“Under Construction”
Prefatory Note
Peter Connor
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
The interventions which comprise the first section of this
issue were received in response to a question formulated by the editors of Qui
Parle and addressed to a number of prominent literary critics and theorists of
literature throughout the United States and Europe. The question, reprinted on
the page immediately preceding the interventions, concerns the place of the
teacher and teaching in the institution, and the role of the student in the
pedagogical scene. Insofar as the problematic of formation or Bildung remains
constitutively incomplete, we shall have to keep this volume "Under
Construction." It is hoped that the publication of these responses will
encourage further debate around the many issues raised and discussed by our
present contributors, and the editors of Qui Parle urge readers to participate
via the columns of the journal.
The urgency of our question arises at a time
when the university is re-organizing its significance and when the effects of
the institution are being seriously questioned, perhaps most especially from
within the disciplines of the humanities.
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Interventions
The Imperative to Teach
J. Hillis Miller
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The questions ask: Who or what (today) calls
on us to teach? Does that demand lay out a clear
road for us to follow? Is that road, if there
is one, "under construction," that is, I take it,
is it in the midst of a social or historical process into which we as teachers or students might
intervene, taking a hand in the work of construction? Is that road, if there is one, a one-way
street, Einbahnstrasse, presumably in that case
going straight from the teachers to the students,
with "Do Not Enter" marked at the other end, to
keep the students from driving the wrong way, in
defiance of the authority of the teacher?
The questions can be extrapolated a little,
perhaps down the one way street that waits to
be traversed, showing me the way to go: Is teaching a contingent addition to "literary study,"
or to "humanistic study" generally? Or, to put
it more simply, does reading, the reading of a
poem, a novel, or a philosophical text, for example, require teaching it or lead inevitably to
teaching it?
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Untitled*
Jean-Luc Nancy
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
Y a-t-il quelque chose qui appelle à l'en
seignement aujourd'hui plus qu’à une autre époque?
Je ne le pense pas, ou bien je ne le discerne pas.
Y a-t-il aujourd'hui un motif ou un mobile parti
culier qui mène à enseigner? je n’en vois pas.
En outre, de telles questions exigeraient, me sem
ble-t-il, qu'on spécifie de quel enseignement on
parle: c’est-à-dire, à quel niveau, dans quelle
discipline, dans quel pays, dans quelle institution,
sur le fond de quelle tradition. Mais votre dessein
n'est manifestement pas celui d'une pareille en
quête. Je répondrai done de manière très "person
nels" et en somme très empirique.
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Two Lessons: The Tui-Report and K. in the Cathedral
Rainer Nägele
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Tui: a Brechtian Chinese word for a certain
kind of intellectual, derived from Tellect-Uel-In.
These literally confused intellectuals have the
task of protecting the socio-economic power structure of their society against any possible threat
from critical thought. In Brecht's China, for
example, the economy, i.e., the profits of the
emperor, is threatened by an over-abundant cotton
harvest. In order to drive up the dangerously
falling cotton prices, the emperor has the majority of the cotton secretly burned. The scarcity of cotton brings its price to astronomical
heights. The population is puzzled by this phenomenon; after all, everybody knows about the
rich harvest. Suspicion and rumors arise.
Quick and clever action is necessary to avoid
civil unrest.
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Untitled
Marian Hobson
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I translate this question, no doubt twisting
it, as: What appeals to teaching/learning today?
One answer is that the appeal is a case of "controlled appellation." Teaching/learning in institutions ends in the conferring of titles--the right
to prefix or suffix letters, or appellations, to
one's name. This conferring is not universal,
but controlled--the rights of appellation are graded,
part of a hierarchized academic transport system
(not for nothing do you speak of "tenure track"),
though not by any means secure "titres de transport." This grading, these grades, this graduation,
all this is central to the educational institution:
degrees are attributed, exams are "moderated" in
a term which tellingly joins the notions of presiding and of insertion of differentials, 'modus,'
means. This is power through distinction: the
distinguishing mark of a university as institution
is its power to confer marks of distinction; and
universities themselves are graded, they or academic
boards cross-validate each others' marks by a system
of external examiners, of University Grants Committee
assessors, etc.
