Of Hermeneutics and Tail-Consuming Snakes

Well, this week’s reading was sure a spring break pleaser!  Raul Sanchez’ The Function of Theory in Composition Studies is sure to spark some really interesting conversation in our class on Monday, which in my opinion we should dedicate to the poor souls acknowledged in Sanchez’ introduction:  Sid Dobrin, Julie Drew, and Joe Hardin “who cheerfully endure the rambling and often intemperate e-mails in which I try to work through pesky theoretical problems and who, with equal cheer, let me know when I am writing nonsense.”  I’m surprised that none of those three folks treated Sanchez’ emails as if they were  politely requesting some assistance in obtaining the $51 million owed by the Nigerian government.

I think that I am genetically predisposed to get my academic undies in a bunch whenever I start reading texts that are so dense and choc-full of terminology and concepts requiring the reader to break out various reference books/websites in order to successfully navigate a paragraph.  After having to pause eight times in as many pages to consult the dictionary, the encyclopedia, and my trusty Contemporary Composition Studies:  A Guide to Theorists and Terms, I began to become weary, and I was only just beginning!  This did not bode well for Dr. Sanchez’ future as to my treatment of him in my blog post.

I am frustrated – very, very frustrated – with Sanchez’ treatment of his topic.  I agree with Sharon’s posting, especially with regard to the way he closed his text (I hesitate to say that he finished it).  It was almost as if, having set the snake to eating its own tail in the first chapters, the snake had suddenly reached its own teeth and found them to be hermenutical in nature, thus, “an obstacle” to the process of tail consumption.

I am troubled by much of what Sanchez has postulated; however, there are some aspects I want to discuss that I find to be helpful.  He calls for us to rethink even the most basic of our closely held ideas:

describing writing in the way I am proposing will require composition theory to commit itself to textuality more thoroughly than it has in the recent past.  It will require us to relentlessly and scrupulously bracket all ideas, to place in quotation marks (or italics) every deeply seated and casually assumed concept, even those around which composition studies has formed its intellectual and professional identity, such as rhetoric and  the subject….

I think it is always important and worthwhile to return to older (or newer, even) ideas and revisit our beliefs – what do we believe?  Why do we believe it?  What do we base those beliefs on?  And do those beliefs remain solid in light of new ideas and concepts?  Few would argue this point, I believe.

So I’m with our author on this point, but after reflecting on it a bit, I am forced to wonder then if he’s not suggesting that we do the very thing we determined in class that so many theorists do entirely too much of:  that sort of navel-gazing comp theory consisting of “Who are we?  Why are we here?”  So even in my agreement with Sanchez, I am forced to take a little of my own writing agency and question.

As to my invocation of the Tail Consuming Snake Muse, I point to this passage:

Derrida claims that grammatology cannot be a ‘positive science,’ that it has no proper object of study precisely because the subject-object conceptual system is in question….But precisely because of grammatology, composition theory can recognize and elaborate the writtenness of the empiricist impulse in order to rearticulate empiricism itself as a form of writing. (8)

My brain immediately after reading this passage.

Sanchez continues:

By redefining concepts as discursive tactics within a general framework of writing, composition theory can move closer toward explaining what writing is and how writing works in the world.

Okay, Dr. S.  I’m with you here.  It’s important to apply reasoning to most anything, I think, and while I think that we have a plenty of explanations of what writing is and how it functions, I think we can agree on this statement generally.

Writing happens, and composition resesarchers can watch it happen and make claims about writing as a result.

Yes, and these claims can then hopefully go towards creating more productive and successful methods for teaching writing in the classroom, right?  Or not?  What is the purpose for these claims you are suggesting can be made?

To do so with the disposition for which this book argues is to map the ways in which, for example, an act of writing can be considered a contingent and impossible attempt to fix meaning.

I don’t like the use of the word “impossible” here.  Maybe “fluid” or something similar?  Because the meaning I might attach to something I have written 10 years ago is going to change, I think, as I change, and my circumstances change.  But one thing that can’t change is the historical moment in which something is written; however, our later understanding of that moment can indeed morph into something altogether different.  Be that as it may, I made meaning with my decades-old writing, and I take some umbrage at the suggestion that I did not.  I see meaning as being similar to the concept of a copyright on a writing:  the meaning comes into being as I create the piece of writing, and that meaning may not be crystal clear to begin with, but through my writing, there is meaning, and it attaches to the text without regard to the attempted negation by others.

It is to show how acts of writing try to present presence, the supposed existence of which is known only through prior acts of writing.

So our current acts of writing – this blog, for instance, is present only because of my prior attempts at writing?

So do we sum this concept up as “practice makes perfect?”

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