Logocentrism (or another scene of domestic bliss)

Another delightful evening finds our protagonists sitting in their living room cum study. Both are peering into books that have been assigned for their respective courses. On the chair by the window, ET sits, reading a book on the evolution of race and biology while GL tries to make sense of Culler on Saussure. We intrude into this scene with a keen awareness that both out readers are in deep thought, though what they are thinking about is not apparent to the other person ...

ET: I've got so much reading to complete by the next lesson. I've got to finish this book and other stuff ...
Me: Yup -- it's like that for me too ...
ET: But it's different ...
Me (now vaguely interested): Why? There's as much reading in Lit ... we do two to three books a week ...
ET: Yah. But I'm reading about theories. You're ONLY READING STORY BOOKS...

What was exchanged after that would be of interest only to the parties involved but needless to say, words were exchanged. But let us take a step back from that last remark, "You're ONLY READING STORY BOOKS ...", and consider it in the light of Logocentrism.

The assumption in a comment like that can trace itself to a the binary relationship between "form" and "content". In effect, Logocentrism (a neologism derived from the Greek Logos -- the Supreme Word -- and somewhat popularised by that mad brilliant Frenchman Jacques Derrida) is an insistence that the REAL/CORE/ ESSENTIAL/the TRUE should be privileged over APPEARANCE/ REPRESENTATION/ SURFACE. Derrida exposes this as a myth that has been handed down by the Enlightenment but there are implications even before one tries to overturn the distinction.

A Logocentric view of language and knowledge takes "language" as a transparent, objective, uninvolved vehicle of "ideas", privileging the latter over the former. Hence, language is merely the receptacle used to contain the vastly more important "ideas", merely used as a mode of communication. Implicit is the idea that "ideas" exist prior to language; that under different circumstances "ideas" could be transmitted without "language" anyway. We see this insistence of the Logocentric in EVERY English/GP/Humanities class where are essays and writing are the issue:

"It's the ideas that are more important than the grammar or style what. So why are you penalising me because of my language? It's only language what."

"Can you proof read this submission? It's for the Maths/Science/Physics whatever. You don't need to bother about the content -- just look at the language."


Roland Barthes has pointed out that the "science" (under which he includes the social sciences) has been most guitly in promulgating this position, believing that "language" is an instrument that knowledge can confidently deploy for its own purposes. In opposition stands "literature" where the distinction between "form" and "meaning" are endlessly collapsed and questioned. it is then the study of literature, of how forms disrupt the confidence with which we presume the ascendancy of "meaning". Story books have already discovered every theory that psychology, anthropology, sociology, economics, and the hard sciences have. But they evade the tyrannical confidence of Theory by self-consciously privileging the "act" of knowing rather than presuming it.

Gary, when are we going to do some writing?

An interesting occurrence in class today. After about 30 mins of talking about the Freud piece that we were supposed to be reading in preparation for a long writing assignment, one of the students, frustrated, asked me, “Why are we doing all this? isn’t this supposed to be English 101?” And I had a mini-coup on my hands.

People started piping up, “Yeah – when are we going to do some writing? All we’re doing is talking about ideas. We’re supposed to be writing!”
“Aren’t you going to tell us exactly what we need to do in the writing assignment?”
“We need to know exactly what the 101 course is about!”
“I don’t get this stuff. It’s just too hard. I need to get writing.”

I desperately tried to explain that we would get to the writing soon. But they weren’t appeased. After the lesson, a group stayed back and explained the situation to me.

Several had been taking ENGL 095, an even more basic writing course where they dealt with paragraph structure, points of grammar and essay structure very explicitly. They’d been told exactly what to do when writing an essay. They wanted the same thing. They wanted to write, or be told what exactly to write.

Which struck me as rather significant.

First – no student, in my time teaching in Singapore has ever stopped a class where we were having a discussion about ideas (and mind you, the lesson this morning WAS an animated discussion of ideas) to insist that we should be writing.
Second – the age old question: can we write without content? The students wanted to write BUT they did not get the Freud. How much understanding of ideas is required for writing?
Third – the pragmatics of the situation manifested itself.
• “Do you know it’s taken me two years to qualify for this class!” ie I’ve spend two years in remedial English and I need to pass this class!
• “If I don’t pass this class, I don’t get my financial aid and I can’t continue ...”

My compromise? Instead of discussing the passages some more – we were supposed to apply the Freud to a short story, I said we would do writing in the next lesson, based on the Freud alone. I actually don’t think this is a satisfactory situation because it means that people will be writing in a vacuum. But at least it’ll allay some panic about being prepared for the exam and it’ll get some work done.

Dinner Conversations

Over dinner last night, a strange conversation. Slurping down our third meal of instant noodles and dumplings for the week, the following:
Me: You know I’m reading this Delany book, it’s a memoir of his time as a struggling writer, when he was 18 and married to Marilyn Hacker. It’s intriguing that he managed to explore his homosexual instincts so freely. I mean, he goes into a subway toilet at 125th street, looks over this other guy in the stall, they exchange smiles, then they get it on.
ET: Should I be concerned that you find homosexual explorations intriguing?
Me: No no – the point here is how easy it was. He just looked over and smiled. And it’s like a public toilet.
ET: You really need to protect your mind while you’re reading all this stuff. You don’t need to be homosexual to be good at Lit. And don’t go and try smiling at people in the toilets here.
Me: That’s not the point.
ET: You mean you’re reading the book because it’s full of homosexual encounters. If you tell me you’re homosexual, I’ll jump off the Brooklyn bridge ...
Me: Ok. I don’t go around smiling at people in the toilets. I don’t even use the urinals. I go into the stalls and close the door. But I read Delany because he’s probably the best contemporary writer I know. It’s just that when you want to have a conversation about a books with people, you need to pick out the sensational bits, to make conversation. Look here (flip flip flip) ...

“Every once in a while I would get up to wander into the kitchen to stir the skillet full of spaghetti sauce I’d done up from a recipe on the back of a small white-and-green cardboard box of oregano leaves, the counter still flaked with bits of onion and three fugitive pieces of tomato. Or I’d wander into the front bedroom – just as another arc from the hydrant below broke between the black fire escape slats to sing across the grass, and five hundred purple crescents would gem and drool the pane, while I stood watching the motion of light in water.”

He’s obviously writing in retrospect and thus poeticising the mundane. Still, this is some of the keenest description of the mundane that I’ve seen in a long time. The alliteration in the first two lines is varied with the subsequent consonant and vowels fusing the repeated “s” into the sentence, such that they don’t stick out and draw attention to themselves but bring energy to the line so that its length becomes seductive rather than laborious. And that wonderful synesthetic image of a jet spray “sing(ing) across the grass” having those twin effects -- “gem and drool” – the ornate and the primal, all on an evening of living, young and poor, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.