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Landmark has a history of controversy in the press and the view of outsiders. Why is this not reflected in the lede? Micahmedia (talk) 02:25, 22 January 2009 (UTC)
O.K. Let's look at your "stuff."
Wowest (talk) 11:33, 26 January 2009 (UTC)
- Sales techniques - Cult accusations - Effectiveness challenges
Genuinelycurious (talk) 10:00, 24 January 2009 (UTC)
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This is getting too long to edit. .
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. Wowest (talk) 19:23, 29 January 2009 (UTC)
"At one point this article contained a description of the Forum's format and business model. Why is that gone? Micahmedia (talk) " .
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http://www.landmarkeducation.com/landmark_forum_course_syllabus.jsp .
Drew Kopp ENGL 597R Dr. Roxanne Mountford 14 May, 2003
Invisible Bodies, the Disinherited, and the Production of Space in the Landmark Forum
There is always a world already interpreted, already organized in its basic
relations, into which experience steps as something new, upsetting what has led
our expectations and undergoing reorganization itself in the upheaval.
âHans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics
When I see an empty spot, I park my car there; when someone points the way for me, I walk in that direction; when someone opens the door for me, I enter the room; when someone ushers me, I seat myself; when someone stands in front of a room and speaks, I sit quietly and listen. In his statement above, Gadamer first asks us to consider that we are always already inscribed into the basic relations of our everyday world. An important implication that follows asks us to examine what happens when the material space we inhabit simultaneously calls forth bodily responses (Gadamerâs âexperienceâ) that defy our always already cultural expectations of those material spaces. Even if I fail to acknowledge something conceptually, say for instance, ultraviolet sunlight, it still affects me physically. How might this apply in material spaces that creative minds design with intentional rhetorical aims not available to immediate conceptual scrutiny, or that in fact take advantage of the always already interpreted world evoked by the material space to effect persuasion? Iâm not simply talking about advertisements, but social events that require significant time commitments from attendees to occupy arranged material space. Iâm taking for granted that social events of any kind call for some manipulation of
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material space to enhance the effectiveness of the rhetorâs purposes in holding an event. It is because of this that these arranged spaces call for rhetorical analysis. In her article, âOn Gender and Rhetorical Space,â Roxanne Mountford calls the geography of these social, communicative events, rhetorical space, which, âlike all landscapes, may include both the cultural and material arrangement, whether intended or fortuitous, of spaceâ (42). The cultural, what Gadamer refers to as the always already interpreted world, gives us the code for the range of appropriate responses to a given arrangement of material space, and as Mountford also contends, it is âthe nexus from which creative minds manipulate material spaceâ (42). Landmark Education (LE), an educational company, has developed educational courses as communicative events that take full advantage of this principle. I will study one course in particular, the Landmark Forum (LF), because of its creative and intentional manipulation of space to effect its rhetorical aim of producing social spaces new to its participants.
Writing about material space as rhetorical necessitates sharp distinctions between different ways of conceiving of space. For clarityâs sake, I will use the term space in three senses in relation to the study of the rhetorical employment of space in the Landmark Forum. One is the material, purely physical space that requires arrangement or manipulation; the second is the conceptual, culturally determined, always already interpreted way we read material spaces; and the third is social space, which emerges at those sites where the material and conceptual spaces converge, calling forth resistance and transformation.
The production of social space occurs there where âexperience steps as something new, upsetting what has led our expectations and undergoing reorganization itself in the upheavalâ (Gadamer 15), allowing someone to speak and act in ways not previously available. The term âproductionâ here refers only to the generation of the social space that emerges in the experience
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of a subject when material space disrupts that subjectâs cultural expectations triggered by that material space. I will speak of the work and effort needed to move and arrange physical objects that together compose a space as arrangement or manipulation, rather than production. Throughout this paper I will continue to develop and distinguish this concept of the production of space, as Henri Lefebvre and Edward Soja employ the term, but first, a few words must be devoted to the rhetorical event under scrutiny and how I came to know about it.
What is it? Or, how is it an is?
The Landmark Forum has added new dimensions of leadership and contribution to my work. As an academic, I have always drawn great satisfaction from teaching. In completing this program, I was able to find a national and even global expression for my deepest concerns. Today, I face the challenge of leading a team of scientists, engineers, and public policy experts in finding ways to be responsible stewards of our environment. The Landmark Forum has equipped me to contribute on a large scale, and to think and act effectively, even in complex and difficult situations. --Dennis Mileti. Chair, Sociology Department at the University of Colorado. Boulder, Colorado.
Including numerous, culturally diverse and high-profile testimonials such as Dennis Miletiâs, Landmark Educationâs website also provides many other pages of information designed to create a favorable public image of the company. First and foremost are descriptions of the course and the results promised; the Landmark Forum is a weekend long seminar that promises breakthroughs in the quality of everyday life for its participants. Many facts argue for the effectiveness of the course, which include a study performed by noted social scientist Daniel Yankolovich. It touts that âMore than 90% of participants report practical and enduring value for
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their life â well worth the time and cost,â though the date of the survey is inconspicuously absent.1 Another interesting fact is that â610,000 people have taken The Landmark Forum since Landmark Education was founded in 1991.â This averages out to approximately 50,800 new participants a year. The website also explains âhowâ their methodology works: âThe Landmark method is more like coaching than teaching; more like conversation than lecture. While conventional education methods focus on content (adding facts, rules, or skills to our knowledge), the Landmark method deals with context â the framework(s) in which content can exist.â Despite the informative nature of the website and the favorable image it portrays, it does not account for the numbers of new participants a year quoted above. Rather, Landmark relies primarily on graduates of the LF and other courses to generate new business. The course leads graduates to produce a social space that compels them to âshare the LFâ with relatives and friends, with the aim of having them attend a guest event and ultimately attend the LF. Part of my intention is to illustrate the role of material space in producing this space and to examine how it remains hidden from the conceptual scope of participants in the course.
This hidden-ness actually leads enthusiastic graduates to spend enormous amounts of time selling the course to friends and relatives through professing the results they achieved, i.e., the newly produced social spaces, in the course. They may have asked their boss for a raise and got it, or perhaps they have taken part in a project that has helped fulfill their desires to contribute to their communities, or perhaps they expressed their love for family and friends in ways that have deepened their relationships to new levels of intimacy, sometimes breaking past years of silence to do so. Graduates desire the same new social space for their friends and relatives. Yet, when the friend or relative asks a graduate to explain how this âcontext shiftâ led to saying and doing things outside the graduateâs character, the answer the graduate gives often
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continues to bewilder the investigator: âItâs a conversation. During the course, you sit in a hotel ballroom for three days and an evening with a hundred other people and you listen and talk, listen and talk, until you see whole new ways to deal with your life.â The focus then turns to what was said during these conversations. Then the graduate struggles to explain the âtechnologyâ of the course, i.e., the ideas and the language (the âdistinctionsâ) the facilitators use. Landmark terms their use of language its âtechnology.â I use the term in quotations to mean the same thing, but I will use the term without quotations to mean the combination of how the material space of the course disposes participants to âgetâ the unfamiliar âtechnologyâ of the discourse. Technology, then, is the intentional working together of the material and conceptual spaces to produce social space. The Course Leader (CL), the most visible facilitator in a Landmark course actually warns graduates against trying to relate the ideas of the course to potential guests. Rather, she will coach graduates to simply share what âopened up for themâ (i.e., the newly produced social spaces they now have access to). The trust a potential guest has in the graduate is all that is needed for her to attend a guest event in order to see for herself what itâs all about. Only rarely does merely talking about the LF, or reading information on the website, lead to someone registering to attend the course.
However, it is interesting that a graduate will likely not consider what role the material space of the course has in the production of social space, as it works to defy oneâs cultural expectations. Part of what makes this interesting is the minute degree to which the material aspects of the course, space and time, receive exposition on the companyâs website:
The Landmark Forum is held in a workshop setting, such as a hotel conference
room or one of our meeting facilities in major metropolitan areas. [â¦] The
[course] takes place over three consecutive days and an evening session (Friday,
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Saturday, Sunday, and Tuesday evening.) Each full day begins at 9:00 a.m. and usually ends between 10:00 p.m. and midnight. Breaks are approximately every 23 hours, with a 90-minute dinner break. The [Tuesday] evening session generally runs from 7:00 p.m. to 10:15 p.m.
