PRETEXT, a Re/INter/VIEW
       with V.Vitanza, 5

Date: Fri, 19 Sep 1997 18:38:37 -0500 (CDT)
From: sophist@UTARLG.UTA.EDU
Subject: vv>mth: life against (next to) deathless

Hi, Todd. My apologies for taking so long to get back to you. I will not quote the passages you quoted but will simply put the page number. (Negation, Subjectivity, and The History of Rhetoric, 204).

About this passage, you write:

"Victor... I see two contradictory claims which I am not sure what to make. In the first part, I hear/gehoren:-) "Heidegger remains within metaphyisics while Nietzsche doesn't. Heidegger is the last man, Nietzsche the Ubermensch?" In the second part, I hear, "We cannot escape metaphysics but we can try. Heidegger tries one way, but fails; Nietzsche tries another way, and though he is meant for doom, he fails and succeeds".

My response is that the later seems more true that the former. And here is how I think it through: the general economy is not a state that can ever be achieved. In a (mis)paraphrase of Jean Luc-Nancy, the general economy implies a state of death where all things are indeed rendered equal. While I still live, I do seem to have/want boundaries, body, openings and closings (aporias and porias)--albeit I want these things to recognize the fluidity of these boundaries, bodies, openings and closing. More importantly, though, I want to recognize that these limited economies are always in a state of decay of becoming dead. The body is constantly shedding off its body etc. . . ."

Let's say that it is possible to render unto Bataille's-Deleuze's Nietzsche what is Nietzsche's and unto Jean Luc-Nancy what is his. I see both readings. And they work and play sorta well.

For me, the general economy can be achieved. But it requires stripping away all custom and convention, etc. It requires not to be repulsed when you or I see a 'dead' body with maggots eating their way through it. We cannot feel that repulsion! (I am alluding to opening sections of Bataille's _Erotism_.) For if we feel that repulsion along with nothing else, then we are on our way to the taboo against dead bodies and then the custom of burial, etc. 'To be sure,' if we do not bury that body, you and I and us can possibly get very sick, that is, if we stick around that body! It is necessary for us to behave with repulsion and _attraction_. At a thinking level that means that we would blink or wink at the so-called decaying body and describe it as ....

Let's don't use my words. Tom HiJinks Rickert, who is studying for his exams and getting ready to write his dissertation, brought me an interesting article he found in the Architecture library. It's by Mark Taylor (Professor of Religion, VB!). Taylor is borrowing ... openly ... much from Bataille. This is what he writes about the grotesque body:

""""...The grotesque upsets thought by dislocating its structure. While the logic of reflection tends to be either Aristotelian (either/or) or dialectical (both/and), the grotseque involves the nonlogic of neither/nor. Neither inside nor outside but inside-out and outside-in: shit, piss, spit, vomit, blood, sperm, and, perhaps most groteque of all, a corpse--a rotting corpse."""""

Taylor continues:

"""""The corpse is the paradigmatic transitional object. As the point at which _eros_ and _thanatos_ intersect, the corpse is neither merely living nor dead. The stench of decay, which is the smell of death, is at the same time the sweet aroma of life renewing itself. An unassimilable 'remainder,' the corpse is a grotesque monstrosity that is disgusting yet strangely fascinating and attractive. The place of the corpse is, of course, the grotto (whence 'grotesque'), crypt, or tomb. The tomb, like the groteque body, is invaginated. Neither inside nor outside, the tomb hollows out 'mother' earth _as if_ from within. _Eros_ and _thantos_ mingle in the bowels of _mat(t)er_. The _atopos_ of death is 'the cruptic enclave [that] produces a cleft in space.' This cleft is nothing other than the 'space-between' [what I have been referring to in NSHW as the return of the excluded middle] that marks the endless interplay of time and space by remarking a timing that is a spacing and a spacing that is a timing. To explore this crypt is to return--albeit differently--to the 'origin of the work of art' """""" (_assemblage_ 11 [1990]: 12).

Which Taylor goes on to talk about ... from the alogic of a general economy to death that is not death but becoming life to celebration of decaying body in terms of building a womb/tomb for it as a form of art. If you have read too much 18th century graveyard poety, it's difficult to grasp what is happening here, for you might want to see this development toward art as a form of negative sublimation. And then would miss the pointless.

So you blink or wink, I would try for the general economy as something that is obtainable.

