Update

So, I've had a lot of ups and downs lately. I've realized once again (which I've always known) that doing too much of one thing = unhappy me. I feel the pressure of getting a draft out really soon before surgery and that makes me not want to do anything but work on my paper, which is both unrealistic and counter productive. In my obsession to get a draft out, I've really made myself miserable and haven't taken the time to enjoy being in Idaho. So Thursday last week I decided to knock it off. I am close to having something that I can send to others for evaluation, but my brain was so fried and I was so sad, I decided rather than keep a deadline for the deadline's sake, to decide to develop positive work patterns (and strategies for doing things I don't like ;-)

Here is what I have figured out about work habits for me:
I get a lot done in 2 hours. And I usually need a bit of a break after those 2 hours. I can get two productive sessions of 2 hours each a day and occasionally 3 sessions, but not every day.

I do better work in the morning first thing OR after I've had a chance to plan my day and know what else is on my plate and check my email, and take care of everything. Which means, the best times for me to work (at least mentally), are first thing (but I have to get started before Jane wakes up, so like 5:00 am), during Jane's nap (if she takes a nap...), late afternoon (3:00ish) or like 7:00pm after Jane is in bed, dinner is over and cleaned up (if I'm not too exhausted). So, go ahead and ask me how getting up at 5:00 am is going...;-)

After 4 four hour days, I need a break. I was thinking that this was just my own lack of motivation and deep desire not to write this thing, but it's been so consistent and I've had so much more energy and positive feelings at the first of the week after a good break, that I've decided it's reality. I'm wondering if I could maybe fit in a small session during the weekend, like if I work M-Th, and maybe Friday morning, take a break and then maybe look at it Saturday, make a plan, and then forget about it again until Monday. I don't know.

I need to be busier to be more productive. If it's the only thing on my plate, I get depressed quickly and find ways to avoid it (like my dad is with vegetables. Or salads). But if I've got some people to see, projects to work on, I make that time work better and I'm more focused and motivated. Go figure. See, that whole "be anxiously engaged in many things" is REALLY true.

Umm...I think there are more, but I need to hunker down and get to work now.

The Power of Caps

I'm forging ahead, even as Jane is crying in the next room, refusing to go to sleep (which usually derails me), even though I'm still not sure what this last section is going to look like, even though the more I write, the shorter my paper gets, I keep going. How? The Power of Caps.

Yes, there is great power in provisional writing. For me, I tap on the caps lock and write. That way I know that I will surely see my stupidity and note to myself as I read through to revise. And it's strangely liberating. I've written a whole paragraph in caps before only to realize later that the prose is actually pretty perfect. Writing in caps turns off the internal editor for a minute so I can just get out what I'm trying to say. The Power of Caps will prevail...

Uh...yeah.

So I have about 2000 words left to write before my Thursday deadline and I'm having a really tough time even figuring out where to start with this last chunk. This is the part where I'm supposed to look at the feminist pedagogues and the things they have done and critique it. It's supposed to be the smartest and most analytical part of my paper, or at least I think so. It should be the funnest part to write and yet I'm either scared or totally checked out. I've read SO much for this project (too much, that's part of the problem...) and last night I re-read an article that is really fabulous and I found myself, "why am I writing this?" I feel like I can't really add anything to the conversation. And anything I do say is going to be at least second rate (probably more like fourth rate), so what's the point? I mean, despite the fact this is the last hoop to jump through to get my MA...

When I wrote my honor's thesis at BYU, there was this huge emphasis on coming up with truly original and creative work. On the one hand, it added a lot of pressure. On the other, it was really exciting and had exigency based on that alone. Most of the time I feel like I'm just writing a book report. I mean, I've learned a ton! But I don't feel like the critique I could add would do much to further the discussion. And the discussion needs to be furthered because it's kind of dead at the moment....

So I'm going to go back to wandering (in high speed) aimlessly (which looks pretty silly) trying to come up with how to break into this section...

It REALLY doesn't help that I don't have all my materials and notes here. I've done A LOT of this work already and now I've got to go at it all over again.

My Master's (current) Theme Song

I have highlighted the especially pertinent lines.

