GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

Is there anybody who genuinely supports the free market?  That is, anyone who supports it when free market principles would forbid the bailout of failing financial institution costing one’s life’s savings or when a protectionist law would prevent the loss of one’s job?  I leave aside times when one might balance other priorities against a free market purism:  say, in imposing sanctions to contain or bring down a dangerous regime, the protection of public spaces from development, the interference in a free labor market through immigration restrictions and so on.  In such cases, one could always argue that the free market itself requires citizens and governments willing to defend freedom and sovereignty and the market can’t do that on its own; but in my opening examples, it is the very consequences of the free market, that which makes it a market in the first place, that are negated.  Of course, we may protect only one industry or bail out one bank–but the point is that if, when push comes to shove, when too many constituencies demand the repeal of market verdicts, we capitulate; which, then, means, that if larger encroachments on the operations of the market were required by an even more pressing emergency, we would surely capitulate more abjectly.  Who would stand for economic freedom, in the way in which there would always be quite a few who would stand, at great risk to themselves, against some new form of racial discrimination; and if they stood, who would notice or care?

I am trying to point to a paradox here, which is that the one article of consensus holding together the free world in the post-Cold War era is meaningfully adhered to by almost no one.  One might go even further and say the same thing about the Consitution, or the law–how many really “believe ” in either, as opposed to having becoming habituated to the greater probability of advantageously settling disagreement through these means rather than through violence?  This, of course, is part of the genuis of modern freedom–that it works without virtue, without making unrealistic demands upon its practitioners and beneficiaries.  But the case of the market seems to me to be different, or at least more extreme.  We would know “where” to stand in defense of, say, civil rights:  there is a courthouse where someone is being tried unjustly, a school someone is prevented from attending.  But where does one stand in defense of the market–where “is” the market for that matter.  It is also true that it is far more seldom that the market requires this kind of commitment–but when it does, it really does.

Perhaps it’s needless to say that these reflections are provoked by the current financial “meltdown” in the U.S., which demands some kind of response from originary thinkers, even a rank amateur in economics like myself.  Part of the fascination in these unfolding events lies in the clarity of the causes behind it; and the other part in the complete impossibility of claiming any real expertise regarding how to correct what has gone wrong.  First, the cause:  we actually have a victimary financial crisis that, according to some accounts at least, imperils the entire capitalist system.  This certainly situates the whole discussion of the victimary on new terrain!  The stakes had already been raised by the victimary absolute of global jihadist terrorism, but now we have something much more benign and closer to home with potentially far more catastrophic consequences.  One would have thought that affirmative action created all kinds of local, but hardly critical, injustices–a white kid who has to go to a state school instead of a more prestigious private university; an employee with 15 years experience given the same seniority as a minority employee with only 5, etc.  And, of course, there is the broader, creeping corruption of the whole notion of equal rights and equal opportunity and the associated incremental encroachment of the state upon private freedoms… But this is on another scale entirely:  because of the claim, promoted first of all by “community activists” like Barack Obama going back to the 70s and 80s that banks were “redlining” (who would have thought, as a reader of leftist stalwarts like The Nation and Mother Jones in those days, that these tendentious, monotonous, hysterical arguments would bear such prodigious fruit!) and thereby unjustly excluding minorities seeking mortgages, laws were actually passed mandating that such mortgages be extended by banks; mortages which then got caught up in various financial mechanisms and shenanigans which I can’t pretend event to begin to understand so that when the housing boom peaks and all those mortgages go unpaid, enormous sums of money (how much?  trillions?) goes poof!   Not even real money, of course, but promises of future money, which is now worthless because nobody believes the promises.

But now, what to do?  I, like many others, accepted the initial dire narratives of total, imminent collapse and “got behind” the original “bailout plan.”  But now, a few days later, having had a chance to be reminded of the disgraceful behavior of the Democratic majority, which continues to provide no evidence that it has the slightest interest in actually governing; becoming increasingly suspicious, not of President Bush’s intentions but of his “compassionate” tendencies which might be leading him to err on the side of inflating the crisis so as to take responsibility for it; noticing that the sky seems not to have fallen yet (while stipulating that it still might); detecting a somewhat desperate, even “it’s too urgent to explain to you idiots” bullying tone in those urging the bailout; and, finely, have seen among conservative thinkers some other, cheaper, more market friendly alternatives–now, I say no.

