Date: Sun, 31 Dec 1995 17:15:58 -0600
From: zghazzal-AT-midway.uchicago.edu (Zouhair Ghazzal)
Subject: Re: Textuality & Practice


Cindy,

I like Foucault's distinction between what he calls in the _Archeology of
Knowledge_ "discursive" and "non-discursive" practices --what you refer to
as the "ineffable" dimension of "social reality" (or the "lebenswelt").
There's always to him a dimension which could not be expressed by means of
"text" or "language." But, from what I recall, he's also interested in how
these "non-discursive practices" end up affecting the "discursive," or, in
other words, how those infinitesimal (bodily) practices, usually never
expressed in words, could affect the discursive level and force it into new
directions hitherto unthought of. I think in a concept like "disciplinary
society," Foucault went beyond, once for all, the Kantian notion of the
"transcendental": as Deleuze would say, we seem now to be always operating
"in the middle of something." Maybe this is our new "epistemology" for the
end of this glorious twentieth century.

Happy New Year!



>Regarding the textuality issue:
>
>I don't think Bourdieu is against textuality, but cautions us in general
>to recognize that textuality is a practice, not a meta-practice. Hence, the
>idea that practice is to some extent ineffable (that is, when we try to
>say what we do when we, for example, kick a ball, we tend to give rules
>or phenomenologic descriptions that misapprend our practice) means that
>our own textual practices are to some extent ineffable to ourselves. To me,
>this has always meant that Textual Methods (which I have been called on to
>teach) are really dangerous, since they imply that we know what it is we do
>when we perform a textual analysis. Rather, I have moved toward looking at
>the practical theories in textual practices. Text, then, can no longer be
>thought of a representation (except to the extent that those who produce
>them generate a discourse of their representationality--but that is a
>descriptive finding about a text). Nor can the critique's position be one of
>Seeing the Truth. Rather, I now imagine myself holding the readers hand, in
>much the way I would cajole a swimmer (I used to teach swimming--I highly
>recommened that teachers of Ideas gain some experience teaching the body to
>move) into moving in the way that it seems to me works best. I really can't,
>ikn either case, explain how to swim nor how I know how to swim. The critic
>or anthropologist is, then, always liable to the same problem of ineffability
>as their objects. When we generate a theory of our practice, that is all we
>have done, however interesting. The generation of a theory about our practice
>(what is usually called methodology) is, itself, another practice. Thinking
>this way enables us, I think, to get at another set of questions Bourdieu and
>others (Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard in particular) raise: what are the ideas
>that are doxic or beneath the threshold of discussability? In other words,
>what kind of things do we think we are doing such that we imagine we could
>develop at Method, much less a whole line of thinking called methodology? Or
>worse (better?) what do we thinking knowing is such that we could develop a
>branch of thinking called epistemology?