methodology 5

But--to return to my own arrival at the place where a methodology that crosses disciplines as well as the boundaries of feeling versus thinking-- for me, the question is also one of topic. If philosophy, speaking about love, "mistreats it or betrays it" (The Erotic Phenomenon, 1), and has forgotten its own roots in love and wisdom such that it is only "of use in populating universities and in having discussions among the initiated but without the impact on our lives that a wisdom presupposes" (Irigaray, The Way of Love, 3) and allows the philosopher to "remain among those like himself without confronting the delicate...relational problems" (5) that a discipline based in love would require, then how to write a philosophy, a theory, or a poetics of love without purposely going outside the main system of knowledge? Using texts from across the disciplines makes the constellation bigger, shows the way relation puts things into play that philosophy (or even the idea of disciplinarity) sometimes won't accept, like the body--like, for Irigaray, "a language that creates...a language that lives" (12). The scholar I am learning to be would not read as well, would not think as well, without the contributions that poetry, art history, everyday life, and even things like walking around, watching people, working in the garden make. Not closing myself off to ‘non-academic’ or non-scholarly, or even extra-disciplinary methods allows me to learn about making theory in ways that I might not if I felt more wed to one way of doing things. The work of the body is good for the mind, and all that.

Of course, there are objections to be raised to this methodology--not least of all that it might be appropriate for some book or other, especially if one is a well-known theorist already, but that in terms of the requirements for a PhD dissertation it might be on shakier ground. It is presumptuous and not a little arrogant, isn’t it, to say to what is essentially a canon of scholarly and critical literature, I know better than you how to treat these texts. But that is what any dissertation asserts, in the end; that is, to some extent, what it means to make a contribution to the literature. And, in my case, there seems to be precedent not only in the theoretical works I'm using to frame the thesis but within the case studies themselves. For example, at one point, Toni Morrison suggests that her readers, scholarly or otherwise, be receivers for “resonances” ("Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature." Within the Circle : An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present. Ed. Angelyn Mitchell; 377). Her language creates “spaces, which [she is] filling in” but which “can conceivably be filled with other significances” (393). She goes on to write that the “point is that into these spaces should fall the ruminations of the reader and his or her invented or recollected or misunderstood knowingness” (393). And when, in an interview, Morrison says that she “would just like to feel less isolated” (Gates, Jr., Henry Louis, and Kwame Anthony Appiah. Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present; 128) by critical attention paid to her work, I think it is not far off to say what she is asking for, as her work's proxy, is for a listening, living attention to be paid. So there is, then, a natural place for the reader to sit within Morrison’s language and listen.

But perhaps the best defense this kind of methodology has--if it needs one--is inherent: it is flexible, adaptive; it is responsive to the needs of the text, the time, the writer, and her context. It is not prescriptive. It can say yes--in a very Derridian way, maybe--to many different, even contradictory things, and "make a promise...to take into account the singularity of the Other" even if it is used "to criticize, to ask questions, to challenge" that is also "an irreducible affirmation" (Jacques Derrida, Interview) of that otherness. The position of saying yes in this way is an obviously affirmative one, an open one--one that allows the texts to want and the writer to listen. Despite its weaknesses, a ragpicking methodology fits my project and my texts--and my writerly self.

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“Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them” (Rilke, Letter 3)

“Although Coleridge may have been referring specifically to poetry when he devised the phrase, might ‘a more continuous and equal attention’ offer not just a way of reading but of living as well?” (Donaghue, Denis. "Congenial Disorder: Why should we look for comfort in poetry?" Harper's. Sept. 2008; 98)