A REINTERVIEW with Rosa Eberly, 3.

The PreText Conversations held a Re/In/View

with Rosa Eberly  about her  article published in P/T

during February, March, April of 1995.


================================================== 
Date:         Thu, 2 Mar 1995 02:15:09 -0400
Reply-To:     "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Organization: Miami University (Ohio USA)
Subject:      re->vjv: subaltern, new practices, etc.

so glad vv echoed the conclusion of spivak's work: no, andrea dworkin
cannot speak "for herself," as i said in my last post. none of us can. and
we need to understand this more.  and differently.  and in a way that, to
my mind, intersects with identity politics and some writing classrooms.

andrea dworkin cannot speak "for herself". (yet) she speaks. in my response
to vv's first set of questions about ethos, i referred to social
psychologist richard sennett's distinction between presentational and
representational subjectivities and said that this distinction helps me
think about public ethos (to the extent that that is not redundant).  at
the risk of postus maximus, i'll pull a few paragraphs from an essay  i've
written on sennett:

        Sennett articulates his enterprise in *The Fall of Public Man* as
creating "a theory of expression in public" (6).  In this light, the book
opens with a critique of contemporary public life centering on a
Christopher Lasch-inspired view of narcissism, the end point of the fall of
public man: narcissism "has arisen because a new kind of society encourages
the growth of its psychic components and erases a sense of meaningful
social encounter outside its terms, outside the boundaries of the single
self, in public" (8).  This new kind of society is void of public spaces
where people can linger and interact.  Instead, public spaces are meant to
be moved through by isolated individuals rather than used for communication
and, of secondary importance to Sennett, conjoint action.
        Sennett's historical metaphor of a fall depends of course upon a
prelapsarian state, in this case the theatrum mundi of eighteenth-century
coffeehouses, salons, theaters, and opera houses in Paris and London.  In
these public places, "places where strangers might regularly meet" (17),
people were "determined to remain strangers to each other" (23) rather than
becoming intimates. Because no one was sure where his or her fellow
city-dwellers came from, it was unclear what kind of behavior would gain
the attention and belief of others in public, a realm of experience
separate from private or intimate life.
        One characteristic of communication within the theatrum mundi was
that speech was treated as a sign rather than as a symbol, that is, it was
presentational rather than representational.  Unlike in today's intimate
society, where "people speak of doing something 'unconsciously' or making
an 'unconscious' slip which reveals their true feelings to someone else,"
(24) in public life, "social expression will be conceived of as
presentation to other people of feelings which signify in and of
themselves, rather than as representation to other people of feeling
present and real to each self" (39).  As such, public life shared much with
acting; the theatrum mundi existed before nineteenth-century ideas of the
authentic self came on the scene.  The collapse of separate public and
private spheres, Sennett argues, has deprived human beings of a realm in
which to present selves different from their private, perhaps "authentic"
selves.  In this way, the intimate society prevents people from expressing
different selves to one another; "we are artists without an art" (28),
Sennett writes, and the art we have lost is playacting.
        With an emphasis on psychological authenticity, people become
inartistic in daily life because they are unable to tap the fundamental
creative strength of the actor, the ability to play with and invest feeling
in external images of self.  Thus we arrive at the hypothesis that
theatricality has a special, hostile relation to intimacy; theatricality
has an equally special, friendly relation to a strong public life. (37)
        Sennett's work allows for a presentational rather than (as in
Bleich and Holland) psychologically representational mode of reading acts
of interpretation and thus assists in theorizing about public spaces or
spheres in which private people write publicly in order to do more than
solely get to know themselves better.

now: through sennett as well as through spivak, we can, if we want to,
reach the position that one cannot speak in public "for oneself."  and as
teachers of writing or citizens of the virtual states of amerika, we might
be interested in this distinction between presentational and
representational speech and writing.
we also might challenge it; i use it as a point of departure.

sp com scholarship for a long time tended to talk about how discourse about
things traditionally "private" "degenerated" truly "public" spheres.
(what can you say but, "i feel your pain?")  as i said a few posts ago, all
public spheres are somehow "degenerate" bc, just as sennett's prelapsarian
state did not exist, all models of publics and public spheres are blind to
inequalities of power.  that's why i'd rather study local and actually
existing public spheres and build accounts of discourse in public from
them.

to think of it another way: peter elbow told us to close our eyes when we
write--at a certain point in our writing processes.  for a few years i made
my students think about the public nature of their classroom and written
discourses from the outset, and the public stage blocked them.  now i
encourage them not to neglect expressing themselves--and we talk about
plural subjectivities and their presentations in public.  so there are
times for the private--for speaking for oneself, as oneself--and for the
public--for trying on different presentations of self--and, of course--to
speak to the empirical worlds--the combination of all of these.

as to andrea dworkin, i read dworkin's consistent claim that *mercy* is
fiction as a kind of relentless presentation. "fiction is not to confess
but to confront." as to "hearing" dworkin, as to hearing anyone, we make
guesses.  very rarely are we right the first time or the second.... and
what is RIGHT, anyway?  i'm sure i haven't heard andrea dworkin the way she
wants to be heard.  but i think i'm reading in a way that's more helpful to
the quality and quantity of public discourse about the sexual abuse of
women than was camille paglia or even wendy steiner.  you and i, vv,
thought we "heard" each other over the phone over the weekend: we make
guesses.  we interpret.  that is the best we can hope to do.  in public or
in private.

as to your one way of telling the subaltern topos through foucault and derrida:
i have not read *language, counter-memory, and practice,* and so i am
unable to speak to it. i wonder, though, if affirmative
deconstructions--passing out of the binary altogether--would not leave us
with an affirmative dialectic rather than a negative one: and, therefore,
after all this philosophy, in hegelhell, still. just a thought.

what? could you speak a little louder?
you said WHAT?
what happened to you?
 
