From: meaghan-AT-utdallas.edu
Date: Sun, 7 Jul 1996 15:50:21 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Re: de(con)struction


> 
> moving, to keep turning up what is covered over. A way of seeing, as de 
> Man suggested, is always also a way of not seeing. The best we can do, I 
> believe, is stop expecting to finally LAND somewhere safe, stop 
> expecting that we will one day "see" the *whole* picture. The best we 
> can do is begin to, as lyotard says, tolerate the incommensurable...not 
> so that we can finally "set things straight" but so that we might begin 
> to make room for differences.  

> We've proven our will to hierarchy. Deleuze and Guattari say it's not 
> enough to celebrate multiplicity...it'll be necessary to MAKE it. "Make 
> the multiple."  It's not enough to be good hermeneuts--good hermeneuts 
> are dangerous. It'll be necessary that we become hyper-hermeneuts, 
> capable of embracing a number of incommensurable cognitive grids and of 
> enjoying the multiplicity of potentiality without driving for closure.

Diane,  YEA!!!  Yes, and joy.  To me, when these two stolen bits of your 
discourse are combined what you get is the wonderful idea that the 
"unsayable" or "unthinkable" is big enough, and far enough out of our 
lines of sight that we'll never run out of it.  D&G are big fans of lived 
imagination, adn as poet, so am I.  If all the unsayable (Rilke) ever got 
said, we'd have no need for imagination, for creating new modes of 
being.  It's the very core of the "human" adventure that enforced or 
endless sameness threatens (as well as real, live humans).

And since you're a COmp. person, and I teach Comp as a TA, a side note: I 
tend to think that closure is an artificial move (I'm never done thinking 
around something just because I finish an essay), and a move that I 
consider a favor to my reader -- a place to stop subjecting them to my 
on-going re-openings of ideas.  And the reader I'm thinking of  is the 
sort of reader who goes through TIME and THE UTNE READER, or my students 
who get very jittery at the notion of not having a stopping place.  In 
teh context of FF concepts and methods as compared to "public writing" 
what do you think the place of closure is?

Meaghan