History Bump

I find the entire introduction confusing and stymi-ing. I don't really understand words like "hypotactical" or diegetic, or paratactical or diatactical - tactical seems to me to mean touch, or relating to touch. I hate when I have to have a big dictionary just to get the basic terms.

Some of his terms are pretty obscure, but lots of them are drawn from rhetoric--terms like poiesis and noesis, for example.

One of the things I was going to show you all today is a resources page I've set up. As you're reading White, check out the rhetoric glossaries listed under "dictionaries and encylopedia."

I think his project is very slippery. He identifies a set of tropes which he tries to tie in to some archetypal mental construct that drives human understanding, and then attempts to morph it without dropping it,
"see, see, Piaget really meant the same thing, if you paint it blue; and see, see, Freud was really using the same tools, if you turn the blocks sideways and squint".

The two parts that are most problematic to me are that he wants us to agree a priori that these tropes are hierarchical, and hierarchical in the ways he needs them to be in order for his theory to work, and that he's selecting the pieces from various theoreticians/fields that are easy to fit in his theory.

clo

Isn't he arguing that they are not hierarchical, but rather they seem to occur in a particular order, developmentally. Arg, I have to find the bit, but I believe he says that while the child may learn them in a particular order, what a poet can do with metaphor is clearly not infantile... Now I better get my evidence in the text...

Becky,
in response to your resource page, I read it several times and so did others here, while reading White; but the thought is that batting the terms back and forth or trying to put them into plain language might be a useful exercise. clo

I agree with you, Carolyn on his attempt to fit examples into his theory, but I also think that he is dealing with some of the major figures in each discipline to demonstrate how these hierarchies work. The idea of a telos of mind, body, history moving toward some more enlightened terminous is a philosophical mainstay (Hegal, Kant), but it is also worth challenging. And I think the White begins to challenge this with his discussion of Freud's uncanny and how there is always residual parts of prior knowledges and steps with us, so these systems are not as hierarchical as we may think.

I agree with you, Carolyn on his attempt to fit examples into his theory, but I also think that he is dealing with some of the major figures in each discipline to demonstrate how these hierarchies work. The idea of a telos of mind, body, history moving toward some more enlightened terminus is a philosophical mainstay (Hegel, Kant), but it is also worth challenging. And I think the White begins to challenge this with his discussion of Freud's uncanny and how there is always residual parts of prior knowledges and steps with us, so these systems are not as hierarchical as we may think.

Gale,
I'd say that this is merely a different take on hierarchy. Diachronic development has consequences. And yes, he does say that poets can reach back into earlier stages of development to use simpler forms of trope, but doesn't that in itself tell you something about how he sees them?

Besides, what is "peekaboo" if it's not irony-based? He ties
A to stage 1 and B to stage 2, but - does it hold together?
clo

On pages 12 and 13, White is actually only willing to give the tropes the statues of "model." He engages the question of whether or not their "ubiquity" and the point that they recur "persistantly in modern discourses about human consciousness" grants them the status of "law," and he rejects this possibility: "I claim for it only the force of a convention in the discourse about consciousness and, secondarily, the discourse about discourse itself, in the modern Western cultural tradition."

This also comes out in the way he keeps playing with the question of whether the pattern is "imposed" or "discovered" and that this doesn't really matter as it has the same effect on discourse, regardless.

I agree with gale that he is trying to articulate (and perhaps by using language/discourse in his own text he runs in to the same patterns he is critiquing, but doesn't that just prove his point?) that discourse is an imperfect science and that the dialectic between truth and non-truth is in motion and more about degrees than hard distinctions. He wants to make it so that "we do not have to choose between art and science" not only because it is ethically wrong, but because it is impossible. These things feed each other and are always in motion.

I'm with you, Gale. On page 19, White suggests that the metaphorical is naive and the ironic (at its advanced position) is self-critical. That's where the ordering of increasing sophistication/complexity/absraction seemed a bit uni-directional. Reminds me of the project I did in Scott's class last semester on artifical mythologies (as third order systems); maybe this is the relationship between meta-history and history. Maybe I need to get up and walk around for a few minutes.

If you all want to start some entries on terminology, feel free; I agree, that would be very useful. If they're terms that are already in the lexicon, you can use the Comments function to expand what's already there.

Let's not overlook the references to Bloom and Burke, and the underlying reference to the analysis of poetry. I always look at text like this with an attempt to understand who the author believes he or she is working against, and in this case it feels like White is trying for a different understanding or way of analyzing text, particularly prose, than the more "conventional" forms of literary analysis that had been applied to poetry.

Part of the uni-directional move is necessary. You can't be self-reflexive, a.k.a. ironic, before you've idetified a self, which happens in the shift from metaphor to metonymy (if I'm remembering White's structure correctly?) However, it may help to model these as concentric rings rather than on a spectrum. That way there is still a whole lot of movement available as new metaphors are created from the self-reflexive musings.

I am always interested in the reasons why theorists chose particular scholars over another—why the attention paid to Marxism? Piaget?