A REINTERVIEW with Jasper Neel, 1.

The PreText Conversations held a Re/In/View

with Jasper Neel  about his book Aristotle's Voice

during April and May of 1995.

 
======================================
Date:         Mon, 1 May 1995 19:49:02 -0500
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         SOPHIST@utarlg.uta.edu
Subject:      announcement

Announcement--------->

we are still preparing ch. 1 of japser neel's
book for posting. please bear with us. after it
is posted, you will have about a week to read it
before we begin.

if i can be of assistance, please drop me a note

victor (j. vitanza)
SOPHIST@UTARLG.UTA.EDU
======================================
Date:         Tue, 9 May 1995 15:03:29 -
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         SOPHIST@utarlg.uta.edu
Subject:      Ch. One, Neel's Book

*To: Reinviewers
*From: victor, moderator, reinvw
*Re: Chapter One of Neel's book

Below is the part of Jasper's book that we have permission to
post. If at all possible please try to read the entire book; if you
have, then, please feel free to ask questions or make comments
on the entire book.

We will give you a few days to read this chapter, and then we will
begin.

I would like to thank Curtis Clark, Marketing, of Southern Illinois
UP for permission to post from Jasper's book. And I would like
to thank Collin Brooke for preparing the electronic version of the
manuscript and my colleague Charlie Chiasson for rendering
the Greek to English.

Good readin', folks.

=====================================


*Conversion Notes:
--Footnotes are marked in the text with parentheses and an
asterisk--(*#)--to distinguish them from page numbers of texts.
--Section Headings are desginated with a plus sign before
the title (see <<+Mississippi 1967>> below)
--Words rendered in Greek in the text have been transliterated
into English equivalents, and marked with brackets. (Ex:
[LOGOS]); since impossible in ascii, no diacritical marks have
been included.
--All italicized words have been converted to underline (Ex:
_Rhetoric_)
--An asterisked offset paragraph about page citation in Aristotle
(on p. 14 of the original text) was inserted into the text at the
appropriate location.

=======================================


Date: Tue, 09 May 1995 15:03:29 -0500
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
Poster:       SOPHIST@utarlg.uta.edu
Subject:      Ch. One, Neel's Book
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

*To: Reinviewers
*From: victor, moderator, reinvw
*Re: Chapter One of Neel's book

Below is the part of Jasper's book that we have permission to
post. If at all possible please try to read the entire book; if you
have, then, please feel free to ask questions or make comments
on the entire book.

We will give you a few days to read this chapter, and then we will
begin.

I would like to thank Curtis Clark, Marketing, of Southern Illinois
UP for permission to post from Jasper's book. And I would like
to thank Collin Brooke for preparing the electronic version of the
manuscript and my colleague Charlie Chiasson for rendering
the Greek to English.

Good readin', folks.

=====================================


*Conversion Notes:
--Footnotes are marked in the text with parentheses and an
asterisk--(*#)--to distinguish them from page numbers of texts.
--Section Headings are desginated with a plus sign before
the title (see <<+Mississippi 1967>> below)
--Words rendered in Greek in the text have been transliterated
into English equivalents, and marked with brackets. (Ex:
[LOGOS]); since impossible in ascii, no diacritical marks have
been included.
--All italicized words have been converted to underline (Ex:
_Rhetoric_)
--An asterisked offset paragraph about page citation in Aristotle
(on p. 14 of the original text) was inserted into the text at the
appropriate location.

=======================================


Jasper Neel
_Aristotle's Voice:  Rhetoric, Theory & Writing in America
Chapter 1: The _Rhetoric_ and the _Politics_ of Slavery

For James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael
Schwerner

+Mississippi 1967

   I have seen the truth. I have known some of the people who
believe that the truth has set them free. Their discourse has a cool,
clinically detached quality  about it. Their discourse allows them to
rise above life and understand it.
   In March 1967, I was in the process of leaving both the place
where I saw  the truth and the truth that place told. I remember
sitting late into a Saturday evening in an elegantly furnished living
room near Silver City, Mississippi. I was a college junior home for
spring break, and my Saturday ramblings
around Humphries County had led me to a house I knew well
where I was surrounded by friends I knew well. I had not yet thrown
away the AuH20 button that was my souvenir from the 1964 presi-
dential campaign, nor had I met Al Lowenstein, whose visit to Missis-
sippi the following year would draw  me into Gene McCarthy's presi-
dential campaign. My job in that campaign would be to work as a field
organizer for a political movement referred to in those days as the
"Mississippi Black Democratic party."(*l)
   I spent that Saturday evening listening to a set of arguments that
I knew to be wrong, but at the time I did not know how to contend with
them. I listened with a mixed feeling of horror and regret: horror
because I had read Ralph Ellison and listened to Martin Luther King;
regret because I knew I would  never again hear the evening's con-
versation expressed in its jocular, open, and natural manner. Aside
from the pleasantries of arriving and departing, throughout the
evening I remained silent, which is not my usual demeanor. Some-
where deep in my being I could sense that I was "at home" for the last
time. The truth was slipping away from me, taking with it the safe home
where I had grown up. The arguments raged well into Sunday morning,
which would find everyone in the room at one of the five white-only
churches (Baptist, Catholic, Episcopalian, Methodist, and Presby-
terian) in Belzoni, Mississippi, the only town of any size in the county.
   The conversation was about race. Those who participated argued
vehemently over three different ways of justifying the American
system of racial segregation. One group (I call them the "Noah group")
based its argument for segregation on an interpretation of the events
of Genesis 9, whose story goes like this: After the floodwaters recede,
Noah celebrates too much, finally falling into a naked, drunken stupor.
The youngest of his three sons, Ham, "the father of Canaan," dis-
honors Noah by looking on his nakedness and then describing it to
Shem and Japheth, Noah's other sons. When Noah awakens and
learns of Ham's disrespect, Noah condemns Ham with this curse:

Cursed be Canaan;
lowest of slaves shall he be to his brothers.
.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
Blessed by the Lord my God be
     Shem;
   and let Canaan be his slave.
May God make space for Japheth,
   and let him live in the tents of
     Shem;
and let Canaan be his slave. (*2)

   According to the Noah group, this passage means that the African,
Asian, and Caucasian races were engendered by Noah's three
sons and that the curse on Ham, the father of the Africans, is hereditary
and eternal. Because of this curse, black servitude is both biblical and
godly.
   A second group (I call them the "Lilith group") justified racism through
an interpolation of Genesis 2-6. In this interpolation, for which there
is no canonized text, God ejects Adam and Eve from Eden for dis-
obeying him. Soon thereafter, Adam copulates with a nonhuman female
named Lilith (there was dispute among those arguing this position
over whether Lilith was a  fallen angel in female shape or a humanlike
beast, some sort of female higher primate). From this copulation,
whether demonic or bestial, springs a race of humanlike creatures
who enjoy much the same physical and mental gifts as humans, but
who have no souls. These soulless creatures become the progenitors
of all black people, who, because of their soulless nature, are amoral
and shiftless. They must be held in servitude to keep them under
control, and since they have no afterlife, their intrinsic
value is not significantly different from that of other nonhuman, higher
primates. Black servitude is, therefore, a natural and necessary human
responsibility.
   A third group (I call them the "oligarchs") responded to the first two
groups with a pragmatic elitism. This group also buttressed its argument
with Scripture, but it did so more out of convention than out of faith.
At that time anyone living in the Mississippi Delta had to offer some sort
of Scripture in order to be taken seriously as a social theorist. In the
Old Testament, the oligarchs explained, the prophet Zephaniah writes
"I will also leave in the midst of you a people humble and lowly" (3.12).
In the New Testament Christ himself says, "you always have the poor
with you" (Matthew 26.11). Those arguing this position contended
that there have always been and will always be inequities in the way
life is lived. Some people must be poor for others to be rich; some
must work hard for others to have leisure. Some, through their suf-
fering and deprivation, must constitute the foundation on which others
can build the art, music, philosophy, and politics that life at its
finest requires. This situation is unfortunate, but true. And this truth
shows that black people in the modern world, whatever their ancestors
may have been like, simply do not work as hard, think as deeply, under-
stand as thoroughly as do white people. Of course, as the Bible makes
clear, this leads to a double obligation: neither to abuse black people
because of their inferiority nor to pretend that the inferiority does not
exist.
   No one changed positions during the evening. And to any African
American living in the Mississippi Delta during those years, the pre-
vailing position mattered little because all three led to the same thing:
segregation, injustice, racism, suffering. As far as I know, all of the
people present in that room are still living today. I doubt that their
positions have changed much over the years, though perhaps I
am wrong, for I have been in Humphries County only once since
1972, and I have not seen any of the people in that room in two
decades. For many years, I viewed them as good and decent people,
salt of the earth; for many more years I viewed them as
demons incarnate, emblems not only of American racism but, more
generally, of what I have always understood Conrad's Kurtz to mean
when he whispers, "The horror! The horror!" Nowadays I have difficulty
characterizing those people at all, except to say that it makes me ex-
ceedingly nervous to discuss them or to repeat what I heard them say
as they reaffirmed the political and theological discourses of my child-
hood. I am, however, certain  that the discourse they spoke with such
clinical detachment that evening will haunt me for as long as I live.
   It would be nice if we could dismiss this scene with an incredulous
shake of the head, grateful that such habits of thinking and such
patterns of living are behind us, confident that everyone now knows
better. But any drive from Greenwood, Mississippi, through Tchula
and over to Belzoni, or any drive through the neighborhoods between
the University of Chicago and the Congress Parkway, or the neighbor-
hoods around Yale University, or almost anywhere in the South Bronx
(few readers of this book would be likely to _walk_ in those neighbor-
hoods), or any time spent on land managed by the Bureau of Indian
Affairs, or any evening spent watching a film by Julie Dash
or John Singleton or even Spike Lee demonstrates that those
dark and dangerous conversations of the Mississippi Delta are very
much with us today, with all of us. This is, I recognize, an odd approach
to Aristotle, especially from the perspective of composition studies.
Perhaps I have no business inflicting the wounds of my own past on
others, the vast majority of whom no doubt grew to adulthood in better
places than I, hearing better arguments and traveling on less troubled
roads. And in treating Aristotle and his _Rhetoric_  in the way that I am
about to do, I know that I stand wide open to the charge
that I am finding my own past, my own family, social, and professional
drama in a place where I alone can see it. But my motive in this book
is to foreground the professional discourse in which teachers of
writing are situated. I do not think we pay enough attention either to
the dynamics or to the assumptions of that discourse. Nor do I think
we pay enough attention to the way professional discourse both
enables and blinds those who speak and write it in the innocence
of academic safety. For well or ill, Aristotle is where I begin. All of us,
and especially those of us in composition studies, are situated in
Aristotelianism; we teach the voice of professional discourse that
Aristotelianism creates.

+Athens 325 B.C.

Rhetoric is my destination, but I cannot go there directly because
Aristotle's system makes the art of rhetoric a subsidiary within the art
of politics, which Aristotle names the "master art." He makes the
hierarchy clear in both the _Nicomachean Ethics_ and the
_Rhetoric_. Political science, he explains in the _Ethics_ [Unless
otherwise indicated in parentheses, all quotations from Aristotle are
taken from the respective edition of the Loeb Classical Library,
Harvard University Press. In all cases, I refer to the Aristotelian
canon using numbers keyed to Immanuel Bekker's 1831 editions
of the Greek text of Aristotle.],

ordains which of the sciences are to exist in states, and what
branches of knowledge the different classes of the citizens are
to learn, and up to what point; and we observe that even the
most highly esteemed of the faculties, such as strategy, domestic
economy, rhetoric, are subordinate to the political science.
(1094b1-5)

