Datos específicos del área de estudio

Ideograph the abstract but frequently used political vocabularies with ideological positions (McGee, 1980, p. 5). Such vocabularies (words and phrases) usually do not have clear definitions but tend to give an impression of clear meaning. For example, democracy, liberty, and freedom seem to be clear but can mean very different things in different ideological systems. Each of these ideographs can mean different things to individuals, institutions, and nation states. McGee (1980) claims that the ideograph is culturally bound and subject to changes in another culture while at the same time may have similarities or consonance with each community’s behavior or practice (pp. 15-16). For instance, “democracy” means differently in different cultures according to his theory. The diachronic and synchronic tensions that ideographs create should be our study objectives if we are trying to analyze a given discourse (p. 16). His vertical and horizontal

rhetorical structures and the situational rhetoric structures are helpful in intercultural, comparative, and transnational rhetorical and communication research owing to the

investigations into both contemporary and historical knowledge. This journey of archeology of knowledge transcends chronological research on language, speech act, and knowledge within one culture.

For example, McGee’s “ideograph” can be explained with Chinese characters, which is a

systematic ideographic language. For instance, the word 国家, which is over simply translated

into “nation” or “nation state,” actually include two words: 国/nation and 家/family. Therefore, this seemingly clear definition “nation family,” is culturally bound to the Chinese people and the

Chinese socialist ideology of the nation as a family. Another example is 民主, which is generally

translated into “democracy,” actually means “people as masters.” The ideographic phrase 民主

includes two words: 民/people and 主/master. Similarly, 人民, an ideograph which is simply

translated into “people,” actually means 人/human beings and 民/people, and 人民 is always

used with another phrase “群众,” to emphasize the Marxist concept “the masses”/人民群众 as

opposed to “the government” and the “officials” in a Chinese rhetorical context. The word 民

used to be used in the word “子民,” which literally means the “child people” of the heavenly

bestowed emperor/ruler. Therefore, a scrutiny of the ideographs in a Chinese context immediately connects the diachronic and synchronic meanings of a series of ideographs. In addition, the ideographic power can reside in visual rhetoric because visual rhetoric is kind of an ideographic representation of meaning and its carrier, or form and content, which is significant in cosmopolitan pedagogy because visual and digital rhetoric help students’ cultural awareness and

images of family members, images of other Chinese people and their families, which is basically related to Baudrillard’s idea of simulation and simulacra because these images are simulations in

the minds of the Chinese people in their rhetorical context. Also, 民主/people master will direct

the Chinese people to think of themselves as masters, a concept that is different from the

Western democracy. Teaching students transnational literacy then means to help them to imagine different sets of images in different nation states and their cultures so when the ideographs appear in different media, they will have the competency to connect them with visuals and texts alike. This is exactly McGee’s focus: how ideology can be seen holistically inside one society’s ideographs, and among different society’s ideographs, paying attention to both materialistic and mythical demonstrations (pp. 4-17).

McGee also, when talking about definitions of “ideology,” claims human beings in groups behave and think differently than human beings in isolation (p.2); he illustrates how the dynamics of the collective mindset and the individual mindset operate according to Symbolists and Materialists respectively (p. 2-3):

• symbolists such as Burke believe that ideology is what people voluntarily

participate in whereas Materialists such as Marx holds that ideology is just an illusion or a “lie” that the ruling class uses to control the society;

• Burke’s emphasis on the tricked individuals who are more concerned with motive

rather than reality and Neo-Marxians’ focus on the materiality of the political machine both leads to the fallacy of the “moral” issue.

Therefore, to McGee, symbolists seek to understand the material reality is represented through symbol use, while Materialists interpret how the reality each society is endowed with could affect how people gain power politically: the symbolists’ activities are thus mythical and

normative because they cannot get rid of the conventional use of symbols and the archetypal— religious or non-religious rituals; whereas materialists’ neglect of language studies witnesses their failure in revealing the reality that is constructed by language; however, symbolists’ neglect of “non-symbolic environment” found their theory unable to describe how the material

environment constructs social reality (p. 3) because it is only one part of the story. McGee proposes that we think of the “trick-of-the-mind” seriously and do not ascribe to either side’s tricks, i.e., we embrace at once Marxist materialism and symbolist myth because Marx’s idea that political “truth” is forever an illusion in that this illusion “is the product of persuasion” (p.4). Therefore, there is the possibility of falsity in any ideology and critical thinking is needed in any given rhetorical setting or culture.

