History Bump

Good idea. Go for it.

I'm worried, though, about your poor spelling. The word is rasslin. No "W," no hyphen, double "S." I promise not to tell on you down home.

Y'all see whut these here damn yankees have gone 'n dun to me? I'm ru'nt!

:-)

Yew shore it happened afore yew came up to these parts?

Slippage

In reading White's introduction, I am struck by the idea of sliding away from the data toward some (prefigured?) structures as we describe that data. In the very first paragraph, White writes,

Our discourse always tends to slip away from our data towards the structures of consciousness with which we are trying to group them. (1)

It occurs to me that this is where a great deal of confusion set in for me the first time I was reading. I picked up in Becky's summary a few valuable clues. First, at the end of her summary, Becky paraphrases White’s idea that his tropes “seem to be analogous structures, rather than replications of a common theoretical model” (19). In my first reading of White, I felt he was trying very hard to prove the consistency of these models across disciplines. Having revisited the material, I’m now thinking that he is demonstrating the slipping of discourse from the data by giving these various models, showing how they are similar, but also highlighting how they slip from one discipline to the next and modify according to the structures of that discipline.

Secondly, I see White as acknowledging necessary contradictions in the above quote from page 1. He rephrases it as “the data always resists the coherency of the image which we are trying to fashion of them” (1). Our claims are contingent on the structures that guide us (though these structures may not be fixed, and are certainly not immutable). Our primary way of communicating, according to White, is through “easily recognizable examples,” which seem to fall into the four tropes he defines and also necessarily change the data according to their function as a trope (23).

White is not telling us how discourse functions, but is describing the ways in which analogies are made and noting how these analogies, when used as description, slip away from the data itself. (He is also performing these analogies for us, which led me initially to confusion and contradiction.) He has codified these slippages along the lines of tropes: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. I am still struggling through these concepts, particularly as they relate to issues of subjectivity and agency. Can we say that our descriptions, because they represent a slippage in the data, demonstrate (betray?) a worldview? I think so, and I think that’s where I’m headed out of this, that our ways of describing data also describe the structures that we adhere to. This becomes important for me in the study of history and in defining methods/methodologies because of the discussion Derek, Kelly, and others began on the first day of class. Then it was described as the limitations of a method/methodology (which is a fair characterization). I prefer to describe it now as choices that take us along certain arcs away from the data and toward interpretation and analysis.

It further occurred to me that in order to agree with people's interpretations of data, we need to buy into their metaphors (or other tropes of discourse). This goes beyond following along with an idea (understanding where they are pulling their discourse from) to agreeing with the analogies and how those analogies sync with the data. If I don't agree that the example being given is analogous, I'm not going to buy the interpretation.

I'm now wondering if stasis theory might further inform this line of inquiry, not as another example of a model with four phases, but to further define/refine agreement and acceptance of claims?

When you say, "White is not telling us how discourse functions," I feel a bit uneasy. I would have said that is what he's doing. Aside from that reservation, I think your two comments here bring a lot of clarity to the introduction to Tropics. As for stasis theory: dunno. Which doesn't mean you're right or wrong, but only that it will be awhile before I can concentrate on that possibility. It may be an interesting connection (á la the connection between Burke's terministic screens and White's use of Burke's master tropes).