"All of the lead articles are working to create links among techne, technology, the technical, and technique in ways that move techne away from an instrumental reading that sees technology as an object to be possessed by subjects and toward a reading of techne that sees the technical as one equal element in a larger, more complex set of relations" (372).
Integrating technique into our conceptualization of techne "moves techne away from a reductive, generic, a-contextual conception of the technical toward a sense that technique operates through human bodies in relation to all other bodies (animate and inanimate) in larger, more complex contexts" (372).
"The human and the technical are no longer seen in opposition but as operating together in complex econologies" (372).
agency and change are partly products of technology
Seeing techne as part of a complex system allows us to conceive of invention outside of just the subject's control. "The assumption of autonomy, presence, and control ignores the ambient, unconscious, habitual elements of invention that emerge out of complex systems that human bodies inhabit" (373).
Hawk wants to institute invention in a post-techne in a complex ecology that integrates "humans with technological and institutional environments--with the goal of invention" (373).
HIGH-TECHNE: TOWARD THE POSTHUMAN
techne a la Renato Barilli--"combination of art and technique"
"Rhetoric, then, puts abstract, technical knowledge and lived, habitual knowledge on equal footing" (374).
Though rhetoric is for political intervention in the Classical sense, we have evolved away from the Classical civic space. "Heideggar's view of techne, on the other hand, redefines the human relationship with technology as one that can no longer be reduced to deliberate human intervention or to a narrow view of human control over the contextual situations--especially human control via technology or technique...Technique consciously transferred through teaching cannot be simply applied to all occasions as an object controlled by a subject" (374).
"Both technology and aesthetics are connected and viewed as art, as techne. As techne they produce ways of seeing and ways of being; they produce constellations, which in turn produce possible ways for humans to be in relation to the world" (376).
"The key point in Rutsky is that being human in the contemporary context is not reduced to exerting human will through technology; it is not about intervening through technology but about dwelling with/in technology, with/in a culture that is intimately intertwined with technology in multiple, complex ways" (376-77).
"A human body, a text, or an act is the product not simply of foregrounded thought but of complex developments in the ambient environment...techne emerges only through enacting relationships...technique becomes a matter of operating in the ambient environment" (378).
POST-TECHNE: PHYSIS AND PORTABILITY
"what I am proposing is to turn this work toward pedagogy and start thinking about techniques, methods, and heuristics as interfaces in ambient rooms" (378-79).
"A posthuman understanding of techne would mean that teachers accept the ecological and ambient nature of rhetorical situations and begin to develop techniques for simultaneously enacting and operating in these complex, evolving, contexts" (379).
"If the seat of agency is no longer the conscious, autonomous subject, then it is important to flesh out the locus of agency in distributed cognition
"Technique as post-techne, then, should set up constellations of relations that allow its users to see something as something else--that is, to see in a new way through those constellations of relations...teching techniques would have to situate bodies within their environments and enact bodily, ambient elements in the service of learning in addition to employing consciously taught elements" (379).
"Heideggar's recognition that something can arise spontaneously from itself and its situation is a key to moving beyond instrumentality and humanism with regard to invention. Spontaneity and chance are not under human control but are the outcome of complex sets of relations, making physis [nature] a source of agency for techne" (380).
"Kairos is not the opposite of techne but its very ground; every technique is (un)grounded in physis, powered by kairos" (381).
post-techne--"placing a body within a situation, utilizing the power of that situation, and enacting ambient elements of that situation in the service of invention. A post-techne doesn't do away with intension as much as it adds a layer of complexity beneath it; that is, it adds an ambient level of cognition. Both action and enaction, thus, become coresponsible" (383).
"The only way, then, to get a sense of the possible effects of a technique is to enact it in a specific kind of situation. The enaction would then need to regularly produce more situationally specific techniques and regularly engage them in that specific kind of situation" (383).
"Techne at this point would begin to operate both consciously and unconsciously. Moreover, as post-techne, it would be driven by the situation, not just the subject or the subject's particular desire to intervene" (384).
TECHNIQUE: A PEDAGOGY FOR POST-TECHNE
Post-techne: "the use of techniques for situating bodies within ecological contexts in ways that reveal models for enacting that open up the potential for invention, especially the invention of new techniques" (384).
"Rather than teaching students general principles for professional writing, Henry habituates students to inventing form their complex institutional situatedness....The subject, then, is not one that intervenes in, as much as coinvents with, the situation" (388).
"The recognition that theories don't have to be consciously applied to be a part of pedagogical technique can help teachers understand their practices in a new way and make us think differently about new practices" (388).
Hawk's techne: techniques for situating bodies in contexts (371).
Posthuman: a theory that "redescribes the human in terms of complexity" and moves human subjects away from the subject/object binary and considers "humans and the technical...as operating together in complex ecologies" (372).
Agency: reading the situation and not the individual that's in it. Distributed agency/cognition--the ship's captain operates in relation to the ship, the ocean, the weather, etc.
Saturday, October 31, 2015
Friday, October 30, 2015
Victor J. Vitanza--"Three Countertheses: Or, A Critical In(ter)vention into Composition Theories and Pedagogies"
Vitanza from the outset introduces the term "perverse comedy"
Perverse comedy approaches subjects from "the opposite," but is not "a mere attack on a status quo but a meditative questioning of it through an act of ironic 'critical intervention' (157).
It aims to critically intervene and critically invent by using "uncanny criticism" as a heuristic "with the sole purpose of establishing the (postmodern) conditions for the possibilities of discourse in and about writing theory and pedagogy that...the field of composition has had to disallow" (139-40).
Perverse comedy seeks to disrupt and decenter composition theories that "fix a point, plot an order." Instead, perverse comedy "attempts a discourse that will not follow" and "searches for new ways of linkage" (140).
Discourse a la perverse comedy has been disallowed because it would force composition into an identity crisis by unraveling Decartes' premise that the individual/self and the premises of composition that follow: authorship, fiction vs. truth, exposition (being wise) vs. argumentation (consensus), the ability of the wise teacher to teach students to write, and even community building via rhetoric.
The essay serves as a three-pronged counter-response to:
Vitanza disagrees with the view that the motives are "noble" and instead chooses to call "their modes of representation--insidious and invidious" (140). He believes traditional and modern rhetorics masquerade as a subject that builds heterogeneous communities through the individual, and instead claims that they seek to devalue the individualistic nature of a subject in a community by forcing the subject to conform to the values of mass society (140-141).
By "allowing," composition/rhetoric must also disallow.
Vitanza believes language is "mercantilized," by which he means that it is controlled and divided into similarities that can be used for trade/commercialism--an attempt to commodify language.
The essay then contrasts two competing psychologies: Cognitive (Carl Rogers' consensus building and Martin Buber's dialogue and community) and Psychoanalysis via Freud, Lacan, Deleuz, and Guattari, which will be referred to as the Vitanza approach.
Cognitive psychology utilizes language as a formula that students can master and employ to "solve rhetorical problems" (141).
Vitanza argues that the field of rhetoric and composition has resisted the non-humanistic Vitanza approach because it views language as uncontrollable/unmasterable and therefore its teaching cannot be controlled.
NO ARGUMENTS FROM ME
Vitanza is very much against the commodification of knowledge, which leads to the "homogenization and totalization of both modes of production and the codes of consumption" (142). This mode of teaching composition maps writing over its purchase power. Writing is only defined as valuable inasmuch as it can be traded for financial gain.
For students to resist, knowledge must be laid bare, which can come about through rejecting "'rational' thinking and acting, especially about language" (142). Vitanza cites Lyotard in arguing that reason akin to power, and by privileging power we take only a "cerebral view of history," which "neglects...a history of desire" (142).
MY NOTICE
Instead of embracing a pedagogy informed by and tailored for capitalism, consumerism, socialism, and consensus. His countertheses "are to be seen as conceptual (re)starting places for modes of resistance that are to be deployed against the game of rationality/knowledge and against the dominant (political) modes of representation, which are expressed throughout the field of composition" (143).
Composition is either foundational or antifoundational
Subversive modes of resistance to the foundational and antifoundational composition classroom do not exist in a third group, but are instead an amalgam of the thinkers listed in the aforementioned "Vitanza approach," and are expounded upon in his three countertheses.
Though Vitanza has arranged them into three groups, they are, he argues, a mixture that invariably overlaps. The countertheses are extracted from Gorgias's nihilistic treatise, or "trilemma of negative propositions," which states: "Nothing exists"; "If it does exist, it cannot be known"; and "If it can be known, it cannot be communicated" (144).
To further support the "trilemma of negative propositions," and how it informs the nebulous third way, Vitanza draws from Lyotard's debate with Habermas about "grand narratives" of Knowledge. Vitanza sides with Lyotard's post-Enlightenment/Modern approach to dealing with the "crisis of rationality," an approach that doesn't give into nostalgia (as a cynic might), but instead Lyotard, and Vitanza, look for "a different set of language games, or experimental discourses, that will allow us not merely to survive the (legitimation) crisis but to flourish within it and to fend off attempts...to bring us out of the crisis and return us to the nightmare of the Enlightenment," a game Vitanza calls the "game of avant-garde [paralogical art].
COUNTERTHESIS #1--NOTHING EXISTS
This counterthesis opposes the idea that knowledge can be grounded in an ontological universal absolute or rhetorically through building consensus. Habermas, who upholds the consensus absolute of discourse, believes in using criteria--communication, responsibility, and judgment--to support discourse as universally pragmatic, that is discourse operates at its most evolved level when it meets these three criteria, and this evolved level is absolute/pinnacle/ideal form of discourse.
Vitanza sides with Lyotard in the delegitimation of knowledge through the death of science [the human's ability to rationally perceive the world and draw conclusion from their perceptions] and postmodern nihilism. When the absolute nature of science died, everything was decentered, but the nostalgia for science as truth allowed science to live on in its "death." In its zombie state, we continue to use consensus criteria for discourse, which Lyotard believes "only enslaves and impoverishes us" (146). Lyotard believes we should instead aim for dissension instead of consensus and move toward the telos of discussion paralogy--a "means of discovering...what is at stake," a way to "bear witness to the unintelligible or to disputes or differences of opinion that are systematically disallowed by the dominant language game of homological science" (146). Paralogy seeks to make the weaker mode of discourse the strongest and to supplant to "unified via many voices" approach to one that truly resembles a "radical heterogeneity."
Paraology invention works toward disruption of fulfilling the normal science needs and instead is used for postmodern science (147). "To link is necessary, how to link is not" (Deleuze and Guattari A Thousand Plateaus). Essentially, by favoring parataxis--coordinating rather than subordinating conjunctions--hierarchies literally and figuratively (in language usage) are leveled instead of placed in subordination.
Paraology resists taxonomies and hierarchies, branches of knowledge and discourse that form concrete relationships. Instead Vitanza borrows the rhizome metaphor, a tuber with "no beginning, middle, or end" (151), instead of the tree metaphor, to promote a parataxis view of writing and knowing.
Relevance to Composition
"there should not be any foundational principle or covering law or ontogenetic model for composition theory and pedagogy" because "Language...turns against the models that are constructed in its name, ever delegitimizing the models of language processing itself (148).
Utilizing hierarchies or taxonomies (think tree metaphor), and to pass that composition paradigm off as a freeing mode of thinking, capitalizes language by controlling the means of its production, which result in the enslavement of the students. This approach creates territories where there should be none. It presents writing as a fixed process of knowing: follow these branches and subordinate your thoughts this way and you can gain economic advantage from discourse. This mode works toward uniformity.
Vitanza recommends deterritorialization, a "critique [of] the modes of representation...to decode them so as to free...desire" (150). This approach destabilizes systems and organizations, which act to "contain the flow of information and meaning" and reinforce capitalist and totalistic ways of thinking. The operative metaphor here is a body without organs, a "body of excess" (150).
The rhizome (one and many at the same time; in all places at once; and incapable of division because it will grow anew--antigenetic) and the body without organs relate to writing in that they should work in opposition to commonplaces by writing through radical multiplicities.
COUNTERTHESIS #2--IF ANYTHING EXISTS, IT CANNOT BE KNOWN
Humans don't speak. They are spoken.
Lyotard's pragmatics:
Here Vitanza looks to Lyotard's pragmatics (non-universal, anti-Habermas universal pragmatic criteria of language) and focuses on the third postmodern pragmatic, which envisions a listener without a speaker. This works against "a rhetoric of the speaking subject or an authoritarian...[which] favors language as the function of the speaking subject" (155). Vitanza/Lyotard favor a view of language as a "listening game," a mode of language that envisions only an addressee.
Relevance to composition
The first pragmatic views the human as the shaper of the world and knowledge (foundational)
"The self/subject apparently is forever a master/slave dialectic, with the master being the dominate discourse and the slave being the so-called (invented (Bartholome)-liberated) self"
Vitanza very much takes issue with Bartholome's prescriptive view of "inventing the university" as a way to absorb and deploy a privileged language to maintain the stability of the university. He advocates Lyotard's disruptive "game of art" that states one can liberate him/herself by "cutting it up" (158). Additionally, assuming the privileged language is exclusionary.
Academic discourse, via capitalization, exclude nonacademics and pagan academics (those with countertheses--"those who have views that are only silenced by the so-called privileged academic-discourse strategies" (159). He wants to set the university free from its myopic paralysis and engender a "polymorphous perversity" (159).
COUNTERTHESIS #3--IF IT CAN BE KNOWN, IT CANNOT BE TAUGHT
A moratorium on turning theory into praxis/pedagogy
In rhetoric and composition we too quickly try to turn theory into praxis without acknowledging "the resistance of theory itself to be theorized and applied" (160). We embrace in futility "the universal theory of the impossibility of theory" (160).
Theory in the foundational model is psychology; theory in the antifoundational model is social (hegemonic discourse), but Vitanza, reading De Man, advocates a theory that resits unified theories and consequently resists totality and totalitarian knowing-doing-making...the 'game of avant-garde theory-art' as a means of resistance" (160).
In describing theory hope and pedagogy hope, Vitanza states that "We hope for improved modes of production (a set of techne) to create an improved product" (161), that supports the economic, political, and social status quo, and we should embrace postpedagogy like we have dismissed the philosophical-pederasty paradigm of learning. We should, in the interstice of the theoretical moratorium and reflection, "do away with pedagogy altogether" (161).
Knowledge is defined as something that can be taught. "If any of these concepts or activities is unique, then it cannot be taught and is discarded as being 'irrational'" (162).
Here Vitanza returns to Lyotard's third pragmatic as a way to view discourse that doesn't define itself as rational via its teachability, "which attempt to keep knowledge from being realized as a system, as categories, as genetic, as techne, as political 'linking'--and more so, as 'teachable'" (163). It's worth noting that Vitanza turns to this point after a brief discussion concerning tacit knowledge; we know more than we can every articulate; we can learn without being "taught." In this third pragmatic, we write "little narratives."
Through the little narratives, which resist grand/master narratives, the third pragmatic links to paralogy--"that which does not logically flow." Within this framework, Vitanza and Lyotard resist the "how to link" hierarchy of knowledge--theoretical, practical, and productive; listed in the article as "pure reason...practical reason...aesthetics" (164). For this reason Lyotard begins with art (production).
He turns to linking pedagogy from the game of knowledge to the game of art. This non-discipline would have no foundations, no criteria, no "knowing" subject. It is post-pedagogy/paralogic pedagogy. Argument in this vein is "a means of continuous "dissensus," that "attempt to lessen the oppressive forces of discursive language; would be, then, a matter of contrary language games" (165).
In closing, Vitanza points out the irony of invention being the driving force of composition since invention implies a creation that works outside of the system's rules. He recognizes the three countertheses can never be implemented because systems cannot think in terms of their own destruction. Some may, however, conceive of these three countertheses within the realm of invention as they seek to improve performance and can act as intervention on the way to renovation; this is normal science, not paralogical science, which seeks innovation. Here Vitanza nods to how his countertheses may be absorbed an reinscribed into the system as renovation.
He links standard teaching to "abnormal" teaching (e.g. Socratic trickery that has the predetermined conclusion in mind; Nazi trials that foregrounded proof in evidence and thereby further victimized the Jews). What are the alternatives to such teaching? He reminds us that we can't make macro-changes vis-a-vis the "little counternarratives, but we can bear witness to them" (167).
A
- perverse: showing a deliberate and obstinate desire to behave in a way that is unreasonable or unacceptable, often in spite of the consequences.
Perverse comedy approaches subjects from "the opposite," but is not "a mere attack on a status quo but a meditative questioning of it through an act of ironic 'critical intervention' (157).
