Language's Inadequacies

[kamdong]

Landslide

“But the Tuvel affair raises issues that go beyond the controversial notion of transracialism. First, it invites reflection on what might be called “epistemological insiderism.” This is the belief that identity qualifies or disqualifies one from writing with legitimacy and authority about a particular topic. Few would argue directly that who we are should govern what we study. But subtler forms of epistemological insiderism are at work in the practice of assessing scholarly arguments with central reference to the identity of the author. Does the often-mentioned fact that Dr. Tuvel is white and cisgender (as am I) disqualify her from raising certain questions? Is her identity relevant to assessing her argument for according more weight to an individual’s racial self-identification and less weight to ancestry?”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/18/opinion/the-uproar-over-transracialism.html

[kamdong]

“To this day, it’s a peculiar trait of Leechfield citizenry that your greatest weakness will get picked at in the crudest local parlance...In fact, the worse an event is for you, the more brutally clear will be the talk about it...The theory behind it held that not mentioning a painful episode in the meanest terms was a way of pretending that the misery of it didn’t exist.  Ignoring such misery, then, was equal to lying about it.  Such a lie was viewed as more cruel, even, than the sad truth, because it somehow  shunned or excluded the person in pain (i.e. in the above case, the Ambusher’s daddy) from everybody else...So neighbor kids talked to me in language meant to toughen me to the cold facts of my life.” - pg. 159, Mary Karr, The Liar’s Club

[kamdong]

Burning House

“Given the nature of our story, I know the words that inevitably accompany it — victim, rapist — and labels are a way to organize concepts, but they can also be dehumanizing in their connotations. Once someone's been deemed a victim, it's that much easier to file them away as someone damaged, dishonored, less than. And likewise, once someone has been branded a rapist, it's that much easier to call him a monster — inhuman. But how will we understand what it is in human societies that produces violence if we refuse to recognize the humanity of those who commit it? And how can we empower survivors if we're making them feel less than? How can we discuss solutions to one of the biggest threats to the lives of women and children around the world, if the very words we use are part of the problem?”

- TedxTalk: Our Story of Rape and Reconciliation

[kamdong]

Cheap Thrills

“For what kind of world is it in which disenfranchisement is accepted as a necessary way of life?  I want to suggest that such ordinary ways of thinking limit our own political imaginations... To say that gender is performative is to say that it is a certain kind of enactment.  The appearance of gender is often mistaken as a sign of its inherent truth.  Gender is prompted by obligatory norms that we materialize in our daily life, or we fail to materialize in our daily life, or we materialize in ways that we weren’t exactly supposed to do.  But those obligatory norms demand that we become one gender or another usually within a strictly binary frame.  The reproduction of gender is thus always a negotiation with this norm, this obligation, this exercise of power.  There is no gender without the reproduction of norms that risk undoing or redoing the norm in unexpected ways, opening up the possibility of a re-making of gendered reality along new lines.  The political aspiration of this analysis is found in the call to let the lives of gender and sexual minorities become more possible and more livable for bodies who are gender non-confirming as well as those who conform too well and at a high cost, to be able, as I have said, to breathe and move in public and private spaces, as well as all the sites that cross those two.” - Judith Butler 

[kamdong]

Undeniable

“The irony is that many feminist theorists want to attend to the particular, to the specific situations and cases.  But they also think they need to build a general theory of identity, gender, or femininity (or language, or power, or affects, or matter) to get there.  Usually the purpose is to establish a complex understanding of identity, one that aims to subsume all possible kinds of identities under itself...

I am questioning the underlying picture of theory that generates...the idea that feminist theory needs a high-level, all-inclusive theory of identity before it can get going.  As if feminist theory was to settle the question of (female) identity once and for all, in general in the abstract.  As if the right theory could guarantee the right politics, the right feminist understanding of the specific case...As if our understanding of identity doesn’t emerge from and rely on careful attention to the particular case.  As if identity is always a problem, always the problem, that must be settled before feminists can say or do anything.  Why do we think that feminist politics requires a theory of identity in the first place?  What notion of politics makes us think that identity, rather than action (what we are, rather than what we do) is always the key feminist problem?  In short: what is the question to which identity is the answer?