Compare this to the language used to describe the results LE promises: The Landmark Forum is specifically designed to bring about positive and permanent shifts in the quality of your life. These shifts are the direct cause for a new and unique kind of freedom and power. The freedom to be absolutely at ease no matter where you are, who youâre with, or what the circumstance â the power to be in action effectively in those areas that are important to you.
Whether from a graduate or the website, potential guests are led to believe it is the information delivered in the course that does the work, which is due in part to the fact that the resultsâ produced social spacesâare the most visible and attractive feature for participants. Most who attend the LF keep their eye on getting those results and consequently do not pay much attention to the material space they must occupy along the way.
Regardless, I contend that it is the âwhereâ and âwhenâ of the arranged material space that plays the essential though largely undisclosed rhetorical role in effecting the results LE promises. Therefore, I will illustrate how âthese shiftsâ result from the accumulation of innumerable points of interaction where participantsâ cultural expectations crash against the physical space of the course, incurring resistance that the spoken discourse of the course then challenges and silences. The experience of resistance in participants is not only expected, they are crucial in allowing the facilitator to apply the âtechnologyâ of the course to effect âtransformation,â i.e., the production of social space. Without the rhetorical effectiveness of the
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arranged material space, LEâs âtechnologyâ would occur as a perplexing set of ideas at most, indecipherable claptrap at worst.
Methodology: My Horizon of Experience or Erfahrung
It is important to address how I acquired my knowledge of Landmark Educationâs practices and methods of delivering their programs. I first attended the Landmark Forum in February of 1992, experiencing first hand several transformations, including positive impacts in my life, from personal relationships to professional development. The principal âshiftâ for me was that I got myself into the film business, which was no small feat. However, I doubt that the extensive changes I made in my life would have been possible had I not continued participating in the organization. In fact, for a total of seven years (1992-1999), I participated in the companyâs various âeducationalâ programs, including LEâs Curriculum for Living, which I completed within a year after attending the Landmark Forum, and experienced the continuous production of social spaces I desired to occupy. This âCurriculumâ has four parts, the first of which is of course the Landmark Forum. The Advanced Course, which takes place over four days and an evening, follows this along with a seminar series called the Landmark Forum in Action, which has ten evening sessions spread out over twelve weeks. Lastly, after having completed these three courses, as with many others who follow this track, I took the Self- Expression and Leadership Program, which combines three Saturday workdays and ten evening- sessions, all spread out over a three-month period. Landmark promises those who complete the Curriculum âa life that you love or your money back,â which at the time would have been $1145.00 total.2 However, since I was successful in the several projects I used my participation to forward, I happily declared myself a happy customer.
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By the end of 1993, I also began to volunteer with the organization in various roles, from taking part in the actual legwork of producing LEâs courses, to registering people to attend them. LEâs volunteer program, called the âAssisting Program,â is an elaborate and powerful mechanism that not only trains people to deliver Landmarkâs programs, but also promises further transformations in the quality of life for participants who volunteer their time and effort in such a manner. Landmark could not operate without its veritable army of highly skilled and committed volunteers. Landmarkâs website presents the program in the following way:
Participants in The Landmark Assisting Program assist at all levels in producing and generating results in Landmark's programs. As in all Landmark programs, Landmark Educationâs commitment to participants in this program is that each person receives more value from the program than the time, energy, and expense he or she puts into it. The Landmark Assisting Program is designed so the activities in which you participate become the medium for your training, development, and empowerment.
Consequently, the more âtraining, development and empowermentâ I received, the more qualified I became to take on larger and more demanding roles within the organization, and doing so also continued to expand my professional development.
Through an intensive six-month volunteer training program, I became qualified to lead âIntroductions to the LFâ from 1993-1995. In addition to leading numerous small guest events intended to âenrollâ guests into attending the Landmark Forum, I also volunteered to coach and train others to perform this same rhetorical activity for the company. This in turn prepared me to take on a two-year (1995-1997) long âAssisting Agreementâ as a Course Supervisor, a volunteer position that requires one to manage every physical detail of a courseâs arrangement, while in
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direct partnership with the Course Leader, the principal speaker at a course. During these two years I supervised the material arrangement (Landmark terms this âproductionâ) of eight Landmark Forums, and four Landmark Advanced Courses. During this same two-year period, I enlisted and trained dozens of LF graduates to volunteer in the Assisting Program, specifically to carry out the arrangement of the material space of the particular courses I supervised. Following this I participated sporadically with the company, ceasing to do so altogether in 1999, after I reviewed the LF in December of that year. Today, I remain in contact with only a few people who continue to participate in Landmarkâs programs. In this study I will rely primarily on my experience as a Course Supervisor, which brought me into intimate and intensive contact with all aspects of Landmarkâs technology, both the material, spatial practices, as well as their spoken discourses, as it was my aim to acquire them. I will use my life-experience, what Gadamer calls Erfahrung, to illustrate what rhetorical role the manipulation of the material space of the LF has in the production of social space. It is the horizon from which I will work to ultimately analyze the very values that have shaped this horizon itself.
Material and Conceptual Space and the Production of Social Space
How is it that graduates fail to acknowledge the role of the arrangement of space as the primary rhetorical force that effects the production of social space? To begin to answer this question, I need to distinguish what I mean by social space, already used in ways distinct from material and conceptual space. Edward Soja terms social space âthirdspace,â which he in turn has reshaped from Lefebvreâs âspaces of representation.â It is distinct from material and conceptual spaces, but yet encompasses them. Social space is a âthirding,â the lived space where the nearsightedness of subjectivity (the conceptual) and the farsightedness of objectivity (the material) no longer cancel each other out; yet neither is primary. This thirdspace perspective
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allows us to study that approximated space where subject and object meet as a newly inscribed space. This approximated space is no longer material space alone, nor is it the cultural, always already understood conception of material space, but a space including both and moving beyond them. In other words, when we encounter material space, we cannot help but see it through a culturally supplied conceptual lens, which determines our possible responses to what we see conceptually. Because any concept is an abstracted approximation taken from an originary experience of material space, conceptions ultimately cannot contain the entirety of material space. Thus, material space always defies our conceptions of it, despite any attempt to subordinate material space to our conceptions of it. However, while our minds may be deceived, our bodies are not; the material relationships we enter by virtue of our physical presence continuously demand approximated re-conceptualizations or revisions. Our bodies, when arranged together with material spaces intended to defy our always already conceptions of the material, prompt these re-conceptualizations. If our bodies must contend with continuous affronts, the multitudes of re-conceptualizations build to form a different sort of space unfamiliar to the inhabitant. This continuous re-conceptualization is the production of social space, or thirdspace. However, since the role of material space in effecting rhetorical intentions often remains hidden, our attention remains on the conceptual space, and thus, we attribute to it the lionâs share of the production of social space. When locked in seeing only conceptual residues of social space, valuing only words and the concepts they signify, we keep the âactual social and spatial practices, the immediate material world of experience and realizationâ at a distance, âunseen and untouchedâ (Soja, Thirdspace 63). Therefore, because Landmark Education arranges the material space of their courses in such a way that its role in persuasion remains hidden to the participants, they only attend to who speaks and the things said in the Landmark
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Forum. Thus, that is all that graduates of the LF have to explain how they achieved their breakthroughs: words and concepts. Their transformation remains a mystery to them, unexplainable, which fact presents its own rhetorical appeal to a perplexed friend or relative, ultimately resolvable only if she physically attends the Landmark Forum
How can we access and reveal what works to remain invisible in the production of social space? Lefebvre, in The Production of Space, helps delineate further the context for my analysis of Landmark Educationâs rhetoric when he points toward an answer to the question, ââ¦what exactly is the mode of existence of social relationships?â
[S]ocial relations of production have a social existence to the extent that they have
a spatial existence; they project themselves into space, becoming inscribed there,
and in the process producing that space itself. Failing this, these relations would
remain in the realm of âpureâ abstraction â that is to say, in the realm of
representations and hence of ideology: the realm of verbalism, verbiage and
empty words. (129) Rather than the language and concepts Landmark proffers in its courses, I will explore the arrangement of material space, what Lefebvre and Soja call âspatial practices,â as the rhetorical element without which, âthe genesis of a new realm of possibility,â the explicit aim of the LF, would not be possible. Thus, the key to this inquiry lies in the multitudinous sites where cultural expectations meet the material space the volunteers provide, forcing re-conceptualizations to occur in the manner that Landmark Education intends. Invisible Bodies, Arranged Space, and Cultural Expectations
Roxanne Mountford, in her exploration of the pulpitâs gendered location, writes that âmaterial spaces can trigger the social imaginary because of the historical and cultural freight
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attached to the spaceâ (49). Thus, creative minds can take advantage of the cultural freight attached to the material arrangement of space in order to cause us âto form relationships with each other and the space through its structuresâ (49). Landmark Education rhetorically uses commonplace cultural expectations about educational spaces to effect transformation in a participant without the participant having conceptual knowledge of the mechanism itself. For instance, the company utilizes an arrangement of the material spaces of their courses similar to communicative events common to everyday educational experience. They set chairs in theatre- style facing a podium with chalkboards, a music stand and a tall directorâs chair, which arrangement intersects with educational, business, and even theatrical sets of expectations. Also working within these expectations, participants, volunteers and the facilitator all wear nametags as at most business or educational gatherings, obviating those uncomfortable moments of having to ask more than once for someoneâs name. As an educational expectation, everything looks like a situation where a facilitator will merely impart knowledge to the participants, who in turn will consume this knowledge just as they have in all the educational situations of the past. Participants expect that the facilitator will provide understandable concepts and getting their moneyâs worth depends on getting something from the course. In actuality, the material space of the course as the Course Leader and her team of volunteers enforce it, defies this expectation at every turn.
