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)

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.

A non literary poem

Derrida says literature, that which illuminates textuality and referentiality, does not include poems. So here is a poem about the body of texts we signify as "belonging to" Derrida, that which he "signed" (qu'il a signe?), and yet this poem points to its own textuality.
So HA.
Ce ci n'est pas une texte

Have you ever seen yourself on a bus or subway or streetcorner
not just something like you, but you in all your problematic glory
and seen your own eyes reveal the despeartion you thought
your laughter hid?

the gasps come then
even as you open the mailbox
not from the lack of checks or possibility of bills
but because the past was present

Before the law, in front of and in a previous time to
prior to and the foundation of
the Law that makes us make sense of the swarm of la vie
the "il faut que" and the "interdit"
La loi est interdit: it is prohibition itself and is prohibted
It is behind us, we are before it, and cannot bow down
because we are outside it--all are outlaws qui est hors de la loi.

That guy with the dyed red hair thought he was
defying some law, but the law is not present
it is only re-presented by people, who are voices for a silent mark
If I could have deferred that moment, I would have.
He is desirable because he cannot ever be had; he represents desire.

Il faut que
we notice that faut and fault and fall are all alike
When we kill the father, he is more present
when we killed Jesus, he became holy
and only by being alive can we be dead, says Jacques
no violence in killing, for the dead are more present
but it hurts, and pain is the root of all ethics

If to end "ci falt" is to "finish although incomplete"
then the only completeness to be found
can be found in those that do not declare finis
All stories are prematurely ended.

It's turtles all the way down
it's desire of desire, to have the need to need
that I see in that girl with the sparkling eyes
his violet glasses are from 1999,
a reflection and defelction I wanted to pass through

There is nothing in between us but colored glass
I am before the you I've created for me
and cannot reach you through the layers of la glace
Je n'ai pas le droit to melt the ice
Je n'ai pas le fort to touch the sacred

At ERC, again

In Amy's 106 class, Role playing: Interview practice.
Jake to Ed: What's your passion [gesures with hands]
Ed: Drugs.


It's hard to miss Boston
when the air is wet like this
and the pipes are exposed
on the ceiling of the coffee shop.

I have a palimpsest of buses
of brick-walled dim rooms
of expressivist photography, of harmonies,
each layer denies the other
each sip stops my breath like the first.

I would have kissed him,
you, if not for the trench coat's smoothness
against my gloves.
I would have enshrined you there,
poised, suspeneded by the quarter note triplets.

Il n'y a pas de hors-text.
Il n'y a pas de l'or text.
Il n'y a que mon text.
La texte, c'est moi.
Et personne ne lis cette texte la.

The Longest Post in the world: Armstrong Part 2

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Run Nancy, Run! (The Novel)

On Nancy Armstrong's "Introduction: The Politics of Domesticating Culture, Then and Now." Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Poitical History of the Novel. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987. 3-27.
Amylea's Part I.
Some initial qustions from the first page: Why is it called "domestic" fiction? How did it get that name? Does signifying it as "domestic" only add to the created and assumed distance between "literature" (male) and "popular fiction" (that is, "low" and female)? Even as Armstrong writes to illuminate the power of domestic fiction, she must differentiate it from the privileged term because we have no other way of talking about it, of singling it out for discussion without demoting it.
Of course, this is not her fault. It is, in fact, what she is writing against. Can criticism be a form of social action? Burke would say so, and I think he'd call this type of lit crit "poetry."

     Armstrong ("Nan"? Nance?) wants to connect fiction and desire: "Most fiction, which represented identity in terms of region, sect, or faction, could not very well affirm the universality of any particular form of desire. In contrast, domestic fiction unfolded the operations of human desire as if they were independent of political history. And this helped to create the illusion that desire was entirely subjective and therefore essentially different from the politically encodable forms of behavior to which desire gave rise" (9, emphasis added). In other words, the unprivileged form of fiction, domestic fiction, inscribes desire. As it is the unprivileged term, despite all its power as fiction, it becomes an invisible actor. Domestic fiction ("chick lit"?), in order to talk about desire at all, must separate it from the legitimated forms of commentary--the political, civil, social. As the two further diverged, we ended up with a "two kingdom theory" of desire: The novels changed social behavior, but could not be seen as actors; instead, mores for those behaviors were created seemingly without a history, without a past. Their source was unspeakable, and thus could not be named as the source. Having no past, the mores took greater hold; they seemed eternal (no origin means no ending?), true. And thus, despite the subversive, representative anecdotal nature of the novels, domestic fiction became "unliterary" and unnoticed.

Until now.

