Brief Description:
For over 2500 years, philosophy has made an occupation of distinguishing between truth and language so that it might ground itself in the former while also fixating the latter. It is imperative for philosophy that language be tamable so that truth might be representable in the form of philosophical language. But language's tendency toward infidelity, its tendency to step out on itself, has proved un/settling for philosophy. And all along, there have been harassing counter-traditions that deconstruct logical constructs and contend both that truth is a function of language and that even the most scientific language has a wild streak, an extra-logical impulse. Because our category systems, our genders and genres, are linguistic constructions, and because language is anything but stable, truth is constantly breaking up/down. If philosophy and philosophical rhetoric traditionally seek the truth, the counter-traditions of sophistic rhetoric examine the way language is working to produce what functions as truth. These counter-traditions can be traced back as far as Heraclitus and up to the present in the works of such "post-philosophers" as Butler, Cixous, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucualt, Nancy, and Ronell, and of such rhetoricians as M. Ballif, C. Haynes, S. Jarratt, L. Faigley, G. Ulmer, and V. Vitanza.
This project both traces its lineage to sophistic counter-traditions and sets its sights beyond them, participating in what Vitanza has called "third sophistics." Third sophistic rhetorics focus less on 'making the weaker side the stronger' (a time-honored sophistic trick) than on tracing lines of flight out of oppositional structures altogether. This work strains to hear the (laughter of the) leftover, the (cackling) remainder drowned out by the boom of dialectic's either/or choice. It's interested in the atonal excess that is made unhearable by the sheer decibel-level of the (phal)logocentric symphony, in the non-sequential and un-countable third that overflows dichotomies. This book moves beyond the disso-logoi, the privilege-flippings of negative deconstruction, and into what Vitanza has called dissoi-paralogoi, affirmative deconstructions that point to the excess flying around, to the leftover busily touching off tiny explosions at the limits of the thinkable. Laughter operates in this study as a trope for breaking up, a joyfully destructive shattering of our conceptual frameworks. In his preface to The Order of Things, Michel Foucault says the idea for his book arose out of his response to a passage in Borges; it arose "out of the laughter that shattered . . . all the familiar landmarks of [his] thought-our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography" (xv). This laughter is not (only) the laughter that Aristotle attributes to Gorgias, the laughter that opposes meaninglessness to meaning (Rhetoric III, 18). Rather it is a laughter that shatters what Jacques Derrida calls the very "fabric of meaning" ("From Restricted," 259) through which the notion of meaninglessness becomes meaningful, through which meaninglessness operates as the dirty underside (the negation) of meaning, or, in Gorgias's case, vice versa. This/my book arose out of Foucault's tossing of this metaphor: laughter as an explosion of the border zones of thought. Our categorical boundaries operate as artificial guardrails, protection against what Friedrich Nietzsche calls "the great sweep of life," which never ceases to overflow our categories and "to be on the side of the most unscrupulous polytropoi" (Gay Science #344).