It aims to critically intervene and critically invent by using "uncanny criticism" as a heuristic "with the sole purpose of establishing the (postmodern) conditions for the possibilities of discourse in and about writing theory and pedagogy that...the field of composition has had to disallow" (139-40).
Perverse comedy seeks to disrupt and decenter composition theories that "fix a point, plot an order." Instead, perverse comedy "attempts a discourse that will not follow" and "searches for new ways of linkage" (140).
Discourse a la perverse comedy has been disallowed because it would force composition into an identity crisis by unraveling Decartes' premise that the individual/self and the premises of composition that follow: authorship, fiction vs. truth, exposition (being wise) vs. argumentation (consensus), the ability of the wise teacher to teach students to write, and even community building via rhetoric.
The essay serves as a three-pronged counter-response to:
- "the will to systematize (the) language (of composing)
- "the will to be its authority"
- "the will to teach it to students"
Vitanza disagrees with the view that the motives are "noble" and instead chooses to call "their modes of representation--insidious and invidious" (140). He believes traditional and modern rhetorics masquerade as a subject that builds heterogeneous communities through the individual, and instead claims that they seek to devalue the individualistic nature of a subject in a community by forcing the subject to conform to the values of mass society (140-141).
By "allowing," composition/rhetoric must also disallow.
Vitanza believes language is "mercantilized," by which he means that it is controlled and divided into similarities that can be used for trade/commercialism--an attempt to commodify language.
The essay then contrasts two competing psychologies: Cognitive (Carl Rogers' consensus building and Martin Buber's dialogue and community) and Psychoanalysis via Freud, Lacan, Deleuz, and Guattari, which will be referred to as the Vitanza approach.
Cognitive psychology utilizes language as a formula that students can master and employ to "solve rhetorical problems" (141).
Vitanza argues that the field of rhetoric and composition has resisted the non-humanistic Vitanza approach because it views language as uncontrollable/unmasterable and therefore its teaching cannot be controlled.
NO ARGUMENTS FROM ME
Vitanza is very much against the commodification of knowledge, which leads to the "homogenization and totalization of both modes of production and the codes of consumption" (142). This mode of teaching composition maps writing over its purchase power. Writing is only defined as valuable inasmuch as it can be traded for financial gain.
For students to resist, knowledge must be laid bare, which can come about through rejecting "'rational' thinking and acting, especially about language" (142). Vitanza cites Lyotard in arguing that reason akin to power, and by privileging power we take only a "cerebral view of history," which "neglects...a history of desire" (142).
MY NOTICE
Instead of embracing a pedagogy informed by and tailored for capitalism, consumerism, socialism, and consensus. His countertheses "are to be seen as conceptual (re)starting places for modes of resistance that are to be deployed against the game of rationality/knowledge and against the dominant (political) modes of representation, which are expressed throughout the field of composition" (143).
Composition is either foundational or antifoundational
- Foundational--current traditional rhetoric, expressionistic rhetoric, and cognitive rhetoric.
- Antifoundational--"dangerously utopian and blindly ideological." They suffer from theory and pedagogy hope, "and have simply not been suspicious enough of their rationalistic motives, which are best described as the will to knowledge and power" (143). He recommends they should be strongly resisted, which might call for perverse comedy.
Subversive modes of resistance to the foundational and antifoundational composition classroom do not exist in a third group, but are instead an amalgam of the thinkers listed in the aforementioned "Vitanza approach," and are expounded upon in his three countertheses.
Though Vitanza has arranged them into three groups, they are, he argues, a mixture that invariably overlaps. The countertheses are extracted from Gorgias's nihilistic treatise, or "trilemma of negative propositions," which states: "Nothing exists"; "If it does exist, it cannot be known"; and "If it can be known, it cannot be communicated" (144).
To further support the "trilemma of negative propositions," and how it informs the nebulous third way, Vitanza draws from Lyotard's debate with Habermas about "grand narratives" of Knowledge. Vitanza sides with Lyotard's post-Enlightenment/Modern approach to dealing with the "crisis of rationality," an approach that doesn't give into nostalgia (as a cynic might), but instead Lyotard, and Vitanza, look for "a different set of language games, or experimental discourses, that will allow us not merely to survive the (legitimation) crisis but to flourish within it and to fend off attempts...to bring us out of the crisis and return us to the nightmare of the Enlightenment," a game Vitanza calls the "game of avant-garde [paralogical art].
COUNTERTHESIS #1--NOTHING EXISTS
This counterthesis opposes the idea that knowledge can be grounded in an ontological universal absolute or rhetorically through building consensus. Habermas, who upholds the consensus absolute of discourse, believes in using criteria--communication, responsibility, and judgment--to support discourse as universally pragmatic, that is discourse operates at its most evolved level when it meets these three criteria, and this evolved level is absolute/pinnacle/ideal form of discourse.
Vitanza sides with Lyotard in the delegitimation of knowledge through the death of science [the human's ability to rationally perceive the world and draw conclusion from their perceptions] and postmodern nihilism. When the absolute nature of science died, everything was decentered, but the nostalgia for science as truth allowed science to live on in its "death." In its zombie state, we continue to use consensus criteria for discourse, which Lyotard believes "only enslaves and impoverishes us" (146). Lyotard believes we should instead aim for dissension instead of consensus and move toward the telos of discussion paralogy--a "means of discovering...what is at stake," a way to "bear witness to the unintelligible or to disputes or differences of opinion that are systematically disallowed by the dominant language game of homological science" (146). Paralogy seeks to make the weaker mode of discourse the strongest and to supplant to "unified via many voices" approach to one that truly resembles a "radical heterogeneity."
Paraology invention works toward disruption of fulfilling the normal science needs and instead is used for postmodern science (147). "To link is necessary, how to link is not" (Deleuze and Guattari A Thousand Plateaus). Essentially, by favoring parataxis--coordinating rather than subordinating conjunctions--hierarchies literally and figuratively (in language usage) are leveled instead of placed in subordination.
Paraology resists taxonomies and hierarchies, branches of knowledge and discourse that form concrete relationships. Instead Vitanza borrows the rhizome metaphor, a tuber with "no beginning, middle, or end" (151), instead of the tree metaphor, to promote a parataxis view of writing and knowing.
Relevance to Composition
"there should not be any foundational principle or covering law or ontogenetic model for composition theory and pedagogy" because "Language...turns against the models that are constructed in its name, ever delegitimizing the models of language processing itself (148).
Utilizing hierarchies or taxonomies (think tree metaphor), and to pass that composition paradigm off as a freeing mode of thinking, capitalizes language by controlling the means of its production, which result in the enslavement of the students. This approach creates territories where there should be none. It presents writing as a fixed process of knowing: follow these branches and subordinate your thoughts this way and you can gain economic advantage from discourse. This mode works toward uniformity.
Vitanza recommends deterritorialization, a "critique [of] the modes of representation...to decode them so as to free...desire" (150). This approach destabilizes systems and organizations, which act to "contain the flow of information and meaning" and reinforce capitalist and totalistic ways of thinking. The operative metaphor here is a body without organs, a "body of excess" (150).
The rhizome (one and many at the same time; in all places at once; and incapable of division because it will grow anew--antigenetic) and the body without organs relate to writing in that they should work in opposition to commonplaces by writing through radical multiplicities.
COUNTERTHESIS #2--IF ANYTHING EXISTS, IT CANNOT BE KNOWN
Humans don't speak. They are spoken.
Lyotard's pragmatics:
- The addressor--in control of laguage (authority)--Habermas; universal/political ideal.
- The addressee--listens only, no control of language
- The addressee-- listener with no speaker/ speaker with no listener (pagan game --the metaphor of a person (mis)interpreting a message from the gods--who have no literal mode of discourse--and who is then in conflict with the main discourse based on his/her (mis)interpretation)
Here Vitanza looks to Lyotard's pragmatics (non-universal, anti-Habermas universal pragmatic criteria of language) and focuses on the third postmodern pragmatic, which envisions a listener without a speaker. This works against "a rhetoric of the speaking subject or an authoritarian...[which] favors language as the function of the speaking subject" (155). Vitanza/Lyotard favor a view of language as a "listening game," a mode of language that envisions only an addressee.
Relevance to composition
The first pragmatic views the human as the shaper of the world and knowledge (foundational)
- humanist; the rhetor is free and capable of being emancipator
- social epistemic; humans not free due to subjectivity and being subjected; self is founded in cognition
- In Vitanza's view, they are right to say the self is invented socially, but they don't go far enough to point out that the "social...it itself previously...constructed (157)
"The self/subject apparently is forever a master/slave dialectic, with the master being the dominate discourse and the slave being the so-called (invented (Bartholome)-liberated) self"
Vitanza very much takes issue with Bartholome's prescriptive view of "inventing the university" as a way to absorb and deploy a privileged language to maintain the stability of the university. He advocates Lyotard's disruptive "game of art" that states one can liberate him/herself by "cutting it up" (158). Additionally, assuming the privileged language is exclusionary.
Academic discourse, via capitalization, exclude nonacademics and pagan academics (those with countertheses--"those who have views that are only silenced by the so-called privileged academic-discourse strategies" (159). He wants to set the university free from its myopic paralysis and engender a "polymorphous perversity" (159).
COUNTERTHESIS #3--IF IT CAN BE KNOWN, IT CANNOT BE TAUGHT
A moratorium on turning theory into praxis/pedagogy
In rhetoric and composition we too quickly try to turn theory into praxis without acknowledging "the resistance of theory itself to be theorized and applied" (160). We embrace in futility "the universal theory of the impossibility of theory" (160).
Theory in the foundational model is psychology; theory in the antifoundational model is social (hegemonic discourse), but Vitanza, reading De Man, advocates a theory that resits unified theories and consequently resists totality and totalitarian knowing-doing-making...the 'game of avant-garde theory-art' as a means of resistance" (160).
In describing theory hope and pedagogy hope, Vitanza states that "We hope for improved modes of production (a set of techne) to create an improved product" (161), that supports the economic, political, and social status quo, and we should embrace postpedagogy like we have dismissed the philosophical-pederasty paradigm of learning. We should, in the interstice of the theoretical moratorium and reflection, "do away with pedagogy altogether" (161).
Knowledge is defined as something that can be taught. "If any of these concepts or activities is unique, then it cannot be taught and is discarded as being 'irrational'" (162).
Here Vitanza returns to Lyotard's third pragmatic as a way to view discourse that doesn't define itself as rational via its teachability, "which attempt to keep knowledge from being realized as a system, as categories, as genetic, as techne, as political 'linking'--and more so, as 'teachable'" (163). It's worth noting that Vitanza turns to this point after a brief discussion concerning tacit knowledge; we know more than we can every articulate; we can learn without being "taught." In this third pragmatic, we write "little narratives."
Through the little narratives, which resist grand/master narratives, the third pragmatic links to paralogy--"that which does not logically flow." Within this framework, Vitanza and Lyotard resist the "how to link" hierarchy of knowledge--theoretical, practical, and productive; listed in the article as "pure reason...practical reason...aesthetics" (164). For this reason Lyotard begins with art (production).
He turns to linking pedagogy from the game of knowledge to the game of art. This non-discipline would have no foundations, no criteria, no "knowing" subject. It is post-pedagogy/paralogic pedagogy. Argument in this vein is "a means of continuous "dissensus," that "attempt to lessen the oppressive forces of discursive language; would be, then, a matter of contrary language games" (165).
In closing, Vitanza points out the irony of invention being the driving force of composition since invention implies a creation that works outside of the system's rules. He recognizes the three countertheses can never be implemented because systems cannot think in terms of their own destruction. Some may, however, conceive of these three countertheses within the realm of invention as they seek to improve performance and can act as intervention on the way to renovation; this is normal science, not paralogical science, which seeks innovation. Here Vitanza nods to how his countertheses may be absorbed an reinscribed into the system as renovation.
He links standard teaching to "abnormal" teaching (e.g. Socratic trickery that has the predetermined conclusion in mind; Nazi trials that foregrounded proof in evidence and thereby further victimized the Jews). What are the alternatives to such teaching? He reminds us that we can't make macro-changes vis-a-vis the "little counternarratives, but we can bear witness to them" (167).
A
Wednesday, October 28, 2015
Kevin Michael DeLuca and Jennifer Peeples--"From Public Sphere to Public Screen: Democracy, Activism, and the 'Violence' of Seattle"
Readings on the Rhetoric of Social Protest. 2nd edition.
(2002)
"These protests illustrate contemporary public acts of global citizenry that suggest new conditions for the possibility of participatory democracy in a corporate-controlled mass-mediated world" (244-245).
"This essay will introduce the 'public screen' as a necessary supplement to the metaphor of the public sphere for understanding today's political scene" (246).
"Viewing contemporary public discourse through the prism of the public screen provokes a consideration of the emergence of new forms of participatory democracy" (246).
The authors cite Habermass's critique of the declining public space, which he argues was a place that "mediates between civil society and the state, with the expression of public opinion working to both legitimate and check the power of the state." In turn, the public space was capitalized and turned into a mass media spectacle,which Habermass saw as a "refeudalization of the public sphere" (247).
However, they find flaws with Habermass's view of the public sphere, as he privileged "dialogue and fetishization," which is too idealistic and "shuns much of the richness and turbulence of the sense-making process" (247).
Essentially, DeLuca and Peeples see a public sphere as one that seeks first consensus is one that "silences dissent and condemns resistance" (247).
The authors want to add the public screen to the public sphere, something Habermass thought was a public sphere in only appearance (247).
DeLuca and Peeples trace the history of the public sphere back to the agora and the Pynx, but problematize the narrow conception that these comparisons lead us to through their privileging of "embodied voices." We, they argue, continue this notion of the public sphere/ public place. It is, they say, "a deep impulse and a beautiful dream and it is endemic to our version of the public sphere, of democracy, of even communication itself" (248).
Even postmodern thinkers like Baudrillard--known for his ideas about simulation--privilege the "immediacy" of speech as the authentic medium of the public space (248).
"Yet the dream of the public sphere as the engagement of embodied voices, democracy via dialogue, cloisters us, for perforce [used to express necessity or inevitability] its vision compels us to see the contemporary landscape of mass communication as a nightmare" (248).
DeLuca and Peeples look to Derrida to deconstruct our reliance on language and voice as the ideal means for reality and being. In addition with John Peters, the authors look to dissemination to prove that, especially in the era of mass communication, communication may not every be received. "In counterpoint to a public sphere underwritten by consensus through communication or communication via conversation, dissemination reminds us that all forms of communication are founded on the risk of not communicating" (248).
"Communication as characterized by dissemination is the endless proliferation and scattering of emissions without the guarantee of productive exchanges" (249).
"In short, although an historically and culturally understandable desire, the fondness for bodily presence and face-to-face conversations ignores the social and technological transformations of the 20th century that have constructed an altogether different cultural context, a techno-epistemic break...as a normative ideal, the public sphere promotes as unquestioned universal goods several deeply problematic notions: consensus, openness, dialogue, rationality, and civility/decorum. As a supplement, we want to introduce the public screen as a metaphor for thinking about the places of politics and the possibilities of citizenship in our present moment" (249).
The authors argue that we have moved toward a visual rhetoric, a hypermediacy that doesn't present reality but creates it.
"If embodied gatherings of culturally homogenous, equal citizens engaged in rational dialogue with the goal of consensus is no longer a dominant mode of political activity, what constitutes politics today?" (252).
The authors argue that the new public sphere can be used by corporations, governments, and citizens to "critique through spectacle" (252). Since we have become a visual culture, visual rhetorics an employ images and spectacle via the public screen.
The authors look to Horkheimer, Adorno, and Kracauer and their view on the proportional rise of distraction and technology. Technology breeds distraction, which "annihilates contemplation." The authors use this to suggest that our current visual, image-driven, and technologically addicted public sphere is one not-conducive to the old conception of the public space as a place for civil, concentrated, face-to-face discourse. "We suggest that they be read not morally but analytically as signs of the emergence of a new space for discourse, the public screen, that entails different forms of intelligence and knowledge (254). (rhetorical velocity perhaps?)
"Citizens who want to appear on the public screen, who want to act on the stage of participatory democracy, face three major conditions that both constrain and enable their actions: 1) private ownership/monopoly of the public screen, 2) Infortainment conventions that filter what counts as news, and 3) the need to communicate in the discourse of images" (254).
"In comparison to the rationality, embodied conversations, consensus, and civility of the public sphere, the public screen highlights dissemination, images, hypermediacy, spectacular publicity, cacophony, distraction, and dissent" (262).
(2002)
"These protests illustrate contemporary public acts of global citizenry that suggest new conditions for the possibility of participatory democracy in a corporate-controlled mass-mediated world" (244-245).
