in their

speaking silences remind us is that at the centre of humanist activity is the book. All its values --

its virtue and eloquence, its recklessness and moderation, its piety and obscenity -- are

textualized: grounded in texts, taught through texts, rehearsed, elaborated and disputed in texts”

(92-93). Peter Malekin, in “What Price Humanity,” notes that a goal of humanism was to equip

“a perfect gentleman for this world and the next. Literature was part of the linguistic tradition

and rhetoric a major means of studying it, while philosophy accessed the highest (and most

abstract) level of civilization” (59). This assertion notes that the person who benefits from the

humanist education is a gentleman, of a high class. The fact that this is a gentleman gives just a 22

brief insight into the way that this paradigm benefits some people, while also excluding and

marginalizing others.

Malekin’s quote also emphasizes the fact that literature, or poetics, is privileged above

rhetoric, which is seen as a means towards an end, and philosophy is privileged above both other

fields, philosophy being seen as the highest level of civilization. Charles L. Babcock notes the

strong emphasis on literature within humanist educational systems, noting that memorizing great

literary passages served as a way to develop our own sets of values. He also adds that through

literary education, man received “rich entertainment for his spirit, stimulation for his mind, precepts for his choice of action, and examples for his daily life; the classics shared with the larger part of his intellectual and spiritual activity” (24). Again we see here the elevated status of literature and also the way that poetics are seen as tools that serve a higher purpose and one that relates to social standings of individuals in society.

While she does not necessarily state outright that she is discussing humanism, in The

Woman with the Rhetorical Figure, Michelle Ballif takes on many of the tenets of humanism, and I suggest that within the subtext of her main argument, she also offers a critique of humanism. Within this discussion, we can see her suggest the notion that humanism, or at least some of its main qualities, subsumes the field of rhetoric for a specific agenda. As Ballif explains the Greek tradition of placing importance on presence and stability, she also discusses the importance, for the Greeks, of the negated other:

What was at stake, and what continues to be at stake, is nothing less than the prescription

of what exists, what has value, and what -- by implication -- has no value at all. We are

the inheritors of this tradition, of this suspicion of changing phenomena, of this demand

for stability, mastery, and fidelity that sustains notions of truth and subjectivity, but that 23

has for centuries required that rhetoric (that is, the instability of language) and Woman

(the instability of being) serve as negated other in order to sustain that tradition. (35)

Here Ballif describes what many humanists value: stability, mastery, notions of authentic truth,

and stable subjectivity. These qualities were valued by the Greeks, and we know that much of

our Western society was originally influenced by the humanistic, Greek forms of civilization.

Again showing the Greek preoccupation with unified transcendence, Ballif quotes Plato’s

Gorgias: “Wise men say, Callicles, that heaven and earth, gods and men, are held together by the

principles of ...order, by self-control and justice; that, my friend, is the reason they call the

universe ‘cosmos,’ and disorder or licentiousness” (qtd. in Ballif 42). By bringing in this quote,

Ballif shows the importance Plato placed on order and self-control. By quoting Plato’s

Phaedrus, Ballif also shows how Plato viewed rhetoric and writing as opposed to order and self-

control: “That is, writing...has the capacity to seduce the reader, and the reader potentially can seduce the text, and most importantly, the text can ‘forget’ Socrates’s judgment, can resist his abduction” (47). Essentially, then, Plato feared writing because it is an instantiation of all that is uncontrollable in language. Plato valued an ordered universe, and order is not possible when one is vulnerable to seduction. Because of this, Plato vilified rhetoric and writing and persuasively argued for philosophy, logic, and order to occupy superior positions to rhetoric and poetics. If we note the correspondence between Ballif’s descriptions of Platonic values, such as mastery, order, self-control, and domination, and those values that are also esteemed within the

foundations of humanism and the humanistic agenda, we can see how these values may have

negative implications. In addition to this, we see that writing has an influential role in this

relationship. 24

Perhaps laying a foundation for the idea that everything, including rhetoric and poetics, is

subordinated under humanism, because humanism and other logocentric philosophical concepts

operate through a process of negation and subordination that affects all systems with which they

interact, Diane Davis notes that Plato saw logos as reason and in order for reason to work,

language must be available as a tool. In this process, language gets divorced from “.”

Davis notes that Plato’s system of logic “is based on a system of sub-ordination…Plato and

Aristotle strove to calm the storm, to drive it away by taking the becoming out of it so that it

could be stabilized, structured” (84). Because Plato’s system is one of subordination, it operates

through a process of negation, meaning that elements within the system are defined based on

what they are not. Additionally, the ordering of this system operates hierarchically, which

consequently privileges certain elements over others. Davis and many other scholars suggest

that within this process of hierarchical ordering, language takes on a subjugated role. Davis

discusses the volatile relationship between language, what I think we can consider here as

rhetoric and poetics, and truth, what we can equate with humanism. She notes that Victor

Vitanza suggests, “Plato and Aristotle re/fashioned logos,…they separated physis from

,…language and truth began to be viewed as separable and the former became a supplement

for the latter…The reign of terror begins there, with the determination to categorize,

hierarchicalize, and prioritize, with the determination to stabilize language and to get to the

bottom of things” (103). As Davis notes that Plato and Aristotle strove to take the “becoming

out of the system of logic, we might equate this with Vitanza’s claim that they refashioned logos.

We might think of logos as having a primordial sense of becoming; logos, or what we might consider logic or even language, is constantly changing and shifting shapes, never reaching a final state of “being” or closure. In this state, before it is refashioned, logos is ambiguous; it is a 25

combination of both physis (natural phenomena) and doxa (manufactured thought). Under Plato and Aristotle, however, logos becomes stabilized and ordered through the process of subordination. Language, which is comprised of logos, becomes subjugated to truth and logic.

It becomes a tool used to maintain and achieve humanistic values.

Poetic Rhetoric and Its Revisions of Old Distinctions

In response to my assertions that humanism privileges authentic notions of truth and

order over rhetoric and poetics at the expense of language, I suggest an alternative way to view

these distinctions: poetic rhetoric. In short, my theory of poetic rhetoric is the acknowledgment

that language defers meaning and through this process of deferral it creates meaning, in a

tenuous and fictitious way. This notion of poetic rhetoric challenges and disrupts the basic tenets

of humanism, noting that truth, stability, and order are illusions, and more importantly that,

language in the form of poetic rhetoric is not a tool to be manipulated, but rather a process that

creates, shapes, and defers meaning. Friedrich Nietzsche has posited the fictitious nature of

truth, noting the blurred boundaries between the real, what humanists strive for, and the imaginary, what poetic rhetoric stands for. As Sarah Kofman notes,

in Nietzsche’s eyes…the opposition between philosophy and poetry derives from

metaphysical thinking; it is based on the fictitious separation of the real and the

imaginary, on the no less fictitious separation of the ‘faculties.’ Philosophy is a form of

poetry: speaking in makes language find its most natural form of expression

once more. (17)

Kofman touches on the ways in which poetics have been subordinated over time by and scientists. She also notes that Nietzsche refuses to see the distinction between these fields, arguing instead that the distinctions we have created between real and imaginary are really 26 illusion, fictions. A point to note here is the fact that we never know entirely whether or not the is poetic or rhetorical, because it seems to fit into both genres so well. The very tricky and nature of metaphor is reflective of the ambiguous and shape-shifting nature of what I will call poetic rhetoric.

In Chapter 2, Poetic Rhetoric and Its Revisions of Old Distinctions, I put forth the theoretical discussion of my main argument for the project. Rather than viewing rhetoric and poetics as two distinct fields that operate to serve the goals of a privileged ideology, we may instead acknowledge an alternative way of thinking about rhetoric and poetics: as one fluid movement that courses through language and the structures of meaning around us. This movement works to create language and meaning through a process that is ambiguous and illusory, that is creative and generative, that is constantly deferring meaning, and it is this process that I term poetic rhetoric.

I argue in this chapter that rhetoric and poetics have often been put to humanistic ends, and I have outlined some of the possible negative consequences of this activity. In Chapter 2, I further argue that we resist the humanistic impulse to categorize and control through order and hierarchies that play themselves out through the dichotomization rhetoric and poetics. I suggest that poetic rhetoric can operate as a form of what Victor Vitanza would call third sophistic.

Vitanza describes the third sophistic as a nonpositive affirmation that operates through an economy of excess. What this means is that within the third sophistic, one approaches language, meaning, and even history, with a resistance to negation. One attempts affirmation not through a binary distinction that something is because it is not something else; rather, something is defined as itself plus some more. In this sense, we cannot create ordered boundaries and neat distinctions; instead, boundaries are blurred, and we recognize that to operate through negation is 27

to impose boundaries and power over others. Poetic rhetoric stands to disrupt the binary thinking

and logocentric thought that all too often lead back to a unitary that works to privilege

some people and their ideologies over others. Poetic rhetoric can enact what Vitanza calls the

“language games of art” (133) by reveling in the excesses of language and shaping language

through a deferral of meaning such that we are always left open to multiplicities of meaning.

Furthering this suggestion that poetic rhetoric can operate through a deferral of meaning is my

assertion that poetic rhetoric is powered by Derrida’s description of writing, which is a form of

unstable logos that operates through a process of deferral and supplementation. As poetic

rhetoric operates through language, it calls into question notions of authentic truth and the stable

subject. An acceptance of this description of poetic rhetoric indicates an acceptance of

Nietzsche’s argument that “There is obviously no unrhetorical ‘naturalness’ of language to which

one could appeal; language itself is the result of purely rhetorical arts” (21). As poetic rhetoric

embraces the notion that language is not “natural,” but a result of a rhetorical art, or poetic

rhetoric, it does this through an awareness and celebration of the ways in which language does

not represent “real” truth, but rather replicates our ideas or fabrications of what truth is. It resists

the humanistic idea that a truth must exist and that it must be communicable. Instead, it

acknowledges that we create our truths in as much as the creative impulse of language creates us.

Poetic Rhetoric, First-Year Composition, and the Genre of the Essay

In Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985, James

Berlin gives us a valuable description of the dichotomy that has existed within English departments between rhetoric and poetics. Berlin defines rhetoric as “the production of spoken and written texts” and poetics as “the interpretation of texts” (1). He discusses the fact that

Charles Eliot, president of Harvard from 1869-1909, valued writing so much that freshman 28

writing became an established part of Harvard’s curriculum in 1874 (20). By the end of the

1800s, however, “the study of English…literature had become the main concern of the department, and the place of a writing course in the college curriculum had already been challenged at the first meeting of the Modern Language Association” (20). Further illustrating the distinction between rhetoric and literature, Berlin notes: “In order to distinguish the new

English department professor from the old rhetoric teacher or the new composition teacher, a new discipline had to be formulated, a discipline based on English as the language of learning

and literature as the specialized province of study” (22). While this comment shows the

importance placed on composition, we still see literature in a place of privilege, and there is still a perpetuation of the dichotomy between rhetoric and literature. The desire to improve the image of the English department, the university’s emphasis on the study of literature, and the general academic approach to learning are all reasons that Berlin suggests for the subjugation of rhetoric

(24). He gives a detailed description of the different ways in which rhetoric and poetics have been treated in the development of English departments:

the two were at first thoroughly compatible, being grounded in a common epistemology.

In time, however, this relationship changed – unfortunately, much to the detriment of

freshman English – as rhetoric became petrified in a positivistic configuration while

poetic continued to develop and grow. (25)

Berlin observes that these two notions started out as compatible in terms of study and that they initially offered a nice dialectic within which to approach different areas of study. Since then, however, these two concepts have significantly diverged from each other. He describes what we commonly call current-traditional rhetoric as the rhetoric that appeared in late nineteenth century

English departments (26). The paradigm of current-traditional rhetoric considers language as a 29

tool for transcribing our thoughts into a product to be consumed by the reader; the job of the writing teacher, then, was to teach that process of transcription, “providing instruction in arrangement and style – arrangement so that the order of experience is correctly recorded, and style so that clarity is achieved and class affiliation established” (26-27). While current- traditional rhetoric still remained (and remains to some extent today) in the forefront, underwent a transition. Berlin asserts that as literary theory continued to develop and branch out into different schools of criticism, it had to keep current-traditional rhetoric in its subjugated position in order to maintain its own privileged status. Ultimately, Berlin argues, “In tacitly supporting the impoverished notion of rhetoric found in the freshman writing course, academic literary critics have provided a constant reminder of their own claim to superiority and privilege, the range and versatility of their discipline against the barrenness of current- traditional rhetoric, the staple of the freshman course” (28).

In Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition (1991), Susan Miller further describes the split that has occurred between rhetoric and literature within the English department. She says that if we use the binaries of the carnival, writing becomes literature’s “covered-over

‘Other’” (46), and she notes that,

Given a literary “medium” for , New Critics could claim that they had an object

of investigation, the workings of literary language in literary texts, and that they could

discover self-contained ‘meanings’ in this language. Given the ‘purified’ (ahistorical,

intransitive, theorized) ‘processes’ of writers, composition has become able to make the

same claims – that it has an object of study and that it can discover self-contained

‘meanings’ in the of writing. (116) 30

In this description, we see that rhetors and writing teachers objectified writing in the form of the

in order to study in a way that could be equated with literary study. This sort of

description shows that rhetoric was operating in a subordinate position and it was maintained in

this position by composition scholars working to legitimate their field. We see from Berlin and

Miller’s descriptions that within the field of first-year writing rhetoric and poetics are often considered separately. While Berlin notes that they share a common epistemology, we might consider this epistemology the one that is often recognized within the university, that of Platonic logocentrism.

Humanistic influence on the university system affects the implications of the poetic and

rhetoric divide for English departments. The very fact that poetics and rhetoric are dichotomized

and opposed to one another reflects the humanistic tendency to organize people, things, and ideas

into a hierarchy that works to privilege and maintain positions of superiority. In addition, pitting

these two concepts against each other obscures the ways in which each exists within the other. It

also endorses unquestioningly the idea that rhetoric and poetics are tools that can be added to

language, thus offering a simplified, and therefore inadequate, view of language. Chapter 3,

Poetic Rhetoric in the First-Year Composition Classroom, tackles the issue of validating

humanistic goals in the first-year composition classroom, and it posits that breaking down the

distinction between the two courses of study and instead acknowledging the poetically rhetorical

side of language is a way to resist and disrupt humanist agendas. It concludes by making the

pedagogical suggestion that the poetically rhetorical form of the essay may be the form of

writing that best enacts my suggestions for poetic rhetoric.

We know that the concept of humanism in some ways shaped the foundation of our

educational system. Tony Davies remarks, “The motivation behind the great resurgence of 31

German philological and archeological scholarship was a reformed educational system…and the

word the reformers invented to describe their educational ideals, with a backward glance to the

classical studia humanitatis or ‘study of humanity’ promoted by the umanisti or educators of an earlier ‘renaissance’, was Humanismus: humanism” (2). Davies also notes that “Humanismus was a term devised, probably by the educationalist Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer, in the early nineteenth century to describe a high-school and university curriculum based on what have been known since the as the ‘’” (9). James Berlin notes that Johns Hopkins modeled their university after the German university (22), and I think that we can see the German emphasis on humanism throughout colleges and universities today. We can certainly see the emphasis on humanistic qualities in our English departments. As Berlin has pointed out in several of his texts, our English departments have a long history of privileging mastery and eloquence, and they have prided themselves on preparing individuals to be contributing members of society. This form , however, deserves some careful consideration of all that it implies.

As Diane Davis notes, when we teach with our main emphasis on the modern text, which comes along with modernist and humanistic consequences, “we become pushers of hypotactic linking/thinking strategies; we push not simply a , but a value system that privileges hierarchy, mastery, and (Final) closure. And we validate (encourage) as if it were thinking itself, a style of thinking that operates via negation” (12). The hypotactic linking and thinking that

Davis repudiates is the kind of thinking that operates through subordination. As opposed to paratactic linking, hypotactic linking connects elements hierarchically, where one element ultimately ends up privileged over the other. This kind of thinking operates through negation, where one element is considered less than or inferior to the other, and it is this value system that 32

can be encouraged when we view poetics and rhetoric as two distinct fields. The type of

thinking that endorses and facilitates binary opposition gets taken for granted when we view

rhetoric and poetics as distinct fields, objects even, that can be added to language and manipulated as tools. Davis also discusses the possible implications of such humanistic impulses

for the composition classroom:

Like the drugstore, the composition classroom functions as a neutral zone, positioning

itself between the subject and the ‘drug’ so that the object of desire/study will not be free

to take possession of the subject. Both the drugstore and the prosthetic composition

course are on the side of ‘truth,’ the ‘scientific impulse.’...How much interaction between

the drug (language) and the addict (student writer) will produce the desired result, the

desired kind of citizen-subject-author? What’s at stake here is not only freedom; it is

also and more so “reality.” (233, italics in original)

Davis’s metaphor, although it operates as much more than a metaphor, notes that writing can

function much like a drug and that both the drugstore and composition classroom strive to

regulate and control the implacable power and mutability of the subject. Suggesting that the

composition course operates as a prosthetic, making up for some perceived defects in the student

body’s ability to interact with writing and language, Davis notes that academia attempts to create

citizens and subjects out of their students; however, the value system and type of thinking

endorsed in the composition classroom ultimately help to create students’ senses of reality. She

continues: “What gets protected in the prosthetic composition course is the economy of the

Same, as Irigaray calls it; what gets excluded is that which this economy makes unhearable,

unthinkable. What gets silenced is any thinking, as Cixous puts it, of ‘what is not-the-same’”

(qtd. in Davis 235). The economy of the Same is the that we can associate 33

with humanism. While the notions of masculine domination and feminine subjugation are

deeply connected to this discussion, it is the humanist economy that privileges order and

homogeneity over ambiguity and multiplicity that is most pertinent to my argument. Davis

asserts that the composition course facilitates a society where those in power stay in power and all others are rendered unimportant and silent. She states that employing language for any higher means, and I think we can consider applying language towards humanistic goals here, “appears in all instances to be the most terrifying option…Systematic exclusions are born here” (236).

When discussing John Clifford's “The Subject in Discourse,” Davis notes that he offers two options: the teacher can use the composition class to create good public citizens, or it can teach students to resist and turn more towards political activism. Davis says, “What both options have

in common is a humanist impulse: Power always belongs to Some/One; it is always an ego's

power…The pedagogue placed in Clifford’s di/lemna is forced to make a choice for power,

either way, for both assuming power (/knowledge) and then for passing it on” (251). We can see

how the relatively common design of composition courses to create two linked sections of

courses, one pertaining to the study of rhetoric and the other to the study of poetics, illustrates

some of the problems that Davis points out. The typical dichotomization of the two fields and

the privileging of literary study over rhetorical study serves to maintain the teaching of

eloquence and other humanist values often associated with the study of canonical literature. This then perpetuates the economy of the “Same” that Davis mentions in citing Irigaray. It promotes a course of study that avoids questioning what gets left out when the two fields are taught

separately. With so much focus on eloquence and good taste, we lose the larger discussion

whether language is stable or unstable and how it comes to be viewed as malleable. The 34 dichotomization of poetics and rhetoric continues to reinforce the idea that rhetoric and poetics operate as tools, that they are merely means towards humanistic ends.

While some scholars have argued that rhetorical and poetic texts are valuable lenses through which we can view and better understand the world, I would argue that this understanding is illusory at best. In “Uses of Rhetoric in Criticism,” Donald C. Bryant says,

“But fiction, though not life, is like life; in Aristotle’s terms, it has resemblance. It is like life because it is experience in which the takes part. It is unlike life because the experience includes equipment for examining the experience, perspective with which to contemplate those moments of decision as they pass” (12). In this description, Bryant is discussing a very specific form of literature from a specific perspective on literature. While he is exploring the blurred distinctions between rhetoric and poetics, he ultimately argues for a reinscription of those distinctions where rhetoric deals with motivations, politics, and actions in the “real” world. He further argues that literature can extend itself into the political, hence rhetorical, realm. While I would argue that the ambiguity of rhetoric and the creative illusion of poetics fabricate the world around us, it is necessary to acknowledge that poetical works, such as fictive works like and poems, and rhetorical works can operate in Platonic ways and be set to humanistic ends, just as any other language structures and structure of meaning we may encounter. A rich history of and rhetorical analysis speak to the fact that we often use these texts to examine our experiences and the potentiality of our experiences. However, in my own work, I want to emphasize the notion that while we may be reassured by these examinations, or at least we may feel confident that they are accurate representations of life, we must also acknowledge that they incomplete, ambiguous, and ultimately fabrications that shape who we are as people and how we view the world around us. Perhaps the experience we examine, under my paradigm, would be 35 the experience of unsettling oneself, the experience of discovering that the self is neither stable, nor authentic.

In addition to scholars who argue for the interpretive and applicable value of rhetorical and poetical texts, many composition theorists have suggested that we embrace the relationship between rhetoric and poetics. Many scholars suggest that we view everything as an argument, meaning that we note the rhetoricity of all texts. This argument, however, only acknowledges one aspect of rhetoric as it has been historically described as the art of persuasion. Some scholars, such as Phyllis McCord in “Reading Nonfiction in Composition Courses: From Theory to Practice,” suggest that “The limitation of most definitions of literature…is that they are based either on fictionality or on the formal qualities of a text…What we need is a definition that encompasses both these emphases and, by regarding form and content as inseparable, allows for a literary reading of any discourse” (749). McCord argues for more of a synthesis between rhetoric and aesthetics within first-year composition. As recently as 2002, Peter Elbow addresses the fact that scholars in the field of English are sometimes hesitant to perform literary of any discourse, just as they are sometimes hesitant to acknowledge different discourses’ rhetoricity. Elbow notes that he’s “not saying that the culture of composition ignores metaphor and imaginative language altogether” (536), and he says that, “People in the field usually acknowledge that such language helps essays do their discursive work…But I’m sad that the composition tradition seems to assume discursive language as the norm and imaginative, metaphorical language as somehow special or marked or additional” (536). He continues: “I’d argue that we can’t harness students’ strongest linguistic and even cognitive powers unless we see imaginative and metaphorical language as the norm – basic or primal” (536). Elbow supports the valuable point that has been emphasized throughout this paper: 36

In one sense, all language is rhetorical; Wayne Booth made it clear that even literature

has designs on readers – argues, does business. But the tradition from Nietzsche and I.A.

Richards provides the opposite lens to help us nevertheless see that all language use is

also an instance of poetics: a figurative or metaphorical structure that characteristically

yields up more meaning or pleasure when we see it as a self-contained or intertextual

structure – one that always means more than it purports to mean. (539)

While these discussions are helpful in the ways they bring awareness to the binary opposition that has been created between two concepts that have moved into fixed places among a humanistic hierarchy, I maintain that they operate at a level that still asserts ideological hegemony over language. In many cases, scholars seem to want to simply reverse the binary opposition between rhetoric and poetics, moving rhetoric to the place of privilege. Ultimately, however, most theorists end up inserting their own ideologies and agendas into their arguments, which typically results in the continued view of rhetoric and poetics as tools that can be added to or manipulated with language. For example, even as Elbow makes an argument for viewing language as poetic, he discusses the need to “harness students’ linguistic and cognitive powers.”

This kind of statement assumes that such powers are there to be harnessed, that this is an ideologically innocent act, and that language can be manipulated for these ends. This ultimately

results in the objectification and subjugation of students and it teaches them to replicate this way

of thinking.

I argue that we consider breaking down the distinction between rhetoric and poetics

altogether and consider instead a third option: poetic rhetoric. My description of poetic rhetoric

encompasses the argument that Nietzsche puts forth when he says that “language itself is the result of purely rhetorical arts” and the statement that makes: “Literature is 37 fiction…because it is not a priori certain that language functions according to principles which are those, or which are like those, of the phenomenal world” (11). Both of these assertions describe poetic rhetoric, that playful process through which logocentric hierarchies are disrupted and meaning is shifted and shaped. From a pedagogical perspective, I suggest that we can pursue poetic rhetoric in the composition class by studying and writing poetically rhetorical essays.

I ultimately argue that the poetically rhetorical essay would work to push the limits of creativity to such a degree as to show the fictionality within all , texts, and structures of meaning. It would seek out what Vitanza calls “an excess that is for some of us more of a

‘feeling’…a that is not determined, again, by negation…but a feeling and a sign of exuberance” (68). The poetically rhetorical essay would constantly question and maintain skepticism in such a way that it would defer meaning even as it inevitably posited multiple ideas and statements. These different operations would stand to disrupt the humanist agenda that has come to operate as the foundation of our college curricula. The creativity of excess would work to unravel binary oppositions and work to disrupt hegemonic notions that often go unquestioned.

By creating multiple connections that sometimes question and contradict each other, the essayist can stand to disrupt binary distinctions and preconceived ideologies. One may be able to show the individual fictions within each “truth” statement, and one may be able to create tiny fictions for each statement as well. Poetically rhetorical essays would seek out and work to create excess by resisting and deferring any sort of definitive statement of meaning by the end of the piece; rather, they would work to remain open, ambiguous, and illusory throughout the text.

The poetically rhetorical essay is also able to seek out excess through another one of its necessary qualities – its constant questioning, skepticism, and deferral of meaning – and all of 38 these qualities help it resist the humanistic impulse to organize and unify for a higher ideological purpose. Doug Hesse notes that the essay stands in opposition to such humanistic genres as the scientific article or the philosophical argument (35), and Heilker argues that the essay “operates in opposition to the scholastic delineation of experience into discrete disciplines” (19). Rather, the essay brings together contrasting, often conflicting, ideas from multiple disciplines and genres in order to question and explore ideas more fully.

Poetic Rhetoric in the Electronic Environment

The final core chapter of my dissertation, Chapter 4: Poetic Rhetoric in the Online

Environment, extends my discussion of poetic rhetoric into a medium that is becoming more prominent in classrooms across the university: the electronic environment. I argue that poetic rhetoric is best envisioned in a technologically developed and online environment for several reasons. The most basic reason is that scholars are increasingly turning to electronic media to theorize and practice their current courses of study. Writing, and the study of writing, is thus inextricably bound with technology, especially when we consider the idea that writing was one of the first forms of technology. Computer technology that serves as the foundation for the online environment represents the complicated nexus around which poetic rhetoric revolves.

With electronic technology, people create and attempt to control languages through specific binary oppositions. And yet, there is often an excess within this binary code that is uncontrollable and disrupts the illusions of control we have created in our world. While I acknowledge that electronic media can still affirm a metaphysics of presence and can most certainly work towards humanistic ends, I argue that it is possible to see the poetically rhetorical energy that also flows through electronic languages and structures of meaning. Because electronic texts, in the forms of hypertexts, MOOs, wikis, and blogs, present meaning in a 39 constant state of deferral and subjectivity as unstable and fictitious, they offer an environment that reflects poetic rhetoric. I conclude Chapter 4 by discussing how we might envision an electronic form of a poetically rhetorical essay.

While we can arguably make the point that print technology can operate in many progressive, and even postmodern, ways it is also recognized that there is much about print that can reify and perpetuate humanist ideologies and ideals. When I think of the complexity of print technology, I am always reminded of a statement Marshall McLuhan makes in The Gutenberg

Galaxy: “Pope is telling the English world what Cervantes told the Spanish world and Rabelais the French world concerning print. It is a delirium. It is a transforming and metamorphosing drug that has the power of imposing assumptions upon every level of consciousness” (259-60). I think McLuhan is touching on the power of language here and, in fact, on the poetically rhetorical element that operates through language to transform and to take on this delirious aspect. This property still has the ability to function in print. And yet, as McLuhan points out, there is much about print technology that swings in the logocentric direction to maintain structures of power that exscribe and subordinate some people for the benefit of others.

McLuhan notes that along with the printed book came a resurgence in Grammatica (101), which we can associate with humanism and an emphasis on eloquence, uniformity, and in its worst case, elitism. Additionally, McLuhan notes that the printed book also brought about the first mass-produced commodity and a narrowing of communication into one unified sense impression: the visual (124-25). The fact that the printed book played a part in the adoption of an assembly line type of mass production, I think, speaks to the commodification and class hierarchies associated with Capitalism and plays into the class ideologies and hierarchies of 40

power associated with humanism. The emphasis on unification over diversity also speaks to the emphasis on class and power relationships.

I ultimately argue that the poetically rhetorical nature of electronic and digital technologies can disrupt the humanistic tendencies of print technology. While I do acknowledge

that electronic technologies employ a metaphysics of presence in order to function, and that they

often work towards humanistic ends, they also possess many poetically rhetorical qualities and

work to push the boundaries of the printed book into an alternative dimension that holds multiple

possibilities for illusive deferral of meaning. In How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine

Hayles discusses her theory of “flickering signification,” which she says, “extends the productive

force of codes beyond the text to include the signifying processes by which the technologies

produce texts, as well as the interfaces that enmesh humans into integrated circuits” (46). This

type of signification that Hayles associates with electronic technologies leaves a space open for

noise, ambiguity, and excess meanings to appear and disappear throughout digital texts. This is

reflective of the poetic rhetoric that flows through signification and works in a “flickering” way

as it constantly shapes and defers meaning.

We see in the digital media of hypertext, MOOs, and wikis the enactment of poetic

rhetoric in electronic technology. Ultimately, however, I suggest the form of the electronic

poetically rhetorical essay as the best way to incorporate poetic rhetoric into the composition

classroom. While it is entirely possible for hypertexts, MOOs, and wikis to operate solely on the

basis of a metaphysics of presence, we can also see the ways that poetic rhetoric can run away

with them. In My Mother Was a Computer Katherine Hayles notes that within the hypertext “for

networked texts, these vehicles are never the same twice, for they exist in momentary

configurations as data packets are switched quickly from one to another, depending on 41 traffic at the instant of transfer” (103). This constant changing of networked texts reflects the creative deferral of meaning inherent within poetic rhetoric. As Diane Davis notes about MOOs and hypertextual spaces, they “spotlight something about language that our humanist impulses and pedagogical imperatives try like hell to forget: that language won’t sit still, that it won’t denote without also disseminating, and that we cannot control it” (248). The electronic poetically rhetorical essay would also spotlight these qualities that Davis acknowledges; it will not “denote without also disseminating.” It inhabit a creative excess that revels in the fictitious nature of all texts, and it would do this in networked spaces, bringing in the flickering signification that Hayles discusses.

Conclusion

My proposal to view rhetoric and poetics more as one fluid process and less as two concepts that can be analyzed and studied may seem radical. Even more radical is my suggestion that students learn and study a new genre of writing and that they do this in the electronic environment. As I conclude my argument, I acknowledge the challenges that my arguments pose to the first-year writing curriculum. At the same time, I note how these challenges might also relate to the humanistic structure that is in place in the design of composition programs and English departments. While it may be that a study of poetic rhetoric would be more appropriate for an upper level English course, it is nevertheless valuable to consider the way the current designs of many English departments and first-year writing courses function to divide and privilege within the fields of rhetoric and poetics. In addition to this consideration, it is equally valuable to acknowledge on some level the importance of a consideration of poetic rhetoric and to discuss this process-through-language with first-year writing students. It can be valuable for students to see ways in which the university and the 42

world around them operate. They can learn to question predominant ideologies, and they can learn about the power of language and writing in the process. Moreover, it is important for first-

year writers to come into contact with the poetically rhetorical essay and to create their own

essays in the electronic environment. These forms of writing show another side of language that

is often disregarded, and they help students become aware of the ways that ideologies and

languages shape them and the world around us.

43

2. POETIC RHETORIC AND ITS REVISIONS OF OLD DISTINCTIONS

What is truth? a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short, a sum of human relations which were poetically and rhetorically heightened, transferred, and adorned, and after long use seem solid, canonical, and binding to a nation. Truths are illusions about which it has been forgotten that they are illusions, worn-out metaphors without sensory impact, coins which have lost their image and now can be used only as metal, and no longer as coins. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying in an Extra Moral Sense”

Basic Principles of Poetic Rhetoric

As I have been discussing poetics and rhetoric, I have noted the ways in which they have traditionally been seen as dichotomous subjects. I have also noted that viewing these concepts from this perspective leaves them locked within a logocentric paradigm that typically ends up privileging one term over the other and subordinating both concepts to Platonic notions of philosophy. As much as I work to describe the theory that underlies my concept of poetic rhetoric, it is important to remember that just as important as this concept is the point that I am breaking down the distinctions between poetics and rhetoric. This project is as much about creating a new way of viewing poetics and rhetoric as it is about resisting the urge to simplify and categorize such powerful forces. As I resist and disrupt these tendencies towards dichotomization and , I also aim to show that the processes of poetics and rhetoric are not mere tools added to language in order to serve humanistic ends. In this chapter, I will continue this discussion and elaborate on my own theory of poetic rhetoric as a way of breaking down the distinctions between these two terms and offer up a third term, poetic rhetoric, that operates in a more complex, ambiguous, and generative way. I will argue that poetic rhetoric acknowledges a loss of control over our languages, our bodies, and our structures of meaning. 44

Poetic rhetoric creates a dislocation of meaning and dislodges notions of a coherent, stable self.

Additionally, embracing poetic rhetoric also means recognizing that our experiences are visceral and finite. I draw on scholars such as Nietzsche and Derrida, as well as scholars in the fields of philosophy, language studies, rhetorical studies, and aesthetics to support the theoretical basis for this argument. Since I argue that poetic rhetoric is the creative function in a language that dissembles and fabricates the world around us, this assertion is supported by Nietzsche’s claim that one cannot add rhetorical tropes to language, because language is inherently tropological. If we see logos as logic and speech, my arguments about poetic rhetoric are further supported by

Derrida’s description of the logos from which rhetoric stems as having deceptive, pharmacological properties.

As I discuss my description of poetic rhetoric I will have to struggle with several challenges. To begin, it is difficult to discuss this synthesized term without breaking down into a dichotomous discussion of each term in regards to its own history and merit. Secondly, when breaking poetic rhetoric down into a dichotomy, it will be even harder, then, not to fall into that trap of tacitly privileging one term over the other. Finally, since the notion of “poetic rhetoric” is an extremely broad topic, I will need to focus in on the attributes that I find most relevant to my overall project. I will address these challenges by acknowledging that, to some extent, I will not be able to escape them. For example, it will be necessary for me to discuss the terms “poetics” and “rhetoric” from historical and theoretical perspectives before synthesizing them and discussing the merits of my description of poetic rhetoric. I find the issue of inadvertent privileging to be a more complicated subject. At times I have found myself arguing that poetic rhetoric operates more poetically or that it operates more rhetorically. However, it is important to note that it is not my intention to privilege one term over the other. I see poetic rhetoric as one 45

fluid process. At times, it is helpful to consider its rhetorical properties, but these properties are

also just as much poetical. In my mind, rhetoric is poetical, and the poetic is rhetorical. In many

ways, I think, the two terms share a history of subordination to philosophy. However, they have

both been recovered in different and complex ways. For example, one could argue that Sidney’s

and Shelley’s defenses of poetry do for poetry what Aristotle’s attempts to save rhetoric from the

demeaning claims of Plato do to rhetoric. In a way, both are trying to show that their subject is important in its role in the world; however, both still operate under the predominate paradigm of the day, one dominated by Platonic notions of logocentrism, where philosophy is privileged above all else. It may be that people see poetics as having more ability to be the free-form, illusory, creative process because we typically consider poetics to operate in a more abstract, creative realm, whereas people may view rhetoric as traditionally being a logical tool used for making language more persuasive. Because I argue for a different consideration of rhetoric, it may seem that I am privileging it over poetics. However, the type of rhetoric I discuss is one that thinkers such as , Nietzsche, and Derrida argue has existed ever since humans have tried to understand and make meaning out of the world around them. While I do see connections between the sophistic rhetoric that is exemplified by such as Gorgias and discussed by such scholars as Nietzsche and Derrida, I ultimately argue that my description of poetic rhetoric is more aligned with the third sophistic that is posited by Victor Vitanza. It is my contention that the form of third sophistic rhetoric is poetically creative, that it is illusory, and that it fabricates the world around us. This is also how the poetic operates, and this is why I argue for a new term that is poetic rhetoric. 46

Poetic Rhetoric as a Form of Third Sophistic Rhetoric

One way to approach my description of poetic rhetoric is to discuss it in terms of other

scholarly descriptions of rhetoric. Sophistic rhetoric, and its different iterations, can be a

valuable frame for my discussion of poetic rhetoric. Because sophistic rhetoric resists the

logocentrism of Platonic philosophy and Plato’s descriptions of philosophic rhetoric, it sets an

example as to how poetic rhetoric operates. Here I will discuss poetic rhetoric as it relates to

sophistic rhetoric, and I will extend my discussion to include a consideration of how poetic

rhetoric relates to what Victor Vitanza calls third sophistic rhetoric. Sophistic and third sophistic

rhetoric are connected in a complex way: while first and second sophistics worked to resist the

unitary logocentrism of Platonic philosophy through the argument/counter-argument form of

dissoi-logoi, third sophistic thought takes this disruption further by breaking down and exploding

the argument/counter-argument paradigm in the form of dissoi-paralogoi. Dissoi-paralogoi does not operate through a point/counter-point process, but rather acknowledges the multiplicitous nature of language and hence all arguments. This approach to logic and language resists the that is created in the argument/counter-argument, or dissoi-logoi, paradigm and creates what Vitanza describes as a “dispersion/scattering of the antithesis that leads to ‘something new’” (“’Some More’ Notes 124). The different iterations of sophistic rhetoric hold value for my discussion of poetic rhetoric because poetic rhetoric reflects the skepticism and resistance to authentic truth espoused by first and second sophistics. Beyond this, though, poetic rhetoric also works to unravel the antithesis that can exist within sophistic rhetoric, and thus poetic rhetoric is more aligned with a third sophistic. Poetic rhetoric’s dissembling of arguments, and hence language, works as a deferral of meaning and ultimately ends up creating “something new.”