It is negation/exclusion, via our categorical distinctions, that makes both "order" and cohesion possible, but what of the excluded? Judith Butler's answer is chilling: they constitute those "populations erased from view" ("Contingent" 13, my emphasis). And there it is, the terrifying potential for a(nother) Final Solution, what Vitanza calls the "wreck" of the negative. The desire to perpetually postpone this "wreck" by swerving anywhere and everywhere else is the primary motivation behind this project. I suggest that a laughter that shatters would laugh with the "sweep," with what Hélène Cixous, in "The Laugh of the Medusa," calls the "rhythm that laughs you." Laughter that shatters is an affirmative laughter that catapults us out of negative dialectics by negating negation itself. The first half of this book attempts to articulate not a new reterritorialization but rather a rhetoric of deterritorialization, of breaking up, a rhetoric of "laughter"--for subjectivity (Ch 1), composition (Ch 2), and technology (Excursus)--that spotlights that which gets excluded for the sake of stable identity. Chapter One challenges the humanist impulse by noting that human beings are made by history at least as much as they/we make it. Chapter Two suggests that language is not stable or logical and that to be spoken by this laughing logos is to be at the mercy of a language on the loose, a language that never stops troping and punning, that perpetually mis/behaves, hailing "subjects" who can Be only polysemically. The major Excursus that follows Chapter Two notes, along with Martin Heidegger, that we are 'enframed' by technology; however, it also suggests, against Heidegger, that not even technology escapes the reach of the "sweep": we are enframed by a laughing techné, which manifests itself in violations of the semiotic/symbolic order. The last two chapters read feminist politics (Ch 3) and composition pedagogy (Ch 4) across the rhetoric of laughter developed in the first half of the book in order to make something of what the crisis in the legitimation of knowledge and representation has made of "writing," "teaching," and "community." These last two chapters attempt to project new and affirmative possibilities in the writing and rhetoric classroom by offering a re-hearing and a re-viewing of the excess that operates as the excluded third in any oppositional system of thought.
The book strives persistently to slip out of binary thinking, to reconceive several cross-disciplinary issues without sliding into logocentrism or easy privilege-flippings. Beginning with a notion of original excess (a non-positively affirmative physis) rather than original lack (typically associated with both physis and nomos), this work attempts to articulate a (feminist) politics and (composition) pedagogy that are not re-active or parasitic, that don't work out of "the negative." This approach necessarily up/sets some of the major projects underway in the fields of rhetoric, composition, and feminist theory. But this work is anything but nihilistic-it calls for other projects, different projects, and it's affirmative, as Foucault would say, in a non-positive way.
Celebrating laughter is a risky business. Donald Morton, for instance, has argued that laughter is an irresponsible approach to a violent world, a position that says to the oppressed: "oh well, just laugh about it." And in a sense, it is precisely the point of this project to issue a call to "just laugh." But here "just" would have the double entendre Jean-François Lyotard gave it in Just Gaming. That is, it would connote both "merely" and "justly." Though I do hesitate, for obvious reasons, to say that this is a serious topic, I do not hesitate to say that it is a responsible, political, and ethical one. If it's risky, it's because breaking up necessarily involves risk-there is no way of knowing what will be left in the wake of a laughter that shatters "all the familiar landmarks of [our] thought."
There can be no doubt about it, this laughter is destructive: An impulse toward destruction (clearing away) is involved in any thinking of futurity. In Finitude's Score, Avital Ronell defines destruction as "a decisive doing away with that which, already destroyed, is destructive in its continuance. To the extent that it is possible only on the basis of a new and more radical affirmation, destruction, moreover, has pledged itself to the future" (xiii). Ronell notes that devastation, on the other hand, "holds no such contract with futurity." Devastation, rather, "has to do with a fundamental shutdown," a "pathological" drive toward "a telic finality or fulfillment or the accomplishment, once and for all, of a Goal." Life is devastated when it is not permitted the room to move, to sweep, to shed what Nietzsche calls its "old bark."
This project is joyfully destructive; it hopes, along with Hélène Cixous, to "break up the truth" with laughter, to take Nietzsche's hammer to anything passing itself off as solid/closed/finished.. .dead. The motivation for all of this destruction will have been the anticipation of an/other future, a glimpse of an/other way of being-with-one-another-in-the-world. Community is at issue here: we hope to find a way to avoid creating "populations erased from view," to steer clear of the "wreck" of the negative. We will have been after a posthumanist "community" without closure, a subjectless community of shattered identities (be(com)ings) who are nevertheless capable of catching traction on/and what Ronell, after Levinas, calls "the trace of the other" (Finitude's 3). Destruction is affirmative insofar as it hopes for a third way, out of logocentric meaning-making, out of the negation required for final closure. That is, it is through its No to nihilism that this destructive project comes to a genuine affirmation of life.