JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, Volume 21, Number 4, Spring 2001 Page: 770
733-962 p. : ill. (some col.), ports. ; 22 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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gies, 'other words,' for writing, teaching and learning at the productive
spaces where the two fields meet and diverge," a process that may double
rhetoric but still relegate materiality to the formative realm of the sign
without choreographing what Michel de Certeau calls the dance of "the
word when it is spoken, that is, when it is caught in the ambiguity of an
actualization" (Jarratt 4; de Certeau 117).
Without naming it as such, feminists' efforts in composition manifest
a commitment to the bodysigns of a biorhetoric. But those efforts also
reflect the difficulties ofjust such an agenda, for it requires a positioning
where the edges between materiality and semiosis blur. Meaning is not
material; it is not semiotic: it is both at the same time. Citing her Catholic
upbringing as well as her training in molecular biology, Donna Haraway
notes that "biochemistry and languagej ust don't feel that different to me"
(How 86). She explains, "The first thing I'd say is that words are intensely
physical for me. I find words and language more closely related to flesh
than to ideas" (85). Meaning relies on and implies the existence of
material potential. But it also relies on and implies a semiotic marking or
segmenting of that potential, for without that segmentation, potential
remains unknowable. Without a doubt, we need Foucault's biopolitics,
the insight that the material details of life-such as what we wear, how
we sit, and where we eat-all conspire to maintain the dominance of a
particular discursive arrangement of culture. As de Certeau observes,
"There is no law that is not inscribed on bodies. Every law has a hold on
the body. .... It engraves itself on parchments made from the skin of its
subjects. It articulates them in a juridical corpus. It makes its book out of
them" (139-40). But we also need Antonio Gramsci's contradictory
insight that material experiences--experience in and of the world-will
always contend with the ideological apparatus implicit within a culture's
dominant discourses (324-27). A biorhetoric offers a double lens that is
neither the product of language nor the product of materiality but the
confluence of both. Lurking within this double way of seeing is a double
way of speaking, a new vocabulary of metaphors that Richard Rorty
claims is necessary for any change: "a tool for doing something which
could not have been envisaged prior to the development of a particular set
of descriptions, those which it itself helps to provide" (74). It is this
double way of speaking that I address next.
Double Tongues: Speaking through Bodysigns
As Rorty points out in "The Contingency of Language," a new way of
seeing cannot be separated from a new way of speaking; to see double, wejac
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Association of Teachers of Advanced Composition (U.S.). JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, Volume 21, Number 4, Spring 2001, periodical, 2001; (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc28634/m1/46/: accessed April 19, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .