I'm really not sure how this is a productive approach to rhetoric.

Firstly, by equating the canon of memory to "magic" -- memoria, among other things, governs the cognitive -- we continue ignore the canon of memory and all the recent work done in recovering its historical role in rhetoric and composition. By invoking magic as the process by which we think, you and Covino brush memory aside as something to marvel at rather than something to theorize, understand, and develop a praxis for.

Secondly, the linking of rhetoric to "behavior variously associated with imagination and creativity" is actually quite old, but to know this, one needs to pay attention to pre-modern conceptions and practices of memoria. By brushing aside memoria as nothing more than magic, you and Covino have already limited your ability to approach memoria critically.

Thirdly, invoking magic to describe cognitive functions is nothing more than sloppy, lazy thinking akin to those who suggest that good writing must be inspired by a muse. I mean, really, let's think about this sentence: "Magic is a term through which we can address the ways in which words make real things happen." Yes, it's so much easier to lay it down to magic than it is to discuss agency, exigency, audience awareness, the use of logos, pathos, and ethos, etc. Or really think about "Magic designates a broad range of symbolic actions that are really magical, exerting strong effects on society..." What? Magic is magical and what magic does is work through magical means? If rhetoric is magic, what do we teach? Mysticism? Occult knowledge? Shall I tell my students to draw a circle and invoke the daughters of Mnemoyse?

And, finally, this idea that rhetoric is magic seems to be based on a fallacy. I'll buy that magic is a rhetorical act, which is what the quotes above that I don't question suggest. Just because x is y does not mean that y is x. Just because magic is a rhetorical act does not mean that a rhetorical act is magic.

Really, invoking magic as the underlying force of rhetoric, what you do is suggest that we're high priests in possession of occult knowledge and, among other things, the banking model of education at its worst.

Yikes. It's not quite this easy to dismiss the magic-rhetoric dialectic in history, and it's a mistake to suggest that memory is brushed aside or that those who have theorized this model buy into a banking model (quite the contrary, in fact). Just a few of the works that explore this rich history include

• Covino, William A. Magic, Rhetoric, and Literacy: An Eccentric History of the Composing Imagination. Albany: SUNY P, 1995)
• de Romilly, J. Magic and Rhetoric in Ancient Greece. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975.
• Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form. 1941 Berkeley: U of California P, 1967.

and then on memory, almost anything by Mary Carruthers (The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, The Craft of Thought: Rhetoric, Meditation, and the Making of Images, and The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures). Covino make particular and extended use of The Book of Memory and Freire to build a praxis of memory and imagination in the Magic book and then in textbooks like Forms of Wondering: A Dialogue on Writing for Writers.

There's no shirking of responsiblity that I see in that.

If you begin with a conception of magic as mysticism (as some super-ordinary, transendental act), then perhaps it doesn't seem that relevant. (Burke would say that this is a characteristic move in rhetoric, however, this elaboration and exploitation of substance.) But as coercion or even wishful (symbolic) thinking in a sympthetic universe, magic certainly does have a lot to do with the practical issues of composition and the function of memory.

To borrow Verbal's words from The Usual Suspects: "Poof! He's gone . . ."

Dave

I deny that asserting magic's role in the performance of rhetorical acts is a way of slighting the place of memory. If I'm not mistaken, Frances Yates wrote several books about the connection between magic and memory. Virtually every Renaissance rhetor thought of himself as a magician; resorting to the Muses is hardly "sloppy thinking" even if those with a Platonic bent think so.

Please consider this statement: "The fundamental rhetorical purpose, the most basic kind of influence--communicating--requires you to initiate a rhetorical act that can be translated into virtual experience by others. The most basic question in rhetoric is how to do that." (K.K. Campbell)Is there not something magical about the whole idiom of "virtual experience"? The Phantasm?

MGGreer

The fact that Renaissance rhetors considered themselves magicians is not really relevant here, at least from the perspective of my argument. We have an entirely different understanding of cognition now, one that is rooted in science rather than in magic. (Though, as far as having a coherent theory and practice of rhetorical memory, renaissance rhetoric, as many scholars of medieval memory theory (rhetoriacal and otherwise) have pointed out, Renaissance rhetors first trivialized and then turned its back on a functional system and we're still trying to catch up. Medieval memory theorists had a sophisticated understanding of memory that is much closer to our own than most people realize.)

