Watchmen: Nihilism and the Status Quo

Social control comes in many forms, ranging from government institutions such as the police and military, to private industry, to apparently neutral institutions such as medicine and education. Perhaps most insidious as a form of social control, is the very popular culture of society; apparently mindless entertainment reinforces social control even while it seeks or appears to question it. Superheroes have, in one manifestation or another, been a staple of culture for ages, with mythical figures like Heracles of ancient Greece dating to pre-literate cultures. The modern conception of the superhero is most commonly traced to the United States, particularly to the creation of Superman in 1938 and Batman in 1939. Since then, superheroes have been a staple of comics, particularly in the US. Since that time, superheroes have made the jump from page to screen, appearing in both television and movies.

The Watchmen film, released in 2009, is an adaptation of a comic series of the same name originally published in 1986 and '87. Despite its faithfulness to the original, the film differs from the comic in subtle yet important ways, particularly as regards the ideological messages. The comic attempted to critique the society of 1980's America, however, it ended up coming to support the same society it attempted to critique, as a result of the audience identification with one ideology in favor of another. The film, while it has attempted to remain as faithful to the comic as possible, presents important ideological distinctions in its argument. The comic ideologically supports radical conservativism or neo-liberalism. The film, however, suggests an ideology of nihilism to the audience. While nihilism is not out right a support of the status quo, in abandoning any belief or hope for action, nihilism comes to ideologically reinforce and support the status quo of society.

Watchmen is often regarded as the first truly postmodern comic for its attempt to realistically picture a world in which superheroes existed, it also attempted to shine a critical light on the society of the 1980's. In particular, the comic attempts to critique cold war posturing and rhetoric, particularly that of President Reagan, famed for declaring the Soviet Union to be an evil empire. The comic attempted to show that this rhetoric was building up to an almost inevitable nuclear war, one that could only be stopped by some drastic outside force. In the comic, the superhero Ozymandias unleashes a genetically engineered monster that appears as an alien from outer space on New York city, killing almost the entire population instantly. In this way, he averts nuclear war through directing the worlds attention elsewhere. The final success of this action is left deliberately ambiguous, in keeping with the ambiguity that pervades the entire story.

According to Wolf-Meyer, the Watchmen comic tried to present a view favorable to radical liberalism, favorable to the creation of a utopia at almost any cost. However, even while it attempted to present such a view, another view was received much more widely by the audience. This was the much more conservative viewpoint, that Ozymandias was the villain, his actions could in no way be forgiven, even if they did result in a utopia on earth. The audience, instead of identifying with Ozymandias and being moved to the view that he represents, generally identified with the character of Rorschach who opposed Ozymandias to the end, unwilling to compromise his beliefs even if it meant that the world would once more be on the brink of nuclear war.

The heroes of Watchmen can be read as emblematic of political ideologies: Rorschach is a radical conservative, Dr. Manhattan a conservative, Silk Specter indifferent or neutral, Dan Drieberg a liberal, and Veidt a radical liberal... Inevitably, as rorschach confronts Ocymandias, and Ozymandias' plans for achieving utopia at any costs, rorschach must act conservatively: Regardless of the effects that his actions might have on the new civilization that Ozymandias has helped to foster, they must be taken to conserve the Cold War dystopia that is the status quo. (Wolf-Meyer 508-9)

The audience widespread identification with Rorschach means that the audience has largely been persuaded that his view and actions were correct. In this way, though the comic attempted to critique the society of the time, it actually served ideologically to support it.

The comic, in this way, is an example of a rhetorical artifact that attempted to present one perspective or action, and the audience took it as supporting another (in this case) contradictory perspective or action. It is evident that the readers of the comic identified with Rorschach through his being placed at the center of the plot in the summary offered by Reynolds in Superheroes: A Modern Mythology. Further, it can be argued that the primary audience of the comic, being disaffected mail youth, most identified with a character who embodied the position they liked to see themselves in, that of Rorschach.

...his popularity may be as simple as this: Rorschach is misanthropic, has poor social skills, and is ostracized by his peers and society; Veidt, on the other hand, is handsome, intelligent and bourgeois; Dr. Manhattan is omniscient and omnipotent, essentially a god. Who is an adolescent male reader supposed to identify with, and who is he most likely to identify with? (Wolf-Meyer 508)

From this identification once can easily see which view the audience has been persuaded by. In this way, an attempt at creating a complicated work with a multi-layered and nonlinear narrative that featured at least a reasonably realized view of multiple ideologies has come to serve one that was unintended. This is because identification is the foremost aspect of persuasion. Rhetoric, according to Burke, functions primarily as a result of identification or consubstantiation. So, argument or reason can fall short, particularly if the audience identifies, as in this case, with another view.

