PRETEXT, a Re/INter/VIEW
       with V.Vitanza, 7

Date: Sun, 21 Sep 1997 12:23:34 -0500 (CDT)
From: sophist@UTARLG.UTA.EDU
Subject: Re: mth>LH--Derrida Quote

...the gods, thank you for these dazes!

On Sun, 21 Sep 1997, m. todd harper wrote:

[...]
> Victor, on the other hand, I see you as really trying to transform a
> tradition, i.e. the History of Rhetoric or at least the master narrative
> therein. I don't necessarily see you as trying to reclaim a tradition or
> preserving rhetoric, though I might be wrong and would be interested in
> your in put here. From the rotting corpses of Heidegger, Jaeger,
> Schiappa, Jarrat, we find new life, but is that life a new rhetoric or is
> it something wholy new?

...there is no new rhetoric. ...there is only they who lived prior to aNaximander's realization of indeterminateness, _to apeiron_. And yet, does this not sound like a form of 18-19th century primitivism! Tragedy is dead, but the third dionysus is coming. Is it happening? Yes! s/he comes

Marx--that hermaphrodite--says in the _German Ideology_ ... it does not matter because it will have happened, this revolution.

VVhat logoi are attempting to let be said in NSHR is that it does not matter what 'people think' because libidinal matter is what matters. Is it happening? YES

>The other big difference I see between Taylor's negative theology and
> Victor's denegation is that Taylor or at least this tradition begins with
> 0 whereas Victor begins with 1. I think there is a big difference here
> that must be explored. Taylor, in other words, is trying to think through
> the *Not*. He is trying to understand God by thinking God to the limit in
> order to realize that there is still more, that is, trying to think the
> unthought. This ultimately seems to fall into Victor's critique of Kant.

Bingo! bongo. let's go to the beach. Bring our blankets. Forgive me. I have to un/pleasantly sneer at myselphs because I so wrestled with that distinction and I wondered if anyone would blink at it as a siteless of wrestling. Nick Land and his book on Bataille ... gave me many drunken nights and many sorehead mo(u)rnings. He begins from zero! He says that Bataille does! Even HMiller (in Tropics) says that he does. The spread wide legs signify for him ... zero. I un/just have never Seen such places as zero! Such thinking gives me to drunkenness. In the worst sense of that word. Though was saves drunkenness for another day ... was an evening of drinking and talking at one of my favorite irish-italian rest-rants, when someone who was listening to me said ... so you are k"Not" beginning from zero but from One to get to some more. Bingo! Bongo. Let's go to the beach.

> Victor, on the other hand, I see (you) as not necessarily thinking the
> unthought but thinking and vomiting what has been cast aside (not as a way
> to reclaim, but as a way to transform).

Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, some more, Ves

From: TheVoidBoy@AOL.COM
Date: Sun, 21 Sep 1997 18:46:13 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: VB >>>>>> VV et al: Nothing and the Inbetween

I was just struck with something. Yes yes yes, I know what you have written about it, so I'm not really misunderstanding you. But it just occured to me:

Is Zero (0) negative? Couldn't one/I argue (though not in an effort to support others, but in an effort to confront and fragment them) that 0 *is* the inbetween, the fracture between + (the positive, the "real") and - (the negative, the "unreal", the "anti-real" the dead)?

I happen to like your series better (1,2,3, some more), but I think that is because one could suggest that the equating of 0 with - is a pathological error, a chronic habit of mistaken conflation. In many religio-philosophies to become 0 is not to become -, not to become no-thing, but to become the inbetween. Negative and Positive return to 0, the point where both meet but do not meet, the point where they touch and cannot touch. The liminal inbetween.

But this inbetween is not the excess of infinity, though infinity returns to 0 - all things divided by 0 become infinite. Just musing. On "nothing".

-VoidBoy

Date: Tue, 23 Sep 1997 23:26:42 -0700 (PDT)
From: Steven Mailloux
Subject: sm->vv>trj: what, me worry? 1

VV:

During this mid-week lull in the action, let me try a question. In your 18 Sep 1997 response to TRJ, you wrote: > 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 . . ."

