Burke (Wordman) says, "Imagine that you enter a parlor..."

Jester_Guest .o O(is he going to say that evertime we come in?)

Tuman (WP 90) says, "It is in the vibrant crowd, the practices of the people themselves -- notably their rowdy carnivals --that Bahktin locates what he calls internally persuasive discourse,, language that is..."

Bahktin (speaking for himself) says, "...denied all privilege, backed by no authority at all...

Tuman parenthesizes, "..religious, political, moral; the word of a father, of adults and teachers, etc."

Bahktin (speaking for himself) says, "and is frequently not even acknowledged in society (not by public opinion, nor by scholarly norms, nor by criticism), not even in the legal code." 342

Beckster (glowing) says, "`Characters' play with gender and power roles in the carnival of the net."

Tuman (WP) says, "Such discourse, critics of print literacy claim, has too often been suppressed in the language classroom as well as in society generally. As in society itself, what is most vital and compelling in social discourse has been suppressed by what Bahktin calls authoritative discourse, or language that we are asked to accept because of the status of those who speak it."

Bahktin says, "The authoritative word demands that we acknowledge it, that we make it our own...[it] is located in a distanced zone, organically connected with a past that is felt to be hierarchically higher. It is, so to speak, the word of the fathers."

Lacan (Eat your Dasein) says, "The nom du pere."

TL (Da Lawd) says, "KB and Foucault had a similar discussion."

Lanham (electronic 37) says, "The most revered and central function of the literary canon is to transmit the canonical wisdom found quintessentially in the proverb. Burke deliberately calls that tradition into question, breaking the "literacy compact" by introducing visual patterns and typographical allegories to suggest that proverbial wisdom never comes into the world purely transparent and disembodied, totally serious, unconditioned by game and play, by the gross physicality of its display."

Jester_Guest holds up a big sign:

    +-------------------------------------------------------+
    |                                                       |
    |	How do we define community? Is it local? Global?    |
    |	Have our perceptions about community changed with   |
    |	with the advent of computer mediated rhetoric?      |
    |                                                       |
    +-------------------------------------------------------+

Bizzell says, "In the absence of consensus, let me offer a tentative definition: a `discourse community' is a group of people who share certain language-using practices. These practices can be seen as conventionalized in two ways. Stylistic conventions regulate social interactions both within the group and in its dealings with outsiders; to this extent "discourse community" borrows from the sociolinguistic concept of 'speech community.'"

Williams (Red ain't Dead) says, "..if we come to say that society is composed of a large number of social practices which form a concrete social whole, and if we give to each practice a certain specific recognition, adding only that they interact, relate, and combine in very complicated ways, we are at one level much more obviously talking about reality, but we are at another level withdrawing from the claim that there is any process of determination." (381)

Burke (Wordman) says, "Marxism has many faults, the most obvious being that it is a poor critique of Marxism" 42

Williams (Red ain't Dead) says, "Intention, the notion of intention, restores the key question, or rather the key emphasis."

Bizzell says, "Also, canonical knowledge regulates the world views of group members, how they interpret experience; to this extent, "discourse community' borrows from the literary-critical comcept of 'interpretive community`."

Burke (Wordman) says, "But, like the German philosophy, English economics and French politics from which it sprang, it also has many virtues. And it can be wholly rejected only at great sacrifice of intelligence ( a sacrifice which many of our colleagues seem quite willing to make. 42

Williams (Red ain't Dead) says, "..intentions, by which we define the society, intentions which in all our experience have been the rule of a particular class."

Bizzell says, "The key term 'discourse' suggests a community bound together primarily by its uses of language, although bound perhaps by other ties as well, geographical, socioeconomic, ethnic, professional, and so on." 222

Bizzell muses, "This tentaive definition of `discourse community' will not, I suspect, provide an infallible test for determining whether a given social group constitutes a discourse community."

Williams says, "We have to break from the common procedure of isolating the object and then discovering its components."

