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Paralipsis is a rhetorical figure of thought that hints at something by mentioning it in passing, or saying it negatively. Here I explore this figure as saying the unsaid. Speaking Being. “But if man is to find his way once again into the nearness of Being he must first learn to exist in the nameless” (223). In the “Letter on Humanism,” Heidegger distinguishes the public realm, and its derivative, the subjective (cogito), as having reduced thinking to a techne (disciplinary practices all governed by the various forms of the principle of sufficient reason, which cannot fail to submit all and every to some “in order to”), a techne that brings us to lose the nearness of Being. He offers a paradox: the nameless, which cannot be subordinated to the “in order to,” not only brings Being close: it also grants us power to speak. “Before he speaks man must first let himself be claimed again by Being, taking the risk that under this claim he will seldom have much to say.” Before I can address the nature of this claim—that Heidegger says “again” is perplexing—I want to dwell on what it means to “learn to exist in the nameless.” To exist means to stand out in the world. To exist is to be held out in the world, to endure the very moment of our being there in the “openness of Being” (252). World is the clearing/showing “of Being into which man stands out on the basis of his thrown existence.” Most of us have not “learned” to be, to let be, such a moment, for what awaits us in such a moment of namelessness is the emptiness and meaninglessness of the public and the generic patterns of meaning it dictates for the subjective interpretation of existence. Such generic patterns are what have governed through having to submit—and to bring any individual to submit to—what is already named. Uncovering the emptiness and meaninglessness of any name reveals that the nameless already always shines there. Learning to exist in the nameless requires a techne, a mode of revealing the nothing in the unsaid, the unnamed, which brings Being close. And here he addresses how we might “learn” to be claimed by Being again. He asks: “can we obtain from such knowledge” –knowledge of our ek-sistence in the belongingness of Being— “directives that can be readily applied to our lives?” “The answer is that such thinking is neither theoretical nor practical. It comes to pass before this distinction. Such thinking is, insofar as it is, recollection of Being and nothing else [hence the again]. Belonging to Being, because thrown by Being into the preservation of its truth and claimed for such preservation, it thinks Being. Such thinking has no result. It has no effect. It satisfies its essence in that it is... For it lets Being—be” (259). I’m just about to complete season three of Cobra Kai and I have found it delightful, especially as a way to display what is at work in the preliminary research methods that I’ve asked my students in Core II: Research Methods for Writers to get acquainted with. By method, I mean a series of steps that the researcher takes while pursuing a real inquiry, so, a series of questions, each of which calls for a response that you provide before moving on.
For instance, what is the question for which Cobra Kai is an answer? First of all, what is Cobra Kai? One of the most-watched streaming Netflix series, the third season of which was released January 2021, with the first and second season released on YouTube Red (2017, and 2018 respectively). The series presupposes four films, the first of which, The Karate Kid (1984), starred the principal characters of the series, Daniel LaRusso, and Johnny Lawrence, played by Ralph Machio and William Zabka respectively. Three sequels followed: The Karate Kid II (86) and III (89), and The Next Karate Kid (94). I treat the 2010 remake as negligible. Here’s the deal, Cobra Kai is a Karate Dojo in Los Angeles whose students are taught by Sensei Kreese to “strike first, strike hard, and show no mercy,” that is, to win at any cost, even at the expense of honor and love. Students of this Dojo, led by star student Johnny Lawrence, rule the scene in highschool in 1984, which means they keep their regime in place through intimidation and force. As the new kid from New Jersey, Daniel LaRusso becomes their target, but refuses to kowtow, which in turn leads to an escalation until a mild mannered elderly Mr. Miyagi steps in, defeats Johnny and his buddies, takes in Daniel to teach him Miyagi-do Karate through methods that are counterintuitive but are actually enormously effective. Through staying true to the ultimate guiding principle of self-defence, Daniel overcomes the win-at-any-cost cheating method of Cobra Kai, and once exposed for the unethical cheaters they are, Cobra Kai is shut out of all approved karate competitions. This narrative answers, among others, this question (or what McKee calls a “premise”): What if a good-hearted, rash-acting weakling is faced with implacable bullies? The narrative plays out one way it could go, and there are many other narratives that take it in a multitude of directions: think Rocky, Star Wars, Zoro, Gladiator, Hunger Games, etc. But the question the series Cobra Kai is answering is slightly different: What happens when two great rivals, with roles reversed, meet again years after their legendary struggles? Johnny Lawrence lost to Danny LaRouso, the underdog, and as a result Danny becomes competent as a successful business and family man, well-respected in his community, and Johnny endlessly falls deeper and deeper into being a loser, no matter the earnestness of his misguided efforts, all the while haunted by the loss of his golden years of being top dog back in the 80s. We could push it further, and that is precisely the whole point, as pushing it forward leads to laying out the whole narrative, to write it all out, guided by a controlling idea, say, for instance, through being authentic, owning up to our pretenses, we reveal ourselves to be something bigger than who we took ourselves to be, we grow through the challenge itself, leaving behind what kept us small the moment we rise to meet the challenge. This requires a narrative where people suffer, and they do so