In any case, here you have an alternative view of life as lifeeeeeeeeeeee. hummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. What Bataille is doing, as Taylor plays with his ideas, is to replay intentionally or not, Freud's beyond the pleasure principle. Replay the struggle between eros and thanatos, with eros-as-general(libidinal-material)economy.

We of course can get some help, along these lines, from N. O. Brown, in _Life Against Death_. In fact, Brown mentions Bataille before he becomes popular again in this country via u of minnesota p.

I say all this in no romanticized way. I have seen, perhaps, more than my share of people dying. I am at times so pissed that people I have known and still want to talk with are dead. Perhaps, that is the pain you ask about, VB. But if anyone were to run with that as a de/baseline to understand what I am saying, they would be far afield of what I will have been about. I am no auggie march writing letters to the dead. If you-readers read the introduction in that manner, you missed it. (Now, if you are a freudian, you would have to say that my 'no' means 'yes.' And that, my dear friends in the convolution, is what i have to say NO to. I am very suspicious of the hermeneutics of suspicion! And moreso than it is of me!)

Todd writes:

""""""To illustrate this in less(?) metaphorical terms: I am currently writing a dissertation on WAC. WAC interests me as a site because it is one of the most troubling spots for composition in its attempt to legitimize (negate?) itself. In other words, working with faculty to develop writing based pedagogies, WAC calls into question who can research and teach writing. In monetary terms, literally, who owns the study of writing. What I have found is that rhet/comp has often struggled for very real and material reasons of empowering a subordinated class of faculty (Miller's "women in the basement") to maintain its lose control over who can teach writing and how.

Part of my argument has been to insist that composition accept this rotting away of its field as inevitable, that is, it must accept its own intersubjectivity and fluidity which makes it a non-permanent entity among a lot of non permanent entities. In other words, to play on Victor's phrasing in the first of the book, I want to see compsition as a becoming minor in much the same way that Victor wants to see the History of Rhetoric as a becoming minor.

However, I will try to conclude here, though I now feel like I am running loose at the mouth. I don't necessarily see a "general economy" for the history of rhetoric, rather I see a becoming minor, where the "rotting" away of logos is occuring--and it is are duty to celebrate this rotting away--but has not and may not occur for a long time (and when it does, this will mean its death?!?).""""""

I like what you say about WAC. Some of us who have been talking about composition as a nondiscipline or as a post-discipline would find what you say the case. What is ironic is that 'composition' in dis/order to do WAC must present itself as a metadiscipline while at the same time it is trying to legitimate itself as a discipline. It is this wrenching effect of going into two different directions that chokes it to death. I am directing a dissertation right now by Margaret Weaver that deals with some of these problems in terms of the attempt of comp to legitimize itself as process and then as postprocess. Though she does not deal with WAC, there is every attempt to deal with the issue in terms of writing centers (WC!) .... I follow what you say about composition having 'to die.'

At first, as Cixous says, we must die to become-minoritarian, which ironically is 'a Vastness.' In other words, we must be denegated. If, Todd, this is what you are saying then I am with you along these lines of flight. If by minor you mean non-general economy, then I would not want to follow you to that place. I would equate both general and minor together. Though D&G spend much time talking about a minor literature in their book on Kafka, they are very much talking about a general economy simultaneously. And therein I lie. But lest I suggest otherwise, what you are playing towards should be pursued, for as chance would have it, you may stumble and stutter over and outer ... over-outer what we will have desired to become.

Thanks for your post.

vv

Date: Fri, 19 Sep 1997 21:50:15 -0500 (CDT)
From: sophist@UTARLG.UTA.EDU
Subject: vv>tr3: irony, humor, profit, phool

TR, you write:

""""Your remark that, rather than follow Aristotle many of us choose irony ("life is a joke") as a source of security, a defense mechanism, and a survival strategy, raises what is to me a very rich question:""""

I meant 'life as a joke' in a humorous sense. If I used the word 'irony' then i misled you and I apologize. It is the case that I use the word early in the book in Rorty's sense of being Not a metaphysician, but an ironist; but I think in the post I was using it in a pedestrian sense, just as I used it in the last post concerning composition (on WAC). But I don't think that I mean/t irony previously. And definitely not as a defense mechanism, which evidently, in freudian thinking, is owing to the negative.

Somewhere in NSHR, I do some exposition on the difference that D&G see between *irony* and *humor.* (Yes, it's a negative exposition.) Irony has echoes of Hegel with his restricted economy and with the depth model and therefore I feel a little uneasy.

