We visited Isabelle and James today - they are doing great! So are their moms. :-) Hannah and [the FP] both got to hold each baby; I was occupied with cameras but insist my turn will come (muscling my way into the hug-fest wasn't where I was at today).
oh...just me: November 2003 Archives
Isabelle (7 lbs, 4 oz) and James (6 ob 4 oz) were ushered into the world at 4:00 and 4:02 am this morning. [the FP] was witness and welcomer to the grand event. (Midwifery could have been an alternative career.) Hannah has been calling from her father's so she could know exactly when her self-appointed "cousin-dom" and "main babysitter" roles officially begin. Done!
THIS seems like who I want to be: "the critic needs an enormous amount of 'Negative Capability': the ability to exist 'in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason' (Dewey, 1934, p.33)" (121).
"...the intent of a critical servant [is] no less subject to critique than the actions/he proposed.......the critical rhetor takes on a more specific role than the 'social actor' proposed by McKerrow (1991, p. 62). Servitude as douleia is a giving over of one's will to fulfill the important function of addressing the needs of the community.....The agency of the critical servant is obtained by understanding the agent's subjectivity as a combination of the individual and the social......When critic and servant are combined in constant interplay, the rhetor is a moral and political agent who sacrifices his or her self-interest to the community, and through this loss gains knowledge and power.....The critic interprets the history of a community, showing how past choices led to the present conditions...Future actions are ones the community could have chosen in the past but did not....the critical interpretation...thus remakes the past with an eye toward a brighter future....This new constitution is powerful because it is grounded in a subjectivity that is actively both individual and social. In this critical service lies the possibility for ongoing transformation....
"The critical servant perspective pushes critical rhetoric to take 'as one of its tasks an investigation of what the good is or might be' (Charland, 1991, p. 73).....it draws on and articulates the experience of the audience even as it moves them toward a new position....maintains its legitimacy by remaining open to further challenges (Wellman, 1971) by its critical servants....helps rhetors manage the paradox of proposing a course of action in an ever-changing world" (118).
"The servant is duty-bound to strive for the best for the community....can...play the 'ethic card' without denying its role as an ethic. Ethical appeals can win an election and reorient the audience toward an ethical position entailed in the community's history but not yet fully realized in everyday practice. Is it this position that the critical servants offers as the best possible goal......Critical servants situate their knowledge of possible actions within the history of the community...knowledge...is always temporally relative, always situationally contingent, and always subject to further critique and revision....knowledge must be tied to a historical moment.....In the past lies transformative potential for the present community, potential that can be used in radical ways....By initiating a transactional interaction between past and present, the critic calls into question the good endorsed in the present as much as the good of the past. The critic offers a judgment on the past and, as such, draws on the history of the community for good" (118-119).
"As we look to notions of the good that a critical servant may articulate, it is important not to confuse community history with community standards. All communities have a history of practices that can lead to new practices. In every act there is some unanticipated opening that the actor did not intend. Rhetors have the freedom to take up a past practice, explore its potential, and discover its previously unexplored use. THus history can be seen as the resource of a potential that has yet to be actualized. Critical servants can transform local knowledge by drawing on the history of the community and the history of discursive practices that produced that knowledge. By looking to the past, critiquing it, refocusing and reorieting it, the critical servant can produce critical interventions and suggest courses of action with positive transformative potential" (119).
All quotes from Norman Clark (hope the link is to the right one?!), "The Critical Servant: An Isocratean Contribution to Critical Rhetoric." QJS, Vol 82, No 2, May 1996.
My all-time favorite and deepest inspiration, Audre Lorde, also known as Gamba Adisa, meaning "Warrior: She Who Makes Her Meaning Clear".
"There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all."
Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure.
"But every place she went
they pushed her to the other side
and that other side pushed her to the other side
of the other side of the other side. . . .
Pushed to the edge of the world
there she made her home on the edge. . . .
Always pushed toward the other side
In all lands alien, nowhere citizen." (Anzaldua, 1994, p. 3)
Both quotes in "Postcolonial Interventions in the Rhetorical Canon: An "Other" View" by Raka Shome. In Contemporary Rhetorical Theory, 1999.
Some quotes that illuminate last night's (wee hours of this morning, actually) existential crisis:
"...failures to bridge the gap between a lived practice and a noncorresponding ideology...the contradiction is between a a moral sense of 'what should be done' and 'what is being done' (p. 280). The contradiction is mediated, both in the life of the individual and within the public realm, by recourse to suitable myths that gloss the incompatibilities, and thereby provide a rationalization for action. The task of a critical rhetoric is to call attention to the myth, and the manner in which it mediates between contradictory impulses to action" (McKerrow, Critical Rhetoric, in CRT, 1999, pp. 456-7, cites Abravanel (1983).
"...a specific intellectual is 'one whose radical work of transformation, whose fight against repression is carried on at the specific institutional site where [she] finds [herself] and on the terms of [her] own expertise, on the terms inherent to [her] functioning as an intellectual'" (McKerrow, Critical Rhetoric, in CRT, 1999, p. 458, cites Lentricchia's (1983, pp. 6-7) statement of Foucault's notion of a specific intellectual.)
It happened. Last night. I turned away from the sink and caught a sideways glance and there they were. Wrinkles around my eyes. :-)
People have consistently taken me for several years younger than I really am. Not any more!
Danny, Srinivas, and Qianqing were there for the celebration - a beer in the Blue Wall. Ooooo baby!
