I’ve been thinking quite a bit about how the Cartesian mind-body split has carried over to certain contexts in the present (even if it has been somewhat disrupted in other contexts). For example, some classrooms, disciplines, and universities still focus on the mind and do not necessarily acknowledge embodied experience as part of intellectual activity. I also find it interesting that our psychological models have not shifted all that far from the Enlightenment conceptualization of faculties of the mind. Noticing the lack of change is what caused me to pose this question during class: How might the mind’s faculties be redivided, redistributed, and/or reconceptualized based on a different (not Enlightenment) epistemology?
I’m not sure that I can actually answer that question, but perhaps I can make some suggestions based on some of our readings. As a starting point—thinking back to Locke’s psychological model, and later, Campbell’s application of this model to rhetoric—the faculties of the mind would include: understanding, imagination, passion, and will (Campbell 902). Bizzell and Herzberg articulate these faculties in a convenient and easy-to-digest table (898). I think an initial critique, inspired by either Haraway or Mao, would be a challenge to the seemingly clean divisions between faculties. Mao, in looking at methodology, says, “we must cultivate and indeed demand an intersubjective, interdependent ethos so that our own historically privileged dispositions can be consistently challenged and made manifest throughout the entire process of representation” (“Writing the Other” 44). Applying the notions of intersubjectivity and interdependence to the faculites of the mind begins to complicate their designated functions. Additionally, the view of clear divisions and compartmentalization may be continued repercussions of remaining in our comfort zone, in an epistemology that favors clear distinctions, rules, and methods for managing complexities.
Haraway’s disruption of “relativism and totalization” as promises of “vision from everywhere and nowhere” blurs boundaries between how and what we know (191). It may be a bit of a stretch, but I can see how Campbell’s theory of the faculties would fall short of Haraway’s call “for politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating, where partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims” (Haraway 195). Campbell begins to identify the differences between a general and a particular audience, and even outlines seven methods of “operating on the passions” to better relate between speaker and hearer, but these circumstances come from a particular perspective and don’t necessarily take into account the possibility of contradictions between and through perspectives.
I see a discrepancy between Campbell’s articulation of his theory and the implications of that theory. Even the selections that we read from Campbell provided significant overlap between the faculties in example, if not in conceptualization. He says, “in discoursing on a subject, many things may be introduced…But then these other and immediate ends are in effect but means” (902). So, a speaker might appeal to a hearer’s passion as a starting point for motivating the hearer’s will. Despite the distinctions (as illustrated in Bizzell and Herzberg’s table), the faculties are not so easily separated in practice. Additionally, these are faculties of the mind, but there seem to be relationships between these faculties with the body, as well. The concordance activity helped show this relationship (especially in the visualizations of the relationships between terms). Moving beyond the Cartesian split, can we really even call these faculties of the mind? Are they simply human faculties, of both mind and body? As Michael pointed out, using the tools to search for both plural and singular “mind/s” and “bod/ies” added to the complexity of the conversation that emerged from Locke, Hume, and Campbell. We could see a more general use of “mind” or “body” being individualized, placed in terms of other bodies and minds, and seen as an entity in a community.
Thinking about the spaces and linkages between minds and bodies also made me think more about Mao’s concept of the “discursive third” that Dr. Graban mentioned during class. I’m certain that I do not fully grasp Mao’s concept of the “discursive third” as part of “the art of recontextualization” (“Beyond Bias” 218). But I did find his article, “Beyond Bias, Binary, and Border: Mapping out the Future of Comparative Rhetoric,” that provides some detail about the discursive third. It seems to be a synthesis and condensation of Mao’s book into an introduction for a special issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly on Comparative Rhetorics. For anyone interested, you can take a look at the abstract, and if you want to read the full version of the article, I have it as a PDF. Let me know. I remember from class that Mandy expressed some confusion that I think we were perhaps all feeling: Haraway and Mao both write in ways that feel neither familiar to self nor separate as our construction of “other.” I’m wondering if our confusion and our discomfort stems from being asked to read in/from a discursive third in these pieces. Are we being asked to inhabit a space that is neither self nor other? Haraway gets at this by examining objectivity as situated—an epistemology built, not on a single perspective nor a multiplicity of perspectives, but rather on a situated perspective that considers, is in relation to, and intertwines with a broader picture. Mao immerses the reader into a philosophical/rhetorical “theory” of Daodejing, and by moving through the art of recontextualization, performs the overlapping space between self and other, disrupting this binary.
