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Lyotard’s “Differend” and Torts

In Arts & Letters, History, Humanities, Jurisprudence, Law, Law-and-Literature, Legal Education & Pedagogy, Libertarianism, Literary Theory & Criticism, Philosophy, Politics, Rhetoric, Rhetoric & Communication, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy on October 13, 2011 at 12:53 pm

Allen Mendenhall

 

“I would like to call a differend [différend] the case where the plaintiff is divested of the means to argue and becomes for that reason a victim.  If the addressor, the addressee, and the sense of the testimony are neutralized, everything takes place as if there were no damages (No. 9).  A case of differend between two parties takes place when the ‘regulation’ of the conflict that opposes them is done in the idiom of one of the parties while the wrong suffered by the other is not signified in that idiom.”

                             —Jean-François Lyotard, from “The Differend”

Lyotard’s term “differend” does not refer to a concrete, tangible thing; it refers to a situation.  The situation is one where a plaintiff has lost the ability to state his case, or has had that ability taken from him.  He is therefore a victim.  If the plaintiff has no voice, he has no remedies because he cannot prove damages.  Just as one cannot prove something happened if the proof no longer exists, so one cannot prove something happened if the proof depends upon the approval of another person or party denying or erasing the proof, or having the power to deny or erase the proof.  Lyotard describes this situation in relation to power or authority.  Because of the nature and function of power or authority, a person or group possessing power or authority can divest the plaintiff of a voice.  This divestiture results in what Lyotard calls a “double bind” whereby the referent (“that about which one speaks”) is made invisible.  A plaintiff who is wronged by the power or authority cannot attain justice if he has to bring his case before the same power or authority.  As Lyotard explains, “It is in the nature of a victim not to be able to prove that one has been done a wrong.  A plaintiff is someone who has incurred damages and who disposes of the means to prove it.  One becomes a victim if one loses these means.  One loses them, for example, if the author of the damages turns out directly or indirectly to be one’s judge.”  Specifically, Lyotard uses the differend to describe the situation where victims of the Nazi gas chambers lack the voice to articulate their case in terms of proof because, among other things, the reality or referent is so traumatizing and tragic as to be ineffable. 

If Entity A harms me in some way, and Entity A also represents the arbiter or judge before whom I must appeal for justice, Entity A can (and probably will) neutralize my testimony.  That is why a State may tax its citizens.  In effect, a State has the power or authority to do something—take a person’s earnings against his will and punish or threaten to punish him, by force if necessary, when he fails or refuses to yield his earnings—that a private person or party cannot do.  When a private party demands money from a person, and threatens to use force against that person if he does not yield the money, the private party has committed theft.  The difference between theft (an unauthorized taking by one who intends to deprive the other of some property) and taxation (an authorized taking by an institution that intends to deprive the other of some property) is the capacity or ability to sanction.  The difference depends upon who controls the language: who has the power to privilege one form of signification over another and thus to define, determine, or obliterate the referent. 

“Sanction” is a double-edged term: it can mean either to approve or to punish.  Both significations apply to the State, which, in Lyotard’s words, “holds the monopoly on procedures for the establishment of reality.”  (Note: Lyotard is not referring to any State, but to the “learned State,” a term he borrows from François Châtelet.)  Sanction is implicated when a party is harmed, or alleges to have been harmed, whether by the State or by a private party.  The State then resolves whether the harm, or the act causing the harm, is “sanctionable”—whether, that is, it receives State approval or condemnation.  The State either validates [sanctions] the alleged harm (in which case the alleged harm officially is not a harm), or it condemns the alleged harm (in which case the alleged “harm” is officially constituted as a “harm”) and then punishes [sanctions] the one who caused the harm.  In any case, the State sanctions; it enjoys the power to decide what the referent ought or ought not to be.  Read the rest of this entry »

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A Few More Words on Patrick Allitt’s The Conservatives

In American History, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Conservatism, History, Humanities, Liberalism, Libertarianism, Politics on October 9, 2011 at 4:51 pm

Allen Mendenhall

Many American politicians call themselves “conservative” despite never having read Paul Elmer More, Irving Babbitt, Robert Taft, Donald Davidson, Frank Meyer, Richard Weaver, James Burnham, or Russell Kirk.  Television pundits recycle the term “neoconservative” without even a passing reference to Leo Strauss, Irving Kristol, or Norman Podhoretz.  A welcome respite from the ignorance of the talking heads, Patrick Allitt’s The Conservatives (Yale University Press, 2009) is an engaging and informative book, even if it is more of an introduction to American conservatism than a critical study.  I recently reviewed the book here at the journal 49th Parallel, but I have more to say about it.

