Some Considerations of Discourse

(What follows is a collection of incomplete postings that I've doctored and strung together to give a semblance of cohesion. All the postings explore questions of discourse; all the postings in their fragmented state enact the very problem they seek to articulate, which is why I think they need to be posted despite being unfinished.)

The Beauty of Academia

I need to get something off my chest: sometimes, I am overcome with fury towards academia. That’s an understatement. Starting at age fourteen and continuing all through high school I scrawled manifestos on the shortcomings of contemporary education as I experienced them in my well-funded, East-coast public high school and left them outside my parents’ bedroom door for them to stumble upon in the morning. These would alternate with lengthy handwritten pleas that I be allowed to withdraw from school altogether and educate myself from home. The situation improved somewhat in college, owing to the wider array of options college provides (choosing a major/concentration, choosing not to attend college at all or enroll in a conservatory or take time off to travel or work), and to my increased understanding that we forge our own path in life and our frustrations with society and its institutions—our institutions—are our own responsibility to ameliorate.

But despite the greater freedom of choice in college, graduate school and beyond, my rage-flecked, pain-swelled frustration persists, and it interferes with my ability to articulate and enact my vision for an Academy of Readers. Previously I have culled manifestations of frustration with academia from my postings, but doing so prevented me from saying what needs to be said. And so I am changing tactics. Some things that I say from now on may sound retaliatory, petty, snide, disgruntled, harsh or accusatory, as though emanating from a miserable and malnourished lump of mind. Perhaps my mind is malnourished, as all our minds are perhaps malnourished by what in my view are the pettinesses of academic institutions that too often cramp and mangle the practice of thought. My intent, however, is not to revel in indiscriminate bashing of academic institutions. I feel bored around others who circuitously air their scholastic wounds and use them as an excuse to forego discipline and abandon their dreams; I feel bored not because I lack compassion for these others—indeed in the past I committed the same offense and know well their pain—but because an alternative, more promising subject beckons, namely, what should constitute the practice of humanistic thought and how academic institutions might best support such practice, from kindergarten through graduate school and beyond.

Under different circumstances, I would here proceed to formulate the problem with academia in the humanities and offer a thesis that addresses how this problem might be solved. Under ideal circumstances, there would be no “here”; this paragraph and the two preceding it would not exist, and in their place would be an impassioned, rigorous, boldly articulated and insightful discussion of Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text, what I happen to be reading closely right now. Ideally, none of us would have to think about school, just like children do not have to think about the playground—they simply use it, for their own ends, without being judged by some arbitrary standard of what constitutes play, and create and amend their own rules to fit the dictates of their imaginations, not the other way around. That idea right there would seem to constitute an interesting thesis: “academia should model itself after the concept of the playground.” It should eradicate grades and grade levels; allow students to direct the inquiry, progress at their own pace, and devise their own assignments without restriction; encourage interdisciplinarity; advocate inventiveness over conformity; and make learning its own reward. But although I am salivating like a Pavlovian dog at the prospect of defending such a thesis and attending a school successfully founded upon the above-mentioned precepts--

Living by Literature

From Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

"If one shuts one's eyes and thinks of the novel as a whole, it would seem to be a creation owning a certain looking-glass likeness to life, though of course with simplifications and distortions innumerable. At any rate, it is a structure leaving a shape on the mind's eye, built now in squares, now pagoda-shaped, now throwing out wings and arcades.... This shape...starts in one the kind of emotion that is appropriate to it. But that emotion at once blends itself with others, for the 'shape' is not made by the relation of stone to stone, but by the relation of human being to human being. Thus a novel starts in us all sorts of antagonistic and opposed emotions. Life conflicts with something that is not life."

From Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The American Scholar"

"If it were only for a vocabulary, the scholar would be covetous of action. Life is our dictionary. Years are well spent in country labors; in town; in the insight into trades and manufactures; in frank intercourse with many men and women; in science; in art; to the one of mastering in all their facts a language by which to illustrate and embody our perceptions. I learn immediately from any speaker how much he has already lived, through the poverty or the splendor of his speech. Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of today. This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made."

This composition begins with an anecdote.

At a small, rural college on a May afternoon, Charlotte emerged from her dormitory, arms full of papers, and strode towards the library--a two-minute walk. A man's voice boisterously called out her full name. She stopped; turned.

