Wyrd rhetoric

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Digital Rhetor

As rhetorical practice expands into the digital commons, a broader spectrum of rhetorical programs and transmission strategies, both complementary and orthogonal to deliberative/Greek rhetoric, become increasingly available and germane to compositional practice and pedagogy. Ok, then, considering this from a classroom/writing program perspective, we've argued that step one is simply to "open." Then tune--tune so as to find good timing, some sort of coherence, when introducing high energy inputs into university spaces dedicated to a training in deliberative rhetoric. It would seem to be to chaotic for writing programs to simply promote a laminate of of contemporary digital ecologies, each with it's own rhythms and sense of kairos going into dissonant interference patterns in the bottleneck of the classroom and curriculum; at the same time, how to divide the time?

Metrics can be designed, segments aligned and realigned, but multimedia is always already a mixture, a composite, so where to draw the line? In dynamic (rhythmizable) media, we are already in motion, in the realm of prosodies. Yes, these are granular prosodies that underscore the difficulties of separating "sonic" domains from any other modalities/perceptions of media. However, music and dance can teach us the limits of jittery discourse, so we can find modes that translate well into the classrooms we have now by simply considering the ways language and music overlay, and by experiencing/inhabiting the time signatures and tropes of their mesh. A composition pedagogy that would attend to these dynamics of time and timing introduces the conditions (interference) for composition (resonance). Enjoining ecstatic and meditative cultures of music and dance provide many elegant models, metaphors, histories, and rhetorical formulations of order emerging from chaos. These practices alternate connection and disconnection, and can be understood in their simplest and most compressed form as rhythms – the generation and interruption of patterns in time. In the Greek tradition, we find that music and rhetoric acquire consistency and practicability, manifesting as prosodies, between words and sound.

Classical Forms

Socrates speaks in Plato's dialogues, Plato writes through the medium of Socrates. Aristoxenus speaks in the writing of Nietzsche. James I. Porter brings Nietzsche's Aristoxenus and the very idea of a "rhythmizable medium" into focus when he translates portions of Nietzsche's notebooks and lecture preparations on the topic of classical Greek and Roman rhythm. Nietzsche finds much at stake in Aristoxenus' simple argument distinguishing rhythm from the "rhythmized." Nietzche distinguished between "irrationalities codified by feeling and sensation from those that eluded the sense of rhythm, only to return in a "subtactile" effect." (153). It seems that Nietzsche begins in medias mix and works his way out; so-called irrationality becomes synecdoche for rhythm and rational measures dependent upon sensation, perception. Nobody, Nietzsche insists, can feel Greek rhythms, but the discussion of irrational rhythms or alogia he picks up in his study of Aristoxenus. Porter explains that extant texts, in Nietzche's hands, at least demonstrate that "irrational rhythms could be felt as well as analyzed...and they did present themselves in practice. It is to the credit of Aristoxenus that he could accommodate them in some form in his theory. The ancient musicologists reserved the dissonances of the so-called "irrational" rhythms to an area that Aristoxenus calls 'intermediate between two ratios that the senses can recognize.' By definition such rhythms are at the limit of sensation: to experience them is to experience sensation's boundaries as well, and it is this that contributes to their effect (which is often described as "ecstatic"). Going well beyond the conclusions of the ancient theorists, Nietzsche holds that language and music are just discrepant mediums, wherever they represent the intersection of time and a body" (Porter 152-3)

The 3rd OED entry for "prosody" picks up on ideas about rhythmizable media from linguistics. "In the theories of J.R. Firth and his followers," the entry says, narrowly ascribing attribution but nevertheless discerning prosodies as mixtures of domains, as "phronological features having as its domain more than one segment. Prosodies include the class of 'suprasegmental' features such as intonation, stress, and juncture, but also some features which are regarded as 'segmental' in phonemic theory, e.g. palatalization, liprounding, nasalization" (OED). These nominalizations describe gestures, appertures, and intonations participating in the definition and site of interactions between discrepant mediums--clefts, overlays, transcodings, rhythms made by the sounding body.

W.B. Stanford's consideration of the clefts between and overlays connecting music and speech (The Sound of Greek 1967) offers a shared framework for practices of oratory, poetry, and music.

"From what the Greek musicologists said," and here Stanford is referring to Aristoxenus of Tarentum, and others, "it is clear that one cannot always draw a clear line of separation between speech and song; there is a central area where the kinds of utterance meet. This is the area where ancient poetry and oratory chiefly moved, and in it they probably kept closer to the sound of music than to the sound of plain conversation," argues Stanford. This area would then be the starting the topoi of response and engagement with others. What does this mean? Stanford relies on the rhetorical force of the sample to explain. Citing Paul Valery, who in a different context argued "'...in studying a piece of poetry, one should never take as a beginning or point of departure ordinary discourse or current speech and then rise form the the level of prose to the desired poetic tone; on the contrary, I believe one should start from song, put oneself in the attitude of the singer, tune one's voice to the fullness of musical sound, and from that point descend to the slightly less vibrant state suitable to verse,'" Stanford's mix anticipates the conditions of receptivity necessary for participating in the formation of a digital commons.

Tagging as Rhetoric

-tagging, like music, compresses information and initializes rhetorical patterns differently than prose. What happens when the initial conditions of a rhetorical formation are initiated by practices such as tagging, sound, streaming video? -such practices on a common surface/medium: cybernetic version Greek arsis/thesis understanding of rhythm for rhetorical invention amidst emergent and increasingly social technologies... -tagging creates mantras, meaningful/meaningless "riffs" that pick up where the canon of memory leaves off, i.e. they help manage collective attention (screen grabs of tag lines start here)

In "Technology and Music Performance in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, " published in 1989 by The International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, Jon Frederickson discusses metronome time vs. musical time, machines for "playing together" and the musical vector in the early emergence of what we call "social technologies." To define the latter, Frederickson relies on Peterson's The Industrial Order and Social Policy, where Peterson "distinguishes social and machine technology as follows: machine technology involves the processing of tools and machines, and social technology involves the skills and means of organizing people to get work done" (194). Frederickson argues that "social technology perpared the way for and was the stimulus for machine technology in musical artwolds".[1]