skip to main |
skip to sidebar
1. Begin with an analogy that has little to do with your topic:
The mathematician who subscribes obstinately to her branch of the discipline, with its specialist premises, exclusionary methodology, and rigorous traditions, is often the first mathematician to denounce a radical theory, to disregard a disparate analytical perspective or denigrate the revolutionary scientist whose work might undo or surpass her own.
However venerated she may be in her own field, she severely handicaps her capacity for horizontal research, her consideration of possible paths of application, and her role in an expanding discipline. Nevertheless, she does remain rooted in her own niche and is regarded with respect within her own circle—but only at the cost of an impressive debilitation. She is bound by fixed rules that will only allow for movement in an already set direction, rules that merely proliferate sets of progenitive ideas that only appear to differ from one another.
2. Employ and mimic the obscure style of writing used by the theorist himself:
But their incestuous conception, their limits, will be exposed by their homogeny, for it precludes any real novelty, and their homologous lineage only spawns ever more lines of defective cogs or ideas; however, these cogs, when placed into a self-proliferative and self-contained machine, function perfectly and exactly as they are meant to, that is, they become the streamlined ideas of perfect docile bodies to which Foucault refers.
3. Begin the concluding paragraph with 'therefore', to make it seem as if you had actually come up with a coherent thesis:
Therefore, the most constrained members of society are those members who are utterly abiding, those who submit to the system, even if they are ‘succeeding’ or ‘thriving’ within that system.
4. Extend your analysis with the word 'thus' and use several internal and obfuscating clauses to conceal the emptiness of your argument:
Thus, I propose that, contrary to belief (and by necessity, this proposition must be contrary to belief), it is the marginalized, and not the mainstreamed or ‘problematized’, that are the least constrained, for they, by their very nature and liminal position, are suspected, expected, and hold the possibility of revolution.
5. Repeat steps 1-4 for your next essay.
My last essay was about the Early Modern Christian idea of the Final Moment before death. (Most of my evidence came from manuscripts and monographs written in the 16th and 17th centuries.) At the time, Renaissance Christianity more or less taught that one's damnation or salvation would be determined by one's state of being in extremis, that is, at the point of death. No matter how spic-and-span you lived your Christian life, if you weren't clean before dying, you weren't getting in to heaven. People were obsessed with ars moriendi, or the Art of Dying, and several guidebooks had been written on the subject of "how to die well".
The deathbed scene—in which one's eternal fate was decided—became central to Christian art that dealt with death, and woodcuts often depicted the dying man sandwiched between a patient reception of heavenly figures and an enticing mob of demons, with each member of the latter group holding a sort of diabolical pennant or scroll that marked their tool of temptation (e.g., pride, lust, etc.). In the image here, it seems like our boy has sold out to earthly perversions (note the disapproving faces of the godly figures in the background):
Getting the Final Moment "right" was crucial and, as explained in my essay excerpt below, it just about required the precision of a sniper. And, as in the case with most snipers, you only had a single chance to get it right:
To corroborate the emphasis on the Final Moment, Wunderli cites the English reformer and Marian Exile, Miles Coverdale, who said that at the time of death (and not at the Final Judgement) ‘the soul…doeth either out of the mouth ascend up to heaven, or else from the mouth descendeth into the pit of hell’ (266). Coverdale also employed a metaphor of a marksman firing for a target: if his aim veers even slightly at exactly the moment of expelling his gun, he misses his target and all his preparation was for naught. The decision regarding one’s afterlife, regardless of the piety of one’s life, was determined in the final moment. Talk about laying it on.
Causality asserts that, in general, the Effect is preceded by the Cause. And this simple premise is no better applied than in the discipline of history as we know it. The study of the past can lead no further than the present, and the present is the very end to which history aspires. History, so it goes, is the natural progression from the times of antiquity to today. And the mountains of today were forged from ruins of the past, and this belief rests on the very notion of causality, that is, to repeat, that the effect is preceded by the cause. But do we not read the events of the past by the fragments of our present? Tacitly, we read history toward the conclusion of the present; we presume that history, and indeed the existence of the past, have served only to bring us to this very Present. And perhaps our idée fixe distorts our reading of the past, our chronoteleogical reading of the past deforms our conception of the present.
