Rhetoric, Culture, and Technology
James P. Zappen
Introduction to Rhetoric, Culture, and Technology
A. Problems of Meaning and Representation
1. "That since beauty and ugliness are opposite, they are two things;
and consequently each of them is one. The same holds of justice and
injustice, good and bad, and all the essential Forms: each in itself is
one; but they manifest themselves in a great variety of combinations,
with actions, with material things, and with one another, and so each
seems to be many."
Plato, The Republic of Plato, trans. Francis MacDonald Cornford
(London: Oxford University Press, 1941), 183.
2. "At any rate, the need to symbolise moral abstractions as final was
the primary motive, we suggest, for calling them Forms. For the Forms,
in order to be such, have to enjoy a kind of independent existence; they
are permanent shapes imposed upon the flux of action, and shapes which,
while they can be viewed and understood by my psyche, cannot be
invented by it."
Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 1963), 263.
3. "Gorgias of Leontini began from the same position as those who have
abolished the criterion, but did not follow the same line of attack as
the school of Protagoras. In what is entitled On the Nonexistent or
On Nature he proposes three successive headings: first and foremost,
that nothing exists; second, that even if it exists it is inapprehensible
to man [i.e., humanity]; third, that even if it is apprehensible, still
it is without a doubt incapable of being expressed or explained to the
next man [i.e., human]."
Sextus, Against the Schoolmasters, VII, 65, in The Older
Sophists, ed. Rosamond Kent Sprague, 42-46 (Columbia: University of
South Carolina Press, 1972), 42.
4. "Of everything and anything the measure [truly-is] human(ity): of
that which is, that it is the case; of that which is not, that it is
not the case."
Plato, Theaetetus, 152a, attributed to Protagoras, in Edward
Schiappa, Protagoras and Logos: A Study in Greek Philosophy and
Rhetoric, Studies in Rhetoric/Communication (Columbia: University
of South Carolina Press, 1991), 121.
5. "Whatever sorts of thing seem just and honorable to a particular city
are in fact [just and honorable] for it, as long as it so regards them."
Plato, Theaetetus, 167c, sometimes attributed to Protagoras, in
Martin Ostwald, From Popular Sovereignty to the Sovereignty of Law:
Law, Society, and Politics in Fifth-Century Athens (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1986), 240.
6. "Words spoken are symbols or signs of affections or impressions of
the soul; written words are the signs of words spoken. As writing, so
also is speech not the same for all races of men [i.e., humans]. But
the mental affections themselves, of which these words are primarily
signs, are the same for the whole of mankind [i.e., humankind], as are
also the objects of which those affections are representations, or
likenesses, images, copies."
Aristotle, On Interpretation, I, 16a4-9, in The Categories,
On Interpretation, trans. Harold P. Cooke; Prior Analytics,
trans. Hugh Tredennick (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1938), 115.
7a. "If, for Aristotle, for example, 'spoken
words . . . are the symbols of mental
experience . . . and written words are the symbols
of spoken words' (De interpretatione, 1, 16a3) it is because
the voice, producer of the first symbols, has a relationship of
essential and immediate proximity with the mind." (11)
7b. "The formal essence of the signified is presence, and the
privilege of its proximity to the logos as phonè is the
privilege of presence. This is the inevitable response as soon as one
asks: 'what is the sign?,' that is to say, when one submits the sign to
the question of essence, to the 'ti esti.' The 'formal essence' of the
sign can only be determined in terms of presence. One cannot get around
that response, except by challenging the very form of the question and
beginning to think that the sign is X that ill-named thing, X the only one, that escapes the instituting question of
philosophy: 'what is . . . ?'" (18-19)
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974; Johns Hopkins
Paperbacks, 1976), 11, 18-19.
8. "In actual fact, the utterly incompatible elements comprising
Dostoevsky's material are distributed among several worlds and several
autonomous consciousnesses; they are presented not within a single
field of vision but within several fields of vision, each full and of
equal worth; and it is not the material directly but these worlds,
their consciousnesses with their individual fields of vision that
combine in a higher unity, a unity, so to speak, of the second order,
the unity of a polyphonic novel . . . . It is as
if varying systems of calculation were united here in the complex unity
of an Einsteinian universe (although the juxtaposition of Dostoevsky's
world with Einstein's world is, of course, only an artistic comparison
and not a scientific analogy)."
Mikhail [M.] Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics,
ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson, Theory and History of Literature, Vol. 8
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 16.
