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Response-ability in today's hyper-connected and digitally intertwingled polis asks us to dissolve our "voice" and find our "unvoice," our identity in common. Finding identity in common requires dissonance. The mode of invitation is different, and the compositional strategies are different. Connectionist skills need to be cultivated alongside analytical skills. Writing in wiki, students wrangle with objectivity/subjectivity issues from the get-go. And, at the same time, they gotta let go! Because initial forays into a shared medium require some degree of subjective commitment, a "self" must be factored in--ironically, it is more "authentically objective" to weave a self into a wiki post. Put another way, forming a commons requires more than observation it requires participation, and compositional strategies of fascination, attention, and even intoxication. Then you get engagement.

Following the work of Jeff Walker and others, we like to focus attention on the root thymos (heart) at the heart of enthymeme. This rhetorical form, for Aristotle and others, is at the heart of what rhetoricians do, and, just as a kernel communicates between hardware and software, enthymemes can function as the kernel communicating between the students interests and passions and the modes of persuasion germane to current civic rhetorics that would be anchored, in some way, to our classrooms. But unlike the kernels of computer science, the kernel of enthymeme-ing seems to be human passions. So for teachers, engagement begins with listening to the ruckus of students sharing and testing premises, making enthymeme-ing by emergence essential to community literacy.

Drawing on the entire spectrum of modern treatments of the Greek enthymeme, Jeff Walker's "The Body of Persuasion: A Theory of the Enthymeme," published in College English, gives us the most thorough explication of the the enthymeme's potential.

The root of the word enthymema is "thymos," meaning "heart," where pathos and asignficatory forces manifest and enter our sphere of awareness. "Thymos," Walker explains, is "often linked to both the production and reception of passional thought and eloquent, persuasive discourse" (49)

Walker dials in on the ways the enthymeme was understood to be a musical and kairotic instrument for the invention, arrangement, stylizing, and delivery of civic rhetoric, one that brings together sense and reason in ways that collapse this distinction in interactive practices of persuasion. Naiomi Cumming, in The Sonic Self, works with this same understanding of music. Cumming explains that "inscribed in the different priorities of interpretive approaches to music is an informal distinction between reports of sensory qualities, which rely in some way on the sensitivity or feeling state of the analyst and on descriptions of conceptual orderings, taken as evidence for the application of formal knowledge. This bifurcation of sensuous recognition from conceptual interpretation may be useful in distinguishing the emphases of diverse genres, but when overextended, it represents a false dichotomy of sense and reason" (Sonic Self 47). I am interested in the ways that working with sounds, enthymemes, and order that can emerge from complexity in the expanded/networked classroom can help also us surf this distinction, query it, and leverage it into a participatory turn in our students' writing. Enthymemes in this context orchestrate our "liasons" (Perelman). We ask, borrowing Walkers phrase for describing the making of an enthymeme, can a network "turn an enthymeme?" Can sonic rhetorical exercises inculcate timely participation in the creative commons (demos) or our times, crucial for responsible civic engagement and response-abilty?

Even in Aristotle's formulation of the enthymeme, which Walker distinguishes from Isocrates and Anaxemenes teachings, dissonance is always present or in potentia. Dissonance arises from direction and movement of thoughts and intentions/plans. A later connection between intention and tone, elaborated by Cicero, seems important here. Walker in this context does not explore this etymology, but Mary Caruthers has made note of Cicero's translation of Aristoxenus of Tarentum's tonos. "In De oratore Cicero describes how every human emotion has its own expression, sound, and gesture, and "the whole frame of a man, and his whole countenance, and the variations of his voice, resonate like strings in a musical instrument, just as they are moved by the affections of the mind. For the tones of the voice, like strings, are so tightened intentae as to be responsive to every touch."15 The original Greek word used by Aristoxenus was tonos, which Cicero translated with Latin intentio" (On Affliction and Reading, Weeping and Argument: Chaucer's Lachrymose Troilus in Context by Mary Carruthers. Representations. Berkeley: Winter 2006., Iss. 93; pg. 1, 22). In both the Sophistic framework of Anaxemines/Isocrates, and for Aristotle, dissonance or the interference patterns of classing tones/intentions is basic to the inventional aspect of the enthymeme. These are Anaximenes' "exetastic" movements, which are "capped" or tagged/compressed by enthymeme structures.