Sophistic rhetoric has a deep history and one to which can be devoted many book length 47

projects, so I will focus on its main qualities that are relevant to my arguments and discussions

regarding poetic rhetoric.

Some scholars, such as Edward Schiappa, say that sophists did not exist as we have come

to understand them; others, such as Scott Consigny and Susan Jarratt, appropriate sophists for their own ideological purposes. In “Sophistic Rhetoric: Oasis or Mirage,” Schiappa argues that,

“even if we stipulate the traditional list of sophists as ‘definitive,’ there is no consistent ideology which could be called a distinct ‘sophistic rhetoric’” (10). He also asserts that sophistic rhetoric

“should be considered a mirage” (8) and that “‘sophistic rhetoric’ is a construct we can do without; a fiction, originally invented by Plato for his own ends” (16). Susan Jarratt does much to redeem sophistic rhetoric in Rereading the Sophists, yet she does it to further an awareness and emphasis on democracy in the composition classroom. While these scholars work to legitimate the sophists, they do so through systems of classification and structures of social norms that do not take into full account the complex and illusory nature of logos that the sophists, like Gorgias, so often describe.

Sophistic rhetoric works to challenge and disrupt Platonic notions of philosophy and philosophic rhetoric, and many of those ideals can be equated with humanist ideologies that purposefully or inadvertently exclude and subjugate others. In Seduction, Sophistry, and the

Woman with the Rhetorical Figure, Michelle Ballif discusses rhetoric as it was described by

Plato, both in terms of the type of rhetoric he valorized and the type of rhetoric he vilified. Ballif notes that Plato privileged philosophy over rhetoric and philosophic rhetoric over sophistic rhetoric (42-43). She says, “Plato has articulated rhetoric – his philosophic rhetoric (rhetoric with being, as being) as a technē: it is presented as being (1) universal: as applying to all men,

(2) codifiable, and, therefore, teachable, (3) precise (match this soul type with this discourse), 48

and (4) concerned with (rhetoric is here described according a cause/effect model)”

(43). Plato’s description of philosophic rhetoric reflects some humanist ideals that can maintain

class hierarchies and propagate exclusion. Plato has codified language and the process of

rhetoric that flows through it, isolating rhetoric as a skill that can be taught the same way to all

people. This assumes a certain stability and authenticity of language and the meaning that it

represents. His description of its being precise and explanatory also assumes stability and the kind of hypotactic thinking that can result in the privileging of certain ideas, and ultimately people, over others. Victor Vitanza discusses the ways in which Plato subjugated notions of sophistic rhetoric:

For Plato, the possibilities for representing the Sophists, is to be realized by way of

diaresis (division, naming) and purification ( 226c.) Plato…concludes…that the

Sophist practices ‘the art of contradiction making, descended from an insincere kind of

conceited mimicry, of the semblance-making breed, derived from image making’ (268c-

d). As we know, Plato continually speaks against , or representations three times

removed. (28)

By dividing and naming the sophists, Plato decried them as being limited to searching for contradictions and creating copies of thoughtful arguments. Additionally, Ballif says that for

Plato, “philosophic rhetoric is, above all, logical and rational, like the mind. Conversely, sophistic rhetoric is presented as irrational” (43). In these ways, we see that rational thought and logical reasoning were privileged over what scholars in Plato’s time considered the persuasive arguments of rhetoric.

Considering sophistic rhetoric is a way to resist the logocentrism and male-dominated ideologies of power propagated by Platonic descriptions of philosophic rhetoric. There is much 49

to be gained from studying sophism and considering how it adds to our notions of rhetoric. For

example, in Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured, Susan Jarratt rereads Gorgias

and to show the complex rhetoricity of their works and to show their keen awareness

of rhetoric and democracy. Regarding the sophists, Jarratt says, “Rejecting traditional religion as

an explanation for natural phenomena, they evinced a special interest in human perceptions as

the only source of knowledge in all fields, including nature, and emphasized the significance of language in constructing that knowledge” (xviii). In this sense, we see sophistic rhetoric acknowledging that there is no authentic source of knowledge; rather, language constructs our forms of knowledge and our notions of subjectivity. Gorgias says, in his Encomium of Helen,

Speech is a powerful lord, which by means of the finest and most invisible body effects

the divinest works: it can stop fear and banish grief and create joy and nurture pity. I shall

show how this is the case, since it is necessary to offer to the opinion of my

hearers: I both deem and define all poetry as speech with meter. Fearful shuddering and

tearful pity and grievous longing come upon its hearers, and at the actions and physical

sufferings of others in good fortunes and in evil fortunes, through the agency of words,

the soul is wont to experience a suffering of its own. (45)

Gorgias argues here for the creative properties of language, noting that poetry comprises all speech.

Poetic rhetoric is very much in tune with sophistic rhetoric. Because rhetoric is so clearly not a monolithic term, it is helpful to consider poetic rhetoric as another way of viewing sophistic rhetoric, one that also embraces the creative power of poetics. Because of its creative and rhetorical properties, poetic rhetoric propels an “art of contradiction” throughout language and structures of meaning. It creates a kind of truth through semblance and can operate 50 irrationally, like sophistic rhetoric. In addition to its similarities to sophistic rhetoric, poetic rhetoric works to break down the distinction between poetics and rhetoric, and, as I am discussing in this work, it specifically breaks down the dichotomy between literary poetics and rhetoric. As I discuss the similarities between sophistic rhetoric and poetic rhetoric, one may wonder how poetic rhetoric differs from the former. The point to remember with poetic rhetoric is its emphasis on breaking down the distinction and categorization between the two concepts, poetic and rhetoric. By breaking down this distinction, one is able to see a more fluid possibility that stands to disrupt the binary opposition that has so long existed between the two fields. This process of resisting dichotomization also operates to resist the notion of categorization that is so often aligned with humanist tendencies towards order and to organization through subordination.

Beyond comparing poetic rhetoric to sophistic rhetoric, however, it is helpful to consider it in terms of a more disruptive concept: third sophistic rhetoric. In the notes to her book, Breaking Up [at] Totality: A Rhetoric of Laughter, D. Diane Davis describes the third sophistic. She says,

Third sophistics interest themselves not just in the supplement, the dirty underside that

holds the logocentric (binary) system intact, but also in the nonsequential and

uncountable third that overflows and upsets any dichotomy, in the harassing other that

the epistemological impulse aims to excrete. Third sophistics set their scanners to

‘static,’ to the ‘noise’ that must be silenced or appropriated for the sake of meaning-

making. Third sophistics move beyond the disso-logoi, the privilege-flipping of negative

, and into what Vitanza has called dissoi-paralogoi, affirmative

that point to the excess flying around, to the leftover that’s busily

shattering the border zones of thought. (262) 51

Victor Vitanza posits many of the foundations, or as he might call them anti/foundations, of the third sophistic, and it is to him we turn for a deeper description of how the third sophistic works and the possibilities it projects. For Vitanza, the third sophistic is a stage of sophism that has always already been enacting a disruption of Platonic and Aristotelian notions of logos and binary opposition that works to define through negation. The third sophistic works to break unitary and binary concepts and ideologies into multiplicities of possibility. Vitanza links the third sophistic with Gorgian notions of , which can be described as the “right thing at the right moment” (“‘Some More’ Notes” 124). In this way, as Vitanza says, the subject no longer decides its own fate, but rather becomes a function of a kairotic logos: “it moves from a hypotaxis/syntaxis of ‘one’ and ‘two’ to a radical parataxis/paralogy of ‘some more’” (“’Some

More’ Notes 117). Vitanza also notes that “A Third Sophistic Rhetoric…would be, or is, an ‘art’ of ‘resisting and disrupting’ the available means (that is, the cultural codes) that allow for persuasion and identification” (133). He adds that “It engages in ‘language games of art’ (‘art’ not as techné, but as ‘avante-garde art’) and in countless ‘little ’ that are often more radical than the Sophistic strategy of local nomoi, or the local knowledge” (133).

This is, in effect, how I suggest poetic rhetoric can operate as a third sophistic. Vitanza touches on the poetic element of poetic rhetoric. Throughout much of his work, he discusses the need for an aestheticized politics and here again we see his reference to the language games of art, of avante-garde art. What he is discussing here is the same thing that has been discussed so much by Nietzsche – the way in which art not only disassembles false, unquestioned notions of truth, but also the way that out of that unraveling it creates something that calls on us to question our preconceived ideas of what constitutes truth and meaning. Embracing a notion of poetic rhetoric means embracing this notion of art as it courses through language. Poetic rhetoric can 52

also work to divide logos into radical multiplicities and challenge the notion of the humanistic

subject that has been disseminated throughout the university by the distinction and categorization

of rhetoric and poetics as separate fields of study. As I have suggested and will continue to

assert, this type of dichotomization leads to a privileging of one field over the other and includes

the view and use of rhetoric and poetics as tools put towards humanistic ends. Furthermore,

whenever scholars attempt to rescue or legitimate either field in its own right, the binary

framework in which it operates leads them to perpetuate that logocentric paradigm, preventing us

from further learning about the possibilities connected with rhetoric and poetics. By suggesting that we break down the distinction between rhetoric and poetics, I am suggesting that we note the ways in which all language is driven by an unstable form of logos, that this form of logos drives

rhetoric and poetics, and that these two forces power language in a way that is ambiguous, shifting, illusory, and creative.

Poetics, Rhetoric, and Logos

It is my assertion that acknowledging poetic rhetoric means embracing the idea that

language and structures of meaning are ultimately powered by a form of unstable logos, which

operates as the foundation, or anti-foundation, of poetic rhetoric. One of the most helpful ways

to approach this discussion is to turn to , because it is his discussion of writing,

discourse, logos, metaphysics, and presence that best describes the possibilities for poetic

rhetoric. When Derrida discusses writing, he often refers to the relationship between Plato and

the sophists, so it is fair to claim that in his discussions writing can be related to rhetoric.

Derrida complicates Platonic notions of writing and its relation to stable meaning as seen in

Barbara Johnson’s quotation of Derrida in her introduction to Dissemination: 53

There has never been anything but writing; there have never been anything but

supplements, substitutive significations which could only come forth in a chain of

differential references, the ‘real’ supervening, and being added only while taking on

meaning from a trace and from an invocation of a supplement, etc. And thus to infinity,

for we have read, in the text, that the absolute present, Nature, that which words like ‘real

mother’ name, have always already escaped, have never existed; that what opens

meaning and language is writing as the disappearance of natural presence. (xiv)

This assertion notes that writing is pervasive, but that it only operates through a process of supplementation, meaning that it can only stand in for some perceived meaning. In order for meaning, ideas, and language to come to fruition, they must take the form of representation, and this representation through supplementation takes the form of writing. The natural presence of meaning disappears in order for writing to stand in its stead. Because all thinking is an inaccurate attempt at representing and appraising meaning, all thinking takes the form of writing and all meaning operates through the process of supplementation and deferral. Writing operates through a process of deferral, and this process is inherent within all discourses and structures of meaning. If we associate meaning and words with logos, we will see that under Derrida’s theory, logos is something that is unstable, a process in which meaning is constantly being deferred and supplemented. It is this form of rhetoric that I see operating in my description of poetic rhetoric.

This instability of meaning can be represented both by Derrida’s of writing with the figure of a joker and by Nietzsche’s appeal to the figure of the fool. Nietzsche says,

“We must discover the hero no less than the fool in our passion for knowledge… Precisely because we are at bottom grave and serious beings -- nothing does us as much good as a fool's 54 cap: we need it in relation to ourselves” (Gay Science 163-64). An acknowledgment of meaning’s instability requires an element of creativity, imagination, and play. Derrida also speaks of this notion of play that represents deferral of meaning when he compares Thoth, god of writing, to a joker:

In distinguishing himself from his opposite, Thoth also imitates it, becomes its sign and

representative, obeys it and conforms to it, replaces it, by violence if need be. He is thus

the father’s other, the father, and the subversive movement of replacement….He cannot

be assigned a fixed spot in the play of differences. Sly, slippery, and masked, an intriguer

and a card, like Hermes he is neither king nor jack, but rather a sort of joker, a floating

signifier, a wild card, one who puts play into play. (93)

The creativity of art that Nietzsche associates with the fool and the subversive movement of rhetoric or writing that Derrida associates with the joker come together when we break down the distinction between poetics and rhetoric. Both of these are figures of pleasure, ambiguity, and illusion, and they can both describe the type of unstable logos that powers poetic rhetoric. When

Derrida says, “It is precisely this ambiguity that Plato, through the mouth of the King, attempts to master, to dominate by inserting its definition into simple, clear-cut oppositions: good and evil, inside and outside, true and false, essence and appearance” (103), we might also add to his list of false binaries the binary of poetics and rhetoric.

Ultimately, Derrida argues that logos is an unstable pharmakon. Under this paradigm it is neither good nor bad, but rather has the pharmacological properties of the pharmakon. The pharmakon is the word that Plato uses to describe “writing,” and it has the potential to be translated in a multitude of ways. It can at once mean illness, cure, medicine, drug, tool, and recipe. It is something that can have both negative and positive effects. Derrida says, “If the 55

written word is scorned, it is not as a pharmakon coming to corrupt memory and truth. It is

because logos is a more effective pharmakon. This is what Gorgias calls it. As a pharmakon, logos is at once good and bad; it is not at the outset governed exclusively by goodness and truth”

(115). He goes on to add, “If the pharmakon is ‘ambivalent,’ it is because it constitutes the medium in which opposites are opposed, the movement and the play that links them among themselves, reverses them or makes one side cross over into the other…The pharmakon is the movement, the locus, and the play: (the production of) ” (127). It is this instability in logos, and hence language, that powers poetic rhetoric. It is inherent within all language, whether or not it is reflected clearly or operating subversively. It is the deferral of meaning, and we can see this through the creative, illusory nature of poetic rhetoric.

Derrida returns us to the notion of sophistry by referencing Gorgias, and it is his description of logos, in the form of speech, that challenges traditional notions of logos and posits the view of logos as pharmakon. In his “Encomium of Helen,” Gorgias describes speech as “a powerful lord, which by means of the finest and most invisible body effects the divinest works”

(45). His description of speech here acknowledges the way in which language can shape the people and the world around it, and his reference to the divine can represent the arbitrary elements of the world that are beyond human control. Gorgias also compares speech to witchcraft when he says, “The effect of speech upon the condition of the soul is comparable to the power of drugs over the nature of bodies” (46). He notes the multiple ways in which drugs can affect the body, both positively and negatively. He also says that some drugs can “bewitch the soul with a kind of evil persuasion” (46). In these ways we can see the powerful and yet sometimes illusory and deceptive nature of logos as it operates through language. Michelle

Ballif notes that in Gorgias’s text, “we are never certain where or what logos is. Further, 56

although Gorgias’s text pretends to offer us four neatly packaged and delineated causes or

reasons for Helen’s seduction, they keep slipping into each other. The categories cannot hold.

Therefore, even though via logos Gorgias can defend Helen, his logos continuously dissembles

itself” (83). In addition to the way Gorgias describes logos as being a deceptive and illusory force outside of human control, the very role of logos in his discussion is one that is constantly falling back on itself in a way that unravels its meaning and puts it into play.

Poetic Rhetoric as it Operates Through Discourse

As mentioned previously, scholars, beginning as far back as Plato, have often viewed

rhetoric and poetics as subordinate concepts, existing to serve what they consider more pure and worthwhile fields, such as philosophy. In his notes on rhetoric and language, Nietzsche notes that “Plato’s polemic against the rhetorical is directed sometimes against the base goals of popular rhetoric, and sometimes against the entirely crude and insufficient, unphilosophical preparatory training of rhetors. He holds rhetoric to be legitimate when it rests upon philosophical education, and provided it is used for good aims, i.e., those of philosophy”

(“History of Greek Eloquence” 215). In addition, “Plato, to be sure, attributes ’ great mastery of oratory to philosophy…not to the Sophists” (“History of Greek Eloquence” 224). In this way, we see philosophy reigning supreme over all other forms of thought and views on meaning. This can include approaches to language and language arts. To embrace a concept of poetic rhetoric would be to resist this Platonic hierarchy that has been in place for so many centuries. As I have said, it would be to resist this form of categorization that is so in line with humanistic ideologies and instead question the very role those ideologies play in our discourses and approaches to language and meaning. As I describe it, breaking down the distinction between poetics and rhetoric acknowledges that both of these concepts operate in similar ways, 57

working to shape and shift our forms of meaning. In embracing this notion, we resist the

humanistic impulse that would see rhetoric and poetics as tools that can be applied to language to

achieve specific ends. We would also note that when poetic rhetoric operates through language,

it challenges the notion that we have authentic access to truth, that there is a stable form of

meaning we can access, that we are stable subjects, and that we have control over ourselves or

the world around us.

In order to challenge the Platonic binary opposition between rhetoric and poetics and

affirm the poetic rhetoric that flows through language, creating and deferring meaning, we must

first understand how poetic rhetoric operates as a process through language. Friedrich Nietzsche

helps us understand this argument through his artistic and rhetorical approach to language.

Describing rhetoric’s subjugated position, he draws a connection between rhetoric and poetics

when he says, “We call an author, a book, or a style ‘rhetorical’ when we observe a conscious application of artistic means of speaking; it always implies a gentle reproof. We consider it not to be natural, and as producing the impression of being done purposefully” (21). He draws a parallel between rhetoric and artistic means of speaking, showing that the boundary between rhetoric and poetics can be ambiguous. Additionally, he observes the negative connotation often associated with rhetoric and artistic eloquence. Nietzsche also suggests that there is an assumption that one can distinguish natural and non-natural elements of language. This assumption comes from the Aristotelian idea that rhetoric and poetics have techniques that can be added to language. This assumption offers a simplistic view of language, and it portrays language as something that can be natural and innocent. This idea covers over the ways in which language can be manipulated, especially by those already occupying positions of power. It does not account for the ambiguous and volatile nature of language that can influence all of our 58

discourses. Language is always representing some form of meaning; therefore, there is always a

disconnect between that untenable meaning and the verbal constructs that represent it. In this

way, language operates as a metaphor, representing its underlying meaning. While some might

argue that language is able to naturally and authentically convey meaning, the metaphorical

nature of language indicates that there will always be some slippage between the root meaning

and the language that represents it. Because of this, we can say that language is tropological. In

this way, language can be seen as rhetorical and poetic because of its figurative nature.

Nietzsche supports this argument when he suggests that,

[I]t is not difficult to prove that what is called ‘rhetorical,’ a means of conscious art, had

been active as a means of unconscious art in language and its development [Werden],

indeed, that the rhetorical is a further development, guided by the clear light of

understanding, of the artistic means which are already found in language. There is

obviously no unrhetorical ‘naturalness’ of language to which one could appeal; language

itself is the result of purely rhetorical arts. (“Description of Ancient Rhetoric” 21)

He also asserts: “In sum: the tropes are not just occasionally added to words but constitute their most proper nature” (25). In this very statement we see Nietzsche’s argument that all language is rhetorical. Rhetoric is not a tool or a technique that can be added to language; rather, rhetoric is language. Language is rhetoric. The poetically rhetorical slippage that occurs between language and meaning ensure that meaning always exists within a state of deferral. Nietzsche lays the groundwork for my argument through his discussion of conscious and unconscious art.

Nietzsche’s reference to “unconscious art” and “rhetorical arts” shows the artistic, and hence poetic, nature of language. Beyond Nietzsche’s suggestion that there is no “unrhetorical

‘naturalness’ to language,” we can see that language operates artfully, as a creative principle. 59

Through the poetically rhetorical deferral of meaning within language, new ideas are constantly created.

Additonally, Nietzsche shows the relationship between sophistic rhetoric and poetics.

Nietzsche’s argument that poets are deceivers shows how the illusory nature of poetics fuels language in its most creative sense. Nietzsche argues that the poet is a deceiver who creates illusions that he and everyone else around him . I have argued that rhetoric operates through language to also create illusions. With language and rhetoric, as Derrida has so convincingly shown, meaning is in a constant state of deferral; therefore, our structures of meaning are ultimately based on illusions. Or, at least, we can never know an authentic sense of meaning. This same relationship of language to meaning can be seen in terms of poetics. When speaking of the poet, Nietzsche notes that, “The poet as a deceiver: he imitates being a knower…he carries it off with those who do not know: finally he himself believes it” (“On the

Poet” 243). Nietzsche also notes that, “Even now poetic men…still seek the limits of knowledge, indeed preferably of skepticism, in order to break free from the spell of logic. They want uncertainty, because then the magician, intimation, and the great sentiments become possible again” (243). As Nietzsche’s poets try to break free from logic and seek out uncertainty, they remove themselves from the subjugated position of being subordinate to the logic of philosophy. The uncertainty of the magician is also the uncertainty of rhetoric, that shape-shifting process inherent within all language.

Poetic Rhetoric’s Resistance to a Metaphysics of Presence

Derrida has argued and shown persuasively that at the root of Western thinking there is an emphasis on what he calls a metaphysics of presence. Essentially, this is the belief that life at the present moment is true and believable and that therefore we should value that which is present 60

over that which is not present or which can not be known indefinitely to be true, authentic, and

present. Derrida describes presence as encompassing the meaning of being, “presence as

substance/essence/existence…the self-presence of cogito, consciousness, subjectivity, the co-

presence of the other and of the self, and so forth” ( 12). He also adds that

“the determination of absolute presence is constituted as self-presence, as subjectivity” (16). In

this we note that presence is equated with being and with the existence of a stable self. Scholars

with whom Derrida takes issue with view presence as natural and self-sufficient. Therefore,

these scholars view writing as dangerous because in its operation through representation, it

substitutes writing for “the thing itself” or authentic presence: “Writing is dangerous from the

moment that representation there claims to be presence and the sign of the thing itself” (144).

Because so much value has been placed on presence, this then results in a fear and subordination of death and anything that might stand in for or re-present what we have come to consider as true and authentic. In Speech and Phenomena, Derrida notes that “phenomenology, the metaphysics of presence in the form of ideality, is also a philosophy of life” (10). To place an emphasis on

life, one consequently places an emphasis on presence. There is also an aversion to or fear of

death that occurs within a metaphysics of presence and an emphasis on life. Derrida draws a parallel between the death of life and the death that occurs when a sign takes the representational place of that which it signifies: “We know now that indication, which thus far includes practically the whole surface of language, is the process of death at work in ” (40). In

Dissemination, Derrida says, “For it goes without saying that the god of writing must also be the god of death. We should not forget that, in the , another thing held against the invention of the pharmakon is that it substitutes the breathless sign for the living voice…In all the cycles of Egyptian mythology, Thoth presides over the organization of death” (92). He adds 61

that, “Thoth extends or opposes by repeating or replacing. By the same token, the figure of

Thoth takes its shape from the very thing it resists and substitutes for. But it thereby opposes

itself, passes into its other, and this messenger-god is truly a god of the absolute passage between

opposites” (93). Derrida argues that Plato fears death and sees writing as a symbolic enactment

of death over authentic meaning. Derrida also shows, however, that writing is not just an

enactment of death, but that it is more so a play of opposites: because writing takes its shape

from that which it represents, it is necessarily a part of that thing in itself. Essentially, then, these arguments support the notion that some theorists address fear of death by privileging life and presence. In this way, writing, which takes the place of the presence of an “authentic” meaning, is something that Plato, and many following him, fear and hence feel the need to control. These fears and impulses to control can be extrapolated to show that hierarchies of power are created because people fear death and consequently want to make their lives as powerful, meaningful, and enjoyable as they can. They ultimately achieve this, however, on the backs of others.

It is my contention, along with support from Derrida’s theoretical reasoning, that the privileging of presence and coherent meaning should be resisted, especially when it comes to an unquestioned acceptance of these hierarchies. We can resist privileging presence and authentic meaning by considering that it is through our fears of death that we attach so much significance to our discourses. Language has the potential for multiple meanings; it creates multiplicities of meaning through its constant cycles of deferral. It is our human impulse to seek out unified notions of meaning and to believe that we are the ones creating this meaning in our lives. We want to manipulate language to reflect the meaningfulness that we believe exists within our lives.

However, as Nietzsche says, “’Meaning’ means no more than that: no expression determines and delimits a movement of soul with such rigidity that it could be regarded as the actual statement 62 of the meaning. Every expression is just a and not the thing; and can be interchanged” (“Description of Ancient Rhetoric” 67). At some level, “meaning” comes down to being just another word. Nietzsche is reinforcing the idea that no real “authentic” meaning can exist; rather, we can only make attempts to estimate meanings through our interchangeable symbols. Poetic rhetoric acknowledges this transitory nature of meaning. Its ambiguous, shifting nature resists the metaphysics of presence, and while some people deal with a fear of death by attempting to manipulate and control ideas of meaning, people who embrace poetic rhetoric focus more on accepting the inevitability of death and playing and reveling in the creativity associated with life and death.

As Derrida has shown in other works, to a certain extent the metaphysics of presence is necessary to his theory; however, it is something that must be in a constant state of being questioned and of deferral. In this instance, we question the emphasis on presence and authenticity. My configuration of poetic rhetoric would note that all language can operate as a form of re-presentation and, as Derrida notes,

By reason of the primordially repetitive structure of signs in general, there is every

likelihood that ‘effective’ language is just as imaginary as imaginary speech and that

imaginary speech is just as effective as effective speech. In both expression and

indicative communication the difference between reality and representation, between the

veridical and the imaginary, and between simple presence and repetition has already

begun to wear away. (Speech and Phenomena 51)

Derrida suggests that as the distinction between presence and repetition blurs, even as we attempt to cling to the sovereignty of presence, it is philosophy that supposes a metaphysics of presence that works to make the sign a subordinate, derivative feature that also imbues language with 63

significance, therefore acknowledging the complexity that is inherent within language. In regard

to the difference between presence and repetition, he notes, “Does not the maintaining of this

difference…answer to the obstinate desire to save presence and to reduce or derive the sign, and

with it all powers or representation? Which come to living in the effect…of repetition and

representation, of the difference which removes presence” (51). Derrida describes the acknowledgment of repetition and difference as “living in the effect.” This reflects an awareness

that the underlying meaning that we assume exists behind our representations is actually

transitory and unstable. Thus we live our daily lives and attach meaningfulness through the ever-

changing effects produced by the representations of our signs.

As Derrida mentions, the strong emphasis on a metaphysics of presence has led scholars,

starting with Plato, to subordinate and denigrate such fields as rhetoric and poetics. In fact, it has

motivated theorists to think categorically, which has resulted in poetics and rhetoric being viewed as distinct fields in the first place. Because the emphasis on presence also means an emphasis on truth and authenticity, fields where truth can be dissembled or fabricated have been viewed as everything from deceitful to entertaining artifice. Poetic rhetoric stands to resist the metaphysics of presence and instead to revel in that space between presence and repetition. I would suggest that through its creative, illusive properties, poetic rhetoric “lives in

the effect.”

Nietzsche furthers the argument that language does not represent an “authentic” meaning;

it defers that meaning and presents us instead with multiple representations. Poetic rhetoric

flows through this language and is the creative, differential force within these multiple meanings.

In regard to language, Nietzsche says, “What is a word? The portrayal of nerve stimuli in

sounds. But to conclude from a nerve stimulus to a cause outside ourselves is already the result 64 of a false and unjustified application of the of causality” (“On Truth and Lying in an Extra-

Moral Sense” 248). Poetic rhetoric acknowledges this physiological description of language, enacting instead a language that is illusory. The meaning within poetic rhetoric is in a constant state of deferral and ultimately ends up being artfully fabrication. Additionally, Nietzsche argues, “The ‘thing-in-itself’ (which would be pure, disinterested truth) is also absolutely incomprehensible to the creator of language and not worth seeking. [The creator of language] designates only the relations of things to men, and to express these relations he uses the boldest of metaphors” (248). Nietzsche emphasizes the rhetoricity of language, its inability to capture an authentic truth. In fact, he suggests that this is not a purpose of language. This reflects rhetoric’s ambiguous and shifting nature. Nietzsche’s discussion of the use of metaphor also captures the poetically rhetorical nature of language. With this statement, we see that all language is metaphor. Nietzsche even extends his discussion of the role of metaphor to the field of mathematics, which is a field often associated with logic, presence, and the orderly, rational spirit of humanism. He notes, speaking of the “coldness of mathematics,” that “Whoever feels the breath of that coldness will scarcely believe that even the concept, bony and cube-shaped like a die, and equally rotatable, is just what is left over as the residue of a metaphor, and that the illusion of the artistic transference of a nerve stimulus into images is, if not the mother, then the grandmother, of any concept” (“On the ” 209). He also adds, discussing mathematical forms and of nature, “the artistic metaphor-formation with which every perception begins in us, already presupposed those forms, and hence is carried out in them”

(254). It is arguable as to whether or not the metaphor is a rhetorical or poetical device, or both, but the fact remains that the metaphor behaves in a poetically rhetorical way. It substitutes one 65

meaning for another, constantly deferring pure truth. It is creative and illusory, and it is the way we create the world around us.

Nietzsche, and others, have argued that by searching for coherent, stable, true knowledge, we begin to privilege notions of stability and coherence above all else, in an unquestioning way.

We see that which is unified, linear, and logical as that which is true. In accepting this,

sometimes uncritically, we risk assimilating multiple perspectives into a concept that covers over

the deep complexities of any given issue. In this sense, we risk forgetting that the concepts arose

out of fictions. We risk forgetting the roles metaphors play in the formation of concepts and in

our notions of truth. In Nietzsche and Metaphor, Sarah Kofman says, “metaphor is founded on

the ontological unity of life represented by Dionysus. But if there is a metaphor it is because this

unity is always already in pieces and can only be reconstituted when symbolically transposed

into art” (14). Thus, in seeking out unity and logic, we forget that unity has also been in a

previously fragmented state. The symbolic transposition that takes place through art is one in

which that unity is constantly being broken down and put back together again in differing and

multiple ways. Furthering this point, Kofman also notes that, “Aristotle’s definition of metaphor

could not be retained as such by Nietzsche since it is based on a division of the world into well-

defined genera and species corresponding to essences, whereas for Nietzsche the essence of

things is enigmatic, so genera and species are themselves but human, all-too-human metaphors”

(15). Here we can also argue that even when one is seeking unified logic by dividing and

categorizing, one forgets that the categories are themselves creations that are subject to change

and dissimulation. 66

Embracing Poetic Rhetoric Means Accepting a Loss of Subjectivity

When we start to think of poetic rhetoric operating in the world around us, we must then

accept the idea that these illusory, ambiguous, shifting processes control more in our lives than

we do. With this acceptance comes an acknowledgment that we do not control our own

subjectivities; rather, they are products of poetic rhetoric. Nietzsche’s views on the origins of

language illustrate this idea: “Language is neither the conscious work of individuals nor of a

plurality” (“On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense” 252). He goes on to say, “Language

is much too complex to be the work of a single individual, much too unified to be the work of a

mass; it is a complete organism” (209). He also says that we might consider language an instinct, but he emphasizes that this instinct is not a conscious reaction. The acceptance of this view of language is the first step towards acknowledging a lack of control in our lives, because we must admit that we do not control language. We may try to control it, but in the end,

language will always be its own organism.

Not only is language its own organism, but it is also occurs as a process, charged and

powered by poetic rhetoric. As Nietzsche has argued, our world is created through metaphor. It

is a rhetorical act, where the meaning in life is constantly being shifted and deferred. Even as we

find ourselves latching onto meanings, it is helpful to be reminded that these meanings also

operate as illusions. Nietzsche argues,

Only by forgetting that primitive metaphor-world, only by the hardening and

rigidification of the mass of images that originally gushed forth as hot magma out of the

primeval faculty of human , only by the invincible belief that this sun, this

window, this table is a truth-in-itself, in short, only insofar as man forgets himself as a 67

subject, indeed as an artistically creative subject, does he live with some calm, security,

and consistency. (252)

Nietzsche argues here that in order to live in some form of security, in order to be at some level of peace with ourselves, we must forget that we are always subject to some thing, to outside forces beyond our control. It is Nietzsche’s argument that we must forget that we are artistically creative subjects, that we are creating illusions to cover over truths which are too uncomfortable to bear, truths about the very instability of the notion of “truth” in general, in order to be happy with ourselves. In doing this, we must give up a sense of subjectivity.

I would assert that acknowledging the role of poetic rhetoric as a creative force driving language and structures of meaning entails acknowledging ourselves as artistically creative subjects who are also subject to the shape shifting deferral of meaning that lies inherent within rhetoric. In relation to challenging traditional notions of subjectivity, Nietzsche notes the role that art plays in helping us let go of stable notions of subjectivity where we assume that our ideas about our selves are necessarily authentic, accessible, and true. Poetic rhetoric not only acknowledges Nietzsche’s description of the role of artistic creativity, but it also embraces the questioning and deferral of meaning that comes along with it. In The Gay Science Nietzsche talks of our gratitude to in a way that is worth quoting at length:

If we had not welcomed the arts and invented this kind of cult of the untrue, then the

realization of general untruth and mendaciousness that now comes to us through science -

- the realization that delusion and error are conditions of human knowledge and sensation

-- would be utterly unbearable. Honesty would lead to nausea and suicide. But now there

is a counterforce against our honesty that helps us to avoid such consequences: art as the

good will to appearance…As an aesthetic phenomenon existence is still bearable for us, 68

and art furnishes us with eyes and hands and above all the good conscience to be able to

turn ourselves into such phenomenon. At times we need a rest from ourselves by looking

upon, by looking down upon, ourselves and, from an artistic distance, laughing over

ourselves or weeping over ourselves. (163-64)

Nietzsche is not speaking about an art that is the solution to the lies and mendaciousness of

science or the false notion of a stable truth. Rather, he is speaking of an aesthetic way of playing

with the forms around us to create new ideas and multiplicities of truth. By discussing the

“untruth” of science, Nietzsche offers a subtle reminder of the illusion that accompanies science,

scientific thought, and reasoning. His discussion here relates to science and to all of our lives

when he notes that we have turned ourselves into artistic phenomena in order to exist within the

pure joy and pain that this world brings. As he says, honesty would lead to nausea and suicide.

