Conspectus

Evocation  and  Provocation

John S. Nelson and Robert Hariman

Poroi, August, 2003

Dialectic, which is the parent of logic,
came itself from rhetoric.  Rhetoric is
in turn the child of the myths and
poetry of ancient Greece.  . . . [The]
first teachers of the Western world
were teaching Quality, and the medium
they had chosen was that of rhetoric.¹
                                    — Robert M. Pirsig

Each issue of Poroi includes a “general view of its subjects,” and the dictionary defines this as a “conspectus.”  The components of the word come from Latin, and they should lead us to acknowledge that a conspectus is not an over-view but a with-view.  It happens on the same level with what it views; and it looks at its objects from within their midst, not from above or afar.  A conspectus provides a quick, engaging, informative, possibly provocative sense of the contents.

If a conspectus evokes an issue as a whole, perhaps this evocation of a conspectus should do the same for the journal as a whole.  Poroi is a journal for works of rhetorical sophistication in all fields of learning.  It is a home for interdisciplinary studies alive to strategies and tactics of persuasion.  It brings the rigor of peer-review to inquiries not always disciplinized, and the vigor of invention to scholarship sometimes too staid to ring true.  Consistent with the aspirations of Iowa’s Project on Rhetoric of Inquiry, the mission of Poroi is to publish an exciting range of rhetorical scholarship promptly, accessibly, and attractively.

Poroi is an electronic outlet for individual works of scholarship and experimentation attuned to the importance of rhetoric for inquiry and culture.  It brings the advantages of online distribution to the escalating challenges in sharing intellectual works widely and well.  Poroi is a place for occasional sets of studies that arise from conferences, conventions, invisible colleges, topical seminars, symposia, and other forums for scholarship.  It provides a public for rhetorical analysis and invention.  It affords an arena for leaping beyond print forms into the possibilities that online publishing can provide for multimedia inquiries.

Accordingly Poroi issues scholarly articles of established, conventional kinds.  Yet it also publishes occasional features that stretch scholarship in different directions.   As explained, every issue has a conspectus.  From time to time, the journal has film takes, multimedia inquiries, myth scapes, rhetorical inventions, strategy studies, and word tours.  The journal’s architecture evokes each of these forms in decent detail. Perhaps the most important thing to say, though, is that Poroi remains open to additional experiments in scholarship.

Poroi springs from pioneering work by Iowans on rhetoric of inquiry, rhetorical analysis, rhetorical invention, and multimedia scholarship.  Iowa created the first department of rhetoric and communication studies, the first MFA degree, the first writer’s workshop, the first program on film theory, the first library launching pad for multimedia teaching and scholarship, the first center for crafts of book publication, the first programs in speech pathology and audiology, and the first home for rhetoric of inquiry.  These remain among the world’s premier programs, and Poroi turns Iowa’s enduring excellence into an electronic platform for publishing works on the resulting frontiers of investigation.

As an electronic journal of rhetorical analysis and invention, Poroi issues inquiries that arise within, across, or beyond disciplines.  Poroi emphasizes the production of knowledge and culture.  It pays special attention to the scholarly implications of current media and modes of communication.  It has a strong interest in understanding how academic disciplines and artistic practices depend on political, economic, and epistemic conventions articulated in language.  It appreciates knowledge and culture as persuasive accomplishments and constraints for further inquiry.  It cultivates invention of practical topics, tropes, forms, and conversations.  It develops interdisciplinary resources for detailed studies sensitive to rhetoric and for public debates about their implications.  Thus Poroi seeks to spur communities of rhetorically intelligent scholarship.

Good writing is a defining aim of Poroi.  Interdisciplinary inquiries cannot succeed without it.  Poroi also experiments with imaginative communication of other kinds, because inquiries for electronic times requires no less.  Poroi especially seeks inquiries that reflect on methods even in practicing them.  It features works that refine our constitutions of knowledge, explicitly through analysis and argument or implicitly through novel modes of investigation.  The commitment is to encompass works from a wide variety of fields to spark discussion along the boundaries of academic, artistic, and cultural practices.

