Derrida, Writing, and “Alternative” Rhetorics

I’ve been thinking about Derrida’s idea of writing and the ways in which we could think about the intersections between that paradigm and this past week’s discussion concerning identity/consciousness in FYC classrooms. 

If this seems like an odd move to make, I won’t disagree: scholars typically interpret Derridian notions of “writing” as markedly different from, as he would say, “writing in the narrow sense” (that is scratching symbols on white sheets of paper). However, I think that Derrida would encourage us to play with this division.

I’ll try to begin by providing a very selective gloss (or rather I’ll cherry-pick some quotations from Of Grammatology) so that we can establish an equal footing of this idea, and I’d like to invite those of you who have more experience with Derrida to jump in to correct some probably egregious points that I’m going to try to make: namely, that when we examine translingual, queer, alternative, embodied, non-normative rhetorics, what we’re trying to articulate on a fundamental level is “writing,” which is, as I understand, different from simply subjective identity (whatever that is—however fluid). 

First, some cherry-picking from Of Grammatology. 

“For some time now, as a matter of fact, here and there, by a gesture and for motives that are profoundly necessary, whose degradation is easier to denounce than it is to discourse their origin, one says ‘language’ for action, movement, thought, reflection, consciousness, unconsciousness, experience, affectivity, etc. Now we tend to say ‘writing’ for all that and more, to designate not only the physical gestures of literal pictographic or ideographic inscription, but also the totality of what makes it possible; and also, beyond the signifying face the signified face itself” (9). 

I’m not sure how adequate the following example is, and I feel as if I’m stumbling over myself in this post, but I think we can understand Gloria Anzaldua’s mestiza rhetoric as an example of this.

For Gloria Anzaldua, mestiza is not only a kind of writing, which affords genre conventions, critical analyses of the way certain discourses are generated, analyses of craft—mestiza is also (with its own limitations as expressed in the limitations of language) an example of “writing” in the sense that it expresses a mestiza consciousness, a mestiza identity. So, I suppose what I’m attempting to articulate is the incredibly interesting idea (to me at least) that writing can be the embodiment of more than idea, but that content, shape, form, are all complex representations of an even more complex subjectivity. 

And I would like to re-raise the question: what happens when we I feel as if we could, from this point, write and understand a lot about the writing act (even if I’m unsure of what benefit would come to the composition classroom as a result of this theorizing). 

I’ll return to Derrida, again:

“And thus we say ‘writing’ for all that gives rise to an inscription in general, whether it is literal or not and even if what it distributes in space is alien to the order of the voice: cinematography, choreography, of course, but also pictorial, musical, sculptural ‘writing.’ One might also speak of athletic writing, and with even greater certainty of military or political writing in view of the techniques that govern those domains today. All this to describe not only the system of notation secondarily connected with these activities but the essence and the content of these activities themselves” (9).

For Fan Shen, Western argument is arguing in another consciousness, another identity, frame of reference, what have you, so that even if the mode of communication doesn’t necessarily change (ie. Fan Shen still writes in print), arguing in a Western culture means that he’s at once being inscribed by that culture as he’s learning to write. By writing, he must be “written” upon.

I’m not sure what to do with any of this abstraction. On a fundamental level, I think that we need to consider how our students are composing in FYC and how the composing that we’re advocating changes them (for better or worse). We should obviously be thinking about what happens when our pedagogies are “unimodal” in more ways than one: power dynamics in the classroom, composing media, the language, what kinds of argument are allowed, the subjectivity that they’re allowed to write from—the list goes on. 

Obviously, one quarter or semester of FYC isn’t enough to change our students in any majorly significant way, which I for one am thankful for. However, I’m reminded of something that Dr. Rouzie said in class, which was something along the lines of, the effects of your class don’t end in 10 weeks, but at odd moments, your students re-think the lessons that you give them, in, albeit odd moments.

If you stayed with me, I hope there was something fruitful in the ramblings above, even though it's left me more confused than when I started. 

I'll leave you with some Bruce Nauman, who (maybe) resonates with this post (another form of writing? or maybe I've simply lost my mind).