You see there is a progression in NSHR of some key words. Irony does not stay fixed in Rorty's sense of being unfixed (How's that for humor?); for it moves toward 'comedy' (KB; cf. Hegel) and then 'humor' (D&G).

Deleuze and Parnet, in _Dialogues_, have an interesting discussion of the difference between irony and humor (see 68-69). Also, you might want to re.look at D&G's discussion of humor in _Kafka_. Or perhaps best look at Deleuze's _Logic of Sense_, in which he distinguishes among the tragic, the ironic, and the humorous. About the latter, he writes ... and you have heard some of this before: "humor is the co-extensiveness of sense with nonsense. Humor is the art of the surfaces and of the doubles, of nomad singularities and of the always displaced aleatory point; it is the art of the static genesis, the savoir-faire of the pure event, and the 'fourth person singular'--with every signification, denotation, and manifestation suspended, all height and depth abolished" (141; see the entire section, 134-141).

"""""Might irony be the best way, the most ethical way, to perform our sometimes necessary strategic acts of negation? The black comedy of Naked Lunch, of Greek Tragedy, of Andy Kaufman's wrestling career strike me as deeply moral gestures. And the deterritorializations they wreak, the howling "madness" to which they seem to rise, calls to mind the wild nomads of the pagus who's war-like rants surely sound something like the rhetoric of the prophet--those roaring lions of moral deterritorialization who, if my hunch is right, must have a special commitment to both the tense that "heals" (future anterior) and to humor."""""

All sounds ungroovy, that is, smooth here, except for the use of "the best way," etc. And Kaufman, yes, .-)>=

"""Why do you disavow the role of prophet?"""

Blink, I am un/just a phool for Gorgias. I'm on a mission for Gorgias. Everyone by now knows that! ;-) And anyway, it's really embarrassing to be thought of as a profit. I'm just a fool ... but, I would hope a special un/kind of fool. After all has been said and undone, we are all fools; it's un/just a matter of what kind of phool your desire desires to become.

Veto-r; formerly, the artistic sophist know as rotciv.

Date: Sat, 20 Sep 1997 05:24:03 -0400 (EDT)
From: TheVoidBoy@AOL.COM
Subject: VB>VV

"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."

***I'm as big a Rhetoric type as any you'll meet. But I appreciate you're hesitation to make global claims about rhetoric. It is tempting, isn't it?, to make accept the claims the HofR makes for itself vis a vis "history of humon consciousness". Yet, philosophy, religion (and, I suppose, "literature" though that term, as currently used, is more a 18th-19th century phenomenon) -- these, too, could be called upon as part of the history of consciousness.

I wasn't necessarily suggesting you *should* have gone global. I liked you're local strategies. I simply thought I had noticed an ambivalence, an ambiguity, regarding local-global strategies and their effects. I was simply wondering if you had thought about the pagus space as something other than local. And, yes, I did read the places where you touched upon physics, mathematics, medicine, politics, jurisprudence, economics, so I was pretty sure you had. But then, that funny amerikan pragmatic side came out, wondering aloud - "hey, this pagus sounds pretty good on paper (in theory, in rhetoric, philosophically), but putting it into play, what would that take, what would that look like?"

'Cause, you see, I am not an English-comp-type (though many others on this list are, and I'm pretty sure many of your readers are). I'm a religion type. So when I read your stuff, I think less about issues of "getting real" in the composition classroom than, say, "getting real" in other areas - university (very nice stuff, what you wrote on that) in particular, I guess, but also, since I'm making that strange leap among and between disciplines (where I reside, always in the inbetween - not an easy place to be, actually), I'm naturally wondering encountering your work (and the work of others in rhetoric, lit, comp, psych, phil, etc.) through a process of translation - How could this affect what I, but also many others do? And the tension in your work between global and local (because rhetoric itselves is built on that tension) makes me wonder aloud about it.

That's all.

***HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA

(****laughter has a demonic side to it, sometimes it's hard to tell if one's laughter isn't participating in it. Probably unavoidable. But I always find myself chuckling with your writing.)

"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."

***puke puke puke puke puke puke puke puke

I've always been strangely amused (attracted?) to the idea of a vomitorium.

***Sometimes I get the feeling rhetoric types are too Greek. Even too Greco-Roman. All caught up in systems of thought we believe are unavoidable, universal, even unsolvable. Plato, Aristotle, Isocrates, Gorgias, blah blah blah puke puke puke.

