Concept
rhetoric
4 writings
- rhetoric sections touch Rhetoric is a strategic cut through the full signal of touch, shaping it to fit the listener's bandwidth. The discarded remainder — the vestige — reveals more about the channel's limits than the delivered content ever can.
- the stop is not in the code A running algorithm cannot halt itself to observe its own state; the stop is always exogenous. Rhetoric uses this constraint to create brief narrowings that make a listener's interior processing visible, producing conviction as an externally imposed self-observation.
- dead rhetoric is live assumption Arguments that win completely erase themselves, becoming unexamined ground from which subsequent reasoning operates. Dead rhetoric functions as live assumption — persuasion so successful it presents as self-evidence, shaping what seems obvious long after the argument has been forgotten.
- breath as the hinge Two distinct silences — one that empties the mind for genuine perception and one that gathers before utterance — structure a theory in which rhetorical power depends on passing through both: synthesis occurs in the pause between witness and speech.