|
Weeks #1-2d, Continued: My Lecture NO.tes used for the Seminar, Wednesday, 2000, January 19th & 26th.
Previous Notes #1c | Previous Notes #1b | (Originating Notes #1a) |
Continued>>
 Body&Noise: The Private, Public, Pubic Spheres. Kristeva, Serres, Kott,... |
I'm going to begin with Julia Kristeva instead of Ian Kott, for JK mis/identifies the component that is excluded and IK gives us a try angle of what has been Xcluded. (I will insert a notion from Serres in between the two.) With this disgustshun we will have been departing from the disciplinary view and its norms, though we will be working and playing, nonetheless, in the disciplinary body of the field of Rhetoric and Composition. Instead of calling on Kristeva and Kott, I could re/employ Mikhail Bakhtin (whom Kristeva herself calls on), but I have chosen not to and for the simple reason that there are already numerous articles employing Bakhtin and R/C, though these employments are greatly cleaned up and attenuated.
An Aside:
If there is a Communication Triangle, there is also, more so, some more so, " 'A Demonic Triangle,' " according to KB, of " 'excrement, blood and flowers' as 'three essential oils' of human plight. (By 'demonic triangle' I refer to a concept I first developed in my Grammar of Motives. It concerns the terministic fact that the three persons of the Trinity have their burlesqued analogues in terms of the fecal, diuretic, and genital respectively. [Here most Freudians cut corners.]" Language as Symbolic Action 251; KB's bracketed statement and pun. |
Bodies learn language (KBurke) but they also f/art and excrete and present us with foul alternatives (cf. MB Rabelais and His World; Allen Weiss The Aesthetics of Excess; and my "Excurus. Preludes to Future [anterior] Histories of Rhetorics..." in Negation...).
Any discussion of scatology (or associated scatoareas) is greatly aVoided in (and pUrged from) the corpus of R/C. Or from most certainly and decorously from Rhetoric and Speaking. (VVhich leaves us, or me, with the question: Can we un/knot see the Tourette syndrome as a method of invention? Yes!) Things called 'writing' decompose right before our eyes and recompose. Decomposition.
By beginning with Kristeva, I will be able to begin by(e) way of ethics and politics and Language (logos). Then going on to Kott, I will be able to locate (topos, locus) the sites of writing-excrement (decomposition) and all else that is norm ally Xcluded for the sake of (forsaken for) a discipline. A Philosophical-Rhetorical Discipline. VVhich accepts Socratic-Platonic Dialogues but rejects--does not let be thought--DeSadean Dialogues, which are concerned with the dark side of Reason (See, e.g., Pierre Klossowski and Annie Le Brun).
Some More Disorienting Meditations:
The Pelvic Sphere, the pelvic triangle: The body that learns language is the body that also f/arts.
Noise as nusiance (the sound-rhythms of mouth belching, stomach growling, anus f/arting--the alimentary phunctions) is a source for nascence. Noise is inventive (heuristic) and aleatory (a throw of the dice).
And Yet, all that this lack of decorum really signifies is a bad infantile experience in toilet training! Right? After all, Look at what the early critics did with and to JSwift! (But see Norman O. Brown, Ch. 13, "The Excremental Vision" in Life Against Death.)
Alright, if you made it this far (out), then we can take up Kristeva ("Ethics of Linguistics" in Desire in Language): Who opens with a reference to "a prominent modern grammarian," who "in his linguistic theories he sets forth a logical, normative basis for the speaking subject, while in politics he claims to be an anarchist." (Is she referring to Chomsky?) She then speaks of the new ethics:
Ethics used to be a coercive, customary manner of ensuring the cohesiveness of a particular group through the repetition of a code--or more or less accepted apologue. Now, however, the issue of ethics crops up wherever a code (mores, social contract) must be shattered in order to give way to the free play of negativity, need, desire, pleasure, and jouissance, before being put together again, although temporarily and with full knowledge of what is involved. Fascism and Stalinism stand for the barriers that the new adjustment between a law and its transgression comes against.
