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Disability Awareness Month

There's a nice banner hanging between Stewart and the Union: Disability Awareness Month. This sign always makes me both giggle and snarl.
First, if you are disabled you are aware of it. If you are not visually disabled, it is unlikely anyone else will be aware of it, unless you decide to tattoo it across some body part (asuming you are abl to be tattooed). So I giggle.
Second, to cause a snarl: The idea of Awareness (which flits in and out of Jenkins' chapter on Photoshop for Democracy) assumes that once someone has been Enlightened, action will ensue. Grassroots organizations depend upon this assumption: "Raise awareness!" seems to me to be just as useless as "Empowering the Helpless." The power relationships don't change in either of these.
Since I'm studying dystopian rhetoric, the question of "awareness" is always nagging at me. If Enlightenment does not lead to action, then what do we do with the novel 1984?

Submitted by Amylea on Tue, 2007-03-20 10:09.
Amylea's blog

Unawareness
Morgan R.'s picture
Submitted by Morgan R. on Wed, 2007-03-21 13:43.

 The banner you speak of struck me too as I walked into school this week. It seems a passive sort of awareness, as if awareness is action enough. Red Cross Month, Disability Awareness Month, African American Month, Coke Month, Nike Month… I just don’t know what to do with these kinds of awareness’s, and I tend to agree with you that they lead to no action. They hang there, limp and unaware as a banner. What would an active visual rhetoric entail? These types of awareness are shallow, and only imply the loosest idea of awareness. What purpose does this awareness serve, except to sooth consciences? This seems a negative visual rhetoric… I’m not sure why.  Mad Morgan Rackem (aka Morgan Reitmeyer)  


Banners and Ribbons
Adryan's picture
Submitted by Adryan on Wed, 2007-03-21 18:57.

As an impressionable junior (hey, I retain naivety longer than average, okay?) my mind was blown in a discussion of those damned support ribbons - if there were a meaningful community behind them, the ribbons would be unnecessary. They cover the void. Now, is that a Lacanian void or Nietzschian void?

But I will repeat Morgan's question - what would a productive banner look like?


Epideictic Rhetoric
nrivers's picture
Submitted by nrivers on Sun, 2007-03-25 13:39.

This is not to say that there cannot be bad banners, but what happens if we consider such banners as epideictic. Such a move would certainly account for critiques of banners. Often times epideictic rhetoric is the rhetoric pejoratively dismissed as "mere rhetoric" - that is rhetoric that is most divorced from action. Certainly the banners do not outline a specific course of action - they are banners, not a legislative agenda. However, if we see them as akin to something like Burke's "persuasion to attitude" we can see them as celebratory of a community's values or a reminder of what a community believes or desires. Certainly, awareness, on its own, does not install ramps or provide services where and when they are needed, but awareness is certainly important for, if not primary to, any course of action.

To answer your question Adryan: It is often because there is a community that we have ribbons. We might want to the community to be otherwise, but in order to show others how a place might be otherwise, we first need to display before we legislate (as if, of course, legislation cannot itself be seen as epideictic).


Ribbons
magnoliafan's picture
Submitted by magnoliafan on Thu, 2007-03-29 10:44.

And yet the ribbons CREATE a community, or people buy them to join a community of support. It's extra interesting because people just think they're supporting a different community (usually the troops).

L-Train