He repeats this hierarchy in the _Rhetoric_ (1359b2-19) where
he defines rhetoric as less rigorously intellectual and less trust-
worthy than political science, of which rhetoric is a kind of de-
pendent offshoot (135625). (*3)
   Now I surely understand how to make the argument that right-
thinking, fair-minded people in the modern world can extract
Aristotelian rhetoric from the Aristotelian system. By doing so we
can read the _Rhetoric_ without reading the _Politics_. Those
of us in composition studies who read the history of rhetoric
usually protect the _Rhetoric_ this way. We find the proofs,
the canons, the commonplaces, indeed the whole Aristotelian
system of taxonomizing discourse too useful and too historically
important to jettison. (*4) We teach it and employ it as neutrally
and innocently as the New Critics ever taught those other
Aristotelian terms-_plot, character, theme, and metaphor_.
We know, however, that neither poetry nor rhetoric is innocent,
and we know that no set of terms can become neutral tools that
generate innocent analysis and explanation. I fear that we some-
times forget the degree to which the teaching of writing is and
must be a political undertaking.
   Aristotle did not forget. His rhetoric is, from beginning to
end, part of his politics, and a subsidiary, dependent part at that.
I want to argue that when we see discourse as consisting of
invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery; when we
teach the ethical, pathetic, and logical appeals; when we
divide argument into induction and deduction; when we urge
the virtue of the plain, middle style; when we organize our
courses around such apparently innocent topics as analogy,
definition, description, cause-effect, comparison-contrast, and
example; when we teach the pro and contra process
of public debate; when we allow ourselves to think even for a moment
about a paper's "style" as opposed to its "content"; when we assume
any of these perspectives on discourse, we look through Aristotle's
eyes. Those eyes saw  a terrible reality. I know. I have seen some of
it myself.
   Of course the term _rhetoric_ has taken on such warm and cuddly
connotations in the postmodern era, and we feel so good about
having recognized the rhetoricity of nearly everything that we tend to
forget the politics and world view in which rhetoric is and always has
been embedded. It seems that half of all university press books in
the humanities and social sciences now have the word "rhetoric"
somewhere in the title, most members of CCCC (myself included)
claim to be "rhet/ comp" specialists, and Stanley Fish can attack
elitism by writing, "there is always just beneath the surface of
the antirhetorical stance a powerful and corrosive elitism" (473). Fish's
sentence sounds so good to those of us in composition studies
that we forget to interrogate the rhetorical stance itself. We play the
roles of Robin Hood and Little John in the Disney animation. Like
Little John, we can ask, "Are we good guys or bad guys?" Like
Little John's, our question is utterly innocent, entirely "rhetorical."
   Slavery does not appear often in the _Rhetoric_. When it does,
the offhanded, desultory way in which Aristotle presents it shows
that the social theories in the _Rhetoric_ are of a piece with those
in the _Politics_. In contrasting anger with mildness, Aristotle explains
that we easily forgive those who admit their offenses and recon
firm their subordination to us. Evidence of this, he explains,

may be seen in the punishment of slaves; for we punish more severely
those who contradict us and deny their offense, but cease to be angry
with those who admit that they are justly punished.... Men are also mild
towards those who humble themselves before them and do not contra-
dict them, for [those who submit] seem to recognize that they are
inferior.... Even the behaviour of dogs proves that anger ceases towards
those who humble themselves. (1380a3-20)

In explaining the superfluousness of long introductions, Aristotle
gives slaves a character identical to that of Scarlett O'Hara's slave,
Prissy, in _Gone with the Wind_. Long introductions are okay,
Aristotle explains, when the speaker has a bad case. If the case is
bad, "it is better to lay stress upon anything rather than the case
itself. That is why slaves never answer questions directly
but go all round them, and indulge in preambles" (1415b10-15).
   Aristotle did not need to spend much time on slavery in the
_Rhetoric_ because he had justified it in detail in the _Politics_,
the master art in which his rhetoric is a subsidiary. (*5)  Throwaways
like the two above glow at their full intensity only when one reads
them in the light of the _Politics_, where Aristotle begins by ex-
plaining that he will follow his "regular method of investigation"
(1252a19). This method requires that he analyze the
composite whole "down to its uncompounded elements."
Political science turns out to consist of two elements. Element one
is the "union of female and male"; element two, "the union of the
natural ruler and natural subject."
   The master term that plays throughout the first section of the
_Politics_ is the Greek noun [PHYSIS]. As one might expect, this
term is difficult to render in English, but generally it carries the
following three notions: 1) the essential, structural nature of a thing,
2) the teleological whole toward which a thing inevitably develops,
3) the genetic, predetermining origin of a thing. Most translators
use the word "nature" as the English equivalent of [PHYSIS], but it
is important to remember that Aristotle used [PHYSIS] in a much
more determined and determining way than we now use "nature."
When Aristotle describes the [PHYSIS] of a thing, he means the
essential being that the thing should have, must have, and will have.
   Of the "natural" union between ruler and ruled, Aristotle says,
"one who can foresee with his mind is naturally ruler and naturally
master, and one who can do these things with his body is subject
and naturally a slave; so that master and slave have the same
interest" (1252a30-35). The one who is a natural ruler "must have
his tools, and of tools some are lifeless and others living.... a slave
is a live article of property" (1253b27-32). Aristotle leaves
no doubt about the absoluteness of the slave's nature: "whereas
the master is
merely the slave's master and does not belong to the slave, the
slave is not merely the slave of the master but wholly belongs to
the master" (1254a11-14). To make the master-slave relationship
clear, Aristotle compares it to the relations between genders,
between humans and animals, between body and soul, and
between intelligence and appetite:

the soul rules the body with the sway of a master, the intelligence
the appetites with constitutional or royal rule; and in these examples
it is manifest that it is natural and expedient for the body to be
governed by the soul and for the emotional part to be governed
by the intellect, the part possessing reason, whereas for the two
parties to be on equal footing or in the contrary positions
is harmful in all cases. Again, the same holds good between man
and the other animals: tame animals are superior in their nature
to wild animals, yet for all the former it is advantageous to be ruled
by man, since this gives them security. Also, as between the
sexes, the male is by nature superior and the female inferior, the
male ruler and the female subject. And the same must also
necessarily apply in the case of mankind generally; . . . [some men]
are by nature slaves, for whom to be governed by this kind of
authority is advantageous, inasmuch as it is advantageous to the
subject things already mentioned. For he is by nature a slave who
is capable of belonging to another (and that is why he does so
belong). (1254b5-24)

Aristotle endlessly reiterates this sort of social theory in the
_Politics_. "The usefulness of slaves," he continues, "diverges
little from that of animals." He finds it "manifest . . . that there are
cases of people of whom some are freemen and the others
slaves by nature." Lest anyone wonder about race or
geography, Aristotle makes clear that the one who by nature
is a slave is a slave everywhere, for "the principles of natural
slavery" make clear that "there exist certain persons who are
essentially slaves everywhere and certain others who are so
nowhere" (1254b25-1255a35).
   And by now, of course, it is clear why we read the _Rhetoric_
alone, pretending that it can be extracted from the political and
social theories in which Aristotle embedded it. How in the world
would anyone ever justify taking seriously a theory of communi-
cation that had any sort of relationship at all with such notions as
Aristotle's? Once one begins to look at the world  through his
eyes, things "make sense" in a terrifying way. For example, since
nature has made the souls of freemen and slaves so different,
"The intention of nature . . . is to make the bodies also of freemen
and of slaves different- the latter strong for necessary service,
the former erect and unserviceable for such occupations, but
serviceable for a life of citizenship." One would expect, Aristotle
repeats a few pages later, that nature would set a clear physical
mark on those intended to be slaves.
     Does nature do this? Well, no. "As a matter of fact," Aristotle
admits with not a hint of sheepishness or embarrassment, "often
the very opposite comes about-slaves have the bodies of freemen
and freemen the souls only." In other words, nature intends to
put slaves in slaves' bodies and freemen in freemen's bodies,
but nature "is unable to bring it about." After admitting the
difficulties of interpretation implied by this little failing on nature's
part, Aristotle blithely concludes, "It is manifest therefore that
there are cases of people of whom some are freemen and the
others slaves by nature, and for  these slavery is an institution
both expedient and just" (1254b27-1255a2; 1255a39-1255b4).
   How does that make sense to anybody? Given nature's brilliant
success in the creation of souls, or individual [PHYSEIS], how can
nature have failed so miserably in getting these souls appropriately
embodied? Would such an outrageous lack of fit not cause the
prudent to pause for a moment and rethink their prior categories?
After all, the souls of freemen, as Aristotle openly admits, actually
wind up in the bodies of slaves, and vice versa. In working
through all this, Aristotle even admits that "beauty of soul is not
so easy to see" as is beauty of body (1355a1). Does this give him
pause? Not a whit. Indeed it seems to let him see the truth of his
notion more clearly.
   To Aristotle, slavery and all the concomitant vestiges of a
hierarchical society simply _are_. The notion of natural slavery is
deeply embedded in Aristotelian thought. In the _Categories_,
for example, he uses "master-slave" as a way to demonstrate
the concept "relationship." "All relatives," he explains, "have
their correlatives. 'Slave' means the slave of a master, and
'master,' in turn, implies slave" (6b29-31). The essential quality
of the slave _as a slave_ is so important, Aristotle continues, that if
"slave" is defined "in relation to 'man' or to 'biped' or what not,
instead of its being defined (as it should be) by reference to
'master,' then no correlation appears, for the reference is really
inaccurate." "Suppose we remove, Aristotle muses, all the
"irrelevant attributes" from the master, "such as his being 'two
footed,' 'receptive of knowledge' or 'human,' and leave but his
being 'a master,' then 'slave' will be still the correlative, 'slave'
_meaning_ slave _of a master_ (7a28-7bl).(*6)
   Anyone can readily see the many ways to ignore or obscure
Aristotle's social theory, beginning with the patronizing claim that
slavery was part of the ancient world and thus we have no right to
condemn Aristotle for living and thinking as all others of his age
did. A. H. M. Jones estimates that there were 20,000 slaves in
Athens (_Athenian_ 78-79); Chester Starr (_Birth_ 38)
estimates 30,000; M. I. Finley (_Ancient Slavery_ 80) doubles
that estimate to 60,000; G. E. M. de St. Croix (112-269) and S.
Laufer (5-13) each raise the figure as high as 80,000; A. W.
Gomme pushes it up to 160,000 (20 26); and Athenaeus, who
is the only surviving ancient source, estimates a whopping 400,
000. (*7) Of course, the number of slaves at any given time
between 480 and 322 depended on the relative wealth and
success of Athens at the moment, and the figure was probably
lower in the fourth century than in the fifth. Nevertheless,
whether the figure was 20,000, 400,000, or somewhere in
between, there were _a lot_ of slaves in Athens. R. K.
Sinclair's estimate that slaves constituted slightly more than
one-third of the people living in Athens throughout the fifth
and fourth centuries is probably accurate (192-202).
   Unquestionably, Aristotle himself owned numerous slaves.
Anyone can read his will and see that at his death he owned
well over twenty slaves, and probably many more than that.
He grew up in an affluent family, the son of a king's personal
physician; slave ownership would almost certainly have been
a structural part of his life from birth. And justifications of slavery
do appear elsewhere in Athenian literature. Euripides
(_Iphigenia_ 1400) implies the propriety of Greeks' subju-
gating and owning barbarians, Plato (_Republic_ 470c--471a)
and Isocrates (_Panegyricus_ 3, 184 and _Panathenaicus_ 163)
both argue that non-Greeks can be enslaved, or even exter-
minated, and so on. According to Peter Green (59), a kind of
structural racism so pervaded Greek intellectual life that the
use of slaves was almost compulsory. A. Jones ("Economic 32)
explains that slavery was an established institution protected
in an ideological way by the Athenians' longstanding,
unquestioned belief in the sanctity of private property. Oswyn
Murray ("Life" 223) suggests that slavery was about as wide-
spread in fourth-century Athens as automobile ownership is in
Europe today and that it attracted about the same degree of
attention. After describing the hideous conditions at the
Laurium silver mines, which were worked largely by slaves, many
of them children, Murray goes on to lament, "It is indeed an appal-
ling indictment of Athenian indifference that Nicias, whose money
was made from child labor of this sort, could widely be regarded
as the most moral and religious man of his generation"
("Life" 224). The "Background Book" on Athenian culture,
given to all students who learn Greek using the system
developed by Britain's Joint Association of Classical Teachers
(JACT), contends that the Athenian way of life depended on
slavery (P. Jones 179 87). Sinclair points out that "a master
who killed a slave seems to have been required to do no more
than submit to the ritual act of purification" (28). Donald Kagan
(_Great_ 221) and David Ross (4) both explain that Aristotle's
racism and his endorsement of slavery fit nicely with the
opinions of other Athenian aristocrats. And anyone who
reads Greek history discovers endless battles that led to the
enslavement of entire city-states. In 335, for example, about
the time Aristotle returned to Athens for his most productive
years as a writer and teacher, his Macedonian countryman and
friend Parmenio destroyed the town of Grynium and sold its
inhabitants into slavery. In that same year, Aristotle's most
famous student, Alexander, did basically the same thing to
Thebes. The act of reducing a city to rubble and selling its
inhabitants into slavery was so common that the Greeks gave
the practice a name [ANDRAPODISMOS].(*8) So why is it fair to
hold Aristotle to a standard both higher than and unknown
to his own time?
   There are two equally important reasons. First, if we are
not careful, we run the risk of absolving Aristotle on the
grounds of absolute innocence by making a statement
such as this: "no one, in the ancient world, as far as we
know, advocated the abolition of slavery" (Mulgan 40-44).(*9)
This way, we skip Book I of the _Politics_ and we have
political science; we skip the defense of slavery in the
_Economics_ and we have economics; we go directly to
_Ethics_, _Metaphysics_, and _Analytics_ where we get
philosophy; we take physical science from _Physics_,
_On the Heavens_, and _Meteorology_; biological science
from the various works on animals and plants; psychology from
works having to do with the human psyche; and
from _Rhetoric_, _Sophistical Refutations_, and _Topics_,
we get communications theory. From _Categories_ we learn
how to create taxonomy, from _Poetics_ and _On Interpretation_
we develop critical theory, from _The Constitution of Athens_
we learn how to carry out and present research in history and
social science. (*10) In other words, we build the West. Our
problem, of course, is that we must live in what we build.
  It may be true that no surviving ancient manuscript includes
a carefully reasoned argument for abolishing slavery, but that
does not let Aristotle off the hook. A century before Aristotle
wrote the _Rhetoric_, the sophist Antiphon wrote a treatise
entitled _On Truth_ in which he laid the theoretical foundation
for abolition. "We revere and venerate" those born of a great
house, he writes, but

those who are born of a humble house we neither revere nor
venerate. On this point we are barbarized in our behavior to
one another. Our natural endowment is the same for us all,
on all points, whether we are Greeks or barbarians. We may
observe the characteristics of any of the powers which by
nature are necessary to all men.... None of us is set apart either
as a Greek or as a barbarian. We can all breathe air through our
mouth and nostrils. (Barker 98)

