Writing the self through service, a Dietetic Ethics.

Abstract

In this paper, the writer offers an approach to writing ethical arguments that depends on service-learning. Ethical thinking and writing are often associated with pure theory, dogmatism, and the enforcement of normative morality; however, in the view presented here, ethics is only possible through constantly situational and dialectical engagement between the practical and theoretical, the philosophical and the material, the subject and the object. Thus, writers in a medically focused service-learning composition course are in a rewarding but challenging educational position. In order to adequately learn in such an environment and to succeed as an ethical writer, the writing student puts into practice certain habits or techniques: she or he engages in a dietetics, a mode of self-production in the midst of frequently contradictory cultural materials and practices. This approach aligns experientially based composition with the ancient medicinal ethics of Hippocrates and a more recent ethical theory, technologies of the self, as described by Michel Foucault.

**********

A Dietetic Ethics

I will apply dietetic measures for the benefit of the sick according to my ability and judgment; I will keep them from harm. [1]

Thus reads what is effectively the third tenet of the Hippocratic Oath, in its classical incarnation. To twenty-first-century eyes and ears, the passage quoted above probably seems a little estranged, out of place, anachronistic. Some perhaps come across the word "dietetic" and then repeat it to themselves to make sure that they have heard or read correctly. At least this is the case when many freshman composition students study the Oath in an argumentative composition classroom. Certainly, nurses, general practitioners, and family doctors are concerned about what a patient eats, but we arguably sense, when hearing the third tenet, that Hippocrates had something even more substantial in mind. Such is the case with most of the Oath, even the modern version, and with most of Hippocrates' writings: one feels temporarily displaced or encounters a conceptual gap and then recalibrates one's thinking. Take for instance the deep ambiguity in the following phrase from Hippocrates' Epidemics: "Do no harm." [2] It is a dialectic of the affirmative and negative. It tells us to progress through reflection. It calls for intervention and restraint, as does the Hippocratic Oath. The Oath's profundity indeed lies in the energy created by its contradictory nature and its impracticality--as is the case with most moral philosophy, [3] and as is the case, most pertinent here, with ethical argumentative writing.

It is because of the medicinal arts' problematic aura, as indicated in the Oath and elsewhere in Hippocrates' work, that one might use medicine as a window through which to have students enter into ethical writing. Composition students in a service-learning course at Louisiana State University encounter and research topical medical issues and take part in experiential learning--or service-learning--in order to write ethical arguments. Many of the students who enroll in this course intend to pursue medically related professions; they are typically wary of the English curriculum. Consequently, the course is geared toward students not necessarily interested in the humanities, while at the same time covertly introducing them to the humanities--i.e., rhetoric and ethics. Instead of learning ethics through extensive lecture, students delve into the fray of societal and cultural problems by volunteering in a local hospital, by making a number of journal entries, and by writing in multiple phases and in multiple genres on a medically related topic they have chosen.

The adopted approach reflects and is influenced by Edward Zlotkowski's stress on "linking practice to theory," helping students "develop more fully their moral imaginations," assisting students in their ability to "demonstrate a grasp of basic ... concepts and procedures"--or a blend of these. [4] On its face, such an approach is extremely common-sensical or practical. In the immediate, without splitting hairs too much when it comes to terminology, one might consider such a characterization to be a positive one. What could be more practical, particularly for the composition classroom, than writing about what one is immediately experiencing in a hospital and writing about current socio-cultural issues? Nevertheless, looks can be deceiving, and depending strictly on experience can be a dubious, limiting, and even dangerous practice. This is what philosophers and theorists have been telling us for some time. [5]

Often in our post-Enlightenment, late-capitalist world, the practical is understood to be what is applicable, immediately usable, profitable, and thereby ready for instant consumption or experience. Experience itself has been subsumed under the bourgeois rubric of performativity. [6] Like that deemed practical, experience is only valuable insofar as it produces something consumable, something immediate, something happy, or something good. [7] To boil things down even further, the more we perform our duty or produce for the greater good, according to bourgeois logic, the more we will experience happiness. In such a brilliant, highly efficient system, which it most definitely is, the performative has very little time for theory. [8] The practical and theoretical become separated, thus allowing activity and thought to become estranged from each other. And as has been indicated up to this point, the presently dominant connotation attached to practicality implies that things move better with less thought the performative could do even better with even further curtailmem of philosophy. Or could it?

