Not Knowing, not Being, but Goodness

Levinas: Ethics and Infinity

It's not about knowing (epistemology). It's not about Being (ontology). It's not about God (theological). It's about the Ethical.

Levinas was a student of Heidegger, who worried about being (Dasein). For him, philosophy's question was one of fundemental ontology, of essence, the copula "is". What is? Levinas wanted to move beyond this question of what is and if we can know what is into the realm of action--ethics, the Self and the Other.

But Ethics ("What is ethics") should be situated outside of that question. There's more than just ontology. Do we have to "Know" what is good to do good? No, first you act. Because we can never "know" fully. At some point we have to just sign up to with MVS. Even if they don't want us. The good beyond being, said Plato, says Levinas.

Heidegger worried about Being from the point of view of Time. The nature of the human is embedded in time. But is this the time we all know, where X did happen and Y therefore could not have also happened? The single, simple Aristotlean time. If "Time is the Horizon of Being" as Heidegger wants to say, if there is an analytic affinitutde ("to be" requires limitations), if we are limited by death and old age, then the question cannot cover those parts of living that are outside time. One of which is "How do we position ourselves ethically?"

Heidegger was a Nazi.

"It's hard to forgive Heidegger." We must not do violence, however. And Heidegger's inability to work past the ontological question left an opening for Levinas. Not just to take Heidegger's project, but to turn that project. It is not a question of Time and our own Being, but the Time of the Other (l'autrui). Time is not the limit of our being, but the Other's being is. Not just the Other (a category) but an Other Person, a real living being (no pun intended)--the real neighbor we must love as ourselves (in fact, we can only love ourselves if we love the other).

Oh, what does this have to do with Burke, you ask? (Okay, I ask.) Burke also, like Heidegger, noted that "essence" is a difficult question, that it has something to do with "grounds." Like Levinas, Burke moved the question of being into the question of the other, specifically, consubstantiality and rhetoric. Burke, however, only noted how these appear in communication and society, an anthropological, sociological approach. Burke would never place the theological, the revelatory, or sacred in the same question set. Ethics for Burke can be separated from revelation. He was a humanist. We are "response-able" because we as humans are speaking creatures, inventors of the negative. Burke believed we can act without the voice of the Revealed.

I'm not sure I do.

What I should do? (The ethical) Is what everyone ought to do (Kant). Goes through the juridical, the civic, the logical, a third party.
Levinas asks "What then shall we do?" Is what we should do when faced with a specific Neighbor. Goes through nothing but the Neighbor, is not a civic or societal question.
If it were only You and I, our actions would be easy. But a third party always enters--politics, "always" or "time" or "government" and we act through it instead, complicating our response. Do we bomb Iraq to save the oppressed? Which neighbor are we serving in which party?

What then shall we do? Large action in a democracy must always be produced through a civics. If we could move without government ("anarchy") if we could have only ethical (to the Other) repsonses, then we could have utopia--lack of suffering, equality, keeping our obligations to each other. This is what dystopias point to as the current lack. But if we recognize that we are not acting ethically, we cannot band together to create an ethical utopia--that would again create a new politics, a just politics, but still not one necessarily obliged to the neighbor. As the postmodern dystopianists say, one man's utopia is another's dystopia.

The Levinasian version of utopia is not possible, however. We can never reach that--we're too damn human, as Girard notes. Does this mean we stop trying?

Of course not. Hence Bluffton University's question posed to seniors: "What then shall we do?" We still must act despite the impossibility of acting.

Good luck.

