"Public-making" is the chief instrument of modern social control. --George Gerbner

George Gerbner, "Communication:  Society is the Message"

The key to the historic significance of mass media is their ability to mass- produce messages that create mass publics-heterogeneous social aggregates that never meet face-to-face, and have little in common except the messages they share.
Such "public-making" is the chief instrument of modern social control. When rebels take over the radio station, when election candi- dates demand "equal time," when advertisers buy space or time in which to deliver their message, what is bought (or fought for) is not time or space but the chief "products" of modern media: access to the publics they have created.

A false self cannot feel alive in a continuous way

From Susie Orbach, Bodies

Winnicott tells us that a false self cannot feel alive in a continuous way. It can only find a sort of continuity and aliveness by the person creating and then surviving emergencies which in effect provide proof of their existence. 

We have swapped the body politic for the politics of the body.

From Susie Orbach, Bodies

We have swapped the body politic for the politics of the body.

How to Increase Faculty Productivity

From Darrin J. Griffin, San Bolkan & Barbara J. Dahlbach (2018) Scholarly productivity in communication studies: five-year review 2012–2016, Communication Education, 67:1, 88-101, DOI: 10.1080/03634523.2017.1385820

Corporeal Rudderlessness

From Susie Orbach, Bodies

It has become a feature of postmodernist thought to celebrate multiplicity, to elevate fluidity over knowing and complexity over simplicity, and to see embodiment, like femininity and masculinity, as something we achieve through performing or enacting the body we want to have. In this kind of theorizing, it is believed that the body can be anything we want it to be, with corporeality no more than a symbolic construct. 

Playful and enriching as such ideas can be within literary theory, it is painfully apparent that they are not playful or enriching for those whose corporeal rudderlessness propels them to seek extreme solutions to what they experience as their physical incongruities. Postmodern theory is insufficient to cope with the demands of the post-industrial body. It celebrates fragmentation, a fragmentation that, in fact, requires understanding, deconstructing, nourishing and then knitting together. (…) I know from the labile bodies that I encounter in the consulting room that their "owners" are on a search for anchoring which, once secured, perhaps allows for playfulness and masquerade to follow. But there needs to be a body there for the person in the first instance. (…) The celebrating of numerous self/body states that postmodernists engage in seems to applaud the very distress of the pre-integrated body. The celebration of multiplicity unwittingly dismisses the ways in which the individual seeks a bodily coherence. (91-2)

I had to look up "labile."  

Definition of labile
1: readily or continually undergoing chemical, physical, or biological change or breakdown: unstable
2: readily open to change

On the Liberal Arts, notes by IA Richards, from the Magdalene Archives

Orbach: Phantom Limbs and Loss

Sabbatical means curiosity reading, too.

From Susie Orbach, Bodies.  She offers a kind of common sense about the body and about grief, then totally undermines both by referring to neurology -- at least as I read it.

We know of widows who, having lost their husbands, often continue to put out two coffee cups and two cereal bowls.  We can understand how this occurs.  Less comprehensible at first glance is the disconcerting experience of a man who endeavours to attract a waiter's attention or to answer a telephone with an arm that no longer exists...

The widow, we can understand, is dehabituating herself, slowly unhooking herself from an identity and a long life with a husband.  She doesn't always get her new reality right.  Repression works to lull her into forgetfulness...

The phantom limb sufferer knows that something is missing, but his body seems to act indepedently, as though his absent limb were still present.  His mind has a kind of split, a cognitive knowledge of a physical reality and with it the continuing physical sensations of a present but absent limb.

She then discusses the neurological basis of phantom limbs.  It's not an inability to adjust to a new reality.  It is entirely an adjustment to a new reality.  I double-checked her neurology [because she's a psychotherapist, which is adjacent to but not the same as a neurologist].  The MIT Technology Review says that "neurons in the brain that receive input from a limb may rewire themselves to seek input from other sources after the limb is amputated."

These insights come from research I think I find unethical [the intentional damaging of nerves in monkeys], which led to more ethical experiments in humans.  The nerve endings that used to respond to an amputated arm rewire to accept input from a cheek [the most adjacent nerve cluster in the brain].

The goal, then, is not to "get used to it," the way we think a grieving widow must "get used to" the loss of a partner.  Because it's not just about acknowledging the loss.

The brain changes, it uses those resources in new ways, ways that acknowledge the loss but reintegrates the self.

Orbach makes me rethink phantom limbs and the body, yeah, but also makes me rethink grief.

Susie Orbach: Why can't pain, once understood and engaged with, allow for a speedy rewrite of a physical or mental template and thus bring quick relief?

From Susie Orbach, Bodies

Why can't pain, once understood and engaged with, allow for a speedy rewrite of a physical or mental template and thus bring quick relief? It is frustrating. Our brains seem to work so fast to grasp things and yet so slowly to change. 

A way to think about this is to remind ourselves that the human animal has a long gestation period outside the womb, during which the baby absorbs and personalizes that which will make it human. If we use language as a model and recognise that it takes two to four years for language to become personal and a part of oneself, then the idea that therapy is akin to absorbing a new language, only more so, begins to make sense. (68-9)

What is Art, notes by IA Richards, from the Magdalene Archives

The Most Significant Passages in "Force and Signification"

My colleague Scott Koski and I are re-reading Derrida, and we've each got three quotations that strike us as worth rethinking.  Maybe you read "Force and Signification" and have some thoughts about your favorite passages?

[Think of this as our brief version of what was an old Rhetoric Society panel mainstay.  At RSA conferences, scholars would propose "the most significant passage in ___ for rhetoric.]

