Breaking from Binary Invention for Belva!

For Belva, on the occasion of her birthday.

I had friends who welcomed their daughter, Belva, into the world. Baby names are a weird thing: bound up in family history, aspirational politics, and (increasingly in neo-liberal culture) individual branding. There’s a way to read Belva as a deviation from the terribly popular Bella iteration of Isabella. Bella is off-the-charts popular because of the Twilight series, which makes variants like Belva a useful alternative. It beckons to the other Bellas in her future classrooms while having plausible deniability that her parents were Twilight fans.

But I like Belva for other reasons (that have only a little to do with my fondness for her parents).  Belva peaked in popularity in the 1880s (and by peaked, I mean, it’s highest point was when we started tracking things like baby-name popularity. That this tracking coincides with the height of industrialization, urbanization, and consumer capital shouldn’t come as a surprise. But even at its most popular, Belva seems to have barely broken into the top 400 names. So what does this data tell us, as we contemplate little Belva of the 21^st century? It tells us that her parents have tapped into a recognizable but still rare signifier from the American Victorian Era. And that’s why baby names are awesome.

Belva is a chance to learn something about our past, to indicate (however subconsciously or accidentally) a willingness to connect our future with a previous aesthetic. And Ranciere notes that aesthetics (secondarily, in the aesthetics of the name, I suppose) indicate the conditions of belonging. So to what historical trajectory does Belva belong? The trajectory of Belva AnnLockwood, a proponent of coeducation at a time when that wasn’t the norm. That Belva also got a law degree, though only after being refused entry to one school (she’d be a distraction to the men, apparently) and completing coursework at another. She only received her law degree after she wrote to President Grant to lean on the school to grant the diploma. Not surprisingly, Belva Lockwood went on to use her education and legal experience to petition for equal rights, equal pay, and women’s suffrage. She was the first woman to argue before the U.S. Supreme court (and so Belva’s arrival in the wake of important court decisions has a kind of cosmic synergy…if you’re into that thing). Lockwood managed to secure $5 million for the Cherokee people, because it turned out the U.S. Government owed it. Like many suffragettes of her time, Lockwood was a prohibitionist, which isn’t exactly a policy my friends support (but don’t we all want our children to follow in the footsteps of prohibitionists, for at least a little while?).

I wouldn’t have learned anything about Belva Lockwood, were it not for little Belva of the 21^st century. And here’s to hoping the new Belva has the tenacity and conviction of Belva Lockwood of the 19^th century…because as it happens, Lockwood’s work is clearly not quite finished. But anyway, thanks Belva of the 21st Century. You've been here for 8 hours and already I'm a better person because of you.

Resonant Isocrates

David Beard, the syntax factory himself, recently directed readers of the blogora to a really tidy blog entry by Tania Smith at Edu*Rhetor on the utility of reading Isocrates as part of an Organizational Communication course.

Smith notes that Isocrates is invaluable, not only because of his commitment to a rhetoric of ethical engagement, but also because his model of rhetorical education closely resembles what many imagine when they think of the liberal arts. While Smith notes that Isocrates connects to these contemporary dynamics of pedagogy, it remains less clear how we might get contemporary students to connect to Isocrates.

As part of my continuing experiments with packaging the rhetorical tradition in the trappings of digital life, I'll be working on this project in the coming months:

I imagine "rhetorix comix" as pdf formatted comic books (with interactive links, maybe?) that package things like "Against the Sophists" for use in the undergraduate classroom. The project is severely limited by my own meager abilities at digital imaging (more on why that might not be a terrible thing in a coming entry), but I think Isocrates might be the best place to ease into this mode of presentation. First, as Smith notes, Isocrates is terribly relevent in many contemporary contexts. Second, his works are generally short essays and orations that lend themselves well to the abbreviated style of the comic-book frame. Maybe someday we'll get the illustrated Quintillian, but for now I'm hoping to churn out a short exercise in anachronism: Isocrates Against the Sophists.

Prosopopoeia, Twitter, and Puppets

So here's the rudimentary video presentation I did for UND's Working Group in Digital and New Media event. We called the event "Digital Lightning" and the purpose was to demonstrate a variety of approaches to digital scholarship in quick bursts that prompted the audience to ask questions.

To drive home the point about voice, I stood behind a podium beneath the screen with the puppet above.  The puppet did all the fake talking.  You can't quite make it out, but you can see it (and the whole slate of presentations) here.

Loss Leaders and Leading Losers

As Black Friday descends upon the American buyosphere (to borrow from Thomas Hine), it offers an opportunity to consider the civic, cultural, and maybe (though not likely) spiritual obligations in light of consumerism. What follows is a tweak of the Holiday episode of Communication 404: Advertising and Society, and an effort to give shape to a notion of consumer culture that does not neglect its civic responsibilities nor insist on exorcising the structures of liberal capital.

In COMM 404, we read Twitchell’s essay on Santa andCoca-Cola along side Thomas Hine’s chapter on Christmas shopping in I Want That! And the chapter on American Girl Dolls from Trading Up. Triangulating these three texts necessitates considering how the Holiday season develops as a palatable excuse to embed a culture of consumption that both bolsters the economy at a crucial time (December is cold and dark and nobody wants to go walk the storefronts, and also, end of the fiscal year for a lot of businesses) and trains individuals (particularly the kiddos) to engage in the marketplace in discerning ways. The punchline of Hine (and of the Holiday episode of 404) is that if Christmas did not exist (and as the communal and familial event, it did not prior to the late 19^th century) then the market would have to create it (and so it did).