And then this no reveals a whole new vision of the stakes in the upcoming election (and, yes, all this is happening in the middle of a rather important Presidential election in such a way as to upset all the carefully laid strategies of both campaigns–neither of which, clearly, has the slightest idea of what to do).  This election gives us a choice regarding the meaning of the events of 9/11:  either that day was the beginning of the end of victimary blackmail, because we now realize that no payoff can ever satisfy the blackmailer, because each payoff simply confirms the original and incommensurable guilt of the the extortee; or, in some hazy, not quite explainable way, all the bad things that have happened since 9/11 (sliding over imperceptibly into 9/11 itself) are the fault of the Bush Administration and therefore, once that scapegoat (and everthing associated with it) has been sacrificed, all will be right again.  Back to the prior status quo in which we perpetually negotiate the terms of blackmail based on the fantasy that a final settlement is just within reach, and less and less incentive remains not simply to jump over to the side of the blackmailers.  This is why Obama, in his final, extraordinary and yet unremarked upon, remarks in his first debate with McCain, provided the following criteria for determining the rightness of American policies:  prospective immigrants from Third World countries must find them inspiring.  That McCain didn’t seem to even notice this bizarre combination of triviality and teachery filled me with the closest thing to despair I have felt in a long time.

John McCain seems capable of thinking of himself, as a public figure, only in terms of “saving the country.”  That’s fine–a president can have worse ways of imagining himself.  But he has to choose between two versions of this attitude:  one, “saving the country” from what may very well be exorbitantly inflated claims about the danger we are in, which will mean covering up, in the interesting of brokering a bi-partisan deal, the deep implication of the entire criminal cult that goes by the name of the Democratic Party in that crisis; or, he can join the Republicans who were either immune to or have snapped out of that hypnotic stance in which one simply insists “we must do something,” and have regrouped around the more salutary “no, instead I think we’ll just stand here for a while,” and ruthlessly, obsessively virulently, rub the faces of the Democrats and Obama above all in the consequences of their decades of, in essence, “laundering” the ideological currency of victimary blackmail–and, in that case, he just may have a chance of saving his country from an Obama Presidency and Democratic control of both houses of Congress and what will be a veritable riot of the Left which is still in a scapegoating mood and has been busy painting targets on the backs of their enemies.

OK, I’m not sounding very “disinterested” myself, am I?  But I think I may have located where one “stands” in defense of the market–against every law and every employment of governmental power that gives anyone in the government any interest in who wins in the market place or, for that matter, increases their ability to predict who will win.  Doesn’t the rush to scapegoating result from the selection and promotion of preferred winners, with the subsequent skewing of the market place, upsetting of values and suddenly visible and unseemly ties btween the winners in politics and the winner in the marketplace.  Right now, there is someone out there with an idea for how to get super-rich by cleaning up at least a good portion of this mess and redistributing values more productively.  And none of us could have any idea who that might be or what that idea might look like.  My own criterion for any governmental action in the meantime is that they not do anything that gets in his (or her!) way.  In the meantime, the public itself seems to be on the side of distinerest–let them sink! seems to be the general idea.  Some principled and clever politician might use this event to paint all government interference in the market place as being not only against the interest of most of you but a first step towards a calamity.  But first the opposition to the bailout must become increasingly determined, unified and articulate. 

Adam

I would like to try out something new for the GABlog:  a minimal approach focusing on brief, sometimes enigmatic or paradoxical, sometimes exploratory, always compact “samples” of political thinking which we might call “originary” because they defer sacrifice and propose a political stance predicated upon such deferral.  Here is a well known piece by Gertrude Stein, and my own reflections.

