"Rhetoric and Poetics in the English Department: Our Nineteenth Century Inheritance."
James Berlin

Writing and Difference.
Jacques Derrida
Trans Alan Bass
Chapter Ten: "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences."

"Beyond Persuasion: A Proposal for an Invitational Rhetoric"
Sonja K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin

"Postcolonial Interventions in the Canon: An 'Other' View."
Raka Shome

The Rhetoric of Rhetoric: The Quest for Effective Communication.
Wayne C. Booth
Chapter 5: "The Fate of Rhetoric in Education."

In this chapter Booth make his case for the teaching of rhetoric in the primary and secondary school (and I assume university) calling it "Rhet-Ed." I think it's safe to assume he would deem the endeavor the teaching of "rhetorology", the probing for common ground via training that studies the employment of rhetoric in every human interaction, and it is a definite he means the teaching of L-R since later in the chapter Booth explains ways to teach L-R through specific classroom practices. These practices are:

1. Don't pontificate; don't slap down students you think are on the wrong side.  Even if your group or class is much too large for individual encounters with everyone, get strong rival opinions on deck.  This seems to mean allow two of the students of two very different camps on an issue to debate in front of the class and developing some type of task that ensures those in the audience are analyzing and questions the strategies and ploy of each student debating.
2. Once you observe one of the two opponents not listening, intrude authoritatively, and force one student to paraphrase and reproduce the other student's position to the student being paraphrased satisfaction.
3. Once either side has done a decent job articulating rival positions and has madesome effort to understand their rivals, divide the class physically.  Those who agree with debater x in one corner, those who agree with debater y in another, leave another corner for debater a if another rival point of view comes into play, and leave the fourth corner for those who are undecided.  Allow each side to continue debating, and ask that as people are persuaded they move to the corner of said rhetor.

The point, it seems, is not to come to a definite solution to the issue on the floor, but to stress everyone practice L-R, and that people can articulate what methods the rhetor who persuaded them used, as well as what methods used by other rhetors failed in their eyes (most of this is paraphrase based on pages 100-102 and alot of it is my own interpretation how to make it meaningful in a classroom setting).  For Bootha good class ends with students leaving and still quarreling as they enter the hall.

Booth's other component to Rhet-Ed is teaching research, in so much as research deals withplacing sources into conversation as the students pursue a topic of inquiry they find interesting.  In this way, the student is engaged with texts, responding to texts, and juxtaposing those texts in way which allows the student to practice L-R within the world of print rhetoric.   The things Booth sees as the hallmark of good research education are students learning:

• the fun of asking and answering questions in a way that entices readers to join in the inquiry
• to practice attentive listening when reading or hearing other research reports
• the importance of asking, at every point, "So what? What does it matter?"
• to face conflicting hypotheses and deciding which on is superior by listening to all of the arguments on both sides 

(paraphrase 102-103)

Booth's political cures, his methods for ensuring a central authority mandate rhetorology (or Rhet-Ed or L-R) on all levels is a fanciful journey on the level of Gulliver's Travels, which while interesting, is wholly impossible in this life (hence, I suppose, the fairy tell format on pages 103-106).

The warrant for Booth's claim about the importance of rhet-ed in public education is based completely in the narrativeof the good citizen.  This foregrounded warrant may be rhetoric in and of itself; Americans tend to look favorably on things connected to the continuation of the Union.  Whether ethical or not the strategy is effective.  It makes sense a voting citizen of the a rational public would need to understand how an argument is presented, how that presentation either hides or amplifies certain aspects of an issue, and the citizen would need to be able to separate the suasive strategy from the outcome of a bill, law, or amendment.  And all of this is needed to combat the unethical rhetors who use rhetotrickery, who in Booth's eyes, bombard students with their sophist ways everyday through the countless and insidious channels of pop culture.

The Rhetoric of Rhetoric: The Quest for Effective Communication.
Wayne C. Booth
Chapter 8: "Can Rhetorology Yield More than a Mere Truce, in any of Our 'Wars'?

The "wars" referred to in the title of this chapter is actually only one war, and even that I don't think is really a war, just a topic that produces some pretty heated talk.  Essentially, Booth's talking about the division between religion and science, and in chapter eight he shows (using Toulmin'sterminology) that each side of this "war" shares the same seven warrants.

1. The world as we experience it is somehow flawed.
2. The flaws seen in the light of the Unflawed, some truth, some notion of justice, or "goodness," or of some possible purging of ugliness or ignorance; standards of judgment of the brokenness exist somewhere.
3. There is some supreme order or cosmos or reality, something about the whole of things that provides the standards according to which I make the judgments of Warrants One and Two.
4. Emerging from the first three: All who are genuinely religious (not just complaining) will somehow see themselves as in some inescapable sense a part of the brokenness (for scientist this is revealed through the lamentation : what I don't know I ought to know!).
5. Following inescapably from the first four: The cosmos I believe in, the cosmos I may or may not feel gratitude towards for its gift of my existence, the cosmos that is in it manifestations in my world in some degree broken-- my cosmos calls upon me to do something about the brokenness.
6. An inevitable moral corollary of the other five: Whenever my notion of what my cosmos requires of me conflicts with my immediate wishes or impulses, I ought to surrender to that higher value.
7. A warrant that everyone would make essential to all religions: The psychological or emotional feelings connected with all of this (a high comes from both time in church and time in the lab when the individual feels they've made contact with "Truth").

I suppose this is the demonstration of the awesome (as in "awe inspiring) power of L-R.  These seven warrants seem to have been divined via L-R, ie, through research, putting text in conversation, speaking withadherents from each side, really listening to the rhetoric they employ, asking questions, looking for common ground, putting each into a debate with another in front of the reader(s), and pointing out their common ground (here, the seven warrants).

This action is much like the classroom exercise discussed in chapter five, except the answers and responses are filtered through Booth and his recounting of them. If I practice rhetorology, this seems like his argument from earlier chapters in the book, where Booth couches all things he deems "unethical rhetoric" in the same camp as rhetoric which promotes slavery and child abuse, then this seems like a contrived scenario with delimiters which force the reader to agree with Booth.   In fabricating a scenario where he uses L-R to solve one of the more popular debates of the last few centuries, where readers are unable to hear the multiple voices with different objections or nuanced positions on this subject, Booth makes Listening Rhetoric seem like the best thing since sliced bread.

"Rhetoric and Poetics in the English Department: Our Nineteenth Century Inheritance."
James Berlin

This article is a recounting of the shift in the social/scholarly milieu which degraded rhetoric and lifted the poetic to an exalted position within the university, and therefore, society in general. Berlin traces out this move by demonstrating the shift in how writing was taught and what the new, positivistic warrants under-girding this pedagogical move meant for public discourse, and how that new paradigm was disseminated beyond the university by the indoctrination provided by literature and composition courses. Berlin begins by explaining the classical ratio between the poetic and rhetoric; rhetoric, traditionally, "was concerned with the uses of language in carrying on the practical affaris of society in law, politics, and other essential functions" (Burke qtd in Berlin 522), while "the principles of poetics were closely related to rhetoric" but:

The important difference was that rhetoric was concerned with language designed to bring about action in the material world. Poetics, on the other hand, was concerned with language that existed as an object of contemplation, apart from any practical consequences, and poetic discourse was studied for its intrinsic merits, as an object of interest in itself. It was to be concerned with truth and goodness, but its distinguishing feature was beauty. Rhetorical texts, in contrast, were created for extrinsic purposes. They too were concerned with beauty, but making truth and virtue prevail through specific directives was more important.
(522)

The boundariescould be blurred, but they were both of equal importance and considered the backbone of any pedagogical endeavor designed to train a society's elite (what we would now call attending university).

The change comes in the 19thcentury with the industrial revolution, the positivist worldview, the new emphasis on science and the scientific method, and the advent of the elective curriculum within universities. Berlin starts withCampbell and Scottish Common Sense Realism, asserting that Campbell was attempting to create a new rhetoric which could be the counterpart to the new scientific logic. The Newtonian inductivescheme (in contrast to the classical deductivescheme) becomes the new way to arrive at truth about the physical world, and "[r]ationality ceases to be a rhetorical construct revealing itself through the application of syllogistic logic" (524). The universe is an orderly and lawful thing. All truths can be derived through observation and accurate recording. Rhetoric and poetic are still important in equal parts, but now persuasion is based on the quality of observation and the imparting of these observations to corresponding, essential mental facilities where things will ring true due to their adherence to physical phenomena.

Blair is of the same epistemological leanings as Campbell (Scottish Common Sense) and is the next figure Berlin taps as the modifier of rhetoric. Blair maintains the separate but equal status of the poetic and rhetoric, but, in a new twist, promulgates individuals can learn rhetorical principles through studying literary works, that is, the belletristic method. This method emphasizes the principles of style, and relagates rhetoric to questions of arrangement and style, effectively eradicating all the other canons of rhetoric. Students can imitate the writers deemed "exemplary" and absorb their excellent rhetorical moves by analyzing or creating works like the preferred writers.

Fast forward to AS Hill (Harvard) and John F. Genung (Amherst).  Berlin explains:

Hill and Genungcombine the modes of discourse found in Campbell withthe stylistic emphasis of Blair. For them the mechanistic nature of reality dictates that all rhetorical discourse naturally falls into four forms: description, narration, exposition, and argument. Each form corresponds to a different faculty. Writing is an inductive process in which the composer simply transcribes into language what the faculties have discovered. It is, moreover, learned inductively. Thus Genungclaims the invention of the "laboratory" method, by which he means having students study examples of effective essays in the newly devised fresh-man anthology in order to learn the stylistic principles that they are to follow. This is obviously an application of Blair's belletristic approach. Arrangement-the modes-and style are all that need be taught since the content of discourse is automatically discovered through the correct use of the faculties in exploring the external world. Indeed, Hill and Genungeven deprive rhetoric of a concern for emotion-thereby departing from Campbell and Blair-because of its tendency to distort observation. Their systems are thus completely in line with the induc-tivemethod of science, depriving rhetoric of its traditional concern with the in-herently probablistic: the proving of opposites in politics, law, and the public domain.
(529)

Rhetoric petrifies into freshman composition, poetics evolves into literary studies and takes over meaning making, while students are deprived of the education necessary to make sense of the language practices utilized in democracy to dupe the masses. Much like Booth, Berlin asserts students not trained in rhetoric are incapable of truly participating in democracy.

Question: Does rhetorical training really equate to a strong, robust, and ethical citizenry? Even when education was based on a classical pedagogy there were several people disenfranchised from the political process. Unethical practices and methods of persuasion abounded in the continuation of slavery, and later, institutionalized racism through legal segregation.

Writing and Difference.
Jacques Derrida
Trans Alan Bass
Chapter Ten: "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences."

Derrida makes his case for the weakness of the structuralist paradigm of reality by examining the work of Claude Levi-Strauss. Derrida asserts Levi-Strauss' work, the constant return to archaic societies, is the attempt to return to the origins of contemporary societies. Specifically, Derrida targets Levi-Strauss' constant motif of changes within these ancient cultures (synonymous with societies) as a rupture, or break, or a change that occurs "in one fell swoop." Derrida posits this move is indicative of all work in social sciences, and the its status as a reoccurring motif is the sign of a failing within the structuralist worldview. Structuralists, Derrida asserts, rely on this technique since they believe in a center, a transcendental signified, an absolute truth which must exist and propagate itself through all things in material reality for reality to exist at all. Derrida explains this event becomes paradoxical "rupture and a redoubling" (278), where an event must not only break with the reality of the past, but at the same time, conform to the prescribed rules consistent with absolute truth. Because structuralists and structuralism must have this center, any change brackets history; this bracketing effectively denies the possibility of hybridity or construction of a concept through social means--a social construction that is constantly tested and revised in various instances until it achieves the status of common sense beyond all contestation. For Derrida this move makes the brith of social sciences like ethnology possible; only when a epistemology begins to feel threatened does it create appendages which defend and constantly make it the standard to judge all cultures by, or at least make it the epistemology, via the culture it engenders, the culture/epistemology of reference (282).

