Final Project

http://www.wix.com/zoloat/pathos

Presentation: http://prezi.com/vlmdfcpayzbw/pathos-fina-presentation/

The Final Drop

The last few readings have left me pondering just how the “Rhetorical Situation” interacts with our day to day lives. What I mean by that is not whether or not it effects us as we go about our daily business, I don't think that can even be questioned at this point. Instead the question I thought most about was how everything around us is shaped by or shapes the rhetorical situations in which we discover ourselves. Bitzer's reading of the rhetorical situation has rhetoricians “answer an invitation to solve a problem” presented by “autonomous” exigencies (Edbauer, 6). They are located as “external conditions of material and social circumstances (Edbauer, 6).” Vatz's critique places exigencies as “created for audiences through the rhetor's work(Edbauer, 6).” These conceptions of the rhetorical situation are points, established by the circumstances or the rhetors. They are finite in the sense that they are created and have some type of limit in their scope of altering factors, even if that number is vast. They are, to take a cheap potshot at the title of the article, framed.

Craig Smith and Scott Lybarger expand the concept of situation by arguing that it “involves a plurality of exigencies and complex relations between the audience and a rhetorician's interest (Edbauer, 6),” but this is still a framed conception. While the previous theories may be points, this conception is a small network of points tied together into a situation. It is broader in scope, but still “framed.”

According to Edbauer, while those models of the rhetorical situation are informative, they “can also mask the fluidity of rhetoric(Edbauer, 20).” Instead we see the idea of “life as network(Edbauer, 10),” that is- life as an interconnected system with no finite limits. Rhetoric changes. It evolves, it amalgamates, it transforms and alters itself, spreading outwards. What Edbauer present us with is the rhetorical situation not as a point or a finite network, but as a drop falling into a pool of water.

The effects of a rhetoric “do not only exist in the elements of their situations, but also in the radius of their neighboring events (Edbauer, 20).” Through this they ripple outwards as a kind of butterfly effect. Situations alter situations, changing each other. In such a way everything is changed, and our daily lives and the rhetorical situations we encounter transform according to elements beyond our conception that we could never hope to understand the full extent of. But then the question I have to ask is, if there are no borders to a situation and you can never truly “understand” it because it extends so far in so many directions, how does this change the way we approach a discourse?

Final Project Proposal

Overview: In my final project I will examine 3 different types of propaganda that differ from the common perception of propaganda that is held by most of the general public. In this project I am using the definition of propaganda as something created to be targeted towards some specific group with the intent of inspiring a specific political action or opinion.

The 3 propaganda genres that I will examine are
1) The animated propaganda produced by Walt Disney during WWII. Example
2) Pro-America and patriotic images created in the wake of 9/11.
3) Amateur created propaganda created by player formed Alliances in EVE Online targeted towards their membership or enemy players in order to inspire or demoralize. Example 1 Example 2 Example 3 (the 3rd is a response video to the second)

The intention is to analyze these materials in the ways that they create their desired affects on the target audience through visuals, pacing, audio, text and tone among other elements. These pieces were (at least on a visible level) not created by trained propagandists or even  those in the employ of an agency that specifically creates propaganda pieces, so a primary part of the presentation will be discussing the less polished aspects of these propaganda pieces and how this effects their effectiveness.

Process: This project will rely heavily on video clips, text and images. As such I will have to select a multimedia platform that can present all three in a coherent, integrated format. I have not been able to narrow down which program I will use, as in my past experiences some have not been willing to cooperate on newer computers such as mine. I will attempt to use either the Sophie 2 eBook authoring platform, create a PDF containing embedded video and images, or attempt to create a website hosting all of the elements using an editor such as Wix.com

Presentation: I will create a very brief, summarized version of my project and use Prezi to lay out my visual aid. I will personally clip the propaganda videos down to short, easily demonstrable sections to illustrate the main points of my project along with a less than 5 minute spoken presentation.


Finish: I will complete the project and turn it in on my blog by May 5th.

Ahmed and the Terrorist.

Ahmed's discussion of the Terrorist and his place in the economy of fear is a particularly interesting section of the reading, but I actually think that it could be taken a step farther. The origins of 9/11 are complex and I wouldn't dare to try and discuss them comprehensively in a short blog post like this, but there are some peculiar similarities that I think we could examine.

Greatly simplifying things to an almost criminal degree, the explosion of modern Islamic Fundamentalism can be traced back to the actions of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt during the 1950s and 1960s. A religious social organization that had occasional militant leanings, the Muslim Brotherhood sought to bring the Qur'an and Islamic religious ideals into the modern era as the center of life for Muslims. In 1952 the Muslim Brotherhood supported the rise of Gamal Abdel Nasser, a westernizer that sought to free Egypt from Imperialist influences secularize, and modernize the Middle East to compete with the rest of the world. One of Nasser's first movements was to outlaw the Muslim Brotherhood, and then later crack down on it incredibly brutally.

