A REINTERVIEW with Jasper Neel, 2.
(No part of this reinterview may be published elsewhere without written permission from
victor j. vitanza and jasper neel.) --Full Copyright notice at end of each file, starting with Neel 2
file.
The PreText Conversations held a Re/In/View
with Jasper Neel about his book Aristotle's Voice
during April and May of 1995.
================================================
Date: Wed, 31 May 1995 22:57:38 -0500
Sender: "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From: Victor J Vitanza
Subject: V->JN: COLLECT Call? nyet!
V->JN: COLLECT Call? nyet!
*****
"WARNING: _This Telephone Call_ is going to resist you. Dealing
with a logic and topos of the switchboard, it engages the destabili-
zation of the addressee. Your mission, Casper, should you choose
to accept this vocation, is to learn how to read with your [third] ear.
In addition to listening for the telephone, you are being asked to
tune your ears to noise frequencies, to anticoding, to the inflated
reserves of random indeterminateness--in a word, you are expected
to stay open to the static and interference that will occupy these
lines." --.--..-...-
--Avital Ronell, *The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia,
Electric Speech*
*****
Riiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnggggggggggggggggg!
RiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!
--Yes, hello, this is AT&T, how may I help you?
--Yes, operator, i would like to be connected to an MC I operator,
please.
--Sorry, you will have to dial direct to the competitor's operator!
Good luck!
--Uh, operator, would you please give me that number?
--No sir, you will have to get it from your MC I operator?
*****
Riiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnggggggggggggggggg!
RiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!
--Yes, hello, this is AT&T, how may I help you?
--Yes, operator, i would like to be connected to an MC I operator,
please.
--Sorry, you will have to dial direct to the competitor's operator!
Good luck!
--Well, operator, in that case, I would like to make a collect call,
please.
--Your , nummmmmber, plaaaaaeeeeeezzzzzzzeeeee!
--Yes, I would like to call Jasper Neel in HaberM*A*S*Hville, please.
--Mr. Neel's telephone number, pllaaaaaeeeeeeezzzzzzzeee
eeee?
--Operator, i am sorry, but i don't have it.
--Well, then, Surrrrrr, you need to talk to informaaaaaashunshun!
--Well, operator, i would appreciate all the help that u can give me.
... i'm sorry!
--Yes, Sur, you certainly are!
Well, then, would you be interested in an application for
AT&T?
--Actually, operator, i would just like to talk with Professor Neel.
--Ohhhh, youuuu woulddddda, would you? Well, I will send you a
supplication for AT&T and, if you sign up, you will get 10 hours
free on the weekends. Now, you want to speak to Professor
Who?
--Uhh, Operator, his name is Jasper Neel.
--What, Casper Nil? Sur, how do you spell that name?
--Yes, operator, it's N . E. E. L!
--Well, let's see, I have a Neel ... actually, I have quite a few kNeels
here. What is his first name?
--Casper. No, No, NO. I mean Jasper. J - A - S - P - E - R .
--Oh, yessssssss! Here he is. Ohhh, sounds like Jazzmine!
I just luvvvvv it!
Riiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnggggggggggggggggg!
RiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!
--Helllllllllooooooo. This is the Neel residense. Whom do you
care to speak to?
*****
" 'This morning, I thought that I ought not to pay,' Derrida thought
this one particular evening at 8:00. But in refusing to accept the
charges ... was the debt reduced? "
--Ronell
"To assume a debt, or to assume a proper name ... inflects the proble-
matic toward a region of fictionality, where assumptions of nonverifi-
able sorts can be made and sustained. The upshot [is] that 'one can
be _schuldig_--guilty, responsible, indebted--independently of any
act of feeling, intention or awareness. For instance, the act of
refusing to accept a collect call'."
--Ronell
*****
Riiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnggggggggggggggggg!
RiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!
--Yes, thisssssss iiiss the Aaaaaae.Teeeee&Teeeee opera-terror.
I have a collect call for Professor Casper Hauser. Will...
--Uhhhhh, Operator, Operator, i am calling Jasper Neel, please....
--Well, uvvvv curse you areee, dearrrrrrrie!
Uh, excuse me, please--you at the residense--would you
accept a collect call from Victor Vitanza?
--[Dear, do you know anyone by the name of Victa Nyanza?]
--[Hailllllllllllll, noooo. Why?]
[Well, the AT&T opera-ator says he's making a collect call to you.]
--[Hailllll, I don't know anyone by that name! Dear, it's just a vveirdo-
call. Just-HANG UP!]
KLICK!
--Uhhhh, Sur, your party does not, so to speak, want to party! haha!
--Thank you, Operator.
--Thank you, sur, and don't forget to call AT&Teeeee, again, next
time, ya'hear?.
KLICK!
KLICK!
.................................
{KLUCK}
.................................
==============================================
Date: Thu, 1 Jun 1995 16:44:50 -0400
Sender: "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From: Victor Vitanza
Subject: lak-->mal: interrogation
Matthew: I don't mean to "interrupt" you (as per our PTC 4Cs session); just
putting these in my post so that the context for my response is available.
YOU: But statements cannot be exhaustively interrogated. We have
microscopes now and can see that spontaneous generation isn't the best
explanation for that phenomena, but we shouldn't expect "progress" or
empiricism to answer everything. Scientific judgements are made based on
criteria, which are choosed using other criteria, which are choosed using
other criteria, which are choosed using other criteria....... That chain
of legitimacy cannot be exhaustively interrogated.
YOU: OK. His claim is not TRUE, but it is provocative, and if we
aren't so debilitatingly strict about how we make links, we might let it
take this conversation somewhere (also) interesting. Perhaps the best
way to avoid not bothering to interrogate what a grand or provocative claim
might mean or what it's based on IS TO BOTHER.
ME: I'm pretty uncomfortable with the notion that "not everything can be
interrogated." I think this is an easy way for theorists to theorize without
actually checking to see that their theories are grounded in someone's
reality... kind of a cultural empiricism, I guess. This is the work of the
historian, I think; but just as I think that the historian can't operate without
theory, so I think the theorist can't operate without history... even if it's
not made explicit, it's there (maybe even for Bataille!), and the theorist has a
responsibility to make their "history" (just as the historian has a
responsibility to make her theory) available/evident, etc.
I like Jasper's work here (the chapter I've read, anyway) because it IS TO
BOTHER about the history behind theory. My scholarship is almost entirely, 100%
based around the same interrogation. If we don't BOTHER, we wind up (perhaps,
almost certainly, unintentionally) perpetuating the same inequities, injustices,
etc. that we object to in the work/theory/teaching/research/whatever of others.
TO BOTHER is to contextualize thought, to reveal the ideological baggage that it
all -- even theory, even Bataille -- carries with it, so that we might begin
examining whether that thought/theory/curriculum/movie/email list/whatever
(again) is "right", accomplishes the goals we want it to, etc.
--Linda
Linda Adler-Kassner
General College
University of Minnesota
140 Appleby Hall
(612)625-6383
|--------------------------------------------------|
|"Sometimes luck is nothing but a real cool hand." |
|--------------------------------------------------|
========================================
Date: Thu, 1 Jun 1995 21:55:13 -0500
Sender: "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From: Victor J Vitanza
Subject: Riinnnnnngggggg: Wake Up Call
If you would like to send in a question or comment to Jasper Neel, now is the
time to do so. Since this REINVW is being conducted in the format of a
Forum, please feel free to address your questions to anyone in the
discussion.
write to:
reinvw@miamiu.acs.muohio.edu
vjv, moderator
========================================
Date: Fri, 2 Jun 1995 05:27:16 -0400
Sender: "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From: Victor Vitanza
Subject: mal->lak: _Darkness_at_Noon_
Linda: Unfortunately I wasn't able to attend 4C's, so I
don't
know what specifically you are referring to. In any case, I don't feel
interrupted, in fact, I would always rather be interrupted than ignored.
So, I appreciate the response.
What you write makes sense to me. I don't see any way in which your
comments contradict mine (not that contradictions are so bothersome), so
I know you must have misunderstood me (which is only slightly more
bothersome) :)
You very conscientiously quote me at length to give context, but then
omit an important word when quoting me in the body of your response. I
am also uncomfortable with the notion that "not everything can be
interrogated." By saying statements cannot be EXHAUSTIVELY interrogated,
I meant that the legitimacy of a statement cannot finally and totally be
determined with no regard to context. I was objecting to the out and out
rejection of Bataille's statement, to the fact that it was NOT interrogated.