So my essay this week is on Derrida, and for the last three or four days I've been painfully sawing through sections of Of Grammatology, Margins of Philosophy, Glas, and the Ear of the Other (not to mention the sea of secondary sources that attempt to explain Derrida). Unfortunately, I haven't hit anything that I can actually make sense of. So in exhaustion and exasperation, I call it a day and decide to take up the search for sense tomorrow. But I cannot escape him—I begin to actually dream about Derrida.
He's at my house (except it doesn't look like my house) and we're making lunch. As my mom brings out sandwich meat and bread, I address Derrida and say, "Mr. Foucault, would you like any mustard on your sandwich?"—I then realize the grave mistake that I've committed. "Oh, excuse me, Derrida. Derrida. Mr. Derrida."
"If I want to be called 'Mr. Foucault'," he says, "I would have dressed myself in childish clothes and a fish." I am confused, but do not dare ask for clarification for fear that he will begin to "speak, therefore, of a letter," and describe the différance between things spelled "with an e" and things spelled "with an a".
My life is ruined.
What the hell I am doing anyway?
For you kids wondering why I delayed medical school for a year to study English literature, I've provided an excerpt from my work to disclose, at the very least, what I'm doing. The why, however, is a bit more difficult to answer...
This excerpt comes from my primary tutorial (more widely known in the States as a "class"). I am under the guidance of Dr Mary Ann Lund, who studies Renaissance literature, medicine, and religion. (Yeah, I know there's no period to abbreviate "doctor"—that's how they roll here. I think it's a way of signifying that the degree does not merely confer a title, but informs an identity—a name as natural as one's birth name that any attempt to abbreviate it would only serve to demean and deprive the identity of the person as a whole. Arguments to this assertion are welcome.)
Michel de Montaigne was a French statesman during the Renaissance that endured what has been called the most excruciating pain known to man (and I use the term in its biologically-specific sense): the kidney stone. Because he suffers, he is fair game for my "illness narrative" tutorial. Enjoy:
To illustrate the interdependency between pain and pleasure, Montaigne goes on to cite Socrates, who was ‘freed from the load of his fetters’ and ‘enjoyed the delicate tingling in his legs that their pressure had produced and…delighted in thinking about the close confederacy that there is between pain and pleasure’ . Montaigne himself even saw his acute fits of pain from his kidney stone as ‘a cure: when freed from it [the paroxysm] I consider that to be a durable and complete deliverance’ . So there is a complex dichotomy in the pain/pleasure binary, in which one (usually pleasure) can be derived from the other (correspondingly, pain).
To add a scientific stitch to the philosophical threading of pain and pleasure, clinical researchers at Harvard Medical School have shown that parts of the brain activated during pleasure are similarly activated during the sensation of pain, suggesting that the perception of both stimuli share a common neurological and sensory pathway . The interconnectedness of pleasure and pain, it seems, exists in the literary, philosophical, and neurobiological realms.
American universities ought to promote social drinking parties, or 'drinks', between their students and faculty. If anything, it'll teach us how to drink socially and carry our liquor with some dignity. The rest of our lives will be marked by cocktail parties, business dinners, and family gatherings with the in-laws—all events accentuated by the sauce. Unfortunately, the product of American universities in the corporate world is the guy who hits the office Christmas party, thinks he's at a beer pong tournament, and gets completely smashed, jiving and gyrating on a makeshift dance floor in between high fives with his boss' unamused spouse.
At Oxford, the faculty recognize that students like to drink. The faculty also have enough sense to recognize that they like to drink too. And instead of regarding drinking and occasional drunkenness as taboo, they embrace it, they make use of it, they hold all sorts of parties that celebrate the setting of the academy which is, essentially, a life in which college never really ended.