One of the men that suffered under this was Sayyid Qutb. Qutb is an interesting and important case. Well educated, Qutb had spent several years visiting the United States which, in combination with Nasser's later policies, would form the foundation of the ideological background of Jihad. He termed the theory of “Modern Jahiliyya” the concept of modernity as New Barbarity(Sivan 23), and viewed modernity as an incompatibility with Islam that would destroy their culture and people. The horrendous tortures inflicted upon Muslim Brotherhood members at the hand of modern, westernized nationalists under Nasser provided a shining example for Qutb's work. Naturally, this concept did not belong solely to Qutb, but his experiences with the materialism, indulgence, and, in his mind, loose morals, of the early 1950s in America created a particular fear within him. He looked west and saw for Muslims a future of “unbridled individualism, dissolution, depravity” and moral and social decline(Sivan, 24). In order to throw off “Modern Jahiliyya” radical change was needed – a Jihad against modernity to “reestablish the Kingdom of God upon Earth(Sivan 25).” These ideas, which spent time maturing in Egyptian prison cells, would eventually be set free. While Qutb was put to death shortly after, his works spread profusely, particularly in Saudi Arabia and to a young man by the name of Osama bin Laden.

Long winded as that may have been, the point here is that the Terrorist who works to strike out at societies of “individual freedom, religious intolerance, democracy and the international flow of free commerce (Ahmed 128)” does so out of fear for consumption and spending destroying his own values. It is a curious mirror. For us the vision of 1950s USA is a wholesome memory of simpler times. For Qutb it was a vision of societal decay, decadence, and loose morals that would provide no future. His revulsion at this later became connected with the violence and secular nature of Nasser's government to create an incredibly strong affect.

Ahmed says that “fear's relationship to the potential disappearance of an object is more profound than simply a relationship to the object of fear (Ahmed 125).” For Qutb and later Bin Laden, it is not the west and its decadence that frightens them, it is the fear of their traditional values being swept away and “Modern Jahiliyya” holding dominion over Muslims as they saw in Nasser's reign. This creates the strong drive necessary for such horrible acts that, in turn seek to create opposite fears on the other side. One really has to marvel at how interconnected such economies of fear truly are.

Emmanuel Sivan. Radical Islam – Medieval Theology and Modern Politics. Yale University Press: London.

Ummm....

I feel like I've already made this blog post... hmmm...

It never ceases to amaze me how remarkably thoughtless politics often are, considering that if anything should be based solely on rational thought, it should probably be politics. The issue of Massumi dealing with Reagan returns here along with some parallels to Gearge Bush Jr. Much like Massumi, Edbauer is not a fan, and the arguments presented here are similar to Massumi's presentation, although Bush's defects are of a slightly different nature. Instead of the jerks of Reagan, so filled with their infinite potential, we have Bush's incoherence. As Edbauer says, Bush's ability to move his audience is “not in spite of his incoherency, but because of it(32).” It creates a gap, an opening which we bombard with our own thoughts, filling the hole he presents us with whatever material we wish. This affective opening is exploited before our mind even has its say because “the body acts beyond the full control of our cognitive knowledge(26).”

The example is carried away from the Presidential podium when Edbauer gives the example of Pauline Hanson, who allegedly won popularity not through her arguments or ideologies, but through her ability to transmit an affect and evoke the sympathy from her audience. It is a tugging at the heartstrings gone horribly, horribly wrong, but presents us with an interesting variation. Reagan had his jerk. Bush had his incoherency. Hanson has her trembling. All of these politicians functioned according to their transmission of affect, according to Edbauer, and not so much on their actual ideas.

But I do have to wonder how widespread this is... and then I remembered something that had always particularly stood out to me. President Obama is a talented speaker, few will argue with that. He is fully capable of moving a crowd, and definitely lacks the jerks of Reagan or the incoherence of Bush. He does have, however, a bad habit of saying “Umm...” in his speeches. A lot. Umm is a peculiar word in our language. It doesn't really have a meaning – it's a space filler. It exists for the time when the speaker is working to think of what to say, but needs to say SOMETHING to fill the gap. The question here is, could we consider the Umm to function on the same level as the jerks and stumblings of the earlier politicians? Umm creates a space in the same way, an interjection for thought into the speech being made. Our reactions to affect are not conscious, they happen because the body simply functions that way and it cannot be helped. We have to remember how batted Obama has been in the wake of his actual election as those who massively inflated their expectations based on what they saw of his speeches later came crashing down.

The difference of course being that Obama is the opposite of incoherent – he is very much capable of expressing his position and the thought behind it in a coherent fashion. Yet I have to wonder if this is simply a flip to the other side of the coin, still affecting the audience, only now affecting the other half that was not moved by Bush's incoherence. Now they are offered gaps of a fundamentally different nature (in addition to the type reasoning being applied, which may adhere more to their standards), while those that previously responded well to Bush are unmoved. Essentially, are the people with square pegs now being offered square holes instead of round ones, while the people who had the round pegs no longer respond due to the square holes?