This webtext consists of three sections. Section one conducts a rather inhospitable reading of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, focusing its attention on his comments on hypokrisis. I wish to demonstrate that Aristotle’s idealism leads him to preference invention over delivery. This preferencing has profound effects on how he (and we, forever caught in his wake) conceptualizes audience and, consequently, on rhetoric’s ability to investigate localized, contingent, what I like to call “human,” ethics. In addressing himself to a transcendental Truth, Aristotle places “mere” humans at the mercy of a singular, authoritative ghost (one, it seems, who is always friendly to Socratic, Platonic, Aristotelian desires for a transcendental Truth). Taking advantage of digital environments' abilities to reconfigure delivery requires that we reexamine the implications of rhetoric's Aristotelian heritage.
Section two attempts to counter the Aristotelian treatment of delivery on the basis of two of Derrida’s later concepts: the archive and the specter.Derrida’s spectral ethics, by undermining the stability of traditional conceptions such as life, death, and time, humanize rhetoric and invigorate its ability to discuss ethics. Derrida consigns all of to and as ghosts, always already haunted and haunting, and incapable of ever transcending the condition of conditionality. Paradoxically, Derrida exorcises the primacy of the Aristotelian ideal ghost by opening the (im)possibility that we all might always, already be(come) specters. I consider such an excessive exorcism the first step in articulating n new scope for delivery in the digital, information age (an age marked by mediums still very much in formation).
Section three presents an example of how spectral considerations of audience can be integrated into first-year composition pedagogy. It introduces my Visual CoOperative project, a Drupal installation housing visual essays donated by students from five different semesters of first-year composition (selections of which are displayed throughout this webtext). George P. Landow (1997) proposes that digital environments serve as testing grounds for postmodern theory- the CoOperative is my ongoing attempt at such experimentation. I also to address Cheryl Ball’s (2004) call for new media texts to show, rather than tell, their arguments. I will not attempt to perform as the Judge of my students’ work, I rather prefer to let these projects speak. From beyond this text.