Writing the Torment

Okay, are we agreed? Let’s stick to Derrida and build upon those conversations we’ve been having OVER AND OVER when we try to figure out what to do with this data—whatever it is—that comes, proliferates, and haunts us whenever we write our research?

Do you really think we should try to limit what or who we think with for this paper?

Yeah. We have to actually write something for an audience to read. And who wants to try to sift through the gabillion ways we are thinking and rethinking this data?

“I imagine a cacophony of ideas swirling as we think about our topics with all we can muster—with words from theorists, participants, conference audiences, friends and lovers, ghosts who haunt our studies, characters in fiction and film and dreams—and with our bodies and all the other bodies and the earth and all the things and objects in our lives—the entire assemblage that is a life thinking and, and, and . . . All those data are set to work in our thinking, and we think, and we work our way somewhere in thinking” (St. Pierre, 2011, p. 622).

Like St. Pierre (2011) described, when we set out to think something—whether it be theory, data, or analysis, all of which are, of course, the same—data are put to work in our thinking.

Wait, shouldn’t we nod to the fact that St. Pierre is thinking with Deleuze here . . . the “entire assemblage” and the “and, and, and . . . ”? That might be the direction we need to go.

We can’t go there. We’ll just end up attempting to produce a new writing ontology like we always seem to do when we go back to Deleuze.

It is the “and, and, and” though. Don’t you think? We’re always thinking with the logic of the and. It’s part of the problem of trying to cite at all. How do we decide who to cite when we’ve always read Deleuze and Guattari right alongside Derrida? We can’t really think Derrida without Deleuze anyway.

I know, I know. All of our writing is haunted by anything that calls itself poststructural work . . . the absent presence. We cannot think without the voices in our heads. Even if it’s just a general “understanding” that comes from having read it, reread it, read it against and through other scholars.

However, nothing is ever as separate as we attempt to make it, and “the signifier seems to erase itself or to become transparent, in order to allow the concept to present itself as what it is, referring to nothing other than its presence” (Derrida, 1972/1981, p. 22). The cacophony is always an absent presence.

Are you talking about the blur again? The posty noise we can’t help but think with? We can’t spend any more time waiting for you to find images that capture the blur.

But it helps me think. When the words won’t come sometimes, when there’s too much blur, I need an image.

Are you hoping the image will capture what the words can’t and represent this data?

One of the ways this affects us is that we often cannot separate theorists from the sources writing about those theorists or the previous writing and thinking we have done as we weave the words of those theorists in and out of the words of others that happen on the page as we write. Even when we use the same theories over and over, it is always different. Like Derrida (1991, and Derrida, & Ewald, 2001, “[e]ach time [we] begin a new text, however modest it may be, everything falls apart in the face of the unknown or the inaccessible, a crushing feeling of clumsiness, of inexperience, and of powerlessness. Anything [we] had already written is instantly annihilated, or rather, as if thrown overboard” (p. 64). The same annihilation happens when we return to a text, as new and other theories inform our thinking both with and without our knowing.

And what about that quote? What’s the quote? You know, about the hope and the torment? Do you know where that quote is?

We could talk about how the page is like the hope and the torment when we try to cite who we think with—when we try to sort through the cacophony of data—what do we call this, theoretical data?—to put something out there that might be intelligible. When we groan because we know what we have written isn’t what we think we mean.

So the quote. Is it in your dictionary? It is Derrida, right?

It sounds like Caputo’s Derrida. Affirmative—not the Derrida of “the street-corner anarchist” (Caputo, 1997, p. 36).

Wait, if we write these conversations in our paper, how are we going to cite in them?

We’ll deal with that later.

I actually think the quote is Biesta. I vaguely remember reading it when I was prepping for my reading group the other day. Biesta is so hopeful.

Do we even need that quote?

Although we have become accustomed to this philosophically informed inquiry where “it’s nigh onto impossible not to think with what others have thought and written” (St. Pierre, 2011, p. 622), the issue of having to put something on the page, having to produce new interpretations—both of our objects of knowledge and whatever or whomever we think with—that do justice to the Other creates a . . .

It’s the problem of shaking metaphysics.

Talk more.

