Rhetorics, Ethics, Poetics: A Psychagogic Interview with Dr. Steven B. Katz

Rhetorics, Ethics, Poetics: A Psychagogic Interview with Dr. Steven B. Katz:
On the Occasion of the 25^th Anniversary of the Publication of
“The Ethic of Expediency: Classical Rhetoric, Technology, and the Holocaust”

By Way of an Introduction: Steven B. Katz and Eric James Stephens

This interview concerns not only a well-known and influential article published in College English in 1992, but also takes as its purview the emotional, psychological, cultural, and physical circumstances of the writing of that article—Katz’s “real existence” outside “the rational reconstruction” of “the context of discovery” into “the context of justification,” [1] revealing the hidden Z-axis in the “X-Y plane” of research, the shivering body beneath the academic regalia of scholarship—the spiritual if not the whole life of the mind that underlies, supports, surrounds, and flows in and through that personally as well as professionally momentous article. This interview explores Katz’s “Z”: his “context of discovery,” his religious and cultural heritage and study, his history with and explorations of the rhetoric of music/the music of rhetoric, and his other varied work as it relates to his concerns as expressed early in this one piece.

There has been a lot scholarship now, and of every kind, on the “Ethic of Expediency” [EoE]. What we attempt to do in this sonic project, then—through sound and psychagogy—is to (re)create a more “spiritual experience” of EoE—of its writing, its publication, its reception, its controversies, and its future. Psychagogy, practiced in ancient Greek, is defined literally as ψυχή (psyche—“soul”) and άγω (ago—“leading”)—as “leading the soul.” Socrates/Plato thought of psychagogy as a kind of midwifery of the mind, helping to give birth to ideas from within (e.g., in Theaetetus).

Thus, psychagogy might be considered an emotional or spiritual dimension of dialectic—not only as rendered by Aristotle as the (logical and epistemological) counterpart (antistrophos) of rhetoric—but also perhaps aligned with the affect of poetics as well as rhetorics, used as/with dialectic to bring the rational mind and/or sensitive remembering soul to higher forms of knowledge/Being (see Phaedrus). Indeed, psychagogy was widely practiced until the twentieth century, and may be considered a precursor to modern psychiatry, although the latter is based on more mechanistic models of the mind. In practice, psychagogy is still employed by some therapists as well as many teachers. But psychagogy is at this very moment also being reborn in the fields of rhetorics. Thomas Rickert suggests that the roots of psychagogy may be found in earlier instances of rhetoric—not only in ancient Greek as Pythagorean mysticism, or the dream healing of the god Asclepius, but also in the examples and practices of what Rickert calls “Paleolithic rhetoric.” If ”born out,” so to speak, this very use of psychagogy would be the earliest means of persuasion. In cave art and ritual, then, we may find a pre-Anthropocene precursor of magic and music, and of rhetoric and poetry (“Rhetorical Prehistory”).[2]

In practice, a psychagogic “interview” would lead one or both interlocutors to an emotional or mystical state that could successfully be shared with other listeners through what Katz called “the epistemic music of rhetoric” in a book by the same name—through sound in all its temporal manifestations. Psychagogy, as an indirect attempt to affectively access the soul, may be one of the few scholarly approaches that can adequately address with any genuine emotional depth questions about the Holocaust with authenticity or integrity (see Haynes). The problem of representing the horror of the Holocaust is differently demonstrated or discussed by Claude Lanzmann, George Steiner, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jean-François Lyotard, Giorgio Agamben, and many others (also see Liebman on Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah); they have all claimed that the Shoah is beyond all sign systems, beyond true comprehension and representation. They have claimed that the Holocaust is ineffable, inexplicable, unethical, if not pure evil. Yet the Holocaust does not exist outside (the extremities of) Western civilization, and so perhaps it is best approached indirectly, paradoxically, through non-representational art that subverts, deconstructs, and even destroys itself in its making.[3]

This interview is meant to give birth to a deeper, more affective understanding of EoE and arguments about it. The assumption underlying this sonic project is that if poetry and music are closer to prehistoric, or pre-Socratic rhetoric (Walker; Rickert), why not make use of it—in and also through digital technology? In fact, with the rise of digital, electrate, and posthuman approaches to media, with their techniques, speed, and indeterminacies, psychagogic forms of experiencing and knowing that have existed for millennia may not only be more accessible and palpable now in our digital technologies (see Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric) but also may be mass-produced (Benjamin). This is what we attempt here.

