The Art of Doing

     In the Cheryl Geisler article “How Ought We to Understand the Concept of Rhetorical Agency” it seems as if there is a bit of a rhetorical identity crisis going on in the world of the rhetorical cocktail party. Agency, says Wells, is a subject pursuing intention through activity.

     However, what most intrigued me is that Geisler has been doing scholarly rhetorical work on the subject of the digital assistants that help her with the accomplishment of everyday tasks. “Here”, she says, “rhetor and audience appear to occupy a subject position strategically fragmented in order to get work done. This fragmentation of agency…is made possible by a combination of the culture of systematic management, the affordances of literate technologies, and the strategic choice of the rhetor who is conscious of what she is “doing” to herself”.

     This “techno-liberal arts” as she calls it, is like Aristotle’s pen for the speechmaker or the  artist’s painting to that which is represented in the painting. It is a tool or aid to memory.  The film Julie and Julia is about just such a subject of rhetorical techno-liberal arts that combines a reminder, or biographical account of Julia Child with the account of a contemporary blogger of cooking adventures.

     In the film an aspiring New York City author and office worker named Julie Powell starts a cooking blog with the design of making all the 524 recipes in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 365 days. She began the blog project as a discipline and before the end of the year of cooking and blogging, she had acquired a literary agent and a book deal.

As rhetor, Powell enlisted the assistance of Julia Child via her recipes, and her blog and its readers to keep her on schedule and to add discipline, structure and meaning to her life.  She was conscious of what she was doing to herself with this techno-liberal arts program of epicurean research. Work got done through this fragmented agency of combined culture of systematic management.  It was a team effort by people who never met. The rhetorical agency was a resource available for use and application as the context applied. The rhetor had the capacity to act, and in addition, had an audience in herself and her blog readers.

“Rhetoric, after all, is concerned with the art of doing in language.” Cookbooks and cooking are a fascinating form of “the art of doing in language”. (Geisler 16).