FoolsCap

A response–or maybe, a harmonic reply–to Collin’s post here.  One thing that’s interested me, given my own educational history, is the curious phenomennon that Collin describes: namely, the conversion of the aspiring literary scholar to an aspiring rhet/comp scholar.

Collin, as I’m sure he knows, is not unique in this.  Jeff Rice and Richard Marback have described their own conversions to me, and I hear tell that even Gwen Gorzelsky began her studies as a student of medieval lit (as did friend and colleague Mary Karcher).  This, of course, prompts the question: what is compelling about rhet/comp work to lit folk?

For Collin, it was a realization that he could pursue an interest in literary theory while doing rhet/comp work (something that rings true for myself as well).  For my own history, in addition to the interest in theory, I’ve found that rhet/comp is also a good space for someone whose interests are. . .hm. . .to be kind, voracious, though some might say I’m terminally undeclared. Rice’s 6010 was a good place to get a feel for the variety of work being done in the rhet/comp field, so in that sense I owe Jeff a debt similar to the one Collin owes to Susan Jarratt (I too, have handy access to the readers from Jeff’s course).

A point, though, that I find interesting.  Collin’s introductory and closing comments:

I was thinking the other day about the choice I made to get into the Rhetoric/Composition game, and while it was undoubtedly a gradual and only semi-conscious process, I think I can pin down the semester that would feature in my Secret Origin.

At any rate, as a theoretically minded young MA student, SJ’s course convinced me that I could follow that interest in R/C just as easily as I could in literature, and while I don’t know that this counts as "conversion," it’s the one point I recall where I "chose" R/C.

I like, I want to point out, Collin’s use of the phrase Secret Origin, a little nod to comic book lingo that reminds me, again, that there’s a pleasurable synchronicity btw my own interests and those of other scholars. 

More significantly, however, is Collin’s emphasis on the "gradual and only semi-conscious" nature of his conversion.  In part, of course, this points to an assumption we have anout conversions as being a dramatic and epochal moment–archetypically, we might look at Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus, right?  Blinding light, paradigm shift, voice from above.  While I do have the benefit of having gone through something like the Pauline epiphany (which you can reread here), I again find Collin’s description of the gradual conversion to rhet-comp eerily familiar, esp. given the juxtaposition between (for Collin) Susan Jarratt’s "Theories of Reading and Writing Course" and Edward Tomarken’s "LIterary Theory" course, much as Jeff’s "Theories and Practices of Writing" practicum was the same semester as Barrett Watten’s "Intro to Graduate Literary Studies" course.

What I also find valuable, of course, is that I have had the opportunity to blog through my gradual conversion, and, in fact, careful readers could probably point out moments on the blog that suggest the swing from lit/cult studies into rhet/comp with little difficulty.  Of course, speaking about the "conversion narrative" in this way makes it seem as though I’ve finished the process . . . in fact, I admit my ignorance of much comp theory and the occasional urge to turn back to the comforting arms of literary scholarship.

But then, I think: Nah.  I want a real job.

I’m not trying to describe a sense of personal kismet between Collin and myself, but I think the points of similarity between our respective conversion narratives are striking, and I wonder how many other rhet/comp scholars would describe a similar conversion narrative.

So, in that sense, I’m suggesting to the three or four of you that read this, that if Collin’s narrative or my own sound familiar, that you take a moment on your own blog to revisit the scene(s) of your own rhet/comp conversion narratives.

So, for a couple of weeks now I’ve been wanting to post about Grammatology and haven’t.  No suspense, it’s just ‘cos I’ve been lazy.  I am trying to commit myself to the following for July:

1. One article per day
2. 25-30 pages of a major text per day
3. At least one, and hopefully two, substantive blog posts a week in response to my reading.

So, any "You can do it!"s from readers and friends would be encouraging.

So: Derrida.  I’ve read through Spivak’s intro, the "Exergue," "The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing," and about halfway through "Linguistics and Grammatology"–right now, I’m stuck in the middle of "The Outside Is the Inside."

My text is marked on every page, a crazy mish-mash of underlined passages and marginal notes, so rather than go through on a note-by-note basis, I’d like to just throw out some ideas that Derrida seems to be working through–playing through might be more appropriate of course.

It’s hard to know where to start, because as I try to describe one idea, I recall another, and that seems to be the proper starting point.  Which, from what I can understand, is at least part of Derrida’s goal through deconstruction: to complicate our assumptions of genesis and of telos.  This is fitting, giving Derrida’s aversion to binary epistemology: alongside in/out and presence/absence, we should include begin/end.  (Here, as throughout this post, I seem to offer an ineloquent and reductive version of Derrida’s text.  So it goes.)

