Now That I’m Here…
Is it not necessary to draw a line between those who can believe we can continue to situate our present discontinuities within the historical and transcendental tradition of the nineteenth century and those who are making a great effort to liberate themselves, once and for all, from this conceptual framework? (Foucault, “What is an Author”)
Slowly, some of the pieces are starting to come together for me. For example, the degree to which the essay, literature and composition have been historically constructed, and the degree to which they, as they have informed the (writing) classroom, derive from the past and its particulars. Also, the way they have normalized and naturalized themselves to such an extent that they have come to equal “writing,” to the exclusion of other discursive practices, methodologies and forms—in other words are themselves ideology.
Duh.
Ulmer, George, Yancey, Gilyard, Collins, and others we’ve read would fall on the latter side of Foucault’s line, if I am understanding both it and them correctly. Remake, remix, visual argument, non-linearity, networking, involvement, juxtaposition, even Sophistry, as principles not only of composition but Composition, all represent a return to those points of origin where writing was tied to type, where rhetoric was tied to philosophy, and signifier to signified (NOT that these are all the same types of moments), and creatively and intellectually deploy the gap.Nothing like being thrown into the middle of a giant row when you don’t even know what everyone’s so upset about. Which just about sums up my experience of academia so far.Novelists work in a nostalgic form, of course, poets less so. For nearly twenty years now I have not been able to look at a flock of birds in flight without hearing (seeing) Cixous, who described them as writing in the sky. In more recent years I have often thought of Arthur Tze saying that the Chinese place the character for “fire” on top of the one for “tree” to create autumn: the literal translation is “tree tips on fire.” Situational rather than nominal, perhaps.
I always saw the space around and between letters and words as wide-open space, where the imagination goes to work and meaning forms and banks and breaks apart; I always did read aloud in order to better understand whether and how writing worked; I always worried about whether to break to the next line, whether the em dash or the comma worked best on the visual as well as punctational level. And Sal and I have often wondered why the best of films still doesn’t move either one of us as the best of books do—and she’s a video maker, not even a big reader anymore. I always thought that had something to do with the pleasure of the image being deferred in words, fully realized only in the mind, that the pleasure lay somewhere in that gap and the work it demanded. Of course, people like Ulmer and Vitanza and Collins are not arguing for a move away from words, far from it, just more and different forms of invention and delivery. I do get that. I think.
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