Again, the fact that we cannot scour every bit of known space for
spontaneous generation doesn't mean we can't talk about it.
So, you are right.
_____What ideological baggage do you see in B's statement?
_____In what ways (if you were to interpret it) could it be wrong or
"right" (if that particular binary opposition is what drives your
academic work)?
_____Ever read Koestler's _Darkness_at_Noon_?
Brighten the light! Interrogate away!!!!
Matthew Levy
============================================
Date: Fri, 2 Jun 1995 05:38:24 -
Sender: "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From: Victor Vitanza
Subject: gs->jn/lak:nothing
I am here and there is nothing to say. A dazzled man speaks to you.
The world of "right"-ness, Linda? Is it any different from where I live? Call
it a world where causing pain knowingly and unnecessarily is wrong, killing
innocents is wrong, helping each other is right. I'm there, but like, so what?
There's still a lot of tedious fucks running around. I thought that's what
Vitanza and Bataille were talking about. I remember the first time I met
Victor, we were peeing next to each other at a 4C's, and he turned to me out of
the blue and started ranting to me (I'll never forget this), "That's the
situation. Each of us is involved in killing the humanness inside us. To live
life and demand it, and to make life echo resoundingly, thwarts our own
interests. To say to those around you, 'Take a good look at
yourselves--bleary-eyed, bent over, ever holding back, lackluster, accepting
infinities of boredom, lacking pride--that is what you do with possibility; as
you read you express admiration, but within and around you, you kill whatever
you claim you like.'" I knew just where he was coming from, so I nodded and
added, " . . . 'What you like only when it is dead and gone and not actively a
temptation to you.'"
Aristotle's Voice? Lately (what can I say? rapturous concert), I prefer
Michael Stipe's Voice. Let's begin again, like Martin Luther Zen. A mythology
begins the begin. Stipe says: I was central, I had control, I lost my head. I
need this, I need this. Bataille says: Acephalic. Stipe says: It's crazy what
you could have had, crazy what you could have had. Bataille says: I can't
stand seeing them forget the *chance* they would be if they took risks.
I laugh at this talk about Bataille saying nothing. If he said something, I
would never read him. He has nothing to say and he is saying it and that is
poetry as he/I/we need(s) it.
Linda says: "check to see [your] theories are grounded in someone's reality."
Survey says (conducted by some amusing joker on the Ctalk list): 9 times out of
10 reality is a word people use to push other people around. But *someone's*
reality, Linda--OK, sure, I'll go for that. Can I pick the somebody? Theory
Star Baudrillard? "In contrast to the discourse of reality and rationality,
which bets on the fact that there is something (some meaning) rather than
nothing, and which, in the last analysis, wants to be built on the preservative
notion of an objective and decipherable world, radical thought bets on the
illusion of the world. This thought wants to be illusion, restituting
non-veracity to the facts, non-signification to the world, and formulating the
reverse hypothesis that there may be nothing rather than something, tracking
down this nothingness which runs under the apparent continuation of meaning."
I have to live rather than continue to know. I can now easily see what (more or
less) turns each of us away from possibility. Or, if you will, what turns us
from ourselves.
That paper you quote, Jasper, the one about teenage suicide, was pretty
interesting. I'd have had nice things to say to that writer. Talk about
welding form to content, choosing a perfect grammar. I have never been that
close to thinking about really killing myself, but I assume if I were, the world
would become quite atomistic; I might need definitions for every single word,
think about each absurd step I was taking. I bet language comes unglued like
that for some suicides (look at some of those notes they leave), the meanings of
words start to slide. I might be stopped dead, then, on a lot of levels,
including the linguistic--with every step needing a reality check. Sure, this
reading implies an "ownership" of the student's text, a "rulership," but is
there a reading that doesn't? I would tell the student why I liked the
stopped-short, regressive anti-rhythm of the opening; I would also add that a
lot of teachers find that dictionary jazz really old. But what can I say?
Senselss hopes excite me.
Why either pure knowledge or particular knowledge? Why either situated or
disembodied? And that intellectual vs. moral split (which I can't help but
associate with the religious right)? If I was there is Vzelay in '44 I might
have asked Bataille why either transcendence or immanence, project or
uselessness, rationality or the sacred? And of course our theory star answers
the questions by seeming to contradict himself, trump his own words--but maybe,
rather, discovering "the inadequacy, the profound silence, of a philosophical
language that has been chased from its natural element, from its original
dialectics, by the novelties found in its domain. . . . Next to himself, he
discovers the existence of another language that also speaks and that he is
unable to dominate, one that strives, fails, and falls silent and that he cannot
manipulate, the language he spoke at one time and that has now separated itself
from him, now gravitating in a space increasingly silent" (Foucault). We need
not fear these silences,--we may love them.
Your dogged faith in a notion of culture which seems almost solved, like a
problem, has me puzzled, Jasper. Bataille has that word I keep coming back to
and turning around and examining, like a weird alien jewel. And each time I do,
it reveals more and explains more. Trangression. I used to think it meant
evil, outlaw, going against. (Evil, that's another one of those weird alien
jewel words.) I now think transgression is like progression only with the
trans-prefix. Going across, moving beyond limits. Going other.
Your world makes too much sense, Jasper. But I love that image of you, on the
attic steps, in your underwear.
Geoff Sirc
==========================================
Date: Fri, 2 Jun 1995 12:53:42 -0400
Sender: "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From: Victor Vitanza
Subject: lak-->mal: caveat 1
I knew I should have sent this yesterday...
What I wanted to add is that I _do_ agree with what you're saying... not that I
disagree. Sorry if I was interpreted otherwise. Just got on a roll.... More in
answer to those other qs later.
(I will say, however, that I was _assailed_ for my post by our fellow PTCer and
my colleague, Geoff Sirc, last night at a neighborhood gathering. Oy!)
--Linda
Linda Adler-Kassner
General College
University of Minnesota
612/625-6383
"Sometimes luck is nothing but a real cool hand."
===========================================
Date: Fri, 2 Jun 1995 12:55:26 -0400
Sender: "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From: Victor Vitanza
Subject: lak-->gs: reality
A response in a Sircean vein:
Yes, Geoff. You can choose the "reality." Objectivity, no. Some relationship
between, as I said, and "someone's reality"? Yes. Theory for theory's sake...
why? What good does it do? Isn't what we're about _doing_ something, changing
something, for example, the ways that composition is taught? I know that's what
_I'm_ doing here, and I think it's what _you're_ doing here, too. So don't we
need to ground our thinking about that, in a theoretical sense, in some
classroom practice ("reality")? Otherwise, why?
We can go back and forth (we have gone back and forth) on this
pomo/structuralist debate forever... you come from one direction, I generally
come from the other. That's one of the big differences in the way that we look
at "the world" "reality" etc. And _of course_ "reality" is used to push people
around. That's why we need to uncover it, to interrogate it, to see what
ideology/history/historical relationships/historical ideologies _underscore_ it,
so that we can see who's pushing whom, for what reason, and how (--adapted from
a historiographer, Robert Berkhoffer, who posed them differently, but the
questions are just as relevant). A communication historian named Hanno Hardt
put it beautifully, I think -- we need to historicize theory, and theorize
history.
Linda Adler-Kassner
General College
University of Minnesota
612/625-6383
"Sometimes luck is nothing but a real cool hand."
=======================================
Date: Sun, 4 Jun 1995 10:28:47 -0400
Sender: "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From: Victor Vitanza
Subject: sjm->jn: What's it all ABOUT, Ari?
Jasper,
I've been following the extremely interesting human/professional
exchanges about your book these past several days, trying to figure out
what they're about, which is to say, trying to make enough sense of some
part of it all so I can ask a question or two. (By coincidence, this
week for a grad class called Critical Theory and Histories of Sophistic
Rhetoric, we've read some pages from PD&W and AV along with your
essay, "The Degradation of Rhetoric," in addition to stuff by Kerferd,
Schiappa, Jarratt, and Vic Vicious.) Yesterday, I read through all the
exchanges again and, to my own surprise, was most shocked by a simple
statement of yours that began "My point has little to do with Aristotle .
. ." "Huh?" says I to myself. After all, the name of the book is
ARISTOTLE'S VOICE.
So back to that book I go, and, lo&behold, there it is again in
the very first sentence of the "Prologue": "This is not a book about
Aristotle, nor it is a book about rhetoric." How did I miss that?
