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8 P o s t c o n f l i c t P e dAg o g y Writing in the Stream of Hearing Cynthia Haynes There are language games in which the important thing is to listen, in which the rule deals with audition. Such a game is the game of the just. And in this game, one speaks only inasmuch as one listens, that is, one speaks as a listener, and not as an author. It is a game without an author. At first he appears nervous, but he’s speaking in his own words. Then he’s reading something scripted, like a robot, and he’s afraid. There are Arabic words in one corner of the screen. And unspeakable images in the other. You brace yourself. Your heart is pounding. You pray. You pray hard. Then death. The harrowing of all humanity in a split second. Then the glitch happened. The cameraman got too close, and the camera jammed (too much blood). They had to start again. I had to watch. I had to know, I told myself. I had to test my convictions about peace. I had to know the meaning of peace, and the peace of meaning. I had to know whether peace advocates. Whether peace has a voice at all. Whether advocacy is a turn toward hope or just another futile trope against death. In his case, a gentle journalist caught in the crosshairs of human depravity, it not only turned toward death—it took out language, the last outpost of blood and breath. His last words were: “My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish.” The last sound he hears is “the motion of the knife as it approaches his throat. He hears a rustle in the air next to him and realizes the [executioner] is practicing” (Lévy 2003, 42). His name was Daniel Pearl. dAnny’s ri ff In January 2002, journalist Daniel Pearl was brutally beheaded in Pakistan by terrorists who filmed the slaughter and posted it on the Internet. At the time, I was working on a paper about rhetoric and peace (introduced above), so I decided to view the video to test my philosophical stamina and think through the connection between the information society and 146 BeyON D POST P ROC eSS the reality of unthinkable violence. It has taken me almost seven years to think about the digital enframing of scripted torture and to hear the language of pathos circulating online and not off limit. Their script forced Daniel to utter these words: “My father is Jewish. My mother is Jewish. I am Jewish.” Needless to say, I was affected. And I realized, as Roland Barthes puts it, “affect was what I didn’t want to reduce. . . . I wanted to explore it not as a question (a theme) but as a wound” (1981, 21). The problem is that this rhetorically wounded academic was not equipped to write arguments on Daniel’s behalf. That felt like the wrong language game, not to mention the wrong pragmatic. It seems more important to bear witness to such cruelty by confronting the mediation of his murder, to confront its discourse and style—not by joining in the discourse of counterterrorism, but by situating language and image outside the logic of war, for that is where Danny lived. The challenge: how to find a postconflict means of argument in a post-9/11 world. I needed a variation on a theme. I needed to riff on my rant against argument qua reason that I began by “Writing Offshore” (2003). I had heard Ground Zero as the death knell of ground metaphysics. It revealed the abyss of conflict torn open by rifts that now called for riffing , not argument. The process of terror, as we learned, resembled too closely the process of argumentative writing. Claims, grounds, and warrants were no longer just standard features of freshmen arguments . They had become, overnight, like guided missives illuminating the dark side of grounded pedagogy, orphaned signals lost amid the ruins of the imploded twin towers of process and argument. My thinking morphed from the original riff (“When Peace is in Style,” delivered at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, 2004) to “Glitch Rhetoric: Shock Design and the Mediation of Global (T)error” (delivered at IT-University, Copenhagen, 2005). The following year, the riff folded computer games into the mashup when Games and Culture published my “Armageddon Army: Playing God, God Mode...

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