USC Conference on Rhetorical Theory Working Group: Repetition

1  

LETTING IT RIDE: RHETORIC, REPETITION, AND THE NECESSITY OF CHANCE BROOKE ROLLINS LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY Belly up to one of the felt-covered tables in any card room in any casino in Las Vegas, and you’ll likely hear a wearied, unshaven poker player in an Ultimate Bet t-shirt use some variation of this old saw to describe No Limit Texas Hold ’em: “It’s hours and hours of boredom punctuated by moments sheer terror.” Appropriately clichéd, this adage (which a cursory search reveals has also been used to describe war, aviation, and baseball) speaks to the fact that repetition is an intrinsic feature not only of poker but of all games of chance. Gamblers gamble, that is, to experience the possibility of fortune’s favor and its associated feelings of tension and exhilaration. And because those adrenalin-rush moments come and go quickly, games of chance must be repeated—over and over—for any sense of action to endure. Individual hands of Texas Hold ’em, for example, can be completed in as few as forty-five seconds from deal to rake. Even in those instances of “sheer terror,” when the stakes are high and the appropriate course of action is unclear, players contemplate their decisions for minutes (not hours) at a time, and everyone involved knows that the new deal is just around the corner. In his extended study of gambling in “Where the Action Is,” Erving Goffman calls attention to the inherently repetitive quality of betting by clarifying the distinction between a single play (an individual poker hand, coin toss, or horse race) and the broader session (the span of time “between making the first bet and settling up the last one” [155]), which is comprised of a number of repeated plays. Despite being single, interestingly enough, the play possesses its own repeatable, successive phases—the squaring off phase, the determination phase, the disclosive phase, and the settlement phase (154)—and so a single wager is itself made up of multiple repetitive actions.1 And even if you are that rarest of species, the self-disciplined gambler who approaches the roulette wheel once and only once and puts $100 on red, your wager works (that is, your bet is taken, honored, and paid off or collected) only because it is engaged in a kind of repetitive action. Such a wager has happened a million times before and will happen a million times more, and even if we could pinpoint the very first time, it too worked because it was involved in a kind of originary repetition that made the bet possible from the get go. Repeatable circumstances, conventions, and subject positions, in other words, had to be in place even in that inaugural venture. Since I’ve just called attention to the necessity of repeatable conventions in games of chance, perhaps it’s no surprise that I turn now to that charming old gambler J.L. Austin, who, among other endearing qualities, was willing to risk the very concepts on which his entire theoretical enterprise was based. Austin, that is, defined and distinguished between the now canonical                                                                                                                 1  There’s a particular repetitive seriality to Texas Hold ’em that heightens this effect. Here, the determination phase alone involves four rounds of betting when players see a single hand through to the end: shuffle, deal, call, raise, reraise, fold, flop, bet, call, raise, re-raise, fold, turn, bet, call, raise, re-raise, fold, river, bet, call, raise, re-raise, fold, call, rinse and repeat. Worn out as it may be, the idea that we are able to risk a great deal while simultaneously being bored out of our minds by the repetitive quality of the action isn’t too far a stretch.  

