A Conversation

This is a writing-program blog, but so far, in addition to me only Gray Kane has regularly contributed to it. After I posted on Byron Hawk's book, I tried to get him to post about vitalism, and he responded to my email ("Have you had a look at ...?") with another email:

Yeah. I haven't read the source and didn't find a point of entry into the subject matter to get me excited one way or another about it. I understand the desire for consistency between the form of an argument and its content, but I didn't see what was so exciting about the content for me to care.

To put it another way, forget for the time being how "true" vitalism might be and the corresponding imperative to bring this "truth" to the larger critical community. What does this "truth" enable us to do that we weren't able to do before? That's what I didn't find.

What does interest me is this critical tendency to dismiss the content as "crackpotty" because of its form. This aspect of the post of course reminds me of the arguments levied against "convoluted" theory in general. To communicate the ideas to a broader audience, a writer has to abandon each idea's form, but to a certain extent this damages the idea's content, such that people who already know the ideas easily see where the clarity paradoxically convolutes. I see that this is also what happens to vitalism. When critics fail to address each other's arguments in such a way that acknowledges how vitalism posits their relationships, the act of writing initiates a mind-body divide and disembodies an argument about somatic exchange. This perspectival problem not only reduces what is visible through its lens, but also distorts what it does see.

If a writer of perspective A wants to communicate idea "a"
to an audience of perspective B, how does that writer avoid transforming "a" into something contaminated by the audience's different framework? How does the writer stop "a" from looking like "b"?

I replied:

The point of entry I imagined was that, while you and I have some points of contact in our theorizations, there's a fundamental difference between our approaches, and this book has made me think that it's maybe that I'm a vitalist and you aren't. Specifically, you seem to me to be interested in the critical thinking going on in individual heads, and at most in individual teacher-student dyads, and seem to resist my pressures to understand critical thinking in the larger systemic (ideosomatic) terms. You recognize the potential validity of those larger terms, of course, but don't seem particularly interested in them--and so leave them for me to theorize.

Which is interesting, because Hawk draws a lot on Heidegger--as well as Nietzsche and Deleuze and Guattari, of course--specifically, the technology article and the passages from Being and Time where Heidegger discusses tools and their "ecological" situatedness.

Gray's dissertation, a rough draft of which is now being written, is on Heidegger and Lacan in the FYW classroom--specifically the four discourses of a Heideggerian Lacan and pedagogical theory. He responded:

As you acknowledged, it's not that I disagree with vitalism. It's that I don't see how it can help us. I see the answer to that question more in your textbook, but that answer still isn't worked out for me.

What I most appreciate from your textbook is the strategy for primary and secondary audiences and the distancing of authorial persona from the imagined configurations of a "true" self. In other words, what I most appreciate from your textbook is not necessarily tied to a theory of embodied exchange--at least from my perspective. In fact, I see the paradigm in terms of Other/other and split subjectivity.

That question of "usefulness" is my lack of point of entry in vitalism. And I find it interesting that in your reply to my email that you didn't offer an answer to that question.

I realize that Heidegger produced an interpretation of "meaning" that involves our retrospective configuration of how other human beings have manipulated the material world such that we are engaging those beings in our engagement with the material world. This is why he disagreed with technology: it impossibly distances the human fingerprint from the being's manipulation of the world, which consequently encourages the mind-body divide. But even though I can find usefulness in parts of Heidegger's paradigm, his desire for the "truth" of his subject matter overcomplicates his analysis to the point of his obfuscating its usefulness, from my perspective.

I realize that I'm caught in a paradigm of "usefulness" (bourgeois bricolage) that limits my ability to appreciate tangential lines of thought as equally central lines of thought. I think the comps and prospectus processes damaged that part of my appreciation: the external pressure for me "to get to the point." However, I don't feel a need to correct this problem since my abidance to it will help me publish and get a job.

So, since I'm not going to correct my interpretive lens' starting point of "usefulness," let me try to clarify how that usefulness plays a role in my interpretation of what others see to be useless. Maybe this can help you target my concerns about vitalism.