Gertrude Stein, “Reflections on the Atomic Bomb” (1946)

They asked me what I thought of the atomic bomb. I said I had not been able to take any interest in it.I like to read detective and mystery stories. I never get enough of them but whenever one of them is or was about death rays and atomic bombs I never could read them. What is the use, if they are really as destructive as all that there is nothing left and if there is nothing there nobody to be interested and nothing to be interested about. If they are not as destructive as all that then they are just a little more or less destructive than other things and that means that in spite of all destruction there are always lots left on this earth to be interested or to be willing and the thing that destroys is just one of the things that concerns the people inventing it or the people starting it off, but really nobody else can do anything about it so you have to just live along like always, so you see the atomic [bomb] is not at all interesting, not any more interesting than any other machine, and machines are only interesting in being invented or in what they do, so why be interested. I never could take any interest in the atomic bomb, I just couldn’t any more than in everybody’s secret weapon. That it has to be secret makes it dull and meaningless. Sure it will destroy a lot and kill a lot, but it’s the living that are interesting not the way of killing them, because if there were not a lot left living how could there be any interest in destruction. Alright, that is the way I feel about it. They think they are interested about the atomic bomb but they really are not not any more than I am. Really not. They may be a little scared, I am not so scared, there is so much to be scared of so what is the use of bothering to be scared, and if you are not scared the atomic bomb is not interesting. Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense. They listen so much that they forget to be natural. This is a nice story.

Stein claims that neither she nor anyone else is “interested” in the atomic bomb.  “Interest” would seem to attach to events or phenomena that are, on the one hand, below the threshold above which “interest” would be impossible because nothing recognizable would remain and, on the other hand, above the threshold below which nothing would be of interest because nothing would have changed.  Furthermore, change that nevertheless occurs within recognizable parameters concerns the living, not destruction and not machinery:  no matter how destructive a weapon gets, our interest would always be addressed to what remains, not the destruction itself.

The implicit question the “reflections” raises, then, is what would count as change in the “living” that would count as “interesting”?  Stein’s interest in detective and mystery stories (which are ruined as soon as extravagant sci-fi effects are introduced) suggests that the basic elements of human variety and unpredictability are involved:  surprises, secrets revealed, unanticipated consequences, and so on. 

Surely, though, all those people asking Stein for her thoughts on the atomic bomb think that there is something new in it for the living:  indeed, wouldn’t the fact that total destruction is now a possibility something that the kind of existential and strategic representation Stein finds in the detective story have to account for?  Wouldn’t the problem of how to prevent such total destruction be interesting?  But how could one figure into our calculations today the possibility that there would be “nothing left”?  If that possibility is not representable, because we can’t situate ourselves in a post-apocalyptic space as a possible signifier, then even if we think we are trying to rise to the occasion of this more urgent deferral, we are really just trying harder to do the same kind of thing we have always done in rivalrous situations.  When it comes to anything more than trying harder to prevent what would be even worse destruction, we don’t really know what we are doing and hence can’t really be “interested” in it.

But in that case, the effect of the atomic bomb, as we come to have more of them to the point where “nothing left” is the only plausible outcome of it being put into play, would be to narrow the sphere of human interest.  As more and more conflicts are liable to being caught up in a chain of consequences that might lead to nuclear exchange in which no one could have any idea what they are doing, that much human interest is subtracted from our activities.  It might follow, then, that increasing the sphere of human interest might be a way of countering that subtraction, giving Stein’s refusal to grant any “interest” to the atomic bomb a strategic dimension.  All human conflicts would need to be, somehow, pre-emptively deferred, to remove them from the various chains of consequences leading toward nuclear war:  but it’s hard to see how human interest stories like detective novels could do anything more than reinforce a primitive logic of deterrence and retaliation.  Mimetic relations and rivalries would have to embedded in some mode of deferral that doesn’t rely upon these sacrificial narratives.

So, what could be these new sources of interest?  Stein’s mysteries and detective stories offer the reassurance of the familiar, the reinforcement of habit, and it is certainly Stein’s love of habit that accounts for the political conservatism of this most radical of esthetic radicals.  We might assign habit to the imperative sphere of existence–habits start with events, the results or feelings associated with which we wish to repeat or avoid, leading to instructions, as inflexible as need be, designed to guarantee the recurrence or neutralization of such events.  After a while we forget the instructions because we forget we might have ever done things otherwise.  Habit ends up as a more or less imperceptible rumbling through our daily lives, as in the feeling that accompanies our morning coffee and newspaper. 

