The Public Sphere and "Gangs and Their Walls"

In Cintron's piece "Gangs and Their Walls," he draws attention to the ways in which the identification and differentiation methods deployed by street gangs depended upon the material products and cultural content of mainstream society. Specifically, Cintron notes that street gangs would, in an effort to mark themselves as members of their own gangs, amass and wear items of clothing whose mainstream "meanings" served an alternate purpose. Thus, a member of a gang whose colors are black and gold might wear a sports jersey from a well-known professional team whose colors are also black and gold. His intent seems to be to point out how the street gangs appropriation of mainstream cultural material for their own particular purposes parallels their very raison d'etre, which is to create a situation (a society) that allows for them to acquire the respect denied them from mainstream society. Although Cintron does not phrase it in this way, but this is very close to the Hegelian notion of determinate negation. Street gangs, in their attempt to break from mainstream society, are nevertheless inextricably tied to it by that very negation; they are determined not to be part of a specific other society and all their efforts are accordingly still oriented towards that which they seek to break from. Not only in the clothing choices of street gangs was this apparent, but even in the grammatical conventions of their graffiti, which Cintron says, "suggests that convention in signaling respect was the baseline on which a transgressive order was manufactured" (169). Cintron ties this observation to Habermas' notion of the public sphere, but then remarks that the model provided by Habermas is not without its difficulties. Turning to Stanley Aronowitz, Cintron draws attention to the fact that "because Habermas' model is dependent on rationality as a "presupposition of public communication," the public sphere is understood as a "restricted space" rather than a participatory one" (174). The general idea is that this is supposed to line up with the efforts of the street gangs, who have been "restricted" from mainstream society, yet continue to orient themselves toward it in their actions. However, the suggestion that the public sphere excludes street gangs on the basis of their lack of rationality strikes me as patently false. As Cintron himself notes, the methods employed by the street gangs are numerous and subtly intelligent. In other words, they manifest rationality. This entails that Cintron has either misunderstood or misapplied Habermas' theory (although perhaps Aronowitz is partly to blame?). Street gangs might exist on the fringes of mainstream society, and they might even be excluded from the public sphere, but if they are, it wouldn't be due to their non-possession of rationality.

On McGee's Notion of "Ideograph"

McGee's argument is premised on "a brute, undeniable phenomenon: Human beings in collectivity behave and think differently than human beings in isolation" (McGee 2). McGee notes a pair of apparently conflicting explanations of this phenomenon, which, nevertheless (purportedly) agree that "the only possibility of "mind" lies in the individual qua individual". The result of this agreement is that the phenomenon of the apparent agency of human collectivities must be explained in terms of the agency of individuals, since a collectivity cannot (ex hypothesi) have "mind". Thus, the rival explanations revolve around opposing ways of conceiving how individuals are engaged in collective action. On one hand, the "symbolist" camp maintains that collective action involves "a voluntary agreement [on the part of the individuals] to believe in and participate in a "myth"" (ibid). Materialists, on the other hand, contend that the participation of (most?) individuals in a collectivity must be premised on a calculated deception about the existence of an ideologically grounded unity, which is "foisted on all members of the community by the ruling class" (ibid). McGee's response to this opposition between symbolist and materialist camps is that neither side, strictly speaking, is wrong because they are pursuing two different goals. McGee's proposition, then, is to conceive of the two sides as supplemental to one another rather than mutually exclusive explanatory frameworks. The synthesis of the two results in McGee's account of "Ideographs". However, it is unfortunate for McGee that he explicitly bases this account on the following commitment: "If a mass consciousness exists at all, it must be empirically "present," itself a thing obvious to those who participate in it" (McGee 4). Why it is that McGee (who is surely not alone in making this assumption) believes such a claim warranted is not immediately obvious. All consciousness is the consciousness of a collectivity. Human awareness is the product of a human brain, which is a complex network of highly specialized cells working in concert. How those cells produce the singular phenomenon of consciousness is, of course, still an enormous scientific mystery, but however it is produced, it remains clear that it emerges out of the collective activity of millions of individual cells participating in the same endeavor. Our conception of a human mass-consciousness and its characteristics ought to be based on what we know about the paradigmatic consciousness of individual persons. If there is a human mass-consciousness, our relation to it would be the relation of one of our neurons to our own consciousness. What kind of relation could that be? What seems certain is that pronouncements of the kind McGee makes here about what that relation must be like are unfounded, and invalidate any argument that follows from them. At the very least we can say that any mass-consciousness must be immediately obvious to itself (cogito ergo sum) but whether its constitutive participants must be immediately aware of it is far from clear.