It would be unbearable to admit that we have no control over our lives, that death is always

imminent. By describing art as the “good will to appearance,” Nietzsche connects art, and hence

poetics, with rhetoric. In dealing with appearances and aesthetic phenomena we are dealing with

the rhetoricity that underlies language and structures of meaning that make up representation, indication and, ultimately, appearance and meaning. Nietzsche speaks of art, and therefore poetics, but I would argue that he is more fully describing poetic rhetoric. Within this description of poetic rhetoric, we let go of a grounded notion of subjectivity in order to look down upon ourselves, to laugh at and mock our selves and our egos. As I have mentioned previously, Nietzsche encourages us to see ourselves as “the fool in our passion for knowledge”

(Gay Science 164).

Nietzsche argues that art gives us the distance to separate ourselves from our ideas of stability. I also argue that embracing poetic rhetoric spurs us to acknowledge that we lack 69 complete control over ourselves and therefore that our subjectivities are neither wholly authentic, nor stable. We are ultimately comprised of so many tiny fictions. Poetic rhetoric operates in this way, acknowledging the creative power that can operate in language and writing, including writing that is classified as literary, poetic, rhetorical, and . It has the ability to prompt us to question preconceived notions of authentic truth and to lose our notions of stable selves in order to laugh down upon ourselves and try on our fools’ caps. Nietzsche discusses music in The Birth of Tragedy, and I think his description of music aligns also with the statements he makes about art. In The Birth of Tragedy, music seems to be the highest form of art, and it seems to be representative of art as a whole, including poetics. As Nietzsche discusses the loss of subjectivity brought on by music, I think he best describes the loss of subjectivity associated with poetic rhetoric:

The inchoate, intangible reflection of the primordial pain in music [here we can substitute

poetic rhetoric], with its redemption in mere appearance, now produces a second

mirroring as a specific symbol or example. The artist has already surrendered his

subjectivity in the Dionysian process. The image that now shows him his identity with

the heart of the world is a dream scene that embodies the primordial contradiction and the

primordial pain, together with the primordial pleasure of mere appearance. The ‘I’ of the

lyrist therefore sounds from the depth of his being: its ‘subjectivity,’ in the sense of the

modern aestheticians is a fiction. (49)

Here we can see that by accepting both joy and pain, life and death, the artist, or subject, surrenders her or himself to the artistic process. The artist becomes lost in the intoxicating, excessive Dionysian process wherein she or he becomes a product of the artistic, or poetically rhetorical, creation that makes life bearable. In this description, Nietzsche shows that the subject 70

is created out of the artistic strife between pleasure and pain. In this sense, then, the subject is

one that is as ephemeral as fiction. It is at once full of possibilities of meaning and yet empty of

a stable notion of truth. It is a generative process where meaning, and subjectivity, is constantly

being created and destroyed.

Poetic Rhetoric as Creative and Generative

Not only is poetic rhetoric something that questions traditional notions of subjectivity,

but it also operates as a creative, generative principle. While Derrida speaks of language as

representing the death of the sign, Nietzsche revels in this death as much as he encourages

experiencing the joy of life. While we may see Derrida and Nietzsche’s acceptance of death,

both metaphorically and literally, as apathetic or even morbid, there can also be a positive or

even gleeful account of life as it is created through the machinations of language. We cannot

have one without the other. In The Gay Science Nietzsche points out that

The reputation, name and appearance, the usual measure and weight of a thing, what it

counts for…grows from generation unto generation, merely because people believe in it,

until it gradually grows to be part of a thing and turns into its very body. What at first

was appearance becomes…the essence...How foolish it would be to suppose one only

needs to point out this origin and this misty shroud of delusion in order to destroy the

world that counts for real, so-called ‘reality.’ We can destroy only as creators. (121-22)

This argument is similar to Nietzsche’s assertion that truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions. These illusions, or appearances, are not typically more authentic or truthful but are often arbitrary and ambiguous. Over time we come to believe in these “truths” as

stable and reliable, forgetting that they are ultimately appearances. However, Nietzsche notes

that it is foolish to think that we can point to this fact as an origin and thus destroy what we 71

consider to be real. The moment we do this we end up creating a new version of what is real to

us. This is how we destroy only when we also create. Our ability to create as we destroy is

indicative of the poetically rhetorical language that flows through us, that makes up our

structures of meaning and creates our subjectivities. Language ultimately represents the death of

that which it represents, and out of this death and deferral of meaning, it also creates

multiplicities of meaning. This creative principle operates within us as we attempt to grapple

with language and its surrounding illusions. And yet, we want to resist the idea that poetic

rhetoric is the origin of language and the world around us. As Sarah Kofman notes, “Life’s

artistic drive is constantly calling new worlds into being, with as much freedom and necessity as

there is in play” (21). Kofman suggests that there are multiple worlds constantly being called

into being; therefore, we cannot state definitively that there is one true origin. Citing Nietzsche,

she also adds, “Artistic activity gives everything a surface; it creates forms that do not exist in

nature, which has neither inside nor outside, neither top nor bottom…Art is based entirely on

humanized nature, on nature enveloped in and interwoven with errors and illusions which no art

can disregard” (qtd. in Kofman 26-27). Finally, Kofman suggests, “art…is an instance which

man needs in order to beard the severe ‘reality’ he has constructed for himself, the fictional

nature of what he conceals from himself; it is this instance which he needs…in order to accept

truth as an absence of truth and to will illusion as such” (31).

All of this is to show the creativity within the artistic element and hence within what has

been described as poetics and what I am discussing as poetic rhetoric. Art is not just creative in a

transcendental, humanistic sense, where it can be manipulated by people for purposes of individual enlightenment. This is how humanists may view art, poetics, and rhetoric: it can be

approached rationally, even theologically, as something that can raise the human soul to a higher 72 level. However, we can also see how art, and more specifically poetic rhetoric, can be a disruptive force to those humanistic ideologies and can instead fashion a world that is all surface, that operates through play, and that shapes and shifts meaning on a regular basis. As Nietzsche reminds us, though, it is important to avoid casting poetic rhetoric as some sort of solution to humanistic agendas and logocentric ways of viewing language, and hence describing it as a kind of origin. I would emphasize in my description that poetic rhetoric is not a solution, origin, or type of writing, but rather can be seen as a force of activity that both creates and dissembles as it flows through language and structures of meaning. As Kofman notes, “The artistic paradigm allows the metaphysical oppositions between reality and appearance, the speculative and the artistic, the man of action and the contemplative to be erased” (32). It is through this erasure that poetic rhetoric, through its artistic and illusory nature, is able to operate as a creative function through language.

Implications of Poetic Rhetoric

As Nietzsche concludes “On Truth and Lying in an Extra Moral Sense,” he talks about the differences between rational man and intuitive man. Intuitive man does not hide the fact that all around him was created by need. Rational man does not recognize that life is created through illusion and beauty, whereas intuitive man seems to embrace more of this in his life and thus finds more joy and redemption in life. While rational man spends more of his life trying to avoid pain, intuitive man spends more time seeking cheerfulness. Because he feels things more passionately, intuitive man also ends up feeling more pain when it does occur. As Nietzsche says of intuitive man, “he also suffers more often, because he does not know how to learn from experience and he falls again and again into the same pit into which he fell before” (256). Much of what Nietzsche says about the two types of man relates to poetic rhetoric and the way it 73

shapes our world. Poetic rhetoric can be viewed from different perspectives; it can be seen from

the perspective of both rational and intuitive people. It is possible for language, and hence the

poetically rhetorical force that flows through language, to be manipulated for rational,

humanistic purposes. However, even as people attempt to exert rational control over language,

because of its poetically rhetorical nature, there is always some element of language that gets

loose, that slips out of control. This project pursues that loose, slippery, intuitive aspect. From

this perspective, we can see that poetic rhetoric is the illusion and beauty that creates our world.

It represents the arbitrary nature of life. Those who embrace poetic rhetoric may feel deep

suffering, but they are also able to recognize the immense joy that can be found in life as well.

People who embrace more rational descriptions of poetics and rhetoric may feel more control

over their lives and may be able to escape more pain in life, but it is doubtful that they will

escape entirely or hold control completely. While we can acknowledge the rational ways in

which people approach language, and hence poetic rhetoric, I argue that it is more valuable to

accept and embrace the creativity of poetic rhetoric. Studying the complexities of poetic rhetoric

can help us see the deep suffering in the world, from both personal and general perspectives.

Through the creativity of poetic rhetoric, we are also able to find ways to cope with this suffering and experience joy.

These different perspectives can also inform our . The distinctions between rhetoric and poetics and the ways in which the fields have been subordinated under humanist ideologies to fulfill humanist agendas have implications for the university, especially for English departments and writing programs. As evidenced by the Lindemann-Tate debate in 1993, the

role of literature in the composition course is an often debated topic, and I contend that

considering my theory of poetic rhetoric offers another valuable way to view the rhetorical and 74 poetic split that exists in many first-year writing programs today. As I will suggest in the following chapter, acknowledging a sense of poetic rhetoric within the field of composition works to resist the humanistic agenda that has long been in place in English departments and opens students to new ways to consider the roles of ideology and subjectivity that are shaped by poetic rhetoric within our discourses. 75

3. POETIC RHETORIC IN THE FIRST-YEAR COMPOSITION CLASSROOM

We have yet to get rhetoric and poetic (let alone electronic) under one roof in composition. Paul Heilker, “Twenty Years In: An Essay In Two Parts”

Poetics, Rhetoric, First-Year Composition, and the Genre of the Essay

As scholars such as James Berlin, Susan Miller, and Sharon Crowley have shown us, the

relationship between rhetoric and poetics within first-year composition, specifically, and the

English department in general, is a long and complicated one. While Berlin, Miller, and

Crowley show the historical and ideological implications of the rhetoric/poetic divide, scholars

such as Erika Lindemann and Gary Tate laid the foundation for a debate on the inclusion of

rhetoric and poetics based on pedagogical merits. In 1993 Lindemann and Tate were both published in College English as part of the latest installment in a debate that has existed since

Plato and Aristotle. Lindemann argues that college composition courses need to prepare students for the work of college and the professional world. Gary Tate presents the alternative side to this argument. He suggests that it is impossible to prepare each student fully for the work that must be done in her or his major or professional job, and that the goal of the composition course should be to equip students for lives outside the academy. The primary focus of the Lindemann-

Tate debate is on the inclusion of literature or poetics into the composition curriculum.

Lindemann has argued that it is a mistake to teach literature in required first-year English

courses, noting that focusing on literature does not help prepare students for the types of writing

they will need to do in other university courses that will prepare them for their professions. She

concludes with an assertion that, 76

If we will take the time to appreciate the writing that shapes other disciplines, we can

become comfortable with, even confident about, constructing student-centered

classrooms, where the acts of language we are most concerned about are those of first-

year students eager to participate successfully in the rigorous work college demands of

them. (316)

Lindemann’s argument has an ironic relationship to what I have described as humanism and its

relation to the university. Lindemann appears to be arguing against the inclusion of literature for

humanistic purposes. She makes the point that all texts are as important and serve the same

function as poetic works. While her argument is not the same as mine, we can see how the

boundary between poetic and rhetorical texts is not as distinct as we might originally think.

Even as Lindemann appears to take an oppositional stance to humanism in the college

curriculum, her suggestion to prepare students for the demands of college and the professions to

which they will graduate is aligned with the humanistic goal of maintaining class hierarchies and

ideologies of power. Gary Tate, in “A Place for Literature in Freshman Composition,” posits a

counterargument. He suggests that we encourage students to be familiar with many forms of

discourse, including literature. He issues a caution that is worthy to note:

Whatever our motives, I fear that more and more we are primarily interested in shaping

and fitting students to perform their appointed tasks as good little workers in the various

artificial – and some would say oppressive – academic/administrative divisions that

constitute the modern American university. (320)

In his argument, Tate emphasizes some of the problems that I see with humanism: putting people

to work for the ideologies of others. This is often done with the exclusion and subordination of others. In fact, Tate further states, “I find it ironic, for example, that the unprecedented freedom 77 that many young people seem to enjoy today is largely an illusion” (320). Tate goes on to discuss different ways in which people are held in bondage to outside forces and higher powers.

The Lindemann-Tate debate emphasizes the relationship between rhetoric, poetics, and humanism within the composition classroom. This chapter will further show how rhetoric and poetics have been displaced by humanist principles within the field of composition. It will also present a genre of writing that can resist and disrupt the humanist dichotomization of rhetoric and poetics: the poetically rhetorical essay.

Every story can be told differently depending on its narrator, and the history of English departments and its subsequent formation of first-year composition is no different. Sharon

Crowley divides teachers of composition into three camps: conservatives working to maintain entitlement and class structure; student-centered pedagogues; and leftist composition theorists

(235). While these categories can be limiting in their ways of conceptualizing the field of composition, they can also offer one way to view the status and development of first-year writing, and wherever one falls within these camps can influence how she or he tells the story of the development of the field. As I have equated poetics with works of literature, my concern with the history of English and revolves around the distinctions between rhetoric and literary study that were instantiated during the inception of the department of

English and its composition curriculum. As my theoretical discussions have shown, I view this discussion with an ideological lens, noting that viewing rhetoric and poetic as distinct categories reifies concepts of Platonic notions of a stable, transmittable logos. In this chapter I argue that the separation between rhetorical and literary study within English departments, in general, and composition programs, specifically, maintains a humanist agenda that is analogous to Platonic control and manipulation of logos and subjectivity. I further this argument by suggesting that we 78 should reconceive our notions of this distinction altogether, and I propose, along with Paul de

Man, that we teach “poetic as rhetoric.” The idea that literary works are rhetorical is not a new one. I discuss scholars who work to draw these connections within contemporary, poststructuralist paradigms. However, I ultimately argue that as long as we see these terms as distinct categories, we are still operating in an outmoded, logocentric paradigm that does not fully account for the Derridean notions of logos that describe both rhetoric and poetics as shape- shifting, deceptive, creative forces in our world.

While I admit that any proposal for paradigm change in the composition classroom will ultimately question current curricular requirements and fail to fully embrace the type of deconstruction I am proposing, I still include suggestions for ways we might approach notions of poetic rhetoric within the writing classroom. de Man notes that institutional requirements may make it impossible to teach the poetic as rhetoric, but I maintain that there is a value in embracing poetic rhetoric in the writing classroom. It is beneficial to address notions of poetic rhetoric in the composition classroom, even in smaller , such as reading texts with more of an eye for endless possibilities of meaning or through a resistance of traditional, logocentric categories of genre and interpretations of readings. In addition to revised approaches towards reading, I suggest we emphasize the poetic, creative, illusory essence of rhetoric. This involves viewing writing and the documents we compose as texts that hold illusory, deceptive meaning. I propose that along with traditional assignment requirements, we encourage students to work in the genre of the essay, a genre Lyotard describes as postmodern and that Victor Vitanza describes as one that “just drifts.” This genre typically resists the that works to maintain categorical distinctions and Western notions of scientific logic and language. It acknowledges the instability in meaning and it resists closure: these are both qualities of poetic 79

rhetoric. I suggest that we study a revised notion of the essay that would resist its emphasis on

personal understanding and would instead acknowledge the ways that we and our world are

created by poetic rhetoric.

Rhetoric and Poetics as Subjugated Other

The notion of rhetoric being distinct from and subordinate to poetics is not a groundbreaking concept. Indeed, rhetoric has been conceived as the “dark horse” since the inception of Platonic philosophy. In his Phaedrus, Plato describes charioteers and their horses as analogies for the soul. The horse aligned with truth is the one that reaches heaven and a state of godliness. Other horses and souls, those who choose not to pursue truth and philosophy, will not reach a state of fulfillment, enlightenment, or true humanity. Plato asserts, “But of the other souls that which is likest to a god and best able to follow keeps the head of its charioteer above the surface as it makes the circuit, though the unruly behavior of its horses impairs its vision of reality…finally, for all their toil, they depart without achieving initiation into the vision of reality, and feed henceforth upon mere opinion” (53). This unruly horse can be representative of rhetoric and writing, because these were concepts Plato viewed as distinct from and even oppositional to the truth, which could only ever reflect opinion. In Plato’s argument, rhetoric’s noble appearance is only an illusion. The desire for truth and dislike of opinion is also representative of the fear Plato and many Greeks had about the instability and lack of control in their lives. Michelle Ballif notes this fear as one of the forces that led the Greeks to implement control and order through their approaches to language. She cites Martha Nussbaum when she says, “the Greeks struggled with the issue of will, that is, the issue of what Man controls and what chance or ungovernable forces control” (37). Ballif notes that “technē” is the term for human art or science and that the Greeks saw this as the best way to assert control over their 80

unstable environment. She says that technē “ the superiority of man’s intelligence in the face of brute forces” (37), and she asserts that “the Western metaphysical tradition, which has constructed our truth and our subjectivity, is dependent on an imperative to master that which

‘is,’ to delimit its being, to demarcate within/by a set of prohibitive and illusory binaries used to prescribe, not describe, ‘reality’ and to describe a certain set of social relations” (38). Many poststructuralists have argued that through Plato, philosophy supplanted rhetoric in such a way that modern day forms of scholasticism and societal structuring were influenced and shaped by notions of stable, communicable meaning and truth.

Plato’s Phaedrus introduces his theory of rhetoric, in which rhetoric takes a subjugated position to philosophy and authentic truth. Plato presents his views on rhetoric through a between Socrates and his young friend, Phaedrus. As Socrates discusses the merits of noble and persuasive speech through the examples of based on love, he ends up privileging truth, knowledge, categorization, and purity over emotions, opinion, and rhetorical art. Because Plato privileges authentic truth and philosophical reasoning above all else, we can see through his descriptions how rhetoric and poetics were set up to play subordinate roles throughout history. We see Plato’s emphasis on truth and philosophical reasoning when he discusses the ability of souls to reach a state of godliness: “These souls, if they choose to live the life of the philosopher three times successively, regain their wings” (54). He also states that “It is impossible for a soul that has never seen the truth to enter into our human shape; it takes a man to understand by the use of universals, and to collect out of the multiplicity of sense-impressions a unity arrived at by a process of reason” (55). Here we see his emphasis on truth, unity, and reason. In his eyes, one cannot be fully human if one does not strive for unity, or sameness, through a process of logical reasoning. This statement also reflects Plato’s belief that truth is 81

accessible and authentic. It is through these statements that we begin to see the trend that has

influenced Western thinking ever since. Plato emphasized the possibility of truly seeing reality,

something one could not do when one was distracted or persuaded by rhetoric. If we think of the

horses described in the Phaedrus as the vehicles by which we approach knowledge, Plato

describes the dark horse as being ruled by its passions. In Plato’s description, this is something

negative that will prevent one from achieving one’s goals and from truly seeing reality. Plato

privileged philosophy over rhetoric, and philosophy, under the Platonic paradigm, seeks a

knowledge unfettered by human emotions and desires. The more one seeks truth through a

process of reasoning, according to Plato, the more human one is. Additionally, one must rein in

multiple sense-impressions in order to derive the unified, rational concept. Through his

privileging of unity, categorization, reason, and authentic, accessible truth, Plato subordinates

rhetoric to humanistic values. These values are emphasized within humanistic ideologies, and they contribute to our university systems today. Thus, rhetoric takes a subservient role in university systems today.

Scholars today have tried to legitimate rhetoric by showing its usefulness within the university, but this type of value system has a way of continuing the subordination of rhetoric.

We can see the effects of this value system reaching as far back as Aristotle. By working to legitimate rhetoric by describing it as the counterpart to dialectic, Aristotle again subjugated rhetoric. In Aristotle’s Voice, Jasper Neel shows that Aristotle saves rhetoric, in effect, from

Plato and philosophy, but in this process he, Aristotle, dooms rhetoric. Rhetoric cannot offer more than faith or persuasion, thus positioning the location of truth in the believability of the speaker. Aristotle creates the categories of demonstration and dialectic, in which truth lies in the thing being studied and in the “rigor of the argument itself” (65) respectively, but with rhetoric, 82

truth relies on the strategies in the composition classroom. Neel says, “Rhetoric as Aristotle

saves it for us becomes a sort of self-eradicating violation of the law against non-contradiction.

It depends on demonstration and dialectic as a way of knowing itself, but it can neither generate

knowledge nor fully justify opinion” (73). The main point of Neel’s argument here is that

rhetoric is in the service of knowledge and dialectic. In the very process of showing rhetoric’s

usefulness, however, Aristotle also demeans rhetoric as something to be used, a tool, for a greater form of thought. Neel asserts: “Within the Aristotelian system, rhetoric serves the necessary function of being the thing excluded so that knowledge can know itself by having

something to be better than and different from” (66). Rhetoric, according to this line of

reasoning, is useful from the perspective of negation; it is useful because of what it is not. As

Neel points out, “Those who are eager to argue that Aristotle conceives rhetoric as necessary should remember that he also considered necessary” (66). This is the very danger that can occur when we use objectification for our own agendas.

Perhaps both Plato and Aristotle did the same thing to poetry by privileging philosophy and dialectic over all else. When Ballif quotes Plato’s Socrates as saying “I am unable to give

the name of art to anything irrational” (44), we can see Plato placing the same philosophic

strictures on art that he places on rhetoric. Ballif also notes that “Philosophers, however, assume

that logos speaks being, and that poets, playwrights, and sophists speak a false logos – a logos of

imitation, of counterfeit, of falsity, of dressing up and covering” (49). The Platonic assumption

here is that only poetics and rhetoric can be associated with falsity and that there is a purity to

truth that is distinct from these trivial forms of language. Ballif further supports this assumption when she says that “By implication there exists the genuine art of speaking ‘Truth’ and the spurious ‘art’ of speaking nothing – of offering nothing more than ornamentation” (49). Finally, 83

Ballif proclaims, “No wonder Plato exiled poets and sophists from his Republic; he recognized

the relationship between poetry and Dionysian frenzy: too much delight, too much pleasure, and no restraint” (53). Here we see an emphasis on reason and control being privileged over the loss of control associated with poetics. This can be seen as something Plato feared and hence exiled along with rhetoric.

Ultimately, we see that both rhetoric and poetics have been subjugated to philosophy and notions of stable, authentic truth. Because of this subjugation, the very nature of writing, that which is inextricably bound with rhetoric and poetics, has been unquestionably accepted as something innocently available for humanity’s use. Derrida’s critique of the system of language supports this point:

The system of language associated with phonetic-alphabetic writing is that within which

logocentric metaphysics, determining the sense of being as presence, has been produced.

This logocentrism, this epoch of the full speech, has always placed in parenthesis,

suspended, and suppressed for essential reasons, all free reflection on the origin and

status of writing, all science of writing which was not technology and the history of

technique, itself leaning upon a mythology and a metaphor of natural writing. (Of

Grammatology, 43, Derrida’s emphasis)

As Derrida asserts, in our reliance on present meaning and our attempts to manipulate and

control language in order to maintain our beliefs in authentic truth, we make assumptions that

language is something stable and pliable. In making this assumption, we consequently accept

Plato’s descriptions of writing. Derrida describes writing under the Platonic paradigm: “There is

therefore a good and a bad writing: the good and natural is the divine inscription in the heart and

the soul; the perverse and artful is technique, exiled in the exteriority of the body” (17). These 84

descriptions end up privileging philosophic reasoning over rhetoric and poetics. Since both fields have been subordinated, scholars within these fields have worked to legitimate them, and in this process it is possible that the poetic has been privileged over rhetoric. As scholars try to

justify the significance of their fields of research, they have placed both rhetoric and poetics into

service for the humanistic goals of the university. In this sense, scholars attempted to manipulate

notions of rhetoric and poetics for their own agendas within the university. These agendas were

driven by notions of reason, good taste, and class standing. At best this has resulted in a lack of

communication between academic departments; at worst it has taken the form of exclusion and

domination.

Development of First-Composition: Building Up Walls Between Poetics and Rhetoric

We have seen how Plato subordinated rhetoric and poetics to philosophic reasoning.

After Plato’s stripping of inherent value from these forms of writing, scholars have attempted to rescue them from images of frivolity and licentiousness. However, in this process academics have fallen into the same paradigm of binary opposition utilized by Plato. Instead of philosophical reasoning being privileged over rhetoric and poetics, literary study has taken the place of privilege over rhetoric. The separation and opposition of these two fields preserves the humanist agenda within the university system, and this is reflected within English departments and composition programs. Within English departments, composition has often been subjugated to poetics as well, and it has had to work to legitimate itself. In this process it ends up reifying humanistic values such as emphases on class hierarchies and objectification of language and people.

Susan Jarratt addresses the distinction between rhetoric and poetics, or literary study, as it has been represented throughout the years: “Today the denial of the disgraceful ‘other’ is being 85

replayed in the academy between the poles of literary study and the teaching of composition.

Belletristic authority began to replace ‘philosophic’ at the end of the eighteenth century in the oppression of rhetoric (Howell 714 passim), a movement completed with the evolution of modern departments of English at the end of the nineteenth century” (3). Crowley acknowledges the way in which poetics have moved to a place of privilege over rhetoric. In regard to the relationship between rhetoric and poetics, there are three underlying themes that we can see emerge from histories of English departments and creations of composition programs. These themes revolve around the creation of a discipline and all its necessary entailments. Specifically, within the department of English, we see the notion of creating and disciplining subjects, the subordination of rhetoric to literary study, and the appropriation of composition to a humanist, bourgeois agenda that was prominent in the early American colleges and that we still see traces of within our universities today. All of these areas overlap with one another in order to create and maintain the discipline of and the field of composition.

The notion of the humanist, bourgeois agenda that was and is so instrumental in the creation and maintenance of the department of English is also related to the other two aspects of

composition within the discipline. Crowley describes humanism as the need for students to

“learn values,” “to be acquainted with the best that has been thought and said,” and to take a

“respectful attitude toward already completed texts” (13). Additionally, humanism is “an

exclusive educational tradition, insofar as the humanist impulse is to impart instruction to a

select few who are considered able to inhabit a humanist subjectivity” (14). Crowley also finds

it valuable to include this definition of humanism, posited by humanist, R. S. Crane: “’Education

and training in the ‘good arts’ or disciplines; and the goodness of these arts is made to reside in

the fact that those who earnestly desire and seek after them come to be most highly humanized, 86

in the sense of being endowed with the virtues and knowledge that separate men most sharply

from the lower animals” (qtd. in Crowley 268). Upon first inspection, these qualities of

humanism appear noble. Upon further reflection, however, we might find some problems with

these descriptions. While it may seem right and good to seek out that which is “best,” we must

remember that things are defined as “best” by being compared to other things which are inferior.

Therefore, something that is described as “best” is done so at the expense of others, often to

these others’ detriment. This can take on a dangerous connotation when this discussion is

applied to the question of what it means to be human. R.S. Crane’s description of humanism

equates humanization with being trained in the good arts, with virtue, and with knowledge. This

description hearkens back to Plato’s theory of the soul and its relation to truth as he discusses it

in the Phaedrus. Plato says,

It is impossible for a soul that has never seen the truth to enter into human shape; it takes

a man to understand by the use of universals, and to collect out of the multiplicity of

sense impressions a unity arrived at by a process of reason…That is why it is right that

the soul of the philosopher alone should regain its wings; for it is always dwelling in

memory as best it may upon those things which a god owes his divinity to dwelling upon.

(55)

Plato’s emphasis on the understanding of truth, unity, and reason as a prerequisite for humanity excludes anyone who does not accept his line of philosophical reasoning. Both Crane and

Plato’s descriptions of humanism and what it means to be human tacitly reinforce ideologies that perpetuate structures of power. Crane’s emphasis on “training in the good arts” begs the question as to who would qualify to be humanized, for only those with enough money to be trained or educated would be able to participate in that process. People are only counted as 87

worthwhile when they see and accept truth or when they follow a line of philosophical reasoning.

Under this paradigm, people must also strive to decrease multiplicity and reach for states of

unity. While there are fields of scholarship devoted to studies of consensus and dissensus, it

suffices to note at this point that when we strive for unity at the expense of consideration of multiple perspectives, we can purposefully or inadvertently subjugate concepts and people, often creating subjugated Others. Victor Vitanza lodges one complaint against humanism when he notes that, “it was (is) Humanism (anthropolgism), which goes wrong, namely, the belief that human beings actually choose, or make, their own history; and the belief that sometimes human beings, as when making a grammatical error, choose incorrectly their own history, and it is just a matter then of learning to choose correctly” (43). The beliefs that Vitanza criticizes are

reflective of the fact that when human beings attempt to create their histories or choose correctly,

they often do so at the expense of others, others who do not match their visions of their histories

or who do not represent correct choices for them. Vitanza thus critiques humanism in the

institution, arguing that a “human being is, more so, the function of language than vice versa”

(43). This description of humanism relates to our discussion of poetic rhetoric and the idea that

our subjectivities are created through poetically rhetorical functions of language. In addition,

when we think of “learning values,” of humanism, we must ask ourselves, “Whose values?” In

many of my readings, the values supported by humanism are those values held by the ruling

class, and they are often associated with morality. As Louis Althusser has shown us, we are

often called into being by values that are established through hierarchies of power that we have

come to take as natural and good. Althusser says, “you and I are always already subjects, and as

such constantly practice the rituals of ideological recognition” (1269). He also argues that, “all

ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects” (1269). Althusser 88 makes the point that we are subjects because there are subject positions, and we will adopt the values of the ideologies that contribute to our subject positions. For example, if we go to church, we adopt the values of religious ideology and believe that we are subjects of God. In my discussion, we might say that if we are subjects of a university with a humanist foundation, we will adopt the values of the humanist ideology and work to maintain it. One problem with the humanist notion of learning values is that students are expected to learn the values of the ruling class, sets of elite values marked by exclusion and the assumptions that there is an absolute, unproblematic, and purely transmittable truth.

This tacit element of humanism, which is an underlying part of creating and maintaining the university, has implications for the ways in which academia creates and shapes the roles and subjectivities of its students. In Composing in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays

Sharon Crowley quotes William Spanos: “The ‘darker agenda’ of humanism, Spanos avers, is

‘the production of ‘subjected subjects,’ – of individuals who are not only subordinated to the identity of the state, but who also work actively to enhance its hegemony’” (qtd. in Crowley

186). In this sense, we see students who are subjects of the university. Their subjectivities take on the values of the institution in which they are taught, and these values are too often humanist ideologies that are unquestioningly accepted by both teachers and students. When literary study became privileged over composition, those values also contributed to the formation of student subjectivities. The emphasis on literary study has ties to the humanist agenda, because it was believed that while composition could teach social mores and discourse, literary study could impart taste to its students, and this could truly raise them to a sustained position in the upper class. Crowley quotes David Shumway on this point: “the literary built class unity not as a special interest---but insofar as it defined and was identified with good taste. Such taste was 89

founded on common formal and informal education…by 1890 knowledge of [English literature]

remained a significant form of class distinction…the point was…to create…individuals who identified with the culture of the elite” (qtd. in Crowley 80-81). The emphasis on literary study also included an emphasis on creating student subjects who would maintain an elite culture, who

would maintain class hierarchies. Michelle Ballif’s analysis of the Platonic subject aligns with

the humanist description of the creation of student subjectivities. She notes that the “subject

becomes not a participant in the sensual world around, but a spectator, an observer of reality,

who remains rational and logical” (52-53). Ballif also quotes Eric Havelock as saying that

Plato’s description of subjects requires that they “examine [their] experience and rearrange it,

that they should think about what they say, instead of just saying it. And they should separate

themselves from it instead of identifying with it; they themselves should become the ‘subject’

who stands apart from the ‘object’ and reconsiders it and analyzes it and evaluates it” (qtd. in

Ballif 53). Havelock’s concept of the Greek subject is consistent with the humanist qualities that

we can see emphasized in the types of student subjects the university works to create: distanced,

objective, rational, logical subjects. By encouraging this type of thinking and critical analysis,

the university contributes to the subjectivities of our students.

Through its distinctions between rhetorical and literary study, the department of English

in early American universities was able to create subjectivities for its students, and the

disciplining of those subjects helped maintain the university structure and its humanist agenda.

The very real need for students to inhabit and build the department fed into its dichotomizations

of course study. Sharon Crowley notes the role of entrance examinations in both literary and

rhetorical study. She attributes the emphasis on entrance exams to the university’s desire to

break the individual down into something that can be analyzed and quantified. In this way, the 90

academy was also able to make general statements about the population at large. All of this allows the institution to control the subjectivities of the students entering their institutions.

Crowley bases her understanding of examinations’ ideological function within the academy on

Foucault’s argument that that exams operate to make visible the academic attributes of students.

Teachers can then measure them against their invisible standards (69). Speaking of the panopticon, Foucault suggests that the power to punish contributes to the “disciplinary power to observe” (213). We can see this in the way students are observed and disciplined in the evaluation of their writing, but there is also a larger implication in which observation of students turns into objectification of students. When Foucault says, in Discipline and Punish, “the

‘subjects’ were presented as ‘objects’ to the observation of a power that was manifested only by its gaze” (199), we can see how the disciplining of students as subjects employed the similar objectification that humanism does in a larger scale. In both instances objectification occurs in order to fulfill the agenda of those in power. These exams precipitated a disciplining of the student, and they helped the administrators maintain positions of power in the university.

Foucault also says that discipline

brings five quite distinct operations into play: it refers individual actions to a whole that

is at once a field of comparison, a space of differentiation, and the principle of a rule to

be followed. It differentiates individuals from one another, in terms of the following rule:

that the rule be made to function as a minimal threshold, as an average to be respected, or

as an optimum toward which one must move. It measures in quantitative terms and

hierarchizes in terms of value the abilities, the level, the ‘nature’ of individuals….The

perpetual penalty that traverses all points and supervises every instant in the disciplinary 91

institutions compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, excludes. In short, it

normalizes. (195)

We see here how the disciplining of the student creates a subject that maintains some of the

negative qualities of humanism. Students themselves are placed into oppositions in which some

are privileged over others, and the deciding factors of superiority are based on who most

successfully conforms to the dominant ideologies. Additionally, student subjects are categorized

and placed in hierarchies, which perpetuates the humanistic emphasis on categorization and

social hierarchies that can work to exclude and oppress certain classes of people. Many of the

disciplines in early American universities worked in the ways that Foucault describes, and the

fields of rhetorical and literary study were no exception.

Crowley notes that rhetorical study revolved around grammar and usage, which focused

on creating minimal thresholds that students were required to achieve. Much of the literary study

of the time emphasized knowing obscure details across a vast range of texts. They also required

students to be able to discuss those texts in hierarchical ways, and their ability to discuss those

texts were seen as a reflection of their nature and worth as individuals. Rhetorical and literary

knowledge were seen as reflections of students’ social status, moral views, and individual worth.

Speaking of composition, Crowley says, “To put this in Foucauldian terms, Freshman English was (and is?) a ‘political technology of individuals,’ a designed to create docile

subjects who would not question the discipline’s continued and repeated demonstration of their

insufficient command of their native tongue” (77). The purpose of the English department, and

the writing classes specifically, was to maintain a level of class distinction that was associated

with education and social status. This was maintained by enforcing rigorous standards of

English grammar and , as well as studying classical literary texts that employed “pure 92

English,” a concept with roots back to that came to be analogous with high cultural

standards and correct grammatical usage: qualities associated with the ruling class (60-63).

By dichotomizing rhetoric and literature, early scholars ended up subordinating rhetorical

study to literary study, and this subordination again fell within the confines of the humanist agenda. Susan Jarratt offers Platonic and Aristotelian descriptions of rhetoric that most certainly informed the mindset of humanists who opposed poetics to rhetoric within departments of

English. Jarratt says of rhetoric, “After the complete formulation of logic by Aristotle, rhetoric appears to employ distorted versions of that logic used in ethically questionable ways to sway ignorant audiences with an affective power similar to that wielded by the Homeric minstrels”

(39). She also says, “For Plato, rhetoric was the means of delivering truth already discovered through dialectic…Aristotle, while offering an elaborate theory of rhetoric, kept it in place as an imperfect system of reasoning, subordinate to science and dialectic” (64). We can see the influence of these views on rhetoric in early English departments when James Berlin notes that by the end of the 1800s, “the study of English…literature had become the main concern of the department, and the place of a writing course in the college curriculum had already been challenged at the first meeting of the Modern Language Assocation” (Rhetoric and Reality 20).

