1. Think Electrate:
Inventing Electrate Thinking Practices
Richard Smyth, C.M.
Full Digressor
UnderAcademy College
24 May 2013
Week 4: Orientation

2. Week 3 Review
--read Ulmer essay “Florida Measure (Chora)”
--Forum discussions about emblem writing
and iconic images
--Google Hangout discussion
– “Florida Measure” as comic
– testifying as electrate strategy
– on master tropes of literacy &
electracy
– remix as rhetorical dispositio /
arrangement as inventio

3. Week 4 Preview
--Continue prior weeks' discussions
--read Richard Smyth's “Imaging Place as
Imaging Thought” essay
--Week 4 discussion questions in forum
--continue discussion of key questions
--thinkelectrate.wikispaces.com
--Google Hangout: time to be determined

4. Memory Palace as Image Writing
--ancient rhetorical mnemonic strategy
--use of images in locations to help in
ordering and identifying “topoi” (topics)
of a speech
--rhetorical guides suggested using striking &
vivid images set in a familiar space
--spatial thinking/reasoning

5. Embodied Cognition
--metaphorical concepts:
dead or forgotten
metaphors that structure
thought
--”The Mind is a Body
Moving through Space”

6. Embodied Cognition
Some related metaphorical concepts:
--Ideas are Locations
--Reason is a Force
--A Line of Thought is A Path
--Communicating is Guiding
--Understanding is Following
--Inability to Think is Inability to Move
(Lakoff and Johnson 236)

7. Spatial Theory of Thinking
“...reasoning requires going
beyond language and is
based on the construction,
inspection, and variation
of spatially organized
mental representations.”
(Knauff xi)

8. Memory Palace as Spatial Thinking
“This combination of a nonsymbolic
representation of 'where' information and a
symbolic representation of 'what' information
is, I think, highly suitable for a cognitive
theory of human reasoning.”
(Knauff 38)

9. Examples of Spatial Thinking
“A post (future) writing would leave these
assumptions at the center of (current)
traditional composition pedagogy and move
to the wayside, the gutter” (Figueiredo 14).
“...allow a free play of the imagination to
take alternate routes” (Figueiredo 16).

10. Imaging Place as Imaging Thought
--an invitation to think with/in/through this
metaphorical concept
--essay is an attempt to “show and tell”
--relevant in the age of augmented reality
and locative media
--how can conscious awareness of this
metaphorical concept help us to “think
electrate”?

11. References
Figueiredo, Sergio. Un/Composing (Visual) Rhetorics: A Comic(s) View of Writing
in the Age of New Media. Diss. Clemson University, 2011. Print.
Knauff, Markus. Space to Reason: A Spatial Theory of Human Thought.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.
Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind And
Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books, 1999.

12. Contact
Richard Smyth, Ph.D.
rsmyth1964@gmail.com
sites.google.com/site/thinkelectrate