Category: Rhetoric

Something Old

I was struggling most of last week trying to figure out how I might approach teaching Composition I. It came together today, on the first day of class. Strange how these things work. I was intrigued by Kiraki’s approach of using deliberatory and mediatory essays in Comp. I. One advantage is that it provides an easy way of introducing research as an invention strategy. However, the disadvantage is that first year students need to spend a lot of time on confidence building and using such complex targets takes away from the time you have to deal with the practical matters of style and diction. I wanted to incorporate some of her approach, but not all of it.

The problem is that arcing toward true negotiating skills requires the development of chops that first year writers usually don’t have— it would take a while to get there. I devised a plan, using five rather than the usual four essays assigned in Comp I:

1. Descriptive essay
2. Narrative essay
3. Encomium
4. Comparative essay
5. Deliberative essay

When I was lecturing today, I backwards-engineered a great rationale for it. I like modeling the arc of a class against a classical method— in the case of Composition II I use the Ciceronian six-part essay, spending weeks on each of the sections. However, since the emphasis in Comp I is not usually on argument, that just didn’t seem right. Instead, I decided that my arc would be across the three branches of rhetoric— forensic, epideictic, and deliberative. Trying to give a short course in the history of rhetoric as a discipline today, it all began to make even more sense.

Not many first year comp teachers start with Corax and Tisias, but I did. The birth of rhetoric can be traced to the courtroom— the first trials by jury in Sicily in the fifth century BC caused a need for common people to be able to argue their case in front of their peers. Corax and Tisias set up schools to train them. The first rhetoric was courtroom rhetoric, and it was largely focused on the preservation of property in the present. A descriptive essay is classified as forensic because of its similarly present-directed argument. This is what it is— or isn’t. As the teachers (Sophists) spread further, the power of language to move people to political action became clear. One of the surest ways to move people was to stir them up over ancient battles and such, praising their heroes or blaming their enemies. Rhetoric begins to look back, telling stories of praise or blame. Stories are situated in the past— hence, the ability to write a narrative essay combines a talent for present description with the ability to arrange time in a coherent fashion. The most highly developed form of it is really the encomium— epideictic rhetoric in the public square.

To write a good encomium for something requires some research in order to really sing the full praises of your subject, but it isn’t totally essential. I can ease into it there— but as Aristotle enters the equation, the ability to compare things certainly means doing your homework. I want to do the comparative essay on a political topic, and ask them to be dispassionate about it. A deliberative essay should build on the comparison between two courses of action, so I’ll allow them to revise the fourth essay substantially into the fifth— I know how hard it is for first year students to be dispassionate about anything. But the ability to compare two positions is the essential stepping stone to deliberation on future action, and I think that is a nice note to close on— a sort of Isocratian landing spot for the whole class.

What I find the most fun about this is that it matches the historical development of rhetoric so closely— it begins with a need, moves into a fluffier sort of writing, and ends with a concerted look at future action. I love this stuff.

Reading the audience

I was thinking about the first time I encountered “audience analysis” in school. It was my second writing class— persuasive writing. The instructor had the class bring several popular magazines to class so that we might guess what the “target audience” for these publications were. The easy way to do it is to look at the advertisements. Trends were easy to spot, with little actual reading involved.

Watching the History Channel this morning, I was enlightened by the troubled story of the M-16. I didn’t realize that it was created by a man with the surname of “Stoner” and built by the Armalite Rifle Company. Who watches this stuff? Non-stop stories of new and better ways of killing each other. Ah, maybe the ads provide a clue. The first ad was for the Q-Ray Bracelet. Perhaps the same people drawn to weaponry as a talisman of power are also drawn to mystical ionic ray bracelets that relieve all pain. The commercials found on these cable stations seem to have a big overlap with a publication that the instructor made some guesses about in that persuasive writing class— The National Enquirer.

The general consensus of the class was that the audience for supermarket tabloids is women with less than a sixth-grade education. I wonder how the History Channel’s marketing reps sell to these companies? Ozzy Osbourne is a big fan— perhaps there is a connection between ritual healing and ritual destruction? The question of audience is complex though, because the station does have many quality programs besides the constant barrage of war pornography. TV advertising is not nearly as monolithic as print advertising. Next to the ads for diabetes test equipment, teenagers cavort with day-glow cell phones. But there is an overwhelming tone of machismo to the bulk of the History Channel’s programming, so I really do wonder at the presence of the miracle bracelet. Do guys really buy this stuff?

