Controlling Values
The fundamental premise of Rhetorics of Style asks us to consider a radical notion, to entertain a possibility: that life shows up for us within the tropes and schemes that compose the language we use, whether in speech or writing. That is, the richness or shallowness of our experience of life is given to us by the language we speak and write within. I would stretch this ever so slightly to add that actually, we don't use language. Rather, language uses us.
An antithesis emerges here, which we might see as structuring what I will call a controlling value. Here is one term of the antithesis:
This has a negative charge. One of the assumptions built into this antithesis is the commonplace relationship most folks have with what occurs as negatively charged. There arises a need, an urgency to change the conditions that led, or might lead to the experience of a negative charge (prosapodosis: supplying a rationale to a value). And what controls the response aims to transform the negative charge to a positive one, such as:
That's the value that has brought this course into existence. Whether students experience this kind of development is yet to be seen. That's what we are working on. One key practice that will assist us in this quest is what I call "distinguishing networks of controlling values," which is a method of exercising the schemes of antithesis, merismos, prosapodosis, and paradiastole.
Distinguishing NetworksWhat does it mean to value something? When we value something, that continuous act of valuing, of caring, compels us to organize our acting, our thinking, our feeling so that our feelings, our thoughts, our actions serve to bring about the conditions that will allow the value to be expressed and fulfilled rather than allowing what we don't value to prevail.
What does it mean to distinguish? Distinguishing is an action in language, an act of speech or writing, wherein we shape a sentence or group of sentences, and singly or together, the distinction then casts a light that lets the world (and you as an actor within the world) show up in novel ways.
We already live and speak and write within a body of language we have inherited from the language makers and users that came before us. Distinguishing that for yourself is the first creative act: owning what is not yours already, taking it up as if it was yours, and playing with it. The act of distinguishing is a creative act, wherein you use language to bring an entity forth from the swirl of existence, an entity that may have been there before, but you did not yet have the language to "house" it. As soon as that entity "shows up" in your having distinguished it, you can respond appropriately. What is a network? Think of a net. How does a net work? It is a design wherein all of the nodes that comprise the net mutually support the existence, the position, and the function of all the other nodes within the network. Each designed network has an integrity to its design, so that it works the way it does. Once a node is distinguished, the rest becomes available to be distinguished and articulated.
To distinguish a network means to reveal in language all of the nodes that compose the network, to bring them forth into appearance, to see them in their relationships and functions. This involves the scheme of merismos.
Controlling ValueThe example above gives us one "node" within a network of controlling values, and just one part of a single controlling value: "the more we distinguish tropes and schemes, the more access we have to revealing the world and acting in it in ways that diverge from the common and everyday, even reaching the extraordinary."
Now, I do not merely "hold" this value, as if I could pick it up or put it down. No, this value controls who I am as a teacher, as a writer, as a researcher: it discloses the world to me and thus controls what I do, think, and feel before I even begin to feel, think, and do regarding my researching, writing, and teaching. The bolded sentence above expresses my purpose, and as such it is the contrary term within an antithesis, contrary to what I call the context of a controlling value, which in this instance might be worded in the following way: "failing to distinguish the tropes and schemes within which we think and speak and write will leave us living an ordinary, paltry, repetitive, and constrained existence."
The relationship between context and purpose is simple: the purpose, as positively charged, serves as the contrary to the negatively charged context. The context triggers and then feeds the purpose, that is, the context gives the purpose its reason to be. At the same time, the purpose posits a context sufficient for the purpose to be such, for anything positive is so only when contrasted with its contrary negative.
Furthermore, the context and purpose together make up a single controlling value, and as contrary terms within an antithetical scheme, they comprise two nodes within a single network of controlling values, which has a total of four nodes. The opposing controlling value, with its own context and purpose, is the contradictory antithesis to the original controlling value. More of this below.
But first, let me clarify that when you distinguish for yourself the antithetical structure of a controlling value, you begin to "own" and master the scheme of antithesis, which you already have some expertise in using, as antithesis is a dominant scheme that structures the language you use. "Getting" the structure of a single controlling value will open up to become a tool that will help you "see" networks of controlling values at work in any rhetorical artifact, but more importantly, in any sentence, at work either explicitly or implicitly.
The compulsion that brings us to act, think, and feel--that's why it is called a controlling value, but we have to ask about the nature of this compulsion that controls. Why is there compulsion at all? Perhaps we experience compulsion, what is called exigence, due to the profound sense we have of something being "wrong" in the world, where the necessary alteration that would correct this wrong is an effect of our feeling, thinking, and acting. Consider that this is why we act, think, and feel the way we do, at the moment we do. The hard part of life and living to square with this definition is the fact that we often are very much in the dark about what we most value, until the consequences produced by our feeling, our thinking, and our acting reveal what we actually value.
