Saussure Sucking on his Lost Knight's Tale

[Terrance]

> 
> Fact is, I've offered, over the past weeks, quite a lot in the way of
> explaining where I'm at. I've complained repeatedly (to the amusement of
> one and all) that, all too often, those with nothing to say come forward
> and say it, and offer nothing constructive to counter my approach to
> textual analysis (sorry, jbor, "interpretation" - and I didn't forget
> the scare-quotes, you've trained me well).

I like to say that Moby-Dick is not about a little black monkey. 

I'll come back to that. 

Suppose I'm playing chess and a little black monkey runs up to the board
and snatches my Black Knight. Can I replace the Black Kinght with an
apple? How about an orange? 
Sure I can.  Why not? How about a sperm whale? 
Not a model of a sperm whale. 
A sperm whale. 



How about Moby-Dick? 

Think about this for a moment while I digress and tell you the amusing
tale of the flea circus on LSD: 


Analysis or Interpretation? 
What's the difference? 
What kind of analysis and what kind of interpretation? 

What kind of theory?   

A three ring circus? 

Literary-criticism, Critical-theory, Literary-theory. 

You have got to see it. Why,  it runs circles around schools,
approaches, disciplines ...  flying  definitions and terms through hoops
of fire with the greatest of ease. 

In some Universities theory is more read than literature by both
students and teachers (graduate students, with nothing else to live on,
live on the stuff). 

Students study theory. 
Teaches teach it. 
Scholars are for or against it. 
Theory, like it or not, has replaced much of the cannon of the academic
literary institutions. 

So, what is it? What is theory? 

No one seems to know. 

Literary theory? What is Lit-theory? 

Is it antonym of practice  or of interpretation? 

Wouldn't that mean a theory of literature that is somehow  antithetical
to either its practice or the interpretation of literary texts? 

If I write a book on the history of theory is that book a theory of
theory's history? 

Back in the day, when we actually read novels, like 8 or more novels in
a single course( even if it was a course in Russian novels or Dickens,
or giant satires)  we warmed up to these reading marathons with training
courses called surveys. We would read excerpts complied in those fat
anthologies with the tissue paper thin pages. Brit Literature From
Beowulf to Chaucer, Romantics, Victorians, American Lit I, American Lit.
II, and so on. We would run through some fairly strenuous theoretical
exercises too. But we never took survey courses in theory. While today's
kids read less than we did, they are reading more and more theory. But
how does one read Brian McHale if one hasn't read any of the fictions
(Modern or Post Modern) he's talking about in his books? Our survey
courses were literature courses. They were taught in English
departments. Are there now theory departments that teach theory? Back in
the day literature courses required close reading of the text and
interpretation of the text. Were we practicing theory without knowing
it? 

When the disciplines were encircled the general confusion under the big
top was exacerbated. But the spot light was eventually fixed on a single
clown (Theory)  who had somehow tamed all the paper tigers and chased
them from their stools. Funny thing is, he did it with
self-flagellation. The tiger stools are all that remain. But we remember
some of the names of the ferocious animals that once sat on the
stools--psychoanalyis, linguistics, philosophy, history, art history,
sociology, logic, others I've forgotten. 








> 
> If I've not said enough, not "bothered" to please you, I guess it's
> because I can't be "bothered" to go on pissing in the wind. Tell you
> what, davemarc, ask the moronic twins. Trouble is, you'll have to
> decipher their semi-articulate grunts. Better still, ask Terrance, he
> knows exactly how much I know. And yes, I know he jumps about like a
> flea on acid, but at least he's good for a laugh, and laughing's always
> preferable to thinking.
> 
> The edit is significant, I think. You cut off P in full flow. He
> continues: "Those who don't learn from history used to have to relive
> it, but only until those in power could find a way to convince
> everybody, including themselves, that history never happened, or
> happened in a way best serving their own purposes ..."
> 
> Precisely. History is contested knowledge. We have to know how we've
> arrived at what we know. The "distinctions" you speak of, funnily
> enough, what Foucault calls "truth-games" or "regimes of truth", are
> defined by those who have the power to do so at any given time.
> Everything I've written has targeted that, but I guess there aren't
> enough laughs in history.