But I wonder more about the statistics that Ampersand posted about our so-called “representative” government. I wonder if the typical member of Congress wears a Q-Ray bracelet to match their M-16? With all the talismanic saber-rattling these days, it would make a lot of sense.

Subtlety

One of my favorite comments (about me) came when selecting material for my first show. A photographer I respected was helping me. After looking at a large number of my prints, he said:

You aren’t very subtle, are you?

I suppose that might be a contributing factor to my current career in Rhetoric. I’ve had to learn to cope with increasing levels of subtlety, in literature and in other forms of discourse. It doesn’t come naturally to me. I’m usually embarrassingly direct.

When Spitting Image linked to a page on Hitler’s Art I was curious about just where this resource was coming from. I used several articles on the art of the Third Reich to demonstrate the rhetorical bias behind them in class last semester, so I couldn’t help but question this. The Hitler Historical Museum?

The aim of the site seems innocent enough:

The Museum’s chief concern is to provide documents and information that shed light on Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist Party. Because of the numerous contradicting, disjoint[ed], biased, confused, and deficient interpretations that exist, few scholars are able to gather the facts and to understand and explain them coherently. Whether this failure is from a lack of information, scholarship ability, or honesty is unimportant. What is important is that historical information be made freely available and gathered into exhibits that allow researchers to derive indepedent (sic) conclusions from the relatively well preserved writings of this time period.

Of course, there is an ideological statement:

The teaching of history should convey only facts and be free from political motives, personal opinions, biases, propaganda, and other common tactics of distortion. Every claim that is made about history should also be accompanied by documentation proving its basis. Only responsible scholarship and teaching should be permitted. Those who intend to support particular political interests and agendas should have their biased historical interpretations criticized for lacking proof.

Sounds great— ill informed (communication without bias is an oxymoron)— but noble at any rate. Responsible scholarship? I needed to look at this more deeply.

A quick check of the links page revealed what was really going on. As you might guess, there was no link to what I would consider a reputable historical site, The Holocaust Museum, but instead a link to an article called The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. I read the first line of the introduction, and then stopped:

I see three principal reasons for the widespread but erroneous belief in the legend of millions of Jews killed by the Germans during World War II: US and British troops found horrible piles of corpses in the west German camps they captured in 1945 (e.g. Dachau and Belsen), there are no longer large communities of Jews in Poland, and historians generally support the legend.

Legend? The scary thing that this is the page of a US computer-science academic, complete with .edu address.

I cannot believe that Northwestern University actually underwrites the presence of such utter crap on the web. But they protect themselves with a convenient disclaimer:

The content of all Pubweb pages is solely the responsibility of their authors and not the responsibility of Northwestern University or any of its employees engaged in management or administration of the Pubweb service. Northwestern University will not monitor Pubweb page content except as necessary to investigate allegations that such content violates federal, state, or local laws or University policy.

Following the link-train reminded me of the reason why I spend so much time focusing on reading responsibly. You’ve got to be careful out there. Free from political motives? Yeah, right!

Unnatural Acts

I received so much material in the last few days for my project that its hard to keep track of. I keep getting lost in the minutiae of it all, along with several new software packages to try to help me keep things straight. Merry Xmas to me, and all that. Strange confluences keep popping up so fast that I’ve got to at least note the web related ones so I can come back to them later.

Steve Himmer noted something about Henry Wallace a few days ago and then today I encountered another article about the presidential race of 1948 which continued the theme. I was doing some research on the Southern Agrarians and then of course, the next day, Wood s Lot provided links to a bio of John Crowe Ransom and some poems. It’s nice when things work out this way. I haven’t really begun to process that part of things yet, but I’ve been reading a lot about it and eventually I’ll have to spit it out. But another link from there lead me to at least to try to sketch something I was thinking about regarding “the resistance to theory.”