Further illustrating the distinction between rhetoric and poetics, Berlin notes, “In order to distinguish the new English department professor from the old rhetoric teacher or the new composition teacher, a new discipline had to be formulated, a discipline based on English as the language of learning and literature as the specialized province of study” (22). While composition is given a place of importance here, it is still seen as inferior to literature, maintaining the separation of rhetoric and poetics. Berlin argues that in their attempts to legitimate themselves as a field, scholars of English privileged poetics over rhetoric. The 93

subjugation of rhetoric to poetics worked to maintain the humanistic agenda within the

university, as suggested by Crowley’s comparison of literary teachers’ rejections of rhetoric with

Mathew Arnold’s call for criticism without interest: “by keeping aloof from what is called ‘the

practical view of things’…by steadily refusing to lend itself to any of those ulterior, political,

practical considerations about ideas…which criticism really has nothing to do with” (qtd. in

Crowley 83). This distanced, objective perspective reflects the humanist values of objectivity

and rationality. The idea that one could analyze a text without being influenced by ulterior

political and practical concerns is a humanist ideal that does not acknowledge social and political agendas that contribute to our subjectivities. In support of her argument, Crowley notes that

based on the Arnoldian model, “reality and truth have always already been discerned by some

other means than composition. Deprived of its role as intervention into the circulation of

meaning, composition is placed in a servile position as a means of explicating the real, true, or

beautiful, all of which are found elsewhere than in composition” (86). By privileging poetics

over rhetoric, scholars objectify both and put them into service for ideals that are

unquestioningly accepted; under this paradigm reality, truth, and beauty are all qualities seen as

stable and authentic rather than inextricably bound up with language. Crowley argues that if scholars wanted to maintain this ideology, if scholars “wanted to preserve the supposed universality of and timelessness of literature – that is, to preserve its unwordliness – they had to characterize more wordly writing as fallen, alien” (85).

The creation of subjectivities for students and the subordination of rhetorical to literary

study all contribute to the appropriation of composition to a humanist, bourgeois agenda within

the English department. As the early American universities continued to grow, and as writing

was seen as a necessary skill within the academy, we began to see less of an incorporation of 94

rhetorical study into the curriculum and more of an emphasis on the practical aspects of

composition. Crowley notes that even as scholars rejected rhetorical study, they still favored the

moral and personally fulfilling aspects of composition: “Rhetoric’s emphasis on public discourse

was not friendly to the new literary aesthetic, while composition considered as a means of

expressing the self, was quite compatible with the aims of the new department of English” (82).

In an ongoing effort to legitimate their field, teachers of writing supplanted rhetoric with

composition and put composition to work for humanist goals. By focusing on the use value of

composition and on the self-expression of its students, scholars objectified writing and students

as quantifiable, analyzable subjects that would conform to and perpetuate social hierarchies.

Crowley suggests that early composition courses showed “how easily the classical approach to

composition could be conflated with modern humanist attitudes toward literature, which were

not at all rhetorical” (90). Classical composition’s emphasis on grammar and -level errors created an area in which students’ abilities and characters could be tested. As Crowley

notes, “The focus on usage and grammar was necessary because of humanists’ interest in

policing the development of students’ taste and ” (94).

Crowley, and others, have commented on the ways in which current-traditional forms of

teaching align with and propagate modernist, humanistic motives. This in turn shows

composition being appropriated for humanist values. Crowley notes that,

Current-traditional pedagogy forces students to repeatedly display their use of

institutionally sanctioned forms. Failure to master the sanctioned forms signals some sort

of such as laziness or inattention. All of this is fully in keeping with

humanism’s rejection of rhetoric, as well as its tendency toward idealism, its reverence 95

for institutional and textual authority, and its pedagogical attention to policing of

character. (95)

The disciplining that occurred within current-traditional composition maintained the humanist agenda within the English department. Its five-paragraph, thesis-driven form systematized

writing in such a way as to provide discrete instances for students to display mastery. It also

made writing appear innocuous, as if students only failed to write well due to laziness or natural

inability. Programs that viewed composition this way ultimately objectified writing along with

students and embraced institutional forms that are based on humanist values. Additionally,

qualities of current-traditional composition are very much in line with modern, humanistic

ideologies. As humanism operates, so does modernism, and D. Diane Davis describes modernism, basing her argument on Foucault’s assertion that “modernism refuses to let things

remain unstructured; it has a propensity for unifying diversity, for huddling up multiplicities, systematizing them so that they might be master-able” (41). Humanism operates much in this same way, as does current-traditional pedagogy. Crowley notes that it “valued closed patterns; it also forwarded the principle of unity, which forbade ; and it prized as well the production of well-designed artifacts in which a student’s experience was supposedly represented” (114). As compositions began to dislodge their pedagogies from the perceived flaws of current-traditionalism by hailing the development of process pedagogies, Crowley notes that they still did so from within the inescapable foundation of modernism. When she discusses

Maxine Hairston’s landmark proclamation that teachers were in the midst of a paradigm shift,

Crowley incisively notes that Hairston “put her finger precisely on the real achievement of

advocates for process pedagogy: they supplied composition teachers with something to study,

something on which a field could be erected and a discipline could subsequently be based” (195). 96

Crowley concisely sums up some of the flaws with process-centered pedagogy that can also be

considered similar to the flaws inherent within the humanist emphasis on literature for the sake

of improvement of the individual:

The easy accommodation of process-oriented strategies to current-traditionalism suggests

that process and product have more in common than is generally acknowledged in

professional literature about composition, where the habit of contrasting them conceals

the fact of their epistemological consistency. A truly paradigmatic alternative to current-

traditionalism would question the modernism in which it is immersed and the institutional

structure by means of which it is administered. Process pedagogy does neither. It retains

the modernist composing subject of current-traditionalism – the subject who is

sufficiently discrete from the composing context to stand apart from it, observing it from

above and commenting upon it. Furthermore, this subject is able to inspect the contents

of the mind and report them to a reader without distortion, using language that fully

represents a well-formed composing intention. (212-13)

Here again we see tenets of composition being subsumed by and contributing to a humanist paradigm. Crowley points out the main problem with current composition pedagogies employed today: their immersion in the modernist, humanist university structure. This structure was in place when rhetoric and poetics were subjugated to philosophical reasoning; it was in place when rhetoric was subordinated to poetics and literary study; and it is in place when composition acts as in a servile role within the larger academic community. Whenever we view the student as a subject, distanced and objectified, whenever we view writing as a subject to be manipulated for a higher purpose, whenever we view knowledge as authentic and perfectly transmittable and language as the vehicle for that transportation, we must stop and consider the ideologies that 97

inform those beliefs, and we must examine the ideological community that benefits from those

beliefs.

The ideologies and communities associated with objectifying writing and subjectivities is

one of exclusion and negation. As Diane Davis notes, “Humanist notions of community are

constituted through the production of an abject realm, a domain of excluded sensibilities and excluded Others, both of which would threaten the closure of the ‘community’s circle’” (180).

This description is an extrapolation of the argument I have been making regarding students as subjects and the humanist ideology perpetuated in the writing classroom. The objectification of students and writing within the composition classroom has consequences for our communities outside the academy. Sharon Crowley issues a warning to leftist composition teachers, but her warning is one that should be taken seriously by all teachers of writing because of its impact on society as a whole:

Leftist composition teachers must remember that we inherit an oppressive institutional

history and a repressive intellectual tradition. We inherit an institutional structure that

was created in order to serve as a social and intellectual gatekeeper. Its operational status

was and still is grounded in nineteenth century hopes for literacy, assumptions about who

was, and who could become, ‘an educated person’ and about the most efficient ways of

fitting people to compete aggressively, if obediently, in a capitalist society. Freshman

English has always been a toward general fears of illiteracy among the

bourgeoisie, fears generated by America’s very real class hierarchy. (235)

Our institutions, especially our educational institutions, contribute to the formation of society,

and as Crowley points out, our institutions are based on an oppressive intellectual tradition.

There is a significance to the fact that our fields of study are termed “disciplines.” In order to 98 function and maintain existence, institutions must operate through discipline, and these forms of discipline have implications of oppression. In order to have educated people, we must, necessarily, have uneducated people, so our educational institutions must function in such a way as to maintain these distinctions. While these distinctions have long-term effects on and implications for class structures, we see their origination in deeper oppositions such as rhetoric and poetics.

Deconstructing the Walls Between Poetics and Rhetoric: Poetic Rhetoric in First-Year

Composition

As I consider breaking down the distinctions between rhetoric and poetics, it is important to approach this discussion in a thoughtful manner. Derrida emphasizes such careful consideration when he talks about the relationship between the sign and the signifier, and I think his attention to the complex nature of their relationship is applicable to my discussion of rhetoric and poetics. Speaking of the sign and the signifier, Derrida notes that, “it is not a question of

‘rejecting’ these notions; they are necessary and, at least at present, nothing is conceivable for us without them. It is a question at first of demonstrating the systematic and historical solidarity of the concepts and gestures of thought that one often believes can be innocently separated” (13-

14). This same notion is applicable to our discussion of poetics and rhetoric. What I have been questioning is the idea that these two concepts, or fields, can be innocently separated, as they so often are in first-year composition programs. Derrida also proposes that

it is necessary to surround the critical concepts with a careful and thorough discourse – to

mark the conditions, the medium, and the limits of their effectiveness and to designate

rigorously their intimate relationship to the machine whose deconstruction they permit; 99

and, in the same process, designate the crevice through which the yet unnameable

glimmer beyond the closure can be glimpsed. (14)

Derrida’s point here is similar to Foucault’s when he questions the multiple roles and discourses of the author, and this perspective is how I would like to approach my consideration of poetic rhetoric. A complexity of my argument is the acknowledgement that the very distinction between rhetoric and poetics helps to maintain the university structure, which in itself fuels higher learning and critique, and this ultimately contributes to my ability to call into question and deconstruct the opposition between rhetoric and poetics. Even as I acknowledge this potentiality, I aim to glimpse the spark that occurs when we view these two ideas not as things to be separated and manipulated, but as forces that operate beyond our control.

When we think of reconceiving the distinctions between poetics and rhetoric it is important to try to avoid replacing one set of oppositions with another one. It is not my desire to privilege one of these concepts over the other, but rather to show how we might see the driving force inherent within both rhetoric and poetics: to show that both concepts “radically suspend[] logic and open[] up vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration” (“Semiology of Rhetoric

10). de Man notes that, “Literature is fiction not because it somehow refuses to acknowledge

‘reality,’ but because it is not a priori certain that language functions according to principles which are those, or which are like those, of the phenomenal world. It is therefore not a priori certain that literature is a reliable source of about anything but its own language”

(11). de Man points out literature’s rhetoricity, but more importantly when it comes to poetics, rhetoric does not operate as an adjective; rather, the poetic is rhetorical in its very nature.

Poetics, just like rhetoric, does not take language for granted; it does not assume that language is innocent or can be manipulated for humanistic ends. The fact that literature, or poetics, holds 100

this complex relationship to language is the basis for my argument that poetic rhetoric is a process that flows through language in order to create and defer our senses of self and our structures of meaning. This is how we might consider the term “poetic rhetoric.” Michelle

Ballif differentiates between philosophic rhetoric (the type of rhetoric endorsed by Plato) and sophistic rhetoric (the type of rhetoric vilified by Plato), and while my intention here is not to distinguish poetic rhetoric as different from sophistic rhetoric, I would describe it as a concept that resists the logocentrism of Plato’s philosophic rhetoric. My description of poetic rhetoric is quite similar to descriptions of sophistic rhetoric, in that it acknowledges the instability of the logos that drives my conceptions of both poetics and rhetoric.

As I have mentioned before, the concept that rhetoric and poetics are similar or one and the same is not a revolutionary idea. Wayne C. Booth made strides in this area in his book The

Rhetoric of Fiction, showing that works of fiction operate rhetorically. Of course, we also see

these arguments in the works of . In 1972, in “From Problem Solving to a Theory

of Imagination,” Ann Berthoff attempts to bridge the dichotomy between rhetoric and poetics by

showing how all language is rhetorical. Phyllis McCord, in 1985, in “Reading Nonfiction in

Composition Courses,” asserts that, “The limitations of most definitions of literature…is that they are based either on fictionality or on the formal qualities of a text…What we need is a definition that encompasses both these emphases and, by regarding form and content as inseparable, allows for a literary reading of any discourse” (749). And more recently, in 2002,

Peter Elbow laments, “I’m sad to see that the composition tradition seems to assume discursive language as the norm and imaginative, metaphorical language as somehow special or marked or additional” (536). Elbow goes on to say, 101

In one sense, all language is rhetorical; Wayne Booth made it clear that even literature

has designs on readers – argues, does business. But the tradition from Nietzsche to I.A.

Richards provides the opposite lens to help us nevertheless see that all language use is

also an instance of poetics: a figurative or metaphorical structure that characteristically

yields up more meaning or pleasure when we see it as a self-contained or intertextual

structure – one that always means more than it purports to mean. (539)

Each of these theorists emphasizes the importance of resisting the binary opposition between rhetoric and poetics that has so long been a fixture in composition programs. Even as they resist this binary distinction, however, these scholars still endorse a view of rhetoric and poetics as distinct entities. They still view them as “things” or “techniques” that can be added to language.

Ann Berthoff asserts that language can behave rhetorically or that we can parse out rhetorical aspects of language, and Phyllis McCord emphasizes the literary nature of language. We still ultimately see these scholars privileging one concept over the other, and we also see them viewing both forms as figures that can be examined and applied to language. Peter Elbow makes strides in showing the deep way the two concepts are connected, and possibly one with each other, but he also stops short by still discussing these terms as distinct concepts and as posing a meaning that is accessible and communicable. Ultimately, while these and many other scholars work to question the opposition that has been created between rhetoric and poetics, they still do their work within a humanist paradigm of categorization and objectification. They continue to see rhetoric and poetics as objects that can be classified and analyzed and put to work. They fail to deeply question the ideological structure that created these distinctions in the first place. The rest of my project presents my attempt to develop a style of writing that takes these problems into consideration. Since I have established the problems with viewing rhetoric and poetics as 102

distinct subjects and I have described my own idea of the poetically rhetorical process that flows

through discourse and disrupts humanist ideologies, I will go on to suggest my own description for a genre of writing that can work to disrupt, resist, and subert the negative aspects of humanism in the composition classroom.

The scholars I have discussed show the value in considering the similarities between the ways rhetoric and poetics have been covnceived, and they reflect the implications this can have for students of writing. I would like to consider an alternative to their descriptions, however.

My suggestion is that rather than seeing rhetoric and poetics as concepts that must be synthesized, rather than trying to validate each one’s contribution to the roles of language and discourse, we instead break down the distinction between the two to create a space for poetic rhetoric, which acknowledges the idea that meaning in our world is created through an aesthetically charged rhetorical practice. This drive is propelled by an unstable logos; acknowledging this would also require us to acknowledge our inability to control meaning in our world and hence acknowledge our attempts to fabricate and manipulate our .

Paul de Man suggests the importance of embracing rhetoric and poetics in the writing

classroom. His argument is that poetics should be taught as rhetoric, but I think it would also be

valid to say that rhetoric should be taught as poetics, as well. His view of poetics and rhetoric is

one that resists the humanism upon which our university classrooms are based. He says scholars

either rejected rhetoric or assimilated the poetic significance of rhetorical tropes into a

normalizing form of writing. He adds that,

It is by no means an established fact that aesthetic values and linguistic structures are

incompatible. What is established is that their compatibility, or lack of it, has to remain

an open question and that the manner in which the teaching of literature, since its 103

beginning in the later nineteenth century, has foreclosed the question is unsound, even if

motivated by the best of intentions. What also ought to be (but is not) established is that

the professing of literature ought to take place under the aegis of this question. (25)

As de Man notes, teaching literature ought to take place under the question concerning the rhetoricity of poetics, and I would suggest that the teaching of writing about literature that so often takes place in composition programs should grapple with this very question as well. Poetic rhetoric resists the unquestioning acceptance that the two concepts are incompatible or that they are even distinct. Discussing how one would go about teaching a writing class that questioned this distinction, de Man says, “From a purely methodological point of view, this would not be difficult to achieve. It would involve a change by which literature, instead of being taught only as a historical and humanistic subject, should be taught as a rhetoric and a poetics prior to being taught as a hermeneutics and a history” (25-26). de Man suggests that we should resist teaching poetics under a humanist paradigm, and I take this argument further by suggesting that we approach all texts from a poetically rhetorical perspective that resists and disrupts humanist ideologies. Diane Davis discusses the problem with modernism, and I think that it is the same problem with the attempts to break away from humanism. She notes that while we may recognize the fact that our senses of structure are illusions, “the typical modernist response to that re/cognition is to attempt to produce the foundation that is thought to be lacking….And such a production/creation demands a knowing subject who can transcend false consciousness, determine what is ‘just,’ and act in the service of that knowledge of justice” (42). This problem that Davis so astutely articulates can be seen when scholars attempt to show how poetic works operate rhetorically. They acknowledge that those works have more complicated and unstable structures than previously accepted, but they still ultimately work to reestablish a strong 104 foundation, replacing the complexity of the poetic work with a solid semblance of stable rhetoric, philosophical rhetoric.

To address the questions that de Man poses (questions concerning the ways that aesthetic values interact with linguistic structures) without falling prey to the humanistic and modernist desires to unify discrepancy and produce foundation will require deep questioning without requisite, absolute answers to this uncertainty. While it is a difficult (perhaps impossible) task to carry on this kind of discussion without coming back to producing some kind of foundation, without assuming some stable subjectivity, that is what we will have to try to do with this work.

In some ways this questioning happens in English departments through the diversity of courses taught. The fact that students do have choices regarding the courses they would like to take, the fact that they come into contact with different professors’ regarding texts, helps to resist the centripetal force of the university. Students who are particularly perceptive may notice how the boundaries between the courses begin to blur. They may also notice the way in which the university exists in order to replicate itself. They may even notice the way the humanistic values of the university tend to reify and maintain class hierarchies outside of the academy. However, this kind of questioning can take place at a more fundamental administrative level when it comes to how composition courses are divided and taught. Our approach to classroom organization and fundamental ideas such as rhetoric and poetics may help to start a and exploration of the ways these fundamental ideas contribute to student subjectivities and value systems. This dissertation does not propose to supply a regimented syllabus or structure for a course that embodies poetic rhetoric, but I do want to discuss the different ways we can inform our pedagogies to start reconsidering the ways we distinguish concepts like “rhetoric” and “poetics” and the ideologies we are subconsciously endorsing when we view these terms in such 105

dichotomized ways. I also want to talk about ways in which we might start to deconstruct these

distinctions and start to sketch out what “poetic rhetoric” might look like in our discussions of the first-year composition classroom. It is beneficial to address notions of poetic rhetoric in the composition classroom, even in smaller gestures, like reading texts with more of an eye for

endless possibilities of meaning or through a resistance of traditional, logocentric categories of

genre and interpretations of readings. I suggest a form of writing that embodies my descriptions

of poetic rhetoric: the poetically rhetorical essay, which by seeking out excess and by being

creatively excessive would resist the categorization and negation of humanism.

Pedagogical Considerations of Poetic Rhetoric: The Poetically Rhetorical Essay

In “Writing Against Writing: The Predicament of Écriture Feminine in Composition

Studies,” Lynn Worsham addresses the problem of incorporating a truly postmodern discourse

into the academic institution. She does this through a consideration of how one should approach

écriture feminine in the writing classroom, and she describes écriture feminine as representing an

intimacy between the body and language that “once again puts into discourse the sense that our

deepest relation to language is concrete, material, existential -- and rhetorical -- not epistemic”

(91). She ultimately suggests that a class that embraces écriture feminine would view writing as

something that should not attempt to control and distribute power; rather, it should attempt to

make the world “strange and infinitely various” (102). Composition theory, in her view, “should

examine ways in which culture is reproduced in its theory and in its practice -- with a view

toward becoming a site for the production of difference” (102). While my description of poetic

rhetoric cannot be compared to or conflated with écriture feminine, poetic rhetoric does follow

along the lines of postmodern discourse, in that it resists the humanist agenda so closely aligned

with Enlightenment thinking and modernism that are rejected by postmodern theories. Worsham 106

notes that “écriture feminine disturbs the logic of academic language” (91), and it is my contention that poetic rhetoric also, perhaps quite differently, disturbs the logic of academic

language; in fact, it works to resist the logic and foundation of the institution as a whole.

Worsham strongly cautions against attempting to appropriate postmodern discourse to the composition classroom, because if we attempt to recreate it within and according to the confines of academia, we risk submitting it to the very hegemonic strictures it works to disrupt. Worsham suggests teaching students to “read culture, read the ways hegemony works to win and shape so that the power of dominant meanings and dominant groups appears natural and beyond question” (101).

It is this type of questioning that I would encourage in the first-year composition classroom. It may be that this sort of suggestion is old news; Worsham’s suggestion was published over ten years ago. I that many teachers today overlook the importance of examining hegemony, power, and domination in the texts their classes read. More specifically, though, my suggestion is that classes studying writing, both texts that are purported to be rhetorical and poetical, should explore the creative and illusory properties that both resist and

contribute to the workings of hegemony and power. This would involve a stronger connection

between literary and non-literary courses. It would acknowledge the poetically rhetorical nature

of all texts, and it would seek to question how language is fueled by poetic rhetoric and how this

works to resist and disrupt humanist ideologies that so often influence structures of power in our

society.

Under this type of writing, I suggest we reconsider the genre of the essay, what many

refer to as creative non-fiction, and that we take it one step further to shape the genre into that of

the poetically rhetorical essay. This would involve focusing on the Montaignean essay and 107

disrupting its notions of stable self. It would go further through its use of excessive description

and a form of reasoning that operates through broad links, amorphous connections, and deep

feeling. Before describing the poetically rhetorical essay, however, we must understand where it

fits within the broad context of the genre of the essay. Perhaps because it has existed for so long,

the term “essay” has been appropriated by scholars for a multitude of writing genres. The essay

has been described as “a friendly, personal, informal piece of writing about anything you like”

(qtd. in Heilker 13-14), but the term also includes the thesis-driven expository writing we often

teach in composition classrooms today. Because of this, it is difficult to define the genre of the

essay; however, understanding its history and development over time will help give a valuable

context for my own descriptions of the poetically rhetorical essay.

In The Essay: Theory and Pedagogy for an Active Form, Paul Heilker shows that the

essay has been linked to Ancient Greek and Roman treatises, citing Georg Lukács, who has

described Plato as “the greatest essayist who ever lived or wrote” (qtd. in Heilker 14). The essay

has also been described as taking the form of early epistolary and journal-based writing. Heilker quotes H.V. Routh as observing that in many instances Montaigne’s Essais “first came into

existence as marginalia in books” (qtd. in Heilker 15). Even though some scholars have posited

the essay’s roots as far back as biblical times, many people will agree that the essay first became

fully realized in the works of Michel de Montaigne.

Interestingly, there are as many diverse descriptions of the term “essay” as there are to

the term “humanism,” and there is an ironic connection between the two concepts. As Heilker

and others show, in many respects the essay evolved during the time of humanism’s inception

and in response to humanistic values. In many instances, humanism replaced the unquestioning

belief in and religion with an emphasis on individual discovery and the of reason and 108

science. The essay is a form of writing that embraces that spirit of discovery. Heilker cites

Michael L. Hall as saying that the essay developed during the 1500s and 1600s “as a product of

the Renaissance ‘idea’ of discovery and in response to it” (qtd. in Heilker 16). It is the spirit of

discovery, however, that allows the essay to challenge even the basic tenets of that humanism from which it sprang. In this sense, the essay has a complex relationship to humanism, because it both develops from and disrupts humanist ideology. Therefore, some descriptions of the essay work to reify humanist qualities, and other forms of the essay work to resist and disrupt humanist ideals. One way the essay resists and disrupts humanist values is through its antischolasticism.

Spellmeyer and Newkirk assert that Montaigne created the essay as a way to challenge the scholasticism of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. They note that Montaigne questioned “the most basic beliefs of the academic specialists of his day” and “their belief that the world consisted of fixed entities that can be named and categorized with precision” (qtd. in

Heilker 17-18). Montaigne resisted the humanist belief that the world could be categorized, even questioning the idea that knowledge is stable and thus categorical. Speaking of the essay,

Heilker notes that its antischolasticism rejected the idea of stable, and interrogated “the idea of authority itself…challenging its basis of categorization and specialization” (18). The fact that the essay challenges conventional wisdom suggests that it would question dominant social structures and hierarchies of power, and its resistance of categorization and specialization reflects an anti-humanist nature. However, the essay operates inclusively, at times striving for cohesiveness out of many heterogeneous parts. While an emphasis on heterogeneity reflects movements away from humanism, the essay’s attempts at cohesiveness and coherence reflects its humanistic roots. Heilker quotes Spellmeyer as describing the Montaignean essay in a way that insightfully shows the complexity of the essay as 109 it relates to humanist and less humanist qualities. Spellmeyer argues that against the abstraction, exclusion, and discrimination of scholasticism, Montaigne took “the central position of the author-as-speaker, at once subject and object in discourse,” endorsing a form that sought to bring together “dissonant perspectives in order to restore the lived world” (qtd. in Heilker 18). By seeking out dissonant, sometimes contradictory, perspectives the essay resisted the exclusion and discrimination that is often associated with humanism. By viewing the author as both subject and object in discourse the essayist both challenges and reifies notions of stable subjectivity.

The awareness of dissonant and contradictory perspectives can destabilize notions of subjectivity and yet the personal and introspective nature of the essay confirms the idea of an authentic self.

Similarly, whenever an essay attempts to bring pieces together in order to restore a whole, it risks replacing one logocentric paradigm with another. There is a sense, within the paradigm of restoration, that there is some stable or authentic world underneath the current society of illusion and lies and that this world can somehow be restored if we just do enough research and include enough wit in our writing. However, Heilker emphasizes,

Montaigne does not seek to portray universality, stability, and continuity (or ‘being’) and

thus replicate the authority of the tradition he is working within, but rather seeks to

portray uniqueness, mutability, and discontinuity (‘passing’) and thus skeptically

undermine the authority of tradition he is working against. (21)

It is this aspect of the essay that differentiates it from the thesis-driven form of writing that many composition scholars mistakenly refer to as an “essay” today.

I argue that the thesis-driven form is “mistakenly” referred to as an essay because it seems that as the essay has taken on so many differing descriptions and uses, it has been appropriated into as a thesis-driven genre. In A Handbook to Literature, C. 110

Hugh Holman explains that the essay can be split into two versions: formal and informal (169).

The formal version of the essay is what we refer to as the thesis-driven essay that is emphasized

in writing classrooms today. Holman explains that the formal essay of the early nineteenth

century came about in the emergence of critical magazines and in the writings of other prose

scholars at that time (170). Describing the formal essay, he says,

At one extreme it is represented by the brief, serious magazine article and at the other by

scientific or philosophical treatises which are books rather than essays. The technique of

the formal essay is now practically identical with that of all factual or theoretical prose

writing in which literary effect is secondary to serious purpose. (173)

Essentially, while some scholars saw the essay as an opportunity to explore ideas without closing

off meaning, others saw the essay as a form in which to write short, argumentative, analytical

pieces. As Heilker notes, “It is a common conception that the essay split into two distinct modes

after Montaigne” (34). He quotes Michéle Richman, who describes the two different types of

essay: “’informal, personal, intimate, relaxed, conversational, and often humorous,’ and the other

‘dogmatic, impersonal, systematic, and expository’” (qtd. in Heilker 34). Because the essay once derived from the French verb meaning “to test” or “to prove,” Montagine used it in the explorative sense of “testing out an idea”; however, the essay today has been appropriated by academia to imply that it will prove an argument. As William Zeiger insists in “The Exploratory

Essay: Enfranchising the Spirit of in College Composition,” “To ‘prove’ an assertion today is to win undisputed acceptance for it – to stop an inquiry rather than to start it” (456).

Zeiger observes that “with overwhelming frequency college composition classes today teach the writing of an essay which conforms to the scientific model of thesis and support” (456). This type of writing is often referred to in composition courses as expository or 111

argumentative/persuasive essays. Heilker describes the essay as opposed to or as an alternative

to the thesis-driven or thesis/support form. He says that the essay does not refer to the “primarily

narrative and/or descriptive writing…or to the fundamentally argumentative or editorial pieces

that are typically and mistakenly gathered together under one rubric and mislabeled as ‘essays’ in

most anthologies” (161-62).

My description of the poetically rhetorical essay differs greatly from those of the

academic or thesis-driven essay. Heilker describes the thesis-driven form, citing William

Zeiger’s argument that it creates a “logically exclusive, linear progression to a predetermined

end” with the purpose of moving “the reader to one and only one conclusion” (qtd. in Heilker 4).

With the thesis-driven form the writer is meant to argue what she or he knows, and this often

prevents the writer and even the reader from actually learning anything about the paper’s topic.

Rather, known facts are meant to be analyzed and organized and the reader ultimately accepts or

rejects the main argument. As Heilker argues, “The thesis/support form, it seems, is inherently

paradoxical: it begins with what it has already ended; it introduces the topic with its conclusion;

it opens with airtight closure” (4). Heilker posits that the thesis-driven form endorses notions of

hierarchy and presents a “mystified authority” whenever an argument is presented on the basis of

objective observation. I would argue that the infallibility of objective observation that is emphasized with the thesis-driven form makes assumptions about authority that are in line with humanistic beliefs. There is an emphasis on authority that shows domination and mastery over a subject in a way that can be exclusionary to contrasting voices and opinions. Heilker presents a thoughtful on this subject through the argument of Keith Fort who, Heilker says,

“asks us to consider to what extent our teaching of the traditional thesis/support form, our 112 replication of the status quo operating in composition instruction, may lead to our students’ unquestioning replication of an oppressive status quo in society outside the classroom” (7).

It is important to note the many different types of essays that exist and how my emphasis on poetic rhetoric pertains to them. Doug Hesse states that “Within the academy the term ‘essay’ has evolved into a generic term for all works of prose nonfiction short enough to be read in a single sitting” (qtd. in Heilker “20 Years In” 203). It is in this way that the term “essay” has become ubiquitous in the university and conflated with the type of expository, argumentative, thesis-driven writing we typically teach in first-year composition. A quick look at an anthology of , which is consistently equated with the essay, shows the many subgenres of essay that exist today: memoir, nature essay, personal essay, segmented essay, critical essay, and literary (Root, Jr. and Steinberg xi-xiii), and Phillip Lopate says that personal essays have existed for years in the forms of New Journalism, autobiographical-political meditations, nature and ecological-regional writing, literary criticism, travel writing, humorous pieces, and even writing about food (306). It is easy to see how the term “essay” has lost some of its descriptive value. Additionally, in his article “Twenty Years In: An Essay in Two Parts,”

Heilker observes the ways in which the boundaries between the essay and the article are blurred:

As writers, it is not a matter of choosing between the essay and the article, but rather a

case of understanding that these are opposing extremes on a continuum of possibilities

and choices for framing and developing our prose: the essay and the article are the

infrared and the ultraviolet, but real people live and write in some glorious hue of visible

light between them. (192)

Heilker’s description of the blurred boundaries between the two types of writing brings to light a very valuable point. While the essay is a form more suited to enacting the poetic rhetoric I 113 describe, poetic rhetoric is a process that flows through all language; thus we will see instances of it in all types of writing. While I make my argument for a poetically rhetorical essay, there are types of essays that have been appropriated for thesis-driven, humanistic ends. Additionally, if we approach any text, even the thesis-driven form, from the perspective of poetic rhetoric, we should be able to explore humanistic elements that that text either confirms or disrupts.

It should be clear that I am arguing for a poetically rhetorical essay that derives from the

Montaignean essay; however, in thinking about the possible problems with considering the essay for this project, we might note that the essay still works towards a sense of meaning and a sense of closure, however tentative or provisional. In Heilker’s description of the essay he argues that

“truth is not detached and impersonal, existing previous to and outside and outside of , but rather is produced through a dialogic intersection and interaction of viewpoint-voices, through the dialectic transaction among individuals working within a social epistemic rhetoric” (61). While it is helpful to acknowledge that truth is not something that exists outside of human communication, the poetically rhetorical essay would differ from the traditional essay as Heilker describes it and as so many essayists have practiced it in that my description for this new form of an essay would acknowledge the hegemony involved in dialogue, , and social epistemic rhetoric. While it would note the value in engaging in a certain degree of these practices, it would also seek to resist and disrupt the ways that these practices operate through binary distinctions and ultimately operate off of foundations of logocentrism. Ultimately, the poetically rhetorical essay would seek to pursue and question all that is pushed aside when simple and dialectics take place.

Since the essay is traditionally depicted with an essayist who seeks possible answers or insights to a question or subject of curiosity or concern, and since there is so much emphasis on 114

the personal insights of the essayist, we might believe that there is an assumption that the

essayist is operating off a foundation of belief in a stable self that can authentically come to new

understandings about the self and reach conclusions about meaning in the world. The poetically

rhetorical essay would seek to challenge this notion. Speaking of the personal essay (in The

Fourth Genre), Jocelyn Bartkevicius says that the “self – at least my self – is composed of

misremembered and unremembered scenes. The path back to that uneven landscape is the path

of the mind” (227). The notion that there is a path back to the self, however, implies that there is

some original self that can be accessed. In the introduction of their book, The Fourth Genre,

Robert L. Root, Jr. and Michael Steinberg discuss the role of the self in the essay, which they

also equate with creative nonfiction. They describe two main qualities of the essay as being self-

discovery/self-exploration and personal presence. They assert that many of the contributors to their anthology suggest that the essay is one that “encourages self-discovery, self-exploration, and surprise” and that the “sense of personal presence is one of the most forceful elements of nonfiction” (xxv). As Phillip Lopate points out, Montaigne himself set out to study the only subject he knew the most about: his self (302). All of these suggestions seem to imply a self that is there to be discovered, a self presence not unlike the presence revered in humanist ideology.

The poetically rhetorical essay seeks to disrupt the notion that there is a self that can be discovered or that personal presence exists, at least fully and authentically. It would note, as

Michelle Ballif does, that, “As Donna Haraway reminds us, ‘Figures do not have to be representational and mimetic, but they do have to be tropic; that is, they cannot be literal and self-identical. Figures must involve at least some kind of displacement that can trouble identification and certainties’” (qtd. in Ballif 178). Ballif reminds us that language does not offer an unambiguous representation of meaning; rather, the tropological nature of language displaces 115 meaning and calls into a question in a troubling way what we identify with as people, how we identify ourselves, and what we consider to be certain. The essay as a genre has the potential to operate in this tropic, troubling way. If we view the essay from a poetically rhetorical perspective, we can disrupt humanistic notions of coherent, stable selves and instead acknowledge all that we cannot control in our lives and in our definitions of who we are. In this process, we would seek out all of the other people and ideas that must be oppressed in order for humanistic notions of stable self and authentic knowledge to exist. Rather than operating in a more traditional sense to perhaps help the essayist come to know her or himself better, or rather than coming to some form of universal truth by the end of the piece, the poetically rhetorical essay would work to displace the essayists’ and readers’ senses of self. It would disrupt and trouble certainties and notions of meaning throughout the piece.

