Rhetoric & Technical Communication
Rhetoric & Technical Communication
Toscano, Aaron, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Dept. of English

Resources and Daily Activities

  • Dr. Toscano’s Homepage
  • ENGL 2116-083: Introduction to Technical Communication
    • ENGL 2116 sec. 083 Major Assignments (Summer 2020)
      • Final Portfolio Requirements
      • Oral Presentations
    • June 11th: Continue with I, Robot
    • June 15th: Ethics and Perspective Discussion
      • Ethical Dilemmas for Homework
      • Ethical Dilemmas to Ponder
      • Mapping Our Personal Ethics
    • June 16th: More on Ethics
    • June 1st: Effective Documents for Users
    • June 2nd: Final Project and Research Discussion
      • Epistemology and Other Fun Research Ideas
      • Making Résumés and Cover Letters Better
      • Research
    • June 3rd: Technology in a Social Context
    • June 8th: Information Design and Visuals
    • June 9th: Proposals, Marketing, and Rhetoric
    • May 18th: Introduction to the course
    • May 19th: Critical Technological Awareness
    • May 20th: Audience, Purpose, and General Introduction
    • May 21st: Résumé Stuff
      • Making Résumés and Cover Letters More Effective
      • Peter Profit’s Cover Letter
    • May 25th: More Resume Stuff
    • May 26th: Plain Language and Prose Revision
      • Euphemisms
      • Prose Practice for Next Class
      • Prose Revision Assignment
      • Revising Prose: Efficiency, Accuracy, and Good
      • Sentence Clarity
    • May 27th: More on Plain Language
    • May 28th: Review Prose Revision
  • ENGL 4182/5182: Information Design & Digital Publishing
    • August 21st: Introduction to the Course
      • Rhetorical Principles of Information Design
    • August 28th: Introduction to Information Design
      • Prejudice and Rhetoric
      • Robin Williams’s Principles of Design
    • Classmates Webpages (Fall 2017)
    • December 4th: Presentations
    • Major Assignments for ENGL 4182/5182 (Fall 2017)
    • November 13th: More on Color
      • Designing with Color
      • Important Images
    • November 20th: Extra-Textual Elements
    • November 27th: Presentation/Portfolio Workshop
    • November 6th: In Living Color
    • October 16th: Type Fever
      • Typography
    • October 23rd: More on Type
    • October 2nd: MIDTERM FUN!!!
    • October 30th: Working with Graphics
      • Beerknurd Calendar 2018
    • September 11th: Talking about Design without Using “Thingy”
      • Theory, theory, practice
    • September 18th: The Whole Document
    • September 25th: Page Design
  • ENGL 4183/5183: Editing with Digital Technologies
    • Efficiency in Writing Reviews
    • February 3rd: I’m in Love with the Shape of You(r Sentences)
    • January 20th: Introduction to the Course
    • January 27th: Rhetoric, Words, and Composing
    • Major Assignments for ENGL 4183/5183 (Spring 2021)
  • ENGL 4275: Rhetoric of Technology
    • April 13th: Authorities in Science and Technology
    • April 15th: Articles on Violence in Video Games
    • April 20th: Presentations
    • April 6th: Technology in the home
    • April 8th: Writing Discussion
    • Assignments for ENGL 4275
    • February 10th: Religion of Technology Part 3 of 3
    • February 12th: Is Love a Technology?
    • February 17th: Technology and Gender
    • February 19th: Technology and Expediency
    • February 24th: Semester Review
    • February 3rd: Religion of Technology Part 1 of 3
    • February 5th: Religion of Technology Part 2 of 3
    • January 13th: Technology and Meaning, a Humanist perspective
    • January 15th: Technology and Democracy
    • January 22nd: The Politics of Technology
    • January 27th: Discussion on Writing as Thinking
    • January 29th: Technology and Postmodernism
    • January 8th: Introduction to the Course
    • March 11th: Writing and Other Fun
    • March 16th: Neuromancer (1984) Day 1 of 2
    • March 18th: Neuromancer (1984) Day 2 of 2
    • March 23rd: Inception (2010)
    • March 25th: Writing and Reflecting Discussion
    • March 30th & April 1st: Count Zero
    • March 9th: William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984)
  • ENGL 4750-090 & ENGL 5050-092 Video Games & Culture
    • Assignments for Video Games & Culture
    • August 25th: Introduction to the Course
    • November 10th: Aggression & Addiction
    • November 3rd: Moral Panics and Health Risks
    • October 13th: Narrative, ludology, f(r)iction
    • October 20th: Serious Games
    • October 27: Risky Business?
    • October 6th: Hyperreality
    • September 1st: History of Video Games
    • September 22nd: Video Game Aesthetics
    • September 29th: (sub)Cultures and Video Games
    • September 8th: Defining Video Games and Critical Theory Introduction
      • Marxism for Video Game Analysis
      • Postmodernism for Video Game Analysis
  • ENGL 6166: Rhetorical Theory
    • April 13th: Umberto Eco & Jean Baudrillard
    • April 20th: Moving Forward on Theory
    • April 27th: Last Day of Class
    • April 6th: Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition
      • What is Postmodernism?
    • February 10th: St. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine [Rhetoric]
      • Oratory and Argument Analysis
    • February 17th: Knoblauch on Magical and Ontological Rhetoric
    • February 24th: Rene Descartes’ Discourse on Method
    • February 3rd: Aristotle’s On Rhetoric Books 2 and 3
      • Aristotle’s On Rhetoric, Book 2
      • Aristotle’s On Rhetoric, Book 3
    • January 13th: Introduction to Class
    • January 27th: Aristotle’s On Rhetoric Book 1
    • March 16th: Friedrich Nietzsche