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The Road Belong Cargo
Laurence Rickels
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In Dialectic of Enlightenment Adorno and
Horkheimer argue that the university, like the rest of the culture industry and like the radio
in particular, is democratic: it turns all participants into auditors subjected to broadcast programs which are all exactly the same. This norm
of killing time represents the institutionalization
of Freud's discovery of the mechanism of repression;
it corresponds to the unceasing expenditure of unconscious psychic energy which accompanies the
effort to keep that which must not enter consciousness in the unconscious--in the all-pervasive public
sphere. The analogies that thus keep the public
sphere on this side of the Freudian system converge
in Totem and Taboo as the close encounter between
projection and cinematic projection. At the end
of these analogies, Freud's theory of phantoms
and the technical media finds confirmation and
realization in the Melanesian Cargo Cult, which
also makes a ghost appearance in 1913.
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Untitled
Werner Hamacher
Translated by Adam Bresnick
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Dear Peter Connor:
One should reply to your question, of course,
with something more than a "relatively brief submission," namely with at least an exposition of
and tentative reply to those questions which arise
from questions and from forms of questions which,
following a long tradition of pedagogical questions
and questions about pedagogy, you use again today--or aujourd-hui. Qu’est-ce qui----donne----l'appel---- à l'enseignement----aujourd'hui----? These
questions about your question--I will suggest them
only very quickly--would be of the following sort:
Why what? Why gives and not takes? Why is the
call thought of as something which, rather than
taken, taken down, or taken in--be it from a specific situation, be it from a specific agent, subject, principle, preferably a moral one--will be
given? And if each call which issues is destined
to make demands on the one who is called (but this
is also questionable), is it already settled that
I will hear, that I will hear this call and hear
it as one destined for me?
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Untitled
Francine Masiello
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Far from offering a rhapsodic celebration
of the attractiveness of university teaching (and
you must admit that your question invites this
kind of response), I feel obliged, instead, to
take stock of the neo-conservative climate of the
eighties and its effect on the academy. In particular, I am alarmed by the Reagan administration's narrow vision of the university and its
patent contempt for the heterogeneity of contemporary scholarly pursuits. Ranging from the
so-called advisory committee for accuracy in
academia to the proposed educational reforms
drawn by William Bennett, the initiatives of this
administration have been designed to monitor and
contain the range of dialogue articulated in the
classroom. Among his many pronouncements on university teaching, Bennett, for example, has demanded a reduction in the multiple offerings of
the liberal arts curriculum, calling an end to
what he deems the unnecessary frills of the humanities program.
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Copie Blanche*
Jason Ales
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
Une conversation inouïe: un parlait à plusieurs, trop pour vraiment se connaître, chacun
aussi attentif que s'il eût été seul à écouter,
peu jaloux, peu gêné par la concurrence faite à
ses oreilles, sages tous et silencieux sans s'être
entendus à l'avance, interdits, ne se permettant
que questions et acquiescements, ne prenant jamais
l'initiative de changer de sujet. Mais l'orateur
lui-même, l'avait-il choisi? Se contentait-il
de questionner quelque orateur supérieur et invisible? II semblait là sur ordre, comme sachant
qu’on faisait aussi son appel, aujourd'hui comme
hier, mais pour en référer à qui? N’y avait-il
donc, à chaque échelon de cette procession de
paroles, qu'acte de présence pour répondre à
l'appel?
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Articles
Something for Nothing: Barthes in the Text of Ideology
Jonathan Elmer
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
If, instead of the question "What does this
text say?", we ask "What does this text want me
to say?", we perform the first gesture (doubtless
paranoid) in what would seem to be a reversal of
the normal power relations between a text and its
reader. No longer interested in invading the text
with an imperialistic determination to search out
"radical elements" in order to harass them into
confessing the "truth," we begin to set up a paranoid counter-intelligence system designed to protect ourselves from the infiltration of the text’s meanings which, posing as one of our own agents,
might trick us into disclosing the state secrets
of our bigoted, ideologically determined, sexually
neurotic, petty selves. Like any paranoid structure, however, this one is fantasmatic, since texts
cannot infiltrate us: at most, they can lure us
into their discursive system and, by making it seem
attractive to describe the contours of that system
(as though it were exterior to ourselves), they
generously allow us to announce triumphantly our
ideological complicity with them.