She had just crested a small hill overlooking the dormitory. The dormitory--in fact a row of three identical quirky, modern structures, whose sharp, spare geometrics made them look like replicas rather than realizations of their blueprints--stood on the edge of a sloping field that stretched for acres. Though situated so as to draw maximum sunlight into its sliding glass doors and bay windows, their clean, deliberate design at times clashed with the soft naturalness of the landscape. At other times, one felt as though the structures, with their sloping roofs and unpainted cedar siding, were formed out of some spore of landscape, the way mushrooms form, or, perhaps, mushroom clouds when nuclear bombs, spore-like, hit the earth. Beyond the field was a thick wood; beyond that, mountains, verdant and florid. Dragonflies glided, bumblebees hummed, young brown rabbits nibbled on clover, and the subdued sun of late afternoon stretched shadows of freshly leaved birch in long, horizontal parallelograms across the distance between Charlotte and the owner of the man's voice.

The voice belonged to Mark: literature student; aspiring writer; reader of Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, and Faulkner. He seemed always to exude these authors, as though some elemental clay or spiritual trace from their stories and their lives spontaneously coalesced into this young man. His birthplace was a small town in Idaho. The Rockies, canyons, forests, streams--the panoply of the state's rugged, grand landscape was alive in Mark's writing. In his stories nature was not merely a backdrop; its textures and colors formed the textures and colors of Mark's thoughts, so that it was reborn through Mark's pen, not merely depicted. In the summer after his freshman year, he traveled in the Amazon. Sophomore year brought him to Alaska to work on a fishing boat. Somehow in adolescence he wound up in California, where he worked as a manual laborer alongside newly immigrated Mexicans. He never attended high school. Perhaps he lived with his family then, perhaps not: there was an inborn worldliness and independence about him, a naturally honed common sense, as though he never had parents, nor needed them. There was none of that flimsy veneer of self-reliance, usually cultivated to hide ignorance, or feelings of abandonment. His skin was smooth and tanned, his muscles well formed, his shoulders broad. He befriended the everyman, living apart from the predominantly white, middle-class college campus and spending as much time with locals in the surrounding blue-collar town as he did with his fellow students. Mark was manly, in that timeless sense: refined, but without pretension; rugged, but not course or violent. Every gesture issued from him as naturally as a spring. Somehow, his sensitivity and observational arts led him to the source of all that makes life remarkable--or he had not actually discovered the source, simply the capacity to be his own source...

***

In my second posting I posited that passion fits in with the reading of literature in that "you don't just read literature, you live it--and insofar as passion implies fierce commitment, focus, desire and a heightening of the senses, passion is necessary for reading richly, just as it is necessary for living richly." When I wrote that I had Emerson in mind, who in "The American Scholar" argues that study of literature is not enough to elicit a vibrant, forward-thinking intellectual life in America; action and nature must balance the influence of literature, otherwise its influence becomes tyrannical. Emerson writes:

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the
worst. What is the right use? What is the one end which all means go to effect?
They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than to be
warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead
of a system. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul.

In saying books' right use is "for nothing but to inspire," Emerson does not suggest that the scholar read casually, lest too deep an involvement with the text render the scholar a slave. Close reading does not crush the scholar; the scholar's greatest threat is his own mind, when it treats books as sacred relics of the past. "Meek young men grow up in libraries," Emerson observes, "believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given; forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books." The effect of such an attitude is that "instantly the book becomes noxious: the guide is a tyrant." The only antidote to this tendency in the scholar is a relentless drive to create. Possessing such a drive is what Emerson means by having an "active soul." Each act of creation, according to Emerson, is defensive, a triumph against the tyranny of homage to the past.

Discursive Alienation

However sophisticated out tools for examining culture and literature, however cemented our discourse in the reality of our fragmentation and the illusion that all meaning is, our expression as human beings never will fully accept these realities. The result is that this sophisticated discourse becomes--as it has already become--alienated from our lived experience. If art is an expression of feeling, a representation of lived experience, something that bridges the intellectual and the emotive (if one believes the two qualities ever were separable), then this sophisticated intellectual discourse is talking ourselves right out of the need for art--while talking itself into impotence.

Slippery Signifiers, Barricated Discourses

One of the most difficult aspects of engaging in a discussion about such an abstract, broad term as "passion," is that one person may use the term one way, and the other person may use it another way, and whatever disagreement might ensue is often not really disagreement, but merely a mutual, mistaken assumption that both people at least agree what the term means. The word "passion," for example, has been appropriated by various discourses--colloquial, religious, academic--and each discourse construes it differently. If these discourses each were islands unto themselves, barricaded by miles-high cliffs and treacherous surf, and if we, their inhabitants, were so landlocked within a single discourse that we lived monk-like on one island, divergences in signification wouldn't matter. But these islands of discourse, through an astonishing feat of ideological geophysics, overlap to form a Venn diagram of sorts. The cause for this overlap, as I see it, is our common humanity, a discourse of lived experience that envelops and carries us forward through our life spans the way a river envalops and carries schools of tadpoles. Islands of discourse--academic, scientific, spiritual--form out of accumulations of sediment, i.e., of all that is most mysterious, most weighty, most 'mineral-rich,' in the human condition, the stuff that resists the pull of the river's unquestioning, eternal rolling. We, amphibian-like, pull ourselves up onto one or more of these islands to lead productive adult lives. Never, however, do we become independent of that river, whose relentless flow erodes discursive islands in the same way they were built. Each discourse slaves away at fortifying its boundaries--by hardening into rock, for example--to prevent erosion. But as Michel-Rolph Trouillot claims, a discourse "can find new directions only if it modifies the boundaries within which it operates.... Alchemists become chemists or cease to be--but the transformation is one that few alchemists can predict and even fewer would wish." In the river's waters, sediment flows from one island to another, back and forth in haphazard swirls; boundaries are illusory. And since most of us cannot live monk-like in one discourse, as each discourse battles to uphold its boundaries, we become tongue-tied: which discourse to speak?