Through this method the social sciences are able to profess (here, using Levi-Strauss as an example) that it is possible to use:

old concepts [European epistemology and culture] within the domain of empirical discovery
while here and there denouncing their limits, treating them as tools which can
still be used. No longer is any truth value attributed to them; there is, a readiness
to abandon them, if necessary, should other instruments appear more useful. In
the meantime, their relative efficacy is exploited, and they are employed to
destroy the old machinery to which they belong and of which they themselves are
pieces. This is how the language of the social sciences criticizes itself. Levi-Strauss
thinks that in this way he can separate method from truth. the instruments
of the method and the objective significations envisaged by it.
(284)

The last thing Derrida charges Levi-Strauss with (and therefore, everything he represents: structuralism, ethnology, the social sciences) is Levi-Strauss' side-stepping of totalization, his assertion that such a move is impossible because "there is too much, more than one can say" (289). Derrida finds this paradoxical since the structuralist worldview should be able to reduce everything to its center, the absolute that flows through all things in an orderly universe. Derrida argues here that this is the moment of play, the moment where the epistemology of the social sciences falls short due to its inability to accept play (and here I would advocate "play" is equivalent to "social construction"). Derrida explains:

This field is in effect that of play, that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions only because it is. finite, that is to say, because instead of being an inexhaustible field, as in the classical hypothesis, instead of being too large, there is something missing from it: a center which arrests and grounds the play of substitutions. One could say--rigorously using that word whose scandalous signification is always obliterated in French--that this movement of play, permitted by the lack or absence of a center or origin, is the movement of supplementarity. One cannot determine the center
and exhaust totalization because the sign which replaces the center, which supplements
it, taking the center's place in its absence--this sign is added, occurs as a surplus, as a supplement.
(289)

Because the social sciences can not deal in this concept of play, the structure of the sciences (its methodologies, methods) and its use of signs (reading, interpretation of, and wielding of) are flawed.

In trying to connect this to the objective of the course, this would seem to fit into the purview of rhetoric not because Derrida identifies himself as a rhetorician (well, at least not to my knowledge does he ever) but he writes and speaks of things in terms rhetoricians can agree with.  There is no center or transcendental signified which rings true with people as the hear/talk/write about something.  The world exists outsideof us, but how we make sense of that world and how we use the things which exist outside of us to make decisions about how to move through the world are made real through rhetoric.  Through the canons of rhetoric we make sense of everything and develop a knowledge base, replete with stereotypes (tropes) and routinized actions that allow us to navigate our way through the world.  It would seem fair to say every rhetoric is based within a specific cultural epistemology, and every individual within a society practice rhetoric within the confines of that epistemology (this claim would connect back to,and be supported by,  Derrida's talk on the bricoleur on page 285).

"Beyond Persuasion: A Proposal for an Invitational Rhetoric"
Sonja K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin

In this text Foss and Griffin develop a taxonomy of rhetorics in an attempt to move the focus of the discipline beyond persuaion. The four branches they devise are Conquest Rhetoric, Conversion Rhetoric, Advisory Rhetoric, and Invatational Rhetorics. Due to time constraints, the (thankfully) straighforwardness of the paper and a formatting issue, the following is a cut-and-paste of various quotes from the paper sans any page numbers.

Conquest Rhetoric

the object of interaction is to secure an idea, claim, or argument as the best, strongest, and most powerful among competing positions--in other words, to achieve a rhetorical prize. Such interactions produce winners and losers; winners, ideas or beliefs prevail, and losers' arguments or positions are overturned and discredited. The goal of conquest rhetoric, then, is to win an argument more than to affect listeners or to change their image of a subject in some significant way (Flower, 1989).

Rhetors see their audience members as opponents whose goals are incompatible with their own. They are viewed by rhetors as somehow less expert and as holding less insightful or "correct" positions. The relationship between rhetors and audience members is "unilateral" (Brockriede, 1972, p. 2) in that audience members' arguments have little potential to alter or affect rhetors' positions.

The process of producing a winner relies on dichotomous positions, rules, and argumentative skill directed at the rejection and destruction of ideas or positions different from the rhetor's own.

Conversion Rhetoric
the goal of conversion rhetoric is not to defeat or destroy an opponent but to convince a person that one argument or perspective is better than another. Conversion rhetoric involves the effort to construct arguments or claims so compelling that they cannot be refused--arguments that are appealing to audiences because of their substance and/or presentation. This rhetoric is exemplified in the discourse of advertisers, politicians seeking votes, and sales representatives.
The means used in conversion rhetoric are designed to engage audience members, to involve them, and to motivate them to the perspective and/or action intended by rhetors. Traditional conceptions of rhetorical strategies tend to be the means used in conversion rhetoric--the proofs of ethos, pathos, and logos; patterns of organization that present ideas effectively; a

language style that appeals to and is appropriate for the audience; and a style of delivery that enhances the vividness of a message, for example.
In conversion rhetoric, audience members usually are seen as naive and uninformed, holding perspectives inferior to the rhetor's own

Although not always explicit, conversion rhetoric involves a degree of paternalism, in which the rhetor guides others in an effort aimed at serving their best interests.

Conversion rhetoric, then, involves persuasion through a process of convincing others to believe rhetors' positions on issues.

Advisory Rhetoric

Although rhetors who employ advisory rhetoric seek change in their audiences and see it as beneficial, they do not insist that such change occur. Such rhetors, in Buber's (1988) words, see themselves as helpers "of the actualizing forces" of their audiences. Because they do not insist that others adopt their positions, advisory rhetors listen to the perspectives presented by others, consider them seriously, and even may adjust or reverse their original positions as they take them into account.
Those who are subject to advisory rhetors' persuasive efforts willingly enter into the interaction because of their respect for the rhetors. They listen receptively because they recognize the knowledge, expertise, and experiences of advisory rhetors and desire to benefit and learn from them; over time, their experiences with these rhetors have proved the value of the perspectives they offer.

Invitational Rhetoric

We have chosen to label this rhetoric invitational because it assumes the form of an offering, an opening, or an availability and not an insistence. Although some will choose to accept this invitation, the point is not to secure the adherence of audience members to the perspective offered by the rhetor.
We have constructed invitational rhetoric largely from feminist theory, the literature in which its various dimensions have been most thoroughly theorized.

Invitational rhetoric, then, rests on three assumptions. The intent to persuade others is seen as a violation of the integrity of others--of the system of belief and action they haveconstructedfor themselves. Such efforts are seen to be largely ineffective, and individuals are viewed as capable of changing only themselves. Consequently, invitational rhetoric looks substantially different from conquest, conversion, and advisory rhetoric. No longer the attempt to persuade, rhetoric is defined as a process of creating an "atmosphere in which growth and change take place" (Gearhart, 1979, p. 200)--the creation of an environment that facilitates growth so that individuals may change if they desire to do so. Invitational rhetoric involves the creation of "a milieu in which those who are ready to be persuaded may persuade themselves, may choose to hear or choose to learn" (Gearhart, 1979, p. 198).

Two primary means are employed in invitational rhetoric to accomplish this giving or offering. one is modeling, a mode by which rhetors enact their perspectives; the second is the creation of rhetorical conditions that allow others to change if they choose to do so.

Rhetors model their perspectives "by being the best example" they can in their own lives of those perspectives (Johnson, 1991, p. 165).

We propose that to create an environment conducive to growth and change, an invitational rhetoric must create three external conditions in the interaction between rhetors and audience members--safety, value, and freedom.

In such rhetoric, individuals are allowed to tell of their experiences without the listeners interrupting, comforting, or inserting anything of their own.
A variety of factors are involved in the decision to use one type of rhetoric rather than another. The factors the rhetor would use in making the decision would fall into four categories --situation, audience, rhetor, and subject (Foss & Foss, in press).

The expansion of the notion of rhetoric beyond persuasion to include invitational rhetoric has several implications for rhetorical theory. For one, the introduction of invitational rhetoric into a taxonomy of rhetoricschallenges the presumption that has been granted to persuasion in the rhetorical tradition. Identification and explication of a rhetoric not grounded in the intent to persuade undermine the position of privilege accorded to persuasion in rhetoric. The existence of invitational rhetoric thus encourages the exploration of yet other rhetoricsthat do not involve the intent to persuade.

"Postcolonial Interventions in the Canon: An 'Other' View."
Raka Shome

Here's a link to something I wrote previously about this piece: Shome.

Through juxtaposition with this week's reading there are some interesting questions evoked by Shome, specifically when Shome on page 599 argues "Rhetoric as a discipline has been traditionally built on public address. But historically public address has been a realm where imperial voices were primarily heard imperial policies were articulated." How, if we take Shome's project seriously, do we reconcile Booth's L-R and methodology of teaching in the classroom? These practices, especially in the university, do not exist in social vacuum. In using Booth's methodology, what is considered appropriate talk and who can speak on what subjects would be severely limited, and there--most likely--would be no in-class conversation about these rules. It would just be understood. And not only would these rules be floating about, but also the inherent method of rhetoric as public policy making tool would be enmeshed in this type of classroom. How would we examine different texts and rhetorical practices for neocolonialism in a situation so rife with cultural cues? Also, this would move away from Berlin's assertion that rhetoric prepares citizens for participation in democracy, which is also Booth's warrant. How can we use rhetoric to achieve the ethical goal of challenging de facto chauvinism if the methodology promotes methods that have another goal in mind? This may be hair splitting, but can this type of work be done without a serious overhauling of how rhetoric is perceived and used? Would there need to be a ideological re-ordering on the scale of what Foss and Griffin call for?

In New York City, the reaction was just as swift.  "I mean, my god, does she even read Frank Rich every Sunday?  Has she ever read Derrida or Foucault?  Is America really ready for that kind of president?" asked Paulette Kael, the literary editor of the New York Review of Books.  "Look at her.  Her husband's a union member who works with his hands, her son is in the military, she had to work for everything she has, she engages in hunting and fishing, and, my god, she has five kids, none of which are adopted from exotic countries.  This will seem so alien to voters.  I'm not sure how America will be able to relate to her."

Not all of the consternation came from left of the political spectrum.  Regal Puddington III is the editor in chief of The Weekly Review, an obscure conservative literary journal.  As he lit his pipe and adjusted his bow tie, he asked: "Does she even know her Burke from her Locke? Her Mises from her Hayek?" Puddington, who has been to London, Paris, and other cosmopolitan cities around the world, but has yet to visit anywhere in America besides New York City, his ski chalet in Boulder, and his summer home in Martha's Vineyard, considers himself an expert in Alaskan politics as he once read a Jack London novel in middle school.  "I'm not sure America will be comfortable with a vice president who didn't attend Dartmouth or Yale."

- Wszyscy na swoje miejsca! - krzyknęła Królowa przeraźliwie donośnym głosem. Goście rozbiegli się w różnych kierunkach, przy czym wpadali na siebie i przewracali się raz po raz. Po jakiejś minucie wszyscy byli gdzie trzeba i gra mogła się rozpocząc. Alicja nie widziała nigdy w życiu tak dziwnego pola krokietowego, o samej grze nie wspominając.