While the comic tried to argue for one perspective, and ended up arguing for another, the film, being once removed is acting in a different fashion. The film is not explicitly trying to argue against the danger of the cold war, or the fiery rhetoric of President Reagan. Such an argument, in 2009 would have little bearing on the audience. Instead, in treating the comic reverentially, the film has removed any explicit ideological view. It tries to present itself as pure entertainment, albeit one that is complicated and has something to say. Still, the film does function rhetorically, and is in response to societal issues. The film is a response to postmodernity in general, to the situation in contemporary society in which ambiguity seems to rule the day. The film is responding to the apprehension and angst that people feel as a result of the constant ambiguity and lack of any clear lines of power. This ambiguity and decentralization of power is the hallmark of postmodern society; a world in which the American government has confessed to and defended torture, in which multinational corporations seem bound by no law and to serve no one but themselves. Importantly, the film is also post 9/11 and the terrorist attacks of that day. This act remains largely incomprehensible to the American audience, it is, in fact, the kind of action that one would normally see in superhero comics undertaken by a super villain, or at least attempted before they are foiled in the nick of time by the hero. So, while the film may not be making an ideological argument in the narrow political sense of the word, in the broader, theoretical sense, it has no choice but to present an ideological viewpoint.

Likewise, the characters come to represent different things within the film than they do in the comic. Ozymandias is made more appealing, so, for all his machiavellian plotting and mass murder, he can be forgiven by the audience. He is, after all, striving against an impossible situation in trying to prevent for all time nuclear war. That it took the total destruction of New York, along with all inhabitants, is unfortunate but forgiveable. This is particularly in a film that comes after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. That an American audience can forgive and for some, identify with, a character who is responsible for the nuclear destruction of New York is troubling. It is revealing of the overall ideology of the film that some in the audience will identify with Ozymandias even is post 9/11 America, and that even those who do not identify with him are at least ready and willing to understand his apparent perspective and the reasons behind his actions.

Likewise, Rorschach is an obsessed sociopath, one who aggressively and viciously pursues his brand of justice. The film doesn't really offer either Rorschach or Ozymandias as a character to identify with. While Ozymandias may be the driving force behind the story, and Rorschach may be the audiences vessel, the perspective through which they see the world, the audience is asked to identify with Dan Dreiberg aka Nite Owl.

Nite Owl is not a voice of nihilism, or of any particularly extreme ideology. He is a man struggling in day to day life, nostalgic for a past that he sees as having had more meaning, desperate for any relationship. He's put on weight after having given up being a superhero, but is still trapped in his past. He continues to visit another elderly and retired superhero each week, to relive old stores of the glory days of the past. Even once he takes up being a hero again briefly, he is still largely living in the shadow of the past. In his inability to live in the present, he's rendered largely powerless. Importantly, at the end of the film, as in the comic, despite his disgust and revulsion at Ozymandias actions, he stands aside and agrees to keep the secret; agreeing that the world can't afford to ever know the truth. While Dreiberg is a likeable character, and easy to identify with, it is telling that the audience is asked to identify primarily with someone who is essentially powerless and driven by nostalgia. There is an implication in this, that the audience sees themselves as being powerless, lost in the world. For all of Nite Owl's ability as a superhero, he offers no particular solution to this feeling. Certainly he is capable of rescuing people from a burning building, or of dealing with thugs on the street, and even of dealing with the guards in a prison. In the context of the problems of the film however, nuclear war and global catastrophe, he is incapable of really acting. More so, though he does set out to stop Ozymandias, once confronted with his inability to stop him having been too late, he gives up and goes along with keeping quiet. He cannot deal with the real problems that face the world, so he goes along with the plan of a man responsible for mass murder, because that man has a means of dealing with the worlds problems.

Other characters in the film offer more explicit philosophies behind their actions. The two most important ones are Rorschach and The Comedian. Rorschach, is a misanthropic sociopath. He sees only terrible things in the world, and so he lashes out vainly. His philosophy is summed up in his opening voice over.

Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face. The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout “Save Us!” and I'll look down and whisper “no.” (Watchmen)

He cares nothing for the people of the world, indeed, he views all people as evil. He acts to punish evil, but not out of choice, but because he must. In addition to being a sociopath, he is obsessed. His actions are driven by mental disorder. Even while he appears to hold to a stringent moral code, he doesn't really have one, since he's incapable of making choices for himself. The character offers nothing but nihilism to the audience, and offers as the only means of escaping nihilism insanity that removes free will and individual choice. Still, his insanity is on one level a rejection of postmodern society. Unable to cope with the world, he has surrendered insanity. Lacking choice, any need to actually cope with the world is removed from him. In this way, he does not act at all, he simply moves. He is not a man who thinks, but an animal who moves.

