Diane Davis - Quotes

Is there a way to activate a sense of solidarity among singularities—a way to say "we"—that doesn't simultaneously give the other the squeeze, that doesn't feed this craving for communion, in the name of which any number of "we"s have committed the most horrific atrocities in recorded history?
Davis, Diane.

Writing and reading are functions of this pre-originary sociality; they are expositions not of who one is (identity) but of the fact that "we" are (community).
Davis, Diane.

Teletechnologies, including tele-vision, launch an irrevocable assault on tropological home-security systems, tripping metaphysical alarms and touching off panicked scrambles to (re)secure the homestead. TV—inasmuch as it challenges phantasms of immanence, immediacy, and interiority—is anxiety's secret agent, prompting the spooky suspicion that the "real life" it would "displace" was never real, never reality, anyway, never home.
Davis, Diane.

Internet communications applications effectively up television's ante, breaking down the barrier of spaciality and blurring two supposedly distinct modes of existence: dwelling and traveling. Requiring a kind of hypermobility that nonetheless stays in place.
Davis, Diane.

The most pressing and controversial questions in rhetoric and composition today have to do with what communication can be after the so-called death of the subject and the crises in legitimization and representation.
Davis, Diane.

Each of the fundamental elements of the communication triangle has been exposed as little more than a concept metaphor: the reader, the writer, and the message. And from here, we'll need to go back to the starting board and reconsider not only the prospects for rhetoric but also the goals of composition instruction.
Davis, Diane.

Scholars in rhetorical studies generally accept this elemental insight: what is common among those who “belong together” does not constitute an essence. What is common among the members of a nation, an ethnic group, a gang, or even a family operates not ontologically but symbolically—“blood” every bit as much as “native soil,” “cultural history,” and “turf colors.” Nonetheless, inasmuch as what is common is identified as a condition for belonging, inasmuch as it symbolizes a bond or property that is shared by otherwise discrete “individuals,” it is both retroactively essentialized and grounded in the presumption of a prior essence. The field remains mostly unaware of or unconcerned with an intersection of rhetoric and solidarity that neither references a preexisting essence of the individual (organism) nor installs, as a product of human work, an essence of the community (of the “common”).
Davis, Diane. Inessential Solidarity: Rhetoric and Foreign(er) Relations. University of Pittsburgh Press. November 2010. Paperback 232 pages, Language English, ISBN: 9780822961222.

And this “community,” without essence or project, this foreign(er) relation irreducible to symbolic prereqs, will be the primary focus of our investigation.
Davis, Diane. Inessential Solidarity: Rhetoric and Foreign(er) Relations. University of Pittsburgh Press. November 2010. Paperback 232 pages, Language English, ISBN: 9780822961222.

If rhetorical practices work by managing to have an effect on others, then an always prior openness to the other’s affection is its first requirement: the “art” of rhetoric can be effective only among affectable existents, who are by definition something other than distinct individuals or self-determining agents, and whose relations necessarily precede and exceed symbolic intervention.
Davis, Diane. Inessential Solidarity: Rhetoric and Foreign(er) Relations. University of Pittsburgh Press. November 2010. Paperback 232 pages, Language English, ISBN: 9780822961222.

Singularity is what it is only inasmuch as it is exposed on and as its limit.
Davis, Diane. Inessential Solidarity: Rhetoric and Foreign(er) Relations. University of Pittsburgh Press. November 2010. Paperback 232 pages, Language English, ISBN: 9780822961222.

Community consists in this communication that neither appropriates nor fuses; it consists in the fact that singularity is exposed to an inappropriable outside that constitutes it, affects and alters it, prior to and in excess of symbolic intervention. Ex-centrically structured, the singular being exists as an outside-inside,or an inside-outside.
Davis, Diane. Inessential Solidarity: Rhetoric and Foreign(er) Relations. University of Pittsburgh Press. November 2010. Paperback 232 pages, Language English, ISBN: 9780822961222.