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Tristan et Isault as a “Salle Aux Images”
Adam Bresnick
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In a terse and provocative apothegm, Jacques
Lacan declared that "on n'est jamais amoureux que d’un nom." The Lacanian model of desire adumbrated in this little catch phrase seems to me particularly useful for a consideration of the medieval
legend of Tristan et Iseut, for throughout Tristan
et Iseut one is confronted with episodes in which
the fundamental mediation of representation--be it
nominal, narrational or pictorial--is presented to
the reader as that which deflects desire away from
its ostensible object back onto the represented image
or story itself. In contradistinction to the "realistic" point of view, which takes as its model what
might be called a naive mimetism (the text as a
secondary imitation of "the real world"), I will
argue that Tristan et Iseut is as much a narrative
about our love of narrative itself as it is a story
of love between two individual people. As we shall
see in the episode of the Salle aux Images, representation is presented as that which magnetizes our
cathexes in a manner simultaneously troubling and
enrapturing, for in the end Tristan et Iseut suggests that it is the image and not the reality
which has the upper hand in our affections.
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The Socratic Disruption of Origins in The Birth of Tragedy
Marc DaRosa
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The opening section of this paper will present, in a selective and strategic, but not altogether critical manner, various passages from The
Birth of Tragedy which characterize Nietzsche’s
treatment of "Socratic culture." Of course, it
is possible that any instance of selection represents an interpretive act, and therefore becomes
a "critical" gesture. However, by the end of the
essay, these isolated passages will have received
a more detailed exposition. They will reappear
wearing a second face, one which is more suited to
the complex and ambiguous nature of Nietzsche's
relationship to the "Socratic man." This double
(and duplicitous) reading is perhaps the only possible approach to a work which speaks in a plurality of voices, in which every statement is an
illusion that masks an illusion.
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The Double-Edged Pen: Reading “A Peine” in Mémoires
Cynthia McPherson
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Enfolded between the preface and the first
lecture of Mémoires: For Paul de Man is a concealed scene of pain, a scene easily overlooked
and forgotten. In "A peine," the proper name of
this hors d'oeuvre, which stands like an epitaph,
perhaps marking the temporary resting place of
Paul de Man, Derrida reads and remembers the pain
hidden in the phrase à peine. The ear of a
franco phone hardly hears the pain and hardship
in à peine, hardly remembers in the spoken word
the pain visible in writing. What follows is a
meditation upon the difficulty hidden in the
phrase "à peine" in relation to following in
life and in thought.
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How Progress Eludes Us: Variations on a Theme
Bruce Gold
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There was once a boy whose mother died
on the sidewalk in the night, but before she
collapsed she lurched forward, walking as if
one leg were shorter than the other. As her son
dashed forward and fell at her side, crying "Mamma! Mamma!" a tide of darkness seemed to
be sweeping her from him:
"Wait here! Wait here! he cried and
jumped up and began to run for help
toward a cluster of lights he saw in the
distance ahead of him, but the lights
drifted farther away the faster he ran,
and his feet moved numbly as if they
carried him nowhere. The tide of darkness seemed to sweep him back to her,
postponing from moment to moment his
entry into the world of guilt and
sorrow. (FLANNERY O'CONNOR)
Nonetheless, he had many more years to live...
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Poem
Elégie californienne (extrait)*
Pierre Alféri
Nous sommes partis de Berkeley -
traversée
par la route à deux voies
taillant d'une main sûre dans le ruban des terres
deux bandes qui s'effrangent
au passage et au loin
se rafistolent,
la ville ou la forêt à l’égyptienne
défilait en parallèles insoucieux l'un de l'autre...
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Book Review
Nouveau traité des ruines by Giancarlo J. Lacina*
A review of Lacina, Giancarlo J. Nouveau traité des ruines (Trojan University Press, 1986)
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Cover Design by Michael Macrone
*Published in French
Volume 1.2 is available at JSTOR. Qui Parle is edited by an independent group of graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley and published by Duke University Press.