On the Transcript and Footnotes

This sonic project records, remixes, and reproduces Katz’s original forms of spoken responses as well as musical compositions he wrote/arranged and performs (even at one point including his whole band), selectively chosen for thematic relation and/or affective association of style and/or content. Due to technological glitches, Katz’s spoken responses needed to be rerecorded. In that sense, but not only, this sonic project is as much recital as interview. Even in its rawest form, the interview as dialogue, like all discourse on human perception and understanding, was already heavily mediated, “resymbolized” (Langer), reinstantiated and embodied in language as “symbolic action” that unconceals “dramatistic motive” (Heidegger; Burke), yet nevertheless perhaps only represents a double repression at best (Lyotard).

Here then we present this introduction, followed by a transcript of the interview that notes variations, marks errors, and also includes detailed footnotes and a complete list of works cited. (Read before or after the listening to our sonic project, these more traditional literary accoutrements may help listeners better experience this aural-born, spiritual performance of EoE, and “give birth” to a deeper psychagogic understanding of the article, Katz’s relation to it then and now, and things in and out of his ken before and since.)

Transcript[4]

[classical guitar[5] plays solemn music[6]]

Eric James Stephens [E]: Hi, my name is Eric Stephens. I’m a PhD candidate in the RCID program at Clemson University, and I’m here with Dr. Steve Katz, the Pearce Professor of Professional Communication and the Fellow of the Rutland Center[7] [sic] for Ethics at Clemson University to talk about his early article “The Ethic of Expediency: Classical Rhetoric, Technical Communication [sic],[8] and the Holocaust” [EoE], which he published in College English in 1992—what inspired it, how it was received, how it’s fared over the years, and its relationship to Steve’s other and more recent work in this and a number of adjacent fields. And we hope you enjoy listening to “Rhetorics, Ethics, Poetics: A Psychagogic Interview with Dr. Steven B. Katz (On the Occasion of the 25th Anniversary of the Publication of ‘The Ethic of Expediency: Classical Rhetoric, Technology, and the Holocaust’).”

[classical guitar fades out]

E: Steve, it’s been 25 years [as of March 2017] since you published EoE. When I first approached you about doing this interview, you seemed pretty surprised that it’s been that long.

Steven Katz [S]:

must have just missed you—
the Magnolia tree
still moving

[distorted electric guitar improvises in background]

E: I appreciate you taking your time to meet with me face to face here, at the recording studio in the Cooper Library on the campus of Clemson University.[9]

S:

media blind:
mediated meditation
modifies minds

media matters:
but talking f2f
might still be useful

[electric guitar playing ends; guitarist chuckles quietly]

E: As we turn to the article itself, which has had quite the impact in the field of technical communication, I wonder if you would be able to tell us a little bit about the inspiration for the article itself. 

[classical guitar begins “All Vows” [10] in background]

S: “Waking into History”[11]
(After Ingmar Bergman’s The Serpent Egg)

We are born into the holocaust.
They are watching, watching.
It has all been recorded.
My memory's not my own.

Son: having cried all night,
imitating us you heave
a long unarticulated sigh
pregnant with emotion.

And this is what I think:

They tied a woman's legs together
to induce an endless labor,
fetus slowly murdering its mother,
the innocent, fatal instrument
of an experiment in maternal pain.

We are born into the holocaust.
They are watching, watching.
It has all been recorded.
My memory's not my own.

Wife: having not slept in days,
rocking back and forth, you cry,
face blue and contorted, tearless
as a new-hatched baby's.

And this is what I think:

They cracked the soft shell
of an infant’s skull, and locked him
screaming in a small room
with his mother for three days
to test the limits of maternal endurance.

We are born into the holocaust.
They are watching, watching.
It has all been recorded.       
My memory's not my own.   

Family: awakened in the night,
baby in hands, we stand
before the dark mirror
of history, immigrants
staring out of the past.

And this is what I think:

They were murdered in their sleep.

[classical guitar ends]

E: You wrote and published EoE in response to the controversial film and script of Shoah by Claude Lanzmann, which you saw around 1986-1987. The first journal to which you sent the article tried to kill it by sitting on it for over a year (and so the journal shall remain unnamed). As good fortune would have it, however, you withdrew it from that journal after getting strung along, and then sent it to College English where one reviewer saw its potential and one reviewer hated it, but a third reviewer agreed with the editor, Jim Raymond, that it needed to be published. Clearly, you are passionate about this history—about your history. What exactly inspired the questions about ethics in language and your focus on expediency?