A system that stresses performativity without deeper engagement--theoretical engagement--might actually prove to be quite immoral and thus ultimately impractical. Both Utilitarians and Kantians would probably have a problem with the morality driving medical activities dominated primarily by the West's superrich. In fact, students in this course often initially identify with one major ethical camp or the other but come to similar conclusions about a moral drought in the current medical environment. On the basic Utilitarian side, the current habits of healthcare industries are not benefiting the greater good, as it were. Accordingly, if the majority of human beings are not receiving adequate health coverage and care, then the current route is immoral. From the basic Kantian perspective, because individuals are not being treated as if they are ends in themselves or according to an overarching principle of respect, then the activities of the majority of our medical institutions are ethical failures.

Those reading are most probably well aware that ethics cannot be reduced to a battle between Consequentialists and Kantians; moreover, there are many factors affecting why medical treatment and research proceed the way they do. Nevertheless, one must keep in mind that freshman composition students--most of whom have not been deliberately exposed to medicine, economics, politics, and ethics--have discussed and written themselves to fairly rigorous positions. College composition students have found through their writing that the human being is forgotten in much of today's practicality, and equally as significant, they are asserting the human being into their conception of their world through their writing.

These student writers do not reach such depthful analyses and academic arguments by merely reading articles, listening to lectures, and then writing a formulaic five-paragraph research paper. Key to their ethical practice or practice in ethics (this is practical activity) are their intimate involvement in a community hospital, their subsequent reflection exercises, and a gradually produced and multi-genre ethical argument.

Students in service-learning courses are not volunteers in the generally understood sense. There is much to be said for such civic activities as volunteerism, but service-learning students do not stop there. They serve their community in a more complex, dialectical way. They are asked to read their community as a text inside of a larger context, reaching below socially enforced appearances to the deeper cultural currents that compose the body of our collective life. When a student observes nurses and doctors speaking badly of each other or of patients, she or he begins to glimpse a whole dimension of the medical world that no amount of supposed scientific objectivity can disguise. When a student witnesses an African-American patient's insurance status being greatly scrutinized while a Euro-American patient of comparable socio-economic standing is admitted with nothing more than the usual bureaucratic inconvenience, that student observes firsthand one of the deepest cultural problems in the U.S. A student who realizes that institutions such as hospitals and universities might exploit volunteers and service-learners for economic and academic profit is a student engaging the very conflicted nature of the so-called good in our society: Is one doing good, or is one in service to a system of exchangeable goods? These are just some of the topics service-learning students have brought forward in the last few years.

Student experiences--or practical activities--in the community are anything but removed from academic work--or theoretical practice--in the university, and vice versa. (One might notice the blurring of lines between practical and theoretical activity, which is indicated by mixing terminology. Moreover, we will proceed henceforth with the term "production" in place of "activity" so that a notion of production countervails the typically implied bourgeois usage.) Refocusing on student writing assignments will perhaps demonstrate how theoretical and practical production are not merely interconnected but are interimplicated, to borrow a term from a Lacanian theorist. [9]

What students are asked to do is probably going to again sound rather practical, except of course to students, at least initially. In their journals, students write twenty or more entries. Each entry is supposed to be at least two handwritten pages in length. Approximately one-third of the entries are prompt-driven. These usually consist of reflections on reading, concepts, or class discussion. The other two-thirds of the entries are experience-driven, the majority of which are specifically related to service work at the hospital. Student writers are encouraged to take risks and express "crazy thoughts" in their journals, and they must somehow connect what they observe at the hospital--no matter how mundane it might seem--to the larger socio-cultural context. To use the idiom of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, the journal should be the place where they build constellations. [10] This extensive and ongoing writing activity has proved to build writers' confidence and to assist them in the three formal writing assignments.

