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January 16, 2005

Introduction, White: Becky's summary

White, Hayden. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978.
Introduction, "Tropology, Discourse, and the Modes of Human Consciousness," 1-25

When writing history we can never say what we really want to or what we really mean; therefore, we must always acknowledge the contingency of our claims (1) and settle for examples rather than scientific knowledge (23).

We use language—and specifically the language of prefigured tropes—to justify the evidence that supports our claims about new phenomena (1, 12). Rather than describing and analyzing, tropical discourse constitutes its objects through its deviations from ordinary language. Tropes are integral to discourse (2), and discourse is always in motion (3-4). "[D]iscourse itself, the verbal operation by which the questing consciousness situates its own efforts to bring a problematical domain of experience under cognitive control, can be defined as a movement through all of the structures of relating self to other which remain implicit as different ways of knowing in the fully matured consciousness" (10-11).

Discourse is commonly thought of as dialectical, but it doesn't in fact fit the usual notion of dialectical, in which a subject is possessed of verifiable truth. White prefers the term diatactical, a term that doesn't idealize discourse as the mediator between generality and particularity. Diataxis involves combining the "description (mimesis) of the data" with the "argument or narrative (diegesis)." Because it is reflexive, "genuine discourse" challenges the fallacious belief in a middle ground (4).
Understanding—making the exotic seem familiar (5)—derives from deliberately connecting "memory images" to words or sounds and then formulating propositions (20). Restructuration produces understanding through a sequence of Kenneth Burke's "master tropes" (5-6):


  1. Metaphor (5). All metaphors have some truth to them (20-21).
  2. Metonymy, which works deconstructively (5): elements are "construed" (or "prefigured") as "parts of an as yet unidentified whole" (6).
  3. Synecdoche, representing the dynamic of surface and essence (5). The trope of synecdoche may have a genetic basis in Piaget's third stage of development, which is grounded in a "logic of classifications" (8).
  4. Irony, which reflexively finds the contrasts and contradictions in the "ordering principles" of synecdoche (5-6).

This tropological sequence may provide the basis for an individual's acquisition of "rational modes" (7). The sequence seems to correspond to Piaget's developmental stages (6-13); Freud's dreamwork mechanisms (13-14); Vico's and Nietzsche's "'logic' of poiesis"; and Hegel's and Marx's "'logic of noesis." The sequence is not a law but a model (12-13) that applies not only to the individual but also, as Marx demonstrates in Capital and The Communist Manifesto, to the collective (15). E.P. Thompson's study of the working class makes similar discoveries (15-19). The structures in rhetoric, poetics, and dialectic are analogous rather than equivalent to those of psychology and psychoanalysis (19).

Posted by senioritis at January 16, 2005 01:02 PM

Comments

Becky,
I don't read White the way you do. At least, I don't think so. Or maybe I don't read you the way you do. Perhaps I'm being distracted by White's willingness to see Piaget's and Freud's stages are analogous to rhetorical/tropical categories, but -

"tropical discourse constitutes its objects through its deviations from ordinary language"
seems wrong for White, whereas farther down in your summary, if all discourse is diatactic, then "combining the "description (mimesis) of the data" with the "argument or narrative (diegesis)" seems to acknowledge that tropes are intrinsic to all discourse, not just the extraordinary.

It seems to me that somewhere in this intro,
White's making the claim that all language is
(or at least, all discourse is) tropical.
clo

Posted by: clo at January 17, 2005 04:32 PM

i might be off-base here--& that's not a weasely disclaimer but an admission that i'm jumping in while i'm only actually halfway through reading the introduction & so might very well be missing something--but the impression i have so far about what you're calling into question above is this: "tropical" discourse is different in theoryin practice, though, all language use (so, discourse?) does this, whether consciously or not.

i think he is making the claim you identify, carolyn, but as part of/alongside a definition implying a difference between tropical discourse & other kinds--because in application there are no other kinds; they're an ideal like scientific objectivity that we cloud our understanding of what actually goes on by insisting on believing in.

Posted by: tyratae at January 22, 2005 08:23 AM

crap.

okay--the technology here didn't do quite what i expected it to. apparently you can use html tags to format text in entries here but NOT in comments. things i marked to boldface compressed and deleted instead. :( so where my post above says, confusingly, "'tropical' discourse is different in theoryin practice, though," what it MEANT to say was something more like this:

"...'tropical discourse' is different IN THEORY from 'ordinary language' because it's in one of his ways (metaphor, etc.) requiring the user(s) (speaker/writer &/or hearer/reader) to reach beyond the literal; IN PRACTICE, though..."

Posted by: tyratae at January 22, 2005 08:33 AM

I'm not sure that (at least in this intro) White says that all language is tropical, though I don't think he rules it out, either. He does specifically say that troping is necessary to understanding.

When you say, "tropes are intrinsic to all discourse, not just the extraordinary," you may be inserting an extra step. My summary says, "tropical discourse constitutes its objects through its deviations from ordinary language." That doesn't mean that tropes are intrinsic only to extraordinary discourse; rather, it means that tropes use extraordinary language (e.g., metaphor) to produce understanding from ordinary discourse.

Posted by: senioritis at January 27, 2005 06:34 AM