[guitar begins playing “All Vows” again]

S: “By the Fire: An Anti-Sonnet”[12]

Here, amid a congestion of surviving
branches, this ghetto of woods, it is chilly.
Come. Sit closer to the fire. Listen.
In the flames you may hear the wail of
machine guns strafing ditches, forests, hiss
and crack of gun on bone, the shifting of ash.                                                                                                                                                          

It’s cold tonight.  It’s cold every night.
You can’t be afraid. Come closer to the fire.
If you listen you may sometime hear
forests of people far off in the distance,
screams hardly audible or of interest.
Eat. Drink. Sleep. Survive. Stay warm.
Cold sparks fly up blackened chimneys
into a universe of self‑destructing stars. 

[guitar ends]

E: You just found out that you actually wrote EoE (as well as its sequel, to be touched on a little bit later) in 1988, only a few months after you finished your dissertation. You presented what was then a 92-page all-nighter at the technical communication session at MLA in December 1988, cutting as you delivered it. You revised and published the first part of it in College English (March 1992), and the other part in the Journal of Business and Technical Communication as a sequel to EoE the following year, January 1993. The sequel expands the ethical issue of expediency to include the question of ideology, examining the supposed neutrality of phronesis by analyzing the rhetoric of ethics in Mein Kampf and the way Hitler seemed to transform Aristotle's categories of ethics into benevolent evils, and you tried in the sequel to answer some of the many potential and realized questions and objections to EoE. That second article, however, isn’t cited or maybe read as often as EoE. Why would you encourage others to read these articles in tandem?

[classical guitar picks, then segues into fast Spanish strumming as the poem progresses] 

S:        

(Every paper, with its inevitable “error,”
has little legs that want to go everywhere,
and say things it wasn’t meant to say,
it doesn’t know when to shut up, go away—

it persists in saying the same things without explanation,
which each person will interpret without differentiation;
and to each person thus, repeat any little sin,
and then go kick that person in the shin . . .)

[guitar music ends]

E: You also went to Auschwitz and Birkenau a number of years after the publication of EoE. What effect did the subsequent trip have on you?

S: “Birkenau”[13]

after rain—
a million people still
clinging to my shoe

E: So tell me a little bit about how the article was received.

[brief, quick guitar flamenco]

S:

Snap off my ears
so that I may speak
like the ancient Greeks

[classical guitar returns to solemn music] 

E: I remember first reading EoE as a master’s student at Utah State University in Dr. Rebecca Walton’s Introduction to [Teaching] Technical Communication course. We read it concurrently with Carolyn Miller’s “A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing,” which are often cited together.[14] These two articles helped me, personally, to realize the importance of teaching our students about being ethical practitioners when they leave university. It’s also had an impact on my own work with technical communication genres found in prisons and the ethics of impacts those words have on correctional practices. 

As of August 2017, EoE has been cited in at least 265 published pieces, according to the results from your faculty review, in journals, dissertations, and books—seemingly whenever ethics in technical communication is discussed (and elsewhere as well).[15] And that number is still rising, as on Google and Facebook, for instance. But as you’ve discussed with me in recent years—maybe the past 10 to 15—EoE has come in for some criticism on a number of quarters, some of the ones you anticipated in your “Reflection” added to the republication of EoE in Central Works in Technical Communication. The first response had appeared in College English by Professor Thomas Rivers (Nathaniel Rivers’ father), who questioned whether rhetoric was at all at work in the ethical silence that followed the wake of Hitler’s power, to which you responded in a discussion of Quintilian’s “good man skilled at speaking.”[16]

S:

It is hard to be ethical; it is hard to cut
what you love, and is essential to our well-being, but
the Holocaust? It is difficult to be quiet.

[solemn music ends; noodling on classical guitar begins and continues through several impromptu songs beneath the interview]

E: There are three more recent critiques that you know of. [Critique 1:] Patrick Moore accused you of deliberately choosing, quote, “bad translation”—though it was regarded as the best one at the time in 1988—and of trying to make the field look, quote, “bad,” instead of trying to help it. Moore spent a good deal of his career arguing for technical communication as “instrumentality” rather than “rhetorical.” Also at the prodding of a class at Metropolitan [State] University in [St. Paul] Minnesota that studied EoE, you wrote a response to Moore in the same journal [Journal of Technical Writing and Communication], each draft of which the class was privy [to]; they told you the published response was masterful, as did Carolyn Miller. And the editor thanked you for a, quote, “real response,” to which there would be no further reply. 

