Beyond the abyss

"When we no longer pretend to abolish aporia, we turn to poroi: practical ways and means for proceeding through the uncertainties of the abyss or interstice" (John Nelson, in Poroi at U Iowa)

Okay then. Let's abolish it.

The aporia, the abyss of language, the would-be end of the trace which contains nothing. Derrida made us realize its existence and that we write (and write and write) to abolish it, to get "closer to reality" through more words (supplement). To add more extras to the DVD, to be "there" from the storyboard to the CGI to the opening night. Derrida told us it was impossible, and he said it over and over, because it was impossible not to repeat.

And then? And then?

I like Nelson's comment here because it tells me postmodernism is "over." Or, at least, postmodernism as a new theory, theory for theory's sake, has ended with his "When we no longer." Yes. Now that we "no longer" have to supplement because postmodernism has done its job, now we can move beyond it, past and through postmodernism to something else.

Ever since Derrida's work exploded the literary scene, people have been trying to label Kenneth Burke as a forerunner, an anticipator of postmodernism. Barbra Biesecker does this in her book; these, however, were attempts to keep Burke as part of cultural capital. If Burke was not postmodern, then he could not be "validly" studied, because "Modernism is so over." Reclaiming Burke as a pre-postmodernist meant he had value again.

But now postmodernity qua postmodernity is over, and although the deconstructionist theory informs what we do, it is not all we do. One can only say "the text is undecidable" so many times. The centre falls apart; it cannot hold--okay, great. But we Act like it holds, and we imagine a center in order to act. Nelson's quote above insists on this; despite the undecidability, the "interminable conversation" to use Burkeian "terms," we make decisions, make texts, inscribe each other, move one another around.

This is Burkeian territory we've returned to, the "practical" and the pragmatic. It's phenomenology informed by structuralism; it's linguistic and social and legal and religious all at once, because we act in a Scene that is all at once.

Is it modern? Is it Postmodern? Is it something else entirely? Does it matter?

What am I doing? What am I "professing"? Is it professing or prophecy when I study texts of warning? In Derrida's language, am I doing archaeology or eschatology? If I am no longer going to pretend I can abolish the aporia, and instead am going to focus on how others manage or negotiate the abyss, what can I write, and how can I write it?

Ever since we watched the first DVD of Lord of the Rings (for whatever reason ;) ), ever since Laura said that "Now we can watch a movie for hours on end" I've been thinking about fandom, about textuality and supplements. I've been watching pop culture manage the aporia and blogging it, going "hmm" at key moments. Rhetorical theory alone cannot tell me what I need, nor can literary theory, nor psychology nor sociology. My parallel structure I played with in my honors project began to think about mimesis (not poesis) as a necessity of rhetoric, but it didn't do enough to connect the literary, the textuality, with desire.

The most problematic concept in Burke is, for me, also the most illuminating. I am refering, of course, to "identification," to the act of "consubstantiation" two tiny little words that make me watch other people watching movies, read myself reading. Where does the author open up a possibility of identification? has been my line of inquiry for two years now, and it is helpful for thinking about the relationship between author and readers, author and the Scene, readers and the Scene.

Oh, but lurking back there is the problem, the one that would make Burke and essentialist if he answered it the way he seems to answer it: Why does the possibility of identification matter if the readers don't want to do it in the first place? How do we really know identification happens, and is it a learned reaction to text in general? Or is it, as Burke and others seem to suggest, inherent, a "mimetic drive" to combine the Self and Other into something Else? Is it, (oh, god) "Natural"?

How do you know? Dana keeps asking. Show me. The surface phenomena are there--the DVDs, the websites, the fanzines, the forums, the TV shows--all asking us to touch the text more, to be absorbed into it and the characters, but not just the characters, the production of the text. Texts are never given to us as autonomous wholes (Here! It's got borders! At Borders!) any more; instead, we are encouraged to see ourselves as co-authors, as participants, as consubstantial with the text, context, and subtext.

Is it "Midrash" come back to us in the land of the non-sacred? Can a vulgar text be Midrashic? What of the division of the sacred and profane (for certainly these texts are profane, completely touchable, dirtied by our common hands)?

Can you do a rhetorical analysis of a Midrash? Can the atemporal prophecy fit into a Pentad? How are we dealing with the aporia--or is the end of our pretending only present in academia? It's one thing to say "we" in a rhetoric journal, it's another to say it to the masses on a DVD.

