History Bump

White's ideas about how discourse drives our systems of thought and classification can be fruitful for me in thinking through the work being done in feminism. There are many feminists who are attempting to break down traditional boundaries of presentation of information (chronologically and argumentatively) by using synecdoche to make parts represent the whole of a system of knowledge (or time period). By affixing meaning to one image and then placing it next to an other image that may not conventionally seem to fit, allows for the gaps in meaning (the ones I think White would argue we fill in with tropes) become clear. This enables us to look at the movement between and through these discourses, instead of at history as a static, linear, or narratively driven phenomenon.

I'm currently unsteady with the way that White is using discourse as a term here. At times, it seems that he is discussing/describing the exchange, "..discourses about reality.." (6). I'm trying to work through some Foucault this semester, and the way that White structures discourses as controllable seems problematic from a Foucauldian stance. Foucault's use of discourse positions it as something that speaks through us, which causes problems for agency and rebels against subjectivity entirely. As I read White, I can see him extending these ideas of discourse, but I'm not sure if they are being extended in productive ways for my peculiar theoretical frameworks. There seems to be a great deal of subjectivity implied in White (for starters) and I also get a lot of agency blended with/overlapping the ideas that discourse moves through us. So I'm on a fence and needing more input, but it's a good place to be.

In general, I can see White's levels of analysis for discourse being a pattern to follow in archival research and historical reconstruction of a period of academic conversation in separate arenas. The CLA, for example, started its own journal in order to get stuff published that wasn't being published by the mainstream journals of the day. Those early articles can be read as in dialogue with the other journals. So that makes it a discursive whole, in some way, if I understand White at all (at its entirely possible that I don't...)

Very interesting. "levels of analysis for discourse being a pattern to follow": do you mean that one should follow these levels of analysis when doing research, or when reading research?

It seems to me that you could follow any pattern you want to, and a ~ A, or a ^A or a+a=A or a'sNOT=A is an easy pattern to apply. You could as easily apply logic gates as a trope for multiple approaches as you could apply tropes as trope for multiple approaches, or you could adopt a physical body trope or the House of Discourse or whatever. Not trying to be difficult, but trying to understand what adopting White's system buys you.
Hey, come to think of it: is White's system a set of rhetorical/poetic terms for logic gates? Who programs around here - Derek? Aleshia? Is this what he's almost reaching toward? That would be quite interesting, sort of like Chomsky throwing nearly all of language out of linguistics in favor of an IF-THEN plus AND plus NOR structure for grammar in the Minimalist Program.

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his bloom quote on pg. 2: "all interpretation depends upon the antithetical relation between meanings, and not on the supposed relation between a text and its meaning"

his bloom quote on pg. 2: "all interpretation depends upon the antithetical relation between meanings, and not on the supposed relation between a text and its meaning"--i'll need that, but i'm not sure if i'll need it for what i'll end up doing in here (since i don't know yet what i'm doing in here) or for something(s) else.

This is a hard one for me. I'm mostly thinking about narrative histories, metahistory, and other organizing principles. I probably should say more about that by next week. Working from (extending from?) White, specifically, is a question about archetypal orderings, which he at once builds a case for, then crinkles. His move to complicate the neatly progressive trajectories (thesis/antithesis/synthesis-->) helps me think about useful variations and ways to rethink the comp histories, such as Campbell, in these terms. [Thanks, Chris, for talking this over with me!]

What I was thinking of, I guess, was that if you didn't know how to proceed in doing research, his levels of analysis would be a path to follow. But now that you ask, it also makes sense to me that you could use this outline as a way to understand or evaluate research of others you are reading.

Yikes! I'm being outed as having some understanding of theory! Help! Help!