PRETEXT, a Re/INter/VIEW
       with V.Vitanza, 4

Date: Thu, 18 Sep 1997 11:40:17 -0500 (CDT)
From: sophist@UTARLG.UTA.EDU
Subject: vv>trj: what, me worry? 1

Hi, TR.

You say,
"I worry that I am ...."
and
"VV says somewhere that the future anterior is the tense that heals. I would love to learn more about what that means."
... and you ask,
"How is it that the future anterior heals? Does it have anything to do with that much neglected discourse-mode (Bain wasn't into it) called prophesy? Is this perhaps why "mad" Blake, who was so interested in freeing/cleansing/healing the body, always insisted on being called a prophet?"

Thanks for your comment and questions, for they give me an opportunity to think-a-deterritorialization about some things again. I don't know if the possible answers that I give will be satisfying. I don't guarantee satisfaction. The only 'return' policy that I know of is the one given by the logos.

In respect to "I worry." Which is a statement that you use several times in relation to what I am saying in the book. I understand. I wrestle with this problem of worrying specifically in terms of worrying about the logos. Through out the book. E.g., with ch. 4 (159- ), I retake up the issue of un/just how dangerous the logos is. If you recall, I write from Nietzsche: "_Where have I been; where am I going?:_ "Measure is alien to us; let us own it; our thrill is the thrill of the infinite, the unmeasured." Is it? Or should it be? Ought it be? Let's take a closer look, lest I be accused of inviting us all to leap into the infinite (play of differences) without first having a look. And yet, to look into the abyss, for too long, for more than a glance [a wink], Would it not blind us?"

The notion that "Measure is alien to us" is from Nietzsche. The full quote values, "our thrill is the thrill of the infinite, the unmeasured [the denegated]. Like a ride on a steed that flies forward, we drop the reins before the infinite, we modern men [sic], like semi-barbarians--and reach _our_ bliss only where we are most--_in danger_."

When I get into ch. 4, I play hard at making it understood that Isocrates, Heidegger, etc. have very different attitudes towards logos. I render Isocrates as an innocent in his hymn to logos. Heidegger, as not an innocent, but someone who knows that logos is dangerous. Unfortunately, "Heidegger," I write, "did not finally keep his guard, did not perpetually deterritorialize the various voices of the logos; he did not ... remember the Forgotten, and, therefore, Heidegger compromised with National Socialism ..., with, heretofore, the worst form of imperialism and colonization" (165) Even if he had remembered, however, there is every bad reason to think that it would not have mattered, for the 'good reasons' of mice and men oft ....

Let us affirmatively forget the articles written by people like RBernstein (_The New Constellation_) who argue that if only Heidegger had stayed with his Aristotelian start, if only he had stuck with his investigation of ethics, he would have been in better hands, etc.

T.R., there is every reason to worry. There is no way to abolish hazard when we toss out words on the table. Words have no memory! We are the ones cursed with memory. There is no relationship for Words. We are the ones that have relationships with words. It's a one-way relationship. Words un/just 'word' their way into our lives ... minds and bodies. So to think that IF we but take a rationalistic attitude toward logos (language, words, words, words) ... that if we but do this rationalistic thing ... we will then have fewer 'reasons' to worry about what we say, about what is heard in the ears of others, about what the actions might be as a result of those words ... if we but take this attitude, things will not be better. Words offer only the guarantee of the return. As much as I would like to embrace neo-Aristotelian values (AMacIntyre), I don't have any faith in that kind of thinking that does not account for the blind spot of reason, for the necessity of living dangerously.

In 1987, when GKennedy responded to my early work, he wrote: "Though a game, it is not a joke. A fundamental psychological fact of human life is that most people cannot cope with a universe in which there is no absolute truth and they are left on their own. Of the various efforts to give some sense of psychological security, the Aristotelian tradition of logocentrism seems to me among the least objectionable in that it made minimal use of a transcendent being and almost alone of philosophical systems created a workable ethics on the basis of pragmatic experience. Vitanza the Vitalist seems to think that traditional philosopy is not only a disease, but a fatal one..." ("Some Reflections..." RR 6.2 (1988): 230).