In some ways, I think the Montaignean essay can work to do this, and it is something the poetically rhetorical essay needs to embrace and extend. From this perspective, I am very much in favor of the Montaignean essay, and I believe that we can both view the essay from a poetically rhetorical perspective and craft it to be more poetically rhetorical. Paul Heilker cites

Graham Good as noting that within the essay, the self and the object “reciprocally clarify and define each other” (qtd. in Heilker 51). He goes on to note that Good says that “this illumination is temporary…knowledge of the moment, not more” (qtd. in Heilker 51). This type of description of self understanding is more aligned with the poetic rhetoric and the way that knowledge is acknowledged as an ambiguous, illusory, and creative concept. Additionally, because the self and object mutually create each other, we can see the influence of the content and form, both properties of poetic rhetoric, on the formation of the self. Heilker goes on to say,

“Truth of the world is inseparable from the truth of the personality of the essay – the subject and 116

object mutually, provisionally, and temporarily defining each other within the bounds of the

text” (60). In this sense, we see the ways in which the self is not necessarily controlled by the

writer of the essay, but, rather, is created out of the language of the essay. As Rosellen Brown

suggests, the essay creates a self that “will cast a shadow as dense and ambiguous as that of an

imaginary . The self is surely a created character” (qtd. in Root, Jr. and Steinberg

xxiv). The poetically rhetorical extension of the essay is the acknowledgment that the “I” is a

fiction; the expression that is discovered about the self is a fabrication, an illusion, a self that is simultaneously created and deferred. While the essay does assume a certain stability of self, if we approach any essay (personal, exploratory, argumentative, academic) from a poetically rhetorical perspective, we will learn that the self is just as much a construction as all of the other selves that are created as language pulses within us. We construct ourselves: our selves are constructed by language; the very boundaries between these two ideas are fluid, constantly being permeated by our human wills and egos and the uncontrollable force of language. The essay’s emphasis on self-presence and exploration creates more opportunity for creation and deferrals of self than does a thesis-driven form.

The “creative non-fiction” aspect of the essay lends itself well to the idea of poetic rhetoric. In a way, these two concepts run parallel to each other, with the creativity of the non- fiction holding the potential for an awareness of the fictionality of non-fiction. In order to construct a poetically rhetorical essay, we might consider taking the creativity to such a level of

excess as to truly embrace the fictionality that is inherent within rhetoric and ultimately what we

consider to be non-fiction and other language and meaning structures. In addition, the

questioning and skepticism inherent within the essay can lead to a simultaneous creating and

destroying of notions of stable subjectivity for the essayist and hence for those that read essays. 117

Finally, all of these points, along with the essay’s emphasis on anti-scholasticism, stand to disrupt the humanist agenda within the university.

Heilker specifically emphasizes three important qualities of the Montaignean essay:

“profound epistemological skepticism, transgressive anti-scholasticism, and use of radically anti-

Ciceronian chrono-logic” (35). The essay, then, operates by questioning all that we consider certain; resisting and subverting elements of scholasticism such as categorization, discrete disciplines, and objectivity; and challenging classical, formal forms of logic. These qualities are important to our discussion of the poetically rhetorical essay, both for the ways it encapsulates some of these elements and in the ways it will need to push some of these qualities beyond their limits to operate in a more poetically rhetorical way.

The essay exhibits epistemological skepticism through its antischolasticism. Diane Davis gives a helpful description of the type of scholasticism that is promoted by both composition programs and the university as a whole: “Not only composition courses but the UniVeristy itself is implicated in this charge. The kind of thinking and writing that pushes the limits of the knowable and the writable, that challenges established bodies of ‘knowledge’ and disciplinary boundaries, is rarely welcomed in the academy” (97). By embracing the Montaignean essay’s antischolasticism, the poetically rhetorical essay would work to challenge humanist qualities that are reflected in traditional university scholarship. Essentially, the type of writing endorsed by the university and its departments promotes an unquestioning acceptance of established bodies of thought. In this way, it can create a sort of stagnant recapitulation of knowledge which can, in many cases, perpetuate the status quo, both within the university and the social structures it maintains. The poetically rhetorical essay, however, can work to resist and challenge the hierarchies inherent in academia. In “Saving a Place for Essayistic Literacy,” Doug Hesse says, 118

[E]ssays are a specific kind of nonfiction, one defined in opposition to more formal and

explicitly conventional genres -- the scientific article or report, for example, or the

history, or the philosophical argument. Whereas these latter genres have aspired to

objective truths…essayists have pursued conditional representations of the world as the

essayist experiences it…[The essay] can…be viewed as an ultimate rejection of

knowledge as objective and truth as independent of context and experience. (35-36)

Hesse emphasizes the ways that the Montaignean essay resists scholastic forms of writing. The essay reflects a rejection of humanistic qualities such as objectivity and independent, authentic truth. As Paul Heilker says, “According to Adorno, the essay operates as a challenge to the reductive scientific and positivism that dominate modern Western thought, attempting to demystify and unmask the fiction of objectivity” (43). Heilker also notes that “the essay operates in opposition to the scholastic delineation of experience into discrete disciplines and their respective discourses, offering instead a transgressive and more inclusive discourse that temporarily brings together contrasting and incongruous points of view in an attempt to more fully and deeply address whole problems of human existence” (19). This type of writing resists and disrupts many of the ideological goals of humanism that are so fundamental to our academic systems. It resists scientific nominalism and positivism. It resists categorization and instead attempts to include as many voices, genres, and disciplines as possible, never privileging one over the other.

In addition to its epistemological skepticism and antischolasticism, the essay, Heilker argues, operates chrono-logically, showing the reader’s thoughts as they appear to the essayist.

He asserts that while some scholars argue that this is a natural form of writing, chrono-logic is no more natural than any other rhetorical forms. We are taught to think certain ways, and time- 119

related linearity is one of those ways. The important point here is that Heilker argues that there

is no one way of thinking that is more natural than any other (31). Of course, we do know that

some essayists, most essayists, will artfully arrange their thoughts in the most provocative or

effective way in their pieces. Heilker notes that the essay does not “wander,” but rather moves

through time in an inevitable way as directed by the thought processes of the author. Thus, one

would not say that the essay is illogical but rather that it is “differently logical.” This would

connect with and appeal to the poetically rhetorical essay in that it would not deny the way that

language use ultimately creates a closing off of meaning, and it would also show that even as

meaning is closed off with one thought, it can also be reopened and questioned with the next thought. However, to fully push the boundaries of a poetically rhetorical essay, I would suggest

that my genre of the essay would consider what excesses were left out of that thought process

and perhaps wander off in the direction of those excesses. It might note the irrational side of all

purportedly logical processes, traditional and different, that is silenced and subsumed through

that rational order; and, it might seek to illuminate this in a creative way while at the same time

emphasizing the illusory, uncontrollable properties. It would differ from the thesis-driven form

in all of the ways that the Montaignean essay differs, and it would strive to resist the appropriation that has occurred with the Montaignean essay. It would exist within a constant state of creation and deferral, working to trouble subjectivities and certainties. An example of this type of poetically rhetorical essay would include one that does not operate logically or even chrono-logically but perhaps paralogically (a type of logic that I see as paradoxically operating through a resistance to reason, but rather operates through linking and feeling.

To envision the essay with a paralogic order would be to invoke Jean-François Lyotard’s and Victor Vitanza’s descriptions of paralogy. While there are many different descriptions and 120

approaches to paralogy (Thomas Kent’s discussion of paralogic rhetoric, for example), Lyotard’s

and Vitanza’s are the most appropriate for the genre of the poetically rhetorical essay. In the

foreword to Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, Fredric Jameson describes Lyotard’s conception of paralogism as a search for instabilities, “in which the point is not to reach agreement but to undermine from within the very framework in which the previous ‘normal science’ has been conducted” (xix). Paralogy, as Lyotard describes it, is a resistance of consensus with an emphasis on dissension (61). Meaning is approached through the form of the

“little narrative” (petit récit), and the logic of paralogy is “not without rules (there are classes of

catastrophes), but it is always locally determined” (61). The little narratives of paralogy

approach meaning and power from an individual perspective, and paralogy is interested in

exploring that which “comes along to disturb the order of reason” (61). Therefore, paralogy and

its little narratives operate on a local, individual level, but they work in provocative ways to

generate new ideas and to destabilize the current ruling order.

Victor Vitanza describes Lyotard’s paralogy as “just-linking,” and he says that with

paralogy, “the rules develop out of the processual realization of them” (Negation, Subjectivity,

and the History of Rhetoric 42-43). Vitanza shows the paratactic, associative nature of paralogy,

and he emphasizes while there is some structure to paralogy, this structure is flexible and

adaptive, developing along with the process of paralogy as opposed to against it. Vitanza also

describes paralogism as an approach to meaning that “de/stabilizes” and “dis/places” and can

work subversively through writing (“Critical Sub/Versions of the History of Philosophical

Rhetoric” 52). Lyotard and Vitanza describe paralogy as generating new ideas and approaching

meaning through the elements of paradox, , displacement, and subversion, and it is these

qualities that I would relate to the poetically rhetorical essay. In addition to these qualities, I 121

would add the elements of chance and emotion. The type of reasoning that would be associated

with paralogism is based more on feeling than on the cool calculation that often accompanies

typical descriptions of reason. There is also an added element of chance that plays a part in helping people to detect the subtle nuances that bring to light paradoxes and opportunities for

subversion.

The structure of paralogy, then, would proceed not by reason or time but by feeling. Bret

Lott has a description of the essay that resonates with paralogy: “The two opposed ideas of

creative nonfiction are finding order in chaos without reforming chaos into order; retaining the

ability to function is the act of writing all this down for somebody else to understand” (310). In

my mind, this can encapsulate the poetically rhetorical, paralogic, excessive nature of the essay.

The poetically rhetorical is not just utter meaninglessness; yet, neither does it represent a chaotic

world restored to a whole. To offer a more concrete visualization: when I picture myself picking

up a poetically rhetorical essay, I see the pages at first being a bit confusing. I sense connections

within the different segments and sections of the essay. I feel the connections more in the

metaphors, , images, vivid language, and contradictions than in any of the actual words

on the page. I am reminded of a student’s paper that explored feelings regarding death, but spent

much of the paper talking about the stars in the summer night sky. The essay did not have a

thesis or any logical organization, but even though it was written years ago, I still have a fiery

picture in my mind, as painted by that student. I still remember being impressed that someone so

young could offer such profound insight into a topic that can, at times, seem so banal. This

poetically rhetorical essay is a subversive form, challenging the tenets of humanism. It focuses

more on feeling rather than reason and excess as opposed to categorization. 122

The essay as a genre typically works to include as many voices, genres, and angles of

perspective as possible. It is one that is constantly questioning and resisting closure. Heilker

describes the essay in terms of Bakhtin’s theory of heteroglossia, or “the plurality and variety of

discourses at work at any given time and place” (55). Heilker notes: “The essay is a textual form

embodying this centrifugal tendency: in its anti-scholasticism, it acknowledges, and indeed

celebrates, the realities of heteroglossia, incorporating a diversity of differentiated discourses”

(55-56). I would like to focus on this quality of the essay and perhaps draw it out even more to

connect it to what Victor Vitanza describes as excess and nonpositive affirmation. Nonpositive affirmation seeks to resist the negation that is so closely tied to humanist operations of exclusion.

While the rationality of humanism operates through negation (I am “I” because I am not “you”),

the paralogical operation of nonpositive affirmation resists that negation by saying that we are

“more than one or two or countable ethoi; in fact, there is a ” (Vitanza 64).

Essentially, rather than defining ourselves against others, we acknowledge that our selves are acted on by other forces. Therefore, we must act ethically (through a sublime ethos) because these actions will come back to play upon us. One way to do this is to excessively give of ourselves. Excessively giving of oneself is a way to enact nonpositive affirmation, and it is a quality of the poetically rhetorical essay. One excessively gives of oneself by questioning and troubling certainties about identity and social structure. As he describes his “Montaignean essay,” Vitanza says,

A recapitulation: I am talking about, pointing us to, an excess that is itself either excluded

by and that escapes dialectic, division, diaresis, definition or I am talking about

preferably an excess that is for some of us more of a ‘feeling’ and a ‘sign’ (Lyotard), but 123

a feeling and a sign that is not determined by, again, negation, as with Lyotard, but a

feeling and a sign of exuberance, as with the poet Blake. (68)

Vitanza describes an element of excess that operates outside of the logocentric paradigm of categorization through negation. Vitanza speaks of an excess that is associated with abundance, fertility, and affirmation. This element of excess avoids the naming through separation, the negation and binary opposition, that is associated with diaresis. It operates paralogically, through feeling, and seeks out through that feeling exuberance, passion, and pleasure. Pleasure is important, ethically, because one cannot give pleasure without feeling it oneself. He notes

Bataille’s argument in The Accursed Share that energy exists in a state of excess and that we have a choice as to whether or not we will approach that excess through a model of scarcity, meant to provide profit for the few, or through a general economy that would operate more ethically (68). Vitanza also quotes Norman O. Brown, who says, “That is why, in the last resort, there is [no traditional philosophy or rhetoric] only poetry” (qtd. in Vitanza 69). Notice

Vitanza’s emphasis on the notion of “traditional” philosophy or rhetoric. The quote goes on to say, “We cannot live without imagination; adoring and exaggerating life; lavishing of itself in change [which The History of Rhetoric has suppressed!]. This property of the imagination is not a human aberration, but a manifestation of the fundamental nature of life” (qtd. in Vitanza 69).

Vitanza goes on to say, “This, then, would be a view of nature (physis) without any negatives”

(69).

If physis is a supposition of that which is natural, Vitanza notes that embracing nonpositive, affirmative excess reflects the imaginative, creative aspects of life. Embracing this represents a life without negation, because if we negate, or oppress, others, we negate, or oppress, ourselves. The excess that Vitanza is emphasizing is one that is creative and poetic. It 124

is described in comparison to traditional rhetoric and to the traditional history of rhetoric, and these notions of rhetoric match my descriptions of rhetoric as the subjugated other. A sophistic, or third sophistic, rhetoric is more in line with the poetry that is described here. This form of creative excess stands to disrupt negation, something that we can see happening when rhetoric and poetics are separated into distinct categories. Negation is also often associated with the humanist agenda and way of approaching ideals. The poetically rhetorical essay would challenge this negation that emphasizes reason and categorization, this negation that would oppress others in order to maintain social structures and would justify these discriminations through logical rationalizations.

It is this aspect of excess that I see as playing a role in the poetically rhetorical essay.

This type of essay would pursue the excessive abundance of affirmation that Vitanza describes.

In some ways, the essay already does this in its attempts to bring in as many voices and perspectives as possible. In fact, my poetically rhetorical essay would not differ entirely from some of the Montaignean-styled essays I have seen. However, I think it is possible for a poetically rhetorical essay to operate more paralogically than chrono-logically. Instead of representing a mind thinking down the page, as it does with chrono-logic, the poetically rhetorical essay might show a mind leaping across the page. There would be more of a linking strategy occurring within the essay. There would also be such an emphasis on feeling that those links might not make sense to a reader who does not work to access the feelings within the text or who even gives her or himself over to the feelings within the text. The essayist would attempt within the poetically rhetorical essay to give of her or himself in such a way as to feel the actions taken within the essay her or himself. This could be exhibited in a poetically rhetorical essay that considers excluded Others, that works to include rather than exclude, and through its 125

sometimes ambiguous and contradictory linkages works to trouble subjectivities and certainties.

Even as it literally attempts to bring in an excessive number of voices, genres, and perspectives,

it would be interesting to see an essay that truly seeks out the excesses that have been and are

constantly being exscribed (excluded, oppressed, pushed aside) to the margins in a way that does

not involve negation. Equally important to this essay would be one that is so excessively

creative that it ends up showing the fictionality of non-fiction and disrupts previously established

ideas of stable and authentic meaning and subjectivity.

The Poetically Rhetorical Essay: An Example

Poetically rhetorical essays should operate in such a creative way as to show the

fictionality within non-fiction and within the world that shapes us. In this dissertation I have

included an Appendix that contains an unpublished essay by Paul Heilker titled “Inertia,” which

I suggest exemplifies some of this creative, poetically rhetorical writing that I describe.

Heilker’s essay is not entirely poetically rhetorical, because it does have a chrono-logical

organizational scheme; however, there are elements of it that are poetically rhetorical, and the

essay would benefit from a poetically rhetorical reading of it.

“Inertia” begins with a description of Heilker’s visit to Fort Worth Zoo in 1989 and his

viewing of orangutans and a raccoon. The orangutans he describes as being lethargic and static,

but the raccoon is full of energy, moving in an endless loop. He then switches to 2001, to two

scenes: one where he monotonously cares for his ailing mother, and then the final scene where

he learns of his mother’s death and responds through a process of moving as quickly as possible in what becomes a loop around an airport.

“Inertia” is organized chrono-logically, in an organization that Heilker espouses, so it would be helpful here to view the organization from a poetically rhetorical perspective to see 126

how it both confirms and resists poetically rhetorical tenets. Because the essay is organized

chrono-logically, we can see some forms of causation between the segments of the piece. It also

reaffirms notions of linearity that can be associated with logical progression that is often

valorized in humanist ideologies. The chrono-logical organization does prevent this essay from neatly fitting my description of the poetically rhetorical essay; however, its resistance to meeting my own definition can also help it operate as a subversive form to my description. There is also a sense in which the logic of time is blurred within the piece, helping it to operate more through broad links and challenge perceived notions of linearity. Heilker’s description of the orangutans in the zoo creates a feeling of endlessness that seems to exist outside the boundaries of time.

When he says, “four orangutans sit on three concrete slabs, motionless, victims of gravity. Arms languish limply at their sides, though one finger loops loosely around the base of a bar. Long, red-brown hair mats into shapeless rugs. Black almonds sink into resigned, static masks,” we have the feeling that the animals have existed forever within the bars of the zoo. There is a feeling that time there has stopped.

Its description of his time spent with his mother also incorporates such excessive instances of time that one can become disoriented: “ill for ten years…ill for two years…ill for six months”; “oxygen 24 hours a day”; “sleeps 18 hours a day”; “good 90 minutes for her to become lucid”; “twice a day”; “3:00 one morning”; “dwell with her for two weeks.” Even his mother’s rehearsal of “well-worn stories” and questions about the children creates a feeling of endlessness and disorientation. Heilker’s final segment involves a cycle of movement that takes him to different physical locations, but cannot help him escape his own mind. There is a juxtaposition of incredible movement and incredible stasis, creating a paradox where time is moving forward and yet everything has stopped. Heilker references movement throughout the last section: “I 127 wrestle”; “I press”; “I walk”; “I search”; “I can move through space”; “I create my own breeze.”

And yet this movement is inhibited. He finds himself in a lobby eating; this movement is not one of his own accord. He feels compelled to flee but is unable to. He moves quickly through space only on moving sidewalks that keep him in the same place. All of these processes serve to halt time and to blur time’s discrete boundaries. Even though “Inertia” is organized chrono- logically, its excessive descriptions work to complicate preconceived notions of time; the of the boundaries help the reader make paralogic connections.

There is also a sense of feeling in this essay that creates a paralogical undertone. The narrator feels mindless and specifically moves “in order to stay mindless” (emphasis in original).

Literally, this mindlessness is indicative of feeling, because the only way he is able to stay in the moment is by feeling it. More than that, though, he gives of himself in this text in a kind of way that represents the feeling, or pleasure, of nonpositive affirmation. This is not necessarily an enjoyable pleasure, but rather a type of beautiful pain. In this case, the author’s excessive use of first-person verb conjugations foregrounds the vividness with which life continues in the face of death: “I help”; “I go”; “I find”; “I help”; “I pick”; “I listen”; “I dwell”; “I say”; “I understand.”

Through the excessive description of seemingly mundane details, we are moved emotionally and viscerally to make connections between the pain of death and the human ability to continue on: to make one’s own breeze. These connections are not necessarily meaningful; one moves in order to stay mindless. In this way, I see the meaning that is created in this piece as existing in a constant state of deferral, at once being both made and destroyed, similar to the “frenetic circuit” made by the raccoon in the beginning of the piece.

The excess of zoo animal descriptions in Heilker’s beginning segment helps him trouble his own identity and it also calls into question the very distinctions we have between humans and 128 animals. Because his very movements at the end of the piece mimic those of the orangutan and raccoon from the beginning description, the descriptions give something of and enact something on his conceptions of self. This blurring of distinctions troubles any ideas of a stable self that the author might have, and it has implications for its general readership. While these descriptions hold significance on a general social level, they also affect his notions of self. Additionally, they do all of this in a way that questions basic tenets of humanism. Heilker’s blurring of distinctions between animals and humans has the effect of challenging notions of subjectivity endorsed by humanism and creating a subject in the text that is more aligned with posthumanism. In How We

Became Posthuman, Katherine Hayles offers a helpful description of the difference between humanism and posthumanism. She says that while the humanist perspective sees its idea of the human as being an autonomous individual moving freely about the world, with a foundation in presence and having teleological motivations, the posthuman is a signal of the end of a kind of humanity where individuals can (literally) afford to see themselves as having the luxury of being autonomous and exercising free will (286). Posthumanism, then, acknowledges our lack of control in our lives, even if we appear to be maintaining or exerting autonomy. In this way, our assumptions of control, through self identity and scientific objectivity, are called into question.

Further complicating notions of authenticity, autonomy, and “natural” meaning, in

Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, Donna Haraway observes how physiological reductionism has been put towards capitalistic ends. Haraway shows how our notions of meaning are shaped by ideological, physical, and social motivations. She calls into question the motives behind scientific categorization: She argues that the scientific understanding of nature is something that needs to be understood within the context of labor (12). We need to remember that the scientists creating this knowledge were also operating under a paradigm of supply and demand; they were 129 thinking of the economic factors behind their decisions. When discussing a scientific experiment involving a study on monkeys and apes to explore sexuality, Haraway says, “Monkeys and apes were enlisted in this task in central roles; as natural objects unobscured by culture, they would show most plainly the organic base in relation to which culture emerged. That these ‘natural objects’ were thoroughly designed according to the many-levelled meanings of an ideal of human engineering has hardly been noticed” (14). Here Haraway shows how seemingly

“natural,” unbiased elements of science are actually imbued with human motivations. This complicates even our scientific delineations between man and animal, showing that these distinctions we have created are more blurry than is currently acknowledged. In the same way,

Heilker’s comparison of himself with animals on view at the zoo troubles humanist notions of self and reflects an awareness of culture and these many-levelled human meanings.

Through its resistance to humanistic qualities, “Inertia” represents a concrete example of poetic rhetoric, both in the ways it seems to enact poetic rhetoric and from the valuable connections we can make by viewing it from a poetically rhetorical perspective. Poetically rhetorical essays should work to unravel distinctions that have been put in place and have been unquestioningly accepted. They might search for connections while at the same time breaking down preconceived notions and binary oppositions. Through this creativity, one might be able to see how binary oppositions hold an element of fiction within them and the way they have been created by people to fulfill a system of power. Through the essay’s multiple connections, connections that can sometimes question and contradict each other, one is able to see how each connection itself is a tiny fiction that holds possibilities of meaning, but that does not fully occupy a place of “true” or “authentic” meaning. Poetically rhetorical essays should resist putting connections together in some form of new meaning that would proclaim itself as truth, 130

but rather create ambiguity and illusion within the text such that the essayist and the reader find

themselves unsettled in regards to knowing a “true” meaning. There may be possibilities of

meanings, but no one true meaning set forth or argued for. From this perspective, “Inertia”

encompasses many of the qualities of poetic rhetoric. The essay creates and defers meaning in a

way that is resistant to a metaphysics of presence; it resists traditional and even less traditional notions of logic and logical organization; and it troubles stable notions of subjectivity and knowledge. In these ways we can say that “Inertia” behaves in a poetically rhetorical way.

Final Thoughts on the Poetically Rhetorical Essay

Ultimately, I think it is important for poetically rhetorical essays to be difficult to define

and for them to take many shapes and forms. As Réda Bensmaïa points out,

since Montaigne used the term to describe his writings, ‘essay’ has served to designate

works that are so diverse from a formal point of view, and so heterogeneous from a

thematic point of view, that it has become practically impossible to subsume a single

definitive type of text under this term. (95)

While we don’t want them to dissolve into arbitrariness or meaninglessness, essays, and specifically poetically rhetorical essays, should represent difficult challenges for our students and

for ourselves as teachers. Specifically because it resists and disrupts traditional, humanistic

notions of scholarship, the poetically rhetorical essay should present the student with a different

perspective on language and learning that will at first, and possibly for a long time, seem foreign.

It will seem like a way of thinking and a genre that has been excluded from the educational and

university systems. Yet, it should have a place within our writing curriculum.

Currently I teach my courses along a spectrum that progresses from humanistic qualities

of reading and writing to finish with a more poetically rhetorical perspective and the writing of a 131

Montaignean essay. We begin by writing academic, thesis-driven papers and end the semester with a Montaignean essay in which I encourage students to embrace a poetically rhetorical

perspective. Over the course of the semester we move from accepting established theories about

writing and regarding texts to questioning those established authorities. For example, during our

skeptical and antischolastic progression, I ask the students to consider Tomás Rivera’s “Richard

Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory as Humanistic Antithesis” from a poetically rhetorical

perspective. In the excerpt from this article, Rivera argues that because he focuses on public and

social identity Rodriguez does not value his history, his language, or his culture. Viewing that

piece from a poetically rhetorical perspective challenges humanistic qualities that students have

typically accepted as ingrained within our society and institutions. It challenges the notion that

language is innocent, and it questions the ways in which people in upper classes manipulate

language in order to oppress others and maintain class hierarchies. We conclude the semester by

reading sample essays that exhibit poetically rhetorical qualities. These essays are not thesis-

driven; rather, they often operate paralogically to exhibit intense feelings and to make broad

connections that leave much of the meaning making in the hands of the reader. Additionally,

they tend to have different meanings depending on different readers and readings, and one’s

study of these essays often results in raising more questions than it does answers.

When it is time for students to write their own essays, I emphasize poetically rhetorical

qualities such as excessive use of description and a paralogical organization as opposed to logical

or even chrono-logical ordering. I encourage the students to be antischolastic, therefore resisting

the thesis-driven form, and to incorporate as many genres, opinions, and voices into their pieces

as possible. Paul Heilker has a grading criteria for his students based on what the essay can do

as opposed to what it must do, and I take this approach with my students as well. Admittedly, I 132 insist that their essays must avoid the thesis-driven form and I must be able to see some element of social significance to their essays. For example, the essay cannot consist entirely of a personal narrative without any connection, either implicit or explicit, as to how their exploration relates to larger social issues. Beyond that, however, much of my assessment of their essays involves the connections I make as I read through their writing. I encourage them to be as creative in their pieces as possible and in turn, I approach their essays with a creativity of my own as I read through their pieces. I often offer feedback on each individual essay, and I spend much of that time trying to help them achieve pleasure in their writing. This is not necessarily a pleasure brought about by the ease of writing; but, rather, because they give so much of themselves in this process. This involves the nonpositive affirmative experience wherein in their process of giving of themselves for their teacher and for their grade and through the voices they incorporate in their essays, they also often find that their writing has influenced how they view themselves and society as a whole. Students have expressed to me how much they have learned when writing their essays and many of them seem to leave pieces of their selves, or shape pieces of their selves, along the page. They do not necessarily create perfect instantiations of poetic rhetoric: we are all learning, after all. And they do not always leave my class recognizing an instability of self or having an awareness that language both creates and destroys our forms of meaning, but these are good goals for which to aim.

Perhaps one way to consider evaluation of poetically rhetorical essays, and incorporation of poetic rhetoric into the composition curriculum altogether, is from the perspective of my ethical role as a teacher of the writing. How do I evaluate these student essays through a poetically rhetorical paradigm that is ultimately meant to subvert the very humanistic, university ideology within which it exists? How do I acknowledge James Berlin’s assertion that “A 133

rhetoric is never innocent, can never be a disinterested arbiter of the ideological claims of others

because it is always already serving certain ideological claims” (717-18) and still preach my

gospel of poetic rhetoric, a process that flows through language and disrupts humanistic

oppositions and tenets that perpetuate hierarchies of power? As Jeanne Gunner states, in “Cold

Pastoral: The Moral Order of an Idealized Form,” “In liberatory teaching, the pedagogical goals

are at odds with the institutional means of measuring instructional success,” (34), and I see this

challenge in any attempts I take to evaluate students’ poetically rhetorical essay. Yet, as Christy

Desmet argues in “Beyond Accommodation: Individual and Collective in a Large Writing

Program,” it is possible to disrupt the “law” of the university in an ethical way. In her argument,

Desmet shows that it can be possible for instructors to achieve their pedagogical goals while navigating writing program constraints by creating a credible and appealing ethos and working within and through professional masks. Desmet approaches this challenge from an administrative, programmatic level, but her argument speaks to the potential possibility of navigating the discord that can exist when one attempts to make changes in the composition curriculum. From the perspective of my theory of poetic rhetoric, I suggest that it can be just as valuable to teach students to view texts from a poetically rhetorical perspective as it can be to expose them to the potential that lies within a poetically rhetorical essay. In this process, they can still learn the skills needed to succeed in the very university and social system that I ask them to question and resist. In addition, my awareness as a teacher of poetic rhetoric and the ambiguous, illusory nature of language will help inform all of my discussions of language, text, and discourse within the classroom. 134

All texts have poetic rhetoric flowing through them; some just attempt to wrestle it to the ground more than others. Perhaps this is a lesson students can learn in their writing classes.

Describing the ideal text, Roland Barthes says,

In this ideal text, the networks are many and interact, without any one of them being able

to surpass the rest; this text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no

beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be

authoritatively declared to be the main one. (5)

Very few examples of this “galaxy of signifiers” exist; however, there are many approximations available today. Striving towards this type of writing should be the goal of the essay and would be a large part of the poetically rhetorical essay. The poetically rhetorical essay can take these ideas further to more fully resist humanistic agendas. Just as Heilker notes the essay’s attempt to

“unmask the fiction of objectivity,” we might suggest that the poetically rhetorical essay uses elements of creativity and excess to revel in the many tiny fictions of objectivity, blurring the boundaries between what we have come to believe as fiction and nonfiction. By blurring the distinctions between poetics and rhetoric, by embracing the unstable logos that courses through language, poetically rhetorical essays can exhibit the idea that these concepts are not tools that can be added to language for certain ends, but rather are inherent within our languages and structures of meaning. They, in fact, shape our languages and our structures of meaning.

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4. POETIC RHETORIC IN THE ONLINE ENVIRONMENT

Like a great many other poststructuralist ideas that appear particularly opaque, bizarre, pretentious, or all three from the vantage point of print-based thought, this blending and blurring of genres makes a good deal of sense in the world of networked electronic text. When Cixous, Barthes, Miller, and other theorists seek to deny a boundary or barrier between theoretical and literary texts, their claims strike many as outrageously pretentious attempts at self- aggrandizement, which the general reader never encounters and at which the writer of poetry and fiction smiles -- claims that in a print world have value only, it would seem, in the statusphere of academe. Nonetheless, like Barthes's and Foucault's remarks about the death of the author, Derrida's on textuality, Kristeva's on intertextuality, and so man others, this merging of creative and discursive modes simply happens in hypertext. George Landow, Hyper/Text/Theory

An Argument Against Print Typography

I hope to show that the electronic writing environment is the optimal space for the

process of poetic rhetoric; however, before I discuss the value of digital technology, it is

important to explain how traditional print technology falls short of being a resistant, poetically

rhetorical force. In order to put forth my argument for electronic technology, it is necessary to

examine how it is both shaped by and different from its precursor. My ultimate argument is that poetic rhetoric flows through the language of all texts, print and electronic. However, print

technology is emphasized more within the humanist agenda, and the poetically rhetorical nature

of electronic texts helps them disrupt humanistic qualities. Therefore, while print can operate in

networked or excessively creative ways (for example, the Cent Mille Milliards de poèmes of

Raymond Queneau and the artists’ books that N. Katherine Hayles discusses in Writing

Machines), those types of texts more often represent exceptions to the typical way in which print

texts operate: categorically, hierarchically, and with an unquestioning acceptance of reason.

While print formats can operate in networked, poetically rhetorical ways, electronic media can 136

offer new possibilities for exploring poetically rhetorical textualities. Throughout this

discussion, I emphasize that in keeping with Marshall McLuhan’s landmark declaration that “the

medium is the message,” the different ways we approach and manipulate media are a direct

reflection of the poetic rhetoric in their texts. For example, hypertexts can operate in a linear, causal, hierarchical manner that generally follows logocentric paradigms, or they can shape-shift and morph, presenting illusions of reality that ultimately break down into meaninglessness. And

of course, many online media fall somewhere within a spectrum between these two poles. The ultimate medium of all of our structures of meaning is language, and even when a text does not specifically set out to enact poetic rhetoric, there is still a poetically rhetorical process within it

that shapes, creates, and unravels its meaning. Thus, even when electronic media reflect a world

that still runs on a metaphysics of presence, they also show the ways in which poetic rhetoric

flows through them, constantly offering new opportunities to shape and change our world.

There are print texts that reflect poetic rhetoric and challenge the basic tenets of

humanism; however, many of them do not utilize straightforward typography. One classic

example fis the poetry of the ouvroir de littérature potentielle (Workshop for Potential

Literature), or Oulipo, which first met in November of 1960 (Lescure 172). We see, even in

their different print pieces, that the subject can be a product of language. Jean Lescure asserts, in

“Brief History of the Oulipo,” that, “People noticed that they were language from head to toe”

(174), going as far to say, “That medicine was fine and dandy, but if we were suffering in our

language, medicine wasn’t enough, although it is itself a language” (174). Lescure is picking up

on the arguments that have been put forth by people such as Plato, Gorgias, and Derrida – this

notion that logos is a drug or medicine that controls us as human subjects. He also argues that

members of the Oulipo viewed true literature, true art, as that which had potential. They looked 137

to past groups and practices as a guide, considering the works of the H.L.E., Histoire des

littératures expérimentales, showing that there is a precedence where other scholars worked to

push the boundaries of print tradition. The Oulipo began their work by exploring the potential in

print literature and pushing it past its traditional boundaries and rules. As Lescure notes, the

print experiments of the Oulipo “ that the field of meanings extends far beyond the

intentions of any author” (175). He also asserts, “In short, every literary text is literary because

of an indefinite quantity of potential meanings” (175).

Along with these issues of infinite potential meaning and the notion that we are created

through language, we can also see print typography creating conditions for the loss of a coherent

self. For example, print is able to create both homogeneity and individualism at the same time.

McLuhan has shown the ways in which print’s linear style and mass production work to instill

homogeneity within a culture. Essentially, there is a sense in which print creates a collective,

homogenous community; it establishes groups of like-minded readers and ways for people to

identify themselves within communities of similar interests. Its creation through mass

production reinforces an “economy of the Same”: the same product being distributed to people

with the same values and vested interests in such a commodity. However, McLuhan has also

shown that print enables a form of individual self-expression that can operate as a mouthpiece

for an individual to critique society. If a person has access to a print publication, that person can share her or his beliefs in a public medium. While we can see how these two qualities can both operate within a humanistic paradigm, we might also note that in some ways, because of these two qualities, print negates itself and creates within itself an axis of and contradiction. A person can become both part of the collective and distinct as an individual at the same time.

Within this construction, there is a potential for the self to become conflicted. This conflict 138

between the homogenous community and the desire for individuality can create a confusing, and even delirious, state for the subject. There is conflict between homogenous and individual notions of self. As suggested previously, McLuhan asserts that print is a drug, producing a

delirium, and we can feel this effect throughout all levels of societal consciousness (The

Gutenberg Galaxy 259-60). McLuhan also notes that, “prose remained oral rather than visual for

centuries after printing. Instead of homogeneity, there was heterogeneity of and attitude, so

that the author felt able to shift these in mid-sentence at any time, just as in poetry” (136). Here

McLuhan shows that even within a community that can emphasize collectivity, there is also a

potential for heterogeneity. While McLuhan goes on to show that print places an emphasis on

visual rather than oral qualities, this statement shows how print can also operate in more poetic

ways. It shows the multiple ways that print can present and shape meaning. Because print is a

medium that expresses language, it has the potential to be both homogenous and heterogeneous

at the same time. It can impose a sense of community and individuality at the same time as well.