But habits, in themselves, are not particularly interesting either:  Stein remarks elsewhere that she is against utopianism because while she likes having habits she doesn’t like other people talking about her habits.  I take this cryptic remark to suggest that habits can rarely withstand public scrutiny, and insisting that they do so is the key to the violence of utopias–once you start organizing social life in accord with some abstract schema you must arrive at the point where you start scrutinizing habits, which inevitably interfere with such reconstructions, and once you start scrutinizing habits there is no end to it and the further you go the more intractable and “irrational” habits become–and the more violence that would be needed to uproot them. 

If habits are not interesting, then, the unexpected disruption of habits might be:  indeed, we only really notice habits in their disruption.  Such disruptions might be especially pleasurable and interesting when they lead you to see that your habits have serendipitously enabled you to now see something completely new–an internal disposition is brought into the light along with an external revelation.

The exposure of the internal disposition, the tacit knowledge deposited in the habit now opened to view, presents that disposition as the implementation of some maxim.  At some point, one settled on the maxim, say, that “coffee along with the newspaper makes for a nice morning.”  The interruption of the habit–say, through the development of a caffeine allergy–however unpleasant in itself, opens up other possible compositions of one’s morning.  In accord with another maxim, inevitably, one, at first at least, less steadily tied to existing habits and more eccentric.  As, for example, “air and static [i.e., listening to the radio instead of reading the paper–once one thing is changed why not review the entire routine?] make a morning.”  This maxim would be as intelligible for the person involved as the previous one, along with carrying with it the pleasure of invention, discovery and ownership; it would only be intelligible to another, though, who has sufficiently entered the life of that person, and for whom the combination of rightness and idiosyncrasy embodied in the maxim would provide the same enjoyment, ramified by the intimacy created between those sharing it.

Those who insist that Stein take an interest in the atomic bomb want to see some habit and its attendant maxim continued–a habit of conventional strategic thinking, newly applied, perhaps; or a habit of denouncing the alienating effects of modern weaponry, modern technology, modern society.  What would be interesting, though, is interrupting these habits by not being interested in the bomb.  Such subtraction of interest neutralizes the demands pressed by these habits and requires a new composition of the relation between our thinking and the unthinkable. The first maxim I would propose for guidng these practices of composition is:  creating idiosyncratic maxims distracts attention from the unthinkable.  A second one:  entering and disrupting each other’s habits helps us combine common sense and the revelatory. 

The discursive form given to the interrupted habit is “one should always do x except for…”  The revelation of an exception is the revelation of a new possible rule.  If we are interested in the deferral of sacrifice, even the more sublimated and deferred forms of sacrifice embodied in, among other things, political irony (which is useless in deferring the unthinkable), added attention to our habits might serve us better than arguments about principles.  Habits drag us along with them in the path of least resistance, which is always toward scapegoating; at the same time, the active preservation of our habits in all their distinctiveness and idiosyncrasy might prevent us from being dragged.  And if we stand still while others are pulled along, everyone else’s movement becomes evident to us while it remains invisible to them.  And we will notice anyone else also standing still, anchored by their habits.  All the intersections and forms of reciprocal visibility between those standing still would be new and interesting.  Maxims helping us maintain our interest in standing still and being unaffected by the latest rush to sacrifice would evolve; perhaps some of them would take on a public form.

The last four Chronicles are available on our website:

No. 361, August 2, 2008: A Minimal Theodicy: God Helps Those Who Help Themselves

No. 360, July 19, 2008: Qui perd gagne

No. 359, May 31, 2008: Notes for a History of Transcendence

No. 358, May 10, 2008: Believing in GA

All these Chronicles address different aspects of the relationship between GA and religion.

-eric gans

Here is a paper I presented to a crowd of four people at the College English Association Conference on Thursday in one of my academic “specialities,” Composition Pedagogy:

Composition Pedagogy and Disciplinary Inquiry:  Toward a Generalized Semiotics
 

Adam Katz

Quinnipiac University

            Conversations about composition pedagogy are, I would suggest, at their best when they sound as if they might, or even should, be overheard by students, the “subject” of said conversations.  In the traditional disciplines, that is, the classroom is viewed as a space where the teacher disseminates the results of already completed inquiries while (on the margins, so to speak) recruiting those who will go on to conduct future inquiries and sustain the tradition in question.  Conversations in composition, meanwhile, are meaningful to the extent that the (continually revised) vocabularies in which those conversations take place converge with those which we shape and through which we invent classroom practices in collaboration with our students.  Could we not formulate it as a rule, then, that we should strive to render whatever distinctions we sort out amongst pedagogies operational in the classroom space:  in other words, our questions would be deemed “real” insofar as they can be made visible in textual practices and assemblages of interpretive moves that students themselves can name.