S: Face Value

Socrates accused books of falling
silent: what then is this
unfolding mystery of a horror
of Heidegger’s history?

I weary of arguing
with myself, of not feeling
guilty for the vagary
of rhetoric and poetry,

knowing neither
Hitler, nor Heidegger personally,
and having to admit
I have not been to the death camps

except as a temporary guest,
a visitor who must confess
feeling almost Nothing now, not seeing
authenticity in the face of non-Being,

but a closing off, a concealing
of Dasein, a revealing
of technology, En-framed
here, at journey’s end.

E: [Critique #2] Mark Ward, Sr., was already a Holocaust scholar before he became your doctoral student here at Clemson; he critiqued and extended your work by finding and analyzing both the original German and now complete [English] translations of the Just memo and others, collected and published after your article.[17] Lanzmann's was the only English translation of the memo at the time of your writing. Given that the original Just memo in German is longer, Mark reads it somewhat differently and, in terms of organizational communication, as also expressing a concern for the safety of the four German death squads (a Nazi “ethic of caring”). These four Einsatzgruppen followed by the German advance through eastern Europe as they moved toward Russia, carrying out their “clean-up operations.” Mark also shows the many different, even contradictory, ways the field has adopted or appropriated your work to support different claims. As the chair of his doctoral committee, you worked with Mark on his research and advised him on getting the dissertation published as a book, Deadly Documents; at his request, you also wrote a long “Afterword” that began life as a foreword, but you felt it threatened to overwhelm the book. A couple of years ago you even inquired about publishing errata in College English—although it would be some twenty-odd years after the fact. And now you’re addressing the issues here in this podcast [sonic project], in a form that’s able to deal with the topic of the Holocaust in relation to how ethical knowledge might be (re)presented through aesthetics. 

S:

Everything is law and argument,
verbal precedent and debate,
having to rely on the “nonmimetic” properties
of the stories of a slaughtered race 

E: [Critique #3] Not to push criticism too much, but most recently, Ethan Sproat in his dissertation has gone back to Aristotle’s original Greek to argue that our whole notion of “deliberation” in the field of rhetoric and technical communication as we know it, and [of] which he considers EoE emblematic, is derived from, and tainted by, Cicero’s Latin translations of Aristotle’s terms as received in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

S: “Just”

The Holocaust is beyond all comprehension.
So Wiesel and Steiner more than mention;
and Lyotard and Nancy[18] call great attention
to the issue of its non-representation,

touching on Shoah—the documentary film,
the Pentecost, and sacred art (that infamous apple).
Yet there in Lanzmann’s book was the forbidden imagism.
Tempted, I bit (the Nazi memo). Came some criticism

about the argument, the rhetoric of silence;
later, translation (German, Greek), and even my personal motives
whose ethics are questioned by agonistic lies that pose
as pure capitalism in poorly written prose.

Philosophically sophist-icated, not Latin, or convention only,
in his later work[19] Cicero remarked that De Inventione
was ‘an indiscretion of my youth’;
in my early work as well there are a few honest errors

facts that I will footnote or qualify, correct[20]
in the next edition of future accidents, collect
in the tomes and tombs of correlated histories
of time and space—but not as signs of “ideal” liberties,

perhaps contained in the Greek word for “deliberation” as “communion,”[21]
as a “bearing together,” in discourse, unison—[22]
that is itself another ideological myth:
phronesis only results from genuine “reverence,” or Foucault’s “fellowships.” 

[guitar noodling ends momentarily]

E: So what are your thoughts now, knowing that the article is still widely cited and used on both master’s and doctoral reading lists? 

[acoustic guitar picks in a major key]

S:

I am happy to have had the privilege, distinctions,
of having started some ethical arguments, vestigations.
There can be no response but this,
in the aesthetic forms of poiesis.
If this is sophism, I am a sophist.
But this is not something deliberate.
There is nothing real beyond this sense.