As far as our invoking something like the muses goes, I do maintain that it is, at worst, sloppy thinking, and, at best, metaphoric thinking that runs the risk of eliding over the real issues at hand. The metaphors we use shape the way we think about and approach issues. Our metaphors not only open doors of potential thought, they shut doors as well. When a writer or, worse yet, a writing teacher (and I've met a few) assumes that good writing is something which comes from an external force (the muses or, in modern terms, "inspiration"), they are resorting to sloppy thinking. They're looking for the easy answer as to how good writing gets done rather than confronting head on a complex and difficult problem. That is sloppy thinking. Magic, the muses, and other such supernatural metaphors work to avert our gaze from the complex processes that make up cognition. (We could, on the other hand, discuss Jocyeln Penny Small's theory of the muses in Wax Tablets of the Mind and talk about them as mnemonic symbols for memory encoding, which is an entirely different matter, and one with which I have no quarrel.)

As far as Yates goes, while she does explore the connection between memory and magic, when she does so she is exploring hermeticism, not rhetorical memory. It was her interest in hermeticism that brought her to rhetorical memory, not her interest in memory that brought her to hermeticism. See, for instance, Carruthers' The Book of Memory for a critique of The Art of Memory. Carruthers critique of Yates, as well as my own, are not against her or The Art of Memory per se, but the wide-spread assumption that Yates' investigation into hermetic traditions and practices of memory are investigations into rhetorical memory. While Hermeticism drew upon the rhetorical tradition, it was a dead end as far as memory studies goes. From a rhetorical perspective, the first half of The Art of Memory is very important, though it needs to be supplemented some 40 years of work on historical and rhetorical practices and traditions of memory. Mary Carruthers, Janet Coleman, and Jocelyn Penny Small are good starting points to flesh out our current understanding of Classical and Medieval memoria.

As I stated in my first post, to invoke magic, even as a metaphor, for the complex cognitive processes that take place in even a "simple" rhetorical act is to slight those cognitive processes, whether this is done intentionally or not. To understand where I'm coming from, you should know that I follow both Mary Carruthers and John Frederick Renyolds in considering the cognitive issues of rhetoric and composition to fall under the canon of memory.

Again, from my perspective, to describe these cognitive processes as acts of magic is to state that they are unknowable and, therefore, we shall not seek to understand them. It brings to mind the Far Side cartoon in which two scientists have filled a chalkboard with a large equation and down at the bottom, just before the answer, one has written in "a miracle happens" (or something along those lines). For me, to label these cognitive processes as magic is stop looking for an answer, it is to stop to asking how these cognitive processes work by invoking the supernatural.

In fact, your quote of K.K. Campbell is illustrative. Campbell states:

"The fundamental rhetorical purpose, the most basic kind of influence--communicating--requires you to initiate a rhetorical act that can be translated into virtual experience by others. The most basic question in rhetoric is how to do that."

If we are to understand how the initial rhetorical act gets translated into virtual experience by others, we need to understand how the cognitive processes involved draw from and make connections to all the various factors in play (personal and social; emotional and intellectual; past and present experience and future desires; material and spiritual; and a whole host of other issues) and how they work to create that virtual experience.

To suggest that this process is magical or mystical, while shorthand for "we don't know" or "something really cool," carries with it the additional implication that these processes are supernatural and, therefore, "not for us to know." To rely upon the supernatural, even as a metaphor, for a complex natural process is, as I have already suggested, sloppy thinking.

Rather than tackle the question head on, even if tackling that question means admitting we don't understand the complex issues at hand -- to refer to the process as magic -- is to sew it up with without providing a real answer. It's filling in part of a scientific equation with "a miracle happens" so that we can move on to something else. Leave the unknown as a blank space so that our lack of understanding is foregrounded. Leave it blank so that when we look at the equation, we notice our understanding of the process is incomplete. Leave it blank so that its absence becomes a forceful presence that beckons to us. Leave it blank so that we'll be drawn to fill in that empty space with a real answer.