The Language of Idea: Notes from the Master's Thesis Underworld

An image arises relentlessly in my mind: In the courtyard of a university is a peppering of identical suit-clad men and women wielding brooms. The brooms are of the rectangular-brush kind, with which you push dirt forward rather than sweep it to the side. The courtyard's cobblestones are blanketed by dirt as many inches deep as a New England snow. And the dignified men and women, brows furrowed in concentration, no eyes seeking out other eyes, push the dirt into aimless, sporadic piles--only to demolish the piles and make new ones, some isolated, some in clusters, some imposingly tall, others no bigger than a cluster of horse patties. An observer of this scene could not detect a reason behind these piles. The piles are always changing, but the dirt remains the same, withdrawn, exempted as it is inside a square of edifices.

Images arise all the time in my mind--some stand witness unthreateningly in the distance like mute, oafish companions; others surge up and drench me at regular intervals until I relinquish my attention to them. All images are dream-condensations, encapsulating an idea, an impression I never knew I felt, or knew but stubbornly tried to un-know--and if experience has taught me anything it has taught me that recurring images contain information no less true, permanent, or trustworthy than all the knowledge erected upon marble bases of sound rational argument.

Perhaps the above is merely the embittered imagery of one who is relegated to writing her master's thesis several hundred miles away from her university--that is, away from the discursive context, the dirt, the grist, that gives this thesis its foundation. Going to graduate school is akin to journeying to a remote country, being immersed in its language, the ornate, pointed Language of Academe, and then to leave is like returning home to your crude native tongue, only you have to speak the Language of Academe to write the thesis, and there's no immediate context to help you raise your language to the necessary next level. Complicating matters further is that the Language of Academe is the self-professed language of knowledge--the language of culture if only culture could speak the Truth of itself (Language of Academe pooh-poohs this last bit, but it runs rampant in the unconcsious of the language; you hear it if you listen closely)--and your native tongue is the language of experience, yours and your milieu--a messy amalgamation of all your learnings, formal and informal, your beliefs, psychological knots, economic opportunities, biases, etc. Ideally, these two languages could peacefully coexist. But Language of Academe disdains the language of experience. It mocks its narrowness of reference and vagueness of expression, its lack of rigor and propensity to wash one along in a current of complacency. It brazenly trumps the language of experience, assuring that if the language of experience has articulated an idea, Language of Academe has already encapsulated all conceivable facets of that idea into a pat theory. The individual who enrolls in graduate school out of an eagerness to surmount her transparent, flimsy language of experience by means of the marbleized language of knowledge finds herself in a quandary when called upon to speak: She has not mastered the Language of Academe sufficiently to articulate her thought by it, but the language of experience has receded in shame from the tip of her tongue. And so commences a battle on the haggard pages of her master's thesis.

Rules that Beg to Be Broken and Broken

How often, when you set out to write something—whether seminar paper, article for a journal, personal letter, poem or e-mail—does the thought arise in your mind, It’s supposed to be like THIS, where “this” refers to any number of limitations, or rules, that will govern how you will structure what you say? An e-mail should only be *so* long. An article for a scholarly journal has to present the argument like *this*. This poem…this poem should sound like the poetry of _________, whose work I admire so much. I think it is inevitable, that whenever anyone sits down to write, even something as banal as a grocery list—whenever someone faces the bright white space on the screen or the smooth, clean slice of paper, the shape of some rule of forgotten origin expands and looms like the shadow of a figure that interpolated the capacious, incandescent archway leading from the mind into the world and back again. And when that archway is unobstructed? When the mind, that porous cave, is saturated with light so that it grows white like the page and hot, what then—can the thought, that prompted the intent to write, find its way into writing?

A Long-Overdue Response to Anonymous

I apologize profusely to Anonymous, who posted an in-depth response to That Question of Passion, Part I that has not yet been duly addressed. This posting is devoted, Anonymous, to your thoughtful, and thought-provoking, response.