Although Aristotle is notoriously hesitant about rhythm, It would seem that for both Anaximenes and Isocrates, the stylistic element of enthymeme-ing is irreducibly rhythmic. Walker beatmatches Anaximenes' and Isocrates' teachings regarding the art and science of "turning enthymemes" to articulate "a pre- or non-Aristotelian notion of the enthymeme in rhetoric" (49). Walker suggests that for Isocrates, enthymeme-making involves kairotic inventiveness, yes, "but is also linked to matters of style....In Against the Sophists, likewise, he portrays the ability "to see what kairos demands, and speak a discourse wholly wrought with fitting enthymemes and words both rhythmical and musical,' as the essence of rhetorical skill (Isocrates 16-17). Isocrates' statement, emphasizes the function of both rhythm and music in kairos. Kairos is rhythm, and resonance. Communicating, in this context of distributed and embodied rhetorical practice, involves the full range of musical arts--mousike, as Plato uses the term. I would argue that the "attentional" 'element of enthymeme-ing, today, can be fruitfully explored by means of sonic rhetorics. The necessity of tuning: enthymemes as prostheses of listening. Timbre and resonance not necessarily based in the ear, and neither is hearing or listening. Enthymemes are necessary prosthesis of listening in an attention economy, tools for deep attention in a context overcoded by practices of hyper-attention. Still, the practices of sound technicians in our age, such as dj-ing, teaches the same lessons that Quintilian rendered when he insisted on learning the art of "divided attention" when reading aloud. The essential difference between Quintilian's scripts for attention management and the means available for exploration in our sonic rhetoric is an understanding of the expansion of formalisms and techne throughout a distributed and creative culture, across the diverse media where styles emerge, and enthymemes get made. Walker considers how enthymeme-making happened in Greece, and provides two modern examples (Dr. Martin Luther King's brilliance and Barthe's observations on professional wresting), but ours is a different scene of writing, today. The arrangement of enthymeming elements, now, is radically distributed. Pedagogy that would attend to timing, attends to space: arrangement. In this pedagogy, we become search engines browsing for dissonance. In enthymeme-ing and emergence. rhythm, tempo, tone, timbre, harmony, pitch, etc shape and influence response-ability.

In distributed ecologies (p2p) of information, the sonic trope of compression, as economy of expression in Anaximenes' account of enthymeme, still functions. Walker explains that "or Anaxemenes, then, it would appear that an enthymeme is, or is like, the argumentational cap that finishes an exetastic movement: a concise, emphatic statement of an emotionally charged opposition, one that serves not only to draw conclusions but also to foreground stance of attitude toward the subject under discussion and to motivate the audience to strongly identify with this stance" (Walker 50). These compulsions to movement, to join or follow (N. Gay Science) are systolic/diastolic dynamic at the thymos or heart of the enthymeme, and constitute pathos/affective forces in rhythmic/far-from-equilibrium dimensions of communication and commons-formation.

When considering enthymemes, we glimpse but of course cannot hear the sound of Greek. The tropes of sound in Anaximenes' account of enthymeme--amplification, repetition, and of course compression--do, however, suggest opportunities to empirically experiment with a sonic rhetoric unhinged from hearing and moving closer to a more generalized embodied rhetoric. Sonic enthymemes have even subtler dimensions than those detectable by the ears (cf Heidegger). Nevertheless, it is helpful to focus on the auditory systyem's incredible ability to overlay and compress remarkable complexity in immediate perceptual templates. Psychologist JJ Gibson anticipates cybertetic means for measuring and working analytically and intentionally with the complexities that are in fact simplicities to our auditory system:

"Instead of simple duration, they vary in rate, in regularity of rate, or rhythm, and in other subtleties of sequence"

Gibson, in 1966, is articulating the need for a more subtle science of studying meaningful sounds.

"instead of simple pitch, they vary in timbre or tone quality, in vowel quality, in approximation to noise, in noise quality, and in changes of all these in time. Instead of simple loudness, they vary in the direction of change of loudness, the rate of change of loudness, and the rate of change of change of loudness. In meaningful sounds, these variables can be combined to yield higher-order variables of staggering complexity. But these mathematical complexities seem nevertheless to be the simplicities of auditory information, and it is just these variables that are distinguished naturally by the auditory system. Moreover, it is just these variables that are specific to the source of the sound--the variables that identify the wind in the trees or the rushing of water, the cry of the young or the call of the mother" (p. 87)

So, like the auditory system, which compresses "staggering complexity" into immediate perceptual templates, enthymemes today, according to Walker "foreground stance." This shortcuts propositional logic. Drawing on Perelman's web or network of "emotively significant ideas and liasons that may or may not appear as a structure of value-laden oppositions," Walker proposes that modern writers "turn enthymemes" without knowing it. This "enthymeming-without-knowing" comports with the stigmergic and hive-mind metaphors for distributed creativity. Boolean Genetic Musical Tag is a game designed to use sonic rhetoric and principles of positive feedback in pedagogical contexts. It is a way to focus collective attention on the ways networks can "turn enthymemes," and provides a space for the arrangement of an inhabitable rhetorical space for recursively working with the conditions that promote the emergence of ideas and arguments through subtle dissonances, amplifications, and resonances, or "liasons" between speakers and writers. Students of this process are given opportunity to experience both the compressed overlay of ethos, logos, and pathos and the analytical work of teasing out these elements woven into the implicate order of all discourse. In other words, focusing on sonic rhetoric gives us time to work on timing! With wikis, our students become instrument builders