Just to review, we’ve spent all semester identifying and describing the ways that communication does much more than transmit packets of neutral, pre-existing information or ideas. Instead we’ve explored a rhetorical sense of communication that helps us see the ways communication (including words, signs, symbols, performance, media, pictures, and so on) shapes, invents, forms, creates, influences, [insert other "making" word] the world around us and the way we understand and act in the world.

We’ve said that if we want to understand culture better we should look carefully at the surface of what we say about culture or the things we do (or ways we perform) in our lives. If we want to understand our actions, our beliefs, our values, our knowledge, our identities, then we should pay close attention to our communication because that’s the way we make sense of—or quite literally create meaning for—these things.

The link to the short commentary above is an example that looks at what people say about Michelle Obama’s personality, identity, style and considers what that means for the complex meanings about race and gender in U.S. culture.

 Representative Betty Brown doesn’t want to “have to learn Chinese” in order to pronounce voters’ names

The post is from a great website called racialicious.com that discusses race and pop culture.

• Racial identity acts a little like a myth constructed by “conflicting discourses,” “political struggle,” and “rhetorical discourses that have political consequences, both positive and negative” (DeLuca, 637, 634)
• Our knowledge about race results from “arbitrary assignments” and “illusions” that we’ve forgotten we invented. Our truth and knowledge about race results from “a sum of human relations which ahve been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically.” (Nietzsche)

Lopez focuses on the way law and court cases helped create our knowledge, truth, and reality of race.  Your help document points to some of those legal decisions (just a few of the “intersecting discourses”) that constructed racial meaning, definitions, and reality. The previous post and the PBS website Race: The Power of an Illusion also provide examples of how humans have invented and agreed upon race and racial identity. I strongly encourage you to explore those resources — I would be very happy to meet with you and discuss any questions you have.

But LAW is not the only form of communication that constructs the social meanings we assign to race or that impacts the material consequences of race. MANY intersecting discourses or “rhetorical discourses with political consquences” (myths) in society help construct this knowledge–from movies, to advertising, to news reports, to music, to childrens books and cartoons, etc.

The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia has a large collection of cultural items–a broad range of “communication” if you will–that constructed social knowledge and truth of black Americans that many people believed to be generally true: caracatures like the “Mammy,” the “coon,” and the “picaninny.” These messages appeared in everything from piggybanks, to cartoons, to product advertising. Here are a few examples:

When it comes to race it’s very easy (especially for white folks) to say “These messages existed a long time ago and don’t matter any more” … But the social and material consquences–or the “political consequences” of these myths–still exist … and even though times have changed for the better, we still create messages with similar effects.

We have evidence that these messages still exist because we have black citizens today who 50 years ago were denied entry to college and who are moved to tears today because they NEVER thought they’d see a black President … and we have voters who refused to vote for Obama because they’re scared he’s a Muslim, or a terrorist, or who say “there’s just something about that guy that doesn’t sit well with me”–meaning his RACE.

We know these messages exist because they still create disproportionate gaps in income, incarceration rates, and graduation rates from high school and college. We still see housing / residential segregation in major cities, suburbs, and rural towns.

Here’s an example where Michael Moore rhetorically plays around with and challenges certain “myths” about race that exist today:

RACE – The Power of an Illusion

Just because we call race an “illusion” or “myth” doesn’t mean the effects of race are imaginary. It means we’re thinking about the nature of “reality” and “truth” and “knowledge” differently than we’re used to. We might have made up the classifications and meanings and social consequences of race through laws and media representations and many other forms of communication, but these myths are “rhetorical discourses with political consequences,” and those consequences are very real. With a rhetorical view of communication, we realize there might be nothing “natural” or “given” about race, but we also realize that there are real effects and consequences of the truth, knowledge, myth, and meanings we’ve created and come to accept.

