Davis,+Diane.+Breaking+Up+At+Totality..+A+Rhetoric+of+Laughter

Davis, Diane. //Breaking Up [at] Totality: A Rhetoric of Laughter.// Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2000.

Davis argues for a rhetoric of laughter--a rhetoric that acknowledges the multiplicity and excess of subjecthood, a post-humanist position--and suggests the possibilities that this rhetoric may offer for feminist politics and the field of composition. She suggests that the modernist determination to see the world from a totalizing point of view, subsuming all subjectivities under the banner of rationality, is limiting the possibilities of what we can accomplish. Specifically, Davis questions our use of "radical" or "liberatory" pedagogies as way to challenge pedagogies that reproduce the status quo. She insists that, rather than actually challenging the oppressive nature of schooling, radical pedagogies simply reproduce those same structures but with a different political agenda. Likewise, feminist politics that rely too heavily on a solidified sense of "woman," including those positions that attempt to grant women the same rights as men or that use counterviolence, simply flip hierarchies rather than challenging them.

Rather, Davis encourages teachers who wish to hold to a feminist pedagogy eschew the need to be a 'subject-supposed-to-know' and instead encourage that writing which exists outside the the knowable. By pushing against the limits of the knowable, or the teachable, and encouraging writing "for writing's sake," we can realize the possibilities inherent in a rhetoric of laughter, the breaking-up of the subject, communal mythologies, and phallogocentrism.

$$ Quotes

"Laughter that shatters is an affirmative laughter arising from the overflow, the excess, and capable of momentarily and instantaneously catapulting us out of negative dialectics by negating negation itself" (2).

"Though we-teachers have attempted to incorporate postfoundational ways of knowing into our pedagogical strategies, as far as I can tell, we have no alowed what Lyotard calls 'the postmodern condition' to radically refashion our pedagogical goals themselves" (6)... "writing toward futurity... is sacrificed for the sake of 'teachability'" (8).

"... reason itself is on the stand in this text, and it will have been found GUILTY" (11).

"We have, inherent in our discourses on writing, a rhetoric of totality" (12) and through our insistence on 'community' "we demand that the Unthinkable remain unthinkable" (13).

"Negative deconstructions - even those designed for 'women' - remain faithful to the phallogocentric structure that 'disenfranchised' them in the first place" (137).

"What's wrong with many feminisms today is that they exist as a... reaction..to a..reaction" (139).

"'The' subject needs no help from us to de/construct--it is happening, it is crumbling on its own" (160).

??179

"We will, however, attempt to locate a composition pedagogy that has eXscripted itself from *oppositional* politics" (211), and quotes Shoshana Felman's claim that "'Every pedagogy has historically emerged as a critique of pedagogy"' (211).

Key term: E3=Enlightenment, Empowerment, Emancipation (211)

"Even so-called emancipatory pedagogical techniques function within a disciplinary matrix of power, a covert carceral system, that aims to create *useful* subjects for particular political agendas" (212).

"The will to pedagogy is a will to truth-in-political-pedagogy, and the prime directive is forestalled precisely at the moment when radical pedaoggies, of any flavor, begin to believe that they can *teach* that truth: E3 becomes impossible as soon as teh teacher her/himself begins to .. suppose..s/he..knows" (221).

"What the teacher, who does not know what s/he knows, pases in the classroom is *her own desire* as s/he attempts to find the articulation of what s/he knows in the student-Other" (227).

"What would happen if writing were dismissed from its representational servitude, if, that is, we put ourselves in the service of writing* rather than the other way around?... Not for another purpose, not writing as mastery, but writing *for writing's sake*?" (235).