USC Conference on Rhetorical Theory Working Group: Repetition

2  

constative and performative utterances only to demonstrate their conceptual instability, a risk that paid off for readers who, as Jacques Derrida has famously and appreciatively noted, can enjoy an analysis that is “patient, open, aporetical, in constant transformation, often more fruitful in the acknowledgment of its impasses than in its positions” (“Signature” 14). In addition to taking such conceptual and propositional chances, Austin, you may remember, is explicitly interested in placing and taking bets. He turns to the language of gambling not only to distinguish performative utterances from constative ones, but also to demonstrate the necessity of appropriate circumstance and genuine intention for a performative utterance to count as felicitous, for it to be “happily carried off” (14). To “bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow” (6), for example, successfully performs the action of entering into a contract provided the bettor is being serious and her wager is accepted by a taker (often with a utterance like “Done!” or “Book.”). Like marrying, bequeathing, and christening ships, the bet is one of the central archetypes of How to Do Things With Words. Austin introduces it in the first lecture and returns to it repeatedly (might we even say compulsively?) until the twelfth lecture (where the bet ultimately ends up a “commissive”) to demonstrate the changing fortunes of the performative utterance. To begin with at least, the bet for Austin is a special kind of performative, an “explicit” one that vividly illustrates the affective dimensions of language. “[H]ighly developed affairs […] that […] begin with or include some highly significant and unambiguous expression,” explicit performatives very clearly enact the objects of their utterances (32). When I say, “I bet you $25 that Aaron Rodgers will earn me over 30 fantasy football points this week,” that is, I have very clearly done the thing I am talking about. And while it is certainly possible to gamble without saying anything at all (such as when you “bet with a totalisator machine by putting a coin in a slot” [8]), the utterance “I bet” is an explicit performative because “the uttering of the words is, indeed, usually a, or even the, leading incident in the performance of the act” (8). Yet as Austin himself will come to suspect, utterances like these, though seemingly explicit, are not as unambiguous as he initially speculates. Indeed, he attempts to corral some of the risk he sees emerging from this linguistic scene by articulating the necessary conditions required for a performative utterance to be felicitous. And it is in his articulation of these conditions that Austin forges an indissociable (and ultimately impossible) link between repetition and identity, a link that puts into question the very “I” of the “I bet.” Austin must make note of such conditions because it is not simply the case that uttering the phrase “I bet” successfully carries off the action. Other fitting conventions, actions, and affiliations are necessary for the utterance to effectively perform its object. To wit: If we “announce our bet after the race is over” (14), we probably won’t have much luck getting paid for hitting the exacta. Classified as a “misfire,” a post-race bet like this one is infelicitous because it gets wrong the accepted protocol for betting horses and so no contract will have ever been put in place. What’s needed, in other words, for the performative to be properly fired is an “accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect” (14). This is important for our purposes because, in so far as the procedure is conventional, it relies on the logic of repetition: Generally accepted practices for live track betting are repeated across time and location. This is how the work of betting gets done—this time, the first time, every time.

USC Conference on Rhetorical Theory Working Group: Repetition

3  

And yet even if the protocol is properly performed (which is to say, repeated), the bet as explicit performative encounters still another risk, the risk of insincerity. That is, we can follow all of the generally accepted procedures for betting—say the appropriate words to the appropriate people at the appropriate times—and not have any intention whatsoever of paying up should we lose. Austin deems such hollow utterances “abuses.” In cases like these, the performative act is achieved (we’ve successfully made a wager) but the purported effects of this wager are never implemented, and thus the bet does not work.2 “Our word is our bond” (10), Austin tells us, and for the wager to be happily carried off we must be serious. We have to mean what we say and be fully present with our intentions. For Austin, then, successful (not to be confused with profitable) betting requires—in the very same moment—two types of felicity: appropriate conventions (which operate through the logic of repetition) and sincere intention (which assumes the full presence of the intending subject). What is happening here is that “certain thoughts and feelings” (15) must attach themselves to and maintain themselves across the repetitive elements of performative action. Austin ties repetition and intention together, that is, even though the nature of repetition would seem to suggest that our intentions can never be fully present. Why? Because if we are following a protocol, we are simply executing the actions that have been determined in advance by a repetition machine (here, the various conventions that govern the act of placing a bet). Thus in the moment of the bet, the purity of intention is necessarily contaminated by the ritualistic elements of convention. This reading of Austin suggests that what we risk in the moment of the wager is far more than our stake. We put our very being into question the moment we place a bet, and this dispersion of identity occurs over and over again as our repeated plays (already made up of multiple, repeatable phases) turn into lengthy sessions that defy natural circadian rhythms and our experience of chronology itself.3 The repetition of gambling takes us out of ourselves. It divides intention and forecloses the spontaneity of human reason and response. It is sometimes said that gamblers are after something for nothing, but my guess is that the people who say this don’t have much experience at the tables. Gamblers risk everything—being itself—not simply for a big jackpot or even a break-even score (as many a down-on-his-luck gambler has chased), but rather for a chance, for that indeterminate moment before the river card falls. Here, on the precipice before winning or losing, the self is dispersed in the face of an infinite alterity. This dispersal of the self in the face of alterity, though heightened in gambling because of the repetitive structure and explicit orientation toward risk, is not confined to the act of wagering alone. Derrida suggests that we are always rendered other by repetition. Why? Because repetition simultaneously enables and makes impossible self-presence. For any thing or being to have presence, that is, it must remain identifiable as the same across time and across all possible                                                                                                                 2  What’s interesting here is that for Austin, the object of the abuse is not the person we’re fully planning to stiff, but rather it is the procedure itself: “[T]he act is achieved, although to achieve it in such circumstances, as when we are, say, insincere, is an abuse of the procedure” (16). Thus the repeatable conventions occupy a particularly important position in Austin’s formulation of the performative. Our intentions have to maintain a direct relation to the repeatable protocol.