American conservatism is rich and complex but too often simplified or ignored by academics who think they know what conservatism means.  I applaud Allitt for taking conservatism seriously and for marshaling a wealth of evidence to support his thesis.  Those who cannot identify what generally distinguishes a paleoconservative from a neoconservative, or who’re confused by the apparent hypocrisy of conservatives who call for big-government spending on military and surveillance while griping about big-government, need to read this book.  Allitt provides clarity and direction for the uninitiated.  He deserves not just our attention, but our admiration.

Allitt attends to several figures in this book, including John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, William Cobbett, John Marshall, John Randolph of Roanoke, George Fitzhugh, Rufus Choate, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, George Ticknor, Abraham Lincoln, Orestes Brownson, William Graham Sumner, Andrew Carnegie, Theodore Roosevelt, John Crow Ransom, Andrew Lytle, H. L. Mencken, Herbert Hoover, William Howard Taft, Albert Jay Nock, Ralph Adams Cram, George Santayana, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig Von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Ayn Rand, Whittaker Chambers, William F. Buckley, Milton Friedman, Barry Goldwater, George Will, Ronald Reagan, Michael Novak, Robert Bork, Allan Bloom, M. E. Bradford, Thomas Fleming, Clyde Wilson, Francis Fukuyama, Samuel Huntington, Patrick Buchanan, Jerry Falwell, Roger Kimball, Thomas Sowell, Charles Murray, Dinesh D’Souza, and others.  One book cannot address every major figure that influenced American conservatism, and Allit’s failure to mention some names (Strom Thurmond, Gerald Ford, Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich, Donald Rumsfeld, Wendell Berry, James Dobson, Pat Robertson, or any of the Bob Joneses) is understandable.  Paul Gottfried appears just once in the book, and passingly.  But a case could be made that Gottfried’s paleoconservatism is more European in origin and thus worthy of analysis.  And surely Eric Voegelin warrants more than a casual reference in a single paragraph.

For some, Allitt’s most objectionable suggestion will be that the Civil War was a conflict of two conservatisms: Calhoun’s versus Webster’s.  This interpretation illuminates and simultaneously complicates such recent debates as the one held between Thomas DiLorenzo and Harry V. Jaffa over the issue of Abraham Lincoln’s legacy.

Allitt also suggests that the Federalists represent an early manifestation of conservatism.  This classification would mean that Jefferson and his ilk were not conservatives, which would in turn imply that current Jeffersonians are not in keeping with a purely conservative tradition.  Allitt offers this helpful and accurate note about Jefferson: “He might not have been the Jacobin his Federalist foes alleged, but neither can he easily be thought of as a conservative.”  Many scholars and enthusiasts consider Jefferson to be a “classical liberal,” but the signification of that word relative to “libertarian” or “conservative” merely confounds definitional precision:  All three words have been used interchangeably and negligently in recent decades.  It may not matter if Jefferson is called “conservative” or “liberal,” especially if those terms cause people to short-circuit reflection or affix a contemporary label to a complicated man living in a complex, radically different era.

Allitt’s book is a fine contribution to and about conservative letters.  I recommend it to anyone who thinks he can explain conservatism.

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Nietzsche on the Writer or Artist

In Art, Artist, Arts & Letters, Creativity, Humanities, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Philosophy, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy, Writing on October 5, 2011 at 9:23 am

Allen Mendenhall

The following post first appeared here at The Literary Table.

 

“[O]ne does well to separate the artist from his work, which should be taken more seriously than he is.  Ultimately, he is no more than its pre-condition, the womb, the soil, possibly the manure and midden upon which, from which it grows—and thus, in most cases, something which must be forgotten before the work itself can be enjoyed.  Insight into the origin of a work is a matter for physiologists and vivisectors of the spirit: but never one for the aesthetic men, the artists!”

—Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals

It’s easy, reading Nietzsche, to fall into anachronism: to consider his comments about divorcing the author from the text as indicative of something akin to the New Criticism, a hermeneutic that isolated texts from externalities such as authorial intent and that treated the aesthetic object as self-contained and autonomous.  That is not at all what Nietzsche meant.  For Nietzsche, the text, or the aesthetic object, is not isolated from externalities, but merely removed from and, in a way, prior to the author; the text is plugged into externalities, shaped and molded by them, so much so that the author is but the incidental medium through which the text speaks.  The text, in other words, has its own authority apart from its creator, who, through the will, channels social and cultural energies to generate aesthetic output.  The writer or artist is “no more than its pre-condition, the womb, the soil, possibly the manure and midden upon which, from which it grows.”  Discourse impregnates the writer or artist, who, thus implanted with ideas and alphabets, carries vocabularies through their prenatal stages and into a rebirth—or new expression—in the form of art.  

According to Nietzsche, the objects and ambitions of the writer or artist as a thinking actor are not, or ought not to be, overstated because the writer or artist is the ultimate example of the effect of action and will.  For the writer or artist is not independent from discourse and ethos—indeed, he is constituted by them, and so, by extension, is his textual production: the aesthetic object.  We may forget the author; if anything, he or she only impedes the pleasure we derive from texts and aesthetics.  The author is “something which must be forgotten before the work itself can be enjoyed.”

Why does Nietzsche posit this view?  What is he after?  Among other things, he’s criticizing the writers and artists who would have us believe that they are above and beyond others, somehow able to divine the real and the eternal.  These writers and artists treat the ascetic ideal as part and parcel of aestheticism—i.e., they conflate the ascetic with the aesthetic to maximize their feeling of power.  Although writers and artists promote themselves in this way, as if they had privileged access to universal yet remote knowledge, they realize, Nietzsche says, that on some level their ascetic ideal is an unreality or falsity—what Baudrillard might have called a hyperreality or simulacrum.  The ascetic ideal is escapism: a fleeting respite from the reality of the will to power, the impulse that the writer or artist seeks to evade, suppress, and disguise.  The conflict of the writer or artist lies in the desire to escape both to and from asceticism; for the intoxicating powers of the ascetic ideal are sobered by the boredom and angst of knowing that the ideal is but therapy and relief.  That realization means that therapy and relief are themselves, paradoxically, the grounds for further escapism—for further therapy and relief. 

All of this suggests that ascetic ideals do not signify.  As Nietzsche says, ascetic ideals “mean absolutely nothing!”  What is so remarkable about these ideals is that they are contingent and contextual such that they amount to nothing and everything at once, and that we will, despite ourselves, and despite our longing for meaning, chase after nothing rather than not chase at all.  That, alas, is why the artist lacks independence in this world.  That, alas, is why no artist is disinterested.

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BOOK REVIEW: Laura F. Edwards. The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

In Advocacy, American History, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Civil Procedure, History, Humanities, Jurisprudence, Law, Laws of Slavery, Nineteenth-Century America, Politics, Rhetoric, Slavery, Southern History, The South on September 28, 2011 at 10:41 am

Allen Mendenhall

Since Mark Tushnet revived the study of slave laws in the American South, several historians, most notably Paul Finkelman, Thomas D. Morris, and Ariela Gross, have followed in his footsteps.  Laura F. Edwards’s The People and Their Peace is a book that extends this trend in scholarship.  Focusing on North and South Carolina from roughly 1787 to 1840, and more specifically on three North Carolina counties and four South Carolina counties during that time, Edwards situates local law in contradistinction to state law, portraying the former as polycentric and heterogeneous and the latter as centralized and homogenous.  Edwards suggests that state law was more aspirational than practical in the early nineteenth-century Carolinas because it failed to inform ordinary legal practice at the local level in the same way that resident culture or custom did.