            So, for example, when Nathan Crick re-frames the expressivist/constructivist debate within composition by contending that both sides of the debate “define communication as the act of representing something inside of us that wants to get out” (257), as opposed to a Deweyan pragmatism that overcomes dualisms by viewing intellectual activity as a mode of giving shape to experiences that only exist as such in that very process of “artistic expression, reflection, revision and communication” (272) itself I am happy to agree—as long, that is, as the distinction between “experience[ing] the joy of Becoming in the midst of their own writing” (273) and forms of writing that presuppose mental or physical states outside of language leaves discernable marks, that we could ask students to point out,  on a piece of writing.  In that case, the pedagogue’s question is, what kind of contrivance, or what kind of assignment aligning reader with text and an audience of collaborators within a sequence of assignments, would best serve us in eliciting various forms in which this distinction might become visible? 

            If we insist upon re-circulating all of our theoretical distinctions back into the classroom space it follows that students should be reading the very texts through which we would construct these questions ourselves.  By constructing the classroom space through the students’ readings of these texts we thereby abolish from the outset the assumption that the texts placed at the center of the class have a correct interpretation and that interpretation is possessed by the teacher and approximated more or less closely by the students.  Surely, one wouldn’t want to set up a “Deweyan” class with a pre-established code regarding what will, and what won’t, count as “Deweyan” (even less would one want to set up a Deweyan class and conceal that construction from the students’ view).  If our elemental assumptions regarding writing are to be made transparent to the students, those assumptions must be as minimal as we can make them.  Deconstructing the expressivist/constructivist debate from a pragmatist standpoint might serve to render one’s pedagogical assumptions and their formulations more minimal but on this point David Bartholomae is still more minimal than Crick when he says that in his course

The real subject is writing, as writing is defined by students in their own terms through a systematic inquiry into their behavior as writers.  Behind this pedagogy is the assumption that students must be actively writing and simultaneously engaged in a study of their own writing as evidence of a language and a style, as evidence of real and symbolic action. (158).
 

Students are, then, writing about their own experience as writers in the writing classroom.  The texts (and, through those texts, the theories and scholarly discussions) made available to students in the composition classroom are pretexts (albeit very carefully chosen pretexts) to produce the kind of “evidence” and hence self-reflexive inquiry Bartholomae points to here. 

            If our goal is make our constructions of this self-reflexive inquiry into one’s own practices as minimal as possible, we would have to significantly qualify the claims of “post-process” theorists that no universally valid definition or description of the writing process is possible.  Thomas Kent, in the “Introduction” to Post-Process Theory:  Beyond the Writing Process Paradigm, challenges the assumption of a generalizable “process” by presenting the following assumptions of the post-process theorists:  “(1) writing is public; (2) writing is interpretive; (3) writing is situated” (1).  Since “writers are never nowhere” (3) no collection of “codifiable shortcuts” (2) will ever exhaust all of the possible situations and ways out of and through those situations writers might devise or be compelled to improvise in sharing meanings with others.  True, but this only indicates that our construction of “process” or “experience” has not yet been sufficiently minimized.  As Kent says regarding the construction of ways of making and communicating sense in the infinitely diverse processes writers invent, “[t]his give and take, this hermeneutic dance that moves to the music of our situatedness, cannot be fully choreographed in any meaningful way, for in this dance, our ability to improvise, to react on the spot to our partners, matters most” (5).  In that case, attempts to “choreograph” must indeed be abandoned, but in the name of the construction of a classroom space that maximizes the process of writing as a “give and take” in which the norms and requirements of the class make improvisation and instantaneous reaction to the unpredictable gestures of others not only inescapable but visible as a series of moves we could identify, refine and transform into habits that would then indeed be generalizable within that “situation” and as an emergent set of habits to be deployed in hypothesizing any other “situation.”  In other words, we can make sure the class is a dance floor, with the shape and proportions best suited to surface and de-familiarize prior, ingrained “movements” and clear a space for the construction of new “steps.”

