Davis – Breaking Up [at] Totality (selections)

Preambulatory Emissions: A Prefatory Post-Script on Where We Will Have Gone

• This work is centrally concerned with negation inasmuch as it challenges the binaristic thought rooted in negation and boundary making.
• disrupts the liberal humanist subject in this section, instead siding on the notion of becoming subject throughout. This logic is also applied to the audience.
• notes that she’ll be rereading histories in this book as a means of “writing toward futurity” (5).
• notes that this is a work not in the typical agonistic vein of scholarship, but “This text will be less interested in proving a(ny) point than in inviting unusual linkages, in calling for new idioms, in holding the space of questioning open.” (5)
• A key idea: D. notes that composition courses are almost always in the service of something else . . . typically the “basic skills” required of a liberal humanist subject. The goal is never writing itself. The problem for D. is that this style “has been allowed to masquerade as writing itself.” Even gestures to collaboration, personal experience and process reify these same goals: the production of the modernist text.
• Method: “break up what is called “composition” by engaging in third sophistic rereadings of the grounds upon which this “discipline” has been built” (7).
• argues that rhetoric must extricate itself from composition’s grasp. This is because “composition” derhetoricizes inquiry and writing.
• undertakes a destructive not devastative project here, emphasizing the potential of destruction and the solidity/non-futurity of devastation.
• A key quote: “In fact, to “teach” writing is to push a world view, a way or ordering ‘the world.’ When we require students to write only according to the criteria associated with what Faigley calls ‘the modernist text,’ we become pushers of hypotactic linking/thinking strategies; we push not simply a writing style but a value system that privileges hierarchy, mastery, and (Final) closure” (12).
• The first two chapters of D.’s work articulates a rhetoric of laughter that breaks up the accepted topoi of the discipline and shatters common ground. The final chapters are a “transfusion” of feminist politics and composition pedagogy that incorporate the rhetoric of laughter (17-8).