The first formal paper is an analysis of an op-ed writer's article on a medical topic of each student's choosing. To prepare for this paper, students study the Socratic process of maieusis, conduct trial analyses in small groups, and practice such analyses in their journals. They judge an argument strictly on its rhetorical merits, avoiding reference to their own or the author's position on the topic at hand. Through this method, the students become sensitive to biases, fallacies, and the like in other people's writing. For the second paper, students write what is popularly called a dialectical argument, based on the format used in the essay portion of the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT): the writer presents binary views concerning the topic, writing each position as "a believer," and then ultimately presents a compromise or produces a new solution. Students thereby encounter the concepts of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Effectively, the so-called synthesis of the second paper becomes the thesis of the third and final paper, which is the standard academic term paper. All three assignments involve some amount of research, so none of the papers is an exercise in Unhindered subjectivity. The papers lead one into the other, demonstrating a graduated approach to argumentative writing and together forming an ethical argument. So, once more, such assignments seem relatively practical, at least as far as pedagogy is concerned.

When bringing into relation their experiences at their service sites, their reflections in twenty-plus journal entries and in class discussions, their analyses of other writers, their research, and their composition of formal writing assignments, something magical for these student writers does seem to occur. Perhaps we should not say "magical"; maybe "illuminating" would be a better term.

On the level of academic writing, students themselves tend to increase the amount of rigor they apply to each assignment, and they begin to enjoy writing. Enjoyment, though, must be qualified: Students have indicated that they feel something akin to what an athlete might experience in a competition. The harder they push themselves, the more euphoric they become. The production of writing is not always comfortable, but it takes them to the brink of something that they did not expect. When it comes to the study of topical medical issues, the students believe they have a stake in the topics they have chosen, and they feel that the political, economic, and cultural forces that intersect in a given topic require closer scrutiny. More significantly, issues are no longer merely issues but are connected to bodies, to human beings.

Finally, on the ethical dimension, writing students have indicated that they become more comfortable with ethics. Most are initially frightened, confused, or indifferent when they find out the course has an ethics focus. Indeed, discussing HMOs seems less daunting to some than discussing morality. This is due in large part to the fact that many students have been raised to believe that ethics is dogma. Some have indicated relief when they discover that ethics, at least in how they are asked to approach it, actually resists dogmatism. Admittedly, others are not pleased at all when they find out that ethical thought might actually raise more questions than it answers, break down more laws than it proffers. During the course, though, students typically come to the conclusion that ethical reasoning or writing through ethics opens up a space for them in what many of them otherwise believe to be a daunting, suffocating, totally colonized, hyper-competitive, and cynical world.

In the pedagogical environment described thus far, the actual teaching and learning occur during the writing process, of which the students quickly take charge. If we scratch below the surface of what seems practical, one finds an arguably impractical but no less educational process. Now, to clarify the view of composition promoted in this course, let us follow the lead of Jean-Franqois Lyotard and broaden the definition of writing to include any deliberate thought event, which is, says Lyotard:

   to question everything including thought, and question, and the
   process. To question requires that something happen that reason has
   not yet known. In thinking, one accepts the occurrence for what it
   is: 'not yet' determined. One does not prejudge it, and there is no
   security. Peregrination in the desert. One cannot write without
   bearing witness to the abyss of time in its coming. [11]

But to honor Hippocrates and his negative and affirmative dialectical thinking, and to better reflect on the conception of writing discussed here, we should adjust Lyotard's thinking a bit, at least as it is reflected in the above passage. The writer is not just bearing witness, which is the negative current of the dialectic, but the writer also enters into the openings of what is not yet, which is the affirmative or positive current. Such sites or events are arguably where one enters into ethics, where life occurs, where the ethical self or subject can emerge. [12] But such moments of production, to reassert the word, are only possible if the human being engages the physical, social, and philosophical material in which she or he is rooted. Only by working through the extant, and recognizing one's place in it, can the ethical subject exceed the extant. This working through requires a diet, regime, or habit of being.

Indeed, when it comes down to it, all a teacher can do in such a context is suggest a diet or regimen. Let us return for a moment to our passage from the Hippocratic Oath. "I will apply dietetic measures for the benefit of [human beings] according to my ability and judgment; I will keep them from harm." [ 13] As noted earlier, Hippocrates writes in such a way that one cannot just adopt outright any of his stated principles. One must wrestle with them and their ambivalent nature. Granted, a doctor--or teacher [14]--will apply or prescribe a certain set of habits: "I will apply dietetic measures for the benefit" of human beings. When we read what first appears to be a straightforward prescription, we are, nevertheless, effectively stopped in our tracks.

