A Conversation

This is a writing-program blog, but so far, in addition to me only Gray Kane has regularly contributed to it. After I posted on Byron Hawk's book, I tried to get him to post about vitalism, and he responded to my email ("Have you had a look at ...?") with another email:

Yeah. I haven't read the source and didn't find a point of entry into the subject matter to get me excited one way or another about it. I understand the desire for consistency between the form of an argument and its content, but I didn't see what was so exciting about the content for me to care.

To put it another way, forget for the time being how "true" vitalism might be and the corresponding imperative to bring this "truth" to the larger critical community. What does this "truth" enable us to do that we weren't able to do before? That's what I didn't find.

What does interest me is this critical tendency to dismiss the content as "crackpotty" because of its form. This aspect of the post of course reminds me of the arguments levied against "convoluted" theory in general. To communicate the ideas to a broader audience, a writer has to abandon each idea's form, but to a certain extent this damages the idea's content, such that people who already know the ideas easily see where the clarity paradoxically convolutes. I see that this is also what happens to vitalism. When critics fail to address each other's arguments in such a way that acknowledges how vitalism posits their relationships, the act of writing initiates a mind-body divide and disembodies an argument about somatic exchange. This perspectival problem not only reduces what is visible through its lens, but also distorts what it does see.

If a writer of perspective A wants to communicate idea "a"
to an audience of perspective B, how does that writer avoid transforming "a" into something contaminated by the audience's different framework? How does the writer stop "a" from looking like "b"?

I replied:

The point of entry I imagined was that, while you and I have some points of contact in our theorizations, there's a fundamental difference between our approaches, and this book has made me think that it's maybe that I'm a vitalist and you aren't. Specifically, you seem to me to be interested in the critical thinking going on in individual heads, and at most in individual teacher-student dyads, and seem to resist my pressures to understand critical thinking in the larger systemic (ideosomatic) terms. You recognize the potential validity of those larger terms, of course, but don't seem particularly interested in them--and so leave them for me to theorize.

Which is interesting, because Hawk draws a lot on Heidegger--as well as Nietzsche and Deleuze and Guattari, of course--specifically, the technology article and the passages from Being and Time where Heidegger discusses tools and their "ecological" situatedness.

Gray's dissertation, a rough draft of which is now being written, is on Heidegger and Lacan in the FYW classroom--specifically the four discourses of a Heideggerian Lacan and pedagogical theory. He responded:

As you acknowledged, it's not that I disagree with vitalism. It's that I don't see how it can help us. I see the answer to that question more in your textbook, but that answer still isn't worked out for me.

What I most appreciate from your textbook is the strategy for primary and secondary audiences and the distancing of authorial persona from the imagined configurations of a "true" self. In other words, what I most appreciate from your textbook is not necessarily tied to a theory of embodied exchange--at least from my perspective. In fact, I see the paradigm in terms of Other/other and split subjectivity.

That question of "usefulness" is my lack of point of entry in vitalism. And I find it interesting that in your reply to my email that you didn't offer an answer to that question.

I realize that Heidegger produced an interpretation of "meaning" that involves our retrospective configuration of how other human beings have manipulated the material world such that we are engaging those beings in our engagement with the material world. This is why he disagreed with technology: it impossibly distances the human fingerprint from the being's manipulation of the world, which consequently encourages the mind-body divide. But even though I can find usefulness in parts of Heidegger's paradigm, his desire for the "truth" of his subject matter overcomplicates his analysis to the point of his obfuscating its usefulness, from my perspective.

I realize that I'm caught in a paradigm of "usefulness" (bourgeois bricolage) that limits my ability to appreciate tangential lines of thought as equally central lines of thought. I think the comps and prospectus processes damaged that part of my appreciation: the external pressure for me "to get to the point." However, I don't feel a need to correct this problem since my abidance to it will help me publish and get a job.

So, since I'm not going to correct my interpretive lens' starting point of "usefulness," let me try to clarify how that usefulness plays a role in my interpretation of what others see to be useless. Maybe this can help you target my concerns about vitalism.

In Lacanese, "meaning" is always a somatic exchange and might have more in common with vitalism than you realize. Objet a is the source of bodily pleasure that we ignore but that nonetheless is essential in our "meaningful" attachments to objet a's externalizations, its semblances (in Schema L, a'). It's why we enjoy chasing the soccer ball even when we're so intent on the ball that we forget that what we're enjoying is our bodies. Meanwhile, we can't experience our bodily objet a in a "meaningful" way (in other words, objet a doesn't exist) until we locate it in the Other-- for instance, in the missing object in the gleam of the Other's eye. Lacan's dialectical desire and its "short circuits" through the drive are always somatic
exchanges: the discovery (and repression) of the body in an ontological network of human interaction.

I find "usefulness" in this because I can see in it a strategy to intentionally move the perception of "meaningfulness" (like Dupin in Poe's "The Purloined Letter"), which has incredible applications in pedagogy. (And politics, although I'm tiring of the unification of pedagogy and politics.) This is what I don't see thus far in either Heidegger's Dasein or vitalism.

So again, how does vitalism enable us as teachers or critics to achieve something that we otherwise couldn't achieve without it?

And I replied:

Yes, the split self is part of the poststructuralist/ postmodern bolus I'm smuggling into FYW. But for me a vitalist approach is so important precisely so that we recognize the ways in which a split self is not merely a pile of dead fragments that we can gloat over in a death-of-the-subject spirit, but a living (vital) complexity ORGANIZED for us by society. When we split off a part of ourselves and call that part "reader," and then split off another part and call it "writer," and give them new names and contexts and purposes and so on, we aren't just playing clever games; we LIVE the lives of those parts. We are invested in them. If we weren't, of course, writing and reading literature would be impossible, watching plays and movies would be impossible. (Or perhaps not so much impossible as cognitively difficult and affectively empty, affectless, disaffected.)

Hawk argues (drawing on someone else's reading of Heidegger, someone whose name I can't check because the book is in the room where Agnes is sleeping) that Heidegger didn't so much argue "against technology" as against the reduction of technology to efficient cause--against the instrumentalization of technology. According to Heidegger, EVERYTHING is technology, but it's a technology that's complexly saturated with the local ecology of meaning-production. In fact, that ecology is also the ecology of das Man. It's an ideosomatized ecology, the highly nuanced and constantly shifting production of reality and meaning by the group. (Something like that. I'd need to check the book again to get the argument exactly right.)

As for Lacan, I'm just learning to use the term "vitalism" in connection with his thought, but I've always read the Other AS the somatic exchange. In your paraphrase you mentioned "the missing object in the gleam of the Other's eye," but as I read Lacan that is exactly wrong. The Other is never another person; that's the other-small-o. As the Subject enters into a dyadic (or as I insist group) interaction with an other, that interaction is vitalized by both the idealized ego and the Other, both of which are collective (I would say ideosomatic) organizing "forces" or "vitalities" that bring complex order to the interaction.

The pedagogical usefulness of this perspective to my mind is that teaching is always a group interaction, and it's extremely useful to have a conceptual framework for the exploration of those vitalizing/organizing forces that work behind the scenes to structure and impose meaning on that interaction. At the sheer "textual" level of student writing (and peer-editing, etc.), those forces vitalize/organize text-production through an imagined (but actually felt) writer-reader interaction; at the pedagogical level of teacher-student interaction, the pressures of print culture and various other Others for us, and of SMS culture and MTV culture and whatever else for them, all impose various kinds of divergent and difficult to (re)organize vitality on our classrooms. And to my mind (Freud: where id was, let ego be) the more AWARE we are of those vitalities, the better able we may be to channel them.