==================================================== 
Date:         Thu, 2 Mar 1995 14:08:52 -0400
Reply-To:     "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Organization: Miami University (Ohio USA)
Subject:      Re: voice of the voiceless (fwd)

victor: here's another /representative?/ anecdote that addresses the
question of who can speak and how and who can listen. send to re/inter/view
or not, as you like.  rhosa

 Cop Killer Strikes Book Deal

From: C-ap@clarinet.com (AP)
Date: Fri, 24 Feb 95 2:40:07 PST
Newsgroups: clari.local.pennsylvania, clari.news.crime.murders,
clari.living.books


        PHILADELPHIA (AP) -- A man convicted of killing a police officer
has negotiated a $30,000 advance for ``Live From Death Row,'' a
collection of essays written in a Pennsylvania state prison.
        Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former award-winning radio reporter, doesn't
discuss his case in the book. His topics include the importance of
television to death row inmates and the anguish of waiting for a
death warrant signature.
        ``Here is a voice of the voiceless,'' Alison Pratt, a
spokeswoman for the publisher, Addison-Wesley, said Thursday.
``We've never heard an articulate voice from death row talking
about what it's like to be there.''
        But Rich Costello, president of the city's Fraternal Order of
Police, said the book deal amounts to a reward for a convicted
killer. ``The only thing I'm interested in Mr. Jamal saying is
good-bye,'' he said.
        Last year, after fierce protests from across the nation,
National Public Radio backed out of a deal to broadcast 12 of the
book's 42 commentaries.
        It was unclear whether Abu-Jamal would actually receive any of
the advance because a state law prohibits convicted criminals from
profiting from their crimes. The book is scheduled to reach stores
in May; Abu-Jamal's profits will depend on how well the book sells.
        Pratt surmised that any money Abu-Jamal receives would go toward
lawyers' fees. A telephone call to Abu-Jamal's agent, Frances
Goldin, was not returned.
        No execution ate has been set for Abu-Jamal, who is in the State
Correctional Institute at Huntingdon.
        He insists he is innocent in the 1981 death of Officer Daniel
Faulkner. He was convicted of shooting Faulkner in the head after
the officer tried to frisk his brother during a downtown traffic
s chapter of the Black Panther Party. His radio
reports were known for their focus on social issues.

 
================================================= 
Date:         Fri, 3 Mar 1995 14:26:37 -0400
Reply-To:     "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Organization: Miami University (Ohio USA)
Subject: cgb->re: re/presentation

Rosa,

I want to pick up a couple of threads from your last post (subaltern,
new practices, etc.) and see what I can make of them.  One such
thread (although I wasn't counting this in my "couple of") is that we
guess and interpret, indeed, that it's the "best we can hope to do."  I
just wanted to stress that I'm still working on the interpretation part
of things here--I think one of the reasons for the relative silence so
far has been the fact that some of us haven't had as long to listen to
your work and Dworkin's as, say, Victor has.  But here goes....

I hope that it's fair to say that you're interested in a revitalization of
the public sphere, be it different from that of later Habermas.
Although I wasn't as sure from the article itself, your posts have
made that point clearer for me.  I'm thinking specifically of the
conclusion of the article where you write, "...this article raises serious
questions about whether and how issues usually considered 'private'
can be discussed credibly and productively in literary public
spheres" (301).  In your posts, you write of Sennett's possibilities for
a public sphere, and of your own "...reading in a way that's been
more helpful to the quality and quantity of public discourse about
the sexual abuse of women..."

It's possible that Sennett, or Habermas, or you, can resolve or have
resolved this difficulty, but I have problems reconciling the project
of a public sphere with the idea of literature, or even art.  I may be
interpreting things here far too reductively, but the separation of
public and private subjectivities suggests to me Kant's dissociated
interest in art--the idea that we can remove ourselves from the
interpretation and still have art.  If Dworkin (and/or we) believe that
the task of art is to confront, change and transform others, then

_____Is there a place for art in the public sphere which doesn't
radically limit its transformative potential?

I know that you question the appropriateness of literary criteria to
deal with Dworkin's work.  And her work does blur genres (as you
point out), a move which presents problems beyond the scope of that
question.  But I would also point out that even as you've been "more
helpful to the quality and quantity of public discourse" (a point I
wouldn't dispute), you've done so, not so much by looking at
_Mercy_ itself, but by looking at its reception.  And as you point out
in your article, many (if not all) of the critics seem to be trying to
look everywhere (stylistics, personam, context, politics) but at the
work itself.  Which leads to a variation on the questions/answers
about hearing, and speaking for one's self and others, I suppose, in
that I might ask a chicken and egg (which came first?) type of
question:

_____To what degree might we understand "public discourse" as the
source of the very inequalities that it is blind to?  That is, might not
the very effort towards a public discourse (in the forms of those
reviews) contain the seeds of mis/recognition that you discuss in the
article?