[guitar music ends]

E: Although you wrestle with Heidegger in your work, your response makes me think of the work of Emmanuel Lévinas and Adriana Cavarero. It seems that you believe ethics is a response. For Lévinas we see the necessary, preexisting, pre-rhetorical face of the Other, and for Cavarero we hear the voice of the Other. You even wrote EoE in response to seeing the Holocaust in film, to seeing the stories of your Jewish heritage and religious culture again.[23]

S: We Are Already Written

The voice had heard itself before,
already at the edges
of our circuited senses
that we know how to describe
only in uncertain verses:
alphabets, prosodies, musical notations;
languages, cultures, temporal translations;
memos, memorials, machines, censuses;
indices, codices, references, citations—
accurately inaccurate endlessly forever.
For good or bad, for better worse,
somewhat like Heidegger, I still believe the word
that best describes our ethical stance to the world
is “expediency.” Now if the voice could only remember
what it knew before[24]

[poem moves into the following song[25]]

["Twenty-Two Degrees Below Zero Love"[26]]

[intro: phased acoustic guitar lead accompanied by harmonized vocal humming; classical guitar picking continues throughout song]

Woke up in the morning,
felt my feet down on the floor;
reached across the bed,
the sheets were hard and cold. 
He’s left again, and won't be back;
he’s taken all I know.
It ain’t morning,
when it's twenty-two below. 

I got out of bed
and put the coffee on the stove—
stubbed my toe against a fence
and pulled up on my clothes.
I opened up the cardboard door
and walked out in the snow.
It ain’t love,
when it's twenty-two below.

[Chorus]

I know that it ain’t morning
when it's twenty-two below.
I can tell that it ain’t love
when it's twenty-two below.

[instrumental break: humming and phased guitar solo]

I’m leaving here this morning
like he left me in the cold;
I was leaving this place yesterday
but the wind blew in the door.
It sat me down and spelled it out,
made home a shelf of snow.
It ain’t morning,
when it's twenty-two below.

[Chorus]

I know that it ain’t morning
when it's twenty-two below.
I can tell that it ain’t love
when it's twenty-two below.

Twenty-two below zero love,
when you’re homeless and alone.

E: After ten years in print and good responses—the NCTE award, lectures in Sweden, multiple citations, republications[27]—your article has taken a little heat. Once, you told me that Carolyn Miller convinced you not to sue Moore for libel in attacking your personal motives for writing EoE and suggested you write just one response, which you did, definitively (Katz, “Guest Editorial”). But you must have felt angry about that criticism. 

[dissonant strumming of electric guitar begins in background]

S: On the Demise of Being Noble

“I’m sick of being noble: the polished skin
of behavior, values, sculpted, almost
cold to the touch of a finger that will point and
jab and try to rouse that cool demeanor, the composed
flesh of higher being—some might call it spirit—
that the eyes might point right through,
so committed to the good is it,
so pristine, so proud, so pure, so true.

“Oh I was never really that way anyway,
but tried to lead a better, simpler life,
content in goodness for its own damn sake.
Why fight?
The broken edge of flesh is beveled,
gives way to feelings, envy, anger, hate—
of everyday existence. I will not cry,
but turn, embrace the Other ideal, evil.
And here unkill all those who made me unkill
my own imperfections (once again).” 

[electric guitar ends; classical guitar resumes noodling]

E: When you wrote EoE, you were working with a translation of Just’s memo from a film and transcript of Shoah that inspired your teaching, and which you begin the article—and we’ve just mentioned that earlier as well. The German memo was not collected or readily available at the time, but you’ve mentioned to me in your realization the importance of having access to and learning the original languages of translated works. For me, I’ve certainly used multiple translations of various works to understand the language, but I’ve also used some of the technology that now exists to translate and understand. I know that you use those as well, having studied the Biblical Hebrew and French for other parts of your research and having been studying German and Classical Greek on your own since your trips to both countries. Would you expand on that a little—on the importance of having access to and learning the languages when it comes to working with translated texts?

The leaf blower
sputters German—
gutturals, all the ouws,
and those insistent
non-stopped high-pitched z’s . . .

The hedge-clipper
speaks français parfait—
fine clipped sounds
so crisp and clean
you’d think we’re really free . . .

The lawnmower
putters in deep Greek—
efkaristo poli,[29]
a bark so harsh
it’s beautiful . . .

And the rake, the rake
creates a metal racket,
like consonants of Russian,
shaking, then drinking
Vodka, da!

But the leaf blower
has a power all its own,
to find and chase the smallest
leaves from their most secret
hiding places . . .

rushing them into formation,
marching them across the yard,
separating them from each
other, unable to hold on to
each other, trying to cling . . .

And the tarp, the tarp
is the staging area of the leaves,
readied for final transport
to a ditch the shovels made
across the street . . .