Pitting “reformers” (elite individuals who sought to create a uniform and consolidated body of rules that appellate courts could enforce at the state level) against locals, Edwards demonstrates that the legal system was bottom-up and not top-down and that law on paper or in statutes was different from law in practice.  On paper or in statutes, law subordinated lower courts to appellate courts and seemed, in keeping with the reformers’ ideals, systematized into a unitary, integrated order that reflected the supposedly natural and inevitable unfolding of history.  Reformers selectively compiled local laws and practices into lengthy works to forge the impression that law was a set of consistent, underlying principles.  In practice, however, law was variable, contingent, and contextual.  It emerged from the workaday and quotidian operations of individuals in towns and communities.  Law was therefore as messy as it was unpredictable, and it cannot be understood today without a deep knowledge of interpersonal relationships and cultural conditions in locales where courts sat.  Slave codes, for instance, did not reflect realities on the ground because they were handed down by state legislatures and could not account for the reputations and routines of people in local communities—people who cared less about consistency in the law or about fixed principles than about their personal stake in any given legal matter. 

This book is a corrective to histories interested principally in local legal sources but neglectful of the particularities that brought about these local sources.  It marshals evidence from legal documents—especially case decisions, including appellate opinions—while considering why and how those documents were produced.  The development of state law became increasingly important during the antebellum years, but the rise in state law—which privileged narratives of individual rights, standardized legal principles, and enabled southern distinctiveness—does not make sense apart from local data.  Local data reveals much about the processes (as opposed to philosophies) of law.  Put differently, local law remained discretionary because it was fluid and not subject to abstract and purely notional mantras about rights. Read the rest of this entry »

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Allen Mendenhall Interviews Joyce Corrington

In Art, Arts & Letters, Creativity, Fiction, Film, History, Humanities, Information Design, John William Corrington, Law, Literature, News and Current Events, Novels, Philosophy, Screenwriting, Television, Television Writing, Writing on September 22, 2011 at 8:31 am

Joyce Corrington is a writer who, with her late husband John William “Bill” Corrington, wrote several films, including The Omega Man (1970), Box Car Bertha (1971), and The Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973).  Also with Bill Corrington, she co-authored four novels: So Small a Carnival (1986), A Project Named Desire (1987), A Civil Death (1987), and The White Zone (1990).  She was head writer for such television series as Search for Tomorrow, Texas, General Hospital and Superior Court, and she has been a co-executive producer for MTV’s The Real World.  She holds a Ph.D. from Tulane University.  Her latest book, Fear of Dying, is available in both Kindle e-book and paperback format.  Formerly a Malibu resident, she now resides in New Orleans. 

Photo by Robert Corrington

Joyce, thank you so much for doing this interview.  I’m surprised we haven’t done one before.  You’ve been an enormous help to me over the years.  You even allowed me to stay at your home in New Orleans so that I could do research on your late husband, Bill.  During that time I learned that you hold a Ph.D. from Tulane University, and taught Chemistry at Xavier University for ten years.  Tell me, how did a person with that background become a writer?

I’m sure it would never have happened if I hadn’t met and married Bill when we were both at Rice University.  He was working on a doctorate so he could earn a living teaching, but he wanted to write.  Bill succeeded in publishing a number of well-received novels, which I typed and edited for him.  But we did not become co-writers until Roger Corman read one of Bill’s novels and invited him to write a movie script.  This was not something Bill especially wanted to do.  But it paid better than college teaching, so we evolved a film writing partnership, whereby I would create a detailed story structure and Bill would write a script following my outline.  After six films, we became involved in writing television series and continued our writing partnership there and in the four New Orleans mystery books we published.  Bill passed away as the fourth was being written, so I completed it.

Why did you choose to continue the series?