            Minimal pedagogy, in other words, maximizes the responsibility of students to establish the criteria for all the elements of writing (coherence, interpretive rigor, structure, diction, and so on) that are normally assigned to a model academic discourse guaranteed by the teacher:  in fact, one test of a genuinely minimal classroom would be that students write papers that you, the professor, have no criteria for in advance of their construction.  In other words, we should have to learn how to read the student’s work as they are learning how to compose it.  The most basic distinction minimal pedagogy makes is between, in the words of novelist Ronald Sukenick, writing in which “thinking is simultaneous with the moment of composition” and writing which “is largely a report of thinking that’s already been done” (81-2).  The goal of minimal pedagogy is to keep drawing and redrawing this distinction by maximizing the former, minimizing the latter, and multiplying the signs distinguishing one from the other.  Minimal pedagogy certainly overlaps Crick’s proposed pragmatic pedagogy, with the proviso that the class is precisely the open-ended space of inquiry Dewey (and before him, Charles Sanders Peirce) proposes with, as I suggested earlier, the “object” of that inquiry being the student’s own evolving writing practices and self-reflexive inquiry into those practices.  The practices produced within such a classroom space are both directly experienced, in the sense that they could only have been produced in such a space (again, in ways that are visible and can be catalogued therein) and generalizable, insofar as what marks the entrance into any discipline is an acquisition of fluency in the language constitutive of that discipline:  what students do in the minimally conceived classroom is construct a conceptual vocabulary and, since they are present at its creation, they also acquire insight into the artificiality and malleability of any such vocabulary in the only way one can, by inventing and using it to address intellectual exigencies.

            Such a recasting of the terms and ends of pedagogy would then lead us to reconsider the norms of disciplinarity and the mode of inquiry in the academy at large.  Once our guiding question becomes, what makes this text, or this region or mode of semiosis distinctive then we are really asking about the “signness” of signs, the “textuality” of texts, and we are interested in constructing disciplinary events making the signifying difference visible.  This would make knowledge in the academy a trans-disciplinary project carried out through inter-disciplinary means:  trans-disciplinary in the sense that a minimally consistent object exists across all the fields of inquiry and inter-disciplinary in the sense that the “fields” are inevitably plural and a result of the ongoing composition and hybridization of various vectors of inquiry.  Defining the human as the user of signs and knowledge as the self-reflexive bootstrapping operation of using signs to represent the uses of signs and generate more signs would re-open historical, cultural, sociological and other fields of inquiry along with magnifying the channels of communication across the various, provisionally and pragmatically defined fields.  And we ourselves are all signs, as Peirce argued, representing in this case a particular disciplinary intersection and mode of visibility.

            Proposing a generalized semiotics as the object and means of knowledge making in the academy also re-opens questions regarding the essence, origins and ends of signifying activity.  One path into the re-conceptualization of disciplinary inquiry along lines I am proposing here, and, in fact, the one I would propose as most viable, would be that laid by the originary hypothesis of Eric Gans. According to Gans’ hypothesis, the origin of human language lies in an event in which (borrowing from the mimetic theory of Rene Girard) the threat of a catastrophic mimetic crisis is warded off by what Gans calls the “aborted gesture of appropriation” of the central object which has triggered the mimetic rivalry.  That the first sign—inaugurating the human—would be a sign of deferral is rich in consequences insofar as it defines representation as the deferral of violence and the human as that species which poses a greater danger to itself than is posed by any external threat.  On one level, the originary hypothesis enables us to address the formal, systemic, synchronic dimension of signification:  the formal unity of the sign, or its autonomy and separateness from the practical environment in which it must function is determined by the requirement that the sign be sustained by the equipoise (the state of arrest which transcends the imminent violence) of the members on the originary scene.  On another level, the originary hypothesis enables us to account for the endless variety and unpredictability of sign use in the myriad situations in which it takes place:  the sign (and, by “sign,” we can, with Peirce, refer to a sentence, a discourse, a discipline, a person) must defer some concretely apprehended threat of cataclysmic violence and it must provide some means of communal appropriation of the object (or world of objects) in question “fairly,” which is to say in some way that ensures the continuity and effectivity of the sign.  And, of course, we could have no way of limiting in advance all the ways in which these tasks could be accomplished, which means an irreducible margin of freedom also attaches to such an originary conception of semiosis. 

