Vitanza, Victor. “From Heuristic to Aleatory Procedures: or, Toward ‘Writing the Accident.'” Inventing a Discipline: Rhetoric Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Young. Goggin, Maureen, ed. Urbana, IL.; National Council of Teachers of English. 01 Jan. 2000.
185: “Every attempt in relation to the new rhetoric was to break away from algorithmic (rule-governed) procedures in favor of heuristics that were being developed by and borrowed from cognitive psychologists.” **except for Berthoff, whose heuristics were being developed by alternative educators? Who was developing her own heuristics based on Peircean triadic hermeneutics?
“Rhetorical invention was being returned to the canon of composition studies, and its reinclusion was touted as part of the paradigm shift from product to process theory and pedagogy (Young, “Paradigms”)…”
“To be sure, there were clashes of opinion about borrowing from cognitive psychology (e.g., between Lauer and Berthoff), but it appeared at the time that the most systematic new approach would have more followers than would a return to the considerations of the value of metaphor or acts of the imagination.” **This is a dismissal of Berthoff, for sure. It describes what happened, though, pretty clearly. The field was seeking “the most systematic new approach.” Also, look at this language: “return” (“retrograde”) to “the considerations of the value of metaphor” or “acts of the imagination.” Wow. What does that even mean? It echoes Wayne Booth’s ‘novomania.‘ I think this passage is an interesting peek into a moment that rejects Berthoff’s language. Hers is too Romantic? “Imagination”? Too easy? Too simple? Analogy/metaphor? To identify Berthoff’s point of view as “consideration” and not “systematic approach” breaks my heart a little. Boo hoo…. :). Certainly hers was not a tagmemic craziness. sheesh. These movements seem so conservative to me. They certainly place a high value on traditional (aka white/male) notions of theory and philosophy. Their theoretics bloom in mind, between and among minds, far from classrooms. These directions are far from teacher-researcher/philosopher.
185: “Heuristics based on the social sciences, in fact, had their day in the composition journals, while the less systematic approaches were set aside either as unclear or too literary, or as vitalist and therefore unteachable.” **And which is these for AB? All three, I think.
186: “It became clear to me in the early 1980s that much of what poststructuralism was attempting was a new economy of writing based not on exclusion or on the semiotics of the negative (or positive), but on a radical inclusion or a new semiotics of the ‘nonpositive affirmation’ (Foucault 36).” **For the love of theory. About writing; not about pedagogy; not about learning, but about ‘knowledge’?
- While the former is predicated on a binary (negative/positive), the latter searches for third terms (nonpositive affirmation) that signify limitlessness. (See Eco and Sebeok 1-10; Deleuze, Cinema, 98 -101, 197 -205; Vitanza, “Threes,” Negation.) **How are these ‘third terms’ different from ‘interpretants’? Does a Piercean triad assign ‘limitlessness’ to ‘interpretant’?
- While the former discovers or invents meaning by way of defining (i.e., limiting), and therefore while it is indebted to the basic principles of formal logic (identity, noncontradiction, and the excluded middle), the latter is not indebted to these principles and instead makes meanings by recalling to mind what heretofore had been excluded by the principle of the excluded middle. (The latter would embrace all the excluded so-called monsters of thought.) **What the f*** does this mean? Fn Foucault! This is certainly not a thing of praxis.
- While the former searches for meaning by establishing a species in a genus (a human being is a featherless biped that is either male or female), the latter forgoes such logical categorization and seeks out the conditions for the possibilities of recalling what has been excluded (a human being is both a feathered and a featherless biped, triped, and so forth, that is either male or female or both, as in a hermaphrodite, or different yet paradoxically similar, as in what some geneticists call a merm or ferm, and whatever else had been excluded because it was thought monstrous). In the animal kingdom, a platypus makes biological categorization problematic; in the human-animal kingdom, a hermaphrodite and other forms of sexuality make for similar difficulties. ***This is not about learning, not about pedagogy. It’s a theory of language that has implications for pedagogy. I’m not understanding what it’s doing except for bringing attention to what gets left out when we create categories. This way of understanding language maintains possibilities for being beyond dichotomies. And yet… Why do we need all of this? It certainly hasn’t helped our society or culture. In retrospect, actually, it seems wildly irresponsible, rhetorically irresponsible.
187: Presaging ANT: “The next important step, after genetics has been nonpositively affirmatively deconstructed, is to break the binary differences between nonhuman and human, or lower and higher animals. The exploding of this binary is presently under way by Donna Haraway.”