      Armstrong gives a different social history of the novel than Watt--instead of saying that social conditions gave rise to the novel, she implies (from a Foucauldian standpoint) that both the social conditions and the novel are in a web of power, pushing and pulling each other, mutually mutable. While the history of the male novel is the one privileged, it has been priviledged after the fact. Both forms were at work, and they are more difficult to extrude from one another--unless one simply looks at the gender of the author. Armstrong uses the idea of "cultural hegemony" to find her way outside the text (a major cultural studies problem). How, we must ask, did the hegemony of that day and this day create our current ideas about desire? How do the novels inscribe and create desire? How do they temper it, domesticate it, turn that subversive human need to possess into something socially acceptable, socially stabilizing (marriage, the "Cinderalla" complex of needing to find the perfect man to have a good life). The idea that "love" (not desire) is the ultimate goal? That class, money, status do not mean as much as "true love"?

Oh barf. Just in time for Singles' Awareness Day (a.k.a. "Saint" Valentine's Day).

What I think Armstrong will miss, based on her overview of her methodology and Foucauldian association, is how the texts themselves create desire--the rhetorical dimension of the texts. Burke describes how the plot and "argument" of a novel (actually, of any good "poetry") lead us to desire. We are assimilated (consubstantiated) into the text's form, recognize it, become part of it. As the texts progresses, we become aware of the construction, and we want to know the end. We almost know the end, we chant along with it, racing toward the conclusion. First, then, next. Even as the novel speaks of desire, gives us a representative anecdote of how to desire, what appropriate desire is, it causes us to desire. And that parallel construction of form/content and effect is especially good rhetoric.
But I doubt Armstrong will go that far.
To Be Continued....

Chili's, sushi, and "love" in the English department

Last year Anna said there was no love in our English department at Northeastern. I vowed that the next place I settled (as close as I ever get to "settled") would have love. With, like, people and everything.
Alors, c'est vrai.
Next weekend is Fun with Sushi. mmmmmmmm Raw FISH.
I suppose I should start in on my reading. Derrida is kicking my absent/present ass. If writing's goal is to make us absent enough to ourselves so that we can represent ourselves, then....something about the internet and the "presence" indicated by avatars, "instant" messaging, and the less present world of cyberspace text goes here. Can we say internet writing is different (differAnt?) simply because it purports to be less present (space) and more present (time)? Or does that not matter because writing in books or on paper is equally ephemeral: it can be burned, or lost or fade?
Is all self representation a type of absence? And aren't we always representing ourselves? (A self? A "selph," as Burke would say?) So even when I go out to Chili's with my friends, am I not absent to myself? Perhaps that's what we like. Too much presence is a bad thing. Madeline L'Engle wrote that most humans can't handle too much reality. Real reality would fry us.
Fry....mmmmmm eggs.

Your Hair Should Be Purple

Intense, thoughtful, and unconventional. You're always philosophizing and inspiring others with your insights.

What's Your Funky Inner Hair Color?

Cool. Now I know what to buy for next weekend.

You Are Japanese Food

Strange yet delicious. Contrary to popular belief, you're not always eaten raw.

What Kind of Food Are You?

Duh.

Your Hidden Talent

You have the natural talent of rocking the boat, thwarting the system. And while this may not seem big, it can be. It's people like you who serve as the catalysts to major cultural changes. You're just a bit behind the scenes, so no one really notices.

What's Your Hidden Talent?

Right. So this fabulous dissertation I'm going to write on rhetoric and subversive/dystopian fiction...that's going to be my contribution. Woo. Hoo.
I need to go protest something somewhere.

Watt Part 2

The link above has nothing to do with Ian Watt, novels, or the 18th Century. It does, however, take you to the online edition of The Bloody Theatre, or, the Martyrs Mirror of the Defenseless Christians, Who Baptized Only Upon Confession of Faith, and Who Suffered and Died for the Testimony of Jesus, Their Saviour, From the Time of Christ to the Year A.D. 1660 Complied Ffrom Various Authentic Chronicles, Memorials, and Testimonies. Nice title.

     As for Watt: I have a few thoughts which do not go together, and probably never will. First, I can't help but notice how similiar his argument is to that of Kenneth Burke. Both of them find that "both the philosophical and the literary innovations must be seen as parallel manifestations of larger change" (Watt 31)--For "manifestations," insert "symptoms" and you have Burke's idea of literature as arising from a particular Scene, as a "stylized and strategic response" to that scene. What Burke would emphasize about ALL writing ("poetry" he says) is that it is rhetorical in that it tries to create identifications and identity. When Watt talks about "the various technical characteristics" of the novel, of the "stylistic [classical] tradition of fiction" that the novel does not have, of the novel's "break [...] with the accepted canons of prose style" (27-29), he is forgetting that those very stylistic changes are rhetorical changes. If literature is a stylized response, a change in style is a change in argument. It is not enough to simply state that "the" novel breaks with traditional style; we must now identify that style and what it does. Style, as much as content, determines reception and Attitude changes in the audience.