Despite dying within the first few moments of the film, The Comedian offers another, competing perspective on how to deal with postmodern society. In his case, where Rorschach has gone insane, The Comedian has embraced nihilism. His name sums it all up, for him, the entire world is a joke. He has seen so many terrible things in the world, that he simply becomes one of the terrible things of the world himself, murdering a woman he got pregnant while fighting in Viet Nam without a second thought, simply because she cut his face. When Dr. Manhattan asks him about it, he correctly points out that Dr. Manhattan was fully capable of stopping it, of disintegrating the bullet in mid flight and chose not to act at all but to simply stand there and let the woman die. In this way, The Comedian is an existential ironist, his only purpose is to in his way, eradicate any real meaning.

The ironist's burden is to annihilate any meaning in the world, for to allow the possibility of any true heroism or any real tragedy would be to admit that the ironist's superior, belittling judgement does not, after all, reach everywhere. (Kukkonen 201)

The ideology of the ironist is nihilism, that there is no value or meaning in anything. The Comedian's actions embody this, even while he makes pretense of being a hero, and is indeed sanctioned by the government to act as one, he is also a murderer, rapist and general thug. He is distinguished from the criminals he goes after solely because he is sanctioned to do so. That the Comedian is sanctioned to behave as he does by the government implies that there is no meaning or value to be found in the state either. The state, in sanctioning his activities has become an accomplice to them, and taken for itself his own philosophy of nihilism.

If Ozymandias is a machiavellian megalomaniac who thinks nothing of the wholesale slaughter of millions of people, Rorschach is an obsessed sociopath, and The Comedian has embraced nihilism as his philosophy, what of Nite Owl who is after all, the one the audience is asked to identify with? As previously stated, he is powerless before the world, still, he acts from conscious choice, and tries to do the right thing. The problem here, is that even within the film, Nite Owl is not the real person or character, Dan Dreiberg, the man inside the suit is the real person. For Dreiberg, at least in the present time of the film, donning the costume isn't just about putting on a uniform before doing his job. After all, he is forbidden by law from acting as a costumed hero. For him, putting on the costume then, is about being someone else, about escaping into nostalgia. It is Nite Owl, however, who acts, and not Dreiberg. Indeed, Dreiberg is incapable of acting in any meaningful way when he doesn't have his costume on. He is even incapable of forming real human relationships without the costume.

This is perhaps most telling when Laurie Jupiter comes to Dreiberg seeking solace and companionship after Dr. Manhattan has left earth for Mars. He tries to console her, and they attempt to make love afterward, but both of them are unable to consummate the act at all. Later that night though, when they have both donned their old costumes, they are finally able to have sex and form a deep bond. Their friendship up until this point has been based entirely on their mutual nostalgia for their pasts as superheroes. After this, they seem to have turned a corner, basing their relationship on something in the world and not in nostalgia. However, they are not the ones who have formed a relationship, their costumed alter egos have formed a relationship. They remain trapped in the past, incapable of acting at all. Whereas, according to Morris, Batman and Superman are in fact their real identities and Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent are in fact the false alter egos, Dreiberg and Jupiter are the real people. Nite Owl and Silk Specter are simply characters, not even of their own creation; in the case of Dreiberg, Nite Owl was originally the costumed identity of Hollis Mason, and in the case of Laurie, Silk Specter was originally the costume of her mother Sally. Neither of them has even managed to create their own superhero identity, but have taken on the identity of another. In this way, while both Dreiberg and Laurie Jupiter are characters the audience identifies with, they represent nothing. In representing nothing and in being powerless, they come to represent nihilism. However, where The Comedian represents a radical nihilism that seeks to actively destroy meaning and prove that the world truly is meaningless and valueless, Dreiberg and Jupiter both represent a much more passive nihilism. They don't try and prove that the world is meaningless. Instead, they embody the utter meaninglessness of the world in their very being.

While there has been a tendency to link nihilism or the culture of deconstruction to postmodernism, the two are not synonymous. Indeed, nihilism is a response to conditions in postmodern society. While the culture of deconstruction, according to Moore, embraces the breakdown of boundaries and hierarchies present in postmodernism, it does so with no intention of actually changing anything. Instead, it embraces this breakdown solely as it can be used to represent reckless nihilistic abandon. Just as Moore asserts that some portions of the punk music movement embraced nihilism and the culture of deconstruction as a response to postmodernity, so to does the Watchmen film embrace and suggest nihilism as a response postmodernity.

In this way, the film actively rejects the salvation narrative. According to Wanzo, the salvation narrative is worth critiquing in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries.

...resist the pleasures of the salvation narrative. Christian and superhero narratives similarly offer fantastic narratives of grand salvation in return for believing in the ideality of some moral arbiter of right and wrong. As superhero narratives have evolved, they have interrogated the pleasures offered by the belief in an ideal arbiter and a salvation mythos. Interrogations of the pleasures offered by those narratives are not out of place in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries, as the Christian right rises in power and pushes for Christian ideology to be coterminous with the state. Revisionist superhero narratives provide a critique of the moral logic that runs through religious and national fables, suggestion that the construction of the citizenship ideals is often shaped by fear. (Wanzo 96)

While both the comic and the film can be read as critiquing the drive to utopia and the intrinsic salvation narrative in such a story, the film, in embracing nihilism, is going a step further. It does not simply critique the salvation narrative, or even reject it, but suggests that the alternative to the salvation narrative is nothing whatsoever. That rather than strive for utopia, people should instead do nothing, strive for nothing.

