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CHAPTER 1
The Remains of Theory
A Manifesto
Diane Davis
Etymologically, theory is associated with the act of viewing, looking at, or beholding; literally and figuratively, it has to do with vision and the light, with the eye — both the organ that sees and the so-called mind's eye that ideates or contemplates. Often opposed to practice and to truth, it tends to connote passivity (thinking is not yet acting) and uncertainty, as in, "it's just a theory." Or more affirmatively, as Sharon Crowley proposes, theory is performative, "a doing, or an act that recalls a constructed set of other performances"; theories, she writes, are "rhetorical inventions: depictions or assessments produced by and within specific times and locations as means of opening other ways of believing or acting" (2006, 28). As rhetorical invention, theory involves illumination, bringing something to light, arresting a subterranean truth so that it can be seen and operationalized as a coherent practice or method or systematic belief.
What I want to propose here, however — for Sharon and in the name of taking her theory-as-invention provocation to the limit — is that the force of theory, its motive and motor, is a nocturnal operation: theory operates in the dark, actively (even hyperactively) tracking that which withdraws from presence and so from vision. There is an autoimmunizing force at the heart of theory that works to protect itself from what would, precisely, put an end to it: the certitudes of sight, both sensible and intelligible. Theory in general, I'd like to suggest, is indeed thoroughly rhetorical and inextricably tied up with in(ter)vention: it's the name for a self-deconstructive function intrinsic to any specific performance of theory-as-practice that clears a path for, and pledges itself to, a future that cannot be anticipated.
A theory, any system or performance of conceptual generality used to ground or explain something, establishes and puts itself to work through immunizing strategies, drawing and narcissistically protecting boundaries around itself for pedagogical, political, ethical — maybe religious — purposes. A theory must be delimited to be teachable, applicable, even preachable. But built in to any discernable theory is a quasi-suicidal drive that darts straight to the edge of the self-protective boundary ... and jumps. Taking a hit out on itself, theory destroys its "own" borders, charging through "the very thing within it that is supposed to protect it," as Derrida describes it (2005, 123). The task of theory is not to defend what it brings to light but to respond to a call, an address that comes through in the dark from the as-yet-unthinkable; theory's task is to catch traction on the remains of the thinkable.
Any distinguishable theory is inhabited from the start by this autoimmunizing function, a force of weakness, driven to protect itself against its own protection, picking off its own border patrol to expose instead a threshold: a limit that joins what it also separates. Like any and every appreciable phenomenon, a theory defines itself, presents and protects itself, only inasmuch as its so-called constitutive outside — its originary contaminants, the border-crossing "not-its" at the heart of its heart — withdraw from what they've rendered possible. And this means, first, that every attempt to pin down or stick to a specific theory — say, a theory of ethos or kairos or "theory"— every attempt to explicate it by isolating it from a putative outside, ends up an attack on that theory itself, on a part of itself that got designated "other." That's the paradox of absolute loyalty. And/but second, it means that every effort to say, practice, or perform what this theory is invites all its not-its to loom up within it, to announce themselves again, to put a call out. In each iteration of this or that theory, the remains of some other here and now, some other not-simply-present presence, some other hope promises itself. And to theorize is to respond to that address, to promise oneself to that promise, to attend to the mark of what withdraws, and so to protect the finite opening to an incalculable chance.
Theory's task is to engage — without assured methods, ideological loopholes, or handrails of disavowal — the remains that haunt the performance of any specific theory, even as they displace that theory's horizons of expectation. Playing at the limits, theory puts those limits back in play, compromising the very identity, the self, "the sui- or self-referentiality," Derrida notes, of the suicide itself. A theory's autoimmune function does not simply destroy itself "in suicidal fashion," in other words, but dissolves the identity that suicide presupposes, robbing "suicide itself of its meaning and supposed integrity" (2005, 45). Theory saves itself by offing itself: it compromises its "self," turns on itself, corrupts itself, in order to protect itself — not against praxis or politics — but against the certitudes of sight, which invite the regulation (and so the stifling) of thought by a telos.
The enemy of theory is what Michelle Ballif recently described as the "panicked rhetorical process" of burying the remains (2013, 143), burying them for the sake of some mystified end-goal, already lit up and waiting. Theory and in(ter)vention share this enemy, and they combat it together, Tai Chi style. Which is to say: not through direct opposition but by shifting position so that the "hostile force dissipates on its own," Avital Ronell observes; "this is another syntax of action, which also suspends the presumed difference between activity and passivity" (2010, 33). To theorize is to actively respond to a nocturnal address, to promise or pledge oneself to that which "obliterates the originariness of site," Ronell writes elsewhere, and of sight, to that which haunts the here and now without being simply present, visible, or clear (2000, 270). To embrace a real without remains, as if what is real could be condensed into sensible properties — viewed from afar or under a microscope — is to refuse to theorize. Theory, as this style of rhetorical in(ter)vention, is not "antirealist," a label certain contemporary proponents of "new realisms" are fond of tossing around, but a passionate and self-sacrificing love affair with the real: call it a realism of the remains. No remains, no theory; no theory, no future.