Eric Hutchinson
Back To Where I Was :
New life decides to come through the front door
and makes us wish we'd shown respect before
though i don't have much of a choice
i resolve to regain my voice

chorus
if i only just begin to understand it that's because
everytime i time i start to change my mind again
it gets me back to where i was

new life we never had a clue
the two of us deciding what to do
though my hands are all but tied
i rebound so i can say at least i tried

chorus

and long as i'm allowed i'll change my mind that's what it's for
i'm getting older but i'm still the same i'm just not thinking anymore

Critical Mass

So I'm realizing I can really only get so many hours of work in a day before I get completely fried. It's a shockingly small amount. Previous to this last week, I had been doing all my work after Jane went to bed for about 4 hours. With Mom around and able this week to watch her a bit, I've been getting some excellent work during the day...but then I'm not able to get much if anything done in the evening. My motivation is waning, but I have to say that posting here about Agonism has REALLY helped me tackle it again today in my draft. I was like "I've talked about that intelligently before, people read it and no one made fun of me...I can do it again." So YAY blog!

I'm really starting to doubt the scope I've picked for this project and the style I've envisioned for it. Surprisingly, writing the typical academic tone comes pretty easy. It's more difficult for me to write in the style I used to for this stuff...when did that happen? Ack! I've been assimilated ;-) Resistance is futile.

P.S. I've been wanting to try popcorn with olive oil for a while now (since it's SO much better than butter), but I was scared. I took the plunge today and yum, yum. Granted, this olive oil is fantastic, but still.

writing, writing, writing,

I have 73% of the words I need on the page! I only had 45% when the weekend hit. I feel hope! Of course, it's a giant mess in need of lots of organizing, rewriting, cleaning, etc, etc. But as we used to tell the students we tutored: a writer is like a janitor--lots of cleaning up messes. BUT a writer has got to make a mess before they can clean it up.... and this is cleaning I like to do.
*happy sigh*

This progress brought to you by Grandma and Grandpa who are currently watching my dear Jane

I am working

Working so hard, in fact, I don't know that I'll have much of coherent interest to post. I'm in that stage where I'm writing like I'm on fire and everything is an organizational mess. It's such a fun place to be!

Essentializing and Style

I have categorized a bunch of the things I have read under the heading of "essentializing." This was stuff I didn't want to get in to and didn't really find interesting. But having FINALLY read Elizabeth Flynn's Composing as a Woman, I think I may have dismissed this group too quickly, especially in how it applies to agonism.

Essentializing happens when we say "women (or whoever) are this way" and we thereby limit them, even when it's well intentioned. One example I used while teaching American Lit was the tragic (although overused) story Yellow Wallpaper. The crazy woman’s poor, well-meaning doctor husband made her more crazy because of what he believed was essentially true about women. Back in the day, the arguments (not that I argue) for why a woman shouldn't go to school where biological, scientific and medical. Learning directed blood away from the woman parts to the brain and the woman parts would atrophy in the mean time. Or that women's brains were smaller than men (they weighed them!) so they didn't belong at school. We say women, or any group, are a certain way and that's that. You can even find proof. But, it's the whole chicken or the egg thing. Are women this way and men that way and that's just the way things are or is their another explanation? In the meantime, essentializing is used as a reason to perpetuate the status quo and is frequently an excuse for inequality.

According to Flynn, the argument (but I don't argue) goes, "women and men differ in their developmental processes and in their interactions with others" but these differences are a result of the imbalance in social power, "of the dominance of men over women" (425). Women are judged by what is perceived as a universal standard but is entirely (I would say largely) a male standard. As Flynn says, "men have chronicled our historical narratives and defined our fields of inquiry" and though we may now be able to function within them, it's still the Master's house and his rules (425). So all the stuff I threw in that essentializing category was basically this stuff that was trying to look at women, their writing, their ways of knowing, outside the Master's house.

Now I do believe in essentialism and truth for that matter. I also believe that as humans alone we have a difficult time accessing that truth, which doesn't mean we shouldn't try. So the problem for me in investigating women's ways of writing or knowing is that I don't know when my own bias, or anyone else's, has creeped in. And maybe I'm afraid of dating myself or something, but I just don't want to go there.

In a lot of ways, my students feel the same way as woman did in the 1920s (I'm thinking of that great line in Thoroughly Modern Millie...) and in the 1950s. There is a perceived equality and therefore no need for feminists to rage. And I am guilty, too. As I have worked on this paper I have wondered whether or not feminism helps or hinders the process of evolving our views on argument. he deepest bias is always the one we can't see.