JK continues:
Meanwhile, linguistics is still bathed in the aura of systematics [recall systems of western rhetoric] that prevailed at the time of its inception. It is discovering the rules governing the coherence of our fundamental social code.... The epistemology underlying linguistics and the ensuing cognitive processes (structuralism, for example) ... seem helplessly anarchronistic when faced with the contemporary mutations of subject [i.e., in poststructuralism, the problem of the ethical subject] and society.... [Moreover,] the problem of linguistic ethics means, above all, compelling linguistics to [see and] change its object of study. The speech practice that should be its object is one in which signified structure ... is
Need to Know:
JK in Revolution in Poetic Language makes an important distinction between
 The Semiotic (associated with the Chora [Plato, "Timaeus."])
The Symbolic.
The Semiotic is what Linguistics proper has not studied but must only deflect, since unaccountable in a Linguistics proper. JK writes: "Indifferent to language, enigmatic and feminine, this space [the atopos of the chora] underlying the written is rhythmic, unfettered, irreducible to its intelligible verbal translation; it is musical, anterior to judgment, but restrained by a single guarantee: syntax." The Symbolic is what linguistics proper can study.
See, e.g., Jacques Derrida, On the Name; Gregory Ulmer, Heuretics.
|
defined within boundaries that can be shifted by the advent of a semiotic rhythm that no system of linguistic communication has yet been able to assimilate.... [It] would establish poetic language as the object of linguistics' attention in its pursuit of truth in language.... (bold emphasis mine)
With a realization of the problems of the ethical subject and object (which must include poetic language not as the Symbolic but the Semiotic ), Kristeva argues,
"we must analyze those elements of the complex operation that I shall call poetic language ... that are screened out by ordinary language, i.e., social constraint. I shall then be talking about something other than language--a practice for which any particular language is the margin. The term 'poetry' has meaning only insofar as it makes this kind of studies acceptable to various educational and cultural institutions. But the stakes it entails are totally different; what is implied is that language, and thus sociability, are defined by boundaries admitting of upheaval, dissolution, and transformation. Situating our discourse near such boundaries might enable us to endow it with a current ethical impact. In short, the ethics of a linguistic discourse may be gauged in proportion to the poetry that it presupposes." (bold emphasis mine)
A Look Back for a Look Forward: In our first seminar meeting, I asked each of you to think about What your relationship is with language (Logos). Here JK is reasking and reanswering the question for herself and for Linguists and the rest of us. In 1986 (in the article "Critical Sub/Version of The History of Philosophical Rhetoric"), I asked the field R/C, What is their relationship with language. It is, I believe, the most crucial question that we must consider for ethical and political rhetorics. What we determmine to be our relationship will determine our Subject, Object, or Abject (Xcluded) position. It will also determmine the conditions for the possibility of action as well. There is everything more to say about all this, and we will return to re/begin (to the) saying (of) it.
And therefore Where are we to discover Model for the New Linguist(ic)s? JK answers, "A most eminent modern linguist believed that, in the last hundred years, there had been only two significant linguists in France: Mallarme and Artaud. As to Heidegger, he retains currency, in spite of everything, because of his attentiveness to language and 'poetic language' as an opening up of beings;...."
JK continues by examining avant-garde movements of the 20th century. She refers to Roman Jakobson as an avant-garde Linguist, especially his studies of "Russian Poetry of my Generation," in which he gives "a reading of Mayakovsky and Khlebnikov." And in particular, "The Generation That Wasted Its Poets." [Or as in today, its Profession, its Students!] JK writes:
We tend to read this article as if it were exclusively an indictment of a society founded on the murder of its poets. This is probably true; when the article first appared in 1931, even psychoanalysts were not all convinced that 'society was not based on complicity in the common crime,' as Freud had written in Totem and Taboo. On the basis of his work on Mayakovsky, Jakobson suggested [however] that the crime was more concretely the murder of poetic language. By 'society,' he probably meant more than just Russian or Soviet society; there are frequent and more general allusions to the 'stability of the unchanging present,' to 'life, hardened along narrow and rigid models,' and to 'daily existence.' Consequently we have this Platonistic acknowledgment on the eve of Stalinism and fascism: a (any) society may be stabilized only if it excludes poetic language.... The question is unavoidable: if we are not on the side of those whom society wastes inorder to reproduce itself, where are we? (bold emphasis mine)
It's not only Encoder and Decoder; it's also the Code (signal, Language) that this society but also "we" today continue to lay Waste. This notion is worth repeating: For stability, "we" would have to exclude "poetic language." And what is meant by poetic language? What, in this case, usually goes for Noise! And all people who misvalue and misperpetuate Noise!