The Heideggerian insight is worth reiterating: thinking calls as and through the failure of hermeneutic appropriation. Thinking is not the same as knowing, and the challenge today, the social, ethical, and political challenge is to learn to think the sharing of community without effacing precisely this sharing by conceptualizing it, turning it into an object to be grasped and put to work.
Davis, Diane. Inessential Solidarity: Rhetoric and Foreign(er) Relations. University of Pittsburgh Press. November 2010. Paperback 232 pages, Language English, ISBN: 9780822961222.

The one who writes is first of all called to write, put “on assignment,” as Ronell likes to say, so that one is always writing in response to the Other and because there are others. An encapsulated interiority would have no need or desire to write; writing, no matter what it says, testifies to exposedness, to vulnerability—to responsivity.
Davis, Diane. Inessential Solidarity: Rhetoric and Foreign(er) Relations. University of Pittsburgh Press. November 2010. Paperback 232 pages, Language English, ISBN: 9780822961222.

The relation with the face is a relation of nonindifference, Levinas tells us, that pivots neither on shared meaning nor on identification but on an obligation, an imperative that precedes understanding. Somehow, in the face to face, “I” am/is opened to an intensity “equal to death”: it is the relation of a “host” to her guest or of a “hostage” to his captor, not simply being-with-the-other but being-for-the-other.
Davis, Diane. Inessential Solidarity: Rhetoric and Foreign(er) Relations. University of Pittsburgh Press. November 2010. Paperback 232 pages, Language English, ISBN: 9780822961222.

Conversation involves not a mutual appropriation but a double deterritorialization, a common but dissymmetrical unworking of “identity”—an exposition of exposedness. The relation with the face, then, is itself nonviolent yet expropriating:to encounter a face is to be both called into question and into service.
Davis, Diane. Inessential Solidarity: Rhetoric and Foreign(er) Relations. University of Pittsburgh Press. November 2010. Paperback 232 pages, Language English, ISBN: 9780822961222.

Though ego operates on such hopes, I was never a subject in that sense; I am/is a subject to the precise extent that I respond(s).
Davis, Diane. Inessential Solidarity: Rhetoric and Foreign(er) Relations. University of Pittsburgh Press. November 2010. Paperback 232 pages, Language English, ISBN: 9780822961222.

And the goal, simultaneously modest and overreaching, will be twofold: to offer a theoretical contribution to rhetorical studies and to excavate the rhetorical basis for contemporary theories of relationality.
Davis, Diane. Inessential Solidarity: Rhetoric and Foreign(er) Relations. University of Pittsburgh Press. November 2010. Paperback 232 pages, Language English, ISBN: 9780822961222.

To that end, this text offers itself up—tentatively, experimentally (let’s see if this works)—as a rhetoric of the saying, a work devoted specifically to excavating, examining, and affirming the saying as rhetoric, as anextra-symbolic rhetorical appeal.
Davis, Diane. Inessential Solidarity: Rhetoric and Foreign(er) Relations. University of Pittsburgh Press. November 2010. Paperback 232 pages, Language English, ISBN: 9780822961222.

Indeed, "to read" already means "to read with your ears", to tune into that which thwarts interpretation's closural aims.
Diane Davis. Reading Ronell. University of Illinois Press. June 11, 2009. Hardcover, 264 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0252034503.

Reading at the extreme limits of responsibility (response-ability), Ronell enacts an ethics of reading that responds to the trace of the other while tirelessly demonstrating that there is no way, ultimately, to have understood (completely).
Diane Davis. Reading Ronell. University of Illinois Press. June 11, 2009. Hardcover, 264 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0252034503.

I want to reiterate that I’m talking about a kind of primary ethico politics—“primary” meaning only that it comes first. It does not institute a “positive” politics or policy, but it does expose the between-us space or the “limit” on which communication and community take place.
Diane Davis. "Toward an Ethics of Listening." With Michelle Ballif and Roxanne Mountford. in: JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory. 20.4 (2000): 931-942.

I can’t accept the notion of the Other’s “equality” unless it’s an equality or equity that’s not based on the calculation of equivalence, as Derrida suggests. Listening for différance involves affirming the radically dissymmetrical experience of the Other, and because this listening can be self-shattering, it also involves a willingness to sacrifice the self for the sake of the Other.
Diane Davis. "Toward an Ethics of Listening." With Michelle Ballif and Roxanne Mountford. in: JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory. 20.4 (2000): 931-942.

