Reality -- what a concept.

[Andy Crockett]

CJ. sorry I'm so long in replying to your reply.  I think your bus fable
gets at my vague question best.  I'm familiar with the Bitzer article.
Even though he uses the term "discover," while Vatz uses "create,"
Bitzer assigns more agency, more author-ity to the rhetor.  Teaching
comp, I'm more inclined to foster authority in my students, but not a
naive authority.  Talking fictional selves, well, that's another story.
I wonder if concern about agency ("I" am always already
preempted...or...I'm my own person...) is a peculiarly Western fetish
and if other cultures, particularly those in which the self/agent takes
its identity from the family or social group, are less inclined to
efface the self as agent in favor of discourse.  (Sorry to conflate self
with agency, identity, etc.  I don't have the energy to parse them out.)
At any rate, "concept," like "reality," is quite a concept as well.  Of
course 'reality' is culturally and linguistically constructed,
inflected, etc., etc.  Still the "real," an indifferent nature from
which we jumped once upon a time, makes any dialogue possible, no?  Andy


>What I think you're talking about is Stasis and Kairos. Even if we
start=
> with
>the classical Greek tradition -- the pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle --
we=
> see
>a serious and complex rift between those grounded in philosophical
Truths,=
> and
>those willing to operate from a relativistic (some might argue even
>solipsistic) view of stasis (rhetorical situation) and kairos (the
>impulse/appropriateness of the moment).
>
>Though I am most comfortable leaving questions of Truth, Goodness, and=
> Beauty
>to the philosophers and theologians, as a Rhetorician I find a great
deal to
>talk about in two seminal articles:
>
>Bitzer, Lloyd F. =93The Rhetorical Situation.=94 Philosophy & Rhetoric
1:1=
> (1968):
>1-14.
>Vatz, Richard. =93The Myth of the Rhetorical Situation.=94 Philosophy
&=
> Rhetoric
>6:3, 154-161.=20
>Bitzer lays out the elements by means of which the writer/orator
*discovers*
>the situation, and then uses language to clearly make descriptions,=
> judgments
>and arguments about it. Vatz argues that writers *create* situation by
means=
> of
>selection and semantics.
>
>Although Bitzer is very seductive in his application of Occam's razor
to the
>issues of rhetorical situation and our impulse to alter perceptions
through
>utterances, in the end Richard Vatz is powerfully persuasive with his
lucid
>commentary (call it "post-modern" if that bakes your academic cookies)
on=
> the
>ability of lantuage to alter our perceptions of "reality."
>
>Hayden White's _Tropics of Discourse_ nails the coffin shut on
"universal
>truths" and any kind of notions that all readers / observers function
in the
>same reality.
>
>As I've always said:
>
>"Perhaps solipsism only works as a point of view until you step in
front of=
> a
>bus. However, the bus does not squash me because I believe it exists.
Oh no.
>The bus squishes me because it believes that *I* exist."
>
>With smiles and a refusal to take any of this *too* seriously,
>
>CJ Jeney
>
>
>
>_____________________________
>CJ Jeney
>Arizona State University
>
>http://www.public.asu.edu/~starbuck/
>azcacti at asu.edu
>_____________________________
>Mork: "Fly, little egg! You're free!"
>Egg:   *splatt*
>


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