Slow Velocity

Velocity. Synonyms: swiftness or speed. In the case of this week’s readings, extremely slow mental velocity occurred for me, meaning it was hard to keep up. However, there was one continuous reaction I felt throughout the majority of the posts: disagreement (besides that of confusion, obviously).

I’ll begin with Fisher, so I can get him over with first. He discussed a lot of different topics that somehow intertwined throughout his piece. Some were fine, others were not, but a lot of the time I found myself wondering why does this even matter? He remarks in his conclusion that he was “concerned with the concept of technical reason and the way it rendered the public unreasonable” (392), which seems like a nice enough notion, I just guess I was (and am) lost throughout the essay on the impact technical reason was truly having on rhetorical discourse.

Now onto Porter. His main concept was intertextuality: “the principle that all writing and speech – indeed, all signs – arise from a single network… ‘the web of meaning’” (34). This turns into an argument that basically every written piece of art (and other works of art) take traces from other artworks, making them not entirely original. Again, my common question was wondering why this is important.

So, having stated that both Fisher and Porter (but especially Fisher) confused the hell out of me and left me wondering exactly why I read these pieces, let’s get into where I disagreed with these authors, and then maybe someone will be able to tell me what they hoped readers would be getting out of it and how I’m reading them the wrong way.

First Fisher, again.

My main issue with Fisher is his reasoning about why people may choose not to vote, which he uses as an example to distinguish between his new, narrative paradigm and the traditional, rational paradigm.

On 386, Fisher writes, “Persons may even choose not to participate in the making of public narratives (vote) if they feel that they are meaningless spectators rather than co-authors”. Now, this alone is fine and true. One of the main reasons people choose not to vote is because they feel their voice won’t be heard and listened to, so why even waste their time with it? However, Fisher then continues “But, all persons have the capacity to be rational in the narrative paradigm” (386).

This is where he loses me. My first thought reading the entirety of that sentence was that people have the rationale and capacity to vote in both Fisher’s narrative paradigm and the traditional, rational paradigm – just as they also have the capacity to refuse in both.

“According to Fisher, I don’t have the capacity to in our traditional, rational paradigm.”

I disagree with what might be a key part of his paradigm, which is maybe why this example didn’t sit well with me. Fisher explains that in the traditional, rational paradigm, “rationality was something to be learned, depended on deliberation, and required a high degree of self-consciousness” (384) and that in his paradigm, there weren’t such demands. But, there should be, shouldn’t there? Rationality is learned, does depend on deliberation, and definitely requires a high degree of self-consciousness. If someone doesn’t have the mental capacity be self-aware, how can we expect them to properly use reason and logic? Don’t those two concepts go hand-in-hand?

Now that I have asked a whole lot of questions about Fisher’s own logic, we move once more onto Porter.

Porter is all about how nothing and no one is original, basically. When discussing the creativity (or lack there) of the Declaration of Independence, Fisher writes how “Jefferson was by no means an original framer or creative genius” but rather just “a skilled writer… because he was an effective borrower of traces” (36). If we’re going to go down that rabbit-hole, then absolutely nothing and no one is, was, or ever will be original and creative.

I argue that instead of that being the case, Jefferson was both original and creative. In order to write the Declaration, he had to weave all sorts of different traces together in a new way (making it original and creative, I argue, as it had not been done before). The dude took so many traces and wove them together that I basically lost count. I mean, he constructed traces from different nations that were literally a sea apart and somehow artfully merged those with traces from a colonial play (36)! How much more creative can one get?

Sure, people borrow traces all the time. People write or draw or paint in response to their surroundings, their time era, the current situations going on around them, or the art works of others that touch them and inspire their own work of art out of it (along with a lot more). Does that really make their work any less original or creative? I firmly believe there is a difference between blatant plagiarism and borrowing of traces.

Now, before I conclude this blog post, I’ll briefly touch on Ridolfo’s & DeVoss’ short article. I’ll be honest in that I don’t have much to say on it because I struggle to see how it connected much with this week’s other readings besides with the idea of rhetorical velocity. Rhetorical velocity is “a conscious rhetorical concern for distance, travel, speed, and time, pertaining specifically to theorizing instances of strategic appropriation by a third party” (Ridolfo & DeVoss).

Either Fisher or Porter (maybe both?) at least alluded to this idea, if I remember correctly. I suppose it could be one writing technique to use, but I feel it’s not the most important to apply. Instead, I would argue that writing to your readers of today is a better idea. And then, if you construct something as original and creative as the Declaration of Independence, maybe the readers of the future will enjoy it just as much.