            Perhaps most important for our purposes here, the originary hypothesis implies a model of knowledge making that wishes to stay as close to the tacit, the everyday, the contingent and the ephemeral as to the explicit, elaborated, permanent and canonical without being obliged to privilege one over the other as a source of knowledge.  All semiosis contains both dimensions, as the disciplinary inquiry into those texts worthy of unlimited scrutiny generates tacit rules of reading and knowing which then in turn open up avenues of attention into hitherto neglected texts and regions of semiosis.  Our criterion for knowledge becomes the construction of disciplinary scenes capable of generating disciplinary events as our attending to what has so far remained tacit generates a new (to draw upon Michael Polanyi) tacit dimension that might at any time emerge as our new object of inquiry.  And this tacit dimension is of interest not merely because it reveals some new possible vocation of the sign, but because it touches, through an infinite series of intermediate steps, and articulates on new terms, the entire semiotic itinerary of the human being.

            To return to the composition classroom, if our interest is in generating such disciplinary scenes, it would seem to be economical or “minimal” to use texts that themselves simulate such scenes—in others words, experimental works that operate just below the threshold of meaning and therefore require the participation of the reader or audience to bring it into some kind of sense.  Our question in approaching such texts—poems of e.e. cummings, Gertrude Stein’s How to Write, Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, Richard Kostelanetz’s Minimal Fictions, Paul Klee’s line drawings, the poetry of Suan Howe, to name just a few possibilities—is, again, minimal:  what contribution by the reader is necessary to “tip” such texts into meaning; this question, in turn, becomes a surrogate for the question of a generalized semiotics, what makes meaning meaningful, what makes signs signify?  If we take the inevitably plural student readings of these texts, and the self-reflexive turn on the part of students toward their own singular and overlapping processes of making sense as the “object” of the disciplinary event that is the course, then that disciplinary center will serve as a pole of attraction around which will constellate other texts and problematics which will enter into the composition of the course:  the various, more explicit, reflections upon the relation between language and knowledge, words and concepts, that comprise the major developments in post-metaphysical thinking:  from Heidegger to Polanyi, Wittgenstein to Derrida, Peirce to Rorty, Arendt to Lyotard, the mimetic theory of Girard and Gans, for starters.  We would, then, be composing our classes as signs—not around subject and topics, or skills, but around “liminal centers,” where new forms of semiosis come into being, along with the ongoing reconsideration of the conceptual means for meditating upon those forms of emergence.

            Nor would these “experimental” composition classes neglect the “basics” of grammar and syntax.  Quite to the contrary, a minimal pedagogy situated within a generalized semiosis provides a way of reintroducing such irreducible elements of writing and writing pedagogy into the substance of the class itself.  Transforming the class into a space of inquiry into the emergence of meaning applies equally to that basic element of meaning, the sentence.  Syntax becomes an object of study in at least the following ways.  The assumption, drawn from the originary hypothesis, that the ostensive sign is the primary linguistic form, with the imperative closely tied to the ostensive as a demand to make the indicated object present, enables us to sharpen our sense of the linguistic role of the declarative sentence.  If we hypothesize that the origin of the declarative lies in the need to transcend, but first of all simply distract attention away from, a dangerously impossible imperative directed, with accelerating intensity, at some member of the group, we might consider the sentence the generation of a linguistic present sustained by the attention directed to the speaker as the center of discourse (as opposed to directing attention to some central object equally present to all sign users on a given scene).  The sentence, also, simultaneous with this linguistic present generates an external reality which the speaker can now share with his listeners, a reality organized around possible centers, and that is presumed to exist even after attention to it is withdrawn (as opposed to an object of immediate consumption, manipulation or ritual worship):  the “meaning” of the sentence is that there is a reality other than that proposed by the “impossible” imperative.  The sentence, then creates the speaker or author as the guarantor of the reality generated by signification and hence of the space where the “meaning” or, simply, certification, of the use of all signs must be situated; and it establishes the permanent tension between the guarantee offered by the speaker and what we might call a “field of semblances” or never completed or known yet independent “reality”—a reality that must be spoken of to be taken to exist and which we nevertheless posit as existing beyond what we happen to say of it. (That we might say that this centering of the speaker as the anchor of discourse and reality is the condition of possibility of the metaphysical illusion of the self-presence of the subject testifies to the linguistic, philosophical and historical weight of the emergence of the declarative.)