Steve Mailloux made an interesting statement in a conference we were at. It had something to do with the dilemma between Platonic rhetoric and Gorgianic. (Oh, I know I'm going to get slammed for messing up this one.) Something about the issue of Truth, the issue of the Real. Something interesting, something he felt was at the heart of, say, rhetoric, philosophy. Something. Maybe he can clear it up.

Anyway, I remember thinking at the time, and I couldn't really figure out how to say it, and I'm still not sure I do, but the best I can do is to put it, "we need to think more Jewish". Think Jew. Perelman thought Jew (not just Aristotle). Derrida thinks Jew. These issues, some of them are simply part of a package we have bought and sold throughout our history, unaware of other ways of thinking that simply ignore them, start from different premises, and work just fine as a result. We, we go through so much hullaballoo over things, arriving at a place other cultures have long inhabited.

There is a profound counter-tradition of rhetoric in Jewish rabbinic thought, a tradition not based on the same premises of Greek thought. It's so damn interesting: It's obvious that Hellenism made an impact upon Jewish culture and religion, but it is just as obvious that Judiasm refused to assimilate. At it worked the same in their rhetorical tradition in rabbinics - lots of Greek thought, topoi, figures. But something very different. I'm not quite sure how to pinpoint it, but it's something like the willingness to live inbetween.

An example: Two rabbinic houses (schools of thought) were debating a point of Torah. Both sides were getting really heated up about it, each side scoring points off the other, neither side willing to capitulate. At the height of the argument, the voice of YHWH intervenes and says, "this group is right, the other wrong". Both sides, upon hearing this, look at each other, look up at the direction of the Voice, and say, "Who asked you?" They went back to arguing.

To put it really badly (and baldly), I have a thesis: all our postmodern wranglings, been done before. The first postmodernists were the rabbis.

Pagus space is okay. It has it's place in the Greco-Roman tradition. But, you know, maybe the Shekinah is another space we can go to. And it's been around much much longer.

***(hee hee hee hee)

-Voidoid boyeeeeeee

Date: Sat, 20 Sep 1997 10:39:26 -0400
From: Lee Honeycutt
Subject: Re: VB>VV -Midrash

TheVoidBoy wrote:

An example: Two rabbinic houses (schools of thought) were debating a point of Torah. Both sides were getting really heated up about it, each side scoring points off the other, neither side willing to capitulate. At the height of the argument, the voice of YHWH intervenes and says, "this group is right, the other wrong". Both sides, upon hearing this, look at each other, look up at the direction of the Voice, and say, "Who asked you?" They went back to arguing.

To put it really badly (and baldly), I have a thesis: all our postmodern wranglings, been done before. The first postmodernists were the rabbis.

The rabbinical tradition to which you refer is known as midrash, which Joseph Dan, in "Midrash and the Dawn of the Kabbalah," contrasts with the hermeneutical Christian tradition:

Dogmatic thinking must rely on an unambiguous text. The Hebrew Bible does not lend itself easily to the formulation of dogma, because of the obscurities which haunt almost every biblical verse.

These two differences -- the ability to use the total semiotic message of the text, and the use of an obscure, and therefore polysemous, Hebrew original -- create a most significant gap between Jewish and Christian exegetes and preachers. In Rabbinic Judiasm it is almost impossible to use a biblical verse as a final proof in a religious controversy; every verse can be and was interpreted in fully legitimate ways to support conflicting arguments. An opponent's way of interpreting a scriptural verse would rarely, if ever, be considered as falsifying a text (p. 129).

At any rate, I loved your recent criticism of the French postmodernists, though it's not their depressing slide into decay with which I take issue. My problem with most of their work is what Anthony Giddens refers to as their privileging of the semiotic over the semantic. This is also a criticism that Bakhtin had of structuralism -- that it focuses too much on units of linguistic code and not on living expressions of the word. Call it logos, if you will, but it's how humans communicate: through negotiated meaning often tied to deixis.

-- Lee

Lee Honeycutt (honeyl@rpi.edu)

Date: Sat, 20 Sep 1997 11:24:42 -0400 (EDT)
From: Nick Carbone
Subject: NC-->LH

Just to ay thanks for the critique and observations Lee. The distinctions your brought you comments to conclusion with, those between semiotics and semantics, tumbled just right for me, unlocking a few doorways I've been trying to get through.