One potential answer I see for all of this you've already talked about,
and that's Sennett's work on presentation and representation.  But
I've been unsatisfied with public/private splits this semester
(reading Rorty's _Contingency, Irony, Solidarity_ for a class), which
leads me to this question:

_____How can we retain a distinction between public and private
without considering it a difference?

The reason for my own distinction (bw distinction and difference) is
this:  I do think that they are distinct, but that distinction is only
useful if we understand them in relationship to each other.  I'm
thinking here of the old joke response to "excessive" pop-Freudian
interpretation: "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."  Well, no.  We don't
have pure presentation or pure representation.  A cigar is always
both a cigar and a phallic symbol--when we try to act upon the
theory of a possible separation (i.e. Jake Baker claiming that it was
pure presentation), we get ourselves in trouble.  Of course, if we can't
separate them, we can get in trouble too.  Uh-oh!  It may indeed
have been useful for your students (it's useful for me!) to rely on the
illusion of their separation, and to believe that their writing
wasn't/isn't public, but that's still an illusion.  Pure representation
just isn't a feature of language, and pure presentation suffers from
charges of irresponsibility.

Put another way, even if Mr. Baker had changed the names involved
in his story, would it have indicated a different attitude on his part?
Not markedly, I don't think.  The presentation-ality of his story
cannot entirely leave behind the potential representation-ality.  In
Dworkin's case, she doesn't try to leave it behind, naming her main
character Andrea, and necessitating her "relentless presentation,"
which further complicates things rather than clarifying.  I'm
reminded of Kenneth Burke's poles of Identification (pure
representation?) and Division (pure presentation?), and how we can
only ever be in between them.

Our solution perhaps is strategic presentation, but I can't help but
think of public and private as sides of a coin, terms in a ratio,
whatever.  I think we can say that some uses of language are more
public or more private, but we can't eliminate one from the equation.
Ask Mrs. Gingrich!

Ah, but maybe!  At the end of your last post, when you wrote, "we
interpret. that is the best we can hope to do. in public or private.", I
wondered if that was intentional.  That is,

_____Can we speak of interpretation as something which has a higher
or lower public/private ratio?

We speak of speaking or writing as public and private activities, but
is interpretation?  I've never thought of that before, the idea of
"public reading," and it's one that I hope you'll speak to.  Are there
different theories of interpretation which rely on the distinction b/w
public and private, and would they help?
 

Rushing in where angels (and lurkers) fear to tread,
Collin G Brooke
cgb1046@utarlg.uta.edu

 
============================================ 
Date:         Fri, 3 Mar 1995 14:34:36 -0400
Reply-To:     "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Organization: Miami University (Ohio USA)
Subject:      cjs-->vjv and re: Foucault


This is a three-part response that I hope won't be entirely
impertinent to the REINVW with Rosa (and as I've only just
returned from a two-week trip, thus have only glanced at the text on
*Mercy*, I'm responding more to the discussion than to the substance
of the essay). This post might appear more appropriate for the
Foucault List, but the topics *are* raised from within this
ongoing discussion.

First, to vv's comment, in his 2/28 post, that "Foucault did not
directly respond to this article by Derrida," i.e. to "Cogito and
the History of Madness" in _Writing and Difference_: ah, but
Foucault did respond quite directly to it, in an essay entitled "Mon
corps, ce papier, ce feu", published first as an appendix to the
1972 edition of _Histoire de la folie_, pp. 583-603, now reprinted
in the 4 vol. collection of MF's interviews and occasional essays,
_Dits et e'crits_, vol. II (1970-1975), 245-268. This essay has been
translated by Geoff Bennington as "My Body, This Paper, This Fire,"
published in the _Oxford Literary Review_ 4.1 (1979): 10, 16-17. By
the way, a second version of MF's response to JD appeared in a
Japanese journal _Paideia_ 11 (Feb 1, 1972): 131-147, entitled
"Michel Foucault Derrida e non kaino", translated in _Dits et
e'crits_ II (281-295) as "Re'ponse `a Derrida".

Second, while MF may well be responding to Derrida "in terms of
LANGUAGE returning *as* COUNTER-MEMORY (that which has been
systematically excluded, purged)", I have to take (very minor) issue
with characterizing this collection, _Language, Counter-Memory,
Practice_, as MF's own "series of articles." In fact, this was a
North American collection of very disparate essay by MF, and the
disparate nature of _L, C-M, P_ becomes all the more striking now
that _Dits et e'crits_ is accessible. That is, whereas _L, C-M, P_
served a strategic purpose when published (of making available in
translation a number of important essays by MF), it now appears
almost to be a random collection, hardly homogeneous in the sense of
MF "work[ing] his way out" in a linear fashion through a systematic
series of articles. My sense in having perused _Dits et e'crits_ is
rather of a process of meandering, through articles and interviews,
trying on different positions, in some cases tentative, in other
(e.g. his response to Derrida) polemical and, thus, quite forceful.

Third, coming to the question of silence, in order to find the
translation reference above, I had to grit my teeth and refer to the
index in James Miller's _The Passion of Michel Foucault_. How Miller
sums up the Foucault-Derrida debate is symptomatic of the
tendentious strategies of his study of MF, but also of a silencing
mechanism operated through appearing to speak the author under
scrutiny (I deliberately use 'speak' as a transitive verb here, as
in _parler franc,ais_, or Miller's attempt to (re)speak Foucault).
After summing up MF's response to JD as "a polemic as vicious as
anything he ever wrote" (120-121), Miller reminds us, quite
usefully, that following this appendix II ("Mon corps, ce papier, ce
feu") in the 1972 _Histoire de la folie_, MF appended yet a third
text, entitled "La folie, l'absence d'oeuvre" [Madness, the Absence
of Work"), a reflection (as in _Madness and Civilization_) on the
relativity of 'madness' and on the equally relative
'exterior'-other/'interior'-self divide, especially as it relates to
the "astonishing" intersection of two apparently distinct languages,
"the language of madness and the language of literature" (_Dits_ I:
420). As Miller translates/comments (122), "'Some day perhaps man
[we/ MF use 'on'] will no longer know what madness was', Foucault
declares. And on that day, 'Artaud will belong to the soil of our
language and no longer to its breaking point'" and (MF continues)
"neuroses will belong to the constitutive forms (and no longer to
deviations) of our society.  Everything that we today perceive as a
mode of limitation, or as foreign (_e'trangete'_), or as
unacceptable (_insupportable_) will settle into the serenity of the
positive. And what is now designated for us as this Exterior indeed
one day risks indicating us, our very selves" (_Dits_ I: 412).