First, I picked this one, because it's loaded with the power of story, and that story connects to an anecdote from Borges that changed my way of thinking about representation.  The Derrida passage:

In the Theodicy, Theodorus, who “had become able to confront the divine radiancy of the daughter of Jupiter,” is led by her to the “palace of the fates;” in this palace “Jupiter, having surveyed them before the beginning of the existing world, classified the possibilities into worlds, and chose the best of all. He comes sometimes to visit these places, to enjoy the pleasure of recapitulating things and of renewing his own choice, which cannot fail to please him.” After being told all this by Pallas, Theodorus is led into a hall which “was a world.” “There was a great volume of writings in this hall: Theodorus could not refrain from asking what that meant. It is the history of this world which we are now visiting, the Goddess told him; it is the book of its fates. You have seen a number on the forehead of Sextus. Look in this book for the place which it indicates. Theodorus looked for it, and found there the history of Sextus in a form more ample than the outline he had seen. Put your finger on any line you please, Pallas said to him, and you will see represented actually in all its detail that which the line broadly indicates. He obeyed, and he saw coming into view all the characteristics of a portion of the life of that Sextus.”  ["Force and Signification"].   

And now, the Borges story:

In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.  [From Wikipedia].

In both cases, the problem of signification, of the ways that a text can represent a reality, are made bare in different ways.  A map can only capture a whole reality if it at the same size and scale of that reality.  A written text requires some godly magic to do the same work.

Second, a passage that emphasizes the radical indeterminacy of writing:

"It is because writing is inaugural, in the fresh sense of the word, that it is dangerous and anguishing. It does not know where it is going, no knowledge can keep it from the essential precipitation toward the meaning that it constitutes and that is, primarily, its future." ["Force and Signification"].   

Finally, this one, because it resonates so deeply with everything I teach and write:

"Speaking frightens me because, by never saying enough, I also say too much." ["Force and Signification"].   

Scott picked these three. Scott is a scholar in Early Modern Studies, and you can probably tell, based on his choices.

First:

“In the seventeenth century they spoke of “the choice and arrangement of words, the structure and harmony of the composition, the modest grandeur of the thoughts.” Or further: “In bad structure there is always something added, or diminished, or changed, not simply as concerns the topic, but also the words.” ["Force and Signification"]

About this passage, Scott reflected in this way:

I find this quite applicable to my early modern work, though I suspect Derrida is referring to French literature specifically, but it could apply to literature in general. I pick up echoes of the writers on which I focus as they pushed back against the tastes and sensibilities of their time, critiquing the work produced by the hacks and pendant writers of London in the late 1590s.

In his second choice, Scott uses Derrida to reflect on the nature of criticism. "The idea that 'metaphor is never innocent' strikes me as being important, for we could interpret it as an indictment, though I suspect Derrida is getting as something a bit deeper."

“Now, in the sphere of language and writing, which, more than the body, “corresponds to the soul,” “the ideas of size, figure and motion are not so distinctive as is imagined, and…stand for something imaginary relative to our perceptions.” But metaphor is never innocent. It orients research and fixes results. When the spatial model is hit upon, when it functions, critical reflection rests within it. In fact, and even if criticism does not admit this to be so.” ["Force and Signification"]

About his third passage, Scott notes that "We push away as we try to pull in closer. Meaning is a moving target, and our understanding—any understanding—is based on our relative position to that which we seek."

“It may be acknowledged, then, that in the rereading to which we are invited by Rousset, light is menaced from within by that which also metaphysically menaces every structuralism: the possibility of concealing meaning through the very act of uncovering it. To comprehend the structure of a becoming, the form of a force, is to lose meaning by finding it.” ["Force and Signification"]

Revisiting the classics with my colleague has been fun -- have we missed a key passage from this work, in your mind? 

More on Scott: Koski has focused on the pamphlets of Robert Greene, arguing that Greene, by adopting such a scandalous persona—near indistinguishable on or off the page—created a buzz that deliberately amplified his popularity and success as a writer; a state cut short by his premature death. With Greene as a foundation, Koski plans to triangulate a young Shakespeare at the beginning of his career. 

Mountaineer I. A. Richards on the rhetorical function of definition, using "Mountains" as his example

Below is my favorite photo of the most significant rhetorical theorist of the twentieth century [suck it, Kenneth Burke]:  I. A. Richards. 

And here are his notes on the rhetorical function of definition, using "Mountains" as his example:

Typescript from the Richards papers at the Magdalene Archives at Cambridge, under the supervision of Richard Luckett.

Rhetoric and Composition at Madison: Sterling Leonard's Death alongside I A Richards

IA Richards, Bronislaw Malinowski, and Bertrand Russell: Inchoate Interdisciplinarity at the Birth of Rhetoric

"Rhetoric" in 1920 was inchoate.  To call it "interdisciplinary" is to give it too much credit right off the bat, maybe even to misdescribe the university in 1920 generally.

To wit, here is the TOC for the early issues of "The Psychic Research Quarterly," or "Psyche," a British journal published in 1920 and after.  It includes articles about "extra-retinal vision" and the "survival of bodily death" as well as articles by anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, philosopher Bertrand Russell and rhetorical theorist Ivor Armstrong (I. A.) Richards.

Interdisciplinary?  No, because the disciplines as we now know them were still coalescing.  Still, a history of rhetoric (or of literary criticism, in which Richards also had formative influence) which can't account for this early ground for research and publication is... incomplete.

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