Let me read this to you. “While Derrida wants to ‘shake’ metaphysics, he acknowledges that this cannot be done from some neutral and innocent place ‘outside’ of metaphysics . . . since that would leave us without any tools, without even a language to investigate, criticize, and ‘shake’ metaphysics. What is more to the point, therefore, is to say . . . that Derrida wants to shake metaphysics by showing that it is itself always already ‘shaking’, by showing . . . the impossibility of any of its attempts to fix or immobilize being through the presentation of a self-sufficient, self-identical presence” (Biesta, 2003, pp. 145-146).

So pursuing justice creates a . . .

. . . tension between reaffirmation and reinvention. Derrida (1992) explained that justice exists in such an aporia, where it must “be both regulated and without regulation: it must conserve the law and also destroy it or suspend it enough to have to reinvent it in each case” (p. 23). Aporia, then, is an impasse, a moment where one does not know how to proceed but requires a decision about what is most just at the very moment when justice is impossible to know. Philosophically informed inquiry, then, especially when produced in a writing partnership creates aporetic data—“each case is other, each decision is different, and requires an absolutely unique interpretation” (p. 23), placing the theories we think with in constant motion.

Holy shit. I was just typing that exact quote about each decision being different while you were typing it. Look at the bottom of the page.

What were you thinking about?

Well right now I am thinking about how we are going to write this paper. Don’t we have to foreground the data to address this call?

Aren’t these conversations the data?

Do we need to tell people how to read these things? What would we even tell them? Shouldn’t we record them then? Maybe a video recording?

Why? Do we need to capture all of our cursing.

I was actually thinking we should get rid of the cursing altogether. This isn’t representational. We can’t include our gestures and our bodies.

Then, what is it?

I don’t know. But it’s aporetic. It’s moving in and out of paralysis, of confusion, using the space of the page. Right? It’s here because this is the only way we can think to portray a moment that always escapes…and we need to do it justice.

It’s like Derrida said, you can’t just take down the tradition, you’ve got to use the tools.

Don’t we already have that quote in here somewhere? This conversation is so cyclical—it’s disorienting.

So Derridean. “Time is off its hinges, time is off course, beside itself, disadjusted” (Derrida, 1993/1994, p. 20).

You know if we add that quote we are going to have to add Specters of Marx to the reference list.

Might be good though. We are talking about haunting throughout.

While we want to do the process justice, to answer the call of Freeman et al. (2007) to be forthcoming about how knowledge is produced throughout the research and St. Pierre (2011), who invited us to “tell . . . what [we] think [we] do when [we] think—when [we] do analysis” (p. 622), responding to those calls is not as simple as it may seem. We question how we proceed after we recognize that we cannot get close enough to ourselves and our process(es) to describe everything that constitutes data, everything we think with.

Oh wait, this Biesta (2003) about behind the scenes is really important. “The point of deconstruction is not only to give recognition to all the work that is being done behind the scenes in order to make the illusion of self-sufficiency upstairs possible . . . it wants to open up, or at least keep the door open, for that which we cannot even know to be going on behind the scenes. In this respect we can say that deconstruction—showing metaphysics-in-deconstruction—is motivated by a wish to do justice to what is excluded and out of sight—or perhaps we should say to do justice to who is excluded and out of sight”

Wait, where are you reading?

I’m reading in our notes from our conversation in November, page 9. Are you reading in the text?

Yeah, on p. 146.

We recognize, for example, that “we are not immediately present ourselves” because “self-knowledge requires a semiotic material technology to link meetings and bodies” (Haraway, 1991, p. 192) that we trouble.

Why Haraway? It sounds like all that Derrida you were reading the other day about the body and organs and citation. How did you get started on the talk of grafting anyway?

I was looking for that damn quote about the hope and the torment.

Even our attempts to account for the knowledge we produce may do little besides creating more data.

Oh I forgot to tell you, I woke up this morning thinking, “We have to remember to write about all the stuff we did with the conversations.” It was like those months of thinking, talking, and writing couldn’t go to waste or something.

Like when we printed them all out, cut them up, and taped them to the wall in different configurations?

Yeah, and took pictures of it too—like it mattered. Like it would help us with the capture. Like it would be real data if we “collected” it in that way.

Instead we are left with questions: Is this what we are doing? How do we say what we are doing when we are thinking and writing with people, and that thinking never stands still long enough to be captured?