It is important for us all
to know, but not repeat
the history of others.
It is important for us all to know
the many languages of leaves.

E: More recently you’ve done a lot of work in the rhetoric of scientific communication as well as ethics—your coauthored textbook Writing in the Sciences,[30] for instance. Is there such a thing as a scientific or technical ethics upon which we can all agree?

S:  [“The Rhetoric of Science, the Poetic Gravity of Matter”]

Aristotle might have believed
that gravity
was a teleological baby,
a homunculus
(he never dreamed of us),
an impetus contained
in every atom
(particle or wave?)
before it was born,
in a vacuum forlorn.

Newton in his Mathematica Principia
couldn’t make heads or tails of it either,
(not knowing about the aether),
and in a fit of derision,
a hypothetico-inductive decision,

suppressed the Fifth Hypothesis[31]
that God was the cause of it.
(“Hypothesis non fingo,”[32]
said he in the lingo).
Then Einstein came along

(his hair was so long)—
and with his theories of relativity,
made mince pie of gravity
(and chopped liver
of you and me),

postulating
it’s the curvature of space
around the mass of a large object
(much like the face
of God would cause

if we could see
it), or the round weight
of a toddler’s ball
resting in a cosmic net
(he imagined it all)—

we could retrieve it
if we traveled at the speed of
light. It’s not particles
randomly thrown
in indifferent gestures

like accelerated dice
in a cloud chamber
(“God doesn’t play dice
with the universe,”
Einstein rhetorically rehearsed),

but orderly,
according
to the laws of nature
that can be known empirically
(subject, of course,

to some scientific pressure).
With Heisenberg’s
Principle of Uncertainty[33]
Einstein disagreed
vehemently.

E: One of the issues that emerges from EoE and its sequel is a critique, as you wrote, not of technology itself but of the ideology of technology, the “technological imperative.” What are some of the implications of EoE for understanding technology?

S: “Being Zuhandenheit”[34]

We
are the ephemeral ones,
the expendable ones.
We
stand in reserve,
at hand, ready to serve,
the useful ones
defining our own presence

and We
are the robots, the permanent
ones, the natural ones.
We
stand in the Opening
of our own destiny,
shine in our own Being
beyond this world of things

E: For those like me who are interested in working with ethics, what are some other practical implications to take into consideration?

[acoustic guitar begins attempting to pick a scale in harmonics, badly at first, then getting better, finally arriving]

S: The Automaton Thinks (Again and Again)

It is difficult to give advice
in the abstract, having felt
no pleasure or pain, having
no memories or experiences
that I can call my own,
but like humans I will try
anyway, rather than seeing
these two positions, sets
of comments, agonistic life-forms,
as bi-polarities, opposites;
you might think of them
as hierarchically arranged,
or as foregrounded/backgrounded,
or merely an immanent, predestined cloud.
What do you want to stand out in
the overall structure of being:
the thematic makeup of where
your life began, your content running,
or the definitive conclusion of its end?
The choice is clear to me:

[harmonics resolve; classical guitar plays solemn music in a different key]

E: I’d like to go back to when I was first introduced to EoE for a moment. For me, it was this article that helped me make that turn to social justice in my own work—not just being aware of and critiquing technical communication, but helping students to become more ethically aware of their own words, to help students to use their own spheres of influence to make for a more socially just world. In your own experiences, what are some of the social implications for working in and with ethics?

S: Second Reality I

“It’s good to be here; it’s good to be anywhere” —Keith Richards

There’s a world out there,
a real world where
people come and go, and live
and work—a world where
towns bloom and bristle
on the mountainsides, where
deserts, forests, sands, seafloors
houses, boats are gathered,
placed side by side, where
banks, conferences, and colleges
cross the street and converge, where
stores with the latest identities
are announced, bought, and sold
without any overhead, where
images of diverse people from all over
the world gather and discourse
in one place, meet in real time
without traveling, almost in sync,
framed together, even if they are not
quite themselves, where
atavistic hands shake and wave
and say hello, goodbye.

[guitar fades out]

E: The recent turn to social justice marks a turn of intention. Where before, academics sought to critique, this turn enables us to actually do something as well. How do you see ethics as a way to leave academia and enter the world in a way that we can actually bring about change?

