Davis > Derrida > Levinas

Today's reading: John Muckelbauer's "Rhetoric, Asignification, and the Other: A Response to Diane Davis" and D. Diane Davis' "The Fifth Risk: A Response to John Muckelbauer's Response". Muckelbauer challenges the assumption that any discourse or pedagogy can claim ethical or political superiority, all share "a different orientation into the impossible wager of discourse" (he is specifically discussing the hermeneutics of Mailloux, the Levinasian alterity of Davis, and the possibility of a third position). Muckelbauer's conclusions performs well his argument that rhetoric, as an art, is not solely concerned with what can be told or shown--it is also very much a matter of feeling.

That is, one of the crucial lessons of Levinas's and Davis's work may well be that, rather than being the telos of rhetoric, judgment may simply be the residue of asignifying, rhetorical processes. But none of these discourses would have any heightened purchase on those processes, as each of them is nothing more (or less) than a different orientation into the impossible wager of discourse, some of which are driven by the desire to criticize or advocate, and some of which are driven by the desire to immanently interrupt the operations of critique and advocacy. In the end, perhaps the best that one can hope for is an impossible encounter with the other on the necessarily impure terrain of the same. Of course, this hope cannot tell you what to do. It cannot tell you what to denounce and it cannot tell you what to endorse. Then again, perhaps it can.

It is the precarious placement of the perhaps--itself an interruption--that interrupts the desire for a Certain judgment. Sweet. And, of course, reading his conclusion made me want to write this post...

I find stomach rejecting Muckelbauer's conclusion--its a bit queezy and tied up in knots, but my head hasn't quite caught up yet (and this returns to his opening point: that rhetoric is more than reason, its sense). This might have something to do with sleep deprivation, who knows. But, while we might not have a stable foundation from which we can make decisions of absolute supremacy, this does not mean we cannot hypothesize from the mists. I believe our orientation toward discourse can affect its political and ethical impact; and Davis' picks up on this when she writes/cites that for Levinas "ethics is not some 'proper response' but this interruption of the self by the other, each time, in which 'the I loses its sovereign coincidence with itself, its identification' ("Trace of the Other 353)." This does not mean that we can extract one ethical program from Levinas' work--rather, we are provided with a first principle, one that eschews egoism and synthesis.

The following comes from the conclusion of Davis' response to Muckelbauer:

Judgment with an eye to justice has no illusions of finality; it is a tentative gesture that is offered without clarity or certitude, both as a test and an invitation. In Otherwise than Being, Levinas writes: "This book interprets the subject as hostage and the subjectivity of the subject as a substitution breaking with being's essence. The thesis is exposed imprudently" (Otherwise than Being 184). Derrida notes that for Levinas the thesis "is therefore not posed, it is imprudently and defenselessly exposed, and yet that very vulnerability is ('this weakness is necessary,' we will read a little later on) the provocation to responsibility for the other, it leaves a place for the other in a taking-place of this book where this here no longer shuts in upon itself, upon its own subject" ("At This Very Moment in This Text Here I Am" 31). As Avital Ronell puts it, "rather than flexing a thetic muscle that would buff up under the light of truth, Levinas offers a discourse vulnerable to its own sense of exposure, frailty and uncertainty" ("The Sacred Alien: Heidegger's Reading of Hölderlin's 'Andenken")

Email Standards

File this one under its about time. A grassroots movement for better cross-client compatibility. The major targets? Gmail and Outlook. Here's to hoping they can have some success. Here's a link to their test email and the properties they are focusing on

Life (or Something Like It)

Finally. I'm back.

My laptop's hard drive died three weeks ago (a couple days after my last post). Stone dead. I had to send if off to the nice people at On Track Data Recovery and pay their extortion reasonable fee of #$%@ dollars to get my data back. Silly me hadn't backed up his files for a few months. Translation: I would have lost half my dissertation, a draft of an article, a ton of reading notes, and all my job search files. For anyone who hasn't gone through a Ph.D. job search, the latter really hurt (especially since I track what I've sent where in spread sheets...). But now, I've got my data back. And Apple gave me a brand new laptop. Yay.

Being laptop-less for almost a month taught me how much I rely on this sleek, black machine. Actually, that's too negative a spin: it taught me how much more productive this machine allows me to be (better, right mrxk?). At times I felt useless without my laptop. I've been about as productive in the five days I've had it back as the three weeks I went without it...