 

3  Not

only are there no clocks in casinos, but the carefully adjusted lighting, hand painted ceilings, and ambient slotmachine symphonies create a kind of perpetual 5 o’clock that is of a completely different order than the real world.  

USC Conference on Rhetorical Theory Working Group: Repetition

4  

instantiations of itself. But because repetition is part of being’s constitution in this way, presence is already interrupted or contaminated. Repetition, then, marks being with an internal difference, and so what it gives rise to is not a copy of the same (not a repetition that is somehow temporally after an original form of presence), but rather a radically unknowable event. Repetition, that is, gives us over to chance. “There is no incompatibility between repetition and the novelty of what is different” Derrida notes (“Others” 136). “In a tangential and elliptical way, a difference always causes repetition to deviate. I call that iterability, the other appearing in reiteration. The singular always inaugurates, it even comes about unforeseeably, like the new arrival, via repetition” (136). So what might this discussion of repetition and chance tell us about rhetoric’s becoming? For one thing, I believe it gives us reason to focus on rhetoric’s uncontainable risks, especially those that come by way of repetition. I’m thinking here of the repetitive elements of rhetorical education (including the progymnasmata and practices of imitation) that are meant to give rise to particular ethical subjectivities. This is likely more of a gamble than Isocrates, Quintilian, and Cicero thought. I’m thinking, too, of rhetoric’s highly conventional design and the persistence with which it attempts to install flexible rules that can be adapted to a multitude of individual circumstances. We can learn how to deliver the introductions of defense speeches, for example, but every individual introductory moment will be an unprecedented event. As Derrida suggests, “The unprecedented arises, whether we like it or not, in the multiplicity of repetitions” (136). Like the casino for the gambler, contingency is rhetoric’s milieu. The only sure bet is the necessity of chance.   Works Cited Austin, J. L. How to Do Things With Words. 2nd Edition. J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisa, Eds. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1962. Derrida, Jacques. “Signature Event Context.” Limited Inc. Gerald Graff, ed. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1988. 1-23. ______. “Others Are Secret Because They are Other.” Paper Machine. Rachel Bowlby, trans. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP. 2005. 136-163. Goffman, Erving. “Where the Action Is.” Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. New York: Anchor Books, 1967. 149-270.

Rollins Repetition Reflective Essay

USC Conference on Rhetorical Theory. Working ... Is,” Erving Goffman calls attention to the inherently repetitive quality of betting by clarifying the distinction ...

936KB Sizes 1 Downloads 172 Views

Recommend Documents

P1 Portfolio: Sample Reflective Essay C 1/10 ...
Eliciting a social history is particularly important in clinical examinations, as often .... Thalassaemia”, I identified potential abuse of gene therapy for eugenics.

Reflective photosensor (photoreflector) - GitHub
The RPR-359F is a reflective photosensor. The emitter is a GaAs infrared light emitting diode and the detector is a high-sensitivity, silicon planar phototransistor.

