This will likely be the paper I deliver at the Media Ecology Association conference next week. Not formatted like an essay. Just the ideas I will deliver.
Walter Ong tells us that the noetic – the rhetorical characteristics of feeling, sensation, and intuition – stem from the oral tradition. In particular, Ong notes that “oral memory works effectively with ‘heavy’ characters, persons whose deeds are monumental, memorable, and commonly public. Thus, the noetic economy of its nature generates outsize figures, that is, heroic figures, not for romantic reasons or reflectively didactic reasons but for much more basic reasons: to organize experience in some sort of permanently memorable form” (69). While we may not characterize our current literacy state as “oral” we also cannot deny the oral’s role within a larger network of literacy practices we experience in the 21st century: orality, literacy, and what many call the digital state of electracy. In other words: what Ong attributes to the oral tradition, we can understand as a major part of the current media tradition we belong within. “With the control of information and memory brought about by writing,” Ong argues, “you do not need a hero in the old sense to mobilize knowledge in story form” (70). And yet, heroic or iconic figures do help us organize experience today; we cannot discount their role in spatial arrangements. Following Ong, we can ask how the noetic might allow for an understanding of rhetorical organization, a way to arrange space or work through space, in the age of media.
Henri Lefebvre, the great theorist of space, imagined the noetic as the everyday. “Is space a social relationship” he asked (Production 85). It is. It is materialism, it is formalism, it is emotion, it is a “network of exchange,” he argues. If we can embrace a critical practice of the urban, Lefebvre argued, it must be based in the everyday. Lefebvre’s critique is that often space is controlled by decision makers: architects, urban planners, politicians, or, we might say, those who embody instrumental reasoning. Only the everyday can deliver a critical practice capable of overcoming instrumental thought, Lefebvre argued. Only the addition of the everyday, the noetic, or what Lefebvre called “strategy” can assist the development of critical practice. “Strategy,” Lefebvre writes “contains a key element: the optimal and maximal use of technology” (Urban 143). One element Lefebvre advocated regarding technology was the network.
Networks, however, have been defined largely as economic, structural, political or other modes of information control and delivery; i.e. instrumental reasoning conduits . Very little attention is given to the noetic nature of networks. Indeed, an everyday network based on noetic organization would not resemble the complex economic, computer, or social networks described by writers as diverse as Manuel Castells or Laszlo Barabási. A noetic understanding of space would, I suggest, be based on non-instrumental modes of communicative organization: feeling, sensation, intuition. And following Ong, this understanding would employ the “heroic,” the “outsize figure” that dominates memory. Important moments within a rhetorical expression, in other words, can shape the arrangement of a given space.
One definition Lefebvre poses regarding the everyday is that any critical practice of the urban must segregate moments and activities, and out of this segregation draw conclusions without a fixed object or subject, what we would call a topos (140).
In other words, I could imagine a noetic critical practice if I compose without a fixed topos. What if I could isolate heroic figures – grand figures who stick out in my memory for emotional reasons – and use them to compose a space? Could I then engage in a spatial organization that takes up the everyday as critical practice? What I would do, then, is invent a method of organization based on noetic figures. Each, when networked together, allows me to fashion a spatial organization. My project, therefore, is rhetorical, for its concerns are with the fundamental characteristics of rhetoric: delivery and arrangement. And what space, in this experiment, would I arrange? Let’s choose the city of St. Louis.
St. Louis
I wasn’t born in St. Louis. I don’t live in St. Louis. Every four to five weeks, my wife and I drive two hours from Columbia to St. Louis to shop, to take our little girl to some place of entertainment, to eat in a nice restaurant. What is, I might ask, my overall connection to St. Louis beyond the desire to be a consumer in the urban environment, one of the elements of the urban that Lefebvre sharply criticized?
My connection emerges out of a series of juxtapositions. A network of moments. Greg Ulmer calls the juxtaposition of interpellative moments of experience the popcycle. The popcycle allows a rhetor the space to see various moments of experience in juxtaposition, rather than in isolation or complete segregation of one another. Ulmer defines such areas of experience as School, Entertainment, Family (motivated by the anecdote), and Discipline. Each, on its own, provides a worldview. But worldviews, Ulmer argues, are shaped by a variety of experiences in relationship with one another – not as separate; at their point of convergence, we find a pattern. The categories, of course, are exchangeable. Any segregated moment or activity – to quote Lefebvre – can be put in relationship with any other. The pattern’s overlap – where these experiences network - provides insight. Ulmer’s point is that invention, as a rhetorical act, must allow for pattern formation at its core. Once you have discovered that pattern, arrangement may take place (and for Ulmer, such arrangements take the form of narratives, not arguments)
St. Louis is such a space of juxtapositions for me. If I were to compose a St. Louis without a fixed topos, I would choose the heuristic of juxtaposition that Ulmer proposes – but I would do so without using the categories established within the popcycle. My categories are spatially, not conceptually bound. In other words, I choose categories already tied to St. Louis, or Missouri, in general, categories that I consider “heroic” because of their place within my memory. As an English professor interested in writing and technology, my categories are also personal – they have emotional connections to my professional experience. Ong argued that Peter Ramus removed the personal from scholastic practices – and particularly from pedagogy – by insisting that the object of study and the one who does the studying be separated, segregated, from each other. Put into a visual display, this practice became the outline, a method for spatially organizing experiences prior to composing. I, on the other hand, want a totally personal motivation for my study: I choose what interests me. My motivation, then, is more akin to Roland Barthes’ method of study: as Barthes writes in Camera Lucida (his exploration of visuality and meaning systems), I am the reference of every image. I, in other words, am the reference of every category I use. Thus, I do not seek out representational categories but rather personalized or folksonomic categories (heroic in the sense of ego as well).