By illustrating that due to the nature of ideology—“political language” composed of “ideographs,” “political consciousness shapes each individual’s “reality” and “hinders “pure thought'”(pp. 5-9). The characteristics of ideographs—“the rhetoric of control,” and the reality that people are “conditioned” by the “vocabulary of concepts that function as guides, warrants, reasons, or excuses for behavior and belief”(pp. 5-6). Therefore the set of “ideographs” chosen becomes dominant power dynamics in a certain society (pp. 6-7). However, the connection between language and the ideology it creates makes what we may call nation or society or

community (pp. 7-8). Certain usage or frequency of words and terms determine our identities and thus unite or separate human beings; even the same word may have different connotations in different societies which contains subgroups of communities that have subcategories of

“ideographs” (p. 8). Additionally, ideographs, which are bound to certain cultures, make “pure thought”—ideas free of cultural, historic, and ideographical differences, an impossible mission. Therefore, ideographs are only meaningful in their concrete history (pp. 9-10).

McGee thinks that in each ideograph’s history, the precedent or fundamental meaning is the “common denominator”— the “categorical meaning” of all situations and that the evolution of an ideograph’s different shades of meaning is therefore judged by certain historical

contexts/situations, for new situations require additional interpretation or restrictions for the ideograph to adapt to new historical conditions; thus, any comparative research for an

ideograph’s vertical meanings “now” and “then”(pp. 9-11) becomes a mirror of history. McGee suggests that compared to the dominant narrative or ideographic meaning, popular culture has more weight in determining the accurate meaning of certain ideographs; however, will the masses be literate enough to live against dominant narratives in the digital and transnational era with their hurried citizen responsibilities?

McGee (1990) claims that “critical rhetoric” can help develop realistic strategies to cope with the postmodern condition and his discussions on fragmentation of the text are helpful in helping students to critically think about the art of rhetoric and communication in that he constructs the idea of textual fragments by looking at texts within the scope of critical rhetoric. To McGee, a discourse that seems finished is at the same time structures of fragments as 1) audience/reader/critic’s own explanation of their power and meaning, or 2)

audience/reader/critic’s rationalization for having taken their cue as an excuse for action.

Therefore, acquiring critical thinking competency in transnational, fragmented texts and contexts is crucial to students and the general public.

McGee holds that new communication technologies are the reasons for contemporary cultural fracturing and fragmentation (1990). Referring to Burke (1945), McLuhan (1964), Ong (1982), Cheney (1988), Bloom (1987), Deleuze and Guattari (1983), Baudrillard (1983), McGee claims that the same essence behind these critics is that the human condition has changed (1990):

the fragments that were formerly presented by traditional media such as books, pamphlets, and so on are now presented by new media in a way that is too fast to analyze. McGee supports Said’s idea that the frustration of handling postmodern fragmentation is that people try to understand and treat them “as if they were whole” and the solution is to look for the formations of texts rather than the text (1983).

McGee gives two different ways to interpret/analyze/criticize the formation rather than the text itself: 1. Now that text and context have a disjuncture, explore the reason why texts disappeared and instead discursive fragments of context prevail. McGee refers to Burke’s “Speech on the Conciliation with the Colonies,” and argues that homogenous culture and text gave way to fragments of information: our postmodern context. Further, traditional textual unity and integrity is now transferred into human beings. 2. Now that text collapsed and became context, explore the “invisible text,” changing cultural traditions that reverse the roles of writers/speakers and readers. The explosion of knowledge/information made all finished texts open-ended to different perspectives, resulting in the only possible solution for readers/audiences to use dense and truncated fragments in the production of a finished discourse. McGee therefore emphasized that text construction is more done by the consumers than by the producers. He also calls for rhetoricians who have the skills to consume discourses. Anderson’s “prosumer”

approach responds to this stance. Anderson looks at the author/writer/speaker, no matter they are instructors and students, or other groups, as both producers and consumers by the invented word “prosumer” (2003).

