March 27, 2005

Becky's research report—theoretical background

Judith Butler (Social Text 20.3) draws away from a causal connection between terrorism and poverty, preferring to speak of one as the "condition" of the other. Certeau (The Writing of History, Ch. 2), limning the relationship between disciplines and institutions, speaks of correlations rather than causality: "[S]ocioeconomic and symbolic systems combine without being identified or ranked in hierarchies" (61).

I find their arguments powerfully calming as I work on the socioeconomic conditions for the rise of composition.

For the kind of work I do, causal arguments are a trap into which I must neither fall nor be led. As I work on the socioeconomic conditions for the rise of composition, I have to be very careful not to fall into a causality trap. —Not because causality doesn't exist in the world, but because I could never establish it as a relationship between these two subjects. —And in fact because I suspect that the relationship is not causal.

The dangers are substantial. With the work I do in authorship (asking why plagiarism is so important to our culture; looking at the enabling metaphors of the discourse of academic integrity; exploring the internal contradictions in plagiarism definitions and policies; and challenging the widely disparate types of textual activity that are lumped together under the term plagiarism), readers have sometimes lept to causal conclusions—among them that I actually approve of and wish to enable plagiarists. Something of the same reductive logic is inevitable here: that because I'm exploring the socioeconomic conditions in which composition arose and because I am arguing for their correlation, readers may take me to assert that ours is a racist discipline that should be abandoned.

Which is not the case. At least here in the early going of this research, I'm thinking that indeed our discipline's nineteenth-century emergence is deeply implicated in xenophobic, racist, imperialist, classist movements in the post-bellum U.S. It's not hard, I think, to detect an ongoing relationship between these fields of activity, one that continues to the present day. But to remove myself from one of those fields is not to solve the problem, because the problem is not causal. Nor is it to remove myself from the problem, because I am still a resident in and participant in the culture in which these discourses circulate. What I am searching for is understanding, in the hope that with that understanding I can contribute to social change. Inserting altered understandings and representations into one point within mutually informing discourses disrupts the smooth, invisible circulation of those discourses; alters their direction, perhaps in ways that can be directed, even controlled, toward the objective of disabling the hierarchies that they support.

Butler's argument, incidentally, is worth revisiting in the context of the current attention to Ward Churchill's argument about 9/11. Those with online database privileges for the SU Library can access Butler's article here.

Cross-posted to Schenectady Synecdoche.

Posted by senioritis at 12:21 PM | Comments (3)

March 09, 2005

Certeau introduction: summary

Certeau, Michel. The Writing of History. Trans. Tom Conley. New York: Columbia UP, 1988.

Preface, xxv-xxvii

"The Writing of History is the study of writing as historical practice." Certeau offers a "'modern' history of writing," beginning in the sixteenth century. Although the book treats identifiable historical periods, he does not organize it according to a "fiction of a linearity of time." Instead he focuses on the situation in which he is writing; the constraints placed upon him by the field in which he is writing; and the methodological alternatives available to him (xxvi). Nor does he employ the "fiction of a metalanguage unifying the whole work." He investigates the "alliance" between writing and history (xxvii).

Introduction: "Writings and Histories," 1-16

Historians insert the dead, who can no longer speak for themselves, into texts (1-2). The "phantasm of historiography" involves a "quest for the Other," and Certeau wishes to make that Other less foreign (2). It is through "a relation with the other" that intelligibility is established in historiography (3). History rejects the myths of tradition (2-6), necessarily separating present from past (2), discourse from the social body. Exercising a "'will to dominate' the body" (6), it endeavors to decipher and decode the other, the object, the body (3). Historians separate themselves not only from tradition but also from their society (6). Western interpretation occurs in the present; assumes a break with the past; and selects that which is to be remembered (4). "[P]rogress is its motto" (5). That which has been repressed, however, still persists, appearing in syntactic lapses (4). Historians' struggles to differentiate the living from the dead are themselves a form of death, and it is writing that both mythically symbolizes and ritually performs this act (5). Writing and thus historiography create systems that legitimate and are supported by political power (6-7). Since the sixteenth century, historians are no longer charged with deciphering sacred, eternal truths, but with creating truth. Hence the historian fictively assumes the position of the subject of action—of the prince, whose objective is to 'make history'" (7). In fact, however, historians are technicians involved in "the making of history"; they do not themselves make history (8). "Archives make up the world of this technical game, a world in which complexity is found, but sifted through and miniaturized, therefore made capable of being formalized." Power pursues objectives, whereas historians analyze situations (9), manufacturing the past as a "fiction of the present" (10). The interplay of subject (historian) and object (the real) is part of the fiction created by historical writing (11). Historiography regards a documents as "the symptom of whatever produced it"; hence production serves as a principle of historical explanation (11). History must fill gaps and establish order (12). Certeau turns to Marx for insights on production. Although production is often discussed abstractly, particular production occurs to satisfy needs, under conditions conducive to that objective, and it is deemed "productive" only when it produces capital. Marx consigns discourse to "improductive labor" (14), but Certeau disagrees: "Discourse is doubtless a form of capital, invested in symbols; it can be transmitted, displaced, accrued, or lost" (13). Certeau endorses and extends Foucault's archaeological methodology (14).