Eli Sagan (80) shows at length that this argument by Antiphon
could appear only in a society where the notions of individual
rights and "equity" were well established. Indeedt several of the
sophists, according to the JACT authors, "held that slavery was
contrary to nature and, because it was based on force,
morally wrong." This explains why Aristotle "spends the opening
chapters of his _Politics_ trying, not very successfully, to refute
those unorthodox sophists and prove that slavery was natural"
(P. Jones 185-86).The most damning evidence, however, comes
not from the scraps that remain of the sophists but from Aristotle
himself. In his own text he makes absolutely clear that arguments
for abolition were in circulation around Athens. Simply to
excuse his defense of slavery based on an argument that
abolition was unknown to him and unthinkable by him will not do.
Abolition was, as his own text shows, quite well known to him, and
he thought through it as carefully as any bigot ever has. Although
 it may be true, to return to Murray's analogy, that giving up his
slaves would have been as unusual, inconvenient, and un-
pleasant for Aristotle as giving up our private automobiles would
be for us, it is also true that we know very well just how wasteful
and destructive our automobiles are, and we can expect no
forgiveness from future generations if, through our insistence
on private, personal automobiles, we make life on our  planet
hellish for our descendants. We know exactly what we are doing.
And so did Aristotle. He tells us in his own words.
   When he takes up the master-slave relationship, he sets out
to see it fully, both as a theoretically grounded social institution
and as a practical way of living. Some people, he admits, "maintain
that for one man to be another man's master is contrary to nature,
because it is only convention that makes the one a slave and the
other a freeman and there is no difference between them by
nature, and that therefore it is unjust, for it is based on force"
(1253b15-23). He lets the question drop for a few pages, but
then he returns to it, making clear that he understands with
excruciating clarity the arguments against slavery:

we must next consider whether or not anyone exists who is
by nature of [the character of a slave], and whether it is advan-
tageous and just for anyone to be a slave, or whether on the
contrary all slavery is against nature. And it is not difficult either
to discern the answer by theory or to learn it empirically.
Authority and subordination are conditions not only inevitable
but also expedient; in some cases things are marked out from
the moment of birth to rule or to be ruled.

He goes on like this for several more sentences, concluding
finally that all of nature depends on hierarchies in which the
few rule and the majority are ruled. In all things "there is always
found a ruling and a subject factor, and this characteristic of
living things is present in them as an outcome of the whole of
nature, since even in things that do not partake of life there
is a ruling principle, as in the case of a musical scale (125417-34).
   Though it seems closed here, the argument does not end.
Aristotle returns to the matter of slavery yet again, this time
showing even more clearly both the care with which someone
in Athens had made the case for abolition and the care with
which Aristotle had formulated his defense of slavery. Having
concluded that slavery is "an institution both expedient and
just," Aristotle turns again to the abolitionists, admitting that
they do have one good argument (1255a3-1255b15). The
words "slave" and "slavery" are rather ambiguous, he admits,
because they apply both to those who are slaves by nature
and to those who are slaves by accident of military conquest.
Both the logic and the Greek at this point in his text are hard
to follow, but Aristotle seems to deal with this ambiguity in
two ways. First, excellence, or virtue (the Greek noun is
[ARETE]), when it has sufficient resources, has great power,
and indeed this sort of [ARETE] carries with it enough moral
strength and superiority to justify  its use of force. This argu-
ment is more complicated than Callicles' bald claim  that "might
makes right" in _Gorgias_. Aristotelian [ARETE] privileges
moral excellence first, and this moral excellence attracts might
naturally. Right is not made by might; rather, such right, such
[ARETE], by the nature of its own virtue attracts might. There-
fore, a military force superior in [ARETE] has a certain moral
justification for enslaving people who have lost a war because
the [ARETE] of a superior, conquering force makes the con-
querors categorically better than the conquered.
   Second, without really sorting out the difficulties raised
by the notion of [ARETE] and its militarily embodied moral
power, Aristotle goes on to admit that those enslaved in an
unjust war or those enslaved who do not have the nature of
slaves should not suffer slavery. Otherwise, "we shall have
the  result that persons reputed of the highest nobility are slaves
and the descendants of slaves if they happen to be taken
prisoners of war and sold." (*11) Aristotle elides all this with a
just-amongthe-boys shrug by saying that no right-thinking person
would accuse him of arguing that Greeks deserve to be slaves;
anyone but a sophist should understand automatically that only the
barbarians deserve slavery, those who are clearly recognized
by all people in all places as naturally slaves. In light of the sophists'
arguments, then, Aristotle allows for two classes of slaves: those
who are slaves by nature, and hence deserve to be slaves, and
those who are slaves by the misfortune of evil chance. Those in
the latter category deserve to be set free. Thus the abolitionists
do have a case in those instances where warfare has brought a
naturally free people into slavery. They do not, however, have
a case when it comes to the genuine, natural slave. This sort
of slave, Aristotle finally closes the matter,

is a part of the master-he is, as it were, a part of the [master's]
body, alive but yet separated from it; hence there is a certain com-
munity of interest and friendship between slave and master in
cases when they have been qualified by nature for those po-
sitions, although when they do not hold them in that way but
by law and by constraint of force the opposite is the case.(*12)

   Now this sounds for all the world like the arguments I heard that
Saturday  night in Silver City, Mississippi. True, the theology has
changed, but the end result is the same: one group of people,
usually a race identifiable by language or complexion, has a natural
right and a moral obligation to subjugate another. Jessica Benjamin
has explained in detail the drive for dominance and control
that characterizes the modes of discourse Aristotle left for us.
Absoluteness, she writes, "the sense of being one ('my identity is
entirely independent and consistent') and alone ('There is nothing
outside of me that I do not control') is the basis for domination-and
the master-slave relationship" (33). Working from Benjamin's ideas
in his Freudian reading of ancient Athens, Sagan describes this
drive as the ever-vigilant, frightened control attempted by the
tyrant (154). And this brings me to the second reason why we
cannot ignore Aristotle's social theories. The rage to categorize,
taxonomize, arrange in hierarchies, and define teleological destiny
too easily spills over into life. The role in discourse offered by
Aristotle is that of a separate, perceiving intellect [NOUS] capable
of disinterested, objective analysis. In no way is this intellect
implicated or imbricated in what it "knows."(*13) This separation
of Being' into its constituent elements allows the three proofs to
exist in a hierarchy, beginning with logos, moving to ethos, and
reaching bottom with pathos. It allows the proofs to be the soul
and body of discourse, with style and delivery as the body's
adornment. It allows an "unsituated" intellect to use
analogy, cause-effect, deduction, induction, description, and
other such "rhetorical" strategies to control and present an
argument. It allows the right-thinking person always to recognize
the true side of opposing arguments. This cool, professional
voice allowed Aristotle to disembody himself and see life through
the eyes of a disinterested professional; alas, it also blinded
him to the human existence of all those around him whose lives
were all too unprofessional.
   Aristotle, for example, seems to have held a position similar
to the second position (the Lilith position) I described when I
began, the one in which black people are the soulless offspring
of a union between Adam and some nonhuman or demonic
female. This is surely the most virulently racist of all possible
positions because it holds that some people, whether they are
black or barbarian, are naturally inferior to others and that these
inferior people draw their very identity from that inferiority. There
is, at least to me, a terrible "logic (or [logos]) at work here. In this
 [logos] a natural slave is one who belongs to someone else
because of the inherent, self-evident capability of so belonging.
And if such normal categories as physical appearance do not
reveal the natural slave's true nature, then nature merely failed
in its intention to make the distinction plain to all. The slave, of
course, "naturally" remains a slave; no thought is given to the
possibilities that "nature" might be wrong, or  that the interpre-
tation given to the results of"nature's" attempt might be  wrong,
or even that the very notion "nature" might be an utter fabrication
rather than some absolute teleological destiny.
   Slavery, sexism, and racism made perfect sense to Aristotle,
even though he clearly knew persuasive and cogent arguments
against them all. As a very  young man writing on rhetoric in the
now-lost _Protrepticus_, he already  thought of people as occupy-
ing different ontological states. Iamblichus quotes him as writing:

in my opinion we do not need the same kind of philosophic knowl-
edge or  wisdom as regards plain ordinary life that we need for
living the perfect  (philosophic) life. The majority of men may wholly
be excused and justified for doing this-for being satisfied with that
sort of knowledge which is sufficient to lead a normal, average life.
These people, to be sure, wish for a higher form of happiness,
but on the whole they are content if they can simply stay alive. (*14)

As a mature and somewhat more cynical scholar, Aristotle repeats
this notion in the _Politics_ (1280a31-1280b40), where he explains
that the state ([polis]) depends on the social clubbing of clans who
intermarry and share the same cultural assumptions. Otherwise,
"a collection of slaves or of lower animals would be a state, but as
it is, it is not a state, because slaves and animals have no share in
wellbeing or in purposive life." The state exists because it is
enabled by "brotherhoods and clubs for sacrificial rites and social
recreations" coupled with patriarchically controlled intermarriage
among the elite and the agnatic transmission of property.

+Composition Studies 1993

   Just as they did to Aristotle, segregation and racism make
perfect sense today all over the world. One can read about them
on any day in any  newspaper. Not a day goes by without someone
on the planet killing someone else-or, more likely, several people-
for racist reasons. There is, I fear, a  risk that the place from which
we speak carries with it a notion of "we," a  notion of"they," and a
notion of the "unspeakable ones." Before Burkean consub-
stantiality has the opportunity to develop, before Rogerian
argument finds the time to begin, the community coalesces through
its differences from and its inability to imagine the perspective of the
"other." Only after this process of coalescing is complete does
consubstantiality become a driving force of rhetoric, only then
does anyone imagine seeing an argument through the perspective
of an opponent. Unfortunately, to occupy the speaking position,
"opponent," one must already occupy a place within the community.
   In Aristotle's system, soul is privileged over body, intelligence over
emotion, humans over animals, men over women, and freemen
over slaves. Is it possible for the field of composition studies to extract
the first three hierarchies-the ones privileging soul, intelligence, and
human-while leaving aside the other two hierarchies- the ones
privileging male and  freeman? What, in other words, is the [PHYSIS],
the nature of the composition teacher and the composition student?
If each has a telos, a shape and function that it must inhabit, what is
 the shape? What the function?
   In most universities, students are "placed" in writing courses,
whether basic, general, advanced, honors, specialized, or whatever;
thus, they are doubly located. First, they are located in the American
system of education, with all the social and economic implications
such location implies-from the
privilege of the Ivy League and its imitators to the "practicality" of the
two-year college and the forprofit, jobtraining institute. Almost without
exception each student's "location" implies preparation for a place in
the economic system. Only an infinitesimally small percentage of
students, even of those in the most elite colleges, regard a degree
as anything other than preparation for some form of"employability."
Within this larger context, location has ontological implications for
each individual. Those placed in basic courses-especially if the basic
course is located in a public institution with "low" or "open" admissions
standards- have already received a mark of identification. They are
"at the bottom of the American educational hierarchy" because they
_belong_ there, and they belong there because they _are_ there.
As Glynda Hull, Mike Rose, Losey Fraser, and Marisa Castellano have
shown with such force, race and class prejudice can create a social
position that the "remedial student" cannot stop filling so that the
place remains occupied. Those basic students fare best who, in the
words of Aristotle, "do not contradict us and deny their offense."
These good ones "cease to be angry" and "admit the justness of
their situation." In short, those "who humble themselves" and "recog-
nize that they are inferior" are most likely to curry the favor of the
teacher, the one located in such a position as to understand and
remedy the students' "natural" deficiencies- so far, of course, as
such deficiencies can be remedied.
   I am describing, of course, only one "take" on the composition
teacher's situation, but it is extremely important for those of us
who train teachers and work with teaching assistants to recognize
the dynamics of this situation. Much too often composition classes,
taught by those who are far from ready to do the work, take on night-
marishly Aristotelian features. Because the teachers are so com-
pletely unprepared for what they find in the classroom, they retreat
immediately into an imagined position of linguistic, aesthetic, and
hence moral superiority. Their students become barbarians while
they themselves become, or at least attempt to become, tyrants.
The communal offices inhabited by composition faculty foster this
sort of oligarchic, virtuous-among-the-barbarians thinking. None of
us can help laughing at paragraphs like the following, written by a
first-year composition student at a public, regional, midwestern
university in 1992:

What is suicide? When one thinks of suicide, different images
begin racing through one's mind. One definition that denotes
suicide is "one who takes or  tries to take one's own life"
(_Webster's New World Dictionary_ 736). How  does one define
_teenage_? Is a teenager someone who thinks as would a
young adult of these ages? _The Doubleday Dictionary_ defines
_teenage_ as "of, being in, or related to the years from thirteen to
nineteen inclusive" (756). Men and woman are physically different,
although when it comes to mental and emotional competence
they are much alike. A _male_ is classified as "designating or of
the sex that fertilizes the ovum" (364). Meanwhile, _female_ is
classified as "designating or of the sex that bears offspring" (225).
As I mentioned before, I am concerned with the questions "why"
and "what if." In _Webster's New World Dictionary_ _why_ is defined
as "for  what reason, cause, or purpose" (683). _What if_ is defined
as "what do you think" (680). All of these definitions in one way or
another are related to teenage suicide.