And this leads me to address what lies beyond the edges of the above, rather simplified picture. In order to appreciate how the manipulation of space works to draw participants into relationships with a space, continually defying their cultural expectations, I must lay out who arranges this space and how. An elaborate power structure exists behind the scenes of a Landmark Forum, working at all times to remain unseen. It is composed of volunteers
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responsible for the arrangement of the material space, though not without accountability to paid employees, both on-site and off.3 The key volunteer in charge of a courseâs arrangement is the Course Supervisor, which I discussed in the above section entitled methodology. Under her are one or two apprentices training for the same key position.4 Below this role in the chain of command is a Production Supervisor, who assembles the team of Production Assistants and manages them throughout the course to perform the tasks of physical arrangement. The Course Supervisor manages another crucial volunteer, Course Leader Support, who provides the Course Leaderâs meals and various personal needs (including having clothes washed or dry cleaned) throughout the course. Under the direction of the Course Supervisor, who is accountable to the Course Leader, this power structure works to ensure the continuous management of the physical space of the course in such a way that the Course Leader and the participants engage in the conversations of the course without distraction. The participants cannot but mind the spoken discourse of the course at all times.
In revealing the power structure responsible for arranging the space of a Landmark Forum, I hope to make clear the extraordinary degree to which the company works to manipulate the material space, and that such care would not be taken unless it played a crucial rhetorical role. During every moment of the course, the volunteers provide a precise theatrical level of intentional management to how the space appears to participants. They show up long before participants do and stay long after participants have left in order to arrange the course room to a state of impeccable brilliance, far above and beyond the standards a normal hotel staff would consider acceptable, and also maintain it, if not improve it. No matter what may occur to disturb the physical space, the Course Supervisor leads the volunteers in their extraordinary efforts to remove, even well in advance, any possible distraction that might threaten to take participants
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out the conversation at hand. As a consequence, participants have no choice but to engage unknowingly in material relationships, while at the same time ostensibly working to understand the concepts of the course. Thus, as Lefebvre suggests, the process of inscribing produces its own space, but this happens below the âradarâ of the conceptual understanding of the participants because most of the rhetoric occurs materially, by virtue of unseen bodies, the volunteers.
Having had some transformation of their own social space out of doing the LF, volunteers genuinely feel they are part of making the same experience possible for participants. Additionally, what compels them is their own quest to expand their ownership of the means of producing new social space by virtue of giving their time and effort, carrying out the various and menial duties of arrangement of the space, while simultaneously receiving training and development. In order to make the scope of my argument manageable, I must exclude many sites of material interactions. Please keep in mind that as I present the ones that follow, they are a sampling meant to evoke and illuminate moments of inscription that participants and even volunteers may be largely unaware of. Donning the White Nametag and the First Points of Contact
Wearing yellow nametags in clear plastic shields and dressed in casual, professional attire, volunteers greet participants with smiles at the hotel doors and at strategic points along the way to the ballroom. The volunteersâ appearance effects the initial steps of material identification and relationship. What is considered casual and professional dress is determined socially: volunteers at a LF in New York City will likely dress more business/professional than volunteers at a LF in Atlanta, Georgia, or in Tucson, Arizona. Yet, unless in Dharamsala, India, the Hopi Indian reservation in New Mexico, or perhaps Japan, no volunteer wears robes and
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sandals, headbands, shorts, or sneakers. Instead, volunteers in North America, Europe, and Australia wear dress slacks and shoes, dresses and blouses, and genuine smiles: all that would identify and inscribe Landmark as familiar, respectable and inviting. The cultural expectations triggered in newly arriving participants begin when they see that volunteers, dressed in such a manner, are ordinary people who have obviously âbeen through it.â They are recognizable in an everyday sense, except for the yellow nametag, or perhaps the ubiquitous smile, which sometimes give people an impression of forced awkwardness. The volunteers provide the very first points of contact, and if the participants can relate to them and respect them, the invitation succeeds. Thus, as the participant accepts this invitation to move along to the next material space, she identifies herself as belonging in the space provided; she re-conceptualizes it as familiar; she steps into the role of a customer being served.
Outside the doors to the course room, which open precisely at 8:30 a.m., two volunteers wait behind two six-foot skirted tables, ready to greet approaching participants. One table contains all the participant nametags in two separate groups, arranged neatly into rows, columns, and alphabetically according to last name. If the participant can locate her nametag in the first group, she simply dons it and walks in the doors. If the participant cannot locate her nametag, the volunteer will ask for her name and locate the nametag. If the tag is not among the first group on the table, the volunteer will direct that participant to the second table to complete unfinished details in her paperwork, usually a signature on a faxed information form. The volunteers restore order to the rows of nametags during free moments after participants step away. Indicative of each following material interaction, these moments provide opportunities for volunteers to guide participants, what Landmark calls âflow.â According to the degree these moments of material
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interaction are familiar, participants either adopt or resist adopting subject positions volunteers provide for them to inhabit. The nametag is key in establishing these initial positions.
Rather than yellow, like the volunteersâ nametags, participant nametags are on white paper slipped into clear plastic shields, with first names computer printed in large bold script, and the last name printed below the first in small letters. The social situation of wearing a nametag brings along a range of cultural freight, depending on a participantâs familiarity with the practice. Unless one is accustomed to attending conferences where nametags are commonplace, awkwardness in putting them on is likely in some degree. Embarrassment may result due to having to subject oneself to the rules of the material space: a participant cannot be in the room without wearing their nametag. If someone attempts to enter the room without having first gotten her nametag, the volunteer at the door will redirect her to the nametag table. The fact remains that putting it on requires a re-conceptualization: making an adjustment to a new situation one has paid to experience. Furthermore, once the course begins, the Course Leader will ask participants to wear their nametags visibly, so that when called upon, the CL can know their name. A participant does not have the luxury of not wearing the nametag. In fact, this is one of many agreements the CL will ask participants to keep in order to be in the course. I will explain the purpose of these agreements in a later section.
Thus, the volunteerâs friendliness and helpfulness at the nametag table helps each participant to re-conceptualize herself as belonging to the material space. When giving the nametag to a participant, the volunteer may offer a small rolled piece of masking tape to affix the tag, if the participant wishes to avoid sticking a pin in their shirt or blouse. Many participants follow the suggestion to affix the nametags on the upper left or right of their chest, while others, feeling awkward about having to wear a nametag, resist the advice and stick it on their waist,
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inside their jacket, or merely hold it. The Course Supervisor instructs volunteers to not bother participants if they avoid wearing it.