Hippocrates' directive in the first clause of the passage seems clear enough. Yet we should not gloss over the latter part of this clause. Any application must not occur without reflecting on one's own applied and speculative knowledge: a person must scrutinize one's own "ability and judgment." Here again, we are reminded of the conflicting attributes of Hippocrates' ethics and, by extension, moral philosophy in general. Before moving on, let us parse the second clause of the tenet. On the one hand, we have what initially seems to be an affirmative movement of the subject, "I will." We nevertheless come immediately to the actual verb, object, and adverbial qualifier of the clause, "keep them from harm." Now we are in the realm of the negative, but even here, the predicate by itself morphs into another case of contradictory semantics: "keep them from harm" becomes another interaction of the positive and negative. As with the statement "Do no harm" in Hippocrates' Epidemics, what seems simple, prescriptive, and normative in the Oath is really anything but simple, prescriptive, and normative, at least not in the sense that some might desire.

Indeed, the physician--or teacher or writer--must follow a dialectical diet or regime in order to best serve her or his patients. If one follows the implications of this analysis of the Oath, neither the doctor nor the patient--neither the teacher nor student, neither the writer nor reader--is or should be in complete control of the situation. Any knowledge and any health can only be obtained through rigorous dialectical processes. Therefore, if we may carry the logic further, ethics, if not life, is a result of techniques [15] that feed into and come out of constant engagement with the self and the other, with the subjective and objective materials flowing in and around us.

This technical view has recently come to the fore greatly because Michel Foucault in his later work called attention to such an ethic or, to use his appellation, technologies of the self. One can see Foucault's deliberate move into moral philosophy in his study of sexual practice, particularly in the second volume of his history of sexuality, The Use of Pleasure. [16] In the books, articles, interviews, and lectures of his later years, Foucault focuses more and more on a re-envisioned, non-aristocratic, and positive askesis that defies the forms of asceticism emerging near the end of classical Greece and Rome and throughout Christian history. [17] From a Nietzschean perspective, he revisits the ethical concepts and practices of such classical thinkers as the Socratics, Aristotle, the Sophists, as well as Seneca and the Stoics. He does this not to recover them but to work through what the ancients did in order to understand what worked and what did not, to engage the present, and most importantly, to construct or compose subjectivity. Of particular interest is the value that Foucault finds in and places on writing as one of the primary technologies of the self. He is drawn to a production of the ethical self through hupomnemata.

Classical thinkers often conducted the process of hupomnemata, which today might be compared to composing a commonplace book. In such writing, a person would record memorable ideas, passages, or comments he or she had read or heard. This process, though, was not simply a matter of copying or regurgitating information; in fact, the procedure was supposed to transform both the person writing such passages and the materials encountered. As a consequence, the learner emerged through but exceeded what was studied, and the student reengaged with her- or himself. What the ancients were up to is instructive; nonetheless, the ancient modes of production are only part of the historical or material fabric through which we as selves arise or are produced. Our emergence or production consequently opens up history, adds to it, reconnects to it, and exceeds it time and time again. All told, the ethic described here is probably impractical, immoral, and even evil, which arguably makes it all the more ethical and educable. This is not a cavalier celebration of heterogeneity; nor is this a bourgeois-liberal case that epicurean atomism or radical relativism is sacred. (A deeper awareness of and a dialectical interaction between heteronomy and autonomy are nonetheless useful.) Indeed, nothing but a rigorous ethical attitude has been espoused here, even if what has been presented is not a coherent, easily exchangeable ethical code or moral good.

Ethics, as alluded, is a genre of human production that is integrally situated in history, politics, economics, and culture, but it does not accept the given as given, the given as predetermined, or the given as final. Ethics is a technique of entering into the multifarious, often contradictory currents of human existence, locating intersections and gaps in that living textile, and emerging through it. Such an ethical attitude has very little interest in perpetuating contradictions, such as interior-exterior, practical-theoretical, academic-civic, subject-object, mind-body, and so forth. Yes, the contradictions do provide dialectical energy, and they will probably always exist; nevertheless, contrary to what some interested in mainstream moral philosophy, politics, and education might demand, the aporias of the human condition do not necessitate elision or foreclosure of ambivalence in the name of practicality, efficiency, and performativity.

