How Not to Open, Close or Anything In-Between an Academic Essay, Part I: My Formative Years

The discussion at The Valve keeps spurring memories of my erstwhile conversion to Church of Theory and Latter Day Feints in the Spring of '98.  The Critical Tradition clutched to my chest,  I would speak to anyone willing to listen about of "Butler's fascinating essay," presumably "Imitation and Gender Subordination," which at the time I felt "the most eye-opening thing I'd read all semester, in that the perspective it offered me [was] so different from what I assumed the 'gay' perspective to be that I [had] a distinct urge to round up everyone I know who's gay and interrogate them."  Very impolitic, I know, but at the time I only knew two verbs and "intervene" didn't work either.  Also, I had spent the previous paragraph "intervening in Irigaray's critique of male-dominated hegemonic practices," and too much intervention left the young A. Cephalous feeling less effective than a Clintonian Democrat.  (His phrase, not mine.)  And so when it came time to write an Honors thesis, I chose the topic closest to my heart: "a Wittgensteinian critique of the discursive function of the feminine and the cyborg in schlemihlhood in Thomas Pynchon's V.  and Gravity's Rainbow."  According to my abstract,

By utilizing Donna Harraway's all-inclusive conception of cyborg identity I will investigate the realities Pynchon imposes on his characters' bodies without limiting the factual information provided about those realities to the demands on a system I impose on the text.  Instead I will work with the epistemological boundaries present in the text itself, provided by the interaction of the historical details, literary allusions, and philosophical and scientific arguments.  This will allow me to explicate the text's complexity without reducing it to a more palatable but less accurate representation of itself.  I am most interested in how these complexities destabilize the systems which impose limitations on the text, both from within and without; prevent critical orthodoxies from establishing interpretive dominance based on the discourse at work outside the novels and the imperial regimes from establishing a hegemonic dominance based on discreet categorical entities within the novels themselves.

I remember spending countless hours working on my Honors thesis, but looking back, I wonder what I spent those hours doing.  Certainly not anything constructive.  You would think the thesis that followed would be more intelligent than its abstract, as it could not possibly be less.  You would be wrong.  The thesis of my thesis, unlike my enemy's enemy, is no one's friend:

Cyborg identities reveal and resist the process of naturalization that molds bodies into categorical entities whose social, familial, and sexual roles are predetermined, providing what Donna Haraway calls "a reference point for the theoretical and practical struggles against...the justifications for patriarchy, colonialism, humanism, positivism, essentialism [and] scienticism."

"Look at how oppositional I am!" declaimed an embattled A. Cephalous.  "Whatever it is, I'm against it!"  I attacked  every category of category, ranting about how, "like other cyborgs, Pynchon's have their otherness written in/on their bodies," or how "this bodily otherness  is then incorporated into their cyborg identities, which deconstruct the wholeness implicit in the exclusionary principle at the heart of a binary conception of identity."  I felt powerful.  Who transgressed borders?  I transgressed borders.  Which ones?  Why

the whole body of lived social relations, since their identities are "predicated on transgressed boundaries"--between such terms as organic/machinic, man/woman, nature/culture, public/private, civilized/primitive, heterosexual/polymorphously perverse--boundaries which society considers inviolable.

Before the workings of my radical mind "all the formerly reliable oppositions/dualisms [were] destabilized and the identities constructed from them [were offered] up for reexamination."  Then I discussed nouns and something I called "the historical/social ramifications of analytic desiccation."  This withering analytic tatooed shudder-quotes on the shoulders of 78% of available nouns, and so when I turned, predictably, to discuss "how cyborg 'identity' in the form of 'information-processing devices' [worked] to further destabilize the 'post-colonial' environs of 1922 Sudwestafrika," is it any wonder I lost track of "what" I had "argued"?  Was I still talking about "a fundamental divide (in the Kantian sense) between a human understanding of the world and a knowledge of the world as it is"?  And had my "argument" evaporated before or after the chart in which I made "the implications of this situation less confusing" by categorizing everything as "Raw Sferical Data Weissmann Transcribes Exists in the World," "Raw Data Transcribed by Weissmann" and "Information Decoded by Weissmann under Wittgensteinian Dictates"?  I cannot answers these questions now, and suspect I couldn't then either.  (Though I would've protested, loudly, repeatedly, loudly, repeatedly, and then rather loudly that your inability to follow my argument is your fault.  Jackass.)