This is where the films ideology is most problematic. In embracing nihilism, it is also embracing the dystopian status quo that currently exists. The difference between this and Wolf-Meyer's conclusion that identification with Rorschach is identification with the conservative ideology that he represents in the comic, is one of how the ideology serves the state. The conservative ideology of the comic explicitly serves the state, and suggests that people actively work to maintain the status quo. The film, however, does not do this. Instead, it suggests doing nothing, and just allowing things to continue. The cost of embracing such an ideology is that other people will continue to act. Those in power will continue to act to preserve and strengthen their power, and those who embrace nihilism will be none the wiser. This is because according to nihilism, no one, not those in power nor those out of power are capable of making any difference whatsoever.

The film then, precisely because it appears as entertainment that suggests no values to the audience is in fact discourse that serves power. The film is a part of the ideological apparatus through which the conditions of society are most subtly maintained. This form of control also resists ready critique. While it is far from impossible to critique this ideological discourse, even the critique seems to have little power. The particular ideology of the film makes the critique all that more difficult, because according to nihilism, no critique will ever matter or amount to anything. In this way, the ideology of the film accounts for the very criticism it demands. This is what most clearly marks the film as being ideological, that any critique is always-already accounted for. The critique of nihilism and response to the critique are all subsumed within the ideology itself.

Works Cited

Althouse, Matthew T. “Kevlar Armor, Heat-Seeking bullets, and Social Order: A Mythological Reading of Judge Dredd.” Comics and Ideology Eds. McAllister, Matthew P., Edward H. Sewell, and Ian Gordon. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2001. 195-220.

Burke, Kenneth. “A Rhetoric of Motives.” The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings From Classical Times to the Present. Eds. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2001. 1324-1339.

Burke, Kenneth. “A Grammar of Motives.” The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings From Classical Times to the Present. Eds. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2001. 1298-1323.

Burke, Kenneth. “Language as Symbolic Action.” The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings From Classical Times to the Present. Eds. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2001. 1340-1347.

Dubose, Mike S. “Holding Out for a Hero: Reaganism, Comic Book Vigilantes, and Captain America.” The Journal of Popular Culture 40 (2007): 915-935.

Foucault, Michel. “The Order of Discourse.” The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings From Classical Times to the Present. Eds. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2001. 1460-1470.

Gordon, Ian. “ Nostalgia, Myth, and Ideology: Visions of Superman at the End of the 'American Century'.” Comics and Ideology Eds. McAllister, Matthew P., Edward H. Sewell, and Ian Gordon. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2001. 177-194.

Hosterman, Alec. “Comics and Rhetoric (Classical or Otherwise): When Comic Art Meets Rhetorical Theory.” National Communication Association, Nov., 2007, Chicago

Hughes, Jamie A. “'Who Watches the Watchmen?': Ideology and 'Real World' Superheroes.” The Journal of Popular Culture 39 (2006): 546-557.

Kading, Terry. “Drawn Into 9/11, But Where Have all the Superheroes Gone?” Comics as Philosophy. Ed. Jeff McLaughlin. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. 207-227.

Kukkonen, Taneli. “Whats' So Goddamned Funny? The Comedian and Rorschach on Life's Way.” Watchmen and Philosophy. Ed. Mark D. White. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2009. 197-214.

McAllister, Matthew P., Ian Gordon, and Mark Jancovich. “Blockbuster Meets Superhero Comic, or Art House Meets Graphic Novel? The Contradictory Relationship Between Film and Comic Art.” Journal of Popular Film and Television September (2006): 108-114.

McAllister, Matthew P., Edward H. Sewell, and Ian Gordon. “Introducing Comics and Ideology.” Comics and Ideology Eds. McAllister, Matthew P., Edward H. Sewell, and Ian Gordon. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2001. 1-14.

Moore, Alan and Dave Gibbons. Watchmen. New York: DC Comics, 1986-1987.

Moore, Ryan. “Postmodernism and Punk Subculture: Cultures of Authenticity and Deconstruction.” The Communication Review 7 (2004): 305-327.

Morris, Tom. “Who's Behind the Mask? The Secret of Secret Identities.” Superheroes and Philosophy: Truth, Justics, and the Socratic Way. Eds. Tom Morris and Matt Morris. Chicago: Open Court, 2005. 250-265.

Shugart, Helene. “Supermarginal.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6 (2009): 98-102.

Skoble, Aeon J. “Superhero Revisionism in Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns.” Superheroes and Philosophy: Truth, Justics, and the Socratic Way. Eds. Tom Morris and Matt Morris. Chicago: Open Court, 2005. 29-42.