And yet, I do know that agonism is a tradition that was formed entirely without female voices. And yet, and this is another concern of feminists I have read, if we don’t speak in the established modes of discourse, we won’t be heard. But how much do we sacrifice? And at the same time, this whole women’s writing thing is pretty new. How much of the way that I write is just latent teenage rebellion against established forms, how much of it is experimental for experiment’s sake (because I get bored easy), and how much of it is really writing as a woman. And even by saying “this is writing as a woman” I could be essentializing. So I’m back to stylistic concerns.

I did work yesterday

In fact, I did so much work yesterday that I had nothing left to say on this blog...kind of burned by brain out, actually. I have procurred readers and set deadlines and even figured out how many words per day (1225) I need to write to meet my goals, and I made my goal yesterday! So here's me personally pep-talking me up so I can do it again today. I've realized that the "easiest" stuff I have to write up is stuff I've known for a long time, which means its stuff I've already thought a lot about which means it's going to be a bit boring to get through which means it's now the toughest stuff (you know, since I "brought it" with Ong and all).

I did want to share this quote, which I found the other day from a blog (I can't remember which now) that has inspired me and which I keep saying to myself over and over again when I start to feel that anxiety creeping in at the edges of my brain.

You have nothing to prove in the first draft, nothing to defend, EVERYTHING TO IMAGINE!

Bring it ONG!

The battle still rages. Or in Ong's terms, the contest for dominance still persists.

So mostly what I've been doing is reaquainting myself with the book and trying to figure out what he contributes to my argument (not that I am writing an argument). Strangely enough, I have NOT found myself throwing his book this time around. Maybe I've been out of grad school long enough to become less angsty and defensive and more relaxed and generous? Here's what is currently striking me and may keep me up tonight.

There are creepy similarities between Helen B. Andelin's The Fascinating Girl.
This point is so huge I have to dwell for a minute. Some of you may know (especially those of you familiar with some of my creative nonfiction work) that I'm ever caught by this book and not necessarily in a good way. It has given me it's own fair share of angst. The book essentializes as much as Ong and both use classic pieces of literature as evidence, or at least as demonstrations of their points, with great frequency. The thing that always bothered me the most about The Fascinating Girl was how much of it rang true--or at least worked. I find myself seeing kernals of what looks like truth in Ong's writings, despite myself.

Ong is sincere. He really believes that contest has functioned "more or less directly to shape the noetic world itself, and specifically its academic development" (28). And that contest "generates intellectual structures, the structures that make science itself" (47). He seems to say that without it, we'd have no knowledge at all, let alone an existence above a primitive one (oh, AND "adversativeness" makes us advanced, not primitive). "Since contest is so pervasive in the evolution of consciousness, there appears to be no way to give a full account of all that contest means to the psyche: its roots are too deep for total excavation" (28).

What is contest, you ask? Well, he goes to GREAT lengths to clarify his definition. It's kind of like competition, but not. And kind of like conflict, but not. And kind of like contention, but not etc, etc. I have sifted through it all for you and here's the basic gist: contest is "a struggle, earnest, possibly but not at all necessarily lethal or even unfriendly, between [...] human beings, entered into to determine dominance of one or another sort. The dominance can be purely ludic, as in a game of amateur sport, or existentially real, as in a lawcase or in war" (44-45).

So how does this all figure in to my paper? Well, feminists beginning (at least in article form) back in the late 70s, started protesting what a lot of them call "adversarial" methods. Ong adds a lot of history, depth, and tradition to that word even if some/a lot/all of it is essentialized and problematic. He's at least trying to explain it, where it comes from, how it has functioned, how it is useful, and for him, why it is necessary. And he definitely makes a case for how entrenched this approach is in academia. You've got to know your enemy before you can take it down, right? And not saying that agonism is necessarily my enemy (not yet, anyway), but it definitely enriches the discussion.

So what is so wrong about Ong? Shall we call them wrOngisms? (I'm having way too much fun with his last name)
Well, for one, he basically says that women can't really take part in this adversativeness/conflict/agonistic tradition because it's in our biology, more specifically our sexual biology. For example, "A mother seems to absorb aggression [...] Anatomically males are not fitted for this creative absorption [intercourse] of aggression and its transformation into life [pregnancy]" (40-41). You can't have conflict without aggression and we really only have aggression when we are protecting our young. Or we mask it (two words: Junior High) in strange social manipulations. It doesn't manifest itself in the ceremonial combat-like manner of men. Or stags (one of his frequent examples).
And even though he says that "Contest has been a major factor in organic evolution and it turns out to have been a major, and indeed seemingly essential, factor in intellectual development," (28) and practically denies women real participation in contest because of biology, he also admits that women do think. And even read. He consistently avoids putting two and two together (which would equal clear chauvinism) but the contradiction is there.