I keep thinking this Derrida (1992). Listen: “for a decision to be just and responsible, it must . . . be both regulated and without regulation: it must conserve the law and also destroy it or suspend it enough to have to reinvent it in each case, rejustify it, at least reinvent it in the reaffirmation and the new and free confirmation of its principle. Each case is other, each decision is different and requires an absolutely unique interpretation, which no existing, coded rule can or ought to guarantee absolutely” (p. 23). Wait. Are you crying?

OPEN IN VIEWER

Why does this matter? Who cares about data when there are kids getting shot? Who cares about this when our own kids miss their moms? When kids everywhere are getting a shitty education?

What is happening?

I said I wanted to get my PhD to do justice in some way to the teachers who do their damnedest to really teach kids how to think and who are meeting all these obstacles, and now I’m having theoretical conversations about what data does to us. Who gives a shit about doing justice to data? This isn’t just a paralysis of “I’m not sure how to think.” I am not sure why I would do any of this. Wouldn’t I be better off working in a soup kitchen right now instead of in this hotel room talking about data? Sorry.

I don’t know what to say. I’m going to read this Derrida. Or this Biesta. Biesta’s Derrida is so hopeful.

Yet we constantly search for those we can write with in order to see what that does to our thinking. We may resist more mechanistic forms of coding or thematic analysis, but each way we choose to think data or think with data requires that we make theory stand still in order to fulfill a purpose. We create yet another grid of intelligibility (Foucault, 1976/1978, p. 93) in the attempt to resist more obvious coding schemes.

Now are we heading into Foucault territory?

It’s not like our Derrida isn’t always already interrupted by our continuous readings of Foucault. I write “grid of intelligibility” all the time without citing. It’s become this common term.

Citational authority is good though.

An appeal to the origin. Like we are closer to the original Foucault or something.

This, too, introduces uncertainty. Did we get it right? Is that Derrida? Is Derrida even whom we thought with when we first thought that? More than getting it right, ours is a search for justice, a deconstructive move that can never be achieved. That is to say, we try to resist the lure of the origin, recognizing that we cannot work outside of the tradition that precedes us, and instead attempt to situate ourselves within the tradition in order to do something different, something other—to pursue justice.

Are you still looking for that hope and torment quote? I don’t think we need it.

Don’t we have to foreground the data to address this call?

Is the Derrida quote our data? Aren’t these conversations our data?

I don’t know.

Data are not data, after all, unless we have collected them for research purposes; that is the narrative that qualitative research texts put forth.

Isn’t it wild how we write together all the time but we have never written in this way before?

But when we think with Derrida (or Derridas), we acknowledge that words mean “more, less, or something other” (1967/1974, p. 158) than we intend.

Should we say Derridas?

Reminds me of how Derrida says that he prefers “deconstructions” to deconstruction.

Where does he talk about that?

Right now I am looking at p. 146 in Biesta. Referring to Derrida and Ewald, 2001, p. 67. Hang on. Let me go back to that.

Yeah, I was reading that part yesterday when we were talking about . . .

. . . deconstructions “has never named a project, a method, or a system. Especially not a philosophical system. Within contexts which are always very determined, it is one of the possible names used to designate, in sum by metonymy”

Wait, what’s a metonymy?

Metonymy is when something stands in for a closely related idea. Like Hollywood representing the entire film industry.

Consequently, meaning is always already deferred. If data, too, always escapes yet we constantly try to capture it, we are constrained by the need to sort data, make sense, force data to mean.

This is what we need. For your tears. Listen. Biesta asks: “Isn’t deconstruction in a sense a luxury? . . . the point is, that one could well argue that there are many urgent needs in the world and that, with respect to those needs, it is simply clear what has to be done: to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, and so forth. It is only after all that has been done, that we may find time to look for metaphysics-in-deconstruction. This is also true” (2003, p. 152). I swear I’ve read this essay a million times, and I have no recollection of ever reading this before.

What? Sorry. I was reading about grafting and citation and Derrida. “Along the edges of an overcast seam” (1972/1981, p. 390) . . . that is totally what we are talking about, don’t you think?

“But we should always keep asking ourselves whether it might be the case that in the very name of justice we are doing injustice. We should, in other words . . . (p. 152)

“. . . the tree is ultimately rootless” (p. 390)

“. . . always entertain the possibility of the injustice brought about by good intentions and clear conscience . . . This is the critical question which deconstruction in a sense puts to us. It is up to us to respond” (p. 152). The soup kitchen isn’t the solution. We have to recognize that it’s not about intentions.

If we had read about grafting, it would have totally changed our last paper.

