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December 27, 2005
Rachel’s comment that a gatekeeper of the VG can renegotiate her/his own function as well as decide who gets admitted to the site suggests a higher degree of authority than an ordinary gate-keeper would have. My first idea was to think about the VG staff as gardeners and VG as the grafting device. New texts by women writers of color from outside the academy are brought into contact with academia through the work of undergraduate researchers who engraft them onto the tree of the academic discourse through their projects. When wildlings are grafted to a garden fruit tree, they begin to bring forth new cultivated fruit, and, in fact, undergraduate research projects that result in author pages published on our web-site are the cultured fruit of the grafting device of the VG. If such were the case, however, then new texts of women-writers would just serve as raw material for the academic discourse who would use it to produce more and more research papers and dissertations - the cultured fruit identical to that brought forth by the mother tree. However, the ‘wildlings’ grafted to the cultured tree, viewed as texts, or more generally inscriptions, conform to different laws, the laws of scriptural economy, and it is these laws that impact their negotiation. . . For Bruno Latour, inscriptions are not just representations, they are evidence, hard facts employed in an agonistic encounter for the purpose of gaining victory, Science is not just an attempt to represent as much of the world as possible and it has never been. Inscriptions help to solidify victories in the situation of competition. Official science is an accumulation of traces of documented victories. A university website whose mission is to make accessible a marginalized group of writers is a thoroughly agonistic endeavor. It is the point where the marginal and the integrated systems of inscriptions, in the form of academic scholarship based on the accepted literary canon, meet. An integrated system of inscriptions is a historical effort. It is an accumulation of traces, each layer being deposited in the former only after the confidence about its meaning is established (Latour 17) The VG website provides a venue where ‘the confidence about the meaning’ of the new material can be stabilized, in the words of Bruno Latour who saw this as a necessary condition for the inscriptions, texts, or, more generally, traces, to be included into the already stabilized group of texts (the canon). The moment of establishing this confidence is the moment of negotiation - interfacing with the institutional power when the very notion of what is marginal can be discussed and redefined. Negotiation becomes the temporary opening, or breaking, of the borders to allow new voices to penetrate the institutional borders, a point “at which voices slip into the great book of our law” (de Certeau 132). The process of negotiation implies a certain amount of force applied to open up a point of entry. So the VG becomes a place of sabotage, and its officers – saboteurs, strangely combining this military function of receptionists and gatekeepers at the beck and call of the academy. The setting works like a giant ‘optical device’ that creates a new laboratory, a new type of vision and a new phenomenon to look at (19). It is a transitional space: what comes out - comes out with the marks of power and belonging. “The scriptural enterprise transforms within itself what it receives from outside and creates internally the instruments for an appropriation of an external space (de Certeau ) The VG is the point where the border is broken – what enters through this border is not a new name but rather a community of writers, with ill-defined, due to the nature of the Internet, borders. The VG website offers a course that is listed in the class schedule together with courses on Shakespeare and Melville. Thus, marginalized writings become one of the items on the list of canonical works but still marked as marginal – an excluded inclusion. Marginalities can be integrated into the system and sometimes they do but their integration will have to be framed in ways that would indicate their marginality. The important thing, however, is that marginal texts become part of a chain or a cascade of inscriptions, whatever their status is and integrated systems, viewed as methodologies, according to Heidegger, adopt themselves to their own results, and thus , even included as exclusions can contribute to the subsequent developments of literary studies. Once an item of information is received, classified, inserted into a system it begins to act on the environment and transform it (de Certeau 135)
Posted by LaurenCurtright at December 27, 2005 08:44 AM
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