I am in favor of investigating identity when it becomes a problem for us, when we experience a confusion, when our categories seem to fail in the encounter with concrete and specific identities or situations”

A feminist inspired by ordinary language philosophy would be unlikely to set out to theorize “intersectionality” or “identity” as such.  Instead, she wold focus on a specific problem that troubles and confuses her, maybe my looking at some examples.  The work of theory would be an effort to reach clarity - to find a clear view  - of that problem...it requires the particular case.

We can’t solve political disagreements by focusing exclusively on definitions.”

- Toril Moi, “Thinking Through Examples: What Ordinary Language Philosophy Can Do for Feminist Theory”

[kamdong]

Middle of a Memory

“He renamed everything around him to snub the world and show there were other ways of seeing and calling things and that everything had to go through baptismal fire to be cleansed of all cant and pieties before he’d let them into his world.  It was his way of reinventing the world in his own image, or in the image of what he wanted the world to be - his way of taking this cold, inhospitable, ersatz, shallow town and bringing it down a few a few notches to see it turn into a kinder, more intimate, more complicit, sunnier place that would open up a secret passageway for him and ultimately yield to him with a smile..He defaced the world by applying improvised monikers, leaving his fingerprint on everything he touched in the hope that the world might one day seek the hand that had left such deep scuff marks at its door and pull him in saying, “You’ve knocked long enough.  Come in, you belong here.”

- pg. 127, Harvard Square, Andre Aciman

[kamdong]

Life Goes On

“That’s what de-construction is about, right? It’s not just destruction. It’s also construction. It’s critical intimacy, not critical distance. So you actually speak from inside. That’s deconstruction...

[There is part of deconstruction that says] you do not accuse what you are deconstructing. You enter it. Remember that critical intimacy? And you locate a moment where the text teaches you how to turn it around and use it.”

- Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak 

[kamdong]

Strip it Down

What would it mean to “master” a term?  We have not mastered any words; rather, language structures reality while also giving language-users the capacity to construct reality. 

“To question a term, a term like feminism, is to ask how it plays, what investments it bears, what aims it achieves, what alterations it undergoes.  The changeable life of that term does not preclude its use.  If a term becomes questionable, does that mean it cannot be used any longer, and that we can only use terms that we already know how to master?  Why is it that posing a question about a term is considered the same as effecting a prohibition against its use?  Why is it that we sometimes feel that if a term is dislodged from its foundational place, we will not be able to live, to survive, to use language, to speak for ourselves?  What kind of guarantee does the foundational fix exercise, and what sort of terror does it forestall?  Is it that in the foundational mode, terms are assumed, terms like subject and universality, and the sense in which they ‘must’ be assumed is a moral one, taking the form of an imperative, and like some moral interdictions, a defense against what terrifies us most?  Are we not paralyzed by a kind of moral compulsion that keeps us from interrogating the terms, taking the risk of living the terms that we keep in question?”

- Judith Butler, “The End of Sexual Difference?,” Undoing Gender

[kamdong]

Raised On It

Excerpts from Menon’s introduction to Indifference to Difference:

Identity as bondage?

“It has been pointed out commonly that identity can be exclusionary of those who are outside its scope; those who are - or who are taken to be - in no way affiliated.  You don’t belong, you don’t meet the conditions or criteria of belonging so we are going to keep you out.  What is less observed is that identity can also be a bondage within.  It can keep people in who don’t want to be in.  And it can do so by insisting on an essential racial character, or simply be requiring racial solidarity” (Goldberg in Menon 4).

A process of unknowing:

“...Indifference is not about heartlessness or ignorance.  Rather, it names an anti-ontological state of being that would acknowledge and embody difference without becoming that difference...We will be able to encounter, for instance, a woman without already knowing what it means for her to be a woman and already assuming that she wants to belong to any definition of ‘woman’ with which we have already been supplied” (Menon 14).

We are necessarily fragmented:

“Everything is queer because no-thing - peoples, events, desires - can achieve ontological wholeness” (Menon 19).

[kamdong]

Orange Sky

“I think Anita Allen was right, for example, when she said that it’s up philosophy to prove that it has something to offer Black women, rather than up to black women to prove they can fit into philosophy as it currently is.”

- Elizabeth Barnes

https://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/2015/11/23/interview-with-elizabeth-barnes/

[kamdong]

[kamdong]

Take Your Time

Choice can be a problem; freedom can be a problem.  