    • March 23rd: Mythologies and Meaning of Meaning (part 2)
    • March 30th: Derrida’s (refusal to have) Positions
    • March 9th: Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women
    • Rhetorical Theory Assignments
  • LBST 2212-124, 125, 126, & 127
    • August 21st: Introduction to Class
    • August 23rd: Humanistic Approach to Science Fiction
    • August 26th: Robots and Zombies
    • August 28th: Futurism, an Introduction
    • August 30th: R. A. Lafferty “Slow Tuesday Night” (1965)
    • December 2nd: Technological Augmentation
    • December 4th: Posthumanism
    • November 11th: Salt Fish Girl (Week 2)
    • November 13th: Salt Fish Girl (Week 2 con’t)
    • November 18th: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Part 1)
      • More Questions than Answers
    • November 1st: Games Reality Plays (part II)
    • November 20th: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Part 2)
    • November 6th: Salt Fish Girl (Week 1)
    • October 14th: More Autonomous Fun
    • October 16th: Autonomous Conclusion
    • October 21st: Sci Fi in the Domestic Sphere
    • October 23rd: Social Aphasia
    • October 25th: Dust in the Wind
    • October 28th: Gender Liminality and Roles
    • October 2nd: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
    • October 30th: Games Reality Plays (part I)
    • October 9th: Approaching Autonomous
      • Analyzing Prose in Autonomous
    • September 11th: The Time Machine
    • September 16th: The Alien Other
    • September 18th: Post-apocalyptic Worlds
    • September 20th: Dystopian Visions
    • September 23rd: World’s Beyond
    • September 25th: Gender Studies and Science Fiction
    • September 30th: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
    • September 4th: Science Fiction and Social Breakdown
      • More on Ellison
      • More on Forster
    • September 9th: The Time Machine
  • LBST 2213/HTAS 2100: Science, Technology, and Society
    • December 10th: Violence in Video Games
    • December 15th: Video Games and Violence, a more nuanced view
    • December 1st: COVID-19 facial covering rhetoric
    • December 3rd: COVID-19 Transmission and Pandemics
    • December 8th: 500-word Essay
    • November 10th: Planet of the Apes. (1964) Ch. 27-end
    • November 12th: Frankenstein (1818) Preface-Ch. 8
    • November 17th: Frankenstein (1818) Ch. 9-Ch. 16
    • November 19th: Frankenstein (1818) Ch. 17-Ch. 24
    • November 3rd: Planet of the Apes. (1964) Ch. 1-17
    • November 5th: Planet of the Apes (1964) Ch. 18-26
    • October 13th: Collins & Pinch’s The Golem at Large (Technology), Ch. 5 and 6
    • October 15th: Collins & Pinch’s The Golem at Large (Technology), Ch. 7 and Conclusion
    • October 1st: The Golem at Large Introduction & Ch. 1
    • October 22nd: The Time Machine
    • October 29th: H.G. Wells and Adaptations
    • October 6th: Collins & Pinch’s The Golem at Large (Technology) Ch. 2
    • October 8th: Collins & Pinch’s The Golem at Large (Technology), Ch. 3 & 4
    • September 10th: Science and Technology, a Humanistic Approach
    • September 15th: Collins & Pinch’s The Golem (Science), Ch. 2
    • September 17th: Collins & Pinch’s The Golem (Science), Ch. 3 and 4
    • September 22nd: Collins & Pinch Ch. 5 & 6
    • September 24th: Collins & Pinch Ch. 7 & Conclusion
    • September 29th: Test 1
    • September 8th: Introduction to Class
  • New Media: Gender, Culture, Technology (Spring 2021)
    • February 16: Misunderstanding the Internet
    • February 23rd: Our Public Sphere and the Media
    • February 2nd: Introduction to Cultural Studies
    • January 26th: Introduction to New Media
  • Science Fiction in American Culture (Summer I–2020)
    • Assignments for Science Fiction in American Culture
    • Cultural Studies and Science Fiction Films
    • June 10th: Interstellar and Exploration themes
    • June 11th: Bicentennial Man
    • June 15th: I’m Only Human…Or am I?
    • June 16th: Wall-E and Environment
    • June 17th: Wall-E (2008) and Technology
    • June 18th: Interactivity in Video Games
    • June 1st: Firefly (2002) and Myth
    • June 2nd: “Johnny Mnemonic”
    • June 3rd: “New Rose Hotel”
    • June 4th: “Burning Chrome”
    • June 8th: Conformity and Monotony
    • June 9th: Cultural Constructions of Beauty
    • May 18th: Introduction to Class
    • May 19th: American Culture, an Introduction
    • May 20th: The Matrix
    • May 21st: Gender and Science Fiction
    • May 25th: Goals for I, Robot
    • May 26th: Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot
    • May 27th: Hackers and Slackers
    • May 30th: Inception
  • Teaching Portfolio
  • Topics for Analysis
    • American Culture, an Introduction
    • Feminism, An Introduction
    • Frankenstein Part I
    • Frankenstein Part II
    • Futurism Introduction
    • Langdon Winner Summary: The Politics of Technology
    • Marxist Theory (cultural analysis)
    • Oral Presentations
    • Our Public Sphere
    • Postmodernism Introduction
    • Protesting Confederate Place
    • Punctuation Refresher
    • QT, the Existential Robot
    • Religion of Technology Discussion
    • Rhetoric, an Introduction
      • Analyzing the Culture of Technical Writer Ads
      • Rhetoric of Technology
      • Visual Culture
      • Visual Perception
      • Visual Perception, Culture, and Rhetoric
      • Visual Rhetoric
      • Visuals for Technical Communication
      • World War I Propaganda
    • The Great I, Robot Discussion
      • I, Robot Short Essay Topics
    • The Rhetoric of Video Games: A Cultural Perspective
      • Civilization, an Analysis
    • The Sopranos
    • Why Science Fiction?
    • Zombies and Consumption Satire