However, the resistance to this form of subjugation usually only occurs on Friday morning of a Landmark Forum. At around 6:00 p.m., when the Course Supervisor announces the beginning of the single, hour-and-half meal-break (all other breaks are thirty minutes), volunteers collect nametags from participants as they exit the course room. During the break, volunteers count the nametags to make sure all were collected, and then place them in neat alphabetical rows and columns while the entire room is cleaned and reset. The doors open precisely twenty minutes before the end of the meal-break, and as they open, the nametag-table comes out with two volunteers. Most all participants, by this time, without a second thought, take their nametag and place it on their chest as they enter the room for the next session. This event repeats each morning and evening of the course, and by Sunday, any awkwardness in donning the nametag has effectively vanished in most all participants, freeing them to attend to the spoken content of the course. Moving Toward the Destination
Driving to the course site,5 walking into the building, following volunteersâ directions, accepting a nametag and putting it onâall these actions and more are subsumed in the material event of registering to attend a Landmark Forum, and thus, participants perform these actions inside the requirements of the cultural expectations that ensue with attending an educational event in the role of a customer being served. A participant has already paid $375 and has arranged her schedule to attend all sessions of the LF as a destination that promises to produce new social spaces for her. I use the term âdestinationâ in a manner similar to Carole Blair in her essay, âContemporary U.S. Memorial Sites as Exemplars of Rhetoricâs Materiality.â Blair
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distinguishes a destination as a material event that demands âphysical labor of a would-be audience member. Some kind of motion is required to go to the sites, and most require mobility to negotiate their spatial dimensionsâ (46). I would add that movement toward a destination, even the most minute material interactions, entails transformation, because material interaction leads to experiences that inevitably defy oneâs conceptual expectations, necessitating re- conceptualization, thereby producing social space distinct from the participantsâ conceptual, always already understood relationships to space. The symbolic and conceptual significance of this movement remains negligible because the arrangement of space compels the participant to move and to engage in small, incremental material shifts that inscribe the participant into a space new to the participant. These incremental steps add up over three days and an evening, sometimes leading to surprising transformations where participants say and do things not considered within their everyday character. These shifts appear to occur suddenly, without detectable cause, and are hence âmiraclesâ of one order or another.
Thus, a participantâs continuous movement toward this series of destinations is a key element of the production of space in the course. While it is accurate to say that volunteers enact the frontline of the creation of space, the course could not happen without the participantsâ money and time. As a customer who is likely to continue this relationship with Landmark if the results of the course meet or exceed expectation, the participant will pay to attend (move in relation to) more destinations: a predictable outcome of being inscribed into the social space participation in the course produces. Entering the Room
Stepping into the course room,6 a participant will see chairs arranged theatre-style into four sections with three aisles separating the sections. The chairs not only complement the
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podium at the head of the room, on which rest two large chalkboards, but they also accentuate the wide-open space of the ballroom, well lighted with a combination of florescent lights and incandescent chandeliers. A volunteer at the door directs participants to one of three other volunteers. Stationed strategically at the openings of the three aisles, these volunteers usher participants to the front and centermost seats. Volunteers, wearing yellow nametags, delineate the space participants, wearing white nametags, can inhabit.
On the Friday morning of the course, participants often greet these requests with various forms of resistance. Though some follow the volunteersâ prompt, most ignore it, finding seats in one of the wings of chairs. By the third day of the course, however, as the continuous arrangement of space works to harness resistance only to silence it in the re-conceptualizations of the production of social space, this ratio reverses. Therefore, by Sunday morning participants not only happily affix their nametags, but they also eagerly fill in the front centermost seats well before the course begins at 9 a.m., a situation quite different from the previous Friday morning. Here, some participants may wander around the room before the course begins: they may get a drink of water at a water station, perhaps examine the podium, or even nosily survey the tables at the back of the room where one or two volunteers engage quietly in anticipatory paper work. Although the cultural expectation is to subjugate oneself to the demands of the arranged material space, participants at first resist fitting themselves in such a space, but as they do so, no matter how incremental the step, former resistances fade.
Below are two diagrams that illustrate the layout of the space with volunteer positions. The first shows the layout before the morning session of each day and before the beginning of the evening session after the meal break. Volunteers wait with nametag tables outside the open doors to the course room before 9 a.m., and before the end of the meal break. As discussed
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earlier, at each of these times, participants must claim their nametags, since the volunteers had collected them when the participants left to eat or left for the night. Also in this set-up, volunteers stand in key positions to usher participants to their seats.
The second diagram gives a course in progress. Volunteers sit behind tables or remain stationed at the door to the room, which remains closed unless someone exits or enters. Throughout the course, the Course Supervisor (indicated by the black square) sits in a tall directorâs chair at the end of the main aisle facing the podium. She also has a music stand used to place a manual that lists all the procedures and timelines for the course. Both the Course Leader and the Course Supervisor each have a tall directorâs chair and music stand. They each have the same style name tag, distinct from either the volunteer or participant nametags: either white lettering embossed on thick black-colored plastic, or black lettering on thick gray-colored plastic. With these material trappings affixed to both the Course Leader and the Course Supervisor, participants identify the latter as the person to speak to privately about particular issues that may arise during the course, including specific complaints having to do with the physical space of the room. The Course Leader also relies on the Course Supervisor to have conversations with participants who have difficulties with the course, when those participants are not comfortable with voicing their issues publicly.
� Kopp 21 Landmark Forum room layouts: before morning and after-dinner sessions, and during course:
Sound Speaker WaterStation Water Station Volunteer Chalkboard or Whiteboard Music Stand 6â Skirted Table Sound Microphone Sound Speaker WaterStation Water Station Sound Speaker Sound Course Leader Course Supervisor Sound Speaker � Kopp 22
The Chairs
The arrangement, appearance and comfort level of the chairs play a crucial role in producing social space, primarily through limiting and confining participants to inhabit a particular material position and to engage in certain spatial practices. Whether in their own facility or in a rented hotel ballroom, Landmark expects all chairs to be in excellent condition, identical in color and form, cushioned and upholstered in cloth or vinyl, with chrome or black metal backing. An observant participant may notice that, upon entering the room and walking toward a seat, from most all angles, the chairs appear set in perfect, even rows; rows are set in even numbers of chairs unless the LF has an odd number of participants, then only one row will remain odd. On the Thursday night before a LF, from 6:00 p.m. to sometimes after midnight, volunteers prepare the room, spending hours to set the chairs in this uniform manner, no matter how well the hotel staff may have arranged the chairs prior. After removing any defective or old chairs, replacing them with newer, more pristine ones if available, volunteers use rulers to make exactly two-inch spaces between each chair, four-foot wing aisles between the side wings and middle sections and a five-foot center aisle. To make the rows and columns appear in perfect lines, volunteers true up the edges of the chairs using a taught string held from end to end of a row. In order to make re-sets quicker during the short thirty minute breaks every three hours of so, volunteers mark key chair positions, usually the corner chairs of each section, with small-cut pieces of tape that the outer back leg of the chair covers.
In a hundred-person LF, the center sections would likely have six chairs to a row, and with five columns, each wing would require twenty chairs: the first row set with two, then four, six, and eight for the outermost row. For the beginning of the course and of each session, volunteers will pull two to four chairs from the last row of the wing closest to the entrance. This
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forces participants to fill all available chairs, including the dreaded front and center seats. For participants who arrive closer to the beginning time or after, volunteers usher them to an odd empty seat, sometimes in the middle of a row mostly filled with participants, rather than put down a new chair. Participants in such cases must undergo the social discomfort of having others make room for them to pass in order to seat themselves, making the row fill up to its requisite even number. Once every chair is filled, volunteers place down, one at a time as each of the last participants arrive, the two to four chairs originally set aside. Several reasons explain this manipulation of the seating arrangement, one of which is that an empty chair in the middle of a section distracts the Course Leader, not to mention the participants sitting around the empty chair who are left to wonder who is not present and why.
