Blog for October 14th, 2014: Rhetorical Agency and Footing

Marilyn M. Cooper- “Rhetorical Agency as Emergent and Enacted”

I wonder whether I would get along with Marilyn M. Cooper, if we were to meet in person. Reading through this document, I found myself nodding along enthusiastically with the evidence and ideas presented. However, as much as the evidence and documentation impressed me, I found myself vehemently disagreeing with the conclusions that Cooper derived from said evidence. From what I understood, Cooper wants to move past postmodernism, in order to produce an interpretation of rhetorical agency that offers better functional utility. However, I believe it’s impossible to most past postmodernism. I may be wrong, but part of the major appeal of postmodern thought is the way that it represents the end game of rhetorical thought. It is not necessarily the most practical line of thought, but it is difficult to go beyond the complete deconstruction of, well, everything. 

Rather than simply explicitly accepting the necessary regression of thought needed for her interpretation of rhetorical agency, Cooper insists on forging ahead, creating a paradox that can’t be reconciled. Cooper explicitly acknowledges the fact that free will is fundamentally an illusion, in that everything is predetermined by environment and biological predisposition. Explicating this notion is a central half of the argument. However, she then counters this by claiming that rhetorical agency represents the other half of this system, by representing the choices that an actor is capable of making in the moment, based on these influences. The problem with this is in the fact that she fails to explain a way for distancing the corporeal here. She simply brushes away the fact that the agent’s actions are ultimately reliant on the chemicals and elements that currently make up the body of the agent. I can accept ignoring this reality, but I can’t get over the way that Cooper attempts to frame it as evolution, rather than a practical devolution. Her analysis of Obama’s speech and the usefulness of understanding the inter-positionality of these systems is fantastic. The fact that she is able to spin this into a system of educational and rhetorical responsibility is equally enjoyable. And, yet, despite all that, this key premise is still illusory, broken by her own admission of the concrete, relying on what amounts to an ephemeral soul.

Stephanie Kerschbaum- “On Rhetorical Agency and Disclosing Disability in Academic Writing”

I am continually surprised by the variety of topics that I encounter in academia. I often find myself dwelling on ideas that I would have never imagined possible. This Kerschbaum piece sparked one of these moments, when I found myself thinking “Well, she’s only focusing on the sexy disabilities.” Throughout the article, we are treated to deafness, blindness, amputees, individuals in wheelchairs, dyslexia and autism*. All of these are legitimate issues with their own unique concerns and necessary compensations/assistances. However, these are all also disabilities that people generally understand and have a sense of sympathy for. For all the problems and issues that Kerschbaum brings up, being deaf is not something that you have to try to hide or cover up. As she noted herself, people are willing, even excited, to engage with a better understanding of these sorts of disabilities. The worst criticism she leverages against the observers is that they are oblivious to the full extent of the rhetoric involved- such as not understanding the intricacies of paralytic physiology.

However, this completely overlooks all the disabilities that aren’t so neat and easy to process. I don’t wish to make this a “disability contest”, but there’s a lot more stigma in being a malformed or internally diseased individual than there is in the more binary and “sexy” disabilities. While the man in the wheelchair invokes sympathy, the elephant man elicits revulsion. I don’t have enough knowledge to pronounce judgment on the effects of such disabilities on disclosure, but it is a glaring gap in the discussion. This gap is further compounded by the aforementioned internal disabilities. Here, there is some variation between people’s reactions- cancer and autoimmune diseases get a favorable response, viral and bacterial infections can go either way, and congenital organ diseases seem to only cause discomfort and a desire to move away from the topic. The average person wants to know more about the rhetorical situation of a blind person. Nobody wants to hear a word about the person who has to store their fecal matter in a plastic bag taped to their stomach.

But, really, even these disabilities, as unappealing as they are, still tend to elicit a visceral sympathy. Regardless of the distaste, there is a comprehension that the physical is a genuine problem. Mental disabilities of the unappealing nature are basically unspeakable. The openly schizophrenic man is rarely offered a PHD- more often, he’s escorted off campus by multiple officers. Even John Forbes Nash, the famed game theorist, had his life whitewashed and his experiences marginalized- A Beautiful Mind is a fantasy interpretation that has virtually nothing to do with his actual disclosures of his schizophrenic experiences. Experiences that are largely brushed away and hid by his family and university. Then, when it comes to less abrasive disabilities, such as depression, the situation becomes yet another caricature. Disclosing that one suffers from depression is something reserved purely for the creative arts. Talking about it anywhere else gets you painted as a loony. Again, I don’t have an answer as to what any of this means, or what the implications of this sort of disclosure are. If I were to have anything disabling about myself in these categories, I’m certainly not going to ever disclose it to my classmates or fellow academics about it. I value whatever legitimacy is afforded to me too much to ever sabotage that. And, that’s not really something Kerschbaum ever has to worry about with being deaf.

As an aside- I was bit surprised when I dug into this piece. I  had researched Melanie Yergeau earlier this year (for a research project/paper on autism in academia), and I really wasn’t expecting to see references to her in other composition pieces.  If you ever find yourself thinking “Man, I really wish I could read a quality paper on autism and rhetoric right now”, I highly recommend the Heilker, P., & Melanie Yergeau article,  “Autism and Rhetoric”. (College English, 73(5), 485-497.)

*I wonder whether Yergeau would have contentions to being included in this list. A fundamental aspect of her arguments, at least as far as I understood them, is the idea that autism is not inherently a disability, but a variety. This has earned her quite a lot of ire, in fact- if you google her name, I believe one of the first-page links is a scathing criticism of the notion. To so casually lump her into the “disabled” category after reading her work comes off as vaguely disrespectful.

Erving Goffman’s Forms of Talk, Chapter 3- “Footing”

I am truly impressed by Goffman’s ability to pad out this topic into a full chapter of nearly 40 pages. There is always a bit of over-articulation that occurs in academic writing. However, typically speaking, the authors don’t go out of their way to talk down to their audience while using absurd terminology to explain simplistic concepts. A hefty chunk of this text seems to be dedicated to explaining an infantile interpretation of how conversations occur, an interpretation that I find difficult to believe was ever relevant, let alone in the 80’s. Goffman then explains how this interoperation, which is clearly painfully incorrect, is in fact incorrect. The rest of the chapter is then dedicated to explaining all the complicating factors of conversation, centered around the notion of “footing”. Here, he doesn’t really seem to have anything to offer beyond describing various positions of footing that are available to those engaging in conversation and observation. I could see using the document as a reference guide, but Goffman fails to even organize the document in a manner that would make it convenient. I can’t say that reading the piece was a total waste of my time- it is at least nice to have some of these concepts directly laid out. I just can’t ever imagine wanting to go back to it.