What would a pop culture text look like if it acknowledged the aporia? Memento only acknolwedges it for its central character, who can never know the origin of his story--it does not tell us that our own reading of his story is itself incomplete, and many will not be able to draw the connection between the main character's memory problem and our own issues with remembering. After all, the DVD has "extras" which show us more, we always know more than the main character, we are always aware of the DVD's textuality. This awareness fools us into believing we've entered the center, we've touched the meaning, we know the text.

I meant for this to be a positive post, a nod toward my field, an appreciative nod that says "Yes, we can do this. We can show how to navigate the black hole; we can get beyond Derrida." I meant to talk about the field, about an article I want to write for Rhetoric Review about readers' contact and contract with a text. About why this matters for dystopian film, for scifi in general. But it's 3:35, and I have to leave the coffee shop where bad coffee shop music is playing.

Amy rethinks Girard

After class yesterday, I am still not completely convinced that I can agree with Girard's theory. But Sandy's explanation tamed the displeasure, somewhat. Some points of revision:
Girard does not himself believe that violence is part of human nature Instead, he sees it as imminent in creation, as an a priori condition for the existence culture and community. This makes me uneasy.
Girard posits the Judeo-Christian tradition as an attempt to work against this requirement of sacrifice. "Jesus was an antisacrificial figure," Sandy said. The "radical inclusion" of Christianity (well, some versions....sigh) is anti-violence (where violence = exclusion from society for scapegoating purposes). But if there's this ether of violence permeating the fabric of culture, then cultures influenced by Judeo-Christian tradition need some sort of outlet, some sort of other violence to hold the community together.

Here I would propose the Burkeian symbolic action, symbolic violence. Ad Bellum Purificandum, toward the purification of war, to purify by transforming it through text. What, then, do we do? Where is this symbolic violence taking place? And is Girard right--have we really managed to create an antisacrificial society (not "un"sacrificial, but one against the idea of the necessity of sacrifice). What about the Cold War? What about Iraq?

Rene Girard makes me angry

Rene Girard makes me angry. But, despite the violence he does to me (his denial of my belief that humans can be at peace), I will not fight him. I have no desire to kill him, or to do a violence in return. Because I have choice.
The lack of agency of the members of the societies Girard discusses is perhaps the most disturbing part of Violence and the Sacred for me. Not even "we moderns" seem to have a choice: if someone hurts us, we hurt them back in an escalating violence. The idea of a restorative justice isn't even argued against--he just doesn't seem to think that forgiveness is an issue.
Which is strange, since he eventually argues that Christianity illuminates the scapegoat mechanism; if Christ's really really senseless death on the cross shows us that our sense of justice is a mess, that we in fact need scapegoats, then doesn't the rest of the story also show us that revenge is not a natural law? Not only did the resurected Jesus (real or metaphorical, doesn't matter!) not take revenge, he didn't encourage his disciples to revenge either. And despite being more powerful than Goku, Vegeta and Gohan combined, Jesus didn't try to do a "violence for good" and overthrow a Roman empire in favor of a peaceful Utopia. Instead of deposing of the king (*cough* Saddam *cough*) to establish a better place, Jesus chose to leave things alone. And he made his disciples choose peace as well--no nighttime raids, no attempt to assassinate various leaders. Just a quiet symbolic action, through a small social movement. Letters, gospels, stories. Narrative. Channeling the revenge drive into positive, non violent action.
But Girard ignores this part, the part covered in Acts (how appropriate that most of the Acts of the appostles were symbolic! Speeches! Sermons! And the occasional healing!) Instead, he focses on the illumination of the mechanism itself. In Girard's Christianity, the religion acts like other rites, holding together a community through ritualistically killing someone on whom all the sins are dumped. The end. The (Western) world, now aware of its own ritual tendencies and their symbolism, can safely move into the atheistic modernity he describes in his progress narrative.
Which makes sense, probably, to those who see us in an atheistic modern world. It probably even makes sense to some Christians, those who, like my father, believe that humankind is evil and will always war with itself. Sure, we need scapegoats. Sure, we need a binary opposition to displace the anger, frustration, aggression.
But that's not what the gospel story says, and, as we said in Sandy's class, that's not even what Shakespeare's tragedies are saying. While Greek tragedies and stories from "primitive" societies focus on the fatalistic nature of violence (that it is fated), both the gospels and Shakespeare (and dystopias, by the way), emphasize choice. Shakespeare probably couldn't have made his plays as exciting without a prior Christianity which emphasizes individual decisions to follow Christ. To choose is to act against fate; sorry Calvinists.
Once we recognize the desire for violence within us, once we recognize that it is, as Girard and others say, almost part of our nature, then we can choose. Blessed are the peacemakers only makes sense if we can choose peace--why bless them if it isn't possible? Why bless someone for something they have no control over? We choose peace, we choose forgiveness, we choose to be meek. We choose to defer to the Other our own desires.
I'm not sure Girard would disagree with me; he'd probably say that I'm thinking of individuals (psychology) while he thinks of communities (sociology). He'd tell me that individuals can choose forgiveness, but for a community--a whole which is entirely different from any and all of its parts, the infinite within the finite--such action is not possible. He'd point to failed Utopian communities. He'd point to the way the early church couldn't hold its communistic tendencies.
And he wouldn't be wrong. I don't think there can be a utopia on earth. (See, Dad, I'm not the idealist you think I am). I think, however, a community can be held together by a ritual other than scapegoating, other than reciprocal violence. It would require a rare set of individuals who all defer to the Other, a group who are all self-reflexive in their daily practices in the public domain, and a group willing to admit its failures of true communual action. As Ursula K LeGuin says, the only possible Utopia is a place that is never stable, always being revised, renewed, upset by revolution. And the revolution does not have to be violent, unless we want to claim that all change is a violence. (not sure how I feel about that claim).
Confession and forgiveness. This is what the literature of the Christian Bible shows us. Symbolic action, not slicing off some guy's ear. Resist the desire to resist.
This is, of course, not postmodern. It's not Foucauldian, it's not even Marxist. It has no place in the academy, especially an academy that claims to have progressed past Christianity. An academy that pretends to be utopian in its desires for a critical pedagogy based in logos.
Again, I quote Fox Mulder. Again, I quote Madeline L'Engle. "I want to believe." "It's okay, I believe enough for the both of us."