Another reason for this seating arrangement is that once all participants are present, both the Course Supervisor and the Course Leader can acknowledge at a glance how many participants are present in the room at any given moment. In other words, LE treats participants as aspects of the material space as much as it does the chairs they sit in, handling them delicately but precisely toward very specific rhetorical ends. Both the Course Leader and the Course Supervisor work to learn each participantâs name, matching them to their face and even speech acts, and usually do so by the middle of the first day of the course, if not sooner. In fact, during each break, these two work together to recreate each and every participant that spoke during the last session, as well as those who appeared to be âunengaged.â Then, at the beginning of a session, with no empty seats anywhere in the chair arrangement, but with one or two chairs left in standing reserve, the Course Leader can lead the present conversation. The Course Supervisor inductively determines who exactly is missingâif there is someone missing, more often than not it was one of the âunengagedâ participantsâand then reports the fact to the Course Leader in due
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time. These communications between the Course Leader and Course Supervisor usually take place during âpaired shares,â when the Course Leader directs participants to examine some aspect of their lives in light of the âdistinctionâ currently under discussion.
This provides another important reason for the particular chair arrangement; it is a form of spatial control that elicits resistance in participants, but leads to re-conceptualizations of social space. The even numbered rows, with no odd and empty seat, insures that each participant has a partner for the multiple occasions for âpaired sharing.â This frequent and crucial practice happens throughout the course, and the Course Leader guides and directs these shares with the assistance of the limited space of arranged chairs. In a LF with an odd number of participants, where an odd row is necessary, a volunteer will sit in during each paired share. Thus, it is quite possible for someone to avoid standing at a microphone for the whole course, never engaging in a dialogue with the course leader and becoming a speaking body for the group to listen to, but impossible to avoid directed dialogues with participants sitting next to one. The chair arrangement, replicated and reinforced numerous times throughout the course, forces participants to face each other during these paired shares and apply the âdistinctionâ currently under discussion to specific areas of their lives. Some participants might wish to avoid the awkwardness of speaking with strangers about their personal life. The economic equation, getting oneâs moneyâs worth, compels some degree of participation, but coupled with the material arrangement of two people having to say something to each other at specific and multiple times, familiarity with the situation emerges with each participantâs re- conceptualizations of the material space. Resistance fades as the values of participationâ willingness to experiment with the concepts of the course and share generously from oneâs lifeâ
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become the demonstrated norm with both the direct and public conversations with the Course Leader and in the private paired shares.
In order to speak to each other, or perhaps to increase comfort, participants often work against the space provided for them through shifting, leaning and scooting their chairs. By the end of each two and a half to three hour session, the participants have disturbed the chairsâ perfect order, have left empty water glasses and trash on the floor, and have left behind pillows and clothing. Upon returning from the first thirty-minute break and every break thereafter, participants may notice the chairs arranged again in pristine symmetry, the water stations restocked with fresh glasses, iced-water, and dry table clothes. Any writing on a chalkboard the Course Leader added during the previous session will reappear rewritten with impeccable precision, in perfect rows, each block letter inscribed with the same thickness. If participants left items behind, such as a pillow, sweater, or water bottle, those items will appear neatly arranged where the participant left them, folded and straightened, or perhaps they will appear in an area designated for personal belongings. Again, the Course Supervisor directs volunteers to pull two to four chairs from the section closest to the doors, forcing participants to fill all chairs, leaving the last to the latest arrivals back from the break.
If they do take conceptual notice of these events of material manipulation, participants hardly have any means of reacting to these events except to acknowledge them. But this is rare; most participants actually do not have much concern for the alterations concerning the space, because of its monotonous order, but are much rather concerned with the subject matter of the course. Yet, someone produced these spatial alterations, and these alterations cause participants to engage in multiple and minute material relationships that force the most incremental re- conceptualizations, happening just beneath the surface of consciousness. The theme of these re
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conceptualizations, fitting the participant to meet each material requirement of the course, could be stated facetiously as âresistance is futile.â In other words, âtry as you might to distract yourself from the aims of this course, you will fail: pay attention to the speaking body.â The volunteers continue to relentlessly replicate this arrangement throughout the course. They do so no matter what material resistance participants may effect: leaving trash on the floor, keeping pens left under the chairs to fill out forms, pulling up tape covering microphone wire, spilling water at the water station, any chaotic situation that may occur.7 Volunteers even appropriate spaces well beyond the course room. After each new session begins, with all the participants back in the room, the volunteers clean and restock all restrooms in the vicinity of the course room, empty all ashtrays and remove all cigarette butts from the smoking areas. Both the Course Leader and the hidden volunteers continuously assert and reassert power over the participants through these means of controlling the material space, all the more so because the volunteers manage participants as material bodies within the domain of the course room, and even beyond.
In asserting control over the means of arranging the material space, Landmark Education, in the form of its direct representatives, the Course Leader with her team of volunteers, seeks to lead people who occupy their space to become attuned to the intentions that continuously forge the physical space. Because the space is designed to bring out resistance only to silence it, the transformative rhetoric of LE works in a way impossible under different, i.e., everyday, material conditions. If the conditions cannot be re-shaped and managed by the company, the rhetoric becomes impaired. Harnessing Resistance
Only when we occupy a space that we hold to be familiar is it possible to engage in attending to a new and unfamiliar experience. Our initial encounter with material space triggers
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cultural expectations of space familiar to us; we find ways to understand what is laid out for us in familiar terms. However, we hardly notice that our choice to be in such a space has already inscribed us into the rhetorical aims those who manipulated the space intended. In the case of Landmark Education, this intention includes confronting participants with an experience that defies familiar explanations. When we encounter an unfamiliar experience, regardless of our initial familiarity with the material space, we always meet the unfamiliar with some form of resistance; we resist acts of domination that threaten subjugation through submission; not knowing or understanding something places us in a position of weakness and dependence. This happens through all the spatial practices Landmark engages participants in already discussed: finding the course room, donning the nametag, finding a seat, speaking at a microphone or with a participant sitting next to one. Each replication of a spatial practice forces a participant to re- conceptualize and incorporate something unfamiliar, âupsetting what has led our expectations and undergoing reorganization itself in the upheavalâ (Gadamer 15). We only unwillingly surrender our everyday interpretation of material space, I assert, because our identities are tied up with our cultural expectations, the always already interpreted world. As Gadamer proposes, following his statement quoted above, âOnly the support of familiar and common understanding makes possible the venture into the alien, the lifting up of something out of the alien, and thus the broadening and enrichment of our own experience of the worldâ (15). The ultimate implication is that with each incremental re-conceptualization that approximates a new relationship to the unfamiliar material space, a participantâs identity, composed from prior conceptualizations and invoked anew as always already cultural expectations, undergoes a transformation, which Lefebvre calls the production of social space. The material space of the Landmark Forum draws out the participantsâ cultural expectations only to challenge them with
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the courseâs unfamiliar material space coupled with its discourse. This ultimately compels participants to speak in the courseâs terms, which themselves are handy and workable conceptual models that aid these re-conceptualizations.
The spoken rhetoric of the Landmark Forum uses the participantsâ resistance to the material space of the course to dispose them to listen to the courseâs discourse in a particular manner; the course harnesses resistance in participants to lead them to re-shape their identities into transformed social spaces. Composed of a number of concepts termed âdistinctions,â the discourse of the Landmark Forum purposefully defies everyday ways of speaking and understanding. This is due in part to Landmarkâs appropriation of many of their concepts from Martin Heideggerâs philosophy of language and Being, infamous for its unfamiliar and difficult- to-understand neologisms.8 Some of Landmarkâs concepts include âthe already always ways of being human,â âbeing-in-the-world,â âcreating a clearing,â and tautological phrases such as âthe possibility of possibility.â These and other constructions may sound slightly familiar to an everyday understanding, but they ultimately require a certain degree of âdwelling in the languageâ to âget the distinctionsâ as Landmark intends, which has nothing to do with conceptual understanding. Here lies the most confrontational aspect of the course that defies the central cultural expectation triggered by the educational and business setting. Understanding the âtechnologyâ of the course is completely superfluous, in Landmarkâs view, and despite the fact that many participants actually get upset with the difficulty of the concepts, the Course Leader will simply coach them to âdwell in the conversation, donât try to understand it.â Participants must contend with the confusion and discomfort that come along with not understanding a discourse they pay money to consume in ways the cultural freight triggered by the material space prescribes them to do.