My heroic categories are as follows: From Theory Marshall McLuhan – who taught at St. Louis University, from Writing William Burroughs – who was from St. Louis, and from Rhetoric Plato – who has no connection to St Louis but whose name appears as that of a small Missouri town, Plato, Missouri.
Allow me, then, to map out this noetic space. The rationale for such a mapping is to engage with the critical practice of the everyday at the level of rhetorical production. These are three of my everyday St. Louis moments organized around heroic figures. I narrate my map spatially (around figures) and temporally (around dates). My rationale is to discover a new media practice of arrangement motivated by the noetic narrative, as opposed to the instrumental basis of argument.
Spatial moment #1 Marshall McLuhan
1951. While a professor at St. Louis University, McLuhan writes his examination of advertising and media, The Mechanical Bride. Now recognized as a book that predicted the cultural and social dislocation of the information age, it was conceived and partially drafted just a short walk from St. Louis’s Grand Center. McLuhan’s contention was that advertising and media play roles in shaping cultural formations. Gary Genosko situates The Mechanical Bride as the temporal and theoretical space between two major theoretical movements associated with cultural studies: The Birmingham school and Walter Benjamin’s work (as a part of the Frankfurt School).
He writes:
“Still, it is McLuhan’s Bride that serves as a two-sided signpost, pointing toward both Paris and Birmingham from, of all places, St. Louis” (McLuhan and Baudrillard 34)
We could say that McLuhan put St. Louis between two cultural cities.
Birmingham —————————–St. Louis ————————Paris
The Grand Center – where McLuhan wrote - references Europe (which Birmingham and Paris belong within); its movie palace, the Fox Theater, alludes to the grandeur of an aristocratic Europe where entertainment culture reigned.
The Grand Center (marked also by education: the University) also features the cultural tradition of food. Along Grand Avenue, restaurants can be found. Food, some might argue, is an emerging form of entertainment.
January 12, 2008, Grand Avenue, Lemongrass. My one year old daughter Vered orders Vietnamese food. We were 2 miles from the Grand Center. To order suggests the grand gesture of organization (whether food or rhetorical expression). Later, we went to eat at the “aristocratic” bistro Franco (less than 3 miles from the Grand Center) Normally, Vered behaves at restaurants. But at this age, restlessness kicks in – particularly when nothing entertains her. To top it off, the restaurant, located in Soulard Market, had no highchairs. We swapped her back and forth while we ate. The waiter nodded affectionately and called her “little boy.”
In the Mechanical Bride, McLuhan writes, “And so it is that not only labor saving appliances but food and nylons are consumed and promoted with moral fervor” (33). The name of this part of the book is called “Know-How.” In our Franco moment of consumption, we rush to finish with a moral fervor – embarrassment or discomfort that we are not representing the grand dining experience.
Spatial moment #2 Burroughs
1959. William Burroughs’ rhetorical contribution to the vocabulary of new media is the cut up method employed throughout his food-inspired title: Naked Lunch. At one point, Burroughs writes: “Illinois and Missouri, miasma of mound-building peoples, groveling worship of the Food source” (11). At another point, Burroughs describes something called “Transcendental Cuisine”: “imperceptibly the quality of the food declines until he is serving literal garbage, the clients being too intimidated by the reputation of Chez Robert to protest” (125). A sample menu features Clear camel piss soup with boiled earth works and the Limburger Cheese sugar cured in diabetic urine, doused in Canned Heat Flamboyant (125)
Burroughs exaggerates food, as he does almost every element of cultural reception and production, in order to cause discomfort or disrupt everyday practice. “You have good taste, my boy,” Dr. Benway tells Carl. “I may tell you in strictest confidence that some of these girls ..are really boys” (163) A great deal of Burroughs’ work is devoted to food. In Ticket that Exploded, he writes: “Present time leads to an understanding of knowing and open food in the language of life” (100). And in Nova Express, he situates food as a method of delivery: “And if there is one thing that carries over from one human host to another and establishes identity of the controller, it is habit: idiosyncrasies, vices, food preferences” (56)
Indeed, Burroughs uses food to decode the cultural coders, to take up McLuhan’s call in The Mechanical Bride: “Why not use the new commercial education as a means to enlightening its intended prey?” (v). Why not turn consumer culture – of which is eating is a part – back on itself?
