On Quotations and Origins.

Okay - for anyone who is wondering what in hell my last post was about, here goes. So a few months ago I remembered a phrase of displeasure from my early 20's: thats' some ol bullshit. And I love the rhythm of the phrase. So I started to incorporate it. But like anything it had shelf life. So one day, after a handful of drinks, a buddy told me a story about something that sucked. And I said something like "That reminds me of this quote by Gandhi. I believe it goes something like this: THAT'S SOME OL BULLSHIT." And we laughed. And lately what's been fun about this admittedly ridiculous practice is how my friends and myself have started inventing. I mean the punchline is drawn. You can add a bit but you can't change much. So what you do is change who you are claiming says the quotation.

So okay - it's stupid male, drunken fun. And that is what it is. But after reading my post I started thinking about it. And what I started to think about is that there's really a deconstructive move here. The quotation is all about origin - the quotation is always connected to logos.

(Logos in this discourse means a central term that grants all other terms around it meaning. God is a logos, in Marx money is a logos, in Freud the subconsciousness is a logos.)

Okay so why does it grant power to our discourse - what we would probably call "ethos" to our students - to quote somebody older? I mean I do this. You do this. But why do we do this. Why can't my words be enough? Why do I have to enter a "conversation."

Here's what I want to say - even though I use the conversation metaphor in class - academia is not interested in conversations, at least not what I think of as conversations.

Responding to a person I don't know who wrote an essay is not the same as having a conversation. Why do academics accept this metaphor so easily? Hell, I did. At times I still do.

Okay let's make a point. Quotations are about ethos deferred. But why is that so important. Can I only be an intellectual because I can quote Heidegger? Oh and I can, lord knows I can, talk Heidegger.

Here's a bigger point: do quotations assume a singular original subjective human that has been more than complicated in recent discourse. Death of the something?
And in terms of conversation as academic metaphor, let's admit that what's so great about face-to-face-what-I-think-of-when-I-say conversations is that they are fast - always capable of the hard right turn. They are not planned or methodical. Academic essays are.