Tyree, J. M. “American Heroes: On Frivolity and Horror in 2008's Summer Superhero Movies: The Dark Knight, The Incredible Hulk, and Iron Man.” Film Quarterly 62 (2009): 28-34.

Wanzo, Rebecca. “The Superhero: Meditations on Surveillance, Salvation, and Desire.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6 (2009): 93-97.

Watchmen. Dir. Zack Snyder. Warner Bros Pictures and Paramount Pictures, 2009.

White, Mark D. “The Virtues of Nite Owl's Potbelly.” Watchmen and Philosophy. Ed. Mark D. White. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2009. 79-90.

Wolf-Meyer, Matthew. “The World Ozymandias Made: Utopias in the Superhero Comic, Subculture, and the Conservation of Difference.” Journal of Popular Culture 36 (2003): 497-517.

Dialog vs. Social Construction

I've been wrestling over the difference between Bakhtin's idea of meaning being dialogic contra Foucault and other french postmodernists idea of meaning as being cultural/linguistic. While both views establish a very high degree of ambiguity and play, Bakhtin's seems to leave a lto more room for human agency. People in dialog create meaning, rather than just playing out the meaning structures of their cultural-linguistic system. So, part of me wants to agree with Bakhtin, finding his view more hopeful. On the other hand, I'm left feeling that the Foucaultian analysis is more accurate when it comes to contemporary western culture and society. I don't have any real answer to this problem. While the differences may seem to be minutae, they imply significantly different outcomes when extrapolated out to a social level. Moreover, Foucault's analysis provides for better understanding of social cohesion than Bakhtin's. The dialogic understanding, rooted as it is in person to person conversation fails to really provide a lot of understanding of mediated culture, particularly of mediated culture where the primary messages are ideological and designed to slip in without any dialogic engagement.

Normative Rhetoric

I was struck by how the rise of and eventual preeminence of teaching grammar in rhetoric-composition classes is a fascinating and logical conclusion of a history of normative theories in rhetoric. Going back to Cicero, much of the emphasis in rhetorical theory has been about making people better at using rhetoric rather then theorizing how or why rhetoric works. In many ways, grammar seems to me to be the logical conclusion of this. If we conceive of the purpose of a rhetoric class as being to get people to write better (since writing by the end of the 19th had eclipsed speaking in primacy) and we look at students and see the primary problem as being terrible grammar, then its only logical to make the teaching of grammar central. In this way, normative rhetoric contributed to the demise of rhetoric as a whole.

Nostalgia

So I was reading through the Rose article put here on webct fo us to read for tonight, and I was struck by something. Nostalgia seems to be one of the dominant rhetorical techniques in our talk of education, particularly when we talk about how education is failing. There's a blind yearning for the good old days, in which education meant something, students could read and write, and all the rest. Rose pointed out very accurately that this same argument has been going on for more than a century in this country, all the while more and more people are attending and graduating from college.

The good old days never really existed, they've just become a rhetorical strategy to use when arguing for changing something in education. Not just in education either, so much of social policy is filled with arguments of nostalgia. Nostalgia is essentially a conservative argument, yearning for the past rather than striving for the future. This is interesting in the broader concept of rhetoric from a traditional perspective. A traditional perspective, from the classical through the modern has been that the purpose of rhetoric is to change things for the better. How do we rectify this greater purpose aiming for the future with the prevalence and power of looking to the past as a technique?

Enlightenment Rhetoric

Locke and Hume, following along from Ramus and Bacon have a Platonic grounding in knowledge. There is truth and knowledge (in the classical definition of a factually true justified belief) available to us. We also understand that language can be used to depict things in multiple fashions, and speak of things we believe to be completely false. From this epistemic grounding then, it seems only natural to disparage language as potentially serving to mislead us and present the false as true. What's troubling for me, is that this is epistemologically a very simplistic approach. It ignores the lessons of Descartes' and all of skeptical philosophy. Not only is language potentially distorting, but our sense and thoughts are also potentially distorting. There's a reason that Descartes' strict reasoning concludes that the only thing he can know for certain is that he exists. His reasoning to accept other knowledge claims is largely faulty, being based on religions principles rather than his own logical method. The real problem it seem to me with the whole cartesian paradigm is even more basic though. It's the assumption that the only knwoledge that we can possible have is when we have certainty. This creates a false dichotomy, where we are forced to throw out as counting as knowledge anything for which we lack logical certitude.

Vico, by contrast, questions the entire Cartesian knowledge paradigm. It's not just that the cartesian method is bad, but the underlying assumptions about it are bad. Vico is basing his assumptions in Protagorean thinking, "man is the measure of all things." From this, it naturally follows more acceptance of uncertainty and probability. The distinction here is grounded in what is worth knowing. For Descartes' and his inheritors it is only worth knowing those things that can be known with certainty. This largely rules out a lot of knowledge of the human condition and of human life. vico Protagorean, humanistic grounding is concerned with knowing about the human condition and human life. From this perspective, it's only natural that there is a measure of tolerance and acceptance of uncertainty. After all, human beings are flawed and we do lack certainty in so very many things.