“While fact and fiction merge and implode, what effect will this implosion have had on rhetorical invention?” * TRUMP
187: “It has been bad enough that the second sex (females) has been excluded ethically, morally, and politically; now we are realizing the exclusion of the third+ sexes. And, yes, their possible re-inclusion.” *** Gees. I wonder if we focused less on identity politics and more on the human active mind operating simultaneous activities in the making of meaning, and bringing conscious attention to that state of being… I wonder if we could more better critical thinkers, more better minds challenging killer dichotomies?
188: “In the history of the West, “thinking” has been done in terms of the ideal (Plato) or the actual (Aristotle), with the third term generally excluded or suppressed or unfavored.” *** Does this mean un-articulated? Interesting way of considering our current political moment.
188: “. That third term is the possible, which is a topos admitted by Plato and Aristotle but only admitted, as I have stressed, under the sign of the negative (Vitanza, Negation).” This is not “triadic hermeneutics.” It’s a different kind of third, not a vague field of possible meanings, but a term (or other ‘thing’) de-ployed (employed?) in the process of meaning making. This isn’t about stasis, or ‘coming to terms’ outside/it’s about coming to terms inside with the outside, which, to me, seems like this must happen first for there to be any use of notions of the kind of third Vitanza speaks of here.
188: “In Deleuze the term is thirdness or the virtual, which he takes from Peirce and Bergson respectively.” ***Peirce? How is Deleuze’s Peircean thirdness different from Berthoff’s?
“All of this slipping out of the binary into a third place is happening at the very moment composition studies is announcing to the world that it is a new discipline and therefore wants to be taken seriously! ” **Interesting. ANT: states of change are always constant; it’s the sameness that is unique. If it lasts, why? How?
‘However, setting the madlike authors aside, we can say that this movement toward thirdness is happening because of the inclusion of computer technology into the field of composition studies” ***I do not understand how this “thirdness” relates to Peircean “thirdness” or how it doesn’t. Why is AB’s triadic hermeneutics considered quaint?
“Computers paradoxically are entirely suitable for the introduction of randomness.” ***Huh? it’s ended up so far not incredibly suitable-seeming for randomness. Isn’t it just the opposite? Not a whole lot of challenging of binaries or dichotomies. Cultural patterns reinforced, not disrupted by thirds or “compossibilities.” Hey… Doesn’t it take a generous imagination to sense composssibilities? (If I say ‘imagination’ am I retrograde? Romantic?)
189: “The so-called paradigm shift that Young (“Paradigms”) and then Hairston spoke of in terms of moving from style to invention or from product to process was not the shift but only a prejudgment and misunderstanding of what was to come the shift to, not ‘secondary orality’ as Walter Ong would have it, but to chance as hazard or to the monstrous.” ***Monster. Hybrid. Star. Harraway.
189-90: “…new reordering of what now will count as and for thinking. The question forever is, What is thinking? Propositional and/or nonpropositional? I am not asking the question as an ontogenetic question or as a negative-essential one, which is normally how such a question does get asked, answered, and canonized in composition studies.”**Acts of mind, all at once, conscious awareness (is that ‘propositional’ thinking?)
190: “Rather than giving the dialectics of good versus bad, both procedures tend to move on progressively to a third term or place, or what Baudrillard would call the ecstasy of communication (Fatal 41, 67). They tend to move on to a scene unseen that moves in a devolutionary manner, again as Baudrillard would describe it, “from forms of expression and competition toward aleatory and vertiginous forms that are no longer games of scene, mirror, challenge, duel games, but rather ecstatic, solitary and narcissistic games, where pleasure is no longer a dramatic and esthetic matter of meaning, but an aleatory, psychotropic one of pure fascination” (68). My intent–Does this “I” have an intent that it can call its own?–is not only to discuss the theoretical principles but also to demonstrate in passing how these paramethods might be applied in the un/learning of writing.: **ecstatic, body; psychotropic/fascination, body; vertiginous form, body…spinning.
191: “Both paramethods bring to the surface information and connections that the so-called new rhetoric, with its commitment to formal and informal logic, would have to discard as nonsense or as illegitimate, thereby deflecting what desires to be said.”***I’m not sure what is being referred to here as ‘the new rhetoric.’ But here all ‘information’ exists as possibility, waiting to be actualized I guess, via iteration. AB, seems to me, and triadic hermeneutics, are committed to “formal and informal logic”? Why so? Berthoff at any rate focuses on student conscious awareness brought to bare on how they make meaning, not on adjudicating what is “legitimate.” And this idea that something ‘desires to be said’? Not in the realm of AB?
“The new rhetoric would have to construct the strongest of alibis for an ignorance of what desires to be expressed. “***huh?
