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.

I just finished reading Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five for the first time.  At a later point, perhaps, I’ll share some thoughts on it.  Today, however, just a brief sample from the text, one I found rather attractive in light of other interests.

From Vonnegut, Kurt.  Slaughterhouse Five, or, The Children’s Crusade.  1969.  New York: Dell, 1991.

. . .Each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message–describing a situation, a scene.  We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other.  There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep.  There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects.  What we love in our books are the depths or many marveous moments seen all at one time.

There is first the echo (or rather, prefiguring) or Sirc’s box logic, as well as (interestingly) a rejection of the seriality his C & W talk seemed to advocate.  Yet this also recalls (for myself at least) Rice’s hip-hop pedagogy, in "1963 Hip-Hop Machine:" a temporal invention (as I think Rice as described it elsewhere) that chooses as its topos (here heavily metaphorized) a year, a moment, and event and parses out its significance in different discursive registers.  No particular insight here, just echoes.

My brain has been fried by all the writing lately, what with seminar papers coming due.  But I still want to write here, in this space–indeed, I often had to resist writing here while drafting seminar papers.  This venue seems, in some ways, so much more compelling.  Is it the promise of instant feedback, or that I can respond to people’s comments–where I can’t exactly write Dr. Flatley a note about his comments on a seminar paper. . . .

Interesting things afoot on Rice’s blog of late to which I want to respond, at least in brief:

1) The emphasis not on what is new or not new, but rather on the changing work/writing space that shifts from hypertextual paths (Bolter) to networks (managing these environments/synching them/seeing them in relationship to one another on the desktop/browser).

Hmm. . .while my first instinct is to freak out–just as I’ve started getting some thoughts together on hypertext, networks come along and shift the whole paradigm–I’m not sure that it’s as big a leap as that gut reaction suggests.  In a sense, we might think of networks (and someone please correct me if I’m wrong) as hyper-hypertexts.  That is, if hypertext is the creation and use of connected texts, one way to think of networks is as the connection of texts that comprise connections–and, as Rice suggests, mananging those connections-within-connections, putting them to work in increasingly flexible, movable, and personalizable writing spaces.  What is compelling (for me at least and, understanding some of Rice’s interests, him as well) about these new spaces is how they seem unbounded by questions of genre (as he notes in his post) and just sort of unbounded generally.

For example, what does it mean to have a kairotic moment if your writing moves with you across writing spaces?  Marback pointed out in seminar last semester that kairos is at least somewhat dependent on physical space, and this leads to interesting questions here–mot only about kairos (is kairos the same at different workstations, or the same at work and home, or . . .?) but about the very "space" metaphor itself.  There is a tendency, at least from my limited exposure to the metaphor, to equate space with either

• medium:the blog is one space but print is another

or

• genre: the academic essay as space vs. (say) the personal narrative as space.

Of course, material spaces become spaces for writing as well–I’m thinking here of Rice’s HASTAC presentation, with his layered metaphors  of space, networks, and databases.  I’m not criticizing the space metaphor, here: I’m interested, in one hand, on its flexibility, but on the other I’m wary of getting too accustomed to one metaphor, regardless of its flexibility.  Still, the space metaphor seems to have some life in it yet, so the question then becomes more about how we adapt the space metaphor to acknowledge an increasingly unbounded understanding of writing.  One thing might need to be thought of: is our use of the space metaphor dependent on assumed boundaries?  If so, how do we work past that or accomodate those boundaries into new forms of writing–or, should we have boundaries?  Hmm.

And as long as I mentioned networks here, I can include the quick blurb for a thought on a possible project about them:  Heidegger mentions Aristotle’s Rhetoric as the first practical study of being-together (god I hate H’s neologisms).  If we can think of networks and network theory as also a study of being-together, how can we use that link to Aristotle to construct/perform a rhetoric that is inherently and essentially of, in, and, for the network?

2) And yet there comes a time when calls for awareness and activism must acknowledge not only their desire for change and eye-opening but the limitations of such acts in of themselves.

Admittedly, I sort of chose this sentence at semi-random to serve as the jumping-off point for something of my own.  It is tangentially related to Jeff’s post though.

In designing my FYC syllabus for this semester, I deliberately avoided doing the semiotics/cultural studies approach specifically because I couldn’t really convince myself that it was my responsibility to show my students how they’ve been oppresses and exploited by the culture industry.  For one thing, I’m not sure I buy the whole culture industry hypothesis.  For another, it seems awfully presumptuous of me to assume I can do so anyway.  I admire Berlin’s idea of social-epistemic rhetoric, but (maybe naively) I just don’t feel that cultural production is all that sinister.  (Though Marcuse’s "Affirmative Character of Culture" has been a big influence on me of late–but that is more about the ideological uses of culture than an outright suspicion of culture.)  Liberation sounds like a great ideal, but from who or what am I meant to be liberating my students?  Ideology?  Big Business?  Globalization?  The Man?  Whitey?