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The Podium
Unmanaged and chaotic material space distracts participants from giving attention to the speaking bodies in the course, including most importantly the Course Leader, who nominates herself for the attention of the participants while inhabiting the space of the podium. Carole Blair explains the simplicity of this principle, pointing to the material demand for attention:
The most obvious demands rhetoric makes on the body are the very physical ones
required for one to pay attention. Rhetoric, regardless of its medium, is introduced
into a space that would be different in its absence. By being introduced, it
nominates itself for the attention of potential listeners, readers, or viewers [â¦] To
attend to a speech is to sit or stand still, usually facing the speaker, and be quiet in
order to hear. (46) Several other elements aid this directing of attention of the participants toward the podium. At all times, sitting in the back of the room, a volunteer monitors the sound system, controlling the volume for each of the microphones, including the wireless microphone the Course Leader uses. Throughout the course, during breaks, the volunteers test the sound system, replacing batteries frequently in the Course Leaderâs wireless microphone to insure no interruption or irregularity in the presentation of clear audible expression for those authorized to speak. The back of the room also has a few skirted tables with volunteers sitting behind them, quietly busy with paper work, or attentive to the current conversation. Table surfaces remain mostly clear and neatâmess, despite being unsightly, is interesting. Controlling what the participants give their attention to is crucial to the rhetorical aims of the course. Whenever anything occurs that defies the uniformity of the material space, it immediately attracts the attention of one or more participants, and they devote their attention to these distractions rather than to the person speaking.
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Both noise and motion are thus distractions to be avoided. Therefore, throughout the course, volunteers remain quiet and hidden, only moving when necessary to accomplish the various tasks of arrangement. Landmark trains volunteers in effective whispering techniques and in how to walk without drawing attention to oneselfâquick, brisk movements are distracting for the Course Leader, as she has a panoptic view of the entire room. Additionally, two volunteers stand ready at the door to the room, opening and closing it silently for participants and volunteers as they approach and after they pass through the opening. During set-up, volunteers tape up the door clasp with masking tape to obviate any clicking sounds, and even oil the hinges of the door to silence any squeaks.
As a consequence, the design of the space leads participants to attend to the podium at all times, to either displayed writing of some sort or more importantly, whoever is speaking: the Course Leader, or a participant standing at a microphone in conversation with the Course Leader. The cultural expectation, again in the educational vein, affixes supreme importance to this physical site. The podium presents a marvel of simple symmetry. It is 8 feet deep, 24 feet long, and 18 inches high, with a step resting directly in the center-front that leads to the 5 foot wide aisle separating the center sections of chairs. Two large chalkboards, positioned equidistant from each other on either end of the podium, flank a tall directorâs chair and music stand at the center of the podium. A chalk eraser and two pieces of chalk, white and yellow, rest on each chalkboard tray. Behind the chair at the back of the podium is a skirted table at the center of which is a tasteful floral arrangement. A few other items sit along the edge of the table, though participants will likely not take notice of them, such as a glass of water, a metal thermos, a small dish with lozenges, and a small notepad with a black pen and sharpened pencil. Parallel to the chalkboards, but not on the podium, are two large white boards that display information referred
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to throughout the course (see diagrams above). The white board to the right contains the purpose of the course (âThe genesis of a new realm of possibilityâ¦â); the white board on the left displays Landmarkâs âCurriculum for Living,â of which the LF is the first course of four. Beyond the white boards, in either corner of the room are sound speakers, though only if the facility does not have its own sound system. Each of the three aisles has a microphone stand.
The chalkboards on the left and right side of the podium are both filled from top to bottom with impeccable, thick white chalk writing. Besides working to set chairs before and after each session, volunteers also spend much time making board-work impeccable: rows block letters are always two inches wide with one inch spaces between, measured with strips of masking tape. Once written, volunteers spell the writing out loud and backwards from the source document, to insure accuracy in the transcription. This passes unheeded in the participantsâ scope of the material space.
The writing on the board to the left, clearly visible for all participants, states unequivocally how the LF produces the results it promises, in essence, setting the tone for an arranged material space that defies triggered cultural expectations. I paraphrase it as follows:
You have a right to expect the results promised only if you are present in the course room during all sessions, including the Tuesday evening session. You can leave the room at any time during the course, but keep in mind that if you do, you will likely experience the result, but you will forfeit the right to expect the result. It may seem to you that leaving the room for just a few moments should not matter, but in our experience, we have found that it does. (Emphasis mine)
The writing on the other board to the right directs participants to speak to the Course Supervisor at the back of the room if they have special requirements such as a leg-chair, or perhaps
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medication schedules, or hearing or seeing difficulties that require special seating arrangements. Knowing of all possible irregularities at the beginning of the course allows the Course Supervisor, as the agent of the Course Leader, to remain in control of arranging the space. Again, the demands on attention, as stated explicitly on a chalkboard as one of the first spatial practices of the course, utilizes the cultural expectation that if one is get oneâs moneyâs worth, participants must engage in physical, spatial practices that will continue to enforce the production of social space. However, the value of being present in the room occurs for most participants as catching everything said, not missing any of the presented information. But this is an appendix to the rhetorical role of the arrangement of the material space.
Invisible Bodies Revisited
As mentioned earlier, the Course Supervisor and her team of volunteers are responsible for the constant visibility of speaking persons throughout the course. The volunteersâ job is to continuously manipulate the space, while remaining invisible to the participants. Of course, this is ideal and there are always impediments to accomplishing this stream of tasks successfully. The Course Leader, with her unique, panoptic point of view of the entire space of the room, provides the standard for the Course Supervisor to manage the arrangement of space. Except for the podium and its accessories (including the sound speakers), everything in the room faces the podium. All eyes look to the front, both those of the participants and of the volunteers. If anything in the space is âoff,â such as the temperature of the room, a failure in the sound system, a sleeping participant, a participant without a nametag, an empty chair, a depleted water station, the CL will see it. If the disturbance is intrusive, the CL will include it in the conversation at large, perhaps requesting the Course Supervisor to raise or lower the temperature in the room, or raise or lower the volume for the sound system. Thus, control is exerted over the means of
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arrangement, even when there is an apparent lack of control. Here is the frontline power relationship that provides the ground for the continuous manipulation of space. A competent Course Supervisor, however, will always be looking out for irregularities that could disturb the Course Leaderâs presentation. She will identify and obviate them before they come into the material space of the room and distract participants from attending to authorized speakers, and from attending to any visual displays on and next to the podium.
The Course Leader
While the volunteers continuously produce the material of the course in conjunction with the participants, the Course Leader provides the standards that measure the effectiveness of the teamâs efforts, but only to the degree that she herself experiences no distractions from applying all her attention and energy to the participants. During most Landmark Forums, the only paid employee present is the Course Leader, making that person accountable for the results of the course. At this point, I think it is important to give a sense of what a Course Leader is as a material presence for the participants. LEâs website describes this 53 member body concisely, while offering pictures and names of each of them: âThe men and women who lead The Landmark Forum are extensively trained senior program directors of Landmark Education. The training program includes 3-7 years of full-time, rigorous, specialized study, preparation, and practice.â9 What does this rhetorical training produce? Perhaps Ciceroâs ideal rhetor. William Bartley, who wrote a biography of Werner Erhard, the founder of est and the Forum, describes Erhardâs performance during an est training in 1972. As Erhard is the archetypal Course Leader, I offer this description (as it matches my experience of the many Course Leaders I have worked with) as applicable to each Course Leaderâs presence, regardless of their gender or nationality:
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[Erhard] seemed to move among the two hundred and fifty people seated in that hotel ballroom with a repertoire of emotions, arguments, and responses that fitted no pattern yet was always on target. He exuded power yet had an unerring sensitivity to everyone in his vicinity. With every person who presented him-or herself to him, he dealt differently. [â¦] He stood in front of usâthis tall, slender, immaculately dressed blue-eyed manâin full view, for sixteen hours each day [â¦] He had virtually total recall of anything said to him by a trainee [a participant in est] and refer [sic] back to things said earlier with minute accuracy. [â¦] At midnight he seemed as clean and well pressed, and as fresh, as he had been at eight oâclock that morning. (xvi-xviii)
Thus, a Course Leader reflects in her well pressed presence the same unflagging uniformity the rest of the material space of the course presents to the participants. Except she is the primary object of attention, including speech acts of resistance. She directs the conversation and regulates the time each session begins and ends. She designates and enforces the rules for speaking (e.g., a participant must raise her hand, wait to be called on, and then proceed to a microphone). Participants step onto the podium only when the CL invites them up to demonstrate something pertinent to the course. Yet, as demonstrated above, it is the arranged material space that constantly grants the Course Leader this attention that spans 13-15 hours a day for three days (hours were much longer in the days of estâ1972-1985).
