Hello, and welcome to the first of a series of posts around topics in life narratives. For this week I’d like to start by saying my ideas came from a note in “Genre as Social Action” made by Miller through David Kaufer (a linguist from what I can gather), and it reminded me of other theorists I have studied. The statement in question is that the stock body of rhetorical knowledge of Classical Greeks was much more small and stable than ours is (158). I think the point is brought up mainly to illustrate how studying the “typical uses and forms of rhetoric [tells] us about the character and culture of an historical period (158), which I think is something we can all agree on. But then Miller goes on to say (through Burke) that in comparison to the Greeks, “ours is an age of ‘marked instability’” and that because of a “wealth of information and a dearth of shared knowledge” we don’t know how to engage with one another in forms of cultural discourse (158). This explanation for an age of “marked instability” seemed vague to me. Why was the mid twentieth century an unstable period?

We can reframe the previous question by asking another one: what is the fundamental difference between Greek society and Western society in the 20th century? Orality and Literacy – or at least that’s what Marshall McLuhan would say. He was a Media Theorist whose ideas I briefly studied last year (in a class taught by Richard Cavell) and who I believe has something to say on Genre Theory. Who was Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980)? He was a Canadian, Toronto scholar whose life work focused on how mass media have created wide spread change in human behavior and social behavior throughout the last century and a half (0:00 – 2:30 of video) It’s in his first book The Gutenburg Galaxy where he studies the differences between oral cultures and print based cultures. His thesis as a media theorist is ultimately this – the medium through which information is exchanged not only profoundly effects that information (the content, substance, rhetoric, and the higher levels of meanings of form and substance) but also our ways of knowing and being: “the medium is the message.” 

What exactly is a medium? To continue the comparison between oral and print cultures, the medium of communication in an oral culture would be air and the vibrations of our voice carried through our physical bodies. In a print culture, it would be paper, pen, and the distribution of text through the printing press. An example of how these mediums have affected society is to make the generalization that the oral nature of Greek society made their culture more centered around community (since oral communication relies on a real-time exchange between rhetor and audience) as opposed to print society in which privacy (to read and write of without disruption) became necessary in order to engage in civil discourse. Mediums shape our societies and who we are in relation to them.

With this in mind, “the medium is the message” suggests that our mediums of communication not only have a dynamic, active role in shaping discourse, but that they themselves material environments and create material effects.

Miller defines recurrent rhetorical situations as fundamentally social and subjective. Recurrence is a social occurrence, “a social [construct] that [is] the result of definition” and interpretation (156). This is what leads to the creation of types which then becomes the stock body of knowledge of a given culture (156). This conceptualization of recurrent rhetorical situations eliminates the possibility of a materialist perspective; or that any given objective, factual, or external forces have influence on the creation of these types. However the mediums through which we communicate have a profound influence on how we perceive the world, given that they create environments. As such, mediums of communication are an encompassing substance, or the historical context that the discourse takes shape in.

McLuhan has a lot of really interesting things to say about our mediums and how they shape our identity  which, for obvious reasons, I can’t go into at this point in time. For now, there are many more videos to view if you click on the individual headings. In the mean time, here’s something that I think speaks to McLuhan’s own feelings of exigency in relation to his work as a theorist.