More on the pharmakon

Here's a youtube video (about ten minutes) which both explains some information about the pharmakon and also exemplifies Rice's ideas regarding the "rhetoric of cool." (See page 3 in his text.)

Does this video give you any ideas for our next project?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dI8RHdao8w

The Pharmakon

In Rhetoric of Cool, you'll find a reference to the word "pharmakon."

I thought this website might help to clarify the curious tension in the word (remedy and poison). Can you think of examples where the poison is the cure?



The Pharmakon
Excerpted from:

http://www.cobussen.com/proefschrift/200_deconstruction/220_undecidables/221_pharmakon/pharmakon.htm


[1] No single word in English captures the play of signification of the ancient Greek word, pharmakon. Derrida traces the meanings assigned to pharmakon in Plato's dialogues: remedy, poison (either the cure or the illness or its cause), philter, drug, recipe, charm, medicine, substance, spell, artificial color, and paint. The word pharmakon is overdetermined, signifying in so many ways that the very notion of signification gets overloaded. A translation problem? Yes and no. In choosing one meaning translators often decide what in Plato's texts remains undecidable. But as indicated above, the problem is inherent in its very principle, situated less in the translation from one language to another, than already within the Greek language itself. And adopted within philosophical discourse, pharmakon does not suddenly become unambiguous, ready and suited for dialectic operations. (In Phaedrus, Socrates tries to distinguish between two kinds of words, the unambiguous - words about which we all agree - and the ambiguous - words about which we are at variance. In Plato, Derrida and Writing, Jasper Neel argues that in fact there are no unambiguous words.) Instead, words like pharmakon threatens the philosophical process, threatens dialectics from within. Plato's text itself is thus already the battlefield of an impossible process of translation.
Plato's systematic and pure reasoning (followed by Platonism and the entire Western tradition of philosophy) experiences great difficulty with this undecidability. It wants to put a stop to this constant shift from one meaning to another and back again. Still, Plato cannot escape the ambiguity of pharmakon either. In Phaedrus, writing is first presented as a useful tool, a beneficial drug (pharmakon). It later proves to be a harmful substance, benumbing to the soul, memory and truth, a poison (pharmakon). In Phaedo, the reverse happens: first, the hemlock is presented to Socrates as a poison (pharmakon). Yet it is transformed, through the effects of the Socratic logos, into a cathartic power (pharmakon), helpful to the soul that it awakens to the truth of eidos.

Found Poems

Your found poetry, drawn from works by Elizabeth Bishop, Allen Ginsberg and Michael Ondjaatje:

1.
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb,
About the size of our abidance,
About the size of an old style-Dollar bill.
I lost two cities, lovely ones and vaster,
a water meadow with some tiny cows.

Heavens, I recognize this place. I know it.
Life and the memory of it cramped.

Two brush strokes each;
Your Uncle George, my Uncle George
Our visions collide.


2.

I can't stand my own mind.
I never knew him.
But we walk around a bit
life and the memory of it cramped.
Clear as grey glass.

I can't stand my own mind.
Buy a bottle, the hour badly spent.

"I'm too tall for you, Billy."
The art if losing isn't hard to master.
He was by then an alcoholic.

I'm sick of your insane demands.

You were a sunflower,
but go fuck yourself.

Intertextuality

Here is a useful site that describes the basic concepts associated with intertextuality. Check it out:

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/sem09.html

Dialogism

For those of you looking for more info on dialogism, here's a detailed blog post on the subject:

http://realmixed.blogspot.com/2009/04/digital-literature-bakhtin-and-dialogic.html

We'll unpack some of this material in class on Th.

Class Notes

Here's a representation of our class discussion today:

Heteroglossia: Meaning is never singular but plural in nature. The "right" meaning depends on context, and no two contexts are the same.

Dialogism: Language is interactive. Every meaning affects every other meaning.

Intertextuality: You drew a Cartesian plane (x/y axis). Along X, you drew the writer and the audience; along the Y, you drew "TIME," with old texts at one end and current texts at the other end.

