Parlor, database, or....

Collin has a great post on the metaphor of Burke's parlor, and some of the nuances of championing this metaphor in front of graduate students (who generally need to publish to even be considered for a job). Burke's metaphor:

*snip*
Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.
/*snip*

Nice, romantic metaphor (and redolent of a Viennese coffeehouse or Czech wine cellar). Collin problematizes the notion "writing" as "dipping oars" quite nicely:

*snip*
My concern is with the ease with which "putting in one's oar" is translated into the nominalism of "publication." As in, I need a publication, or to get a publication, or I don't have enough publications. I'm being somewhat specific here: I'm objecting to "publication" as a thing you have as opposed to "publishing" as an activity you engage in. And thus my concern is also with how we translate "listen for a while," because I think that's key for publishing (and perhaps less of an emphasis in publication).
/*snip*

Collin's point's to Jeff's djing (shades of Johndan Johnson-Eilola's chapter on turntablism in datacloud), and Brenden's katamari presentation at VR@RL as two examples of "collection." One thing I think worth further exploration that neither the Parlor, nor the database collection cover is virtuosity. Somewhere between the rhetorical canons of invention and collection, and the canons of style and delivery lies the ability of knowing what might belong where. The database (with it's connotations of nearly-unlimited memory) and the Parlor (with it's organicist emphasis upon the semi-intoxicated speaker as both collection and performer--a very Burkean bifurcation) push aside the question of how to cut and/or arrange. The mechanistic muscularity of the database and the gentility of the parlor conversation obscure some very real power relations that "dipping oars" and "collection" are attempting to subvert, or at least change. And lest you think I'm slipping into a mechanistic Marxist read of the situation as an easy way out, I am not. I think that Collin's corrective is a good one, but I also want to re-imagine the process as more agonistic and/or dramatistic. I think that the "listening" or "collecting" phases can be also read as "training" or "practicing" for a future performance that is to be evaluated. The slippage between semi-drunk BS grad-school bar conversations and Burke's parlor are a bit too easy. Seeing these conversations and collections as a pathway to virtuosity (certainly someone well-versed in turntablism would understand) could help salve some of the frustration of teachers who goad grad students to take their studies "seriously" by remaining mindful of the collection phase, rather than speeding straight to evaluation/argument (the cayenne "heat" that supposedly generates publication--the talented Mr. Ripley shows up at the Parlor?).