Places of Entry

Reading the prompt, I've had trouble seeing the connections between our critical readings and Daniel's "Public Secrets." I felt that my initial wonderment--caused by the exposure of my complete ignorance of the public perception of prison systems--placed me directly inside the content, outside a critical perspective. Without being more familiar with the structure of the prison system, why it's set up as it is, what is the general public perception, I found myself completely enveloped by the prisoners' stories. This is has prompted me to attempt to answer our third question for today on the essay's interpretability. What are the tropes that stand out in the essay that cue the reader to viewing it as a critique?

After clicking on "Inside/Outside", stylized quotations pop up on the screen: "I was in beauty pageants, I was a ballet dancer..and then I just made a mess of my life" and "I guess I wasn't worthy of protecting" and "I knew I was diabetic prior to being institutionalized." These quotations pull out common places, topoi shared among large audiences, from very personal accounts of how these topics work in the environment of the prison. We come to the topoi with our perspectives and expectations--constructed by our positions in society on the outside--of what might be discussed. I believe this speaks closely to Miller.

Miller claims, "recurrence is an intersubjective phenonmenon, a social occurrence, and cannot be understood on materialist terms." (Miller 156). In other words, what we note as recurring throughout works is based largely on how we interpret society, and our methods of interpreting society is largely based on Burke's idea that interpretation derives from " the cultural group into which we are born." It reminds me of Mitchell's use of the cube picture. The way we saw the cube changed depending on how we conceptualized ourselves in viewing the cube. We, as the audience, are not actually standing in different positions looking at the cube, but we create imagined selves to orient around differing imagined places around the cube. We project ourselves through an entry point, the simple concept of an observable cube (the common place), into new spaces. In regards to Miller, that entry point is our concept of self created by our positions in society. We may have to enter a work from that perspective, but the work can re-position that self to new places (therefore creating new societies) . 


The entry point for Daniel's essay are appeals to the body (diabetes) and supposed inalienable rights ("...worthy of protecting"). This appeal to rights strongly highlights the essay as a social critique. She is directly appealing to the audience's knowing of their own places and rights within society. The audience comes to the essay with certain expectations of society, which they have collected from typification. In elementary and middle school, we study our rights e.g. "freedom of speech", and these rights become types observable in performances throughout society. Daniel assumes an audience that will be familiar with these kinds of topoi. She desires this audience, with very specific societal positions, in order to deconstruct their expectations. Her goals are to provide an entry into the prisoners' comments through the audience's idea that they exist in a stable society, which is determined based on the similarity among interpretations of common places (e.g. diabetes works the same across all classes of society) and then deconstruct that stability. 


It's similar to Killingsworth's concepts on irony. Irony takes on the guise of the subject they wish to critique in order to show its wrongness. Daniel relies on the audience having an identity that has been constructed in the stable society she wishes to argue against. To do so, she first has to take on the guise of that stability through the common and recurring instances which supposedly evidence stability.