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).





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