But language's tendency toward infidelity, its tendency to step out on itself, has proved un/settling for philosophy. And all along, there have been harassing counter-traditions that deconstruct logical constructs and contend both that truth is a function of language and that even the most scientific language has a wild streak, an extra-logical impulse. Because our category systems, our genders and genres, are linguistic constructions, and because language is anything but stable, truth is constantly breaking up/down.
Davis, Diane. "Breaking up [at] Totality: A Rhetoric of Laughter." Summary. in: Diane Davis Homepage. Book Publication Date: January 19, 2000.

This project both traces its lineage to sophistic counter-traditions and sets its sights beyond them, participating in what Vitanza has called "third sophistics." ... This work strains to hear the (laughter of the) leftover, the (cackling) remainder drowned out by the boom of dialectic's either/or choice.
Davis, Diane. "Breaking up [at] Totality: A Rhetoric of Laughter." Summary. in: Diane Davis Homepage. Book Publication Date: January 19, 2000.

Laughter operates in this study as a trope for breaking up, a joyfully destructive shattering of our conceptual frameworks.
Davis, Diane. "Breaking up [at] Totality: A Rhetoric of Laughter." Summary. in: Diane Davis Homepage. Book Publication Date: January 19, 2000.

The book strives persistently to slip out of binary thinking, to reconceive several cross-disciplinary issues without sliding into logocentrism or easy privilege-flippings. Beginning with a notion of original excess (a non-positively affirmative physis) rather than original lack (typically associated with both physis and nomos), this work attempts to articulate a (feminist) politics and (composition) pedagogy that are not re-active or parasitic, that don't work out of "the negative." This approach necessarily up/sets some of the major projects underway in the fields of rhetoric, composition, and feminist theory. But this work is anything but nihilistic-it calls for other projects, different projects, and it's affirmative, as Foucault would say, in a non-positive way.
Davis, Diane. "Breaking up [at] Totality: A Rhetoric of Laughter." Summary. in: Diane Davis Homepage. Book Publication Date: January 19, 2000.

Celebrating laughter is a risky business. Donald Morton, for instance, has argued that laughter is an irresponsible approach to a violent world, a position that says to the oppressed: "oh well, just laugh about it." And in a sense, it is precisely the point of this project to issue a call to "just laugh." But here "just" would have the double entendre Jean-François Lyotard gave it in Just Gaming. That is, it would connote both "merely" and "justly." Though I do hesitate, for obvious reasons, to say that this is a serious topic, I do not hesitate to say that it is a responsible, political, and ethical one.
Davis, Diane. "Breaking up [at] Totality: A Rhetoric of Laughter." Summary. in: Diane Davis Homepage. Book Publication Date: January 19, 2000.

Destruction is affirmative insofar as it hopes for a third way, out of logocentric meaning-making, out of the negation required for final closure. That is, it is through its No to nihilism that this destructive project comes to a genuine affirmation of life.
Davis, Diane. "Breaking up [at] Totality: A Rhetoric of Laughter." Summary. in: Diane Davis Homepage. Book Publication Date: January 19, 2000.

Our categorical boundaries operate as artificial guardrails, protection against what Nietzsche calls "the great sweep of life," which never ceases to overflow our categories and "to be on the side of the most unscrupulous polytropoi.
Diane Davis. Breaking Up [at] Totality: A Rhetoric of Laughter. Rhetorical Theory and Philosophy Series. Southern Illinois University Press. January 19, 2000. Hardcover, 336 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0809322285.

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.
Diane Davis. Breaking Up [at] Totality: A Rhetoric of Laughter. Rhetorical Theory and Philosophy Series. Southern Illinois University Press. January 19, 2000. Hardcover, 336 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0809322285.