Posted by senioritis at 01:10 PM | Comments (0)

Certeau introduction: discussion Qs

  1. In light of your own historical project, reflect on what Certeau says at the bottom of xxvi about rejecting the "fiction of a linearity of time" in favor of emphasizing the situation in which he is writing; the constraints placed upon him by the field in which he is writing; and the methodological alternatives available to him.
  2. Take a look at the situation that Derek describes with regard to the $50,000 data-mining software that's intended for the U.S. Intelligence community. How reasonable would it be to describe this as an extension of the political function of the historian that Certeau describes on 7-8?
  3. I am electrified by Certeau's statement, "In the West, the group (or the individual) is legitimized by what it excludes . . ." (5). Let's think about the possible applications of this statement (in its textual context) to (a) composition history and (b) your projects.

Posted by senioritis at 10:16 AM | Comments (0)

March 08, 2005

Certeau translator's intro (Conley): summary

Conley, Tom, intro. The Writing of History. By Michel de Certeau. Trans. Tom Conley. New York: Columbia UP, 1988. vii-xxiv.

Certeau's title, L'Écriture de l'histoire, does not translate readily into English (xx).

Conley summaries the four parts of The Writing of History (xiii-xiv) and lists the "major tenets" of Certeau's work, all of which are included in this book (xiv).

Certeau's ideal historiographer will attend to the ways in which a history appropriates the past and legitimates its own work; this reveals the values of the time in which the history is written (x-xi). Unlike the chronicler, who transcribes, the historiographer translates (xxi).

It is an "obsessive" relation with death that enables the writing of history. The writing of history depends on a clear distinction between past and present; hence historians regard death as "a total social fact," even though the writing of history brings the past to life (viii). "The labor of writing is ongoing, perpetually dividing and suturing the past and present." Writers' awareness of this movement assumes allegorical proportions and "gives recognizable contour to evidence or historical fact" (ix).

Metaphor fragments the past and also makes historians' representation of it possible; hence Certeau emphasizes the role of language in historiography (ix). Histories describe events in balanced allegories, and the metaphors in which they are expressed trigger representations that are grounded in the affective (xv).

Both historians and literary analysts focus on the rhetoric of documents, deploying a rhetorical notion of the unconscious "in order to disengage how languages of the past are always in a silent dialogue with unyielding problems of mimesis" (x).

Historical representations are inevitably local, partial, limited (ix-x), yet these discursive formations determine the ideology and the limits of representation. In the study of documents, invention amounts to selection. Because selection implies an effacement that may derive from an unconscious will to repress, the "criteria of selection" are key to both literary and historical study (x). Certeau explicates this phenomenon through psychoanalytic theory, focusing on ways in which historians project their own ideology and politics onto their representations of the past as they decide what to include, why it is meaningful, and how it should be represented (xiv-xv).

Reality may be a matter of strategic selection (xvii). From Lacanian psychoanalysis, Certeau appropriates the term réel to indicate "a world of unmarked space and time that cannot be mediated by language or signs." Although events do occur in nature, historical representations of them are cultural, burdened with typologies that affect our understanding of those events. These typologies are transmitted through the language that purports to convey events (xvi-xvii). Certeau's use of the word object locates it within the realm of the réel, the focus of historians' efforts yet out of reach of historians' figurations (xviii).

Since the time of Descartes, reason has supplanted faith in the making of knowledge (xii); "official rationales" are offered for "mystical expression" (xiii), with its association with the body and its engagement with (rather than denial of) death (xviii-xix).