‘cultural theorists’… well, Berthoff is definitely not a cultural theorist
191: “In his Applied Grammatology, he moves from Derridean deconstruction (a mode of analysis) to grammatology (a mode of composition), that is, to exploring “the nondiscursive levels images and puns, or models and homophonesas an alternative mode of composition and thought applicable to academic work, or rather, play” (xi).”***How does this square with Freire’s ‘gramatology’? Funny. Seems to assume a privileged, detached, idealized subject. Purely and uselessly theoretical.
“Ulmer focuses primarily on a theory of invention in terms of these images and puns, which would lay bare associational thinking, coincidences, and accidents, yet produce nondisciplinary meaning.” *** You cannot do this, I think. But you can prepare an environment in which people come to be consciously aware of “associational thinking, coincidences [this implies meaningfulness] and accidents [meaningful?]…” ABs insistence was never on ‘disciplinary meaning’; the KIND of meaning is up to the learner/writer.
192: “Ulmer’s discussion indirectly furthers and complicates Elbow’s expressive writing.” ***
Okay… the play on his own name, VV’s “mystory” is brilliant and would make a phenomenal assignment, I think. What’s so interesting to me, however, is how similar it seems to Freire’s gramatological exercises. I wonder though… what’s the purpose of the exercise? To follow meaning where it might lead? Or to create it as you go? Where does the teacher direct the student’s attention as she introduces the exercise. The research would be interesting. Students would need to employ a great deal of imagination, particularly encouraged to accept potential meanings that feel strange or a stretch.
“Ulmer’s third book, Heuretics, is the one I am most concerned with here. This book more than the others carefully defines in terms of a theory of invention how “to play” on the road to Serendip(ity), while confessing ignorance of the rules of the game.”*** PLAY… allowing possibilities that defy logic or comfort or clarity or clear categorization, or recognition….
193: “Heuretics calls for a return of “a rhetoric/poetics leading to the production of a new work” (94). But as an antimethodology, heuretics is not concerned with critique or with the meaning of a particular text but with “a generative experiment: Based on a given theory, how might another text be composed?” (4-5).” ***Wow, how curious… I’ve been doing this all along as an approach to peer review. “Instead of telling them what the writer did or did not do well, or should or shouldn’t do, imagine what they could have done differently.” As someone who has practiced this in the classroom I can tell you… IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO TELL THEM TO DO IT AND HAVE THE MOVE MANIFEST. It takes, oh I don’ know… a heuristic, a prepared environment, a specific, targeted effort, and above all, AN IMAGINATION!
“From Plato to the present, one of the invidious tests for whether a notion or a practice has any value is to determine whether it can be generalized (is generic) and whether it is transferable (codifiable, teachable).” **interesting. “a notion” or “a practice”… Then why didn’t FTW thrive? it is both of these… or is it? What about it defies this “reasonable” test? Is this the “pragmaticism” AB speaks of getting whacked?
194: “By itself, the acronym of five conceptual starting places, CATTt, looks as if it overlaps with a number of other rather conventional sets of topoi, for example, Aristotle’s twenty-eight, Cicero’s sixteen, Kenneth Burke’s Pentad (perhaps his four master tropes, which Hayden White uses), or Young’s tagmemic nine-celled matrix or any variation of it.” ***Vitanza writes of Ulmer like Dennett writes of Dawkins. (just saying)
195: “Such a proposal stands diametrically opposed to the academic protocol of writing (linear, hierarchical, cause/effect writing), which is bolstered by traditional heuristics.” *** But none of it matters if students don’t/can’t achieve conscientisacao. Right?
“Ulmer’s is not, therefore, a conventional argumentative thinking and writing; his is a grammatological approach to thinking and writing that emphasizes picto-ideogrammatic, aesthetic representations–writing intuitively.” **This is Freire without the overt politics? AB highlights “asethetic” experience dimension. But the ‘writing intuitively’ part… what??? where is conscientisacao?
196: “Electronic media have changed the very conditions for the possibilities of lexical (play)fields.” **I wonder what he thinks of this now? But just because the medium changes the possibilities doesn’t mean people are going to explore a greater range of possibilities.
“Those of us familiar with writing in the new media can easily understand that Ulmer is talking about hypertext (extended texts) the way that George P. Landow, Jay David Bolter, and Richard A. Lanham have most recently. …Ulmer speaks of “chorography (the name of the method that I will have invented)” (26). Ulmer’s notion of topos (the where?) is “the thing” that has been systematically excluded. He, like Kristeva and Derrida before him, returns to Plato’s Timeaus and specifically the discussion of the three kinds of nature: being, chora, and becoming. The excluded is the chora. The excluded third, or middle (muddle), is the chora”*** Chora (third)
“The chora is neither male nor female but third genders. It is the twisting, turning, folding of cyberspace in multimedia. And it has a totally new reconception of memory. The chora is the impossible…” **Ummm.. Okay. impossible?
