February 02, 2006

The Art of Making the Stronger Team the Weaker

The only coverage of the interminable lead-up to SuperBowl XL that I can stand is Gilbert Gottfried and Kermit the Frog on ESPN's Cold Pizza Chuck Klosterman's "blog" for Page2 of ESPN.com. Say what you will about their ugly habit of tucking most of their really insightful writers behind PPV walls, the one thing that ESPN.com does right is Page2, where they hire writers to write.

Anyhow, ChuckK's coverage of Tuesday (Media Day! Media Day! Gather ye sound bites while ye may!) was pretty darn good. Exhibit A is his breakdown of the logic by which the Steelers, a 4-point favorite this week, are actually victims of that most heinous (not to mention nebulous) of treatments: disrespect.

As I write this, Pittsburgh is a four-point favorite to win Super Bowl XL. As you might have heard, the Steeler players are nonetheless viewing this prediction as a sign of disrespect. And Hines Ward spent part of media day explaining how being favored is (covertly) a criticism of his franchise.

I will now attempt to illustrate his five-pronged logic, even though I remain semi-baffled by its abstract complexity; I have a feeling Hines read a lot of Jacques Derrida while attending the University of Georgia. But here goes ...

Premise 1: Earlier this season, the Steelers were not given much credence from the mainstream media. Moreover, they struggled when Ben Roethlisberger was injured.

Premise 2: Conversely, Seattle was exceptional all season. The Seahawks finished as the NFC's No. 1 seed.

Premise 3: By favoring Pittsburgh in this game, the oddsmakers are negating Seattle's success.

Premise 4: Since Seattle's greatness has been quietly negated, the media is premeditating a circumstance in which a Pittsburgh victory would be less impressive than raw evidence would normally suggest.

Premise 5: Ward believes the Steelers will win in a major upset that the world is not recognizing; as such, the Steelers have been disrespected in advance.

Wow. The weird thing about this is that it actually makes a Bizzaro World kind of sense. More to the point, it makes me wonder if we shouldn't be teaching Hines Ward in our contemporary rhetoric courses.

That is all.

Posted by cgbrooke at 02:55 PM | Comments (4)

October 10, 2005

Wayne Booth, 1921-2005

I know. Three posts in a single day is largely unprecedented, but news just came across a listserv that Wayne Booth has passed on. His is not a household name, even in rhetoric circles, and Wikipedia's entry on him is woefully inadequate, but Booth was one of the people who helped rhetoric (re)emerge into its own discipline in the 20th century. He probably doesn't receive the attention nowadays that he deserves for that contribution.

He began as a literary critic (as did many of the canonical 20th C rhetoricians), and the Rhetoric of Fiction is still a staple on many reading lists. Although we carnivalized (and cannibalized?) his latest offering, The Rhetoric of Rhetoric, I've always considered WB to be worth reading, if for no other reason than his optimism. Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent was one of those books that everyone in my grad program read at one point or another, one which attempts a decisive break from the modern dogmas of skepticism and doubt in favor of the kind of rhetorical generosity that certainly characterized that last book of his.

I can't say that I always agreed with Booth, but I can say that I almost always wanted to. He was someone who made the field richer, and who never stopped trying to convince others of that richness and value. Disagreements or no, that's good enough for me.

That's all.

Posted by cgbrooke at 03:52 PM | Comments (2)

March 24, 2005

DeLuca visit

The CRS and CCR programs here at Syracuse hosted a talk on Wednesday by Kevin DeLuca, and I've been meaning to throw my notes up here before I get too far away from it to do any good. Kevin's at the University of Georgia, and is the author of Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism. Given that visual rhetoric is one of those things that I try to keep abreast of, I was pretty interested to hear what he had to say.

His talk was pitched at the level of an overview, which was cool by me. There were a number of undergrads in the audience, and I thought he did a nice job of meeting the citational expectations of the faculty while making it accessible to the whole audience. He began with an overview of the various ways that rhetoric has approached images:

  1. Not at all.
  2. Reading them as texts and denying the qualities that aren't textualizable.
  3. Domesticating them through the same vocabulary and frameworks that we use to write about textual rhetorics.
  4. Taking images seriously as images.

Obviously, he was more interested in the last of these options, and he cited Cara Finnegan and Robert Hariman & John Lucaites as some of the scholars doing this kind of work. He was particularly interested in work that examined how images appear in context, that offered close readings of various images, and work that didn't simply study "serious" or "aesthetic" images. A key distinction, repeated throughout, was that it was important to focus on what an image does, not just what it means.

Some of the issues that may be keeping us from this kind of work are an overreliance on context as a knowable factor. Our tendency, he argued, is to reduce the complexity of context into something that we can grasp, and this tendency can turn contexts into fiction. He was also critical of the kind of iconophobia that still persists today, particularly in academia, as typified by Sontag's now-classic critique of photography. Finally, he was a little critical of the work of Finnegan and H&L, for offering what he described as transcendent concepts, critical terminology that erases the singularity of the images under consideration.

His answer to these issues is twofold. First, he believes that the shift to focusing on what images do rather than what they mean is crucial. And second, he called for a new mode of criticism, one that was more appropriate to an image-saturated society. This latter is a little difficult to pin down, but Kevin offered several pairs of binaries that captured what he was after:

This notion, of an image-based criticism, was pretty provocative, and he cited Barthes, Benjamin, D&G, and others throughout. His close, though, ended up turning in a different direction. He did finally make the turn towards creating images as an important critical practice, and he shared his experiences with the Warbus.

