Thursday, July 27, 2006

Vitanza, "Seeing in Third Sophistic Ways"

Vitanza, Victor. "Seeing in Third Sophistic Ways." Olson 164-176.

Vitanza introduces a third "seeing" to the seeing/not seeing dyad.  With it, he sets up a correlation between theory and seeing (etymologically, drawing on Gk. thea and also Williams' Keywords). From here, he accounts for the shortcomings of dialectics resulting from the faintness of the negatives (no longer can we test "the pagus of thought" and return from the "wild, savage border zone where the excluded thirds and their ways of seeing dwell" (166) to effect a more inclusive polis). Vitanza offers three Sophistic ways of seeing:

1. misrepresentative antidotes: counter to representative anecdotes (168)

2. dissoi-paralogoi: counter to dialectics--"against dialectic (of any kind), against didactic, and against dissoi-logoi by moving from one and two to an explosion of threes or 'some more' (excesses, dissoi-polylogoi)" (168).

3. theatricks: counter to pragmatics (168)

Third Sophistic seeing will keep theorEYEzation alive, will continue to mine the pagus.  Without it, theory stalls, potentiality is reduced, stifled, and we have a restricted economy (Modernism's scarcities?). Whatever beings (Agamben) "prefer not to be in the present reactionary community, prefer not to be complicit in employing the principle that excludes, prefer not to be in the coming community" (173).

Another point: Third Sophistic seeing is not the same as Victor Turner's "liminal space" (169).

"'Whatever beings' are not particular (i.e., species) or general (genus); instead, they are a set(less) of radical singularities (in the paralogic of the excluded Middle Ages, a.k.a. the manere [27])." (171).

"Whatever beings intuit that the principles of identity, non-contradiction, and excluded-middle (all the principles of negation informing re/invention) are the very principles that exclude, that disallow the thing with all its properties, that disallow radical singularities, themselves as such, in community" (173).

"Berger discusses 'seeing' as a matter of ideology and mystification" (165).

"I used to believe that it was possible after leaving the polis of systematic seeing to spend some paraproductive time in the pagus of thought--that wild, savage border zone where the excluded thirds and their ways of seeing dwell--and then when done to return, with insights, to the polis so as to make it more inclusive.  I still believe that such excursions are valuable, but they soon will be impossible" (166).

"What will de/form the coming community is without any notion of antithesis but only remainders. Whatevers!" (167).

"According to Agamben, in The Coming Community, the coming beings are 'whatever beings'" (170).

seeing, theory, theoreyezing, singularity, spectacle, thirds, binary, whatever, community, indifference, identity

Related sources:

Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community. Trans. Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993.

Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. Berkeley: U of California P, 1969.

Jameson, Fredric. Signatures of the Visible. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Posted by Derek Mueller at July 27, 2006 8:42 PM to Writing Technologies