Michel Serres: Writes of Dialectic (2 men) and Noise, cacography (the excluded third man). He explains:
Following scientific tradition, let us call noise the set of these phenomena of interference that become obstacles to communication. Thus, cacography is the noise of graphic form or, rather, the latter comprises an essential form and a noise that is either essential or occasional. To write badly is to plunge the graphic message into this noise which interferes with reading, which transforms the reader into an epigraphist. In other words, simply to write is to risk jumbling a form In the same way,
| Noise as Inventive:
Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises;
Jacques Attali, The Political Economy of Music;
Theodore Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock.
Third Man, excluded:
See my "Threes" and any of my discussions on a Third Sophistic, including Negations....
Elizabeth L. Berg, "The Third Woman." Diacritics 12 (1982): 11-20.
|
to communicate orally is to risk losing meaning in noise.... [C]ommunication is a sort of game played by two interlocutors considered as united against the phenomena of interference and confusion, or against individual with some stake in interrupting communication. These interlocutors ... battle together against noise. The Cacographer and the epigraphist, the cagophonous speaker and the auditor, exchange their reciprocal roles in dialogue, where the source becomes reception, and the reception source (according to a given rhythm).... To hold a dialogue is to suppose a third man and to seek to exclude him; a successful communication is the exclusion of the third man. The most profound dialectical problem is not the problem of the Other, who is only a variety--or a variation--of the Same, it is the problem of the third man. We might call this third man the demon, the prosopopeia of noise.
For Serres the source of the new is "the third man," is "the prosopopeia of noise." Which we would exclude in the good name of establishing stability for meaning.
Serres, in his major work The Parasite, discusses the productivity of noise at great length. It is "interruption" that he sees as the creative intervention into the so-called Communication Triangle:
There are two ways, among some more, to read the vertical pole: one is that Noise (or interruption) and Code are separate, mutually exclusive; the other is that they are together playing off of each other constantly, theoretically and practically multiplying meanings beyond what is ac/countable. When this latter happens, we witness "rhetoricity." Or "pure rhetoric" (see below, DeMan, "Semiology and Rhetoric"). Noise (or interruption) and Code are separate when "we" attempt to fix them paradigmatically; they are together when we attempt to fix them! Go figure!
(If you recall, when we began with our selected-collected definitions, Bob Scott defined "rhetoric" as "communication characterized by a high degree of intentionality and a high degree of structure, including distinctness of communicative roles; it eventuates in discourse in the public realm of experience rather than the private." Every differentia of this definition is perversely & paradoxically met by the various misdifferentiae of Noise&Interruptions that make language and communications possible at all.)
To be inventive, serendipitous, one cum a radical many, at time/s (kairos),
Becoming Rude! Can be-becoming. Of you.
Brake the norm. (Let the paraphraxes--slips of the two fleshes, e.g., speaking lips (tulips), writing fingers--rock and roll.) Maintaining the status quo by way of rudeness, however, is a bore. "Stop! You can't say that, for you are speaking nonsense, breaking every rule of critical thinking!" The status quo must be perpeutally interrupted. Like a volcano (Aetna) errupting. Like a body taken over by Laughter. Or the hiccups (hiccough). Or a tic. (Helene Cixous is good at writing about this kind of erruption (of laughter). So is Diane Davis. Also see Deleuze and Guattari on Kafka and Becoming....)
