Vitanza

In other words, what Plato is doing is very post-modern. Like Lyotard, a child of the post-Enlightenment, a postmodernist who confronts the crisis of rationality, the fortunate fall from a loss of overriding (grand) narratives or accounts of knowledge, science, literature, morality, or the arts, Plato, in offering a series of definitions for the Chora which contradict each other--he is creating a discourse that disrupts the potential for what Habermas calls "the universal conditions of possible understanding" (vitanza 144) Its nature queestions any possible universal conditions of knowledge.

Thus discourse on the Chora foremost reveals the chorology to center on the age old issue of whether knowledge can be grounded either on some universal, ontogenetic theory (that is some universal law or physis) or rhetorically on consensus theory (that is on homology, or local nomos). I am taking a cue from Vitanza who cites Gorgias' famous proposition that "Nothing [of essence exists" (145). Thus the Chora is not foundational. However, that does not mean the Chora must be seen along the lines of antifoundationalism.

Lyotard speaks against a universal theory of pragmatics for two primary reasons: "Firrst he says that such a universal theory is currently not possible because of the loss of grand narratives, which oriinally founded knowledge claims/.../Lyotard's second reason for opposing a universal theory is quite simply that it does not emancipate but only enslaves and impoverishes us. Consensus is only a particular state of discussion, not its end. Its end, on the contrary, is paralogy" (146).

"Paralogy can be seen as a means of discovering "what is at stake in a literature, in a philosophy, in a politics." It is "to bear witness to differends; that is, it is to bear witness to the unintelligible or to disputes or differences of opinion that re systematically disallowed by the dominant language game of homological science and are therefore "silenced;" it is to bear witness "by finding idioms" for these differends. " (146-7)

"Paralogy for Lyotard means legitimation. In this ense, I distinguish paralogy from traditional or modern 'invention' which is smooth, continuous, and controlled and accounted for by a system or paradigm of knowledge which is used to promote a system or paradigm. Paralogy however is "discontinuous, catastrophic, nonrectifiable, and paradoxical" It returns that is radically tropes--against the system or paradigm of knowledge, "changing the meaning of the word knowledge. I hereas invention is used for traditaional or modern science, paralogy is used by postmodern science." (147)

Deleuze and Guattari "aspire not only to local knowledge (nomoi) but also to radical noncodifiable (nonrational minoritarian) ways of knowing or in other words to great levels of noise.///.Specifically, their antimodel then includes a third (dis)integrating element beyond the binary (of the two general models) an element that I have alled "Third Sophistic possibilisms" and tat can be seen as "the demon, the prosopopoeia of noise" (155).


"The question Who speaks? is a question of origins, groundings, sources, capacities. If we conceive of it in this manner, we end up (or begin again) with some groupings that are not true to waht is commonly thought. (To simpify and to root the distinction, f only temporarily, I will use Berlins labels from "Rhetoric and Ideology" along with others from traditional pragmatics, a Lyotard already does). /.../The first answer to the question Who speaks? then is to be found(ed) in the addressor who shapes the world when he or she speaks. The second answer, however, is found(ed) "relationally" between an adressor and the addressee or an addressor and the code/signal, who speak only by virtue of conventions of discourse, situations, contexts, interpretive communities." (156).

VITANZA: "iT IS A QUESTION OF STUDENTS' RESISTANCE TO AND DISRUPTIONS OF [THESE] SO CALLED RIGHTS AND OTHER SELF (157).

Bartholomae shifts the conceptual starting place for a theory of composition from the self as inventor to the community as inventor.

"Whereas Bartholomae speaks oa position of privilege, of being an insider, Lyotard is against privilege and all that it entails. he is diametrically oppposed to writing from such a position, within academic discourse, because it does, indeed, finally exclude others (that is both people and ideas) from being "expressed" within that discourse. Lyotard attempts to extend the boundaries--if not tear them down--of what stands as academic discourse" (158-9)

"Academia and its discourse, no dobut, foster a private club: it excludes not only nonacademics but also nonacademic academics and their ideas. My position with respect to Barthoolomae's therefore is not that of inventing the university but that of paralogizing (the oppposite of paralyzing) the university so that it might become a (polymoprhous) perversit (159).

De Man is instead an advocate of an unstable--postmodern, third sophistic--paraepisteology and pararhethoric, both founded, but unfounded, on the perversity of a rhetoric of tropes: those specifically that resist unified theories and consequently resist totality and totalitarian knowing-doing-making. Like Lyotard, de Man is against a stable topology--that is, a rhetoric of persuasion--and for an unstable "tropology" he is against the game of knowledge as a means of totality and for the game of avant-garde theory-art as a means of resistance" (160).

"What we want, then, is a pedagogy other(wise), what we want is a pedagogy without criteria, what we desire is a counterpedagogy, which exprsses the "desire to escape the pedagogical imperative: a desire...to do away with pedagogy altogether" (berthof "Teaching" Vitanza 161).

Everything I have mentioned is an effort to to keep knowledge from being realized as a system, as categories, as generic, as techne, as political "linking" and more so as "teachable." The game of art is played so that art cannot be known. It is a game of dispersion, diaspora. It is a game of paralinkage. It is a game played proleptically. Lyotard writes that the artist or writer "works without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done. Post modern would have to be understood according to the paradox of the future post anterior modo" . But finally having discovered the rules for linkage does not mean then that they are to be codified. Instead another game of dislinkage i to be played, another game that "will have been done" This game is not of the polis, but of the pagus--"a border zone where genres of discourse enter into conflict over the mode of linking ( (163).

The chora makes no attempt to systematize ambiguity.

"what we want is a way to proceed without foundations and without criteria and without knowing as a subject and wihtout conventional theory and pedagogy. What we want then is not a discipine or metadiscipline but a nondiscipline, which--heretofore referred to as a postpedagogy--is more accurately labeled a paralogic pedagogy. We need strategies that would ateempt to be discontinuous, random, and filled with fragmented thoughts and digressions; would attempt to call each previous statement into (rhetorical) question. would attempt to use sophistic ruse and ounterruse. It woudl then be a matter of contrary language games. " (165).

"Argument in this modification is not a means of achieving or accounting for consensus. It is, instead, a means of continuous dissensus; it "counterhopes" to achieve an occasional if not permanent place of misology, a place that plato and socrates saw as an anathema but that muts be seen as the beginning of what Deleuze and Guattari would call a "nomadology" (thousand 351) or what Montaign and Lyotard combined woudl see as "just drifting/gaming" It is a place outside the philosophical and rhetorical polis; it is places (exploded and) realized through diaspora/dispersion. It is the pagus" (165).

"For paralogy the goal is not renovation but innovation; not a stochastic series based on rules that allow us to guess effectively and efficiently but a paradoxical series that invites us to break with the formal rules altogether. Thinking paralogically is thinking counterinductively in terms that are counterexamples (that are perverse to the norm). Thinking paralogically, Lyotard says, means 'searching for...the unintelligble, supporting an argument means looking for a 'paradox' and legiitimating it with new rules in the games o reasoning" (166).