CHAPTER 2
Beliefs and Passionate Commitments
An Interview with Sharon Crowley
Andrea Alden, Kendall Gerdes, Judy Holiday, and Ryan Skinnell
In June 2015, the editors of this book traveled to Sharon Crowley's house in Arizona to interview her as a first step in the process. We sent her a series of questions in advance, which she refers to in some of her answers below and which should be fairly self-evident, but knowing that helps to account for some of the less-than-graceful transitions in the discussion. As Lalicker, McDonald, and Wyche's chapter in this book indicates, we were not the only people for whom an interview with Sharon seemed like a logical first step. The two interviews represented in this book were not coordinated, though some of the same issues did arise. There is also a third interview (Crowley et al. 2017), which was taken from the same discussion as this manuscript and published separately. What we have tried to do here is include only what we think are useful parts of the larger discussion with as little repetition among the three as possible so that readers will find distinctive value in encountering each of the texts.
We want to offer one additional caveat before leaving the interview to speak for itself. It will become fairly clear to readers that this discussion took place before the bulk of the 2016 presidential campaign. As we reread this interview in the process of composing the book manuscript, we were struck by how many times it raised issues that seem to demand fresh answers in light of the election results. Those answers aren't here, and we decided redoing the interview in light of what we know now would not serve the larger goals of the book project.
* * *
Gerdes: Something that you teach students early in your classes is the Greek origin of theory and theory as a building block for rhetoric. In another interview (Crowley 2008), you mention reading Of Grammatology with a group you called the Poststructuralist Luncheon Club, and your first book, [A] Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction (1989) was published about a decade after this reading group. How do you think your work helped introduce poststructuralism to the field? Was it significant that Deconstruction was the inaugural book in the Teacher's Introduction series? How central was Pre/Text or other journals for publishing poststructuralist scholarship and in creating an audience for it?
Crowley: Okay. Well I read through my own stuff in the last week, which is really weird after all these years. And I put together a little bit of an itinerary.
The Poststructuralist Luncheon Club began to meet in '77. My friend Bryan Short — whom I seem to mention everywhere — had been back to Yale for a seminar, and he had studied with Derrida. Derrida was at Yale in '76, and that was the year that Spivak finally got Grammatology translated into English, and Bryan came back just steeped in this stuff and kept speaking deconstruction. This was a foreign language to the rest of us. Bryan insisted we read Derrida, and we found we couldn't go it alone. So five of us — Jim Fitzmorris, Jay Farness, Mac Malone, Bryan, and me — would meet at one of our homes every Friday afternoon and read something from the Grammatology. We started with it and screamed and argued our way through the book. When we got comfortable with that, we started reading other things. We read a lot of stuff out of the journal Diacritics. We read Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller and around in other deconstructive critics.
We would sometimes spend a whole afternoon on a page or two. And that was at the same time I was discovering the Sophists — I started reading all the historians of rhetoric, the traditional ones, when I got to Northern Arizona University (NAU) because I'd never had a chance when I was doing my PhD at Northern Colorado. I took a lot of courses in rhetoric from the speech department, but I wasn't able to take as much as I wanted and still get a degree in English. So I had this huge reading list when I got to NAU, and I immediately embarked on it and just fell in love with — if you can believe it — with Wilbur Samuel Howell. So I gave myself an education reading that stuff, and I got named the editor of the Arizona English Bulletin, which was one of the best of the local rags at that time. And through that I met a lot of wonderful people. Between the people at NAU and Arizona State University (ASU) and the University of Arizona (UA), we formed a little intellectual sharing group, and talked on the phone, and met at local conferences.