     Which is why it is important to rethink Watt's statement on the novel's structure: "What is often felt as the formlessness of the novel, as compared, say, with tragedy or the ode, probably follows from this: the poverty of the novel's formal conventions would seem to the the price it must pay for its realism" (13). There are MANY problems with this statement. To begin with, let me point to all of the economics metaphors Watt uses: "poverty," "price to pay," later, "cost of," etc. While I realize that writing is a commodity, the language of impovershment seems inappropriate for some reason--I guess I'll work that out later.

      More importantly, however, is his claim that the novel does not quite meet the standards of tragedy. While the novel form is "freer" in a sense, over time it has become formalized. In fact, if I remember correctly, some of the Formalists claimed that there is little difference between Greek and novel plot lines. There is more variance allowed, but that variance is still held to conventions. In fact, as I have argued to death, dystopian and utopian novels have a fairly fixed structure that has only begun to be experimented with. There are stock characters, predictable tragic heroes, journeys home, etc. I'm not sure why Watt thinks there is no form to the novel: Pamela and Moll Flanders are both about the struggles of a pretty girl and her ability to work through those struggles using her wits (Moll being a phystical actor, Pamela working symbolically). Both meet some older woman who is corrupt and helps them see inside the cagey world of working women. Both learn lessons about deception. They may take different approaches, but both end up in the same damn place: at home, with a husband and a child, happily ever after. In the end, the women reading the novel are no different than Moll or Pamela: they do not need to go out and experience this themselves because Moll and Pam have shown that no matter what we do, we all end up alike. And that's a comfort. And it's a form. How else could we have a tragic novel?

Take that.

      The epistilary form of Pamela (and lots of others) lends itself to Kenneth Burke's idea of identification and consubstantiality. The best rhetoric--the only rhetoric--depends on the rhetor's ability to create an identification between himself and his audience. Because writing lacks the immediacy of speech (shut up Derria), because the speaker is absent, identification must be got by other means than mere presence and proximity. The temporal realism of Pamela allows us to move with her (as Richardson's mouthpiece), to be connected to her in time, if not space. While it makes for strange reading if you think about it too hard, the temporal proximity makes up for the lack of action. Pamela is about words, about argumentation, about a woman's ability to speak when silenced, symbolically act when unable to effect change elsewhere. Because of this, not much "happens," but due to the presence the text purports, we do not feel the drag of mere conversation between made up people. It's like a soap opera (or Battlestar Galactica, or InuYasha)--the speech matters only because we are already connected to the speakers.

      Why is Watt's framework still present after nearly 50 years? Why do we still feel the need to at least read it, if not address it? Even I, not knowing anything about the field, felt drawn to his book. First, I think, he is the first person to take the novel seriously, as a work of art. Secondly, he, like Burke, seems to be ahead of his time, in attributing cultural factors to the novel's rise (whether or not he got it right doesn't matter to me as much as the fact that he does not give the Romantic argument of "spontaneous overflow of emotion" for invention). His argument is difficult to breach; he argues that causality as a topoi is ever present in the novel, and this is the very topoi he uses (novels were caused by X, Y, Z). If you accept one part of his argument, you feel compelled by the rest. In linking philosophy to literature, he adds to his ethos and logos. His pathos is lacking, but it usually is in this type of writing.

      In the end, however, Watt gives us a starting place, something to hold onto as a master narrative. The Romantic narratives still hold today; we should not be surprised that this one is equally compelling. Watt's text acts as an island to stand on in the ocean of data, the sea of text and context. It is an organizing principle where there were none before. In creating his framework, he has accomplished a monumental, albeit probably incomplete, task: he's managed to give us a leg to stand on. To not address that leg as we add others would be to try to build a building from the top down. Even if the newer theories and criticism end up undoing Watt, they must first return to Watt to, as Burke says, return the terms to the molten center, where terms are at play and ideas are indefinite (pun intended).

      As for the Martyrs Mirror: Is it literature? Gerald's language seems to imply that it is, at least, somewhat fictive, somewhat in a "story" mode. That, however, does not literature make, according to Derrida. Burke, however, says that any symbolic performance is "poetry" when it does something, when it responds to something. Which stance shall I take?

What, then, shall we do?