Physiological Laughter: The Subject Convulsed

• Baudrillard’s notion of “object strategies”: the domination of the subject by the object.
• is exploring what Cixous calls “the rhythm that laughs you” or the manipulation/possession of the subject by the flux and flow of chaos/objects/life. (22).
• ’s ontological orientation in this piece: “This book accepts the posthumanist notion that human beings are always already functions of other functions: not only are we frequently laughed more than we laugh, we are also spoken more than we speak and even gestured more than we gesture” (23). Obviously, this causes problems of agency and reifies the posthumanist paradox: We make and/but are made by History.
• If, as D. argues, Being is Becoming, then the stability of “I” is lost . . . and in that loss, so too is identity and agency problematized (25).
• As a response to the paradox of becoming, four options are offered: 1) idealists refuse to acknowledge the problem; 2) modernists build something new out of the nothing of flux (still a denial); 3) cynics decries the problem of a loss of the subject and looks nostalgically backward; and 4) kynics celebrate the chaos of flux and the death of the subject, laughing all the while and acting with irony and sarcasm (25).
• Plato’s definition of Kairos: “propriety of time” or saying the right thing at the right moment. In this way it is linked to nomos or humans via social and cultural norms (26). In Gorgianic Kairos, Kairos is an agent – it seizes time and overrules human logic inasmuch as it is linked to divine law or physis. It is alive – and mystical. It is possessive . . . and, as such, can’t be taught as a rhetorical principle.
• This alternative reading of Kairos posits moments of kairotic possession as distinctly anachronistic and situationally inappropriate. IoW, the antithesis of Platonic Kairos. According to D., Kairos and kairotic laughter are convulsions that remind us of the validity of the posthumanist paradox: we make and are made by History.
• calls the Idealist insistence on the complete “Ideal-I” liberal humanist subject is tyrannical. This subject is secured in a foundation (God, transcendental signified) and is invested in a singular political program masquerading as the only political program (32). It is a product of the “classical episteme.”
• grounds the idealist subject in a metaphysics of presence: something always “is” by what it “is not.” Negation is the foundation of identity. The problem here is that what lies outside of the present/absent dialectic is ripe for annihilation and extermination. It fails to figure into the metaphysics at all (33).
• relies on Herder to argue that the mind/body split that underpins rationality has been critiqued from the very beginning of the Enlightenment project in the 18^th century. This is, to some degree, a materialist/empiricist philosophy speaking back to the idealism of Kant/Descartes.
• relies on Nietzsche’s theory of the subject as multiplicity to again critique the unity of the liberal humanist Enlightenment subject. She then extends this work vis-à-vis Butler to take on the constructedness of gender. What appears as a unified subject is “a politically oppressed/repressed/suppressed excess: it is a subject-as-multiplicity that has gone through political negation, abjection, inscription in order to fix it, to hold it steady” (38).
• The body itself is a contestation that is politically/discursively constituted and exists only in that discursive contested construction.
• The Modernist episteme recognizes the problem of unified identity . . . but then it searches relentlessly for certainties and universals that will ground itself (41). This is a recognition of the subject as orderer and ordered. The “individual” is replaced by the “subject” who recognizes that there’s no metalinguistic (read: ideal) foundation for things. Yet, the Modernist works to reestablish that foundation – to produce it through acts of power by hegemonic force.
• Whereas the idealists struggled with the metaphysics of presence, the Modernists operate from a metaphysics of absence where no “Real” thing exists. That’s not a bad thing, though. From that absence you can build the world anew. Building that world is the Modernist project . . . and it can be built correctly. (43) This is a disruption of the classical episteme . . . but it still doesn’t problematize the subject/object dichotomy itself.
• The counterhuman sciences (ethnography, linguistics & psychoanalysis) further problematize the Modernist project, highlighting how the subject itself is a function of other functions, “an object of other forces” (44). When thought this way, agency is again made difficult and the subject/object dichotomy thrown into question. Key quote: “Man, the effect that masquerades as cause” (45).
• The Idealist and Modernist impulse to “save” the subject is, according to D., an impulse to save agency. Interestingly, the postmodern must intervene, annihilating the subject, before the modern can reestablish it’s supremacy. IoW, the postmodern precedes the modern (46).
• According to D., the cynic is one that recognizes the posthuman paradox but refuses to do anything about it. They are enlightened but paralyzed, nostalgic for Idealist humanism. Like Modernists, cynics are “metaphysicians of absence” inasmuch as they understand there is nothing where the Idealists once thought there was a transcendental signifier. Unlike the Modernists, they don’t believe you can build something back up in its place. They despair, and their nihilism is rooted in a nostalgic longing for the subject made whole.
• The fourth: the Kynic. The Kynic, according to D., celebrates release from the “tyranny of meaning, the weight of Truth” (52). Kynismos is a rude, irreverent and blasphemous orientation to the world . . . but it isn’t sad or nostalgic. As D. notes, “If the cynic’s enlightenment is ‘unhappy,’ the kynic’s is ‘uncivil’” (53).
• “When things get too heavy, too saturated with meaning and wholes, the ‘force of gravity’ becomes unbearable. Kynics respond to the overbearing weight of meaning with an overwhelming opposition to it. Kynics do not fear fluidity” (54). That being said, it doesn’t occupy the position of rupture – the third way; rather, it is trapped also in the binary logic. As a counterpart to cynicism, it celebrates absence but doesn’t look past the metaphysics of presence/absence itself.
• Those moments when the binary is exceeded are what D. calls moments of “affirmation” (56).
• The affirmative responses are about excess about “parts is parts” and there is no whole. The affirmative response, or the sovereign position, is this excess. It begins within the negation of meaning present in the kynic position but then breaks with the negation of the metaphysics of absence, taking a third way. This is a double-negation or, a “denegation” that refuses the negation of the negative in the pursuit of excess. There was never presence and absence, never a dichotomy in the first place . . . there is only excess (61).
• This excess isn’t chaos, however. It is a space for the development of a new ethics that is post-identitarian (think Hardt & Negri) and that is affirmative. A new “affirmative politics-cum-ethics” (62).
• Sloterdijk on the affirmative response: “But in the laughter of Diogenes and Buddha, the ego itself, which had taken things so seriously, laughs itself to death” (64).