Given this conclusion, Twitchell’s reading about Santa Claus and Coca-Cola as the syncretization of competing or seemingly unrelated logics becomes useful to us, in that much as we see Coke imbricating the holiday with icy cold refreshment (when, baby, it’s cold outside) we also have to see the unpalatable hyper-consumption of Black Friday as part of a broader logic of consumption that is necessary from a macro-economic perspective. Jobs, tax revenue, etc., are markedly improved by the year-end excuse to over-consume.

All this is to say that grousing about consumerism on Black Friday is unpalatable to me. Unpalatable in the first case because of the social training the holiday season performs for consumers. Children (ought to) learn discerning consumer behavior by tailoring lists and by negotiating their expectations relative to social capital (naughty or nice?). All of this productive socializing work can be undone by hyperactive approaches to the market (if we didn’t learn to balance our Holiday approach as children, we might enact a cycle of over-over-indulgence) or done elsewhere by other authorized structures (not celebrating Christmas certainly doesn’t preclude one from becoming a consumer).

I take gripes about an overly commercial Christmas to be unpalatable in the second sense as a historically misinformed and ascetic obverse to the season’s lessons of indulgence. If Christmas is the time when kids can flip the script on their parents and be as willfully desirous as their behavior merits, then it seems Christmas also becomes the one time of the year when people complain about the evils of capital as if it wipes the slate clean on the other 11 months of consumer behavior. More to the point, I’d argue you can chart an increase in the rise of anti-consumer rants about the Holidays directly to a rise in consumption driven economics that span the year. Why step up the consumerism in December if we’re engaging the marketplace full-tilt regardless of the calendar?

But despite my desire to treat the marketplace as useful and socializing institution in contemporary life, there are surely parts of the Holiday marketplace that are unavoidably cynical. While a great sale serves as an instance of community building for Hine, Black Friday will likely indicate a different kind of community: assault by the invisible (and visible) hands of self-interested shoppers. And so we get to the point of the title. We can answer the question “why do we shop now?” at the macro-level as I’ve tried above, or at the micro-level by noting that many shop at unseemly hours of late November because the deals are inviting. These deals, extremely limited but also extremely rewarding, are called “loss leaders” by the retail industry, meaning the shops take losses on those deals in an effort to get shoppers to commit the remainder of their budget to other products in the store.

In this way, loss leaders are a miniature moment of access to a category of product that would otherwise fall beyond the budgets of shoppers, much as early Christmas celebrations (before the mass-consumer iteration) served as moments of reversing the relationship between feudal lords and serfs. In those times, Hine tells us, the landed aristocracy would provide gifts to the workers and servants, providing them access to a class of products that fell beyond their means and station the other 11 months of the year. If we think of loss leaders via the tokenism of class-based gifting, then we can see that loss leaders indicate which way the losers in a given society are being led. And so loss leaders offer us a way of thinking through our relationship to the marketplace that is less about questions of why and when we consume and more about questions of what and where (in terms of locale and status) we consume.

As such, a responsible mechanism of consuming is no longer a function of whether we engage the market in the 12^th month or not (since engaging the market does a great deal of social work and since not engaging the market would therefore have dire social—as well as macroeconomic—consequences). Instead, we can consider or responsibilities to the market alongside our responsibility to leadership, loss, and the broader consequences of purchases. Small Business Saturday (an initiative set up by American Express, which certainly complicates matters) offers a corrective to Black Friday, not so much as an alternative time (I’ll skip Friday and spend my wares Saturday) but as an alternative logic of engaging the marketplace. Seen as that kind of alternative, it might also inform how we engage the marketplace on Black Friday, less a condition of loss leaders and more a condition of taking leadership in how we articulate what constitutes a win and a loss as we participate in the marketplace.

What does Sabermetrics mean for Rhetoric?

It turns out it takes two weeks to recover from hosting a conference, but that time allows you to ponder the fate of the world.* Particularly, I’ve been wondering what Nate Silver means for rhetorical studies, and given what Nate Silver meant for baseball analysis, this is also a story about negotiating the relationship with my inner curmudgeon. 

An Ass’s Shadow Masquerading as a Horse

Part of this year’s UND Arts & Culture conference includes a piece of “glitch art” by Mark Amerika. In glitch art, the artist manipulates some part or parts of the digital and mechanical process of capture and production to augment the work. In Mark Amerika’s case, he corrupted the code of a digital photograph and printed the resulting image. I’ve been intrigued by the piece since I saw it come out of the print shop because it seems like a prima facie “binary invention.” It’s pixelated and bright and angular. It does not conceal its digital foundations in the way some of the more organic and figural pieces in the exhibit do. It is unmistakably a binary creation. However, glitch art, with its interest in making the digital part of a digital photograph manifest, presents some challenges to understanding it as a mode of invention.

Technological Fallacies

One of the things I'm fascinated with is the way technologies allow folks to abdicate a position of accountability in public discourse. This week offered another example of what we might call the technological fallacy (pretentiously, a fallacy ad mediatio?), wherein a speaker introduces a flaw in the mechanics of mediation as a justification for a breakdown in communication. An interview with Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo abruptly ended after two questions, due to a "phone malfunction."