Openings: The Use of Discourse to Create Dwelling-Places

• In Event: Understanding Discourses of Stability and Change

Abstract

This paper examines how openings are created in our lives whereby we become interested in and involved with other things and other people. Without openings, there would be no places to be, nowhere, for example, to sit or stand, open this essay, and read the opening sentences of its introduction. An introduction is that place in an essay or book that opens readers to what is yet to come. Given what you are doing right now, you presently occupy a place where an opening act has happened (through an act of writing), is happening (through an act of reading), and may continue to do so as patience and interest remain. There are no beginnings, middles, and ends, no pasts, presents, and futures, without openings. And, of course, they are a biological necessity: placed all over our bodies, they enable us to see, hear, feel, communicate, breathe, procreate, take in nourishment, and get rid of waste. Openings are remarkable. Imagine, for example, what life would be like if we were incapable of being open-minded and open-hearted toward others.

Imagination opens us to possibilities such that we may ponder and acknowledge their potential benefits and burdens. Experience tells us that it is wise to be open to what life has in store for us. It is wise to prepare for the future. I am particularly interested in how discourse facilitates this experience. My investigation echoes a strongly held belief that has long guided my teaching and research endeavors and that is stated succinctly in Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus: “Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one’s consciousness, making of every image a privileged place,” or what Camus, “in the manner of Proust,” also describes as a “privileged moment.”

Author

• Michael Hyde, Wake Forest University