From Primary to Secondary Rhetoric

I noticed in particular a transition in the readings, particularly between Cicero and Longinus isn the question of what role rhetoric plays. For Cicero, there's still a very Aristotelian view of rhetoric, with a role in both the courts,assembly and ceremonial speech, as well as potentially even expanding the view of rhetoric to include other areas. While this seems to be the prevailing view in Cicero, taking Crassus to be Cicero's mouthpiece in the dialogue, its not the only view. Antonius presents a more limited view, emphasizing rhetoric's primacy as being in the courts above other areas. Cicero seems to be wrestling with questions as to what role rhetoric plays in society. Is it useful for making change in the direction of society, or is it just about the past. This is in keeping with the times in which he lived, the tail end of the Roman republic and the rise of Julius Ceasar. Soon enough, the republic would see its end with the rise of empire, and the practical role of rhetoric in Rome's albeit limited democracy would be even more greatly diminished. History seems to have proven Cicero to be the loser, for all his skill at oratory, events conspired to lessen the impact of rhetoric in society. Longinus, or whoever actually wrote "On the Sublime", is the aftermath of this. Rhetoric has been reduces to mere persuasion, logic and argument are largely missing, or at least greatly lessened in importance. Instead, we have the triumph of style and eloquence. The primacy of rhetoric in making real change in society is all but gone. Absent a political reality reality facilitating an importance in persuading people to vote for or against something in an assembly or other body, rhetoric seems to have withered. Rhetoric may have great influence, but before the wake of changing reality largely implemented as a result of martial power, it withered in Rome. The art can flourished during the golden age of Athenian democracy has been transformed to stule and eloquence as a result of the rise of empire. Logic, reason and argument have all but vanished in emphasis in rhetoric in Longinus work, making it easy to see how they continued to be absent from rhetoric in the centuries to come.

Aristotle's Assumption

Aristotle makes a fair number of assumptions in his Rhetoric, and those assumptions are primarily the things I have questions on.

He assumes that the true or just will always be more persuasive than the false or unjust. While I like this belief because it gives a real value to rhetoric, I find it difficult to believe sometimes. People seem to ascribe to a lot of beliefs that seems false or unjust. They make arguments in defense of these beliefs, and often seem to have great success in making them. Is this really explanable as a situation that people articulating arguments in support of the true or just are just making really bad arguments? Mein Kampf makes arguments that seem at the very least unjust to most people today, and yet, when it was written, many people were persuaded. Was no one making any half way decent arguments against this in Germany prior to the Nazi's taking power?

One assumption that I easily agree with is that no one admits that their arguments are for the more harmful as opposed to less harmful, that they are arguing for the worse instead of the better situation or case. Whether they believe that their argument will create more harm than good is not whats important. What is important is that to persuade, they need to appear to be arguing for less harm, for the better case.

The psychological assumptions based on what kinds of emotional appeal to use for an audience on what particular age and gender appear to be overgeneralized to me. They might be useful as a methodological starting point in framing an argument, but they don't seem to be a great place to begin a psychological understanding of people.

I (along with I suspect many others) question as to whether logical arguments are really the most persuasive. Having said that, I do think is basic frame work is right, the available proofs really do boil down to logical, emotional and ethical/character based. What I think needs to be expanded upon is logical proofs. Far too often, premises in a logical argument are not based on being necessarily or probabilistically true. Instead, they seem to just be based on ideology or mythology. People accept articulated or inarticulated premises based on ideology far too readily, even in the face of evidence to the contrary. This I think is where Aristotle is lacking. His logical proofs don't really seem to acknowledge that people can and will ascribe to false premises on an ideological basis.

On Radical Feminism and Composition

In some ways, I found Rhodes' argument appealing. More scholarship is almost always a good thing, So its probably a worthwhile goal to try and look at radical feminism when thinking about the relationship between feminism and composition studies.

I can't speak to the claim that radical feminism has been left out of the recieved history of composition studies. From my experience through my years of education though, I've had no lack of exposure to the ideas of radical feminism. I remember being taught Cixous back in hich school, and all of my courses in feminism have looked at radical feminism as an aspect of second wave feminism both in the U.S. and abroad. Feminism, from my experience, is well aware of this part of its history, and is in many ways still grappling with the issues raised therein.

I'll return to Rhodes though. She holds up the Redstockings Manifesto written in 1969 as an example of the type of radical feminist discourse that should be looked at and incorporated. Not being familiar with this particular text, I decided I'd find a copy for myself.