"This essay will introduce the 'public screen' as a necessary supplement to the metaphor of the public sphere for understanding today's political scene" (246).
"Viewing contemporary public discourse through the prism of the public screen provokes a consideration of the emergence of new forms of participatory democracy" (246).
The authors cite Habermass's critique of the declining public space, which he argues was a place that "mediates between civil society and the state, with the expression of public opinion working to both legitimate and check the power of the state." In turn, the public space was capitalized and turned into a mass media spectacle,which Habermass saw as a "refeudalization of the public sphere" (247).
However, they find flaws with Habermass's view of the public sphere, as he privileged "dialogue and fetishization," which is too idealistic and "shuns much of the richness and turbulence of the sense-making process" (247).
Essentially, DeLuca and Peeples see a public sphere as one that seeks first consensus is one that "silences dissent and condemns resistance" (247).
The authors want to add the public screen to the public sphere, something Habermass thought was a public sphere in only appearance (247).
DeLuca and Peeples trace the history of the public sphere back to the agora and the Pynx, but problematize the narrow conception that these comparisons lead us to through their privileging of "embodied voices." We, they argue, continue this notion of the public sphere/ public place. It is, they say, "a deep impulse and a beautiful dream and it is endemic to our version of the public sphere, of democracy, of even communication itself" (248).
Even postmodern thinkers like Baudrillard--known for his ideas about simulation--privilege the "immediacy" of speech as the authentic medium of the public space (248).
"Yet the dream of the public sphere as the engagement of embodied voices, democracy via dialogue, cloisters us, for perforce [used to express necessity or inevitability] its vision compels us to see the contemporary landscape of mass communication as a nightmare" (248).
DeLuca and Peeples look to Derrida to deconstruct our reliance on language and voice as the ideal means for reality and being. In addition with John Peters, the authors look to dissemination to prove that, especially in the era of mass communication, communication may not every be received. "In counterpoint to a public sphere underwritten by consensus through communication or communication via conversation, dissemination reminds us that all forms of communication are founded on the risk of not communicating" (248).
"Communication as characterized by dissemination is the endless proliferation and scattering of emissions without the guarantee of productive exchanges" (249).
"In short, although an historically and culturally understandable desire, the fondness for bodily presence and face-to-face conversations ignores the social and technological transformations of the 20th century that have constructed an altogether different cultural context, a techno-epistemic break...as a normative ideal, the public sphere promotes as unquestioned universal goods several deeply problematic notions: consensus, openness, dialogue, rationality, and civility/decorum. As a supplement, we want to introduce the public screen as a metaphor for thinking about the places of politics and the possibilities of citizenship in our present moment" (249).
The authors argue that we have moved toward a visual rhetoric, a hypermediacy that doesn't present reality but creates it.
"If embodied gatherings of culturally homogenous, equal citizens engaged in rational dialogue with the goal of consensus is no longer a dominant mode of political activity, what constitutes politics today?" (252).
The authors argue that the new public sphere can be used by corporations, governments, and citizens to "critique through spectacle" (252). Since we have become a visual culture, visual rhetorics an employ images and spectacle via the public screen.
The authors look to Horkheimer, Adorno, and Kracauer and their view on the proportional rise of distraction and technology. Technology breeds distraction, which "annihilates contemplation." The authors use this to suggest that our current visual, image-driven, and technologically addicted public sphere is one not-conducive to the old conception of the public space as a place for civil, concentrated, face-to-face discourse. "We suggest that they be read not morally but analytically as signs of the emergence of a new space for discourse, the public screen, that entails different forms of intelligence and knowledge (254). (rhetorical velocity perhaps?)
"Citizens who want to appear on the public screen, who want to act on the stage of participatory democracy, face three major conditions that both constrain and enable their actions: 1) private ownership/monopoly of the public screen, 2) Infortainment conventions that filter what counts as news, and 3) the need to communicate in the discourse of images" (254).
"In comparison to the rationality, embodied conversations, consensus, and civility of the public sphere, the public screen highlights dissemination, images, hypermediacy, spectacular publicity, cacophony, distraction, and dissent" (262).
Ralph R. Smith and Russel R. Windes--The Innovational Movement: A Rhetorical Theory
Readings on the Rhetoric of Social Protest, 2nd ed.
(1975)
"This essay begins with a critical examination of one current theory for the rhetorical analysis of movements which arise form alienating social divisions...our purpose is not to deny the adequacy of current movement theory where it may be appropriately applied. However, complementary theory is necessary both to explain rhetorical phenomena current theory fail to illuminate, and to provide foundation for a general theory of rhetorical movements" (82).
"The primary task of the critic of rhetorical movements, therefore, is to analyze discourse generated in the conflict between a movement's advocates and the defenders of the established order" (82-83).
"Many groups in society call for change, yet they remain embedded in society is the flux of social change. But not all groups acting as agents of change constitute movements. Collective action is a rhetorical movement, Cathcart argued, only when it 'cannot be accommodated within the normal movement of the status quo" (83).
"Aggressor spokesmen, Cathcart suggested, will proclaim that the 'new order, the more perfect order, cannot come about through the established agencies of change.' Such proclamation forces defendant spokesmen to produce a 'counter-rhetoric that exposes the agitators as anarchists or devils of destruction.'...Aggressor spokemen initially intensify misunderstanding in society, calling attention to division. Simultaneously, they engage in a 'strategy designed to infuse the 'priests' of the existing order...with...attitudes that will impel them to the act of opposition...' As a result of the drama produced by conflict, the movement comes to public notice. Aggressors can then begin to 'convert the impious' and to provoke action. In the establishment-conflict theory, radical division defines the movement and gives rise to its strategies" (83).
A Theory of Innovational Movements
Both the establishment-conflict movement and innovational movement share "a goal of social change through group action which must fulfill rhetorical requirements by creating drama" (84).
"Both types of movements must use rhetoric to 'attract, maintain, and mold workers,' 'secure adoption of their product by the larger structure,' and 'react to to resistance generated by the larger structure'" (84). (Much of this can be mapped over how modern movements use Twitter to create rhetorical velocity).
In contrast to the establishment-conflict movement, the innovational movement "acts with the expectation that the changes it demands will not disturb the symbols and constraints of existing values or modify the social hierarchy...Either institutions, as changed, will allow individuals effectively to act out their values, or they will more vigorously reinforce belief in existing values" (84-85).
"The innovational movement cannot appear to be in conflict with the dominant groups in society, those which must be persuaded to approve the proposed innovation and to work for its general acceptance" (85).
"The innovation advocated by the movement must serve a recognized need. Most societies possess institutions which, more or less, satisfy their needs. Spokesmen for an innovational movement must demonstrate that the product of existing institutions is less, rather than more, satisfying. If not, the exigence creating a rhetorical situation will not be perceived. Consequently, advocates must criticize institutions and point to areas of critical failure" (85).
"Without the kind of drama that gives impetus to the establishment-conflict movement, the innovational movement, unwilling to engage other agents in conflict, must create a conflict between its purpose and some nonpersonal element in its scene" (85).
"In an establishment-conflict vision, reference is to real agents who hold power and how can therefore react by creating their own counter-rhetorical vision in which the aggressor spokesmen are depicted through devil terms. In an innovational movements' vision, the personae are impersonal scenic elements which can be condemned for eroding society's values. These elements are mute, for no spokesmen will arise to refute the condemnations" (86).
"a consistent and necessary pattern of usage is to be found only in innovational movements...an innovational movement must consistently deny conflict and moderate its criticisms of institutions. These two strategies necessarily energize a projection of purpose-scene conflict" (86).
SIGNIFICANCE OF THEORY FOR INNOVATIONAL MOVEMENTS
"the theory moves us closer to comprehension of how public communication functions in a nation undergoing change...economic development strains traditional values and hierarchies" (91).
In a post-industrial America of scarcity and pollution, innovational movements in ecology and consumerism will, in the long run, figure as important sources of public discourse" (91).
The authors recommend seeing movements as a continuum: on one end, the establishment-conflict approach; on the other the innovational approach. In the middle are movements" in which spokesmen for the oppressed demand an inversion of the social hierarchy" (91) for an oppressed group.
"Movements could be located on such a continuum and, significantly, their strategies might be predicted from that location" (92).
A
(1975)
"This essay begins with a critical examination of one current theory for the rhetorical analysis of movements which arise form alienating social divisions...our purpose is not to deny the adequacy of current movement theory where it may be appropriately applied. However, complementary theory is necessary both to explain rhetorical phenomena current theory fail to illuminate, and to provide foundation for a general theory of rhetorical movements" (82).
"The primary task of the critic of rhetorical movements, therefore, is to analyze discourse generated in the conflict between a movement's advocates and the defenders of the established order" (82-83).
"Many groups in society call for change, yet they remain embedded in society is the flux of social change. But not all groups acting as agents of change constitute movements. Collective action is a rhetorical movement, Cathcart argued, only when it 'cannot be accommodated within the normal movement of the status quo" (83).
"Aggressor spokesmen, Cathcart suggested, will proclaim that the 'new order, the more perfect order, cannot come about through the established agencies of change.' Such proclamation forces defendant spokesmen to produce a 'counter-rhetoric that exposes the agitators as anarchists or devils of destruction.'...Aggressor spokemen initially intensify misunderstanding in society, calling attention to division. Simultaneously, they engage in a 'strategy designed to infuse the 'priests' of the existing order...with...attitudes that will impel them to the act of opposition...' As a result of the drama produced by conflict, the movement comes to public notice. Aggressors can then begin to 'convert the impious' and to provoke action. In the establishment-conflict theory, radical division defines the movement and gives rise to its strategies" (83).
A Theory of Innovational Movements
Both the establishment-conflict movement and innovational movement share "a goal of social change through group action which must fulfill rhetorical requirements by creating drama" (84).
"Both types of movements must use rhetoric to 'attract, maintain, and mold workers,' 'secure adoption of their product by the larger structure,' and 'react to to resistance generated by the larger structure'" (84). (Much of this can be mapped over how modern movements use Twitter to create rhetorical velocity).
In contrast to the establishment-conflict movement, the innovational movement "acts with the expectation that the changes it demands will not disturb the symbols and constraints of existing values or modify the social hierarchy...Either institutions, as changed, will allow individuals effectively to act out their values, or they will more vigorously reinforce belief in existing values" (84-85).
"The innovational movement cannot appear to be in conflict with the dominant groups in society, those which must be persuaded to approve the proposed innovation and to work for its general acceptance" (85).
"The innovation advocated by the movement must serve a recognized need. Most societies possess institutions which, more or less, satisfy their needs. Spokesmen for an innovational movement must demonstrate that the product of existing institutions is less, rather than more, satisfying. If not, the exigence creating a rhetorical situation will not be perceived. Consequently, advocates must criticize institutions and point to areas of critical failure" (85).
"Without the kind of drama that gives impetus to the establishment-conflict movement, the innovational movement, unwilling to engage other agents in conflict, must create a conflict between its purpose and some nonpersonal element in its scene" (85).
"In an establishment-conflict vision, reference is to real agents who hold power and how can therefore react by creating their own counter-rhetorical vision in which the aggressor spokesmen are depicted through devil terms. In an innovational movements' vision, the personae are impersonal scenic elements which can be condemned for eroding society's values. These elements are mute, for no spokesmen will arise to refute the condemnations" (86).
"a consistent and necessary pattern of usage is to be found only in innovational movements...an innovational movement must consistently deny conflict and moderate its criticisms of institutions. These two strategies necessarily energize a projection of purpose-scene conflict" (86).
SIGNIFICANCE OF THEORY FOR INNOVATIONAL MOVEMENTS
"the theory moves us closer to comprehension of how public communication functions in a nation undergoing change...economic development strains traditional values and hierarchies" (91).
In a post-industrial America of scarcity and pollution, innovational movements in ecology and consumerism will, in the long run, figure as important sources of public discourse" (91).
The authors recommend seeing movements as a continuum: on one end, the establishment-conflict approach; on the other the innovational approach. In the middle are movements" in which spokesmen for the oppressed demand an inversion of the social hierarchy" (91) for an oppressed group.
"Movements could be located on such a continuum and, significantly, their strategies might be predicted from that location" (92).
A
Monday, October 26, 2015
D. Diane Davis--Breaking Up [at] Totality: A Rhetoric of Laughter
Preambulatory Emissions: A Prefatory Post-Script on Where We Will Have Gone
"It is negation/exclusion, via our categorical distinctions, that makes both 'order' and cohesion possible. But what of the excluded?Judith Butler's answer is chilling: they constitute those 'populations erased from view'...And there it is, the terrifying potential for a(nother) Final Solution, what Victor J. Vitanza calls the 'wreck' of the negative. The desire to postpone perpetually this 'wreck' by steerin anywhere and everywhere esle is the primary motivation behind this project" (3).
"What we find appreciable is the stability of the knowing smile and/or the controlled chuckle...This book is an invitation to break up with the force that breaks us up, to laugh with the Laughter that laughs language and technology and human beings, to explore another sensibility, another way of thinking (writing, reading), one that might steer clear of an/other Final Solution. (3)
The Pronoun Thing
"Both the author and the audience are a problem for this project. The 'I' and the 'you' are never given, never stable: 'we' are breaking up; it is beyond 'our' control.
Re-Tellings/Re-Spinnings
"It is with a nod to our own fluidity and to the perspectival nature of any knowing that this book offers a re-reading of certain 'established' histories...This project will be interested, then, in rereading/re-interpreting certain histories--of subjectivity, language, technology, politics, and pedagogy, for instance...they are an attempt to offer my own terribly interested take on an already over appropriated body of works...This text will be less interested in proving a(ny) point than in inviting unusual linkages, in calling for new idioms, in holding the space of questioning open...It hopes to perform a juggling act; to get a scamble of ideas up into the air together and to invite the reader to hear the static created by the crisscrossings and sideswipings of those ideas" (4-5).
A Word about Motivation
"Though this text devotes itself to the field of 'rhetoric and composition'--most specifically but not exclusively to the teaching of what goes by the name 'writing'--it will not have been a 'how to' book...here we will be interested in...a re-thinking, a re-viewing of what is called 'writing' and what is called 'teaching.'...Either way, the writing in a typical comp course is conducted for something else, in the name of some greater aim or grander goal than writing itself" (5-6).
"Writing gets codified, disciplined, domesticated in the typical composition course; indeed, writing is often sacrificed in the name of 'composition,' in the name of this 'discipline's' service-oriented and pre-established requirements" (6).
Davis argues that though we've moved into post-modern theories of language and writing, our pedagogies and composition theories still ask students to produce "'modernist text[s],' the linear and progressive narrative written in an authoritative voice and arising from accepted conceptual starting places (topoi)" (5).
"Though I-write for my colleagues and students in the field of rhetoric and composition, this text will not police/protect the borders of what we like to call 'our discipline'; indeed, in the name of writing, this text will challenge the boundaries of the home field" (7). She hopes to "break up" the usual conventions of writing and composition.
She argues that the teaching of rhetoric in composition squeezes and limits rhetoric so that rhetoric "loses its rhetoricity" (7).
Composition "has been shortsighted and rigid, trusting in its own discourse of mastery and silencing and /or ignoring what it is incapable of appropriating...Through this extreme negligence, through its devotion to some assumed nonrhetorical foundation, composition instruction has effectively given not only rhetoric but even writing the squeeze...Composition...is a control freak" (7-8)
She suggests that writing and rhetoric should move away from "composition."
Some More Words about Motivation
"What we're infusing into 'rhetoric and composition' is a crisis, a 'shattering laughter,' and any alliance with laughter is a risky business...there is no way of knowing what will be left in the wake of a laughter that shatters 'all the familiar landmarks of [our] thought...Life is devastated when it is not permitted the room to move, to sweep, to shed" (9-10).
A Request
"An ear fine-tuned to a logical logos will miss this text's emissions completely. It will be necessary to listen with an ear that can strain past the merely epistemological" (10).
"The request: that this work not be judged across the very criteria it aims to call into question, that it not be called to the carpet for not consistently performing those very language games it finds suspect" (11).
"We will be less interested in building an argument than in spotlighting that which shows up for politics and pedagogy in the suspension of argumentative discourse. We will be interested in what the language game of logic has cost us, as a field and as a society, and in what that game makes it impossible to think" (11).
"In fact, to 'teach' writing is to push a world view, a way of ordering 'the world.' When we require students to write only according to the criteria associated with ...'the modernist text,' we become pushers of hypotactic linking/thinking strategies; we push not simply a writing style but a value system that privileges hierarchy, master, and (Final) closure" (12).
