A Point of Dis(sing)-Stasis Topoi are the foundation of Aristotle's Rhetoric. They provide a place to stand, a point of stasis. At "root," they are a centering focal point from which to order discourse. This has two primary implications for my project here. Initially, the inference in the opening paragraph is to the ordering fetish within composition studies. Whether Current-traditional, neo-Aristotelian, cognitivist, or social epistemic, the emphasis is on control, surveillance, and order. Therefore, I am equating composition with the fetish for godliness...See Schizophrenia, God: Order, Chaos. So I ask in the opening paragraph, what is composition's relationship with disorder: Does it too, as does capital, have an implicit complicity with schizophrenia? Secondly, the concept of topoi plays an important role
in the "structure" of my project. I'm not working directly off of an Aristotelian
rhetoric. My aim is not persuasion, and I provide little traditional "evidence."
This does not mean my project is incomprehensible, nor hostile to its audience.
Rather, I'm making a point of disorder--purposely avoiding a clear/specific
thesis (point of stasis). Always attempting to play the schizophrenic,
nevertheless with a sense of order. I could state that the purpose of this
project is simply to rethink the binary order/chaos across the structure
of the computer classroom--to hint at their inherent interrelationship
not only in general but as it applies to composition, and composition's
relationship to technology. Or more specifically, I could ask my audience
to use this rethinking to examine their own assumptions about composition--
that underlying ideology of order. Or I could say that this project, though
it doesn't discuss writing per se, writes in a way
that exemplifies the implications of rethinking this binary for writing.
But these would sound too much like a theses. [Theses
are always multiple.]
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