Now, I'm really asking about your anti-Protagoreanism but I suppose it might not be heard that way:

_____How permanent can your perpetuality be? In the "To measure, to value" section of ch. 7, there's "a sublime sovereign perpetual repositioning," there's "the perpetual reinvention, revaluing, of the self," there's the "intervention" that "forces metaphysics . . . to question itself perpetually, to dis/engage by way of perpetual self-overcoming. . . . It perpetually denegates this nihilistic tradition." And on and on perpetually(?). Ch. 1: "this 'I' . . . does not want to reterritorialize but perpetually deterritorialize." Ch. 1 on "The Sophists?": "My purpose is to redescribe perpetually by way of new idioms." "I would have us move on, perpetually, to a _third place_ . . ." First "Excursus": "the third dis/engages by way of infinitude . . . dis/engages in perpetual deterritorializings (decodings, denegations)." And on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on . . . perpetually?

I (perhaps mistakenly) hear Lee asking my question in his approving allusion to ethnomethodology's focus on the practical accomplishment of meaning (the temporary but definite, historically-situated pause in perpetual semantic drift), and I even hear it (perhaps even more mistakenly?) in those moments of political misgiving in VoidBoy's otherwise very different stylistic register.

Isn't it perpetual unmeasuredness that is alien to us?

SM

Date: Wed, 24 Sep 1997 07:39:24 -0400
From: Lee Honeycutt
Subject: Re: sm->vv>trj: what, me worry? 1

At 2:26 AM -0400 9/24/97, Steven Mailloux wrote:

>I (perhaps mistakenly) hear Lee asking my question in his approving
>allusion to ethnomethodology's focus on the practical accomplishment of
>meaning (the temporary but definite, historically-situated pause in
>perpetual semantic drift)....

No, not mistakenly, and good question, Steve.

-- Lee

Date: Wed, 24 Sep 1997 17:29:07 -0500 (CDT)
From: sophist@UTARLG.UTA.EDU
Subject: vv>s&m.lh.vb: perpetual motion desiring machine

Steve, thanks for followup questions.

You say:

"""""Now, I'm really asking about your anti-Protagoreanism but I suppose it might not be heard that way:"""""

Please, again, I'm not dis/engaging by way of an "anti-Protagoreanism." I can understand how you and others could 'describe' what I am doing as "anti-X." This is the understanding, however, of the metalanguage game of the Negative that wants to place everything into binaries. You could argue that my saying NO to Protag's man-measure doctrine is a saying NO to no and therefore I am Anti-Protag. Of course, people can respond to me in this fash-shun and go about their business of thinking that they have said something that 'counts' (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, etc.) and of dismissing me out of (the) court (of the school of epistemic rhetoric).

I have (and had) to struggle hard--though at other times without effort--in the writing of the book and in posting here searching for words that might roughly correspond to words that we do not have. My gods, look at poor Aristotle, e.g., in the _Nic Ethics_ from time to time having to give a description of something for which there is no word! Look at Roy Harris in _The Language Myth_ trying to wrestle with incommensurable worlds of logos! He comes up with the phrase "description from ignorance." But this is not a simple form of ignorance that just lacks information that could or might be obtained and therefore would serve as a remedy to the problem. VVhich cannot be settled, as it would desire to be settled, if we were but to find the right 'stance,' as in the right constitution (cf. KB) from which to talk and communicate.

S&M, remember Rorty's radical ... radical ... pragmaticism in _Contingency, I, S_? I am as practical as Rorty is in that I, too, know that there is a strange loop in the logos that returns us to not seeing what wants to be seen but what we have already, already--I am so forking bored!--have seen, theorized, fixed, killed. Arguments are not the source of radical change. Massive redescriptions are. And Perpetually.

If I were to say that I am an anti-Protagorean or that I practice an anti-Protagoreanism, I would be saying that we have reached a pointless of "accomplished nihilism" and now we must revalue value. VVhich I have said repeatedly here and yon. By revalue value, as I have been saying, we must rethink thinking that is not predicated on the Negative, we must rethink thinking that is not reactionary, does not want to redeem the past by way of revenge, does not want to give by taking (expecting returns).