Reason "can no longer be counted on to save us from disaster because it's implicated in too many disasters" (14).
"We're looking, rather, [not for the irrational], for lines of flight, for third positions outside the dichotomy altogether...We're after a new ethics of reading/writing/thinking here, one that does not leave us trapped within a fixed set of obligations" (15).
"we hope to find a way to approach reading/writing/thinking in the rhetoric and composition classroom that will not validate final solutions and that will find ways to steer clear of the 'wreck' of the negative...it is through it No to nihilism that this destructive text comes to a genuine affirmation of life and of writing" (15).
Disclaimer on [My] Inevitable "Stupidity"
"even as we attempt to cross the limits and bust the stupidities that set them, we will not ourselves have escaped the bounds of 'the stupid.' Here, we will be in the business of exposing, among other things, the apparent will to stupidity that drives many composition curriculums, which demand, for instance, that students (and scholars) rush to judgment in the name of the Conclusion, that they simplify in the name of clarity, and that they reign in their own multiplicitous sites of exploration in the name of The authoritative voice" (17).
Trajectory of the T-t-text
"This rhetoric of laughter hopes to offer no an/other topos but what Ronell calls 'an ectopia of all proper places,' a breaking up of our accepted topoi, a shattering of what we tend to assume is common ground" (18).
"The first chapter concerns itself with physiological laughter and the tendency of the laughter to be laughed. Human beings, chapter 1 suggests, are routinely caught in the co(s)mic 'sweep,' seized by outside forces, which manifest themselves, for instance, in bursts of irrepressible laughter" (19).
"The Laughter-in-language proliferates meaning rather than fixating it; it has the tendency to disrupt any techne and to seduce us as it tropes" (18-19).
Chapter 1: Physiological Laughter: The Subject Convulsed
"object strategies: the domination of the 'subject' by the 'object'" (22).
Unrestrained and irrepressible laughter "may be the powerful force of an intertwined logos and (Georgian) kairos...'the rhythm that laughs you.' This present study is an exploration and an affirmation of that 'rhythm,' with which we are occasionally in touch, and of the (post)philosophical, post-humanis consequences of its nonrational seizures" (23).
"This book accepts the posthumanist notion that human beings are always already functions of other functions: not only are we frequently laughed more than we laugh, we are also spoken more than we speak and even gestured more than we gesture...if human beings are routinely and unceremoniously possessed by outside forces or 'rhythms' that have little to do with social norms (nomos), they can hardly fancy themselves in control either of their lives or of the course of human events...we both make and/but are also (more so) made by History" (24).
"if Being is Becoming, 'we' lose our capacity to locate a sticking point for the 'I,' a solid foundation upon which to build our Selves and our world...identity becomes an unstable foundation for (traditional approaches to) politics and out notions of agency beg to be rethought" (24).
POTENTIAL RESPONSES TO THE PARADOX
"This books is not interested in a Final Solution to the problem of the negative. It only hopes to get a peek at the hysteria in which our 'saneness' is inscribed, to witness a moment in which the boundaries of negation fail to hold steady...This chapter is devoted to an exploration of each of these potential reponses to the posthumanist paradox; however, we will not (and could not) proceed disinterestedly. Our examination of negative responses will be conducted across our desire to get to the possibility for an affirmative response...It is motivated by the desire to get in touch with the 'rhythm that laughs [us],' a rhythm that this project will attempt to link with a particular notion of kairos, a notion that has been attributed to Gorgias's epistemology rather than to Plato's" (26).
GORGIAN KARIOS
Plato's kairos is linked to nomos, "human social and cultural norms...Kairos, here the opportune moment, exists as a property/device of linear time, which the philosopher/speaker must learn to seize for the sake of expediency...It assumes time can be reduced to a series of 'nows' and 'seized in a concept; [that it is at a man's disposal, and his mastery of it therefore depends upon time as an abstraction" (Bernard Miller 172).
"Gorgias...appears to fashion his notion of kairos after Heraclitean rather than Platonic notions...there is no metalinguistic foundation on which to base logos, so the decision between contrasting logoi cannot be 'grounded' in logic...it is, rather, kairos that seizes time and overrules human logic. The kairotic moment names that instant when out meaning-making is...exposed as an operation inscribed in rather than opposed to play" (27). Kairos "operates as a 'rhythm' that arises not from negation (a process of reason) but from excess (which is non- or extra-rational), from the free-play of an unmasterable physis" (27).
"The force of karios swoops in at the moment reason yields to a dissoi logoi to overcome the impasse by imposing its own decision...Here, the logos is dispersed by kairos, a force, an atonal rhythm" (30).
Vitanza suggests that Gorgias's epistemology makes both the logos and the 'subject' 'a function of Kairos'...'things' fly apart. The binaries are exploded' (28).
"kairos is tied to...a nonrational physis that is excessive and unmasterable" (28).
"The force of kairos can dance across the body, can instantaneously possess the subject and explode its boundaries/binaries of identity. This project suggests that these kairotic moments manifest themselves physiologically in spontaneous generations of laughter, which, by the way, are anything but situationally correct" (29).
"Kairotic laughter arises not so much from the (rational) realm of meaning-making as from the overriding (nonrational) realm of play, of excess, in which the phase of meaning-making is also situated...this is 'divine' rather than human laughter" (29).
"The question of interest today is not so much whether we are done at least as much as we do but rather how affirmatively we will accept that recognition. And what hangs in the balance of our affirmation/negation are (the slumbers of) humanism and reason themselves." (30).
IDEALISM--REFUSAL TO RESPOND
"mirror-stage: that stage in which one comes to believe that the 'Ideal-I' one sees reflected in the mirror constitutes one's Being in total and through which 'the agency of the ego' is situated fictionally" (Lacan) (31).
the mirror perpetuates the illusion "that the individual exists as a unified and constituting subject who can act, who is in control of his or her person and of his or her world...Being exists as pure and substantial presence...clinging to a naive belief in stable/solid identity" (31).
Ideologues stand in sharp contrast to post-human philosophies. Davis spends time drawing from Lacan, Judith Butler, and Kundera to illustrate opposition to such a paradigm One main concern with "ideologues" is that such philosophies de-center in a way that turns worldview into apolitical ontologies. "The ideologue belongs mostly to what Michel Foucault calls the Classical Episteme, which not only takes identity as given but also assumes that words have a one-to-one relationship with material things" which makes "is possible to concoct an objective 'taxonomia,' an "exhaustive ordering of the world' via a 'tabulated space' created by the act of naming...so that 'representation [might] render beings visible in their truth', in their pure presence" (33).
The ideologue laughs out of knowledge and faith in their constructed taxonomies of ontology. "the laughers (knowers) celebrate their under/standing of the pure presence of the real world, of the order of things" (33).
"There is...a problem with the so-called 'presence,' the 'foundation' of sub/stance upon which this order rests: it never actually appears" (33). The individual is an illusion.
"An examination of our notion of presence unconceals it as an absence: presence is perpetually deferred by a particular style of genus/species analytics, which does not nail down what something 'is' but rather what something is not...I am me because I am not you" (34). We exclude things from bodies of knowledge if they don't fit an order.
"It is negation that makes both the 'order' and the cohesion of the humanist community possible; it is by virtue of exclusion that the 'included' might join hands in a 'magic' circle dance...The excluded...must be 'deactivated' in some way, so that they cannot pose a threat to the closure of the O (other)" (34).
Davis frequently refers to fascism/Nazism to illustrate how clinging to reason, identity, and recognition of identity via negation--which results in the "other"--can have disastrous effects. It was, she argues, this cold style of reason and belief in the logos of the individual and the sureness of reason, which orders (falsely) the world around it, that led to the Final Solution. What many defend as the philosophy against being apolitical or amoral actually, Davis argues, leads to inhumanities. The refusal to adopt a posthuman epistemology and ontology can be inhuman. The individual, the self, is a political construction that ideologues fail to substantiate.
Ideologues posit their own a priori essence or 'sub/stance,' their pure presence as solid 'individuals,' in order to ground their identity-based politics; however, they neglect the political construction of the so-called individual itself...this book accepts and promotes Butler's suggestion that critiques of the subject are not apolitical but rather lead to a politics that would be other/wise," a reference possibly to what Aristotle deems productive knowledge (35).
"Faith in human reason is woven into a faith in the productive/progressive agency of the 'individual'; therefore, pulling the thread of human reason may lead to an unraveling of idealism itself...All Enlightenment beliefs hinge upon the validity of the transcendent subject--the capability of the subject to transcend 'his' situational and sensual elements to reach a state of disembodied, rational thought (35). Davis positions postmodern thought against Enlightenment pure reason to join the body and mind schism, arguing that they are possible inextricable.
NIETZCHE'S CRITIQUE OF THE "TOTAL UNDIVIDED SOUL"
"he celebrates the reign of the passions, relegating reason to a tool, a weapon used to defend one's affective regime...the motivating force behind all reasoned arguments...is not the Truth but desire, passion, instinct" (36).
"The apparent unity of the 'individual' is for Nietzsche an abstraction of a multiplicitous selfhood, in which each passion, each instinct and drive, has its own capacity for reason and will to dominate...So-called rational thought performs in the service of the sensuous ruler of the moment, the ruling passion of the kairotic instant. Reason, then, is a function of the body's will" (36).
BUTLER'S NIETZSCHEAN CRITIQUE OF IDENTITY AND THE BODY
Butler uses Nietzsche's critique of the individual self to "promblematize out conceptions of anatomy as an a priori category," arguing that "sex is as socially constructed as gender"...It is the 'doing' that creates the illusion of 'Being'" (37). She uses Butler's argument that identity (gender/sex) is a construct of negation to support her overall thesis about the faulty nature of reason via negation.
"In fact the notions of 'inner' and 'outer' are linguistic categories, which 'make sense,' she [Butler] says, only 'with reference to a mediating boundary that strives for stability.' The excess re/turns...in the form...[of] an irrepressible burst of laughter" (39).
"If human reason is problematized by an inescapable affiliation with the materiality of the body, what becomes of it when the materiality of the body is itself problematized?" (39). Essentially, Davis wonders how the ideologue can use the individual and pure reason as the basis for an ideology if the construction of the individual exists on shaky ground if it is examined or conceptualized beyond discursive boundaries.
"even matter has its own histories, and those histories are 'partly determined by the negotiation of sexual difference.' The sexed body is always already an effect of power; it is, Butler suggests...produced by that very discourse that stabilizes itself by excluding 'the feminine'...all together" (39).
"This line of thought is terribly disturbing for homo seriosus, of course, who proceeds politically and ethically by taking the materiality of the body and the free-agency of the 'individual' as unproblematic givens" (40). "if the supposed unity of Being is always already an effect of power exercised to camouflage a wild and excessive process of Becomin, then identity politics and the humanist community take problematic turns" (40).
MODERNISM--A TOO HOPEFUL RESPONSE
Modern Episteme (inspired by the serious trouble of the unraveling of the individual): "a relentless search for certainties and universals in a world that has lost its ground, its sticking point. The conception of a potentially knowing subject, one who can transcend false consciousness...once again makes knowledge possible. 'The subject' gets injected underneath the Classical Episteme's crumbling grounds to act as the substitute guarantor of truth and knowledge" (41).
In the modern episteme, the human becomes the knower, the orderer, as well as the thing known and the thing ordered. "Paradoxically, then, through Modernity balks at the possibility of representation through language (because there is no metalinguistic sticking point), it nevertheless embraces a concept of the Self and the distinct possibility of the self-representation. The unified 'individual' is supplanted here by the self-conscious 'subject'" (41).
"Whereas the Classical Epiteme is faithful to One, universal foundation (the pure presence of its metalinguistic 'table'), Modernity is postfoundational; it recognizes no metalinguistic foundation upon which to stand" (41).
"The modernist project, Foucault suggests, is a nostalgic drive for lost Oneness, for a 'transformation without residuum, for a total reabsorption of all forms of discourse within a single word'" (41).
Instead of stopping upon the recognition that the foundation disappeared, modernist seek to build one.
METAPHYSICS OF PRESENCE/ABSENCE
"the modernist impulse is to (re)construct what appears to be missing...Modernists argue that we are no longer limited to what is but are now limited only by what we would imagine...The metaphysician of absence sees the No/Thing as a blank space in which human beings might erect their structures, their hierarchies, their communities through local nomoi: out of the No/Think comes Some/Thing, come Every/Thin." (42).
"Implicit in this hopeful approach is the faith that there is a substantial and knowable difference between a freedom fighter's revolution and a totalitarian's takeover" (42).
"The laughter of the hopeful modernist, then, is also an Angel laughter, a laughter that laughs with an air of certainty, of conviction that meaning can be made 'correctly' and that the world can be set 'right'--by 'man.'...This is laughter with a fight, community cound by the glue of a(n overwhelming) project" (43).
COUNTERHUMAN SCIENCES
"They do not ask the anthropological question, 'What is man?'; rather, they direct their questions to what in man's culture and/or his psyche makes it possible for the abstraction 'man' to appear. The question of autonomy is rendered irrelevant when the subject is exposed as the bi-product of cultural overdetermination, when its agency is exposed as the effect of a particular set of discursive practices...the working through of the counterhuman sciences makes the idea of transcending false consciousness unthinkable--as there can be no false consciousness beyond 'false' consciousness" (44)
"Of interest now is not so much the question of 'man,' a mere effect, but rather of what frontiers beyond the limits of 'man' make it possible for him to show up for us in the first place" (44).
"The point: the capacity even to consider these 'new frontiers' spotlights the inadequacy of the old one---Man, the effect that masquerades as cause" (45).
"The unabashed drive to 'rescue' and /or 'discern' 'the' subject stems from the hope that the notion of agency might be preserved in some capacity...In other terms, without agency, ideology slips into what Kundera calls 'imagology,' which organizes a 'peaceful alternation of its systems in lively seasonal rhythms" (45).
BETWEEN DE- and RE-TERRITORIALIZATION OCCUPYING THE SPACE OF THE HOLE
"Ironically, Modernity's nostalgic drive to resuscitate the subject...must be preceded by the postmodern recognition that the foundations tabled by the Classical Episteme have indeed collapsed" (46).
"If what it means to be human in a posthumanist world is to be a scattered and/or scatterable disidentity with no sub/stantial referential image, it is necessary that our question become: How will these disidentities share the world?...in the face of always already contingent foundations, nostalgic hopefulness is not an option: we may fly into laughter or into tears, into affirmation or into nihilism. The 'cynic' flies into the latter" (47).
CYNICISM--A NIHILISTIC RESPONSE
"the tendency of the posthumanist paradox to invite a nihilistic response, to lead us into the arms of cynicism: 'an enlightened false consciousness' or 'unhappy consciousness' that knows it has been duped but also knows also...that false consciousness cannot be transcended" (47)
"It is rare that laughter of any kind will echo forth from the midst of cynical subjects" (48).
"Cynics are metaphysicians of absence; that is, they have determined that where they thought there was Some/Thing...there is actually No/Thing...But, unlike hopeful modernists, they recognize the impossibility of constructing that Some/Thing that has been lost. And that realization makes them unhappy, remorseful, nostalgic" (48).
"This is the tragic knowledge of the cynic, who cannot affirm it as 'what is' and who feels perpetually betrayed by a world that has suddenly lost all of its meaning and purpose, all of its hierarchical divisions, all of its capacity for (humanist) community. In the face of such a loss, the cynic cries bitter and nostalgic tears" (52).
KYNICISM--AN/OTHER POSITIVE (CUM NEGATIVE) RESPONSE
"The kynic is not nostalgic or remorseful and does not consider his/her paradoxical situation to be the result of a loss. Rather, the kynic is happy to attain a distance from the tyranny of meaning, from the weight of Truth" (52).
"Kynical reason culminates in the snubbing rather than the erection of 'grand goals'" (52).
"With the birth of 'high theory (a la Plato), argumentation gets severed from the body, materiality, and worldliness-from laughter. But that snobbish split is continuously dis/rupted by the emergence (a la Diogenes) of 'a subversive variant of low theory that pantomimically and grotesquely carries practical embodiment to an extreme'" (53).
"The idea is that the weight of meaning can only be countered with the lightness of an excessive laughter, and not with more meaning. When things get too heavy, too saturated with meaning and wholes, the 'force of gravity' becomes unbearable. Kynics respond to the overbearing weight of meaning with an overwhelming opposition to it" (54).
Davis here is establishing the kynic as a foil for the cynic. She almost seems to prefer the kynical outlook to the cynical outlook, but I wonder if she's implying one can choose how to make meaning in the face of posthumanistic tinged nihilism. Is she implying one can exercise control over how one faces a situation? Can a posthumanist argue an individual/subject can posture himself in resistance to something?