Contact Me

Office: Fretwell 280F
Phone: 704.687.0613
Email: atoscano@uncc.edu
ENGL 6166: Rhetorical Theory » April 20th: Moving Forward on Theory

April 20th: Moving Forward on Theory

Today was supposed to be a day where you asked questions in our face-to-face class, and, we would reference the theorists more germane to your topics as they came up. I would like to follow that format if possible. But first, Chris will lead us on Jean Baudrillard’s “Simulacra and Simulation”

Judith Butler’s “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution”

Some Definitions for Butler’s Reading

  • Phenomenon: A thing which appears, or which is perceived or observed; a particular (kind of) fact, occurrence, or change as perceived through the senses or known intellectually; esp. a fact or occurrence, the cause or explanation of which is in question.
  • Phenomenology: a. Philos. The metaphysical study or theory of phenomena in general (as distinct from that of being).
    b. gen. The division of any science which is concerned with the description and classification of its phenomena, rather than causal or theoretical explanation.
  • Illocution: An act such as ordering, warning, undertaking, performed in saying something.
  • Epiphenomena: a. Something that appears in addition; a secondary symptom. Also transf.
    b. spec. in Psychol. Applied to consciousness regarded as a by-product of the material activities of the brain and nerve-system.
  • Episteme: Scientific knowledge, a system of understanding; spec. Foucault’s term for the body of ideas which shape the perception of knowledge at a particular period.

