English 680V: Visual Rhetoric in a Technological Age (Purdue)

In the spirit of the upcoming baseball season, I felt compelled to throw the following curveball into the conversation. Some of the best hitters in history were blessed with better-than-perfect eyesight. In other words, they were able to detect the baseball leaving a pitcher’s hand earlier than most other hitters, allowing them to see the ball for longer amounts of time, and therefore have more chance of making contact with it.

Great story today at CNN on mindreading machines:

"Mindreading scientists predict behavior" http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/03/05/mindreaders.ap/index.html

Here are some of the stunning revelations:

"The fact that we can determine what intention a person is holding in their mind pushes the level of our understanding of subjective thought to a whole new level," said Dr. Paul Wolpe, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not connected to the study.

[. . .] Tanja Steinbach, a 21-year-old student in Leipzig who participated in the experiment, found it a bit spooky but wasn't overly concerned about the civil liberties implications.

"It's really weird," she said. "But since I know they're only able to do this if they have certain machines, I'm not worried that everybody else on the street can read my mind."

What's next? Hey, let's invent a sure-fire technique not only to read motive, but to actually bend someone's will. Using words alone, make people do things that they wouldn't normally do without some urging. Manufacture desire! Now that is a scary thought if it should ever come to pass.

Rhetors, please fill me in on this: Lanham makes it sound like rhetoric is always competitive and this is the ultimate source of creativity. He even claims, on page 36, “[Rockefeller] saw, as rhetorical educations has always seen, that the one could create the other [competition and creativity, order not explicit].” I’m confused. Is competition the primary orientation of rhetoric? I understand that dialectic is effective knowledge production, but it is only one of many techniques of invention, is it not?