For instance, what if a character values justice except when it comes to her own family? If she were to admit that her family is in fact criminal, her controlling value of justice might dictate that she should sever all ties, cleave to the abstract law, and bring her kin to justice. But then she would also have to admit some allegiance to the criminal, and then she would be "wrong." That would contradict everything she is, like Buzz Light Year discovering that he was just a toy and not the actual Buzz Light Year. Therefore, her value might serve to control her to remain blind to the criminality in her family, to thereby design "life," what one is up to, and the everyday relationships embedded therein, to conform to this value. To put it simply, we act and think and feel exactly the way we do, when we do, and we will keep generating responses to life according to the design our values enact with us. To be clear, "controlling value" is a metaphor that is catechrestic, that is, a metaphor that "carries something over" that is inappropriate. Can a value really control anyone? Is there a controlling value like there is the air you breath? No. It is made up and is designed to have us look at the structure of the schemes of antithesis, merismos, prosapodosis, and paradiastole.
Please keep that in mind as we proceed to distinguish the criteria for writing a given controlling value out as a complete antithesis--that includes the contraries and the contradictions. Doing so, I assert, gives us access to most if not all of Aristotle's topics. It also grants us access to an endless source for us to generate new sentences.
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There are several schemes that participate to construct a network of controlling values, including: antithesis (antitheton), prosapodosis, paradiastole, just to name a few.
Here is an example of Paradiastole:
Scott Consigny's "Rhetoric and its Situations" 179
Scott Consigny's "Rhetoric and its Situations" 181
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Distinguishing and writing out a network of Opposing Controlling Values
Let's start with a commonplace example: what might be the controlling values surrounding the cultural narrative we all know as “Barbie”? What we already know is, on the one hand, that “being perfect/beautiful in the eyes of the world brings success,” and on the other, that “self-acceptance leads to happiness," although the latter value is marginalized within the dominant "Barbie" cultural narrative ("perfect beauty brings success"). Regardless, both of these contradictory statements are one part of a single controlling value that opposes the other controlling value. Both of these parts are called a "purpose" of a single controlling value, which serves as a kind of solution to a problem: the second part of a single controlling value, called the "context." For every positively charged purpose (solution) there is a negatively charged context (problem).
The purpose operates as a valued compensation for the persistence of the context (a problem that continues to assert itself in multiple situations); the context then acts as a warrant for the purpose, that is, the context provides a sufficient reason for the rhetor to pursue the worthy aim of the purpose. The negative context and positive purpose may both be articulated as some way of being, doing, or having that results in a consequence: an unpleasant consequence for the context, and for the purpose a desirable end. Distinguishing and articulating the context and purpose of a controlling value is only one portion of the process. Next comes the inventive and critical process of inferring the parts of an opposing controlling value. |
The goal is to see how the context of a controlling value acts as a warrant that triggers the purpose into action as a claim.
Thus, a version of the purpose of the Barbie controlling value could be:
This purpose compensates for a context that could be worded as:
The next step is to infer what weakness another point of view might see in the purpose of the Barbie controlling value. Again, because of the clichéd nature of this particular cultural narrative, we might see that
thus converting the Barbie purpose down into an opposing controlling value’s context. This then serves as a warrant for an opposing purpose:
The final move is to then show how the Barbie controlling value will convert this opposing purpose down into its context, which in turn allows us to understand and articulate how a network of controlling values works in an endless dialogic fashion with multiple turns and various revisions.
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Origins
I began formulating a method of using the controlling value as a tool for invention in writing when I encountered it in a chapter from Robert McKee’s book Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. In chapter 6, “Structure and Meaning,” McKee elaborates the persuasive nature of story structure, wherein a narrative structure works to deliver an experiential conclusion that a controlling idea (as he calls it) appears to guide in every consequential beat, or unit of a film. The progression (the trail) of units engages the audience in the controlling idea regardless of whether they can articulate it in language or not. However, my interest is in articulating and emphasizing the value that controls the idea. Thus, the controlling value.
McKee sees the controlling idea as that which describes “how and why life undergoes change from one condition of existence at the beginning to another at the end” (115). Itself structured as a “value plus cause,” McKee’s controlling idea “identifies the positive or negative charge of the story’s critical value at the last act’s climax, and it identifies the chief reason that this value has changed to its final state” (115). The value that wins in the end has done so over and against an opposing value that appears negative from the point of view of the dominant value. The means by which the dominant value “wins” is the cause, and it must appear to be a sufficient one if it is to be persuasive. |
As another instance, here is a network of the controlling values one may see as operative in the film The Matrix. The dominant purpose appears to be “coming to know one’s real nature leads to freedom,” or even more simply “knowledge leads to freedom.” That is the value that dominates and “wins” by the end of the film. This purpose appears to respond to the context of “ignorance leads to slavery and exploitation.” From the point of view of freedom, the conditions of slavery provide the exigence, the urgent need to bring change to the conditions.