When we assign magic to that blank space, all too many of us will move on, will pretend that this blank space had been filled in because, psychologically, it has. This has, I think, already happened. Because the cognitivist movement of the 70s and 80s failed to provide complete answers, many in rhetoric and composition believe cognitive approaches have been discredited, or at least not worth investigating. Because the problem of cognition was hard, many turned their backs on it and shut the door. And since the door was still standing there, its presence calling attention to itself, they decided to cover that door with a curtain labeled "magic." That term magic may be intended to stand in for "we don't yet know," but that term also works to elide over the fact that we don't yet know. The label works to smooth over a messy thing, to make it look less messy, and when it's out of sight, it's out of mind.

That, in my opinion, is how sloppy thinking happens.

Cognitive science hasn't figured it all out, but cognitive science has figured some of it out, and cognitive science in general and memory studies (including social memory studies) in particular can and do give us a critical vocabulary which we can use to start answering these questions. But, again, using metaphors like magic to describe these processes, intentionally or not, do work against this. Consciously or not, by invoking the supernatural, we're pointing ourselves away from understanding the natural processes at work.

And no, I don't find anything magical in Campbell's use of phrase "virtual experience." Our minds are bio-chemical virtual reality machines. The virtual experience to which Campbell refers is a natural process, not a supernatural one.

I will have to look at Covino, but see my response to MG below for a more detailed explanation of my thinking. In short, appealing to the supernatural, even as a metaphor (especially as a metaphor), focuses our attention from the natural cognitive processes that the metaphors represent. As you know from Carruthers work, medieval rhetoric had a decent understanding of memory as a neurobiological and psychological process (see also Janet Coleman's Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past) and that rhetoical theory hasn't yet caught up.

My reference to the banking model is connected to the idea of high priests and occult knowledge. While you may not have had the same experience, I have met English teachers who are so committed to the Romantic myth that they tell their students that good writing is inspired, that good writing happens when the supernatural moves through you. Likewise, I'm having difficulty seeing how equating rhetoric to magic does anything but mystify the process, and mystification shrouds rather than illuminates. It equates experienced and skilled rhetors to masters of occult knowledge. Pedagogically, I see that as a problem.

It may be, as you note, that we just have different conceptions of magic and my objections aren't vaild. But, as I say that, I'm left with your use of The Usual Suspects. "Poof! He's gone...", if I remember correctly, is a reference to Kyzer Soze, part of the mythology of Soze, and, more importantly, part of Verbal verbal mystification of the events that took place on the San Pedro the night before. Maybe I just don't get it, but magic, mystification, the occult, while foregrounding the fact we don't fully understand the processes involved, draw a veil over those processes as well. I have no problem with magic, per se, but I know enough about magic and hermetic traditions to know that at one extreeme, it's about illusion and at the other it's about personal enlightenment while at the same time closely guarding the Secrets.

As metaphors, as guiding priciples for thought, this can easily lead to a banking concept of knowledge (the high priest in posession of occult secrets) and an eliding of cognitive processes rather than an exploration of them (it's magic, so we don't need to understand it) even if Covino himself doesn't go this route.

Well, I agree that in our day and age one can't really write about magic without raising the issue of science. In fact I view science as the effort to evade what magic tries to teach us. But you see I'm using magic in a very specific way; a way that I think is faithful to a particular reading of Covino's work. Magic in this sense has less to do with evading the laws of cause and effect, laws which have fallen into question anyway, even on scientific terms, and more to do with how things happen and why they happen. How could it be, for example, that one of the greatest scientist of the twentieth- century could write a book entitled _The Mysterious Universe_? How could it be the case that when Newton is not writing about the laws of celestial mechanics, he is trying to decipher the mysteries of the Bible? How could it be, finally, that science recognizes that there is a remainder to every explanation? In an age which has accepted quantum mechanics as an account of probability rather than necessity and an age which is rapidly developing sciences of 'complexity' it seems dated to assert that understanding is merely a matter of reducing effects to prior causes.

I don't know what makes for good writing. You'd have to clarify the type of writing you are doing. Imaginative writing, fantastical writing requires something more than rational analysis. It seems to me you simply assume the truths of naturalism, that is, you simply assume that all causality is reducible to natural causes. I don't see any reason to say, a priori, that supernatural causes are impossible. Perhaps impossible to understand, but not for that reason impossible.