All of these qualities contribute to its delirious and drug-like potential; however, I would argue

that much of this can be attributed to the poetically rhetorical nature of the language that flows

through it.

While print technology does show a potential for poetic rhetoric, there is much about it

that confirms and perpetuates a humanistic ideology. Marshall McLuhan shows the argument

that print technology is limited in terms of its creative capabilities through a between

orality and literacy, stating that “Plato shows no awareness here or elsewhere of how the

phonetic alphabet had altered the sensibility of the Greeks...[U]ntil literacy deprives language of

[its] multi-dimensional resonance, every word is a poetic world unto itself, a ‘momentary deity’

or revelation, as it seemed to non-literate men” (25). Here McLuhan asserts that there is a 139

certain fullness to oral speech that is reduced in the medium of literacy. He describes the oral

world as poetic and notes that this is influenced and lessened through literacy in general. Jay

David Bolter also asserts that

A conventional word processor does not treat the text as a network of verbal ideas. It

does not contain a map of the ways in which the text may be read; it does not record or

act on the semantic structure of the text. Other forms of electronic writing do all of these

things, making the text from the writer’s point of view a network of verbal elements and

from the reader’s point of view a texture of possible readings. They permit the reader to

share in the dynamic process of writing and to alter the voice of the text. (Writing Space

9)

Here we see an argument that print and even basic computer technology do not extend the limits

of networked meaning-making that electronic writing are able to do. Bolter furthers his

argument when he says, “However, the interchangeable parts of print technology are merely

letters, and they are interchangeable only during the production of the text, not during its reading” (144).

Moreover, much of the foundation of humanism can be traced back to print technology.

McLuhan asserts that the printed book and the technology that created it were able to continue humanistic practices, noting that “grammatica formed the base of monastic and later humanist procedures. For grammatica is concerned very much with particular historical circumstances and with a given person, place and time. With the advent of the printed book, grammatica surged back to a dominance” (101). In this sense, we see the notion of stability and ideology that is typically associated with humanism also connected with the printed book. These notions of homogeneity and unification are particularly tied to typography, according to McLuhan: 140

It is necessary for the understanding of the visual take-off that was to occur with

Gutenberg technology, to know that such a take-off had not been possible in the

manuscript ages, for such a culture retains the audile-tactile modes of human sensibility

in a degree incompatible with abstract visuality or the translation of all the senses into the

language of unified, continuous, pictorial space. (112)

It is important to note here that McLuhan contrasts the manuscript age with the age of print, noting that manuscripts present a much more heightened state of audile-tactile communication.

This multitude of sense perceptions McLuhan compares to print technology, where visual qualities in the text are abstracted and where all the senses are unified and homogenized. In my mind, this homogenization connects with and exhibits the humanist qualities previously mentioned. McLuhan also stresses this point when he mentions that, “The invention of typography confirmed and extended the new visual stress of applied knowledge, providing the first uniformly repeatable commodity, the first assembly-line, and the first mass-production”

(124). The mass-production of text stresses how typography and print were both the impetus and exhibition of sociocultural values that, at least in some ways, reflected humanist ideologies. The notion of a “uniformly repeatable commodity” is something that I think correlates with humanist ideals. McLuhan cites William Ivins, who argues that print culture condensed multiple sensations into an emphasis on a single sense: visual. He quotes Ivins as saying, “the more closely we confine our data for reasoning about things to data that come to us through one and the same sense channel the more apt we are to be correct in our reasoning” (qtd. in McLuhan

125). This seems to tie in with the Platonic and humanist emphases on reasoning, unification, homogenization, and disembodied thinking. We can also see this when McLuhan notes that,

“The portability of the book, like that of the easel-, added much to the new cult of 141 individualism” (206). Here again we see another quality of humanism exhibited and extended by the print format.

An Argument in Favor of the Electronic Writing Environment

In my previous chapter, I made the case for first-year writing’s inclusion of the study of poetic rhetoric in the form of the poetically rhetorical essay. In this chapter, I will show that the electronic writing environment provides an optimal space for the movement of poetic rhetoric.

Poetic rhetoric is a continuous process that fabricates and constantly shapes our structures of meaning. Therefore, it is necessary to consider one of our most prevalent structures of meaning: the electronic writing environment. The significance of the electronic writing environment is the way it so fully encapsulates the blurring of boundaries that we can associate with such theories as poetic rhetoric. There are many boundaries and oppositions that can be sought when discussing online writing (print media/electronic media; machine/user; hypotactic linking/paratactic linking; underlying binary code/user interface); however, throughout these many oppositions, there is always an element of excess between the two that cannot be contained. The distinctions that exist within signification, notions of rationality, questions of subjectivity, and even the relationship between life and death are all blurred in the electronic writing environment, and it is this space that is most hospitable to poetic rhetoric.

Electronic media do not differ entirely from print media; rather, they offer new possibilities for envisioning a constantly developing and morphing poetic rhetoric. Based on

Marshall McLuhan’s statement that the medium is the message and Jay David Bolter and

Richard Grusin’s argument that all media operate through remediation, I argue that through its relationship to different media, electronic writing is in a constant state of deferral, thus enacting the fluidity and instability of meaning in poetic rhetoric. In Understanding Media, Marshall 142

McLuhan states that “the medium is the message.” While this idea on its own deserves much thought and scholarship, it is valuable to our discussion in the way it relates meaning (the message) to its medium of production (in our case, electronic writing). In Remediation:

Understanding Media, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin make the argument that all media operate through a process of remediation. That is, all media refashion and repurpose other media. If the medium is the message, and that medium is constantly changing, then it is fair to say that the message, or the meaning, is in a state of flux as well. In a sense, media defer their own stake to authentic meaning through the repurposing of other forms of technology. Bolter and Grusin observe their theory of remediation’s connections with Derrida’s and other poststructuralists’ arguments about the decentered nature of meaning: “Readers may already see an analogy between our analysis of media and poststructuralist literary theory…for Derrida and other poststructuralists have argued that all interpretation is reinterpretation…Any act of mediation is dependent on another, indeed many other, acts of mediation and is therefore remediation” (56). This statement shows the deferral that occurs through the acts of mediation in our technologies. This notion of remediation indicates the transitory nature of meaning: it is just as unstable as the medium it inhabits. Additionally, if electronic writing environments remediate print, then there is a blurring of boundaries between the two that is reflective of the blurring of boundaries within poetic rhetoric. The boundaries between print and electronic media are fluid, with both being comprised of traits of the other. Their qualities of remediation resist the categorization that is prevalent in humanist ideologies. Along with this resistance to the humanist impulse to categorize, there is a disruption of such humanistic values as signification, rationality, subjectivity, and presence. 143

The electronic writing environment troubles and blurs distinctions within signification that have already been questioned and put into movement by poststructuralist theory. While poststructuralist theories question the idea of a stable referent within the process of signification, online environments extend this idea further to disrupt the notion of stable context in which representation takes place. Discussing her theory of “flickering signification,” Katherine Hayles argues that “Because codes can be sent over fiber optics essentially instantaneously, there is no longer a shared, stable context that helps to anchor meaning and guide interpretation…In contrast to the fixity of print, decoding implies that there is no original text – no first editions, no fair copies, no holographic manuscripts” (How We Became Posthuman 47). There are only flickering signifiers whose shifting patterns imply that all texts are “electronically mediated constructions” (47). Essentially, flickering signification takes into account the technologies used to produce texts as well as the ways in which humans interact with textual interfaces. Instead of privileging presence, which is valorized in many humanistic ideologies, flickering signification takes into account the role that randomness plays when paired with patterns used to create electronic texts. Hayles asserts that within flickering signification there is a “rich internal play of difference” (31). Because computers orchestrate compiling symbols with global commands, and because processing programs must mediate user commands along with operating codes, the relationships between signifiers and signifieds become inextricably connected, and the distinctions between each become blurred. As Hayles notes, “A signifier on one level becomes a signified on the next-higher level” (31). Within this process, there are many opportunities for disjunction to occur between representation and that which it represents. Hayles points out that

“the relation between signifier and signified at each of these levels is arbitrary,” (31) and I would add that because there are so many levels, so many matrices at work, there are multiple 144 opportunities for slippages to occur. This is the element of randomness that Hayles says exists within a state of tension with the patterns of the codes. Hayles shows that electronic environments provide space for greater amounts of information and longer codes to transmit that information; therefore, there is greater opportunity for uncertainty, randomness, and mutation to take place. Additionally, in My Mother Was a Computer, Hayles argues that because electronic text is comprised of data packets, it only exists as a momentary configuration (103); this reflects the transitory nature of meaning. While we should acknowledge that the stylus, papyrus scroll, pencil, printing press, typewriter, and computer are all technological apparatuses that shape writing into packets of data, the speed and magnitude of electronic technology shift the scale in which writing functions to more fully exemplify language’s momentary nature and creative potential. The online environment has more potential than that of traditional print formats to disrupt stable notions of signification: for example, electronic technologies have more prevalent elements of noise, excess, and chance.

The electronic writing environment also creates more space for paralogic reasoning and organization. Similarly, electronic texts promote more paratactic linking and organizational strategies, while print texts often have more logical reasoning and hypotactic linking and organizational strategies. What I classify as logical and hypotactic style represents ways of thinking that operate through hierarchies and processes of subordination. Paralogic and paratactic style represent ways of thinking that operate through lateral organizations and processes of association. It is necessary to acknowledge that there are print formats that endorse and facilitate paralogical, paratactic structures; however, it is generally accepted that electronic media more fully encapsulate those types of style and organization. When Vannevar Bush describes his memex machine in “As We May Think,” he contrasts it with the way in which print 145 data has traditionally been stored: data was stored alphabetically or numerically and accessed

“by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can be in only one place, unless duplicates are used; one has to have rules as to which path will locate it, and the rules are cumbersome. Having found one item, moreover, one has to emerge from the system and re-enter on a new path” (44).

That description is one that employs hypotactic linking and organization strategies; it employs hypotactic logic, or a logic that uses hierarchical thinking and rationality. Bush captures distinct ways in which print media differ from electronic media. Print data and texts typically operate hierarchically, exist in only one place, and at times can be difficult to access. His point about one needing to “emerge from the system and re-enter on a new path” is especially significant.

Bush emphasizes that the key distinction of the memex is its ability to incorporate “associative indexing,” which he describes as “the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another” (45).

This type of associative indexing is indicative of paralogical and paratactic organization, and it is this type of reasoning that is reflective of poetic rhetoric. The necessity to emerge from and then re-enter a print text based on certain rules can be highly contrasted to the electronic text, which, as George Landow says, “can take the form of stand-alone or networked systems and…can…grant the reader full access as a writer” (30-1). The significance of Landow’s argument is that hypertext, as a form of electronic text, can be approached as a networked system, where a reader or user can access the text from a multitude of entrances. This description harkens back to Roland Barthes’s description of the ideal essay mentioned in my previous chapter. Barthes describes the ideal essay as being a network of texts, none of which dominate any of the others, that can be accessed through several entrances where no one entrance can be considered the main entrance. This description of the ideal essay aligns very closely with 146 electronic hypertext, suggesting that the electronic writing environment is an ideal place for the poetically rhetorical essay.

In addition to questioning traditional notions of signification and rational organization, the online environment also troubles stable notions of the self. The electronic writing environment’s disruption of authentic subjectivity makes it an optimal place for poetic rhetoric’s similar acts of resistance. Electronic media facilitate people’s ability to be closer to and yet removed from their notions of authentic self. This process questions distinctions between a self that is “real” and a self that is mediated. Electronic technologies also encourage an acknowledgment of conflicting and ambiguous notions of self. Bolter and Grusin remark that

“As so many media critics have recognized, we see ourselves today in and through our available media...This is not to say that our identity is fully determined by media, but rather that we employ media as vehicles for defining both personal and cultural identity” (231). They make a valid point that we see ourselves today through different media, and I would argue that while we attempt to define our identities through different media, we are also shaped by the poetic rhetoric that flows through these media. Electronic technology blurs the distinctions between self and machine, between objective viewer or user and mediated participant, and this blurring of boundaries troubles humanistic notions of stable subjectivity.

Donna Haraway’s emphasis on the cyborg and Katherine Hayles’s theory on the posthuman clearly show the fluidity within the boundaries between human and machine. I often prefer to view Hayles’s and Haraway’s theories of posthumanism on a broader metaphorical level, emphasizing the idea that with the advent of electronic technologies, we lose the luxury of believing that we are in full control of ourselves and our environments. The broader implications of their arguments suggest that in a world that lacks certainty and authentic truth, our selves are 147

also products of human wills and outside forces, products of man and machine interactions.

Their specific discussions of these man and machine interactions (cyborgs, posthumanism,

embodied technologic subjectivities) also show ways in which stable notions of self are resisted

and disrupted. These descriptions are particularly suited to poetic rhetoric in the way that they

also disrupt humanistic ideas of self that emphasize rational justification through subordination

and exclusion. In Donna Haraway’s Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, and in her “Cyborg

Manifesto” specifically, Haraway emphasizes the connection between man and machine and

makes the declaration that

Writing is pre-eminently the technology of cyborgs…Cyborg politics is the struggle for

language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that

translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism. That is why

cyborg politics insist on noise and advocate pollution, rejoicing in the illegitimate fusions

of animal and machine…and so subverting the structure and modes of reproduction of

‘Western’ identity, of nature and culture, of mirror and eye, slave and master, body and

mind. (176)

Because the cyborg does not reflect a traditional description of “man,” it represents that which is

excluded; therefore, while its struggle to be heard represents a struggle for language, its own

position in a place of oppression motivates it to resist notions of authentic truth and logical

signification: the same qualities that operate through exclusion and oppression. Instead, the

cyborg glorifies noise and the blurring of boundaries, and in this process it disrupts humanistic

qualities that at times are taken for granted and perpetuate hierarchies of oppression. It resists

the idea that nature and culture, body and mind, can be innocently viewed as distinct and in so

doing it disrupts stable notions of self. Haraway’s description is very much in line with poetic 148

rhetoric and the ways in which it challenges distinctions and questions notions of stable subjectivities.

Katherine Hayles also discusses the ways in which subjectivities are questioned through electronic technologies, and she emphasizes the fact that writing plays an important role in this process. Hayles asserts that, “Of all the implications that first-wave cybernetics conveyed, perhaps none was more disturbing and potentially revolutionary than the idea that the boundaries

of the human subject are constructed rather than given” (How We Became Posthuman 84). She also argues that cybernetics altered human subject boundaries by “conceptualizing control, communication, and information as an integrated system” (84). This promotes the idea of the self as a networked system, as opposed to the humanist idea of the self as an authentic whole.

Beyond presenting an idea of the self as a networked system, however, electronic technologies reflect a cyborg version of the self that exists both literally and metaphorically. Critical to

Hayles’s, and my, argument is Donna Haraway’s suggestion that cyborgs are “simultaneously

entities and metaphors, living beings and narrative constructions” (cited in Hayles 114). Every

word of this description is central to my argument for poetic rhetoric and its optimal enactment

in the online space. Poetic rhetoric is the fusion of living beings as narrative constructions, and

there is no better space to see this type of subjectivity than in the electronic writing environment.

In a literal sense, as Hayles says, “Cyborgs actually exist. About 10 percent of the current U.S.

population are estimated to be cyborgs in the technical sense, including people with electronic

pacemakers, artificial joints, drug-implant systems, implanted corneal lenses, and artificial skin”

(115). Cyborgs also exist metaphorically and in much higher numbers, “including the computer

keyboarder joined in a cybernetic circuit with the screen” (115). 149

Not only can the man and machine connection be complicated through the image of the cyborg, working to trouble innocent, authentic notions of the self, but the role that is played by writing in the formation of the self is also emphasized and illuminated under the paradigm of the cyborg. While I have argued repeatedly that poetic rhetoric flows through language and works to shape notions of the self, we can also see the poetically rhetorical nature of language and writing within the cybernetic connections of electronic technology. When we discuss the role of prose as a “body” of writing, we acknowledge that to a certain extent, our writing and our texts exist as prostheses for our bodies. As she discusses books where authors write about prosthesis, Hayles describes a term used in a by Bernard Wolfe: “pros/e,” a type of cyborg writing that represents “the truncated/spliced noun that speaks the name of the text’s body (prose) as well as the name of the prosthesis (pros) attached to it and represented within it” (126). While Hayles is specifically referencing a scene in a piece of fiction, I think her description holds value for my description of poetic rhetoric and its place in the electronic writing environment. If we agree that writing is a technology, and we believe that writing shapes our senses of self, then we can also see the writing as a form of prosthesis that can become a part of our selves. This can then complicate humanistic notions of stable, authentic selves, because this writing is a technology that we ultimately cannot control. This is a type of electronic writing that is indicative of poetic rhetoric in the way that it resists humanist ideals and instead works to create and generate new notions of the self. Hayles observes that, “Just as pros/e destabilizes the concept of a natural human body, so it also destabilizes the notion of a text contained and embodied solely within its typographic markers. Pros/e implies a text spliced into a cybernetic circuit that reaches beyond the typography of the printed book into a variety of graphic and semiotic prostheses that it both authorizes and denies” (127). The excessive nature of this “pros/e” helps it operate in a 150

poetically rhetorical way, reaching across boundaries, and both authorizing and denying itself in

a way that speaks to the ethics of nonpositive affirmation. In both authorizing and denying itself,

this poetically rhetorical pros/e recognizes its own validity without subjugating others. The

prose notion of prosthesis falls in line with the argument Marshall McLuhan makes in “The

Gadget Lover: Narcissus as Narcosis,” where he says that the creation of electrical technology

represents the central nervous system’s attempt to autoamputate itself, thus projecting itself into

the tools it uses (43); however, pros/e takes a more liberatory perspective.

In addition to questioning and disrupting stable notions of self, the online environment

also questions stable notions of presence that have been valued under humanist paradigms. As I

argue throughout this chapter, the binary code that exists within electronic technology operates

within a metaphysics of presence: programs work electronically because certain code is present

and certain code is absent. However, electronic, online environments put this relationship of

presence and absence into a process of play that is not as prevalent in print or typographic

technology. The tension and play that exist between presence and absence are reflective of the

way in which poetic rhetoric resists fear of death and humanistic valorization of presence. In

Othermindedness: The Emergence of Networked Culture, Michael Joyce argues that the

movement of hypertext and the ephemeral nature of text in MOO space create a sense of play

within the spaces of our lives that exist before our deaths, our inevitable closing off of meaning.

He sees this happening in language when he says, “We have to die, this is the meaning of words”

(110), but he particularly sees it happening in the spaces of our networked texts. He argues that

MOO space attempts to inscribe our mortality, yet the temporality of its very nature puts its

aspirations into a process of recurrence and play (111). Joyce provides a specific example of the

play between presence and ephemerality by describing a room in LambdaMOO that belongs to a 151

woman who has passed away. Joyce notes that the room and the text in the room signify her

living presence and in a way celebrate the substantive life she lived. It shows how one can be

there and not be there at the same time. The room is simultaneously full and deprived of

meaning. This play between presence and absence, life and death, is reflective of the poetically

rhetorical nature of language, where language both represents and defers possible meaning.

Joyce specifically focuses on a poetic nature of these online spaces, but a fuller picture would acknowledge their poetically rhetorical nature.

Espen Aarseth notes that ideological agendas control the medium of electronic texts

(172), and I argue that these electronic texts have the potential to challenge humanistic ideologies, such as emphases on presence, stable subjectivity, rational organization, and authentic signification. This is something we need to acknowledge and explore more in terms of how it is reflected in our textualities, both online and in print format. As Katherine Hayles asserts,

The contemporary indoctrination into linear causality is so strong that it continues to

exercise a fatal attraction for much of contemporary thought. It must be continually

resisted if we are fully to realize the implications of multicausal and multilayered

hierarchical systems, which entail distributed agency, emergent processes, unpredictable

coevolutions, and seemingly paradoxical interactions between convergent and divergent

processes. (How We Became Posthuman 31)

Hayles reminds us that it is possible for linear causality to infiltrate the medium of electronic textuality, and it is our responsibility to resist such attractions. Networked texts have the potential to operate in a multicausal, multilayered fashion that can place humanistic binary oppositions into a process of play that can both create and defer meaning. Considering electronic 152 media, in general, and the electronic writing environment, specifically, in terms of poetic rhetoric is a way to acknowledge the ideologies that inform our textualities and, at the same time, explore how these views are complicated once we acknowledge that an unstable logos drives language and initiates ambiguous, shape-shifting, illusory, uncontrollable processes. Through unstable logos’ influence on poetic rhetoric, we can see the way in which electronic textualities operate.

While they can sometimes be treated as having linear causality and hierarchical order, there are also elements within them that are beyond our control and result in dislodged notions of coherent subjectivity. Through poetically , these media work to shape the world around us.

Reviewing the Disruption of Distinctions Between Rhetoric and Poetics

Nietzsche disrupts the notion that meaning is a stable concept and that there is some sense of true meaning to which we can work our way back. He shows that the world around us is a fabrication that we create: that “truth is a fiction.” In Nietzsche: Life as Literature,

Alexander Nehamas points out that Nietzsche acknowledges our need to live in and operate in our world, our need to see it as stable. Nietzsche’s argument, however, is that we are mistaken if we assume our ways of talking about the world represent its real nature (95-96). Nietzsche asserts that if all truth is a fiction, art is the primary way of creating such truths, and he illustrates this by noting that truth is “a moving army of metaphors, , and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations that have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished…Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions” (1174).

He says that we must forget this metaphor in order to live with any sense of security (1176).

Additionally, in his book Prophets of Extremity, Alan Megill notes that in Nietzsche’s critique of 153 truth, “‘the work of art,’ or ‘the text,’ or ‘language’ is seen as establishing the grounds for truth’s possibility” (33).

Derrida makes a similar argument when he works to explode all notions of boundaries that exist within logic, language, meaning, rhetoric, and aesthetics. Alan Megill describes

Derrida’s blurring of boundaries succinctly:

Part of Derrida’s value is that he so radically undermines the Kantian distinction between

art and reality that we can no longer view it in any way except ironically. He shows us

that it is not a matter of opting either for ‘realism’ against ‘aestheticism’ or for

‘aestheticism’ against ‘realism.’ It is a matter, rather, of calling into question the initial

distinction upon which such a choice is founded. (265)

One way that Derrida breaks down these distinctions is by showing that “reality” itself is a slippery, unstable concept. By looking at reality through the lens of writing, he shows that writing does not imitate a coherent reality; rather, writing illustrates the idea that there is no stable presence to begin with. Derrida identifies this instability as an ambiguous form of logos, logic or meaning, which operates rhetorically through language and through people’s attempts to control it. As Derrida describes Thoth, the god of writing, he says, “the figure of Thoth takes shape that takes its shape from the very thing it resists and substitutes for. But it thereby opposes itself, passes into its other, and this messenger-god is truly a god of the absolute passage between opposites” (Dissemination 93). In addition, he describes the god of writing as “Sly, slippery, and masked, an intriguer” (93). Derrida continues: “It is precisely this ambiguity that Plato, through the mouth of the King, attempts to master, to dominate by inserting its definition into simple, clear-cut oppositions: good and evil, inside and outside, true and false, essence and appearance”

(103). Here Derrida addresses the Platonic descriptions of rhetoric and shows more of rhetoric’s 154

complexity. He advocates an understanding of rhetoric that employs the sophistic forms that

have been so derogated by Plato and Western logocentrism. By pursuing notions of sophism,

Derrida opens his readers up to new notions of logos. He argues that sophistic rhetoric repeats

the signifier, that it operates as if “the thing itself” were absent. He notes that within this

signification, truth is not present anywhere (111). These notions of sophism open the reader up

to the possibility of logos’ instability; they imply that there is no coherent presence of logos, that

there is no possibility of truth existing anywhere. Additionally, Derrida argues that logos can be as ambiguous and illusory as a drug that can spread both a positive and a negative influence: “If the written word is scorned, it is not as a pharmakon coming to corrupt memory and truth. It is because logos is a more effective pharmakon….As a pharmakon, logos is at once good and bad;

it is not at the outset governed exclusively by goodness or truth” (115). Meaning, as it is created

through writing, is unstable. As human subjects, we attempt to attach values to our words, but

these values are always slipping away from us through the constant cycle of creation and deferral

of meaning.

Paul de Man’s of Reading, can be a helpful bridge for considering how

Nietzsche’s discussion of aesthetics can be combined with Derrida’s discussions of rhetoric to

form an understanding of poetic rhetoric. de Man argues that it is impossible for the language of poetry to appropriate anything. He also says that this loss of appropriation should be considered a liberation, since it creates a rhetorical reversal that frees signifiers from their strictures of meaning (47). de Man describes here what I consider poetic rhetoric. In this instance, we are not separating poetics from rhetoric; we are seeing the play of the logos that Derrida describes.

This can be connected to Nietzsche’s views on aesthetics when de Man quotes him speaking of rhetoric: 155

It is not difficult to demonstrate that what is called ‘rhetorical,’ as the devices of a

conscious art, is present as a device of unconscious art in language and its development.

We can go so far as to say that rhetoric is an extension of the devices embedded in

language at the clear light of reason. No such thing as an unrhetorical, ‘natural’ language

exists that could be used as a point of reference: language is itself the result of purely

rhetorical tricks and devices…Language is rhetoric…Tropes are not something that can

be added or subtracted from language at will; they are its truest nature. (qtd. in de Man

105)

This statement supports the notion that we cannot dissociate rhetoric from poetics because they both operate in a way that is playful and deceptive and, at heart, they are how we create and order our world.

These theorists have shown us that meaning and logos are not stable concepts; rather, through logos meaning is in a constant state of deferral: it is always shifting and changing. This is the process of poetic rhetoric that operates in writing. There is a certain satisfaction and in attaching meaning to words and ideas, but this conceptualization is never stable, and it is always a fabrication; indeed, it is a fiction.

Digital Technologies’ Enactments of Poetic Rhetoric

As my previous discussion shows, much of the effects of different media come about because of our approaches to them. Print media is often manipulated in such a way as to reinforce ideological notions of linear causality and homogeneity. The very technology that is responsible for print format operates in a linear, hierarchical way. While electronic technology presents a different way to approach information and language processes, there are aspects of it that can also reinforce humanistic values. N. Katherine Hayles notes the ways in which 156

electronic technologies can be shaped and classified in ways that support more Platonic notions

of metaphysics as compared to the networked, socially constructed ways in which we so often

view digitality. In My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Text, she

describes Allen Renear’s analysis of text projects in which he identifies three different positions: the Platonic position, the pluralist position, and the anti-realist position. The most relevant position to our discussion is the Platonic. Within this position, encoders view texts as consisting of “a hierarchical set of content objects” (95), suggesting that electronic media can very much still reflect the hierarchy of print. Hayles also notes that, “As computers are increasingly understood (and modeled after) ‘expressive mediums’ like writing, they begin to acquire the familiar and potent capability of writing not merely to express thought but actively to constitute it” (60). Hayles also makes mention of the fact that computer languages are becoming more like “natural languages.” There are two points here that are worth noting. The first is the notion that computer languages are viewed as natural languages and understood as media similar to writing, which comes with its own set of metaphysical baggage. As I have discussed, and as

Hayles further explicates, logos, language, and writing have often been viewed as being imbued

with a metaphysics of presence that privileges elements of disembodied presence of mind,

among other traits. In a sense, by instilling a metaphysics of presence in our computer

languages, we are humanizing them. This can be representative of the ideology that forms our

society’s social structures. For example, high-level computer languages operate through

grammar and syntax that are very similar to our “natural languages.” This then results in these

languages having subjects and objects that are acted upon, thus reinforcing the hierarchies of

subjectivity we see operating in our society. 157

The second point, however, is a shift toward extending and complicating this type of

hierarchical thinking. In this point we note that computer language is starting to constitute

human thought. Our subjectivities are created through the text’s relationship with technology.

Further emphasizing this point, Hayles asserts, “These dynamics make it unmistakably clear that

computers are no longer merely tools (if they ever were) but are complex systems that

increasingly produce the conditions, ideologies, assumptions, and practices that help constitute

what we call reality” (60). By acknowledging that computers constitute our reality, we reaffirm

the notion that our society is still one based on a metaphysics of presence and the ideologies and

that make up computer technology are constituting our notions of reality today. At the

same time, we must also acknowledge that we are subjects being created by text and technology.

In this sense, we accept that we have a certain lack of control over our constitutions and over the

reality we claim to know and command. Accepting the role of computers and electronic text in

the formation of selves and structures of meaning runs counter to the metaphysical emphasis on

presence and shows how language, text, and technology operate in poetically rhetorical ways.

They are processes shaping us through creative forces.

The very processual quality of electronic media both reflects the process that I have been

emphasizing within poetic rhetoric and exhibits a way in which our subjectivities are products of these technological processes. Hayles discusses the ways in which electronic texts operate as

“distributed phenomen[a]” (101). It has been my argument that poetic rhetoric operates as a process rather than as some sort of skill or quality that can be added to language. Poetic rhetoric operates through a shifting process of deferral to shape and fabricate the world around us. In regards to technology, Hayles notes the way in which data is stored on a machine and how it has to be called and compiled in order to appear in viewable form. She says, “It takes all of these 158 together to produce the electronic text. Omit any one of them, and the text literally cannot be produced. For this reason it would be more accurate to call an electronic text a process than an object” (101). While I argue that poetic rhetoric operates as a process and that texts can also operate as processes that shape us, electronic texts can open up this analogy even more. Hayles notes that “electronic text is more processual than print; it is performative by its very nature – independent of whatever imaginations and processes the user brings to it, and regardless of variations between editions and copies” (101). The emphasis on electronic texts’ performative natures aligns with the ways in which poetic rhetoric performs our subjectivities. We also see that if in fact these operations perform regardless of the imaginations of the user, then again there is a loss of control and coherent subjectivity in the user. This is an instance where the user may believe that he or she is the one influencing and interpreting the electronic text, but that may not actually be the case.

Loss of control and stable subjectivity is endemic to poetic rhetoric because by acknowledging poetic rhetoric, we accept that our subjectivities are constructed through textuality. In order to accept this, we have to admit a certain loss of control over our notions of self. Hayles discusses the fact that lag time, which is a significant element of electronic text, can be unpredictable and uncontrollable. She notes that it can determine when and in what shape a user will view a screen, and, in fact, it can determine whether or not a user will see the screen at all. She says, “This aspect of electronic textuality – along with many others – cannot be separated from the delivery vehicles that produce it as a process with which the user can interact” (102-03). In this instance, we see both the user’s lack of control of the situation and the ability of the text to exist in a variable state. Speaking of the uncontrollable text and its influence on the user and subjectivity in general, Hayles also shows the ways in which subjectivity is 159

decentered through electronic media. As she posits her notion of “Work as Assemblage,” which

endorses a view of texts as “a cluster of related texts that quote, comment upon, amplify, and

otherwise intermediate one another,” she posits Deleuze and Guattari’s “Body without Organs”

as a way to envision the work as assemblage and its subsequent description of subjectivity. She

argues that this new view of textuality, one that takes into account the attributions and

differences of print and electronic text, suggests a new view of author and subjectivity. She says,

“The subjectivity implied by the [work as assemblage] cannot by any stretch of the imagination

be considered unified…Similarly, the subjects producing the [work as assemblage] are multiple in many senses, both because they are collectivities in and among themselves, and also because they include nonhuman as well as human actors” (107).

When McLuhan argues that the “I” of the medieval writer is more about emphasis and less about grammatical syntax, he narrows that feature down to “immediacy of effect.”

Immediacy of effect holds significance for poetic rhetoric and revised notions of subjectivity. As

Bolter and Grusin have noted, issues of immediacy were prevalent within print technology, along

with older forms of media, and they are also complicated as we move into the digital age. There

is a constant contrast between the desire to be in the moment of the experience and to be far

enough removed so as to reflect on that experience at the same time. Immediacy of effect is

something that is elevated and increased in online environments in general and, more

specifically, in electronic writing environments as well. This immediacy of effect and

simultaneous dislocation reflects elements of poetic rhetoric. With poetic rhetoric there is an

acknowledgement of loss of control, there is a dislocation of meaning and coherency of self, and

there is a recognition that our experiences are visceral and finite. These qualities of poetic

rhetoric also exist within ideas associated with immediacy of effect and they are present within 160

all of our machinations, including digital media. These poetically rhetorical qualities flow

through language and create and shape our world. In Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic

Literature, Espen Aarseth notes that

It can be argued that this takes us into a new era in the history of art, one which we might

call ( ) the ‘Age of Post-Reproduction’ (see Benjamin 1992). Here,

the work of art regains part of its aura, its ‘here and now,’ through the sense that it cannot

be fully copied and reproduced, since it has a singular place on the network and also a

temporal dimension, a dynamic lifetime. (81)

In New Philosophy for , Mark Hansen also makes a connection between Benjamin’s

emphasis on aura and new aesthetic configurations in the digital age (2-3). Ultimately, Hansen

argues that in the world of the digital image, the body takes on an even stronger role, as digital

technology create embodied forms of knowledge. He states, “One might even characterize this

properly creative role accorded the body as the source for a new, more or less ubiquitious form

of aura: the aura that belongs indelibly to this singular actualization of data in embodied experience” (3). Both Aarseth and Hansen speak to the digital realm’s immediacy of effect.

Aarseth notes the ways in which electronic texts exist as their own organisms, and Hansen shows

that as humans interact with electronic texts the documents take on their own forms of meaning.

There is an implication with these theorists, however, that there is some sense of authenticity within these moments of actualization.

I would argue conversely that the element of authenticity is a more ambiguous concept and that this uncertainty is celebrated more in the digital environment. While Hansen persuasively argues towards the acknowledgment of embodiment in the digital age, there is a still

a sense of cohesive self and bodily control to his argument. Ultimately, he suggests that the 161

body selectively chooses images from the world around it and then is affected by and acts upon them accordingly. While I would agree that the body plays an integral part in our formations of self and actions in the world, my descriptions of poetic rhetoric show that there is not an active control over which images influence us. While Hansen’s notion of an “haptic aesthetic rooted in embodied affectivity” aligns with notions of poetic rhetoric, it is his argument that “the act of enframing information can be said to ‘give body’ to digital data – to transform something that is unframed, disembodied, and formless into concrete embodied information intrinsically imbued with (human) meaning” (13) that I must work to complicate.

Multiple Modes of Poetic Rhetoric

In Multiple Arts: The Muses II, Jean-Luc Nancy describes all arts, including poetry, as

enacting a “silence of being,” meaning that poetry and other art forms give accounts of language,

but they do it in a way where they do not “speak about it, do not speak to each other about it, and

cannot in any sense be totalized or synthesized within a common language” (20). Essentially,

then, they operate through a process where they simultaneously create and defer meaning. They

are constantly resisting totalizing, synthesizing, and authentically signifying practices. Because

Nancy offers this phrase as “a silence of being,” I further extrapolate it to apply to the role of

being, or subjectivity, and to mean that art forms also resist authentic, totalized notions of self.

I would argue that poetic rhetoric, in its resistance to the totalizing theories of humanism and in

its creative excesses, enacts a silence of being. Additionally, the online writing environment is

currently an optimal place for this excess and this silence. Nancy suggests that poetry represents

different art forms as “together but with each remaining separate from the others” (21), and this

is reflective of the cyborg Donna Haraway describes as being “wary of holism, but needy for connection” (151). Poetic rhetoric and electronic writing environments do not degenerate into 162

chaos and meaninglessness: there is a paralogic organization that underlies their texts, and they

operate through causal linkages, feelings, and opportunities for connections by chance. Through

their fluid structure and paralogic movement, digital technologies resist the humanistic notions of

totality that encompass meaning and notions of the self.