- Nic z tego nie rozumiem...na czym właściwie polega ta gra? - spytała szeptem Kota-Dziwaka. Kot Dziwak uśmiechnął się zagadkowo.

- Chodzi o przemieszczenie jakiegoś jeża za pomocą flaminga, a przemieszczenie to tworzy pewien system, w którymś miejscu otwarty na pewną nierozstrzygalną metodę.

- Czyli te rozmieszczone jeże nie tworzą jednolitej gry?

- Nie. Ta gra nie ma żadnego absolutnego początku, a całkowicie pochłonięta przez znajomośc innych gier odsyła, w pewien sposób, jedynie do swojej własnej gry.

Alicja starała sie nadążyc za myśleniem Kota-Dziwaka, marszcząc przy tym mocno swoje dziesięcioletnie czoło.

-Ale w końcu, mówiąc wprost, w którym miejscu rozpocząc taką gre?

-Można uważac, że gra składa się z dwóch części ( połączonych teoretycznie, systematycznie, a nie empirycznie), w której to środek można by wpleśc coś różnego. Można też zrobic odwrotnie - i te dwie części wpleśc w srodek tego różnego. Ale tych rzeczy nie można tak łatwo odtworzyc, jak to sobie wyobrażasz. Problematyka gry, jako taka, była tu już podjęta i powiązana ze świadomością, obenością, nauką, historią i historią nauki...

-Pytałam cię o to, w którym miejscu zacząc, a ty zamknąłeś mnie w labiryncie...

Z kim ty właściwie rozmawiasz? - zapytał Król przyglądając się głowie Kota z wielkim zainteresowaniem.

- To mój przyjaciel, Kot Dziwak - odpowiedziała Alicja - Pozwoli Wasza Królewska Mośc, że go przedstawię.

- On mi się zupełnie nie podoba - odrzekł Król - Ale może pocałowac mnie w rękę, jeśli chce.

- Wcale nie chcę - powiedział Kot.

- Nie bądź zuchwalcem! - zawołał Król - I nie przypatruj mi się tak! Trzeba go stąd koniecznie usunąc! - zadecydował Król i krzyknął do przechodzącej właśnie Królowej: Kochanie, chciałbym, zebyś usunęła stąd tego Kota!

- ściąc go! - wrzasnęła Królowa. Alicja poczuła nagły przypływ odwagi i podeszła śmiało do Królowej.

- Określenie statusu pańskiej wypowiedzi wydaje się prawie niemożliwe. Przecież ten Kot to filozof, a w dodatku to sama głowa! Jak można dokonac ścięcia głowy filozofa, która istnieje samoistnie bez tułowia? Czy wogóle należy próbowac to robic? Czy sam rozkaz nie spycha nas na powrót do wnętrza obszaru metafizyki?

Królowa Kier spojrzała na Alicję pogardliwie, unosząc w górę jedną ze swoich starannie wydepilowanych brwi.

- Usiłuję zbliżac się do kresu wypowiedzi filozoficznej. Powiedziałam kresu a nie śmierci, bo nie wierzę w ogóle w to, co dziś sie potocznie nazywa śmiercią filozofii ani czegokolwiek innego, czy byłaby to Księżna, Szarak bez Piątej Klepki czy Kot-Filozof; tym bardziej, że jak każdy wie, śmierc zachowuje specyficzną skutecznośc.

2.

Zwariowany Kapelusznik przypatrywał sie Alicji już od dłuższego czasu z wielką ciekawością i teraz zabrał głos po raz pierwszy.

- Jaka jest różnica między krukiem a piórnikiem?

Alicja pomyślała z radością, że zanosi się wreszcie na jakąś zabawę.

- Sądzę, że będę umiała rozwiązac tę zagadkę.

-Myślisz, że potrafisz znaleźc odpowiedź na to pytanie? - rzekł Kapelusznik.

- Właśnie.

- No to mów, co myślisz.

- Ja...ja myślę to, co mówię, a to jest właściwie to samo, prosze pana.

- Wcale nie. W ten sposób mogłabyś powiedziec, że "widzę to co jem" i "jem to co widzę", mają to samo znaczenie. Wracając do mojej zagadki, powinnaś zwrócic uwagę na imiesłów czasu teraźniejszego czasownika "różnic".

-Po co?

-Po pierwsze: jest naczelnym pojęciem ekonomii, po drugie: ruch różni jest wspólnym korzeniem wszystkich opozycji pojęc, które wpływają na nasza mowę, po trzecie: różnia jest też wytwarzaniem tych różnic. Różnice te nie są zapisane w niebie ani w mózgu, co nie znaczy, ze byłby one wytworzone przez działanie jakiegoś mówiącego Susła...

- Więc w końcu jakim pojęciem jest różnia? - przerwała zniecierpliwiona Alicja. Zwariowany Kapelusznik uśmiechnął się triumfalnie.

-Powiedziałbym, że to nie jest nawet po prostu pojęcie...

-Więc jak to w końcu jest z tym krukiem i piórnikiem?

- Są różne więc tożsame. Są tożsame więc różne. Podobnie rzecz ma sie z tobą, moja panno.

-Ze mną..?

-Dokładnie tak - niespodziewanie odezwał się zaspanym głosem Suseł - Książka o tobie na pierwszy rzut oka może się wydawac baśniową opowieścią i tak jest przede wszystkim postrzegana, ale są i tacy, którzy dostrzegą w niej opis kryzysu tożsamości płciowej...

- Co takiego..?!

-Dokładnie tak. Mamy tu do czynienia z dziewczynka, która schodzi w głab niezwykle dwuznacznej, króliczej nory i przechodzi w stan przed narodzeniem, usiłując odnaleźc swoją rolę Kobiety. Ukazują jej się różne role wynikające z płci, ale ona nie potrafi przyjąc żadnej z nich. Odrzuca Macierzyństwo, kiedy niemowlę, które niańczy zamienia się w prosię; nie reaguje również pozytywnie na rolę dominującej kobiety, jaką jest Królowa Kier i na jej kastracyjne okrzyki "Sciąc go". A kiedy Księżna w sprytnie zakamuflowany sposób robi lesbijski wypad w jej kierunku, to Alicja ani tego nie zauważa ani jej to nie interesuje...

-Chcesz przez to powiedziec, że istnieją dwie Alicje?

-Dokładnie tak. Dwie albo i więcej...

-Ale któraś z nich musi byc pierwsza!

-Pierwsza nie jest pierwsza, jeśli nie ma po niej drugiej. Właściwie to dzięki drugiej pierwsza jest pierwsza, a pierwsza jest faktycznie trzecia..

-Właśnie tak ma się rzecz z tobą - rzekł Zwariowany Kapelusznik i rozmowa urwała się jak ucięta nożem.

3.

Rozmyślając Alicja zapomniała całkiem o Księżnej i zdziwiła się, gdy usłyszała nagle jej głos tuż przy swoim uchu.

- Myślisz pewnie o śladach tego co nieobecne, drogie dziecko, i dlatego sie nie odzywasz. Nie umiem ci teraz powiedziec jaki stąd płynie morał, powiem ci tylko, że to co obecne, jest obecne jedynie pod warunkiem, że odnosi się do tego co nieobecne.

-Może w ogóle nie ma podwójnej gry - rzekła nieśmiało Alicja.

-Nie, nie, moje dziecko - odparła Księżna. - Każda rzecz ma swoje ukryte znaczenie, które i tak zresztą nic nie znaczy. Trzeba tylko umiec je znaleźc.

- A więc tak naprawdę nie jestem pierwsza i nie nie znaczę, a gra w krokieta, podobnie jak zwariowany podwieczorek nie mają początku i końca...

-Tak samo jak cała nasza kraina, która kwestionuje pragnienie arche, absolutnego początku, źródła. Zatem książka o Alicji nie może się bardziej zaczynac, niż nasza kraina kończyc...a w takiej przestrzeni nic dosłownie nic nie znaczy.

-Więc co ja tu tak naprawdę robię?

-Grasz. Wszyscy gramy. Partia ta trwac będzie nieskończenie a wynik gry pozostanie nierozstrzygnięty...

Alicja przebudziła się z głową na klawiaturze komputera. Spojrzała na zegar. Dochodziła czwarta rano.

- Ależ miałam dziwny sen... - szepnęła do kota zwiniętego w kłębek na jej łózku. - Dobrze, że znowu jestem w swoim prawdziwym pokoju, a pogmatwana kraina, w której byłam, istnieje tylko w sennej wyobraźni, prawda? Zresztą co koty wiedzą o Derridzie...

- Więcej niż jesteś to sobie w stanie wyobrazic - odparł kot, nie otwierając oczu.

*tekst powyzszy pisany byl na zaliczenia cwiczen z postmodernizmu, na 3 roku filozofii. do Alicji i Derridy wracam chcac nie chcac caly czas, a wszytkie te zagadnienia wydaja sie niesamowicie aktualne.basn, filozofia, gra, roznica, znaczenia, kres...wracam do jednej z wazniejszych basni filozoficznych na swiecie, myslac jednoczesnie o smierci i moim wujku, ktory zmarl dzisiejszej nocy...

"There are times when I feel transparent – almost invisible. It is a fragile state in which I am diminishing. I have this feeling of being stretched so thin, of being insipid, diluted – a lite version of me. It is like speaking in a crowd and the conversation continues right through me – no one hearing. It is like being one of the weathered, nameless ones, appearing at my car window begging & when sated, blending right back into the shadowlands. Where did she go ?"

"The transparency of God... Abraham Heschel says that life passes on in close proximity to the sacred, “You are not alone, you live constantly in holy neighborhood: remember: ‘Love thy neighbor – God – as thyself.’” The accessibility of God, God drawing near – holiness moving in next door".

"The discipline of transparency is positional. It implies sensitivity to place & openness to otherness in close proximity. It has that sense of vibrating in tune, of being immersed, enveloped and eventually becoming at ease and purposeful there. It is relationally significant yet non-threatening – reflective yet non-judgmental".

"Transparency has that sense of being pores & permeable – of light passing through the thing uninterrupted. Relationally it risks greater vulnerability and exposure of self".

"Transparency pragmatically embraces truth; not so much truth - universal & immutable but truth - local and dynamic. It is at ease with a reality that is pitted, asymmetrical & irregular. I think transparency is a choice – I choose to be present, I choose to be open, I choose to immerse myself & to allow myself to be penetrated & shaped by this place !"

"As for those others dwelling out on the margins – disempowered and vulnerable - the anonymity of transparency is a discipline of necessity & survival".

I remember when I penned these words I had been living in South East Asia just a few short months. Almost daily I was being overloaded with exotic and unfamiliar experiences in my new home. As I looked about me I saw people who were marginal and poor using transparency as a survival strategy. I was fascinated by it.

At the same time I encountered the idea in the writing of Thorleif Boman. He was suggesting the idea of ‘transparency’ as a theological expression that more accurately captures the way God’s presence and activity is revealed in the world. I was also in the process of reflecting on Jacques Derrida’s usage of the Abraham’s attempted sacrifice of Isaac and the Tower of Babel as metaphors in his philosophical wonderings. Abraham struck me as a person who understood this idea of ‘transparency’ as he wandered about as an alien in the world.

I think it is time to revisit this practice of transparency ! I suspected it was a missional practice in South East Asia. It is time to see if it has currency back at home.