What is happening (Is it happening?) in our con-versayshun is what happens, e.g., in Gianni Vattimo's book _The End of Modernity_, in which he misses the point of revaluing value and slips back into a pathetic modernism. And then he moves into this Italian notion of "weak thought." !!!! He's Italian; I'm Sicilian and prefer to be outside of weak/strong philosophy.

What has happened and keeps on happening in composition studies is the damning ... Oh, s.he's a Vitalist. And well, just forget about what s.he is saying because we can't have anything to do with those neoRomantic pholks if we ever want to have a discipline.

Nietzsche speaks of the history of an error. Allow me to exxxaggerate a pointless: The biggest, most deadly mistake ever made in composition theory and pedagogy was the rejection of something called Vitalism. And it was done completely out of ignorance. I have previously documented in several places in print when, where, and how. And that will (again) be, in part, the subjectless of the sequel to the history bookless.

There is example after example of people almost getting "it" but then this strange loop enters and they are all jerked back, whiplash style, to the status quo.

I am not an anti-protagonorist [sic.]! :-)

You ask

"""""_____How permanent can your perpetuality be?"""""

Oh, I finally shoot my wad and have to take a break. VVriting is like playing a piano solo or a drum solo or like a contraPUNtal effort made by several vvriters simultaneously. VVriting can reach a climax. An end. And then everyone can sigh with relief and agree or disagree that it was good for them, or one or the other. But when it comes to vvriting along the surface, I have other vvaves of vvriting. Often it's the audience that says ... I can't take any more of this. Perhaps some more later, whereas others say 'e'-nuf ... I can't take any more. And that's okay. To each hir ownness. And yet in the negating force.

I would rather vvrite across the surface. Penetration is the writing of the Negative! (I am not alluding to "feminine e'criture". There is nothing feminine or masculine in relationless to what I am alluding to.) And pray-prey tell, What is writing across the surface? I would un/just forget the question! The What is? question.

You say:

"""""I (perhaps mistakenly) hear Lee asking my question in his approving allusion to ethnomethodology's focus on the practical accomplishment of meaning (the temporary but definite, historically-situated pause in perpetual semantic drift), and I even hear it (perhaps even more mistakenly?) in those moments of political misgiving in VoidBoy's otherwise very different stylistic register."""""

I hear them asking and thier misgivings as well. I understand. And sympathize. Is this not *the problem of the perpetual*?! How to get people out of where they are, when their heads keep pulling them back to the species in the genus.

But I cannot not ask ... 'Why ethnomethodology?' What ethe, what ethnos, what ethos, what method? what logy? Do you and others catch my drift here in questioning the question? which misses the pointless. (On the other handless, I do catch your question in asking for another attempt to explain for those who do not follow. Socratic ironist cum humorist! that you are, right?) :-)

Moreover--rollover Aristotle--I am troubled by the notion of a practical application? What is good (as in a value) about pracTICality? What is good about applying knowledge to our everyday lives? What question is being begged here making beggers out of all of us?

'Okay, now stop your theorizing and show us how you are going to deliver the GOODs. Enuf of that theorizing stuff and playing around, We want to know What is the bottom line? How is what you are talking about going to feed people?'

vOMIT! vOMIT! vOMIT! out ... spew out ... such a question. And then examine it. eXamine it by way of the very things that allow you to think and expect an answer to such a inTERRORigation.

Then leap into the measureless that is alien to us! 'We' must 'practice' a self-mortification greater than KB talked about in the _RofM_ or in _Towards a Better Life_. We must 'practice' one that Cixous, sickzoo, becoming-animal, talks a bout.

But you understandably ask:

"""""Isn't it perpetual unmeasuredness that is alien to us?""""

Yes, we who are given to being rotten with perfection and subject to the Negative. Yes. To this cultural kNOwledge that we value as acceptable and practical.

I am a perpetual motion desiring machine. I am not a perpetual motion binary machine!

