GOOD CHARACTER

 

Cicero – De Oratore

 

In De Oratore, Cicero offers some tips to speakers. Of course, Cicero’s focus here is public speaking. However, if we consider the selfie as a form of public speaking, how would we react to Cicero’s advice? Please reflect on the following tips Cicero offers, providing examples that can be related to the composition of a selfie. As an important caveat, I am asking you to describe both what happens in a selfie and how things should be.

 

• Exposition demands both knowledge and style.

• The orator must know the facts.

• The orator, like the poet, needs a wide education.

• The speaker must himself feel the emotions he wishes to excite.

 

Quintilian – Institutes of Oratory

 

Most originally, Quintilian in Institutes of Oratory claims that “a great orator must be a good man.” Some characteristics of a good person that Quintilian offers are: to love wisdom, to be temperate, to control passions, to speak the truth, to have virtuous inclinations, among others. If we applied Quintilian’s precepts to the composition of the selfie, would you agree that a great selfie composer must be a good person? In answering this question, think about what it means to be a great composer in the context of selfies, and what a good person is, for you.

 

PERSUASION

 

Isocrates – Antidosis

 

In Antidosis, Isocrates argues that the orator’s morality, either embodied or imitated, is the best tool to persuade an audience. The orator’s actions are, in the end, the orator’s best argument. Isocrates says that “the stronger a man’s desire to persuade his hearers, the more zealously will he strive to be honorable and to have esteem of his fellow-citizens.” Do you agree with this sentence in the context of the selfie? Do you think selfies are a way for people to seek the esteem of other people? Isocrates’ focus, of course, is oratory—the art of public speech. How would Isocrates write an Antidosis for the 21st century?

 

Aristotle – Rhetoric

 

In Book I, Aristotle sets up the theory of rhetorical discourses: forensic discourse, which focuses on past actions; deliberative discourse, which shapes future actions; and epideictic discourse, which praises or blames someone’s character in present instances. In Book II, Aristotle delves deeper into ethical and pathetical appeals—the most direct way an orator has to emotionally move an audience.

 

In Book I, Aristotle says that “Persuasion is achieved by the speaker’s personal character when the speech is so spoken as to make us think him credible. We believe good men more fully and more readily than others […]. This kind of persuasion, like the others, should be achieved by what the speaker says, not by what people think of his character before he begins to speak.” For our purposes, ‘what the speaker says’ could be interpreted as ‘what the subject does in a selfie.’ In your opinion based on reading Aristotle, what kind of actions would Aristotle approve of as acceptable in a selfie? Why?

 

In Book II, Aristotle spends a great deal talking about young people, and how their nature can affect their actions. In this respect, he states: “Young men have strong passions, and tend to gratify them indiscriminately. Of the bodily desires, it is the sexual by which they are most swayed and in which they show absence of control. They are changeable and fickle in their desires, which are violent while last, but quickly over […]. They are hot-tempered and quick tempered, and apt to give way to their anger.” Do you think Aristotle would change his description of ‘young men’ and ‘hot temper’ if he were to write about selfies? Or, based on Aristotle’s quote, what are some of the actions he would argue against, if young people performed those actions in a selfie?

 

IDENTIFICATION

 

Kenneth Burke – A Rhetoric of Motives

 

In A Rhetoric of Motives, Burke comes up with three principles for identification: when author and audience feel consubstantial, i.e. when author and audience are substantially one; when the community created by the author/audience differs from other communities, i.e. when we realize that there are different communities; and when the author’s belonging to a community is based on desire rather than practice, i.e. the community is imagined rather than real.

 

In particular, Burke suggests that “we might well keep in mind that a speaker persuades an audience by the use of stylistic identifications; his act of persuasion may be for the purposes of causing the audience to identify itself with the speaker’s interests; and the speaker draws on identification of interests to establish a rapport between himself and his audience. […] However, the resources of identification whereby a sense of consubstantiality is symbolically established between beings of unequal status may extend far into the realm of the idealistic.”

 

Applying Burke’s principles to the selfie, and considering your identity as a point of departure, what are some “symbols” that might create consubstantiality between you and the audience? How do those symbols create separation? What is the desire behind those symbols?

 

DISCURSIVE FORMATION

 

Michel Foucault – The Archaeology of Knowledge

 

Foucault asks a simple question, but one that calls for a very complex answer: When knowledge is produced in the form of discourse, who exactly is speaking? He implies that discourse does not originate with the speaking subject, but rather discourse “disperses” the speaking subject. A discursive practice, that is, is always affected by what lies “outside” the speaking subject. If we consider selfies, what lies outside the speaking subject?

 

In particular, please provide your reflections on these three quotes, focusing on how the selfie creates a particular discourse involving the person who takes the selfie. Further, consider your reflections as a way to address issues of character presentation.

 

• Whenever one can describe, between a number of statements, such a system of dispersion, whenever, between objects, types of statement, concepts, or thematic choices, one can define a regularity (an order, correlations, positions and functionings, transformations), we will say, for the sake of convenience, that we are dealing with a discursive formation—thus avoiding words that are already overladen with conditions and consequences, and in any case inadequate to the task of designating such a dispersion, such as “science,” “ideology,” “theory,” or “domain of objectivity.”

 

Discursive formations: what are the “dispersions” of the selfie? What “regularity” can we see?

 

• We sought the unity of discourse in the objects themselves, in their distribution, in the interplay of their differences, in their proximity or distance—in short, in what is given to the speaking subject; and, in the end, we are sent back to a setting-up of relations that characterizes discursive practice itself; and what we discover is neither a configuration, nor a form, but a group of rules that are immanent in a practice, and define it in its specificity.

 

Discursive formations: what are the “rules” between an object and a subject in a selfie? How can an object say something about a subject?

 

• Of course, discourses are composed of signs; but what they do is more than use these signs to designate things. It is this more that renders them irreducible to the language and to speech. It is this “more” that we must reveal and describe.

 

Discursive formation: what is the “more” that the relationship between subjects and objects evokes?