Silence of the Critics was strangely appalling to me. David Herman laments the loss of critics like F.R. Leavis and T.S. Eliot, “the golden age of criticism.” I read a lot from those guys a few years ago, when I was working more with the Romantics. I hated them. They used flip rhetoric to dismiss and denigrate anything that wasn’t either 17th century or high modernist. They had goggles on so thick that it seemed incredible to me that they could function in the real world, where literature actually thrives on and depends on context. I’ve learned to get over that chip on my shoulder a little bit, and thinking of those guys again brought something into focus. It made me think of the relationship of critical schools to speech-act theory [bear with me on this].

The fundamental why behind any communicative act is to provoke an effect. Speech-act theory splits this into three phases— locution, illocution, and perlocution. Locution is the utterance itself; the ground in which the “new critics” like Empson, Leavis, etc., staked out their ground. It’s actually a lot like hard-core scientific linguistics— useful, but rather dry and boring. New critics refused to deal with any concept of intention on the part of the speaker/author. That is in the realm of the illocutionary act. Of course, New Historicism, and later schools attempted to add back in context and usually infer a motive for why the speaker would craft an utterance— a guess at what the intention might be based on genre, etc. Oddly enough, many postmodern critical strains have much in common with the New Critics in that they want to remove individual intention from the equation— communicative acts are rooted in the social and market forces that created them, rather than any motive on the part of the author (Benjamin anticipates much of this). What is important to most postmodern accounts is not what was intended, but what actually happens as the result of a text— the perlocutionary sequel.

To twist this observation mercilessly, what is going on in the locutionary and perlocutionary level does not involve an “author” in the slightest— in other words, no “agent” for the action. One level is linguistic, and the other level is sociological. No one wants to confront the concept of agency much. In writing, a sentence which has no agent for its action is called passive voice. It’s discouraged, except in cases where you want the utterance to recede from the rest of the text. The “silence of the critics” that Herman laments is not silence at all, but a passive drone of a life free from the presence of people. That’s why both the New Critics he loves— and the Postmodernists he hates— are, to me at least, just flat out boring. Don’t get me wrong— I find both approaches to be useful in many circumstances, but it just doesn’t generate “edge of the seat thrills” for reading.

Writing without people is an unnatural act.

I love teaching writing

Besides generally goofing-off for a few days, I have managed to get a couple of things done. I uploaded more major updates to my research site, including a page dedicated to Archibald MacLeish providing some bibliographic information, more excerpts, and fleshing out his positions on the timeline.

Grading a bunch of papers (and wondering why one class always does better than the other) I found a bit in a reflective essay that makes it all worthwhile:

At times, the course became confusing as to whether it was teaching “Writing for Work,” “Poetry,” “Literature,” “Rhetoric” or “English.” However, I found the common denominator soon enough to make a general relationship between them.

Sometimes, as my Blake instructor was fond of saying, “confusion is the best response.”

My approach often seems chaotic to people, but if I dig into things deep enough I can usually ferret out enough of a connection to make things work. I do like to make things up as I go along; it’s just the way I am. But I don’t think that even my twisted brain can connect the other things I wanted to remark about in this hurried entry (grades are due soon).

Trashlog is expanding! One of my favorite sites on the web is now soliciting international submissions for The Global Trash Collection Project, providing even more trash for the Internet. An admirable pursuit, in my estimation.

I was also quite taken by Pascale’s pointer to an item of interest in the Washington Post. Interesting is one of my favorite words. I must type interesting about a hundred times any time I try to write something. Then, I’m faced with the task of editing it back out.

Of course it’s interesting, you doofus! Otherwise, why would you be writing about it?

Sophisticated

If all who are engaged in the profession of education were willing to state the facts instead of making greater promises than they can possibly fulfill, they would not be in such bad repute with the lay public. As it is, however, the teachers who do not scruple to vaunt their powers with utter disregard of the truth have created the impression that those who chose a life of careless indolence are better advised than those who devote themselves to serious study.

Isocrates, Against the Sophists

I went to a thesis defense yesterday. Kiriaki Asiatidou, a Greek woman from Athens who is both stunningly brilliant and stunningly beautiful, carefully laid out her development of a pedagogical strategy for teaching first year composition. I’ve had a few classes with her, starting with a Blake seminar nearly five years ago. She pointed out that Greece, past high school, rhetoric simply isn’t taught. There’s a fear of it most places. The fear that it just isn’t a serious subject at all. I write this because I want to remember her name (I’m terrible with names). She’s returning to Greece now, and most of the staff is going to miss her.