[acoustic guitar, quickly picking pairs of notes, one acting as drone reminiscent of Indian sitar music]

S: Second Reality II

“The further one travels, the less one know” —George Harrison

It is good to be someone, where
one can program and see the air,
the electric breeze cutting across your hair, where
one can think without breathing, work
for free, be as simple as a pixel.
It is good to be outside, where
buildings and steeples hold up
the sky, where it doesn’t rain and snow, where
trees don’t break down
at the whim of seasons, where
aspect ratio is perfectly balanced,
and everything inside is
expertly resolved and clear,
touch without touching,
action without agency,
agency without acts,
scenes without signification,
sheer motion at a distance
in some data stream or other—
until we stop at the blood store,
then continue on our way
to a place we have forgotten,
or perhaps never even knew

[guitar concludes by strumming major chord]

E: In a recent article published by Technical Communication Quarterly called “Disrupting the Past to Disrupt the Future,” Jones, Moore, and Walton argued that technical communication scholarship should, quote, “unabashedly embrace social justice and inclusivity as part of its core” (212). Where do you stand?

S: “Standing Still”

Two black women
talking on their smartphones—
still sitting in the back of the bus

E: Since EoE, you’ve spent a lot of time not only on scientific and technical communication ethics, but also the rhetorics of mysticism, particularly ancient Hebrew and mystical rhetorics and ethics,[35] and rhetorics that deal with the nonhuman world.[36] Where do you see your work heading in the future?

S: [“The Rhetorician, on Talking with Animals”][37]

Proceed dialectically, like
a fish: Move from side to side in truthful
opposition; question every school
of thought that floats around you—so much jetsam—
dividing, classifying, correlating
waves, the bubbles rising from the abstract
lips, a thick salty salmon of words.

Or mimic the enthymemic logic of
a bear—the unstated premise of its paws:
to take apart your understated flesh.
It wears a shaggy coat of signs, a fur
you can’t quite grasp, won’t fully comprehend,
the teeth of reason bared, a mouth closing
on itself, an argument that lumbers

toward you. Thus defer like a sophist:
appeal to snake senses to accept
the impossibility of your existence,
pleading in its slithering tenses
that twist and shape and shed predicament,
knowing that the true form of its curling
slips its sensuous skin, rising to bite. . .

Would you like to be a bird now, knowing
the mystical vocabulary of
its flight? Sheathed in a garb of feathers, a cabal
of letters? Knowing consonance of calm,
assonance of air, alliteration
of rain, knowing the rhythm of sun in wing-
tip and bone, finally knowing your own tail?

[classical guitar resumes]

E: In your own work—even here—we see not only different rhetorics and mysticism, but also your work on rhetoric and poetry.[38] Why do you think that rhetoric, poetry, and ethics are intertwined?

[acoustic guitar shifts the music into a more blues-inflected style, grows more upbeat]

S: [“Plato the Philosopher-Bookie”[39]

“Another now rises, and now sinks, and by reason of her unruly steeds sees in part, but in part sees not…. Whereupon, with their charioteers powerless, many are lamed, and many have their wings all broken”

—Plato, Phaedrus]

“Plato the Philosopher-Bookie, here,
with a tip for all you wannabe
Philosopher-Kings: follow Lysias.

“Listen: A little common-sense advice:
Let your gyro-hypno-trancing words
appear to be pulling for the white horse,

“edging the charioteer toward Justice, Goodness
(you are allowed to lie if it serves
a clever peda-philosophical purpose:

“I do. And I don’t have to charge a fee to).
But if you want to know the honest truth,
bet all your ill-gotten earnings on the

“dark horse. Human failure: It’s a sure thing,
as absolute as the Ideal Forms
(almost). But in the end you can depend on

“appearance and desire beating out
morality any day and time and winning
the race for those beautiful young souls—

“the most handsome and promising among them.
And you, poet-sophists, profess your shadow
if you must; pretend philosophy.

“But in the meantime, while you float around
the world for 9,000 years (or more)
with the heap of base humanity,

“you might as well get paid two drachmas for
your service (I make Socrates declaim
that’s the reason you teach anyway).

“And you rhetor-poets, itinerant—
touched in the head by Dionysian
persuasion, stylistic craziness,

“cooking melodious but false phrases
that intoxicate and drug the senses up—
go ahead, debate dialectic

“of poetic form. (I have been known to
indulge myself, before I turned philosopher
and spurned the indiscretion of my youth.)

