I can’t think of the last thing I tried to repair other than myself which is ongoing. Instead, I use Question 5 of this round’s Blog Carnival as an opportunity to expand an argument originally explored in an earlier nineties post on the concept of broken world thinking, repair, and whether or not rhetoric is in need of repair right now. By extending the concept of broken world thinking to rhetoric and writing studies, I suggest that breakdowns of late in communication and suasive failures are the result of rhetoric being pushed past the point of resiliency to where it is no longer functioning as it should. Also, I question whether or not context, rather than rhetoric itself, is perhaps needing repair in order to reinvigorate rhetoric with its recuperative qualities so as to address many of today’s wicked world problems.
Jackson (2014) invites fellow media and technology scholars to reconsider the primacy of innovation and ingenuity in the field, and instead prioritize as a site of analysis and new ways of thinking about the world, breakdown and repair. For Jackson (2014) such considerations provide arable ground for not only illuminating the ways in which said primary sites of innovation and ingenuity are located in breakdown and repair, but also how “some [communities] are more on the receiving (read business) end of globalization than others”. He spotlights the Bangladesh shipwrecking industry as an example of this sort of imbalance, reminding us that the workers involved in these enterprises have no affiliation with the wider world of trade and commerce whence the vessels came, and how easy it is to forget that the burden of breakdown and repair often comes at the expense of others’ welfare, and particularly the welfare of poc. If the world is coming apart, then, as per broken world thinking–that is, if many of the systems we once relied upon for stabilizing our lives have been pushed beyond their resiliency levels and are deemed kaput–and if “many of the things we care about as media and technology scholars turn out to be implicated in precisely such moments [of breaking],” then said scholars ought to fasten their gaze on the phenomenon of repair for answers as to how things do break, and who exactly does the work of fixing these things when they do (Jackson 2014).
These ruminations have their place in rhetoric and writing studies, too, especially when thinking about Han (2020) and the breakdown of communities on which discursive enterprises are predicated. “Community has a bodily dimension,” writes Han (2022). The gaze is everything in communication–and with digital communication, the gaze is no longer present. The gaze is what affirms the other; and without it, the other disappears. “The absence of the gaze is partly responsible for the loss of empathy in the digital age,” writes Han (2022), and not only the breakdown but also the commodification of community. The cultural dimensions of community are at stake, then, for “the total commercialization and commodification of culture leads to the destruction of community [and] community as commodity spells the end of community”. The ascendance of non-things (e.g. smartphones) threatens the resiliency threshold of communities, thus compromising discourse qua rhetoric whereby democratic ends are pursued in the first place. If community and in turn culture are beholden to the computational rationality of non-things, or machines, or algorithms, and discourse is a commodity to be exploited for its value in the optimization of our lives, what happens to rhetoric?
Operating from the standpoint of a world in need of repair, then, what role are rhetoric and writing scholars playing in the repairing of rhetoric in the age of non-things? Are we simply playing into the Dataists’ game of computational rationale by relying as heavily as we do on digital platforms in service of capitalism among other of our worst dystopian nightmares? And, how do we fix rhetoric–and who does that work exactly?–in an age where the sites upon which discursive prowess is predicated are compromised and commodified? What I’m suggesting is that in the same way Jackson (2014) implores his fellow media and technology scholars to view technology in the modern age as being in a constant state of wear and tear and thus needing repair, we take rhetoric/ians to task similarly. That is, instead of assuming that our rhetorical faculties and devices are in tact and only need to be harnessed by “good people” for effectuating good in a broken world, we assume that they are indeed in peril and have been pushed beyond their levels of resiliency, requiring maintenance. Instead of not questioning rhetoric, I say, and blaming the circulation and proliferation of fake news on bad actors with bad intentions, perhaps rhetoricians should give rhetoric (or the lack thereof) less credit, and question its efficacy/potency instead of simply throwing all the blame on Donald Trump, for example.
Then again, is rhetoric actually broken? Or rather how do we check? Where and how do we run a diagnostic to determine whether it is or not, and where and how that breakdown is occurring? Or is it that, to invoke Jenny Odell (2019), context is broken? Have we in our efforts to optimize human production by way of faster internet speeds and bigger data centers that make possible the transfer of communication qua information at the expense of our environment and the “bodily dimension” of community (Han 2020) turned context into an afterthought? And is it this secondary if not tertiary station where context finds itself today the reason for rhetoric’s failures of late to not stave off breakdowns in communication, or persuasion, that should help us to “stay with the trouble…avoiding positions of detached purity or apocalyptic assuredness” (Shivener & Edwards 2020) within the Anthropocene? And if these context collapses are occurring, are truly to blame for the ascension of fake news and post-truth, the impotency of rhetoric to do good in the world as it was intended, how can rhetoric and writing scholars be more intentional about the work of repairing context as it relates to rhetoric?Or, in our efforts to corporatize education and therefore our students, have we just created more sophists in suits whose sophism runs rampant and against what rhetoric is intended to do?
I haven’t answers and only a lot of questions, you see. Like Jackson (2014), though, I wonder what happens when we take “breakdown and decay” as our starting points for thinking about the nature, use, and effects of rhetoric in the 21st Century.
References
Han, B.-C. 2022. Non-things: Upheaval in the lifeworld. Polity Press.
Jackson, S.J. 2014. Rethinking repair. In T. Gillespie, P.J. Boczkowski, & K.A. Foot (Eds), Media technologies: Essays on communication, materiality, and society. MIT Press, https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9042.003.0015.
Odell, J. 2019. How to do nothing: Resisting the attention economy. First Melville House Printing.
Schivener, R, & Edwards, D. 2020. The environmental unconscious of digital composing: Mapping climate change rhetorics in data center ecologies. enculturation: a journal of rhetoric, writing, and culture. https://parlormultimedia.com/enculturation/environmental_unconscious
