Could I talk my dissertation into being?

I heard last night of a professor that I know who had planned to write a dissertation with a model like this:

Theoretical chunk

3-4 chapters using the theory to read Lit

Conclusion

… but then… clarifying the theory bit and answering to questions put to him about that turned it into the dissertation. 

… I heard two others remark, bemusedly, that their dissertations were Five Paragraph Expository Essays writ large, structurally speaking. 

… "You can never explain too much" another said. 

Then I made various raunchy insinuations about footnotes, none of which are pertinent here.

But somehow, I want to do all the shit that they tell you not to do. 

Think of it as a book not a diss.

Structure it in a more complex way, such that, perhaps, it has something of a method for its movement from idea to idea, or, going further into poetics, it makes use of prompts, is constructed off the page as a series of improvisations and then transcrib-o-formed into something which captures part of my speech patterns as certain poems have done. (that last act connects to many things i have thought about voice, see below).

Could a text be structured topologically? what the fuck does that mean? 

Could I, in significant part (if not all or most) talk my dissertation into being?

. . . quasi Antin perhaps, but I'd have something of a course plotted, a lattice of ideas on a page that would be there to refer to, even the loosey goosey 'word cloud' would do the job.

I'd ask if my theory friends would like to start a salon, but wait - I've tried that. or it was a journal (still a good idea). 

                             video?          hello youtube? 

Can one do a dissertation refusing an endpoint, any specific goal and instead grow something until it feels done? (this is again garden variety assemblage/method poetics, but telos is hard to find here)

the Tractatus is a rather austere model - but I'm thinking of some principle of connection and collocation which would be used to assemble as many small and tightly contained 'chunks' )technical term for poets, you might not know it( these generated as needed to perform tasks, exemplification, context creation, linkage, concept creation, concept deployment, object analysis, image analysis, relational analysis (those last three - read them as real, imaginary, symbolic?) … various functions are determined to be needed here here and here, chunks which perform these functions are sorted into the places. Then if the chunks are quasi-transcriptions, tightened into ecrit...

Ok, so then… 

Way back when on the blog, I had this post wondering about dissertation stuff and I took a pot shot at what a trajectory through it might've involved. Here it be (note the implicit 5 para essay vibe as well):

Language Embodied / Embodied Language 

• What psychoanalysis, Freud and Lacan preeminently, have to contribute to understanding the body's imbrication in language. 

• Voice, a unique site of interface between the two, particularly at its more extreme points or edges - sound poetry, glossolalia, aphasias, psychosis as well as in modes which diminish the sense of subjective engagement as with routinized and depersonalized speech or parapraxes as discussed by Freud and others.

• Voice as object.

• Speech (parole) vs Langue, as well as Speech as semiosis (ala Peirce).

It seems to me that this offers at least the potential to allow for some discussion of art (if I limit to performance art or sound art that uses voice), film (obviously, though the devil will be in the details), fiction (this is less obvious, perhaps there are pioneering studies to be made of author's reading their work? the text-heavy and disembodied nature of most fiction is harder to envision in this daydream I am having), and, without any difficulty, poetry (the biggest challenge here perhaps being that I've tended to avoid writing about the stuff I love the most, not wanting to link it to the dynamics of the academic economy).

There is some of this that I still have a big pull toward. By tags; Body, Voice, Speech all with Psychoanalysis obviously. The ways that we can see, measure, otherwise discern or perhaps only posit upon the body itself the effects of language (as it is treated here) but ultimately the effects of the Symbolic and the Imaginary. The object voice - voice as objet a - as Real. Voice as unique intersection of language and body, voice in the three orders… that sort of thing. 

Hi, I'm Charles Peirce.

I don't get into it above but when I mention Peirce I was think about ways to use Peirce as an alternative vocabulary for discussing speech. That book call The Machinery of Talk by Anne Freadman - there was something I read in that that made me think of other ways than Saussure and Jakobson to talk about speech, still using the idea of the chain and of the automaton - but ditching the X Y axes of the formalist/structuralist style. 

Charles Peirce en femme
Google -> Image :
"charles peirce"

What I'm shying away from at present is certain ways of talking about language, and even more of using the various awkward or technical argots of the many regional discourses or disciplines that already have their own distinctly regional investments in language as the pre-eminent object of interest, or that through which all else must be filtered, or both. That is, a definite demoting of language as the privileged prism through which to grok everything else. It has its place, but maybe it's a place best thought of as but one ring out of a borromean chain (minimum is three rings, but in principle there is no limit to how many rings).

What has changed is the routes taken toward the body. 

I spent some months reading things about brains. Neuroplasticity. There are posts here, look if you care. & I lined up some books by the neuropsychoanalytic folks really and truly intending to read them when I swerved into another territory and suddenly I was reading about sex and gender as lens on the body and then just for their own sakes, and then something tripped me into reading specifically about transgender issues - I think it was coming upon Please Select Your Gender (Patricia Gherovici) on Karnac's site and then getting it and that sent me deeper into trans stuff on the one hand and coincidentally Dean's Beyond Sexuality has a chapter on trans, and off I went on another book buying spree. & other stuff too, more than can be mentioned here etc.

Bzzzzzz Bzzzzzzz

Am still wondering about my pre-order that keeps getting delayed of that book by Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou which promises to be smart, psychoanalytic and all about brain stuff and neuroscience and philosophy and what not. 

So, not ruling out a bit of neuro/psycho-analytic input (broadly construed).

But it seems much more immediately of interest to think about what in a recent post, I called the trans effect, would be upon Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, specifically in so far as it addresses itself to the body and voice. 

& with regard to the readings of texts. I'm torn. I see the utility of that endeavor - at least relative to certain kinds of jobs - but then again, I have never had any real idea about what job I might get with what I do, and the whole poetry backdoor plan is also there and not forgotten. (Not that it is a golden parachute or any thing like that). But, wrt "readings" again, I'd much rather do 20 small ones, that were machines of exemplification or problematization of the theory - rather than being theoretical explications of the texts in question. (off the top of my head, I have the analysts discourse in Faulkner's The Hamlet, lots of things I could still do with Black Hole, there is Inland Empire to draw from I guess, my queer reading of Malina, could it not also be a trans reading to a small degree (is Ich, the woman "trapped inside the body" of Malina, a man?), I could do many things with Spicer possibly again working with lacanian discourses and or with Peirce, The Limits of Control and the desire of the Other?, & somewhere I do want to get pooperific - not just as a nod to Cal's interests either (tho, it will serve that purpose) but to work with abjection and thus to be able to highlight processes which produce abjection in others (like the Master's, but potentially other discourses as well) which is surely pertinent to trans people who are targeted rather mercilessly in precisely those ways. I could go on.

Echt!

If I did this tomorrow, would it sound like a different dissertation entirely? 

[things largely left out - Queer theory, Sexuation/Sexual Difference vs Gender / Sex, Ideology Critique, ...oops]