A Rhetoric of Laughter for Composition Pedagogy

• begins by noting that composition “is a seriously political business” (210) that teaches a worldview that includes a particular relationship among the writer, reader, language and ‘reality” (209).
• notes that radical composition pedagogies are out to challenge the “service” orientation that positions composition as in the service to the dominant social-economic apparatus.
• seeks a feminist composition politics that “ex/scribe itself from phallologocentric ordering systems” while also resisting textual/sexual closure” *211).
• The 3 E’s of liberal education: 1) Enlightenment; 2) Empowerment; 3) Emancipation. Feminist composition pedagogies don’t just try to create “productive citizens” but want to create “critical feminist subjects, revolutionary feminsts armed for the Grand March of women’s liberation” (211).
• claims that most feminist pedagogies end up functioning in much the same way as how Foucault describes discipline: they conceal the very pedagogical violence they hope to remove; and, in the process, normalize epistemic violence carried out by the teacher (212).
• argues that the “pedagogical imperative” or the notion that any theory of writing must also include within it a theory of teaching is a problem that must be removed. Instead of offering more pedagogy, D. argues that we must move toward a postpedagogy (213). She calls this a pedagogy of laughter that 1) unworks pedagogy’s violence; 2) unravels composition; and 3) creates an affirmative resistance to identity politics (213).
• The phallocentric bind for feminists: to “empower” students, teachers must assume the power of the authority/pedagogue. This is exactly the phallocratic game: power shifting (214).
• highlights how some feminist pedagogues attempt a politics of nurturance that uses positions of power to foster community and function as social lubricant. In composition, this takes the form of collaboration-consensus based critical pedagogies that tries to distinguish between good and bad authority (215).
• Argument is contrasted with dialectic in some feminist pedagogies to promote interaction through mediation and consensus building.
• highlights how Jarratt relies on argumentation to facilitate conversation among equals, and an eventual resolution through shared hermeneutical understanding (216). This is still a faith in discourse and argumentation to function as a humanizing essence for interlocutors. D. criticizes even this position for conflict functions here as something to be smoothed/transformed toward some predetermined end (217).
• argues that the nurturer-mother pedagogue is actually the “bearded mother” or “Phallic Mother” inasmuch as the authority game is the same (219). The mother nurtures her students into Proper ways of being. This is another, and more insidious, way of reifying the family structure and all the misogyny that accompanies it. The mother, or mediator, retains her authority precisely because she can conceal the fact that she has it at all.
• kills it here: “when ‘power-with’ (mediation) doesn’t get it, ‘power-over’ is Plan B. . . . the authoritative feminist pedagogue steps in to assure that the class will socially construct the correct truth(s), or those truths deemed correct by the pedagogue facilitating this ‘democratic’ interaction” (220).
• calls “pedagogy hope” the idea that as teachers we can find a pedagogical techne that will create the right kind of students (222). This concept is based on Vitanza’s notion of “theory hope.”
• describes a fascinating problem: If teachers aren’t “teaching-as-knowledge-passing” and also aren’t teaching as subject producing, then “what” are they supposed to be doing in the classroom? (224)
• claims that “What the teacher, who does not know what s/he knows, passes in the classroom is her own desire as s/he attempts to find the articulation of what s/he knows in the student-Other” (227). This is the sujet suppositaire or the idea that the student is called into a particular subjectivity. “The pedagogue, playing the one who knows, launches “a suppository movement” into her student’s subjectivity, the success of which is then determined and evaluated by way of an examination of the student-subjects’ productions/excretions: ‘How do I get an A in this class?’ You become moldable, you accept my desire without a fight, and you manage to articulate well my desire once I have made my deposit (in you).” (227)
• excoriates the notion that writing functions as a tool to incorporate students into the post-Fordist communication economy vis-à-vis “literacy.” Writing in these classrooms is reduced to a very identifiable set of processes to be memorized and used to gain access to the economic system (229).
• wonders, “What if we put ourselves into the service of writing rather than the other way around?” (231). This is the possible foundation of composition that isn’t stuck in the two-way trap of feminist/masculinist composition: 1) for creating an economic subject; and 2) for creating a feminist revolutionary. Both do subjective violence.
• argues that the composition class functions in much the same way as the pharmacy: it mediates and controls the subject and the “drug” (in this case, writing) so that the subject has access to the right kind of drugs that don’t “take possession” of the subject . . . but at the same time, the existence of the composition course-as-pharmacy perpetuates drug (writing) culture itself (233).
• claims that a writing course for writing’s sake would devote itself to an “affirmative unraveling” of established epistemologies and would devote itself to the “Laughter in language” that comes with “thinking of the Unthought” (235).
• claims that a writing for writing’s sake course would be an exercise in writing for no one . . . and in that, it would exercise a “feminine” ethics inasmuch as it isn’t “phallically aimed nor referentially anchored” (238).
• echoes Biesecker (or the other way around) when she notes that a writing for writing’s sake course acknowledges the impossibility of guaranteeing a link between our words and our intentions.
• What would the writing for writing’s sake course do? “It would be about inviting the affirmative decision to ‘let everything go’ to let loose the writing in you and watch it move, feel its brilliance crack your shell, blow your mind. It would be bout inviting students to become-anonymous-conducting-machines, ‘not in order to stop the effects’ but to allow them to flow into ‘new metamorphoses, in order to exhaust their metamorphic potential’ . . . . What this couse would invite, then, would be an interruption of mythation and so . . . a celebration of finitude and an exposition of community” (240).
• claims that authority in this writing course would mimic phallic authority. It would be “mercilessly teased, parodied, pastiched” so the difference between teacher and student would become less and less visible/distinct (242).
• Students in this class would not promote traditional argumentation; rather, they would be exercises in continued listening and extensions of communication. They “would not be about ‘exposition’ or ‘argumentation’ but about ‘trying out questions,’ pressing the limits of discourse, making unusual links, pointing to the limit, the betweenus space” (243). According to D. this requires a “rhetoric on steroids” or a rhetoric that works its way through microcircuits to produce what functions as truth. This would also highlight the polyethoi or multitude of subject positions that occupy students (244).
• recommends a rhizomatic writing, or a paratactic linking-(non)system of writing that emphasizes not the origin or the destination but the going and motion of writing itself. This is based on what D&G call a logic of the “AND” (245). In this sense, writing is in the service of “desire in language” . . . and that desire is the call of the community, the Being-in-common.
• makes a great point when discussing the MOO: all texts – pulp and electric – are always already hypertextual (249).
• According to D., we writing teachers want to experience the force of language and to offer students the opportunity to experience it as well (251).
• In her afterword, D. notes that the pedagogy of laughter she describes “prefers to challenge the assumptions on which such expectations (Does it offer a solution or just criticize? Is it politically, ethically and academically responsible) are based; it hopes to question the usual questions, to open a space for other questions to be posed” (255).