]]> http://lookingatcommunication.wordpress.com/2009/04/02/race-the-power-of-an-illusion-help-and-preview-for-monday/feed/ 0 lookingatcommunication http://lookingatcommunication.wordpress.com/2009/03/31/playing-the-whole-rhetorical-game/ http://lookingatcommunication.wordpress.com/2009/03/31/playing-the-whole-rhetorical-game/#comments Tue, 31 Mar 2009 20:13:31 +0000 Jonathan Rossing http://lookingatcommunication.wordpress.com/?p=375 ]]> In class on Monday, I said that I’d like you to focus on “playing the whole game” for the rest of this semester. That is, in our final readings and in your final projects pay attention to ways that ALL the concepts and ideas of the rhetorical view are intersecting and overlapping every time you try to look at the world rhetorically.

The author who wrote about “playing the whole game” (David Perkins, Making Learning Whole) says that in order for learners to get better at doing something, they must continually experiment and push their knowledge further with curiosity, discovery, and creativity. Learners must find problems which will let them practice playing the whole game.

John Sloop shows us one way to do that in “Riding in Cars between Men.” He has found a problem and plays the “rhetorical game” in order to address the problem creatively and rhetorically. The “problem” is this: in a situaton where someone appears to break or transgress gender norms in seemingly positive ways (specifically, a female has entered into a traditionally “male” sport of auto racing), what are all the communicative ways that people and culture prevent those norms from being broken and reinforce more narrow and rigid gender norms as if they were “true” and “natural.”

So how does he address that problem? By playing the rhetorical game. He looks at performances (commentators describe how Debbie Renshaw still “acts” like a “lady”). He looks at the metaphors and myths that people use when they describe her actions and her identity. He looks at the ways media and fans create and reinforce gender identification and division (“the girls vs. the boys”) and therefore reinforce the “truth” about where Debbie Renshaw belongs. And while he plays this rhetorical game to show us all the ways that communication invents and reinforces cultural knowledge and truth about gender, he also reminds us that within communication we have the power to invent NEW meanings and truths, create NEW identities and norms, and so on (like Peters and Isocrates remind us).

And once we have the ability to play the rhetorical game and identify the complexity of social constraints or problems, we have a responsibility to use that understanding of rhetoric to create that change. (Eisenstein tried to do that with film. And that’s why people like Lanham and Burke emphasize how rhetoric moves people to action and attitude.)

As you read Sloop’s article about Debbie Renshaw and next week as you read the article about the legal construction of race, remember to keep the whole “rhetorical game” in mind and remember that we’re exploring the following themes of the “game:”

1. What else does communication do? (beyond simple transmission or description)
2. What is the relationship among communication and culture, knowlege, truth, identity, power relationships, social relationships, social norms, and so on?
3. What can we do with a rhetorical view of communication? How does it change the way we understand culture? What is our responsibility to use the rhetorical view to change culture?

• Requium for a Dream
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
• Slumdog Millionaire
• Casablanca
• Mimi metallurgico ferrito nell’onore
• V forVendetta
• La Dolce Vita

Now, the mock horror / thriller movie of When Harry Met Sally:

Notice how changing elements of the composition completely changes the feeling or attitude or reaction to the movie (“style becomes content“). Change the music, change the font style, change the order of images to create a different juxtaposition of shots and the entire meaning and attitude changes. The scene where Meg Ryan lays on Billy Crystal who stares blankly into space is somewhat comical in the first trailer; in the second, his stare becomes creepy and a little chilling because it’s been juxtaposed to a different sequence of images. Simply rearranging the clips created a completely different meaning.

One of Eisenstein’s points is that this has to happen with “organic” composition. That is, a filmmaker must use images, conventions, styles, music, and so on that seem familiar and natural to the audience. Through repetition (or maybe “dull daily reinforcement”) we’ve come to understand the “knowledge” that certain types of music correspond to feelings like happy-go-lucky or fear or terror. A filmmaker must tap into at least some of the already existing cultural meanings and forms or else the audience won’t recognize or feel what the filmmaker wants them to to. (Remember that Goffman made a similar point about fronts and our own performances.)