"it remains trapped in the negative: it offers a fight against cynicism, idealism, and modernism, but it (therefore) remains within the binary logic demanded by those negative and negative-cum-positive responses. Kynismos plays by the rules of the very game at which it laughs" (55).
"To fight for meaninglessness--and to stop there--is to make meaninglessness meaningful" (55-56).
AFFIRMATION--A COMEDIC RESPONSE
"the ego doing the battling laughs itself 'to death'. And, in that instant, something remarkable happens: the negative de(con)struction exceeds itself, bursting forth into an unchecked affirmation that is neither positive nor negative, but something totally other, something explosive, which up/sets binary logic from the inside" (56).
"Affirmative responses are tactical in this regard; they leap into the flow without reservation, without limitation" (56).
"affirmation responses, on the other hand, assume a wild and overwhelming excess of 'parts' that will never make a 'whole': there can be no final One, no final Totalization, and therefore no lack" (57).
"At first glance, positive responses (such as modernism's creations and the kynic's oppositional frivolity) would seem closely to resemble affirmative responses; however, the distinction between the two is critical for our purposes" (58). Positive responses are beholden to the positive/negative binary.
"Affirmative responses, on the other hand, move out of reactive/binary logic by challenging or ignoring the limits it sets" (58).
"The laughter that constitutes sovereignity is neither the Angel's (absolute meaning) not the Devil's (absolute meaninglessness) because it does not recognize the terms of that dichotomy. It is a third and affirmative laughter, which, nevertheless, grows out of, from the inside of Devil laughter...This third laughter is an affirmation of the nonpresence as excess rather than lack" (60).
"Indeed, this book suggests that to respond to the posthumanist paradox with a giving laughter that invites the 'sweep' is not to be apolitical but to engage in an affirmative politics-cum-ethics. And it may be here...that there exists the potential for a less dangerous, postfascist community to shattered disidentities" (63).
"Comedy alone challenges what Nietzsche calls 'the force of gravity,' the tyranny of meaning, because it doesn't take faith in The Truth (the negative) seriously anymore. A giving laughter says 'yes!" to the eternal comedy of existence by simulating it, exploding with it" (64).
"In the throes of a giving laughter, the borders of the ego give way; we are hurled outside the 'fabric of meaning,' the restrictive economy, and into a general economy, what Nietzsche calls the 'open sea' of excessive possibility...Affirmative laughers laugh with the kairotic force of Laughter, celebrating the free-play of Being in an ecstatic denegation of negation itself" (65).
AN AFFIRMATIVE ALLIANCE
"Affirmation requires the capacity to let memory go; and when the invitation of a nonpositively affirmative laughter is answered by the kairotic force of Laughter, both meaning and memory are suspended in a convulsion of extrarational and extramoral affirmation" (67).
"To engage in a laughter that has no stake in control is to set one's feet upon momentary lines of flight from the tyranny of meaning and from the violence of a community held together by that tyranny
"The hope is that these glimpses beyond constraint will up/set or at least problematize our determination to create systematic exclusions, to devote ourselves more to our linguistic categories than to the Others that those categories create and then flush...First, though, it will be necessary that we move beyond our faith in logic and language, beyond our faith in paradise" (68).
CHAPTER 4: A RHETORIC OF LAUGHTER FOR COMPOSITION PEDAGOGY
"There is no pure knowledge. Even the teaching of composition, as Berlin suggests, is the teaching of a world view: it assumes and then propagates a particular relationship among the writer, the reader, language, and 'reality,' and from there it peddles assumptions about what is, what ought to be, and what can be changed" (209-10).
Current-tradition-rhetorics have long stated that they are apolitical, but the work of critical and feminist pedagogies have sought to uncover the opposite, and "by so doing...help students overcome some aspect of false consciousness..."What radical pedagogies are after, in other words, is a composition course that refuses to serve the state and its social-economic apparatus" (210).
"composition courses, to the left and to the right, do indeed typically operate as prosthetic extensions of political agendas" (210).
"we will...attempt to locate a composition pedagogy that has exscripted itself from oppositional politics...We'll be on the lookout for a pedagogy that embraces...feminist politics...to locate composition pedagogy that would...ex/scribe itself from phallogocentric ordering systems" (210-11).
"Feminist composition pedagogies typically offer themselves as alternatives, but they do so by inscribing themselves within a set of existing assumptions, within an already (phal)logocentric ordering system and its pedagogical imperative...[they] assume the rules of that fight" (211).
"radical pedagogies, including feminist pedagogies, often camouflage pedagogical violence in their move from one mode of 'normalization' to another" (212).
"This approach to feminist pedagogy, however, may be no less violent and no more capable...than the harsh and sexist 'banking system of education' it aims to supplant" (212).
"Pedagogy continues to be 'offered as its own remedy'" (212).
"It may be time to stop offering more pedagogy or altered pedagogy in answer to the failure of pedagogy" (213).
FEMINIST COMPOSITION PEDAGOGIES--IN (THEIR) BRIEF(S)
"it seems that one can effectively undo authority only from a position of authority, a position that appears to trap feminists within the very phallic economy they aim to subvert" (213).
"Even when conflict is admitted into these feminist classrooms, then, it's typically admitted to be soothed or transformed; it is invited in as a means to a predetermined end...to 'foster and encourage the subjects of [a] feminist transformation.'...The ultimate goal is compelling: to end oppression. The means to that end is troubling: placing rhetoric and composition courses into the service of particular feminist visions" (216-17).
THE FARCE OF THE PHALLIC PHEMININE--A CRITIQUE, IN BRIEF(S)
"I'm haunted by the sneaking suspicion that these/my feminist pedagogies...remain as much a function of the phallic phantasy as does traditional, authoritarian pedagogy" (217)
"I'm suspicious: suspicious of a Mother who assumes the role of Master, but especially of a Master who drapes herself in the facade of 'feminine nurturance,' a facade that successfully remystifies pedagogical tyranny" (218).
"Under the guise of the 'Good Mother,' this pedagogue lovingly nurtures her students into Proper (politically correct) ways of knowing, thinking, and problem-solving" (219).
"But it does seem that those ground rules ought also apply to the pedagogue herself, who may find 'abusive' precisely those voices that refuse to mimic her own...Apparently, this space is safe and/or equalizing only for those willing to operate within the lines of the 'new feminist epistemology' elaborated by the feminist pedagogue" (220).
THE PEDAGOGUE IN DRAG--PERFORMING THE SUJET SUPPOSE SAVOIR
"They [feminist pedagogies] because they are enchanted by the pedagogical imperative...which trusts...that pedagogy can be engaged as a 'concrete political science'" (221).
"The pedagogical imperative demands that every theory be immediately translatable into workable classroom practive for the pedagogue..."'Pedagogy hope' is a function of 'theory hope,' the hope that we-pedagogues might finally get the story straight, might finally land on a pedagogical techne that will pump out the right kind of student-subjects" (222).
"We'll be on the lookout not for more pedagogy--for, it cannot 'fix' itself--but for what Vitanza calls postpedagogy: a postpedagogical pedagogy that operates...'without criteria'" (222-23).
SUPPOSING WE DON'T KNOW--TURNING TEACHING "ARSE UPWARDS"
"Once the pedagogue begins to believe that s/he knows the truth and proceeds to pass that truth on/off, teaching is reduced to a 'functional apprenticeship,' even as 'truth' is disrobed and paraded unabashedly as Truth" (224).
Though teachers shouldn't pretend they know, the very nature of teaching becomes problematic when the thing the subject is supposed to be doing cannot be performed because knowing is always in flux. And if we lionize not knowing, aren't we then turning teachers into imposters? "but it does not suggest that the pedagogue is unqualified or that nothing is happening in the classroom. It only suggests that something else is happening, an/other something: it is not, could not be, true knowledge--universal not socially constructed--that is being passed here, in the pedagogical situation" (227).
"THE SUJET SUPPOSITAIRE"--PEDAGOGICAL INSERTIONS AND INTRUSIONS
"What the teacher, who does not know what s/he knows, passes in the classroom is her own desire as s/he attempts to find the articulation of what s/he knows in the student-Other" (227).
"As soon as there is a subject supposed to know, there is forced subjectification, 'a partial parceling out of the [student] subject'"...To be a good student is to be/come a beautiful mirror for the teacher. The pedagogue who encourages students to suppose s/he knows, to suppose that s/he can tell the truth about truth, makes them an implicit promise: that they too will know if they will only listen carefully and do what s/he asks" (228).
IN THE NAME OF WRITING: (DE)COMPOS(T)ING THE PROSTHETIC COMPOSITION COURSE
"What is usually being passed (off) for truth/knowledge in the composition classroom is a set of 'teachable practices,' codifications of language and writing that are teachable and that support a flavorful assortment of identity politics...Indeed, composition courses have historically figured as prostheses, as 'basic courses' designed to complete a very particular service for the university and/or society's economic structure itself" (228-29).
"Writing is reduced in these classrooms to a codifiable set of practices to be memorized and utilized by the speaking/writing subject in order to make him/her more marketable" (229).
"Education itself, as Lester Faigley points out, is not longer about 'promoting social equality'; it's about churning out "a 'trained capability' adequate to compete with those of Germany and Japan and a host of new economic rivals...But 'the ideal of literacy as a means for achieving social equality...has been replaced with 'a cynical acknowledgement of education as part of the machinery for sorting people into categories of winners and losers'" (229)
"If traditional composition pedagogies prostitute writing for the sake of the status quo, radical composition pedagogies have a tendency to prostitute it for the sake of revolution" (230-31).
"What if we put ourselves into the service of writing rather than the other way around?" (231).
KILLING IT SOFTLY: "UNDERTAKING" WRITING-AS-MEANING-MAKING
"In this post-almost-everything era, we fulfill the function of linguistic undertaker: we are charged, as Ronell says, with coming up with 'what to do with the remainders of writing.' We are also hailed into the position of security guard, hired to protect citizen-subjects, the university system, and the state itself from a language separated from meaning-making, from a language on the loose" (231-32).
"the service-oriented composition course: it does for language what the pharmacy/drugstore does for narcotics...composition courses often operate as control centers, mediating between the subject and a rowdy body of language, which threatens the subject's autonomy...the composition classroom functions as a neutral zone, positioning itself between the subject and the 'drug' so that the object of desire/study will not be free to take possession of the subject" (233-34_.
"How much interaction between the drug (language) and the addict (student writer) will produce the desired result, the desired kind of citizen-subject-author? What's at stake here is not only freedom; it is also and more so 'reality'" (233).
"When language operates representationally...it is believed to produce 'safe text,' to operate on the side of 'truth,' and if affirms the capacity of academic programs...Writing is most threatening to reality and to 'community'...when 'it stops representing...when it ceases veiling itself with the excess that we commonly call meaning'" (234).
"in composition courses, there is no such prefabbed safeguard against the linguistic abyss that is so threatening to the university and its prime directive...The safeguard must be built into it by putting writing into the service of something else, some greater aim or grander goal than writing itself...the whole show is dependent upon the pedagogue, the teacher, who knows and shows the way" (234-35).
WRITING RE-VIVED: BEYOND THE "WHITE TERROR OF TRUTH"
A writing course in the service of nothing but writing "could not be more subversive of the educational system and of every liberal and/or conservative political agenda" (235)
A course in the service of writing could result in a dangerous understanding of language, but Davis contends that a course that upholds the truth-power of the symbol/language is far more dangerous.
A composition course devoted to writing only would be in the position to work against this terror...It would not be about instruction or information exchange--it would hope for 'communication' but communication as the exposition of finitude" (236-37).
"This course would invite students to engage in what Ronell calls a 'genuine' writing, a 'writing for no one' and 'to no address,' without a grand 'purpose' or 'point' (237).
"though it is to no one in particular, this writing will have been written for the sake of others; not to give or address anything to others but to expose the limit...'upon which communication takes place'" (238).
"genuine writing is 'the act that obeys the sole necessity of exposing the limit,' Writing is the singular gesture of touching that limit and so of reaching for others" (238).
"A writing-for-writing course would not limit itself to 'teaching' students to pretend to conduct language; it would not be reigned in by the hopelessly naive conception of 'literacy' for which service-oriented composition courses were conceived. It would, rather, be about inviting the affirmative decision to 'let everything go'...to let loose the writing in you and watch it move, feel its brilliance crack your shell, blow your mind. It would not be about inviting students to become-anonymous-conducting-machines, 'not in order to stop the effects' but to allow them to flow into 'new metamorphoses...It would be about founding an/other identity, solidifying the ego, but about watching this writing interrupt the myth of stable identity, about allowing the Laughter-in-language to laugh the notions of an ego-ideal to death. What this course would invite, then, would be an interruption of mythation and so...a celebration of finitude and an exposition of community" (240).
THE TEACHER SUPPOSED (NOT) TO KNOW: PERFORMING A PEDAGOGY OF LAUGHTER
"A pedagogy...in the service of a libidinalized language, is a pedagogy in the service of breaking up: it is, in that sense, a pedagogy of laughter. This pedagogy would protect nothing...What this pedagogue would have to know, then, is precisely that s/he does not/cannot know...it is time to admit that even the composition pedagogue cannot be a master of language or, therefore, of the truth it creates" (241). Relinquishing the teacher-as-knower paradigm creates a situation wherein the value or need for a teacher is in question.
A pedagogy of laughter would be an imitation of authority, a farce that calls into question its own illusion.
[***How does grading/assessing fit into this paradigm?]
WRITING FOR WRITING--THE WRITER AS LAUGH(T)ER
"The assignments in this class, for instance, would not ask students to promote a single thesis, progress through a focused argument, or come to a (necessarily premature) conclusion. They would not...ask students to impose themselves without exposing themselves" (243).
"These assignments would not ask students to listen and think for a moment only so that they might then stop listening and thinking in order, clearly and cleanly...to wrap things up...They would not be about 'exposition' or 'argumentation' but about 'trying out questions,' pressing the limits of discourse, making unusual links, pointing to the limit, the betweeenus space" (243).
"this class demands a rhetoric on steroids, rhetoric as the intricate and continuous examination of the way language is working to produce what functions as truth...This rhetoric would [force] a writer constantly to double back on herself and her 'texts,' to crack them open again to expose her own assumptions, to reveal inconsistencies, motivations, contradictions, limitations, incantations...students would be invited to disrupt their own positions, to contradict themselves, to expose all that must be hidden and excluded in the precious name of clarity" (243).
"a writer in this space would put her/himself(s) into the service of desire in language, into the service of finitude: writing would respond to its own call, which is the call of community, Being-in-common" (246).
"What if we promoted a postpedagogical pedagogy in which this 'blackmarket' economy operated as more than an exception?" (246). Here "blackmarket economy" refers to a class where students are encouraged to embrace and expound upon their excesses that would be cut for the sake of clarity.
"When we take a full hit of new technologies in the composition classroom, we allow them to bring us into Being and invite them to redefine what pedagogy, knowledge, and composition can be. We're not talking about a face-lift for composition instruction; we're talking about a radical rupture in what we thought was possible" (247).
"In fact, in the virtual classroom, whether or not the teacher thinks s/he knows is irrelevant--the cybergogue's performance necessarily will have been one of interruption and demystification/demythification, one in which the illusion of the subject supposed to know cracks up" (248).
"A wired classroom full of netheads who are happily addicted to technology is not at all comparable to a traditional classroom of technophobes who don't yet know that they are cyborgs...Cynthia Haynes issues a polite wake-up call: '[V]irtual spaces...disrupt power relations, technify pathos, and morph identity'" (249).
FORGET EMPOWERMENT--BECOMING-IMPERCEPTIBLE
"Teachers, then, must be in the business of em-powering their students, but for Clifford, empowerment is now so much about making students more marketable as it is about liberating them from the false consciousness that drives big business, government, etc....The job of the pedagogue, he suggests, either is to use the composition classroom to mold students into 'productive citizens' or to use it to mold students into political activists...Both options, however, turn on the question of power; that is, both claim to empower the student one way or the other...This is a humanist equation offering only humanist solutions, and we choose not to be trapped in it" (251-52).
"We writing teachers are not after power. We are after the chance to experience the force that runs through language" (251).
"A pedagogy of laughter does not encourage students to Become-Human/ist or to Become-Social/ist; it does not...hail them as actors per se...it invites them to hesitate, to strain to hear the noise, the static that gets drowned out by the booming call of the One...It would invite them to shed their inherited need to fix meaning and erect solutions; it would offer them a not-at-all safe space to test the boundaries of the Proper and, perhaps, to begin to think precisely what formal education aims to make unthinkable" (252).