But here comes the tricky part: the opposing controlling value possesses a point of view that sees itself as equally justified in fulfilling its purpose to eradicate an exigence it sees in a given context. |
Thus, within a narrative such as The Matrix, the opposing controlling value’s context is the converse of the dominant controlling value’s purpose: “knowledge leads to pain and great suffering.” Compensating for this is the purpose could be various forms of “ignorance leads to bliss.”
Both the Barbie and The Matrix examples illustrate the dialectic conversation the dominant controlling value has with what opposes it (follow this link to see this dialectic conversation unfold in a Power Point animation). The diagrams help us to see how the context of one controlling value could in fact be the purpose of another turned inside out, which purpose in turn views the original controlling value’s purpose as a context. A controlling value’s context, which always and already corresponds to a compensatory purpose, provides the necessary exigency (like an irresistible itch) the purpose cannot help but correct. Exigency provides the occasion for the purpose to assert its hegemony (dominance), if possible, despite incessant domination struggles with the opposing controlling value. Distinguishing a controlling value operative in a text then becomes the chief tool for writing summaries of arguments, for approaching those texts critically, and then for creating ways to bring various texts into dialogue with each other. However, while the statements that make up the contexts and purposes of each controlling value at first appear simple and reductive, I coach students to treat such statements as mere starting points in need of extensive development. It is a practice of invention, and of further development. |
Pedagogic Rationale
[Please see my book chapter “The Risk of Rhetorical Inquiry: Practical Conditions for a Disruptive Pedagogy" for a more complete exposition of the pedagogical rationale.]
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My pedagogic aim in introducing students to this practice of distinguishing networks of controlling values is not merely to teach them techniques for performing summary, critical thinking, and dialogically executed research. At the heart of this pedagogy is a method disruptive of the drive for certainty, which invites students to explore what it means to be rhetorical through experiencing a process Kenneth Burke termed “perspective by incongruity,” wherein one’s orientation within the world undergoes a disruptive challenge, and consequently falls into a devalued position in relation to another orientation, if but temporarily.
As Burke argues in Permanence and Change, perspective by incongruity is a kind of rhetorical act that effects the revision of any orientation. Here is how it works: any given orientation is always “right” within its point of view, but when another orientation reads the first according to terms alien to the original orientation, the fundamental sense of “rightness” falls into question and a corresponding affect (a dis-eased orientation, so to speak) ensues in the individual who until then lived “piously” within the original orientation. According to Burke, piety is the moral principle that guides the formation of interpretations according to an orientation, and so serves the functions of a given style to coordinate actions, determine meaningful relationships, and permit transference between situations. As such, a style’s piety permits any given orientation to possess its own consistent logic that appears illogical and impious to other orientations. Because piety works to build systems, supplying “a desire to round things out, to fit experiences together into a unified whole,” and is “the sense of what properly goes with what” (74), as soon as a disorientation occurs by virtue of perspective by incongruity, a revision, or reconfiguration of the original orientation and its piety results. The premise I follow then calls for me to create situations in which students repetitively practice undergoing perspectives by incongruity throughout the course. |
Works Cited
Burke, Kenneth. Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose. 3rd. Ed. Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1984.
Kopp, Drew. “The Risk of Rhetorical Inquiry: Practical Conditions for a Disruptive Pedagogy.” In Disrupting Pedagogies and Teaching the Knowledge Society: Countering Conservative Norms with Creative Approaches. Ed. Julie Faulkner. Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 2011.
The Matrix. Dir. The Wachowskies. Perf. Keanu Reeves. Laurence Fishburne. Carrie-Anne Moss. Groucho II Film Partnership, 1999.
McKee, Robert. “Structure and Meaning.” Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and The Principles of Screenwriting. New York: Harper Collins, 1997. 110-131.
Kopp, Drew. “The Risk of Rhetorical Inquiry: Practical Conditions for a Disruptive Pedagogy.” In Disrupting Pedagogies and Teaching the Knowledge Society: Countering Conservative Norms with Creative Approaches. Ed. Julie Faulkner. Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 2011.
The Matrix. Dir. The Wachowskies. Perf. Keanu Reeves. Laurence Fishburne. Carrie-Anne Moss. Groucho II Film Partnership, 1999.
McKee, Robert. “Structure and Meaning.” Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and The Principles of Screenwriting. New York: Harper Collins, 1997. 110-131.