Which is, at least in part it seems, crucial to the idea of the text (as opposed to that of the book).  The book begins and ends, and in this sense offers an epistemology of limited scope: limited, isolated, solitary.  What I’m not wholly sure I understand yet is the mechanism JD uses to move from book to text–I think I understand, or am beginning to understand, what each represents for JD, but the precise moment of transition seems vague.  For me, the answer rests somewhat in the use that Derrida makes of his own sources: Hegel, Saussure, Rousseau, Nietzsche.  Derrida doesn’t simply summarize and condense their respective arguments so that he can move into a stance of mere comparison and contrast; rather, he moves in and around and between and through these sources (playing with them, as it were–frolicking almost in the pleasure of the text) to demonstrate their own points of deconstruction and then–through that play–building his own claims about speech, text, and writing. 

What Derrida offers, then–or at least the offer that I see on hand–is an idea(l) of an infinite text, an unbounded text that accumulates and accomodates contradiction and conflict through its complex structure.  That is, for Derrida (and I admit I might have learned this through Spivak or another source, but it rings true after reading the text), conflict, ambiguity, and contradiction are. . .okay.  His project doesn’t seem to be finding a way to eliminate contradiction nor to (as Adorno/Horkheimer suggest about the culture industry) demonstrate its cooption and commodification, but rather maybe to ask whether texts aren’t in fact built on contradiction–that contradiction is on some level a necessity in textual production?

Of course, it’s an easy gesture to point to the Web as a prototypical "infinite text."  I think that makes sense, but it seems too easy as well–as though recognizing the scope and scale of the Web is the end of the task.  The question I would ask, then, is whether the Web (if we want to think about it as The Infinite Text and hence reify it and leave it uninterrogated) functions in the way that Derrida demonstrates texts can and do.  This is the germ of what could prove an interesting project, assuming of course noone has beat me to it.

Actually, a question about my own idea in the previous paragraph that makes me wonder whether I’ve understood the grammatology or not.  Is JD’s idea that text in infinite or rather that the boundaries we impose upon it are arbitrary and socially constructed?  By saying "the outside is the inside" or even "the outside is the inside" is Derrida necessarily offering a rejection of inside-ness or outside-ness or rather just demonstrating that the boundary is fluid and permeable?  In either case, the question of how to treat the textuality of the Web remains, but obviously the answer(s) would differ greatly depending on which reading of Derrida is right.

[I think, too, that the idea/l of the infinite text is in some ways a Romantic one, in which the text replaces nature as the inspiration and measure for humanity.  In turn, if this notion of the infinite text has any merit, it would bear an interesting comparison with the Kantian aesthetic and sublime.]

Another point of interest: deconstruction is, among other things, an invention strategy.  On two levels, too.  First, of course, deconstruction gives us something to do with texts: to deconstruct them as Derrida does to discover their  contradiction and ambiguities.  Of course, if we think of deconstruction simply as a hermeneutic in this fashion, we realize that all branches of theory are invention strategies.  The problem, of course, is that working with them merely as hermeneutics is sort of a one-trick approach, right?  I have my feminist/poststructural/modernist/postcolonial lens and that’s how I’ll view this text.  So in that sense a hermeneutics seems contrary to Derrida’s project because a hermeneutics (apart from assuming a particular value for the logos) only understands a text through its own lens rather than opening it up to show how it creates meaning.  This, however, points to deconstruction’s value as a heuristic: if we can understand how texts build meaning and construct meaning, then we can employ those strategies for our own ends: as Rice might say, we can re/appropriate them, rearrange them. remix them.

Finally–for this post at least–I’m interested in something Derrida suggests and alludes to but hasn’t (and perhaps might not) addressed directly: the connection between writing and epistemology.  Derrida is critical, of course, of the logos, presence, and phonocentrism, which I guess do constitute certain assumptions about the organization, validity, and construction of knowledge.  But given that Derrida establishes "writing" as an alternative to the tyranny of the logos, how does that effect rhetoricians and other scholars of writing?  I don’t have an answer, but another idea that’s been brewing in me little head of late is precisely this point where rhetoric and epistemology overlap–for Aristotle, (as I’ve suggested before via Heidegger), rhetoric is the task of establishing persuasively valid knowledge–which plainly points to questions of epistemology anyway.

Oh yeah–metaphor is just all over the place.  I’ll have to do a special "All Metaphor" post on JD’s comments on metaphor.

Because I’ve been acutely depressed for a while now.  Those who might be concerned, please don’t.  Just a passage I want to share.

From: Mitchell, David.  Cloud Atlas.  New York: Random House, 2004.

The love-lorn, the cry-for-helpers, all mawkish tragedians who give suicide a bad name are the idiots who rush it, like amateur conductors.  A true suicide is a paced, disciplined certainty.  People pontificate, "Suicide is selfishness."  Career churchmen . . . go a step further and call it a cowardly assault on the living.  Oafs argue this specious line for varying reasons: to evade fingers of blame, to impress one’s audience with moral fiber, to vent anger, or just because one lacks the necessary suffering to sympathize.  Cowardice is nothing to do with it–suicide takes a considerable courage.  Japanese have the right idea.  No, what’s selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends, and enemies a bit of soul-searching.  The only selfishness lies in ruining a stranger’s days by forcing ‘em to witness a grotesqueness.