Blogthings--Amy's post Derrida fun

      I hadn't intended on reading this much Derrida...EVER. Not that I hate Derrida, as some do. I find his ideas...sparky. Little flashes of light behind my eyes. I latch onto the singular moments I understand. Then I go back, and reread and reread. Reading Derrida requires enacting his ideas--recognizing that writing allows us to return, to re-mark, re-iterate. And one MUST return to writing, or it is not real writing; if something is perfectly clear, one cannot call it "writing"--there is no need. All writing, then, attempts to reveal even as it conceals. Literature is "literature" because it illuminates this relationship.
     It also illumniates the relationship of general to specific, of genre to member of genre--whole to part. It points out its own conventions and the necessity of those conventions; otherwise, we would not be able to read the text. But the conventions are repetitions for which there is no original; there is no "ubertext" which taught us all how to read a certain genre. As much as we want to call 1984 the prototype dystopia, it is only one member of a group, which we can only recognize as a group and not singularly. We could not, that is, have "learned" to read a genre from some original text--because we never would have been able to read that text in the first place. Therefore, to call Pamela the first "novel" is a ridiculous distinction; there is no first novel; they are all copies (with, of course, slight variations) of some other structure. No novel is entirely within the "novel" genre, either. There is no pure example of a genre, only hybrids; our social relations encourage us to name these as genre members, for ease of discussion.
     Where does that leave Miller, then? Miller says we recognize genres based on their actions. This does not seem contrary to Derrida, more like a supplement (if I am allowed to use that word in such a way). If Derrida (and Burke! They overlap so much!) wants to say that there is no pure genre, Miller will take the more pragmatic (BURKE) angle, by asking us to consider the fact that we do name genres, despite their impurities (Burke says that purity is barely possible, and if it is possible, is a destruction of essence). How can we do so, with so many "constellations" of forms shifting and changing? What is a good way to talk about these things that we use, but cannot define an essence of? Like Burke, (and lots of other rhetoricians), Miller points to the effect; like the wind, which we cannot see, genres are not quite visible to us except by what they do. It's the doing that matters here, not the essence, or our overall Western inability to discuss essence and being. We still must act.
     The dystopian (topian?) novel is a hybrid genre. If it were merely a "novel" we would call it so; however, we feel the need to include that adjective, to point to a difference. How is it different? What is the social action that changes? It is, at least, more subversive than the "regular" novel (although I would argue that as a genre, novels are fairly subversive in themselves). But Burke said that most revolutionary rhetoric is conservative...is dystopian fiction conservative? I want to say no, because of how 1984 came to me, how it came to symbolize everything that Hum and Monty and (oh god) Derek were doing in their little punky universe in high school. How Marx inflitrated our (their?)attempts to break the hegemony of Ashland so unsuccessfully that it just about drove them mad. And Orwell, to me, seemed to be describing the extremes of what I was seeing; total control, absolute hegemony, the need to hide subversion underground. The feeling of being in "lock down." Reading Orwell was a subversion; he wanted the text to be revolutionary--that much you can feel--and even if it did turn out to be, as Burke predicts, conservative, the act of reading something known as revolutionary is itself a subversion. I'm not saying this well. It doesn't matter what actions 1984 leads to in this case; it's the act of reading that is subversive, that is a change in attitude. Even if the resulting actions only maintain the current status quo, they are still revolutionary.
     Pamela on the other hand, or other novels, do not have this same call to action within them. They may lead to action due to the representative anecdote, and reading them may be seen as subversive (not really any more, but in the 18th century it was), but the novels do not call attention to the social situation in the same way. The defamiliarizing aspects that "science fiction" is defined by allow for a social transformation rhetoric. This defamiliarization, this hidden-yet-obvious commentary on the dangers of the present is what makes the adjective "dystopian" necessary.
     Is Moll Flanders subversive? Yes and no. As Burke says, that which seems subversive is often actually conservative. This is why the ending matters (entelechy!); if Moll had been caught and punished for "real," the subversion would have failed. The representative anecdote would tell us that "even if theiving and other non-social activities are fun for awhile and lead to good things, there is eventually a consequence. Do not desire this life, young ladies, for Moll only ends up in a bad situation." That Moll escapes and lives without consequences means that the representative anecdote is exactly as DeFoe states in his thesis: Sometimes you have to steal to make a living. Society sucks; there is no choice. Good job, DeFoe!
     However, we must look not only at the representative anecdote, but how the text is actually read--there may be an "obvious" anecdote for us, but for the original readers (and later readers...) a different "moral" may appear. The fact that Moll was so popular makes me immediately question its subversive abilities: If attitudes were indeed changed (if the Pentad shifted due to the Act of reading), and there were so many attitudes to be changed, why was there no middle class uprising? Why did young ladies not take to theiving? The critics of the day feared this outcome, but it did not happen. Why not? What prevents someone from acting on the (proposed) attitude change?
     Why do violent video games not lead to violent children?
     Here is the question of rhetoric. To be effective, one must have a very tight mimesis, a strong mimetic desire, the desire for complete identification. You must lose yourself and become the speaking/writing Other for there to be a resulting Act. What Moll failed to do, and what video games fail to do for most children/teens is create this identification. While I am engrossed in the action of Moll (wheee theiving), I am not able to identify with her, due to the time and context change. Her own readers were not themselves in her condition (or they couldn't have afforded the novel)--a revealed/concealed distance is present, one rhetoricians are always trying to overcome.
     It is the problem of communication in general: We cannot speak as the angels. Angels have perfect communication, no trace, no reiteration, no remarking. No doubt. Lucky angels. We, however, always have the problem of the Other, who we want to be like, who we can imitate, but never become so wholly as to (commune)icate.
     This is where Gerald would say something about Christianity--where he has said something about Christianity. What did Jesus do that we could not? As the Son of the Logos, he was able to become part of us completely, and yet remain human enough for sacrifice. Jesus was the Other and himself all at once. As Gerald said, because of this, Christianity's main job is to "seek the distinction of radical inclusion."
     And I still am not sure how to do that.

