Peyton Manning, the Playoffs, and the Ontic/Ontological Question
I wanted to follow up on one of Lauren’s questions from the end of last class–what is the difference between ontic and ontological? Heidegger addresses this early in the essay–it is the distinction between “correct” and “truth.” In some ways, by exposing how the correct is not necessarily the true (how we can give a correct answer without ever approaching the essence of a thing), Heidegger is echoing the the “emancipatory” narratives of the French/critical tradition critiqued by Lyotard.
However, a question becomes whether Heidegger is proposing to give us THE “true” essence of a thing. In short–does Heidegger believe we can reach truth? Honestly, I am not sure. Neither, I believe, are other scholars. Rickert will approach an answer to this question later in the semester (Rickert’s Ambient Rhetorics imagines a Heideggerian rhetoric).
For an example of the ontic/ontological binary, I would offer the questions surrounding Peyton Manning this week. A number of people have pointed out that, despite being one of the greatest regular season quaterbacks of all-time, with truly impressive statistics, Peyton is a mediocre 10-11 in the postseason. As a Patriots fan, that record makes me very happy. Riding the happy mood (at least until Sunday, when I think Manning will smoke a decimated Patriots defense… but I get ahead of myself).
So, every sports commentator is in a rhetorical situation that begs the question: is Peyton Manning “truly” (ontologically) a mediocre quarterback? Because, it is absolutely “correct” (ontically) that 10-11 is mediocre.
I will return to this question and this example Tuesday night. Food for thought.
Heidegger and the Question Concerning Technology
Some questions I would like to raise:
- What is the essence of technology?
- Why is the destining of revealing (of the essence of technology) the greatest danger humanity faces?
- Is there an optimism to Heidegger?
- How does Heidegger’s solution to the question concerning technology (poesis) compare to Lyotard’s solution for the emerging metanarrative of performativity (parology)?
- What is the irony of giving a reading quiz like set of questions concerning Heidegger’s essay?
Cagle’s question: “If the difference between older and modern technologies is of degree, rather than kind, where do we tip from valuable, useful, non-threatening relationships w/ nature, objects, and technologies to “the essence of technology” as the greatest danger humanity faces?”
Worsham and the Question Concerning Invention
Here’s a few questions to wrangle with:
- How does Worsham connect Heidegger to notions of invention in R/C?
- What does Worsham consider the markings of a Heideggerian model of writing?
- What does Worsham mean by “agonistic” writing? What doesn’t she mean?
One point to raise–does the “magical” notion of writing-as-art “end up serving the ends of technology by making the writer’s self a natural resource to be mined for its unique crystal of truth and vision” (201)? In other words, via Heidegger, does it end up with a kind of causality that cares only about the silversmith. Obviously, those of you who are familiar with my investments can imagine how I respond to this question.
As a follow up to the Kairos piece dealing with Ulmer, electracy, and the mystory, Ellie Browning and I have been working on a piece that focuses on choric invention. We draw our theory of chorography from a number of people we will be reading later in this class, including Ulmer, Thomas Rickert, Jeff Rice, Sarah J. Arroyo, and others.
From these theorists, we generalize four guidelines for choric invention. Generally, these guidelines extend from one of Ulmer’s two critical influences–Derrida’s reinterpretation of the chora, and/or Roland Barthes’s theory of the punctum (in opposition to the studium):
- The first principle explores how environs operate as active agents in an unpredictable inventive process, rather than serve as mere backdrop for human acting and thinking.
- The second suggests that choric invention involves a juxtaposition of personal experience alongside objective, “public,” representation; it is this part of choric invention that is drawn from Barthes and his distinction between the studium and the punctum or, in the case of Brooke (2007), between Barthes hermeneutic and proairetic interpretive codes.
- The third principle, similar to the second, notes how choric invention highlights the ways in which particular environments/rhetorical situations can overlap and cause us to simultaneously inhabit multiple–and perhaps contradictory–subject positions.
- Finally, the fourth principle, shared by all of these theorists, insists that choric invention follows no articulable system. Byron Hawk understands choric invention as an approach to invention that resists systemization–or, in Ulmers terms, the distinction between a heretical heuretic and an orthodox heuristic. Choric invention is an invention of a means of inventing, not a following of a guaranteed means that promises to lead to the definitive answer. And while it cannot be reduced to a clear articulable system, this does not mean that we cannot generalize contours that mark an approach. Our goal here is to offer a coherent and concise explication of choric invention, highlighting its resonances with Kalman’s ambient, ambulatory, and serendipitous process, before sharing a pedagogic practice inspired by both Ulmer and Kalman’s work.
We compare a choric form of invention to the work of multimedia artist and author Maira Kalman. Here’s an example of Kalman’s work. Here’s an image particularly important to the article:
And here’s an example of Kalman talking about her process:
Here’s another example:
Here’s how, in the article, we discuss these videos:
What she shares with Ulmer and the theorists that extend his work is an opposition to thinking happiness or ethics in terms of a foundational idea or metanarrative. Rather, both her philosophy of life and her approach to composition begin with an openness to the moment and its peculiarities. What marks all of Kalman’s works is her attention to idiosyncratic details, at times expressing a profound sadness, and at others a giddy delight to the unexpected, odd moments of life.
In her talk “Art and the Power of Not Knowing,” Kalman reveals that there is a deliberate process driving her interest in the seemingly mundane. She emphasizes the importance of learning to traverse places alone, without agenda, with “an empty brain.” Kalman repeatedly links her creative process to specific locales and idiosyncratic experiences, urging would be artists “to be aware of the moment” and that “whatever you tackle can be tackled from a personal point of view and can have serendipity.” We believe this emphasis on subjective experience, the power of place, and the significance of serendipity mark her compositional approach as choric.
In Kalman’s (July 2012) interview, titled “Thinking and Feeling,” with THNKR, the web series produced by @radical.media, she reiterates the importance of “allowing her brain to empty.” The key practice for this emptying is walking. She explains:
Walking enables your senses to really pick up lots of things. You can feel your body going through space. I’m sure there is some kind of explanation for it in physics and biochemistry or something like that. But walking clears your brain and fills your soul and makes you quite happy.
Rickert (2012) identifies the “something like that” as neuroscience, connecting choric invention to much of the recent research on ambiance and brain activity. Of course, walking here isn’t simply walking–it is walking with a purposeful purposelessness, akin to the surrealist practice of the derivé (Debord 1958). Key to this strategic walking is the ability to attune oneself to the serendipitous:
A lot of what my work is waiting for the unexpected and to be surprised, to be walking down the street and to not know what I’m going to see and go “Oh! Ah ha! Of course, that’s what I was going to see today!”
For Kalman, the “Ah ha!” moment is when something “makes your heart go “ah, that’s really fantastic!” The “Ah ha!” moment is a critical component of Gregory Ulmer’s pedagogy–a moment of unexpected (self) discovery. What for Ulmer and others who theorize choric invention is akin to a potentially painful sting, Barthes’s punctum, is for Kalman a moment of affective delight, and a core component of her inventive process.