If I may paraphrase what you've written here it seems that you think that cognitive processes are worth investigating; that we have the tools and methods appropriate to enable that investigation; that given enough time we'll be able to figure out all the preconditions for thinking and writing; that eventually writing will be reduced to some sort of science. Is this adequate or accurate? Is this a faith statement on your part? When you write:"out of sight, out of mind" you seem to be saying that we give up or stop asking how we can understand something when we attribute it to magic or miracles. Using the label 'magic' makes us lazy and dulls our critical acts. This isn't how I understand its usage in Covino. As I see it, 'magic' is a remarkable process that seems excessive when compared to what constitutes it. It's similar to the fact that organisms have properties that none of their parts have. Magic calls attention to wonder rather than analysis. This doesn't mean we shouldn't be asking questions. It is not an argument for charismatic leaders to get away with some slight of hand. That's the wrong understanding of magic. The correct attitude is one of due recognition that something wonderful is going on and we have suspended our critical faculties long enough for it to have an impact on our imaginations. No good writing comes from criticism alone. But perhaps you imagine something other than criticism when you write that we can fully disclose the cognitive works of our minds. If you want to speak and write about imagination, you will need to say something about sensation, the common sensible, the imagination, and formation of concepts. I can say with complete confidence that no one 'understands' this process in any exhaustive way. And I believe you admit that recent efforts to do so have failed.

MGGreer

I find John Walter's scientistic rants against magic baffling, if only because they seem to presuppose the self-transparent, transcendental subject in "cognitive" clothing. The utility of comparing rheotrical invention/composition and delivery to magic is that it seems to suggest that the rhetor is "used" by the symbolic perhaps as much as she uses it, and that some element or degree of suasion is unconscious.

The bigger problem with the use of the magic metaphor is that, while it recommends a position of respect vis-a-vis language (that the symbolic is not a mere tool or instrument), it nevertheless harbors the fantasy of the almighty individual of autonomy (e.g., as in the practice of ceremonial magick).

As for the preisthood of magicians: what else is the academy but that, if only because of the projected fantasies of snotty newpaper reporters in the latest battle of the Culture Wars (e.g., Derrida's death)?

Sorry to be AWOL from this discussion for so long.

MG asks:

If I may paraphrase what you've written here it seems that you think that cognitive processes are worth investigating; that we have the tools and methods appropriate to enable that investigation; that given enough time we'll be able to figure out all the preconditions for thinking and writing; that eventually writing will be reduced to some sort of science. Is this adequate or accurate?

Not at all. Or, to be more accurate, you begin to loose me when you write, "that we have the tools and methods appropriate to enable that investigation." We don't yet, and we may never develop them, but we've got much better tools than we did in the 1970s and 80s. Ultimately, your reading of me, and that of DJ Joshie Juice too, is that because I'm focusing on scientific explanations, that I have a positivistic understanding of the world. I don't. I find it quite interesting that a call for investigating the cognitive processes of rhetoric is automatically discounted as, to use DJ Joshie Juice's words, presupposing a "self-transparent, transcendental subject" or that a cognitive perspective can't include the understanding that "the rhetor is "used" by the symbolic perhaps as much as she uses it, and that some element or degree of suasion is unconscious."

As I've said earlier, my understanding of magic is quite different than yours. My understanding is rooted in medieval and early modern traditions, and, as I pointed out already, it was the hermetic tradition of the Renaissance that helped discredit rhetorical memory (there were, of course, a whole host of other factors, not least of which were Ramism). More importantly, as I've also stated above, when one makes reference to rhetoric and writing as magic, it calls up for me those people, some who do end up teaching, who insist that good writing (yes, a problematic term) is a magical process, that it is inspired from on high, and that if one is not in touch with the muses, one will not write well. I've met a couple people who do espouse such theories. As a theory upon which to base a pedagogy of writing, this doesn't go very far. It was to this that I was originally reacting. To tell the average undergraduate, especially one who is a struggling writer, that rhetoric and writing is magic, you invoke images of occult knowledge, that it is, at best, something unknowable and unobtainable, and, at worst, something we just make up as we go along.

You, however, seem to be suggesting that magic represents the unknown, the wondrous, the imaginative, the creative, which would coincide with what I do know of Covino. (I have long intended to get to Covino but haven't yet, and I was hoping to read some before posting here again, but the dissertation calls.) In other words, magic, for you, is both an invocation and celebration of wonder with the understanding that wonder leads to further investigation, yes?