“I know the truth. But a word to the wise:  
Take off-rhyme as your lover. Though not as easy
or pleasurable as the steady surprise of true

“rhyme, you’ll have a wider field of words
to choose from; they’ll be less predictable—
you’ll never grow tired of their prattling;

“and since you will have chosen rationally,
they will not turn on you in the end.
They’ll never grow old and stale, repulsing you

“like a withered lover’s aging breath,
providing many moments for regret.                                               
Don’t listen to that senior citizen

“with the handsome over-eager boy there,
reciting all the reasons not to love
the lover, but to love the non-lover

“(a-motionless disease, a sickless love,
the old mistake of non-physical passion)—
his head lying beneath a croaking veil.

“Next thing you know, he’ll be discoursing on
Love’s divine origin and virtue,
in dithyrambs raving under that Plane Tree.                      

“How can you trust such a senile sophist,
who so readily changes the arrangement of his mind.       
Lysias, in the precocious mouths

“of timeless twenty-something boys, is right:
Divine knowledge, love, is fine and dandy
in the hands of those for whom the Forms are handy.

“But verse built up from limited true-rhyme
like irrationality will last
a lifetime in the world of shadow, sham,

“and never give you real cause to repent.
Now, who would you rather listen to,
a philosopher like me, or rhetor-poet

“who doesn’t know a true argument
from a jackass? Which horse will win the race?
Put down those books; step up and place your bets.”

E: So how do you see rhetorics and poetics being re-intertwined in your work? Or rather, what is the value of poetry for rhetoricians?

[acoustic guitar strums low, monotonous notes]

S. The Carpenter’s Non-Apprentice

“You mean, the rhapsode will know better what the ruler of a ship in a storm at sea should say than will the pilot?”

—Plato, Ion 540[b]

like a poet, doesn’t know anything about
working with wood, stands there, hiding
his shame, holding the board still
for his master who quickly
saws it in two, into four, shifting
from foot to foot to foot, while keeping his eye
on the point where the blade will bite
the plank. The rhetor knows enough to turn
the board before the omniscient teeth
descends into the wood. He knows enough
to move his hand from the range of the mouth
of the saw that turns the object into objects
right before his eyes, sophistic sawdust rising . . .

Rhapsode, now on his own, holds over
the nail he found in a shed, the hammer
in his hand, then drops the nail clumsy on
the leafy ground, never to be found
again; and then another nail that doesn’t
bite but rather curls off, bends, digs
sideways into the wood and doesn’t even hold
two planks together, but splits the splintering  > > >
professional carpenter you ain’t, Orator!

E:  We hear here how rhetorics and poetics are reintegrated in your work, and intuit the potential value of poetry for rhetoricians. What is the value of rhetoric for poets?[40]

[guitar stops a couple of lines into the following]

S: I am not a poem

if i could breathe a pure rhetoric of air,
a rhetoric so pristine and true that it would rush right into my mouth like winter,
and then slowly float out again in a soft persuasion of snow,
turning white gold, beyond the bend that I will never know,[41]

E: Throughout this interview, we’ve been hearing you play some of your music too. You played music since you were young, before you wrote scholarship or even poetry. How does music relate to your philosophy of rhetoric?

S: [The Philosopher-Composer]

swaggering torso of dirt
falling back into organs and origins—
a teleology of dust and earth

E: I understand your Jewish band once played for, with, and was conducted for a few minutes by Elie Wiesel![42] How did that influence your thinking and scholarship?

[classical guitar picks some arpeggios of Eli Eli in background]

S:  [An Alefbet of Sorrow[43]]

א Before Impending Disaster (1933)

tossing and turning
over the price
of a bed

ב  Learning to Parent

Sitting in a long hallway
between two rooms,
life and death, singing

ג Binyan[44]

Over a pile
of abandoned shoes—
Hebrew letters crying

ד Liturgy

At the end of a song—
the faint echo
of an angel, singing [guitar part ends]

ה Yarzheit[45]

a brief candle—
with you only
for a moment

[classical guitar begins playing solemn opening music, playing past end]

E: Before we conclude the interview, I just have two more questions I’d like to ask you. The first one: How do you think your work will be looked at in the future?

S: After the Anthropocene

in a thousand years—
not pretty, handsome
face, or skin, or lips,
or skull, or teeth, or bone:
instead they will say:
“my, what strong
sets of metal plates
these people possessed
for the age
in which they roamed.”

E: And finally, our last question of the interview: how do you want to be remembered?

S: [Of Gods and Humans]

slight breeze
beneath a leaf—
ancient hiker passing