Derrida “White Mythology”

Derrida: “White Mythology”
Area: Rhetorical and Critical Theory
Content
•    Metaphor in the text
o    Drawn from the senses—“abstract notions always hide in the senses”
•    Possibility of restoring: hides as it is hidden
o    Metaphor no longer noticed: double effacement
•    Expression of an abstract idea can only be an analogy
•    Metaphor is resemblance between two signs
o    Analogy within language is an analogy between language
o    Resemblance ≠ identity
•    One metaphor is always excluded—remains outside the system
o    One would have to classify where they came from (biology, chemistry, etc.)
•    By classifying, they are lending two discourses: more original and ceasing originality
•    Metaphor, then, is an abridged comparison
•    (*p. 227): “How are we to know what the temporalizatoin and spatialization of a meaning, of an ideal object, of an intelligible tenor, are, if we have not clarified what ‘space’ and ‘time’ mean?”
•    Metaphor is giving a thing a name that belongs to something else
•    Metaphor is giving a thing a name that belongs to something else
•    Metaphor makes the detour; detour becomes the return;
o    Detour is w/I; Metaphor is the concept
•    Aristotle: (Rhetoric) : “Analogy is metaphor par excellence”
•    *Language alone makes the connection: metaphorical redoubling; bottomless
•    Metaphor names its death within itself

Lyotard’s Postmodern Condition

Lyotard: The Postmodern Condition
Area: Rhetorical and Critical Theory
Theme: “The status of science and technology, of technocracy, and the control of knowledge and information today.”
Content
• Two great myths: liberation of humanity and speculative unity of knowledge
• Not the disappearance of master narratives, but the making unconscious, or the going underground-ness of them
• Consumption of the past in narrative (*Jameson…); storage, hording, and capitalization in ‘science’ and scientific thought
• A narrative which must generate the illusion of an imaginary resolution of real contradictions
• Knowledge, its production, its consumption—the principle force of production
• What proof is there that my proof is true?
o Who decides the conditions of truth?
• Think: automatic trust of Parrhesiates (Foucault)
• What’s left of popular knowledge?
• Knowledge is founded on the narrative of its own martyrdom
• The states resorts to the narrative of freedom
• Acquisition of learning
o Deriving everything from an original principle
o Relating everything to an ideal
o Unifying this principle and this idea in a single idea
• Knowledge first find legitimacy within itself and it’s knowledge that is entitled to say what the state and the society are
• Knowledge is no longer the subject, but in service to the subject
• Institutions of higher learning: called on to create skills, not ideals (*see p. 48 )
• Knowledge will be served a la carte: promotions; learning add’l skills, etc.
• Memory banks (*p. 50)—disposal of knowledge
• Truth→ use: shift in questions of the modern student: performance oriented
o Best players are those who have knowledge and can obtain information
• New role of the professor: no better than memory banks

Yates’ The Art of Memory

Yates: Art of Memory
Area: History of Rhetoric and Memory Studies
Theme: The art of memory in relation the formation of images

(Still working my way through this text.)
Content
• Simonides: order and mental places critical for good memory (Sim: originator of memory—tells story about how he remembered all guests at dinner party after the ceiling came crashing in on them)
• Orator could improve his memory, enabling him to deliver long speeches w/o fail and accuracy
• Quintilian: memory places—a building, as walking through it
• Cicero: Simonides story—sense of sight is the strongest
• Ad Herrenium: Two kinds of memory: natural and artificial
o (Today, how is artificial memory factored into this? Is artificial digital memory replacing natural memory?)
• Things and words memories
o Words: The language in which subject is coded
o Things: Subject matter of speech
• Need to systematize random association
• Tullius: 2nd Rhetoric—artifcial memory by which natural memory can be improved
• 1st Cen: Quintilian: Institutio Oratoria
o 100 years earlier: Cicero: De Oratore
• 30 years earlier: Cicero: De Inventionae
• Ad Herennium
• Perception ⇔ Imagination ⇔ thought
o Imagination is the same part of the soul as memory
• Aristotle: recollection is deliberate effort to find one’s way through the content of memory
• Plato: Phaedrus –memory is not just a section, but a ground work for the whole
o Platonic memory: organized≠mnemotechnics
• Ad Herennium: related to/derived from the zodiac?
• Middle ages: rules for images: strikingly ugly or beautiful
• Memory for things: notations by images
• Memory for words: words for images
• Thomas’ rules: places and images of artificial memory
• Rosario author: Natural places : places memorized in the country (trees, etc); artificial places: places memorized in buildings (windows, etc.)
• Invisible memory places: internalized for mnemonic purposes
o Not intended for externalization
• Petrarch: Mediaeval → Renaissance memory
o Important authority for artificial memory