     Enough heavy stuff.

You Are a Soy Latte

At your best, you are: free spirited, down to earth, and relaxed At your worst, you are: dogmatic and picky You drink coffee when: you need a pick me up, and green tea isn't cutting it Your caffeine addiction level: medium

What Kind of Coffee Are You?

Medium???????? MEDIUM? Not EVEN!

Your Personality Profile

You are dignified, spiritual, and wise. Always unsatisfied, you constantly try to better yourself. You are also a seeker of knowledge and often buried in books. You tend to be philosophical, looking for the big picture in life. You dream of inner peace for yourself, your friends, and the world. A good friend, you always give of yourself first.

The World's Shortest Personality Test

Um. Hmm. So much for not having compassion. They're close, I suppose. Not bad for an internet quiz.

What would Burke say about this?

Um.

Hmm.

Blogging the Novel--Hunter, part 1

Some thoughts on J. Paul Hunter's "The novel and social/cultural history," to be revisited later

I enjoyed Hunter's piece, probably because it's the first cultural studies like item I've read in a while. His concerns are my concerns, his assumptions are my assumptions...but I, of course, have this little Burke in my head (the Parliament of Voices seems to be ruled by one short rhetorician...)

Hunter begins with the assumption that "Novels [...] explicitly render manners, habits, customs, and beliefs that differ from culture to cutlure, and they depend heavily on the particulars of time and place" (10). As I noted in my Watt entry, both time and place are essential to the argumentative force of the text. But what is it that novels argue for?

Hunter also states that the early novels are readable "even if you know nothing of the history of their time and place, but often conflicts in the plot--and subtle differences between different characters--derive from the interpretations of desires, needs, and values that are culturally based" (10). I would argue that it is not subtle at all--that those particulars of the place are essential for the defamiliarization aspect of the rhetoric of fiction. That those who read the novels without the same understandings as the audience of the original context are reading an entirely different novel, and that novel has an entirely different rhetorical effect. In fact, it may no longer be a "novel" at all, for the readers in the new context. Because the novel bases its identifications in the particular, not the universal, the consubstantiality among author/narrator and reader changes as time and place change.

In other words, 1984 may not be a dystopian novel any more. Texts within a genre can be re-ordered as their function within a culture shifts. This is one of the wonderful things about the printed text; as Derrida points out, texts now outlive their contexts--writing anticipates death. Pamela no longer incites young women to social subversion. Pamela is now so legitimated within the academy that it cannot have the same representative anecdote. I'm not even sure if there is a representative anecdote for 21st century readers, unless those readers are aware of Pamela's context.

While Hunter never uses Burkeian phrases, I find Burkeian ideas throughout (big surprise). When he states that our view of the 18th century was once "appealing for its escapism in the midst of World War I" he acknowledges the Symbolic Action of the narratives we create.

Blogging the novel--Watt, part 1

Note that this is not "Blogging a Novel"

I made the mistake of twitching at the name of Jane Austen in my very first "Rise of the Novel" class. It has become so second nature that I don't even notice that I do it anymore. At Bluffton, this would have awarded me the same sort of chidding, yet light hearted look Mrs. Cleaver gave the Beav when he got into trouble. "Oh, you silly boy," or something, followed by a knowing shake of the head.
Instead, Emily Allen jumped on me and claimed she would reform me.
Oops.

