The Violence of Contact Zones

While reading Lyons, I was struck by two elements surrounding rhetorical sovereignty: 1) the ‘reinterpretation’ that occurs while people seek rhetorical sovereignty, and 2) the conflicting discourse of peoples vs. individual motives/rhetoric. Furthermore, if rhetorical sovereignty is ‘the inherent right and ability of peoples to determine their own communicative needs and desires in this pursuit, to decide for themselves the goals, modes, styles, and languages of public discourse,” how can we begin to give sovereignty to discourses that are contact zones (449-50)? Am I still not understanding contact zones? Aren’t they places of intersection, interaction, intermingling? How then can a discourse truly be fully sovereign and fully dictate its own communicative needs as a contact zone? I know Lyons seeks “a renewed commitment to listening and learning,” but from a purely theoretical standpoint I am having difficulty understanding how sovereignty can occur. It is a paradox that seems a preserving measure which denies the permeating function of discourse.

First of all, hegemony is unrelenting and it is crucial factor in contact zones. (I am truly being the devil’s advocate here, but I do think I have a point here) Example: a bunch of Europeans hop on boats and travel over the Atlantic ocean and ‘discover’ a new chunk of land where people were already living; these Europeans not only physically seek to dominate this land and the native peoples, but also semantically. Hence, in the 1800’s, the ‘U.S.’ (as these European people are now called) and their established law courts begin a “reinterpretation of Indian sovereignty”: physically manifesting domination over native peoples by reworking the meaning behind the word ‘sovereignty’ (451).

Lyons sees the dominating ideology, but I just don’t think he addresses the issue of contact zones very well. I see the understand the desire for rhetorical sovereignty, but I don’t see the plausibility.

Dear Paul,

I got your letter. How are you doing? I am fine. I don’t think you are crazy; I think you are right. How can there be such a thing as the discursive if semantic situations such as the ‘reinterpretation’ of sovereignty exist. Lyons’ whole article is discussing bodily issues, community issues, issues of corporeal interpretation of freedom, rights, and law. For me, the concept of the discursive is way too limiting. Especially in the discussions during this course involving contact zones, establishment of identity involves so much interpretation and reinterpretation. How can contact zones be discursive? How can they be sovereign? And when are we not in a contact zone? Pardon the Syllogism, but. . . if we are always in contact zones and contact zones are non-discursive, then we must always be in the non-discursive. I mean, cmon! We live in the non-discursive--the discursive is just artificial.

I liked your ideas and we should talk some time.

Platonic Love,
Jim

Anyways. . .what I got from Lyons was a lot of miscommunication in the “power imbalances between whites and Indians”(453). Along with the troubles of reconciling individualistic motives and community motives, what do we do with failed attempts to ‘communicate’ about and within Native American rhetoric (i.e. Kennedy and Ballenger)? You re-interpreted Kennedy as portraying differences in the medium; I am going to re-interpret Ballenger as one who (although restrictive in scope and a ‘user’ of Native American culture) constructs a contact zone. Through storytelling, Ballenger tries to communicate non-discursively with native peoples. He uses experiences and imagery to intermingle with the native peoples experiences. Lyons calls it appropriation, but I can’t help but call it communication too—a type of contact zone.

By no means am I advocating dominating ideologies, but I am stating that these dominating ideologies are a part of the contact zone to the degree where I don’t think there can be sovereignty from them. Like Paul, I question Lyons’ function of rhetorical sovereignty because it causes problems in educational environments. It seems like Lyons is not being realistic with the term. If you want to be truly rhetorically sovereign, how do you reconcile the need to communicate with other rhetorics? There has to be a mesh, and (as I agree with Paul again) language does re-colonize the mind in order to communicate across other communities.

One Order of Rhetoric. Hold the Logic, please.

I watched the movie Idiocracy this weekend. It’s one of those futuristic, Sleeper-type comedies about a guy who is frozen in the present and wakes up in the future. The twist is that humanity got a whole lot dumber over time, and the main character, Joe, finds that he is the smartest guy alive in 2550. One particular scene struck me: Joe gets thrown into prison for not having a tattoo on his arm stating his identity; when he enters the prison he sees two lines—one line for those entering prison and one line for those getting out of prison—and so Joe hops into the line exiting prison and tells the guard that he is leaving; the guard sees that he is in the exit line and lets him leave. This scene made me laugh at the pure absurdity of logic sometimes: the use of ‘logic’ will determine factual circumstances and attempt to render other aspects of perception incorrect or ‘illogical.’ Hence, the logic that Joe was in the line to leave the prison made it illogical that he was truly supposed to remain in prison.

What does this long example have to do with this week’s readings? Everything. Thanks to those Greek founders of Western thought logic and rationality are the means in which we measure credible arguments. Hence, logic becomes the very means to exclude opinions and ideologically manage the recipient of ideas and arguments. This is the case in much of the new racism, stereotyping, and lexical manipulation mentioned in Intercultural Communication. All three ideological strategies utilize a certain logic to persuasively guard from certain social realities. Racism is deemed obsolete and is replaced by a view that “minorities are not biologically inferior, but different” (Holliday et al 122); stereotyping will try to scientifically classify a group by what are deemed to be common traits and “reduce everything about [a person in the group] to those traits” (Holliday et al 126); and lexical names for peoples are changed to portrait those people negatively or vilify them. Though these means of bigotry are socially inaccurate, many people do see them as logical beliefs. The simple rhetorical power of presenting a seemingly logical claim can be so dangerous and powerful—powerful enough to be so engrained in students’ minds that it is difficult to help them unlearn these thoughts.