This, too, is a form of know-how. Knowing the limits and possibilities of cultural representation. Knowing how to eat, in a metaphorical yet rhetorical way.
Spatial moment #3 Plato
I do not know if there are any restaurants in Plato, Missouri. I have never been there. A Google Maps request reveals the least European of foods as being available: Hardee’s, McDonalds, Pizza Hut – I am not comfortable around fast food. Neither was Plato, as is evident by how he writes about food. In the Gorgias, he has Socrates say: “So now you know what I think about rhetoric. It corresponds to cookery: as cookery is to the body, so rhetoric is to the mind” (33)” (WATERFIELD translation)
“Cookery is a knack” Socrates argues. “It lacks rational understanding.”
Burroughs, as my brief quotes show, disrupts the supposed rational understanding of food via concepts like Transcendental Cuisine.
Plato also has Socrates associate delivery with cooking:
“According to my source, the story teller’s ‘sieve’ is the mind; he used the image of a sieve to imply that the minds of fools are leaky” (81). Popular cooking sieves include the colander and the cheese cloth. St Louis’ contribution to exaggerated food is Provel, a soft cheese mixture of provolone, cheddar, and swiss with a low melting point. “Last round from St Louis melted flesh identity” Burroughs writes (184). Provel tops the generic St. Louis pizza, if not a Missouri Pizza Hut’s output. It is the least rational of all main stream cheeses.
When Plato denigrates rhetoric as a type of Provel cheese – a false representation of meaning (real cheese indicated by its purity and adherence to specific culinary principles), he makes the Burroughs gesture (some of these girls are boys). He critiques a type of know how. Instrumental reasoning is the supporter of false representations (much as Lefebvre needed the everyday to overcome urban planning’s errors - what he referred to as “the blind field”). Argument. Representation. These are tools of instrumental reasoning.
I am interested in a metaphoric Provel arrangement, not the actual cooking of Provel cheese. In his fragmented autobiography, Roland Barthes compares the rhetorician to a cook. In particular, he wants to be a rhetorician who follows stereotypes, but not to keep such meanings in place. Barthes wants stereotypes to be topoi that move: “Like a watchful cook, he makes sure that language does not thicken, that it doesn’t stick” (162).
McLuhan argued that the “simplest definition of cliché is a ‘probe’ which promises information but very often provides more retrieval of old clichés” (cliché to archetype 55). The topos as stereotype, a type of cliché, is familiar to contemporary culture. But how is it familiar to rhetoric and food?
St Louis as Provel is a culinary topos. It is a gastronomical stereotype.
August 2, 2008, my daughter played with the Provel cheese in a sandwich served at Blues City Deli, near Soulard, four Miles from the Grand Center. She threw the cheese on the table. She tossed the cheese on the floor.
The stereotype of the industrial city – like St. Louis or where I once lived, Detroit – is ruins. Transcendental economics destroys the urban environment. The stereotype of an academic paper is delivery (reading). The stereotype of media arguments is decoding (as McLuhan does in Mechanical Bride or the Birmingham School taught). The stereotype of organization is causality.
But a noetic organization, as I lay out here, is a probe of sorts as well. It is a type of everyday practice. It is the intuition or organization (it feels right putting three heroic figures in proximity with each other and with myself). What is more everyday than the cliché or stereotype? A restaurant acting like a bistro. A child playing with her food. Associating St. Louis with two principle figures of this space – McLuhan and Burroughs – is, after all, hardly novel in the world of topos-driven writing. They are embedded figures in many narratives of the city. Every city, indeed, functions by its iconic and heroic figures (“so and so slept here”). My topos moves, however. It moves with food. Its food driven narrative does not stay still. It is, to quote Plato, knackery.
I can’t help but think of my daughter eating in St. Louis. Vietnamese. French. Deli Food. European styled meals. “In a social and economic sense,” McLuhan writes about media representations of the family, “success, it would appear, means the virtual rejection of the parents” (65). My wife and I have gone to great lengths regarding food delivery, hoping our daughter will not reject our food habits. She ate her first sweetbreads at one. She eats homemade ice cream. She likes olives and blue cheese (whose smells discomfort many people and lead to culinary rejection). If there is an exaggerated food topos learned from my St. Louis, it is to be found in rejection: McLuhan rejecting advertising, Plato rejecting rhetoric, Burroughs rejecting cultural representations of dining experiences. Following Lefebvre, the conclusion I can draw without a fixed subject is that I am discovering how to move through rejections even as I hope to not encounter a final familial one (the child rejecting the parent). I leave rejection open-ended, however, as a networked narrative of moments. A series of food hubs. A rhetoric of the noetic. An unfinished practice.
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