As our close reading of the third section of the Hippocratic Oath demonstrated, the materialization of the ethical moment and the human being transpires as a result of entering into and learning from the contradictory impulses circulating in and around us. Such is also, by the way, what effective service-learning curricula show us time and time again. Medicine, the Hippocratic Oath, and writing in their purview remind us how the hard work of reflective production is indispensable for human health, broadly defined. Moreover, what the medicinal arts, Hippocrates, and ethical composition show us--whether in the classroom, in the operating room, or on the sidewalk--is that human life is not a matter of bringing together theory and practice but is a matter of composing ourselves from their vital interactions and amalgamations. At least this is what service-learning students have demonstrated in this course.

Epilogue

How might one measure the success of eight sections of the course discussed and of service-learning in general? Exceeding any easily quantifiable result is the fact that most of the students in the course have demonstrated through their writing that they are increasingly confident writers and that their writing is directly connected to their lives (professional and private) and to the world. Nevertheless, there are apparently three distinct, somewhat quantitative indicators. First, students in the course have received recognition at the university level, and one received an award for her performance in this course and the service-learning program at LSU. The community partner and instructor have also received such awards. However, awards are typically superficial markers of success. The second, more substantial, and student-driven indicator comes through anonymous course evaluations. The majority of students--many of whom entered the course either frightened of or indifferent to writing--have expressed a heightened interest in writing and a sense of empowerment as writers. They have also indicated that having a thematic focus--which is frequently directly or indirectly related to the students' disciplines--promotes better, more depthful writing. Since teaching this course, the instructor has reached a similar conclusion: student writing is more thoughtful, better researched, and better written in general. Further, students find that otherwise difficult course materials and cultural issues are easier to manage in a focused service-learning environment. Exposure to real-world scenarios and extensive discussion and reflection seem to contribute to this sense of ease. Third, former students have recommended the course to others, have gone on to take other service-learning courses, and have continued to volunteer in their communities, particularly in medical facilities. Some former students have also decided whether or not they will pursue a medical profession because of this course, which is one of the only non-science pre-med courses on campus.

There are, though, problems that the instructor and learning institutions should keep in mind. According to the ethic described above, service-learning courses should not become static--they must adjust to the needs of the students and the community. When the course elaborated here first began, it sometimes proved overwhelming to both the students and the teacher. It was tempting to want to do too much at once; this is why the present instructor, through trial and error, has narrowed even further the focus of the course, has tied writing assignments more tightly to the service performed, and has constructed the writing assignments so that they build on and bleed into one another. To be even more frank, this instructor has grown more attached to the described ethic as a consequence of confronting previous problems in the course. The reading for the course has been dramatically reduced to a small rhetoric, one major philosophical article, and a limited amount of small articles from journals and popular periodicals: Hugh Mercer Curtler's Ethical Argument, [18] Harold Schweizer's "To Give Suffering a Language,"[19] opinion columns in newspapers and magazines, and a few small articles from medical publications, such as the Journal of the American Medical Association and the British Medical Journal. As a consequence of curtailing assigned readings and lectures, argumentative writing is no longer just the subject of the course but has effectively become, through its direct connection with service, the predominant mode of instruction. The success of this service-learning course therefore depends on the integrality and flexibility of the subject matter, teacher, and students.

References

[1] Hippocrates (circa 450-350 B.C.). The Hippocratic Oath, The Hippocratic Oath: Text, Translation, and Interpretation, ed. Ludwig Edelstein, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1943).

[2] Hippocrates (circa 450-350 B.C.). Epidemics 1 and III Hippocrates, Volume I, Trans. W. H. S. Jones, (Cambridge, Mass. and London, England: Harvard UP, 1995), p. 165.

[3] This is the argument Theodor W. Adorno makes concerning Immanuel Kant's moral philosophy and moral philosophy in general: Adomo, Theodor W. (1963). Problems of Moral Philosophy, ed. Thomas Schr0der, trans. Rodney Livingstone, (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001).