That's where I was when Bryan came back from Yale, and Derrida just blew our minds. I mean really just blew our minds. Fitzmorris was a Renaissance scholar, Farness was a classical scholar, and Malone was interested in hermeneutics. And me in rhetoric. Bryan was a Melville scholar, so even to speak a language together was hard for us. But we did it, and it was really fruitful — all of us published books out of that group. I also published "Of Gorgias and Grammatology" in 1979. That was my first effort. I gave that as a lecture at the Wyoming conference. I was scared to death. It was my first big gig. I had new clothes, a new jacket, and I got up to Wyoming and realized everybody dressed very casually. I loved everybody at Wyoming. That was just a wonderful conference. So I get up on stage and give this paper on Gorgias and the Grammatology. After I was done, two older gentlemen came up to the lip of the stage and asked to take me to coffee. And as a young woman I thought, "I don't know about this." And then somebody came up and said, "Mr. Corbett, can I have something-or-other," and I realized it was Ed-fucking-Corbett, and it was Jim Kinneavy with him.
They took me to coffee and Ed says, "Send me that paper, to Three C's." Ed made me revise the paper three times, but one wants an editor like that. That was my first publication in poststructuralism. I did another piece in the early '80s called "writing and Writing" (1985), which is a critique of writing instruction. Then I published the Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction in 1989. Michael Spooner, who was then the editor of NCTE and a former student of mine from NAU, said they needed a piece on deconstruction. So that's how it came about.
Gerdes: It sounds like there was a lot of interest in the field.
Crowley: Yes, yes. Rhetorical study and comp instruction were just arid at the time. It was current traditional rhetoric in comp instruction and new critical approaches to literary study. It was formulaic and dry. I couldn't believe how excited my colleagues in literature were to read Derrida, and I mean it just opened up a whole new way of looking at things. It could have been anything else, really — anything that would have rescued us from where we were would have been great.
Holiday: Did you stay in touch with Bryan Short over the years?
Crowley: Yes, yes. Bryan died early — actually while I was here at ASU. He was one of the best friends I ever had. And another friend up there, lifelong friend, Jim Simmerman who was a well-known poet. Jim taught me a lot about writing. I mean Jim was a practicing poet, wrote beautiful stuff. And a great friend. And then he died a couple years after Bryan. Both of those guys died way too young. They're both younger than me. That was really hard.
Alden: I don't think you can ever be ready for something like that.
Crowley: Right. Until you experience it. In the questions you all sent me, one of you asked about desire. And right next to that, someone asked about psychoanalysis and about the connections. And you know, I'd like for the profession to think desire and grief and other emotions separate from psychoanalysis — which has its own philosophical problems — and start thinking about the forceful rhetorical power of emotion. That's what I was trying to move toward in the Fundamentalism book (2006), but I was exhausted by the time I got to the end of that and couldn't go there. That's what would have come next had I kept writing, but I'm not even sure you can write that.
Holiday: I'd do it with shame. Rhetorical work on shame.
Crowley: I wonder if shame isn't one of those emotions that's a little more accessible to — I don't want to use rational thought — but to language. But grief? And hatred? I've been thinking about hatred a lot this week as we all have [in the wake of the 2015 South Carolina shooting]. How can people be so angry and bitter? People thrive on it.
Gerdes: I wonder if you could add anything about the Teacher's Introduction. What kind of reception did that get?
Crowley: You know I have no idea about the reception. The only person that ever talked to me about it was Ross Winterowd, and he wrote the introduction. Of course, he didn't like deconstruction at all, but he wrote a lovely introduction.
Holiday: Did you ever use it with undergraduates or in first-year writing?
Crowley: No, but I used Ancient Rhetorics (1993; see also Crowley and Hawhee 2011), and the introduction of that is so poststructural. The one I did before Debra Hawhee came on board — it's less clear at the introduction — but it's more poststructural. You know, I could not have written about invention the way I did without Derrida. I could not have done it without feminism, too.
Gerdes: Well that can move us into a question perhaps about the relationship between poststructuralism and feminism in your life. What do you see as the relationship between them?
Crowley: When I saw that you'd asked that question in the materials you sent me ahead of time, I thought, "Who the hell knows?" You absorb this stuff, and you use it, but you don't know specifically where it came from. When you write, you think, "Oh, I stole this from somebody. Who was it?" So that's what I mean when I say, "Who the hell knows?" I don't know.
I was in the second wave. I was in graduate school in the early '70s, and so I was part of consciousness raising and women becoming friends, which we never had before, and relying on one another, trusting one another in ways that we had never done before. All of that was daily-life kind of stuff before I began to read feminist theory. And there was feminist theory in the early wave, people like Robin Morgan, but not heavy theory like Butler. And that began to appear in the '80s and '90s. So I don't know how to answer your question. Feminism sort of becomes part of one's bones, does it not? And unlike deconstruction, which you have to learn, once you realize there's woman centeredness in the world and there's possibilities about centering yourself on a female identity, it's like "Oh, okay! I'll put this on and I'll never take it off!"
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Reinventing (with) Theory in Rhetoric and Writing Studies"
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