Prof. Bertonneau Responds Again

Apropos of the comments made on his second Pope Center piece, Tom has asked me to post this response: My respondent writes: “‘Blaming the culture’ has become a coded phrase for blaming the culture of students – and thus, the students themselves – for most speakers of that phrase generally excludes themselves from the swath of that ‘culture’ even though culture, by implication if not definition, is generally ‘all-encompassing.’” Absolutely, I exclude myself from immersion in and contamination by the toxicity of existing commercial culture; it is the moral obligation of the critic to eschew crassness and crudity, an obligation that I discharge with sustained alacrity.  I notice that the respondent excludes himself (or herself) from an imagined proletariat of poorly educated, unenlightened “English professors,” who putatively have never heard of rhetoric and who cannot speak French.  “Hypocrite lecteur,” wrote Charles Baudelaire, “mon semblable, mon frère.” My respondent writes: “Phrases like ‘rhetoric of the visual’ are perhaps less familiar to professors of English than to professors of French where critics like Christian Metz set the stage, so to speak, for film analysis now decades ago.”  The phrase, “rhetoric of the visual,” is at best an analogy; rigorously, the term rhetoric applies to the public oratory that emerged in the Greek Archaic Age simultaneously with alphabetic literacy, which alphabetic literacy decisively informed.  As for mybona fides as an analyst of film – I invite my respondent to sample an item of my work, which he or she may do by following the link here: http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4230. My respondent writes: “As for the concept of literacy subversion effectuated by mass-circulation newspapers, well, where would Dickens and Balzac have been without newspapers for which their novels were written, chapter by chapter, and did they undermine literacy?”  Again, the writer refuses to see obvious distinctions.  A novel is, by definition, a serial story; chapter two must follow logically from chapter one and so forth until all the chapters together make a unified whole.  Novelistic structure both informs and requires sustained attention.  One hundred unconnected stories appearing “serially” in the same newspaper with a Dickens or a Balzac novel constitute, to paraphrase Neil Postman, merely one damned thing after another, and therefore do not inform or require sustained attention.  In all likelihood they destroy sustained attention, as do even more catastrophically the flickering images of the video game. My respondent writes of “literacy not as a concept linked to the printed word but rather to argument, to rhetoric, to persuasion.” Sorry, but starting from its denotative character as an item of vocabulary, literacy is linked to letters. Whether they are manuscript or typescript, letters they are irreducibly a graphic phenomenon.  The concept of a letter– – of the visible representation of a particular sound – can only exist in a literate (more properly, in an alphabetic) context.  As Ong points out, oral people never analyze language; the idea of a phoneme would be inexplicable to them. My respondent writes: “My point is that the attack is interesting but not ‘airtight’ and thus subject to deconstruction.”  For the record, none of my articles for the Pope Center is an “attack.”  Each one is a considered discussion of a real and troubling aspect of the existing social and cultural situation. I plan not to address further remarks by this respondent in this forum.  I am accessible through my campus email address, however, and would not be averse to a courteous private rapprochement, with the emphasis on courtesy.