I’ve really enjoyed these last two weeks in LWP’s class. We’ve been studying BIG rhetoric and this week, we read Kuhn and Feyerabend.
What do I like about BIG rhetoric? I like how interdisiciplinary it is – how it finds an overarching connection between chemistry and history, political science and drama, English and mathematics. And what is that connection? Rhetoric, my friend, the ancient foundation of it all. But it’s not a set-in-stone foundation. It’s a constantly moving, shaping foundation, steeped in context but still with inherent truths. I like that.
What do I like about that? I like the humanity that it is grounded upon. We are a quirky people, we humans, but that quirkiness is what makes us human. To equate human knowledge with positivism is to try to whitewash our imperfection. It reminds me of Vonnegut’s Player Piano. Great book! It is a treatise against the dehumanization of individuals and communities through an abdication of human crafts and skills in favor of a society based upon and driven by heartless, brainless, human-less technology. I am concerned with how technology is shaping our current world – is it making us less human, as it requires us to rely less on actual human beings? What are we losing? What are we gaining?
I think I really dug Feyerabend because of his validation of all types of methodology (not all ideas – as LWP ponited out.) There is no one way to go about finding and communicating knowledge. Positivism fails because it fails to take into account messy human thoughts and complicated human relationships. Doesn’t then technology fail (in some areas)? Why aren’t we looking at that? (And if we are, where is it?)
I also liked Feyerabend’s passion. He was exciting. His ideas were exciting. Don’t we all need a little more fire? A little more revolution?
Jefferson said every generation needs a revolution. What’s ours, my friends?
I’ve been having great fun too!
(This fun is a revolution itself given the academic fatigue of October obvious in our CCR community!)
We must call for a revolution indeed…
Yet…
It is so easy to feel the possibility of revolution with our heads in the Big Rhetoric skies, but then I have a conversation with someone on the “outside,” as my peps say, and run into a glass wall that leaves me with a concussion. Talking with my older sister last night, an Assistant District Attorney who lives and breathes positivism, I almost laughed out loud at the way that she would hypothetically accept (or reject, I should say) Big Rhetoric.
So – when we mount our revolution, let’s make sure we can take it to the people “outside” as well as liberate ourselves.
Comment by gazingwestward — October 21, 2006 @ 11:23 pm |
This reading sounds like a lot of fun!! But can you define “BIG RHETORIC” vis-a-vis other types of rhetorics for those of not in Louise’s class? I’m interested in that distinction. I have a sense that it is rhetoric in terms of large-scale rhetorical theories of the 20th c. such as Burke, Toulmin, Perelman/Olbrechts-Tyteca, etc vs. work on rhetorical practices? It’s interesting how big gets used as a modifier these days–we have Big Tobacco (Phillip Morris, which has now branched out into Big Food companies like Kraft, a cigarette company now owns the company that makes the boxed mac and cheese for our kids). There are all the complaints about Big Government (the feds) vs. small government (local, small scale). Big has been used as a way to delineate the large-scale institutional structures.
Comment by Eileen E. Schell — October 22, 2006 @ 3:07 am |