Rhodes is critical of the critique that radical feminism is universalizing and essentializing. She argues that we should look deeper at these texts. My problem is, the Redstockings Manifesto, held up by Rhodes as an exemplar of the kind of texts she is talking about is universalizing and essentializing. From tenet 3 of the Redstockings Manifesto, "All men have oppressed women." That doesn't leave much room for individual distinctions or difference. Its a very straightforward, universl declaration. How is it not to be read and essentializing and universalizing? It's a simple statement, designed to elicit a response. Or how about Andrea Dworkin who states in her book Intercourse, "Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men's contempt for women."

So, by all means, lets be conscious and aware of the past, of what has been written and said. Let's look to radical feminism, and incorporate and learn from it. But let's not dismiss the critiques of it as ill founded or unjustified. Yes, radical feminism offers an example of political discourse written by women, on a particular issue and cause. Yes, there are likely ideas worth incorporating. It is also a problematic aspect of feminism, one that hs provoked as much debate within the feminist movement as it has outside.

Socrates the failed sophist?

Aah Socrates, you tried really hard, but in the end, you were a failure. For all of your arguments, no one is persuaded. You try to teach, and yet none of the potential students seem to learn what you have to say. Maybe thats why you come across as bitter.

Socrates spent his life teaching people using argument, but in the end, he was largely a failure. Even Plato largely failed at the pursuit, and it wouldn't be until imperial Rome that he was pulled out of the dust and raised up the lofty heights he is today.

Gorgias, for all his apparent reputation for wisdom and instruction really isn't much better. He fails to make a good case for just what it is he teaches. Or maybe its just Plato writing Gorgias as a bumbling failure. Gorgias own words in the Encomium to Helen make a better case as to what it is he's teaching and why its valuable.

How can we blame Helen for her infidelity and starting a war if she was seduced by pretty speech any more than we can if it was fate that she determined her actions; or if she was raped and kidnapped by Paris. Under the latter two circumstances, certainly she'd be forgiven. Why then, under the former, is she not to be forgiven? Does speech not have the power to change one's mind? Either persuasion is possible and people can be moved

to action by the power of speech, or there's not an argument to be had at all.

Yet, the argument has been going on for thousands of years, the same argument that Socrates has with his various interlocutors. They (particularly Gorgias) make the case through argument that speech is powerful and persuasion is indeed possible. Socrates makes an argument that speech is powerless, and no real persuasion is possible. But this doesn't make any sense at all, how can he even make his case if speech is powerless?

If appearances have no bearing whatsoever on truth, then speech has no bearing on truth. But if speech has no bearing whatsoever on truth, then speech cannot deceive. If speech cannot deceive, and people can't be moved to belief things that are false through the power of speech it is equally impossible for speech to move people to acknowledge that which is true. So, Socrates, in making his argument against Gorgias undermines himself just as successfully as he does Gorgias. Both men are blind and unable to see

truth. Socrates acknowledges that he can't see more that shadows on the wall, but insists there is something more. Gorgias insists that the shadows are all there is. But if our senses only reveal the shadows to us, then what we're left with is the mind. What is the mind if not reason and language? These tools might get one to the truth, or they might not. Even if they did, there wouldn't be a means of independent verification.

As tempted as I am to go with Gorgias for acknowledging the primacy of appearances over truth, he goes too far. I prefer Isocrates approach, to acknowledge the problem of truth, and to change the argument. The argument isn't whether or not there is truth to be known or whether speech can bring us the truth. The argument is what to do with what we have. We have language, we can speak to change the minds of others. What are we to do

with this faculty? Try to develop sound judgement in ourselves and others to make better decisions in our eminently complicated lives. Sometimes we may fail, and it could all be for nought, but this is all we have, so we do what we can.

Dialogue on Three World Views

Tony: Well Bruce, Walter, how did this lifestyle choice of ours work out for each of you? For me, I question now whether it was all worthwhile. Did I make a difference, did I really change things, or did I just spin my wheels and attract a lot of attention. The problems seem to still be there, just as insurmountable looking down now as there were when I started.

Walter: Nothing ever changes, the broken washing machine of the world jerkily spins into oblivion. Our lives were short and stank of rotten fruit drenched in dog urine. Still, we chose to make our stands in our own way. Of course, the two of you compromised, and undermined your own choice.

Tony: How can you say that? I know the world has problems, but I have to believe that we made things a little better in our own way. Maybe I didn't get to save the world as I set out to do, but at least a few people get to sleep better at night without the fear of men with guns coming for them.

Walter: Do you really believe that? Do you really believe that a few deluded souls sleeping better makes a difference? Stop thinking just about what you did and look at the big picture. The world is still messed up. Nations still go to war and the people get crushed beneath their weight. Those same nations rise and fall wwith the course of history, but still thing remain the same. Its all empty and meaningless.

Tony: Bruce, help me out here. You can't believe this deranged psychopath is right. We struggled to make things better. The world may not be fixed, but its a little better for our having been there.