"It would not be interested in protecting categories, borders, genders, or genres. It would, rather, offer students the chance to write, to be written, to follow 'the writing' in them" (253).
A
"It is negation/exclusion, via our categorical distinctions, that makes both 'order' and cohesion possible. But what of the excluded?Judith Butler's answer is chilling: they constitute those 'populations erased from view'...And there it is, the terrifying potential for a(nother) Final Solution, what Victor J. Vitanza calls the 'wreck' of the negative. The desire to postpone perpetually this 'wreck' by steerin anywhere and everywhere esle is the primary motivation behind this project" (3).
"What we find appreciable is the stability of the knowing smile and/or the controlled chuckle...This book is an invitation to break up with the force that breaks us up, to laugh with the Laughter that laughs language and technology and human beings, to explore another sensibility, another way of thinking (writing, reading), one that might steer clear of an/other Final Solution. (3)
The Pronoun Thing
"Both the author and the audience are a problem for this project. The 'I' and the 'you' are never given, never stable: 'we' are breaking up; it is beyond 'our' control.
Re-Tellings/Re-Spinnings
"It is with a nod to our own fluidity and to the perspectival nature of any knowing that this book offers a re-reading of certain 'established' histories...This project will be interested, then, in rereading/re-interpreting certain histories--of subjectivity, language, technology, politics, and pedagogy, for instance...they are an attempt to offer my own terribly interested take on an already over appropriated body of works...This text will be less interested in proving a(ny) point than in inviting unusual linkages, in calling for new idioms, in holding the space of questioning open...It hopes to perform a juggling act; to get a scamble of ideas up into the air together and to invite the reader to hear the static created by the crisscrossings and sideswipings of those ideas" (4-5).
A Word about Motivation
"Though this text devotes itself to the field of 'rhetoric and composition'--most specifically but not exclusively to the teaching of what goes by the name 'writing'--it will not have been a 'how to' book...here we will be interested in...a re-thinking, a re-viewing of what is called 'writing' and what is called 'teaching.'...Either way, the writing in a typical comp course is conducted for something else, in the name of some greater aim or grander goal than writing itself" (5-6).
"Writing gets codified, disciplined, domesticated in the typical composition course; indeed, writing is often sacrificed in the name of 'composition,' in the name of this 'discipline's' service-oriented and pre-established requirements" (6).
Davis argues that though we've moved into post-modern theories of language and writing, our pedagogies and composition theories still ask students to produce "'modernist text[s],' the linear and progressive narrative written in an authoritative voice and arising from accepted conceptual starting places (topoi)" (5).
"Though I-write for my colleagues and students in the field of rhetoric and composition, this text will not police/protect the borders of what we like to call 'our discipline'; indeed, in the name of writing, this text will challenge the boundaries of the home field" (7). She hopes to "break up" the usual conventions of writing and composition.
She argues that the teaching of rhetoric in composition squeezes and limits rhetoric so that rhetoric "loses its rhetoricity" (7).
Composition "has been shortsighted and rigid, trusting in its own discourse of mastery and silencing and /or ignoring what it is incapable of appropriating...Through this extreme negligence, through its devotion to some assumed nonrhetorical foundation, composition instruction has effectively given not only rhetoric but even writing the squeeze...Composition...is a control freak" (7-8)
She suggests that writing and rhetoric should move away from "composition."
Some More Words about Motivation
"What we're infusing into 'rhetoric and composition' is a crisis, a 'shattering laughter,' and any alliance with laughter is a risky business...there is no way of knowing what will be left in the wake of a laughter that shatters 'all the familiar landmarks of [our] thought...Life is devastated when it is not permitted the room to move, to sweep, to shed" (9-10).
A Request
"An ear fine-tuned to a logical logos will miss this text's emissions completely. It will be necessary to listen with an ear that can strain past the merely epistemological" (10).
"The request: that this work not be judged across the very criteria it aims to call into question, that it not be called to the carpet for not consistently performing those very language games it finds suspect" (11).
"We will be less interested in building an argument than in spotlighting that which shows up for politics and pedagogy in the suspension of argumentative discourse. We will be interested in what the language game of logic has cost us, as a field and as a society, and in what that game makes it impossible to think" (11).
"In fact, to 'teach' writing is to push a world view, a way of ordering 'the world.' When we require students to write only according to the criteria associated with ...'the modernist text,' we become pushers of hypotactic linking/thinking strategies; we push not simply a writing style but a value system that privileges hierarchy, master, and (Final) closure" (12).
Reason "can no longer be counted on to save us from disaster because it's implicated in too many disasters" (14).
"We're looking, rather, [not for the irrational], for lines of flight, for third positions outside the dichotomy altogether...We're after a new ethics of reading/writing/thinking here, one that does not leave us trapped within a fixed set of obligations" (15).
"we hope to find a way to approach reading/writing/thinking in the rhetoric and composition classroom that will not validate final solutions and that will find ways to steer clear of the 'wreck' of the negative...it is through it No to nihilism that this destructive text comes to a genuine affirmation of life and of writing" (15).
Disclaimer on [My] Inevitable "Stupidity"
"even as we attempt to cross the limits and bust the stupidities that set them, we will not ourselves have escaped the bounds of 'the stupid.' Here, we will be in the business of exposing, among other things, the apparent will to stupidity that drives many composition curriculums, which demand, for instance, that students (and scholars) rush to judgment in the name of the Conclusion, that they simplify in the name of clarity, and that they reign in their own multiplicitous sites of exploration in the name of The authoritative voice" (17).
Trajectory of the T-t-text
"This rhetoric of laughter hopes to offer no an/other topos but what Ronell calls 'an ectopia of all proper places,' a breaking up of our accepted topoi, a shattering of what we tend to assume is common ground" (18).
"The first chapter concerns itself with physiological laughter and the tendency of the laughter to be laughed. Human beings, chapter 1 suggests, are routinely caught in the co(s)mic 'sweep,' seized by outside forces, which manifest themselves, for instance, in bursts of irrepressible laughter" (19).
"The Laughter-in-language proliferates meaning rather than fixating it; it has the tendency to disrupt any techne and to seduce us as it tropes" (18-19).
Chapter 1: Physiological Laughter: The Subject Convulsed
"object strategies: the domination of the 'subject' by the 'object'" (22).
Unrestrained and irrepressible laughter "may be the powerful force of an intertwined logos and (Georgian) kairos...'the rhythm that laughs you.' This present study is an exploration and an affirmation of that 'rhythm,' with which we are occasionally in touch, and of the (post)philosophical, post-humanis consequences of its nonrational seizures" (23).
"This book accepts the posthumanist notion that human beings are always already functions of other functions: not only are we frequently laughed more than we laugh, we are also spoken more than we speak and even gestured more than we gesture...if human beings are routinely and unceremoniously possessed by outside forces or 'rhythms' that have little to do with social norms (nomos), they can hardly fancy themselves in control either of their lives or of the course of human events...we both make and/but are also (more so) made by History" (24).
"if Being is Becoming, 'we' lose our capacity to locate a sticking point for the 'I,' a solid foundation upon which to build our Selves and our world...identity becomes an unstable foundation for (traditional approaches to) politics and out notions of agency beg to be rethought" (24).
POTENTIAL RESPONSES TO THE PARADOX
"This books is not interested in a Final Solution to the problem of the negative. It only hopes to get a peek at the hysteria in which our 'saneness' is inscribed, to witness a moment in which the boundaries of negation fail to hold steady...This chapter is devoted to an exploration of each of these potential reponses to the posthumanist paradox; however, we will not (and could not) proceed disinterestedly. Our examination of negative responses will be conducted across our desire to get to the possibility for an affirmative response...It is motivated by the desire to get in touch with the 'rhythm that laughs [us],' a rhythm that this project will attempt to link with a particular notion of kairos, a notion that has been attributed to Gorgias's epistemology rather than to Plato's" (26).
GORGIAN KARIOS
Plato's kairos is linked to nomos, "human social and cultural norms...Kairos, here the opportune moment, exists as a property/device of linear time, which the philosopher/speaker must learn to seize for the sake of expediency...It assumes time can be reduced to a series of 'nows' and 'seized in a concept; [that it is at a man's disposal, and his mastery of it therefore depends upon time as an abstraction" (Bernard Miller 172).
"Gorgias...appears to fashion his notion of kairos after Heraclitean rather than Platonic notions...there is no metalinguistic foundation on which to base logos, so the decision between contrasting logoi cannot be 'grounded' in logic...it is, rather, kairos that seizes time and overrules human logic. The kairotic moment names that instant when out meaning-making is...exposed as an operation inscribed in rather than opposed to play" (27). Kairos "operates as a 'rhythm' that arises not from negation (a process of reason) but from excess (which is non- or extra-rational), from the free-play of an unmasterable physis" (27).
"The force of karios swoops in at the moment reason yields to a dissoi logoi to overcome the impasse by imposing its own decision...Here, the logos is dispersed by kairos, a force, an atonal rhythm" (30).
Vitanza suggests that Gorgias's epistemology makes both the logos and the 'subject' 'a function of Kairos'...'things' fly apart. The binaries are exploded' (28).
"kairos is tied to...a nonrational physis that is excessive and unmasterable" (28).
"The force of kairos can dance across the body, can instantaneously possess the subject and explode its boundaries/binaries of identity. This project suggests that these kairotic moments manifest themselves physiologically in spontaneous generations of laughter, which, by the way, are anything but situationally correct" (29).
"Kairotic laughter arises not so much from the (rational) realm of meaning-making as from the overriding (nonrational) realm of play, of excess, in which the phase of meaning-making is also situated...this is 'divine' rather than human laughter" (29).
"The question of interest today is not so much whether we are done at least as much as we do but rather how affirmatively we will accept that recognition. And what hangs in the balance of our affirmation/negation are (the slumbers of) humanism and reason themselves." (30).
IDEALISM--REFUSAL TO RESPOND
"mirror-stage: that stage in which one comes to believe that the 'Ideal-I' one sees reflected in the mirror constitutes one's Being in total and through which 'the agency of the ego' is situated fictionally" (Lacan) (31).
the mirror perpetuates the illusion "that the individual exists as a unified and constituting subject who can act, who is in control of his or her person and of his or her world...Being exists as pure and substantial presence...clinging to a naive belief in stable/solid identity" (31).
Ideologues stand in sharp contrast to post-human philosophies. Davis spends time drawing from Lacan, Judith Butler, and Kundera to illustrate opposition to such a paradigm One main concern with "ideologues" is that such philosophies de-center in a way that turns worldview into apolitical ontologies. "The ideologue belongs mostly to what Michel Foucault calls the Classical Episteme, which not only takes identity as given but also assumes that words have a one-to-one relationship with material things" which makes "is possible to concoct an objective 'taxonomia,' an "exhaustive ordering of the world' via a 'tabulated space' created by the act of naming...so that 'representation [might] render beings visible in their truth', in their pure presence" (33).
The ideologue laughs out of knowledge and faith in their constructed taxonomies of ontology. "the laughers (knowers) celebrate their under/standing of the pure presence of the real world, of the order of things" (33).
"There is...a problem with the so-called 'presence,' the 'foundation' of sub/stance upon which this order rests: it never actually appears" (33). The individual is an illusion.
"An examination of our notion of presence unconceals it as an absence: presence is perpetually deferred by a particular style of genus/species analytics, which does not nail down what something 'is' but rather what something is not...I am me because I am not you" (34). We exclude things from bodies of knowledge if they don't fit an order.
"It is negation that makes both the 'order' and the cohesion of the humanist community possible; it is by virtue of exclusion that the 'included' might join hands in a 'magic' circle dance...The excluded...must be 'deactivated' in some way, so that they cannot pose a threat to the closure of the O (other)" (34).
Davis frequently refers to fascism/Nazism to illustrate how clinging to reason, identity, and recognition of identity via negation--which results in the "other"--can have disastrous effects. It was, she argues, this cold style of reason and belief in the logos of the individual and the sureness of reason, which orders (falsely) the world around it, that led to the Final Solution. What many defend as the philosophy against being apolitical or amoral actually, Davis argues, leads to inhumanities. The refusal to adopt a posthuman epistemology and ontology can be inhuman. The individual, the self, is a political construction that ideologues fail to substantiate.
Ideologues posit their own a priori essence or 'sub/stance,' their pure presence as solid 'individuals,' in order to ground their identity-based politics; however, they neglect the political construction of the so-called individual itself...this book accepts and promotes Butler's suggestion that critiques of the subject are not apolitical but rather lead to a politics that would be other/wise," a reference possibly to what Aristotle deems productive knowledge (35).
"Faith in human reason is woven into a faith in the productive/progressive agency of the 'individual'; therefore, pulling the thread of human reason may lead to an unraveling of idealism itself...All Enlightenment beliefs hinge upon the validity of the transcendent subject--the capability of the subject to transcend 'his' situational and sensual elements to reach a state of disembodied, rational thought (35). Davis positions postmodern thought against Enlightenment pure reason to join the body and mind schism, arguing that they are possible inextricable.
NIETZCHE'S CRITIQUE OF THE "TOTAL UNDIVIDED SOUL"
"he celebrates the reign of the passions, relegating reason to a tool, a weapon used to defend one's affective regime...the motivating force behind all reasoned arguments...is not the Truth but desire, passion, instinct" (36).
"The apparent unity of the 'individual' is for Nietzsche an abstraction of a multiplicitous selfhood, in which each passion, each instinct and drive, has its own capacity for reason and will to dominate...So-called rational thought performs in the service of the sensuous ruler of the moment, the ruling passion of the kairotic instant. Reason, then, is a function of the body's will" (36).
BUTLER'S NIETZSCHEAN CRITIQUE OF IDENTITY AND THE BODY
Butler uses Nietzsche's critique of the individual self to "promblematize out conceptions of anatomy as an a priori category," arguing that "sex is as socially constructed as gender"...It is the 'doing' that creates the illusion of 'Being'" (37). She uses Butler's argument that identity (gender/sex) is a construct of negation to support her overall thesis about the faulty nature of reason via negation.
"In fact the notions of 'inner' and 'outer' are linguistic categories, which 'make sense,' she [Butler] says, only 'with reference to a mediating boundary that strives for stability.' The excess re/turns...in the form...[of] an irrepressible burst of laughter" (39).
"If human reason is problematized by an inescapable affiliation with the materiality of the body, what becomes of it when the materiality of the body is itself problematized?" (39). Essentially, Davis wonders how the ideologue can use the individual and pure reason as the basis for an ideology if the construction of the individual exists on shaky ground if it is examined or conceptualized beyond discursive boundaries.
"even matter has its own histories, and those histories are 'partly determined by the negotiation of sexual difference.' The sexed body is always already an effect of power; it is, Butler suggests...produced by that very discourse that stabilizes itself by excluding 'the feminine'...all together" (39).
"This line of thought is terribly disturbing for homo seriosus, of course, who proceeds politically and ethically by taking the materiality of the body and the free-agency of the 'individual' as unproblematic givens" (40). "if the supposed unity of Being is always already an effect of power exercised to camouflage a wild and excessive process of Becomin, then identity politics and the humanist community take problematic turns" (40).
MODERNISM--A TOO HOPEFUL RESPONSE
Modern Episteme (inspired by the serious trouble of the unraveling of the individual): "a relentless search for certainties and universals in a world that has lost its ground, its sticking point. The conception of a potentially knowing subject, one who can transcend false consciousness...once again makes knowledge possible. 'The subject' gets injected underneath the Classical Episteme's crumbling grounds to act as the substitute guarantor of truth and knowledge" (41).
In the modern episteme, the human becomes the knower, the orderer, as well as the thing known and the thing ordered. "Paradoxically, then, through Modernity balks at the possibility of representation through language (because there is no metalinguistic sticking point), it nevertheless embraces a concept of the Self and the distinct possibility of the self-representation. The unified 'individual' is supplanted here by the self-conscious 'subject'" (41).
"Whereas the Classical Epiteme is faithful to One, universal foundation (the pure presence of its metalinguistic 'table'), Modernity is postfoundational; it recognizes no metalinguistic foundation upon which to stand" (41).
"The modernist project, Foucault suggests, is a nostalgic drive for lost Oneness, for a 'transformation without residuum, for a total reabsorption of all forms of discourse within a single word'" (41).
Instead of stopping upon the recognition that the foundation disappeared, modernist seek to build one.
METAPHYSICS OF PRESENCE/ABSENCE
"the modernist impulse is to (re)construct what appears to be missing...Modernists argue that we are no longer limited to what is but are now limited only by what we would imagine...The metaphysician of absence sees the No/Thing as a blank space in which human beings might erect their structures, their hierarchies, their communities through local nomoi: out of the No/Think comes Some/Thing, come Every/Thin." (42).