Quotations to Ponder from Butler

Remember, our conversations aren’t done to find the last word. Discussions of gender and media happened before this class and will happen long after this class. We’re really just trying to get a handle on our moment in time (think “episteme” from above). One could immediately come out swinging and claim Butler is misguided and obtuse, but the better approach is to try to understand why she concludes the way she does. This is a tough read, so let’s focus on some key places in the text:

  • Thesis…perhaps…p. 521: “the acts by which gender is constituted bear similarities to performative acts within theatrical contexts”
  • p. 519: “gender…is an identity constituted in time–an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts”
    • “…bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self”
  • p. 520: “the possibilities of gender transformation are to be found in the arbitrary relation between…a different sort of repeating, in the breaking or subversive repetition of that style”
  • p. 520: “Feminist theory has often been critical of naturalistic explanations of sex and sexuality that assume that the meaning of women’s social existence can be derived from some fact of their physiology”
  • p. 521: “the body is a historical situation,…a manner of doing dramatizing, and reproducing a historical situation”
  • p. 522: “those who fail to do their gender right are regularly punished”
    • How so? Think of examples where women or men appear to perform roles opposite of the gender. Can you think of a situation where one gender is not punished for performing the opposite gender’s prescribed role?
  • pp. 522-523: “The personal is thus political inasmuch as it is conditioned by shared social structures, but the personal has also been immunized against political challenge to the extent that public/private distinctions endure”
    • In the context of this class, consider our discussions on the INDIVIDUAL and how our culture promotes an ideology of individualism.
    • Our culture wants to believe that there’s a private self, in a vacuum, that is simply personal preference.
  • Break with capital-F Feminism…perhaps…p. 523: “one ought to consider the futility of a political program which seeks radically to transform the social situation of women without first determining whether the category of woman is socially constructed in such a way that to be a woman is, by definition, to be in an oppressed situation.”
    • Uh-oh…what is she suggesting? Think about our discussions of feminism not being monolithic.
    • What’s to gain from holding onto the distinction of the binary categories of men and women?
  • p. 524: “one way in which this system of compulsory heterosexuality is reproduced and concealed is through the cultivation of bodies into discrete sexes with ‘natural’ appearances and ‘natural’ heterosexual dispositions”

Fredric Jameson’s “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (1984; reprinted 1990)

I have a feeling this reading was much easier to read than previous authors. Some of his references might be obscure to us, but he’s writing fairly clearly. That’s a plus, right?

As usual, we have to find a way into the reading, one of several possible ways in. I like to think of Jameson in context of the rise of postmodern(ist) scholarship and, of course, his analysis of artchitecture. Before we get into those, though, we ought to consider Jameson’s caution about theorizing Postmodernism itself. He warns that it difficult:

  • “Postmodernism theory seems indeed to be a ceaseless process of internal rollover in which the position of the observer is turned inside out and the tabulation recontinued on some larger scale” (p. 64).
  • when defining ideology’s function…
    “the production of functioning and living ideologies, is distinct in different historical situations…[and] there may be historical situations in which it is not possible at all–and this would seem to be our situation in the current crisis” (p. 53).

Culture Wars

Although Jameson isn’t as well known in popular circles, he does sort of figure into the “Culture Wars” of the 1990s. Postmodern theory and theorizing gave rise to new kinds of scholarship that critiqued the hegemonic ideology of American society (and Western). Also, it (usually) embraced be the Left, and, therefore, anathema to the Right. However, the postmodern condition isn’t a movement that you can be on or off–you’re situated in it.