After hearing her defense, I really wish I had talked to her more while she was here. Our classroom strategies seem very close. Her thesis was built on Protagoras, Isocrates, and of course she had to give props to Cicero too. She called her approach a “New Sophistic Rhetoric.” I picked up a lot of ideas from her regarding using mediatory essays in the classroom. Another thing that I’m thinking of amplifying is the promotion of a more international point of view— forcing students to write about issues that do not relate directly to the United States or its interests— promoting the idea of international citizenship, rather than just awareness of our own spot of ground.

The intellectual value of the Sophists has fluctuated over time, and just the day before I had been thinking about the only word in common usage that has connections with “sophistry” that does not have a negative connotation: sophisticated. It got stuck in my head after listening to Firehose’s cover of “Sophisticated Bitch” by Public Enemy. I didn’t get around to looking into it into today. I had a feeling that the positive value of “sophistication” had to be a recent development. I was right. According to the OED:

1. Mixed with some foreign substance; adulterated; not pure or genuine. [1607-1897]

2. 1. Altered from, deprived of, primitive simplicity or naturalness. Of a literary text: altered in the course of being copied or printed. [1603-1963]
   2. Of a person: free of naïvety, experienced, worldly-wise; subtle, discriminating, refined, cultured; aware of, versed in, the complexities of a subject or pursuit. Also transf. of a play, place, etc., that appeals to a sophisticated person. [1895-1971]
   3. Of equipment, techniques, theories, etc.: employing advanced or refined methods or concepts; highly developed or complicated. [1945-1979]
3. 1. Falsified in a greater or less degree; not plain, honest, or straightforward. [1672-1861]
   2. Of a printed book, containing alterations in content, binding, etc. which are intended to deceive. [1862-1952]

4. Comb., as sophisticated-looking. [1925-]

Kiriaki is sophisticated in the finest sense of the word.

Making the grade

I just finished the first round of grading and I’m amazed. So far, I’ve handed out about eight A’s. The attrition rate for classes this semester was abysmal, with nearly a 50 percent drop rate. For some reason, that doesn’t bother me. Most who managed to stick it out ended up significantly better as writers. I’m thrilled. Even the most trivial of topics were well argued and not inflated. I told them that falling short of the requested length was a more forgivable sin than bloating the paper with useless, boring, crap.

They actually listened. I’ll never get over that I suppose— talking to a room full of people that actually do listen to you and act based on what you say. Maybe it’s because I’m easily amused— or maybe it’s because life outside a classroom just isn’t like that most of the time. One of the reflective essays had a fascinating question in it:

“Why do you care about this stuff?”

The student who wrote it has had a complex life— eight years in the military, time in prison, conversion to Islam, and then back to school. He was fascinated with the way I confronted hard questions about racial and gender equality.

I deal with these issues not because I am promoting a political agenda in the classroom, but because the rhetoric surrounding these issues is so fascinating and strong. I find it useful to examine the basic assumptions (backing and warrants in Toulminian terms) which undergird political arguments. Examining the Declaration of Independence in particular is useful, in my opinion— both as an example of an enthymeme and for the things it leaves unsaid. It says that “all men are created equal” and yet avoids defining just what a “man” is. I suspect that no one really thinks about that much in high school, or in general— it says we have “unalienable rights” and yet it doesn’t say how those rights are apportioned— do women count? Not in 1776. Do people of color or Native Americans count? Not in 1776. I find it fascinating how Americans accept this document without wondering exactly what it meant. Now that’s effective rhetoric— it slips right past people, unnoticed, as a mythic declaration that every American assumes includes them. It doesn’t. After hundreds of years of struggle, the situation may be better— but the rhetoric is still hazy, and intentionally so. It’s more effective that way— if you don’t question.

The student’s question was a good one— why should I, as a person “automatically guaranteed entry into the white male patriarchy with all its attendant rights and privileges” (as one of my professor’s is fond of reminding me) care about things like gender and racial struggles? He really wanted to know if I started caring about this stuff because of school, or because of real life. The answer is real life, mostly. But it’s hard for me to separate the two. Right now (and hopefully for a long time to come) school is my real life. And I like it.