I find this relevant to the discussion on Dworkin because the
question of silence also connects, I think, to that of recuperation,
of 'spin control,' or (re)interpretation. Rosa's project addresses
precisely the rhetorical strategies employed for the ends of
silencing and/or 'spinning'.  How does Miller spin this toward his
own ends?

"A hidden fantasy is lurking here. In a different kind of world, one
free of the infernal recurrence of transgression and guilt, perhaps
the poet on stage that night in 1947 [reference to Artaud] would not
have acted like a drowning man. Perhaps he would not have
experienced his own most inescapable impulses as cruel, violent,
insanely self-destructive. Perhaps he would no longer have suffered
for being what he was.
"What would it feel like to inhabit such a world?
"Michel Foucault, like Antonin Artaud, did not live long enough to
find out." (Miller 122).

_____ "In a different kind of world...": Isn't this *difference*
what Dworkin is trying to envisage in a literary/discursive manner,
but without the implicit interpretive opprobrium that Miller
attaches to it?
 

Charles J. Stivale

 =================================================
Date:         Fri, 3 Mar 1995 17:23:05 -0600
Reply-To:     "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         Victor Vitanza 
Subject:      vjv->re: an experience on the net (3/3)

To: R(h)osa et al.
From: VJV
RE: 3/3, as promised, an experience on the net

Rosa, when finishing my 2/3 post, I asked a number of
questions that looked back to the what MacKinnon and
Dworkin had to say about pornography and silence. But
these questions not only looked back but pointed forward
to the experience that I had on the net, which forms my final
post in this particular sequence.

Let me repeat the questions here so as to refresh the
readers' minds and so as to move on to that experience, which
deals with postings on the net and how, given my one
example, women are mis/given to responding. I don't want to
make this a M/F issue, though, of course, it will be.

The questions that I ended/began with:

<<_____Is this a way, via Dworkin and MacKinnon, to sense
WHY the public (literary) spheres preontically rule out what
women have to say about their experience?

_____...why the 'War Zone' is the same or, if different, more
of the same?

Given the conditions for the possibility of speaking and hearing,
women's conditions are *silencing* and, hence, women's
not being heard.

_____Does not such a situation place, at least, some of the
silenced in a position of having to engage in *excessive* and
*defective* language?

I think *here* and *now* so.

_____If so, then, ...

_____BUT where must they go ... in dis/order (excess/defect)
... to become heard?>>

Now, I repeat:

_____Where must  go ... in dis/order ... to become
heard?


*****My narrative account of an experience:

About a year or so ago, I began to read a number of posts on
H-Rhetor--all by men--about an article by Sally Miller Gearhart,
"The Womanization of Rhetoric" in *Women'sStudies Int. Q*
2 (1979): 195-201.  (These posts are available in the archives
of that list.)  The bottom line was (is) that each of the posters
began to find major fault with the article, saying that it basically
did not follow the proper research protocol. As the posts pro-
gressed over a period of about 3-4 wks, they became more
and more heightened in their denouncing of the article, but
never really crossing any barrier of (male?) propriety into impro-
priety.

I became especially interested in this article (since I am
interested in historiographies of rhetorics). I searched for the
article in our library; it was not available. I ordered it; finally, 2
weeks later it arrived. When reading the article, I begin to see that
the male posters had simply read the piece across the con-
ventions of a genre that were inappropriate for reading Gearhart's
discourse. (I read her article as a manifesto and not as an article
written by way of the protocol of classical philology or as a latter-day
pretension to such a protocol.) Hence, I posted on H-Rhetor
putting forth a different reading of the article and toward the
end of my post I said (very openly) that I found it curious that not
a single female responded to the numerous posts by males,
and I even referred to a few female colleaguesby first names and
asked, Why not? In other words, Why remain SILENT here in
the face of such gross misreadings of Gearhart?

Not a single female responded.  (Also, not a single male re-
sponded as a follow up to what I had said!)

But interestingly enough, I did get two private posts from a female.
I was instructed: Victor, when this un/kind of thing happens to one
of our female colleagues, we seldom, if ever, post publically; we
talk amongst ourselves privately.

So, Rosa, my question again:

_____ Where must women (Dworkin et al) go ... in dis/order ...
to become heard?

The private sphere!! The private sphere?? For, as you point out, even
many, many females in the public sphere will attack a Dworkin.

Caveat: (1) To be sure, there are all un/kinds of other questions and
inferences that I can think of to spin out of these private posts, but
for now I don't want potentially to cloud the issue of Why women put
themselves (?) back into the *domos* and not in a public sphere.

(2) For the social scientists or some other pedant, a sample of ONE
is not representative of any group. Obviously! But I am still asking for
this question to be considered; someone else, if interested, can go
out and do the surveying among F/M in our field. That kind of (ac)-
counting is not my game. And I am aware that the counting has been
done, and one of my colleagues, a female (!) in linguistics, has done
a lot of wk on this problem.