For the record, I will state that I do not hate the 18th Century (whatever that may mean) as much as I hate William Wordsworth. In fact, all the revolutions make it loads of fun for a rhetorician of subversive moments like me. And while I would not read Jane Austen's work in a bubble bath, I would read various cultural criticism of it while in downward dog position (an excellent reading position, as the blood flows to your head).

In the Summer of Insanity (2004) I ran across several references to Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel. I checked it out and read, I think, the first chapter before returning to Murakami's Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World. It did, however, raise several dystopian questions in my mind, and some problems with genre studies in general. Emily has given us a precis of the first two chapters of Watt's book, and I found myself writing very similar notes to what can be found in the tiny black notebook from the SOI2004.

Particularly, I was working through the problem of "topia" in general. What does it mean to have a genre (here I am thinking of a multifaceted "u/dystopian" genre that combines both versions) defined by its attention to place? Watt says that the novel, in general is special because it pays particular attention to time and space. But the "topian" fictions take this aspect of the novel and make it a main component of the plot.

Watt also says that the novel is concerned with linking "past and current events through temporality and causality" (Allen paraphrasing Watt). Causality is an important word here, as I have mentioned in my "Star Wars" blog. The idea that actions X and Y lead to consequence Z are essential to the topian rhetorics; without a notion of an individual's ability to effect change, the topian novel has no argument.

And "individual" is important, as Watt notes, to novels in general as well. Instead of some universal human, novels tend to particularize their characters. But here we have a problem of causality when thinking about dystopian fictions, which are almost exclusively concerned with the individual's ability to remain a unique person in the face of a totalitarian regime. Did this concern with originality come from the novel as a genre itself, or the cause a more complex mixture of changes in beliefs about humanity in general? That is, are the fear of the unindividuated masses depicted by dystopian fiction and the novel's concern with the individual both "symptoms of" (as Burke would say) some larger movement? How do they feed into one another so that by the late 1930s Huxley can write about the Alphas and the Betas (etc) and their monotonous routines with such fear?

What is important from this (yeah, like I was going to answer those questions above) is that with the novel's "rise," characters in fiction were given added Agency (whee Burke). But Watt is not a cultural-rhetorical theorist. He only begins to think about the possible effects not only on individual readers, but on the fabric of their society. When he states that the "pirated" versions of the novel had little to do with the rise of the novel as a genre, he is missing a very big point. Just as pirated and fan-subbed versions of anime have driven that genre as well as shaped it, I would imagine that the pirated versions of novels eventually shaped the novels being written.

And what of the serialized nature of the novel? That the so-called middle class readers of the novel could only read in increments is especially important to the fanfiction movement. (Amy's question of the decade: Were novels the new epic? And if so, have we supplanted it again with another genre?)

And for the love of the now demonized Johnny Damon, "Britain" was not so isolated, Watt! Moll Flanders proves that! You can't talk about the origins and sources of the novel without considering FRANCE. Il faut qu'on le souvienne!

Il faut que je continue ce blog apres ma classe du roman.

Everyone else is doing it

Kari's blog features her results from bluepyramid.com's famous internet quizes. (Does Quizzes have two Zs?) I'm a copy cat. At least I'm not like Danielle, who found out she's like the Webster's Dictionary. A dictionary. Not even the OED, but the sucky generic American one. Poor girl.

You're The Sound and the Fury!

by William Faulkner

Strong-willed but deeply confused, you are trying to come to grips
with a major crisis in your life. You can see many different perspectives on the issue, but you're mostly overwhelmed with despair at what you've lost. People often have a hard time understanding you, but they have some vague sense that you must be brilliant anyway. Ultimately, you signify nothing.


Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

I Signify Nothing. Yeah, that's about right.

You're an Octopus!

Thoughtful and reflective, you always appear to have tilted your
head slightly to one side. You like stretching out your languorous body wherever
you can, but not everything is always relaxed. You wear your emotions on your
sleeve and have a terrible poker face. And when you feel most threatened, you start
writing things down furiously. If there's a sucker born every minute, there's one
of you born roughly every day.


Take the Animal Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

I do tilt my head to one side, but I'm going for the "inquisitive puppy" look, not the "blubbery octopus" look.

You're Connecticut!

You have a great deal to do with whales and, when an observer squints,
even look a little like one. Even though you don't play hockey anymore, you've got an
icy personality and prefer social climbing to most other activities. If you live in a
small town, you're absurdly wealthy, and if you live in a big city, you're probably
stuck in a dead-end factory job. For some reason, you call cities "fords".
GM can't be pleased about that.