And we believe our laughter is an innocent, necessary, sanity-
inducing defense mechanism-defense against the barbarians,
of course. All  composition teachers feel an ownership of the
above text that is far superior to that of the student who wrote it.
We can understand the teleological wholeness toward which
the text is destined and know exactly what needs to be done to
get it there. The text itself reconfirms the naturalness of our
rulership over the student.
   Those of us in positions to appoint, train, supervise, and later
"place" writing teachers must, in my opinion, answer the same
question I am asking Aristotle, who, great as he was, could see
no reason to abolish slavery; the categories within which he
thought would not allow him to hear the arguments of the
sophists. In this he was all too lamentably human, for few
people can imagine abolishing what they consider natural or
undertake thinking outside their own categories of knowability.
   What are the practices and procedures that we cannot conceive
of abolishing because they are natural? Is it possible that our ways
of placing and evaluating are embedded in a kind of politics and
that they imply a social order? By extracting Aristotle's _Rhetoric_
from his _Politics_, as we so commonly do, do we run the risk of
imagining that we can extract our own pedagogy in a similar way?

+The Venue of the True Intellect

   All of us in composition studies who hold tenure have partici-
pated in the early, halting attempts to professionalize what we
now think of as "our discipline." We have pushed hard to have
our research accepted so that we can be accorded tenure, pro-
motion, and status based on our particular kind of "research." In
the last five years, the "research professor" in composition
studies has become an actuality in more than a dozen universities.
Some of us have watched with pride as our Ph.D. students were
wooed by major universities with (for beginning assistant professors
of English) large salaries, light teaching loads, and considerable
support for research. While the national prejudice against those
who teach writing has remained predominant, it is no longer mono-
lithic.
   Because of the history of composition studies, however, in-
cluding its integral involvement with open admissions colleges,
basic studies, general education, and social transformation, the
professionalization of the discipline in so traditional a way is more
than a little troublesome. Although one can find  the pure social
elitist inscribed most clearly in Plato, the academic elitist, the
publishing professional "philosopher" whose work need have no
particular  relevance to classroom practice, appears first in Aristotle's
_Metaphysics_ and _Nicomachean Ethics_. The nature of this
professional intellectual bears close scrutiny, especially now that
those of us in composition studies may soon have the opportunity
to inhabit the position.
   Aristotle opens his _Metaphysics_ (981bl4--982b28) by
describing the pure philosopher. Such a person, from primitive times
onward, according to Aristotle, has always been not only "wiser"
than but also categorically  "superior" to other people. (*15)Such
superior people cannot, however, emerge into history until society
learns to set apart a special, leisured class, a  class for whom "prac-
tically all the necessities of life were already supplied." The first such
class, Aristotle continues, was the Egyptian "priestly class," which
developed mathematics. This "superior man" in the "priestly class"
must be absolutely "independent," one who is freed from any obli-
gation to provide "the necessities of life," one "who exists for him-
self and not for another." Such a wise person naturally occupies a
commanding place, "for the wise man should give orders, not receive
them; nor should he obey others, but the less wise should obey
him" (982a18-20). This superior person knows things in their ab-
stract, universal, foundational way, the way in which they
can be known truly; this person need not, and usually does not,
know particular things. The wise person "can comprehend difficult
things, such as are not easy for human comprehension.... he is more
accurately informed and better able to expound causes." What
this superior person knows is desirable for itself; it is not "desir-
able for its results." Indeed, what the superior person knows
_must be_ speculative and _cannot be_ productive. The superior
person's inquiry must lead to knowledge for its own sake, not to
knowledge  that is useful or that generates some specific set of
results. That the most noble science "is not a productive science
is clear," Aristotle explains, for the great thinkers always pursue
"science for the sake of knowledge, and not for  any practical utility."
   Aristotle takes up this "superior being" again at the end of the
_Ethics_ (1177a13--1181b24). The highest possible activity avail-
able for humans, he explains, is pure theorizing that leads to
"pleasures of marvelous purity and permanence. " This theorizing
sort of life allows one to extract oneself from the vicissitudes of life
thereby entering a realm of absolute selfsufficiency. "While it is
true," Aristotle admits,

that the wise man equally with the just man and the rest requires
the necessaries of life, yet, these being adequately supplied,
whereas the just man needs other persons towards whom or with
whose aid he may act justly, and so likewise do the temperate man
and the brave man and the others, the wise man on the contrary
can also contemplate by himself, and the more so the wiser he is;
no doubt he will study better with the aid of fellowworkers, but
still he is the most self-sufficient of men.

Pure theorizing, Aristotle continues, is "the only activity that is
loved for its own sake: it produces no result beyond the actual act
of contemplation." Most  importantly, theorizing depends on un-
limited, unencumbered leisure. Such  leisure is essential because
theorizing has no product and leads to no practically useful end.
Political and military lives lead to public honor, but because the
general and the politician are unleisured and because each seeks
specific, realizable goals, both are inferior to the intellectual because
intellectual life is leisured, freed from any practical goal, and utterly
self-sufficient. So noble is the theoretical life that Aristotle compares
it to the divine: "If then the intellect is something divine in compari-
son with man, so is the life of the intellect divine in comparison with
human life." Compared with the life of theorizing, "the life of moral
virtue . . . is happy only in a secondary degree. For the moral activities
are purely human." Moral activities have a situated, temporal, social
quality about them, "whereas the happiness that belongs to the
intellect is separate."
   Indeed, the life of theory is so pure that it requires very few
external goods. Oh sure, the intellectual must have a wife to run
the household, a fair amount of inherited land to free him from the
grubbiness and inferiority of commerce or industry, and some
slaves to provide the "external goods" necessary "to carry on . . .
life as a human being." Of course, the wife and the slaves must
forego any opportunity for the speculative, theoretical, most
excellent kind of life, but because they received their "natures"
from god, they must live accordingly. The superior person capable
of, and willing to undertake, the theoretical life is "the man most
beloved of the gods. " Doubtless that is why  the gods created
women and slaves to serve him. (*16) And Aristotle will have none
of the bleeding-heart liberalism that one so often finds among
composition studies people. "If discourses on ethics were -
 many' (as Theognis says) 'would they win.' " But such is not the
case. While the life of  theory may "have power to stimulate and
encourage generous youths, and, given an inborn nobility of
character and a genuine love of what is noble, can make them
susceptible to the influence of virtue, yet they are powerless to
stimulate the mass of mankind to moral nobility." In the Aristotelian
institution of higher education, the professor's most important
task is to ensure high admissions standards. Students who do not
have the proper  inborn qualities and the requisite prior education
must never cross the threshold. Since most people do not and can-
not hope to qualify, Aristotle admits that "we shall need laws to
regulate the discipline of adults as well, and in fact the whole life of
the people generally; for the many are more amenable
to compulsion and punishment than to reason and to moral ideals."
   The Aristotelian system, of which the _Rhetoric_ is a fully functional
and necessary part, offers a textbook example of the danger inherent
in the notion "higher education." One simply cannot think of oneself
as superior to others without at the same time thinking of those others
as inferior and-at least in some small way-less truly realized and less
 truly real than oneself. If all people are capable of nobility of character,
Aristotle poses an entirely  rhetorical question, "How could it be
proper for the one to rule and the other  to be ruled unconditionally?"
Well, comes the easy and already decided answer, the ruler and the
ruled, while each capable of virtue, have different kinds of virtue
(different [ARETE]). How do we know that different people are
capable of different sorts of virtue? Easy, we look at the soul,
which Aristotle has already described for us as hierarchically arranged,
and presto ([ARETE]) we remember that "the soul by nature contains
a part that rules and a part that is ruled, to which we assign different
virtues, that is, the virtue of the rational and that of the irrational."
With that metaphysics in place, we can now think of the family, where
we find "by nature various classes of rulers and ruled."
Of course in the family the ruling one-the father-always rules, but
he rules different sorts of souls differently and for different reasons:

For the free rules the slave, the male the female, and the man the
child in a different way. And all possess the various parts of the soul,
but possess them in different ways; for the slave has not got the
deliberative part at all, and the female has it, but without full authority,
while the child has it, but in an undeveloped form. Hence the ruler
must possess intellectual virtue in completeness . . . while each of
the other parties must have that share of this virtue which is appro-
priate to them. (1259b20-1260a18) (*17)

The professional discourse generated for us by Aristotle allows
its speaker to inhabit a position of "intellectual virtue in complete-
ness." The power and the attraction of that speaking position are as
difficult to demystify as they are to resist. After all, the discourse
allows one to seem to strip off the metaphysics of the Western
patriarchy while inhabiting the virtuous and disinterested position
from which that metaphysics speaks.

+The Dis-Easy, Particular Situation of the Composition Teacher

   Now that we in composition studies have begun to escape the
scorn of the academy, we occupy an increasingly legitimate place
in an institution thought up by Plato and perfected by Aristotle.
The highest goal of the faculty in such an institution is leisure time,
theoretical activity. The sort of discourse prized by such an insti-
tution is the disinterested, unsituated discourse of knowledge
and power. Most often such discourse appears in the world as if it
had been written by no one, as if it were merely the medium through
which the pure knowledge resulting from pure speculation presents
itself. Such discourse almost never reveals how the writer came to
"know" what the discourse "reveals," or how the discourse of knowl-
edge itself works.
   Composition studies as I envision it will always have an uneasy
situation in the university because it never aims higher than the
practical and productive; its theories can never exist for their own
pure sake. Everything we do in some way connects to the daily,
messy, applied, and practical tasks 1) of helping students learn
how to write and 2) of showing students who do not wish to
write the degree to which they marginalize themselves in the (written)
discourses of the West. Unsituating either the students' essays
or our own "theorizing" about those essays makes both their writing
and our scholarship into leisure-time, theoretical activities, activities
that reinscribe the social hierarchy of Aristotelianism with every stroke
of the pen or keyboard. While we can make ourselves "complete" in
the Aristotelian model by unsituating ourselves and turning compo-
sition studies into philosophy or social science, we will remain "com-
plete" only so long as we remain outside the classroom. Teaching is
not the price a composition studies person pays to do research;
research is the price a composition studies person pays for getting
to teach.
   If composition studies continues to develop into a "true" discipline,
the time will come early in the next century when composition studies
majors, or perhaps writing majors, will appear in every college. Before
this occurs, we must remember both our recent history and our ancient
metaphysics. Our recent history is, for me at least, foreboding. In the
1880s the modern literatures, enabled by the founding of the MLA in
1883, began to seize control of college curricula. By the end of World
War I, classical studies departments, which had dominated throughout
 the nineteenth century, were completely marginalized. As English
departments led the way in this power shift, they carefully situated them-
selves so as to appear just as elitist, just as Aristotelian as the classics
had been. English departments made themselves elitist by degrading
the teaching of rhetoric and composition. A century ago, the teaching
of writing in English departments became the "other" through
whose exclusion the study of literature could coalesce and know
itself as being elevated and refined. I would urge all who consider
themselves "rhet/comp" specialists to read the issues of _PMLA_
published in the 1880s. Each early issue shows how the MLA de-
graded rhetoric and composition so as to claim that the study of liter-
ature equaled in rigor and quality the study of classical texts.(*19)
The standard move-the litany, one might say-of every early _PMLA_
author was to separate the study of literature from the teaching
of rhetoric and composition.
   Our ancient metaphysics is rather more obscure than our recent
history, which, given my love for the obscure, probably explains my
interest in, and antipathy for, Plato and Aristotle. The notions about
discourse that have informed the West for 2,500 years grow out of
a politics and a social theory  that all of us in composition studies
(dare one say all "right-thinking" people?)
abhor. I do not intend to argue that we are trapped either in Aristo-
telianism or  in the West, nor do I think we can or should try to abandon
or destroy them. I do, however, think we must articulate as clearly as
possible the ways in which our history situates our pedagogy. I truly
believe that composition studies cannot do its job without behaving
so as to deserve the contempt of Aristotle as well as that of his teacher
and of all those who accept aristocratic notions in which a "superior
man" can extract himself from the vicissitudes of ongoing, lived ex-
perience and thus be freed to seek pure knowledge for its own pure
sake, knowledge that presents itself through the disembodied voice
of professional discourse as if no lived history at all stands behind it.
Even though we live more than twenty-three centuries after Aristotle,
we live in a metaphysics that one finds written out first in the Academy
and the Lyceum. Even now, after all these years, we are not far be-
yond that metaphysics. I  know firsthand what it is like to grow up in,
and have to struggle against, Aristotelian social theories. Aristotle
unsituated knowledge, dehumanized it. He made it into something
that transcends any particular situation. Only in the knowing of par-
ticular things, however, can a composition teacher "know"
anything at all inside the classroom. The teaching of writing cannot,
in my opinion, ever be unsituated-unless, that is, those who teach
writing decide to live in Aristotle's world.