Without disparaging all that GK has given us, I have to reject the attitude expressed here. It is paternalistic. I have every 'reason' to think so. Let me venture into saying that I believe that most people do think, at some level or other, that life is a joke. How could they not think so and survive. It may very well be the case that they capitulate to Aristotelian values at times, without knowing that they are 'Aristotelian,' but it is also the case that they capitulate to riding the wave of language, even when they are their most inarticulate and go with their reflexes. As Voltaire said--and I paraphrase--god is a jokester playing to an audience who has forgotten how to laugh. And when you multiply god into gods!? I find more wisdom in Greek Tragedy (with its dark comedy) than in Aristotle's writing about tragedy, running it through his species ... genus ... differentiae, etc.

In relation to the logos, I am a pagan. I practice paganism as Lyotard develops it (in _Just Gaming_), though he gets trapped in his conversation with Thebaud, in an agreement that paganism is an aristotelianism. (I talked about all this at great length in the article "Three Counter-Theses" _Contending with Words_.)

Have I digressed from the topic of "I worry"? I don't think so. All of this is to say that when w/riting histories of rherotics we must accept the 'un/reasonable' notion that the logos is not our friend! not our father or mother! not our guide! our prince! Etc. It un/just is. And it can give us ... if used in a denegated mannerism ... greater heights than we could ever reach through reason ... and great falls than we have yet experienced. It's a throw of the dice that will never abolish hazard. The dice of logos have no memory. We are the ones addicted to memory. To the notion of redemption. To wanting to be remembered. To re/venge.

When we w/rite histories ... Recall how I begin ch. 4, with the quote from _Thus Spoke_: "You [the tight rope walker] have made danger your vocation; there is nothing contemptible in that. Now you perish of your vocation [ontological calling?!]: for that I will bury you with my own hands." And if you recall, I ended with the rebegining of ... "_Measure_ is alien to us [Be gone Prot_agora_s!]; let us own it [our alienation]; our thrill is the thrill of the infinite, the unmeasured. Like a ride on a steed [let's now affirmatively forget Plato's _Phaedrus_] that flies forward, we drop the reins before the infinite, we [post]modern [wo/]men, like semi-barbarians--and reach _our_ bliss only where we are most--_in danger_." I think that everyone who writes desires somewhere in their body to spend ... to expend at least a year of w/riting dangerously. There is MORE danger in not doing so, than _in_ doing sow.

As Cixous says: "In the beginning, there can be only dying, the abyss, the first laugh. After that, you don't know. It's life that decides. Its terrible power of invention, which surpasses us. Our life anticipates us. Always ahead of you by a height, a desire, the good abyss, the one that suggests to you: 'Leap and pass into infinity.' Write! what? [histories of rherotics?] Take to the wind, take to writing, form one body with the letters, Live! Risk: those who risk nothing gain nothing, risk and you no longer risk anything. In the beginning, there is an end. Don't be afraid: it's your death that is dying. Then: all the beginnings" (_Coming to Writing_ 41).

As Alfred E. Newman used to say and still says..."What? Me vvorry?"

some more forthcoming on the future anterior....

V

Date: Thu, 18 Sep 1997 16:52:10 -0400 (EDT)
From: TheVoidBoy@AOL.COM
Subject: VB->VV: (ffffrench) Snivilization?

Maybe another question is:

__________The shift away from logos, how do you anticipate its future-anterior advent and impact upon other fields? Physics? Mathematics? Medicine? Politics? Jurisprudence? Economics? You are very careful to limit your critique (stating very explicitly at times: "This is (only) about the HofR"). I wondered aloud to you once, a very long time ago now, just what the pagus space might look like 'for (sur)real'--in other Histories and in other spaces. Is it enough, the H of R? Is that where our problems lurk? With the Romans and Greeks? Why so local?

You like decadence (as do I), even fffffrench decadence (as I don't/do [my light reading, everyday, is Foucault, Cixous, Bataille, Deleuze; I'm getting complaints from my theatrical and literary friends and loved ones that I need to break out into something else; so I pick up my violin and practice my Bach] -- theirs is a theoretical dance of decay, and I'm too pragmatic to join them whole-heartedly; theirs is a brilliance of excess, and I keep wondering "fine, great, wonderful -- now, just what does this *mean*? how will it impact upon us? upon others? upon futures and anteriors? gimme some SKIN, something I can grasp, some material, some blood, some alcohol). Get decadent - what does the pagus mean for those outside the little sphere of rhetoric/composition/communication? You touch upon this a bit in you final(?) excursus, but it all seems so vague to me. So the outcast(e) speak, so the oppressed/repressed/suppressed are recognized at the edge of sound/edge of sight/edge of mind? What does that mean?

