Endless Journey of "Always-in-the-Making": To Ravel and Unravel Her Story, Our Story, History

• In Event: Millennium Hotel Roundtable Session 7
  In Roundtable Session: . . . In-the-Making: Generating Curricular Possibilities With Janet L. Miller

Abstract

In my partial memory, there was a moment when Dr. Janet L. Miller, who always smiled, nodded and asked questions to enable me to think differently about what I inquired into, made a face at me. It was when I said, very naively, that I hoped that my inquiry could prove my assumption on issues at hand. This moment launched an endless journey into playing in the dark, into interrogation of notions of “self,” language, and difference through Dr. Miller’s extensive and provocative scholarship.
Among her numerous research endeavors, her conception of autobiography as a form of inquiry through interrogation of researcher’s self has mobilized me to delve into relation between self and language. Language is considered transparent and iterable and so holds “immanent structure of promise and desire” (Derrida, 1996, p. 21). However, according to Derrida, language is solipsistic in the sense that “language only can speak itself of itself” (p. 22). This solipsism of language collapses the rigorous immanent structure by its iterability. Further, trace in language can readily diminish the iterability. Porous layers of different signifiers caused by trace could create an interstice, which might belie the “phenomenon of hearing-oneself-speak in order to mean-to-say” (Derrida, p. 25). Thus, language is not containable in spite of, and ironically because of, its solipsism. Along with this inquiry, Dr. Miller’s extensive inquiry into notions of self has led me to examine relations between self and language. The relation between language as porous and self as not fully conscious is, as Derrida argues, “inalienable alienation.”
This idea of “inalienable alienation” has shaped my expertise of teaching of college writing. Multiply constructed versions of English, including standardized English, are constantly changing and so make the boundaries among these versions opaque. Hence, writing is not to transmit the meaning but to do “sweaty fight for meaning and response-ability.” With the notion that iterability is accompanied with crevices, Dr. Miller’s mid-career scholarship that has “enabled her to trouble dominant discourses that replicated unitary and essentialized representations” has also informed my pedagogy. I encourage my students to question the fixed and categorical notions of identity and difference and even to embrace an uncertainty waiting for them after these questionings.
However, this is not the end of my journey into the unknown that has been guided by Dr. Miller’s scholarship. The conception of “always-in-the-making” (Miller, 2005) helps me to extend and expand my thinking on this inquiry into language and self. I am grappling with a different notion of language and difference by Georgio Agamben, who also problematizes the concept of language as autonomous and the notion of difference as opposed to identity by criticizing Derrida’s theories. I am again into the unknown by furthering the perspective, into which I have been comfortably situated. The way Dr. Miller has worked with the ideas of "always-in-the-making," “preparing ourselves, over and over again, to engage the “sweaty fight for the meaning and response-ability” (Miller, 2005, p. 239), spurs me to fearlessly dive into this unknown.

Authors

• Naoko Akai-Dennis, Bunker Hill Community College

• Jungah Kim, Borough of Manhattan Community College - CUNY