Of puppeteers and midwives

At the risk of focusing on a very small piece of this week's readings (and sidestepping the theme of the week), I'd like to discuss Lunsford & Ede's quotation of Lawrence Rosenfield in chapter 16. I couldn't resist making some connections that are self-serving in my own research.They use Rosenfield's work to argue that misreadings of Aristotelian rhetoric have caused misrepresentations of classical rhetoric, and thereby constructing misinformed new rhetorics. Rosenfield's article, according to Lundsford & Ede, "explores the relationship between Aristotle's concept of process, or 'the way in which an object acquires characteristics or properties,' and his concept of animism. Basic to Rosenfield's argument is his assertion that 'the essential contrubution of the concept of animism to Aristotle's notion of process is that of dynamic interaction between an agent and an object undergoing change'" (265).

An agent and an object, eh? Now to a Latourian, this animism (attributing a "soul" to a nonhuman) might be interesting, but I want to go in a slightly different direction here.

Most interestingly, Rosenfield questions the role of the communicator (or rhetor, or composer, or author) according to Aristotle as more akin to a mid-wife than a puppeteer. In other words, Rosenfield interprets Aristotelian rhetoric as embracing dialogic rather than sheer manipulation. This is interesting as we continue to consider the role and nature of the author, especially in an author's relationship to her audience, medium, and context.

Brian Eno recently gave a talk about composers of music being more analogous to gardeners than architects, which seems to echo Rosenfield's argument and illustration. Eno describes the two authorship paradigms in music as

"An architect, at least in the traditional sense, is somebody who has an in-detail concept of the final result in their head, and their task is to control the rest of nature sufficiently to get that built.  Nature being things like bricks and sites and builders and so on.  Everything outside has to be subject to an effort of control...

A gardener doesn't really work like that... I suppose my feeling about gardening, and I suppose most people's feeling about gardening now, is that what one is doing is working in collaboration with the complex and unpredictable processes of nature.  And trying to insert into that some inputs that will take advantage of those processes, and as Stafford Beers said, take you in the direction that you wanted to go."

It is refreshing to this Latourian that people, from Eno to Aristotle, have all along been thinking about authorship as an event that places composers not in dominion over ideas, tools, and would-be collaborators, but rather places them in relationship with them, or perhaps part of the ecology of authorship. To me, this is how Latour and ANT can (and in many ways has) emerge as a valuable tool in exploring authorship and composition, from electronic music to FYC courses. While ANT continues to draw criticism in the humanities for it's decentralization of the human and seeming abandonment of value systems, there are ways to circumvent these concerns, notably by a rediscovery of the awe in ecologies, the genius in the unplanned, and the creative in the collective.

A possible model of such a rediscovery exists in John Angus Campbell's 1974 article Charles Darwin and the Crisis of Ecology: A Rhetorical Perspective, in which he argues that The Origin of Species was not a nihilistic, anti-humanist, awe-abandoning work, but rather that it was a "moral and humane response to the competition and violence in nature" (444). Further, Campbell argues that Darwin "retains an attitude of wonder and awe" but that these feelings are not attributed to a God, rather to the natural phenomena themselves (445).

And so I beg a few questions:

If the romantic author is dead (Barthes) in a similar way that God is dead (Nietzsche), that is to say that both constructions of authority and divinity are obsolete, can we retain a sense of wonder, awe, and even genius in the production of art? How can we talk about that as scholars and as teachers?

Are we gardeners or architects? Mid-wives or puppeteers? What do we do? What do we teach? And why the metaphors? Are they useful? Important? What other metaphors can we generate?