derrida ripped
This was just too good not to post:
some thoughts on derrida and non-thesis driven compositions
I wonder what order Derrida wrote the Grammatology in. I ask because one thing I’ve been thinking about lately–as I teach 1020 for the first time based in traditonal or classical stances of argumentations–is how the emphasis on non-thesis driven writing became so prominent in new media rhetorics. I’m still very much interested in this line of work, lest you think my question is critical of these rhetorics; still, the genealogy of such pedagogy is of interest to me. I’m committed to it as an ideal because of my admiration for Rice’s work–in turn, I can cite some of his familiar influences–Ulmer, Barthes, Derrida, Burroughs. Afrika Bambaata, maybe. And although I’ve read enough to understand the theory behind teaching and writing within such rhetorics, what I remain unsure of is their theoretical pedigree.
Which brings me back to Derrida. I asked the original question because I’m curious if Derrida’s text work generated the now-famous revelations of deconstructionism (although I’ve been told JD forswore that particular tag for quite some time) or if he had the insight first and then worked to prove it with the text work. I ask again because many new media pedagogies situate writing as a scene of inquiry, not statement–or questions, not answers. Which I find very attractive, obviously, and (this semester notwithstanding) hope to remain committed to in my own pedagogy. BUT . . . at times I worry whether I could provide adequate theoretical explanations for my interest in such pedagogy beyond merely parroting the Rice/Ulmer/Sirc line–which is not to diminish their work or their influence on my interests, but something that, I think, is of serious import as I look a year or two down the road to my first post-doc job placement.
Of course, the question can also be a stylistic canard. Does it matter what order Derrida wrote the book in? Well . . . beyond my curiosity, maybe not. But I find it interesting that the way Grammatology is laid out at present situates the sort of “claims/theses” of the work in the first chapter (“Writing Before the Letter”) and then explicates them further through JD’s detailed textual work in the body of the text. Which gives the appearance, at least, of working from a claim/thesis, and finding support, etc–the very pedagogy that rhetcomp folks like myself want to move away from.
The lesson, here, maybe (if there has to be one) is two fold. First, the form of a text does not provide its history. Or at least, does’t have to. Second, the pedagogical or rhetorical lessons of a text (often the same thing) are held within the text itself–not the biography of its author. Derrida’s work in the Grammatology shows us how to ask questions within a text (or, he might have argued, to find the questions the text asks of itself) rather than blithely making claims about or for a text.
Sometime soon, I will write about playlist assignments.
Three One Six
Something I noticed reviewing the previous post:
316 pages of Derrida’s Grammatology
Times six minutes a page equals:
1896 minutes to read Derrida.
Divided by sixty minutes per hour equals:
31.6 hours to read Derrida.
Divided by 24 hours per day equals:
1.316 days to read Derrida.
Is anyone else slightly creeped out by the preponderance of the numerical series 3-1-6 popping up in that series of calculations? I’m not getting all Jim-Carrey-in-The-Number-23 or anything, just something that caught my eye.
It might make the start of an interesting research project: what else can we associate with a common series of numbers? Starting with the basic series, we might read this any number of ways:
3/16-March Sixteenth. What has happened on this date historically or personally?
1896-The year, perhaps, as a strating point for research (like Rice’s temporal invention projects).
1/31/(0)6-January 31 2006. As starting point.
I’m not proposing this as a great assignment, but I like how simple series of mathematical calculations revealed a) a small, and no doubt arbitrary, repetition of a three digit sequence; and b) how that might be useful as at least one way of developing an invention strategy. Maybe a dumb one, but an invention strategy nonetheless.
Also, a meta tag here:
Please welcome Jessica Rivait’s new blog, Vita Activa, to the blogroll. As Kim Lacey has recently said, Holla!
Derridone
As the oh-so-clever post title implies, I have at long last finished the Grammatology. In coming weeks, I’ll troll through my annotations and offer some specific comments, questions, and ideas in response to choice bits, but for now just some initial afterglow smatterings:
- As the first major theory text I’ve read under my own direction–i.e., not for a seminar–I think I’ve done okay handling Derrida. That is, without claiming any sort of expertise or mastery of nuance, I feel confident that I was able to follow Derrida through most of his text, only losing the gist on a few occasions. Not that I could, you know, immediately write some well-assembled article in response to Grammatology, but I could probably hash out the salient details to someone interested.
- Speaking of the hashing out . . . Although, as stated, I think I have an adequate handle on the text, at times I sorely wished that I were reading it in seminar, if only to make sure that, yes, I was understanding it okay. Not just that sort of hermeneutic validation, but also to play my own response ideas off someone, to see if they make sense in terms of someone else’s understanding of the Grammatology.
- Of course, the blogosphere is sort of like the biggest dang seminar ever. So shut up, Mike.
- At one point, I figured it out: it took me about six minutes per page reading through the text. Of course, this also accounts for underlining and annotating too, but let’s do the math: six minutes per page at 316 pages comes out to . . . 31.6 hours or 1.316 days.