On Biesecker's "Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation from Within the Thematic of Differance"

In this piece, Barbara Biesecker seeks to highlight a contradiction within the debate between Bitzer and Vatz over what constitutes the rhetorical situation (or, perhaps, whether there even is a rhetorical situation). She notes that "Vatz's ostensive purpose is to propose an alternative to Bitzer's definition of rhetoric and the rhetorical situation...Nevertheless...even as it questions the validity of Bitzer's central proposition, Vatz's essay simultaneously confirms it" (Biesecker 114). In other words, Biesecker is drawing attention to the fact that Vatz's reply, which attacks Bitzer's main claim that the rhetorical situation takes pride of place over the rhetor, seems to play right into this main claim itself. Vatz, the rhetor, is responding to the exigence created by Bitzer's essay, and this is precisely the way that Bitzer characterizes rhetorical situation. At the same time, however, Vatz's claim that the rhetor's position is originary, since it is the rhetor who frames the situation through his or her choice and arrangement of the facts outlining the rhetorical situation, also appears to be confirmed, and Biesecker's target is resolving this apparent conundrum: "After all, Vatz's statement is a response to Bitzer's essay...itself a situation with an exigence that invites a response. And yet, is not Vatz's own article an effect of arbitration on the part of a choosing individual? So, then, is Bitzer right or is Vatz right? Is a situation or speaker the origin of the rhetorical discourse?" (ibid). Biesecker's solution is to destabilize the hierarchical structuring of the question itself, and she attempts to do this via Derridean deconstruction and his notion of differance. Eventually, this approach arrives at the claim that the source of the problem, of the hierarchical structuring of the issue of primacy in rhetorical situation, somehow turns on our ideas about the human subject. Specifically, Biesecker appears to be asserting that it is our belief that individual subjects are stable in a way that the meaning of language (perhaps) is not. This would seem to be what she has in mind when she writes: "Derrida recommends that we think the subject not as a stable presence constituted and operating outside the play of differance, but instead as a production or effect-structure of differance" (Biesecker 125). In other words, the fundamental ambiguity we may acknowledge in language does not exist only there but actually produces, or structures through its effects, our subjectivity. But, isn't this setting up the kind of hierarchical structure Biesecker was ostensibly trying to dissolve? That is, Biesecker wants to switch the ordering from (Apparently) Stable Subject >>Produces>> Ambiguous Symbolic Systems (Differance?) to Differance (Ambiguous Symbolic Systems?) >>Produces>> Subject (With an Illusory Sense of Stability).

On "The First Sophists: History and Historiographers"

In the first chapter of her book, Susan Jarratt suggests an alternative historiographical methodology based loosely on the practices and epistemology of the early sophists of ancient Greece. By employing antithesis and parataxis--two of the characteristic tactics of the sophists--Jarratt suggests that the rhetorical historiographer can disrupt "the continuity of the given historical narrative," and thereby open up a space within which new historical narratives can be considered (Jarratt 17). As an example of the type of exercise she has in mind, Jarratt points to Gorgias' Encomium of Helen, which suggests that Helen's abduction ought not--perhaps--to be blamed on her. The idea here seems to be that Gorgias' contemporary Athenians (and possibly the wider ancient Greek world) placed the onus for the entire Trojan War on the actions of Menelaus' queen, and Gorgias is able to call into question this forgone (and highly dubious) conclusion through his deployment of sophistic rhetorical techniques (e.g., antithesis and parataxis). Jarratt suggests that the modern sophistically inclined rhetorical historiographer can similarly cause his or her contemporaries to reconsider what they think they know about their collective (and individual?) historical narrative. Through a creative approach that draws on various disciplines and techniques, the rhetorical historiographer "plays with the material like Frankenstein with body parts," the point of which "is not exposing or discovering the unknown, but rearranging the known" where "rearrangement is revaluation"(28). Jarratt frames this point in terms of disrupting the teleology of the current historical narratives, by which she seems to mean the notion that we already know where the history has to end up. The assumption Jarratt seems to be operating under is that shaking up our sense of what our history is constitutes a boon. Surely there are revaluations that could be made through rearrangements of the known that would constitute an improvement, but there are just as surely many other revaluations that could only be described as moral disasters. How are we to determine which is which? Here is the charge leveled at the first sophists by Plato and Aristotle, which seems just as valid here and now: Rhetoric does not possess the mechanism for determining better from worse. To the extent that rhetoricians deploy value theories that would allow them to judge better from worse revaluations, they are no longer engaged in rhetoric but philosophy.