--VJV
============================================== 
Date:         Mon, 6 Mar 1995 23:14:35 -0400
Reply-To:     "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Organization: Miami University (Ohio USA)
Subject:      re -> cb: public reading 

>I hope that it's fair to say that you're interested in a revitalization of
>the public sphere,

well, not exactly, colin. rather than a revitalization of THE public
sphere, my telos would be a  revitalization of public discourses in and
among different publics.  in 1995, THE public sphere is historically and
perhaps even theoretically impossible. (yet it's an operative term, isn't
it? i have soooo much work to do!)

>It's possible that Sennett, or Habermas, or you, can resolve or have
>resolved this difficulty, but I have problems reconciling the project
>of a public sphere with the idea of literature, or even art.  I may be
>interpreting things here far too reductively, but the separation of
>public and private subjectivities suggests to me Kant's dissociated
>interest in art--the idea that we can remove ourselves from the
>interpretation and still have art.  If Dworkin (and/or we) believe that
>the task of art is to confront, change and transform others, then
>
>_____Is there a place for art in the public sphere which doesn't
>radically limit its transformative potential?

i'm unsure of the referent of your pronoun, colin:
if it's the transformative potential of _art_ you're worried about, i think
there's a REAL place for that in publics: where else, in fact, would art
transform?  and transform what?

 one of the reasons i still think about my horribly dated critiques of
reader-response is that those critiques haven't lost their exigence: there
are few if any accounts of reading (and you get to this below, colin) that
treat it as anything other than a romantic and individual endeavor; most
often "the reader" is the critic; even when reader-responsers claim they
are interested in students (bleich, holland), their work rests on
frightening sense of psychological "authenticity"; and even rosenblatt's
more transactional theory of reading posits a developmentally right
reading; and on and on.  (i'd really like to hear from anyone who can
update this critique; i haven't read bleich's most recent book, for
example).

so: transform WHAT??? selves? i'd say it's a social process that takes
place--or can be traced as having taken place--in a public when an
individual has written publicly about a work of literature and her or his
interpretation of it.  (this would be clearer if we were talking about my
chapters on joyce and miller, where lots of people DID write publicly about
their interpretations of the novels.)

if it's the transformative potential of _public spheres_ or _publics_
you're worried about, it think that's an even better question and one that
makes me think of the inherently conservative nature of epideictic
rhetoric, which "literature" or "poetic discourse" or "poesy" is most
closely associated with, among the aristotelian genres.  while the ways
literature works as epideicitic cannot be gainsaid, i think of
literature--or texts usually considered literary--as deliberative rhetoric,
that is, as having something to say about social or political or
philosophical or ethical questions and about how we should live: what
course of action we should take (and this of course requires a serious
revision of aristotle; in fact we've got to toss his rhetorical genres _out
the window_ or out of the boule: each of the genres of rhetoric was tied to
a particular venue for aristotle, though putting the rhetoric and poetics
side by side blurs his distinctions in vvvvvv productive ways).

IN ANY CASE i'd say reading texts usually considered literary as
deliberative rhetoric ENABLES one to see the transformative potential of
not only the works of literature themselves but of the publics that grow
(or don't, in dworkin's case) around them. think of upton sinclair's _the
jungle,_ for example, which i'll say more about soon in a separate post.

>I would also point out that even as you've been "more
>helpful to the quality and quantity of public discourse" (a point I
>wouldn't dispute), you've done so, not so much by looking at
>_Mercy_ itself, but by looking at its reception.

yes: absolutely: when i wrote my dissertation proposal, i was sure i'd have
room in each chapter to discuss not only the reception of the works but
also what about each of those works might have fostered those kinds of
reception.  (i was initially interested in writing about openness and
closure and how any act of reading--any act of knowing--APATE!!!--is an act
of closure, no matter how ephemeral: no new idea!)  but i ended up NOT
doing that because, first, it put me right back in the lit crit chair (i'm
not sure inevitably) and, second, i didn't have room in the chapters for
such a discussion.  and i haven't yet figured out what i'll do about this
issue as i revise the chapters.  so: you've cut to one of MY quicks!

>in your article, many (if not all) of the critics seem to be trying to
>look everywhere (stylistics, personam, context, politics) but at the
>work itself.  Which leads to a variation on the questions/answers
>about hearing, and speaking for one's self and others, I suppose, in
>that I might ask a chicken and egg (which came first?) type of
>question:

i'm not sure that "stylistics" wouldn't be part of the work itself.
hmmmmmmmmmmmm.  i need to look at the article again....
>
>_____To what degree might we understand "public discourse" as the
>source of the very inequalities that it is blind to?  That is, might not
>the very effort towards a public discourse (in the forms of those
>reviews) contain the seeds of mis/recognition that you discuss in the
>article?

i'd like you to restate this one, if you would, colin.  "the very effort
toward public discourse"--that is, the fact that public critics rather than
elite academics are writing the reviews?  or do you mean that "public" in
contradistinction to "private" from the greeks on has always "kept someone
at home, in the oikos?  i'm pretty sure i'm misreading you on this; i look
forward to understanding your question better.

>Ah, but maybe!  At the end of your last post, when you wrote, "we
>interpret. that is the best we can hope to do. in public or private.", I
>wondered if that was intentional.  That is,
>
you bet it was intentional, to the extent that that matters.

>_____Can we speak of interpretation as something which has a higher
>or lower public/private ratio?

do you mean, are some interpretations more public than others?