After Bill died I found it difficult to get the same kind of writing jobs we had been used to doing.  I think this was because all of my credits were as half of a writing team and producers felt uncertain whether I could do the job by myself.  Thus I had about two years where I had little to do and, while I read a lot during that time, I also began writing a sequel to our New Orleans mystery series.  I think I wanted to prove that I could do it by myself.  Just after finishing the manuscript for Fear of Dying, I was hired to help produce The Real World, a job which I held for eleven seasons.  I did not get around to publishing Fear of Dying until I retired from that job. Read the rest of this entry »

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Foucault’s Nietzschean Genealogy

In Art, Arts & Letters, Historicism, History, Humanities, Literary Theory & Criticism, Philosophy, Politics, Rhetoric, Western Philosophy, Writing on September 17, 2011 at 10:02 am

Allen Mendenhall

“Genealogy […] requires patience and knowledge of details, and it depends on a vast accumulation of source material.  Its ‘cyclopean monuments’ are constructed from ‘discreet and apparently insignificant truths and according to a rigorous method’; they cannot be the product of ‘large and well-meaning errors.’  In short, genealogy demands relentless erudition.  Genealogy does not oppose itself to history as the lofty and profound gaze of the philosopher might compare to the molelike perspective of the scholar; on the contrary, it rejects the metahistorical deployment of ideal significations and indefinite teleologies.  It opposes itself to the search for ‘origins.’”

                                      —Michel Foucault, from “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”

This brief passage by Foucault has three references to Nietzsche.  The essay from which the passage is drawn demonstrates Foucault’s immense debt to Nietzsche, citing as it does no other thinker but Nietzsche (save for a fleeting reference to Paul Ree, whose term “Ursprung,” or “origin,” Nietzsche adopts).  Of all Nietzsche’s ideas and practices, genealogy is the one that Foucault cultivates most impressively.  Genealogy is a methodology by and with which one documents or tracks the development of ideas and their relation to human organization.  In other words, genealogy traces knowledge to its systemic formations across various networks of discourse.  That is why genealogy “requires patience” and “depends on a vast accumulation of source material.”  It is a process, and processes take time to work out. 

Genealogy does not recover origins because origins are not recoverable.  Origins are fluid, not fixed; they are not, strictly speaking, origins at all—if, that is, “origins” is taken to mean single, absolute causes or definite, immutable sources.  Rather, for Foucault, “origins” is a term of convenience—perhaps strategically essentialized—referring to sets of beliefs and activities that constitute discursive structures mobilized by numerous truth claims.  That is why Foucault can employ the term “origins” in one sentence and then, in a subsequent sentence, seemingly reverse course by calling origins “chimeras.”  The point is not to define or explain origins; the point is to discredit the idea of origins as self-evident and immanently knowable. 

Origins themselves are inaccessible; the emergence and development of structures based on ideas, however, are not only accessible, but also edifying.  Foucault’s genealogy, therefore, seeks to collect data about numerous truth claims and then to explain how these data form and shape culture.  As Foucault says of genealogy, “It opposes itself to the search for ‘origins.’”  Note the quotation marks around “origins.”  Those marks suggest an intent to divest that term of its expressive purchase.  Origins are knowable only as points of loss or complication, only as intricate and multifaceted constructs that, when examined closely, signify multiple and heterogeneous phenomena and that thus enable and sustain further inquiry.     Read the rest of this entry »

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Allen Mendenhall Interviews Richard Miles

In Advocacy, Arts & Letters, Communication, Ethics, Law, News and Current Events, Politics, Prison, Rhetoric, Rhetoric & Communication, Teaching, Writing on September 14, 2011 at 9:23 am

Richard Miles spent years in prison after being wrongly convicted and sentenced to 80 years.  He lives in Texas and speaks about false imprisonment.

Richard, thanks for doing this interview.  You and I have gotten to know each other through email correspondence.  I believe you first contacted me after reading my review of Dorothy and Peyton Budd’s Tested: How Twelve Wrongly Imprisoned Men Held Onto Hope (Dallas, TX: Brown Books Publishing Group, 2010).  You are one of those twelve men.  Tell us how you became part of the book.  What do you think of the book, now that you’ve seen the final product?

The first time anyone heard of or read anything about Richard Ray Miles was in The Dallas Morning News.  I remember that morning as if it was yesterday.  To be arrested for murder and attempted murder, at the age of 19, was a horrific experience, but to wake up Monday morning and read that I was the shooter, in a murder I didn’t commit, tore out my insides.  Mr. Mendenhall, my fight for innocence was not just for me—I knew I was innocent—but for my mom and dad.  I didn’t want the story to be the last thing that my father—a minister in the neighborhood who had to hear accusations about his son—to read.  So, when the book Tested was completed, it was like a dream come true: now Dallas residents could read about MY INNOCENCE. 

