X-Sender: rmcdonel@popmail.ucsd.edu
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.mbu-l
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1992 14:02:05 +0000
From:         rmcdonell%ucsd.edu@SDSC.BITNET
Subject:      Re: Last (?) thoughts on lurking/Reason.Argggh!

>Why can't you dismantle the master's house with the master's tools?
>Presumably they would fit the joints and bonds they created.  If the
>master drove a screw, what better than his screwdriver would take it
>out?
>Bob C.

I think the point is that the use of the master's tools necessitates a
certain apprenticeship--which for writing might mean the submission of
one's selves to a given discourse community's dominant terms, categories,
modes of (re)presentation, and the like--that all to easily leads to
cooptation.  In learning how to take apart the house, how to use the tools
that put it together in the first place, how indeed it fits together, the
likelihood is, according to Audre Lourde's maxim, that you will have
limited the liberatory possibilities of your de(con)structive project.

In kind of the same vein, Carol Cohn describes the slippage of her critical
perspective in "Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense
Intellectuals" (appeared, I think, in *Signs*).  Cohn's piece is remarkable
for making the case that in order to be accepted by the defense
intellectuals she wanted to study, she had to adopt their discourse
conventions, and by so doing, over time, came to lose touch with her
originating sensibility (a fact she finds both interesting and abhorrent).

In her (later?) work, Donna Haraway ("Situated Knowledges: The Science
Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective";
"Primatology as Politics"; the Cyborg piece) is fairly relentless in
undermining our (my?) shared myths about scientific knowledge, revealing
its allegiances, contingent status, development,  exclusionary devices,
etc.  Her take on science is sobering and, with Cohn, might raise some
interesting points of entry/departure for those involved in the discussion
of reason and argumentation up here.

The idea that reason/argument precludes violence, "keeps it at bay"  was
one way it was put, I think omits the shifter "here" as a necessary
qualifier in order to avoid dealing with the "there" (not to mention the in
between) that "here" relies on to define itself.  Indeed, I fear that
argument/reason depends on violence-at-bay --i.e, violence elsewhere--for
its very existence and legitimacy.  Further, given binarism's analytical
untenability (inside-outside, even), it's more than likely that the
relationship is more complex, that the two (arg and violence) are
implicated in each other in ways that preclude a less than tortured
separation.

Hmmm, I'm digressing. . .

The counter-argument (to Lourde), I suppose, is that you can't break the
rules unless you know what they are and how to use them.  But whose rules
are they and how did they become the rules?  Who decided?  Again, I think
we've arrived at that mythical pluralist moment where the included (the
inside, the dominant) sincerely talk utility, tests of time, openness to
reasonable disagreement, consensus, organicism and/or the kitchen sink, to
legitimize the process that led to their inclusion.  My view, perhaps too
easily and obviously, is that the inside rations the authority to reify and
the first reification is of the structuration itself.  Applied to Lourde's
maxim, this means that though the master's house may appear to be
disassembleable by understanding how it was put together and with what
tools, but our multiple understandings/interpretations of its assemblage
are themselves fictive--constructions--stories we tell ourselves that
comport with the insider  myth(s) of its origin and construction(s).

Not to mention that the master's house is built on a land-fill near a
fault-line on the other side of which is the so-called 3rd world. . .

rmcdonell@ucsd.edu


rmcdonell@ucsd.edu
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