Repetition Maximization based Texture Rectification
images is an essential first step for many computer graph- ics and computer vision ... matrix based rectification [ZGLM10] can be very effective, most of our target ...

Repetition Maximization based Texture Rectification
Figure 1: The distorted texture (top) is automatically un- warped (bottom) using .... however, deals in world-space distorting and not with cam- era distortions as is ...

Reflective Practitioner i Reflective Practitioner My Biography As A ...
has the objective of showing to what extent I was a reflective practitioner during the few years I spent in teaching until the present day. ... and I believe it had a role of leading my life to where it is now. .... to define the objectives and to pl

Essay Questions
are Copyright © 1984-2008 by College Entrance Examination Board, Princeton, NJ. All rights reserved. For face-to-face teaching purposes, classroom teachers are permitted to reproduce the questions. Web or Mass distribution prohibited. Essay Question

solipsist henry rollins pdf
Page 1 of 1. solipsist henry rollins pdf. solipsist henry rollins pdf. Open. Extract. Open with. Sign In. Main menu. Displaying solipsist henry rollins pdf. Page 1 of 1.

AMBER: Reflective PE Packer - GitHub
Spreading malicious code is a complex problem for malware authors. Because of the recent advancements on malware detection technologies both malware authors and penetration testers having hard time with bypassing security measures and products such a

STIMULUS REPETITION EFFECTS ON PICTURE ...
Raw EEG data from individual subjects reflects “spontaneous” fluctuations of ... independently, but whose open fields summated at the time recorded (Rugg, ...

Kierkegaard-s-Category-Of-Repetition-Kierkegaard-Studies ...
Penutup. *) Jadwal dapat berubah sewaktu-waktu tergantung situasi pada saat pelaksanaan kegiatan. Whoops! There was a problem loading this page. Retrying... Kierkegaard-s-Category-Of-Repetition-Kierkegaard-Studies-Monograph.pdf. Kierkegaard-s-Categor

Unsuppressible Repetition Suppression and exemplar ...
different process from predicting a particular face with specific features (e.g. John vs. ... Our design involved 3 types of blocks: “Prediction Blocks”, “Repetition Blocks” .... and defined our ROIs as 4-mm–radius spheres centered on local

Masked Repetition and Phonological Priming ... - Semantic Scholar
which led them to predict that the degree of masking will be related to the similarity ... modal repetition priming at 53-ms prime exposures in participants who were ...... approach to phonological coding of printed words, as expressed in the dual.

Repetition Suppression and Expectation Suppression ...
Sep 26, 2012 - data analysis that may arise from having an unequal number of trials per condition ... were performed using SPSS Statistics v16. (IBM).

Masked Repetition and Phonological Priming ... - Semantic Scholar
the computer keyboard and without any time pressure. If participants had ...... The present results provide further support for a model of word recognition (both ...

Repetition Suppression and Expectation Suppression Are Dissociable ...
Sep 26, 2012 - we observed ES (but no RS) during an intermediate (100–200 .... domain. More specifically, for the early time window, we chose to focus on the P50 ..... Friston K (2009) The free-energy principle: a rough guide to the brain?

get in the van henry rollins pdf
There was a problem previewing this document. Retrying... Download. Connect more apps... Try one of the apps below to open or edit this item. get in the van ...

Fractional Repetition Batch Codes
Key words: Fractional repetition codes, batch codes, transversal designs, affine ... the Department of Computer Science, Technion, Haifa 32000, Israel, e-mail:.

essay-hints.pdf
will not get you much, if any, credit by themselves. DON'T. 1. Don't waste time on background information or a long introduction unless -the question calls for it. 2.

Reflective Remote Method Invocation
A language mapping is needed to translate an IDL file into the programming ..... which will allow users to download and run a JVM outside of the browser.

Reflective measurement models, behavior domains ...
models are models used in data reduction techniques like principal .... behavioral sciences essentially sidestep the issue of how to define ...... New York: Wiley.