You’ve been through a lot.  Would you mind telling us your story?  Start wherever you want to start.

I was born in Dallas to Thelma Malone and Richard Miles.  My parents split when I was young, but not long after my mom met William Lloyd and married him.  I was probably about five when that happened, so to say I was without a father is false.  My dad, William, became a minister when I was still young, so I grew up in a very strict, religious household.  Going to church every day was not out of the ordinary.  For the most part, my older sister, two younger brothers and I had a very good upbringing.

As far as schooling goes, I was very smart and interested in learning.  I went to an academy for middle school and then to Skyline High School, which was one of the most prestigious schools at the time.  When I made it to Skyline, I began to feel something different.  I felt that my parents were way too strict on me.  As young children do, I began to rebel—nothing too extreme, but rebellious nevertheless.  I was kicked out of Skyline at the end of 11th grade and was transferred to Kimball.  Kimball and Skyline were two totally different places to learn.  To be more precise, Kimball was a Hood School; its reputation preceded itself.

By the time I got into Kimball and got ready to take my senior exams, I got a reputation for coming to school drunk.  Mind you, I was not a drinker, so any little thing was not good.  The long and short is that I made it all the way to the 12th grade, but did not graduate.  I left home a little after that, never to be in the streets or in a gang because I was working at McDonalds, and I actually liked the idea of having a job.  All that changed when my friend came to pick me up from my parents’ house.  He asked me about selling drugs.  I had never been introduced to that, and by mere peer pressure, my entire life was turned around.

I struggled on the streets for probably one year, but that was enough to experience a life I will never return to.  On May 15th, I was walking home, not knowing there was a shooting miles away, and I got picked up for a murder and an attempted murder.  I have never shot a gun in my life, nor ever thought about stealing or tried to steal someone’s things by force.  So, I knew I would be going home soon. The whole interrogation lasted probably five or six hours.  Because my friend had driven me home and wasn’t with me when I was walking and got picked up, I gave the detective phone numbers of people who could identify my whereabouts.  My friend had gone to his girlfriend’s place.  That’s why I was walking by myself.  All in all, I gave the detective four phone numbers of people who could verify my whereabouts and confirm that I was not the shooter. The detective left and came back about an hour later.  He said, “Your story checked out, but you killed that man, and you’re going to prison.”  I was lost at that point.

I stayed in the county jail for 17 months before I went to trial.  I was given a court-appointed lawyer. In August 1995, I had a jury trial.  

There were ten witnesses, nine of whom said I was not the shooter.  No weapon was ever found, and the fingerprints that were retrieved were neither mine nor the victims’. One person who was shot testified that I did not look like the shooter, and my alibis came as well.  Nevertheless, I was found guilty of murder and attempted murder and sentenced to 80 years in prison. 

After I had sent out numerous letters and spent 14 years in prison, I was contacted by an organization out of Princeton, New Jersey, that picked up my case and found in the police record an anonymous phone record received before I went to trial.  This record mentioned the real shooter as well as other confidential information.  This stuff had never been turned in.  Based on that and other exculpatory evidence, I was released in October 2009; I was the first non-DNA release under District Attorney Craig Watkins. 

Now I’m awaiting full exoneration, even though the DA and my judge pronounced me innocent. Read the rest of this entry »

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What is a Research Paper, and How Does It Implicate Disciplinarity?

In Arts & Letters, Communication, Law, Legal Education & Pedagogy, Legal Research & Writing, Pedagogy, Rhetoric, Rhetoric & Communication, Teaching, Writing on September 8, 2011 at 10:51 pm

Allen Mendenhall

Richard L. Larson interrogates the “research paper” signifier. He claims that this signifier lacks settled meaning because it “has no conceptual or substantive identity” (218). He calls the term “generic” and “cross-disciplinary” and claims that it “has virtually no value as an identification of a kind of substance in a paper” (218). Despite its empty or fluid meaning, the term “research paper” persists inside and outside English Departments, among faculty and students, at both university and secondary school levels. The problem for Larson is that by perpetuating the use of this slippery signifier, writing instructors mislead students as to what constitutes research and thereby enable bad research.