In Lacanese, "meaning" is always a somatic exchange and might have more in common with vitalism than you realize. Objet a is the source of bodily pleasure that we ignore but that nonetheless is essential in our "meaningful" attachments to objet a's externalizations, its semblances (in Schema L, a'). It's why we enjoy chasing the soccer ball even when we're so intent on the ball that we forget that what we're enjoying is our bodies. Meanwhile, we can't experience our bodily objet a in a "meaningful" way (in other words, objet a doesn't exist) until we locate it in the Other-- for instance, in the missing object in the gleam of the Other's eye. Lacan's dialectical desire and its "short circuits" through the drive are always somatic
exchanges: the discovery (and repression) of the body in an ontological network of human interaction.

I find "usefulness" in this because I can see in it a strategy to intentionally move the perception of "meaningfulness" (like Dupin in Poe's "The Purloined Letter"), which has incredible applications in pedagogy. (And politics, although I'm tiring of the unification of pedagogy and politics.) This is what I don't see thus far in either Heidegger's Dasein or vitalism.

So again, how does vitalism enable us as teachers or critics to achieve something that we otherwise couldn't achieve without it?

And I replied:

Yes, the split self is part of the poststructuralist/ postmodern bolus I'm smuggling into FYW. But for me a vitalist approach is so important precisely so that we recognize the ways in which a split self is not merely a pile of dead fragments that we can gloat over in a death-of-the-subject spirit, but a living (vital) complexity ORGANIZED for us by society. When we split off a part of ourselves and call that part "reader," and then split off another part and call it "writer," and give them new names and contexts and purposes and so on, we aren't just playing clever games; we LIVE the lives of those parts. We are invested in them. If we weren't, of course, writing and reading literature would be impossible, watching plays and movies would be impossible. (Or perhaps not so much impossible as cognitively difficult and affectively empty, affectless, disaffected.)

Hawk argues (drawing on someone else's reading of Heidegger, someone whose name I can't check because the book is in the room where Agnes is sleeping) that Heidegger didn't so much argue "against technology" as against the reduction of technology to efficient cause--against the instrumentalization of technology. According to Heidegger, EVERYTHING is technology, but it's a technology that's complexly saturated with the local ecology of meaning-production. In fact, that ecology is also the ecology of das Man. It's an ideosomatized ecology, the highly nuanced and constantly shifting production of reality and meaning by the group. (Something like that. I'd need to check the book again to get the argument exactly right.)

As for Lacan, I'm just learning to use the term "vitalism" in connection with his thought, but I've always read the Other AS the somatic exchange. In your paraphrase you mentioned "the missing object in the gleam of the Other's eye," but as I read Lacan that is exactly wrong. The Other is never another person; that's the other-small-o. As the Subject enters into a dyadic (or as I insist group) interaction with an other, that interaction is vitalized by both the idealized ego and the Other, both of which are collective (I would say ideosomatic) organizing "forces" or "vitalities" that bring complex order to the interaction.

The pedagogical usefulness of this perspective to my mind is that teaching is always a group interaction, and it's extremely useful to have a conceptual framework for the exploration of those vitalizing/organizing forces that work behind the scenes to structure and impose meaning on that interaction. At the sheer "textual" level of student writing (and peer-editing, etc.), those forces vitalize/organize text-production through an imagined (but actually felt) writer-reader interaction; at the pedagogical level of teacher-student interaction, the pressures of print culture and various other Others for us, and of SMS culture and MTV culture and whatever else for them, all impose various kinds of divergent and difficult to (re)organize vitality on our classrooms. And to my mind (Freud: where id was, let ego be) the more AWARE we are of those vitalities, the better able we may be to channel them.

(Re)Vitalizing Berlin

I've been reading Byron Hawk's 2007 book A Counter-History of Composition: Towards Methodologies of Complexity (Pitt) with a good deal of excitement lately. The "counter" or contradictory impulse in Hawk's counterhistory is his attempt to rescue vitalism from the "forgotten history" dump to which it has been relegated in historiographies of rhetorical theory since about 1980.