I feel as though I’ve gone rather far afield from the Enlightenment texts, even though Mao and Haraway certainly add to and challenge the conversation surrounding epistemology and rhetoric. So, to bring this back to the terms and this exploratory, the idea of the discursive third has provided me with another way to think of the concordance activity. Do these digital tools present us with an unfamiliar look at discourse that—in grappling with the nuances of different sorts of close and distance readings—yields new, different, and interesting perspectives? In other words, do we step out of a binary of perspectives (“we” as the readers and “them” as the authors of the Enlightenment texts) and engage in the texts and terms via a third perspective, field, and/or discourse: that of the machine reading? I think that, perhaps it did. I was forced to take into account my own understanding of the terms, my reading of the terms in the texts, and then move into a new understanding that wasn’t anchored nor completely removed from either my perspective or the perspective of the text.
The readings this week have gotten me thinking about an epistemology that places rhetoric as the meaning-making generator, inventing and creating somewhere between/through self and other, in a discursive third, from a situated-objective position that takes into account, but doesn’t surrender to, both a perspective and a multiplicity of perspectives. An epistemology that sees both space between and overlap between minds and bodies, minds and minds, bodies and bodies. A model that layers and twists the faculties of mind/body rather than placing them on a plane, in a table. Even with the limitations of the tools for the concordance activity, there were practically too many linkages, separations, and winding connections to make sense of. But, patterns did emerge. The challenges and limits of the tools could also be seen as challenges or limits or complexities or ambiguities of language. What I mean is, the tool is capable of doing certain things. When the numbers became hazy, or it was difficult to identify the meaning behind a term because of multiple meanings, is that really a problem with the tool? Or, does it indicate the issues we face with language everyday? The challenges of ambiguity and imprecision that Locke found to be the “imperfection of language” (817)? I’d like to end with a small realization that I think might help tie together my rather wide-ranging thoughts that came from the exploratory. In using the digital tools, I recorded our observations of words, word counts, and associations in a table in a Word document (see below). In essence, I took a multi-faceted, interconnected reading of the terms and attempted to flatten the reading into something I could see and understand. I attempted to step back out of an uncomfortable discourse and enforce rules or boundaries to contain the information. I tried to categorize, much like Locke and Campbell do with the faculties of the mind, the various relationships, sensations, and experiences I was having with the terms. I wonder what would have happened if I could have better immersed myself in the discursive space outside my own and outside the texts.
As a side note, I’d like to mention that, for most of the writing of this blog post, LPs were playing in the background. I suppose I could add to the repository of The Internet Archive if I felt so inclined: digitizing and uploading records as a continued use of the tools we worked with this week...
Works Cited
Bizzell, Patricia and Bruce Herzberg, eds. The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present, 2nd ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001.
Campbell, George. “From The Philosophy of Rhetoric.” In Bizzell and Herzberg, eds.
Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. New York and Oxford: Routledge, 1991. 183-202.
Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts.
Locke, John. “From An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.” In Bizzell and Herzberg, eds.
Mao, LuMing. “Beyond Bias, Binary, and Border: Mapping out the Future of Comparative Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 43.3 (2013): 209-225. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02773945.2013.792690?scroll=top&needAccess=true
---. “Writing the Other into Histories of Rhetorics: Theorizing the Art of Recontextualization.” Theorizing Histories of Rhetoric, ed. Michelle Ballif. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2013. 41-57.
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