Curious about her critique of Derrida’s Archive Fever, I picked up a
copy of Carolyn Steedman’s Dust: The Archive and Cultural History from
Bird Library, recalling it from another patron who had checked it out (v. sorry
about that). I deal briefly with AF in Chapter Three. Steedman
makes the point that AF is less about archives than about Derrida’s
concern for the slippage of origins (a theme in his other work) and the
inseparability of psychoanalysis from Freud (and also Judaism). She
writes, "The Foreword [to AF] carried the main argument, about Freud’s
Jewish-ness, and the contribution of Jewish thought to the idea of the archive,
via psycho-analysis" (7). Basically, Steedman is suspicious of Derrida’s
characterization of the fever (as a frenzied pursuit of origins which do not
properly exist). She complains that the concept of the fever is degraded in
translation from Mal d’Archive, and then she enthusiastically claims the
sickness Derrida mocks: "Archive fever, indeed? I can tell you all about
Archive Fever!" (17). Dust undertakes this "all about-ness" at fever’s pitch;
Steedman, all the while, works to correct (or tune, at the very least) Derrida’s
glancing consideration of the archive left behind in his treatment of other
concerns (psychoanalysis, Freud, and so on).
Tag: discipline
Double-Dutch
Derrida, in Archive Fever: “For the time being, I will pull from this web a single interpretive thread, the one that concerns the archive” (45).
I am trying to bring in just enough Derrida at the end of chapter three to capitalize on his insights about origination myths (not of psychoanalysis, for my purposes, but of composition studies), about archivization as the perpetual rearrangement of data, and about the ways transclusive texts and digitization re-distribute and also re-calibrate institutional (or disciplinary) memory. This and more in 6-8 pages.
It is as if the “single interpretive thread” drawn, like a jump-rope, from the web, is held on one end by Derrida and on the other end by Brand. In this section on “How Archives Learn,” I am beginning with the overlap of archives (entering the houses of the Archons) and architecture. The Derrida-Brand skipping is double-dutch, because a second thread–from Brand–is also suspended (another thread) in this early portion of the final section. Two jump-ropes, two jump-rope holders. In their complimentary orbits, the two ropes come close to touching, but they alternate flight paths just enough to avoid touching. And yet I feel intensely the danger of getting tangled up.
As of today, I am four pages (1200 words) into the 6-8 pages I have allowed myself for the section–a necessary cap if I am to keep the chapter under 50 pp. (jeeps, when I promised myself just 35 pp.; so much for control). What remains of the section, however, is well-planned; it will be close.
One challenge has been that there is so much more more more to develop here. For instance, do we have a disciplinarily (or even a post-disciplinarily) shared theory of archivization or memory? And how important is such a thing (not only for online archives or scholarly journals, but also for the preservation of course descriptions, syllabi, listserv exchanges, and so on)? With this, I am not asking about methodologies for dealing with archives of interest to R&C (or of history and historiography, for that matter), but rather of the life cycle of a more explicit class of disciplinary materials. Is it irresponsible (even unethical) not to have greater consensus for archivization or for the “scholar of the future” Derrida writes about? Perhaps.
Next I will return to the matter of learning by squaring with a couple of propositions from Brand. Finally, there will be something on Brand’s contrast between adaptation and “graceless turnover” and also on North’s statement from The Making of… that “Composition’s collective fund of knowledge is a very fragile entity” (3)–an excerpt I work with briefly in chapter one. Maybe some of this will have to be canned later on. There is always that possibility. The chapter is, after all, building up a discussion of tag clouds, data-mining, and folksonomy, which musn’t be abandoned in the concluding section.
Anokye, “Voices of the Company We Keep”
Anokye, Akua Duku. "2007 CCCC Chair’s Address: Voices of the Company We
Keep." CCC 59.2 (2007): 263-275.
Porter, et al., “Institutional Critique”
Porter, James E., Patricia Sullivan, Stuart Blythe, Jeffrey Grabill, and Libby Miles. “Institutional Critique: A Rhetorical Methodology for Change.” CCC 51.4 (2000): 610-642.
Peeples, “‘Seeing’ the WPA With/Through Postmodern Mapping”
Peeples, Tim. “‘Seeing’ the WPA With/Through Postmodern Mapping.” The Writing Program Administrator as Researcher. Shirley K. Rose and Irwin Weiser, eds. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1999. 153-167.
Daly-Goggin, Authoring A Discipline.
Daly-Goggin, Maureen. Authoring A Discipline: Scholarly Journals and the
Post-World War II Emergence of Rhetoric and Composition. Mahwah, N.J.:
Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000.
Searchable text available in Google Book Search.
English Studies’ Anchorage, Flotilla
Bruce McComiskey begins his introduction to
English Studies: An
Introduction to the Discipline(s) with a striking anecdote about the annual
Raft debate among scholars from various disciplines at Alabama-Birmingham.
The Raft debates start with a sinking-boat scenario. The main ship is in
crisis, and all of the passengers have hurried into lifeboats, saving just one
spot for a final survivor. The quandary, however, is that three
passengers remain on the sinking ship, and all of them are professors at UAB who
must vie with the others for the final seat on the life raft by making the most
persuasive arguments for their discipline. The arguments–a braid of
humor, deliberate provocation, and refutation, frame the event, which unfolds in
front of colleagues and students. Audience applause determines the winner.
The scenario, in effect, contributes a sense of urgency to an otherwise playful
(if viciously candid) cross-disciplinary interchange. A professor of public
health defeated McComiskey (who was representing English Studies) in 1999, but
the outcome was inevitably the result of disciplinary incoherence, a problem the
book sets out, following the early pages, to resolve: "What exactly is English
studies?" (2).
Clouds, Graphs, Maps
A couple of days ago Mike posted notes on
my
CCCC talk from late last month, and I was reminded that I’m at least ten days
past due on the video
I said I would
produce following the conference.
I recorded the talk to an mp3 yesterday afternoon and went to
campus last night where I planned to use iMovie to sync the audio with jpegs of
the slides. Because the slideshow includes text, I needed to get the
resolution right, but, well, it started to get late. I started to get impatient.
I was able to output a reasonably readable mp4 file, but for whatever reason, I couldn’t get
Google Video or
Daily Motion to encode it.
Finally Jumpcut accepted the file, so it’s
available below the fold (even if much of it suffers from jaggies). The original mp4 is available for download
here.
Fulkerson, “Composition at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century”
Fulkerson, Richard.
"Summary and Critique: Composition at the Turn of the Twenty-first
Century." CCC 56.4 (2005): 654-687.
North, The Making of Knowledge in Composition
North,
Stephen M. The Making of Knowledge in Composition. Upper Montclair,
N.J.: Boynton/Cook, 1987.