I have read a lot of ethnomethodologists and I have my students read them as well. There are some weird forking ehtnomethodologist down the road a 'fer piece at Rice University. But elsewhere, the only one who gets close to what 'we' are talking about hereless is ... Stephen Pfohl in his _Death at the Parasite Cafe: Social Science (Fictions) and the Postmodern_. NY: St. Martin's P, 1992. This is a good read. Well worth the timeless.

Kathy Acker is good, too; and yet, Is she a ethnomethodologist?, someone will ask. And when they do, 'we' will have had to forget that question.

S&M, I could continue here perpetually, but already I have given the audience a longer poste than it wants and, more importantly, have written more on the surface this time than previously that will be taken negatively.

yours in speaking to the chorus and in becoming nothing to nothing, Casandra

Date: Sat, 27 Sep 1997 09:46:21 -0400 (EDT)
From: "m. todd harper"
Subject: What is becoming animal?

vVictor,

What is becoming animal in your text? Helen? Helens? The History of Rhetoric? HR and Composition? Feminism?

And once one of these things "become animal" can it still be called Helen(s), History of Rhetoric, Composition, Feminism?

todd

Date: Sat, 27 Sep 1997 09:50:52 -0500 (CDT)
From: sophist@UTARLG.UTA.EDU
Subject: Re: What is becoming animal?

Interesting ambiguity in the question!

Todd asks:

> What is becoming animal in your text? Helen? Helens? The History of
> Rhetoric? HR and Composition? Feminism?

All of the above and some more.

> And once one of these things "become animal" can it still be called > Helen(s), History of Rhetoric, Composition, Feminism?

Yes, as Gregor or the Ape can be called Gregor and the Ape before and afterwise.

vV

Date: Sat, 27 Sep 1997 22:17:29 -0500 (CDT)
From: sophist@UTARLG.UTA.EDU
Subject: vv: my questions

vb, lee, steve ...

perhaps this one will help you ...

let me start with a representative anecdote:

In 1988 or so, at the CCCC ... someone ... who was an acquaintance and had at the time a budding place in the field ... but who has since disappeared ... asked me If he were to read all of or most of the references in the Works Cited to my article "Critical Sub/Versions..." in _Rhetoric Review_ (1987) ... Would he then be able to understand the article?

He said that he found the article unreadable. His question had ... has ... to do with investments, right? If he spends an X amount of time reading these cats cited, Will he then understand and more importantly get something for his investment?

Now, set that aside.

And think or recall that in order to do something in most (all?) fields it is important to do three things:
*state your objectives (and of course why they are important);
**tell how you're going to implement them; and
***how you or others can assess the success or failure of your realizing the objectives.

That third one is exceptionally important.

When I studied rhetorical invention at CMU in 1972-73, this was taught as part of the package. The whole process has to be capable of being repeated by others. And has to deliver the goods, right? And of course I learned a version of all this when I was a 'freshman' in composition. And I learned it when I wrote my M.A. Thesis. And my Ph.D. dissertation. And my first articles up to 1987.

People in business and especially Deans of Colleges or of Graduate Schools love these three things. Usually the Deans of Grad schools are in the sciences or business. Politicians live by these things; at least, they do in the so-called public sphere.

The three of you want to know how to determine the success of 'Helen' or want to know the 'practical' value of 'thirding' a sophistic or whatever I do ... and others do along the same lines....

Now comes MY questions: _____What does VV do in _NSHR_ in regards to these three things (objectives, implementation, and assessment)?

If he talks endlessly about the value of a General Economy, _____What do these things have to do with this economy? (Caveat: This is a really tricky question! as I blink at it.)

How would someone, on VV's own paraterms, assess what he has to say? Or _____does VV have any paraterms? _____How was the book manuscript assessed? I mean ... my gods ... the book manuscript was sent out initially to two readers who approved it with much lavished praise. Then it was sent out to another reader, who praised it highly again. And was then considered by the creme de la creme at suny p and someone on the big bored (sic) complained and said that, No, 'we' need two additional readers ... a person in classics and a female classicist in feminism. 5 readers! when the norm, as my Editor told me, was two readers at suny p, with at least one saying Yes strongly!