One trope I’ve observed in my students’ writing this semester is the rush to condemn popular culture/the media (or often, "The Media" as though it’s the brand name of an international conspiracy) for ideological constructions.  "’Culture’ teaches us . . ." or "’The Media’ tells us . . ." are usualy how such sentences begin.  On one hand, I admit, this might point to a weakness in my pedagogy–did I accidentally somewhere suggest that such a conspiracy was taking place?  On the other, I think it points to a certain degree of student awareness that we (as instrucutors) often teach with the aim in mind of bringing students into "awareness" or "critical consciousness" or something similar–and if students just plug in the buzz word du jour (the Media, Popular Culture, Ideology) they’ll show us, gosh darn it, that they’ve been enlightened and (in Townshend’s words) won’t get fooled again!  I find the appearance of this trope so interesting specifically because it’s been so absent from what we usually talk about in my class–which is more about texts and their relationship to other texts we’ve read.  It must indicate something, then, that students are recognizing this trope and exploiting it–not always (or even usually) with great accuracy or efficacy . . . but I wonder why it pops up so much.

Is it too bold a claim that mediation and metaphor overlap?

I’ve been thinking about Kant, despite my earlier avowals to never again do so.  In particular, I’m thinking about a phrase I wrote for one of the Flatley papers, "the apparatus of subjectivity," to describe Kantian subjectivity.  To whit, a vastly reductive diagram:

sensory impressions  —> subjectivity (imagination/reason/understanding) —> cognition

As Flatley points out (in lecture, although if I bothered I’m sure I’d find some official reference to it somewhere), the Kantian subject’s experience of the world is always mediated by the processes necessary for the cognition of experience (what I called the "apparatus" for shorthand reference).  So a little extrapolation  generates this model of mediation:

information/data —> media (however you choose to understand that) —> subject

And after some thought, metaphor is starting to seem like it works like mediation too; yes, it’s comparative, but can we also say it works like this,

object one —> object two —> reader

such that the first object is understood through a mediated relationship to the second?  Let’s tak every third grader’s favorite metaphor, "cotton-candy clouds," and apply it to this model:

clouds  —> cotton-candy —> reader

If this model works and holds true, then metaphor is mediation, or at least analogous to it: we can understand the first object through the way it is mediated through the second. 

Okay, so something to think about.  But what do I do with this?  First, read more.  Then, think more.  And after that, write more.

And think rhetorically too, dagnabbit.

Later. . .thoughts on deconstruction and metaphor.

Flatley had us read Rousseau in order to Derrida on Rousseau and Terada on Derrida on Rousseau.  By far, the most enjoyable of the three for me was Rousseau.  For one thing, although I’ve made my peace with Derrida and even, you know, admitted his influence on my scholastic interestt, he’s still not funny.  Or, rather, he is, in that French way, which just means he’s not funny.  Sorry to any Froggies out there reading this.  Anyway, we saved your asses in double-ya-double-ya-TWO, so quityerbitchin’.

But Rousseau amuses me for two reasons:

1. He writes things that are funny.
2. The charm of antique scholarship.

Some samples of the first reason:

• After two lengthy (and for me incomprehensible) paragraphs about accents and grammarians and some paradox or other: "I cannot imagine what might be said in response to this."  I think R might be advising a certain president I know. . .
• "In order to make a language cold and monotonous in no time, one only has to establish academies among the people that speaks it."
• Before starting two long chapters on the formation of languages: "I amentering upon a long digression on a subject so hackneyed it is trivial."
• "The extent to which man in naturally lazy is inconceivable.  One would say that he lives only in order to sleep, to vegetate, to remain immobile; he can scarcely resolve to devote the motions necessary to prevent himself from dying of hunger."
• "Fanaticism always appears ridiculous to us, because among us it has no voice to make itself heard.  Even our fanatics are not true fanatics, there are merely knaves or fools."

And of the second, a general comment:  I wish I could write like Rousseau.  Obviously, there are writers to whom his work is a reply, but much of the "Essay on the Origin of Languages" sort seems like bullshit, as though Rousseau decided to come up with crazy stories about how language could have had its origins.  Compared to today’s research work, when we’re asked to have read some undefined number of sources for our own work to count as credible, the charm of Rousseau’s work lies for me in the air of improvisation.  I’m not claiming he didn’t do research, but the demands of his era didn’t require him to cite authors and page numbers every time he rips someone’s ideas off wholesale.  While I’m certainly not advocating plagiarism or anything, there’s something to be gained from thinking of writing research as an improvisation, as jamming on the ideas you’re interested. 

Research as finding the groove, writing as the riff.

More metaphor. . .