The sentence, then, can be presented as a medium for translating non-normative pieces of text as well as articulations of meaning through other speech forms, whether generated by the texts used in the course or by student writing.  In other words, declarative discourse is thereby presented as a language in its own right, and therefore a site for the study of the transactions with the co-existing “dialects” of ostensives, imperatives, interrogatives, performatives, etc:  on the one hand, we have students translate anything from deliberately produced fragments to gestures, lines on a page and so on into grammatical sentences; on the other hand, we treat student error on these same terms, as an occasion for the “translation” of problematic, but not simply meaningless, pieces of text they have produced. The emergence of the sentence out of the lower linguistic forms as the transcendence of the limits and threat of violence implicit in the imperative is hence enacted and made available for study in the student’s own writing.

Our assumptions about the sentence should be kept minimal as well, though, filtering our theoretical assumptions about language and knowledge into specific tasks from which, in their fulfillment, we can then excavate a range of possible conceptual vocabularies:  we simply need to present every sentence in a piece of writing as a possible map and measure of any “sign” in the text that can be represented syntactically. Our (minimal) question is, then, what pattern or process in the work is this sentence iterating? Students are thereby situated so as to generate their own account of syntactic form through the use of sentence mimicry and the production of model sentences which are repeated with different forms throughout their papers and used to represent different fields. The deliberate construction of sentences and their deployment as models of thinking is thereby thoroughly integrated into their work:  and, since, if the class and each paper has a “topic,” it is something like “the relation between language and knowledge,” reflection upon, dissection and analysis, and evaluation of such sentences (through the use of both traditional and newly invented grammatical terms) becomes not a formalistic duty added on to their “real” writing but central to the generation of concepts and discursive patterns, and the various ways in which we might draw attention to the grammatical features of students’ work are bound up with their own emergent grammar. 

            As a result of such a pedagogy, students do not imitate the already completed and canonized work of scholars at several removes—they do the work of scholars, however clumsily and uncertainly.  They are present at the creation of the concepts they will use to conduct their inquiry, and the double bind of classical mimesis, wherein the student imitates the teacher and thereby reinforces the inaccessibility of the model embodied by that teacher (leading to the—usually, at least—symbolic slaying of the teacher/father) is replaced by a more productive double bind and paradox:  that your own sign brings into being an object that only takes on reality to the extent that others appropriate it in turn and transform it into something you can barely but still unmistakably acknowledge as your own as it returns to you through the cycle of exchange.  And I would further say that such a pedagogical practice, while certainly not participating in much of the rhetoric of “critical pedagogy” and the attendant anguish over “agency,” does position students as a kind of “cultural indicator” insofar as the world now appears to them as replete with and constituted by signs, and always in need of more signs, better situated and more convincing gestures deferring mimetic violence—or, if one likes, deferring the foreclosure of individual signifying possibilities.

Works Cited
 

Bartholomae, David.  “Teaching Basic Writing:  An Alternative to Basic Skills.”
 In Writing on the Margins:  Essays on Composition and Teaching.
  Bedford/St. Martins:  Boston*New York, 157-76.
 

Crick, Nathan.  “Composition as Experience:  John Dewey on Creative
 Expression and the Origin of ‘Mind’.”  College Composition and
 Communication, Vol. 55, No. 2 (December 2003):  254-275.
 

Kent, Thomas.  Post-Process Theory:  Beyond the Writing Process Paradigm.
  Carbondale and Edwardsville:  Southern University Press, 1999.
 

———-.  “Introduction,” in Kent, 1-6.
 

Sukenick, Ronald.  Narralogues:  Truth in Fiction.  SUNY Press:  Albany, 2000.