The additional two readers cum five did not help the problem, because one just talked about the yeas and the nays of the bookless, and the other after keeping it beyond the alotted time said she was too busy. You can read what you want into the last two readings.

So how would a press such as suny read this book and determine, after reviews, what to do with it? Of what value could such a bookless as _NSHR_ have for ... academia?! or whateva?

_____Do you think the bookless is pre-tentious as hell? self-indulgent? self-aggrandizing?

_____Do you think that perhaps VV just does not know any better?

_____And why do you think that suny p would publish a book with humming in it: "Like: hummmmmmmmmmmmm. Hummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm" (66), when there are so many people not getting tenure because the resources for getting things published are so ... so ... few? and here they are but squandered!

_____Is this book a hoax? If so, how could you tell?

I tell you ... I love reading the outside readers' comments on my stuff. Especially when it's negative to the extreme. They can really cut you down to where you ought to be. One commentator on an article of mine said that I was trying to be "Vitanzaesque"!!! and that I was not very good at it!!!! (There's much good meaning in that one! Sometimes I find it difficult living up to my reputation.)

Your thotlessnesses?

vv

Date: Sun, 28 Sep 1997 08:04:48 -0500
From: "D. Diane Davis"
Subject: Re: vv: my questions

I want to take a shot at responding to your questions, vv. First this, though: as I read your last post, I thought of a section in the preface to _The Differend: Phrases in Dispute_ that seems relevant.

Lyotard notes that readers these days often operate on the notion that "success comes from gaining time"; "reflection" is "thrust aside" today because it seems a "waste of time," because it gets us nowhere fast, because it offers us no "profit margin." Philosophy (which Lyotard defines as slow reflection), he observes, has to defend itself these days against two major adversaries: "on its outside, the genre of economic discourse (exchange, capital); on its inside, the genre of academic discourse (mastery)."

May I just issue a big "ooof!" from the academic section of the bleachers... The tendency in academia (and this is really WEIRD, when ya think about it, given that academia is supposed to be about LEARNING and not simply reinforcing...about learning and not just TEACHING what has been previously learned) is to judge a work across a pre-fabbed list of criteria: "Does it offer a solution or just criticize?" "Does it propose a workable plan of action or a feasible classroom practice?" "Is it politically, ethically, and academically responsible?" ETC. But your work could not be less interested, I think, in fulfilling such traditional expectations. It prefers to challenge the assumptions upon which such expectations are based; it hopes to question the usual questions, to open a space for new and different questions to be posed.

Your book will not help any of us gain time...reading it for that purpose would no doubt be maddening. It offers no quick tips or simple pedagogical/political fixes. Those who keep reading past that recognition very likely will have been those interested less in mastery and quick fixes than in explosive dispersions and ethical re-valuations--those who are already beginning to tune in to the rustle of the EXscribed, already attempting to catch traction on the trace of the Other. This book will not help we-academics do better what we've always done--it may, though, help spark other notions of what it might be ethical/possible to do...in the history/hystery of rhetorik, in the teaching of writing, etc.

I do, though, think you state your objectives in this work. Over and over, in fact. They just don't necessarily look like any objectives that the genre of academic discourse has learned how to validate. The work itself is an example of your method of implementation--third sophistic reading/writing/thinking. You are doing what you are calling for. There is no end, no finale. It is a matter of perpetual deterritorializations, perpetual turning toward/for the Other. And I think these things have everything to do with THIS economy...with a turning toward what it is (already) in this (restricted) economy that has been excluded, silenced, erased. To libidinalize this/our (restricted) economy is to find ways to think past abstract, arbitrary categories, categories that exclude--and to do it perpetually. That would have to be the assessment, as well, I guess: a test to determine if deterritorialization is perpetual.

I give kudos to SUNY Press for finally going ahead with a project like this one, for recognizing the significance of beginning to think/write/read *differently*.

my "thotlessnesses."

ddd