At the beginning of the course, with an empty podium drawing attention to itself, the Course Leaderâs dramatic entrance begins the action. After going over the writing on the chalk boards, this first session becomes all about questions participants have for the Course Leader, which range from LEâs business practices and how it all started, to the personal history of the
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Course Leader herself. The Course Leader also directs the completion of a few logistic activities, which are carried out with the aid of the volunteers, who pass out forms to the different sections and collect them again once completed (another very important role of the volunteers). At this point, participants must make and keep a series of promises in order to demonstrate their choice to participate in the course. These include wearing nametags in visible locations; raising oneâs hand, waiting to be called on, and going to a microphone to speak; attending each and every session while being on time; avoiding the consumption of alcohol or non-prescription drugs throughout the course; clapping after any participant has finished speaking at a microphone. These are required promises. However, if participants promise the recommended promises, the Course Leader promises extraordinary results, usually referred to as the âthousand-dollar Landmark Forum.â The key recommended promise is to participate fully, âas if your life depended on it,â carrying out whatever exercises the Course Leader gives the participants to perform. These exercises almost always have to due with some variation of âsharing whatâs opening up in the LFâ with someone in the participantâs life. Often during these activities, a participant may complain in frustration, asking when the actual course (i.e., the presentation of the words) will get started. The CL invariably answers, âIt already has.â The arrangement of space persuades participants to form material relationships regardless of any conceptual knowledge or cultural expectation they may have of the incremental material movements they enact within the space of the course. Participants thus have no recourse but to inscribe themselves into a relationship with the Course Leader, the preeminent speaking body materially representing Landmark Education, who appears to be the single most dominating force working to subjugate participants into âtrying onâ the presented discourse. Again, her power is the product of the arrangement of the material space. Seeking to gain back on their
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investment, participants stay in the course room throughout each and every session, and often do so despite engaging in fierce resistance to the material and language of the course. In fact, it is those that present the fiercest resistance to the Course Leader who, as visible speakers, provide the most dramatic spectacles of breakthroughs. The Course Leaderâs interactions with these participants make available in the social space of the course the tracks for each of the other participants to follow in their own way.
The Produced Social Space
The impact of the multitudes of incremental moments of the manipulation of space, the harnessing of resistance only to effect its dissipation, delivers the result: attunement to the values LE professes. These values include: âbeing extraordinary,â âsaying yes to life,â âbeing powerful and effective in the face of any circumstance,â âbeing courageously willing to take risks,â âopenly expressing love and appreciation,â âgenerously giving up resentments and urges to dominate or manipulate others,â etc. By the Sunday night of the LF, the production of these spaces culminates in a social space quite unlike the everyday world participants had left behind the previous Friday morning. Ebullience pours forth, encomiums abound, intimacy reigns. The Course Leader warns the participants of the imminent discrepancies that will confront them when they step back out into the ordinary world. The social space created in the LF is highly transient; it requires continuous reshaping to stay in existence, grow and develop.
In the light of this newly created social space, participantsâ everyday social conditions suffer a devaluation of sorts. Taking advantage of the obvious disparity between these two worlds, one in which one lacks power, the other in which one has it, the Course Leader casts this situation as an exigence for participants to institute practices that will lead to the transformation of the conditions of everyday life. The key to this is first and foremost to continue participating
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with Landmark Education in some form: taking courses that cost money, and/or volunteering in the Assisting Program. For instance, a ten-session seminar, included in the tuition (thus, already paid for) of the LF begins in the ensuing weeks after the course (at least 95% of participants register for this seminar by the Saturday of the LF). The Course Leader also presents the âAdvanced Course,â a four-day and an evening course,10 as an additional crucial step, the purpose of which is to design a personal vision (30%-40% of participants enroll in this course by the end of the Tuesday Evening Session). Enrolling other people to occupy the space produced in the LF becomes an exigent situation for graduates, for doing so will assist in the production of this âtransformedâ space (for a hundred-person Forum, LE would consider âeffectiveâ 40 guests on the Tuesday evening session with 25% registering).
Then, the last event on Sunday evening, before everyone goes home, the Course Leader calls all the volunteers up to the front of the room, having them stand together on the podium. She gives them a moving acknowledgment, revealing to the participants the previously unacknowledged source of the manipulation of space in the course; she informs everyone that she could not have done her job without the work of the volunteers. The Course Leader selects a participant to stand at a microphone and thank the volunteers. Clapping and cheering ensue (roughly 10%-15% of the participants of a LF later volunteer in some capacity; perhaps 10% of this latter number end up taking on significant volunteer leadership roles in the company). Conclusion: a Faustian Bargain
In revealing these formerly invisible bodies, the volunteers, as the source of the arrangement of space in the Landmark Forum, the Course Leader confirms that the material conditions and the means to manipulate those conditions are the primary constituents to the production of social space in each participantâs life. The enthymemic message is clear: LE
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possesses the means, it provides the techniques and the technology to manipulate and master the material conditions, and thus the social spaces of life. Participants become aware of the gap that exists between their conceptual intentions and the actual results they produce in life; controlling the material space is equivalent to owning the means of the production of social space. The LF, in its material space, demonstrates this to most participants, especially those who have experienced for themselves the sometimes exhilarating production of social space, breakthrough results, thanks to the LF. Thus, the company has made itself indispensable as a tool or set of tools that asserts itself in any given situation as providing the means to effect intentional changes to everyday life (i.e. the available means of persuasion-the techne).
This begs a further question concerning the values (e.g., âbeing extraordinary,â etc.) the material arrangement of space attunes participants to by the end of the course. The core to each of these values is power and owning the means of production is a clear material expression of ownership of power. Landmark banks on the fact that all people lack power in some area of their lives and thus, desire to possess power. The majority of Landmarkâs customers, I claim, are the disinheritedâthose somehow separated from ownership of the means of the production of social space; their conceptual intentions do not match the social spaces they desire to inhabit. People take the LF for a handful of reasons, almost all having to do with rhetoric, effecting transformation intentionally through communication in relationships, communities, institutions, the workplace, the home, transformations that would lead one to inhabit desired social spaces. By themselves, the disinherited cannot effect these transformations, or so Landmark would have them believe, since they apparently lack the available means. But to own Landmarkâs technology, one must practice the manipulation of the spaces required for the âtechnologyâ to effect transformation. A Faustian bargain results: continue to participate, and you will continue
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to be the master of your fate. An enthymeme lies hiding behind this commitment to participate: the technology is indispensable; it becomes more important than the freedom and power in life it promises to grant its possessor. I would contend that this is a fundamental inauthenticity of Landmark Education, to use its own term to describe this dynamic and Landmarkâs lack of transparency of its operation. Landmark Education, in the form of any and all of its representatives, pretends to their customers, that participants can acquire this technology, its consequent powers, and then drop the tools that granted these powers at any given time in the future. For instance, the Course Leader, at the very end of the LF, will say, âI take it all back,â claiming that everything said in the course possesses absolutely nothing to believe in. Yet, this is said against a background of materially enforced re-conceptualizations that have inscribed participants into a social space the existence of which is completely tied up with continuing to participate with Landmark Education. Thus, Landmarkâs technology compels participants to inscribe themselves further into more extensive and elaborate social spaces the organization offers participants to inhabit. This is the Faustian relationship with Mephistopheles, wherein desires are granted, but only if the means used are promoted endlessly, ultimately gaining importance over the participantâs original aims. Long live the institution.