Matthew Arnold, in "The Study of Poetry," wrote "the strongest part of our religion to-day is its unconscious poetry," a sentiment I've always liked. He wrote that in reaction to religious practices of his day that tried to rely on dogma, an approach he knew was doomed ("There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve. Our religion has materialised itself in the fact, the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing it."). In its way this can be used to gloss what you say about semiotics and semantics.

Semiotics--in many of the uses it is turned to in different post-theories--seeks always to shake and defer and open up meaning, doesn't like to let things settle. Semantics, and we all know we can argue over semantics, at some points allows for agreement, however tentative and conditional on time and place and need and emotion and the imperfectability of full understanding. That is, we go as far as we can and make a small leap of faith that we've done enough to communicate something close enough to an understanding that can be shared well enough for life to proceed, for us to love, read, converse, design, build, destroy, and all the other things humans manage to do with and by use of langauge.

I don't know if this now means that the strongest part of our religion is its unconscious theory or that the strongest part of our theory is its uncoscious religion, but I do thing at some point in either system, we suspend doubt and skepticism and have some faith that we will be heard.

Nick Carbone

Date: Sat, 20 Sep 1997 12:00:00 -0400
From: Lee Honeycutt
Subject: Re: NC-->LH

Right-O, Mr. Carbone,

Indeed, the semantic does, as you point out, hold out hope that we are being heard and understood, and that somewhere along the line, agreement is achieved on important issues. One of the more important efforts to show just how we go about accomplishing such agreements on the semantic level is the field of ethnomethodology, which through painstaking analysis of everyday conversations has demonstrated how people go about grounding their communicative acts. Psycholinguist Herb Clark has also done some great work in this area, particularly in his new book _Using Language_.

Language is never precise -- there's tons of room for misunderstandings and miscommunication -- but most of the time we are heard and understood, and I think we should focus on these positive aspects of language, as opposed to the endless skepticism that seems to be part and parcel of post-structuralism. Such skepticism reaches absurd proportions at times and flies in the face of common-sense examples that surround us.

-- Lee

Date: Sat, 20 Sep 1997 11:39:06 -0500 (CDT)
From: sophist@UTARLG.UTA.EDU
Subject: vv>vb: GreekJewGeekEtAl.

VB writes:

"""""***Sometimes I get the feeling rhetoric types are too Greek. Even too Greco-Roman. All caught up in systems of thought we believe are unavoidable, universal, even unsolvable. Plato, Aristotle, Isocrates, Gorgias, blah blah blah puke puke puke. [...]

Anyway, I remember thinking at the time, and I couldn't really figure out how to say it, and I'm still not sure I do, but the best I can do is to put it, "we need to think more Jewish". Think Jew. Perelman thought Jew (not just Aristotle). Derrida thinks Jew."""""

Yes, as Reb Derissa (Derrida) has written:

"""""Are we Jews? Are we Greeks? We live in the difference between the Jew and the Greek.... We live in and of difference, that is, in _hypocrisy_....""""" (_Writing and Difference_, 153). Yes, I agree ... I quote this and the rest of the long passage and I comment (palimpsist w/riter that I am) on it on p. 140 of NSHR. It is the inbetween (the site of the excluded middle, muddle, of our mucking around for meaning and ways of constructing new communities of thought and everyday lives). Wherein I suggest the Pagus, but I have also suggested other sites ---> contrary critical coordinates or homosocial space or baroque territories/folds or bodies without organs or les domaines infe'rieurs or de'pays or exterior field or temporary automomous zones or etc. And you have suggested sites. We all need to suggest alternative sites. And meet there.

MOOoooooooooo. GreekJewSillyianGeekian--that we must become

I am talking about the excluded filth, pain, piss, all of the waste of the system ... but in the material world. I am talking about a libidinal materialism. There should be nothing abstract or other worldly about what I am saying. Each of the sites that I have mentioned has a referent, though we might wonderfully or awfully dispute it.

We need to constuct a site for minoritarian dis and dat courses. Kafka, D&G's Kafka, an exaggerated jewish oedipus. It was necessary to start with an exaggerated jewish oedipus, so that the stretching could reach the point of popping the (South Sea) Rhetorical Bubble so that we might have what we do have in terms of our uncommon, common towerless of babble, Babel.

Lee, David Porush's work has been immensely helpful to me, though I discovered it post-NSHR, which, btw, I finished as a ms. 5 years ago. In so many waves, I am on down the geek roadless now, elsewheres.

vv