We cannot think aporetic data as something we collect and fully describe. Who we cite is a constant question, a constant decision.

The data escapes us.

It has to. We cannot let this problem of representing theoretical data take over because it just makes us sit in a hotel room and cry instead of doing the work. We can’t stay in the aporia. We have to respond.

So, all we’re saying is that aporetic data happens, and we have to be responsible for it—where it goes and what it does. You’re not off the hook. It’s a constant process.

“These violent deconstructions are under way, it is happening [it is coming, ca arrive], it is not waiting for someone to complete the philosophico-theoretical analysis of everything I have just evoked in a word: this analysis is necessary but infinite” (Derrida, 1991 and Derrida & Ewald, 2001, p. 68).

That’s good. It’s helpful.

We use one another in order to proceed—to name our thinking through citation or to decide whom to put on our thinking to give it the authority of citation and signal the conversation in which we take part. We call upon one another to keep data in motion by truncating, diverting, or extending aporias rather than treating data as passive objects so that we can create qualitative research that might resist the “reductionist, hegemonic, and sometimes oppressive” (St. Pierre, 2011, p. 613) tendencies of conventional qualitative inquiry. St. Pierre explained that “this is the science that beckons—this is the lure. And this is deconstruction at its finest—the rigorous re-imagining of a capacious science that cannot be defined in advance and is never the same” (p. 613).

This might be important. Ewald asks Derrida what is the relation between deconstruction and critique. And Derrida said, “critique supposes a judgment . . . it attaches a certain negativity. To say that all this is deconstructable is not the same thing as disqualifying, negating, disavowing or exceeding it, as performing the critique of critique . . . Perhaps this thinking transforms the space and, through aporias, allows the (non-positive) affirmation to appear, the one which is presupposed by any critique and any negativity” (p. 68).

We don’t code; we produce Derrida and offer that production. We do not know “where the [work] goes and what it does there” (Alcoff, 1991, p. 26). Our work is not about disruption. Rather, it is about production, about possibility, about the hope that comes from not knowing how our work will be taken up.

And it’s about tradition. We need to go to that interview with Pagdaonkar.

I have only always read it on the web and can never find a reference to a book. Always makes me think it is not really an interview with Derrida. But I love that interview.

Maybe we put the link to it, put it out there so that we can be read in conversation with it.

Yeah. It is which Derrida do we want to be read in conversation with rather than which Derrida are we citing.

Maybe that’s all we can hope to do. Maybe that is the purpose of citation, to suggest the conversation we try to enter . . . the conversation we are trying to understand.

So we aren’t collecting our theoretical data we think with?

Maybe. Maybe.

As Derrida said in an interview with Nikhil Padgaonkar (1997), “To speak with someone else, you have to understand what the Other says, you have to be able to repeat it—that’s what understanding means—and to be able to answer, to respond, and your response will be different, it will be something else, and the response includes the possibility of understanding what you’re responding to. So I would put all this in terms of response—and responsibility—towards your heritage” (para 8).

Read me that section about heritage.

“Heritage is not something you are given as a whole. It is something that calls for interpretations, selections, reactions, response and responsibility. When you take your responsibility as an heir, you are not simply subjected to the heritage, you are not called to simply conserve or keep this heritage as it is, intact. You have to make it live and survive, and that is a process—a selective and interpretive process . . . in order to make something new happen, you have to inherit, you have to be inside the language, inside the tradition. You would not be able to transform or displace anything without in some way being inside the tradition, without understanding the language” (para 6).

We stop each other and divert one another’s thinking because it is impossible and undesirable to find and cite all the useful Derridas at once. St. Pierre (2005) described the undesirability of offering her participants up on the page for an audience to presume to know—“when someone asks for a story about the women, I give them a good one, and if they ask for another, I say, ‘Go find your own older women and talk with them’” (St. Pierre in Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005, p. 971). Similarly, we offer Derrida, the Derrida we produced for this article, who helps us think and work through aporetic data as it comes, but we know we must find the Derrida that will help us think each project, each new text, each new space we create to think, and we encourage the reader to do the same. Consequently, theoretical data are not passive—we cannot produce a Derrida, for example, that remains the same—but instead, as we think and write, these data move in and out of aporias, become something different, and resist capture. Citation, then, becomes a marker of aporetic data that cannot be collected and coded—a signal to a philosophically informed inquiry that can never be repeated.