Oh, and there is this interesting element of play necessary to his idea of contest, which is the other reason women are excluded--we don't play well.

But, then, why do I even want to be included? Other than the fact that I'm not fond of arguments that deny me intellectual ability based on biology, I don't know yet.
But his larger thesis that contest is necessary to intellectual development is really interesting and will play a large part in my paper. Granted, I'll probably tweak the definition of "contest" a bit. Can I just leave out entirely the idea of dominance???

En Guarde!

Yes, Agonism! Your time has come. I have dodged you in the past, hidden you in the shadows, left you barely existing in my drafts, condemned to cap-form: "DISCUSS AGONISM HERE." But I refuse to be afraid of you anymore. Today is the day we will do "battle." So dear Mr. Ong, take your best shot. Remember I'm a feminist, a peace-making middle child, and a Christian to boot so you can't expect me to "hit" back, at least in the way your agonistic rear would expect. I myself don't know what my "tactics" will look like. But I know that today I must engage you without fear.

Saturday, Saturday, Saturday! Watch the fierce battle between the Celibate Jesuit Priest and the Feminist Mormon Stay-at-Home Mom in the *Fight for Life! A clash of values, a contest of wit, a feud between the sexes! Enter the fray at 5:00 pm MST, IF YOU DARE!


*the name of Ong's book is Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness

Tomorrow

Tomorrow I got sick. Thursday I started feeling better. Today I'm blah again. I'm kinda working (as we speak!), but blah and profound aren't exactly soul mates.

A Few Letters

Dear Gut,
I'm sorry I mistrusted you. I'm sorry I told the world you had betrayed me. I am sorry I haven't followed you closer until now. Thanks for not giving up on me. Thanks for continuing to nag me and being unrelenting and awesome. I can't promise it won't happen again, but I can promise to listen thoroughly, intently, suspending my disbelief, and always giving you a full chance.
Best Regards,
~m


Dear Reader,
I think we are rolling again. Maybe even rocking. Time (i.e. tomorrow) will tell.
~m

BLOCKED!!

So, as evidenced by my weekend absence (and this weekend was supposed to be BIG work time with Eric home to watch Jane--yea, I took a 3 hour nap...) I'm blocked again. And here's why I think I am:

I don't have a viable exit strategy. Or an entrance strategy. Eric and I came up with one on Friday that I was initially relieved and excited about. But then I couldn't write anymore. So I need a new strategy. Got any ideas?

Contract

I'm trying to come up with a contract or a thesis question. I tend to focus panoramic in my research instead of portrait. So the large question I'm always interested in is: How do we reinforce discourse and buttress inquiry into the structure of our deliberative spaces?

And I'm not sure where to go from there.

My question assumes there is something less than perfect with the current system or at least something about the current system that is constantly susceptible to earthquakes of a kind, thus the need for buttressing. What kind of job am I talking about? If argument was a HGTV show, would this be an extreme makeover type show, or more of a Design on a Dime kind of thing? Or somewhere in between? Am I arguing for cosmetic changes? Organizational issues? Renovation? Demolition?

I think I need to spend some time engaging in agonism to answer this question. IS THERE ANYTHING VALUABLE IN AGONISM? Should it be demoed or just renoed? And I think I need to answer that before I can get too much farther. But I don't know if I need to know that to write a thesis question. I've always been an intuitive writer. As an undergrad, I pointedly (and successfully) wrote my final paper for my Teaching Writing class without a thesis stated anywhere in the paper. My gut has betrayed me.

Panic Mode and an Intro

Yep, it's already starting to set in. I'm just trying to push through and keep writing, even though I just realized I left my outline and other sundry things I now think I need in our apartment which is 1280 miles away from where I sit typing this. I can't get my hands on those things for a month. I'll I've got is my own brain. Scary, right?

