acase@tulane.edu

In the lead up to the 2011 official U.S. State Department decision on the proposed Keystone XL pipeline--running from the Alberta, Canada Tar Sands to the Gulf of Mexico--the Department held nine public meetings in Fall 2011 in the six U.S. states through which the proposed Keystone XL pipeline project would pass (the Department rejected the proposal; however, a new proposal is under consideration as of this writing). The transcripts of these public meetings are publicly accessible. Understanding the pipeline as a project of trans-national trade and the global circulation of petrochemicals--including global emissions of carbon dioxide--this paper hones in on one region within one U.S. state: the Nebraskan Sandhills, a cattle ranching region of grass-stabilized sand dunes and inter-dunal valleys stretching 20,000-square miles across the north-central part of the state, under which rests a vast hydrological network, including the largest freshwater aquifer in the world - the Ogallala Aquifer. This essay argues that we can read the Public Comments as a form of poetic expression, paying attention to the ways the State Department transcription process formatted the oral testimonies into an "official" and sanctioned public document -- instituting line-breaks and other syntactical procedures. Using the tools of literary-critical analysis, this paper makes a case that we can read the Comments as a form of documentary poetry - in the tradition of such American modernist poets as Charles Reznikoff, Muriel Rukeyser, and George Oppen - that explore ecological questions while experimenting with lyric structures. The Comments reveal competing environmental stakeholders' stances - on such topics as Prairie systems ecology and the neoliberal economics of private-public capital markets. In doing so, they subsequently express citizens' various understandings of themselves in relation to landscape, ecology, technology, and geo-politics.

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This thesis is centrally concerned with the texts of Jacques Derrida that have addressed directly the theme of sexual difference. Yet to say the thesis is centrally concerned with a philosophy that positions itself clearly as one that deconstructs centrality and its trajectory of return, is to face the crisis or chiasmus of my concern. The thesis is not returned to Derrida. If the question of feminism for Derrida is a question from the margins, from interruptions, of the trace and of la cendre, ashes, the question of sexual difference is primordially and originarily that of the undecidability of the name, signatory, and textual border. She would not have appeared here. Therefore she cannot return. There are two frames to this research that can be recognized in the chapter sequence of the thesis. Initially I develop a preparatory engagement to a questioning of the ontology of sexual difference, with Chapters 2 and 3, with a questioning that broaches the metaphysics of the feminine with respect to the texts of Derrida, Heidegger and Cixous in particular and further engages with Écriture Féminine, Levinas and feminist responses to Heidegger and Levinas. However, this broader questioning is undertaken in order to develop a sharper focus on the writings of Derrida that address Heidegger’s ontological difference, Levinas’s ethics before being, and a more originary questioning of sexual difference. The second frame and predominant focus of the thesis is on Derrida’s approach to the metaphysics of the feminine with four pivotal texts by Derrida from the late 1970s and early 1980s examined in Chapters 4 to 7. Each addresses a questioning of difference and the metaphysical tradition, under difference’s many names: ontological difference, sexual difference, différance, and engages deconstruction’s encounters with Nietzsche & Heidegger (Spurs); the psychoanalysts Abraham & Torok (“Fors”); Levinas (“At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am”) and Hegel (Glas). In bringing together these four texts, my aim is to emphasize the significance of a double deconstructive movement of transgression and restoration, as this research’s politico-ethical acts of writing and reading for an otherwise discourse on sexual difference. This otherwise discourse has always already been produced with phallogocentrism and remains critical for the inventing of thresholds across philosophy, literature and their others. The ashen Preface enkindles a paradigmatic figure as deconstructive trace of sexual difference in writing and reading practices. A Postscript questions the binding to institutional laws constitutive of disciplinary practice while the fiery trace in Derrida’s writing on Kafka’s law concludes on the ash-laden edges of Blanchot’s unavowable work.