What kind of a misreader am I anyway? Ah, I'll turn these questions
around and point them at you instead:
_____What notion of "aboutness" are you using here?
Perhaps there's some sense that AV is _really_ about "teaching": As you
put it in your post, "My point has little to do with Aristotle, and
everything to do with teaching." But if that's the case, either this and
the Prologue's first sentence are performances (in the sense you and Victor
have been agon-izing over), i.e, pieces of sophistic rhetoric drawing
attention to themselves; or dramatic exaggerations trying to disguise
their melodrama, i.e., pieces of sophistic rhetoric not trying to draw
attention to themselves as exaggeration but hoping to catch the reader's
attention and focus it on what is most important to you; or both? Here,
I guess, "about" means something like "concerned with."
What I find especially interesting about this first paragraph of AV's
"Prologue" is that its first sentence must NOT be using "about" in one of
its other meanings: "in, on, or somewhere near; around." This
spatial sense seems directly excluded when you write in your third sentence:
"But for me, "'Aristotle' and 'rhetoric' function as nothing more than
locations." "Nothing more than locations," mere places for standing
around, simple spaces for mucking about. Yet the whole rest of the
paragraph gives the lie to the sly sophistry of "nothing more than" which
functions ironically in relation to using the trope of "location" in almost
exactly the same way as the paragraph's final sentence functions ironically
in relation to your whole book's argument about Aristotle and rhetoric: You
claim in that sentence that you "do not know anything at all" ABOUT Aristotle
and rhetoric. That is, being about Aristotle, located around Aristotle
by (despite disclaimers) doing your own excavation of "the site
named 'Aristotle,'" all this is what AV is (mostly?) about, and its being
about teaching so effectively is (primarily? at least partly?) due to your
readers (Aristotelian rhetoricians, too, I bet) respecting what you do seem
to know about Aristotle and rhetoric.
But why all this sophistic talk about "about" (mine not yours)?
Well, for one thing, the talk helped me understand your particular
form of sophistry, which you announce in the same "Prologue" paragraph I
can't seem to get beyond: "I am nothing but a sophist." This is another
sophistry that you nicely reveal as such time and time again as you claim
Aristotle's voice as sometimes your own. "Nothing but" indeed.
However, believe it or not, all this talking about "about" is not only about
your first paragraph. It's also about your later references to Ed
Schiappa's distinctions among different ways of talking about the Older
Greek Sophists.
_____Do you agree with Ed's distinction (citing Rorty) between
historical and rational reconstruction, that is, a clear distinction
between historical scholarship on, say, Protagoras' specific teachings and a
late twentieth century appropriation of something called "Protagorean
sophistry" to explain poststructuralism?
_____If you do, then what are you doing when you talk about Aristotle?
_____If you don't, then what are you doing when you talk about
Aristotle's talk about Sophistry?
My belabored point is that I get confused when you say things like
"Whether you agree with my reading of Aristotle is not important to me"
(as you did in your 30 May post) or when you seem to suggest you are not
in competition with other excavators of Aristotle in AV. You might not care
about doing historical scholarship on the Sophists, but your incisive
talk about Aristotle's sophistry is certainly both historical
reconstruction and contemporary appropriation (appropriation as history).
And the persuasiveness of AV as appropriation is to a great extent
dependent on its persuasiveness as historical scholarship.
"And turn yourself around.
That's what it's all about.
Do the hokey-pokey."
Steve Mailloux
=======================================
Date: Sun, 4 Jun 1995 15:15:09 -0400
Sender: "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle
From: Victor Vitanza
Subject: jn-->Linda & Matthew, Geoff, and Vic
jn-->Linda & Matthew, Geoff, and Vic
Sorry to be off for three days. I've been doing this using Kermit to go from
email to Wordperfect and back. It worked fine. Then one of my hot shot
computer whiz colleagues got me to try Eudora via windows and trumpet. Eudora
took all my messages and wouldn't give them back (a backdoor way of admitting
that I didn't know how to get them back). Geoff, if you like the attic stairs
image, you should have seen me yesterday working off a dishpack (we're moving
houses) trying to figure out Eudora and the whole windows business. Yikes!
First to Linda and Matthew. Matthew, I'll have to confess to both hyperbole
and ignorance. Some of you readers of Bataille, tell me. How much cultural
anthropology did Bataille know? Was he indeed an anthropologist or at least,
a la Levi-Strauss, someone who studied "primitive people"? I'm going to take
a flying guess here and bet that his study of anthropology was about like
mine--read a few books, had a few conversations, heard a few comments, knew in
a general way about "so called primitive people." Am I right, or do I have
egg on my word processor?
Matthew, you're right. It would not be fair to expect Bataille to study all
primitive peoples. But it would be fair to demand a definition of "primitive
people" wouldn't it? And it would be fair to ask that he study enough of them
to have a fair basis for hypothesis building. Did he do that? If he did, I
stand convicted of ignorance. If he didn't, then I repeat my claim that
Bataille's claim is nothing at all.
If Bataille's point was nothing more than the provocation of thought and
discussion, then I suppose that's okay. All of us who teach have made such
claims as that, I suspect, if for no other reason than to provoke our students
into a critical response. Early in the twentieth century, Mississippi sent a
man named Theodore Bilbo to the US Senate. Part of his campaign was
"repatriation of the Africans." Bilbo introduced a bill under whose auspices
all African Americans would be given $100 and sent back to Africa. My
American history professor when I was a college freshman (at Mississippi
College in spring 1965 when the Civil Rights movement was burning through
Mississippi) introduced Bilbo's bill to the class and argued that it was the
best possible solution. Several weeks later, I realized that she was actually
arguing against racism and segregation, but she did it by arguing for the most
extreme possible argument for racism--ethnic cleansing (though she did not use
that phrase). Such claims as that, claims that indeed are intended to provoke
an opposite response, need no documentation.
But Aristotle's notion of spontaneous generation was of a different sort. He
saw enough rotten fruit, cheese, and meat produce "spontaneously" flying
insects that he concluded that all such rotting organic bodies (under the
right conditions) spontaneously produced such insects. In time (about 2,000
years) scientists created tools for observation that allowed for a better
hypothesis. The tools used by Bacon and his followers were better; the rules,
on the other hand, seem about the same.
My bet is (and I have never read [gasp!] a single word of Bataille other than
those words quoted by others) that Bataille was not being provocative, just
half-baked. But I am painting Bataille (unfairly, I'd be the first to admit)
with a very large skeptical-of-theory brush. My experience with too many
theory stars has been that they want their radical theory to generate for them
the most extravagant possible traditional positions--e.g., endowed chairs at
Duke, Chicago, Irvine, Yale, etc. Radical theory has the effect of enriching
the theory stars in exactly the same way that conservative theory enriched
their predecessors for the last century. Most of those theorists with whose
names we conjure these days make salaries well above $150,000 a year from the
most traditional and conservative institutions. And while the radical stars
may claim to want to "transform' these institutions, I'd bet they don't want
to "transform" their own salaries and fringe benefits--in any other way than
to make them larger.
Vic,
I bought a copy of Ronell's "Telephone Book" when it came out (about 1989, was
it?). But by then I'd already read "La Carte Postal" (in French, I want you
to know). For about twenty pages the book was inspiring, liberating in an odd
way. Then for about twenty more it was a bit of a grind. I just pulled my
copy off the shelf. My bookmark was just where I left it about five years
ago. Fifty pages in.
My hunch is that all Ronell accomplishes could be accomplished in fifty or so
pages. But, for academic advancement, she needed a "book," and Nebraska was
not going to publish a fifty-page book. So, like a good professional, she
wrote a book.
Geoff,
Well, to say the truth I don't think of myself as a dogged culturalist. I had
not used the term "culture" in recent memory before this conversation. But,
somehow it crept in. Let me see if I can clarify. First, even
"transgression," no matter where or how you put the "trans," depends on
culture, else you would have no line to cross, no limit to break, nothing to
transgress. When you and Vic were at the urinal, you assumed, I'll bet, that
the hotel was plumbed in the standard way and that the water you made would be
swept beneath the street to a sewage plant. You did not expect the water you
and Vic made to be captured in its pristine state and then recycled right
there at the hotel for cooking purposes. What set of rules was at work as you
and Vic stood at the toilet making water under those assumptions?
When you left the hotel in a taxi or airport limo, you expected the vehicle
designated and approved by the city as a public conveyance to be and do what
public conveyers are and do. You did not fear (well not much anyway or you
wouldn't have gotten in) being kidnapped and held for ransom, and you did not
expect certain groups of people driving on the streets of the city to obey
aggressively a semiotic system in which green means stop and red means go.