I like giving people the tools they need to fight for what they believe in— without guns, without fists, without hurting anyone. Yes, it can hurt to break down some treasured assumptions about what it means to be patriotic or a good citizen. But this is mental fight, and it needs to be raised to a higher level so that we won’t be embarrassed in the future by the hollow rhetoric of talking heads. I want to teach people how to take that junk apart and make better decisions. It isn’t about conveying politics. It’s about transmitting the tools needed to “not get fooled again.”

As long as some people are not free, none of us really are.

Ego where I go

Yesterday, I started thinking about the second writing class I took when I returned to college. I needed to take the second core course in writing, the same class I’ve been teaching for the past year or so. I signed up and found that because of a misprint I was in a class for English as a second language students. While I usually feel pretty foreign no matter where I am, they wouldn’t let me stay in that section. All the other sections were full. Several people in the department suggested that I take Persuasive Writing instead— it was a junior level class, but they assured me that it would be okay even though I was still a freshman. I signed up, but I was nervous as hell. The first day, the professor proclaimed:

All writers are self-absorbed, egotistical, and childish— and those are their good qualities.

The class was a trial by fire. The teacher constantly berated the writing of most of the students (which in retrospect, was pretty horrible). He was positively mean spirited about the whole thing. I felt largely ignored, though I was one of the few in the class who consistently got A’s on all my essays. It was good to be ignored in this situation. I’ll never forget the look of shock on his face when I told him it was my second writing class ever. I wrote the most scathing evaluation of his class that I’ve ever written, and cursed about it for years afterward. But the strange thing was, I learned more in this class than any other writing class of my undergraduate career. The professor didn’t avoid theory, as most writing teachers do— he taught straight out of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. It occurred to me yesterday that I’m doing much the same thing, though I tend to lean harder into Cicero and Quintilian. But I don’t berate my students.

I was reminded of this class for a couple of reasons. One of my students was trying to praise me for improving her writing. I complained that I really didn’t think I deserved that much credit— she was responsible for the improvement, not me. I was thinking of the classes I’ve taken where there is a palpable wall between the front half of the classroom and the back, and those that are more like discussion groups. I always got more out of the latter. The key to learning is doing, not spectating. I don’t say this to undercut the role of having good mentors, but rather to assign the credit where it is due. Some people forget all too easily. It’s part of that self-absorbed writer thing. When a “writer” stands at the front of a classroom, they can’t help but give themselves credit. That’s why I try to switch into a reader role when I’m there. The second reason was Luke’s prompt regarding the bashing of NaNoWriMo writers. Luke centers on this bit:

I am a writer. I just get terribly, terribly frustrated when something I have devoted my life to is treated in as cavalier a manner as Baty seems to be doing. To be a writer is not a right, it’s a privilege. And you cannot buy that privilege by writing “50,000 words of crap” in a month. The price is much, much higher than that.

Let’s take this apart carefully. “I am a writer”— just what is this supposed to signify? To write is to send a message through a grapholect; a high percentage of the world can manage this communication skill. The arrogance of stating it as if it were somehow “special” reinforces my professor’s comment about the personality traits of writers. The easiest reply is to say “So what?” She might as well have said “I wash dishes.” A certain group, including AKMA and Jonathon might say that they don’t appreciate that some people treat the proper washing of dishes in such a “cavalier” manner. Writing, or washing dishes, is neither a right nor a privilege and to state it in these terms denigrates both rights and privileges. There is only one factual statement in this paragraph. To write is to communicate, and to communicate does extract a price: the price of being judged both for the quality of your coding (language) and your message (concept). How high the price is depends on the size of your audience.

Wood s Lot recently pointed to an article about the lack of readers. Pungent commentary by folks like Joe Epstein regarding “writers” and ranting like this about online novelists is on the rise. I like to believe that we are not moving to a time when everyone wants to talk and no one wants to listen. Sometimes, it’s hard to say. But I am heartened by my experiences with online writers. Everyone has links on their sidebar. They seem to both read, and write.

There is a difference between operating in reader mode and writer mode. Russ’s reaction hits the nail on the head: “Most offensive is the self-righteous, entitled sense of possession.” It’s a “writer” talking, not a reader. Those qualities are essential to writing, but positively destructive to reading. Let go. Live a little. Listen to someone else for a change. As Luke observed, a writer has to write a lot of crap to get better— that’s just how it works. The only one required to read the crap is the writer, that is, unless you’re in a class where a teacher can cut you to shreds over it. What makes a good writer is writing, not bitching. To read effectively, you have to quit thinking of how you would have written it and dig deeper into what the writer is trying to tell you. Hopefully, they’re not just putting their ego up on display— though a great deal of the time— that’s precisely what it is.

