Blog posting #7 (due MONDAY 4/9, 11:59 P.M.): Understanding "How the H~** They Can Believe This S#^*"

All right, I'm going to sound like a suck-up for a second.  (I swear Robin didn't put me up to this.  In fact, he'll probably be blushing as he reads it.)  "Beyond the Realm of Reason" is one of the most amazing works of cultural theory I have ever read.  It explains so much.  It "gets" what so many other people miss.  If I were trapped on a desert island with one article explaining how people are convinced of things, I'd want this to be it.

We're reading it, of course, to deepen our understanding of State of Fear and An Inconvenient Truth -- and more generally, of the (often disturbing, but unavoidably real) ways in which rhetoric makes and is science.  We're primarily concerned here, as Robin said in class on Thursday, with the loop on Latour's diagram on page 100 called "public representation" --

-- and all the ways it's "linked and knotted" to all the other aspects of scientific knowledge in the world.  Basically, we're trying to figure out why people (including us) get convinced of some f^%*ed up s#^*, even when they (/we) should know better.  Brown and Herndl give us a complex, multifaceted, and (in my opinion) very convincing account of how this can happen.  And they give us a detailed example:  they analyze the rhetoric of a right-wing extremist magazine, which makes only the lamest attempts scientific accuracy, and explain how and why a certain group of people have come to accept it as fact.  (And the explanation isn't "they're crazy.")

In this blog post, we're asking you to find another such example, and give it the same treatment:

Find a piece of rhetoric that you think -- no, know -- is total b.s., but that some group(s) of people, for whatever insane reason, accept as fact.  You can use something we're studying now in class, something we studied earlier in the semester, or something you've found someplace else.  Just make sure it's something that matters to you, something whose misleading falseness is harming the world.  (For what it's worth, if I were doing this assignment I might start here or here.)

Then, analyze that piece of rhetoric in detail, and explain how and why it works on those particular group(s), according to the terms of Brown and Herndl's argument.  Follow their lead.  Note how they take a few key passages from The Resilient Earth and read them closely; they don't try to do the whole thing.  Do the same.  And read the article carefully:  their argument has many interlocking parts and phases.  You don't need to cover them all, but you should cover at least a few in detail, and show how they interrelate.  Cite the text as necessary.  Use the following key concepts as a guide -- again, no need to use all (or even most) of them, but make sure you use at least a few, appropriately:    

• habitus and market
• local market vs. larger market
• (reciprocally produced) identity
• (rhetoric as) cultural work
• worldview
• strategy of condescension
• hypercorrection
• covert prestige
• (rhetoric as a) self object
• mirroring and idealizing relations 

By the end of your analysis, we should have a basic idea of "the social and psychological motives behind [these people's] rhetoric," as well as "the material and social conditions -- economic, political, educational -- that produce and maintain both their habitus and our own and their respective relations to the linguistic and cultural market" (Brown and Herndl 232).

Post by Monday night; comment by Wednesday night.

Go 4 it.