(No part of this reinterview-cum-pretext issues discussion may be published elsewhere without written permission from victor j. vitanza and
and the individual posters.) --Full Copyright notice at end of each file.
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The PreText Conversations held a Re/In/View with Lynda Haas, beginning July, 1997. The discussion quickly shifted when v posted the announcement that Bill Burroughs had died and Lynda posted a quote from him. For the previous conversation visit and read the last segment of the reinvw with Lynda Haas. |
Personally, I didn't really know much 'bout Bill-- I can't remember reading anything but little snippets from his work, I never got around (yet) to reading _Naked Lunch_. Saw the movie, but I know that doesn't really count ;) But I always liked what I would describe as the "less than elitest" appearances of Burroughs he made in his last years-- the various advertisements he showed up in, for example. He was one of the best parts of the pretty good movie _Drugstore Cowboy_ a few years back. And one of my favorite musical performers/performance artists, Laurie Anderson, had Burroughs "perform" in her movie _Home of the Brave_ and on her album _Mr. Heartbreak_. And there's something I always admire about folks who live such a wild and hard-livin' life and still manage to live so damn long. Sometimes makes me wonder what's the point of going to the gym... But I've never really thought of Burroughs as a "tool of the elite" or whatever. So, for what it's worth, I'd be curious to hear more about what Fred means by this too. --Steve
Before this re/inter/view, I associated your name with film studies rather than R/C--from your Disney collection (which I know of but haven't read), and from an issue on David Cronenberg which I proofread for Postscript. I'm very curious to know . . . . Wow, somebody associates my name with something (besides "that bitch!") That is so cool! :-) SO nice to know that somebody heard of the Disney book. ____________ what, if any, difference(s) do you see between R/C academic writing and academic writing on film, and The difference for me was very personal-I enjoy writing about film (still do, not because I have to, but because it interests me). I wish I could tell you what a world of grief I got from my major professor for doing projects like the Disney book. He was sure that if I had all these floozy film things on my resume that I'd never be taken seriously as an R/C scholar. I guess he was right, although I rather think it's a good thing to not take yourself too seriously as an R/C scholar. Films are writing, anyway, aren't they? A different kind of writing, with visual as well as verbal language and rhetoric. ____________ would you level similar critiques against both of them vis-a-vis their "real world" political efficacy? And their phallogocentrism? Films are efficient at influencing culture. That does a world of good for those who write academic film criticism. Writing about film was how I came to understand, really, what phallogocentrism and feminism meant. I read Irigaray and Cixous et al and they made a certain sense-but they made more sense up against films and then feminist film critics who could apply the theoretical and the poetic to films. So, french feminism became a kind of link for me between film studies and R/C studies-at the bottom line, I was saying the same thing-sometimes about something in R/C, sometimes about a film. They sort of melted together after awhile. In fact, that little play that I stuck into the Neel part of my article was a cannibalized version of a scene in "Raising Arizona." ____Johanna, you seem to be in both the R/C and the film studies world-what is the difference in the two discourses for you?
I agree that simply arguing practice/theory is not very useful and I myself depend heavily on theory in order to justify much of what I believe are sound instructional practices. Usually I think that even the more obscure theorizing on this and other lists is valuable as, if nothing else, mental exercise to keep some relatively high-powered thinking engines in tune. Where my own thinking engine slips out of gear is in response to a quote by a literary mystic (Burroughs) proposing a kind of know-nothing stance in regard to technology. Occasionally here, and in other places, people accept a kind of mental liturgy in place of pinning down definitions and articulating relationships. The sentence, "The basic unit of technology is not the bit, but the body," has a proper zen ring to it but, other than presenting a spiritual/aesthetic valuation, says nothing about the most important topic, the relationship of the bit TO the body, and vice-versa. Not meaning to attack this list partcularly; it has a long history of some difficut and rewarding idea-chasing. The Burrough's quote, and the implied deification of Burroughs himself and the further implication of a humanist self-satisfaction, yanked me out of my usual read-only mode. Fred
>VVell, Fred, Hi! Long time!