"Implicit in this hopeful approach is the faith that there is a substantial and knowable difference between a freedom fighter's revolution and a totalitarian's takeover" (42).
"The laughter of the hopeful modernist, then, is also an Angel laughter, a laughter that laughs with an air of certainty, of conviction that meaning can be made 'correctly' and that the world can be set 'right'--by 'man.'...This is laughter with a fight, community cound by the glue of a(n overwhelming) project" (43).
COUNTERHUMAN SCIENCES
"They do not ask the anthropological question, 'What is man?'; rather, they direct their questions to what in man's culture and/or his psyche makes it possible for the abstraction 'man' to appear. The question of autonomy is rendered irrelevant when the subject is exposed as the bi-product of cultural overdetermination, when its agency is exposed as the effect of a particular set of discursive practices...the working through of the counterhuman sciences makes the idea of transcending false consciousness unthinkable--as there can be no false consciousness beyond 'false' consciousness" (44)
"Of interest now is not so much the question of 'man,' a mere effect, but rather of what frontiers beyond the limits of 'man' make it possible for him to show up for us in the first place" (44).
"The point: the capacity even to consider these 'new frontiers' spotlights the inadequacy of the old one---Man, the effect that masquerades as cause" (45).
"The unabashed drive to 'rescue' and /or 'discern' 'the' subject stems from the hope that the notion of agency might be preserved in some capacity...In other terms, without agency, ideology slips into what Kundera calls 'imagology,' which organizes a 'peaceful alternation of its systems in lively seasonal rhythms" (45).
BETWEEN DE- and RE-TERRITORIALIZATION OCCUPYING THE SPACE OF THE HOLE
"Ironically, Modernity's nostalgic drive to resuscitate the subject...must be preceded by the postmodern recognition that the foundations tabled by the Classical Episteme have indeed collapsed" (46).
"If what it means to be human in a posthumanist world is to be a scattered and/or scatterable disidentity with no sub/stantial referential image, it is necessary that our question become: How will these disidentities share the world?...in the face of always already contingent foundations, nostalgic hopefulness is not an option: we may fly into laughter or into tears, into affirmation or into nihilism. The 'cynic' flies into the latter" (47).
CYNICISM--A NIHILISTIC RESPONSE
"the tendency of the posthumanist paradox to invite a nihilistic response, to lead us into the arms of cynicism: 'an enlightened false consciousness' or 'unhappy consciousness' that knows it has been duped but also knows also...that false consciousness cannot be transcended" (47)
"It is rare that laughter of any kind will echo forth from the midst of cynical subjects" (48).
"Cynics are metaphysicians of absence; that is, they have determined that where they thought there was Some/Thing...there is actually No/Thing...But, unlike hopeful modernists, they recognize the impossibility of constructing that Some/Thing that has been lost. And that realization makes them unhappy, remorseful, nostalgic" (48).
"This is the tragic knowledge of the cynic, who cannot affirm it as 'what is' and who feels perpetually betrayed by a world that has suddenly lost all of its meaning and purpose, all of its hierarchical divisions, all of its capacity for (humanist) community. In the face of such a loss, the cynic cries bitter and nostalgic tears" (52).
KYNICISM--AN/OTHER POSITIVE (CUM NEGATIVE) RESPONSE
"The kynic is not nostalgic or remorseful and does not consider his/her paradoxical situation to be the result of a loss. Rather, the kynic is happy to attain a distance from the tyranny of meaning, from the weight of Truth" (52).
"Kynical reason culminates in the snubbing rather than the erection of 'grand goals'" (52).
"With the birth of 'high theory (a la Plato), argumentation gets severed from the body, materiality, and worldliness-from laughter. But that snobbish split is continuously dis/rupted by the emergence (a la Diogenes) of 'a subversive variant of low theory that pantomimically and grotesquely carries practical embodiment to an extreme'" (53).
"The idea is that the weight of meaning can only be countered with the lightness of an excessive laughter, and not with more meaning. When things get too heavy, too saturated with meaning and wholes, the 'force of gravity' becomes unbearable. Kynics respond to the overbearing weight of meaning with an overwhelming opposition to it" (54).
Davis here is establishing the kynic as a foil for the cynic. She almost seems to prefer the kynical outlook to the cynical outlook, but I wonder if she's implying one can choose how to make meaning in the face of posthumanistic tinged nihilism. Is she implying one can exercise control over how one faces a situation? Can a posthumanist argue an individual/subject can posture himself in resistance to something?
"it remains trapped in the negative: it offers a fight against cynicism, idealism, and modernism, but it (therefore) remains within the binary logic demanded by those negative and negative-cum-positive responses. Kynismos plays by the rules of the very game at which it laughs" (55).
"To fight for meaninglessness--and to stop there--is to make meaninglessness meaningful" (55-56).
AFFIRMATION--A COMEDIC RESPONSE
"the ego doing the battling laughs itself 'to death'. And, in that instant, something remarkable happens: the negative de(con)struction exceeds itself, bursting forth into an unchecked affirmation that is neither positive nor negative, but something totally other, something explosive, which up/sets binary logic from the inside" (56).
"Affirmative responses are tactical in this regard; they leap into the flow without reservation, without limitation" (56).
"affirmation responses, on the other hand, assume a wild and overwhelming excess of 'parts' that will never make a 'whole': there can be no final One, no final Totalization, and therefore no lack" (57).
"At first glance, positive responses (such as modernism's creations and the kynic's oppositional frivolity) would seem closely to resemble affirmative responses; however, the distinction between the two is critical for our purposes" (58). Positive responses are beholden to the positive/negative binary.
"Affirmative responses, on the other hand, move out of reactive/binary logic by challenging or ignoring the limits it sets" (58).
"The laughter that constitutes sovereignity is neither the Angel's (absolute meaning) not the Devil's (absolute meaninglessness) because it does not recognize the terms of that dichotomy. It is a third and affirmative laughter, which, nevertheless, grows out of, from the inside of Devil laughter...This third laughter is an affirmation of the nonpresence as excess rather than lack" (60).
"Indeed, this book suggests that to respond to the posthumanist paradox with a giving laughter that invites the 'sweep' is not to be apolitical but to engage in an affirmative politics-cum-ethics. And it may be here...that there exists the potential for a less dangerous, postfascist community to shattered disidentities" (63).
"Comedy alone challenges what Nietzsche calls 'the force of gravity,' the tyranny of meaning, because it doesn't take faith in The Truth (the negative) seriously anymore. A giving laughter says 'yes!" to the eternal comedy of existence by simulating it, exploding with it" (64).
"In the throes of a giving laughter, the borders of the ego give way; we are hurled outside the 'fabric of meaning,' the restrictive economy, and into a general economy, what Nietzsche calls the 'open sea' of excessive possibility...Affirmative laughers laugh with the kairotic force of Laughter, celebrating the free-play of Being in an ecstatic denegation of negation itself" (65).
AN AFFIRMATIVE ALLIANCE
"Affirmation requires the capacity to let memory go; and when the invitation of a nonpositively affirmative laughter is answered by the kairotic force of Laughter, both meaning and memory are suspended in a convulsion of extrarational and extramoral affirmation" (67).
"To engage in a laughter that has no stake in control is to set one's feet upon momentary lines of flight from the tyranny of meaning and from the violence of a community held together by that tyranny
"The hope is that these glimpses beyond constraint will up/set or at least problematize our determination to create systematic exclusions, to devote ourselves more to our linguistic categories than to the Others that those categories create and then flush...First, though, it will be necessary that we move beyond our faith in logic and language, beyond our faith in paradise" (68).
CHAPTER 4: A RHETORIC OF LAUGHTER FOR COMPOSITION PEDAGOGY
"There is no pure knowledge. Even the teaching of composition, as Berlin suggests, is the teaching of a world view: it assumes and then propagates a particular relationship among the writer, the reader, language, and 'reality,' and from there it peddles assumptions about what is, what ought to be, and what can be changed" (209-10).
Current-tradition-rhetorics have long stated that they are apolitical, but the work of critical and feminist pedagogies have sought to uncover the opposite, and "by so doing...help students overcome some aspect of false consciousness..."What radical pedagogies are after, in other words, is a composition course that refuses to serve the state and its social-economic apparatus" (210).
"composition courses, to the left and to the right, do indeed typically operate as prosthetic extensions of political agendas" (210).
"we will...attempt to locate a composition pedagogy that has exscripted itself from oppositional politics...We'll be on the lookout for a pedagogy that embraces...feminist politics...to locate composition pedagogy that would...ex/scribe itself from phallogocentric ordering systems" (210-11).
"Feminist composition pedagogies typically offer themselves as alternatives, but they do so by inscribing themselves within a set of existing assumptions, within an already (phal)logocentric ordering system and its pedagogical imperative...[they] assume the rules of that fight" (211).
"radical pedagogies, including feminist pedagogies, often camouflage pedagogical violence in their move from one mode of 'normalization' to another" (212).
"This approach to feminist pedagogy, however, may be no less violent and no more capable...than the harsh and sexist 'banking system of education' it aims to supplant" (212).
"Pedagogy continues to be 'offered as its own remedy'" (212).
"It may be time to stop offering more pedagogy or altered pedagogy in answer to the failure of pedagogy" (213).
FEMINIST COMPOSITION PEDAGOGIES--IN (THEIR) BRIEF(S)
"it seems that one can effectively undo authority only from a position of authority, a position that appears to trap feminists within the very phallic economy they aim to subvert" (213).
"Even when conflict is admitted into these feminist classrooms, then, it's typically admitted to be soothed or transformed; it is invited in as a means to a predetermined end...to 'foster and encourage the subjects of [a] feminist transformation.'...The ultimate goal is compelling: to end oppression. The means to that end is troubling: placing rhetoric and composition courses into the service of particular feminist visions" (216-17).
THE FARCE OF THE PHALLIC PHEMININE--A CRITIQUE, IN BRIEF(S)
"I'm haunted by the sneaking suspicion that these/my feminist pedagogies...remain as much a function of the phallic phantasy as does traditional, authoritarian pedagogy" (217)
"I'm suspicious: suspicious of a Mother who assumes the role of Master, but especially of a Master who drapes herself in the facade of 'feminine nurturance,' a facade that successfully remystifies pedagogical tyranny" (218).
"Under the guise of the 'Good Mother,' this pedagogue lovingly nurtures her students into Proper (politically correct) ways of knowing, thinking, and problem-solving" (219).
"But it does seem that those ground rules ought also apply to the pedagogue herself, who may find 'abusive' precisely those voices that refuse to mimic her own...Apparently, this space is safe and/or equalizing only for those willing to operate within the lines of the 'new feminist epistemology' elaborated by the feminist pedagogue" (220).
THE PEDAGOGUE IN DRAG--PERFORMING THE SUJET SUPPOSE SAVOIR
"They [feminist pedagogies] because they are enchanted by the pedagogical imperative...which trusts...that pedagogy can be engaged as a 'concrete political science'" (221).
"The pedagogical imperative demands that every theory be immediately translatable into workable classroom practive for the pedagogue..."'Pedagogy hope' is a function of 'theory hope,' the hope that we-pedagogues might finally get the story straight, might finally land on a pedagogical techne that will pump out the right kind of student-subjects" (222).
"We'll be on the lookout not for more pedagogy--for, it cannot 'fix' itself--but for what Vitanza calls postpedagogy: a postpedagogical pedagogy that operates...'without criteria'" (222-23).
SUPPOSING WE DON'T KNOW--TURNING TEACHING "ARSE UPWARDS"
"Once the pedagogue begins to believe that s/he knows the truth and proceeds to pass that truth on/off, teaching is reduced to a 'functional apprenticeship,' even as 'truth' is disrobed and paraded unabashedly as Truth" (224).
Though teachers shouldn't pretend they know, the very nature of teaching becomes problematic when the thing the subject is supposed to be doing cannot be performed because knowing is always in flux. And if we lionize not knowing, aren't we then turning teachers into imposters? "but it does not suggest that the pedagogue is unqualified or that nothing is happening in the classroom. It only suggests that something else is happening, an/other something: it is not, could not be, true knowledge--universal not socially constructed--that is being passed here, in the pedagogical situation" (227).
"THE SUJET SUPPOSITAIRE"--PEDAGOGICAL INSERTIONS AND INTRUSIONS
"What the teacher, who does not know what s/he knows, passes in the classroom is her own desire as s/he attempts to find the articulation of what s/he knows in the student-Other" (227).
"As soon as there is a subject supposed to know, there is forced subjectification, 'a partial parceling out of the [student] subject'"...To be a good student is to be/come a beautiful mirror for the teacher. The pedagogue who encourages students to suppose s/he knows, to suppose that s/he can tell the truth about truth, makes them an implicit promise: that they too will know if they will only listen carefully and do what s/he asks" (228).
IN THE NAME OF WRITING: (DE)COMPOS(T)ING THE PROSTHETIC COMPOSITION COURSE
"What is usually being passed (off) for truth/knowledge in the composition classroom is a set of 'teachable practices,' codifications of language and writing that are teachable and that support a flavorful assortment of identity politics...Indeed, composition courses have historically figured as prostheses, as 'basic courses' designed to complete a very particular service for the university and/or society's economic structure itself" (228-29).
"Writing is reduced in these classrooms to a codifiable set of practices to be memorized and utilized by the speaking/writing subject in order to make him/her more marketable" (229).
"Education itself, as Lester Faigley points out, is not longer about 'promoting social equality'; it's about churning out "a 'trained capability' adequate to compete with those of Germany and Japan and a host of new economic rivals...But 'the ideal of literacy as a means for achieving social equality...has been replaced with 'a cynical acknowledgement of education as part of the machinery for sorting people into categories of winners and losers'" (229)
"If traditional composition pedagogies prostitute writing for the sake of the status quo, radical composition pedagogies have a tendency to prostitute it for the sake of revolution" (230-31).
"What if we put ourselves into the service of writing rather than the other way around?" (231).
KILLING IT SOFTLY: "UNDERTAKING" WRITING-AS-MEANING-MAKING
"In this post-almost-everything era, we fulfill the function of linguistic undertaker: we are charged, as Ronell says, with coming up with 'what to do with the remainders of writing.' We are also hailed into the position of security guard, hired to protect citizen-subjects, the university system, and the state itself from a language separated from meaning-making, from a language on the loose" (231-32).
"the service-oriented composition course: it does for language what the pharmacy/drugstore does for narcotics...composition courses often operate as control centers, mediating between the subject and a rowdy body of language, which threatens the subject's autonomy...the composition classroom functions as a neutral zone, positioning itself between the subject and the 'drug' so that the object of desire/study will not be free to take possession of the subject" (233-34_.
"How much interaction between the drug (language) and the addict (student writer) will produce the desired result, the desired kind of citizen-subject-author? What's at stake here is not only freedom; it is also and more so 'reality'" (233).
"When language operates representationally...it is believed to produce 'safe text,' to operate on the side of 'truth,' and if affirms the capacity of academic programs...Writing is most threatening to reality and to 'community'...when 'it stops representing...when it ceases veiling itself with the excess that we commonly call meaning'" (234).
"in composition courses, there is no such prefabbed safeguard against the linguistic abyss that is so threatening to the university and its prime directive...The safeguard must be built into it by putting writing into the service of something else, some greater aim or grander goal than writing itself...the whole show is dependent upon the pedagogue, the teacher, who knows and shows the way" (234-35).
WRITING RE-VIVED: BEYOND THE "WHITE TERROR OF TRUTH"
A writing course in the service of nothing but writing "could not be more subversive of the educational system and of every liberal and/or conservative political agenda" (235)
A course in the service of writing could result in a dangerous understanding of language, but Davis contends that a course that upholds the truth-power of the symbol/language is far more dangerous.
A composition course devoted to writing only would be in the position to work against this terror...It would not be about instruction or information exchange--it would hope for 'communication' but communication as the exposition of finitude" (236-37).
"This course would invite students to engage in what Ronell calls a 'genuine' writing, a 'writing for no one' and 'to no address,' without a grand 'purpose' or 'point' (237).
"though it is to no one in particular, this writing will have been written for the sake of others; not to give or address anything to others but to expose the limit...'upon which communication takes place'" (238).
"genuine writing is 'the act that obeys the sole necessity of exposing the limit,' Writing is the singular gesture of touching that limit and so of reaching for others" (238).