Radical questioning is fine, even essential. In a very limited (and
thoroughly self-serving, capitalistic way) I indulge in it all the time. But
I do it the same way you do it: with most of the rules of culture safely in
place. I don't want my PhD to stop meaning anything, even though I frequently
make arguments demonstrating its total meaninglessness. I doubt seriously
that anyone reading this list genuinely wants the sort of radical
transformation that would obviate the capitalistic value of degrees,
publications, even tenure. So, when we try to convince ourselves how radical
we are, we might want to ask ourselves to be honest about the degree of
radical transformation we seek (here I preach largely to my [not really very
radical] self).
As to the suicide, you taught me something for which I am grateful. It had
not occurred to me that this might be a young person actually considering
suicide. In that context, suddenly the essay means in poignant and
terrifyingly clear ways. I looked back through my correspondence, and I am
fairly sure that the student was responding to an assignment; thus, I think my
face-value reading is the "correct" one, but I'm no longer sure. Isn't it
weird how we (maybe I should say "I") let our prereadings of texts take over
the text itself?
jn
===========================================
Date: Sun, 4 Jun 1995 18:11:54 -0400
Sender: "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From: Victor Vitanza
Subject: cgb->jn: flying answers
Jasper, Linda, Matthew, Geoff, etc.,
I'm returning from a slightly longer hiatus, but let me weigh in with a
few comments...
In response to Jasper's "flying guess" about Bataille, I would turn to
Stephen Pfohl's _Death at the Parasite Cafe_, wherein he talks about
Bataille and other "ethnographic surrealists." I am not a Bataille
scholar, nor have I done the type of biographical research that it
appears Jasper is asking for, but I will reprint this account from Pfohl:
<>
I don't claim any more certainty for this account than is ap-PROPER-iate
for a second or third hand account, but it appears that Bataille did have
the background to make such a claim.
Problem is, all that tells me is whether he's right or wrong, and as
matthew points out, that's only one of many available criteria with which
to motivate our work. And frankly, I'm not really _that_ concerned about it.
Let me quote another recent read, Clifford Geertz, who writes about
anthropology that it is a primarily "interpretive" enterprise: The thing
to ask is...not what their ontological status is. The thing to ask is
what their import is: what it is, that, in their occurence and through
their agency, is getting said (The Intrpretation of Cultures, 10).
I'm not really concerned with the ontological nature of Bataille's
statement (claim or not). On the other hand, concerning that Bataille is
himself in the advanced stages of decay, I am more interested in VV's use
of him to say something that hasn't really been taken up yet. Namely,
what links may be drawn between Jasper's story about maggot-infested
food, Aristotle's ideas about life that springs from "corruption," and
the question of positioning ourselves with respect to the "decayed" texts
of the sophists.
If the response to decay is one of horror and fascination, then perhaps
we might see those two reactions played out in the debate which Jasper
has dismissed as careerist, tht between John Poulakos and Ed Schiappa.
Because of the promise of a position other than that of Plato and
Aristotle, and perhaps partly in fascination with texts both passively
(simply in terms of partial texts) and actively (in terms of P and A's
responses to them) decomposed, the side we might identify with Poulakos
seeks an alternative pedagogy, politics, and/or rhetoric. The other
side, which I might term, tongue-in-cheek, horror, seems to shy away from
the corrupt(ed) texts of the sophists, relying on philological certainty
for grounding and rejecting the lure of sophistry on such grounds. I am
biased, partial in both senses of the word, for it seems to me that we
are doomed to stasis if horror is our response. But that's not my
question, or critique...
My question, arrived at after this detour is still the one I was asking
before:
_____What has changed?
Perhaps I am, in the end caught up in asking a somewhat similar question
to Steven's. I am still interested in why there seems to be such a large
shift in attitude between AV and PD&W. How do you, Jasper, account for this?
One more before I go:
_____Is there some similarity between the way P and A use "sophist" and
you are using "celebrity" or "star"? I mean, one of Plato's major qualms
with the sophists tend to be the way that they take money (the equivalent
of $150,000 perhaps) for their teaching, and use radical rhetoric while
eschewing the """"real"""" implications of their teaching. This is not
meant to be an AHA! I GOTCHA! kind of question. Rather I'm looking for a
way to understand your critique of Theory differently from the way that
Plato understands sophistry. In the absence of such an understanding, it
seems my first question takes on even more importance in my mind...
Collin Brooke
The University of Texas at Arlington
cgb1046@utarlg.uta.edu
ps. No need at all to apologize for a three days' absence! You've been
doing a great job of responding promptly so far...
=============================================
Date: Sun, 4 Jun 1995 17:15:03 -0500
Sender: "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From: Victor J Vitanza
Subject: vjv: Telephone #2
V->JN: Calling(s)
*****
"WARNING: _This Telephone Call_ is going to resist you. Dealing
with a logic and topos of the switchboard, it engages the destabili-
zation of the addressee. Your mission, Casper, should you choose
to accept this vocation, is to learn how to read with your [third] ear.
In addition to listening for the telephone, you are being asked to
tune your ears to noise frequencies, to anticoding, to the inflated
reserves of random indeterminateness--in a word, you are expected
to stay open to the static and interference that will occupy these
lines." --.--..-...-
--Avital Ronell, *The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia,
Electric Speech*
_____
Jocosta: Yet here me; I implore thee: do not thus!
Edapus: I must not h/ear of not discovering the whole truth!
--Sophocles, *Edapus Da King*
*****
*****
Riiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnggggggggggggggggg!
RiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!
-----Helloooooooooo.
-----Yes, I would like to talk to Forrest Gump!
-----Ah, you must have the wrong number, sir.
-----Oh, is this 000-0000?
-----Yes, it izzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. But no one by that name
livezzzzzzzzzzzzzzs here.
-----Are you sure?
-----Purdy sure, sir.
-----Are you sure?
-----I am sure, sir!
-----Well, then, thanks. (Click)
-----Your welcome, I'm sure. (Click)
...
Who was that?
Who was that calling? Oh, it was just a wrong numba,
honey. Don't you fret. You know, like I aways sezzzzzzzzz,
life is like a telephone call ... ya never know what ya goin get
on the other end. Just get back to your intra-nettin'.
Oh, mom ... yur so jocoserious!! hehaw, hehaw, hehaw!!
Well, thank ya. And when you a-get finished, w'ill put on
Mista Roger's Neighborehood!
*****
Riiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnggggggggggggggggg!
RiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!
-----Helloooooooooo.
-----Yes, I would like to talk to Jasper Neel!
-----Oh really? Well, who is calling, pleaseeeeeee.
-----Simone!
-----Jaspppppper, dear, the telephone is for you, someone
by the name of see-moan is calling.
-----Ohhhhh! I will take it in here, dear. Please hang
up now. (Click)
-----Yes, this is Jasper Neel, how may I help you?
-----Yes, now ... well let's see ... how may you help me?
Professor Neel, I am a character in Georges
Bataille's first novel, *The Story of the Eye*. Could we
meet some where, say, ohhhhhhh in a church?
near the confessional?
-----My gosh, why?
-----I would like to show you a few seecrets about
Bataille!
-----Well, okey-dokey! I will be right there! Shucks, I'm
always ready to learn a bit!
-----I'll be seeing you....
-----I'm a-coming! Bye! (Click)
-----Yes, I'll be seeing youuuuu ... placing you ... professor,
in all those ... how does the chanson go? ... all those familiar
places! (Kluck)
*****
Riiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnggggggggggggggggg!
RiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!
-----Helloooooooooo.
-----Yes, I would like to talk to Jasper Neel!
-----Oh really? Well, who is calling, pleaseeeeeeeee.
-----The Sphinx is calling!
-----The Sphinixxxxx!!??
-----Yes, and I would like to speak to Professor Neel. I have
an ur-gent question for him.
-----Oh, you doooooo, do you?
-----Yes.
-----Well, my dear, you will just have to see him at school
about your question!
-----School? I am not a student! ...
**I AM THE SPHINX!**
-----Well, don't get your clavvs up dear!!
-----Jasper, honey, there's a call for you. The Sphinx is
a-calling!
------**THE Sphinx!!** Wowah! Wowah! Wowah! I've been
a-waiting fur this call all of my life. Why, I bet she has a
question for me.
.....
