A late post

I want to apologize for being so late about posting to this blog. I have enjoyed what everyone else has said and can see some interesting ideas formulating.

As I do not know most of you I am going to start with something of an introduction. My name is Paul Dahlgren and I am finishing my dissertation on the history of rhetoric at the University of California, Irvine. I have provided a description of that project at the end of this post on the off chance that anyone is interested.

I think like many scholars in our field, I have been motivated by an interest in disciplinary history. I am fascinated by Daniel’s post on discovering and working with a usable past for what and I am hoping you’ll read my post as in part a response to his.

My quotation is from Alain Badiou and will require some explanation:

“To be faithful to an event is to move within the situation that this event has supplemented, by thinking… the situation ‘according to’ the event. And this, of course—since the event was excluded by the regular laws of the situation—compels the subject to invent a new way of being and acting in the situation” (Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil 41-2).

This passage describes what Badiou calls elsewhere “fidelity to an event,” the process through which both the world itself and the subject within that world change. Put simply, for Badiou events are radical transformations in the state of the world (what he calls the situation) which happen for any number of reasons. They are, simply put, revolutions. This happens because something within the situation cannot be accounted for given the governing logic or ideology of the situation. By declaring one’s fidelity to an event, one commits oneself to transforming the situation so that what was not represented before becomes part of a new and presumable better world. To take an example, according to Badiou, a scientific revolution happens because people slowly notice that certain phenomenon cannot be accounted for and individuals need to radically transform the way science is preformed in order account for these phenomena. I realize that may or may not be the way science happens, but I hope it serves to clarify what is going on in the passage.

an entry on method

My apologies up front for the criminal lateness of this post.

I think my contributions to our actual presentation will likely deal with the relationship between philosophy(ies) of history and method, so I'm going to divert from the instructions and the theme of the previous posts to talk a bit about method. My quote is from the article "Hegel and Haiti" by Susan Buck-Morss, the article I handed out at our summer workshop, for those of you who were there. Simply (simplistically?) put, this article seeks to rehabilitate the highly unfashionable Hegelian idea of 'universal world history' (arguably the first modern 'philosophy' of history?) by showing that Hegel is not referring to a metaphysical entity when theorizing the 'master/slave' dialectic, but is instead inspired by the struggle for freedom in Haiti (the successful slave revolt against the French led by Toussaint Louverture) at the turn of the 19th century (1804, I think?). The quote:

"Hegel's moment of clarity of thought would need to be juxtaposed to others at the time...There are many examples of such clarity [of thought] and they belong to no side, no one group exclusively. What if every time that the consciousness of individuals surpassed the confines of present constellations of power in preceiving the concrete meaning of freedom, THIS were valued as a moment, however transitory of the realization of absolute spirit? What other silences would need to be broken? What UN-DISCIPLINED stories would be told?"

Continuing the theme on place

I don't have a quote that epitomizes what I am trying to say, so instead I'll describe my thinking and perhaps someone will be able to refer me to someone.

When Daniel asked who we'd offer up as a philosophy of history, I turn most naturally to Susan Jarratt and Rereading the Sophists.  She does three key things that are models for all of us now: she grapples with the practical problems of scant evidence; she speaks to the tradition from a revisionist perspective afforded by feminism and other voices of the margins; and she lets the Sophists speak to the current critical moment.  It's this last part that works so well for her study, because the Sophists, of course, anticipate all the post-structuralist questions that add the problem of language to the usual philosophic problems of the origins of knowledge, reality, and thought.  So in a way she writes such a memorable book because she chooses such an ideal subject in the first place.

Yet as much as she does for historians of rhetoric, she does leave it up to us to figure out what to do with our own respective times, places, and communities which we study.  And it is here that I am moved by Brandon's description of his own roots in the South, and the compelling and insistent way that the past forces itself into the present.  My parallel is that I'm writing about early national Philadelphia.  There are a number of ways the research has opened up personal resonance for me, but that's not what I am talking about here.  Instead, what I am trying to say about multilingualism in this period is supposed to work as a case study; I'm proposing a method that could be transplanted to any other place and time.  But the fact is that it's early America I'm talking about, which has so many symbolic and rhetorical meanings for us as a nation, and I can't seem to escape the fact that I _am_ making a historical argument, writing a new story, about how our country looked when it was new and therefore we have been wrong about our monolingual English origins.  So I'm writing a new story.  And it's _not_ transplantable because it's the soil that counts.  (horrific metaphor I know!)

Histories of what used to be called rhetoric

Hi. I apologize if this isn’t an appropriate entry for a blog, but given how late I am with it, I felt compelled to get something down.

In the published manuscript of his seminar on “L’ancienne rhétorique” [The old rhetoric], Roland Barthes suggested that rhetoric, a

“véritable empire, plus vaste et plus tenace que n’importe quel empire politique, par ses dimensions, par sa durée, déjoue le cadre même de la science et de la réflexion historiques, au point de mettre en cause l’histoire elle-même, telle du moins que nous sommes habitués à l’imaginer, à la manier, et d’obliger à concevoir ce qu’on a pu appeler ailleurs une histoire monumentale » (3: 530)