- That’s ideal time, of course: in reality, since I started this back in June, it’s more like 50+ odd days. Ah well.
Another thing I’ve been meaning to post on and haven’t yet made time to do so . . . again, not a full post yet but some vague sketchings before full post is written.
I’ve volunteered to teach a proposed standard 1020 syllabus in the fall for JP and EB; I like what JP has described about the syllabus so far and it gives me a break from the Text Book syllabus which faithful readers will know I’m growing weary of. (Still like the book, but I need to go through it and find some new things to do with it. . .I’ll probably keep the “Discourse” assigment, but I’m rethinking the other two. More on that later as well.) The goal of my teaching the proposed syllabus is to be able to offer some feedback to JP/EB and to this fall’s 6010 students, so it looks like a happy circumstance for all involved.
In the meantime, though, I’ve got this idea floating about my little mind for a possible 1020 course in the future . . . but I need to do some more research and some more thinking before putting it together (not that research doesn’t involve thought. . .). The bare bones of the idea is as follows:
- I’ve been reading a collection of David Foster Wallace’s essays in the downtime between bits of Derrida. One of the pieces compiled herein is 2001 review DFW wrote of a new usage dictionary of American English (available online here), and at one point in his review DFW introduces a quite lengthy and (to my eyes) theoretically sound critique of dictionaries being instruments of ideological power, as they dictate (literally) the official, approved uses of language.
- Which, you know, I thought was a great point. DFW goes on to outline two differing schools of thought about usage is approved/authorized, how language is fundamentally political and how authorized language is thus a complex epistemic patchwork intimately connected to questions of ideology and personal politics.
- In turn, more thought. Devoted readers will knowI’ve been toying with questions of rhetoric, metaphor, writing, and epistemology of late, and this DFW piece seemed to stitch all those pieces together (less so metaphor, true). In particular, the thought that I had was this–a question really: How does the issue of approved/authorized/legitimized language change when we move to writing online?
- I’m not the first to ask this question, I know, nor do I claim to be able to supply anything resembling an eloquent answer. But one thing that I’ve always found fascinating about the Web is how quickly Web and Internet memes become self-reflexive and self-critical: the recent explosion of I Can Has Cheezburger (even popping up in Time a couple weeks back) is an interesting example. And to a large extent, these memes and meanings are user-regulated, that is, linguistic authority becomes established through a consensual communal epistemic process rather thanbeing decreed accurate or correct by an authorized editor/editorial staff. (Is this what folksonomy is about? I need to do more reading. . .)
- And too, the Web allows for the investigation of dictionaries of non-mainstream, “other” discourses. While Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and The Free Dictionary are more or less still committed to the traditional goals of dictionary/encyclopedic practices (although again through community oversight rather than editorial control in the case of the wikis). the Web also has sites like the The Urban Dictionary, which–even though it may be more a humor site than an authoritative one–we might argue is an attempt to legitimate or authroize “other” discourses–here, obviously, the “urban” discourse.
- So then, the goals of the (thus-far hypothetical) 1020 curse would be to look at the way language use is regulated between print and digital writing spaces. In addition to those questions, we might look at the way our understanding of lexia are shaped by the names given them: do we think of an “Urban Dictionary” the same way we do a “Collegiate Dictionary?”
- The course is sounding pretty stuffed already, but another concern would be to look at how words are linked to one another–the sort of Derridean move, right? Every signifier is a signified and vice-versa. And then, building from there, to ask how dictionaries either reinforce or undermine the system of language by looking at how they connect words and meanings to one another.
- As it stands now, the writing project would be one that builds through the whole semester as students assemble their own dictionaries of personal usage. The goal would be start with a few terms and maybe examine how students already understand the same word/image in multiple discourses (the mystorical move there) and then to keep adding terms and building links through the semester until students had assembled their dictionaries. The assignments would be done in the wiki, and ideally I’d like to maybe have one part of the project just be focused on having students establish links between their entries and other students’ entries. The final assignment then, might be to write a forward (DFW makes much use of a very close reading of the forward/preface/introduction of the dictionary in his essay) that explains the student’s own guidelines for inclusion and theories about language use and authorization.
Whew. That was far more than I meant to write at present. I find this idea exciting but I’m sort of stumped about how to develop it further. Proposed readings, so far: the DFW essay, possibly the foreward DFW makes use of (if it’s still in print/current), and maybe the forewards from other dictionaries as well. The project proposed above is heavily indebted to Rice’s “cool” projects and pedaglossary assignment from 6010 (which, in turn, seem inspired by Raymond Williams’ Keywords).
So, please, faithful readers, any advice, feedback, or resources you can provide would be greatly appreciated. Let me know if you think this could work, or if I’m completely off my chump. If you have a good article, essay, or book in mind that might fit neatly into this project, please please please let me know. I’m really excited about this idea, but I think there’s one chunk missing that I can’t identify yet. . . .