Postmodern theory is beneficial for all kinds of study inside the academy, but here’s my reasons for English Studies:

  • Literature: Jameson brings up interpretations of literature in his chapter, but Postmodernism is crucial for serious literature students. Unless I missed something in the last few years, Postmodernism is the dominant analytical framework for literature over the last 20 years.
  • Rhetoric/Composition: Because we think about student identity as a culmination of ones experiences (even if some of us think they’re totally socially constructed), PoMo theory allows us to consider the multiple positions from which people argue, write, consider, and participate in democracy.
  • Technical Communication: Well, as a member of a postindustrial, global economy, you need to understand how hierarchies lend themselves to technological production and, in turn, how humans interact with technology. Without that insight, you could edit a document, but you can’t re-vision one.

Architecture

This is a great subject for us. I have a video for us and some Vegas pictures. Maybe we ought to back up a second to Eco’s discussion of hyperreality. Jameson mentions that architecture was important for his theories on postmodernism:

“It is in the realm of architecture, however, that modifications in aesthetic production are most dramatically visible, and that their theoretical problems have been most centrally raised and articulated; it was indeed from architectural debates that my own conception of postmodernism…initially began to emerge” (p. 2).

  • The museum guard and tourists (pp. 32-33)
  • The Westin Bonaventure in Los Angeles: “aspires to being a total space, a complete world, a kind of miniature city; to this new total space, meanwhile, corresponds a new collective practice, a new mode in which individuals move and congregate, something like the practice of a new historically original kind of hypercrowd.” (pp. 38-45)
  • p. 63: “Postmodern buildings, on the contrary, celebrate their insertion into the heterogeneous fabric of the commercial strip and the motel and fast-food landscape of the postsuperhighway American city.”

Other Places to Focus on with Jameson

As with all our other readings, we could go into much more detail, so we’ll need to realize we won’t cover everything. Below are some quotations to help us choose.

  • p. 6: “If we do not achieve some general sense of a cultural dominant, then we fall back into a view of present history as sheer heterogeneity, random difference, a coexistence of a host of distinct forces whose effectivity is undecidable.”
  • p. 35: Defining what we’re about: “The other of our society is in that sense no longer Nature at all, as it was in precapitalist societies, but something else which we must now identify.”
    • What is the new other?
      • “Technology may well serve as adequate shorthand to designate that enormous properly human and anti-natural power of dead human labor stored up in our machinery.”
    • What about capital?
      • From Mandel’s “three fundamental moments in capitalism”:
        “These are market capitalism, the monopoly stage or the stage of imperialism, and our own, wrongly called postindustrial, but what might better be termed multinational, capital.”
  • p. 48: “No theory to define “the cultural act outside the massive Being of capital….distance in general (including ‘critical distance’ in particular) has very precisely been abolished in the new space of postmodernism.”
  • p. 62: “The point is that we are within the culture of postmodernism to the point where its facile repudiation is as impossible as any equally facile celebration of it is complacent and corrupt.”
  • p. 54: “The new political art…will have to hold to the truth of postmodernism, that is to say, to its fundamental object–the world space of multinational capital.”
  • p. 54: “The political form of postmodernism, if there ever is any, will have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on as well as a spatial scale.”

Roland Barthes’s Mythologies (1954)

A few terms to define from the preface:

  • bourgeois: characteristic of the middle class.
  • petit-bourgeois: belonging to the lower middle class.
  • semioclasm: the destruction of signs (that, specifically, aren’t useful).

Key quotations from the preface:

  • p. 9: First theoretical framework is “an ideological critique bearing on the language of so-called mass-culture.”
    Second theoretical framework is “a first attempt to analyse semiologically the mechanics of this language.”
  • p. 11: Barthes’s motivation for Mythologies is “a feeling of impatience at the sight of the ‘naturalness’ with which newspapers, art and common sense constantly dress up reality which…is undoubtedly determined by history.”
  • p. 11: “myth is a language”
  • p. 12: a paraphrase of a paraphrase: things repeated are culturally significant.
  • p. 12: “What I claim is to live to the full contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.”

