A Commentary on the "Melting Pot"

The United States is referred to as a “melting pot”, where a society which is divided and heterogeneous can become homogeneous, creating a sort of common, shared culture. We call this culture American. Gates’ piece on The Signifyin[g] Monkey challenges this aspect of the “melting pot” by stressing how Signifying is only taught and mastered through their own culture, how it is taught to be a second language to black adolescents. Their challenge, then, is how to be understood in both universes they are part of, what Gates’ calls linguistic masking: “the verbal sign of the mask of blackness that demarcates the boundary between the white linguistic realm and the black, two domains that exist side by side” (Gates 1571). One realm of their culture allows for them to be understood but only to a certain extent, as Gates’ displays on page 1564. He gives the example of students constructing a standardized test for McGraw Hill that ultimately proved they do not speak the same language. Though it has been said before, the students repeat what has been said already, but needs to repeat what hasn’t been noticed before. Foucault identifies this as a paradox of commentary (Foucault 1465). Foucault’s notion of societies of discourse can also play into this. He defines it as a way to “function to preserve discourses, but in order to make them circulate in a closed space, distributing them only according to strict rules” (p. 1468).

And it is also Foucault that brings this, and all texts into the realm of rhetoric. He gives a triad of three reasons on how discourse becomes distinguished, and most all of them have to do with a text and how to gather its meaning. He even defines an author; as not a creator of a text, but as the creator of principles of a discourse and how they identify it to be “conceived as the unity and origin of their meanings, as the focus of their coherence” (p. 1465). By applying his notions of commentary, author and discipline, a meaning can be found within a text; a meaning that “allows us to say something other than the text itself, but on the condition that it is this text itself which is said, and in a sense completed” (p. 1465).

Extending from this melting pot analysis comes the question of the people and who they really are. How can people be recognized in this homogenous pot? McGee hypothesizes that people have no meaning today, that it is just “the plural of ‘person’, a grammatic convention which encourages the notion that the people of a nation are objective, literal extensions of the individual” (McGee 236). He goes on to say that they are viewed as a statistic rather than an entity. Forms and surveys are used to gather data, but what goes unrecognized is the thought process and the individuality that forms the answers. And even when formed as the center of a new rhetoric, people are undesired in the nature state, which Aristotle defines as “individuals moved…more by maxims and self-interest than by reason and evidence” (p. 238). The point that McGee ends up making, however, is that the evidence that is presented throughout history is circumstantial in that the materials being presented have been seen “only as they have already been mediated or filtered by the Leader whose words he studies” (p.248). Therefore, the people in history are subject to their time period alone and cannot be compared to the present day, as the situations are different.

This exploratory helped bring together most all of the readings. What was interesting about the analysis that we did was that we found a “Truth” from each point of analysis, transtextual, contextual and intratextual, and we tried to find a cultural dis/identification from each of them. We then mapped the ideas and quotes into a flow chart and made a Venn Diagram that tries to converge the concepts shown in Nietzsche’s preface. https://www.gliffy.com/go/share/s9x81y5olnfqhjxd9a9s. For example, in the case of transtextuality, we founded that Nietzsche recognizes the dogmatic philosophy as flawed and dangerous, but hopes that it “may have been only a noble puerilism and tyronism”. He also hopes to understand what beliefs the dogmatists have reared and why. In turn, he talks about how Asia and Europe have given the dogmatists a "caricature" of what it is they have founded their beliefs on. Here, the Truth of dogmatists seem to be misguided and inaccurate: “Is there not ground for suspecting that all philosophers, in so far as they have been dogmatists, have failed to understand women—that the terrible seriousness and clumsy importunity with which they have usually paid their addresses to Truth, have been unskilled and unseemly methods for winning a woman?”. He culturally identifies the dogmatists by traveling through time and providing evidence of how they came to be.

One thing that I have become concerned about, however, is how Gates' work had an influence on my input for this exploratory. His points of empathizing with blacks and how he recognizes that they have been performing Significations since the time of slavery hit me close to him in regards to my own cultural identity, or rather, lack thereof: "'unmeaning jargon' to standard English speakers, were 'full of meaning' to the blacks, who were literally defining themselves in language...black people have been Signifyin(g), without explicitly calling it that, since slavery" (Gates 1565). I drew many personal connections with this aspect of Gates' themes, and because of it, I believe my input in the project was biased in regards to the material I picked out to refer to and to relate back to cultural dis/identification. An example of this would be in the case of my contextual analysis of Nietzsche's truth. The Truth that I believe was identified was that Nietzsche draws an identification of European's as a people. He sympathizes with his people about the hardships they had faced under the oppression of the Christian church, and because of the hardships faced, the Europeans, or a group of people, can come together and try and alleviate the tensions that are being placed on them, creating their own/new culture. I wonder if we had read a different text if this cultural analysis could be valid or at all significant?