Bruce: Oh Tony, you never did understand what my fight was about. I never fought to save the world. I fought to save myself. It took a lifetime to admit it, but it was about me all along. I never really managed to admit it to myself in life, but now that I'm dead, I can accept it. It wasn't about the world, or even really about other people. I don't know if the world deserved saving, though I tried to tell myself it did. I don't know if people deserved a second chance, but I tried to give them one, no matter how despicable I found them.

Walter: Come a little further Bruce, you're almost there.

Bruce: I'm not an obsessive deranged psychopath like you Walter. As I said, I may have been doing it all for myself, but I was doing it for a reason. You never had a reason. You were an animal, you never acted, you just moved. You were presented with stimuli and responded accordingly. I may have acted out of a selfish desire to give meaning to my own life, but I chose and I acted.

Walter: That's where your wrong. We're all just animals, some more delusional than others. You both know I was right all along. There was never any meaning to anything; never any purpose. We all just responded to stimuli and acted out based on circumstance. The bells chimed like good little lapdogs, we salivated and came for dinner. When we didn't get dinner enough times, we started to fight. Then, when the bells chimed, we tore the world to shreds. The difference is, I accepted that I was doing so. I didn't try to find false meaning in the world, try to offer hope to the hopeless. I stared into the abyss and let it stare back into me. So of course I never compromised, that was how I'd been conditioned to respond.

Bruce: Wrong, you made moral choices, just as we each did. I may have acted to give meaning to my own pathetic life, selfish I know, but I could have acted differently. I could have allowed the world to disintegrate into flames around me. I could have taken pleasure in watching the world burn. Instead I chose to try and stop the flood. The reasons may have been selfish, but in that selfishness, I realized meaning.

Walter: Really Bruce? Did you really find meaning? Guess what, the world did burn, and you did stand by and watch. There's really nothing to be upset about, you couldn't stop it any more than I could have.

Tony: Walter, admit it, you acted morally. You may have acted in a fashion more extreme than Bruce or I, but you still were never as bad others.

Walter: I broke a mans wrist to make him talk, and learned what he had for breakfast. I killed a man to threatened me long after he was no threat. I stood by and did nothing as people were dying around me.

Tony: You said it yourself, you couldn't stop everything. You did what you could, it may have been on a small scale, but you stopped people worse than you ever were.

Walter: The world still burned, and I along with it. Everyone I killed, everyone I supposedly saved where are they now? There are right here with us, dead. Their world burned and now they too know the truth. This is all there ever was. Nothing. No heaven, no pearly gates. No cycle of reincarnation. No hell fiery or frozen. No seventy two virgins waiting for us. Nothing whatsoever. This isn't the abyss, the world is the abyss. Its just that now we aren't distracted by all the whores and politicians on television.

Bruce: This may be all there is now, but there was something, something worth fighting for in our brief lives. We all were worth fighting for, good or bad. Each and every one of us is an individual, with a meaningful life to lead in a meaningless world. Thats the secret, the world may be meaningless, but we find meaning in our own lives.

Walter: Just your greed talking there Bruce. You always had everything, of course you believe your life was worthwhile. You never good give it up, just as you can't now. Look around you, what has the meaning you found in your life gotten here. You left here arguing with a dog like me. This isn't a waiting area, no one is coming to redeem you and offer you anything else. This is all there is, nothingness. No past, no future, and eternally meaningless present. The joke was on all of us, even me. I thought I chose to act how I did, but I've realized I was wrong. I never acted any more than anyone else.

Bruce: Tony, you started this argument with this psychopath, why won't you say something now?

Tony: Because he's right. I filled my life with things, objects for whatever I wanted. Entertainment, there was an object for that. Saving lives, there was an object for that. While you two argued, I've been thinking. In finding meaning in objects, I became an object. People were just objects. It may have been easier at the time than laughing at the joke, but it was just a delusional method of coping with the meaningless of everything. If all I was was my toys, then there never really was any meaning.

Bruce: But you chose, you designed the machines and used them.

Tony: I was a machine. Input in, motion out. I wasn't a man, a man chooses. I was a computer. A dog as Walter says.

Walter: Well Bruce, hows your selfishness doing for you now? Any great realizations, any grand meanings to provide us with?

Bruce: Live a life worth living. That my only insight. Tony lived a life worth living, even if he doubts himself now. I lived a life worth living, and I don't doubt that.

Walter: Yet here you both are with me. If life was worth living, why would you be here amongst dogs? I tell you why one more time. No meaning, objects in motion. Not men acting, animals responding. Tony found meaning in objects, but objects don't have any meaning. You, you tried to find meaning in yourself. It's a more pesky and annoying delusion, harder to dispel. No reason to do so any longer. No reason for argument, no reason for anything. This is all there ever was. World is a good joke, everyone laughs. World ends, good joke, everyone laughs. Didn't get joke then, get joke now.