Wenn Sie sich von dieser Definition dieses „Lesers alten Stils“ angesprochen fühlen, dann klicken Sie sofort hier, denn hier erhalten Sie gute Bücher, hier bekommen Interessierte von der Reul Society, Kevelaer, „zum nächsten Tag (bestellt), was immer sie möchten, seien es die ‚500 besten Kreuzworträtsel’, ‚Jagdliche Klassiker’ wie Julius Steinhardts ‚Ehombo’ oder die Abenteuer von Snoopy und Charlie Brown“.

(Natürlich können Sie auch das Gesamtpaket haben – Kreuzworträtsel UND „Jagdliche Klassiker“ UND „Peanuts“. Hinsichtlich der Lieferkonditionen berät Monnier-Beach, die einzige deutsche Buchhandlung mit einer IDEE, Sie gern!)

Soweit unsere Werbeunterbrechung. Aber ich möchte noch eine Bemerkung anhängen, damit Sie sich von unserer kommerziellen Masche nicht verarscht fühlen. Ich glaube nämlich, dass zu diesem Verfall der (Liebe zur) Kultur alten Stils Autoren wie Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze und Jürgen Habermas mit ihrem wirren Gebrabbel nicht wenig beigetragen haben. Sie sind die Totengräber des Logozentrismus, unabhängig davon, in welchem Lager sie sich ideologisch oder ideell verorten. Ihre Art zu schreiben hat mehr Leser vergrault, als sämtliche antilogozentristischen Beschwörungstänze es je vermöchten!

Wenn man z. B. Joseph Roth liest, dann weiß man, was gemeint ist, Zeile für Zeile. Ich weiß nicht, ob man es in einem tieferen Sinne versteht, aber man hat doch am Ende das Gefühl, etwas kapiert zu haben. Lesen Sie aber doch bitte mal die „Grammatologie“! Obwohl, von „Lesen“ kann da keine Rede sein; schlagen Sie das Buch auf und überfliegen Sie ein paar Zeilen. Das ist doch eine Unverschämtheit! Das ist doch ein Witz, und zwar kein guter! Das muss man alles doch auch auf Deutsch (resp. natürlich Französisch) sagen können, statt in diesem verbrämt dadaistischen Slang.

Sie merken schon, dass ist alles sehr ressentimentgeladen, was ich da schreibe. Das kann man nicht ernst nehmen! Ich meine, Jürgen Habermas! Der hat immerhin die Neue Unübersichtlichkeit geschaffen! Und was wären wir ohne den „Anti-Ödipus“ von Deleuze und Guattari? Trotzdem: Wenn Sie ein Argument gegen logozentrisches (vom Primat der Sprache ausgehendes) Denken brauchen, dann schlagen Sie mal ein Buch von Martin Heidegger auf. Klingt nach einem hoffnungslosen Säufer. Ist aber alles absolut ernst gemeint.

Dei rapporti che intercorrono tra le scienze e l'architettura, di certo lo strumento capace di intessere trami sempre più articolate è la geometria euclidea. Dalla Classicità al Rinascimento, passando per tutti i vari neoclassicismi ed eclettismi, movimento moderno e post-moderno architettonico, è stata presente l'ombra di questa, dandosi come unico legame capace di tenere in piedi in un ché di organico l'intero sistema storico dell'architettura. Sia abbracciando che reagendo ad essa, si è sempre stati alla ricerca di una armonia geometrica e spaziale sempre più articolata, portando all'estremo la ricerca di una perfezione che vede nell'appiattimento del particolare al totale, e nelle relazioni tra le parti, la più alta creazione. Ma con l'avvento di quel che Philip Jhonson aggettivò come decostruttivismo architettonico (ammiccando così un pò al filosofo (giustamente) più ricercato del momento, Jacques Derrida, ed un pò alla corrente russa da cui sembrava derivare molto del fenomeno, il costruttivismo) Euclide diventa l'oggetto di una profonda critica, per cui la liberazione dell'architettura da ogni totalitarismo della forma potesse avvenire soltanto l'emancipazione dalla geometria. Nasce così una sperimentazione sempre più disinvolta verso tentativi sempre più estremi di ribaltare qualsivoglia gerarchia spaziale, portando la geometria oltre i limiti immaginati duemilacinquecento anni fa dallo stesso Euclide. Questa ricerca, che si è rivelata feconda oltre ogni modo, accomunante sotto una unica ala un movimento che si manifestava secondo le più disparate forme, non ha prodotto però l'emancipazione che si sperava. Un disinibito approccio alla tecnologia ed alla forma, uno scandagliare nel quotidiano e nel brutto, un virtuosismo spudorato, mai raggiunto prima. Ironicamente però, come il poeta romantico descritto da Fichte nella Dottrina della Scienza, il quale si vedeva centro di un turbinoso superare di limiti che esso stesso aveva posto, l'architetto decostruttivista pare intrappolato sempre più nelle griglie metriche imposte dalla convenzione, ed ogni tentativo di superare il limite posto, si risolve in un allargamento del dominio euclideo, portando così ad una disperata ricerca che non può che concludersi nello stesso dramma in cui sono destinati i romantici, nonostante ogni nuovo traguardo mostra, ipocritamente, come l'obiettivo sembra raggiunto.

Emblema di questo dramma è senza di dubbio Peter Eisenman, il quale si è visto travolto dall'ossessiva ricerca del superamento del proprio limite, scandagliando quasi fosse un sonar nella ricerca di ogni minima falla del sistema, portando però ad una gloriosa vittoria il proprio avversario, portando a limiti mai raggiunti le possibilità del modello. Ma proprio in questo consiste la grandiosità della ricerca di Eisenman, iniziata con le griglie trasfigurate della serie House, e di cui la biblioteca per la Piazza delle Nazioni a Ginevra ne è l'esempio più estremo. Ma se l'approccio di Eisenman può apparire come una felice accettazione di una ricerca impossobile, è straordinario osservare come un'intera generazione di architetti, che non si era presa tra i loro impegni quello di disgregare il modello geometrico dominante, è riuscita a porre una alternativa talmente valida che addirittura Zaha Hadid dovrà riconoscerne il merito, proseguendo per la stessa strada. Questo approccio deriva infatti dall'utilizzo della geometria NURBS, sistema di gestione di geometrie topologiche esteso anche ai professionisti grazie allo sviluppo del software Rhinoceros, che ha reso possibile lo schiudersi alla comunità architettonica di una quantità di possibilità quasi paralizzante per la sua dimensione. Così, ciò che non potè essere fatto tramite anche le più avanzate tecniche di modellazione tridimensionale e morphing vari, perchè comunque derivanti da modelli sottostanti alle regole cartesiane, la topologia porta una nuova consapevolezza dietro di se: quello della possibilità di una continuità di forma che solo l'architettura gotica era riuscita a creare. L'estetica post-Kantiana, del quale il particolare deve poter essere ricondotto all'universale, perde la presa su una creazione di oggetti che fa di se stesso particolare ed universale, la cui superficie è essa stessa oggetto e piano di riferimento, il quale segue e descrive ogni curvatura della stessa, descrivendone le interruzioni, unica possibilità di individuare le relazioni con gli oggetti separati da se. Di questa strada, maestro tra i tanti è certamente Greg Lynn, autore dell'oggetto di design blobwall, separatore per ambienti che gioca appunto con questa proprietà della geometria topologica di descrivere se stessa in ogni piega. Da questo, pare curioso il destino dell'architettura, che vede le proprie rivoluzioni in oggetti così effimeri, e nelle sue opere monumentali l'eterno ritorno del proprio canto del cigno.

"The cryptic fortress protects this analysis resister by provoking the symbolic break. It fractures the symbol into angular pieces, arranges internal (intrasymbolic) partitions, cavities, corridors, niches, zigzag labyrinths, and craggy fortifications. Always 'anfractuosities,' since they are the effects of breakages: Such are the 'partitions of the crypt.' Thenceforth the wall to pass through will be not only that of the Unconscious but the angular partition within the Self." Jacques Derrida, "Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok."

The Wolf Man maintained his access to traumatic satisfaction (jouissance) by means of a fantasy scene of the maid Grusha scrubbing the floor (a rebus).

The passage of pollution through the acquifer is modelled by the phonetic contamination that organizes the conductive logic of the Unconscious. Between the event (the disaster, the trauma) and its containment (engineering, repression) there is a mediation in language, an anasemic formation of condensation and displacement, creating a magic word (tieret) with the capacity to express affective reality "at a distance."

Instruction: Learn to author a magic word. Why? Images are structured as secrets. Do you know where your image is right now?

Det kommer alltid att vara ett misstag att inte läsa, att inte läsa om och diskutera Marx. Det gäller också några andra – och bortom den skolmässiga »läsningen» eller »diskussionen». Det kommer i allt större utsträckning att vara ett misstag, ett svek mot det teoretiska, filosofiska, politiska ansvaret. När dogmmaskinen och de marxistiska ideologiska apparaterna (stater, partier, celler, syndikat och andra doktrinproducerande platser) håller på att försvinna har vi inte längre någon ursäkt, bara alibin, för att vända oss bort från detta ansvar. Det kommer inte att finnas någon framtid utan Marx, utan minnet och arvet efter Marx: åtminstone efter en viss Marx, efter hans ande, efter åtminstone en av hans andar. För det kommer att vara vår hypotes, eller snarare vårt ställningstagande: det finns fler än en, det måste finnas fler än en.

Likväl är minnet en av alla frestelser som jag idag kommer att behöva stå emot: frestelsen att berätta om vad erfarenheten av marxismen innebar för mig och alla i min generation som delat den under ett helt liv, Marx nästan faderliga gestalt, den inre kampen mellan honom och andra stamfäder, läsningen av texter och tolkningen av en värld i vilken det marxistiska arvet var – och fortfarande är, alltså kommer att förbli – absolut och allt igenom avgörande. Det är inte nödvändigt att vara marxist eller kommunist för att acceptera detta uppenbara faktum. Vi bor alla i en värld, en kultur skulle somliga säga, som på ett mer eller mindre synligt sätt, och djupare än vi kan säga, bevarar spåret av detta arv.

—Jacques Derrida i Marx spöken, ss 45-46.

De där första orden, så ofta förbisedda, i Det kommunistiska partiets manifest – ”Ett spöke går runt Europa – kommunismens spöke” – säger kanske mer om kommunismen än vad Karl Marx vid tillfället ämnade. Ett spöke hemsöker alla det gamla Europas makter som ”har förbundit sig till en helig hetsjakt mot detta spöke.” De väldiga arméer av proletärer som hotade det gamla Europa verkar dock sitta bekvämt nu. Inga hot om att storma de besuttnas palats längre. Eller? Hur kommer det sig då att den heliga hetsjakten fortfarande pågår?

Jacques Derridas säregna Marxkommentar – lägligt publicerad inte långt efter att ”Historiens slut” hade proklamerats – Marx spöken, kastar ljus över detta fenomen ”kommunismen som spöke”. Historien, visade det sig, var inte så lätt att göra sig av med. Det förflutna kommer ständigt åter för att hemsöka det nuvarande. Kapitalismens fanbärare trodde att dem blivit av med spöket när den ryska björnen kollapsade. Tji fick dem, säger vi. Vi som fortfarande strävar efter den gemenskap som oundvikligen är knuten till ordet ”kommunism”.