When Marshall McLuhan discuss the “I” of medieval narrative as providing not so much

a point of view as an immediacy of effect (Gutenberg Galaxy 136), he inadvertently brings to light a quality that I see residing in many digital technologies today. McLuhan observes that

“grammatical tenses and syntax were managed by medieval writers, not with an idea to sequence and time or in space, but to indicate importance of stress” (136), and we see a resurgence of this type of textuality today. As Bolter and Grusin argue, many digital technologies emphasize a tension between immediacy of effect and the experience of being mediated. This process can dislodge stable notions of self and enact the poetically rhetorical silence of being that resists humanistic notions of authentic meaning and being. Jean-Luc Nancy describes this effect in poetry as “that which, in or within language, announces or keeps more than language” (17). He also describes it as a form of sense that does not operate as “an object of discourse. It is sense…as inflexion (as in the inflexion of a voice, or a tone, whether being raised, lowered, or sustained” (18). I take these descriptions by Nancy to mean that language operates beyond both la langue and parole, beyond both the formal structure of language and its concrete uses. There is an element of language that operates as more than language: it produces an immediacy of effect; it operates as an inflexion that stresses effect. It challenges the boundaries of time and space, and it disrupts the grammatical subjects and objects of discourse. Nancy’s description reflects my theory of poetic rhetoric and the way poetic rhetoric inhabits electronic writing

environments. The poetically rhetorical essay operates paralogically, emphasizing emotion and 163

the effects of these emotions. In addition it disrupts stable notions of the subject. I think we can see these types of disruption and paralogic reasoning operating in the online environment in the forms of hypertext documents, such as MOOs and blogs, and through their play between presence and absence of meaning, disruptions of stable subjectivity, and anamorphism.

The idea of the hypertext was first envisioned by Vannevar Bush in 1945 (Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort 35) and later defined by Ted Nelson in 1965 as “a new way of organizing text so that it could be read in a sequence chosen by the reader, rather than followed only in the sequence laid down by the writer” (Aarseth 77). Espen Aarseth describes the hypertext as a medium of text that stands as an alternative to the codex format of books and other bound manuscripts, and he notes that, “It is often described as a mechanical (computerized) system of reading and writing, in which the text is organized into a network of fragments and the connections between them” (76). I find hypertexts to represent a broad category of texts across the electronic, online spectrum. Hypertexts can range anywhere from a straightforward online document with links within itself and to outside texts all the way to works of hyperfiction that employ intricate lines of code to distort the text and the reader’s experience of the text, and they can also take the forms of MOOs, blogs, and wikis. Generally speaking, all of these texts function with a hypertextual foundation. The significance of hypertexts to poetic rhetoric is the way in which their tension or sense of play within the presence and absence of control and meaning reflects the poetic rhetoric that flows through language and structures of meaning. For example, the multilayered tension that exists within the nexus of the writer, the reader, and the control of meaning is one that reflects poetic rhetoric’s unstable form of logos. In

Hyper/Text/Theory George Landow discusses the ways in which hypertexts seem to operate on a more disjunctive level than print texts. Landow argues that hypertexts offer systems in which 164 readers can gain more control and influence over texts. Many poststructuralists argue that this shows hypertexts as operating in a postmodern way that puts the issue of control of meaning into a process of play (76, 83-84). However, Espen Aarseth argues that this is a misconception and the control of meaning within the hypertexts ultimately resides with the author. Within hypertexts control can be illusory, since often authors and programmers set limits on how much authority readers actually have. Aarseth argues that in describing hypertexts, Nelson actually described a system “in which the writer could specify which sequences of reading would be available to the reader” (77). He describes hypertexts that do not allow their readers free browsing and insists that, “The reader’s freedom from linear sequence, which is often held up as the political and cognitive strength of hypertext, is a promise easily retracted and wholly dependent on the hypertext system in question” (77). Both of the arguments regarding the control that is gained or lost for the reader of hypertexts overlook the poetically rhetorical nature of a technology that people attempt to manipulate, and that is the fact that control is an illusion, shaped and created through poetic rhetoric. What I am proposing here is that neither the author nor the reader maintains control in hypertextual spaces. While hypertexts are founded on a metaphysics of presence, there are still uncontrollable elements to their languages. Like print, the language of hypertexts is ultimately uncontrollable; however, the dynamism of electronically networked texts provides the potential for flickering signification and disruption of humanist ideologies in ways that surpass print typography

As I have mentioned before, N. Katherine Hayles puts it best when she emphasizes the instantaneous nature of fiber optics and the loss of shared context within hypertexts. Hayles also suggests that flickering signification differentiates hypertexts from print by implying that there is no original text. It is this dynamic nature of hypertexts that creates the potential for paralogic, 165

associative connections and the disruption of humanist agendas. The implication that hypertexts

do not possess original texts puts the relationship between presence and absence into a process of

play. For example, from one perspective I am able to physically see electronic texts with my

own eyes. In some ways, there is only an original text that everyone with an Internet connection can access. However, this original text, and the very notion of “originality,” is proven to be an illusion by the fact that the text I see on the screen is, in reality, founded on an artful combination of zeroes and ones. Through this tension between the presence and absence of the “real thing,” and through the creative way in which writing takes place, we see the poetically rhetorical nature of hypertexts.

Hypertexts offer more instances for readers to take multiple perspectives and different levels of participation within the text. When Theodor Nelson imagines the first hypertext, he

says that it should “accept large and growing bodies of text and commentary, listed in such

complex forms as the user might stipulate” (137). He also adds that it should not be hierarchical,

and he describes the system as having “dynamic outlining” (137). His description of dynamic

outlining is limited to one text that would be flexible enough to enact automatic changes in

multiple versions; however, I think that today’s hypertexts reflect dynamism through the ways in

which so many various types of text have developed out of the first hypertext. For example,

MOOs, blogs, and wikis are just some of the genres of hypertext that have evolved from

Nelson’s original description. Nelson says that “such a system could grow indefinitely” and that

its categories are “chimerical” (144). The categorization system must have “the capacity for new

arrangements and indefinite rearrangements of the old” (144). These descriptions can be

contrasted with those of humanist categorization. The organization of hypertexts is one that is 166

constantly changing, which allows for more perspectives and levels of participation with the

texts.

We also note that the text is constantly changing and morphing; in fact, Hayles argues

that the text is never identical with itself. She asserts, “Moreover, for networked texts, these

vehicles are never the same twice, for they exist in momentary configurations as data packets are

switched quickly from one mode to another, depending on traffic at the instant of transfer” (My

Mother Was a Computer 103). This reference to texts’ variable states suggests that just as there is no authentic, coherent subjectivity, there is also no authentic, coherent text. Espen Aarseth also adds to this discussion when he claims that we have gained an anamorphic perspective, which “hide[s] a vital aspect of the artwork from the viewer, an aspect that may be discovered only by the difficult adoption of a nonstandard perspective” (180-81). He says that we can view the determinate hypertext from the anamorphic perspective and that we can view the indeterminate hypertext from the metamorphic perspective, because it keeps changing over and over again.

Additionally, we see disappearing writing subjects in the online personas that are taken up in such writing spaces as MOOs, wikis, and, I would argue, even in web logs (blogs). This disappearing subjectivity is most prevalent in MOOs. The MOO, which is an object-oriented multi-user domain, was first created by Stephen White at Berkeley and had its first real instantiation in LambdaMOO, which was developed by Pavel Curtis in 1990 (Curtis 29-30).

MOOs are essentially computer programs that allow people to create a central space online in which others can join and interact with one another. Poetic rhetoric flows through these places because they are ultimately created through text, and these MOOs provide fertile spaces for the disruption of stable notions of self. For example, the fact that we are only represented in the 167

online classroom by our textual descriptions and can show, in the Nietzschean sense, that our world is created through our text and that there is a loss of self occurring in this creation. Michael Joyce notes that, in the MOO, “we are always mistaken. Mistaken for someone else…mistaking the form of the interaction…In the MOO attention is always elsewhere, it is a distraction, a disposition of self, the confusion of space for the occasion” (42).

Joyce emphasizes the illusory nature of the MOO. In the MOO our text constitutes our selves, and the meaning within that text is constantly slipping away. We must take the textualities and

avatars in the MOO to represent people, and ourselves, but in this process we constantly mistake

the selves to be that which is reflected on the screen. The self is dispossessed in MOO space,

and this is reflective of the poetically rhetorical nature of language that is constantly deferring

meaning and dispossessing the self. Additionally, D. Diane Davis argues that,

MOO-writing, in particular, exposes and challenges the mythic legitimacy of the ‘writer,’

pulling back the veil of authority by spotlighting the one who writes as a (piece of)

writing (itself). Writing in a MOO – but this is also the case for any writing…is…a

finitude, a polyethoi who has been written and is perpetually being rewritten. Moo-

writing, by explicitly exposing its own illegitimate, unauthorized state, suggests the

illegitimate, unauthorized state of any writing. (248)

Davis also emphasizes the loss of self and loss of the author that occurs within hypertexts. She challenges the authority, the presence of meaning, which can belong to a writer when that writer

is constituted by text her- or himself. Davis notes that electronic environments are already

starting to enact what I would call the silence of being. The self become a polyethoi: “scattered schizo-subject positions” (Vitanza 314). Davis asks, “And what happens to composition itself when texts go blatantly hyperactive, as they do in a MOO, on the Web, and in other hypertextual 168 spaces? Hypertexts spotlight something about language that our humanist impulses and pedagogical imperatives try like hell to forget: that language won’t sit still, that it won’t denote without also disseminating, and that we cannot control it” (248). In this sense, this uncontrollable language also implies a loss of human control, a humbling of the ego, and, in my mind, a loss of self. In this discussion we see less of an emphasis on an operating and grammatical subject, and we see notions of inflexion and emphasis taking more prevalent roles.

Davis cites Foucault: “He called then for a demystification of the author-function and described writing as ‘a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears’” (qtd. in Davis 248).

She notes that the Internet, MOOs, and hypertexts seem to be enacting Foucault’s notions of the disassembled author-function and of disappearing writing subjects. Davis’s statement applies to both the presence of meaning and the presence of self when she asserts that the illusory, unstable nature of language applies to the self that is constructed out of language within the MOO environment.

Further affirming the poetically rhetorical experience of the MOO, Michael Joyce observes the close relationship between presence and absence, life and death, which occurs within the MOO. Joyce asserts,

Against the commonly cited momentariness of MOO experience and the evanescense of

the selves that form within it, there stands the rhythm of recurrence on unknown screens

elsewhere; the persistence of certain ‘objects’ that, like the consumerist flotsam of

temporal existence (a brown bottle or a sailboat), mark the swell and surge of lives lived

in body, space, and time; and the mark of the momentary itself, meaning within

meaningfulness not against meaningfulness. Thus, like any poetic text, the MOO aspires

to moral discourse and to inscribe our mortality. (111) 169

Here Joyce captures the deferral of presence and absence, ultimately of life and death, which

occurs within the poetically rhetorical space of the MOO. There is a momentariness of the MOO

that can represent absence of meaning or death. And yet there is a persistence as well: texts can

live forever in cyberspace. Like the breathless symbol that represents lived thought, the text of

MOO space takes the place of living people; thus, the hypertextual MOO represents a death of

people’s authentic selves while it simultaneously allows them to live forever in textual form. As

Joyce says in “Songs of Thy Selves,” there is a presence that stays in the MOO long after the

physical person has logged out. At the same time, there is a fleeting aspect of the MOO that

permeates one’s time in that space. The poetically rhetorical nature of the MOO acknowledges

our mortality just as it both instantiates and replaces being with language.

The blog is another digital mode that I see tangentially connecting to poetic rhetoric. The

blog, a derivation of the terms “web” “log,” and its precursor the wiki, are both representations

of the dynamic and anamorphic nature of hypertext. The wiki, first created in 1995, predates the web log by two years, and Jeremy Williams and Joanne Jacobs describe the wiki as being “a piece of server software that permits users to freely create and edit web content via any browser, supports hyperlinks and has a simple text syntax for creating new pages” (233). The term

“weblog” was first coined in 1997 by Jorn Barger, and Peter Merholz used the term “blog” in

1999. Similar in technical capability to the wiki, the blog possesses more popularity and potential for participation than the wiki (233). Williams and Jacobs recognize that the blog is a well-established web-based tool (233). While there are several elements of the traditional web log that align more with Platonic notions of discourse, there are also ways in which the blog blurs notions of a coherent self and enacts elements of poetic rhetoric. For example, I would argue that even though the blog places a strong Platonic emphasis on the self 170 and self-expression, there is a sense in which the self that is projected in the blog is very much a fiction, a fabrication by the author of the self she or he would like to project to the world. In

“Audiences as Media Producers,” Zizi Papacharissi refers to blogs and notes that “Numerous aspects of creative online activity have thus been unveiled, focusing on self-expression, use of rhetorical strategies, socialization and display of alternative content” (22). She further notes that online tools facilitate people’s ability to “project their identity” (22). In my reading of this, we could argue that projected identity is fabricated. Since the blog identity is one that is fabricated, we can say that it disrupts notions of a stable self. One does not know where the fabricated self ends and the “real” self begins, and this is reflective of the fact that there is no authentic self: all selves are poetically rhetorical fabrications. Because the blog author and other viewers can go back and read through the history of the blog, readers can see how the self morphs and contradicts itself. I sat in on a panel on blogging at a conference recently, and one of the panelists referenced Roland Barthes’s description in his of, to paraphrase, constructing the pseudonym with whom he shares a name. It is this element of the blog that I see as connecting with the poetic rhetoric. With blogging, and with many of the online social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, there are many ways in which people construct images of themselves to present to their viewers.

This is not something new, however. People were doing this in the online forums and

MOOs and MUDs when they were the prevalent spaces through which people interacted online.

The complexity of all of this arises when we question the authenticity of this online constructed self, persona, or pseudonym. To what extent do people think that they are offering an authentic self-expression? To what extent do they feel they are achieving self fulfillment by expressing themselves online? In Life on the Screen, Sherry Turkle writes about the dissonance between the 171

online persona and the “real life” persona, noting that online personas can be liberating because

they allow the user to act without inhibitions and to role play being the person they would like to

be. She concedes, however, that constructing an online self stops being productive when the user

ceases to apply the benefits from the role playing to her or his real life. She says,

Virtuality need not be a prison. It can be the raft, the ladder, the transitional space, the

moratorium, that is discarded after reaching greater freedom. We don’t have to reject life

on the screen, but we don’t have to treat it as an alternative life either. We can use it as a

space for growth. Having literally written our online personae into existence, we are in a

position to be more aware of what we project into . (263, emphasis mine)

It is actually through the disjunction between the constructed online self, the self we see so often in blogs, and the “real life” self that I see a connection with poetic rhetoric. The fact is that we cannot reconcile these different selves, which indicates that there is no authentic, coherent self to begin with. When I write online, I am unable to discern whether or not I am being true to myself. I do know, however, that often when I write online I select different aspects of my life to share because I am creating an image of myself I find pleasing, and I am aware that others will read this writing. I often find myself coming back to my writings because I want to revel a moment longer in that self that I have created. Even though I know that this self is a fabrication,

I find myself becoming lost in these readings. Through this process I feel that there is both a creation of self and a simultaneous loss of self. Papacharissi also cites a recent study by Herring,

Scheidt et al. that notes that “bloggers tend to share intimate information by employing humorous contexts” (36). This suggests that the use of humor can also show a loss of ego and even a poetically rhetorical act of using humor to contradict or subvert one’s own experiences 172

and opinions. I recognize that it is certainly not the case that others view blogs in this way, but I

do think that they hold this possibility for a poetically rhetorical approach to self.

Online writing also offers students a greater opportunity to incorporate images, sound, and movie files into texts. The incorporation of multimedia to hypertexts contributes to the anamorphic and multivalent nature. Multimedia also facilitate more paralogic, associative connections within and throughout the text. If we focus on multimedia’s ability to illuminate texts, we can see the electronic texts operating in more poetically rhetorical ways. Craig Stroupe

offers a valuable discussion of the difference between “illumination” and “illustration,” and he

approaches this discussion through the perspective of ’s theory of the novelistic hybrid. In “Visualizing English: Recognizing the Hybrid Literacy of Visual and Verbal

Authorship on the Web,” Stroupe takes note of the traditional dichotomy between rhetoric and poetics within English departments and puts forth a theory that connects verbal and visual literary elements and helps us consider poetic rhetoric in terms of visual literacies. In response to the perceived “poetic-rhetoric divide” and “protective border imagined between ordinary discourses of the workplace or popular culture and an ideal of elaborated discourse as a special province of literary artistry or critical literacy,” Stroupe advocates a “hybrid of verbal and visual literacies, of textual integrity and hypertextual porousness” (618). He advances Bakhtin’s theory of the “novelistic hybrid,” noting that, “The novelistic hybrid is an artistically organized system for bringing different languages in contact with one another, a system having as its goal the illumination of one language by means of another” (qtd. in Stroupe 619). This notion of hybridity reflects the anamorphic nature of poetic rhetoric and hypertexts, where they both become increasingly more complex, perhaps excessively so, and where they offer illumination for all of their surrounding texts. They are creative and multilayered and there is some sort of 173

organizational system to them as well; they require thought and consideration. They operate in

an illuminative fashion, as opposed to illustrative. Stroupe shows that the bringing together of

different languages is not a mere juxtaposition of forms in order to further explicate one main

point (illustration); but, rather, the coalescence of the forms works to create a new type of

analysis and reflection upon the idea under discussion (illumination). Stroupe presents two

examples to further clarify his point. First, he looks at George Landow’s website that discusses

Victorian furniture design. The website includes pictures of Victorian chairs and then provides

relevant information about the historical furniture. This is an example of images providing

illustrations of text. Stroupe then turns his attention to Gregory Ulmer’s website, “Metaphoric

Rocks,” that presents an advertisement for a new tourist industry in Florida, but that does so

through an amalgamation of images and text that ultimately both supports his claims for new

tourist development and at the same time calls into question the seriousness and validity of his assertions. I believe that this is a poetically rhetorical move. The act of calling the assertions’ validity into question enacts the ambiguity inherent within poetic rhetoric. The perspective of

illumination represents the abstract, associative nature that I have been associating with the

paralogism of the poetically rhetorical essay. Texts that incorporate multimedia are

anamorphous in their subversive nature, appearing to present one idea or image while

simultaneously calling that idea into question and both creating and deferring possible meanings.

This also enacts a poetically rhetorical element of nonpositive affirmation, in which through its

subversive nature, the actions and meanings in the text both influence the reading world and act

upon the text itself. This discussion of illumination and the hybrid of verbal and visual literacies

is just the beginning of how we might consider the roles images and multimedia can play in

envisioning poetic rhetoric in the online environment. 174

Electronic Essay

For all of the ways that these electronic media reflect and are influenced by poetic rhetoric, I have one final suggestion to make. To further extend my discussion of the poetically rhetorical essay from Chapter 3: Poetic Rhetoric in the First-Year Composition Classroom, I offer here a brief outline of how we might envision this type of essay in the electronic environment. As I conclude my chapter on poetic rhetoric in the electronic writing environment,

I include a description of what a poetically rhetorical e-essay would look like, how it enacts poetic rhetoric, and how it extends the poetically rhetorical essay into the first-year writing curriculum. With all of the different applications associated with online texts (hyperlinks, pages that can disappear, abilities to change formats, abilities to display raw code, and many more), it could be easy to get caught up in all of the interesting ways we can manipulate an e-poetically rhetorical essay to make it more poetically rhetorical. How people want to manipulate their e- essays is up to them. I think, however, that it is more important to consider some general ways we can approach an online poetically rhetorical essay. These general ideas could then be applied to multiple media so that the e-essay could take multiple forms, thus helping it to become a more multi-headed genre that more fully encapsulates the qualities of poetic rhetoric. With that said, I will go back to some of the qualities I have listed as relating to the poetically rhetorical essay and discuss how they can operate within an electronic environment. For example, the creative excess, the multiplicities and deferrals of meaning, and the disruption of stable notions of subjectivity are all qualities of the poetically rhetorical essay, and they can all be enacted and enhanced in the digital environment.

In “Petals on a Wet Black Bough: Textuality, Collaboration, and the New Essay,”

Michael Spooner and Kathleen Yancey discuss the relationship between the traditional genre of 175

the essay and what they consider the “new essay” that is possible through electronic media.

They suggest that through collaboration and through the networked nature of the electronic text

the new essay can “deliberately make constructing and constructedness visible” (99). Poetically

rhetorical e-essays would have the ability to deliberately make their construction visible, which

would emphasize the way in which poetic rhetoric is more of a process as opposed to a “thing”

that can be added to language. E-essays have the ability to exist in multiple stages of

completion, to operate through threaded discussions, and to incorporate a multitude of sources,

genres, and media from various places. All of these qualities help to make their constructedness

visible and to show the different elements of excess that slip out through their creation. Readers

of poetically rhetorical e-essays have the opportunity to pursue these different threads of

discussion and elements of excess. Through the process of making constructedness visible, one

may be able to create and show creative excess. One may be able to not only show one’s own

thoughts on a subject matter, but how one arrived at those thoughts and how those thoughts are

influenced by language, created by language, and ultimately shape the essayist and the essayist’s

world.

Yancey and Spooner also note that in presenting information in new ways, the computer

allows us to develop new ideas and understandings (104). Additionally, they cite Sherry

Turkle’s discussion of the postmodern aspects of software design that allows for more of an

emphasis on bricolage (105). Through the linking ability and through what Yancey and Spooner

call the “expressivity of the medium,” one may be better able to both defer and show the

multiplicities of meaning that operate through poetic rhetoric and that operate through language

and text. In the electronic and online environment, one may be better able to embrace the process of deferral that operates through language and poetic rhetoric. Certainly, this process of 176

deferral is occurring in a more complex way within the electronic essay, as opposed to the print

technology. This is a result of the deferral of meaning that occurs through language being added

to the different aspects of electronic technology, such as different people accessing the text at different times, different packets of information being sent to and on different servers reaching different users and pieces of hardware on the other end. There is much along these different paths that will contribute to multiplicities and deferrals of meaning. This can all be seen in addition to the different ways one may create bricolage and play with multiple meanings with the aid of different electronic tools at the disposal of the e-essay.

Stable notions of subjectivity are also called into question more fully in an electronic environment. Michelle Ballif notes that,

according to Haraway, the figure of the Cyborg is perhaps the embodiment of our future

anterior, the conjugation of ourselves into an [in]tense rhetoric that is already, yet not yet,

thereby creating a tension such as Heraclitus’s bow, with which we can ‘forge’ the

prospect of a rhetoric in the twenty-first century and beyond. (186)

The cyborg is something we can become as we are increasingly unable to tell the difference between ourselves and the machines we use. This has the ability to disrupt our stable notions of self, and as we write in the form of a poetically rhetorical e-essay we will find that our selves become bound with the technologies and all of their levels of flickering signification. As we become enmeshed into the integrated circuits with which we work, we may find that these very circuits shape and create us. This possibility is enhanced by taking the poetically rhetorical essay into the electronic environment. Poetically rhetorical e-essays have the potential to take the form of MOOs, blogs, and wikis; they can emerge from threaded discussions and multi-authored hypertexts, and in these cases the sense of one stable author or self becomes blurry and 177

ambiguous. The main speaker of the text will not be clear and any self that does emerge will be one that is creatively fabricated.

In addition to the ways that the e-essay reflects and facilitates poetic rhetoric, it can also

be influential within the first-year writing curriculum. On one level, the e-essay is designed to

subvert the humanist ideologies inherent within the university structure. The writing of the

poetically rhetorical essay within the electronic environment challenges humanist notions

associated with print technology and disrupts stable notions of the self. On a second level, a key

element of its subversive nature is its potential for effective integration within the first-year writing. Poetic rhetoric’s potential for subversion and disruption is limited only by students’

abilities to come into contact with it, and we can increase that potential by studying it in the form

of the e-essay. Only by incorporating a study of this genre into the curriculum can we learn

more about poetic rhetoric and the hierarchies of power that it stands to resist and disrupt. The e-

essay is easily integrated into the curriculum, then, through the ways it fulfills goals stated by the

Council of Writing Program Administrators. The writers of the WPA Outcomes Statement assert

that “As writers move beyond first-year composition, their writing abilities do not merely

improve. Rather, students’ abilities not only diversify along disciplinary and professional lines

but also move into whole new levels where expected outcomes expand, multiply, and diverge”

(outcomes). The e-essay, with its hypertextual emphasis, reflects the expansive, multiplicitous,

and divergent qualities encouraged in the Outcomes statement. In fact, the hypertextual space of

the e-essay is perhaps the optimal place for such expansions. When students are able to traverse

the online environment, to incorporate so many divergent voices in a networked way, and to

create and defer meaning in hypertexts, they will meet the types of outcomes expected by the

Council of Writing Program Administrators. The divergent nature of the e-essay, while working 178 to meet outcome goals, will also work to enact deferrals of meaning, to destabilize notions of subjectivity, and to acknowledge those that have been excluded by the same humanist agenda that works to perpetuate the university structure.

In addition to meeting, and perhaps surpassing, a main goal of the WPA Outcomes

Statement, the e-essay also meets other goals stated by the WPA. The following is a list of certain outcomes taken from the WPA Outcomes Statement website, and I include only the specific outcomes in which the e-essay facilitates accomplishment.

Rhetorical Knowledge

• Respond to the needs of different audiences

• Respond appropriately to different kinds of rhetorical situations

• Understand how genres shape reading and writing

• Write in several genres

Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing

• Understand a writing assignment as a series of tasks, including finding, evaluating,

analyzing, and synthesizing appropriate primary and secondary sources

• Integrate their own ideas with those of others

• Understand the relationships among language, knowledge, and power

Processes

• Understand writing as an open process that permits writers to use later invention and re-

thinking to revise their work

• Understand the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes

• Use a variety of technologies to address a range of audiences

Knowledge of Conventions 179

• Develop knowledge of genre conventions ranging from structure and paragraphing to

tone and mechanics

• Practice appropriate means of documenting their work

Through its divergent, multivocal nature, the e-essay responds to the needs of different audiences, and it asks students to write for various rhetorical situations, especially the poetically rhetorical situation. The e-essay addresses multiple genres because of its poetically rhetorical nature, and the fact that the writing takes place online and through hypertext increases its ability to include multiple genres. In addition to including multiple genres, the e-essay extends that outcome to also include different media, a skill that surely benefits the student in today’s media- saturated society and workforce. The addition of the e-essay to the first-year writing curriculum extends the types of tasks we ask students to do with their writing, and it creates more opportunities for students to incorporate primary and secondary sources. Because the online environment offers more opportunities for collaboration and communication, students will be able to both create their own sources and contact on their subjects of interest. They will also be able to find and incorporate a multitude of diverse media and sources related to their . Their e-essays will also contribute to their understandings of knowledge, power, and language in the ways that they approach their hypertexts as both vehicles in which they join academic discourse, ways that they subvert academic discourse, and even ways that they are prohibited from joining the conversations. For example, students will be limited by their technical skill in some places, and students may find the motivation to excel with their technical skill as well. MOOs, blogs, wikis, and other hypertexts provide the ability to store multiple copies, for students to revise their work as they go, and for students to collaborate online, thus offering the opportunity for students to see writing as a process. It is hoped that with a study of 180 the poetically rhetorical e-essay, students will see language as a process, and one that shapes our notions of meaning and self. Electronic poetically rhetorical essays will incorporate a vast array of genres and media, and these inclusions will require detailed understanding of documentation.

Perhaps the most significant outcome that is met with the e-essay is the “use of a variety of technologies to address a range of audiences.” The e-essay more than fully encapsulates the variety of technologies, and its diverse nature should allow it to reach many audiences.

The poetically rhetorical e-essay bears many levels of significance for the first-year writing classroom. Its electronic and hypertextual aspects blend with its poetically rhetorical nature to simultaneously create and defer meaning within the classroom structure. It creates meaningful texts that fulfill goals stated by the Council of Writing Program Administrators, and at the same time it calls its own assertions into question and disrupts the very humanistic qualities upon which the English classroom is founded. Thus, the electronic writing environment reflects the poetic rhetoric that flows through language, through our structures of meaning, and through our notions of self.

181

5. POETIC RHETORIC: POST HUMANISM AND THE COMPOSITION CLASSROOM

Rhetoric radically suspends logic and opens up vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration. And although it would perhaps be somewhat more remote from common usage, I would not hesitate to equate the rhetorical, figural potentiality of language with literature itself. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading

Challenging Humanist Ideology by Resisting the Rhetoric and Poetic Dichotomy

The purpose of this project has been to challenge distinctions between poetics and

rhetoric that tacitly confirm and perpetuate humanist qualities in the first-year writing classroom.

I spend much of this text arguing against humanist ideology and in favor of a term, poetic

rhetoric, which breaks down the binary opposition between the two fields of study and instead

acknowledges the instability of poetic rhetoric as a process that flows through language and

simultaneously creates and defers meaning. The purpose of my argument is twofold: first, it resists the humanist emphasis on categorization that is represented in the dichotomy between rhetoric and poetics that has traditionally existed with English departments and writing programs; and second, it subverts the humanist emphasis on present, authentic meaning and subjectivity by acknowledging that our meanings and our selves are both created and destroyed through language and the poetic rhetoric that fuels it.

A discussion and disruption of humanist thought is critical to my argument because it is humanist ideology that reifies subordination of rhetoric and poetics amongst English departments and writing programs. Additionally, through writing courses, humanist values end up being taught to the myriad students who pass through universities each year. The value systems that form our courses become embedded in our approaches to teaching and are ultimately passed on 182 to students, and an unquestioning acceptance of these value systems can lead to inadvertent privileging of those in positions of power and exclusion of those along the margins of social and economic class standing.

I have argued that the term “humanism” has so many diverse definitions that it has come to practically mean everything and nothing at the same time. It is fair to say that there are many different types of humanism; however, in Humanism and Anti-Humanism, Kate Soper states that

a profound confidence in our powers to come to know and thereby control our

environment and destiny lies at the heart of every humanism; in this sense, we must

acknowledge a continuity of , however warped it may have become with the

passage of time, between the Renaissance celebration of freedom of humanity from any

transcendental hierarchy or cosmic order, the Enlightenment faith in reason and its

powers, and the ‘social engineering’ advocated by our contemporary ‘scientific’

humanists. (14-15)

This is to say that while there are many varieties of humanism, they all involve the belief that humans can know and control their environments. Soper connects this with , Enlightenment beliefs, and notions of social engineering. Ultimately, these forms of humanism impact social processes by privileging reason and scientific logic. In addition to the idea that humanists believe in authentic, accessible knowledge and control, Soper also notes that humanists commonly assert that “men make history” (20). She says that people can interpret this in different ways: one can interpret this statement to mean that history is the result of “the aggregate of human acts,” as opposed to believing that “there is a trans-individual meaning or purpose directing those activities or being brought to realization through them” (20). Soper argues that one can believe the first statement without necessarily supporting the second. 183

Essentially, one can believe that man can consciously perform acts that “make history” without accepting the other commonly held humanist belief that “history itself is the working-out of an immanent human purpose” (21). Soper sees a link between these two levels of humanism in the way that people, in order to achieve these higher purposes, attempt to control the “‘irrational’ and unintended consequences of a dispersed mass of private intentional acts” (20, Soper’s emphasis). These attempts to control the irrational and the unintended are linked with humanism, and these efforts to exert control, along with humanist emphases on reason and authentic, accessible knowledge, can have negative influences on society. Soper makes a valid point that we should not conflate the two different interpretations or levels of humanism; however, I argue that we should be critical of the humanist qualities that Soper has identified.

While it is true that much good can come from humanist viewpoints, this dissertation focuses on the negative consequences that can come from unquestioningly accepting humanist ideology.

My argument, then, is based on a definition of humanism that encapsulates these main qualities: humans’ belief that they can know and control their environment; humans’ desire to control their social contexts; the belief that humans can realize a higher purpose; and a desire to manipulate the irrational and uncontrollable. In order for these qualities to maintain their valued status, humanists and societal members alike must push other values to the side. When one attempts to control and dominate anything, be it a sense of purpose, a social environment, what constitutes knowledge, or how we define what it means to be human, certain elements will be privileged and others will be suppressed.

In its quest for power over the uncontrollable, humanist thought appropriates language, especially its instantiations in the forms of rhetoric and poetics, for its own purposes and goals.

In The Semiotic Challenge, Roland Barthes shows that rhetoric and poetics have both been 184

subjugated to Grammatica and Logica, two fields that I associate with humanism. Barthes

relates Grammatica to the science of writing and speaking well, and he says that Logica, which I

associate with reason, scientific rationalization, and philosophy, subsumes Grammatica, rhetoric,

and poetics. Barthes shows that initially both rhetoric and poetics were subordinate to

Grammatica and Logica and over time rhetoric also became further subjugated to poetics.

Essentially, language was categorized into fields of study and was viewed as a tool or object that could be manipulated to serve that “trans-individual meaning or purpose” (Soper 20).

The categorization of language into different fields of study is reflective of a type of

“divide and conquer” paradigm that has its roots all the way back to Plato. To categorize and place concepts into fields of opposition helps one gain control over that which seems to defy logic. It also gives people a sense of stability and reassurance when facing a fear of the unruly and unknown. Language, and the forms of rhetoric and poetics, represent much of what people who value humanist qualities may fear. From a broad perspective, rhetoric and poetics can represent irrationality and unpredictability. They can represent a sense of play that is not often valued in our goal-minded society. Finally, because they take on representative and indicative roles, they can represent the death of living meaning in the form of what Derrida calls the

“breathless sign” (Dissemination 92). As a result of fear of these different elements, scholars throughout history have attempted to control language through the subordination of rhetoric and poetics. Plato is perhaps the first thinker to do this, and he achieved this denigration by subjugating rhetoric and poetics to philosophic thought. By creating this type of binary opposition and privileging philosophy over writing in general and rhetoric and poetics specifically, Plato set the rules for a process of legitimation that would continue for centuries thereafter. As scholars of rhetoric and poetics attempt to legitimate their fields, they ultimately 185

end up working within a Platonic paradigm of negation, where one attempts to privilege one’s

own discipline at the expense of others. In my attempts to resist this exclusionary type of

reasoning, I argue that we disrupt the dichotomization of rhetoric and poetics and instead

consider an alternative term, poetic rhetoric, that represents the blurred boundaries between these

two ideas, or what I would consider processes of language.

Poetic Rhetoric: A Disruption of Oppositions and the Birth of Prosetics

As I resist and disrupt humanist tendencies to control and dominate language through

emphases on categorization and reason, I put forth my own argument for an alternative way of

viewing the processes of rhetoric and poetics. Essentially, I argue that language is fueled by a process, poetic rhetoric, where meaning and authentic notions of the self are constantly being created and deferred. Acknowledging this process of poetic rhetoric involves breaking down the distinctions between rhetoric and poetics to accept that all language operates both poetically and

rhetorically, and I form this understanding on the basis that language, and hence rhetoric and

poetics, is founded on an unstable form of logos.

While Derrida is often cited as criticizing logocentrism, the unquestioning reliance of

reason and rationality through a process that is often negative and exclusionary, he can also be

credited as making the argument that logos can be an unstable, shifting, illusory property.

Following along the lines of Gorgias, who suggests the ambiguous nature of logos, Derrida

argues that logos can act like a drug or medicine, having both helpful and destructive properties.

Derrida’s position that logos is an unstable pharmakon (drug or medicine), that it is “at once good and bad” (Dissemination 115), shows the instability that can be associated with logos.

When Derrida says that logos is “(the production of) difference” (127), we see the implied notion that logos brings about a creation and a deferral of meaning. The idea of “difference” suggests 186

that while logos establishes meaning, it does so through a play of reversals where meaning is never fully pinned down and thus operates through a cycle of creation and deferral. It is this process of logos that forms the basis of poetic rhetoric, which in turn flows through all language and structures of meaning.