This book is an invitation to break up with the force that breaks us up, to laugh with the Laughter that laughs language and technology and human beings, to explore another sensibility, another way of thinking (writing, reading), one that might steer clear of an/other Final Solution. What follows is an invitation to leap into the sweep ... and to say YES.
Diane Davis. Breaking Up [at] Totality: A Rhetoric of Laughter. Rhetorical Theory and Philosophy Series. Southern Illinois University Press. January 19, 2000. Hardcover, 336 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0809322285.

Indeed, writing is often sacrificed in the name of "composition," in the name of this "discipline's" service-oriented and pre-established requirements.
Diane Davis. Breaking Up [at] Totality: A Rhetoric of Laughter. Rhetorical Theory and Philosophy Series. Southern Illinois University Press. January 19, 2000. Hardcover, 336 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0809322285.

And in a sense, it is precisely the point of this project to issue a call to "just laugh." But here "just" would have the double entendre Jean Francois Lyotard gave it in Just Gaming: it would connote both "merely" and "justly."
Diane Davis. Breaking Up [at] Totality: A Rhetoric of Laughter. Rhetorical Theory and Philosophy Series. Southern Illinois University Press. January 19, 2000. Hardcover, 336 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0809322285.

There can be no doubt about it, this laughter is destructive.
Diane Davis. Breaking Up [at] Totality: A Rhetoric of Laughter. Rhetorical Theory and Philosophy Series. Southern Illinois University Press. January 19, 2000. Hardcover, 336 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0809322285.

The differend is at stake precisely when a limit is taken for granted, when it’s no longer doubted or questioned. Negotiation itself implies a limit-crossing: placing the supposed “inside” and “outside” into relation. In a rigorous sense, then, negotiation means negotiation with“monsters.”
Diane Davis. "Toward an Ethics of Listening." With Michelle Ballif and Roxanne Mountford. in: JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory. 20.4 (2000): 931-942.

No doubt about it: walking away (if youcan get away) can be the most affirmative response available when you’re faced with a hostile other who’s intent on physical violence—or on textual violence, for that matter.
Diane Davis. "Toward an Ethics of Listening." With Michelle Ballif and Roxanne Mountford. in: JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory. 20.4 (2000): 931-942.

I haven't seen any evidence of student writing getting sloppier in print, even after they spend time in electronic writing spaces where slang, misspellings, and creative shorthand are the norm. On the contrary, my students seem to develop a kind of rhetorical savvy about this very quickly. What you can get away with in e-mail is a no-no in an essay.
Davis Diane and Wendy R. Leibowitz (Interviewer). "Technology Transforms Writing and the Teaching of Writing." Interview with Diane Davis and other educators. in: Ohio State University Website. Extracted from original publication in: The Chronicle of Higher Education. November 26, 1999.

I've noticed that when students realize their work is going on line, in a Web journal or something similar, they tend to work harder. When students can receive e-mail responses to their posted writings from anywhere in the world, they pay more attention to how they can best express their ideas, and they worry about how poorly written prose may look to their readers.
Davis Diane and Wendy R. Leibowitz (Interviewer). "Technology Transforms Writing and the Teaching of Writing." Interview with Diane Davis and other educators. in: Ohio State University Website. Extracted from original publication in: The Chronicle of Higher Education. November 26, 1999.

As unification personified, the phallus exemplifies perfectly the primary law of reason and logic (logos) which demand that an idea be whole, unified and either true or false but never both and never neither.
Diane Davis. "Breaking Up [at] Phallocracy: Post-Feminism's Chortling Hammer." in: Rhetoric Review. 14.1. Fall 1995, pp. 126-140.

Even we must be either wholly male (the phallus is present) or wholly female (the phallus is absent); "logically" there are no other options.
Diane Davis. "Breaking Up [at] Phallocracy: Post-Feminism's Chortling Hammer." in: Rhetoric Review. 14.1. Fall 1995, pp. 126-140.

Many feminists of course have protested this discrete partnership, coined "phallogocentricism," because it defines woman as lack, that hole (absence) against which the "whole" (presence) of male identity sustains itself.
Diane Davis. "Breaking Up [at] Phallocracy: Post-Feminism's Chortling Hammer." in: Rhetoric Review. 14.1. Fall 1995, pp. 126-140.