Language under the microscope.... the environment of the mind.... something equally fitting for a 10:45pm post-Beale posting

This may have to be a place-holder post, something that I come back to tomorrow when the clutter in my brain has settled out a little more, but for now, I'm content to ramble (in the manner of Annie Dillard) toward a point that I may, or may not reach.

According to Beale's (useful, overly complex) taxonomy, the Discourse Hierarchy, how can I classify the above sentence (or, rather, this entire blog posting?)

1) I think the first sentence begins discursively--it calls attention to the text itself ("This"), assuming (presenting the fiction of) a common present between my writing it and your reading of it. The discursive strategy "focuses attention upon a present time coincident with the convergence of reader and text" and creates (for the reader) the illusion of "being spoken to directly in a present situation" (Beale, 37).

2) Nevertheless, it plays with time, thus confusing the issue somewhat, because assuming that you read this in the time that is my tomorrow, it will be your today, and the time referents I've supplied will no longer make sense--they won't be, as it were, invisible. Instead, they will stick out. They will be conspicuous.

3) The conspicuousness of the markers of time (which take the focus away from a shared present, and which place the focus on the not shared present, that is, the time in which I'm writing) would seem, in addition to the monologue that I'm providing below, as explanation and investigation of my opening sentence, to place the original opening more in the dramatic realm. I am here, talking to myself. Later (at some indeterminate time that will be for you the present, and won't concern me, really, at all), you will be eavesdropping on the conversation that I'm presently having with the imagined you.

4) Having determined that the opening is dramatic (but masquerading as discursive), we can also assert that it (and this whole post, remember) is: personal? (because I am using "I" and expressing myself in the manner of a journal?)

5) or is it objective--because my subject is the opening of this post and its rhetorical analysis, which I am currently (in some weird pseudo-present) endeavoring to undertake?

6) or is it somehow affective, because I'm addressing you? (I think not. Though I know you, I'm using you as a fictive [captive] audience on which to project my innermost thoughts regarding Beale's taxonomy, and I'm therefore not really trying to toy with your emotions or sway you in any way. Though if I do by accident, the more power to this thing called rhetoric).

7) So, it's personal and objective (this was a continuum, right?), but what kind of contact is implied in the opening sentences? Certainly, it's not impersonal; I'm doing my best to insert a presence here, and there's only one of me [today anyway], so from the standpoint of the addresser, this is a personal statement.

8) But to the addressee--are you isolate or aggregate? I certainly can imagine you (all) individually (or together), but the unmenvirorhetoric blog presupposes a collective. Or does it? If you aren't all reading it at once, are you an aggregate audience? (This, dear reader, is on you to decide. I'm baffled.)

9) And finally, what strategies am I undertaking, here, to say these things? Certainly generic ones, right? Using the conventions of a blog post to other purposes? Using the conventions of Socratic address to direct a line of thinking (I wouldn't call this an argument) by way of questions that I expect you (all or one, doesn't matter) to follow me in?

10) I'll presume I'm using all the strategies, not equally, but in some measure, largely because, well, I couldn't get on without them, right?

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Okay, I'll quit the nonsense, but it's a strange exercise to perform (a rhetorical analysis on an unfolding text written to a particular audience which is separated in time and space, and which, for some reason, I'm still trying to imagine and address as present). I had to try it because I assigned my students rhetorical analyses of news articles today. I was trying to imagine their grappling with Beale's Discourse Hierarchy--logos, ethos, pathos, genre, audience, and purpose have been enough to confound them, so I can't even imagine what this would do to their brains. Beale notes, "as a pedagogical activity, it is a mistake for rhetoricians to attempt to construct extensive drill or practice in modes and strategies without tying them into distinct contexts and purposes and situations of discourse" (53). This seems to echo much of the rationale for a genre-based curriculum, and I could go there, but instead, I want to make the connection that first occurred to me upon reading the passage, and that was to Annie Dillard, and more specifically to Deb's post, and her statement:

"It is through the use of language, the naming and the taxonomy of things, that Dillard absorbs the meaning and identifies with the world around her. When Dillard sees starlings, she also sees everything connected with them: rocks, trees, feathers, chloroplasts. Dillard’s process is more than simply that of looking through a microscope and seeing the universe; the universe is comprehensible only by looking at everything through a microscope. There is nothing big that cannot be small, and conversely, that which is small is, in many ways, large. The depiction of the natural environment that Dillard offers to her reader is extensive, and the implication is that it is authoritative and reliable" (Blog post #1).

I think that Beale does for language what Dillard does for nature--when he sees anything, he also sees everything connected with it. The smallest of linguistic processes are linked to the most complex cognitive ones, and so on. The paradox, as Beale puts it, is that "form and meaning are arbitrarily connected in one sense, intimately related in another" (33); "the lowest rank of classifications in the Discourse Hierarchy 'looks back' and entangles itself in the highest rank of categories by entangling itself in the realm of motivation and discovery" (34). In addition to their common ability to see in every particular thing both the general and every other particular, I find it interesting that for both Beale and Dillard, observation is their key method of gathering information about relationships between things/concepts/ideas/objects/referents/etc.

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Finally, a word about story. I have been confronted these past few weeks with the question: What is the role of story(telling) in society? As soon as I figure out how, I will post the other articles that I've read that have me ruminating on the question.