So, in response to the final projects, I humbly try to cobble together a Thomas paper that can put those projects into conversation while threading together some of the themes we discussed throughout the semester. I end up thinking about the legacy of the postmodern.
I want to thank all of you for contributing to an engaging semester. I hope you enjoyed tackling these readings as much as I have. I also hope they haunt you in years to come as you develop or refine your own problems. If Ulmer is right, if problems b us, then I think these readings articulate a set of problems worthy of being (being addressed, not solved).
Phil’s discussion of objects in Latour caught my attention, especially thinking of objects as things in terms of “concerns.” A thing is a gathering. One thing we didn’t talk about in class was Latour and “black boxes”: that everything is a kind of mystery that collects infinite other actants. And every one of those actants can itself be opened. Black boxes all the way down; there is no one foundational, fundamental substance at the bottom (and here’s a connection between Latour and Burke). Latour talks about black boxes in Pandora’s Hope, and Harman spends considerable time with them in Prince of Networks. It leads to the metaphysical thesis that I did discuss in class: that for Latour something is “real” only to the extent that I can demonstrate its impact on another actant. I see this thesis as highly rhetorical–especially if we read it across Davis’s notion of our originary rhetoricity.
In response to Ryan’s project, I would compare Heidegger’s treatment of aletheia (as revealing, a solitary process?) against that developed by McComiskey in Gorgias, in which he argues that aletheia operates in distinction to episteme as two different senses of knowledge/truth: true/false (an objective or “self”ish standard) vs. true/lie (which requires both speaker and listener, a more rhetorical, and more messy, binary). I did want to both acknowledge and warn caution with his framing of Heidegger and Levinas. He states: “…Heideggerian philosophy of “self” toward a Levinasian philosophy of ethics.”
My warning here: while I agree with you, many Heideggerian scholars would challenge this assumption that Heidegger is caught up in the self. Isn’t he caught up in the self’s relationship to the world, they might rejoinder? That is Levinas’s critique of Heidegger, but that critique is often rejected as a misreading by Levinas. I don’t think it is. And I think this bit about rethinking aletheia (particularly if McComiskey is correct) helps support Levinas’s position: Heidegger isn’t interested in other(s), especially the early Heidegger that frames them in terms of the “they” that Dasein must escape if it is to forge a more authentic relationship with Being.
In terms of Heidegger and the warning against the temptation of destiny (the master, meta-narrative). Derrida picks this up from Heidegger in terms of the terrifying undecidablilty of the future, and the knowledge that the future will judge us; that the present is experienced, under the tyranny of the future’s undecideability, as the will-have-been. This is often a critique of liberals–that while conservatives stare blindly into a past they themselves imagined, liberals are frozen from taking action today because they are so sure of the eventual utopia that lies in the future.
Any small action that might improve conditions today, that involves compromises, are immediately dismissed as not perfect enough. The future will judge us for our compromises. And so we make none. And so nothing happens. And so here is why I am interested in “kynicism,” which I (very idiosyncratically) define as the small actions we can take to make things just a little bit better. They are tactics not strategies. But they are something. Something we can do. I think that picks up some of Johanna’s stress (unfortunately, Johanna’s video isn’t on YouTube)–but certainly not all of it. She asks of herself “have I dared I disturbed the universe?” This is the question we need to be asking ourselves (?) Is this the legacy of postmodernism–the inheritance of the priority of disruption? I wish we had read Davis’s earlier work, Breaking Up [at] Totality. It picks up right here. But, on the other hand, I am glad we worked through Innessential Solidarity, though I think it sends us to a different question.
Caitilin considered the transformation of the public sphere from a physical place filled with (privileged, male, land-owning) physical bodies to something much more distributed, virtual, complex, networked, etc–the way you think about the public sphere via Thomas’s definition of rhetoric and ambiance (as the context in which, through which, we flourish). As we talked about in class–I think this is the wonderful challenge of the 21st century, the possibility of actually cultivating a public sphere–of transforming what was once merely an ideal concept into a material reality. It will be a messy process.
I also was drawn to Anne’s framing of Rice in terms of looking to write differently about problems (unfortunately, Anne’s video isn’t on YouTube). I think this is a great walk away for me. Since I am writing about listening, I see that here–and I think this different/listening is a part of coping with the messy process of actually cultivating an actual public. Our normal, logocentric, way about writing about problems is to hurry (Heidegger might say efficiently) to a solution. If we read Rice with Corder echoing in the background, we need to cultivate a process that includes the time to allow one’s narrative to change, one that opens up the possibility of seeing new narratives, new solutions. Because, I would argue via Levinas, solutions should not begin from the default assumption of persuading the other, but rather should always involve a changing, a reorientation of the self.
Tiffany offered a great–or should I sing “amazing”– one line walk away for Jenny Rice’s suspicions toward feeling and change: “caring about changes and actually effecting change are different things.” Furthermore, I think Tiffany’s work on drag as a mode of critical intervention has interesting implications (even if it sets off my postpedagogical warning beacons–”attention, we are approaching ideological ramming speed!”).
Zach’s had me thinking all semester, the (post)humanist sitting on my Otherwise [than] Humanist shoulder. He helped with my Levinas/Latour revisions by making me realize that, at the core, I do not believe in Latour’s at least implicit assumption that knowledge will solve (post)human problems. And I do not even believe Latour believes that either. Hence why the older Latour stresses religion, because religion is his way of getting at the non-epistemic elements (the rhetoric) require to move people toward change. That’s where I see his work heading. Levinas is there from the start. Watching his project even more convinces me on this point–that Latour’s interest in the affective stems from recognizing the insufficiency of the logos.
In response to Katherine’s piece on curiosity and education, as much as I support “whole being” and creative education, and work to foster it, I also see an educational system–saturated with corporate desire–opposing its cultivation. The rise of standardization will be the biggest block to creative–and any–education in the 21st century. We need to stand vigilant in opposition. Not that I have a problem with generating and insisting upon a curriculum. But we cannot allow teaching to be a simple unfolding of that pre-generated curriculum, as if it were programming a computer or following a script. This, I think, is the dream vision of education being advanced by those who have never stepped in a classroom. Asimov sensed that vision, and wrote a wonderful response to it, via his short story “Profession.” Worth your time. Seriously.
Because, as Asimov suggests, the infiltration of efficiency into education isn’t new. It has been there for quite awhile.
Cagle brings us to the subject of efficiency. I had not heard, but appreciate, Agyeman’s distinction between sufficiency and efficiency she offers in her talk. Readings frames efficiency, via Lyotard, as excellence. Or, put another way, excellence is a step toward Agyeman’s efficiency. Whether we are discussing teaching, or problem solving, the question Cagle leaves us with (and Katherine, Anne, Rice, Rickert, Davis) is how we cultivate an opposition to efficiency. That, I want to say, is the legacy of the postmoderns. And, hopefully, the legacy of Contemporary Rhetorics.