Because poetic rhetoric is fueled by an unstable logos, and because it operates through a process of creation and deferral of meaning, it can best be envisioned as a form of third sophistic rhetoric. While poetic rhetoric does include some of the qualities of sophistic rhetoric, such as resisting the logocentrism of the Platonic philosophy and disrupting notions of an authentic and

communicable truth, it more fully encapsulates what Victor Vitanza describes as the third sophistic. Rather than taking the argument/counter-argument form that is espoused by first and second sophistics, poetic rhetoric follows the third sophistic form that Vitanza describes as a

“dispersion/scattering of the antithesis that leads to ‘something new’” (124). As a form of third sophistic, poetic rhetoric creates and defers meaning in a way that disperses and scatters it throughout our organizations of meaning and self. New notions of meaning and self, then, are

both created and destroyed. Another way in which we see poetic rhetoric operating third

sophistically, is through poetic rhetoric’s resistance of humanist ideology. When D. Diane Davis

says that third sophistics seek out that which is excluded in order for meaning-making to occur

(262), we can see the connection between the third sophistic and poetic rhetoric’s resistance to humanist qualities of exclusion and negation. Through poetic rhetoric’s resistance to humanist

notions of exclusion and negation, it functions as a form of third sophistic rhetoric.

The third sophistic act of dispersing and scattering arguments and meanings enacts the

process of creation and deferral that is so prevalent in poetic rhetoric, and this process

contributes to poetic rhetoric’s resistance of the humanist emphasis on a metaphysics of 187

presence. This emphasis on a metaphysics of presence can have many different interpretations, but the most significant one in my mind comes down to a fear of death. This fear of death places

an extreme value on life and all that we can associate with living. While this is also an extremely

broad subject, I see it coming down to two categories that I hope I have addressed within this text: humanist ideology privileging the lives of some over the lives of others and a fear of the written word as a symbolic death of living meaning. In many ways, this argument about the fear of death encapsulates the entire argument of my dissertation. It is the human fear of death that motivates people to exert power over others, to enrich their own lives at the expense of others,

and to attempt to control their environment through language and manipulation. In Speech and

Phenomena, Derrida suggests that language is seen as “the process of death at work in signs”

(40), and it can be argued that it is people’s fear of this uncontrollable, unpredictable quality that

motivates them to try to manipulate language for their own advancement. However, as

Nietzsche has argued, meaning is a transitory concept (Sander et. al 67). There is no “real”

meaning other than that which we attach to it at any given moment. This can be extrapolated

both to our individual lives and to our meanings and lives represented in our writing. This is the

purpose of poetic rhetoric; it captures the fleeting nature of life and renders it meaningful

through the creation and deferral of meaning in language. The meaning that is associated with

the delicacy of life and the instability of language is complex, however. It is at once full of

possible meaning and empty of coherent truth. Contra to authentic presence, it is a meaning that

is cyclically disseminating, creating and deferring all that that we consider as comprising our

notions of meaning and self.

As we acknowledge the ways in which meaning is shaped by the poetically rhetorical

nature of language, we must also accept that these processes of creation and deferral relate to the 188

formations of our subjectivities. Following along the lines of Nietzsche who describes our selves

as “artistically creative subject[s]” (“On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense” 52) and who

describes our existence as an “aesthetic phenomenon” (The Gay Science 163), I argue that our

notions of self are created through the poetically rhetorical process of creation and deferral.

Nietzsche shows that our structures of meaning and our lives are made up of art; additionally, he

argues that language, which he relates with rhetoric, is also comprised of art. Therefore, I

extrapolate this argument to suggest that our subjectivities are comprised of the poetically

rhetorical process that flows through language. I base this argument on the Nietzschean assertions that “language itself is the result of purely rhetorical arts” (“Description of Ancient

Rhetoric” 21) and that our subjectivity is, in a sense, a fiction (The Birth of Tragedy 49).

It is this element of fiction that reflects the creative and generative nature of poetic rhetoric. Nietzsche makes the argument that we “can destroy only as creators” (The Gay Science

122), and this creative element inhabits poetic rhetoric. Nietzsche’s argument that “What at first was appearance becomes…the essence” (121) shows how the illusory nature of poetic rhetoric turns into a creative property that creates and shapes our structures of meaning and our lives.

Just as we acknowledge that meaning is transitory and our notions of self unstable, so too should we acknowledge the creative and generative impulse that also flows through poetic rhetoric.

Meaning is deferred and created, and the poetically rhetorical elements of play and resistance to negation and exclusion operate to create new ideas and new potentialities for meaning.

If I were to think of a term that encapsulates the study of all that I have described as poetic rhetoric, I would suggest the term “prosetics.” I would define this as the study and advancement of poetic rhetoric from etymological, historical, cultural, theoretical, and practical perspectives. The term fuses the concepts of poetics, rhetoric, and prose, where prose extends 189

beyond a reflection of written language to the type of language that flows throughout all of our

structures of meaning. For example, prosetics can include the study of poetic rhetoric that inhabits visual images, works of art, works of architecture, the art of dance, and other forms in which meaning is both created and deferred.

Because of its subtle to the term “prosthetics,” prosetics also reflects the posthuman qualities of poetic rhetoric. As I discuss in Chapter Four, Poetic Rhetoric in the

Online Environment, we can view writing as an uncontrollable type of prosthetic that contributes to, and even constitutes, our notions of self. Viewing writing in this way means acknowledging that writing and its technologies shape our formations of our selves, and it results in the acceptance that we do not have complete control of our selves. A study of prosetics would acknowledge all of this, and it would seek out further study of posthuman qualities in our scholarship on poetic rhetoric, writing, and the works of fiction around us. It would carry this discussion into the forms of visual images, art, architecture, dance, and other creative media.

In many ways, people read meaning from these forms as they would a text, and that is how the notion of “prose” fits into the study of poetic rhetoric. Just as teachers are often encouraged to incorporate studies of into their writing classrooms, so should we encourage a study of poetic rhetoric within the composition classroom. Most students take some form of writing instruction during their college careers, and an inclusion of poetically rhetorical study to their writing curriculum would expose them to a breadth of rhetorical significance previously overlooked within English departments.

Poetic Rhetoric’s Influence on First-Year Composition and the Genre of the Essay

Because first-year composition is a course that most students are required to take, and

because it does influence students’ views on writing, language, and ultimately on society in 190

general, poetic rhetoric holds valuable significance for the field. When Sharon Crowley notes

that we have inherited an educational institution that makes assumptions about who is and who

should become an educated person, and when she observes that our educational system prepares

people to “compete aggressively, if obediently, in a capitalist society” (252), it becomes clear

that our educational institutions do influence our societal structures and that they do it in a way

that reaffirms and perpetuates class structures. Our educational system is influenced by the

humanist ideology that has informed its development. As D. Diane Davis notes, when we teach

with a humanist emphasis, we not only teach elements of writing, but we also teach values that

glorify hierarchy and mastery and a “style of thinking that operates via negation” (12). The pedagogies we use, the subjects we study and our approaches to them, tacitly teach students these values that can perpetuate class hierarchies and ultimately exclude and oppress individuals and classes of people. When we teach rhetoric and poetics as separate subjects, whether purposefully or inadvertently, we teach the value system that is associated with their opposition.

As I have previously argued, rhetoric and poetics have been seen as inferior to philosophy and logic. All of these fields have been categorized and placed along hierarchies of value and importance, and this has resulted in the view of rhetoric and poetics in positions of opposition, with scholars in each field working to legitimate their own studies. Within English departments this process has often resulted in poetic study being privileged over rhetoric. In fact, since the beginning of Platonic philosophy, rhetoric has often been seen as the dark horse: an unruly, spurious art that should be controlled and manipulated for higher purposes. This view of language in general, and rhetoric and poetics specifically, ultimately succeeds in maintaining humanist values of definition and categorization through exclusion and negation. It has the effect of privileging some at the expense of others. In response to the problems I see associated 191 with teaching rhetoric and poetics as separate subjects, I propose we embrace a study of poetic rhetoric in the composition classroom, and I recommend the form of the poetically rhetorical essay. The poetically rhetorical essay is similar to the Montaignean essay in the ways in which it is epistemologically skeptical, antischolastic, and resistant to categorization. However, the poetically rhetorical essay breaks with the Montaignean essay in the ways in which it resists notions of a stable self or of self-realization through its paralogical organization and through its excessive, nonpositive affirmative qualities. The poetically rhetorical essay would work to meet curricular goals for the composition classroom while simultaneously subverting the very structure in which the writing classroom is housed.

The poetically rhetorical essay works to resist the dichotomy that often exists between rhetoric and poetics in the composition classroom. This dichotomy represents an instantiation of exclusionary values that can be found within our educational institutions. Many first-year writing programs split the school year in half, spending the first semester teaching rhetorical and expository writing and the second semester writing about literature, or what I have been calling poetics. There have been numerous discussions pertaining to the value of combining rhetorical and poetic study in the composition classroom, as evidenced by the Lindemann-Tate debate published in College English in 1993; additionally, scholars such as James Berlin, Susan Miller, and Sharon Crowley have argued that the relationship between the two fields has been volatile since the inception of early English departments. Maintaining distinctions between rhetoric and poetics within the writing classroom ultimately affirms the Platonic paradigm of putting two concepts into opposition and privileging one over the other. This enacts a process of definition through negation and exclusion: rhetoric and poetics are each defined by their differences from 192

the other field, and this type of logic employs humanist values of categorization, negation, and

reliance on authentic meaning.

These distinctions reflect the Platonic denigration of rhetoric that we see beginning as

early as Plato’s Phaedrus. In this text, Plato describes rhetoric and writing as a dark horse,

which, through its unruly behavior, impairs its charioteer’s vision of reality, forcing the

charioteer to remain bogged down by mere opinion. Plato privileges truth, knowledge,

categorical definitions, and philosophy over rhetoric and writing. These Platonic qualities align with humanist values, especially when we note Plato’s argument that “It is impossible for a soul that has never seen the truth to enter into human shape” (55). This is the problem with humanist values that are based on notions of truth and that work to define what it means to be human:

these definitions are typically initiated through a process of exclusion, and in this process people

are often pushed to the margins. As Diane Davis asserts, “Humanist notions of community are

constituted through the production of an abject realm, a domain of excluded sensibilities and

excluded Others” (180). In this instance, rhetoric is also exscribed to the margins. Because

Plato values truth over all else, we can see that the poetic is also assigned an inferior position

along the Platonic hierarchy of value. As scholars attempt to rescue rhetoric and poetics from

their subjugated positions, they all too often fall into the Platonic process that valorizes their

discipline at the expense of other fields. They want to show that their discipline is valuable

because it is better than another discipline or different than another discipline. Additionally,

because Plato placed truth, knowledge, and logic on a pedestal of superiority, scholars

automatically strive to show how their disciplines achieve these most eminent qualities. This

process of legitimation inadvertently invokes an unquestioning acceptance of these qualities

without examining the full breadth of their complexity. As regards my argument, scholars of 193

rhetoric and poetics each work to validate their fields, often at the expense of the other, and

inadvertently place these multi-headed processes into service of the humanist ideology of the

university curriculum. In this process the poetic is often privileged over rhetoric, and notions of

authentic truth and class standing reign supreme.

Scholars such as James Berlin, Susan Miller, and Sharon Crowley have shown the ways

in which poetics have traditionally been privileged over rhetorical study within many college

English departments. James Berlin’s history of the nineteenth century English department shows

that the poetic was privileged over rhetoric and showed literature as the “specialized province of

study” (22); Susan Miller describes rhetorical study of early English departments as literature’s

“covered-over ‘Other’” (46). Moreover, Sharon Crowley convincingly demonstrates the ways in

which the subjugation of rhetoric to poetics has served to perpetuate humanist values in the

composition classroom. The people who advanced poetic study argued that it provided texts that

could be analyzed objectively and bring us closer to authentic truth and self-realization. The

emphasis on objectivity reflects the humanist values on rationality and the assumption that we

can control our environment and our emotions. All of these qualities were held above rhetoric,

which, Crowley asserts, was simply a means of explicating a truth found “elsewhere than in

composition” (86). Perhaps because of a misguided attempt at validation, or possibly because

composition scholars were just as influenced by modern, humanist thought as many other

academics, as the field of composition grew as a discipline it conformed more and more to

humanist values within the university. It still maintained a dichotomy between rhetoric and

poetics, and it focused on attaining the goals professed valuable by other academics: good taste and class standing. As compositionists worked to validate their field, they focused on grammar and usage as ways to measure students’ intelligence and personal attributes. The pedagogy of 194

current-traditional forms quantified writing in a way that perpetuated humanist ideals in the

composition classroom. As Sharon Crowley notes, the focus on grammar and current-traditional

forms “is fully in keeping with humanism’s rejection of rhetoric, as well as its tendency toward

idealism, its reverence for institutional and textual authority, and its pedagogical attention to policing of character” (95). Again we see a subordination of rhetoric and an ultimate privileging of humanist ideology.

We can resist the dichotomization of rhetoric and poetics for negative humanistic ends by embracing a study of poetic rhetoric in the first-year composition classroom. While scholars have made attempts to combine the two terms into a broader context, my approach is to resist and disrupt the notion of boundaries that currently exist between the two concepts. In fact, I insist that we not view rhetoric and poetics as “things,” or even concepts; but, rather, we should consider them as processes that each comprise the other. They are both fueled by an unstable form of logos, and they both work together to flow through language.

Following along the lines of Paul de Man, I suggest that we teach rhetoric as poetic and poetic as rhetoric. One way we can do this is through what I describe as the poetically rhetorical essay. The poetically rhetorical essay I describe can be best compared with the Montaignean essay, and both the Montaignean essay and the poetically rhetorical can be best contrasted to the

academic essay. While the academic essay generally typifies a humanist agenda in which

authentic truth is accessed and conveyed by an objective, stable writer, the poetically rhetorical

essay, along with its predecessor, the Montaignean essay, resists and disrupts those humanist

values. The poetically rhetorical essay is similar to the Montaignean essay in its

antischolasticism, epistemological skepticism, and its resistance to categorization. However,

because the Montaignean essay both resists and affirms humanist values, the poetically rhetorical 195

essay departs from the Montaignean essay to invoke a paralogical organization and a dissolution

of stable subjectivities.

Both the Montaignean and the poetically rhetorical essay resist humanist notions of categorization and rationalization through their antischolasticism and epistemological skepticism. In these ways the poetically rhetorical essay is similar to the essay of Montaigne.

Paul Heilker notes that Montaigne disagreed with the academic scholars who were his

contemporaries and their belief that knowledge could be definitively declared and categorized

(17-18). Heilker notes that the essay’s antischolasticism rejected notions of stable knowledge

and questioned “the idea of authority itself…challenging its basis of categorization and

specialization” (18). The essay is epistemologically skeptical in the way that it questions

established bodies of knowledge and in the ways in which it welcomes contrast and

contradictions. As Doug Hesse says, the essay can be seen as “an ultimate rejection of

knowledge as objective and truth as independent of context and experience” (36). The essay is

also epistemologically skeptical through its antischolasticism when it resists scholastic

categorization of knowledge into distinct disciplines and, instead, includes transgressive

discourses and contrasting, sometimes even contradicting, points of view (Heilker 19).

Furthering its transgressive and skeptical nature, the essay is, as Roland Barthes describes it, a

“galaxy of signifiers”: one which has many points of entrance, and no one point dominates the

other (S/Z 5). In this way, the essay operates through a constant cycle of creation and deferral of

meaning. These qualities of the Montaignean essay enact the poetic rhetoric I have been

describing throughout this text, and thus, they should comprise the poetically rhetorical essay.

With these qualities in mind, however, we should also note the ways in which the poetically

rhetorical essay differs from the Montaignean essay. 196

The Montaignean essay has typically affirmed the notion of a stable subjectivity, or at

least it has endorsed a view that there is a self that can be realized through exploration on the page. Robert L. Root, Jr. and Michael Steinberg support that suggestion that the essay endorses

a present self that can be discovered or enhanced through the essay (xxv). This importance of self and presence of self related to the Montaignean essay can reflect the humanist emphasis on

beliefs in a stable or authentic self; therefore, the poetically rhetorical essay would work to disrupt this quality throughout its form. The poetically rhetorical essay can do this by excessively embracing the Montaignean essay’s potential to view knowledge, even knowledge of the self, as something that is temporary and exists only in the moment (Heilker 51). It should be acknowledged that the self of the poetically rhetorical essay is but a tiny fiction, as ever changing as the mutable language that comprises it.

In addition to resisting notions of stable subjectivity, the poetically rhetorical essay differs from the Montaignean essay in its logic or organization. Heilker contends that the

Montaignean essay possesses a chrono-logic nature, that this type of logic is “differently logical” and that it moves through time along with the thought processes of the essayist. My poetically rhetorical essay would disrupt even this notion of linearity and causality. Instead of operating in

the logical organization of the academic essay or the chrono-logical organization of the

Montaignean essay, I assert that the poetically rhetorical essay operates paralogically. That is,

rather than having a causal and hierarchical organization, the poetically rhetorical essay would

operate through associations. In addition, rather than basing assumptions and statements on

reason and logic, the essay would come to its assertions through feelings and emotions that are

happened on by chance. Its logic is its resistance to logic. Furthermore, a reader of a poetically

rhetorical essay would be drawn into the text, free to make her or his own connections based on 197

associations, feelings, and chance. These paralogical, associative connections can apply to

evaluations of the poetically rhetorical essay as well. As a teacher evaluating the poetically rhetorical essay, one must exert a nontrivial amount of effort to not only make connections that seem explicit in the essay but to also make one’s own substantive associations and inferences as well as envision the potential inherent within the essay. The essay can then be evaluated based on how the teacher sees it meeting or exceeding its potential.

Beyond considerations of evaluation, we may wonder how the poetically rhetorical essay

fits into the overall first-year composition curriculum. How do we incorporate a type of writing that has been described in liberatory ways into the structure with which it finds fault? My response to this is to apply a proposal suggested by Christy Desmet in “Beyond Accommodation:

Individual and Collective in a Large Writing Program.” Desmet argues that instructors can advance their pedagogies by creating a credible ethos and working within and through professional masks. As regards my development of poetic rhetoric and the poetically rhetorical essay, it is possible for these forms of writing to wear the masks of the university paradigm while simultaneously calling those same humanistic structures into question and working to subvert them. Paul Heilker argues that the Montaignean form of the essay both compensates for flaws in

the academic, or thesis-driven, essay and that it helps students become better writers of the

thesis-driven, academic forms. The poetically rhetorical essay would operate in this way as well.

It would meet goals for the writing curriculum in the ways in which it would ask students to

understand those humanistic qualities, and then it would proceed to ask students to call those

qualities into question and explode the boundaries around them. As Heilker notes, “Rather than

stopping inquiry by trying to fix an idea in certainty, the essay fosters student development by

starting inquiry, by celebrating and embracing uncertainty and inconclusiveness, and thus 198

encouraging the writer to freely explore and learn as much as possible about an idea” (163).

Heilker describes the flaw in the thesis-driven form as its “overly simplistic positivistic

epistemology,” and he responds that the essay (and I would include here the poetically rhetorical

essay) does not see truth as immutable or prior to language. It would see truth as “not readily available, not objectively, clearly, distinctly, and univocally communicable, not unproblematic”

(163). In these ways the poetically rhetorical essay challenges areas of weakness within the

thesis-driven form, and it offers students a deeper exploration of language and learning. This

also, somewhat inadvertently, helps students excel in the thesis-driven form as well. Heilker

argues that students who work with the complex, multivocal form of the essay,

gain a critical distance and a new perspective on the thesis/support form. They become

more aware of aspects of the form that had previously been invisible or opaque, that had

seemed natural or inevitable. In other words, composing essays seems to help students

compose better thesis/support texts. (165)

While writing forms of poetically rhetorical essays would seem to produce the side effect of

improving students’ academic essay writing skills, the process also has the effect of subverting the hierarchies of power often associated with humanism. While Heilker notes the thesis/support form’s tacit of authority and hierarchies of power, he argues that “the essay’s radical

skepticism constantly interrogates the ‘hidden omniscience’ authorities try to display, constantly underscoring each of their interpretations as the product of the mind of a fallible human being”

(164). Thus, incorporating a poetically rhetorical essay into the composition classroom would simultaneously meet goals of the curriculum while working to subvert hierarchies of power often associated with the humanism of our educational institutions. 199

The E-Essay and Poetic Rhetoric in the Electronic Writing Environment

To further develop my previous discussion of poetic rhetoric and the poetically rhetorical

essay, I argue that this type of study and writing is best suited for the electronic writing

environment. There are many ways in which electronic writing enacts poetic rhetoric, or reflects

poetic rhetoric’s process through it, and we can see the culmination of this in the poetically

rhetorical electronic essay. The electronic writing environment possesses anamorphic

dynamism: the ability to constantly change states of being, to exist within a state of immediacy,

and to be something other than that which it appears to be. These qualities challenge certain

humanistic ideologies, such as authentic stable notions of signification, rationality, presence, and

self. Hypertexts and hypertextuality enact and reflect poetic rhetoric, and we can see this in the

first-year writing classroom through the form of the poetically rhetorical e-essay.

The online environment is a space that is constantly changing, creating and deferring

meaning across multiple networks of texts, and this is reflected in the poetically rhetorical e-

essay. Describing their idea of a new essay, Kathleen Blake Yancey and Michael Spooner say,

It seems to me that in the new essay (call it what you will) we are arguing for a hybrid

textuality that crosses genres in two ways. First, it includes poetic and rhetoric,

privileging neither, invoking each that they might together express what cannot be

represented without the other. Such an essay mixes the conventions governing narrative,

, and pattern, in its effort to invite multiple readings: aesthetic ones as well as

afferent. (114)

The poetically rhetorical e-essay enacts this type of essay which Yancey and Spooner seek.

Yancey and Spooner are calling for an inclusion of poetic and rhetoric, where neither field is privileged over the other. They value the multiplicities of aesthetics as well as an afferent, or 200

centralizing, impulse. In many ways this potential has been residing in language all along.

Poetic rhetoric is not comprised of disorder and chaos; rather, it represents potentialities of

meaning, where no one meaning is privileged over the other. As Yancey and Spooner say,

“Suppose we didn’t think rhetoric or poetic. Suppose we thought rhetoric and poetic and

electronic. Multiple ways of embodying text: multiple textualities” (114). This is in fact what

the poetically rhetorical e-essay proposes to do, and considering its unstable and affirmative nature we might playfully add “and then some!” to the end of that description. Poetically rhetorical e-essays would be written and read in the electronic writing environment and thus they would merge all of the qualities of poetic rhetoric with those of electronic technology. E-essays

would be able to exist in various states of completion; they could take place through threaded

discussions; and they could incorporate various, at times contrasting and conflicting, sources,

genres, and media into their texts. Their hypertextual nature would help them constantly cycle

through multiple creations and deferrals of meaning. Their poetically rhetorical nature is

enhanced beyond print technology through their dynamism and instantaneous qualities. For

example, different people are able to access texts at different times, and different bits of

information are sent over different servers to different pieces of hardware. There are many

instances where both readers and writers lack control over their languages and texts, and there

are many opportunities for chance to play a role in the creation of (unstable) meaning.

Like the poetically rhetorical essay, the e-essay would also work to challenge and resist humanist structures within the composition classroom while at the same time bearing a credible ethos and wearing a mask of professionalism. The poetically rhetorical e-essay achieves the

Writing Program Administrator’s Outcomes statement when it encourages students to expand and multiply their levels of abilities. Through an integration of the e-essay into the first-year 201

composition curriculum, students are able to expand their rhetorical knowledge, , reading, and writing skills, process skills, and knowledge of writing conventions. The e-essay’s divergent, multivocal nature helps students achieve these skills in ways that extend beyond traditional, print-based academic essays. Because the e-essay, like its print-based counterpart, calls its own assertions into question, it is also able to challenge and even disrupt the humanist ideologies that make up the foundation of most writing courses. Because it possesses the poetically rhetorical qualities reflected in the electronic writing environment, the e-essay is able to disrupt humanist qualities and call into question preconceived values that have often gone unnoticed and unquestioned.

The electronic writing environment is an optimal space for poetic rhetoric, and the e- essay, through its very nature, resists and disrupts humanist qualities such as reliance on notions of authentic, stable signification, rational organization, and presence. Electronic texts’ process of what N. Katherine Hayles describes as “flickering signification” challenges traditional notions of representation. Hayles describes flickering signification as taking into account the randomness

that occurs when patterns are paired to create electronic texts. This results, Hayles says, in a

“rich internal play of difference” (31). In addition, because electronic texts provide larger spaces

for more information to be transmitted across longer codes, there is an increased opportunity for

randomness and mutation to occur. All of this reflects the instability of signification, the interconnectedness of points of reference, and the transitory nature of meaning. This resistance

to a humanistic reliance on stable, authentic signification reflects the poetically rhetorical nature

of the electronic writing environment. The electronic text’s potential for paratactic linking and

organizational strategies also helps it resist humanistic forms of rational organization. Paralogic

and paratactic styles represent ways of thinking that operate laterally (as opposed to 202

hierarchically) and through association (as opposed to linear causality). This poetically

rhetorical, paratactic quality of the online text encourages a resistance to and disruption of the rational organization that is typically inherent within most typographic forms of text. Along the

same lines as challenging stable, authentic notions of signification and rational organization,

electronic texts also resist the humanist emphasis on presence. Because of their reliance on

binary code for their programming and functionality, electronic texts actually blur, disrupt, and

put into play the typical tensions that are associated with presence and absence. Electronic texts

rely on binary opposition in order to function, but the very tension that exists within this

opposition enacts the poetic rhetoric of online writing. Along with the binary coding that

comprises electronic texts, there is a sense of play between the presence and absence of ones and

zeroes that allows for the creation and destruction of meaning. At the same time, there are

moments of randomness, error, and chance that work to either render programs broken,

functional, or even functional in unexpected ways. In addition to this, the presence of people and

ideas in electronic texts have the ability to be at once ubiquitous across the networked space and

at the same time empty of any amount of authentic meaning or substance. The poetically

rhetorical qualities of the electronic environment challenge, trouble, and disrupt humanist

qualities associated with presence.

We can see all of these elements in the hypertexts and hypertextuality of the online

environment. The dynamism of hypertexts provides the potential for flickering signification;

hypertexts are anamorphic, they disrupt stable notions of subjectivity, and they challenge the

humanistic emphasis on a metaphysics of presence. An initial representation of hypertexts’

anamorphic and dynamic nature is their ability to transform into multiple types of texts that can

then have varying degrees of writer and reader involvement. For example, hypertexts can take 203

the form of single-author linked pages; single-author blogs; single-owner, multi-authored

threaded discussions; and reciprocal-owner, multi-authored threaded discussions, to name a few

possibilities. These texts can be viewed in secure communities, or they can be accessed instantaneously by anyone across the globe. This dynamic quality makes texts available in

entirely new ways and provides a vast potential for different iterations of meaning and

unpredictable instances of randomness. As Katherine Hayles asserts in My Mother Was a

Computer, “for networked texts, these vehicles are never the same twice, for they exist in

momentary configurations as data packets are switched quickly from one mode to another”

(103). Therefore, their meaning is never the same; one can never be assured of authentic

meaning.

Hypertexts also challenge our notions of stable presence and coherent subjectivity. In

regards to indications of presence, Michael Joyce suggests that online spaces, like those of the

MOO, mark “the swell and surge of lives lived” (111), and I think he really sees this in terms of

lives lived in both the past and present tenses. There is a presence that exists within online

spaces that is both full and empty of meaning. People are somehow there and not there at the

same time. The effervescence of their lives written on the screen maintains a self on the screen

that is both present and fleeting. This disruption of stable notions of presence is yet another way

in which the electronic environment is an optimal space for the study of poetic rhetoric and the

poetically rhetorical e-essay.

Beyond Humanism: The Posthuman Qualities of Poetic Rhetoric

The online environment’s resistance to stable notions of subjectivity is its final quality

that reflects poetic rhetoric and destabilizes humanistic qualities that often go unquestioned.

This point encompasses much of my overall argument for the dissertation; it applies to the 204

meaning that we believe we create and the meaning we attempt to attach to our notions of self

and identity. Throughout this text, I have argued that the forms of meaning around us should not

be accepted unquestioningly, but, rather, we should consider the complexity with which they are

created, and I have argued that they are created through the poetically rhetorical process that

flows through language. To accept this we must also accept the idea that the meaning we attach

to our notions of self is unstable as well, itself a product of the poetically rhetorical nature of

language. In a sense, this is what is conveyed most strongly by the term “posthuman,” and the

term posthuman is most often associated with electronic media. As Katherine Hayles says, being

posthuman means acknowledging that we do not have control over ourselves or our environment.

This argument expresses a movement beyond the humanist reliance on free will and human

rationality.

Donna Haraway’s description of the cyborg exemplifies the posthuman disruption of

subjectvitity. Haraway describes the cyborg as one who rejoices “in the illegitimate fusions of

animal and machine” and thus subverts “the structure and modes of reproduction of ‘Western’

identity” (176). Haraway shows the ways in which our assumptions about identity and

subjectivity are ultimately based in sociopolitical motivations, not any sort of natural

delineations. This observation disrupts arguments made by humanists that man is naturally more

advanced than animals and that reason is the faculty of excellence. Ultimately the image of the cyborg blurs the boundaries between man and animal or man and machine and challenges all that

we know about our formations of our selves. Katherine Hayles also argues that acknowledging

our cyborg nature means acknowledging that our lives exist as narrative constructions (How We

Became Posthuman 114). Cyborgs exist both literally and metaphorically, and in many ways we can make the same statement about our lives. This shows the complexity with which we live our 205 lives, and it emphasizes our narrative nature. Our lives are stories and we are but characters in them, created and powered by language. In this way, the posthumanism of the cyborg reflects my description of poetic rhetoric.

Hayles describes the posthuman as the noisy, shifting, ambiguous hybrid of human and machine, where absence and randomness are credited with having generative properties. Her description of the posthuman juxtaposes the humanist perspective and its idea of the human being as autonomous individual moving freely about the world, with the idea of the posthuman as having a mind that is self-created, that is part of a web of dynamic systems. The posthuman, according to Hayles, posits the end of a type of humanity in which individuals can afford to see themselves as having the luxury of being autonomous and exercising free will. In response to the humanist concept of the autonomous individual, who privileges the presence of a unified truth, Hayles posits her dialectic of pattern and randomness, where even though the presence of the pattern seems to be the privileged term, the randomness is actually what ends up being creative and generative. Hayles notes that textual and digital posthuman texts present narratives that capture the noisiness and ambiguity of the body itself.

I suggest that poetic rhetoric is a way of approaching writing that both encapsulates and is illustrated by Hayles’s descriptions of posthumanism. The notion of being a hybrid of human and machine both acknowledges our technologies of production and embraces a lack of control that is constitutive of poetic rhetoric. When we read and write with an eye to poetic rhetoric, we acknowledge the play of randomness and our inability to control our language. This, however, can be a generative property.

Hayles creates a schematic for approaching electronic texts that revolves around presence, absence, randomness, and pattern, and then beyond that, those elements work to 206 develop the concepts of materiality, hyperreality, information, and mutation (249). She uses four different texts (some of them electronic), along with her , to help further illuminate posthumanism. By exploring different texts according to her paradigm, Hayles is able to come to many profound insights and to raise questions that are deeply relevant to all of humanity or posthumanity, as it were. She finds that all of these texts that deal with electronic environments, technology, and posthumanism grapple in some way with the question concerning the subject, and it is this kind of reading and writing I suggest we concern ourselves with.

Hayles is suggesting that we question and revel in that moment that exists between the form and the reader. While I believe this can be done within the reading and writing of traditional texts, I also think electronic texts hold a great possibility for this process as well.

Hypertexts offer an increased opportunity for the randomness that I see described in Hayles’s theories and in my discussions of poetic rhetoric. I would also encourage students to experiment with creating their own hypertext documents that blend and blur elements of poetic rhetoric. We have much to learn from considering poetic rhetoric in terms of the posthuman. The qualities that Hayles emphasizes in her approach to the posthuman may present a valuable way to approach poetic rhetoric; they certainly reflect many of the tensions and elements of aesthetics and rhetoric as they are discussed by Nietzsche and his predecessors. We commonly think of the term “posthuman” as a contemporary concept: one that came into being with the advent of artificial intelligence. However, when we view posthumanism from a poetically rhetorical perspective, we can see that posthumanism, while not often acknowledged as such, is a process that has always already existed in parallel with human thought. That is, if we accept the notion that writing is a process that shapes and creates us, and writing has existed since the beginning of human consciousness, then we are always already beyond the state of authentic, true, and natural 207 selfhood or humanity. Our notions of self are always comprised of the poetically rhetorical process of creation and deferral of meaning that is inherent within language; therefore, we always are, and always have been, beyond humanism.

208

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APPENDIX

“INERTIA”

Paul Heilker

October 1989

I find the orangutans in a dark rectangle in the oldest part of the Fort Worth Zoo. Behind

heavy glass, four feet of empty space, and one-and-a-half-inch gray steel bars, four orangutans sit on three concrete slabs, motionless, victims of gravity. Arms languish limply at their sides, though one finger loops loosely around the base of a bar. Long, red-brown hair mats into shapeless rugs. Black almonds sink into resigned, static masks.

Ten steps away, down in a pit, a lone raccoon stands upright for a second and scans his

severe horizon, eyes shining like small, dark marbles. He wheels left and scurries along the back

of his world, right shoulder rubbing against the rough rock wall. After a hairpin turn, he gallops

across the half-circle of gravel to make a hard right down a ramp to a dry moat painted light blue.

He sprints to the dead end, makes two hard lefts, and rushes back the length of the moat and up

the ramp. Reaching the gravel again, he pauses, rises on his hind legs, surveys his limits for a moment, then begins another frenetic circuit.

February 2001

My mother, Mary, is dying of congestive heart failure and emphysema. Her weak heart

was discovered during dance lessons when she was eight. Her lungs were scarred when she

worked at the Bulova Watch Company in Queens in her late twenties: she bathed tiny parts in

cyanide before their final assembly. She has been chronically ill for ten years, critically ill for 217

two, and morbidly ill for six months. I am visiting with her in New York to give my sister a break.

Mom is on oxygen 24 hours a day. Even so, her damaged heart and lungs can barely keep up. She sleeps 18 hours a day, and it takes a good 90 minutes for her to become lucid after waking up. Her shins and feet are a cold, swollen blue-maroon. I help her to sit up in bed so she can watch the Crocodile Hunter. I go to McDonalds twice a day to buy her the cream of broccoli soup she will eat. I find the dusty bottles of magnesium citrate laxative she wants on the bottom shelf of the pharmacy. I help her shuffle to the bathroom and back. At 3:00 one morning, I pick her up from the kitchen floor because she has mistaken a chair for the toilet in the dark and

slipped in her own pee. She rehearses well-worn stories, repeats questions about my kids; I

listen, answer. Mostly, Mom thanks me for being there.

I dwell with her for two weeks, but then I have to leave. As I say good-bye, I understand

that I won’t see her again, that she is not going to make it to my sister’s wedding in May. She

tells me that it’s time for me to go. She tells me to have a safe trip.

March 2001

The call wakes me from fitful hotel sleep. I wrestle my way from under the oppressive

bedspread, claw my way to consciousness. It is my wife, and my mom has died. All I can think

is that I have to get home. I’m dressed and packed in five minutes, moving but mindless,

moving in order to stay mindless. I find myself in the lobby restaurant choking down a bowl of

oatmeal. I feel compelled to flee, to return, but there are no straight lines this morning; the cab to

the airport must first evade the police roping off streets for the St. Patrick’s Day parade. We

snake our way through downtown Denver, and I am relieved to feel myself being forced into the 218 seat cushions as we accelerate, swaying against the door on turns. When we finally reach the highway, I press my forehead against the cold window, soothed by the blur racing by outside. I walk around the airport all day until my flight, covering the same ground several times. I search for moving sidewalks to see how quickly I can move through space. I create my own breeze.