First of all, my curiosity about the CAA document has been properly piqued. I hope your analysis won't be relegated entirely to the ethereal space of your f2f defense! Maybe this is something we can bring up Wednesday night during HoopsMOO (8 p.m. EST at MediaMOO, mediamoo.media.mit..edu 8888). Is CAA's statement on the web?
Regarding the substance of your argument here, I am, as usual, torn between admiration for your judicious and politically astute rhetorical analysis and fear that if let it guide our actions we're somehow complicitous in our own subsumption into a system that is, well, not on our side! What I mean is, identifying and employing the topoi of T/P involves a concession to the discourse of the established order. You argue persuasively that we need to be able to recognize and converse in that discourse if we want to be recognized and accepted by it, if we want to turn the light of its authority upon ourselves that we might bask a bit.
Granted. You're right.
But at what cost? Are there other options worth exploring? And wouldn't your rhetorical analysis be just as important to more blatantly subversive (or extrinsic?) efforts? I guess I worry that the power and sense of your argument is subtly dangerous to its own end, if that end is seen as acquiring legitimacy for new forms of scholarship rather than constraining new forms by old conceptions of value.
Can we use the discourse of the master without being mastered?
If we concede that T/P discourses must be employed in order to appease Power, can we sustain the assertion that this concession serves us? or does it serve primarily the established authority structure?
I dunno. It's late. I'm not thinking straight. but these questions nag me whenever we get on the subject of T/P. I'll try again tomorrow to say something useful about this.