GRGR(3) 50.31 Love Pointsman

[Keith Woodward]

At 01:52 PM 6/9/99 -0400, Paul wrote:
>> Isn't the "you" attention grabbing as well as accusatory/admonitory of
Pointsman and the reader.
>> It's like someone has grabbed you by the collar and/or pointed a finger
in your face and said
>> 'Listen!'
>>
>>  I suppose the Marxian element would be the congealed suffering (labor)
of the masses embedded
>> in our research
>> and intellectual agendas.
>>
>>  The use of "you" in this way always reminds me of a Pauline Kael movie
review. Telling us how
>> we react to the film.
>>
>> The "you" isn't the same "you" as in "You never thought they would save
YOU," is it?

There is also the argument (I hope I'm not repeating anyone) made by
structuralists (Ginette?) that the you in a text is an empty signifier.  it
seems to me almost irrelevant, but necessary.  Their argument is that "you"
is not actually directed at anyone in particular, so it's not really
referring.  I suspect that P., in some of the passages that seem to be
directed out of the text are directed at an audience, but one of my profs
suggested in the past that it might not be a universal audience, that it
seems to exclude, for example, women.  I can't make that same claim with any
authority, but it does seem to me that Pointsman's "you" does serve to draw
to reader into the consciousness of the thinker and is in that sense
accusative.  But (although we can't make any final claim about the intended
audience), it seems to me that this type of pairing of the reader with the
thinker tends toward the audience member who is imbued with a kind of
Pointsmania.  And in that way it feels almost exclusine at the same time
that it feels inclusive; the reader (who on some level recognizes a sense of
being the addressee at the same time that Pointsman may be addressing
himself) is at once drawn into and alienated from the text.

Keith W