-----Hello, Sphinx, this is Jasper Neel. Fire away. What's ya
question? Come on, give it to me. Put it to me!! Right, straight
away!!
-----Yes, well okay:
*Who are you?*
-----Why, that's easy: I am Jasper Neel!! Silly! ...
-----R. U. Sure?
----- ... WAIT, is this a trick question?
-----Well, [Jasper Neel] you are-a, indeed-a, showing some
signs-za of improvement in interrogating-ah this question,
BUT we will
SEE
what we will have
SEEN!
[Kluck, Kluck, Kluck]
*****
HOPE springs E-Ternal!!
*****
====================================
Date: Tue, 6 Jun 1995 00:26:35 -0400
Sender: "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From: Victor Vitanza
Subject: cnd->jn: scientific empiricism
cnd->jn: scientific empiricism
Well Jasper, I'm not in rhetoric, but i did minor in anthropology as
an undergrad, and have since done a little work in the philosophy of
science, studying (for the most part) hard line empiricist in the
Humean tradition, such as Quine, Churchland and Dennett. I too have
little interest in what i consider to be 'idealistic' thoery, in
which I include Derrida, Habermas, and probably most of the characters
you would call theory stars. I do, however, have an interest in the
materialist philosophies of Bataille and Deleuze, for both are
homologeous with contemporary scientific explanations of the nature
of the matter/energy matrix, and both exclude what i would consider
to be the naive notions of 'cultural constructivism' and symbolic
descriptionsof nature (as if we could simply shift the cogito to a social
register). So, no, Bataille is not a cultural anthropologist. If he's an
anthropologist in any sense, he's a physical anthropologist. To the
extent that one is more scientific than the other, i would say that it is
physical anthropology, insofar as its findings at least possess inter-
theoretical coherence with natural sciences.
My question is:
_____What do you consider to be empirically valid? and...
_____What criteria do you use to legitmate a statement about homo
sapien behavior?
From my perspective, the only science of man that is really scientific
is human biology (of which physical anthropology is a species you
might say). None of the other so-called sciences of man can predict
anything, even statistically (with any regularity). It has been my impres-
sion, in the time that i have spent studying the philosophy of science
and the humanities, that it is the human sciences inability to take man
as a piece of matter rather than a symbolic manipulator tht has pre-
vented them from approaching the success of the natural sciences.
_____Would you agree with this?
If not, i would have to say that your empiricism is not scientific at
all, in that it would thus have no coherence with *real* science at all.
chris dacus
cnd7750@utarlg.uta.edu
============================================
Date: Wed, 7 Jun 1995 19:16:34 -0400
Sender: "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From: Victor Vitanza
Subject: lh-->jn: Jasper's Body
Dear Jasper,
I read your books. I found you spending a lot more time in AV concerned with
being situated, and it is at that location that I'd like to stand for awhile..
While I was flipping through (before reading) "In the Heart of the Heart of
Rhetoric," I noticed your subtitles.. Situated Writing I: In the Chair Where I
Sit.. In the Chair Where We Sit.. etc; I quickly flipped back to the bib to see
if you listed Donna Haraway's "Situated Knowledge" or any of her cohorts in
standpoint theory.. since that's where I learned about being situated.. but,
no Haraways. By accident, the pages then fell open to the index at the W's and
I saw: "Woman, 184." I smiled (one entry :)) and turned to page 184, the
place where you equate the place of comp studies to the place
(er, I should say, placelessness) of "Woman."
(V! I am gonna get to the part where I ask the question with that ______thingy,
I promise)
You see, I'm interested in the "place" you give to women, because I've been
writing this essay/letter to you for the last few years, ever since I read PDW
as one of the first books that influenced me as a r/c grad student... and I
wondered if the positioning had changed much..
Let me set up what I'm going to ask of you by quoting a few of the passages in
AV that have my attention.. on page 26, you write:
"In Aristotle's system, soul is privileged over body, intelligence over
emotion, humans over animals, men over women, and freemen over slaves. Is it
possible for the field of composition studies to extract the first three
hierarchies--the ones privileging soul, intellegence, and human--while leaving
aside the other two hierarchies--the ones privileging male and freeman?"
(And I thought.. "Surely he is not gonna set aside the last two and leave in
place the first three.." and so I read on..)
On 28: "What are the practices and procedures that we cannot conceive of
abolishing because they are natural? Is it possible that our ways of placing
and evaluating are embedded in a kind of politics and that they imply a social
order?"
(And, having read and reread your texts, I knew that the points you most want
to make are presented in this way.. sometimes as questions, often
presented in the sort of humble (even self deprecating) tone that you are so
good at.. and I read on (btw, I'm reading and looking.. hoping.. for you to
address the body.. embodiment.. the dark horse..)
I know you know that our ways of knowing/categorizing/writing are embedded in a
kind of politics.. and I know you know that it is crucial to be aware of where
not only we.. but the writers we read.. are situated in those politics, and I
know you are going about the task of un-embedding what subsists the "fathers" P
and A... because you write stuff like this (34):
"I truly believe that composition studies cannot do its job without behaving so
as to deserve the contempt of Aristotle as well as that of his teacher and of
all those who accept aristocratic notions in which a 'superior man' can extract
himself from the vicissitudes of ongoing, lived experience and thus be freed
to seek pure knowledge for its own pure sake, knowledge that presents itself
through the disembodied voice of professional discourse as if no lived history
at all stands behind it."
Your many narratives.. your lived experience that weaves throughout the text..
watching TV and the LA riots.. your Mississippi youth (btw, I went to
Mississippi College too, got my MA there.. hung out with folk who loved to say
they were Americans by birth and Southern by the grace of God).. anyway, back
to what I was trying to say.. you have many attempts to bring your own
historical contingency into you texts.. and into the discipline of r/c.. and
yet.. and yet..
______ Where does the body stand in your discourse? I don't mean "Aristotle's
Body"--like in one of your other sections, where you talk about the body of
Aristotle's work.. I mean.. the body.. your body.. phenomenology etc..
remember, you let that soul/body split stand back on page 26,
and I'm having a hard time getting over that (although you do go some way
to deconstruct intelligence/emotion when you talk about epideitic discourse and
the sophists further in... and you really should read Haraway if you think we
should let humans/animals go unexamined).
See I'm interested in your body because I'm interested in a feminism of sexual
difference.. and you come so close to my own agenda by beginning an excavation
of the "fathers".. because they did, in many ways, inaugurate certain features
of our current way of thinking, characteristic of our particular cultural
epoch, that have made it difficult for us to think about what it means to be a
woman. And what has become of the body because of P&A's writing (which
perhaps covered over the way the sophists approached the body) is important..
(maybe as important?) as what has become of rhetoric. Without any thought for
the body, I fear your voice is another inflection of patriarchal dogma
masquerading under the guise of sensitivity. (And like Haraway says, "I'd
rather sleep with a cyborg than a sensitive man.")
Lynda Haas
Writing Program
Ithaca College
haas@ithaca.edu
===============================================
Date: Thu, 8 Jun 1995 08:08:08 -0400
Sender: "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle
From: Victor Vitanza
Subject: jn-->cd re:empiricism
jn-->cd re:empiricism
Chris,
Have you read Zola's "The Experimental Novel"? If you haven't, you might
enjoy it (it's about ten pages long, and you wouldn't need to read all of it
to get his drift). Zola takes a book by a medical doctor named Claude Bernard
and tries to argue that the novel is a "social" experiment intended to
ameliorate society in the same way that medical research tries to improve
human health. The essay is pretty much a hoot now. But it serves as a
cautionary warning to anyone who thinks empirical science can be imported into
(what for lack of a better phrase I will call) human sciences.
I suppose I would turn to (good, old-fashioned) Toulmin for a validation
criterion. I'm happy (in a Neanderthal, pre-theory sort of way) with the grid
claim-data-warrant. When someone makes a claim (e.g., that the stage of
decomposition is the most terrifying for primitive people), I wonder the
following: 1. Who are primitive people? Are they preliterate people (Derrida
likes to play with that notion)? Are they people who live in non-electrified
rural settings? Are they people who live in very poor urban areas but don't
show up in governmental statistics (e.g., don't pay fica, don't attend school,
may not have citizenship, etc.). Are they university humanists who don't know
how to negotiate the WWW with Eudora or Netscape? 2. What is the data for
this claim? Having defined "primitive people," how many such people has
claimer studied? Is one person enough? One tribe? All tribes on one
continent? Representative tribes on several continents? 3. Is the data
appropriate for the claim? For example, must the claimer do the research, or
can the claimer accept Margaret Mead's research as sufficient? Are the people
studied "primitive" according to the guiding definition of "primitive"?