Posted by senioritis at 11:00 PM | Comments (0)

Certeau translator's intro (Conley): discussion Qs

  1. To what extent does Conley's Certeau's account of historiography square with that of Hayden White?
  2. What terms and themes that informed White's Tropics of Discourse arise in Conley's introduction to Certeau, in ways that you find surprising, interesting, or important? What questions will you be asking as you read The Writing of History?
  3. Oxford Reference Online includes this entry on "mysticism," drawn from Jane Shaw's entry in the Oxford Companion to the Body:
Michel de Certeau's work, in the latter part of the twentieth century, has compared the procedures common to both mysticism and psychoanalysis, suggesting that the body, far from being ruled by discourse, is itself a symbolic language, and that in both psychoanalysis and mysticism the body is perceived as responsible for a truth of which it is unaware. Thus the body holds the ‘key’ to the ‘truth’ of the ‘space’ represented by the mystical or unconscious. This has caused the modern study of mysticism to focus, like psychoanalysis, on the bodily manifestations of the psyche's or soul's condition in order to understand the ‘truth’ of that condition. Perhaps the ultimate example of this is Jacques Lacan's attempt to locate the apparent impossibility or unknowability of female desire in the mystical experiences of Teresa of Avila, as depicted in Bernini's sculpture in Rome; he states that on looking at that statue it is immediately clear to us, if not to Teresa, that she is experiencing an orgasm. Luce Irigaray, a feminist psychoanalyst, has appropriately responded (in This Sex Which is Not One) to this collapse and merging of female sexual desire and religious experience thus: ‘In Rome? So far away? To look? At a statue? of a Saint? Sculpted by a man? What pleasure are we talking about? Whose pleasure? For where the pleasure of Teresa is concerned, her own writings are more telling.’
To what extent would this passage serve as a summation of what Conley is saying on xvii ff.? What else is Conley saying on these pages?

Posted by senioritis at 10:48 PM | Comments (0)

Fleshing out écriture

Some definitions from my commonplace book; these might illuminate Conley's use of the term in his introduction to The Writing of History, pp. xx-xxi:

  1. From Gayatri Spivak, In Other Worlds: "It is in terms of saving the freely choosing subject whose concept insinuates itself into the most radical communalist politics of collectivity that Said uses écriture as a code word suggesting (I cannot be sure, since the word hangs unexplained on the borders of his essay) linguistic reductionism at a second remove. The thumbnail explanation of écriture as the excluded other that I have given above would have helped his general argument: 'A principle of silent exclusion operates within and at the boundaries of discourse; this has now become so internalized that fields, disciplines, and their discourses have taken on the status of immutable durability'" (123-124).
  2. From Michel Foucault, "What Is an Author?": "The conception of écriture, as currently employed, is concerned with neither the act of writing nor the indications, as symptoms or signs within a text of an author's meaning; rather, it stands for a remarkably profound attempt to elaborate the conditions of any text, both the conditions of its spatial dispersion and its temporal deployment" (119).
  3. From Leon S. Roudiez, intro. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, by Julia Kristeva: The word writing "must unfortunately convey two distinct meanings as it corresponds both to écrit and to écriture (in the recent, stronger sense of the latter term). The situation is somewhat confusing in French, but worse in English. Écriture is what produces 'poetic language' or 'text'. . . . . One could possibly use the word 'scription' to convey the sense of contemporary écriture" (19).
  4. And from Conley's introduction to Certeau's The Writing of History: Certeau's title, L'Écriture de l'histoire, does not translate readily into English. Writing is an insufficient translation, because "écriture implies more than verbal discourse: it is a Scripture in secular garb, but it is also literature, 'writing,' in an imperiously intransitive form. Following in the steps of Freud's Moses, writing sets off in search of its own poetics. Écriture shares much with literary practice, a discipline without telos or object in sight" (xx).
  5. 3/29/05 addition: Certeau himself defines écriture as having "the broad meaning of the organization of signifiers" (86).

Posted by senioritis at 10:22 PM | Comments (0)

January 20, 2005

Blog, James Blog

Okay, so, here I go. Let's see if this works. Um, test, test...1, 2, 3. There IS no spoon. "Watson, come here quickly!" One small post for Jeremiah...

Posted by jwthom01 at 10:35 AM | Comments (2)

December 11, 2004

Whilst reading White & Certeau

Some useful questions to ask yourself:


  1. What is he saying?
  2. How does it inform, explain, instruct, or contradict the premises on which I'm conducting my own historical research?
  3. What else?

Posted by senioritis at 10:25 PM | Comments (0)