For me, a this is what science is all about. Science is rooted in wonder. It is about trying to understand what we don't yet understand. Likewise, science understands that knowledge is always provisional, that old knowledge must always be reinterpreted, reconsidered, and even discarded based upon new knowledge. And, as you have suggested, science seeks to understand complexity. What science doesn't do is wall off the unknown, the unexplainable, and give it a label in order to put it aside. Rather than set the unknown aside, science focuses on it and seeks to understand it. Finally, inherent in scientific thinking is the acceptance of accident and happenstance. As any scientist will tell you, many of our major discoveries came about by chance while trying to figure out something else.

I may be wrong, but it seems to me that when you write, "That's the wrong understanding of magic. The correct attitude is one of due recognition that something wonderful is going on and we have suspended our critical faculties long enough for it to have an impact on our imaginations. No good writing comes from criticism alone," you are suggesting that the critical and the imaginative are opposite cognitive functions. I would argue that the opposite of critical is not imaginative but rather uncritical, and that the opposite of imaginative is not critical but rather unimaginative. One can use criticism imaginatively and one can use the imagination critically. One need not suspend one to engage the other.

Ultimately, I think our thinking is more similar than our use of terms would suggest. I'm still not keen on the use of the term magic because, for me, it carries a whole lot of unnecessary baggage. I understand what you mean when you write "As I see it, 'magic' is a remarkable process that seems excessive when compared to what constitutes it. It's similar to the fact that organisms have properties that none of their parts have. Magic calls attention to wonder rather than analysis. This doesn't mean we shouldn't be asking questions." But, ultimately, I don't buy it. I guess I don't buy it because I don't see science rejecting wonder and I don't see wonder and analysis as being mutually exclusive processes. In fact, for me, I don't think one can have wonder without analysis, that one can't appreciate the “remarkable process that seems excessive when compared to what constitutes" without criticism.
For me, science doesn't seek to avoid wonder or to discount it. For me, science celebrates "the remarkable process that seems excessive when compared to what constitutes." For me, science is about "how things happen and why they happen." So, in this sense, we seem to be discussing the same thing, more or less, which shouldn't be too surprising when we consider the old science fiction adage that one culture's technology is another culture's magic.

But, I do think we differ in one important way. I will admit to a naturalistic perspective, though I imagine we have very different understandings of what that means. I'm not so ready to embrace the supernatural. If something exists, it's part of nature, which means there are natural explanations for its origins and its processes. This is not to suggest that we can now, or ever will, completely understand those processes. Nor does it mean that I reject wonder or the mysterious or that I have a positivistic view of the world.

There is no better way to conduct a "dialogue" than to toss a number of quotations and citations. That's what I plan to do. First, let me say that I find it quite gratifying that you don't identify with any form of positivism: if there is any position that lacks credibility it must be positivism, or any of its forms. But where does that leave us? We might for example think of science in terms of the current Standard Model. That account takes us in the direction of fermions, mesons, bosons, and so on. Such particles are governed by calculations in Bose-Einstein statistics. If we start up our high energy collider, then our particles will be seen in a variety of colors and tastes: 'charm', 'strange', 'truth', and 'beauty'. Now this is somewhat exotic as an account of how things stand, but it does represent something called the Standard Model.

Let's go back 400 years: Forces can be divided according to their effects. There are mechanical forces but also personal forces. This theory we can call The Magical Theory of Everything: see B.K.Ridley, On Science, Routledge, 2001, page: 84-85. Push and pull forces affect things; personal forces affect minds and persons. "Conscious forces and personal responses were involved in religion and human actions, conscious forces obeying impersonal laws involve demonic magic, unconscious forces and personal responses inform spiritual magic, and unconscious forces obeying impersonal laws eventually become the defining elements in what we now call science."

So, in my effort to toss another challenge in your direction, I will paraphrase how the term 'magic' might continue to have some currency. When a person says something to a child and that child responds through prayer we can call that religion; when the personal is sacrificed to impersonal powers through intention we have demonic magic; when rain refreshes a scene we have hoped would flourish, then we experience spiritual rebirth; and when forces without any purpose or intention conform to impersonal laws, we have science. The best I can say at this point is that we're in the stage of forging definitions.

MGGreer