Now, some Bus Poetry (written on the bus, that is)
Aphorisms in 3/4 time
Revision is division multiplied
One is that single slash
against zero
which pierces through the tempering of disgust


Amerique du Nord
Rumpled flag in the window
Everywhere there's too much
iconography
Who knows what beast it summons
Whose reign it marks to come?

C'est interdit
Single masks cannot cover the cries,
the rage of the strange we can't avoid
Beauty rests but it doesn't elide
the name of the Age just come undone

Mythemic
If not for the fantasy afforded by myths, how would we play out the faster moments to enjoy? They're not now for learning, but for reforming writer and written. They're mutable, but only can be morphed into each other, strangled hybrids of Oedipus and Juliet. This Juliet has no guide for the dark light carnival.

Apophis [laugh, Dana, Laugh!]

White metal
blade the flame
to inhale what
should have stayed veiled
Grease and smoke
too fast eyes
unlawful system to be
unyoked.

Found Poem on Valentine's Day

I know,
Cut off your happy dialogue
and insert drudgery here

Fall in love
A conflict between youth and age
Youth wins. That's Comedy.

Remember Hal?
He wasn't decent, not humane
not to Falstaff
The dark side
of Shakespeare comes out
the unconscious desires kick in to kill them

[we all know what that has to do with Valentines: Riley Court]

Donc texte surpasse
l'etre
le condition
c'est une texte mythique
ca, c'est pas une texte on peux trouver ici

Freire: Fun With

"Here! Question a dominant ideology!"
"Come to conclusions."
"Burke is more Freirian than Freire"
"Here's a spoon. Who wants me to feed them?"

Je dois lire Derrida encore

Reading Derrida from 5 AM to 7
Again he says Invent!
You knew this would happen
you knew its impossibility was possible
You knew that being one is being two is being three
Create!
Each line is an old line rewritten
"love thy neighbor: do not imagine him"
"Thou shalt not kill"
(inventor of the negative--human!)
Let me tell you a story
let it be an allegory
let it be an allegory of invention
Par le mot Par je commence
ce texte de la verite de la verite
the mirror falls again,
and I cannot see myself
I cannot make myself
I cannot speak.
Without my mirror the One is just a name
Without two or more gathered in his name
no need for counting.
Zero Point Modulator: Look it up.
The Zero point is the beginning without a space
One is a number and not a number
One is the loneliest number without a two.
(Bad love songs deconstruct the invention of the other)