What happened that year specifically, according to Hawk, was that three extremely influential articles were published: Richard Young's "Arts, Crafts, Gifts, and Knacks" (in Aviva Freedman and Ian Pringle, eds., Reinventing the Rhetorical Tradition, 53-60 [CCTE, 1980]), James Berlin's "The Rhetoric of Romanticism" (Rhetoric Society Quarterly 10.2 [Spring 1980]: 62-74), and Paul Kameen's "Rewording the Rhetoric of Composition" (Pre/Text 1.1-2 [Spring-Fall 1980]: 73-94). Hawk identifies Young as the one who--drawing on a 1975 dissertation by one of his students, Hal Rivers Weidner, and first disseminating his views in an influential NEH postdoctoral seminar in 1978-1979--first buries vitalistic rhetorics as assuming that "creative processes ... are not susceptible to conscious control by formal procedures" (quoted in Hawk 22) and therefore in some sense are not rhetorics at all. For Young a rhetoric is an art or a techne, a process enacted with conscious control, and he believes that vitalism vitiates such control. In Hawk's paraphrase and commentary (drawing on Kameen's article): "Though Young does not use the term romanticism in 'Paradigms and Problems,' his reading of vitalism has questionable supports. One says the individual writer is not in control of invention (32) and the other says some aspects of invention cannot be taught and exist in the writer (32n5). Both positions may have associations with some romantic philosophies, but neither has any clear connection to vitalism" (23).

What is vitalism, then? Here is Hawk's summary:

While vitalism has romantic variations, at its roots it is theoretically and historically distinct. The fundamental question that cuts across all vitalisms is "What is life?" Each episteme, period, or paradigm answers the question of life differently according to its own situation and within its own discourse, but they are all trying to come to grips with what drives self-organization and development in the world. Historically, the general answers have ranged from an animistic, abstract, or mystical power that exists outside of and operates on the world, to an evolutionary and physio-chemical process that operates in the world, to a complex combination of material, biological, historical, social, linguistic, and ultimately technological processes that produce emergence. Life is situated in the relationships among these bodies and their forces. Rather than seeing life as an autonomous force, or as caused by physico-chemical or purely biological processes, this latter [read: last] view [complex vitalism] situates life within complex, ecological interactions. I see in each of these answers two key assumptions: that life is fundamentally complex (and that complexity must be accounted for or addressed) and that life is fundamentally generative (force, energy, will, power, or desire is central to this complexity). (4-5)

The first thing I note about this description is that my somatic theory is vitalist. The generative "force, energy, will, power, or desire" that drives the organization or regulation of (social) life in somatic theory is the somatic exchange, the circulation of shared evaluative affect through the group. Since my construction of somatic theory owes a lot to Deleuze and Guattari, on whose complex vitalism Hawk relies heavily as well, I suppose this isn't surprising.

The second thing I note, though, is that--at least so far, and I'm only on page 79 in the book--Hawk doesn't seem to be interested in constructing a vitalist counterhistory of composition. His counterhistory seeks to redress the "forgetting" of vitalism, and thus to reinsert it into our historical understanding of the field, but it is itself not vitalist.

For example, in chapter two, his careful tracing of James Berlin's historiographical trajectory in his books and articles from the eighties, Hawk cites William Desmond in Beyond Hegel and Dialectic to the effect that "The thought of everything other to thought [in Hegel's dialectics] risks getting finally reduced to a moment of thought thinking itself" (7, quoted in Hawk 74). Hawk comments:

Berlin's use of dialectics and mapping is also susceptible to this charge. Everything the historiographer attempts to mediate is reduced to that historiographer's framework. In thinking his or her Other--history--the active, engaged historiographer is thinking himself or herself. This folding back onto the self, this inability to finally attend to the Other, creates the inevitable blind spot as a result of Berlin's mapping. Dialectics is always self-dialectics: the self's interpretive framework is always to a certain degree reductive to that particular perspective; Berlin's maps will let him see only what he wants to see and, therefore, will necessarily forget the Other, history. (74)

Now obviously Hawk is critiquing Berlin with his own "particular perspective" in mind, his own "only what he wants to see": he wants to show how Berlin sidelined vitalism. But how vitalistic is it to suggest that this blind spot or this forgetting is Berlin's alone? That Berlin "forgets" vitalism because he wants to--that he is an isolated individual with a "particular perspective" and an individualistic intellectual agenda that he alone desires?