"A writing-for-writing course would not limit itself to 'teaching' students to pretend to conduct language; it would not be reigned in by the hopelessly naive conception of 'literacy' for which service-oriented composition courses were conceived. It would, rather, be about inviting the affirmative decision to 'let everything go'...to let loose the writing in you and watch it move, feel its brilliance crack your shell, blow your mind. It would not be about inviting students to become-anonymous-conducting-machines, 'not in order to stop the effects' but to allow them to flow into 'new metamorphoses...It would be about founding an/other identity, solidifying the ego, but about watching this writing interrupt the myth of stable identity, about allowing the Laughter-in-language to laugh the notions of an ego-ideal to death. What this course would invite, then, would be an interruption of mythation and so...a celebration of finitude and an exposition of community" (240).
THE TEACHER SUPPOSED (NOT) TO KNOW: PERFORMING A PEDAGOGY OF LAUGHTER
"A pedagogy...in the service of a libidinalized language, is a pedagogy in the service of breaking up: it is, in that sense, a pedagogy of laughter. This pedagogy would protect nothing...What this pedagogue would have to know, then, is precisely that s/he does not/cannot know...it is time to admit that even the composition pedagogue cannot be a master of language or, therefore, of the truth it creates" (241). Relinquishing the teacher-as-knower paradigm creates a situation wherein the value or need for a teacher is in question.
A pedagogy of laughter would be an imitation of authority, a farce that calls into question its own illusion.
[***How does grading/assessing fit into this paradigm?]
WRITING FOR WRITING--THE WRITER AS LAUGH(T)ER
"The assignments in this class, for instance, would not ask students to promote a single thesis, progress through a focused argument, or come to a (necessarily premature) conclusion. They would not...ask students to impose themselves without exposing themselves" (243).
"These assignments would not ask students to listen and think for a moment only so that they might then stop listening and thinking in order, clearly and cleanly...to wrap things up...They would not be about 'exposition' or 'argumentation' but about 'trying out questions,' pressing the limits of discourse, making unusual links, pointing to the limit, the betweeenus space" (243).
"this class demands a rhetoric on steroids, rhetoric as the intricate and continuous examination of the way language is working to produce what functions as truth...This rhetoric would [force] a writer constantly to double back on herself and her 'texts,' to crack them open again to expose her own assumptions, to reveal inconsistencies, motivations, contradictions, limitations, incantations...students would be invited to disrupt their own positions, to contradict themselves, to expose all that must be hidden and excluded in the precious name of clarity" (243).
"a writer in this space would put her/himself(s) into the service of desire in language, into the service of finitude: writing would respond to its own call, which is the call of community, Being-in-common" (246).
"What if we promoted a postpedagogical pedagogy in which this 'blackmarket' economy operated as more than an exception?" (246). Here "blackmarket economy" refers to a class where students are encouraged to embrace and expound upon their excesses that would be cut for the sake of clarity.
"When we take a full hit of new technologies in the composition classroom, we allow them to bring us into Being and invite them to redefine what pedagogy, knowledge, and composition can be. We're not talking about a face-lift for composition instruction; we're talking about a radical rupture in what we thought was possible" (247).
"In fact, in the virtual classroom, whether or not the teacher thinks s/he knows is irrelevant--the cybergogue's performance necessarily will have been one of interruption and demystification/demythification, one in which the illusion of the subject supposed to know cracks up" (248).
"A wired classroom full of netheads who are happily addicted to technology is not at all comparable to a traditional classroom of technophobes who don't yet know that they are cyborgs...Cynthia Haynes issues a polite wake-up call: '[V]irtual spaces...disrupt power relations, technify pathos, and morph identity'" (249).
FORGET EMPOWERMENT--BECOMING-IMPERCEPTIBLE
"Teachers, then, must be in the business of em-powering their students, but for Clifford, empowerment is now so much about making students more marketable as it is about liberating them from the false consciousness that drives big business, government, etc....The job of the pedagogue, he suggests, either is to use the composition classroom to mold students into 'productive citizens' or to use it to mold students into political activists...Both options, however, turn on the question of power; that is, both claim to empower the student one way or the other...This is a humanist equation offering only humanist solutions, and we choose not to be trapped in it" (251-52).
"We writing teachers are not after power. We are after the chance to experience the force that runs through language" (251).
"A pedagogy of laughter does not encourage students to Become-Human/ist or to Become-Social/ist; it does not...hail them as actors per se...it invites them to hesitate, to strain to hear the noise, the static that gets drowned out by the booming call of the One...It would invite them to shed their inherited need to fix meaning and erect solutions; it would offer them a not-at-all safe space to test the boundaries of the Proper and, perhaps, to begin to think precisely what formal education aims to make unthinkable" (252).
"It would not be interested in protecting categories, borders, genders, or genres. It would, rather, offer students the chance to write, to be written, to follow 'the writing' in them" (253).
A
Saturday, October 24, 2015
Barbara Biesecker--"Coming to Terms with Recent Attempts to Write Women into the History of Rhetoric"
Source: Philosophy & Rhetoric, Vol. 25, No. 2 (1992), pp. 140-161
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40237715
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40237715
"many of us have found it necessary to question some of our discipline's most basic theoretical assumptions as we have understood that the rhetorical histories that emerge out of and are shaped by those assumptions have consequences both for the practices of our profession and everyday lives and for the lives of our students" (140).
Biesecker acknowledges current efforts to place women within the canon of rhetoric scholarship. Much has been written about how "decidedly male experiences have been made to stand in for the history of Rhetoric as such" (141). In reference to female representation in rhetorical scholarship, Biesecker says, "we cannot but be compelled to rethink our [female] roles both in and outside the classroom" (141).
"recent critical essays seeking to discredit the myth that 'Man' is Rhetoric's hero by writing women into its history find precedence in a relatively prodigious past" (141). Biesecker states that though she's supportive of these revisionist efforts, "we must also...caution against the potentially debilitating consequence of their work: female tokenism" (141).
Adrienne Rich defines female tokenism this way: "the power withheld from the vast majority of women is offered to few, so that it may appear that any truly qualified woman can gain access to leadership, recognition, and reward; hence that justice based on merits actually prevails. The token woman is encouraged to see herself as different from most other women, as exceptionally talented and deserving; and to separate herself from the wider female condition; and she is perceived by 'ordinary' women as separate also: perhaps even as stronger than themselves" (141).
While revising scholarship to include women alongside men creates a more diverse rhetorical history, it may also "unwittingly...perpetuate the damaging fiction that most women simply do not have what it takes to play the public, rhetorical game" (142).
Biesecker, though she understands the dangers of tokenism, wonders "at what point circumspection leads to silence, stagnation, and inactivity" (142). She's willing to risk tokenism to extend an equal voice. She wants to "underscore yet another effect of attempts to insert 'great women speakers' into the official record we call the canon, an effect that utterly escapes out detection as we weigh only the risk of female tokenism" (142).
Biesecker compares this revisionist history as to affirmative action in that we try to include those who have been historically disadvantaged. But in its implementation in the cultural sphere, "the project misfires" (143).
"What I find objectionable in the affirmative action approach to the production and distribution of knowledges...is its underhanded perpetuation of 'cultural supremacy'" (143).
"When deployed in the cultural sphere, affirmative action signifies nothing less that the power of the center to affirm certain voices and to discount others...the affirmative action agenda conserves the putative authority of the center by granting it license to continue to produce official explanation by the designation of what is and what is not worthy of inclusion" (143). Essentially, by maintaining that the core texts represent the gold standard, we privilege the criteria of the old order.
She wonders: "What are the criteria against which any particular rhetorical discourse is measured in order to grant or deny its place in the canon? One way into this question is to recognize that the rhetorical canon is a system of cultural representation whose present form is predicated on and celebrates the individual" (143).
"Already entailed in the valorization of the individual is a mechanics of exclusion that fences out a vast array of collective rhetorical practices to which there belongs no proper name" (144).
"In short..we...have not yet begun to challenge the underlying logic of canon formation and the uses to which it has been put that have written the rhetorical contributions of collective women into oblivion" (144). She applies this critique to Karlyn Campbell's attempt to insert women into the historical canon because she plans her inclusion around the individual. Such an attempt "resolidifies rather than undoes the ideology of individualism that is the condition of possibility for the emergence of the received history of Rhetoric" (144).
So what should take its place?
She references an earlier essay from Campbell which argues effectively at looking at diverging epistemologies. Campbell writes "it is difficult to view them as an audience, i.e. as persons who see themselves as potential agents of change; unlike other rhetorics, rhetorics directed toward the liberation of women must take as their point of departure 'the radical affirmation of new identities'" (144). Though Biesecker appreciates her argument, she argues that her use of Bitzer's theoretical arrangements--which she argues against, essentially using his arrangements as a contrasting point--"marks the essay's complicity with precisely those normative theorizations that it seeks to oppose." Biesecker sees Campbell's desire for "consciousness raising" works against establishing a uniquely female rhetorical perspective as it "posits an irreducible essence inhabiting the subject and a tropology (figurative use of language) of the psyche that writes presence as consciousness, self-presence conceived within the opposition of consciousness to unconsciousness" (146).
"I must admit that I find less than satisfactory the conceptualization of history and social change implied in Campbell's reformulation of female subjectivity, a conceptualization wherein the ideology of individualism and the old patriarchal alignments are reinscribed. In Campbell's work, the possibility for social change is though to be more or less a function of each individual woman's capacity to throw off the mantly of her own self-perpetuated oppression, to recognize her real self-interests (interests that are her own as a woman and, thus, are shared by all women) and to intervene on behalf of those interests" (146).
Campbell's revisionist history doesn't overturn "those structures of oppression larger than individual consciousness and will...positivity lines up with activity, while passivity and with it femininity are identified as negative" (146).
"Thus if, as feminists, we want to produce something more than the story of a battle over the right to individualism between men and women, we might begin by taking seriously post-structuralist objections to the model of human subjectivity that has served as the cognitive starting point of our practices and histories...I want to argue that the post-structuralist interrogation of the subject and its concomitant call for the radical contextualization of all rhetorical acts can enable us to forge a new storying of our tradition that circumvents the veiled cultural supremacy operative in mainstream histories of Rhetoric" (147). Post-structuralism "sets up the conditions for a 'new' definition of techne that considerably alters our way of reading writing history by displacing the active/passive opposition altogether" (147).
A reencounter with post-structuralism
"post-structuralism attacks identity as such and not just particular and isolated forms or versions of identity...Derrida shows us how the identity of any subject, like the value of any element in a given system, is structured by and is the effect of its place in an economy of differences. In short, against an irreducible humanist essence of subjectivity, Derrida advances a subjectivity which, structured by differance and thus always differing from itself, is forever in process, indefinite, controvertible...Thus subjectivity in the general sense is to be deciphered as an historical articulation, and particular real-lived identities are to be deciphered as constituted and reconstituted in and by an infinitely pluralized weave of interanimating discourses and events" (148).
Using Derrida and post-structural hermeneutics Biesecker argues that "it becomes possible to forge a storying that shifts the focus of historical inquiry from the question 'who is speaking,' a question that confuses the subjects of history with the agents for history, to the question 'what play of forces made it possible for a particular speaking subject to emerge?" (148). It seems that in Burke's terms Biesecker is arguing that we revision Rhetoric by emphasizing the Scene-Agent ratio, wherein the entirety of the moment gives rise to the speaker instead of the speaker standing out against the moment.
Biesecker then turns to Foucault.
"Foucault mobilizes the concept-metaphor 'discursive formation' in order to work against the widespread tendency amongst social theorists to presume that the socius is operated by a coherent logic that can account for all relations and practices...Foucault emphsizes time and again that the socius is a discontinuous space constituted by heterogeneous fields of objects operated by a 'body of anonymous historical rules,' a nonstatic arena woven of dispersed 'I-slots'" (149).
"Thus for Foucault, identity is defined by way of one's relation to or place in a network of social, political, cultural, and economic practices that are provisional (in the sense of historical and not essential), discontinuous (in the sense of nontotalizable), and normative (in the sense of rule governed and governing)....subjectivity and identity as made available by, rather than existing outside of or prior to, language and representation" (149).
"Where Derrida would speak of the ever-shifting limits that persistently thwart our desire to make the subject cohere in any final sense, Foucault would chart the localized rules and mechanisms of differentially situated subjects in a nonstatic but hierarchically organized space" (150).
"Feminist and non-feminist historians alike have claimed that Foucault's decisive contribution to our understanding of social economies and their conditions of existence and emergence, is encapsulated in his theory of subject positions, a theory that resolutely challenges the assumption that ideology can be demystified...If, as Foucault suggests, 'power is everywhere,' then it seems only reaonable to conclude that there is nowhere out of which anything like an insurrection may gain its foothold...the very notion of resistance seems nothing more than a fragile proposition" (151).
Biesecker tries to negotiate her use of Foucault as support for a revision of Rhetoric since he seems to argue that resistance is futile. She states, however, that "we must hold against the temptation to construe resistance as a structure that stands over and against power, as an event subsequent to the establishment of power. Resistance is always and already a structure of possibility within power and...power is always and already a structure of possibility within resistance" (152). They emerge from, as Foucault states, "something other than itself" (152).
The paradox is: how can resistance operate within an anti-humanist/ post-human theory.
"by reading the subject itself as a site of multiple and contestatory inscriptions, one can, they argue, locate a reservoir of revolutionary potential in the gaps, fissures and slippages of the nonidentical 'I'" (152).
"I want to press the issue of resistance to a further limit within the Foucaultian frame, once again using Derridean deconstruction as my lever" (152).
Argument thus far: Female rhetorics cannot be inscribed into the canon by using the rules of the canon. Instead, they must be wholly included using non-individualized criteria. To support this, Biesecker turns to a mixture of Derrida and Foucault. However, the post-structural theories raise issues about how to resist power structures within a post-human/anti-human framework, wherein power is not constitutive of agents but of the scene.
Retooling techne
Biesecker wants to use Foucault's primacy of place with Derrida's idea that the "subject...is always centered...outstripped by a temporality and a spacing that always already exceeds it" (154).
"were this excess that never appears as such figured into the Foucaultian calculation, it would become possible for us to recognize the formidable role structure plays in the (re)constitution of subjectivities and the capacity...of those subjectivities to disrupt the structure within which and through which they are differently inscribed" (154).
"a careful reading of Derrida's work will show that the very possibility of resistance is to be found in the articulation of an act and not in the negativity of the actor...Derrida's thinking on spacing shifts the site of resistance from the subject proper to the exorbitant possibilities of the act since spacing in this special sense is precisely that which 'suspends the accomplishment or fulfillment of 'desire' or 'will.'" (154)
"if what we are trying to indicate is a certain structure of reserve that breaks open a pathway within the hegemonizing effects of power by mens of an act whose effluence eludes the mastery of the acting subject, then the word practice simply will not do...Thus what I am seeking to point to is...a force or structure of breaching in practice that establishes a cleft or fissure out of which an unforeseen and undesigned transgression may ensue" (154-155).
techne--"the sign for an exorbitant doing that depends upon practice but which does not obey the imperatives of practice" (155). Techne is productive; it requires practice or doing, but the doing doesn't define in reverse what it is. "techne can be used to refer to a kind of 'getting through' or ad hoc 'making do' by a subject whose resources are necessarily located in and circumscribed by the field within which she operates...[it] harbors within it the possibility of disrupting, fragmenting, and altering the horizon of human action out of which it emerges...What is 'new,' however, is the attempt to use techne differently by bracketing out the ethical/moral sedimentations that have...been attributed to the word and thereby making it possible for us to refuse to grasp the agent of history as identical with her intentions" (155).
"I am suggesting that if we use techne as a word signifying a way, manner or means whereby something is gained, without any sense of art or cunning, then techne signifies a bringing-about in the doing-of on the part of an agent that does not necessarily take herself to be anything like a subject of historical or...cultural change...techne displaces the active/passive binary...It is, as Derrida would put, the trace of 'the not-seen that opens and limits visibility'" (156).
Back to history
"this essay could be summarized as a call for a gender-sensitive history of Rhetoric that, in working against the ideology of individualism by displacing the active/passive opposition, radically contextualizes speech acts" (156-157)
"the argument I have put forward presses for a feminist intervention into the history of Rhetoric that persistently critiques its own practices of inclusion and exclusion by relativizing rather than universalizing what Aristotle identified as 'the available means of persuasion.'...Put simply, not only would one have to declare 'man cannot speak for her.' One would also have to admit that no individual woman or set of women, however extraordinary, can speak for all women" (157).
"For the academic feminist, however, that story may prove to be the most difficult of all to decipher. For in that story, we must begin to read ourselves as part and parcel of the history we so desperately seek to disown" (158).
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