Take the State Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

A whale? I thought I was an octopus? Social climbing? Only up the ivory towers....

Know thyself: Go to tickle.com

"Reading Moll Flanders": The Semester from Hell Ends!

Long an Amy and Kari euphemism for taking a nap, "Reading Moll Flanders" has acutally become a real activity. With, like, action.
Even literature I hate has its moments. And I don't "hate" Moll Flanders the way I cringe at some of the Romantics. It's just not a fun read; the dialogue is not marked by quotation marks, the plot is moralistic, and even the exciting action packed moments are written in the same, 17th century prose style. "She watered the Plants with Awesome grace and Fluency" and "He then, with his Stile of Manners befitting a Gentleman of the highest class, Ignited a Nuclear Warhead, of which there were many in the Parish. Cries were heard throughout the Great City until Dawn approacheth as God had wont to do" are placed in the same sentence phrasing, with the same asides one might imagine in Ladies Home Journal.
But, that being said, there are some lovely phrases which spark my Imagination (damn you Coleridge) into bad poetry, as I am bred unto. Or something like that. So here's Amylea the Great's "Thoughts upon rereading Moll Flanders during Kwanzaa"
Canto 1 (because every poet needs to write something in cantos at some point): The Fall of Rhetoric
Give the lye to all those Arguments
of women,
cabbages, and diamond rings
Let seeping trees weep all fall into the clay
russet as early day break
and let winter lightening
bend the frozen sap.
Give the lye to all those Persuasions
downstream where bodies make bodies clean
Infinite cantatum, Solarum rex est
Unto the fires commit my words

Canto 2: Re-union
Bare loss was not so much
a matter of my attention
as was the loss of his Person
whom I loved to distraction,
to a wild, airy way of Discourse
that has no signification in it.
Come, do not strive to stand up
on your own two fleshy legs
Let my cold hands do the walking
for us both across the sand:
There are no more bridges to cross,
no more houses or fields to burn
No Stands to leap from as the earth turns
from the sun.

Canto 3: Inflamed

Where Love's the case,
The Doctor's an Ass.

He asked me to sing them a Song
At which I scoffed and said my singing Days were over
But I continued on, melancholy, silent, dull and retired
finding myself a snare at my hands.
In the flood lighting, singing one quarter
off the pitch, one quarter in the mud,
I speak as backward as he does
with that unhearable growl gagging
him before his offense reaches me.

He represented these dangers in
the motions of his outward seeking hands
and heightened my imagination
with elves and wands and kings
and I followed his eyes
seeing myself with no Friend
left loose to the world
a mere cast off Whore
Out of that Town
alone with the Maddest, Gayest thing alive
whose snarls stop just in his throat
to the point of burning his tongue.

No Doctor could illusion me well
No Priest entice me from that hell.

Complexity, Chaos and Catastrophe

Book: The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture. Mark Taylor.

Amy's Thoughts: Oh, for the love of all angst.