Much of theory, it seems to me, intends to "provoke" rather than claim because
the very notion of claiming is so fraught with "modern" if not Victorian
narrow minded connotations. Well, I suppose I have been provoked enough over
the last twenty years. One might say I am thoroughly provoked.
jn
==================================================
Date: Thu, 8 Jun 1995 08:10:33 -0400
Sender: "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From: Victor Vitanza
Subject: jn-->cb re: Bataille, claims, food, etc
jn-->cb re: Bataille, claims, food, etc
Pleading ignorance is so liberating! It lets you say whatever you want to say
while denying both that you really said it or could possibly have meant it. I
like the strategy so much, that I'll continue using it. If anyone calls to
complain, the phone is simply off the hook (or in a box).
It's been about five years since I read the Poulakos-Schiappa debate. The
following characterization depends on that five-year-old memory. Here's how I
left that set of essays. In a wary, not-yet-fully-committed way, I think I
want to support the sort of alternative pedagogy Poulakos was seeking. I know
that I felt a strong desire for him to "win the argument." I did not,
however, think he won it. I thought he lost it. (I'm not willing to defend
that response. I will label it a Humean sentiment: since it is my sentiment
it is right as my sentiment, though clearly of little value beyond an
expression of "how I felt.") The result, for me was this: 1) Seeking radical
pedagogy is fine, but the place to seek it, the language through which to
articulate it, may not be available in works written by Protagoras, Gorgias,
etc. 2) The sort of philological scholarship done by Schiappa does not
interest me. I'm glad Ed is doing it. I hope he keeps it up. It is useful
to those (like me) too lazy to undertake it. 3) Since Plato and Aristotle
seem to have been so influential in defining the ways we "think" (and
admitting that I like to "think" in those ways), I decided to explore what
sophistry would sound like if one spoke through the voices that P and A worked
so hard to silence.
I can see why you think I "dismiss" the P-S debate as careerist. It is by no
means fair of me to do that, nor did I intend to do it so as to imply that I
am exempted from the dismissal (on page 181 of AV I try to make this clear).
Everything I have published is at least as careerist (since I don't claim to
be adding to truth or knowledge, one might even argue that what I write is
more careerist) as what P-S have written. I put my publications on my resume,
send it to the dean, expect to get a good raise, and demand that candidates
for promotion to associate or full do the same. That's careerist. Indeed,
for the moment I am an agent of the institution with paid responsibility for
ensuring just that sort of careerism.
I don't see much of a shift between PD&W and AV. In both cases, I was writing
my way through a problem that grew out of my professional situation as a
writing teacher, nothing more. In neither case was I trying to construct (a
la Hegel, or even Matthew Arnold) some sort of coherent "model" or "theory."
The flash point, of course, is that I employ the term "sophistry" in a variety
of ways, and "sophistry" has become a site of considerable professional
contention. When the term appears, professionals say to themselves, "Well
lesssee what we got here boys and girls. Lesssee if this boy knows what he's
talkin' about." Insofar as there is a shift, it results from a six-year space
between the two books. After PD&W I lost interest in Plato and Derrida. I
haven't read anything by or about Derrida (haven't had that spirit here since
1989) in five years. Students who learn that I have written about Derrida
come to talk with me about him, and they all know so much more than I do that
it's embarrassing. Indeed, I suppose the whole "theory" field has lost
interest for me. Now that I've worked my way through Aristotle, he, too, has
pretty much lost interest for me. AV is a record of a problem that once
interested me. For me, the problem is finished (not solved, just finished).
Now I'm working on 17th century American prose, about which I know nearly
nothing. I'll work my way through that, record the process in a manuscript,
and see what happens.
I had not thought of linking (nor did I intend to link) "theory star" with
"Platonic sophist," though I can see how the link would practically glow in
neon. I don't know that I am in a position to critique theory: not
rhetorically (who would care what I thought about theory?) and not
temperamentally (the latest issues of "Diacritics," "Critical Inquiry," and
the most recent theory books from Routlege or Hopkins just don't interest me.
Once they did, intensely; now they don't. In fact, I suspect theory is almost
to the point where it doesn't mean very much simply because a lot of people
have lost interest in it. Yale sets the career standard. Theory is dying at
Yale. The rest of us will attend the funeral and wait for Yale to tell us
where the next party to which we're not invited will be located.)
jn
==============================================
Date: Thu, 8 Jun 1995 08:16:02 -0400
Sender: "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From: Victor Vitanza
Subject: jn-->sjm re:sophistry
jn-->sjm re:sophistry
Steve Mailloux writes the following query:
[[[[[[ I've been following the extremely interesting human/professional
exchanges about your book these past several days, trying to figure out
what they're about, which is to say, trying to make enough sense of some
part of it all so I can ask a question or two. (By coincidence, this
week for a grad class called Critical Theory and Histories of Sophistic
Rhetoric, we've read some pages from PD&W and AV along with your
essay, "The Degradation of Rhetoric," in addition to stuff by Kerferd,
Schiappa, Jarratt, and Vic Vicious.) Yesterday, I read through all the
exchanges again and, to my own surprise, was most shocked by a simple
statement of yours that began "My point has little to do with Aristotle .
. ." "Huh?" says I to myself. After all, the name of the book is
ARISTOTLE'S VOICE.
So back to that book I go, and, lo&behold, there it is again in
the very first sentence of the "Prologue": "This is not a book about
Aristotle, nor it is a book about rhetoric." How did I miss that?
What kind of a misreader am I anyway? Ah, I'll turn these questions
around and point them at you instead:
_____What notion of "aboutness" are you using here?
Perhaps there's some sense that AV is _really_ about "teaching": As you
put it in your post, "My point has little to do with Aristotle, and
everything to do with teaching." But if that's the case, either this and
the Prologue's first sentence are performances (in the sense you and Victor
have been agon-izing over), i.e, pieces of sophistic rhetoric drawing
attention to themselves; or dramatic exaggerations trying to disguise
their melodrama, i.e., pieces of sophistic rhetoric not trying to draw
attention to themselves as exaggeration but hoping to catch the reader's
attention and focus it on what is most important to you; or both? Here,
I guess, "about" means something like "concerned with."
What I find especially interesting about this first paragraph of AV's
"Prologue" is that its first sentence must NOT be using "about" in one of
its other meanings: "in, on, or somewhere near; around." This
spatial sense seems directly excluded when you write in your third sentence:
"But for me, "'Aristotle' and 'rhetoric' function as nothing more than
locations." "Nothing more than locations," mere places for standing
around, simple spaces for mucking about. Yet the whole rest of the
paragraph gives the lie to the sly sophistry of "nothing more than" which
functions ironically in relation to using the trope of "location" in almost
exactly the same way as the paragraph's final sentence functions ironically
in relation to your whole book's argument about Aristotle and rhetoric: You
claim in that sentence that you "do not know anything at all" ABOUT Aristotle
and rhetoric. That is, being about Aristotle, located around Aristotle
by (despite disclaimers) doing your own excavation of "the site
named 'Aristotle,'" all this is what AV is (mostly?) about, and its being
about teaching so effectively is (primarily? at least partly?) due to your
readers (Aristotelian rhetoricians, too, I bet) respecting what you do seem
to know about Aristotle and rhetoric.
But why all this sophistic talk about "about" (mine not yours)?
Well, for one thing, the talk helped me understand your particular
form of sophistry, which you announce in the same "Prologue" paragraph I
can't seem to get beyond: "I am nothing but a sophist." This is another
sophistry that you nicely reveal as such time and time again as you claim
Aristotle's voice as sometimes your own. "Nothing but" indeed.
However, believe it or not, all this talking about "about" is not only about
your first paragraph. It's also about your later references to Ed
Schiappa's distinctions among different ways of talking about the Older
Greek Sophists.
_____Do you agree with Ed's distinction (citing Rorty) between
historical and rational reconstruction, that is, a clear distinction
between historical scholarship on, say, Protagoras' specific teachings and a
late twentieth century appropriation of something called "Protagorean
sophistry" to explain poststructuralism?
_____If you do, then what are you doing when you talk about Aristotle?
_____If you don't, then what are you doing when you talk about
Aristotle's talk about Sophistry?