I've been having a difficult time figuring out how to start this thing. I've written a half dozen intros and considered another half dozen. I can't seem to figure out how I want to start, what I angle I want to go at this from. The problem is that I researched too long and too wide. What I really want to talk about doesn't fit within the scope of this kind of project. With paralysis setting in, I find myself taking advice (so if you've got some, please offer). I mean, that's what advisers are for! So here's the first part of my intro...for now.


I’m not sure what I was thinking the weekend I came home from college wearing a piece of muslin with the screen-printed words “no war in Iraq” tied around my bicep. I don’t think I did it to rile my mother—although it could have been some form of latent teenage rebellion. And I don’t think I did it mischievously intending to incite uproar around the Limbaugh-loving dinner table. I think I wore it out of conviction, or at least out of relief that I had a conviction, a side that I was finally, after much deliberation, on.
“Deliberation” wasn’t over, however. My mother argued passionately, emotionally, from what she saw as the truth, from deeply held values, the same values I hold. It is no exaggeration to say that she saw my position as betrayal, my armband as evidence of a failure on her part as a parent. My dad’s role in the discussion/argument/conflict was more subdued, nearly entirely made up of factual interjections and clarifications: “Well, yes, but-” or “Now remember that-” or “Well, actually-”. My younger sister stared in disbelief, then dismissed my armband and me as she does all things she deems too stupid to engage, and remained silent. My brother was enjoying the display and took part with gusto arguing both sides alternatively. In the meantime, I escaped to the kitchen where my dad found me later. Although entirely shut down, my dad played the part of my apologist, coaxing me back onto the common ground we shared. But I didn’t go back to the table.
My house has always been a deliberative house. Our favorite and frequent pastime is discussing various issues, principles, and ideas. When my armband and I came home that weekend, I fully expected to share the reasons behind my conviction while sitting at the table. I expected to be vigorously challenged, but not blasted and excluded to the kitchen. The tradition of discourse, the environment of inquiry I trusted, the deliberative house around me collapsed, making the question about war in Iraq moot. At that moment, standing in the shambles, I began to wonder just what had happened to cause this collapse and how to prevent it. Was it simply my position that forced me into the kitchen? Are some issues just too hot? How and where do we argue passionately from our principles, especially when we disagree, without excluding those that oppose us? What does that space look like in groups of different sizes and different degrees of solidarity; in homes, classrooms, communities, academia, politics, and between countries?
Since then, I have both shied away from argument and become fixated on it. As a teacher and student I have become something of a structural detective determined to discover how to bring our deliberative houses up to code. And yet I keep one foot in the kitchen, bracing for the next collapse, hesitating to fully engage. Prerequisite to my returning to the table is answering this question: How do we reinforce discourse and buttress inquiry into the structure of our deliberative spaces?

Influence and Intent

What begat my foray into this project to begin with was this strange and strangely seminal (or ovarian, as Dr. Cary would say) piece by Sally Gearhart in '79 called "The Womanization of Rhetoric." The oft quoted line goes something like this: "any intent to persuade is an act of violence." The three key terms here are intent, persuade, and violence. Most of the feminists I have read pick up or take issue with the violence torch. I have followed that debate and explored that idea a lot, but I've also been hung up on the "any intent to persuade" part.

I feel like today I became unhung. And it might be obvious and it might make no appearance in my actual paper, but it felt like a breakthrough in my thinking. You can tell me if you think I'm being perceptive or not.

First of all, it's not the persuasion that is violent but the intent to do so. She has to say that because her discipline is persuasion, and besides, persuasion makes the world go 'round. To get things done, we either have to agree, be persuaded to agree, or be coerced.

Second, and pardon my TV cliches here as I attempt to to debunk "any intent," but her adjective choice is superlative and overreaches. ANY intent? What about persuading someone who is about to jump off a bridge that life is worth living, or the stereotypical man with a gun who doesn't really want to hurt anyone, he just wants money for his kid who needs an operation... you can't tell me that the intent to persuade them to do otherwise is violent.

What makes intent so bad anyway? I'm not really sure what Gearhart's answer to this is. Or maybe I am and I don't remember. But here's what I came up with today. Again, might be totally obvious.

We all think we are right, it seems natural that you want to be right and to convince others of the right as well. I think maybe an initial intent to change is OK. What else moves us to speak our minds if we didn’t believe that what we had to say could contribute to some kind of change in the world? And I generally believe people don't manipulate others for the fun of it, at least not on the big things, maybe to win a game of UNO if you happen to be my brother. There is usually a basic belief of rightness. The difference between manipulation and persuasion (the similarity of these two terms has always made me a bit uneasy, mostly because I couldn't define the difference) comes down to respect. (This is the lightbulb part.)