Utopia: Not my class

Read James Berlin for today. Again. Reminded me why I left Rhet/Comp for pure theory. If pragmatic rhetoric is a theory, that is.
They pay me a little over 12,000 per year (plus tuition) to mold young minds. No, that's not quite true. They pay me to produce students. I am a student factory. The students enter my class, use up my resources, and then use those resources to form their studentness. I am not a teacher or a coach, I am their fodder.
Berlin wants (wanted?) composition classes to "teach" resistance to ideology. This is, of course, a ridiculous concept. No one can resist ideology completely, no one can teach resistance, and even if you could, you'd have to teach them to resist your teaching, which would become problematic. But others have said this before me. I leave the circular reasoning to those Marxists (like Allen) who can think about ideology for an extended period of time without making themselves dizzy with regret and guilt.
What bothers me about any composition pedagogy, any teaching theory, is the subsequent classroom the theories imagine being created. They imagine a pocket universe, a utopia in a white walled room, student-citizens emerging bright and motivated. The "radical" pedagogies particularly still see writing and reading through the Romantic rhetoric lens, even those like Berlin who categorically reject "Expressivism." Teach a man to fish, and he eats for life. Teach a man to read and write and he can take down the structures that have him eating only fish.
I loved 1984 because of this Romantic rhetoric that flows through it and other dystopias. As a writer, I want to believe I am acting. No wonder I have taken to Burke's theory of symbolic action so much--if it's not true, I really have no hope. I can't act, not in this cultural context, not given my various limitations. At first glance I should like Berlin because he wants to create whole universities of freshmen resistance through writing/reading/rhetoric. He wants us to use the classroom as a space for protest. He wants the English department to save us all.
And there have been cases of writing as savior. And Burke is right--moving problems and responses into the symbolic realm will most likely purify war, which is very very very good.
And if my students gave a damn, I could almost believe that my silly little ENGL 106 class could change the world.
But they don't give a damn--for the most part. Those who do give a damn about ideology and capitalism and myth and hegemony are too few, and like me, too weak to make a revolutionary stand in West Lafayette. And, from one theoretical perspective, the one I've been working with for three years now, that classroom utopian rhetoric is exactly what I should not be teaching toward.
If I'm right--or rather, if Burke is right--both dystopian and utopian rhetorics are conservative. More frightening is that dystopian rhetorics might be even more conservative than utopian ones. If I teach resistance in class, if I am able to create a utopian space amid the dystopian university (and beyond) then things can't be all that bad. And I am creating that space only in a university that is, frankly, far more egalitarian than much of the corporate world. As long as my students see that I am still around to make these dystopian claims, then the exigency toward action is lessened. No one really rebels until it's too late. The American Revolution is said to start with the "shot heard round the world," not a symbolic shot in a pamphlet from Thomas Paine. Symbolic action is, for the moment, not recognized.
Remember the protests before the war? Yeah, neither does Bush. Because symbolic action is not valued. If I teach my students in my utopian classroom how to resist symbolically I may be doing more harm than good. Especially if they start to believe that resistance is the job of flaky English professors and their hippie friends in the College of Liberal Arts.
And "job" is an interesting word here the Berlin wouldn't use. I am getting paid by and institution to teach "writing"--not resistance, not ideology formation. If I pretend I have a utopia in my class, I am not only invoking my own ideologies, but I am lying -- the class is just a class, entrenched in a university which is run by the state and tax payers' dollars; their Calculus TAs get more money than I do because my knowledge has less cultural capital.
So what do I do? Make them read 1984? Show Fahrenheit 451 like I did in class today? Create assignments that force them to action? Remind myself I've only got 16 weeks per set of students?
Hide out in some little liberal arts college in New England?
And if I actually don't attempt to produce utopia, if I ignore my instincts to teach awareness of hegemony, then I am failing myself. I study the rhetoric of dystopian fiction because I believe these fictions can show us how to act and how not to act. The books tell me I should start resisting now, do all I can to avoid Big Brother or book burning or the Benefactor (so many B words in my world).
Dystopias are normative, utopias are revolutionary. Don't teach the negative, then, teach toward the possibilities. It's not that we are in a dystopia now (for that's certainly not what Plato or More were saying) but that we are not in a utopia. Plato (damn him) and More and later Bellamy saw possibility, hope, in what could be and wrote in hope that we would not, perhaps, achieve heaven on earth, but that we would do what we could to be the most human we could be, to achieve as much as we can, given our various flaws (see Burke's "Definition of Human").
Berlin, in other words, imagines not only utopia, but asks that we implement it, whereas the utopian treatises and the dystopian fictions ask only that we act in the present. There are various dangers in this rhetoric--we always run the risk that our students will still see this project as only belonging in one space, the English studies space, or that they will not see the class beyond a set of assignments--but if I am to act responsibly as a "teacher," as a pacifist, I have to do something.
So as contradictory as it seems, if I want to encourage social justice in my students, I cannot create my classroom as a utopia where ideologies are abolished and egalitarianism reigns. I also cannot create the outside world as an evil dystopian land where the government is controlling us and corporations own us. Both rhetorics seem to fail to encourage future action on the part of the students.
And none of these seem to have anything to do with creating good writing.
Which is why I'm going to go read my theory like a good little Composition studies drop out, and hope that my colleagues will find a way to reconcile the two ideas of the job of the composition classroom without me.

On reading Girard's extended theory

Poetic notes on "Things hidden since the foundation of the world"

A hinge
on ritual
covering misconstrued Gospels
Instead of throwing branches:
prohibition
Propels fragile mamals
Why to be a dog--
no permanent sexuality
no possession of desire of possession of desire

Subdivision,
"Modern society has develped a violent collection of failsafes
through humanity's production of history"
We are in a spiral of surrogates
a nautilus of DNA and victims
The exception:
the confused mass
of arbitrary victims
Symbolic people witnessing each other
Ever increasing until a word appeared
Birth
L'arc en ciel
(See page 103)evading the inn
Les choses cachee
depuis la fondation du monde
depuis la morte de Dieu
What do we do with the Hindus?
Qu'est-ce qu'on faisait avant la Porte?

"The complete renunciation of violence"
empirical empire on the pyre.
Ghost in the Shell, in the Machine
in the mechanism
evading the innocence
Just because he knows its rhetoric
Just because we've seen the wires
The Budlight ads are still funny.
"nothing but the blood"
Tant mieux.

