Peaden discusses the writing of Jane Addams and argues that she uses a variety of discourses. She “grouped three classes of discourse that Addams used, accepted, and sometimes deflected and discuss them as classical, Christian, and Enlightenment discourses. These often conflicting, intertwined discourses both enabled and constrained not only Addams but also many other of the nation's first college-educated women seeking a purpose in life worthy of their education and powers” (187).
0 Comments
Foucault argues that “in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized, and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures, whose role is to avert its powers and its dangers, to cope with chance events, to evade its ponderous, awesome materiality” (216). He, then, explains how he understands discourse as being controlled. First, we have principles of exclusion: (1) what is prohibited, which determines what we can say as well as when, where, and who can say it; (2) division between reason and folly, which determines what counts as common discourse; and (3) division between true and false, which determines what counts as true discourse and links to what counts as knowledge. “[T]his will to truth, like the other systems of exclusion, relies on institutional support: it is both reinforced and accompanied by whole strata of practices such as pedagogy” (219). There are also internal rules, or “rules concerned with the principles of classification, ordering and distribution” (220): (1) commentary, which reiterates, expounds, and critiques primarily (finalized) texts; (2) “the author as the unifying principle in a particular group of writings or statements, lying at the origins of their significance, as the seat of their coherence” (221); and (3) a discipline, which is “defined by groups of objects, methods, their corpus of propositions considered to be true, the interplay of rules and definitions, of techniques and tools” (222). Finally, there are “rules serving to control discourse...[or] the conditions under which it may be employed” (224): (1) ritual, which “defines the qualifications required of the speaker...; it lays down gestures to be made, behaviour, circumstances and the whole range of signs that must accompany discourse; finally, it lays down the supposed, or imposed significance to the words used” (225); (2) “fellowship of discourse, whose function is to preserve or to reproduce discourse, but in order that it should circulate within a closed community, according to strict regulations, without those in possession being dispossessed by the very distribution” (225); (3) doctrine, whose numbers are not limited like they are in fellowship; and (4) the social appropriation of discourse as “every education system is political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it” (227).
Gates asserts that “the Signifying Monkey, stands as the rhetorical principle in Afro-American vernacular discourse” (44). He points to the importance of using the same signifier, “signification”: “‘Signification,’ in standard English, denotes the meaning that a term conveys, or is intended to convey…[T]o revise the term signification is to select a term that represents the nature of the process of meaning-creation and its representation…[and] to critique the nature of (white) meaning itself” (46-7). It “demonstrate[s], first, that a simultaneous, but negated, parallel discursive (ontological, political) universe exists within the larger white discursive universe…It also seems apparent that retaining the identical signifier argues strongly that the most poignant level of black-white difference is that of meaning” (49).
“To Signify, is other words, is to engage in certain rhetorical games” (48). Gates emphasizes the play of Signifyin(g); while many scholars highlight the aggressive and insulting parts of Signifyin(g), it is more about play and can be used for insulting or building up. “Whereas signification depends for order and coherence on the exclusion of unconscious associations which any given words yields at any given time, Signification luxuriates in the inclusion of the free play of these associative rhetorical semantic relations” (49). Signification involves repeating, reserving, and revising discourse. In this, “meaning [content] is devalued while the signifier is valorized” (61). Signifyin(g) in the trope of trope in that it subsumes many other tropes; because of this, “one does not Signify some thing; one Signifies in some way” (78). Signifyin(g) is a conscious and persuasive rhetorical strategy instead of just being a verbal game. Signification comes partly from the Signifying Monkey stories, in which the trickster monkey convinces the Lion that the Elephant said insulting things about him. The Monkey is speaking figuratively, but the Lion takes him literally. In this, the Monkey wins and, in getting to the Lion and setting up a situation in which the Elephant beats the Lion, the Monkey shows that he is the King. Because of these stories, the implied third element (the Elephant) in important in Signifyin(g). Gates argues that “the Signifying Monkey is the figure of a black rhetoric in the Afro-American speech [as opposed to writing] community” (53). |
Tags
All
|