With manipulation there is a total loss of respect for the listener's agency and a lack of belief in the listener's abilities to make their own decision "correctly." At the basis of manipulation is pride and ethnocentricity. At the foundation of persuasion is respect. If you value the agency of others, you respect their resistance to your ideas even when you think they are wrong. And I think to be a responsible teacher, politician, purveyor of ideas, minister, mother, or whatever, you have to recognize this basic “intent” to change others and actively work on retaining respect for our students, constituents, listeners, parishioners, children, or whatever. They have agency and they have brains. Make Aretha proud!

That said, I'm not sure if a lack of this respect is in itself violence, but it DOES lead to violence. I agree with Gearhart that we need to “change our own use of our tools” (196). But “our attempt to educate others in that skill [of changing others]” (196) has never been why I see rhetoric as important. I always saw the benefit of rhetoric as a deconstructive tool—as a faculty cultivated to help in cutting through crap. Because crap is always violent. ANY intent to crap is violent. But more on that later.

g'night.

Some relevant and moderately favored definitions of rhetoric

These are pasted from my writing journal. I'm not even sure where I got some of them (shhh, don't tell anyone). But they are still good:

"rhetorical study, in its strict sense, is concerned with the modes of persuasion. Persuasion is clearly a sort of demonstration, since we are most fully perusaded when we consider a thing to have been demonstrated."
from http://www.stanford.edu/dept/english/courses/sites/lunsford/pages/defs.htm

Kenneth Burke: "Rhetoric is rooted in an essential function of language itself, a function that is wholly realistic and continually born anew: the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols."

George Campbell: [Rhetoric] is that art or talent by which discourse is adapted to its end. The four ends of discourse are to enlighten the understanding, please the imagination, move the passion, and influence the will.
what about discourse as Inquiry?

Gerard A. Hauser: Introduction to Rhetorical Theory (1986)
Rhetoric is an instrumental use of language…. One person engages another person in an exchange of symbols to accomplish some goal. It is not communication for communication's sake. Rhetoric is communication that attempts to coordinate social action. For this reason, rhetorical communication is explicitly pragmatic. Its goal is to influence human choices on specific matters that require immediate attention.

Sappho
Persuasion is Aphrodite's daughter: it is she who beguiles our mortal hearts (frg 90).
Poems and Fragments. Trans. Josephine Balmer. Seacaucus: Meadowland 1984.

Rhetoric Has a Shadow

So I wrote this more than a year ago when it took great self-control and every brain cell I had left to divert energy from gestating to writing my Master's Report. It's a rushwrite, of course. And it has it's moments, at least in the opening. And yes, "Rhetoric has a shadow" is the grandiose title of the .doc (blame it on the hormones or something) Feel free to comment.

Catherine Lamb stole my introduction. But Kenneth Burke stole my metaphor before I was born. But just because I didn’t write them first, doesn’t mean I have to abandon them. Besides, we’re all just footnotes to Aristotle and Plato anyway, right?

Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for awhile, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment, or the gratification of your opponent, depending up on the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.
--Kenneth Burke (The Philosophy of Literary Form 110-111)

“When I read this passage as a feminist, however, I ask questions that make me less comfortable about it. The “you” in it takes it for granted that he is invited and can enter the parlor; he also seems to have no doubts about being able to speak, using the proper forms, and being listened to once he speaks. His challenges are only those of timing and strategy. I, on the other hand, ask who has been invited and who has been left out. Why should only these forms be used and not others? Must we assume an antagonistic relationship between participants? What other parties can we imagine that might continue the conversation?” (Lamb 155).

Rhetoric has a shadow. Always the figure lingering in the dark alley. A threat. Or more often it is dismissed as “cookery” or “mere rhetoric.” A bag of tricks. Manipulation. Disassociated with the truth, so it must be full of lies.
And so we turn to what is safe, or if not safe, than established, about rhetoric—argument. Argument is all that is rhetoric is, or all that is salvageable, to most people.



I have a bone to pick with argument. I'm just not sure which bone. No, that's not true. I know which bone(s). I'm just too much of a pansy or a peacemaker or something to suck it up and actually pick at it/them. So here's to sucking!