Memes: Blending the Absurd and Serious
In the spirit of Monday's class, I made a couple of memes. I hope you enjoy them, despite the fact that I have no experience creating them. I have been thinking, probably in response to my recent studies of Stanley Fish, quite a bit about the role interpretation plays in the creation of meaning, and I think visual rhetoric, which seems to embrace its lack of clarity and interpretive precision (is there such a thing?), interestingly steps in a sorta reader-response direction. For whatever reason, we take for granted that, while language is (relatively) very precise in its ability to construct and communicate potentially incredibly complex meanings, language is an imperfect, socially constructed (therefore ideologically bound) medium for the construction of meaning. Pulling meaning from language, should, I think, to some extent, be considered in a manner akin to interpreting meaning in visual medium. Meaning always looks different to different eyes, and sounds different to different ears. Nevertheless, meaning, truth, belief, ideology, etc. is almost (because I'm plagued by doubt) always created through discursive, and therefore relational, means. Therefore, meaning is always argued: made up of (at least) two subjective experiences of worlds colliding to reveal what is shared.
I think I might just be confusing myself. I always defer to Shakespeare's "a wise man knows himself to be a fool" when I get too far into the social-constructionist weeds. With this confusion in mind, I think I might as well try to do a wrap up of our wonderfully mind-mushing quarter...
Quarter Wrap-Up: Rhetoric and Stuff
As all good studies of western philosophy begin, we started with Plato--laughing and dancing with his shadows all the way--and the mighty listful understudy, Aristotle. In the case of rhetoric Aristotle and Plato were interesting foils. The fact that, despite all of Plato, or Socrates's, bickering about the nature of rhetoric as manipulation (which I think is more ethically complicated than we, and Plato/Socrates, might have assumed), Aristotle managed to conceptualize rhetoric as dialectic's (and therefore philosophy's) necessary counterpart is pretty fascinating. Rather unsurprisingly, the Greeks seemed kind of inescapable the entire quarter, until maybe the very end, with epistemological social-constructionism and figures like Anzaldúa, Martin Luther King Jr. and Virginia Woolf (with the exceptions of Mayan and Confucian rhetoric earlier in the quarter). Ultimately, while I don't think I'm capable of defining rhetoric accurately, I think I learned a lot in this class. That said, because it can't hurt, and because I like endings with unrealistic closure, here is my definition of rhetoric: "the art of coming to know--and putting to use--how knowledge is created, relationally, through discursive systems and practices." Thank you for reading!
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