My belabored point is that I get confused when you say things like
"Whether you agree with my reading of Aristotle is not important to me"
(as you did in your 30 May post) or when you seem to suggest you are not
in competition with other excavators of Aristotle in AV. You might not care
about doing historical scholarship on the Sophists, but your incisive
talk about Aristotle's sophistry is certainly both historical
reconstruction and contemporary appropriation (appropriation as history).
And the persuasiveness of AV as appropriation is to a great extent
dependent on its persuasiveness as historical scholarship.
SJM]]]]]]]]]]]]]
Steve,
As you suggest, when I say AV is not "about" Aristotle or rhetoric, I mean
"concerned with." First, "Aristotle" is the name of a professional
conversation that has been underway among classicists for millennia (or, if
you listen to Larry Green, et al., since the Renaissance). To participate in
this conversation, one would need training in classical languages, very good
German, and training in classical scholarship. I don't have any of these at
anywhere near the required level. It seems very unlikely to me that a
classicist, particularly one specializing in Aristotle, would learn much from
AV. While I have learned a great deal from classicists, I don't think they
would learn much from AV. (You will note that I have been thoroughly
unprofessional in using classical scholarship, mixing everything from elite,
professional journal articles to popular books and sources not much more
sophisticated than Cliff's Notes.) About one day a month I wish I were a true
classicist, but then I read Mehta's essays in "The New Yorker" about Jasper
Griffin, the reigning classicist at Oxford, and I realize that I don't have
the time to become one (nor, probably, the ability; in sixth form Griffin had
to translate Hopkins' sprung rhythm poems into Homeric Greek!).
There is also a professional conversation about rhetoric. Such professionals
as Tom Cole, Tom Conley, and Tom Farrell (to limit myself to Toms for the
moment, though Cole is really a hybrid classicist/rhetorician) are currently
involved in this conversation. Most such people inhabit rhetoric or
communication studies departments (Jerry Murphy, for example, chairs rhetoric
at Davis; our own Ed Schiappa is in communication studies at Purdue). About
one day a week I consider asking our communication studies department here at
Vanderbilt to take me because I feel more at home with them than I do in the
English department; I think they would accept me--not because of my
scholarship but because they think (quite wrongly) that I have some clout with
the administration, and when my term as chair ends I may well move
departments. If I put my mind to it and spend my leave in 1996-97 doing
nothing else, I could probably make myself into a rhetorician. I'd have to
begin going to SCA, subscribe to "Rhetorica," and begin more regular
attendance at RSA, but I think I might actually have the option of becoming a
rhetorician. The sort of professional I'm describing here would have read all
the texts Corbett mentions in the brief history of rhetoric at the end of
"Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student"; such a person would regard
Golden's "Rhetoric of Western Thought" as a sort of Cliff's Notes to
rhetorical theory.
For the moment, however (and throughout the time I wrote both PD&W and AV), I
am (was) a composition teacher, which means that I take my professional
identity not from an established field of study but from a teaching assignment
that carries with it administrative responsibilities. No specialized training
and no body of knowledge is required to teach the courses I teach. Reputable
universities all over the country assign composition courses each fall to an
eclectic grab bag of instructors, most of whom have no intention of becoming
"composition teachers."
AV is a handbook, if you will, about how anyone teaching composition can
investigate what they are doing and why they are doing it. I learned to teach
writing from Aristotelian rhetoric, which is why I wrote about Aristotle. I
felt it was important for me to know why I did what I did and how what I did
works. The questions I pose in the "Prologue" are very important to me. If
they are wrong, unproductive, pernicious, or misleading, I hope someone will
educate me. The reading of Aristotle, on the other hand, is important at a
second level.
AV, in short, is "about" how one foregrounds the sources of one's pedagogy.
For me, that happens to be Aristotle--and I am truly grateful for those
rhetoricians and classicists who gave me so much to work with. I hope, no
doubt lamely, that some of the rhetoricians might find my "mucking around" in
Aristotle useful; I'd be amazed if any classicists ever even heard of the
book.
Before stopping with this question, let me add one caveat. Very little in AV
"promotes" the positives of Aristotle's rhetoric (and I use the name very
loosely here). In fact, the canons, the appeals, and even the psychology of
communication Ari offers are very useful. They function as the backdrops for
all my composition courses. In writing AV, I felt no need to justify Ari as a
powerful source for pedagogy; that has been done often before. I wanted to
make myself (and anyone else who cared to notice) acutely aware of the
dangers.
I do pretty much agree with Schiappa's distinction. I think historical
research on "sophistry" is possible, interesting, and productive; it is also
painstaking, difficult, slow, uncertain, and fraught with danger and
difficulty. I'm afraid that many of us who have turned to sophistry as a form
of postmodernism (I am speaking of myself at the end of PD&W here) have been
hasty and half-baked. Right now, I doubt that any such label as "the
sophists" has much meaning (unless one uses that label straight from Plato and
Aristotle without trying to compare it to anyone P or A would have tried to
include in the term). I do worry that scraps such as "man is the measure of
all things," or "nothing exists," etc., scraps that sound very contemporary,
can mislead us into finding something in ancient Athens that we alone can see.
I do not, however, wish to "take Schiappa's side" in this argument; it's
simply not an argument I wish to participate in. If I could write PD&W again,
I'd keep the ending as it is, but I'd play Protagoras into it differently--not
so much as a source, more as the instigator of an idea, an idea for which
Protagoras bears no blame.
I do still cling to the notion of sophistry (as defined by P and A) as a good
foundation for democracy. I find comforting symmetry in this maneuver. P and
A both despised democracy. Each used "sophistry" as the label for the
discourse they wished to silence. Democracy depends, it seems to me, on the
ability of all citizens to know how arguments are made. It also depends on a
communal assumption that no one has access to (or is even approaching)
absolute truth; truth is always contingent, public, and subject to change--at
every level from the foundation to the surface.
Bill Clinton's dithering over Bosnia is a good example (so that I'm "out,"
I'll say here that I voted for Clinton and, for now, expect to do so again).
He seems to change his mind daily. This is sophistry at work. There are
compelling arguments for entering a war there. There are compelling arguments
for staying out. And if we "get it," there are compelling arguments over
several different ways of getting in (personally, I hope we don't get in, not
even at the level of bombing because I don't think we can know clearly enough
what we hope to accomplish to accomplish anything). Clinton will have failed
only if he hears all the arguments, allows himself to be provisionally
persuaded by each of them, and then never decides at all. He must decide even
though his decision will be based on partial, changeable information and
opinion. Once he decides, he cannot change his mind without truly compelling
arguments to do so. Alas, Bosnia is so fraught that such arguments seem
makeable at the moment of any final decision. Damn that sophistry!
jn
=================================================
Date: Fri, 9 Jun 1995 19:22:06 -0400
Sender: "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From: Victor Vitanza
Subject: jn-->lh re:(dis)body
jn-->lh re:(dis)body
Lynda,
I, too, looked in my index. But I looked for "man." I found two entries:
also p. 184 (same as "woman) plus one entry in the notes. I'm not sure what
anyone could make of that. One could, I suppose, use that as evidence to
argue that men are twice as important to me as women. Or perhaps, since the
second listing for "man" occurs in the notes, one might argue that "man" is
1.5 times as important. Unfashionable (and anti-Freudian) as it will be to
make such a claim, I don't think it means anything more that this: readers
cruising the indices of books looking for sources that deal extensively with
"man" as man or "woman" as woman won't find much help in this book. One page,
page 184, seems to foreground both with some intensity, and then "man" gets
foregrounded a second time in the endnotes.
Alas, you misread (or, more likely, I miswrote) the section on the splits that
you quote from 26. What I intended to say was this (and obviously my penchant
for rhetorical questions was a total failure here): "As things stand now
composition studies has tried to extract the first three splits from
Aristotelian rhetoric. Composition, as it is generally taught, does operate
in a theoretical matrix which privileges soul over body, intellect over
emotion, and human over animal. [I recognize that I am making exactly the
same sort of undocumented and perhaps undocumentable claim here that I accused
Bataille of. I base this claim on my annual visits to the textbook booths at
CCCC and to what I know from having watched thousands of comp teachers on
hundreds of campuses for the last twenty years.] This privileging of soul,
intellect, and human is, in my opinion, a bad idea for two reasons. First, we
cannot extract the three pairs we want from Aristotle without getting traces
of the two that we don't want; thus, we should consider carefully whether the
first three pairs are worth what they cost because they bring with them the
other two. Second, if we indeed privilege those first three pairs, then we
will see only what Aristotle wanted us to see." This is what I intended to
say. I meant my "Is it possible. . ." to generate a feeling in the reader
that said "No it is not possible. Let's think carefully about how we might
stop doing it." Sorry I didn't do a better job of writing that passage.
