Blabbing Across Barriers

First student blog post! Here's what I'm thinking about.

From Feminist Rhetorical Practices, the authors write,

[W]e must learn to ask new and different questions and to find more and better ways to listen to the multidimensional voices that are speaking from within and across many of the lines that might divide us as language users – by social and political hierarchies, geography, material circumstance, ideologies, time and space, and the like (Royster and Kirsch 4). 

This quote stood out to me because it is a problem that humans have encountered with language since the first time we ever spoke. The perfect metaphor of this problem is the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, which illustrates the frustrations and loss of perfect, one-to-one communication. However, I think this kind of mindset – acknowledgement of the questions of whether we are speaking correctly, if there are more opportune ways of speaking and writing, the differences that may impair our understanding or communication – is crucial to creating new meaning and knowledge. Rhetoric itself can be seen as the art of making meaning, of creating realities, persuading others to believe a certain kind of truth, but can be extremely misleading or ambiguous at times. 

I guess I want to question whether or not the ambiguousness of language and the barriers that separate complete understanding are truly obstacles to learning and growth, or if the constraints are there to enable us to think in new ways.

It is also interesting to think about knowledge in terms of “time and space,” especially when the author is dead (physically, not only metaphorically). Just as Gesa Kirsch was “struck by the fact that ‘these now dead and defenseless women now depended upon my ethical choices in textualizing their interior lives’ [quoting Gere]” (7), I am also filled with an anxiety of being able to fully understand the meanings and intents of the different authors we will come to read. Like any historical work that has been passed down for generations, editing plays a big role in the meaning and argument (take Shakespeare, for instance)– so understanding the essays and passages in their historical context helps me come a little bit closer to what the original form of the document may have looked like and the exigence behind it, but there is still always the question of what more could there be.  

Along those lines, understanding the historical context for, say, Aristotle’s writings are useful to understand the political and ethical climate of the time, but how can I apply that knowledge to my own time and space? “Space” being important as we increasingly become more influenced by visual space (ads of the side of your internet browser), etc. I think that will be a major challenge and a major question for me as I read the more classical works, and coming to see how it influenced later generations will also provide an answer to understanding how it can help me in my own writing and logic today.