Maybe I'm thick and dull.

Dance your dance around me, Victor.

If nothing else, what I most respect and love about your work is that through it all, through all the deep and playful thought-speak-creation, there is a pain. It is grounded in something, somewhere. I know where my pain comes from, and it keeps me focused. I wonder about yours, and whether the pagus is the space for it (to heal it? to let it live without fear?).

VB

Date: Fri, 19 Sep 1997 07:20:45 -0500 (CDT)
From: sophist@UTARLG.UTA.EDU
Subject: vv>trj, 2, on FA and Cure

I do not portray being; I portray passing.
--An early Sophist

The world as we see it is passing.
--Paul of Tarsus

=========================

TR, here is part 2 of my response to your question, this part dealing with the *Future Anterior.* There is no part 3. I've jotted down some ways that I think about the Future Anterior.

...FA is performance; it refuses to be limited, that is, defined. ...FA in part, great part, has to do with making a decision that will lead to action. It is not just a musing. ...it's a speech-act, a writing-act ...future anterior is ... as the exemplum goes ... what will have been. ...it is a mad leap into the abyss, the volcano, knowing that, like Empedocles must have known, that you will be taking a great risk testing what you think will have been. (Who knows, maybe Empedocles will come flying out of Aetna in the near future, unsinged by the heat. Flying, and flying, and flying around the mountain. ;-) ...a future anterior is about w/riting such a risk, with every stroke of the pen or keyboard or finger-in-the-sky, knowing all along that the w/riting might .... ...it means working and playing without any rules. ...it is "difficult to understand, especially in relation to a 'libidinalized Marxism' or libidinalized hystery,' _if_ a connection is not made between the future anterior and the eternal return of the repressed (or suppressed or politically oppressed). What has been negated (repressed) today, therefore, will have returned tomorrow. It is this way, I especially contend, with _The_ History of Rhetorik" (NSHR, 317) ...a perfect example of the FA--in the lightness of the above statement--is the image (_eidolon_) of 'Sophist'! ...it's writing each time as if the very first time, not knowing where the words will have landed or dispersed. ...it's an acceptance of the past (without the need to redeem it) and a willingness to live the future no matter what. Which can require an unbearable lightness, statelessness of mind/body. ..."Conjugate yourself in the future exterior. Go ahead. Do not let the interior past weaken you." (Cixous, qtd on 232) ...it is a projection into the future of what you perhaps will have had to live through ...it is always already or (future)-(past) ...it is possibilisms (Darton) ...it is "esperable uberty" (Peirce) ... the haunting place of total but unaccountable freedoms. ...it is amor fati (Nietzsche) ...it is a fatal strategy (Baudrillard)

...IT has nothing to do with the genre of prophesy or with the subject of prophet, though when in the FA, a writer or speaker can be mis-taken by a reader or listener to be a prophet. ... I have had people tell me that the last, rebeginning Xcursus especially reads as prophesy!

...Someone asked me once and again, if i were a profit, i said NO!

Go figure. I don't consider myselphs as a SinJohn. But we are in Mee-lai-k/nee-ALL times, No?

vv

ps: Yes, when i start talking about FA, I start from Lacan and his suggestion that FA can bring about a *cure.* I'm not really sure that Lacan thought in terms of cures. I don't. There is somewhere in the book (see 327, 330-31, 337), in the last-cum-rebeginning xcurseus, that i say ... there is no cure. (I speak of a 'paracure' such as 'vomiting.' We must vomit up the symbolic, as the child vomits up it milk taken too quickly [Kant, Kristeva]. We must vomit up the history of rhetorik ... vomit, vomit, vomit.) To speak of a cure is to refer to the conditions of possible deviations from a norm. If you recall, i accept and reinclude the excluded who are 'sick,' 'ill,' in supposed need of 'the cure.' I say that controlled writing is an illness and that uncontrolled obsessive or hysterical or schizzo writings are the norm. It's a simple reversal of the kind that you might find, say, being made in the 19th century. (E.g., Poe in his marginilia, speaks of the representative heroes, contray to Carlisle or Emerson or later WStevens, as those who died on the gallows, in the asylums, etc. If you recall, I try to turn around HWhite's claim of the absurdist moment in literary criticism (in _Tropics of Discourse_) and accept Bataille and Foucault's and strange company's santification of the so-called abnormal. I reinclude the so-called 'mentally insane' as part of the w/hole. I reaccept the hysterical females and obsessive males (the Wolfman, Judge Schreber, the Papin sisters, Dora, etc.) whom Aristotle, in the NicEthics, would reject as not in the mean.