I'm not quite sure how you want me to respond--as a or to the--"(dismy)body."
Throughout the book I try to make clear my awareness of the embodied nature of
all people, and I try to argue that as teachers we must never overlook either
the body or the embodiment of our students. No doubt I would benefit from
reading Haraway and other standpoint theorists. I'll try to do at least some
of that before the summer is over. When I do read them, will I merely find
the old-fashioned, rather simple New Critical term "point of view" dressed up
in a ferocious theoretical vocabulary?
Do I speak as yet one more embodiment of "patriarchal dogma"? Obviously I'm
not the one to answer that question, but no one could deny that the highly
patriarchal American university system has been very good to me and that I
have benefited greatly from speaking and appearing as the institution wants me
to speak and appear. While I have been very active in recruiting women to my
department, I expect them to meet exactly the same standards that men meet, so
I may indeed be asking them to denature themselves in order to become visible
to me. Personally I don't buy that argument, but I know it is makeable.
Two final caveats: 1) I am so trapped in logocentrism that no imaginable text
Haraway could write would persuade me to allow nonhuman life forms status
equal to the human. I want doctors to use pigs to make parts for the human
heart and brain. I am likely to continue eating meat. Our family pet, a
beloved, standard poodle, is not so important as my daughter or my wife and
will never have ontological status even remotely equal to theirs. My wife and
I had two other poodles for eleven and thirteen years before our daughter was
born. When she began crawling, the dogs tried to bite her. At ages twelve
and fourteen (but still in fairly good health) I took the dogs to the vet and
had them put to sleep. At least once a month I dream about the expressions on
their faces as the vet led them away. Even so, I would do it again. I want
the polio virus eradicated. Etc.
2) As for sleeping arrangements, I will leave both you and Haraway to your own
devices.
jn
==============================================
Date: Tue, 13 Jun 1995 16:54:16 -0500
Sender: "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle
From: Victor J Vitanza
Subject: questions for jn
If any of you has a question for Jasper Neel and his book,
please send it our way. We would like to hear from each and
everyone of you.
vjv
===============================================
Date: Wed, 14 Jun 1995 14:19:14 -0400
Sender: "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From: Victor Vitanza
Organization: Miami University (Ohio USA)
Subject: lh-->jn: re:(dis)body
Return-path:
Armand: Will you leave so soon, without finding any of the answers you've been
searching for?
Louis: But you said there were no answers...
Armand: Ah.. but you asked the wrong questions.
Jasper,
Let me try again, since you weren't sure how I wanted you to respond, or so you
said. First, the index thing was an accident, an aside, and I guess I also
wrote in a way to lead you to mis/read me, since I'm not really intersted at
all in how many times someone says "woman"--the "add women and stir" mentality,
the "special issue" mentality, doesn't do much except fold women back into the
discourse of the Same. What I was using it for (the index thing) was to
introduce place and placelessness.. and my question to you was in the context
of what I saw as more concern in AV for being "situated" or "embodied" than I
saw in PDW
The body has been displaced, perhaps, since Plato.. since he created his own
womb, the hystera, and made it the origin story of western philosophy...
When he made that gesture, he also buried the womb and the woman..
You go back to excavate Plato, but you don't say much about his elision of the
body...or woman but then in AV, you talk a lot about "embodiment"...
__And what I am wondering is what that means to you.. being "situated" or
"embodied" in your writing.. and in your theory. Does it mean that we can use
personal anecdotes in our academic prose and have a theoretical reason for
doing so.. or does it mean more? And if we do not allow that binary of
man/woman to stay in place... what does that mean? That we are sensitive to
hire more women in our departments.. or does it mean more?
Lynda
=================================================
Date: Thu, 15 Jun 1995 21:50:03 -0500
Sender: "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From: Victor J Vitanza
Subject: cnd->lh: bodies and such"
Lynda,
I was wondering if you could explain what you mean by body and embodiment?
I'm asking because there has actaully been quite a bit of materialist
thought since Plato, it has simply received little or is openly rejected.
There has also been a long running discourse on "embodiment" and just
what embodiment is, including Hegel's notion that "geist" is always embodied
within the homo sapien nervous system. In short, there has always been a
good deal of talk concerning the body, but the question seems to be whether
thought itself is material. I am a bit surprised that most discussions
on materialism in the humanities bypass the major theoretical developments
within materialist thought in philosophy and science in the twentieth
century, referring here to the Nietzschean and quantum revolutions
respectively, both of which remove the matter/energy implex from the
phenomenal world of representation and identity and place it in the noumenal
world of concrete and unmediated actuality and presence. But it is perhaps
not surprising when one considers that phenomenology has been a major
influence in the English speaking world this century, especially the
Heideggerian and Derridean variations, both of which are fascinated with
the Idea, the conundrums of recuperable oppositions and antinomies. That
the paradoxes of identity predication have been around and recognized
forever (and for most materialists resolved by Hume) does little to mitigate
the popularity of the phenomenological disposition.The theoretical and
practical advantages of materialism are simply overlooked in favor of
neoliberal parochialisms, for such politically minded theorists are
reluctant to advance a position of all out materialist determination.
Judith Butler is a good example of both a neoliberal and a neohegelian,
playing around with the concepts of matter and embodiment, but never
explaining in detail what she means by these things, and certainly never
discussing the possibility of materialistic determination. (By determination
i don't mean 'negation' in the Hegelian sense, no do i mean causation
in the mechanistic sense. Nietzsche's notionof genealogy is closer to what
i'm talking about, but i will explain in greater detail if need be.)
So i'm wondering, by 'embodiment' do you mean materialistic determination
or something similar or nothing even close?
chris dacus
cnd7750utarlg.uta.edu
==================================================
Date: Fri, 16 Jun 1995 15:31:43 -0500
Sender: "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From: Victor J Vitanza
Subject: vjv: over on BURP (jvo/cnd)
REINVWers, cnd's post to lh has spilled over to the BURP list. what
happened is that jvo (infamous john omlor, who is on vacation!!)
responded to cnd's response to lh. so if anyone of you is not subed to
BURP and if you are interested in what might happen with these two m&s
posters, you might want to write to:
listserv@miamiu.acs.muohio.edu
and leaving the subject heading blank, send the following message:
subscribe burp (first name) (last name)
and sit and wait ... or don't wait and jump in to the hum(e)an ...
victor
sophist@utarlg.uta.edu
--don't forget that you have to send your messages to me
right now until the miami mf is fixed!!
===================================================
Date: Sat, 17 Jun 1995 08:57:33 -0500
Sender: "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From: Victor J Vitanza
Subject: vjv->lh: ?
vvell, lynda, your response to chris? and humean bodies?
--vjv
===================================================
Date: Sun, 18 Jun 1995 10:16:30 -0500
Sender: "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From: Victor J Vitanza
Subject: lh->cnd: bodily encounters
lh-->cnd; bodily encounters
Chris..
What do I mean by embodiment? Lots of stuff. More than I can say right now,
cuz my own body needs to go to work after drinking lots of coffee, but very
briefly..
I mean bringing the body back into play in how we theorize writing.. but not in
a way so that it is a rock, a monolith.. but in a way that opens up difference.
I don't think that Butler (or Haraway, or Irigaray) talk about the body but
never really say what they mean.. but they do resist defining it in singular
terms..
I will gladly let JVO answer you philosopically since he knows much more than
me and I would gladly take his voice in a philosohpical debate anyday. :)
But what I know about philosophy I learned from Irigaray, and then from reading
the writers that she talks to when she writes.. and from that point of view,
the body is treated both physically and symbolically.. women will need to be
recognized as sexual, material, beings, and men will need to recognize that
they have bodies before any concept of sexual difference could make a
difference.
The question came up to Jasper because of his dealings with Plato.. and
Irigaray marks Plato one of the origin story writers who elided the maternal
body, the woman, and the body in philosophy.. symbolically and materially. To
bring the body back into play would be to make gestures toward difference in
both places and more.
I know this prolly doesn't provide much of an answer, but let's continue the
discussion later..
Lynda
********************************************************************
Lynda Haas "Sometimes you gotta be
Writing Program a high ridin' bitch
Ithaca College to survive."
haas @ithaca.edu --Dolores Claiborne
copyright 1994-1995 Victor J. Vitanza, James J. Sosnoski, and Japer Neel.
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