[4] Zlotkowski, Edward (1999). "Pedagogy and Engagement," Colleges and Universities as Citizens, eds. Robert G. Bringle, et. al (Boston: Allyn and Bacon), pp. 104-105.

[5] Immediately coming to mind are the following: Hume, David (1748). An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Tom L Beauchamp (Oxford, England: Oxford LIP, 1999). Nietzsche, Friedrich (1886). Beyond Good and Evil, Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1992), pp. 1912,35. Derrida, Jacques (1972-88). Limited Inc, ed. Gerald Graft, trans. Samuel Weber et al (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern UP).

[6] Lyotard, Jean-Francois (1979). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984).

[7] Nietzsche. Adorno, Tbeodor W. (1951). Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London and New York: Verso, 1974).

Lacan, Jacques (1959-1960). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 19591960, trans. Dennis Porter, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: Norton, 1992), chapter 24.

[8] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels themselves did not neglect the emancipatory power and inspired force of the bourgeoisie, characteristics which to a Marxist make countering bourgeois production and value systems all the more challenging and necessary. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels (1848-1893). The Communist Manifesto, trans. Samuel Moore (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1964).

[9] Felman, Shoshana (1987). Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight: Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture (Cambridge, Mass. and London, England: Harvard LIP, 1987), p. 49.

[10] Adorao, Theodor W. (1970). Aesthetic Theory, trans, and ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: U of Minnnsota P, 1997). Benjamin, Walter (1927-1940). The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass. and London, England: Belknap, 1999).

[11] Lyotard, Jean-Francois (1988). "Time Today," The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991), p. 74.

[12] I owe much to Alain Badiou when it comes to this affirmative modification to negative dialectics: Badiou, Alain (1998). Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hanward (London and New York: Verso, 2001). Badiou, Alain (1997). "The Political Procedure of Truth," trans. Barbara P. Fulks, Lacanian Ink, 19, pp. 71-81.

[13] I must note at this point that I am Nietzschean enough and Deleuzean enough not to promote a culture of sickness, so I replace "the sick" in the Oath with "human beings." Friedrich Nietzsche bemoans the fact that bourgeois culture privileges, if not celebrates, sickness as its moral foundation: Nietzsche (1887). On the Genealogy of Morals, Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1992), pp. 449-599. Like Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari challenge the wholesale acceptance of and dependence on neurosis in much of Western culture: Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari (1972). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley et al (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983). Deleaze and Guattari (1980). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987). See also Foucault, Michel (1973). Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon).

[14] One should keep in mind that our current usage of the term "doctor" is an etymological derivative of the Latin words for teaching and learning: "doctor" and "docere," respectively.

[15] Employing the word technology is an estranging and therefore resistant move. The use of a term popularly associated with machinery and objectivity to study human formation seems to deny humans their vitality and subjectivity. However, as Lyotard finds in the etymology of the word, technique--even at the microbiotic level--is dialectical and perhaps revolutionary. Lyotard writes: "It is perfectly possible to say that the living cell, and the organism with its organs, are [sic] already tekhnai, that 'life', as they say, is already technique ... The history of life on earth cannot be assimilated to the history of technique in the common sense, because it has not proceeded by remembering but by breaching." one should take Lyotard's extremely applicable point; nevertheless, his logic seems a little off, dialectically speaking. Breaching would entail some consciousness of the what-has-been. So, with this minor adjustment (which Lyotard himself effectively makes elsewhere throughout his oeuvre) one may incorporate his insight and proceed. Lyotard (1986). "Logos, Techae, or Telegraphy," The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford LIP, 1991), 52.

[16] Foucault (1984). The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990).

[17] Foucault (1954-84). Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley et al (New York: New York P, 1997), pp. 109-328.

[18] Curtler, Hugh Mercer (1992). Ethical Argument: Critical Thinking in Ethics (St. Paul: Paragon).

[19] Schweizer, Harold (1995). To Give Suffering a Language. Literature and Medicine, 14(2), 210-221.

Benjamin G. Lanier-Nabors, Luisiana State University

Lanier-Nabors is a doctoral candidate and teacher. His concentrations are ethics, rhetoric, epistemology, postmodernism, and contemporary Scottish literature.