Rhetorical Peaks
Rhetorical Peaks aims to confront students with different conceptions of reading and writing practices and the ethical implications of these activities. Specifically, the game considers how rhetoric’s activities can be read across the hermeneutic divide – the divide between rhetoricians who work toward theorizing and establishing the conditions for successful communications, understandings, interpretations, and identifications and those who seek to expose the limitations of these practices.
“…there is no absolute incomprehensibility between alien cultures, no impassable boundary permanently separating one culture from another’s (at least partial) understanding. No community can be so different from another that cross-cultural communication is in principle forever doomed to fail. With every community that we recognize as a community, our form of life always overlaps significantly, for it is only against such a background of commonality that we can perceive radical difference.”
- Steven Mailloux, “Making Comparisons: First Contact, Ethnocentrism, and
Cross-Cultural Communication”
“There is always the matter of a surplus that comes from an elsewhereand that can no more be assimilated by me, than it can domesticateitself in me…[T]he Conversation belongs, as ethical relation, to the effort of thinking the infinite,the transcendent, the Stranger. None of this amounts to thinking an object.”
- Avital Ronell, Dictations
“Rhetoric’s hermeneutic dimension allows subjects to get things done in the world, and this work is, of course, imperative. But this work, by definition, requires appropriation and assimilation;it can account only for the ‘other’ that overlaps with the Same, which meansthat it cannot account for the other at all, cannot attend to radical alterity—it can only undergo it, suffer it as an interruption, a rhetorical rupture. Thisis why there is an ethical imperative to engage a rhetoric of the saying, toattend to the interruption itself. There is no said without the saying, nohermeneutic understanding without this address that, in calling me to respond, holds my ‘I’ in relation with an inassimilable other, exposing me tomy irreparable exposedness, my radical non-self-sufficiency.”
- Diane Davis, “Addressing Alterity: Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and the
Nonappropriative Relation”
The next iteration of Rhetorical Peaks foregrounds the activity of listening. Game play begins in the woods surrounding the town as the players receives a mysterious letter from Woodsy the raven that asks them to wander through the haunted grounds of Rhetorical Peaks, listening to the voices of the citizens’ ghosts. Each ghost demands a different quest of the player, a different approach to solving the mystery of Lisa Sophist’s death. Completion of these quests requires different types of listening, different understandings of what it means to attend to the other.
Artwork by David Robinson
- The voice of Professor Eidos, one of Lisa’s teachers in life, encourages the player to focus not on Lisa but on the form of justice. As Eidos encourages the player to consider the sun as the embodiment of this form, the player is led off the edge of the world, losing the game.
- The voice of Aristo Telian, Lisa’s boyfriend in life, suggests that Lisa was driven to self-destruction by the relativism of Professor Gorgias’s teachings. In Aristo’s eyes, he was the only one who understood Lisa, and their relationship could have sustained them if Lisa had not been driven to suicide. As Aristo encourages the player to seek out Lisa’s ghost in an image of self-destruction, the player is led into the fireplace, losing the game.
- The voice of Leonora Varo, Lisa’s guidance counselor and mentor in life, encourages the player to listen for Lisa. Her ghost is trapped and silenced, but her spirit can be set free if the player brings balance to the haunted world of Rhetorical Peaks. The player can only win by successfully completing this quest.