____________________________________

NOTES
The _Rhetoric_ and the _Politics_ of Slavery

1. The name was a misnomer from the beginning in that people
of all races were free to join. It was called the "black" party because
the so-called Mississippi Democratic party did not admit black members.
2. _The OxfordAnnotated Bible_, Genesis 9.20 27. Future English
citations from the Bible are taken from this translation and will be cited
by book, chapter, and verse, in the text.
3. Cope (1.60), Grimaldi (1.91), Roberts (35), and Freese (41) all
offer  translations supporting the interpretation that Aristotle sub-
ordinates rhetoric to the ([ARCHITEKTONIKE]) political science.
Kagan (_Great_ 202-4), Shulsky  (77-78), and Vickers (8) also offer
this interpretation. I should also note that the Greek comparative
adjectives ([EMPHRONESTERAS] and [MALLON
and ALETHINES]) are used to describe political science in a positive
way (as being more intelligent, scholarly, or instructive and more
exact, true, or real than rhetoric) rather than rhetoric in a negative
way. My text implies the negative, but I do not think that violates
the Greek.
4. I do not doubt Kathleen Welch's contention that the canons
were in place in Plato's day and thus were not Aristotle's invention.
The fact that Aristotle codified such things as the canons and pre-
served them for history as he did are the important points for me.
5. I accept the general judgment that Aristotle wrote the _Politics_
during his second stay in Athens (335-22); thus, it reflects his
mature and seasoned opinions about how society should be
organized.
6. In the _Economics_ (1344a23-1344b22) Aristotle, or one of
his followers at the Lyceum, works through the business of slavery
yet again, this time with the spin of how one manages and gets
the most production from a slave. It is also worth noting that the
notion of human "whiteness" appears so often in the _Categories_
as to become a sort of fetish. Among other places see la28,
2a1-10 and 30-34, 2b1-22 and 35, 3a20, 4a5 and 20-30, 4bl4,
5b1-10, 6a4, 10b12-18, 13-15, and 26-28. This repeated concern
with human "whiteness" also appears in _On Interpretation_, begin-
ning with 18a15-20 and 20b35-40.
7. R K. Sinclair (197-202) offers a good summary of the debate
over the number of slaves as does Finley in both _The Ancient
Economy_ and _Ancient Slavery_ (especially 67-93).
8. For other discussions of this term, see Thompson 197 and
Sagan 261. The Macedonians did not, of course, invent the act
of razing a city and enslaving its population. One need do no
more than read Thucydides accounts of the way Athens treated
the Mitylenians, the Melians, and the Scionaeans to see that the
Athenians were as adept at destroying and enslaving as any
political entity in the Mediterranean world.
9. One can easily see the sort of apologies this kind of thinking
leads to. The third sentence in Oxford University Press's bro-
chure advertising Kennedy's new translation of the _Rhetoric_
reads as follows: "[Kennedy] eliminates euphemistic and sexist
language (which Aristotle did not use)." While it is true that some
of the older translations use masculine pronouns where Aristotle's
Greek does not absolutely require them, the suggestion that
Aristotle was not sexist-a suggestion that this sentence clearly
makes- is both ridiculous and dangerous. Anyone who reads
the _Politics_ knows that no translator does Aristotle a disservice
by using exclusive (and frequent!) masculine pronouns.
Pretending somehow that the _Rhetoric_ is not a sexist docu-
ment embedded deeply in a sexist culture does, however, do
us a disservice because it helps us blind ourselves to things
that we prefer not to see.
10. Aristotle and his students gathered at least 158 different
constitutions for _The Athenian Constitution_ and the _Politics_.
This process of gathering every available piece of evidence,
organizing and synthesizing all the evidence, summarizing it,
and then critiquing it, really is the beginning of scholarship.
See Sagan (310) and Kagan (_Great_ 199). (Throughout my
text, I will treat _The Athenian Constitution_ as an Aristotelian
text even though that
assumption is disputed.)
11. Aristotle certainly knew that many slaves became slaves
because their  ancestors prior to Solon had taken mortgages on
their own bodies that they  failed to pay. In _The Athenian Consti-
tution_, after all, Aristotle explains Solon's abolition of "loans
secured on the person." For whatever reason, Aristotle chooses
not to mention this form of generational enslavement.
12. This argument in which some "men" are clearly more "men"
than others does not seem to bother Aristotle, even though he
spends considerable time in _Categories_ (2b1-4b19) and _Meta-
physics_ (1006&1-1007b18) arguing that "man" is by definition
"man" and cannot be less than "man." In point of fact, however,
it turns out that "man" really means only aristocratic, philosophical
"man," for nonaristocratic, nonphilosophical "man" is clearly a notch
down; works-for-a-living "man" is two notches down; woman is three
notches down; and slave is really nothing more than an animal in
man form. David Ross (160) and Abram Shulsky (93-94) discuss
this same problem.
13. For other treatments of the [NOUS], see Martha Nussbaum
(251) and Kagan (_Pericles_ 24-25).
14. Quoted in Chroust (1.233). In an endnote to the passage,
Chroust traces this notion throughout the Aristotelian canon.
15. The Greek that I am translating as "wiser and superior to"
reads as follows: "[SOPHON KAI DIAPHERONTA TON ALLON]."
I am translating the participle as meaning "going beyond" in a
categorical, escatological way, hence "superior being."
16. It would be hard to overstate the degree of Aristotle's class
prejudice. One need not accept de Ste. Croix's Marxism to see
it glaringly. Abram Shulsky's (75-89) explication of the Aristotelian
derogatory noun [CHREMATISTIKOS] shows Aristotle's contempt
for those who had to make a living in any way other than owning
land. Finley ("Aristotle" 18) argues that Aristotle's insistence on
the unnaturalness of commercial trade prevents him from examining
the mechanics of economics. Joseph Schumpeter makes the same
case, arguing that Aristotle operated "in the light of the ideological
preconceptions to be expected in a man who lived in, and wrote
for, a cultured leisure class, which held work and business pursuits
in contempt and, of course, loved the farmer who fed it and hated
the money lender who exploited it" (60). Christian Meier and A. H.
M. Jones repeat this formulation, with Jones contending that Plato
and Aristotle were gentlemen who "despised workers and justified
their contempt by asserting that manual work deformed
the body and the soul" ("Economic" 29) and Meier contending
that Aristotle, like others in "affluent circles," had "contempt for
work" (145).
17. In _Metaphysics_ (1075a12-1076a4) Aristotle sets up the
same sort of world view. In _Nicomachean Ethics_ he divides the
soul in a similar way
(1139a).
18. I recognize that Aristotle treats the practical and productive
as mutually exclusive. In chapter 2 below, I deal with the way in
which Aristotle's rhetoric violates the law of noncontradiction.
19. I treat this history in more detail in a forthcoming essay
("Degradation"), but anyone can read the essays by W. T. Hewett,
H. C. G. Brandt, James Morgan Hart, F. V. N. Painter, Theodore
W. Hunt, Henry R. Lang, John G. R. McElroy, and A. Marshall Elliott
that appeared in the very first issue of _PMLA_. The essays by
James MacAlister and Henry E. Shepherd in volume 3 as well as
the essay by Morton W. Easton in volume 4 also bear scrutiny.
The way literature created itself by degrading composition is
astonishing, even to someone who remembers what it was like
before "composition studies" existed as a professional designation.

END

=====================================
 Date:         Mon, 15 May 1995 23:12:41 -0500
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From:         SOPHIST@utarlg.uta.edu
Subject:      vjv->jn: Your writing style?

To: Jasper and REINVW subscribers
From: Victor
Re: Let's begin the re/inter/view with Jasper Neel.
 

Everyone, please feel free to send in your questions. We will
perform this re/inter/view in the same way that we did the pre-
vious two, namely, as a forum.  In other words, questions can
be asked of and directed to all participants as in a multvalent
conversation.

When sending in your questions, please be sure to ...
1. put your initials in the subject heading and a phrase indicating
        your topic;
2. set off your questions with five of these _ as in _____ (see
        below);
3. and put your name at the end of the post.

Thanks.

================

Jasper, I've been saving this quote for some time, not knowing
vvhen I might be able to use it. Perhaps this is the opportune
moment. It is from Linda Flower in her article "Cognitive Rhetoric:
Inquiry Into the Art of Inquiry" (in _Defining the New Rhetorics_,
ed. Theresa Enos and Stuart C. Brown. Sage Series in Written
Communication. Vol. 7. Newberry Park, CA: Sage, 1993:  171-90.)


Linda writes:

"For me, the excitement of rhetoric is in the chase, in exploring
the rhetorical  acts of my colleagues, my students, and myself. I
would like to understand, for instance, the rich web of intentions
that lead writers like Jasper Neel and Victor Vitanza, for instance,
to take a sometimes outrageous/playful/serious performative
stance on complex questions. As they carry on, using familiar (literary
and theatrical) conventions in the unfamiliar setting of an academic
journal or conference, we see a process of constructing meanings
that (they and I believe) could _not_ be created with conventional,
qualified kinds of discourse. What forces, intentions, conventions,
goals, plans, voices, traditions come into such making? What is the
cognition of creating such discourse when these rhetors are reading-
to-write, staring at a computer screen, or driving home wrapped in
thought? What, for instance, are they assuming about their readers,
when they simulate in their own minds how we will respond to their
unconventional, complexly crafted rhetorical moves? What readers
and what responses are they constructing? And does their represen-
tation have an interesting relation to what an assortment of English
teachers who read them actually think/do? Experts are intriguing."
(176)

I don't know if you found this passage before and had a chance
to think about it, but having had a chance to read it now ...

_____What are your thoughts concerning the various questions
and characterizations?

More to the point here ...

_____Why did you write your book on Aristotle the way _it is written_?

Linda asks: "What forces, intentions, conventions, goals, plans,
voices, traditions come into such making?"

Now, it seems to me that you in great part answer some of these
questions in the early part of the book and for sure in the parts that
we sent out in electronic form.

_____Do you have anything additional to say about the way

        "IT                IS                          WRITTEN"      ?

I have purposefully repeated that phrasing to emphasize it to be to be read
as an idiom.

--victor (j. vitanza)
============================================
Date:         Tue, 16 May 1995 14:48:43 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject:      je->vjv: writing process/"Romantic"

I have had two long, intense discussions with Linda Flower about what, for
lack of a better phrase, I will call, "scholarship in composition studies" (I
no longer find the phrase "composition studies" useful, but that opinion is
best left to another conversation).  I found each discussion useful and
challenging.  For the sake of this moment, and in an attempt to be as
(playfully!) provocative as I can, I will classify my writing as highly
romantic; then I will make an argument against the usefulness of the sorts of
questions that Linda Flower has traditionally asked.

In 1982 my PhD was seven years old, and I had risen to the rank of professor
and chair of English at Francis Marion University in South Carolina.  I was 35
at the time, and I faced an uncertain future.  I allowed myself three options
(and, yes, when you see how excruciatingly similar the three are, you'll see
the dimensions of my stunted imagination): 1) become an academic administrator
with the goal of becoming a university president; 2) stay at Francis Marion
and become active in the political, cultural, and social life of the community
(in addition, of course, to being a good teacher); 3) try to become a
publishing scholar, which, in time, would mean leaving Francis Marion for an
institution that allowed time and provided funds for research and writing.  I
regarded option 1 as normal professional ambition, option 2 as normal human
behavior, and option 3 as weird and scary.  So, of course, I chose 3, gave up
tenure, took a reduction in rank to associate professor, and moved off to a
PhD granting department.
 
To regain tenure and get promoted, I had to publish a book with a university
press.  When I began that process in fall 1984, I did not have a clue what I
was doing.  My wife often tells a story of coming home to find me sitting on
the attic steps in my underwear, head in hands, unshaven face (I didn't wear a
beard at the time), in complete despair.  I was trying to write what would
become in a few years "Plato, Derrida, and Writing."  She asked me what I was
doing, and I replied that I had no idea.

In my opinion, I was then working my way through the most romantic imaginable
notion of writing.  In "Preface to the Second Edition of the Lyrical Ballads,"
Wordsworth says his purpose is "to choose incidents and situations from common
life, and to relate or describe them, throughout....in a selection of language
really used by men [please excuse his gendering], and, at the same time, to
throw over them a certain coloring of imagination, whereby ordinary things
should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect."  Later, in a
formulation that has become a cliche, Wordsworth describes his writing process
as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from
emotion recollected in tranquility: the emotion is contemplated till, by a
species of reaction, the tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion,
kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually
produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.  In this mood successful
composition generally begins, and in a mood similar to this it is carried on;
but the emotion, of whatever kind, and in whatever degree, from various
causes, is qualified by various pleasures, so that in describing any passions
whatsoever, which are voluntarily described, the mind will, upon the whole, be
in a state of enjoyment."