Kapitalismen skapar sina egna dödgrävare, sa Marx. Vi kan lämna Marx profetior åt sidan för nu, men vad som kvarstår är att kapitalismen inte blir av med spöket därför att det är beroende av den historiska kraft, den som vi kallar arbetarklassen, som ständigt åkallar spöket. Arbetarrörelsen och dess ställföreträdare må vara döda (och det är inget vi sörjer), men arbetarklassen (även om den går under allt för många namn idag) var inte lika lätt att bli av med, helt enkelt därför att kapitalet inte klarade sig utan arbetet.

Vi sjunger inte i kör längre eller marscherar i takt (tack och lov), men vi kan fortfarande säga: ”Ett spöke hemsöker Europa…”

Akt II: Helige Max

Marx hade sina egna spöken. Han gillade dem inte och försökte förgäves fördriva dem. Det är därför lustigt att han åkallar spöket i manifestets sidor efter att två år tidigare i Den tyska ideologin ha angripigt sin kollega bland Die Freien, Max Stirner, för att ha fallit offer för spöken. Stirner spökar för Marx. Stirner talade om spökena innan Marx gjorde det. ”Han har bedrivit tjuvjakt på Marx spöken.” Helt oacceptabelt för Marx givetvis. Därför måste han angripa Stirner, ”någon som nästan liknar honom till förväxling: en bror, en dubbelgångare, alltså en diabolisk bild. En slags vålnad av honom själv.” (s. 202) Stirners fel, enligt Marx, är att han förråder fadern, Hegel, men på fel sätt. Det rör sig om att ”världen för Hegel inte bara var förandligad, utan också av-förandligad” (s. 181) – det vill säga, han har missat det nödvändiga, bestämmelsen. I slutändan, menar Marx, förstör Stirner bara representationerna i deras representationsformer. Det finns inga spöken utan kropp, eller ett sken av en kropp. Trolla bort spökena och kropparna finns kvar.

Men just som vi trodde att dispyten mellan bröderna var över förbluffas vi av något märkligt. Det tycks som att Stirner har kapitulerat. Kroppens ego är alltid ”bebodd och invaderad av sitt eget spöke.” (s. 194) Stirner förbluffas inte längre över ”att hädanefter bara finna ett spöke i sig själv.” (s. 195) Det är som om Stirner återvänder till Marx för att säga: ”Käre bror! Du kan inte fördriva dem alla. Lyssna till dem, vad säger dem?”

Akt III: Kapitalets spektrologi

År senare lyssnar Marx. Han hör inget men börjar se. Gengångare, vålnader… Hade kapitalet sina egna spöken? Men varför talade dem inte? Kapitalet hade onekligen också en ”fantomeffekt”, och han fann den i varufetischismens mystiska karaktär. Vid det tillfälle som bordet började dansa – för att som Derrida låna ett exempel från Kapitalet – visade det sig att ”[t]inget är varken dött eller levande, det är dött och i livet på samma gång. Det har ett efterliv. Utspekulerad, uppfinningsrik och samtidigt mekanisk, sinnrik och oberäknelig: denna krigsmaskin är en teatermaskin, en mekhane.” (s. 221) Ett väldigt skådespel utspelar sig, så totalt och genomgripande att människorna inte längre känner igen den sociala karaktären i deras eget arbete.

”Det »specifika» hos spökena, liksom hos vampyrer, är att de saknar en spegelbild, den sanna, goda spegelbilden (men vem saknar inte den?). På vad känner man igen en vålnad? På det att den inte känner igen sig själv i en spegel. Detta är också det som sker genom varornas kommers med varandra. Dessa vålnader som handelsvarorna är omvandlar de mänskliga producenterna till vålnader. Och hela denna teaterprocess (visuell, teoretisk, men också optisk, optikal) inför en mystisk spegeleffekt: om inte spegeln återkastar den rätta spegelbilden, om den alltså fantomaliserar, är det först och främst eftersom den naturaliserar. Det »mystiska» hos varuformen som spegelbild beror av den sociala formen, det är det otroliga sätt på vilket denna spegel återkastar bilden, när man tror att den för människorna reflekterar »deras arbetes sociala karaktär»: en sådan »bild» objektiverar genom att naturalisera. Därigenom visar den genom att dölja, och det är dess sanning, den återspeglar dessa egenskaper som »objektiva» egenskaper direkt inskrivna i arbetsprodukten, som »dessa tings naturliga sociala egenskaper». Från det ögonblicket – och här kan man se att kommersen mellan varor inte låter vänta på sig – blir den återkastade bilden (deformerad, objektiverad, naturaliserad) en bild av en social förbindelse mellan varor, mellan dessa inspirerade, autonoma och automatiska »föremål» som de dansande borden är. Det spekulära blir det spektrala just på tröskeln till denna objektiverande naturalisering: »Därmed återspeglas också producenternas samhälleliga förhållande till totalarbetet som ett samhälleligt förhållande mellan ting, som existerar utanför dem själva. Genom denna quid pro quo blir arbetsprodukterna varor, dvs. Ting med övernaturliga eller samhälleliga egenskaper».” (ss 224-225; Derrida citerar Kapitalet ss 248-249)

Men varför hör inte Marx någonting? Är skådespelet stumt; ett mimspel? Varuproduktionen åstadkommer något alldeles unikt; den inför en gräns, en ständigt expanderande gräns som omsluter allting i sin väg, i vilken den totala cirkulationen V-P-V vecklar ut en »serie utan varken början eller slut» (Marx). Kapitalet omsluter allt, blir en totalitet, och dess apologeter deklarerar Historiens slut.

Akt IV: Det messianska spåret

Vad apologeterna dock inte kunde bli av med var orättvisorna, klyftorna och förtrycken. De utnyttjade, uteslutna, förtryckta spökade fortfarande.

Det är lätt att se Marx som en bärare av en messiansk-eskatologisk tradition, kanske som en arvtagare av självaste Paulus. Det är en anda Derrida försöker vara trogen. Han formulerar det ”messianska utan messiansm”, utan religion, och är i den meningen också trogen Marx ateistiska anda. Det messianska är här ett löfte om det kommande. Derrida insisterar emellertid på att behålla det kommande som öppet, utan slut. Det är väsentligt för Derridas förståelse av Rättvisan. Det är samtidigt en stängning mot det eskatologiska momentet hos Marx och även Walter Benjamin, som influerat Derrida betydligt. Derrida vill bidra till den Nya Internationalen i tjänst för Rättvisan, ett ändlöst projekt. Vilket är nobelt såklart, men säger oss ingenting om slutet för det kapitalistiska produktionssättet.

Derridas ledmotiv är repliken ”The time is out of joint” från Shakespears Hamlet (som Marx också var särskilt förtjust i), vilket inte bara kännetecknar livet under kapitalismen utan är också förutsättningen för idén om Rättvisan. Föreställningen om en slutgiltig lösning kommer med risken att Rättvisan blir en regulativ idé som världen skall rättas efter. Det är i Derridas ögon tyranni och han vill bekämpa den, och med all rätt. Men om vi tar Benjamin på orden och läser det messianska inte som mål utan slut kan vi se det i ett annat ljus. ”Först Messias själv fullbordar allt historiskt skeende”, hävdar Benjamin, och fortsätter:

”Därför kan ingenting som hör historien till av egen kraft sträva efter en relation till det messianska. Därför är Guds rike inte telos för den historiska dynamis; det kan inte uppställas som mål. Historiskt sett är det inte mål, utan slut.” (”Teologisk-politiskt fragment”, i Bild och dialektik)

Innebär en sådan läsning av Benjamin mot Derrida att Rättvisan överges? Inte nödvändigtvis, för det etiska ansvaret inför den Andre består. Men det inverkar på vår politik som inte kan vara uppbygglig utan blir nihilistisk. Urledvridningen kommer inte vridas tillbaka eller rätas ut. Tvärtom måste förfallet (nihilismen) påskyndas. ”Att sträva mot detta … är uppgiften för den världspolitik vars metod måste betecknas som nihilism.”

Akt V: Marx som skräckförfattare

Vålnader, spöken, gengångare, vampyrer, ting som får liv… Marx författarskap är fullt av dessa varelser. Den världsbild som tecknas i Kapitalet är mörk och mardrömslik, likt en zombiefilm där vi knappt vet vilka som är hjältar eller vilka som är de riktiga monstren. Marx var sparsam med sina visioner om en verklighet efter kapitalismen. Världen verkar stängd, och värst av allt tycks den vara cyklisk, som om de identiska uppföljarna aldrig tog slut.

Kapitalets monstruositet lever av och i kroppar, verkliga kroppar. Vi vet, tack vare Marx geni, att det i själva verket är våra kroppar som utgör kapitalets monstruösa kött, och att vi nu blivit parasiter på denna kropp (utan organ). Även om vi skulle förmå att äta livet ur kapitalets kropp, skulle vi kunna överleva utan den? Om inte, kan vi skapa nytt liv?

In a play where the characters are named for the humoural composition which directs all their behaviour, though, names are critical: often, the name seems more important than the body beneath the name. In a humours play the body itself seems little more than a slate on which a name/behaviour/vice can be inscribed. Thus (on Prof. Martin's recommendation) I began to consider the relationship between words and bodies in Jonson's theatre through Jackie Derrida's "The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation". Here then, is both an excerpt and synoptic analysis of the essay:

The stage is theological for as long as it is dominated by speech, by a will to speech, by the layout of a primary logos which does not belong to the theatrical site and governs it from a distance. The stage is theological for as long as its structure, following the entirety of tradition, comports the following elements: an author-creator who, absent and from afar, is armed with a text and keeps watch over, assembles, regulates the time or the meaning of representation, letting this latter represent him as concerns what is called the content of his thoughts, his intentions, his ideas. He lets representation represent him through representatives, directors or actors, enslaved interpreters who represent characters who, primarily through what they say, more or less directly represent the thought of the “creator.” Interpretive slaves who faithfully execute the providential designs of the “master.” Who moreover – and this is the ironic rule of the representative structure which organizes all these relationships – creates nothing, has only the illusion of having created, because he only transcribes and makes available for reading a text whose nature is necessarily representative; and this representative text maintains with what is called the “real” […] an imitative and reproductive relationship. Finally, the theological stage comports a passive, seated public, a public of spectators, of consumers, of “enjoyers” – as Nietzsche and Artaud both say – attending a production that lacks true volume or depth, a production that is level, offered to their voyeuristic scrutiny. (In the theater of cruelty, pure visibility is not exposed to voyeurism.) (235)

The theatre of cruelty, because it places no limits on the stage space, no line demarcating stage and audience, “permeate[s]” (237) the viewer, allowing him or her to experience the action on stage not as an act, but as life itself; the theatre of cruelty creates a space the viewer can actively inhabit. As a result, the theatre of cruelty forces its viewer to forget that the space it inhabits is theatrical.

The theological theatre, conversely, is one which divests bodies of their capability to be seen or to move as bodies; they are representatives of a textual idea belonging to the author/god who creates the play. In the theological theatre it is impossible for the viewer to transcend the superficial representative barrier of signs for which the bodies (and objects) on stage stand; it is impossible for the audience to lose itself in the gestures of the bodies on stage, to become, in Nietzschian terms, a Dionysian participant in the action on stage.