The term research paper “implicitly equates ‘research’ with looking up books in the library and taking down information from those books” (218); therefore, students learning to write so-called research papers inadvertently narrow their research possibilities by relying on a narrow conception of research as library visitation, note-taking, or whatever, without recognizing other forms of research that may be more discipline-appropriate: interviews, field observations, and the like (218). Using the term “research paper” to describe a particular type of activity implies not only that other, suitable practices are not in fact “research,” but also that students may dispense with elements of logic and citation if their instructors didn’t call the assignment a “research paper.” Really, though, research papers teach skills that apply to all papers, regardless of whether instructors designate a paper as “research.” In a way, all papers are research papers if they draw from sustained observation or studied experience.

Having argued that the term research paper is a vacant signifier—vacant of identity if not of meaning (not that the two are mutually exclusive)—Larson argues that the “provincialism” (220) of writing instructors (by which he means writing instructors’ presumption that they can and should speak across disciplines despite their lack of formal training in other disciplines) leads to a problem of territoriality. Some information belongs in the province of other disciplines, Larson seems to suggest, and writing instructors should not assume that they know enough about other disciplines to communicate in a discipline-appropriate setting. Some knowledge, in other words, lies outside the writing instructor’s jurisdiction. I’m ambivalent on this score. Read the rest of this entry »

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Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals: A Critical Précis

In Art, Artist, Arts & Letters, Ethics, Humanities, Law, Philosophy, Rhetoric, Western Civilization, Writing on September 1, 2011 at 11:44 pm

Allen Mendenhall

We remain unknown to ourselves, we seekers after knowledge, even to ourselves: and with good reason.  We have never sought after ourselves—so how should we one day find ourselves?  It has rightly been said that: ‘Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also’; our treasure is to be found in the beehives of knowledge.  As spiritual bees from birth, this is our eternal destination, our hearts are set on one thing only—‘bringing something home.’

                                             —    Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals

Nietzsche employs an aphorism to open the third essay of On the Genealogy of Morals (GM).  That approach seems fitting for this critical précis, the aphoristic epigram to which quotes none other than Nietzsche himself.

The opening declarative here—“We remain unknown to ourselves”—signals the ancient Greek imperative: “Know thyself.”  That Nietzsche converts the imperative to a declarative is suggestive.  The imperative expresses a command: the emphatic utterance of an authoritative demand (“do this”).  The declarative is a descriptive assertion: the positive utterance of fact or opinion.  The imperative, if issued by the right person and not meant as merely advisory, presupposes the power to enforce or induce the substance of the command.  A speaker that commands another to know himself assumes that the other will act, can act, or ought to act in accordance with what he, the speaker, orders.  The speaker of a declarative statement, on the other hand, conveys information; the transmission of data from the speaker to the listener does not necessarily signify a desire that the listener act, or refrain from acting, in accordance with the data or the speaker’s wishes. 

Nietzsche uses the declarative to describe our epistemic state or to posit an idea about our epistemic state.  His articulation necessarily undermines the idea that we already have answered the call to know ourselves.  Either we have ignored the command to know ourselves (“We have never sought after ourselves”), or we have failed to comply with it—or both.  To the extent that Western philosophy could, at Nietzsche’s moment, be reduced to these two words—“know thyself”—Western philosophy had, if we believe Nietzsche’s declaration, failed or decayed.  What Nietzsche seeks to posit, in more assertive or, one might say, more declarative terms, is a radical rewriting and reinterpretation of knowledge itself.  To know ourselves, we must know what we know and how we know it, or know what we think we know and how to overcome it.  We have blurred the distinction between knowledge and morals; we have internalized weak epistemic truth claims across time; a genealogy of morals is necessary to trace and thereby illuminate our understanding of ourselves. Read the rest of this entry »

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Dragon*Con Convention in Atlanta

In Arts & Letters, Fiction, Georgia, Humanities, Literature, News and Current Events, News Release, Writing on August 31, 2011 at 8:25 am

Allen Mendenhall

The Dragon*Con convention will take place in Atlanta from September 2 through September 5.  The convention features events and workshops about science fiction and fantasy, gaming, comics, literature, art, music, and film.