Kott (Darnton): It's time for another inclusive--yet systematic--if incompossible, non-Euclidean--Try Angle. (VVe have only hinted at how to re/include unsystematically, but we event ually will have become less and less systematic. Becoming Elliptical. Hyperbolical.)
There is a similarity between the try angular thinking of Kott (the sexual triangle) and Robert Darnton (the communications circuit): Both take--contrary to their predecessors--the material conditions into account. And work and play at reincluding what had heretofore been Xcluded:
Kott, the opening/closings that are the sites of announced bodily functions (we communicate with mouth, tongue, lips, and other orifices);
Darnton, the open/closings of the full circuit of, say, book and/or article publishing (we get published through and by way of economic/social conjuncture [intellectual influences and publicity, political and legal sanctions], publisher, printers, supplier [e.g., paper, ink, type labor], shippers, book sellers, readers).
Countless things "happen" (as in an almost "happening") between and on the way from the encoder to the decoder!
Kott: The bod(il)y (matter/s) functions:
The parentheses and slashes, do they make it difficult to read the above words? While they slice up a word--it's a cut-up method (Bryon Guyson&William S. Burroughs)--showing layers of words within words, uncovering the paradigmatic (vertical) structure over the syntagmatic (horizontal) structure, making more meanings to compete for one meaning, we can get lost. Or stopped in our tracks. And have to reread several times to get the gists (the various&vertiginous un.re.foldings) of what's happening.
What Kott offers is an extension of the Claude Levi-Strauss culinary triangle (Structural Anthropology):
Not at ease with
Nature (physis),
We select
Culture (nomos, nomoi).
In Levi-Strauss's rendering,
Nature = Death;
Culture = Life.
Or Culture = Life on terms that are more acceptable to us. Essentially, we have placed Nature under negation and created a Culture or customs-laws. In selecting Culture, we select Sex and Food (which are at the apex) according to a variety of customized norms and laws. We establish cultural taboos against what we see as unacceptable Sex in Nature (homosexuality, incest, the whole ball of birds-bees wax) and as unacceptable food and as unacceptable preparations of and recipies for that or any food (pork or beef, sweet and sour mixed, etc.) A meal is a communication just as sex is a form of communication, communion. Food and Sex are tokens in an exchange or gift economy. (See Geo. Bataille, Erotism and N. O. Brown, Life Against Death and Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology.)
 Kott's extension-revision (there are several, but I focus on two that allow for eventual superimposition of the communication triangle on the sexual triangle and vice-vers[e]a): The homologue between the two (culinary and sexual) triangles--which are still all about communication (in a gift exchange economy)--is between
culture <--- Life and Mouth, to eat - to breath, "voice";
and
nature ---> Death and Anus, to excrete - to fart, "noise."
Basically, that which is on the left is okay; that which is on the right of the triangle is not okay. Most Grossly, the two ends/ins of the alimentary and digestive track all the way to eliminatory system are coded differently. One sustains life by taking in; the other sustains life by excluding. (Perhaps, I can say hyperbolically that nothing is more politically coded than the human body, and all so coded that we encoders and decoders will have known how[l] to speak in and out of it.)
One represents in the analogy or homologue "Voice" as composition-communication;
the other represents, "Noise" as decomposition-miscommunication.
It's a simple set of ratios with simple combinations and permutations. But it's a complex set of results for many human beings who are seen as less than "human" (culture). As the unspeakables (either they only miscommunicate because they are "raised" so to speak by nature or they are outside of a common [i.e., "our"] culture or they cannot be spoken about at all, for they do not, for economic-political reasons, exist) and the untouchables, the Xcluded (they are carriers of filth). (See Alexander Garcia Duttmann, At Odds With AIDS. Stanford, CA; Stanford UP, 1996.)
The Public Sphere (Habermas) and the Pubic, Cloacal Sphere (Kott) are rent in two, virtually, into a Third. (The triangles, though trios, represent only a dyad, not a triad. But though not re/presented, the third [turd] is present. It takes two, recall Serres, to exclude the third (turd). We are not at peace with our Natural Bodies that learn Language Custom-Cultural-ized, nor are we on most occasions at peace with other cultural-customized bodies, e.g., extreme tatooing and body piercing.)