The theological theatre transforms bodies into words (words which are themselves representatives of larger conceits). The theological theatre also draws attention to its own limits, seeming to make those limits (between audience and stage, actor and thing acted) transparent, (“diaphanous,” 240), and in this gesture of transparency, distracts the viewer from the superficiality and lack of will involved in the theological stage (on the part of the spectator, though not the poet-god). [2]

Derrida (and Artaud) believe that western theatre has always been theological, but Jonson's, with his insistent references to himself as a character both within and without his stage world (reading an expository poem of one of the characters in The Magnetic Lady, the scholar Compass tells us that "Ben Jonson made it"), with his references to other plays (his nigh-direct parody of Jacques's "All the world's a stage" speech in The New Inn, his direct and indirect references to Terence and Plautus in Cynthia's Revels and The Magnetic Lady), with his emphasis on his characters' names, and his direct appeals to, and mocking imitations of, his audience create a stage world that is highly theological, where Jonson, the poet-god of the stage, creates a textualised world where bodies themselves merely reflect higher ideas of the poet-god, and where the audience, is allowed to "see" the limits of the stage in order to prevent it from inhabiting the bodies on stage; instead, we are to "read" the meanings which the bodies represent.

In the context of the theological theatre, the transvestite boy actor can be excused by claiming that he only represents the idea of the female gender, while his "actual" male gender remains intact (an idea Jonson emphasises in Cynthia's Revels by displaying the children from the acting company in a mock argument before the play starts: one of the children, when attacked during his attempts to deliver the play's argument, announces "I'd cry a rape, but that you are children!" (151). Noting the immature sexual bodies of his two attackers, the child rejects the possibility of rape as a viable charge. The child actors expose themselves as children, neither men nor women, nor real courtiers: the audience should not mistake them for real men, women, or courtiers at any point throughout the play.

In The Magnetic Lady, Jonson employs the theological stage for more than simply negating the notion of performative gender, however; in drawing comparisons between the poet who creates and directs humourous characters on stage, and God, who creates the humours that make up real bodies outside the stage, Jonson is able to hypothesise a world in which women are banned for active social and economic roles. Given the "essentially" (unalterable and divinely-given) weaker humoural composition of their bodies [iii], which impede their ability to think and behave rationally, women should remain in hidden birthing rooms (where much of the female contributions to the plot occur) and in the "tiring houses" (4.2.554) of the theatre. As if to illustrate this principle, Placentia, the female whose body (her marriage and pregnancy) is the central question of the entire play, appears in only five scenes, and speaks only nine lines in the entire play. If they must be out in public, women’s bodies and voices should be kept under the governance of males. The results when women do participate as active members of the economy are confusion in the male community and violence in the female ones (as a fight between Placentia's female guardians demonstrates in Act 4).

Of course, if female humoural imbalances are unalterable, so too are the humoural compositions of the male fools within the play. Jonson is, as always, in a bit of a predicament...

End Notes:

[i] humours genre. Drama where the characters are named after the composition of the four basic bodily fluids (or humours) in their blood. The four humours are sanguine (made of hot and wet properties), choler (hot and dry), black bile (cold and dry), and phlegm (cold and wet). The sanguine individual is courageous, amorous, witty and lively. The choleric is violent, ambitious, and cruel. Black bile causes melancholy, and is usually found in pining lovers, scholars, old men, and misers. Finally, the phlegmatic individual is slothful, slow-witted, corpulent and cowardly. Women are also often phlegmatic, but humours medicine is also inconsistent towards women, as Gail Kern Paster notes in her wonderful Humouring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago, London: U of Chicago P, 2004), females are often found to be without humour.

The early modern humours drama was developed and popularised by Jonson himself in his first two comedies Every Man In His Humour and Every Man Out of His Humour; the humours drama, and the medical theory on which it is based, were originally developed in classical Greek and Rome.

[ii] The theatre of cruelty [...] poet-god. I enjoy writing about my work, but am still going to be cropping much of this chapter summary directly from my chapter three. Including all this summary/analysis of Derrida's work.

[iii] weaker humoural composition. Females in Gallenic medicine were assumed to be “cold and wet,” which should imply a phlegmatic humour, though there do not seem to be any consistent or logical rules to the physchphysiology of females, whose general humoural imbalance seems to have been thought the cause of their unstable natures (Paster, 80). Helen King observes that women “have an entirely different texture of flesh from men, being wet soft and spongy. This means they accumulate blood” (39). Women should be a hotter composition than men; their lack of external sexual organs, inability to produce semen (King, 32) and production of breast milk (“the female is too cold completely to concoct and disperse all the food she takes in, Flemming, 307), though, suggest a lack of heat; this theory is contradicted, again, however, when considering the womb: both Aristotle and Hippocrates conceive the womb as “an oven” (King, 33).

Works Cited:

Derrida, Jacques. "The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation." Writing and Difference. Chicago, London: U of Chicago P, 1978. 232-250.

Flemming, Rebecca. Medicine and the Making of the Roman Woman: Gender, Nature, and Authority from Celsus to Galen . Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.

Jonson, Ben. Cynthia's Revels. Ben Jonson's Plays. Ed. Felix Schelling. Vol. 1 London: JM Dent, 1915. 149-232.

Jonson, Ben. The Magnetic Lady. Ben Jonson's Plays. Ed. Felix Schelling. Vol. 2. London: JM Dent, 1963. 505-572.

King, Helen. Hippocrates’ Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece. London, New York: Routledge, 1998.

Me! "Ben Jonson made it: The god of the theatre in the comedy of humours." Obviously Unpublished. July 2008. 1-27.

Paster, Gail Kern. Humouring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage. Chicago, London: U of Chicago P, 2004.

13 July 2008 ~ St. Catharines.

Warning: Nerd Alert. Heavy integral theorizing ahead.  Read at your own mental peril.

--

A while back (June of last year to be precise) I wrote a short piece commenting on an article by Gary Hampson in Integral Review. Gary just recently commented on the original post, along with some questions for me.

Gary's original article is available here in pdf from. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the link next to his name.

My original post from last year is here. Gary's comment is at the bottom of that post.

I'm going to take a bigger view and hope that in doing so I cover the questions Gary has asked.  Much more after the jump:

Gary's article is wide ranging and very sharp.  He argues for a reevaluation (actually as he says more properly a "reviewing", i.e. a re-cognizing) of postmodernism from the perspective of integral. This includes a number of sub-elements: e.g. reviewing of postformal cognition. On the main points of that effort, I think his work is a real significant contribution to integral thought. Two thumbs up for my money.

What this means is via this process of reviewing, green/postmodernity is redeemed in a sense. It is healed and made usable for the integralist. The often jarring disjunction between green/yellow seen in the integral community is (dis)solved by going turquoise/indigo, in which case green is not frightening but simply limited play/tool.

I would also recommend his problematizing of the notion in Wilber's writings of the mean green meme (see Appendix A in Gary's article).

One way to square this circle between the two is to say that what Ken is doing is trying to push people from green (postmodernism) to teal-turquoise (integral, post-postmodernism) hence the amplified rhetoric. What Gary has done/is doing is re-translating down the Spiral. That is, he is safely and stably within the integral frame and is re-interpreting ("re-viewing" in the mind and heart) the place of green (postmodernity) from within the integral world. So for those who have already achieved such a shift in consciousness, Gary's work is to be preferred. It's like memory--the more we remember a story one way, it eventually did happen that way, whether or not it "really did" or not.

All that said, there is one minor disagreement over a sub-point in the article (in larger agreement of the overall arc & thrust of the thing). This minor disagreement involves Derrida and his placement/categorization within Wilber's and Cook-G.'s developmental schemes.

A tentative (very tentative) speculation of mine is that Gary has confused his (proper/correct) re-interpretation of Derrida-in-integral with Derrida as Derrida is. If that makes sense. I think what he has done is very useful but should not be confused for anything other than a very heterodox (even heretical) read of Derrida.  So long as that is kept in mind, I think it's great. Because it is that way if we re-member that way.

And before I get further afield I want to say that my overall view of colors/levels and such is that they are only at best first approximations.  i.e. We have to have a common descriptive language I suppose but what is of real value is the actual spaces ("locations" in Wilber's wording) of these writers.  i.e. Following their paths, exploring the worlds, mindsets they uncover.  Otherwise colors are meangingless and at their worst distract from real quests for knowledge. 

So anyway, with my quasi-agnostic position on the value of colors laid out, let me get into them. 

To give a comparison (this from Integral Spirituality p. 69, see image above) of the two lists and how they match up (remember for Spiral equivalents, amber=blue, teal=yellow, magenta=purple):

Wilber= Cook-G.
Indigo = Ego Aware
Turquoise= Construct Aware
Teal = Autonomous
Green =Individualistic
Orange = Conscientious
Amber = Self-protective
Red = Impulsive
Magenta= Symbiotic

So according to this schema, if Gary is right, Derrida is turquoise. As Gary agrees (p.133 of his text) C-G sees the green meme as equivalent to her individualistic. This is where Wilber would traditionally place Derrida and I am in agreement with that basic proposition. [But with a slight twist I'll get to in a second.] At most like Foucault, Derrida may have been intuiting the beginning of teal, but never fully stabilized there seems to me.  Flow without open-ended chaotic structure/integration.

Returning to Wilber's image above, notice in the cognitive line a few descriptors/qualifiers of the levels. For green KW has Pluralistic Mind which reads "meta-systematic". Teal is Low-Vision Logic qualified as paradigmatic. Turquoise (which is the construct aware equivalent) is Higher Vision Logic qualified as cross-paradigmatic.

Looking at that I think can help clarify some of the ground I think. So green by this reading is certainly post-formal. (Formal being equivalent to orange/modernist). It is not however vision-logic. Yet still meta-systematic, which I think Derrida is and something Gary is getting at but misinterprets as construct aware.

There is a meta-system to be sure in Derrida's writings, which I summarize below. But it is a meta-system that serves the end goal of plurality (here I read Derrida in light of the influence of Emmanuel Levinas), hence green.

Much of the confusion I think stems from the use of the word relativist by Wilber, Gary, myself & others. I actually prefer the term pluralist. Pluralist means just that--plurality of voices, opinions, views. It is not paradigmatic however insofar as there is no integration. Now integration may be a crock and the pluralists may be right that this is just the reformulation of normativity, exclusivity, and uniformity (i.e re-entrenching orange modernity). I think that's incorrect, but that is always out there as a possibility I suppose.

But granting that something like this C-G/Wilber view is correct, then no I don't think Derrida (deconstruction more generally) is either paradigmatic or cross-paradigmatic. That is neither autonomous nor construct aware in C-G's schema.

A number of Gary's questions to my post directly or indirectly deal with this notion of relativism. What I said in the original post was:

I think the problem stems from this idea that green is relativist. And relativist is taken to mean that the person can not make any judgments or believes in no better/worse. No one can actually do that. There is plenty of vertigo in postmodernism and a difficulty in some to make clear distinctions, but eventually pushed people come down on a side.

In other words, if relativism is taken to mean that everything is relative, this is clearly a performative self-contradiction; it's an absolute statement. Eventually people will value something over something else. But what they may value is say plurality over unicity.

And promoting plurality is itself a fairly unified position.  So moving the debate onto that terrain shows that it is never plurality versus unity but rather different combinations of unity and plurality.  Orange (having a 3rd person point of view cognitively) tends to see the other but mostly as either to be subsumed into one's own system or a threat.  Green on the other hand sees the other (at its best) th plural as having its own value and own right to exist on its own terms.  (Except usually for the other that is Western modernity but that's a whole other story).   

And Derrida is no different in this regard.

Derrida is described a post-structuralist. Structuralism as my old philosophy professor (who taught me the subject) used to say was "Linguistic Kantianism."

By that he meant the following. [This is a little bit a detour but I'll come back to the main boulevard shortly, I promise].