In large part, this is what I was doing.  There were three differences between
me and Wordsworth:  First, he wrote verse and I wrote prose.  Second, he
wandered through the Lake District looking for inspiration, and I read Plato
and Derrida looking for inspiration about the nature and effect of writing.
Third, he's a much better writer than I am.  I wanted to situate myself in a
state of intense feeling, which I did by reading Plato's attacks on rhetoric
and writing and Derrida's deconstruction of meaning and the self.  Then I
wanted to relate that feeling to my classroom teaching.  Finally, in a
language that anyone could understand, I wanted to write about my situation
and its relation to teaching so that I and my readers would enjoy it.  And
that's really all I wanted to do.

My notion of how my text would develop came from Wordsworth's co-conspirator,
Coleridge.  One can see this highly romantic notion of the writing process
most clearly in the essay "Shakespeare's Judgment Equal to His Genius," where
Coleridge claims that "no true work of genius [I'll deal with the term
"genius" in a moment if you can hold your laughter that long] dares want its
appropriate form, neither is there any danger of this."  Later in this same
paragraph, he contrasts what he calls "mechanic form" (mechanic form would
lead to an assignment in which students write comparison-contrast or cause-
effect essays before any thought is given to what they might write about) with
"organic form."  Organic form, he continues, "is innate; it shapes, as it
develops, itself from within, and the fullness of its development is one and
the same with the perfection of its outward form.  Such as the life is, such
the form.  Nature, the prime genial artist, inexhaustible in diverse powers,
is equally inexhaustible in forms, each exterior is the physiognomy of the
being within its true image reflected and thrown out from the concave mirror:
and even such is the appropriate excellence of her [excuse C's gendering, too]
chosen poet, of our own Shakespeare, himself a nature humanized, a genial
understanding, directing self-consciously a power and an implicit wisdom
deeper even than our consciousness."

In effect, when I start to write something (this very text, for example), I
turn to some matrix of classical texts, think a lot about my most recent
writing classes, start writing in this matrix of canon and classroom, and
trust that the writing itself will develop its own being.  In Aristotelian
terms, it is undeniably teleological--if one can throw a twist of chaos theory
into Aristotle's teleology.

Now this leads me to the problem with questions such as those raised by Linda
Flower.  As Coleridge says of Shakespeare, the entire writing process lies far
beneath anything one might call consciousness.  Trying to understand such a
process (especially in anything like systematic, empirical ways) is like
trying to understand both brain (psychology) and mind (philosophy) at the same
time.  Anything we in composition could possibly do would have to be so
utterly general as to be largely useless.  In "A Defense of Poetry" Shelley
describes what I mean: No one, he argues, can comprehend the composing
process, "for the mind in creation is a fading coal, which some invisible
influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this
power arises from within, like the color of a flower which fades and changes
as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic
either of its approach or its departure.  Could this influence be durable in
its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of
the results; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the
decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the
world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conception of the poet."

I end with two caveats: First, I am aware that Wordsworth, Coleridge, and
Shelley set the poet apart as having "a more comprehensive soul" and a better,
happier mind than do most people.  For them, the writer is a "genius."  While
(at least for this morning) I accept their notions of the writer's process, I
do not accept their notions of the writer's ontology.  This necessarily traps
me in an inconsistency--just where I like best to be!  Second, I think the
work done by Linda Flower is essential in that it falsifies "theories of the
composing process."  I do not see how empirical or cognitive research can
construct a theory of the composing process, but I see very clearly how it can
falsify any claim that someone might make.

I conclude with an apology for having written so much.  In future, no more
than one page!  Also, I do not think I want this conversation to deal much
with the pros and cons of cognitive and/or empirical research.  I deal with
them here merely because of the initial question.  I expect not to deal with
questions about them in the remainder of this conversation.

--Jasper
 
================================================ 
Date:         Tue, 16 May 1995 14:03:56 -0500
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From:         SOPHIST@utarlg.uta.edu
Subject:      vjv: correction

to: jasper and reinvwers
from: victor
re: correction

note how i am in/famous for giving directions on how
to fill out the  and can't do it
correcty myself. i wrote:

<vjv: writing process/"Romantic">>

jasper neel's initials should be jn !

my apologies.

--vjv
================================================== 
Date:         Wed, 17 May 1995 00:05:31 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Organization: Miami University (Ohio USA)
Subject:      fk->jn: teaching writing?

Jasper says

>Now this leads me to the problem with questions such as those raised by Linda
>Flower.  As Coleridge says of Shakespeare, the entire writing process lies far
>beneath anything one might call consciousness.  Trying to understand such a
>process (especially in anything like systematic, empirical ways) is like
>trying to understand both brain (psychology) and mind (philosophy) at the same
>time.  Anything we in composition could possibly do would have to be so
>utterly general as to be largely useless.  In "A Defense of Poetry" Shelley
>describes what I mean: No one, he argues, can comprehend the composing
>process, "for the mind in creation is a fading coal, which some invisible
>influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this
>power arises from within, like the color of a flower which fades and changes
>as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic
>either of its approach or its departure."

Yep, he's a romantic.  Quotes Coleridge and Shelley.  That helps me out a lot.

I supervise teaching assistants who teach 2700 freshmen a semester.  The
"fading coals" stuff doesn't do much for us.  As I told Victor Vitanza once
at a party at Jim Berlin's house, we either believe that writing can be
taught, or we point all our freshmen toward Wordsworth and Arnold and sit
back and see what happens, biting our fingernails.

The early Linda Flower is easy to knock over.  I've done it myself a few
times. But improving writing through a teachable set of supporting
behaviors is a valid activity.  We aren't trying to generate Shakespeares;
we want to help citizens do better in college and in their professional
lives.  Jasper sets up an either/or that pulls the plug on helpful
activities.

Fred Kemp
Texas Tech University
ykfok@ttacs.ttu.edu

=========================
Date:         Wed, 17 May 1995 09:28:42 -0500
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         sophist@utarlg.uta.edu
Subject:      ddm-->fk: yer kidding?

Fred Kemp wrote about Jasper Neel:


> Yep, he's a romantic.  Quotes Coleridge and Shelley.  I told Victor Vitanza once
> at a party at Jim Berlin's house, we either believe that writing can be
> taught, or we point all our freshmen toward Wordsworth and Arnold and sit
> back and see what happens, biting our fingernails.
>
> The early Linda Flower is easy to knock over.  I've done it myself a few
> times. But improving writing through a teachable set of supporting
> behaviors is a val id activity.  We aren't trying to generate Shakespeares;
> we want to help citizens do better in college and in their professional
> lives.  Jasper sets up an either/or that pulls the plug on helpful
> activities.

ACK! Who's generating an either/or here? *Either* we present students
with a set of codifications to make them BETTER CITIZENS (Foucault
would say "more docile citizens") *OR* we simply stick wordsworth or
arnold under their noses and wait? You're kiddng?(!) Do you not use forms
of immitation when you teach?  (Who cares if the models you use are
examples of student writing or of Wordsworth?)

But I'm more interested in this: If "writing" (as a making-manifest of
"reality") DIED with the death of the author, what are we doing when
we present students with a "teachable set of supporting behaviors"?
Going through the fantasy?  Mourning? (Like when we feel we must VIEW
a body so we can know it's dead?)

I sympathize with the desire to help students be successful by helping them
write in ways they will be expected to write in their lives. But I do not
see what I do only as a service activity. To teach writing, as Jim Berlin
used to say, is a seriously political and ethical activity: it's about
inviting students to come face to face with a linguistically constructed world
that is more often than not OUT of their control--OR (to keep up this
reductive oppositional theme)--it's about HIDING that post-humanist
thought to continue the (dangerous) fantasy.  It seems particularly
unsupportable to try and make things easier than they are for students in
writing classes (That would be Rush Limbaugh's approach.) When I teach,
I'm not out to simplify ANYTHING for my students...I'm out to try to let
the enormously complicated nature of "writing" show its stuff.

What gets left out of our codifications is what I'm interested in. The
leftover. The remainder. "Romantic" approaches might mystify that
leftover, but at least they DEAL with it.  It doesn't get HIDDEN--it gets
applauded.

Diane
Mowery@utarlg.uta.edu
======================================================= 
Date:         Wed, 17 May 1995 10:54:29 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Organization: Miami University (Ohio USA)
Subject:      jn--fk: teaching writing

Two responses to Fred.  First, no one asked me how I taught writing.  Victor
asked me how I wrote.  Second, and much more importantly, Fred seems to think
that one either teaches by defining describably features or steps in the
writing process or one points to a bunch of romantics and hopes (though how
Arnold got included in the romantics is beyond me).

The issue is not whether one can or cannot teach writing.  The issue is how
one defines the writing process.  While empirical work in the writing process
is very useful in falsifying claims about how writers write, it is not very
useful in describing how writers write because neither the writers nor the
researchers can get at that complex (and yes romantic) process.

Romanticism serves to remind me (and I'll bet Fred too) of what we don't know
when we make claims about how to write.  In practical ways we can learn a lot
from empirical research.  Outlining, for example, seems to have disappeared
as a method of teaching writing after "The Composing Process of Twelfth
Graders." But the romantics (by which I mean Wordsworth, Coleridge, and 
Shelley in this sentence) remind us just how little we know when we know 
those surfacee behaviors available for conscious inspection and report.

jn--
 
====================================================
Date:         Wed, 17 May 1995 10:57:01 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Organization: Miami University (Ohio USA)
Subject:      la-k-->jn re:academic essay/process

Before the questions, a comment.  I enjoyed the way this chapter makes some
clear connections between historical theory/ideology and present incarnation in
composition, rather than just constructing a narrative history of the
discipline.

_____Do you (elsewhere in the book)/can you trace a lineage from Aristotilian
rhetoric to the "academic" essay beyond the couple of paragraphs in this
chapter?

Also:
After the excerpt of the student essay in chapter one, you write that
"[Composition teachers] feel an ownership of the above text that is far
superior of that to the student who wrote it.  We can understand the teleological
wholeness toward which the text is destined and know exactly what needs to be
done to get it there.  The text itself reconfirms the naturalness of our
rulership over the student" (28).  This section, although it raises problems
with the idea that "we" know what a text should "look like" (or, as Dewey would
say, how to bring a text "into alignment" with the ideas shared by the
discours ecommunity of the academy), acknowledges that this is part of our role in the
academy.  But I sense a tension between this idea of writing and the one raised
in your answer to Victor's question about _your_ writing, where you invoked
more "romantic" notions of composition and process.  

_____Are you making a
distinction, that "academic" writing is less "true" to those notions because it
is somehow more governed by Aristotelian rules, where "other" writing is
governed by a more "egalitarian" set?  If so, what is that set, and how is it
more egalitarian?  

_____Aren't we reproducing unequal power relationships
_whenever_ we enter into established written discourse?  If so, do you think
the answer to the dilemma is to understand/acknowledge the "roots," and if so, how
does that address problems perpetuated through the (perhaps unintentional)
reproduction of these relationships?  If not, what isn't unequal?

--Linda

Linda Adler-Kassner
General College
University of Minnesota
Minneapolis, MN  55455
612/625-6383
kassn001@maroon.tc.umn.edu

====================================================
Date:         Thu, 18 May 1995 12:59:53 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Organization: Miami University (Ohio USA)
Subject:      jn->la-k re:academic essay

jn-->la-k

_____No, I don't attempt a tracing of the lineage of the academic essay.  In
fact, I think the book's greatest weakness is that if pretty much stays
suspended between fourth century Athens and 1990s America.  That is a very
great jump, perhaps in normal intellectual terms too great a jump.  While I
don't take up this point at length in the book, I do believe that Aristotle
(and his students) largely created humanities research at the end of
"Nicomachean Ethics" (1181b), where Ari outlines how he will proceed with
"Politics" and the "Athenian Constitution."  Then in "Politics" and the
"Athenian Constitution" Ari (or whichever of his students did the writing) 
worked through the process of humanities research: surveying the existing
literature, gathering all of the possible data, organizing and critiquing it,
and reporting on their research--all in a neutral, knowledge-generating voice.

____Actually, I'd like to blur the distinction between academic writing and
"other" writing.  Nearly everything I write is "academic" in the sense that it
is written by an academic for other academics and published in places that
only academics are likely to be reading.  I'll take a small risk here and say
that if there is such a thing as academic writing it's probably a bad thing in
that it has the function of excluding large numbers of people because of the
ferocity of its vocabulary and syntax.  I spend a great deal of the book (in
later chapters) on the enterprise of "professional discourse":  where it comes
from, how it works, why it is so attractive.  If you ever have time, I'd be
interested in knowing what you think of that part of the book.  I think I deal
with the business of inequality in the section on professional discourse.