Berlin is working at this point in his formulations with a tripartite conceptual framework, dividing rhetorical theories into "objective," "subjective," and "transactional." The referents of these adjectives change over the eighties, but ultimately "objective" rhetoric is current-traditional, "subjective" rhetoric is expressivist, and "transactional" becomes social-epistemicist. Presumably because Berlin uses these terms to categorize rhetorics, Hawk too uses them to analyze Berlin's historiographical categories. At first this just means turning Berlin's categories back on him: "His way of dealing with this 'paradox' of competing dialectics--of arguing for openness and totality, of arguing against objectivity, then calling for it--is not surprisingly to imply a dialectic of dialectics" (75). But then Hawk seems to buy into those terms, identifying the inevitable (and for Berlin salutary) failure of objectivity as "subjective history": "Nevertheless, the subjective history must operate as if it were objective" (76).

Hawk then goes on in his next paragraph to call the "objectivizing" uptake of this "subjective history" a "problem": "The problem is that even if historians take this stance--realizing that in theory their maps are not total while using them as if they are--in practice readers can and will take the maps as total" (76). Yes, all right. But my question is: shouldn't a vitalist take on this recognize the complexity of the social interactions that produce these results? Aren't Berlin's interactions with the people he reads and the people who read him part of an intellectual economy that circulates value and collective desire? Is it really a problem that the thousands of readers influenced by Berlin took him to be describing "reality" "objectively"? It is if you're an objectivist yourself, who believes that vitalism should be in this history, and that its omission is therefore an objective error--a product, in other words, of subjective bias. If you're a vitalist, interested in the complex ecology of desiring-machines that produce "reality," surely this whole field looks very different?

But then I wonder: perhaps Hawk is leery of committing the imitative fallacy? Maybe he thinks his argument against the subjective-but-objectivizing exclusion of vitalism will be more effective--more persuasive to objectivizing academic readers--if he objectivizes it? Maybe he's afraid he'll sound like a crackpot if he writes more like Deleuze and Guattari? Doesn't in fact the whole concept of the imitative fallacy come out of an antivitalist tradition, an objectivizing tradition that wants to set it up as a negative exemplum in order specifically to warn us off vitalism?

Also, couldn't it equally well be argued that in invoking subjectivity and objectivity in his critique of Berlin on subjectivity and objectivity, Hawk is committing the imitative fallacy anyway?

Not, in fact, in vitalist perspective. Viewed vitalistically, the scene in which academic agents invoke objectivistic criteria in order to accuse others of subjective bias is itself a collective agent or agency, a desiring-machine, that perpetuates its values and ends by circulating them (and the regulatory pressures that maintain them) through the group. In this view, Berlin sidelines vitalism in the eighties not because he wants to (though his desire might certainly serve as the agency of a collective agent) but because "the field" wants to; and "the field" takes his construction of the history of rhetoric as objective truth not because of some "error" (subjective bias) Berlin committed, but because the exclusion of vitalism was somehow crucial to the desiring-machine that was "the field" at that time. Hawk is able to critique that construction now, and win the Winterrowd prize for doing so, because "the field" (the comp/rhet desiring-machine, especially as it begins to pay more attention to affect) wants him to--but wants him to do so objectivistically, because obviously objectivism is the sign and seal of academic discourse.

Doesn't that sound crackpotty? "The field" as a desiring-machine that wants Hawk to write a certain critique in a certain style? If I'm right, that feeling you have that this is the way a crackpot thinks (and theorizes) is the sign that I am right: that there is a collective agent that continues to condition us to objectivize, and to valorize objectivizing arguments as worth taking seriously (and giving academic awards to), and to feel uneasy when anyone deviates too sharply from those collective norms.