Second Day (The Office) post-script

I left class wondering about this: where does our knowledge about rhetoric actually come from?  What are the sources and origins?  It's not just out of thin air, right?  So what precipitates our knowledge about rhetoric?

I was particularly interested in our attempts to DISagree in class today over the definition of the term "rhetoric."  We had a hard time!  Seems to me that the reasons were good ones: we don't know a lot about it yet, we all draw from the same sources so far, and we are TRAINED to agree.

These are all good explanations, but they are also good reasons to PRACTICE disagreeing.  New knowledge is made through the tensions and differences, seems to me (ultimately we may agree, but any new idea causes a furor at first).  

Also, it seems to me that disagreeing means in a way that you're taking somebody seriously.  When I hear somebody say only "that's nice," I think I'm being dismissed or swept under the rug, not really being taken seriously.  I don't like it!  Not at all!

Next time, I'll lecture some more about the origins of rhetoric, we'll discuss the James Porter article and your questions about it, talk about your one-page paper on "How Do College Students Use Rhetoric," and maybe finish The Office, where Kevin defines the terms of the debate, we see Oscar's lame logos at work, Kelly's goofy pathos, etc.

Second day of Rhetoric (PWR 399)

It was a real pleasure to meet everyone yesterday.  I thought it was useful to think of the people in the room not just as individuals (though everyone is) but instead as an intersection, the intersection of their various communities.  I am always excited by the crazy chicken-and-egg paradox: do communities shape individuals, or do individuals shape communities?

I was impressed by the AWESOME list of words we have for "community" or "group."  I wish I had that paper now!  But we obviously are so very sensitive and attuned to the types and nature of our communities (brigades, clans, families, units, neighborhoods............).

My argument -- it's an experiment, not a fact -- is that it's the communities we live in that give us the license and reason to make knowledge.  I was driving my son (16) and his two friends in the car this morning and they were talking excitedly about new video games (World of Warcraft? Breach? MindCraft?) and I was so very much outside their conversation.  But they were putting new experiences together, valuing the whole process, coming to categories, claims, implications, theories, and the like -- and all the while were creating themselves AND their communities.  So that's what communities do, that's their function: to create discourse, to create knowledge.  It doesn't have to be schoolish or academic knowledge, but it is valuable knowledge nonetheless.  To whom is this knowledge valuable, where does it do work, where does it get traction? In the community.

Yesterday we talked about how a discipline and a major (same thing, seen from different perspectives) is always making knowledge, always abuzz with new claims, viewpoints, asssertions, and terms.  I said that the really interesting ideas come from the points of TENSION in a discipline.  Evolution/Creationism, for instance, is a point of tension in Biology (or was).  These points of tension can be discovered in key terms and concepts.  What are the key terms of your discipline?

How is knowledge made?  By an active and often contentious discussion.  The practice and study of how knowledge is made -- is that rhetoric?

First day

I'm excited to meet the new students.  The first day means I don't know my audience yet, so I have to think about the course in a new way, trying to anticipate the best way to introduce the subject.  It's a little bit of a challenge (it's sometimes easier to have a conversation when you have a lot of subject matter in common), but it's also a great way to deepen and think through things in a new way.

It occurs to me for the first time today (a "duh" moment) that this is one of the very cool values of the academy, of higher education: you have teachers re-formatting and revising their understanding of the material every semester.  In fact, we have a derogatory joke, a cliched image, of the teacher who lectures from his old, yellowed notes every semester.  Nothing new, nothing surprising happens.  No wonder colleges are the places we make knowledge: everyone there is a newcomer semester after semester, even the most seasoned professor (unless he actually lectures from old, yellowed notes).

Colleges are not just places where knowledge is trotted out, old die-hard facts and truisms.  They can be that sometimes, but also places where what we know is challenged.  I have a picture in my office that says "It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it" (Jacob Bronowski).  I think that is a very important way to look at rhetoric, too: it's a matter of questioning, opening inquiry, not codifying facts <yawn>.  I'm excited.