--Jasper
 

=========================================
Date:         Thu, 18 May 1995 23:35:35 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Organization: Miami University (Ohio USA)
Subject:      sw-->jn: teaching writing

_____In what ways can our pedagogy avoid reproducing the master/slave
opposition?

Thus far, the discussion here seems to have focused on the false binary of
Romantic  (re: untrainable) and cognitive or skills approaches to teaching,
with the assumed goal of teaacquire mastery
so that they themselves move beyond the  slave  role.   I like the way in
which you link ethics with method (I think here also of Steven Katz' article
in CE on  The Ethics of Expediency ), and I think that we ourselves have to
evaluate our pedagogical method in relation to the ethical value system in
which that method inhabits.

As an instructor of intro comp, I don't feel that I'm actually teaching
writing  as a definable set of skills, or a definable set of processes, or
even a definable set of cognitive strategies, though I know that each of
these  sets  in some measure, are implicitly and explicitly evoked throughout
the term.  My students, I assume and they generally demonstrate, already know
how to write.   What I try ideally to teach them is a way of perceiving and
communicating knowledges via writing (more specifically, computer-mediated
writing), with the ethical goal of understanding how that knowledge circulates
within particular communities, influencing action, etc.  I say  ideally
because a 15 week semester, 26 students, and a history of existing (usually
very comfortably and unconsciously) as a student/container/slave (my students
and me) makes the ideal goal at best tentative, and some might say noble,
foolish, and invalid.

____As Aristotle put together a method of persuasion rooted in  natural  laws,
are my methods a kind of  social-constructivist  natural law  that encodes,
perhaps not a master/slave binary, but a more potent form of ideological
control?

Ie., am I a Stealth  master  in the sense that I naturalize a more indirect,
but nonetheless ethically-driven pedagogy?

Steve Watkins
Department of English
University of Louisville

 
==========================================
Date:         Fri, 19 May 1995 14:57:35 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Organization: Miami University (Ohio USA)
Subject:      jn-->sw   re:teaching writing

 
jn-->sw re:teaching writing

Steve,

_____I don't mention Paulo Freire in "Aristotle's Voice" because I am not
(even remotely speaking) a Marxist.  But my notion that pedagogy allots a
certain role to students comes straight from Freire.  I think it is incumbent
on every teacher to wonder what ontological state (to use the most highfalutin
vocabulary I can think of) that teacher's pedagogy requires of students.
Freire once explained why American adult literacy campaigns rarely have much
effect.  Such campaigns, according to Freire, allot the following role to the
students: "As an illiterate adult you are a complete failure.  The least you
can do is learn to read so that the state won't have to pay someone to
complete your welfare and medicaid forms."  Since very few students will
accept such a self definition, the pedagogy doesn't work.  And those who mount
the literacy campaigns would never consider a pedagogy that offered students
this role (and to say the truth, this pedagogy is too radical for my safely
tenured, upper middle class self too): "We're going to learn to read in this
classroom.  But reading will be only one of several tools we will use in
destroying the current economic and political system.  This is a classroom in
the methods of social transformation and social justice.  Sometimes violent
revolution is necessary, but in today's world violent revolution can only be
undertaken successfully by the literate."

_____As my book develops, it deals more and more with the teacher as scholar
and less and less with the teacher in the classroom.  My point is to explore
the nature of an educational institution in which one's relative success can
be measured by how much one teaches.  The more you teach, the less successful
you are.  In a way you are a kind of "stealth master" (a phrase I wish I'd
thought of) because you occupy an institutional space that, at least in part,
defines you as a sustainer of the status quo.  The Kentucky legislature and
most of the donors to U of L see you as an enabler and improver of the way
things are.  But the more important question (and here I'll change to first
person because I don't want to presume to speak for you) is my own intentions.
If I want to change my students in some way, how do I want to change them?
And how do I know that I have the right to want to change them in that way?
What makes me think I know something they don't know and should know?  (Of
course, I do think I know something they don't and should know.  But that very
claim makes me squirmy-nervous in my chair!)


jn

 
============================================
Date:         Fri, 19 May 1995 15:02:05 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
Organization: Miami University (Ohio USA)
Subject:      cgb->jn: sophistry

Jasper,

Like Linda, I haven't yet had the chance to read the entire book, yet, so
you'll excuse me if some of these questions already have answers...

Linda's question about the academic essay ( the first one ) echoed back
to your example of antiwriting in _Plato, Derrida and Writing_ for me.
As I went back to that book, I found a number of other echoes as well,
for example, your discussion of English departments and the suppression
of composition seemed analogous to the rejection of sophistry by Western
thought (205).  There are a number of others, but instead I'll ask an
initial, general question:

_____What kind of relationship exists (for you) between the two books?

More specifically, I am thinking of the final chapter wherein you outline
that theory of strong vs. weak discourse, building on Protagoras and
Gorgias. In the chapter we've read, you cite Antiphon, and I began to
wonder

_____Have your ideas about sophistry changed in between these books?

I ask this because your book (along with Susan Jarratt's _Rereading_ and
various articles by John Poulakos) attempts to pin down sophistry to a
degree. Although I would make this characterization tentatively, I think
Susan's book selects a particular facet of the sophists (political
involvement) for explication, while John's work is quite general. Bottom
line is that _PDW_ sets out a pretty specific sophistic "manifesto," but
I'm not certain how comfortably someone like Antiphon would rest within
it. I'm not really asking you to defend that. Rather, I'm interested in
either how your position has changed, or how you see _AV_ as a
development of that position.

Let me end this post by returning to Linda's question of equality for a
second, and run this possibility by everyone.  One of the threads in rhet
and comp is the topos of abandoning the master/slave hierarchy--we see it
in the whole teacher vs. student center argument, and most recently, it
can be seen in a lot of the writing about hypertext (subverting the
author, text, reader, etc.). Might we say that, rather than seeing A's
topoi (etc.) as a player in master/slave interpellation, that very
hierarchy is one of the topoi, within the whole species-genus analytic?
Perhaps a goal like equality is doomed to fall within the same
understanding of arete that A employs, where egalitarianism becomes
our guiding virtue.  Perhaps we're all doomed. Is it possible to teach a
virtuoso class instead of a virtuous one?  Can there be a third position
inside a composition classroom?


Collin Brooke
cgb1046@utarlgdu
==============================================
Date:         Mon, 22 May 1995 00:44:14 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Organization: Miami University (Ohio USA)
Subject:      jn-->cgb re:sophistry

jn-->cgb re:sophistry

_____While I may not have managed to explain my intention in the last chapter
of PD&W, I intended "strong discourse" (a phrase I probably would not use now)
as a kind of label for the sort of discourse that would keep both Plato and
Derrida at work on the same site at all times.  At the time (and probably
still today) I did not want to give up the notion of "movement toward truth."
I read "Phaedrus" as a very early text whose intention was to posit the
existence of absolute truth.  Of course, I know this is a fairly face-value
reading of "Phaedrus."  I accept the plainest, most superficial sort of
reading: that "Phaedrus" is intended to argue exactly what Plato's Socrates
seems to argue.   I read Socrates' statements about rhetoric and writing with
no irony, no intention to displace themselves.  I felt (and I guess I still
feel) that a notion of absolute truth is a useful notion.  In physical terms,
for example, there either was or was not a big bang.  Quarks either do or do
not exist.  Certain subatomic particles either do or do not have "charm" or
"top spin."  Of course, once one moves to metaphysical terms, such physical
truth seems both naive and misleading.  But anyway, I wanted to keep alive a
notion that humans, even in deliberative and argumentative discourse, must
test that discourse against truth.

At the same time, of course, I knew any such notion of absolute truth was at
least dangerous and almost certainly misleading.  So I turned to Derrida--that
great contemporary rereader of Plato--for the reading and writing strategies
whereby one could always show how any truth claim undoes itself in its own
process.

Sharon Crowley pointed me toward Protagoras and Gorgias.  In reading about
them I ran across a little Que sais-je? book on the sophists at a bookstore
(I've been told that Derrida himself owns that store, but I don't know) on
Boulevard St. Michel, and in that book I found the phrase "strong discourse."
I used the phrase as a label for discourse that always has truth-seeking and
deconstruction at work all of the time.  Such discourse, it seemed to me,
might serve as a good foundation for democracy--and I suppose in a theological
sort of way I accepted democracy as "Good."  I felt then, and feel now, that
democracy is most secure when everyone has a good sophistical education.  The
greatest danger to democracy comes from those who think they know the absolute
truth absolutely--Oliver Cromwell, for example, or perhaps Tim McVeigh, if he 
did what it seems he did.

Since I finished PD&W (in late fall 1986) much has happened with the sophists.
My own interest in them, which I explain in the last chapter of "AV," no
longer has much to do with anyone now labeled "sophist."  Rather, I think
Plato and Aristotle create a notion of sophistry for the West.  Their
sophistry probably had something to do with such people as Antiphon, Gorgias,
Isocrates, and Protagoras, but I don't think either Plato or Aristotle had any
interest in offering a fair and "correct" representation of sophistry.
Rather, they used the term sophistry as a label for what they opposed.  That's
the sort of sophistry (that is to say, the sophistry that emerges from Plato
and Aristotle) that interests me.  And the good thing about sophistry as P and
A define it is that we have most of its record available because so much of
Plato and Aristotle has survived.

In light of work done by Ed Schiappa, in particular, I am reluctant to try for
a reading of either "sophistry" or "any particular sophist."  I'm not opposed
to such readings, I just don't want to try to undertake them myself.  What
interests me more is the speaking (or writing) position which Plato and
Aristotle tried to exclude under the name "sophistry."

_____You didn't pose your last question to me, but I will presume to offer an
answer anyway.  I think the structure of the university locates the instructor
in a position of power.  I don't think there is any way for the instructor to
escape or undercut that power.  This empowered position does not trouble me
much.  I am still enough of a Platonist that I think some people's ideas are
more persuasive (closer to the truth) than are the ideas of others.  I still
see myself as a teacher, someone who "knows" more than the students "know."  I
don't want to live outside culture--first because I don't think it's possible
and second because I think it would horrible.  And culture has as one of its
features distributions of power.  For me, it is enough to keep distributions
of power as near as possible toward the forefront of consciousness.
Destroying them isn't desirable, nor, in my opinion, is it possible for any
but the briefest of moments.

jn

=============================================
Date:         Mon, 22 May 1995 11:27:17 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Organization: Miami University (Ohio USA)
Subject:      lak-->cgb: power/paradigms


I like Colin's suggestion that there's a third possibility out there, that one
need not be either "master" or "community member" (for lack of a better term;
by
this I mean a person who believes that each student is an equally knowledgable
member of the "classroom community"). I'm intrigued (and strongly believe in)
the idea of "third paradigms" where, seemingly, only two exist.  I also agree
with Jasper's assessment of the relationship between my knowledge and that of
my students in the classroom.
  I haven't read _PD&W_, but:

_____Do Plato, Aristotle, or the ideas of the sophists offer a theoretical
platform upon which to begin building different models of teacher-student
relationships?  (I realize that this book revolves around Aristotle's
master-slave narrative, but perhaps there possibilities for subversion within
the text?)  If so, can they be briefly sketched?

Linda Adler-Kassner
General College
University of Minnesota
Minneapolis, MN  55455
612/625-6383
kassn001@maroon.tc.umn.edu

=============================================
Date:         Mon, 22 May 1995 15:36:59 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject:      cnd->jn: culture

Jasper,

_____What do you think of as culture and how do you go about defining
it?

In your response to Colin you stated that you really didn't think that
there was any way to be outside of culture, and that you would certainly
no want to be anyway. I am interested because I, being in philosophy,
am intersted in how culture is thought, defined, represented, etc.

Chris
   
==============================================
Date:         Mon, 22 May 1995 16:33:08 -0500
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         SOPHIST@utarlg.uta.edu
Subject: vjv->jn: alone/another?

from: vjv
I am posting this once again since there is no idication from the
listserv that it actually was posted. if you, by some chance, have
received it already, then, my apologies.

**************

Jasper, while others are thinking of questions, let me intervene now,
especially in response to one of your answers to Collin's questions.


You wrote:

"In light of work done by Ed Schiappa, in particular, I am reluctant
to try for a reading of either 'sophistry' or 'any particular sophist.'  I'm
not opposed to such readings, I just don't want to try to undertake
them myself.  What interests me more is the speaking (or writing) posi-
tion which Plato and Aristotle tried to exclude under the name
'sophistry.' "

I find this statement, with its various juxtapositions, very interesting.

first of all, i would like to know, very specifically if you do not mind, ...