<p>The phenomenology of Gaston Bachelard holds that readers, or viewers, relate to spatial imagery through the use of age-old archetypes. These archetypes form a collective image-memory that is employed when reading space. One such image is the house. The house for Bachelard is, however, never solely an image, but constitutes a familiar space that becomes inscribed in our bodies through the repeated physical contact with this domestic space. The house teaches us to interact with space, and comes to inform the way that human beings understand images of space. Spatial imagery can be conceptualized both as embodied, lived experience and as semiotic sign. The aim is to investigate the idea of a collective image-base, and in what way the universality of these images relates to the individual conditions of each meeting with images of space. The object of study here is also to survey the ways that images of space transgress the borders between bodily experience and abstract sign, between the individually specific and the universal, as well as between actual space and represented space.</p>

<p>How does action turn [into a] substantive and, if it does, how does it turn into action again to perdure or even change?</p><p>In this endeavor I set out to study organizing and organization by asking myself how organizing becomes a product called organization and how that product turns into the very organizing whence it once was spawned. In other words, I set out to study what I denominate the movements between organizing and organization. To that end a play is put in motion in which actors act and make representations which are subsequently interpreted poetically and rhetorically. This in order to create a stage of evidence from which the movements between organizing and organization can be derived.</p><p>The imagination put forth consists of two movements, which I dub instantiation and concatenation. These I relate to the motions embodied by metaphor and metonymy and later conflate them into one and the same movement of organizing in the wor[l]d within which materials through their play against each other are gathered to create more or less stable products. These products may be called organizations.</p><p>In a way, this is an attempt to study the makings of organization by way of a passage into it.</p>

This study examines how teaching is interactionally accomplished within a vocational program for students studying to become electricians. The data is drawn from video recordings of classroom lectures as well as hands-on instructions at construction work sites. The analysis of the classroom explores how the students exploit poetics and sequential structures of language including especially the Initiative-Response-Evaluation sequence tosupport, challenge or undermine teaching and to build alliances with or against peers. The analysis of the construction work sites focusses on how the teacher and the students use multimodal resources to create situations for teaching and learning. The analysis of the classroom focusses on how students launch different initiatives that compete with the instructional activities in the classroom. These initiatives emerge from and reveal the broad meaning potential inherent in linguistic forms. The analysis shows how structures and roles that are constitutive of the classroom as well as the emergent professional identity of the electrician provide resources for maintaining, challenging or even dissolving instruction.The analysis of the construction work site shows how artefacts, postures, talk, and spatial configurations are handled in relation to place, mobility, and action. In stark contrast with the classroom, students at the construction site compete for the teacher's attention and assistance. The analysis includes descriptions of collaborative moments between the teacher and the students as well situations where the teacher is interrupted and challenged by the students. Three frames are deployed to convey meaning, a professional, a mundane, and an educational. The professional frame involves higher or lesser degrees of manifested professional visions on part of the teacher as well the students. The mundane frame is characterized by playfulness which in turn can jeopardize the professional agenda. Instructions provide a tool for re-establishing an instructional setting where work related tasks can be executed.

How does action turn [into a] substantive and, if it does, how does it turn into action again to perdure or even change? In this endeavor I set out to study organizing and organization by asking myself how organizing becomes a product called organization and how that product turns into the very organizing whence it once was spawned. In other words, I set out to study what I denominate the movements between organizing and organization. To that end a play is put in motion in which actors act and make representations which are subsequently interpreted poetically and rhetorically. This in order to create a stage of evidence from which the movements between organizing and organization can be derived. The imagination put forth consists of two movements, which I dub instantiation and concatenation. These I relate to the motions embodied by metaphor and metonymy and later conflate them into one and the same movement of organizing in the wor[l]d within which materials through their play against each other are gathered to create more or less stable products. These products may be called organizations. In a way, this is an attempt to study the makings of organization by way of a passage into it.

The phenomenology of Gaston Bachelard holds that readers, or viewers, relate to spatial imagery through the use of age-old archetypes. These archetypes form a collective image-memory that is employed when reading space. One such image is the house. The house for Bachelard is, however, never solely an image, but constitutes a familiar space that becomes inscribed in our bodies through the repeated physical contact with this domestic space. The house teaches us to interact with space, and comes to inform the way that human beings understand images of space. Spatial imagery can be conceptualized both as embodied, lived experience and as semiotic sign. The aim is to investigate the idea of a collective image-base, and in what way the universality of these images relates to the individual conditions of each meeting with images of space. The object of study here is also to survey the ways that images of space transgress the borders between bodily experience and abstract sign, between the individually specific and the universal, as well as between actual space and represented space.