Kott explains: "In this classification system the idealization of the mouth corresponds to the abasement of the anus: the 'hole' is related to the cloaca (meaning both a sewer, a receptacle for filth, and in its zoological use, referring to the common orifice of the urinary, eliminatory and genital systems in vertegrate embroyos), to filth and, in the semantics of myths, to the 'gates of Hell.' "
The Status-Actus (KBurke) relationship is rent (or torn, divided within itself) here. KB writes about Stasis words: Specifically, hypostasis:
Medically, the word can designate a suppression, as of humours that ought to come to the surface; also matter deposted in the urine; and of liquids generally, the sediment, lees, dregs, grounds. When we are examining, from the standpoint of Symbolic, metaphysical tracts that would deal with 'fundamentals' and get to the 'bottom' of things, this last set of meanings can admonish us to be on the look-out for what Freud might call 'cloacal' motives, furtively interwoven with speculations that may on the surface seem wholly abstract. An 'acceptance' of the universe on this plane may also be a roundabout way of 'making peace with the faeces.' " (Grammar of Motives 23)
Where are "we" now!? but so uncomfortable with "the 'thinking [speaking, writing] of the body' " (KB, GM 302)!?
And Where and How shall We reBegin!? I recall Frank Lentricchia's recollection of an ending that is yet a(nother) re/beginning, a re/beginning that illustrates in part how KB self-depicts the way that an audience depicted him. Lentricchia writes:
I want to begin my pursuit of the issue of criticism as social force with a look at an event in the life of Kenneth Burke, the publication of which in his books and collections he has to this point deferred; an event which, according to his testimony, produced hallucinations of 'excrement . . . dripping from my tongue,' of his name being shouted as a 'kind of charge' against him, a 'dirty word'--'Burke!' . . . Burke's kind of Marxism could be received only as heresy--as the very discourse of excrement. (Criticism and Social Change 21-22)
The proper made improper, the name (identity) turned to excrement--Burke is having to make peace with his audience's reception of what they take to be fascistic faeces, being spoken to them. His discourse ("Revolutionary Symbolism in America")--that so upset the audience at the American Writers' Congress, April 1935--inverted (more so, in the ears of the audience, perverted) the nature/culture status of orthodox Marxism when KB emphasized 'symbolism' (text, culture) over nature (matter). For the Old Left in the 30s, matter was reality, 'twas nature and not symbolic (cultural). For the New Left of the 30s, the reverse was the case as it was for KB.
Let's continue looking at this nature/culture (compromise formation?) with Kott's next triangle.
Kott has many interesting things to say about the French-English etymologies and puns on the words in this version of the triangle, and on psychoanalytic characterizations, but I want to focus on, in closing for a reopening, the "I"-"You"-"It" relationships that the communication (communion) triangle signifies. What is better here, perhaps what is more fully presented here instead of in the generic communication triangle, is both success and failure, communication and miscommunication, acceptance of the law and transgression of the law, etc. We can see here how something becomes "shit." There is a set law and accountability for success in the "I"-Mouth relationship with the "You/The Other." The directions of Negation and Identification make for a matching and separation of the sexes, M/F. However, there is a set law and accountability for a successful failure in the "You/The Other" relationship with the "It"-Anus. Whereas the former has the conditions for only possible heterosexual relations, the latter has the conditions for bisexual relations in its communicative exchanges.
The whole triangle is reminicent of Karl Buber's I-Thou and I-It relationships.
How now are we to take Derrida and DeMan dancing on words of rocks, rocks of words (rock/s of ages, foundational ages), dancing along side the precipice overlooking the Abyss? (The Volcano? [What was it that Empedocles dis/covered in the depths of Aetna? What was it much later that Geo. Bataille heard near 'the edge' of Aetna?].)
Notes #1e>>
|