Virtue!

There was a long alle-gory towards the end ... rebeginning ... of the bookless, in which i discussed PShaffer's play _A Mad Deus_, which takes place as a retrospective narrative being told in an ahsighlum. In my discussion ... the retrospective, which only appears to be a retro, ... i examine the play as a prospective narrative. As a retro-prospective narrative. I had to lift this from the book ... which was too long in its original ms. form ... and it will be in the spin off book on canonicity, rape narratives, and the history of rhetoric, whick i am playing with now. In that section of my discussion on _A Mad Deus_, i talk at greater length about the cure being worse than the disease, and consequently dump the condition thinking about the or a cure. There can be no cure, for there is no disease. I am, however, extremely critical of THE history of rhetoric as being one long series of rape narratives. I give some 'evidence' for that claim in NSHR. some more later with some more to follow on top oc even some more....

vvv

Date: Fri, 19 Sep 1997 10:34:40 -0500 (CDT)
From: sophist@UTARLG.UTA.EDU
Subject: vv>vb: why local, decadence, and pain?

VB writes:

"__________The shift away from logos, how do you anticipate its future-anterior advent and impact upon other fields? Physics? Mathematics? Medicine? Politics? Jurisprudence? Economics? You are very careful to limit your critique (stating very explicitly at times: "This is (only) about the HofR"). I wondered aloud to you once, a very long time ago now, just what the pagus space might look like 'for (sur)real'--in other Histories and in other spaces. Is it enough, the H of R? Is that where our problems lurk? With the Romans and Greeks? Why so local?"

I am starting with the mixed feelings (apparently) of Aristotle's view ... or some people's take on Aristotle's view ... (perhaps McKeon's) ... which is that rhetoric is an architechtonic, productive art. And in taking this view, I stretch it to a general science or metadiscipline informing all fields. I take it as being as imperialistic as it has been in certain linguistic or semiotic circles. Why? so that I might allow the reader to infer what s/he would want, that is, infer heuristically what s/he would want to think about other fields that are indebted to big Rhetoric. I don't do that in the bookless; the readers have to do that. And yet, I do talk about physics, mathematics, medicine, politics, jurisprudence, economics ... through out. Perhaps another read would catch those references.

My not doing it is simply a tactic.

The History of Rhetoric in many ways offers itself as The History of the development of human consciousness, etc. It is not local, but global, in this view.

So if one cum radical many take on Rhetoric or The History of R, a radical many is taking on everything. ...Would be taking on the Symbolic. And with it the symptoms of das Ding and the Real. And the rest of it all.

The question that you ask, which I assume that you ask for people who would want to ask it and hear it answered, is like the question that I often get ... "Well, Victor what does this all have to do with freshman English?" My answer is "Everything and Nothing." In dis/order to understand the connections, you must not ask the question within the present framework of education with its linkup to Capitalism. The eunickversities must go. I'm talking about a libidinal education (comparable to Cixous's) that must leave the walls and simualted ivey and go on the road. It would be a nomadic education as we think the Sophists imparted. There is no President, Provost, Dean, etc. There is the facilitator and the one who desires to learn. Or there is not the leafing of the university, but the staying in it and the making of useless things. ;-)

I am writing a sequel to NSHR provisionally called ... _Negation, Subjectivity, and Composition Studies_. Therein, some more will be said about 'freshman English.'