Yeah, Fred-tell us what you really think! By the way, Steve, the quote from Burroughs I sent in was from an advertisement too, maybe you remember the ones he did for Nike. David Cronenberg directed those spots, which Burroughs wrote, during the time they were shooting Naked Lunch. L
Is recognizing that "the basic unit of technology is not the bit, but the body," to 'proclaim,' as Fred Kemp scribbles: > the essentialism of some mytico-religious desire ... to resist change? What about recognizing and writing about living the life of a > continually disintegrating human being...? Is that the product of > dimwit nothought humanists? While few of us may reflect or act upon it, are any of us really above disintegration? Finally, who should be given pantheon status? Stephen King? John Grisham? Dean Martin perhaps? Sports heros?!? Also, what's wrong with dark pillars? I find shadows intriguing. Don't you? If that makes me a dim wit, you're just afraid of the dark! Don Socha
Well, if nano-technology keeps progressing to the ends some imagine, where computers can be shrunk to microbe size and sent into our bodies to modify the electrons and synapses that regulate our flesh, then the bits or bodies difference won't matter mush, er... much. And aren't we approaching that now, we who only exist for the purposes of each other's viewing in emailed words? Our body of words and works and days sent over ethernets. My body isn't separate from my bits. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? What would god look like if the Bible were being written today, on a Mac, instead of milleneum ago, descended from oral traditions and stashed on papyrus? Pantheons are fleeting and personal and under constant revision. Though for the record, Dean Martin's in mine, martini in hand, tippy tippy taying away. Just my two bits worth... Nick Carbone,
>To give him [William Burroughs] pantheon Wasn't it William Blake--another humanist mystic that Fred undoubtedly eschews--who said "The path of excess leads to the palace of wisdom"? And besides, the second any of us hits the age of 30, we're all disintegrating, slowly but surely :-) -- Lee
One list poster declares: "Occasionally here, and in other places, people accept a kind of mental liturgy in place of pinning down definitions and articulating relationships." Gosh, I guess I'm in the wrong place--I thought it was understood in the PreText ConText that "pinned down definitions" and "articulated relationships" are part of the frozen sea we hope, through liturgy and conversation, to thaw. Houston Wood
>____Johanna, you seem to be in both the R/C and the film studies R/C discourse is, to me, so conflicted that I really don't know what it is. Are, say, _Research in the Teaching of English_ and _Pre/Text_ even in the same neighborhood, let alone on the same block? Perhaps my prior training/disciplining in lit studies stops me from seeing such a thing as R/C discourse and knowing what you mean when you refer to it. Is it talk of portfolios? T-units and sentence combining? social epistemicism? topoi? liberation pedagogy? tagmemics? sophistic(s)? When we talk of composition theory, for instance, does the word "theory" mean the same thing as it does in the phrase "lit theory"? Or film theory? Or even, and especially, rhetorical theory? (Any takers on this last?) Film studies has always been a guilty pleasure for me, as perhaps for you, because the academy is not configured to allow for much of it at present. Which is mind boggling, considering that film probably influences more people than freshman English and "great literature" combined. (And yes, as you say, film constitutes both a language and a rhetoric.) It seems that many theorists (e.g. Butler, Bhabha, Jameson) do it as a "side thing." Guess we should be happy there are some guilty pleasures left. One symptom of this guilty pleasure often appears in the rhetoric of film studies, which often revels (perhaps ironically, perhaps self-deprecatingly) in its own mixing of grand abstraction with down-and-dirty commentary and description. Here's an excerpt from moi, as an example: "Melina's kiss at [Total Recall's] end, silencing Quaid's last doubt, may be read as reassuring the viewer that Quaid is the hero of his own narrative and the world is safe for unified subjects everywhere."(And then I go on to explain why we shouldn't read it that way.) In talking about film, we have to talk about kisses, about Hollywood endings, and we've been taught by the canons of literature that these are not things to talk about, except disparagingly. But we can use the popular to unsettle the academic and theoretical--I pit the popular cliche "the world is safe" against the academic cliche "unified subjects" to poke fun at both perspectives. And in that phrase "reassuring the viewer that Quaid is the hero of his own narrative and the world is safe for unified subjects everywhere," I disrupt my parallel construction just a tad-- by omitting the "that" before "the world" which I would probably have included in a R/C publication. Another, more obvious difference between film discourse and that enigma we've agreed to call R/C discourse: in film writing, we get to stick lots of pix in to illustrate our points! We get the very childlike pleasure of show-and-tell in academic film discourse. Offhand I can't think of anything comparable in R/C besides our inclusion of student writing. Johanna