I've been trying to read this book all day. It culminated with a call to dear old Dad, who kindly explained chaos theory to me. Which I get. I really do. It's based in two premises: All systems have an inherent order and that any change to any part of the system, no matter how small, can cause huge, giant, catastrophic effects. (This is different from the so called "Catastrophe theory" which has something to do with nonlinear systems wherein resulting values make "quantum leaps" for certain given initial values plugged into an equation.)
And I get that within these systems, we cannot account for individual behavior, but the whole we can explain.
The idea of "Complexity" seems to blend the two, asking us to reconsider the second part of premises of chaos theory; instead of a single change introjected into a system, Taylor posits a series of overarching social changes that build up. The system remains stable, self-conserving, constant until a quantum moment where the critical mass of "newness" creates a change.
For Taylor, this newness began appearing in 1968. A lot happened that year. Chaos theory was invented (discovered? Articulated?). Derrida got massively popular. Some bad stuff went down in the South. More bad stuff happened in Vietnam. People began figuring out that the structures of structuralism could be a little scary in their oppositions. For Taylor, the "leap" (my words) happened in 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Literal barriers between oppositions (east/west, communism/capitalism) were torn down brick by brick. And hovering in the background (or perhaps the cause? or the effect?) were new communication systems just ready to change us all. CNN, for one. The Internet was made public. And the happy, categorizing grids of structuralism got bent into the wire frames for fractals that are unpredictable. Yeah. And my generation was just learning long division and cursive writing. We're a new breed alright. We've got a new sense of communication, networking, persuasion, movement of individuals. We are fluid, as is our information (and our sense of what counts as information).
This is the new paradigm of theory? This is replacing poststructuralism? Isn't it a bit too utopian? My generation is still controlled by binary oppositions; it's stuck in our language. And what the hell does this have to do with Burke?
I could make some connections. Burke likes systems. The Grammar is his ultimate critical system for understanding human motives. But within that system of human motives, which we can describe as consisting of Act, Agent, Agency, Scene, and Purpose, we cannot predict the action of an individual, only use the terms of the system to describe what happened after the fact. We can show how the system of the "Human Barnyard" requires patterns of behavior as a whole, but cannot predict the movements of any one "wordling." Burke reminds us that language matters; his discussion of behaviorism reminds us that humans, unlike animals, choose options based on our understanding of the world as filtered through language (also a system, and much harder to break).
But, if we take the idea of systems seriously (which postmodernists would rather not), we can say that average persons will respond to stimulous X within the system in a given way, because we have seen it before. And we can even probably say that we know the limitations of the system, how much change it can hold before it collapses under the newness. The predictablility of this can lead us to create very effective rhetoric.
But isn't the purpose of rhetoric to incite change? To move a people? To do something new? Perhaps (and this is the dystopian/utopian problem) the system must have some amount of newness/change--perhaps the system is ready for such a movement, and even requires it (think of Matrix: Reloaded here). That to preserve our current democracy, we must have revolutionary, dystopian rhetoric, which reminds us just how bad things could get.
Burke says as much, when he says such rhetorics are largely conservative. What is being conserved is the system as it is now. We don't want a revolution; we want to maintain equillibrium.
And not all systems are chaotic, Dad points out. But that type of determinism, totalitarianism is too much for a humanist like me. I want to believe that I have the choice to move, even if it is within the system, even if the system requires it.
And where does that leave us Christians? Free Will? The Eschaton, where all systems everywhere collapse, unless you consider that right now we are in the largest, most complex system ever, moving according to Her/His equation, looping from beginning to end to beginning again until the ultimate moment of complexity arises, and S/He leads us to that next quantum leap into a new system.

Then what?


It doesn't say what happens after the thousand years, after the new heaven and new earth. "After," is, after all, a human idea based on a linear understanding of time. time feels linear; i won't get any sleep tonight.

What does this have to do with Burke and fanfiction and multiple interpretatins? Of laycriticism? Of rhetoric, and representative anecdotes and symbolic action and stylized, strategic responses to situations?

I don't know.

If you know, please post a comment! Or, you know, write my paper for me! Your Choice! Free will served up daily on unwiredmascot.blogspot.com!

Waiting for Studii

Back in the day, we used to make the plural of "Student" be "Studii." I think it had something to do with how we felt that "Biesecker-Mast" should be pluralized as "Biesecker-Masti." Both conversations were spawned (pun intended) from our concern over the plural of "penis."

None of which has anything to do with this teaching journal post.

I just finished grading 2/3 of my (remaining) class's verbal/visual portrait. While the visual portraits tend to be pretty good (at least they are talking about the person) the verbal portraits are all over the place. Some are like news articles, some like a diary. Some quote too extensively, some are all paraphrase. What did I DO?!

Because I'm pretty sure their abysmal performance is my fault. And it all boils down to how they see themselves (positioning) as part of this project.

When I said I wanted a "portrait," I initially talked about a verbal portrait putting into words those things you would capture on film. I suppose I should have been less metaphorical. I should have said, "This means a good argument in this genre includes X, Y, Z."

But how many times did I tell them that I need to "See" the person? That I need to intimately "know" the informant? To "show don't tell"? Did I only imagine that I got those things across? Did I ever look into their eyes to see if it was sinking in?

I can't remember.

And now I'm waiting for the last stragglers to email me their critical bibliographies. Some were holding out for me to push them back yet another few days, but I insisted this was it. And yet, this is a genre I know how to speak to; despite being a horrible bibliography writer myself, I know how to talk about this kind of audience, purpose and style. I'm comfortable with the language, with the expectations. I'd work with them forever on this if I could.

But, alas, I cannot. Time gusts swiftly past something about inspiration, imagination, the autumn wind and dying leaves as metaphor goes here I must not fail this class....

I will spend time tomorrow working on "issue identfication" with them. Although that seems more fit for conferences.

I love conferences. I don't know what people are complaining about. I feel they learn far more in small groups with me as facilitator than they do any other time. So much gets accomplished! And yet I was the only one in the conference room this morning. My kiddos sent me meaningful looks: "We could be in bed like these other classes."

They'll appreciate it later. I've built in lots of "Peer editing from your bed" in the last two weeks. They'll love it.

Twenty-four minutes to go.