Somnio, ergo sum


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Somnio, ergo sum

Donald Challenger

The dead father

Descartes -- the personification, if not the historical personage -- is emblematic of an entire matrix of assumptions about the world, about subjectivity, about the place of reason and the status of knowledge, and about the eternally troubled relationship between form and content, media and information, the local and the universal, path and landscape.

Much of the work of contemporary rhetoric and composition theory, as well as of postmodernism in general, has clearly been dedicated to a struggle against that matrix of assumptions. The isolated Cartesian cogito, the dualism of mind and body, the supremacy of "reason" and stability of "truth" outside any situated history or context -- to cite just a few fighting words -- have for many of us assumed the long shadow of what Lacan calls "the dead father," the signifier of the Law to which we continue to bind ourselves in the very act of violent rejection.

Hypertext, however, seems in many ways to confront the vestiges of Cartesian thought in a visceral, immediate manner that theory previously could only, well, theorize. Hypertext pulls authorship and readership out of their Enlightenment isolation and coaxes them back into a public space of collaborative, evolving, agonistic discourse. In doing so, it decenters, in a very visible and practical way, the very notions of a discrete "self" and a fixed, authoritative "text." It challenges the taxonomies of order, sequence, and narrative by resurrecting parataxis and association as models of writing, reading, and cognition. It reinforces the rhetorical turn by blurring the Platonic distinction between episteme and doxa, knowledge and opinion.

The Cartesian and the hypertextual have, in fact, assumed a certain limpid opposition to one another that is so convenient as to be suspect.

"Even if a deficiency of definitive evidence defines the situation both of the process of theory and of rhetoric, nevertheless science has provided itself with the invaluable advantage of being able to put up with the provisional character of its results indefinitely. That is not a matter of course: Descartes would have regarded it as intolerable. But his idea of 'method' made it possible to understand science, and to organize it, as an overall process that is always 'transferable' and that integrates individuals and generations into itself as mere functionaries."

Hans Blumenberg, "An Anthropological Approach to the Contemporary Significance of Rhetoric"