Anonymous said:

Yes, yes, anonymous nods, but unable to refrain, proceeds to reiterate: In the
beginning -- before there is a word, before there is a letter -- in the
beginning is a void. But not merely a void, for the void invites, anticipates,
awaits. The void has one characteristic: desire. The void desires not to be a
void. By desiring, the void has ceased to be a void, because it now possesses
something, a desire. It has one characteristic, which by its number proves the
void has not been a void at all. It has become, or rather always already was, a
text, the text of a desire. But the void seems not to realize this. Or seems not
to care. The void wants to destroy itself, to self-immolate. It continues to
desire not to be a void even though by desiring, it is already not a void. Would
it continue to desire a text if it knew it already possessed a text? Or is it
merely undeterred? Does it simply desire MORE? More and more. And so there comes forth into the void a letter, a word, a sentence, and after some extent of such
things, a passion. One would hope. But there has always already been a text,
because without a text, the text of desire for a text, there could be no text.
Without desire, there could be no passion.

"Passion, or the text, spins words
to placate the anxiety of the speaker. How many words are required to structure
a passion depends on the extent of the speaker’s anxiety--the anxiety over
whether passion will refind itself. Where the words are many, the anxiety of the
speaker is high."

Anxiety. Passion. Anonymous is uncertain of the difference.
Is one a form of the other? Is anxiety caused by passion deferred? Or do you
mean, Carroll, anxiety as Heidegger wrote of it? A collapse in the structure of
the intelligibility of the world, the being utterly alone and out of touch? The
being nothing and nowhere?

I’d like to discuss the style of Anonymous’s response. The “style” of a text encompasses many things; for our purposes let’s consider style as the character, or manner, in which a series of thoughts are transmuted into a formation of written words. In the third posting on this site, I likened literary texts to meals: “Just as we must eat food in order to procure nutrients,” I claimed, “we must somehow imbibe text to procure certain kinds of knowledge.” Style is analogous to flavor, flavor being the trademark of cuisine. (I am attempting to relate abstract terms to the senses as much as possible; in my experience it seems the mind gets more involved in the topic that way.) Style stands out as particularly important to a discussion of passion’s role in literature, in that if passion somehow links the subtle intrapsychic and ideological fields that give rise to the need for and possibility of a text with the physical text itself (see the previous posting), then style is passion’s imprint upon the text. Except for the mention of Heidegger at the end, Anonymous mentions no theorists. His or her ideas might derive from certain theorists or a certain theoretical school—I hear echoes of the structuralists and poststructuralists—but we cannot know for certain. Perhaps Anonymous is a literature professor, or a writer, or an intellectual in the truest sense (a thinker who is not necessarily an academic); whatever Anonymous’s profession, he or she obviously thinks deeply about reading and literature. Since we cannot definitively attach the response to a specific theoretical tradition, and since it presents a number of terms without defining them—terms such as void, desire, and text of desire; chains of events such as the progression from letter to word to sentence to passion; and claims such as “there has always already been a text” and “without desire, there could be no passion”—how ought we to continue this discussion? Through the play of language and nothing else.

More on Style

In other words, the style of a text is analogous, let’s say, to the size, color, and form of crystals in a geode: geodes form, you may remember, when water seeps into a cavity within porous rock (lava, for example, or limestone) and leaves deposits of dissolved minerals that, through a process called nucleation, form crystals. The size, color, and form of these crystals enable geologists to determine the chemicals and chemical reactions that produced the geode. Analogously, examining the style in which a text is written might shed insight into the process by which a text is produced, and the way in which passion perhaps serves as a catalyst for its production. Regarding Anonymous’s response, my purpose is not to analyze, through its style, the process that produced the response. Rather, I address its style in order to highlight the fact that the manner or character in which a subject is spoken about determines what aspects of that subject are discussed, and are able to be discussed. The style of writing or speech inevitably imposes limits on the discussion of a subject. To return to the geode analogy: the cavity in porous rock, the void, to borrow a term from Anonymous’s response, solicits conditions conducive to growing any one of a range of crystals; which one depends upon several conditions occurring at random: what kind of trace minerals are present in the cavity, the cavity’s temperature, and how deep the cavity is in the earth. Before these conditions combine to spur a process, the cavity is nothing but a site of possibility. It serves as a neutral space, whose characteristics are determined by what happens to it and through it. Once conditions for a certain kind of crystal are met, the crystal grows, its atoms aligning in the precise geometric formation which characterizes that crystal. Its geometry is the solidification of a process--like a photograph. Before the process began, any crystal could have formed inside the cavity. A text’s style, like the color, size, and form of a crystal in a geode, is a manifestation of a linguistic geometry resulting from an array of thought processes (cultural and individual—they do not necessarily differ).