Part of this may have been the audience, so I'll be gentle. For me, there was a real disjunct between the theoretical tenor of the first part of this talk and the emphasis on advocacy in the conclusion. For example, Kevin was somewhat critical of H&L's concept of iconicity (images that are widely recognized, historically significant, reproduced broadly across multiple media, and that evoke strong emotion), and yet, it's hard not to see the images on the warbus as selected and presented precisely for their iconicity.

My other qualm was that Barthes' Camera Lucida was being used in an unusual way. Kevin never mentioned the term punctum and yet constantly referred to the excess, the ex-stasis of the photograph. For my part, I take Barthes' punctum to be singular and personal, and this makes that quality exceptionally unsuitable for public advocacy. In some ways, the punctum is the polar opposite of iconicity, and while this made sense in terms of the theoretical vector of the talk, it falls short in the application, and far shorter, I would think, than a text like Debord's Society of the Spectacle might. The one example of a punctum-based reading is Finnegan's claim that the "migrant mother" Depression-era photos "oozed sexuality," and Kevin was pretty flip in dismissing that reading, while I would have argued that F's response is exactly what RB is after in Camera.

Hey, but that's my take. Both pieces of the talk were clear and engaging, but I left really feeling the tension between them. My guess is that Kevin would have dealt with that in more detail for a more strictly academic audience. As it was, he made me think during the talk, and for a couple of days now afterwards. I can't ask for much more.

Posted by cgbrooke at 10:56 PM | Comments (1)

August 21, 2004

How to write about rhetoric without mentioning rhetoric

A quick question for those of you who visit regularly: has anyone picked up Howard Gardner's new book? (Gardner is familiar to me as the "multiple intelligences" guy.) His new book, Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other People's Minds, is freshly out--I saw it in Borders today, and was about as stunned as I was to read Richard Lanham's Virginia Postrel's The Substance of Style. In other words, it looked to me like another book that would discuss rhetoric without actually mentioning it. It was published by Harvard's Business Press, and looks like yet another attempt to translate my field into corporate-speak.

Thanks to Amazon's handy dandy search function, I did find out that the word rhetoric appears some 13 times, and in a couple of cases, even looks to be used correctly. Even so, I'm suspicious. And curious to hear if anyone's taken a look yet...

Posted by cgbrooke at 04:16 AM | Comments (0)

July 29, 2004

Perspective(s)

Thanks, all, for the kind comments and emails re the new homepage design. The longer I look at it, the happier I am. I think it's pretty well set--I've added credits, and links both to email and a slightly dated version of my cv. Good enough for now, I think.

I'm gearing up for a dissertation defense later today, and took a break from poring over chapters to try and bring my aggregator under control. There's a couple of interesting pieces I wanted to point to. danah boyd takes the NYT to task for demeaning the unprecedented amount of blogging going on at the DNC this week. What's most interesting about this is that she was asked to expand on this entry, and to turn it into an essay for Salon. In it, she shifts gears quite a bit, and frames a pair portion of the essay in terms of the ideals of objectivity versus the virtues of multiple perspectives. It's an old, old debate, and one that's getting fresh legs as the mainstream media responds to blogging.

The essay is interesting in and of itself, but I recommend it also to those who plan on using (or already are using) blogs in their writing classrooms. Pairing these two essays might provide a really nice example of what it means to move from blog to essay, or simply to move from one audience or space to another. I was struck, for example, by the move from the first passage here to the second:

By framing bloggers as diarists, the NYTimes is demanding that the reader see blogs as petty, childish and self-absorbed.
In order to signify the difference between blogging and "real journalism," it is not that surprising that the New York Times drudges up connotations of 13-year-old girls writing about their lives. It helps to belittle the role of convention bloggers who have been given the same press credentials as reporters.

Neither of these is the "correct" or "better" one for me; each is effective given its context, and helps to point out some of the differences between those contexts. For the record, I'm guessing that "drudges" is simply a misspelling of "dredge," and not a subtle dig at the Drudge Report, but who knows?

The other pointer I have is to David Weinberger's site, where he likewise tackles the question of objectivity. In this case, he examines coverage from the Boston Globe, and discusses how the "necessity" of devising headlines and leads interferes with journalists' ability to be objective. It's a really nice reflection on the gap between convention and coverage, conceived in terms of the rhetorical demands of what are two very different media (speech v. news story).

And if I may be a disciplinary homer for a moment, what's most refreshing about DW's piece is that he uses the word "rhetoric" correctly. Yeah, he cites Heidegger too, but that's just gravy by the time I get to it. heh.

Posted by cgbrooke at 03:50 AM | Comments (0)

May 06, 2004

Criticism

It's been a couple of weeks since this was posted, but I've been trying to pare down my bookmarks here at the end of the semester. I just re-read this post by Rick Poynor over at Design Observer, and was struck again by the reason I bookmarked it in the first place.

Poynor reprints about half of an article ("The Critic and His Purpose") that came out in the late 60s, and setting aside that pesky "his," the article is a 62-point list, collectively generated, about art criticism. The first half is over at DO, and is subtitled "Critical Method." Some of it seems a little dated, of course, but otherwise, it's a pretty accurate distillation of what most fields in the Arts and Humanities expect from criticism--our students and colleagues could do worse than consulting this for guidance...

Posted by cgbrooke at 02:06 AM | Comments (0)