The journal title is more than an acronym.  Poroi is the plural of poros, Greek for a way through or across.  Poroi are tracks through the mountains, not detours around them; poroi are fords across a river, not bridges above it.  The journal pursues rhetoric of inquiry as immanent, comparative, and practical epistemology for better knowledge and culture.  It resists Olympian stipulations of Scientific Method.  It appreciates specific devices of research and persuasion.  It replaces Archimedean ambitions for Logical Criteria with detailed analysis of actual appeals to particular audiences.  It favors situated and sophisticated studies of individual practices over quests for any fixed foundation of the true, transcendental ground of the good, or eternal idea of the beautiful.  Poroi pursues truths, goods, beauties, faiths, inferences, inventions – in the plural.

For democracy, poroi means practical “ways and means,” the resources for shared work, as with the Ways and Means Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives.  Classical rhetoric refined the available means of persuasion.  Current means are greater but no less practical.  Poroi means to trace paths among many cultures of learning and learning in many cultures.  It does the same for many media, and so the journal encourages multimedia scholarship in the myriad forms fit for publication online.  The Sophists invented rhetoric as the first systematic inquiry into “politics,” which Aristotle then defined as the art of the possible.  For the ancients and us, poroi are these practical possibilities, specific ways and means that facilitate our ordinary transactions.

Aporia, as Paul Ricoeur has shown in fine detail, are absences of these practical ways and means.²  Lacking poroi, we face gaps that pose difficulties of passage; we need ways and means to carry out our quests.³  But if we leap the gaps, we never learn what they have to teach us.  Our inquiries meander then toward empty or endless questions, as Ricoeur and the deconstructionists agree.  Aporia are not black holes, and we can probe them.  Hermeneuticists like Riceour as well as deconstructionists like Derrida have been inventive enough to return enriched from extended engagements with the proliferating queries that arise from aporia.  New practices of inquiry such as hermeneutics, deconstruction cultural studies, and rhetoric of inquiry can be crafty in creating their own poroi and facing the aporia that remain.  No quest should, or could, proceed otherwise.

The plurality, accessibility, and practicality of poroi contrast with the supposedly more rigorous and heroic methodos, a singular Greek word for a special path of travel or investigation.  This informs the modern meaning of method as the orderly pursuit of knowledge or other results.  It also lurks behind the late-modern relaxation of “methods” into “approaches.”  Both put us at a distance from the objects of knowledge then prescribe our paths, step by step, from here to there.  Poroi put us into the full field of play, within the midst of possibilities.  Their popular, prudential ways and means remind us how the conventional tracks are aspects of who we are, where we can go, and what we can know.  Poroi are not methodological highways that bulldoze the landscape.  They do not distance the knower from the known and discipline both.⁴  Hence Poroi encourages new “practices” of inquiry, not new “approaches” to research.

Turning from rigid prescriptions of method and the formal logic of science, Poroi helps explore the many ways we actually seek, embody, and disseminate knowledge.  Where logical, methodological, and other meta-studies would rise in principle above scholarly boundaries and particulars, rhetorical analysis and invention strive to connect diverse studies.  Poroi considers their specific commonalities and differences in practice.  The paths of poroi stay well-grounded, neither transcending nor undermining the practical criteria of everyday existence.⁵  The rhetorical trails of inquiry stay attuned to humanity and nature by staying within our worlds and the wilds that surround us.  This keeps them akin to the paths of inquiry promoted by environmentalists.⁶  Thus Poroi supports new practices of inquiry, new forms for scholarship, and many inventive connections among formerly separate studies.