Endnotes
1 I believe that DYG, Inc. performed their study during the year 1992.
2 The prices for the courses were as follows: the Landmark Forum, $295.00; the Landmark Advanced Course, $700.00; the Self-Expression and Leadership Program, $150.00. The seminar series the Landmark Forum in Action is included in the tuition of the LF.
3 The Course Leader is the on-site employee. Off-site employees include staff-members who manage the local LE Center. Titles include the Production, Finance, registration, participation, and Enrollment Managers who are all accountable to the Center Manager. Phoenix houses the LE Center for Arizona. Staff from Phoenix may be present for logistics purposes on the Friday morning of a LF in Tucson, but will not stay throughout the course.
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4 The number of apprentices depends on the number of participants attending a LF. After receiving sufficient training as an apprentice (successful performance in 3-4 courses), a Course Supervisor can assume a lead role, in turn training other new apprentices. At the end of a course, the Course Leader assigns a score to the Course Supervisor. The score, out of 100 points, measures the effectiveness the Course Supervisor demonstrates in the management of the physical space during the entire course. Running averages of these scores determine a Course Supervisorâs eligibility for lead positions in future courses.
5 Most LE Centers have facilities large enough to hold courses at their offices. However, many cities that have LFâs do not have LE Centers and so courses are held at tasteful hotel ballrooms. Phoenix, which houses LEâs offices for Arizona, have LFâs more frequently, with higher numbers in attendance than in Tucson. The cost of renting hotel space can run between 3 and 5 thousand dollars per course. It becomes cost effective to set up office space large enough to hold courses only when sufficient demand calls for frequent courses (more than one every four months). $375 a person for a hundred-person course would generate $37,500. I cannot recreate the precise overhead costs for running a Center, but it includes office space rental, office and course supplies, printing runs, travel, lodging and expenses for Course Leaders and other staff, and salaries for 4 to 6 staff members that run the office. Headquartered in San Francisco, Landmark offers courses in 110 cities via 60 major offices worldwide, manned by a total of 400 some employees (this number includes 53 Course Leadersâsee endnote vi). Landmark states that it is an employee owned company with no employee owning more than 3% of the shares. In 2001, the corporationâs revenues reached $58 million. Landmark also claims that they are âorganized and operated to invest its surpluses into making its programs, initiatives, and services more availableâ (Landmark Education Website).
6 Areas like Tucson usually have an average of 100 participants in a Forum. The square footage calculation for the hotel ballroom size is 20 square feet per participant, thus 2000 square feet for a 100 person course.
7 At a LF I supervised in Orlando in 1996, the hotelâs air conditioner malfunctioned. As a result, water accumulated in a ceiling tile right above a few participants in a back row. Just before breaking for dinner, the tile collapsed onto the floor, but not before I moved the participants quietly out of the way. After breaking for dinner, we moved the entire course to another ballroom in the same hotel (one with working air conditioning) all within an hour and a half, in time for the next session.
8 Please see Bruce Hydeâs Saying the Clearing: A Heideggerian Analysis of the Ontological Rhetoric of Werner Erhard. Diss. 2 vols. University of Southern California, 1991. Werner Erhard is the creator of the technology of Landmark Education, though he has remained in a consulting role since he sold his company to his employees in 1991. Hyde writes that Werner Erhardâs work âis both a manifestation of the metaphysical/technological tradition and a new appropriation of that tradition. Therefore it is, on the Heideggerian view, an appropriate venue for a thinking which would reach beyond the current technological paradigm by reaching through that paradigm. The Forum is putting-into-use putting itself to use in order to turn and see itself face-to-face. It is calculative thinking calculating its own deconstruction, reflexion radicalized for the appropriation of its own essential nature. And as a dialogical rhetorical project, it extends the communicative possibilities of Heideggerâs thinking, and makes the event of appropriation, and the freeing release which it occasions, available to an audience which Heideggerâs work is likely never to reach.â
9 I offer a brief national (ethnic) and gender breakdown of the âCourse Leader Body.â Of the 53 Course Leaders, 37 are US citizens (9 women), 2 Japanese, 3 Indians, 1 Dutch (woman), 1 Mexican, 2 Australian (one woman), 1 French, 1 Swiss (woman), 1 (Indian born) Canadian, 1 New Zealander (woman), 2 British, and 1 Italian. Thus 13 of the 53 are women. Of the 37 US citizens, there is one black male, and three born in India, one of which is a woman.
10 The cost of the Advanced Course is $700, though a $100 discount is available if a participant registers during the LF.
Works Cited
� Kopp 41
Blair, Carole. âContemporary U.S. Memorial Sites as Exemplars of Rhetoricâs Materiality.â Rhetorical Bodies. Eds. Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley, eds. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1999.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Philosophical Hermeneutics. Trans. David E. Linge. Berkeley, California, 1977.
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991.
Landmark Education. 13 April 2003. http://www.landmark-education.com/
Soja, Edward W. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real and Imagined Places. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996.
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O.K. For the benefit of those who find the above impossible to read, you can click on "history" and compare Pendant's last version with the previous version. This gives you shorter lines with a lot of extra white space, since the lines are still a little longer than the window you're reading them in. It will take a while to read this, even if you do understand it. Wowest (talk) 20:08, 2 February 2009 (UTC)
This is, again, getting too long to edit. Wowest (talk) 14:34, 6 February 2009 (UTC)
In the hierarchy of reliable sources a 500-level university paper ranks somewhat higher in detachment and credibility than corporate spin (re)produced on a company web-site. If we have better material on this specific topic, let's see it. Failing that, we can use Kopp's work with appropriate caveats. -- Pedant17 (talk) 12:06, 6 February 2009 (UTC)
Not really. We're dealing with a semi-self-published "term paper" from a lower-level (Master's degree level) course in English from a third-rate graduate school. That doesn't qualify as a "reliable source." We know that the paper was taken down by the author because he states or implies things he no longer agrees with, although we do not know what those things were.
The paper is not that well-written. The author deals with minutiae of the Forum with scrupulous detail. We might, well, call that "being anally-retentive about anal-retentiveness."
The paper deals with the rather interesting notion that a physical environment constitutes a form of rhetoric. We can see that, on a daily basis, on television newscasts, with sets which serve to suggest the competency or professionalism of the news-readers.
There are a few unjustifiable assumptions. Certainly, Landmark Education did not invent nametags. They are most famously seen at science fiction conventions, where some fans lay out good money to have a personal nametag decorated by a famous fan artist. The Forum leader and course supervisor go out of their way to remember which participant is which. I remember an algebra teacher doing that in eighth grade. He got the previous year's yearbook and studied the pictures before class started. On the first day of school, he knew everyone's name. That certainly helped maintain order in the class.
The jump from concern about tidiness to some sort of manipulation of various kinds of "space," all undefined, and then the rhetorical jump to some sort of Faustian contract aren't exactly justified, but one must remember that this is a paper for a class in English, not in sociology, and that the writer has apparently earned a bachelor's degree in a related field. That paper isn't particularly relevant to anything or interesting to anyone who hasn't completed some sort of LGAT program. Wowest (talk) 14:55, 6 February 2009 (UTC)
The Pedant doth protest too much, methinks.
You're placing an undue emphasis on a non-reliable source, according to Wiki standards. . You rather need to separate your two topics. The "business model" seems to by very much like the business model of any other educational organization. Let's do that now. Wowest (talk) 02:47, 17 February 2009 (UTC)
Compare it to a state university. You have registration. Frequently, members of various honor societies provide volunteers to make it work. You have classes that meet in certain places at certain times. You pay your tuition and take your class. Then, you list it on one or more versions of your resume, if you think it's relevant. The biggest difference with the Forum is that they offer you your money back, assuming they still do that. It's been about fifteen years since I was around there, as I said. What is it you want to say? Wowest (talk) 02:47, 17 February 2009 (UTC)