_____what is your take on Ed's position concerning the Sophists, say,
in his "Oasis or Mirage?" article?

Ed is not on this list, but i will not be speaking out of class when i say
that i have very negative response to his position and have written a
rather lengthy chapter about it in a book ms. of mine. Ed and I have
talked about it at length, tho not satisfatorily. In short, Ed uses a
dividing practice (diaeresis) ... oasis or mirage, reality or fiction, etc.,
a language very much a part of the language game informing olde
philology. It is a language game that is, as Foucault calls it, species-
genus analytics. Or negative dialectic. what does not fit in gets ex-
cluded automatically. as being irrational.  Hence, the Sophists, as a
historical category, get excluded. What we end up with, in my analysis,
is a differend (Lyotard). (There's a great deal more to be said, but i am
more interested now in returning to your above statement.)

you say that you are "reluctant to try for a reading" and that you are "not
opposed" but that you "don't want to try to undertake them myself." and
then you refer to "Plato and Aristotle [who] tried to exclude under the
name 'sophistry'. "  My question:

_____What is *the difference* between Ed and P and A in respect to
"thinking" about the Sophists?

Ed claims that the 'Sophists' may simply be an "effect" of Plato's dis-
course. Very interesting point!  If i carry this to its deconstructive logi-
cal conclusion (new rebeginnings!) ... so is Ed an "effect" and V an
effect, and JN, etc.

*the difference* now gets neologistically misspelled with an "a".

I jest but joust (_Wettkampf_).

my """""""real"""""" (as opposed to my fictive/phantasy)  .)>= question
is that it seems to me that *the difference* you are making is between
you by your self ("I just don't want to try to undertake them myself") and
possibly you and another.  which then leads you to recapitulating per-
haps what Plato and Aristotle have done by way of dialectic or dialogue.

the question:

_____Does one deal with the problem of the Sophists alone because
to deal with them with another will only create the conditions of "thinking"
about the Sophists as the (necessary) excluded third?

[[My allusion, everytime i put "thinking" in quotes is to Heidegger's,
actually Nietzsche's, thinking about "thinking" as fundamentally
"reactionary," that is exclusionary. as KB says to us: we get congre-
gation by way of segregation.]]

It seems to me that you, in your writing style, work very much alone. i
don't have any problems with that, for the same could be said about
me, although i always feel like a crowd, a chorus that has not yet
been identified (dionysian tragedy is still very much alive!) as a
"chorus."

let me really be perverse:

_____alone or with another?
to be alone, Is this the condition for the possibilities of not being
reactionary; tobe with another in dialogue, the condition for being
reactionary?

_____do you see this perverse question based on a dividing practice
that i am claiming from your very statement ... do you see it as proble-
matic?

 ...standing at the altar/altercation, he (i) most solemnly post: "I do!"

...and lest we negatively forget, let us remember a togetherness (with
another, for we are always with another or others) ... let us remember
Nietzsche's distinction between _Vernichtungskampf_ (the struggle
that is to end in the extermination of the opponent, the other) and
_Wettkampf_ (jousting, gaming). I am referring tohis "Homer's Contest"
and to its being played out in Lyotard's _Just Gaming_ and Sam
Weber's discussion of it.

so
_____JN, where do you mis/stand?


***********
--vjv

========== ====================================== 
Date:         Wed, 24 May 1995 00:50:58 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Organization: Miami University (Ohio USA)
Subject:      jn->lak: sophistry; cnd: culture

jn-->lak re:sophistry
jn-->Chris re:culture

_____If you will forgive me, I will respond to these two comments in the same
post.  I'll wait until tomorrow to respond to Victor's post.

 
_____Linda, I know that you sent your message more to Collin than to me, but I
will presume to make just one comment.  Several years ago (you can find the
debate in "Rhetorica" and "Philosophy and Rhetoric" between the years 1983-
1990) John Poulakos and Ed Schiappa had a running argument about sophistry.  I
haven't really kept up with the argument on this site since about 1991, but in
effect there is a group of scholars (Poulakos, being one, but also Susan
Jarrett, Sharon Crowley, and Vic Vitanza to mention but a very few) who have
turned to "the sophists" or one or more "sophists" as a way of writing and
thinking about rhetoric/composition nowadays (I made a similar move at the end
of an earlier book, PD&W).  Schiappa cautions against such attempts.  You can
read the Schiappa-Poulakos essays to get an introduction to the dimensions of
the argument.  It no longer interests me because it has become merely one more
site of professional dispute.  I try (no doubt ad nauseam) in "AV" to show how
professional discourse works.  At any rate, I think Susan Jarrett (and maybe
Victor--yes?) would hedge like mad but would finally argue for some sort of
theoretical construct based in some way on one or more ancient sophists.
Instead of pursuing that approach (trying to figure out and then base a notion
on some scrap from Protagoras or Gorgias--or even on a whole tome by
Isocrates), I decided in "AV" to try to define and then focus on "sophistry"
as something excluded and repressed in the works of Aristotle and Plato.  In
other words, I think we can get a pretty good notion of what "sophistry" was
to P and A.  I'm not so sure that we can from those fifth-century sophists
whose works are largely lost to history.  But if you're looking for something
that will go directly into your comp class tomorrow, I don't think you'll find
it anywhere in Athens between Ephialtes in 461 and the death of Alexander in
323, unless, that is, you buy into Aristotle's rhetoric.  If, on the other
hand, you are interested in some sort of intellectual inquiry into the
relations among "knowledge," "writing," "self," "truth," etc. then you can
probably spend your adult life exploring and talking about Athens between 461
and 323.

_____Chris, no doubt I'm using "culture" in a hopelessly naive way.  In the
grossest, most general terms, I mean by culture "those rules that define food,
sexual relations, evidence, persuasion, and adulthood for a group of people
usually living in the same place and sharing some sort of history."  This sort
of "culture" depends on education.  Forgive me, but I will tell two stories.
1) When I was in college I made my first trip to France.  After arriving in
Paris, I took a bus trip from Paris to Nice.  The trip was really a tour of
several vineyards.  For five days we ate, drank, and rode.  I and one other
traveller were the only Americans.  In the wonderful little town of Autun on
the second night, we had a delightful dinner.  The last course was cheese.
Halfway through my camembert, I noticed that my cheese was moving.  Sure
enough, it had a maggot in it.  I don't know whether the part of the cheese I
had already eaten had maggots.  Probably not.  But the maggot I found spoiled
what had been a wonderful meal.  One of the travellers (a medical student from
Dijon) told me not to worry: that the maggot, if I had eaten one, would be
digested as protein.  He said that some cultures prize maggots because they
offer a high-quality source of protein.  He reminded me that some cultures
would be more revolted by the rare beef I had eaten than I was by the maggot.
His analysis, including a reference to Levi-Strauss, didn't help.  I threw up.
2)  When my wife and I married in 1982 neither of us had much money.  I
convinced my wife that I could not afford an engagement ring; unaccountably,
she agreed to marry me anyway.  A local jewelry store had, at the time, an
expensive pave diamond ring.  I knew that my wife admired the ring.  It cost
$4,500 (my house, at the time, was worth about $42,000).  I took a second
mortgage on my house, bought the ring, and surprised my wife with it at the
wedding ceremony.  When the minister put it on her finger, she was so
surprised that she almost became too confused to answer "I do" at the
appropriate places.  About three weeks ago, my six-year-old daughter took the
ring from my wife's dressing table.  For a full day, my wife thought she had
lost it.  She went through agony (with my daughter comforting her along the
way).  When the ring suddenly reappeared, of course we knew what had happened,
and finally by daughter confessed.  Culture makes rituals like expensive rings
"valuable."  It invests a particular object like a ring with absolute value
(my wife didn't want another ring, even it was identical to the one she
thought she had lost; she wanted her specific ring).  Such high romantic
doings as surprise rings that are too expensive and even such notions as
completely smitten, lifelong, sexually monogamous romantic love are cultural.
Even the elaborate schemes we are now using to teach my daughter not to steal
are culture.  I don't think it would be either possible or desirable to live
outside culture, for culture tells us what and how to eat (I don't want to
learn to eat maggots), how and with whom to have sex (I don't want to have sex
with anyone but my wife and I don't want her to have sex with anyone but me),
what constitutes property and how to recognize what is mine and what is not
mine (I want my daughter to grow into a bourgeois consumer like me), etc.

Sorry for being so long winded.

jn

========================================


Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From:         Pre/Text Editors 
Subject:      fdw-->jn: reading and slavery

Jasper:

Each time I read through chapter one of AV, I'm more and more drawn to
the parallels between the Mississippians you knew 20 years ago and the
freshman paper on suicide.  Though you cite all these instances as
"texts" that speak with an Aristotelian voice (I think that's one of your
points), what struck me was how grounded these texts were in other texts:
the Bible and the dictionary.  In the end, they turned out not to be
texts at all, at least in a broad sense, but readings (uncritical, of
course) of other texts; or, if you will, reproductions of the texts
(scriptural and lexicographical) but twisted to give support for
insupportable positions.  (The case of the freshman is more
problematical, since he/she has clearly not figured out what to say in
the fragment you provide.)  So, some questions (some of which you may
have answered later in the book, and if so say so and spare yourself some
repetitive work):

1.   Could it be said that the Mississipians and the freshman are people
who cannot speak, who have no words, no language, no logos, ethos,
pathos, even though they are full of things to say?  Perhaps another way
to rephrase it: the "Noah" contingent: how do they extract a theory of
debased human beings, which theory gives, in their eyes, divine sanction
for slavery, from an account that hardly goes that far?  What are they
reading that is not written?  Ditto with the freshman.  She/he hopes to
transition from a half-dozen definitions to a spin on suicide.  Is she
playing the Aristotelian categorizing game?  (From _On Interp_, 16a5ff:
though we do not all have the same writing and speech, we have the same
mental images which these things represent.  Is Aristotle giving a
proto-definition of a dictionary?)

2.  About teaching, as it's done today.  As the person who works directly
with our TAs, and as (usually) their first grad prof (a rhetoric course),
I'm directly connected with your concerns about how we introduce new
teachers to comp. teaching within the Aristotelian environment you
describe.  Since, as you mentioned in another post, we are all inside
culture, I wonder what this implies for our new (or not-so-new) GTAs.  Do
we try to shift them from the Aristotelian to a different and more
inclusive culture?  Charles Schuster speaks of a composition that isn't
"specified or located" (Lindemann and Tate eds., _Intro to Comp.
Studies_), indicating that he would prefer a composition that is outside
culture, perhaps taking on a kind of Deleuzian nomadism at the periphery
of academic culture.  Would this be an alternative?  (I think your answer
would be no, but your attack against Aristotelian centeredness suggests,
so far at least, an attack against centeredness altogether.)

Incidentally, I took my son last night to the high school to meet with
his AP European History teacher for next year.  I glanced through the
textbook, especially the section covering ancient Greece, and there was a
sidebar on Xenophon's _Hellenica_ as providing a "window" into Greek
politics from 411-350.  The gist of the sidebar is that Xenophon gives
us a 4th century Greece as interesting and as compelling as Thucydides
for the last half of the fifth.  I told the teacher that some scholars
feel that Xenophon's favoritism toward Sparta, esp. in its wars with
Thebes, tends to distort his interpretation of events.  Would her
students be told of this?  Her answer was that since the class was
European history, 1450 to now, they wouldn't spend a lot of time covering
history before 1450.

Thanks in advance, Jasper.

Frank Walters
Auburn University
 
=================================================== 
Date:         Fri, 26 May 1995 11:11:31 -0400
From:         Pre/Text Editors 
Subject:      jn-->vv      re:where I mis/stand

jn-->vv re:where I mis/stand

Victor,
Sorry to have been slow with this, but I am moving houses, and everything is
either in another box or at the other house.  I'm not going to respond to your
questions directly (partly from my own ignorance and perversity, partly
because your questions are more performances than questions, more epideictic
than deliberative); rather, I'll respond to questions I'm a little more
comfortable with.  Both by training and temperament, I'm more philologist than
philosopher, more pedant than theorist.  I'm not sure that I've read the
"Oasis or Mirage" essay, and that site of professional discourse no longer
interests me, so I'm not going to try to find it to make sure that I've read
it.

From about 1985 to 1992 (perhaps culminating with Susan Jarrett's book in
1991) several people whose interests interest me were looking to "the
sophists" (usually thought of as at least these seven: Protagoras, Gorgias,
Prodicus, Hippias, Thrasymachus, Antiphon, and Isocrates) for a way of
"refiguring" rhet/comp.  Schiappa's publications made me acutely aware of
three problems with  this project: 1) the term "sophist" was widely used in
ancient Athens, and applied even to Plato and Socrates; 2) "the sophists" was
a phrase sometimes used as if there was a coherent "school" or "manner"
uniting some loose federation of those non-Athenian rhetoricians who are
generally portrayed as differing with Plato and Aristotle; 3) except for
Isocrates, we have very little from "the sophists" to work with.  I do not
imply (and I hope no one will infer) that I am convinced that Schiappa is
right.  And, generally speaking, Schiappa's rhetoric and his method seem
rather hostile to rhet/comp.  But I think anyone using "the sophists" or
"sophistry" as categories must pay heed to the three warnings listed above.

In addition, I was always concerned with the financial aspects of sophistical
(or perhaps rhetorical) education.  The "sophists" seem to have made a great
deal of money, and their pedagogy seems to have been available only to the
very wealthy.  The sophists seem to have sought out the rich and powerful as a
way of enriching and empowering themselve