VB writes:

"You like decadence (as do I), even fffffrench decadence (as I don't/do [my light reading, everyday, is Foucault, Cixous, Bataille, Deleuze; I'm getting complaints from my theatrical and literary friends and loved ones that I need to break out into something else; so I pick up my violin and practice my Bach] -- theirs is a theoretical dance of decay, and I'm too pragmatic to join them whole-heartedly; theirs is a brilliance of excess, and I keep wondering "fine, great, wonderful -- now, just what does this *mean*? how will it impact upon us? upon others? upon futures and anteriors? gimme some SKIN, something I can grasp, some material, some blood, some alcohol). Get decadent - what does the pagus mean for those outside the little sphere of rhetoric/composition/communication? You touch upon this a bit in you final(?) excursus, but it all seems so vague to me. So the outcast(e) speak, so the oppressed/repressed/suppressed are recognized at the edge of sound/edge of sight/edge of mind? What does that mean?"

I am very critical of the French. I lived in France for a year and taught at the Universite de Nantes. Which was during the time of Lacan's Seminar XX, not that anyone knew IT WAS seminar the 20th as we think of it today.

But I am also very accepting of things-French. Let's not forget that they ... in an earlier form ... spent some important times in western Sicily. I love Gaulstones from which pus flows! (HMiller, _TofC_, 257).

And the French are critical of themselves. Have you seen 'French People, If you only Knew'! But of course, their critique does no good, just as critiques do no good, but make us more and more cynical. You write: "theirs is a theoretical dance of decay, and I'm too pragmatic to join them whole-heartedly." I take my notion of theoretical dance of decay and decadence from Nietzsche (_Birth of Tragedy_) and hence equate the theoretical dance to the impulse to make all things rational, to make them visible (representatable), to make beauty intelligible ("to be beautiful everything must be intelligible, as the counterpart to the Socratic dictum, Knowledge is virtue." Or "to be beautiful, everything must be conscious" ... hence, clarity ... hence the worst forms of sentimentality [and hence ... I want to vOMIT/vOMIT]), ... decadence is the impulse then to have an audience, a public (which is a further break down of the things dionysian). Decadence is optimism. Leading to 'theoretical man.' He who no longer winks, but gazes on all things! S.He who wants to control what something means.

VB, you say you stop and play your violin. What a coinci-dance! You know of the Nietzschean distinction between the 'aesthetic socrates' and the 'artistic socrates'?, I'm sure. The former is the rationalist, the latter the lover of music. During his last days in prison, Socrates ... called by his instinct or the gods ... practiced his music. Perhaps, he realized then that everything does not have to be intelligible in dis/order to be beautiful, or beautiful to be intelligible. The sublime is not beautiful. It's attractive. It's a weird incomprehensible joining of attraction and repulsion. There is no reason to be optimistic. There is no reason to be pessimistic. There is every un/reason to be joyfully pessimistic. The last cum first of these _is_ pragmatic.

The French so-called decadent thinkers that I read (Bergson, etc.) are read by other USers. KB read Bergson, but rejected his notion (and where he wanted to go with his notion) that there are no negatives in nature. As I said before, the French read everyone and do wonderfully inventive things with them, with especially USA w/riters.

Perhaps 'decadence' belongs to a family of words that I would associate with vulgar enlightenment thinking. And with fascism. I think the most decadent words are 'empowering' ... 'liberation' ... 'emancipation' ... 'enlightenment' ... and the most decadent phrase is 'non-cohersive consensus'. Those haberhaberhaberM*A*S*Hians! who art so deca-dent! They just don't get it! I un/just want to wretch and vomit that stuff out of my systemless.

As my voice HMiller says: "Let us have ... a world that produces ecstasy and not dry farts." And "let us living ones dance about the rim of the crater, a last expiring dance. But a dance! I love everything that flows..." (_TofC_, 257).

VB writes:

"If nothing else, what I most respect and love about your work is that through it all, through all the deep and playful thought-speak-creation, there is a pain. It is grounded in something, somewhere. I know where my pain comes from, and it keeps me focused. I wonder about yours, and whether the pagus is the space for it (to heal it? to let it live without fear?)."

Thank you for your kind words, but mine is not pain as often thought of ... it is pain that gives pleasure ;-) I talk about this excessively in the bookless. It's difficult to talk about such pain today, because when we do it sounds as if someone wants to feel our pain, or we want them to feel it. 'Pain' is another one of those enlightenment words. I injoy my pain. I do not want to make it conscious, understandable, ... do not want to decadentize it!

VV