The cribs notes version of Kant is summarized thusly: no perception without conception. Meaning the mind never sees anything "bare". Every sense (percept) is in fact always already an interpretation (conception). The structures of the mind that Kant articulated shape our vision of the world. They (con)struct our reality.

Structuralism as Linguistic Kantianism then means the following. Language is parallel here to the mind in Kant. There is never linguistic perception without linguistic conception. i.e. There is never simply describing something as it is. Language is not a clear window into the thing as it is (just as with Kant neither is the mind).

The structures in this case however lie not in the mind (as for Kant) but rather in language itself. Often in grammar (Derrida's first book is on the subject). Language then is a construction not a reflection. The structure of language (for structuralists) was what was really speaking whenever anything was said or written not authorial intention, the inner self, etc.

Hence structuralists proclaimed the end of the author, the end of the subject, the end of history and so on. It was the end of phenomenology (a la Husserl) and hermeneutics (a la Heidegger) both of which presumed this inner world either individually (phen.) or communally (herm.).

The structuralists came to see binary opposition at the core of these linguistic structures--which remember were the real bearer of truth not the subject. e.g. Male/Female. Being/Becoming.

Derrida critiques elements of structuralism but as a post-structuralist is entirely within that frame. He accepts the basic structuralist account/critique of interiority. What he will do--and rather brilliantly--is show that the binary opposites the structuralists detail develop historically. Structuralism tended to ahistoric (descriptive rather than historically understood).

Derrida shows that the signifier (the material element of discourse, i.e. words on a page, vocal chord vibrations) always slides back under the signified (the intended speech). One binary Derrida always points to, central to his thought is the absent/present. The absent for Derrida while treated in the history of Western thought as subsidiary is actually for him primary. One of his more famous and radical claims was that grammar precedes the speaking of a language. Because the signifier (grammar) always slides back under the signified (speaking). Because structures speak not people. The absent/forgotten (grammar) slides back and pushes out the present (intended speech).

Why I would say that this is not construct aware/cross-paradigmatic is Derrida does not detail (so far as I can tell and I've read a good deal of his writings) what would be in Wilber-5 the perspective, i.e. the prior move of accepting structuralism. Structuralism is in Wilber's perspectives view is an outside (3rd person) view of the inside (1st person). KW's work is structuralist (3rd person view of interior realities) as both he and Gary point out, but I would say it is construct aware because it describes itself as such. It points to its own perspectives and level--that is aware of its own construction.  As opposed to simply performing construction (Derrida) and realizing that there is construction.

And even deconstruction. I would argue the prior move (the taking of the perspective that reveals structuralism and that structuralism in turn reveals) is a moment of presence over absence undercutting Derrida's total and absolute prioritizing of the absent. Pull this thread and Derrida unravels. But it's worth following his unraveling. In fact, I would say that he is the master par excellence of the feeling and space of unraveling (but no integration). It's just that at some point, you can't live in that space forever. You have to eat and do things and make ethical choices. But it's always a real space in the Kosmos and one worth checking into and back into periodically. 

All of which is definitely not to say he (Derrida) is not in many ways a brilliant thinker who brought forth some central insights of permanent value. I think he was and did. Its also undoubtedly true (as Gary describes) that Wilber comes from a line that goes Kant-->Foucault-->Habermas. Habermas held a higher opinion of Foucault's work than Derrida's and so does Wilber.

Rather than choosing between Foucault or Derrida, I would say they were simply dealing with very different things. Both I believe had intimations of a post-pluralist mindset but never made it. Both interestingly ended their lives in dialogue with Habermas (teal thinker par excellence), which I think is highly pertinent and telling. Derrida at the end of the day (and this was my point that no one is a pure relativist) basically had to sign on to Habermas' political writings on the role of the EU (paradigmatic politics relative to that context).

Both Foucault and Derrida I would say reached dead ends. Brilliant dead ends and the journey they got to those dead ends is worth the recapitulation. Also according to my understanding of what Gary has done, their respective works can be re-imagined in an integral frame.  For Wilber's re-view of Foucault through integral, see here. 

And deconstruction can then work as Gary argues along with construction as complementary not contradictory. But only I would say after it has gone through the grinder of integral.  Derrida's promotion of the absent/grammar/the underside could be and should be held within all the higher stages, but we must be cognizant we are placing it/interpreting it in such a way. Left on its own, as it were, it does not (imo) reveal a construct aware space.

http://www.romanialibera.ro/a128221/v-voiculescu-si-rugul-aprins.html .

‘Adevărata călătorie a lui Zahei’ este ceea ce a hotărât  Vasile  Voiculescu să fie, prin tropii cei mai potriviţi. Nu ceea ce stabileşte criticul (istoricul) că este ‘adevărul’. Adevărul  este  ca  pielea de sagri,  se reduce în permanenţă.  La noi se vede dispreţul măreţ al unor  Nicolae Manolescu şi Mircea Cărtărescu faţă de Jacques Derrida. Care, totuşi, ne cerea, --şi nouă, rumânilor!--,  să îl recitim atent pe Bonnot de Condillac. Ioan Eliade Rădulescu, Petrache Poenaru şi prima generaţie de elevi de  la Sfântu Sava foloseau manualele scrise de Condillac pentru educaţia Micului Prinţ (principele de Parma). În filosofia existenţialistă a lui Jacques Derrida, veridicitatea, identitatea, şi autenticitatea  sunt înlocuite de Signatură, iar cauzalitatea de Diferanţă. În fine, paralela –deşi spun că omotetia este neavenită--, între  Zahei şi Vasile Voiculescu putea fi analizată folosind Diferanţa. Oricum, nu poţi face o comparaţie între puşcăria din Belle Époque şi represiunea comunistă, decât recurgând la Adorno. Nu am citit cartea lui Marius Oprea, însă predefinit clamez că referinţa Adorno nu este prezentă între  coperţile semnate de Marius Oprea.

Taina Rugului Aprins nu mai este demult ‘o taină’, mişcarea culturală Rugul Aprins, protejată de patriarhul BOR ca locţiitor al catedrei episcopale din Cezareea Cappadociei,  a fost  un curent de renaştere rumânească a primului umanism bizantin.

Titus Filipas

[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7347615341871798222&q=source:015967095465106503065&hl=en]

The theater is born in its own disappearance, and the offspring of this movement has a name: man. The theater of cruelty is to be born by separating death from birth and erasing the name of man. The theater has always been made to do that for which it was not made: "The last word on man has not been said....The theater was never made to describe man and what he does.... (WD, 231)

It's funny how things turn out sometimes.

My initial research when considering thesis topics back in second year invlved a lot of reading: besides working my way through Jonson's plays and poetry (and a few of his masques), I read the work of his dramatic contemporaries and followers (particularly the work of Richard Brome*), critical and philosophical contemporaries (this included anti-theatrical pamphlets, sermons, and poetic statements like that of Sidney's Defense of Poesy), as well as current examinations of early modern culture (Gurr's Playgoing and Constance Jordan's Renaissance Feminism). I also read classical works on which Jonson had modelled his poetry: Horace, Martial, and (theoretically) Juvenal, and even tried my hand at (very poor) translations from Horace's Art of Poetry. Finally, since I had never taken any in a formal class, I studied literary theory, and Prof. Martin and I practiced applying this theory to the drama we read, using Andy Mousely's Renaissance Drama and Contemporary Theory (New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2000) as a discussion guide.

The third chapter of Mousely's book concerned Poststructuralism, a school which I found both fascinating, and bewildering. Mousely's text offers examples culled from the works of the major theorists in each school, but, because there are no complete essays, it can be difficult to understand the context and full implications of some of the ideas presented within these examples. Consequently, I found myself attempting one of Jacques Derrida's smaller books, Limited Inc, which includes "Signature Event Context" (SEC), a response to the speech act theory of JL Austin*, and "Limited Inc a b c," a text he wrote in response to the theorist John Searle's own response to SEC.[i]

Derrida, the "father of deconstruction" (the literary method which he founded), would likely have appreciated my difficulties with reading fragments of his work out of context in Mousely's book. One of the main tenets of Derrida's theories of deconstruction and differance is that context matters:

A written sign, in the current meaning of this word, is a mark that subsists, one which does not exhaust itself in the moment of inscription and which can give rise to an iteration in the absence and beyond the presence of the empirically determined subject who, in a given context, has emitted or produced it. ("Signature Event Context," 9)

Derrida here is responding to the theories of structuralists like Ferdinand de Saussure* who claim that words function within closed systems of meaning: while syntactical context alters, somewhat, the nuanced meaning a word possesses, that meaning can always be fully understood by any reader, no matter who the writer of the words.[ii] Words can be understood by all readers because their meaning is conventionally agreed upon, as are the grammatical systems in which the word operates.[iii] For Derrida, words do bear conventionally agreed-upon meanings, but every repeated utterance ("iteration") alters, and thus adds one more memory to the word's collective "meaning". Conversely:

At the same time, a written sign carries with it a force that breaks with its context, that is, with the collectivity of presences organising the moment of its inscription. This breaking force [force de rupture] is not an accidental predicate but the very structure of the written text. […] This force of rupture is tied to the spacing [espacement] that constitutes the written sign: spacing which separates it from other elements of the internal contextual chain (the always open possibility of its disengagement and graft), but also from all forms of present reference[.] (SEC, 9)

If specific context adds to the history of collected meanings of any given word, then those collected meanings/uses also haunt each successive use of the word. Context, then, both matters and does not matter. [iv] In an effort to demonstrate how words can operate without even grammatical context, Derrida offers Husserl’s example of “the green is either” (SEC, 12), a phrase for which we can create contexts - especially poetical contexts - even though grammatically, it appears nonsense: this is because the individual words themselves still carry meaning, even when placed in the wrong order in the syntactical system.

Not only can the signifier* function without conventional grammatical contexts, but even when it functions within these contexts, the “mark” (signifier) carries a “nonpresent remainder” (SEC, 10): meaning that is “nonpresent” because it is not indicated by the specific context in which the signifier is used, yet remains present, nonetheless, capable of being employed at any moment, in any other hypothetical context.

Further, Derrida emphasises in “Limited Inc a b c…”, his follow-up essay to “Signature Event Context,” the importance of rupture and absence – the rupture created by the written marks of the text (the physical spaces between words on the page), the rupture of words from context and conventional grammar, and finally, the rupture of the text or of the reader/audience from the writer (through physical, ontological, and temporal absence). This absence allows the opportunity of mistranslation, misinterpretation, misunderstanding – it allows the “remainder” of the mark to enter into play:

This re-move [of author and intention from writing] makes its [the remainder’s] movement possible. Which is another way of saying that if this remove is its condition of possibility, it is not an eventuality, something that befalls it here and there, by accident. Intention is a priori (at once) differante: differing and deferring, in its inception. (LI, 56)

For Derrida, it is impossible to understand the full meaning of any word: not only are we always understanding the meaning of every word based on how it "differs" from related words (as Saussure proposed),[v] but we are always also comparing each word use to how that same word was used "differently" in the past. Too, accounting for the countless potential misunderstandings and mistakes in word usage, we see how meaning easily slips, or defers, from our understanding.

Derrida is an odd reading experience: his prose is renowned for being difficult to untangle (it usually involves the OED, hopefully the one with eytmologies as well as biographical entries to look up all the philosophers/poets/apologists to whom Derrida responds). Yet painstakingly re-reading each sentence a few times often reveals an idea that seems breath-takingly simple: until he starts to play with it, that is.