>We speak of speaking or writing as public and private activities, but
>is interpretation?  I've never thought of that before, the idea of
>"public reading," and it's one that I hope you'll speak to.

did what i said about public reading above help here?  literary public
spheres interest me so much precisely bc they give an empirical record of
the social natures of reading and writing AND of the way that texts usually
considered literary canmight change social practices.  no interpretation is
"private": the hermeneuts would not disagree, i think.  what i'd add to the
hermeneutic accounts of interpretation is a more social theory-based idea
of shared interest or common concern.  the people (again: not in the
dworkin study--there were no letters to the editor that i could find) who
wrote in response to _ulysses,_ _tropic of cancer,_ and _american psycho_
did so out of a sense of concern for the world they share with others.

let me know if you want to hear more about public reading.  my Cs paper is
about publics in the pedagogical as well as hermeneutic sense.

 
=================================================== 
Date:         Tue, 7 Mar 1995 21:32:37 -0400
Reply-To:     "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Organization: Miami University (Ohio USA)
Subject:      re -> vjv (3/3)

 >Not a single female responded.  (Also, not a single male re-
>sponded as a follow up to what I had said!)
>
>But interestingly enough, I did get two private posts from a female.
>I was instructed: Victor, when this un/kind of thing happens to one
>of our female colleagues, we seldom, if ever, post publically; we
>talk amongst ourselves privately.
>
>So, Rosa, my question again:
>
>_____ Where must women (Dworkin et al) go ... in dis/order ...
>to become heard?
>
>The private sphere!! The private sphere?? For, as you point out, even
>many, many females in the public sphere will attack a Dworkin.

>Caveat: (1) To be sure, there are all un/kinds of other questions and
>inferences that I can think of to spin out of these private posts, but
>for now I don't want potentially to cloud the issue of Why women put
>themselves (?) back into the *domos* and not in a public sphere.
>

well, vjv, having been called to position myself between your experience on
the net and what you have made of your experience on the net--you have made
this tale, and you have made with this tale an argument, call it what you
will--i will first resist taking that position.

i resist taking that position.

then i will take up that position:

yes yes yes: the status of anecdotal evidence is a productive question in
ALL of this: annabel patterson and i had an uneasy q&a over anecdotal
evidence when she visited penn state last year to give a talk on
historiography and the importance of reconsidering mere "anecdote" in
historical record.  she was willing to consider anecdotes as persuasive in
english cultural history but (bc of her absolutist stance on the first
amendment, i'd guess) she was seemingly unwilling to consider anecdotes
about the effects of pornography as persuasive or "significant."  yet and
so: many other pedants are coming slowly 'round to reconsidering the
persuasiveness of the anedcote, not the least of which some feminist social
scientists who--as i mention in the article--would support dworkin in
saying, "i'm the one he done it do."

we now return to your anecdote, wherein: are you the one they done it to?
or are you suggesting these netwomen done it to themselves?
and it, this time, is taking themselves out of the power of public discourse?

so: is your anecdote persuasive? that is, does it persuade me that women
sometimes tend to refuse to "go public"?  women absolutely do sometimes
refuse to go public; many many many subalterns do; many nonsubalterns do as
well for any number of reasons.  but it is not your anecdote that convinced
me of that.

let's please pluralize public into publics and consider that when these
women posted AMONG THEMSELVES they were not posting privately but in a
public that was different from the one you posted to.  it is NOT the oikos
but rather a subaltern and perhaps counter public: a public that simply
didn't include vjv.

that's my main point: what THOSE WOMEN were doing was not by my definition
private discourse, tho it might have been by theirs.

they didn't do it to you.

and i must run....
but i have much more to say in response to the very public discourses
of vee jay vee

 
===============================================
Date:         Wed, 8 Mar 1995 23:39:15 -0400
Reply-To:     "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Organization: Miami University (Ohio USA)
Subject:      the jungle and the war zone

as promised and as prompted by colin's question about art in public:

from the introduction (first two paragraphs and first sentence of third
paragraph) of "Rats: What's for dinner? Don't ask." James S. Kunen, *The
New Yorker,* 6 March 1995 ///emphases mine///:

        Ninety years ago, Upton Sinclair's immensely popular
///documentary/// novel "The Jungle" exposed the conditions then prevailing
in the American meat-packing industry. "Rats were nuisances, and the
packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then
rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together," Sinclair wrote,
in one of many vivid passages based on his research in Chicago, and he
added, "There were things that went into the sausage in comparison with
which a poisoned rat was a tidbit."

        Peering back in time from the moral heights of the present, we may
find it hard to make out why the captains of industry circa 1905 conducted
their businesses so rapaciously.  Were their hearts more resistant to the
promptings of conscience than those of today's corporate executives?  Or
did Sinclair's villains do what they did because it kept costs down and,
besides, they could get away with it?  Such questions are of ///more than
just literary interest right now,/// for what can be got away with may be
on the brink of vast expansion.

        ///Sinclair's best-seller helped spur the passage by Congress, in
1906, of American's first great consumer-protection measures--a federal
meat-inspection law and the Pure Food and Drug Act, which together
prohibited the shipment of adulterated or mislabelled goods in interstate
commerce....///

kunen goes on to talk about the dangers of the proposed Job Creation and
Wage Enhancement Act of 1995.  kunen's piece is exemplary of *the new
yorker*'s attitudes about ///literature/// on the one hand and
///politics/// on the other: though kunen begins para 3 by noting the
social change effected through sinclair's novel, he still reifies the
distinction between literature and social change in the previous sentence.


while i was at first surprised to read that same distinction in colin's
question, i had to remember how we are ///still/// trained as undergrads
and graduate students to distinguish the literary from the political.  i
remember being told as an undergraduate that the reason john steinbeck was
not taught by anyone in the department was because he wrote sociology
rather than literature.

rosa eberly 

=============================================== 
 Date:         Thu, 9 Mar 1995 14:25:30 -0400
Reply-To:     "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Organization: Miami University (Ohio USA)
Subject:      apt->re: Sinclair, Theoria, and a Catch-22

Having recently re-read Sinclair's _The Jungle_ I have to wonder
if Kunen ever read the book himself.  Sinclair is quoted as saying
"I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the
stomach."  His "beef" was that a book which he had intended to
be a story about the systemic exploitation of immigrant labor by
American capital got canonized as a "muckraking" novel,
primarily concerned with issues of cleanliness and purity in the
meat-packing industry.  "No, no, no!" Sinclair might say.  "You
violate me in reading me that way!"