Lynda and Johanna, To what extent do either of you feel that literary theory, in this case, film theory, maintain a distinction between what is literary and what is real? Here, I am distinquishing between literary theory and critical theory. As in the case of *Glass*, Derrida is clearly interested in showing how all texts, in this case Hegel's, are literary. I ask this because I often find my friends in lit. baffled with my interests in academic discourse. What I find interesting about academic discourse and the construction of knowledge is that what is literary and what is real begins to break down. Indeed, what interested me about Lynda's article was the use of a literary convention (a film shot) in order to call into question the constructed nature of both Plato's dialogues and the historiographical "dialogues" with Plato in male scholars such as Jasper Neel. In some ways, this move within "academic discourse", for me at least, revealed the very "play of appearances" which I consider disciplinary knowledge. On the one hand, I guess I am identifying "academic discourse and the construction of knowledge" as "pleasurable" (I loathe to use this term after reading Bauldrillard's *Seduction*, but it seems most appropriate); on the other hand, I am asking to what extent would either of you agree, especially Lynda since your writing parodies and thus reveals the very constructions you are writing about. m. todd harper
As a McLuhan fan, I find it very confusing to accuse Burroughs of mystico-religious desire in human thinking when he says, "The basic unit of technology is not the bit, but the body." I happen to find that a very nice summary of the notion of technology as an extension of the body. And, what is so terrible about humanism? Or, to put it more defensibly - in light of neo-Marxist sociological analysis that eliminates human agency from theoretical consideration, how is such an anti-humanist move supposed to help do anything other than provide the theoretical surrender of the subject to the now overwhelming forces of political and economic (and other) institutions? How does a theoretician advocating anti-humanist analytics escape from the paradox of either 1) admitting his/her own work is nothing but the product of these forces, hence ensuring his or her participation in the hegemony of dominant systems even in spite of his or her own revolutionary tropes or 2) admitting that, after all, there is a human subjectivity which performs in contexts of freedom necessary to power, namely, his or her own work? I think we can learn a bit from a no-thought humanist sound bite such as Burroughs: Cyborgs unite! -TheVoidBoy P.S. On the other hand, doesn't any else find it pathetic that someone as creative as Burroughs is purported as being found new fame by appearing in a commercial for a pathetically exploitative international corporation such as Nike? I think his work with Tom Waits (_the Black Rider_) was far more interesting than anything he did with Laurie Anderson.
Nick Carbone wrote:
> Pantheons are fleeting and personal and under constant revision. Though Hey, has the moon been hittin' your eye like a big pizza pie again Nick? Actually, I don't quite agree with Fred's fear that Burroughs is really in danger of gaining "pantheon status" in English departments any time soon (and I don't really care if he does, frankly-- Dean Martin, WSB, Goofy, Bugs Bunny, why not?), but I think it's really interesting that Burroughs has gone from being another one of those "homosexual junkie writers" of the late 50s to become one of the great men of letters. Kind of reminds me in a way of the section in Allan Bloom's book _Closing of the American Mind_ where he talks about music, complaining that the "mastrabatory" music of contemporary (mid to late 80s, actually) rock 'n roll, while the music of his youth, big band and jazz, was transformational and pristine. Never mind the fact that this music corrupted the youth of its own time. Makes you wonder who will be joining this (mythical?) pantheon from our own time. Scott "Dilbert" Adams? Mark Leyner? Wes Craven? Matt Groening? Annie Sprinkle? They'd all be fun too... --Steve
In response to Johanna's "rhetorical theory (any takers?)" admit I know nothing (never quite occurred to me there might be such a thing until I more or less inadvertently subbed to this list) but gotta raise the obvious question, i.e. how could a theory of rhetoric be articulated, expressed, worded, whatever, without recourse to its own (author's) rhetoric, or god-given or pre-fab prototheories thereabout? Recall an aphorism of Wittgenstein to the effect that the rules of orthography apply, serenely enough, to the spelling of the word "orthography," the nut or moral of which I take to be that we needn't worry about 'recursivity' in each and every case, but then again (theory of) orthography isn't really in the business of persuasion, is it? Whereas I suspect that theory of rhetoric has to be. Am I missing some unmentionably blatant point here? Please enlighten or ignore as appropriate. Lewis