What I think is interesting/frustrating is that in addition to students believing such false reasoning, they don’t trust a lot of reasoning from an instructor in a classroom. They are somehow trained to leave their reasoning unquestioned but immediately question the logic of certain authority figures. How do we as teachers fight logic with logic? Or do we fight logic by analyzing logic and letting them come to logical conclusions?

Educational institutions can be the worst users of false logic. Looking at the example of Tlaltelolco, the Spanish missionaries had a “mandate to institutionalize” the indios (Romano 260). Here, the Spanish rationalized that truly educating the indios in rhetorical studies would “endanger colonial society in unspecified ways” (Romano 263). The logic that the communal society (established in oppression) was more important than the empowerment of the indios creates a justification to control the educational experience of the indios, hence depriving the opportunities for contact zone educational experiences where the differing mentalities of the Spanish and indios could interact. So, in what ways do instructors manifest such rationality today?

As Bizzell states in her article, reason became the central means to argue for power between the Christians and Jews in the 13th century. However, her article highlights how logical arguments can be used to fight the power. Nahmanides recognizes the need to utilize logic in his arguments against Friar Paul, attempting to prove that “this Christian story is irrational” (Bizzell 23). Rationality wins Nahmanides respect and graces for the Jewish people essentially under Christian rule, which illustrates the need for logical rebuttal.

At the same time, how logical is any religion? Most religion is based in the irrational because the spiritual is beyond human understanding. Because the material world differs from the spiritual world, the material world refers to the spiritual world as irrational—it does not follow the rules that the spiritual world does. The same could be said of differing cultural discourses. When a different discourse comes into contact with Western discourse, that discourse tends to be dismissed as irrational. It does not follow the rationality of the dominant discourse.

Mao details much of this struggle of discourses in his piece. Especially when he discusses indirectness v. directness, he expresses frustration towards how Western discourse tends to rationalize indirect communication into a feminized discourse. In this, Mao shows how dominant discourse sees something as irrational by its definition and begins to rationalize it in order to legitimize it. All the while, this reductive strategy dismisses the possibility of contact zones. The same sort of thing happens with ‘correlative thinking’—it is not the way the dominate discourse does it, and so it is seen in some way irrational.

Logic is often used as a means of legitimization, rhetorically negotiating within mixed discourses. Each of the articles (Romano, Bizzell, and Mao) show this struggle of legitimating: the non-dominant group is legitimizing itself with the dominant discourse. The indios were prevented from legitimizing themselves; Nahmanides helps somewhat legitimize Jewish claims, and Mao states his case for legitimizing Chineze American rhetoric.

But how do we distinguish between legitimization and oppressive rationalization? How do we teach students the difference? Is there a difference?

Me, Myself, and the Other

I can’t just focus on one reading. I tried, but it just felt like trying to play ping-pong with myself. The readings just won’t allow me to separate them. What I mean is that they speak to each other. I used to think that I was crazy trying to link life experiences and textbook terms, comparing television shows to established academic theories. Believe me, many teachers made me feel crazy. As a said in a previous blog, much of my early education attempted to segregate cultural life aspects and educational drills. What I first thought was an appropriate separation of work and fun is now what I view as a form of otherization—a divide and conquer tactic. Separate them, and then make one superior to the other

This is the key scheme of otherization, as the Edgar and Sedgewick state in the Intercultural Communication text, that it remains as a “cultural projection of concepts” that “constructs the identities of cultural subjects through a relationship of power in which the other is the subjugated element” (93-94). Perhaps the sneakiest element of otherization is that it does acknowledge the other, but it acknowledges the other in a condescending, dismissive manner. Much like the Detroit educational system in Monroe’s Front Street chapter forbidding “street culture” to enter into the classroom, the culture of the other is known as a iniquitous part of the student’s lives (53). In this way, the ‘street culture’ is forbidden to interact with the dominant white culture and language. Divide and conquer. The other is not given voice because the other is not considered worthy to enter into the conversation.

Dominant ideologies seek a monolinguality; it fears a code switching (because it questions the supremacy of a sole ideology). But both the Front Street chapter and Lunsford’s interview with Gloria Anzaldua highlight that one’s lives and one’s writing are never tied to monolinguality. As Anzaldua notes of the other, “now I think that ‘us’ and ‘them’ are interchangeable. Now there is no such thing as the ‘other.’ The other is in you, the other is in me” (Lunsford 52). We can’t perform surgery on ourselves to take out the other (or kill off that part of us—as I mentioned last blog with the Ribeyro piece); rather, the other is in dialectic interaction with the dominant ideology. Not one or the other: both. Anzaldua says of her exercise of cultural multiplicity in her writing, “It’s a hybridity, a mixture, because I live in this liminal state in between worlds, in between realities, in between systems of knowledge, in between symbology systems” (Lunsford 65).

The dialectic continues, mostly within the self. Anzaldua discusses how we address this, but it is still a complicated issue in the classroom. Students still lean away from discovering one’s multiplicity and gravitate towards the dominant discourse because they want to get a job or they want to rid themselves of the stigma of being othered. It frustrates me that education at times is so ideologically opposed to understanding one’s social self outside of a business modal.