“They're talkin' about a revolution?”
It was the summer of 1988. Tracy Chapman sang, “They're talkin' about a revolution?” The lyrics speak of the poor. “Poor people gonna rise up.” though it is over thirty years old, you may have heard the song. It was used sometimes and unofficially as a theme for Senator Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign.
Chapman’s lyrics resonate with time. A time to come. She is talkin’ about a revolution and Chapman sings that it is the right time to catch change. “You better run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run …”
The revolution I have in mind in A Revolution in Tropes involves space. You must be still. No running. Open your eyes and see the space around you and others. Set your focus not on the actual objects—chairs, trees, pictures hanging on the wall, the flowerpot on the patio, but on the negative space. Try. Le essai.
This is my essay. For thousands of years, many humans thought the earth was at rest. This belief helps to shape our boundary and provides us with a sense of stability, permanency, and solidity. An earth at rest composes negative space. Rest is the hardscape of our world. It creates the ground on which ideas about human communication, human-to-human contact, and talk (exchange, discussion, argument, and altercations) emerged as a theory. Human communication designed for contact required organization. Theory makes it happen. “It is worth mentioning that the word ‘theory’ comes from the Greek word theōrein, a word referring to seeing and observing” (xxi). Theory does more than make communication function. As a way of seeing, it can enable us to observe the negative space around us.
As I worked on A Revolution in Tropes, I would sit and observe people (the objects in space). Sometimes I would sit and look at the negative space (the space around, over, between, and among individuals). I imagined the negative space is where the people of the earth at rest think, feel, and connect with the people around them. You can practice this way of imagining people being on the earth by sitting in front of a maple tree and looking at the leaves and the space around, between, and among each leaf.
Rhetoric is an art or techne. The whole idea of having a technology (of communication) is to connect one person to another and to another. If you are a theoretician (like Aristotle), how do you engineer, program, build, or make possible human-to-human contact with a brand-new fangled technology called rhetoric? (Le essai: You must get past the idea that rhetoric means bullshit).
That’s the question I try to figure out when I’m writin’ about a revolution.
As it turns out, it appears we have had (thanks to the sophists and Aristotle) a fantastic technology for communicating with people for eons. The old way of communication—the techne of rhetoric—worked and even protected us from the perils of disorder. Now, we are set in our ways of thinking. We are so set, as it were, it seems as though we are locked in stone. Beings in a cave. Stone is a metaphor of the earth at rest. The stone on the book cover (pictured) suggests we have become use to being locked in and are comfortable with a tired old belief because it provides us with a sense of stability and solidity.
The figure of a woman is pushing out into a new space. You must push against the earth at rest to rise. What are to make of space that is not at rest? This is where theory comes in. How can we retheorize—look at, see, observe—human contact on a new earth? A Revolution in Tropes: Alloiostrophic Rhetoric tries answer this question. A stone woman serves as my guide. I like to think she is on her way to Mars (?) to observe (theorize) a way to contact the alien, the other—the alloiōsis.
May her spaceship be a red wheelbarrow, for “so much [of a revolution] depends on a red wheelbarrow.”