In many ways this is an excellent text for comparison with
Dworkin's _Mercy_ (hats off to rosa) because it allows us to see
how easily one might "mis-read" _Mercy_ to be a call for the
mass-mutilation and murder of men.  To such a charge Dworkin
might say, "No, no, no!  You violate me in reading me that way!"
And to my question ...

___How might one answer such a charge?  How might one write
about Dworkin and avoid such a charge?

A little dose of Heidegger might be useful here.  He suggests in
_Being and Time_ that everything that shows up for us
(everything that we can see, everything that we can even notice)
shows up not "as it is," but in the way that it is _useful_ to us.  As
a result, every reading (all seeing, theoria) is by necessity a mis-
reading.  This explains why Kunen can so easily reify the
canonized version of _The Jungle_.  What was useful for critics in
the early 20th century was not all the "exploitation of labor"
stuff, but the stuff that made them sick to their stomachs when
they though about eating meat that was unsanitary.  So the
socialist agenda of Sinclair's novel didn't even show up for those
critics.  The other stuff did.  And this is a mis-reading, a typical
one, perhaps an inevitable one for persons who are invested in
capital.  Same goes for _Mercy_.  All that some critics can see in
the book is a direct assault, an invitation to murder them.  For me,
it's more useful to see this novel as a kind of 20th century
_Madame Bovary_, the story of a woman caught by her social
construction, violated by it, and unable to escape from it except by
VERY drastic means.  In this sense it is a political call to action.
It warns us that the way our society constructs women is so
limiting (cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt) that the _excess_ of the people
who are so constructed is bound to come back to haunt us.  It's been
bottled up for so long that when it comes back, it will do so with a
vengeance.  (eternal return of the repressed)  But, this is just "my"
take on the novel, and it also is necessarily a mis-reading.  (BTW,
the "my" does not imply that other people did not get similar
things out of the novel.  This isn't a copyrighted position.  It's just
one that is _useful_ for me at the moment.)

___So, is there a way that one can read Dworkin without mis-
reading her?  Can one write about _Mercy_ without violating its
author?

Probably not.  This may explain some of the silence that you
(rosa) speak about in your essay.  You suggest (in my mis-reading
of you) that the lack of speaking around _Mercy_, is a political
act, an act of silencing.  In not speaking about _Mercy_, critics
continue the ancient project of silencing women.  And from this
position critics are caught in a double bind.  In not speaking about
Dworkin, they perpetuate the oppression of women through their
attempt to "silence" Dworkin (who you remind us cannot be
silenced).  On the other hand, to speak about _Mercy_, to
publicly mis-read it, constitutes a violation of the author, yet
another rape.

__How can a critic escape from this bind?

At this point, I cede the mike, for I have rambled on long enough.

I enthusiastically await your reply!

-alan

alan patrick taylor
apt6083@utarlg.uta.edu
=========================================== 
 Date:         Fri, 10 Mar 1995 13:38:53 -0400
Reply-To:     "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Organization: Miami University (Ohio USA)
Subject:      re -> apt: enthused

alan: thanks for another vvvv productive post about *mercy* and silence,
this time by way of sinclair.  and of course you're right: 90 years ago,
sinclair's novel fostered social change bc it made people sick to their
stomachs.  kunen was seeing/reading *the jungle* as useful to his point
about 1995, just as i am seeing/reading what happened to *mercy* as useful
to my point about literary texts in public spheres.  so: theoria.

but does that change my point? a novel functioned to cause social change;
the energizing topos was gastronomic rather than socialist: you've offered
a smart topical analysis that argues differently than kunen's did. and i'm
sure studying public discourses about *the jungle,* esp letters to the
editor in the chicago papers, would empirically support your conjecture and
tell us more about how novels might work in public contra authors'--and
critics'!--intentions.

did sinclair feel "violated" when he made his famous
not-in-the-heart-but-in-the-stomach comment?  i can't say.
is to misread to rape? i certainly would never equate the two. misreading
is inevitable; rape is not.
would dworkin equate the two?  i have read much but not all of what she has
written, so i cannot say for sure. i will say that the way i see her, i
would conjecture that she would be loathe to use rape that metaphorically.
hence my emphasis on silence (not silencing, as i will get to below).

>Same goes for _Mercy_.  All that some critics can see in
>the book is a direct assault, an invitation to murder them.
no: there were no male critics who said, "dworkin's book says women should
kill us."  (and that is worth note, esp in the context of *american
psycho.*)  what several women critics saw in *mercy* and also in dworkin's
*intercourse* was the implicit argument that if they did not agree with
dworkin (again, in *intercourse* dworkin argued that all intercourse is
rape; the penis is a weapon) they were not adequately or correctly
interrogating/reading/seeing their own sexual practices.