Threat to Marriage

It’s an interesting example for thinking about the different ways that the standard view and rhetorical view of communication impact our interactions. Notice how the author seems to suggest that the definition of marriage could expand and shift to include gays and lesbians. But at the same time, the author treats marriage as if it is a stable and natural “institution” that should mean the same thing for everyone.

Why Rush Is Wrong

The author is a conservative Republican who talks about avoiding the belief that there is ONE, True way to be “conservative” (i.e. forgetting that it’s just a metahpor or myth). Instead he suggests that it’s necessary to continue to redefine the concept to better fit the country today. This article provides an example of the day-to-day significance of realizing that knowledge or meaning is not stable or universal.

• Freire believes knowledge “emerges” in communication, dialogue, inquiry, interaction with others.
• Nietzsche tells us that all knowledge and truth are only metaphors (arbitrary words that have become imperfect concepts) that humans have agreed to use.
• DeLuca says we invent “myths” and then we forget that we created those stories and we treat those myths as absolute “truth” or “knowledge.” But he wants us to remember that all the cultural stories that we accept as “natural” are really “myths” humans created for social and political reasons.

Here are few more examples of VERY well-known or recognizable myths from U.S. culture.

Newsweek ran a story about “How American Myths Are Made.” The article mentions one familiar myth–the Triumph of the Common Person. Or in other words, the story we tell about how any old Joe or Jane can achieve greatness and accomplish extraordinary things if they just work and try hard enough. This myth explains why someone like the now infamous “Joe the Plumber” becomes such a big icon–he fits perfectly into the role of your everyday, hardworking guy with aspirations to buy a company and achieve something. This myth has positive aspects like encouraging people toward success, but it also can cause problems because it leads us to blame people for their “failures” when sometimes the odds are stacked against them. Not everyone who works hard will “make it.”

The Newsweek story also mentions the way we create myths about evil enemies and “others” when we need someone to blame or distrust. We saw this during the era of McCarthyism when the House Committee on Un-American Activities accused innocent folks of being communist. We saw this when the goverment rounded up Japanese Americans and put them in U.S. internment camps while many cultural messages portrayed any Asian American as untrustworthy and scary. We’ve seen another version of this enemy myth after 9/11 when anyone from the Middle East or any Muslim was suddenly a risky terrorist.

You might also want to check out this site about American Myths and their realities . It describes 10 myths that shape our lives such as “separation of church and state,” “no one is above the law,” and others.

Caution: We want to avoid dismissing myths as LIES or DECEPTIONS (that’s something Plato might do) … we’d call that attitude the standard view of communication because if we call myths FALSE LIES, then it implies that we should be using communication merely to describe and transmit the “truth” and nothing else.

The important thing is how we think about myths and how we recognize and realize the ways myths create reality. If we learn a rhetorical view of communication, we realize that most every cultural story is a “myth” (or all knowledge/truth is “metaphor” for Nietzsche … or every identity is a performance for Goffman). We pay attention to the many ways humans and human culture invent and re-shape those myths. And we realize that those myths all have social and political consquences. We can’t live without myths, but we can have a better understanding of how they shape our lives, our identities, and our world.

Here are a few other sites and a clip that provide interesting points to consider about myths in U.S. culture.

• Here’s a post from another wordpress blogger about Myths: Ten American Myths 
• Election rhetoric last fall played on a myth of small-town America as the real heart of America with hard-working, family-value oriented, folks. These qualities are not false, but they are not “natural” or “given” as this opinion piece points out: Yo, John McCain, while you’re in Pennsylvania
• We create mythical heroes out of people like Thomas Jefferson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, or Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. This site looks at the myth of Abraham Lincoln.

You might write about any of these examples or keep thinking about other examples of myths–the myth of the “traditional American family,” for example, or historical myths like the Boston Massacre or the way college admission materials construct myths about university life and the college experience.