9a. "Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey are in agreement that the notion
of knowledge as accurate representation, made possible by special mental
processes, and intelligible through a general theory of representation,
needs to be abandoned." (6)
9b. "The picture which holds traditional philosophy captive is that of
the mind as a great mirror, containing various
representations—some accurate, some not—and capable of
being studied by pure nonempirical methods. Without the notion of the
mind as mirror, the notion of knowledge as accuracy of representation
would not have suggested itself." (12)
9c. "The only point on which I would insist is that philosophers' moral
concern should be with continuing the conversation of the West, rather
than with insisting upon a place for the traditional problems of modern
philosophy within that conversation." (394)
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1979), 6, 12, 394.
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10.
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Jacobs-Rosenbaum
Levin
Thorne
Hayes
Ohman (?)
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Stanley Fish, "How to Recognize a Poem When You see One," in Is There
a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities,
322-37 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 323.
11. "Interpretive communities are made up of those who share
interpretive strategies not for reading (in the conventional sense) but
for writing texts, for constituting their properties and assigning
their intentions. In other words, these strategies exist prior to the
act of reading and therefore determine the shape of what is read rather
than, as is usually assumed, the other way around."
Stanley Fish, "Interpreting the Variorum," in Is There a Text
in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities, 147-73
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 171.
12. "Epimenides was a Cretan who made one immortal statement: 'All
Cretans are liars.' A sharper version of the statement is simply 'I am
lying'; or 'This statement is false.' It is that last version which I
will usually mean when I speak of the Epimenides paradox. It is a
statement which rudely violates the usually assumed dichotomy of
statements into true and false, because if you tentatively think it is
true, then it immediately backfires on you and makes you think it is
false. But once you've decided it is false, a similar backfiring
returns you to the idea that it must be true."
Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden
Braid (Basic Books, 1979; New York: Random House, Vintage Books,
1980), 17.
13. "What withers in the age of the technological reproducibility of
the work of art is the latter's aura. This process is symptomatic; its
significance extends far beyond the realm of art. It might be stated
as a general formula that the technology of reproduction detaches the
reproduced object from the sphere of tradition. By replicating the work
many times over, it substitutes a mass existence for a unique
existence. And in permitting the reproduction to reach the recipient
in his or her own situation, it actualizes that which is
reproduced." (22)
14. "From a photographic plate, for example, one can make any number of
prints: to ask for the 'authentic' print makes no sense. But as
soon as the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applied to artistic
production, the whole social function of art is revolutionized. Instead
of being founded on ritual, it is based on a different practice:
politics." (24-25)
Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological
Reproducibility: Second Version," in The Work of Art in the Age of
Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media,
ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, trans.
Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eiland, and Others, 19-65
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 2008), 22, 24-25.
15. "The 'simultaneous field' of electronic information structures,
today reconstitutes the conditions and need for dialogue and
participation, rather than specialism and private initiative in all
levels of social experience."
Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic
Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), 141.
16. "By crossing into a space whose curvature is no longer that of the
real, nor that of truth, the era of simulation is inaugurated by a
liquidation of all referentials—worse: with their artificial
resurrection in the system of signs, a material more malleable than
meaning, in that it lends itself to all systems of equivalences, to all
binary oppositions, to all combinatory algebra. It is no longer a
question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a
question of substituting the signs of the real for the
real . . . ."
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria
Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 2.
17. "In the symbolic exchange of the
gift, . . . the object 'is inseparable from the
concrete relation in which it is exchanged' and the 'transferential
pact' it seals. Once given it is an 'absolutely singular' phenomenon,
actualizing the 'unique moment of the relationship and becoming 'the
concrete manifestation of the total relationship.' The sign originates
with the breaking of this bond, no longer gathering its meaning from
it, but taking on a relationship to all other signs in the semiotic
system in its precoded difference, being unilaterally, individually
appropriated for that meaning. Baudrillard's example [of the symbolic],
highlighting the survival of the gift, is the wedding ring, which, once
exchanged, becomes a unique and irreplaceable incarnation of the
relationship. Contemporary examples of semioticization are perhaps
easier to find, from city centre theme pubs with original farming tools
and equipment anachronistically nailed to the walls and original oak
barrels decorated with plastic barley on the shelves behind the seats,
to America-themed diners and pizza restaurants with antique
typewriters, Chevy fenders and baseball gear fixed to the walls, all
semiotically organized and combining to signify what they might once
have actualized and lived." (17-18)
18. "The consequence of the global village is indeed the instant
availability of all times, places and experiences, but for Baudrillard
this 'obscene' transparency leads to the erosion of all meaning,
relations and participation. The scene of the symbolic is replaced by
'the smooth and functional surface of communication,' reducing us to
'terminals of multiple networks,' unable even to define the limits of
our being and merged with our electronic connections." (57)
William Merrin, Baudrillard and the Media: A Critical Introduction
(Cambridge, United Kingdom: Polity Press, 2005), 17-18, 57.
Latest Update: 2012-01-15
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