La Loi du Genre: L'etat des Etats Unis

Is a blog a genre? Are there genres of blogs? If so, what follows should be a breach of genre, should create its own category by its presence. It's presence marks my absence, though, that I am not telling you this in person.


Derrida on Blanchot on Dostoyevski on Rousseau...
I am not learned; I am not ignorant
I had to acknowledge that I was not capable of forming a story recit [....]I had lost the sense of the recit story.
Who was being questioned? Who was answering? One became the other. The words spoke by themselves

He is absent to himself in this telling. The story has no end. The part is larger than the whole.

The single member of the genre must then also contain the whole of the genre? To do so is to do a violence, a violation, a penetration of the whole. Such violence is present in sacrifice: Jesus stands for many, Jesus is the exemplar which illuminates the logic of the exemplar.
What would J Denny say?
See the sun slivers sickle inside
See the burdened burning to the snow
Cinders ash as they're sinking inside
Of a hollowed mind caught in the flow

(Or, "Amy reaffirms her Burkeian position")
"What is at stake, in effect, is exemplarity" (227). Each exemplar (repetition) has a relationship to the universal Law or Genre it is an example of. In rhetoric, we take this for granted, that the exemplar is a member of the genre, that it can tell us something about both the larger category and the other members of the category. X is like Y, both of which are members of category Z is a condition of logos itself. Without this principle, I could not argue anything's existence, for if it existed already, I wouldn't need to argue for it. Why does it all make me dream of derrivations in trig?

Derrida relates these to the mathematical set theories. For Jacques, "the law of the law of genre [....]is precisely a principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy" (227). In set theory, the law of the law of genre requires a "sort of participation without belonging." It is, as Sandy says, the infinite within the finite. This is possible because "the trait that marks membership" (the line between the genres) "inevitably divides, the boundary of the set comes to form, by invagination, an internatl pocket larger than the whole." Like the crust of bread, that which marks the boundaries of being are neither part of the being nor NOT part of the being.

Sandy goes further to say that the only moment where the one can stand for--contain--the whole is in sacrificial substitution. Substitution is a moment of violence or trauma.

But this violence is only symbolic, it is not a real pain. Must our symbols be so symbolic that they displace the real violence, real harm done by humans? I cannot ignore the war. Ad Bellum Purificandum--to purify war is to make it only symbollic, Kenneth Burke says. The only way to eliminate war is to purify it by doing harm in text, not life. But to privilege the symbol ignores that we have yet to purify it; to call reading a "violence to the text" is to equate the purified violence with the real violence, which, because of the negation that purity creates, denies the pain of the victims. That is, when we say that re-interpretation is symbolic violence to the original text and we say that violence is happening in Iraq, the two types of violence take on the traits of the other; the symbolic violence is more violent for its resemblance to the bloodshed, and the violence of the "war on terror" is less violent for its comparison to reading.

Ad Bellum Purificandum Toward the purification of war. Burke is a theorist of hope; he can still imagine social change, he believes there are essences, even if our langauge will never let us know them. Even if purification (nullification) is not possible, the "toward" part is. Bin Laden, who enacted real violence, has now taken to the symbolic violence of hate speech on video tape. We do no better when we hate (kill) our enemies. The law of the law of genre states that the very divisions by which we create categories of "friend" and "enemy" are themselves impure--there is a principle of contamination behind the idea of division. Burke says the same, in different words. There is no absolute Other (outside of the divine, I would add), everything can return to the molten center.

In terms of science, we all know that the "solidity" of an object is really quite shaky: at what point do the molecules of the table end and the ones of my hand begin? Are there not electrons that cross between us, shared bits of the universe that make up both me and it? Just because our nerves can't sense the exchange doesn't mean it doesn't occur; I drink the same water as my enemies, and that water--the hydrogen and the oxygen--interact in "my" cells, create my dna, then are redispersed into the air, where they are picked up by others. The lines are so fine, and the physicists keep finding smaller particles, ad infinitum, so that electrons are made of quarks, and quarks are made of strings and strings make up the universe when they move.

Demarcation, then, of one genre of literature to the next is like finding up and down quarks. Isn't it enough that we have found the differences between atoms? Between parts of atoms? Now we must further differentiate...for why? Why agonize over the difference between "the novel" and "comic prose epic"? Why argue the differences among "science fiction" and "speculative fiction" and "dystopian fiction" and "utopian fiction" and "fantasy"? Who gives a damn?

We all give a damn, not just because of our occupational psychosis, but because it helps us give value to the world. And value helps us make decisions, helps us act. Hope, therefore, lies in differentiation, because hope is the possibility of action.

Derrida says "Il n'y a rien de hors-text" --outside the text there is Nothingness, or there is nothing other than text. For Derrida, the lines of "text" and "context" are too fluid to matter, making meaning indeterminate. This makes me uneasy; if I want hope, I have to reject the "therefore" of Derrida's theses. Yes, differentiation is a futile task because we cannot know where the pure essence is, but we still act as though we can, we still base value judgements as though there were easy lines of demarcation, and we, as humans, know no other way. Burke takes this assumption as his starting point; he recognizes the problem of ontology, of Being and Time, of sub-stance, ("Substance-free living! Join Alpha Chi Omega!"), but also notices that this lack of demarcation does not prevent us from hurting (or helping) one another, either physicaly or symbolically. In fact, we do a whole lot based on our belief in a demarcation that doesn't exist, and we use those lines of difference as evidence, as logos. Burke wants us all to be comically Derridian, recognizing the constructedness of our terms, and yet not assume there is no meaning. After all, meaning happens all the time. Meaning helps us elect officials, pass laws, execute inmates, go to war, cut welfare, etc. Meaning--even outside the judiciary, even in "literature"--in texts determines our culture, our Attitude, which is latent action.