*Part of the divisiveness revealed in the two attitudes reflects the split between literature departments and rhetoric departments. Unlike what you might think, literature departments tend to underwrite this egocentric view of authorship. Though they are largely in the reading business, they treat authors as somehow above the crowd. This drives most literature students to desire this lofty, egocentric position. Rhetoric departments are focused on more practical aspects of writing. As one instructor of mine recently put it, “My students will change the world by writing grant proposals and influential documents. Will the poets you train ever do that?”

I sit in the middle between the extremes. I believe that the best poets can and do change the world. Not because they are privileged and special— but because they are sensitive, reading focused humans who force us to confront deeper truths. The best poets get past the necessary self-involved stages and look to the world, instead of just themselves, to convey a message.

Identity Politics

I made a trip to the bookstore tonight and discovered something odd. I was looking for more Hegel, and there were a couple of books sitting astride the top row, on top of the books by and about Foucault. They were turned were I couldn’t read the spines, so I picked them up. Somehow, I don’t think this book belongs in the philosophy section. But then again, there was something rather poetic about the placement.

I was going to try to say a little something about Steve’s observations regarding the angry feminist question flying about. Thankfully, Golby and Baldur have covered most of what I intended to say. There are major problems with any attempt to flatten complicated theories. I was once in the same position as Jonathon, regarding poststructuralist theory— detesting it “because it gutted art practice, subordinating artists to the whims of curators who hate art but love politics and power.” Feminist theory suffers from the same sort of collapse, in the perception of most people who haven’t actually read it. I’ve come to realize that it isn’t poststructuralist theory I detest, but rather the myopic misreading of it that caused the atmosphere that Jonathon is talking about. Most curators latched onto tiny bits regarding a proclaimed death of representative practice as license to avoid dealing with the problems of representation that these theories highlight and intensify. Most people view the political polemics of Marxist feminism in the same way— with distaste. In a similar fashion, feminist theory intensifies the problems of gender and power.

Continue reading “Identity Politics” →

Scared

The more Judith Butler I read the more I like her. I picked up an oldie, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France which is a rewritten version of her doctoral dissertation that she refers to as her “juvenilia.” The way that Butler recasts Foucault and Derrida as bound to Hegel’s theories on desire is downright astounding. I find it to be clearly written, understandable, and to the point. I’m really scared. You see, Butler was the winner of the 1998 Philosophy and Literature Bad Writers Contest for this sentence:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

Okay, so I agree that anyone who uses the words “hegemony” and “rearticulation” twice in the same sentence has got a problem. And I will freely admit that Pete Townsend wrote the same thought in a much more easily understandable fashion:

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

But just the same, I’m really scared that I find Butler’s sentences quite comprehensible. What the hell is happening to me? Have I acquired the virulently pernicious academic gene? Maybe I’m even more terrified by the conversation I had today with the director of the graduate program here. We had a nice talk about my project, in post-structuralist terms that we were both quite comfortable with and she stopped to point out that our conversation would have been totally incomprehensible to most people in the department. I hadn’t thought about it. I was just talking. Now I’m struck by images of Jeff Goldblum in The Fly where I become reduced to some genetic mutant who drools on his food to digest it. Or worse still, I shrink to an imperceptible size like the Vincent Price version squeaking a nearly inaudible “help me . . . help me . . .”

Of course, it’s even stranger to think about the book I’m reading as juvenilia. Butler sums up Foucault’s position on history eloquently in two sentences. These are the sentences that I wish I’d used when I attempted to say (and was shot down for saying) that Foucault was obsessed with dominance and submission:

In effect, domination becomes for Foucault the scene that engenders history itself, the moment in which values are created and new configurations of force relations produced. Domination becomes the curious modus vivendi of historical innovation.

However, I must say that I made a big mistake last night. Never read Hegel before going to sleep. It causes nightmares. My advisor suggested that I try Aristotle’s Rhetoric instead to cure stubborn insomnia. She has a point. Aristotle has the same sort of droning sentences, and isn’t nearly as scary from a conceptual point of view.