FoolsCap

Attentive readers will note that the puns grow increasingly atrocious as the semester continues.  It’s just going to devolve into dumb blonde jokes by, say, late November.

Attentive readers–particularly the class instructor kind–will further note that I am in fact posting the day of class.  Hrm. 

So:

p. 715: "’games of truth’"

Briefly: Foucault’s quote, describing knowledge forms as "games," reminds me of Derrida’s notion of "play" between and within words and discourses.  I don’t have a big point to make, I just wanted to note that both theorists construct language/discourse as something we should be having fun doing–an aspect that we tend to forget sometimes.

p. 717: "institutional anonymity of forms and conventions"

Shades of Bartholomae, Batman!  I think Spellmeyer observes something that correlates with Batholomae’s notion of commonplaces: they do sort confer a certain anonymity by allowing writers to assume a preestablished discursive form without risking the subjective "I."  [I almost sound like I know what I’m talking about.]  Since, as Bartholomae notes, commonplaces too often pass without scrutiny, couching one’s argument in these forms similarly allows an attempt to enter discourse without one’s subjectivity meeting the same scrutiny.

p. 720: Quoting James Porter: "’communities of discourse’", "’individuals bound by a common interest who communicate through approved channels and whose discourse is regulated’"

Briefly: I think these two ideas are what Batholomae means by "the university."  Nothing extraordinary, just sayin’.

p. 723: "[. . .] [W]e speak first, and then learn what we have said and whom we have become.  By beginning and beginning again, attempting and being mistaken, the "I" defines a space it can occupy, long before the writer makes any conscious determinations about truth and falsity, consistency or inconsistency, understanding and misunderstanding."

First: I wonder why Spellmeyer enforces the binary between consistency/inconsistency when truth/falsity and understanding/misunderstanding both get paired contiguously; it seems at odds with the rest of his argument here.

Second: The whole "speak first, learn what we have said" structure seems to explicate nicely my own suggested essay model from a few posts back.  I think, too, that Erica’s essay later in Spellmeyer works in much the same way my proposed model might.  Something for me to look for: does this model hold true for the essays that the assigned readings hold up as quality student work?  If so, does that in itself mean the model is viable?  Or is it merely an extrapolation from a technique that produces worthy results?

p. 726: "[. . .] [T]he last three sentences above might be seen as contradicting everything that comes before them in a passage opening with [an] unqualified assertion [. . . .]"

I read this sentence and asked myself: reading Erica’s essay, would I see the logical continuity in her essay, or would I read the "contradiction" and not see its connection to the rest of the response?  This goes to the ongoing discussion that Jeff and I have had via comments to my Bartholomae response.  Would I assume Erica made a mistake, penalize her for it, and then risk losing insightful, probing responses like the one Spellmeyer offers us?  I did not, in fact, read this as a contradiction since, as Spellmeyer notes, it is a contradiction that comes naturally out of her analytic method.  But if her paper were 15th in a stack of 30, would I see it?

p. 727: "[. . .] [E]very form of discourse [. . .] discloses retrospectively, and only retrospectively, the transformation of a game of truth."

I read as follows: Why ask a question to which you already know the answer?  It seems there is no quicker way to limit the possbilities of discourse than to limit its outcomes to a pre-ordained statement.