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: 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:
  1. "the will to systematize (the) language (of composing)
  2. "the will to be its authority"
  3. "the will to teach it to students"
Essentially, Vitanza will take issue the assumption that we can codify, master, and disseminate writing 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

  1.  Foundational--current traditional rhetoric, expressionistic rhetoric, and cognitive rhetoric.
  2. 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.
CONTRARY COORDINATES WITHIN CRITICAL THEORIES

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:

  1. The addressor--in control of laguage (authority)--Habermas; universal/political ideal.
  2. The addressee--listens only, no control of language
  3. 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
The second pragmatic views the speaker and listener as coproducers of the world (antifoundational/social-epistemic)
  • 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 third pragmatic will be dealt with in the third countertheses

"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).









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