The basic idea was that meaning is influenced by the writer and the audience as well as all of the texts that have come before and all the texts at are being produced in the here and now.

Dialogism and Heteroglossia

I thought you might find the definitions of Dialogism and Heteroglossia useful:

A Few Key Terms Regarding the Collaborative Nature of Interpretation

See Fontaine and Hunter, p 9 for a brief summary.

Heteroglossia:

“The base condition governing the operation of meaning in any utterance. It is that which insures the primacy of context over text. At any given time, in any given place, there will be a set of conditions—social, historical, meteorological, physiological—that will insure that a word uttered in that place and at that time will have a meaning different than it would have under any other conditions; all utterances are heteroglot in that they are functions of a matrix of forces practically impossible to recoup, and therefore impossible to resolve" (Holquist 426).

Dialogism:

“Is the characteristic epistemological mode of a world dominated by heteroglossia. Everything means, is understood, as a part of a greaterwhole—there is a constant interaction between meanings, all of which have the potential of conditioning others. Which will affect the other, how it will do so and in what degree is what is actually settled at the moment of the utterance. This dialogic imperative, mandated by the pre-existence of the language world relative to any of its current inhabitants, insures that there can be not actual monologues" (Holquist 428).

Bakhtin. M.M. The Dialogic Imagination. Tras. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Austin Press, 1992.

Intertextuality

You will notice that Fontaine and Hunter provide a brief summary of Bruffee's article on p. 7. They extend Bruffee's ideas with a discussion of Mikhail Bakhtin (next post) and Julia Kristeva on pp 8 and 9.

I thought this passage from Douglas Eyman might inform your understanding of intertextuality:

"Perhaps the most obvious theory that hypertext embodies and makes explicit is Julia Kristeva's (1986) notions of intertextuality: Kristeva, influenced by the work of Bakhtin, charts a three-dimensional textual space whose three "coordinates of dialogue" are the writing subject, the addressee (or ideal reader), and exterior texts; she describes this textual space as intersecting planes which have horizontal and vertical axes:

'The word's status is thus defined horizontally (the word in the text belongs to both writing subject and addressee) as well as vertically (the word in the text is oriented towards an anterior or synchronic literary corpus) . . . each word (text) is an intersection of words (texts) where at least one other word (text) can be read . . . any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another. (p. 37)

Essentially, every text is informed by other texts which the reader has read, and the reader's own cultural context. (emphasis added, http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/1.2/features/eyman/julia.html)

So how does "intertextuality" shape your interpretation of the image of above? If you're interested to learn more about Marcel Duchamp's famous "Fountain," this link may offer you a good departure point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp)

Douglas Eyman. "Hypertext And/As Collaboration in the Computer-Facilitated Writing Classroom." Kairos 1.2. http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/1.2/binder.html?features/eyman/index.html.

"The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife"

First, let me say that I appreciate your good with with the responses to Hemingway's story. Brendan brings up a good point on his blog. To paraphrase: Interesting story, but what does it have to do with collaborative learning?

Building off the work of Thomas Kuhn, Richard Rorty, Stanley Fish, Bruffee argues that "knowledge is established and maintained in the "normal discourse" of communities of knowledgeable peers" (640). Fish, he notes, goes so far as to claim that "'interpretive communities' are the source of our thought."

These points lead me to several questions:

Are we, in this class, a functioning interpretive community? With regard to Hemingway's story, what does "normal" discourse look like? Finally, if new knowledge is created by way of "abnormal discourse"(see pp. 647-8), what would that look like?

Colbert Report and Wikipedia

Check out this link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20PlHx_JjEo&feature=related

I wonder if Colbert's argument about the dangers of knowledge as consensus informs our discussion of Bruffee, Rorty, and Kuhn?

Cogito Ergo Sum

A funny video regarding Descartes famous contribution to philosophy. The video includes some cursing, so you've been warned.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHihkRwisbE&feature=related

And here's another, which relates Decartes to the popular film "The Matrix"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEr8hnvzeHU