For the concern of this dissertation, world citizens living in a digital era will have to acquire the skill sets necessary to become the prosumers who are at once producers and

postmodern art forms, including multimodal, fragmented, and transnational rhetoric. However, before we embark on the variables and skill sets our postmodern subjects need in transnational setting, it is crucial for us to discuss the postmodern subject because it is the central agency of postmodern texts and contexts.

2.2.3 “Death of the Subject”: Postmodern Subject & Its Fragmentation

Postmodernity threatens both the object and the subject. The subject under concern is a fragmented/schizophrenic one. For contemporary postmodern human beings, fragmentation has become a primary state of existence due to late capitalism (Jameson, 1991), or global capitalist development. The explosion of information and cultural clashes across borders, new media and mass media platforms, as well as transnational movements, have greatly enhanced global communication, but at the same time brought forth new challenges to the postmodern subjects.

Descarte (1977) defined human existence as “Cogito ergo sum/Je pense que je suis/I

think therefore I am.” This definition of human as subject laid the foundation of human beings as ideological beings, which means we are what our minds think or are told to think. However, subjectivity is highly related to societies and different cultures. Althusser (2014) holds that state apparatuses repress human beings to become subjects of certain ideologies, but such subjects consider their identities as natural. Jacques Derrida (1978) argues that subject is deconstructed to the extent that the subject itself is doubted. “Who am I?” becomes a more intriguing postmodern question due to the disappearance of narratives and authority, the doubt of Western main stream

capitalist narrative and therefore postmodern “death of the subject.”Fredric Jameson (1991)

considers culture in a humanistic sense by defining it as architecture, paintings, movies, novels, and so on, and summarizes postmodernist culture characteristics as “depthlessness,” “pastiche,”

and “schizophrenic.” He argues that these feature lead to the loss of historicity, and therefore the “fragmentation of the subject” (1984). The postmodern subject, then, should be a compartmented subject located in different systems of ideologies, cultures, images, medias, and so on. These larger concepts are all relevant to understand the postmodern subjects, how the schizophrenic subjects react toward one another in the transnational and technological context.

Fredric Jameson’s idea on the fragmentation of the subject is closely related to his

Marxist cultural critique. Jameson discusses the concept of postmodernism regarding ideological symptoms in cultural products in “The Political Unconscious”(1982), “Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”(1991), and “Postmodernism and Consumer society”(1992). Jameson holds that interpretations in “Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” are confined by historical, political and economical preconditions that have to be identified beforehand. In this perspective, he holds firmly to the Marxist material and historical “totality” as the principle guideline for all analysis and interpretations. However, emphasizing the

temporality any cultural product and its conditions, Jameson admits the dominant or prevailing role of any single culture at certain phases, which made him distinct with Marxist dialectics. Jameson claims that the current (1991) cultural dominant is postmodernism. Jameson notes the phenomena of postmodernist culture, such as pastiche and depthlessness, is highly relevant to their historical context. He holds that one of the features of postmodern culture is “the waning of affect”(10). Indeed, the rise of global economy and global market, in Jameson’s view, made insignificant the individual consumer, producer, and employee, who became a little data entry in the big data. Individual human agency is facing the crisis of alienation and anxiety and gradually, the intense separation of labor among people and nations made the postmodern subject

and the Consumer Society,” p.17). The waning of affect, to Jameson, is due to the subject’s loss of continuity between past and future, and the difficulty to integrate his/her temporal existence into a coherent experience. Jameson believes this loss of ability to integrate, consume, and produce leaves postmodern subjects nothing but fragments.

Jameson also argues that postmodernism has turned into a consumer product (1992), which posts another challenge for postmodern subjects to understand and analyze culture(s) and cultural products. Rather than clinging to the Marxist ideology and economic conditions,

cosmopolitanism gives us a philosophy of love and care to look at citizenship and responsibility towards late capitalism and globalization.