Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

evil,” “us or them”: all of these define the perceptions of the
world, of those living in it, and of the culture and history
that they both inherit and hand down that is conceived by that
bipolarity. Nothing different and nothing questionable, nothing
new, is allowed into such a scenario because to do so would
threaten the sovereign epistemology upon which it was founded
and, through this, the authority and order and control it
affords those who would promote and propagate it. In the end
then, it is a situation where neither variation nor progress is
likely because they are simply not wanted and not welcome. For
those who exhibit these perspectives - whether consciously or
not, whether willingly or not - reality and “truth” are static
things. It is a phenomenon witnessed most arrantly amidst the
worlds of religion, of science, and of politics. And through
this three-fold influence, it is also witnessed, for my
fundamental purposes in this work, amidst the world of rhetoric,
the inheritor and veritable executor of the reality and “truth”
that they would see abide. It is for this very reason, then,
that those within the field of composition and rhetoric who
would seek to nurture that variation and progress through their
scholarship, their research, and their teaching must consciously
avoid that “black or white,” “us or them” exaltation of either
Certainty or Uncertainty and the exclusion of the other.
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