Invisible tombs
No culture without a tomb
hieroglyphs encoding gods of the gears
Oedipus, Ra, Dionysus, Bachhae.
Pure difference
Began again with interlocutors,
again.
Outside Cheektowaga University
The Bible deconstructs
everything:
all language is based on mythic substitution;
all substitutions are for a sacrifice.

Conceiving psychology,
Totem, taboo, the inefficient machine
(it's a management technique)
Moving toward the Buddhist
Go east to understand the absent myths
I'm human
"the animal who sacrifices"
(inventor of the negative)
Stoichasitic
to stay to eat bananas,
let the weak ones meet the knife.

They've begun to differentiate themselves
from those who can grapple with bananas.
Or each other.
Not many cultures survived
who thought living in a volcano
was a groovy thing to do.

Here I'd have to ask about the women
What do we do with
the Marys who threw no stones?
Hebraic thought is with the ethical
Tragic is with the critical
I am with the heretical
Scapegoat stories in Sethe
(Daniel Jackson killed him)
587 BC Chronicles in the picaresque
falling through the canon
Council of Nicea
making text into truth.

"Is this an account of
a guy named Jesus who all this stuff happened to
and he says some things
and some guy like Paul who never met him
writes about him
and these churches write about him
and by the 3rd century, these churches create a canon
then the 16th century ('I am a flaming athiest') with the Protestants."
"These Gospels take all these stories
and superimpose them on this guy named Jesus."

This is not just one more story
this is something like
the story of stories
(Jesus is Derridian before Derrida)
('Jesus gave an atheist account of these
mythical stories').
"I'm interested in what Nietzche said
what Hegel said--those are my gods--they're white men
they can do the job."

You don't need truth if you have Midrash
You don't need truth
You don't need.

A vision of the messianic

I see you in the finite,
Which is, of course, wrong.
I see you as a condition of my caught breath,
As a phantasm of a deeper structure.

I should pray for stronger words, angrier words
For words against completion
Something to beat a rhythm of protest,
And to pace the dampened streets at night.

I want to shiver in the air,
For without these I am hungry.
I see you as a condition of cradles and graves;
They fed into the delta valley.

Every other line is empty
Of devotion and vocation to cloister.
Not me, not in context, not in the northeast,
A condition of angrier words.

I've been here too long already
my blood stagnates when I taste
the exhaust of suburbia
My hands remember the spike
of fiberglass splinters

IRC, Mosaic, and Old School Communication

Or, /me slaps #nick with a large trout

Susan Herring, writing in 2001 (ah, the golden days!), questions the matrices of gender, power, and online communication. Something I'd like to think about: intersections of magic, the internet, and gender. Why "Wizzards"?

So here we might mention something about synchronous and diachronous textuality?
[15:06] *** driscodl has joined the chatbox
[15:06] *** cdoran has joined the chatbox
[15:06] *** Jen Backman has joined the chatbox
[15:06] *** rlnichol has joined the chatbox
[15:06] *** Allen Brizee has joined the chatbox
[15:06] *** Jess has joined the chatbox
[15:06] *** mgutowsk has joined the chatbox
[15:06] what is "diachronous"?
[15:07] It's much 'quieter' now....
[15:07] huh...amy...huh....what is it?
[15:07] in a standard time line
[15:07] nothing is equal - all rhetoric is political
[15:07] oh, okay
[15:08] What are we talking about?
[15:08] Here I'd say something about fanfiction and authority and gender


Conversations With Jon
Let's all be quiet and praise Robert Redford
for his contributions to Mankind. All the President's men
can't put order into chaos.
Again, I wonder: Do artists play guitar?
The answer is always Madagascar.
Where was the President when the Vietnamese died in our capitalist schemes?
Madagascar.
What is the fourth largest island on Earth?
Madagascar.
How do we reconcile pacifists and patriots?
Madagascar.
Who is our god?
Madagascar, Madagascar, Madagascar.
Let us all join hands and encircle the whole of our universe: America!
Send rice and pork.
Let them all eat cake, Jon, with Canadians while they wait for their friends to become pop stars.
But when push comes to love, a country in Africa will always be Madagascar,
so we can share inside jokes. Mix the small world's known images (Elm tree, Dog, Chair),
in the cauldron of the body until Paris is just a tower, New York was just two towers,
and Egypt is towers shaped like pyramids.
The smog we breathe is dope to the soul. But you know that.
In the baptistery, in blue costumes, in choir gowns, we will always have television. And Madagascar.
I miss being self-conscious of: bomb dropping, War Memorial Criticism, and the reporter's gaze right into our mouths;
she strings out quotes like handkerchiefs from a magician's sleeve.

Biblical language now: Thy grace befalls our plaster globes, oft colored sienna. Thou art Madagascar,
maddening allure of Madagascar drawing backward solid bodied objects.

Now you have etched yourself with frog brains and red ink. Hit play on the VCR, and wait to be overcome
with Disney and the urge to utter

Ethiopia.