Burke’s Unending Conversation

21Sep2005 Filed under: reading Author: Marcia Hansen

Just some loose ideas here as I think more about the rhetoric of affect:
Burke’s Unending Conversation Metaphor
Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1941.
This unending conversation is a great metaphor for what happens when we blog. Of course, I’m not the first one to notice this idea.
I read something connected to this idea of an unending conversation on Random Connections. The link is to a post about a speech given by David Weinberger at Harvard. Weinberger said that knowledge is an unending conversation. This idea made me think of two things.
First, our question the other night about what we would call the public sphere today. Let me make another attempt: Oral tradition – Public Sphere – Public as Publishers (joining an unending conversation.) That’s not a cool catchy name yet. I’ll keep working on it. It’s something like a cross between wiki and blogosphere. Hmmm… We blog o sphere: weblogosphere.
Second, I am particularly intrigued by the following:

So what are the implications for teaching? According to Weinberger, the job of a teacher should be to make things more complicated. So how we should treat students? Shove content into heads? Evaluate by testing as individuals? Imply ambiguity is a failure? Insist on being right? We must realize that knowledge is an unending conversation. We should teach contexts of knowledge �C how to Listen, to seek ambiguity, and to love difference.

Some forces are afraid af ambiguity, nuance, and difference. They believe that there is one knowledge, only right and wrong. Disagreement is never-ending, and we shouldn��t even want it to go away. A generation that embraces ambiguity will embrace a truer view of the world.

Amen to that! Hmm… recognizing affective connections could be a key to embracing ambiguity and continuing the unending conversation.

Tags: affect, blogging

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2 Responses to “Burke’s Unending Conversation”

Donna
September 24th, 2005 at 11:20 am

Yes! Did you see Collin’s link to Weinberger’s post? Here’s a bit of it that seems awfully relevant to Burke:
It is the connectedness of the Net. We can see what the world is thinking. But that just leads to relativism, a form of disappointment. Instead, the Net is filled with joy. That is why almost a billion people are using it and are finding it transformative. In fact, we are escaping from the old, dissatisfying clash between objectivity (the world as it looks when we’re not looking at it) and subjectivity (the world as it matters to us). With the Internet, we get multi-subjectivity for the first time. Take blogs. They look like publications, but they’re overwhelmingly conversations. We’re linking to one another, disagreeing, amplifying, making fun, extending, sympathizing, laughing. We are talking with one another, thinking out loud across presumptions and continents. If you want to know about an idea, you could go to an encyclopedia and read what an expert says about it. Or you could find a blog that talks about it and start following the web of links. You’ll not just see multiple points of view, you’ll hear those points of view in conversation. That’s new in the world.
Marcia
September 25th, 2005 at 9:51 am

This is great! I also thought his statement about the digital age undoing our old assumptions was provocative. So, not only can we ask “what this text/site do?” But, we can also ask, “what does it undo?”
I’m going to have to think more about what blogging undoes when it comes to affect.

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About m2h blogs

Marcia Hansen works by day as a marketing manager in social media. At other times you'll find her traveling about speaking, writing, and learning. And, if she's lucky, it's on her Honda Shadow 1100.

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