Other areas of the book:

Although we can’t get through everything tonight, we should focus on the following places:

  • “The Romans in Films,” pp. 26-28
    • p. 26: “Romans are Romans thanks to the most legible of signs: hair on the forehead.”
    • p. 28: “it is both reprehensible and deceitful to confuse the sign with what is signified.”
    • Hollywood Romans and Shutterstock Romans
    • To be fair, there are lots more pictures in the Roman category
  • “Operation Margarine,” 41-42.
    • p. 42: “A little ‘confessed’ evil saves one from acknowledging a lot of hidden evil.”
    • p. 42: What does it matter, after all, if Order is a little brutal or a little blind, when it allows us to live cheaply?”
  • “Of Novels and Children” (scroll down a bit)
  • Of course, times have changed, which is why during the 2016 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton avoided being associated with children…
  • “Toys,” pp. 53-55
    • p. 54: “the child can only identify himself as owner, as user, never creator.”
    • p. 54: “French toys are usually based on imitation, they are meant to produce children who are users, not creators.”
  • “The Nautilus and the Drunken Boat,” pp. 65-67
    • p. 65: “Imagination about travel corresponds in Verne to an exploration of closure…to enclose oneself and to settle, such is the existential dream of childhood and of Verne.”
    • p. 67: “Rimbaud’s Drunken Boat, the boat…can make man proceed from a psycho-analysis of the cave to a genuine poetics of exploration.”
    • And to what (to whom) might the above refer?
  • “Neither-Nor Criticism,” pp. 81-83
  • p. 81: “Culture is a noble, universal thing, placed outside social choices: culture has no weight.”
    “Ideologies…are partisan inventions: so, onto the scales, and out with them!”
  • p. 82: “two common expedients of bourgeois mythology”–
    1) “a certain idea of freedom, conceived as ‘the refusal of a priori judgments‘.”
    2) pp. 82-83: “the euphoric reference to the ‘style’ of the writer as to an eternal value of Literature.”
  • p. 83: Literature–“It is no longer its ornaments that it is defending, but its skin.”
  • “The New Citroen,” pp. 88-90
  • “Plastic,” pp. 97-99

Jodi Dean’s “Enjoying Neoliberalism” (2009)

I actually have a page from another class devoted to Jodi Dean, so let’s just go there.

Slavoj Žižek’s “The Totalitarian Invitation to Enjoyment” (1991)

This requires quite a bit of psychoanalysis, so, in an effort to stay as close to rhetoric as possible, I’m going to just discuss this if questions come up.

Three Important Terms to Consider

  • Id: the unconscious, unorganized part of one’s personality; often accessible through dreams.
  • Ego: the conscious part of one’s personality. From Freud: “The ego represents what may be called reason and common sense, in contrast to the id, which contains the passions” (p. 15).
    • “Thus in its relation to the id [the ego] is like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse; with this difference, that the rider tries to do so with his own strength while the ego uses borrowed forces….Often a rider, if he is not to be parted from his horse, is obliged to guide it where it wants to go; so in the same way the ego is in the habit of transforming the id’s will into action as if it were its own.” (p. 15)
    • Compare to Plato’s metaphor of the chariot…
  • Super-ego: the mainly conscious conscience of one’s personality that embodies ideals, goals, and confidence; it also prohibits drives, fantasies, feelings, and actions; is an internalization of culture and cultural norms.

From Freud, Sigmund. The Ego and the Id. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1962 (original work published 1923).

The above three Freudian terms have a rather complex relationship to one another and their supposed development is also quite difficult to describe. However, for our purposes, what do the three suggest about a person’s relationship to others? What is the cultural significance of these personality components? What do they have to offer an analysis on rhetoric?