>For me,
>it's more useful to see this novel as a kind of 20th century
>_Madame Bovary_, the story of a woman caught by her social
>construction, violated by it, and unable to escape from it except by
>VERY drastic means.  In this sense it is a political call to action.

absolutely.  that's how dworkin INTENDED it, i am quite sure. but where
does that get us, when the question is how novels really function
politically or, yes well, sociologically?  or, hell, RHETORICALLY?  what i
wanted to study was how--because of dworkin's rhetoric, because of power
imbalances, because of assumptions about what is and what is not "art" or
"literature," because of the way discourses about matters ususally
considered private become public--the book was not read that way.  (but
remember, alan, that is how you and i are seeing the book: i'm trying to
study collective seeing.)

hmmmmm. yes: collective theoria.  what would the greeks call that?  to be
seen by the many: to be seen in the polis: to have the appearance of
reality in the polis: i'm thinking hannah arendt here....  hmmmmmm.

>___So, is there a way that one can read Dworkin without mis-
>reading her?  Can one write about _Mercy_ without violating its
>author?

>Probably not.  This may explain some of the silence that you
>(rosa) speak about in your essay.  You suggest (in my mis-reading
>of you) that the lack of speaking around _Mercy_, is a political
>act, an act of silencing.  In not speaking about _Mercy_, critics
>continue the ancient project of silencing women....
>___How might one answer such a charge?  How might one write
>about Dworkin and avoid such a charge?
no: my article and i do not argue simplisitically that "the critics
silenced dworkin."  it is the combination of dworkin's rhetoric after
*intercourse* wherein public spheres discussing her became, for her, "war
zones" and critics insistence on moving the locus of discussion away from
the novel in a way that other critics refused to do with *american psycho*
that changed the structure or contour of the public discussion of the
novel.  nowhere do i say the critics silenced dworkin; nowhere do i say
dworkin silenced the critics. that is the same pointless pingpong as
cultural studies' reify/critique two-step.  ALL DISCOURSES BOTH SPEAK AND
SILENCE.  burke and many others--and heidegger: theoria--tell us this.
language, esp as it functions socially/publicly RHETORICALLY, is much more
complicated than any silence/speech, reify/critique binaries allow.

____how can a critic escape from this bind?

we know, of course, that no critic can escape from this bind of seeing, of
theoria, of having to choose a critical method, of having always to see
oneself in the reading.  theoria and apate!  (frost's poem, "for once,
then, something" just shot across my memory!)  but i can tell you about how
THIS critic used the bind to rethink how this critic mightshould do her
work.

it began....  no: that would take too long.  my problem reached its itchy
apex in a graduate seminar on blake, in which i was smelling the fact that
i would have to write yet another 20- to 25-page paper that would have to
argue some interpretation of a poem or group of poems....  and i could not
bear the thought of it.  hermeneutically.  epistemologically.
rhetorically.  no textual or theoretical warrants i could muster would
enable me to make a case for one interpretation of a poem or group of poems
that would have any more worth than any other interpretation.  i saw
myself, foundationless!  what a happy thing!

yet i was miserable.  (steve mailloux's *rhetorical power* offers an
antifoundationalist theoria of reader response that speaks to my malaise.
maillouxmalaise, i guess.)  IN ANY CASE  i ended up, for that seminar,
writing a study of how blake came to be an unignored poet in the united
states.  (very local kind of study: very historical, and fraught with all
the wonderful and terrible questions historiography has handed us.)  i
focused on placing critical communities alongside histories of criticism.
that was a breakthrough study for me bc it moved the theoretical locus of
my work finally away from literary argument (always relentlessly epideictic
and at the stasis of value: see secor and fahnestock) and towards studying
literature--texts usually considered literary--as a rhetorician.

i do not escape the bind. i offer, simply, another kind of product. a
product that, i flatter myself to think, has a social and political end:
increasing the quality and quantity of public discourse.

sorry i've gone on so long:
thanks for another great invitation.
i am, too, enthusiastic--a god within!--to hear more!

rosa

===================================================
       \                                       Fri, 10 Mar 1995 13:40:46 -0400
Reply-To:     "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Organization: Miami University (Ohio USA)
Subject:      theoria--a private connegtion

For Once, Then, Something

Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
Me myself in the summer heaven, godlike,
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.
_Once,_ when trying with chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths--and then I lost it.
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at the bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth?  A pebble of quartz?  For once, then, something.

Robert Frost
_New Hampshire_ (1923)


================================================= 
Date:         Mon, 13 Mar 1995 17:19:18 -0600
Reply-To:     "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         Victor Vitanza 
Subject:      Announcement, spring break & CCCC

RE: spring break/brake und CCCC

for the next 2 wks, we will experience, as we are now,
an all but absence of posts. just a note to let those
of you who are not going to CCCC or know about it that
we will take up this re/inter/view with rosa eberly
in about 2 weeks. if you do have questions, however, please
send them in. we will eventually get to them.

victor, moderator, REINVW
============================================== 
Date:         Tue, 28 Mar 1995 13:03:36 -0600
Reply-To:     "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         sophist@UTARLG.UTA.EDU
Subject:      Announcement: restart reinvw with R. Eberly

ANNOUNCEment_________________

let's restart the re/inter/view with rosa now. if you have questions,
please send them to REINVW.

rosa has received not a single question from a female subscriber to this
list; if any of you have questions, female or male, please post.

thanks.

victor, moderator
SOPHIST@UTARLG.UTA.EDU




copyright 1994 Victor J. Vitanza, James J. Sosnoski, and Rosa Eberly.
All Rights Reserved. 

Feel free to link to this page, but do not publish otherwise in part or whole 
without prior written consent from copyright holders and from particular posters. 
PRETEXT has an agreement with its subscribers to protect their posts 
from being published in pulp versions without first their written permission 
being given.)



To REINVW Archives

 
To PRE/TEXT List