With this general view of Poroi, there is more to say about the conspectus for every issue.  A conspectus is not mainly a survey or a distillation of an issue’s contents.  It does not seek any pre-emptive word to define the other contributions, but lets them speak for themselves.  Nor is a conspectus an authoritative pronouncement on the meanings and truths of the other publications.  A conspectus does not provide some master plan for its issue, even when the issue has an overall theme or devotes several of its elements to a symposium on a special topic.

In the Poroi case, at least, a conspectus is a recurrent feature composed by the principal editor of each issue.  This is not always the journal’s editor-in-chief.  Poroi anticipates its share of special issues, because electronic publication can be more timely than print – as well as more flexible about forms and lengths.  So occasionally a Poroi conspectus comes from the editor for a special issue.  An issue of Poroi might even have more than one conspectus.  When there is no overarching theme for the issue, but it does include a symposium with several related articles, the assembler of the symposium could provide a conspectus for those contributions, while a different perspective would inform the journal editor in offering a conspectus for the entire issue.

Consequently we are not just muttering to ourselves when we mention, at this late point, that brevity, energy, and personality are conventions of a Poroi conspectus.  (At least one of us concedes the mild irony in talking here about brevity.)  It does not speak in the collective tones of a canon or discipline.  It does not talk in the technical terms of a school.  Nor does it seek the consensual voice of an anonymous method.  Instead a conspectus pursues lively and accessible prose fitting for its topics.  Usually a conspectus requires between one and three thousand words.  Always it stays mindful of rhetorical analysis and invention, more or less in the manner of Pirsig, at once ancient and current.

A conspectus responds to the other contributions with thoughts of its own.  It is bound to mention the other pieces but not necessarily to introduce them in any strict sense.  A conspectus is not exactly a preface, coming before the main text to help put a face on what follows.  Nor is it principally an afterward, adding a further perspective once the main work is done.  A conspectus arises in the midst of editing the pieces that comprise the issue, and it reads that way.  This suits the lack of linearity in ordering and accessing an issue’s elements online.  A conspectus is as apt to be read in the middle of perusing an issue as it is before or after all the other elements.  Hence it had better be useful to encounter at any point, and it should even be worth reading by itself.

Often a conspectus is a meditation or a rumination.  Typically it includes a provocation.  Sometimes it replies, rebuts, or refutes.  Nearly always a conspectus comes from reflecting on the implications of interactions or comparisons among the other contributions to an issue.  It is a place for measuring their themes and theses, their assumptions and agreements, their logics and lacunae, their intentions and innovations.  It is a form for eliciting further lessons or possibilities from the rest of the issue.  Thus a conspectus takes the issue contents as exigencies for rhetorical performance.  It responds to the troubles and opportunities they pose for intellectual communities connected, in this instance, to the diverse inquiries of interest to Poroi.  Hence it keeps an eye on the issue’s significance for the journal as an evolving population of scholarly publications.

Notes

¹     Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, New York, Bantam Books, 1974, pp. 385 and 371.  See John S. Nelson, “A Turn Toward Rhetoric,” North Dakota Quarterly, 56, 3, Summer, 1988, pp. 53-59.

²     See Paul Ricoeur:  The Rule of Metaphor, Robert Czerny, trans., Toronto, University of Toronto Press, (1975), 1977; Interpretation Theory, Forth Worth, Texas Christian University Press, 1976; Time and Narrative, Volume 1, Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, trs., Chicago, University of Chicago Press, (1983), 1984, especially pp. 5-30.

³     All these definitions come from Liddel and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon, Oxford, Oxford University Press, abridged edition, 1966, pp. 92 and 579.

⁴     See John S. Nelson, Tropes of Politics, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1998, pp. 34-46.

⁵     See Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason, New York, Oxford University Press, 1979.

⁶     Compare the rhetorical inquiries of Robert Pirsig with the ecological essays of Gary Snyder:  Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; Pirsig, Lila, New York, Bantam Books, 1991; Snyder, The Old Ways, San Francisco, City Lights Books, 1977; Snyder, The Practice of the Wild, San Francisco, North Point Press, 1990, especially pp. 144-154.