At 05:06 PM 8/5/97 -0500, Todd wrote: I'm not sure what you mean by your distinction between literary theory and critical theory (in my experience lit tends to assume the two mean the same thing, that is, just about any post-Saussurean thinking, while rhet tends to restrict the term "critical theory" to the Frankfurt school.) In lit theory, texts are seen constructed but knowledge is usually not. It's obscured, waiting to be revealed by the appropriate reading strategy. This is the major difference between applications of poststructuralism that I noted when I shifted over from lit to rhet/comp. In lit, poststructuralism was used heuristically to read texts in Derridean ways, and sometimes the results of those readings were seen as more "real" than the false reality the words supposedly pointed to. (Thus reinscribing the concept of realness even in an attempt to invert it.) In rhetoric, poststructuralism is more likely to be seen as a way to produce or engender knowledge (rather than find it.) Hope that answers your question, Todd. Rhetorical theory does seem a bit oxy and moronic when you put it that way, Lewis. Hope someone else is willing to do the "pinning down" of definitions I'm requesting. Now seems like a kairotic moment to make a pitch for a SCMLA panel I'm proposing for the 1998 New Orleans conference. It goes something like this: Interpretive Frames: Seeing (Through) Theories--requesting essays arguing for any particular theory and its heuristic potential for, epistemological purchase on, or rhetorical fitness to any aspect of English studies. Johanna Schmertz
Johanna, Thanks for the elucidation:) I actually had something a little different in mind in distinquishing lit theory and crit theory. The distinction is one of audience, that is, I see lit theory, such the works of Harold Bloom or any of the Yale school, as targeted at a lit audience and an attempt, as you say, at interpreting texts. I see crit theory, on the other hand, as targeted at a general audience and at a specific audience, often depending on the discourse of the author. I don't, for instance, see Derrida writing to American English departments anymore than I see him writing to other audiences, such as continental philosophers. But this is actually more of a side issue. What insterests me is the extent that people in rhet/comp, crit theory, and literature are willing to read academic texts as ficticious. Here, I am actually thinking about an ongoing conversation I have had with my son's godfather, Tom Byers (whom I only mention because he too is a film theorist that primarily deals with issues of masc. and film). For years, Tom and I have argued about whether Darwin's theory of evolution is a theory or a fact. Of course, the scientific community considers it a theory--as they do almost everything, with the exception of laws. However, what disturbs Tom is when I begin to point out that Darwin's idea of progression seems more to do an enlightenment sense of progression, than empirical fact. Similarly, many of Darwin's central metaphors (or those we associate with Darwin) come right out of the langauge of the Great Chain of Being (such as the missing link). Again, these metaphor have less to do with empirical fact than they do with Plotinus concept of plentitude. However, it is important to note why Tom wants to argue for the certain validity of Darwin. First, to say that Darwin's theory of evolution is constructed might give them there folks in public schools in Bama the right to cross out Darwin in scienfific texts. Second, and this gets to the root of what I was asking you and Lynda earlier, as a literature professor, Tom is interested in a careful distinction between what is fiction and what is real, since part of his university duties is to teach works of "fiction"--something which breaks down when you begin reading non-fictional discourse as fiction or as rhetoric (as in the case of Latour, Mulkay, Woolgar, Feyerabend, etc. . .). Would you make that distinction? Would it be fair to say that many in lit make this distinction--even though MLA features rhet of science and science and lit panels every year? Bringing this back to Lynda, I felt her "metafictional" strategy of using a film scence/dialogue exposed the constructed (ficticious?) nature of the texts she is critiqing. However, our initial discussion revealed that this move doesn't necessarily call into question the ficticious nature of knowledge. Specifically, for the many on the list who wanted to attach the body to writing (you must be women to write woman's writing), Lynda's text was much more ideological. By ideological, I mean to suggest a rigid dualism between surface and depth so that what is real (what is below and hidden from the surface/text) only can reveal itself through appearance. This view is the technological destiny that Heidegger critiques as beginning with Plato but fully emerging in the Twentieth Century). The other view, of course, is to say that it is all text, all a play of appearance, of concealment and unconcealment. This view, of course, rejects the concept of ideology because--as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, and Bauldrillard have all pointed out--there can be no ideology when there is not the rigid dualism of surface and depth, appearance and the real. Again, I see Lynda's film shot/dialogue as a parody of these other discourses which reveals their constructed (fictional?) nature; and thus I see her text within this second model. Johanna, you pointed out that texts were constructed but that meaning was more elusive. Were you suggesting a certain hermeneutics of suspicion which would maintain the sort of dualism I am thinking about, or were you suggesting meaning as elusive within the play of appearance (Derrida's hall of mirrors?) I look forward to hearing yours and others responses. todd
On Tue, 5 Aug 1997, Steve Krause wrote: Nick Carbone
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