History Bump

"discourse, if it is genuine discourse--that is to say, as self-critical as it is critical of others--will radically challenge the notion of the syntactical middle ground itself. It throws all "tactical" rules into doubt, including those originally governing its own formation" (4).

This is particularly meaningful to me because it reminds me to constantly investigate the assumptions that I present as I work through ideas. The implications of questioning the rules that govern the formation of discourse opens exciting possibilities.

Yes, he's definitely speaking to what has become foundational in anthropology and feminist research: the principle of reflexivity.

& into the rabbit-hole (okay, it isn't really a rabbit-hole--it's more like a whole mountain of theory/scholarship all agreeing about its own wonderfulness) of teacher-research & the sainthood of the reflective practitioner. :)

which, actually, is what i was saying was north's point, too, wasn't it--that comp needed a lens through which to be reflective about its own processes & projects...

What I find intriguing is the suggestion that discourse is never closed; that all persons are not only capable of understanding, but desire to understand methods of discourse are cognitive. Am I totally off?

Denise,

I'm not sure what you mean by cognitive here. Can you explain a bit more? Sounds interesting.

Since he utilizes Piaget in his discussion, it makes me think that discourse and the desire to understand discourse in "hard wired" into the brain, like language.

I keyed in on White's notion that "conventional" techniques for assessing the validity of discourse were actually oppositional to discourse, because discourse constitutes what counts as fact and what mode of comprehension is appropriate (3). So it becomes a bit circular - assessing the validity of discourse requires seeing it as constitutive, but then the conventional analytical tools don't work, so then there need to be new tools, but then discourse is the source of the tools, and it becomes a meta-reflexive process that can't have an end....

Except, remember the first paragraph of the intro:
Discourse doesn't and can't constitute what counts as fact;
like the arrow that is always flying half of the distance and
can never reach the tree, meaning in discourse is always
a trope, and never the real thing. In discourse, what counts
as fact and how you comprehend are always under negotiation,
never fixed; every instant in the propagation of meaning
alters the meanings that are available.
clo

"For we would recognize that it is not a matter of choosing between objectivity and distortion, but rather between different strategies for constituting "reality" in thought so as to deal with it in different ways, each of which has its own ethical implications" (22).

I like the way that White engages the ethical implication of the multiple perspectives that are produced when "reality" is seen as produced by discourse. He heads off the fear of relativism (scare tactic?) so often produced by postmodern/poststuctual thought with the idea of this "typology" that could be used to evaluate ideological differences--so that we don't have to turn to (illusory) 'scientific objectivity.'

Right. And I think too the idea that these tropes can be charted throughout differing modes of intellectual discourse as imperfect representations of truth allows for the spaces he sees as important to consider when speaking of reality. So we could choose to disregard what has come before and build our own reality, but we would have to do it so consciously that through our production of difference we are at the same time acknowledging the existence of the generally accepted forms of reality and order. In other words, when Benjamin created the Arcades project, he had to consciously recognize that he was disrupting our normal production of history. And through the texts production, he makes us, as readers, confront all those embedded structures that we normally don't see.

yeah, and Benjamin's Arcades is such a great example, because Benjamin is both absent from and at the same time all over the text. And the power of his "absence" is so much about the 'conscious recognizion' you cite above.

hmmm, a lag time there...

I'm pulling this bit from my notes. I find it useful that White works on the limitations of logic to comment (or enable commenting) upon itself.

White is critical of logic (what system of logic is this? any old system?), when he says, "Logic cannot preside over this rupture with itself, for it has no ground on which to arbitrate between the claims of contending logical systems, much less between the kinds of knowledge that we derive from logical operations, on the one side, and dislogical or analogical operations, on the other" (10). Is this his way of calling for meta-discourse or meta-history?

It is interesting to see how he reviews particular figures in his piece—paying attention to Marxism as well as the developmental models of Piaget to illustrate parallels in rhetorical theory to more scientific discourses.
It was additionally interesting to see how he takes up issues of the unconscious/conscious—it made me think of Butler/Austin and the ways in which we cannot really have control over language/meanings.