As far as this blog: posts should begin to pick up again. My job search process is quieting down a bit--I've only got about five more applications to send out. Besides that, its a few phone interviews and then MLA. Which means that I'll actually be able to return my focus to my disseration. Which means I'll have some material to publish to a blog. To get started, I've been reading a lot of interviews with Derrida from later in his life. Here's a nice selection on how Derrida imagines audience (and the ethical implications of imagining that one can control writing and its reception):

Derridean Method from "There is No One Narcissism" pp. 199-201

Q.: [ ... ] you have often repeated that deconstruction is not a method, that there is no "Derridean method." How, then, is one to take account of your work? How do you evaluate its effects? To whom is your work addressed and, finally, who reads you?

J.D.: By definition, I do not know to whom it is addressed. Or rather yes I do! I have a certain knowledge on this subject, some anticipations, some images, but there is a point at which, no more than anyone who publishes or speaks, I am not assured of the destination. Even if one tried to regulate what one says by one or more possible addressees, using typical profiles, even if one wanted to do that it would not be possible. And I hold that one ought not to try to master this destination.

Stirke Up the Band

I am not quite sure that words can describe quite how awesome this is:

Make sure you make it to at least 3:50.

Wiimote Already Obsolete?

I'm starting tag a lot of stuff like the following video lately. I'm real interested in the digital sandbox that video games are becoming. More and more your seeing games inviting prosuming, including advanced, yet accessible, level editors. Game companies are encouraging users to make modifications, and services such as X-Box live are making it easy to exchange stuff online. Now, it seems, we're on the verge of homemade controllers?

The Wiimote is not obsolete. Its still quite cool. But I'm really beginning to wonder if any of these user modifications will go mainstream. I could see a SimCity / Starcraft type of game built around the hand interface (nevermind if you could create a glove for a baseball game or Manhunt 3: Choker's Delight).

Complexity Theory and Authorship as Plurality

There was a discussion on a listserv today regarding why the individual author has become a myth. I cranked out a short response and figured I'd share. The original poster referred to the Emersonian (right?) "nothing is original" mantra. While I find that interesting, that's not what I identify as the problem. Its not so much that the individual author is a myth, as much as our postmodern ethics are skeptical of the egoist control and assurance that such a perspective purports. I can't help thinking of Mark C. Taylor's discussion his own sense of authorship in _The Moment of Complexity_:

I, Mark C. Taylor, am not writing this book. Yet the book is being written. It is as if I were the screen through which the words of others flow and on which they are displayed. Words, thoughts, ideas, are never precisely my own; they are always borrowed rather than possessed. I am, as it were, their vehicle. Though seeming to use language, symbols, and images, they use me to promote their circulation and extend their lives. The flux of information rushing through my mind as well as my body (I am not sure where one ends and the other begins) existed before me and will continue to flow long after I am gone. "My" thought--indeed "myself"--appears to be a transient eddy in a river whose banks are difficult to discern. [...] One of the few things that is clear even if not obvious is that all writing is ghostwriting. This work, like all others, is haunted by countless specters. Some I know, others I do not; some I name, others remain unnamed. The unknown and unnamed are not, of course, absent--nor are they present. Their silence speaks through my words in ways that remain cryptic to author as well as the reader. (196)

I think Taylor presents us with something more complicated than anti-originality. The constitutive debt to language stems beyond the ability of any individual consciousness' comprehension. Resisting the myth of the individual writer is a recognition of just how much of our reality is built up through nothing more than our symbol systems (and our ghosts-thnx KB). Even at our keyboards, though perhaps the only ones biologically present, we are never alone.

Romantic Rinse Cycle

The all-consuming job search, coupled with adorable baby daughter, doesn't leave much time for blogging (or anything else, for that matter). But I did want to take a few minutes to explain how parenthood has alerted my wife and I to how gender identity is constructed through toys. Yes, that's right, toys.

Here we are, enjoying an episode of House (if memory serves), when a commercial for the PlaySkool Rose Petal Cottage comes on. Seems innocent enough at first--think detailed play house. Now imagine the look of horror that grows on my wife's face as the advertisement shows a happy little girl learning how to: cook, clean, arrange the furniture, and put laundry in the washing machine. That's the real clincher: just as the add says something like: "watch your little girl's imagination grow" it shows the little girl stuffing clothes into the Rose Petal Washer (sold separately, of course).

Sigh.

As ideologically disturbing as the ad was, I must admit some enjoyment at watching my wife's face turn from disinterest, to awe, to moral outrage (for those who don't know, my wife won't allow anything Disney in the house since in their moives women are allowed only two courses: death or finding a man). I think, as the years roll on, Christmas is going to be fun, if only because I can totally see my dad thinking this would be a great present...