196: “Ulmer’s antimethod is at present the best rationalization that the fields of philosophy, rhetoric, and composition have for glimpsing the power that lies in what they have dubbed “vitalism.'” ***Vitalism? interesting. Hawk. Didn’t take off. Made AB mad.
196: “What I am insisting on as the difference between the old new rhetoric and the newest new rhetoric or rationalized thinking about composing is that to understand the often misunderstood, each of us must set aside classical, Aristotelian logic informed by the terministic screens of dynamis (power, potential for what is possible) and energeia (the act that actualizes the possible or probable).” ***AB certainly does not do this. She is not this ‘hip’ or ambitious or “novo”….
197: “When I read Ulmer, I hear him attempting to rationalize a new screen (or monitor) with terms such as chora that would be a Derridian-Deleuzean paralogic, making visible the Virtual, or the unthought, that lies on the plane of immanence.” WTF. Seriously? And people say Berthoff is difficult? unaccessible? How does any of this inform how we teach basic writers?
198: “Opposed to the classical concept of memory as storing information in some specific locale from which it may be retrieved, connectionism designs memory as not stored at any specific locus (topos, lines of argument determined by negation) but in the myriad relationships among various loci, topoi-cumchora (atopoi, nonlinear lines of para-arguments undetermined by nonpositive affirmations). It’s worth repeating: Not in loci but among.” ***Dude this totally describes my experience. It also seems to echo ANT.
197: “But I need not back off from this argument, for “bits and bytes” themselves (b/b)in my rationalization are ever desiring the new “border logics” (M. Bricken; W. Bricken) that totally reconstitute computer programming from on/off, +/, in/out to what lies in the virgule (/), lies in the middle, muddle of what Joyce calls the “sounddance” (378.29-30). The binary machines are becoming-desiring machines! The scattered possible readings or con-fusions I gave in terms of my entitled, proper name are possible virtually future-perfect possible in multimedia environments.” ***Theoretical philosophy like this sometimes feels like poetry does to most people. I love the idea of con-fusions. My sense, though, is that, since most people/humans do not experience the computer in even close to its potential for possibility, certainly don’t enact a consciousness in experiencing/using it that might bring the virgule to the fore, then of what use is this theoretical thinking?
198: “And yet again, there is a way: “Here is a principle of chorography: do not choose between the different meanings of key terms, but compose by using all the meanings (write the paradigm)” (48; emphasis added). And I would casuistically stretch Ulmer as adding, “and all the ways previously found illegitimate as making meanings.” And while doing so, write, unbeknownst to yourself and others, new paradigms that might generate still other paradigms, saying Yes to everything and No to only the negative. To approach, as incompossibles, the worlds other than that One we have from the mode of production of the real world.” ***This is interesting Freirean, I think, only without an ounce of concern for consequences or practicality.
199: “In discussing Ulmer’s Heuretics, I have been especially heretical in insisting and perhaps inciting that wethe various WEs (Can one even address a “WE” anymore?)think the unthought, or illegitimate notion that things can think. Can do. Can have their revenge.” **ANT, Latour, okay…
200: “By way of furthering a preface (praefatio) to our monstration of the aleatory, let us recall poor Ferdinand de Saussure, who as a philologist studied Latin hymns and poetry, the Rig Veda, the Niebelungen, and found in them, far beyond what anyone might expect, anagram after anagram. Saussure found anagram dedications to God and to gods and even found cryptograms (signs) uttered by the gods in pagan poetry and prose.” **Saussure. Interesting. Playfulness descends to madness?
201: “I am not sure I agree that logos loses its capacity to communicate. I guess it depends on what constitutes a communicative act. Should ideal or pragmatic speech-act theory determine what constitutes a communicative act? I think other/wise, which leads medrives my desireto the following pronouncement:” **So the purpose is not meaning-making but “communication”?
“If it were not for grammars, we would easily drift into psychotic episodes.” (And we do…)
202: “Coda: Baudrillard writes: The work of reason is not at all to invent connections, relations, meaning. There’s too much of that already. On the contrary, reason seeks to manufacture the neutered, to create the indifferent, to demagnetize inseparable constellations and configurations, to make them erratic elements sworn finally to finding their cause or to wandering at random. Reason seeks to break the incessant cycle of appearances. Chance the possibility of indeterminate elements, their respective indifference, and, in a word, their freedom results from this dismantling. (Fatal 151-52)” *** Agreed we do this naturally; human nature. But conscious awareness that and how we do it… That’d different. That’s AB/Freire/Montessori
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