Williams says, "We have to discover the nature of a practice and then its conditions." 389

Jester_Guest holds up another small sign:

+---------------------------------------------------+
|  Is there a revolution or just more of the same?  |
+---------------------------------------------------+

Williams (Red ain't Dead) says, "This implies no presumption about its value."

Bizzell says, "But we need to go further toward acknowledging that discourse community membership implicates people in interpretive activities."

Williams (Red ain't Dead) says, "All that I am saying is that it is central."

Burke (Wordman) says, "Thus, since Marxism is much concerned with the relationship between a literary work and the nonliterary context from which it arose, Formalism sets up antithetical demands not only that such considerations be excluded from the special field of poetics, (or, more commonly Aesthetics), but also that speculation about texts be ruled out entirely, as questions unfit for discussion under any circumstances" LASA 42

Lanham (Electronic) says, "We are still bemused by three hundred years of Newtonian simplification that made "rhetoric" a dirty word, but we are beginning to outgrow it" (EW 51)

Jester_Guest holds up a small sign:

+--------------------------------------------+
|  Are we in the midst of a paradigm shift?  |
+--------------------------------------------+

Jester_Guest wonders if rhetoric is then promulgated as the center of all?

Bizzell says, "To take the next step in our rhetorical turn, we will have to be more forthright about the ideologies we support as well as those we attack, and we will have to articulate a positve program legitimated by an authority that is nevertheless nonfoundational." 271 Lanham says, "It is almost as if the university's structure has been invented specifically to deny a place for this vital conversation to occur. An extremely thoughtful Research Grants brochure issued by the Council on Library Resources points to the problem." 135

Lanham passes around the brochure:

+--------------------------------------------+
|       THIS IS THE BROCHURE, REALLY         |
|                                            |
|   Despite many claims and assertions,      |
|   the information structure of the future  |
|   has not yet taken shape, but the pace    |
|   of change is such that it is imperitive  |
|   that `architects' of great skill, who    |
|   are concerned with the well being of     |
|   universities, scholarships, and          |
|   libraries, go to work with some sense    |
|   of coordination before a structure is    |
|   imposed by default.                      |
|                                            |
+--------------------------------------------+

Are notions of "reality" all that important to the conversation at hand? 
How important is the binary opposition of RL and VR? Does this particular 
binary point to any long standing notions of "reality?" Why are we always 
so engrossed with the "real"? 

Cherny says, "Identity-shift, even to nonhuman or abstract discourse entities, is commonplace in the course of playful conversation in a MUD. Even in nonplayful conversation, the user is subjected to the split identity of being physical and corporeal at a terminal, and being an entity of code which can be manipulated by herself or other characters. Some manipulations are amusing, part of collaborative fun; others are more sinister, and raise profound questions about the ethics surrounding construction and use of bodies and the identification of the location for agency in interactive spaces. The self is constantly in question and open to redefinition in such an environment, even through the narrow bandwidth of text, and this experience may be exhilarating or terrifying."

Cherny says, "Identities forced on a user by another user with spoofs or scripts disrupt the usual casual identification of a character and her typist.

Cherny says, " As the identification between code and typist decreases, so does the sense of responsibility and accountability that ones assigns to others in the virtual environment, making the establishment of community norms of behavior less likely. "

Cherny says, " Although play with identity will always be an important part of a virtual system, transparent agency should be a built-in component as well; users should be able to rewrite their own character signifiers in whatever manner they like, but should not be allowed to manipulate other characters as if they were puppets."

Shaughnessy (whuggling errors) says, But when we move out of the centuries and into Monday morning, into the life of the young man or woman sitting in a BW class, our linguistic contemplations are likely to hover over a more immediate reality -- namely, the fact that a person who does not control the dominant code of literacy in a society that generates more writing than any society in history is likely to be pitched against more obstacles than are apparent to those who have already mastered the code" (EE 12).

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