because of an ignorance that makes the “other” into an enemy who we must defeat at all costs, or defend against at all costs, and only when it gets bad, the truth comes along and saves the day, allowing our prejudices that keep us "small" disintegrate in favor of what matters most in life (for instance, Hawk's turn during Cobra Kai's invasion of the LaRusso home). But the darkness (Cobra Kai) always comes back, bigger and badder, and so rather than succumb to it, honorable stand to take is to provide support and defense against “being an asshole." To simplify: the idea that controls the narrative is that when we seek authenticity, casting aside our pretenses before they destroy us, truth and justice prevail. This counters the idea that guides Kreese's Cobra Kai: Striking first and hard and showing no mercy will lead to dominance of the field, and the exaltation that comes with complete mastery of the world--silencing your enemies and operating with impunity. But from the point of view of the controlling idea, it appears in a negative light: Striking first and hard and showing no mercy may allow you to rise to the top, but you're going to be an asshole, that is, you will lose all that matters most in life: friendship, love, peace, creativity, accomplishment, true power, etc. It is interesting to note that the value that guides Kreese's Cobra Kai is the inverse of the value that drives Miyagi-do Karate. For Kreese, life does not show mercy when we are weak--it strikes first and hard, every time--and so there is no choice but to become the hand of reality itself. Once we begin to engage in these thematic contrasts, what emerges is a constellation of what Gallop calls projections. For instance: toxic masculinity, or trumpism, the zero-sum game of winner takes all, where we leave no prisoners--that is what is being addressed here, and Johnny is ultimately the hero, as he begins to discover that only through “shedding” his Cobra Kai skin, again and again, does he grow beyond his ossified, juvenile projections about people, relationships with women, and about what it means to be a leader. As a follow up to "Nietzsche's Teacher: the Invisible Rhetor" (Rhetoric Review. 32.4. 2013), and serving as the second part of a trilogy examining the complex rhetorical relationship between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, "Schopenhauer's Telescope: Tracing the Mind of a Clever Animal," was published in Issue 3 (2020) of the online journal Intraspection.
In this article I attempt a close reading of Schopenhauer's rhetorical maneuvers as they appear in Nietzsche's unpublished essay "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral sense," which itself serves as both a stylistic homage to the elder philosopher and an effort to escape from the debt Nietzsche owed to his educator. Reading both together interrogates the rhetorical role philosophical discourse plays in bringing its addressee into “illumination,” while also permitting subtle rhetorical cues to emerge that spell the impossibility of any such illumination--despite cogently argued declarations to the contrary. This is a recording of me reading through a draft of a paper I presented entitled “The Digital Enkyklios Paideia: cMOOCs and the 21st Century Renaissance Cyborg.” I presented this at the Conference on College Communication and Composition, Indianapolis, IN, March 2014.
My son was watching a documentary that he’s been meaning to watch, and I joined 15 minutes in.
When he first told me about it a week or so ago, I scoffed. “Why would you want to watch that?” I wondered if it was meant to persuade me of what counters something I know is already true. Behind the Curve And I was wrong, so, so wrong. It is truly amazing. Truly one of the more amazing experiences I’ve had watching a documentary. It brought me to a place I’m ashamed to say I had been closed off to. And I didn’t know that I didn’t know it. Something new got disclosed through articulating something I had forgotten: real compassion that empowers us to risk being in dialogue, the kind of dialogue that grants the “other” existence and value. By “real” I mean a discovery of, an experience of, meeting another where they are, the point of view they are projecting from, which for the most part, I had consigned to oblivion. I saw my own hubris: that if I am indeed one of the “enlightened ones,” then any failure in my attempt to create a way to connect with anyone so “benighted” as these “flat earthers”—that failure is with me. Who “they” are is simply an audience role I have been heretofore unwilling to adapt myself to address, to speak into their way of listening, of seeing the world, and bring them bit by bit to see something they had been unwilling to see, and at the same time discover what I had been unwilling to see. While I saw these people affirm--so audaciously--this near ridiculous perspective, I also saw my ridiculous perspective, one that left me unwilling to regard these people as human beings. I had no respect for these others. I had “othered” them; in the mirror of this documentary I saw that I had othered these people and it surprised me. It shamed me. It moved me. I turned and told my son how wrong I had been: “You were right. This is one of the most awesome documentaries I’ve seen!” What this documentary granted me was an experience I call, following Nietzsche, “going under,” and following Kenneth Burke, “a conversion downward.” It is the moment when my horizon closes up inside the light of another controlling value, a moment I did not see coming. That is, it is always that controlling value that I have kept furthest away, fully justified in making it wrong and fully dismissible. As I have met my own dismissibility, I have undergone “paradiastole”: there’s a whole new way to see the same old thing. Another way to see this experience, I think, is like a conversation. Like the moment we enter into a conversation, we stay in it till the end, moment by moment, as long as we keep saying yes after each moment of truth. A “moment of truth” is the moment of decision present in every encounter with a textual phenomenon, whether visual or audible. And as we grow accustomed to the role the conversation gives us to play, we undergo the movement of the conversation, of the discourse, of the language, and we follow its movement until it leaves us being so immersed in the conversation, so deeply dwelling in it, that we relinquish a little our familiar lens even as we repeat it, as we emulate it, as we critically examine it, and hopefully as we innovate from what our original view always and already excludes from our orbit of valued knowledge. Some recent publications on fiction and fictionality:
Pragmatics of fiction https://www.degruyter.com/view/product/458681 Fiktionalität, by Klauk and Köppe https://www.degruyter.com/view/product/208576 Örebro Studies in Literary History and Criticism: Narrativity, Fictionality, and Literariness http://www.publications.oru.se/4DCGI/dropacta?r=7550&t=t&id=413 In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Teresias, the blind prophet, foretold that Narcissus would grow to a ripe old age only “if he does not come to know himself.” This statement remained quite innocuous until the boy’s beautiful image inspired such unfulfilled longing that one of his many spurned lovers begged the gods to punish the ingrate. The sufferer asked for the beautiful one to fall in love with another in the same way they have: “May he too be unable to gain his loved one.” The gods took pity and granted the broken-hearted request. And so, once Narcissus caught sight of his own image in a pool of water, he gave up food and drink until he completely wasted away for the sake of that insubstantial reflection (83-85). The mirror and its capacity to reflect has long captivated human consciousness as a metaphor for the act of abstract reflection, which is what distinguishes human beings as those animals that form discursive abstract concepts from concrete perceptions. We marvel at our capacity to reason to such a degree that we lose concern for the perceptions we originally took our concepts from, thereby losing touch with the “the fact” that concepts in no way equal the richness of perception. Human beings become so preoccupied with the act of reflection that we even forget how we arrived at our current conditions for living. What could awaken us back to the world from which our reflections came? Can Narcissus relinquish his longing for his image, if but to save his life?
The plastic arts of architecture, sculpture, and painting, the narrative arts of poetry, the novel, drama, and film, as well as the musical arts all have long provided access for individuals to the possibility of awakening from their naturalized state of consciousness; they have provided the means to shock them out of deadening habit. Habituation to a particular conceptual state, according to Fredric Jameson in his Prison House of Language, “strengthens us in the feeling that the things and events among which we live are somehow ‘natural,’” or permanent (58). Reinforcing art’s privileged role in snapping us out of our semi-permanent, mesmerized stupor, Jameson introduces Shklovsky’s term ostranenie, defamiliarization, as the proper function of art. This quality offers us the prospect “to be reborn to the world in its existential freshness and horror” (51), and which promises us “the renewal of perception” (52). But when was the last time you had such an experience via the apprehension of a work of art? Walter Benjamin laments that in the age of mechanical reproduction the aura of the original work of art is lost in its convenient conversion to accessibility in the multitudes of simulations produced for economic profit (“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”). How, then, can depotentialized works of art reawaken us to the “existential freshness and horror” of life? And would we want such an awakening? After all, what would happen to our beloved reflection if we turned away from it? To satisfy my antiquarian compulsion, I dredged up an old blogspot blog, which contains two posts, one of which was my first real serious attempt at writing a "smart" sounding blog that was designed to enter an existing conversation. It failed. Here it is.
The first of four levels of listening introduced in the U.Lab course is called "downloading," wherein we apply what we already know and bring a situation down into that schema. The second, "factual listening," is where we observe the world, perhaps noticing things beyond what we might normally notice through downloading. The third is listening empathically, from another point of view, and the fourth is a generative listening, wherein there is no longer a "you," but a field, an emerging future, within which all elements are in a dance together, and "you" are the field. This is where leading through listening happens. As a way into understanding leading through listening, Otto Scharmer introduces and plays a clip of Zubin Mehta conducting two orchestras accompanying a superstar tenor Placido Domingo, before a large audience. My first thought watching the clip was that I lacked the intertextual background that might have granted me some access to the significance of what it means for this conductor to be conducting this orchestra and tenor. "Leopold" came to mind, the "famous" conductor Bugs Bunny played to give the egotistical soloist his just deserts. It appeared that Mehta was doing more that just keeping time just near the end, when he was "being with" Domingo, and punching the bursts of music out of the orchestra, or maybe it was the orchestra and Domingo pulling the punches out of Mehta. That is the point: what makes Mehta a great conductor/leader is that he constitutes himself as the space, the "Being," within which the orchestra, and tenor, and audience, and himself (as an "instrument") all dance in a kind of harmony that isn't just "musical": it's being in the world. Scharmer calls it "presencing": the moment where "you" give up your "you-ness" to be used by Being, which then allows being to return to the world as meaningfully present. This is the meaning of Heidegger's term "ex-sistence": standing out ahead of itself returning to meaningful presence.
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Drew KoppI am a professor of Writing Arts at Rowan University. The views expressed here are my own. Archives
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