Play* is an important word for Derrida's writings: frustrating and opaque as they may sometimes be, understanding Derrida's concept of differance and the non-existence of complete systematic meaning begins to allow the reader insight into why Derrida so frequently employs double entendres, and long, winding sentences, delves into philosophical terms or untranslateable French, or simply makes up words: his work attempts to demonstrate the very theories it proposes. Too, Derrida's method provided the model on which many contemporary post-structuralist and postmodern counter-hegemonic theories are built. [vi]

This long over-view of Derrida's work is not without purpose. Derrida, being the first theorist I studied in any serious and extended manner, has obviously had an impact on my critical methodology. I had originally planned to use Derrida in my thesis, but as my reasearch developed, his work became less obviously relevant. It's been more than six months since I last read him outside of a syllabus.

All that's about to change, however, as I'm currently working on an examination of the relationship between bodies and words in Jonson's theatre for the third, and final chapter of the thesis. I'm reading "The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation" in JD's Writing and Difference, and, I confess, even if I'm out of practice, and amazingly frustrated with the piece, it's brilliant, as I'm "shutting up [...] [my] circle" [vii] to find myself returning to my theoretical "root(lessnes)s" in the form of Jacques's work.

End Notes:

[i] SEC. Limited Inc is a good text to begin reading Derrida, not only because of its relative shortness, but because it is also rather funny, including a running satire of Searle whom Derrida renames "Sarl," and uses in all his examples throughout the second essay. Though Searle's "Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida" is not included in Graff's edition, Graff himself reminds us that it is almost unnecessary given "Derrida's comprehensive quotation of Searle's "Reply" (Forward, vii), which is an understated way of reminding us that Derrida republishes almost the entirety of Searle's work in the form of "quotations."

[ii] the reader. Saussure distinguishes between speech (which, because of tone, accent, and the complexity of muscle movements necessary to produce speech-sounds, cannot be easily systematised by visual code) and language (which can be systematised). For Derrida, speech and hearing are critical factors in language and (mis)communication.

[iii] the word operates. An example of this would be that in Latin, words are usually strung together in the order of Subject-Object-Verb.

[iv] and does not matter. It became a running joke in lit. theory, whenever we encountered a difficult problem, to pull the Derrida card: "it is, and it isn't". Oh, how we laughed. Right before we shook our heads at the sad little people we were.

[v] how it "differs". The best concrete example of this theory is simply to open the dictionary: a single word is defined by multiple words, each of which are then defined by yet more words in an endless fragmenting process that never allows one to stop reading.

[vi] counter-hegemonic theories. For Derrida, as for most post-structuralists, physical conflict and persecution only occurs where dialogue between opposing parties ends. The possibility for endless deferral of words, then, suggests an alternative to violence. This theory has significant implications for political conflict as well as for feminist, marxist, post-colonial, and queer theorists.

[vii] [my] circle. The Magnetic Lady (Induction, 507)

Works Cited:

Derrida, Jacques. "Signature Event Context" and "Limited Inc a b c..." Limited Inc. Ed. Gerald Graff. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1988.

Derrida, Jacques. "The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation." Writing and Difference. Transl. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978. 232-250.

Jonson, Ben. The Magnetic Lady. Ben Jonson: The Complete Plays. Vol. 2. Ed. Felix Schelling. London: JM Dent, 1973. 505-572.

20 June 2008 ~ St. Catharines

Glossary of Terms:

Edmund Husserl. n. nom. Early twentieth-century German philosopher and the father of "phenomenology," a school which involves the examination of conscious/material experience as a means of reaching the metaphysical/non-material. I'm not too certain about Husserl (having only read about him, but Hegel, in the same school, proposes that words are a material form that allows the reader to approach that which is beyond materiality).

Ferdinand de Saussure. n. nom. A literary structuralist. His most famous work is the Course in General Linguistics, a text which was compiled by his colleagues from student notes after Saussure's death in 1913. I draw from this text in order to summarise Saussure's theories but, for brevity, do not cite it directly.

Jonathan Langshaw Austin. n. nom. A structuralist following Saussure. His How to Do Things with Words examines the social conventions that make certain utterances "performatives" (that is, affecting reality: these are phrases which "do" things, for example, marriage vows, or the christening of a boat).

Play. n. (lit.) In Philosophy and literary theory, "play" is usually referred to as jouissance, as in Barthes's essay "From Work to Text." The French feminist Hélène Cixous also uses it to discuss the experience/communion of the feminine.

Richard Brome. n. nom. One of the tribe of Ben, and Jonson's former servant as well as his main dramatic "heir."

Signifier. n. (lit.). The physical representation (the word) of a concept. Saussure's famous example is the word "t-r-e-e". The "signified,"then, would be the actual concept behind the word, that is, the tree itself.

Barber, C.L. Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom. Cleveland: World Publishing, 1967. [An older text, but Barber's extended definitions and reflections on Shakespearean festive comedy offers the canonised criteria of the genre with which contemporary critics continue to work.]

Boeher, Bruce. “Ovid and the Dilemma of the Cuckold.” Ovid and the Renaissance Body. Ed. Goran V. Stanivukovic. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2001. 171-188. [Along with Gary Kuchar's text on cuckoldry, Boeher's works which examines the extremes of the early modern cuckold's reactions in Middleton's A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and Jonson's Volpone, directed me to examine the relationship between cuckoldry, theatricality, and knowledge at the end of chapter two, and (forthcoming in chapter three), the impossibility of a poet/performer to have both complete control over the audience and the recognition of the poet's genius.]

Bulman, James C. “Queering the Audience: All-Male Casts in Recent Productions of Shakespeare.” A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance. Eds. Barbara Hodgdon and WB Worthen Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. 564-587. [An examination of the RSC's recent performance of Twelfth Night, and Cheek-by-Jowl's early '90's production of As You Like It. Bulman theorises that purported attempts to reclaim early modern performance conditions are only indicative of contemporary gender concerns.]

Dusinberre, Juliet. “Women and Boys Playing Shakespeare.” As You Like It: Essais Critiques. Eds. Jean-Paul Debax and Yves Peyre. Toulouse: PU du Mirail, 1998. 11-26. [An examination of how Shakespeare's play-text draws attention to the body of the boy actor beneath the females represented on stage.]

Evans, Robert C. “’This Art Will Live’: Social and Literary Responses to Ben Jonson’s The New Inn.” Literary Circles and Cultural Communities in Renaissance England. Eds. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth. Columbia and London: U of Missouri P, 2000. 75-91. [After the failure of The New Inn on its opening night, Jonson wrote the infamous "Ode to Himself," in which he criticises his audience's poor taste in drama, and also promises to "leave the loathed stage." Evans examines the plethora of contemporary poetic responses to this poem (some reprimanding Jonson for his petty reaction to his failure, some supporting the dramatist), and argues that, based on the commentary of these poems, Jonson's play (contrary to the belief of many contemporary critics) was never valued/rejected for its political comments, but for its literary merit.]

Grace, Tiffany. “Experimental Androgynes: Falstaff, Ursula, and The New Inn.” Erotic Beasts and Social Monsters: Shakespeare, Jonson, and Comic Androgyny. Newark, London and Toronto: U of Delaware P, Associated UP, 1995. 136-169. [Tiffany's article represents the half of the critical debate which argues that Jonson's play is a (failed) attempt at serious Shakespearean romance. I find Tiffany's argument rather reductive (and not because I feel the need to automatically side with Jonson here): it fails to account for the "problem ending" of Jonson's Court of Love (an ending which, I think, in a Shakespearean comedy, would have gotten more attention from Tiffany, given that the text's primary interest seems to be Will's work), and suffers from a tendency to project biographical information into the play-text. This is a common problem in readings of the late plays: many critics have assumed that The New Inn, which was written after Jonson had suffered from stroke, must be of poorer quality than his earlier city comedies. Recent Jonson criticism has interrogated this assumption, which cannot explain how some of his most popular poetry (for example, his Cary-Morrison ode on friendship) and masques (Chloridia), were written simultaneously with The New Inn.]

Jameson, Frederick. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York, London: Norton, 2001. 1960-1974. [Reading The Political Unconscious (or sections thereof) was one of the more torturous collective experiences of literary theory last term. Yet Jameson (like good old J. Derrida) seems to grow on one with repeated readings. Too, he is, like Raymond Williams, Paul DeMan, and Ernesto Laclau, one of the more significant post-structuralist/Post-Marxian literary critics, and one to whom contemporary feminist/environmentalist/political theorists (including Butler) are yet responding.]

Lin, Ya-Huei. “The Women Who Disappear on the Shakespearean Stage: As You Like It, The Taming of the Shrew, and the Misogynic Poetics of Deduction. Mysogynism in Literature: Any Place, Any Time. Ed. Britta Zangen. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2004. 59-70. [Lin offers a neat comparative reading of Woolf's A Room of One's Own and As You Like It; her discussion of male narcissistic speech in Jacques's "All the world's a stage," monologue (along with the wonderful Anne Barton's comparison of this speech with Jonson's "All the world's a play" parody) provided an interesting departure point in examining Shakespeare's play as both supporting and subverting patriarchy.]

Sanders, Julie. “Alternative Societies: The New Inn and the Late Plays.” Ben Jonson’s Theatrical Republics, Basingstoke: Palgrove, 1998. 144-164. [Sanders has written a handful of articles on The New Inn, most of which offer a (naively optimistic) defense of Jonson as a quasi-proto-feminist. I tend to disagree with her on most accounts, but in this chapter she presents a well-researched analysis of the early modern inn as both a theatrical and a Bakhtinian carnivalesque space. (Now I just need to read more Bakhtin!)]

Stallybrass, Peter. “Transvestism and the ‘body beneath’: Speculating on the boy actor.” Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage. Ed. Susan Zimmerman. New York: Routledge, 1992. 64-83. [Speculations on what audiences "see" when encountered with moments of undressing "females" (boy actors) on (particularly the tragic) stage.]

Stewart, Andrew. “Some Uses for Romance: Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and Jonson’s The New Inn.” Renaissance Forum: An Electronic Journal of Early Modern Literary and Historical Studies 3.1 (1998). [Stewart represents the other half of the critical debate commonly surrounding the play: that is, that The New Inn is not meant as a serious romance, but a parody of that genre, constructed to provide political commentary on the Neoplatonic court of Charles I and Henrietta-Maria.]

12 June 2008 ~ St. Catharines

So Derrida habe ich jetzt gelesen. Und viel neues dabei gelernt. Zusätzlich habe ich es in 2 Tagen mit meiner neuen Lesetechnik durchgelesen. Deswegen ist diese Buchbesprechung auch nur vorläufig.

Derrida ist ein Philosoph und sein Gebiet die Dekonstruktion, das bedeutet er zerreißt/zerlegt Wörter und Sachverhalte und schaut was dann noch übrig bleibt.

Schurken, das sind alle Staaten. Der erste Schurke, das sind die USA. Das Recht des Stärkeren ist immer das beste. Denn der Stärkere, der macht das Recht (indem er sich zusätzlich das Gewaltmonopol sichert).

So nennt er auch die Fabel über den Wolf und das Lamm. Nachdem der Wolf in einem langen und überzeugenden Diskurs das Lamm überzeugt hat, dass es gefressen werden muss, kann er es fressen. Er fragt, wer ist nun nach unserer Sicht der Schurke. Der Wolf bestimmt nicht, denn er hat ja klar und deutlich das Recht auf seiner Seite und dieses dem Lamm auch dargelegt. Das Lamm ist trivialerweise auch nicht der Schurke.

So gibt es denn in unserer Welt eigentlich nur Schurken(-Staaten). In der Definition