Why am I sharing this?  On the one hand, it's because I was thinking about the vehemence of my position in the this week's discussion on the Valve.  How did I come to distrust the suggestiveness of Theory?  Then I remembered: A. Cephalous, you little shit, you penned "Cyborg Identity and the Destabilization of Epistemological Boundaries in Thomas Pynchon's V. and Gravity's Rainbow."  What frightens me about this document (excerpts of which will now lurk the darker corners of the internet until the most inopportune moment possible) is that I earnestly believed I was saying something about something.  What frightens me more generally are those occasions when I stumble across articles seemingly no better than my honors thesis in academic journals.  Granted, some of those critics undoubtedly walk the walk I only talked, but since none of them really talk all that better than I did, I wonder about the quality of their walking. 

One final historical note: Seven months after completing my opera mictilis I officially forswore Theory in an essay on the current state of Hawthorne Studies.  Why I forswore there instead of forswearing somewhere else or appropriate even escapes me.

Comments

[winkingironist]

Your honors thesis is adorable! What did your advisor/preceptor/mentor tell you after reading the draft? More stories about adventures in writing, please.

[A. Cephalous]

There's a way in which that post could be read as an indictment of my faculty mentor, but it shouldn't be. I had an excellent advisor who would, three years later, chair a panel at a Joyce conference in Trieste that my Canadian friend and I were on. At dinner later that night, he leaned over to me and said "I'm glad you're not so full of yourself or shit anymore."

Given the monumental failure of the finished product, I could see why you'd suppose him an incompetent buffoon. But I think his comments, though unheeded at the time, paved the way for the swift conversion to the anti-muddle-headed position I still hold.

P.S. My Latin looks wonky. Corrections would be appreciated.

[Sean McCann]

Hilarious, headless! Been there. You just have to take it one day at a time now.

[language hat]

Well, you may have been a jackass, but boy could you problematize! Funny, I faced an entirely different set of obstacles in my never-finished dissertation on zero-grade thematic presents in the early Indo-European languages, but I'm just as appalled when its moldering fragments stumble out of a box I've heedlessly opened and assault me. "The Greek evidence... the Sanskrit forms... As Sebastian Sitzfleisch said in Indogermanische Forschungen in 1889..." Aiieee! Run away!

I tried to read Theory when I was working at an academic bookstore in a university town where the English majors couldn't get enough of Derrida, de Man, & Co, but it fried my brain and I had to stop. I respect your ability to understand it well enough to renounce it.

[laura]

You remind me of the bit in Seven Types of Ambiguity where he apologises for not doing too much revision for later editions by invoking how his younger self would've felt if some stupid old man had gone through crossing out all the best bits.
(I mean that in a good way.)

[genevieve]

It's ten or fifteen years on from my honours thesis on 'Measure for Measure', but it warms my old heart to see once again, even through the veil of theory (whoops, that's 'Theory', isn't it!)that academic discourse either flows out of us like an undammed torrent at the age of twenty - or not at all. I had a wonderful tutor for Irish Literature who once assured me I was bright enough to dispense with my propensity for fence-sitting. Which was good of him really because nobody else bothered to tell me before Honours year - or after.

[DrACRoberts]

Magnus Corpus Urinae would be 'Great Body of Piss'. 'Micturio' means to take a piss, and there isn't really a noun form, though you could say Opera Mictoria, Work that Promotes Urine; or even Opera Mictilis, Work that deserves to be pissed upon. But why would you want to? Your dissertation sounds splendid, and is evidently (vide this post) part of a longer ongoing project to problematize.

Second thoughts: why not Textus Mictilis, since as every lit-crit-enthusist knows 'text' derives from the same root as 'textile', something woven or intertwined, and wool (such as might be woven or intertwined) was treated with urine ... actually there's a whole new thesis here.

[A. Cephalous]

Dr. Roberts, you're a life-saver. But I can't decide which of those wonderful options best describes my Honors thesis, so I'll refrain updating my post for a little while. (I'll probably go with opera mictilis, but then again, textus mictilis has its charms too.)

[Sin]

This is great. I just had complete flashbacks to when I was writing my Honours thesis, and actually spent absolute HOURS coming up with chapter headings like "Fore(father) Play - in Three Acts", and "Sex, Drugs, and Trans-national Performances of Narration as Drag".

I hang my head in shame at some of the sentences I wrote in the past.