Key places in the aritcle:

  • p. 73: “We represent for ourselves an object, and the pleasure or displeasure attached to its representation sets off our activity.”
  • p. 75: “Kantian ethics…our activity can be considered truly moral only insofar as it is motivated by the form alone, to the exclusion of every pathological impetus, however noble it may be (compassion, etc.).”
    • “The stain of enjoyment that pertains to the Kantian categorical imperative is not difficult to discern: its very rigorist formalism assumes the tone of cruel, obscene neutrality.”
    • Think obsession with duty.
  • Lacan claims, “it is the subject who determines himself as object, in his encounter with the division of subjectivity,” and that subject assuming the role of the object is precisely what sustains the reality of the situation of what is called the sado masochistic drive” (p. 185).
  • p. 83: “enjoyment is the ‘surplus’ that comes from our knowledge that our pleasure involves the thrill of entering a forbidden domain–that is to say, that our pleasure involves a certain displeasure.
  • p. 85: “This is the way superego is at work in the very heart of the autonomous, free subject: the external social law is sustained by compulsion, whereas the superego shares with freedom its non-intrusive character: in itself, it is completely powerless, it is activated only insofar as the subject addresses it.”
  • p. 86: rationalization
  • p. 87: “the core of so-called doublethink: we must consciously manipulate the whole time, change the past, fabricate ‘objective reality,’ at the same time sincerely believing in the results of the manipulation….the knowledge that we ‘deceive’ in no way prevents us from believing in the results of the deception.“
  • p. 93: “Authority bases its charismatic power on symbolic ritual, on the form of the Institution as such….it is Law itself which speaks through him.”

Martin Heidegger “The Question Concerning Technology” (1954)

There’s a reason this makes next to no sense (in the context of this class), so I’ll explain…

Is he for real? Did he really lead us through a grueling intellectual exercise just to tell us the the essence of technology is ambiguous?!? He started out so clear. What happened? Also, why is he so obsessed with “correct” meanings of words?

We could spend lots of time nailing down the definitions of enframing, causes, revealing, challenging, and bringing forth, but, in the interest of time, we should focus on what allows us to talk about rhetoric. I think the following terms are important to consider:

  • techne: method, ways of producing things; the word “technology” comes from it
    • check out Heidegger’s definition on p. 18: “bring[ing] forth truth into the spledor of radiant appearing”
  • episteme: knowledge or science; you can read “epistemology” in it
  • instrumentalism: the belief that tools (or sciences) are useful in carrying out (or explaining) goals (or ideas)
  • eidos: 1) the distinctive expression of the cognitive or intellectual character of a culture or social group.
    2) how cultures organize intellectual material to inform their thinking or behavior.
  • poieses: the activity in which a person brings something into being that did not exist before.

We should use our other texts to help us think about technology and it ambiguous essence. In fact, Derrida’s differance allows us to consider the problem with defining technology’s essence. Because technology is embedded with meaning, it can be read; it’s rhetorical. Charles Bazerman defines “the rhetoric of technology” as:

  • “The rhetoric of technology shows how the objects of the built environment become part of our systems of goals, values and meaning, part of our articulated interests, struggles, and activities.”

How can we think about the above quotation in light of Heidegger’s point that modern technology is enmeshed in a system that demands resources “be immediately at hand” (p. 8)? He even tells us that man (and, presumably, woman) is “made subordinate to the orderability of” needed resources (p.8).

More helpful to us would be Herbert Marcuse’s “Some Social Implications of Modern Technology” (1941). He was a Frankfurt School member.

  • Let us take a simple example. A man who travels by automobile to a distant place chooses his route from highway maps. Towns, lakes and mountains appear as obstacles to be bypassed. The countryside is shaped and organized by the highway. Numerous signs and posters tell the traveler what to do an think; they even request his attention to the beauties of nature or the hallmarks of history. Others have done the thinking for him, and perhaps for the better. Convenient parking spaces have been constructed where the broadest and most surprising view is open. Giant advertisements tell him when to stop and find the pause that refreshes. And all this is indeed for his benefit, safety and comfort; he receives what he wants. Business, technics, human needs and nature are welded together into one rational and expedient mechanism. He will fare best who follows its directions, subordinating his spontaneity to the anonymous wisdom which ordered everything for him….There is no personal escape from the apparatus which has mechanized and standardized the world. (p. 143)

Above excerpt from Herbert Marcuse’s “Some Social Implications of Modern Technology.” The Essential Frankfurt School Reader. Eds. Andrew Arato & Eike Gebhardt. Urizen: 1978.

Next Week’s Reading

Finish up Cy Knloblauch’s book Ch. 6, 7, and “Afterword” (pp. 130-200). Your projects are due next week! Then, on May 4th, we’ll have your presentations on those projects.

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