think electrate -- week 4 orientation
TRANSCRIPT
Think Electrate: Inventing Electrate Thinking Practices
Richard Smyth, C.M.Full DigressorUnderAcademy College 24 May 2013
Week 4: Orientation
Week 3 Review
--read Ulmer essay “Florida Measure (Chora)”--Forum discussions about emblem writing
and iconic images--Google Hangout discussion– “Florida Measure” as comic– testifying as electrate strategy– on master tropes of literacy &
electracy– remix as rhetorical dispositio /
arrangement as inventio
Week 4 Preview
--Continue prior weeks' discussions--read Richard Smyth's “Imaging Place as
Imaging Thought” essay--Week 4 discussion questions in forum--continue discussion of key questions--thinkelectrate.wikispaces.com--Google Hangout: time to be determined
Memory Palace as Image Writing
--ancient rhetorical mnemonic strategy--use of images in locations to help in
ordering and identifying “topoi” (topics) of a speech
--rhetorical guides suggested using striking & vivid images set in a familiar space
--spatial thinking/reasoning
Embodied Cognition
--metaphorical concepts: dead or forgotten metaphors that structure thought
--”The Mind is a Body Moving through Space”
Embodied Cognition
Some related metaphorical concepts:
--Ideas are Locations--Reason is a Force--A Line of Thought is A Path--Communicating is Guiding--Understanding is Following--Inability to Think is Inability to Move
(Lakoff and Johnson 236)
Spatial Theory of Thinking
“...reasoning requires going
beyond language and is based on the construction, inspection, and variation of spatially organized mental representations.”
(Knauff xi)
Memory Palace as Spatial Thinking
“This combination of a nonsymbolic
representation of 'where' information and a symbolic representation of 'what' information is, I think, highly suitable for a cognitive theory of human reasoning.”
(Knauff 38)
Examples of Spatial Thinking
“A post (future) writing would leave these
assumptions at the center of (current) traditional composition pedagogy and move to the wayside, the gutter” (Figueiredo 14).
“...allow a free play of the imagination to take alternate routes” (Figueiredo 16).
Imaging Place as Imaging Thought
--an invitation to think with/in/through this
metaphorical concept--essay is an attempt to “show and tell”--relevant in the age of augmented reality and
locative media--how can conscious awareness of this
metaphorical concept help us to “think electrate”?
References
Figueiredo, Sergio. Un/Composing (Visual) Rhetorics: A Comic(s) View of Writing in the Age of New Media. Diss. Clemson University, 2011. Print.
Knauff, Markus. Space to Reason: A Spatial Theory of Human Thought. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.
Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind And Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books, 1999.
