faking it

Music: Dif Juz: Extractions Ken's question from Sunday's post regarding the strategery of liberal pluralism in the classroom and my not-so-secret conviction in psychoanalytic values and understandings of difference (as constituted in the symbolic; there is no pre-discursive gender, sex, race, and so on) has struck and nerve and caused me to rethink my lecture for today. Now I think I'm going to introduce "queer theory" to the class as a critique of my mass email to the class two days ago; I think, if they read the email, this may just work out in a way that makes me harmonious.

And speaking of harmony, I don't know much about the work of Ernesto Laclau (except that which I have apparently read and forgotten), and I'm participating in a seminar in a couple of weeks that, pretty much, orbits his work (I was roped into this by friends who stressed the necessity of my being there as a reader of Lacan). Anyhoo, I've been dabbling in Laclau for a week now, and damn, it's hard to read but I think I'm getting the sexiness of his work's appeal: there ain't no outside baby! I'm liking his take on hegemony quite a bit.

Anyhoo, we were to develop a position paper for the seminar. Mine is short--homologous to my knowledge of the stakes involved in his unique brand of articualtion theory. Nevertheless, here it is:

On the Ontology of Tropology

A Very Brief Position Paper for the Seminar on Laclau, Lacan, and Rhetoric at the Meeting of the National Communication Association in Boston

Joshua Gunn University of Texas at Austin

When Chris Lundberg started urging me to read Laclau's work on tropology, my initial and unspoken feeling was of one of dread (or laziness). "Oh god," I thought, "if I have to read Peter Ramus one more time I'm going to slit my wrists." Such a disciplined response is as predictable as it is ignorant, but I think it also helps to represent the central challenge rhetoricians have and will face introducing Lacanian (or Lacan influenced) theories of articulation to rhetorical studies. Aside from combating the longstanding unwillingness to abandon the self-transparent subject, insofar as the ground of introduction is something called "rhetoric," attempts to engage Laclau (or Lacan) on or in his own terms will require a theorization of tropes beyond the commonly assumed level of style.

I am admittedly new to Laclau's work, but so far it seems to me that a crucial Sassurean move is that moment in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy when the "naturalist paradigm" is abandoned: "Synonymy, metonymy, metaphor are not forms of thought that add a second sense to a primary, constitutive literality of social relations; instead, they are part of the primary terrain itself in which the social is constituted."[1] In subsequent work Laclau has consistently maintained the centrality of "tropoi" to the constitution of (social) reality,[2] more recently calling for theorizing a fundamental linguistic and rhetorical ontology.[3] Although I am very interested in learning about the more sweeping, political-theoretical projects of seminarians, my interest in the seminar primarily concerns the need for a better understanding what Laclau means by "rhetoric," and what an ontology of tropology entails.

[1] Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, 2nd ed. (New York: Verso, 2001), 110.

[2] See Ernesto Laclau, "Metaphor and Social Antagonisms," in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 249-257; and "The Politics of Rhetoric," in Material Evens: Paul De Man and the Afterlife of Theory, edited by Tom Cohen, Barbara Cohen, J. Hillis Miller, and Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 2001), 229-253.

[3] Ernesto Laclau, "An Ethics of Militant Engagement," in Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, edited by Peter Hallward (New York: Continuum, 2004), 136-137.

How's that for being an ignoramous? I'm still foggy on what Laclau thinks rhetoric actaully is. So far it seems to be tropes. And it seems that he's calling for an ontologization of style that would, essentially, jettision any notion of ontological homology (that is, formal parallels between, say, an inside/outside or a real/imaginary). But I dunno for sure. I'll be reading the assigned readings on the plane to Boston.

Okie dokie. Must prepare for school.