“In practice, though, companies that have instituted unlimited vacation often find that employees end up taking less time off than they did when they had well-defined vacation allowances. What's more, employees feel guilty for the time they do take off. When you add in the resentment that parents often face - or fear facing—when they take time off or embrace a flexible schedule to tend to their families, unlimited parental leave could make life more stressful for new parents. If that new mom down the hall came back full-time after only six weeks of leave, will you look like a slacker if you take four months and ramp back up with a three-day-a-week schedule?”

[kamdong]

Riptide

“Each of us has the power to create reasons...

When you think about it, it's nuts to believe that the reasons given to you dictated that you had most reason to pursue the exact hobbies you do, to live in the exact house you do, to work at the exact job you do. Instead, you faced alternatives that were on a par — hard choices — and you made reasons for yourself to choose that hobby, that house and that job. When alternatives are on a par, the reasons given to us, the ones that determine whether we're making a mistake, are silent as to what to do. It's here, in the space of hard choices, that we get to exercise our normative power, the power to create reasons for yourself, to make yourself into the kind of person for whom country living is preferable to the urban life.

When we choose between options that are on a par, we can do something really rather remarkable. We can put our very selves behind an option. Here's where I stand. Here's who I am. I am for banking. I am for chocolate donuts. This response in hard choices is a rational response, but it's not dictated by reasons given to us. Rather, it's supported by reasons created by us. When we create reasons for ourselves to become this kind of person rather than that, we wholeheartedly become the people that we are. You might say that we become the authors of our own lives.”

- Ruth Chang, “How to Make Hard Choices”

(https://www.ted.com/talks/ruth_chang_how_to_make_hard_choices#t-588325)

[kamdong]

Summertime Sadness

"I distrust summaries, any kind of gliding through time, any too great a claim that one is in control of what one recounts; I think someone who claims to understand but is obviously calm, someone who claims to write with emotion recollected in tranquility, is a fool and a liar.  To understand is to tremble.  To recollect is to re-enter and be riven... I admire the authority of being one's knees in front of the event.

- Harold Brodkey, "Manipulations," qtd. in Into Thin Air

[kamdong]

Say Something, I'm Giving Up on You

"'READ TO LEARN,' the sign on the wall advised in December.  I privately wondered: What was the connection between reading and learning?  Did one learn something only by reading it?  Was an idea only an idea if it could be written down?"

"What did I see in my books?  I had the idea that they were crucial for my academic success, though I couldn't have said exactly how or why.  In the sixth grade I simply concluded that what gave a book its value was some major theme or idea it contained.  It that core essence could be mined and memorized, I would become learned like my teachers.  I decided to record in a notebook themes of the books that I read.  After reading Robinson Crusoe, I wrote that its theme was 'the value of learning to live by oneself.'  When I completed Wuthering Heights, I noted the danger of 'letting emotions get out of control.'  Rereading these brief moralistic appraisals usually left me disheartened.  I couldn't believe that the were really the source of reading's value..."

"Merely bookish, I [the scholarship boy] lacked a point of view when I read...  [The scholarship boy] will not not let his critics forget their own change.  He ends up too much like them.  When he speaks, they hear themselves echoed."

"A professional, I knew exactly how to search a book for pertinent information.  I could quickly assess and summarize the usability of the many books I consulted.  But whenever I started to write, I knew too much (and not enough) to be able to write anything but sentences that were overly cautious, timid, strained brittle under the heavy weight of footnotes and qualifications.  I seemed unable to dare a passionate statement.  I felt draw by professionalism to the edge of sterility, capable of no more than pedantic, lifeless, unassailable prose."

- "The Achievement of Desire," Richard Rodriguez

[kamdong]

Blurred Lines

The lyrics to pop-songs are finally being taken seriously and listened to:

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/nov/13/blurred-lines-most-controversial-song-decade

AND 

This is a fascinating, productive project: http://everydaysexism.com/

[kamdong]

Nothing Left to Lose

"My jaw throbbed.  Rubbing it with my hand seemed to have no good or bad effect: the pain was deep and untouchable.  Because the pain was genuinely unanticipated, there was no residue of anxiety to alter my experience of it.  Anxiety and anticipation, I was to learn, are the essential ingredients in suffering from pain, as opposed to feeling pain pure and simple.  This alien ache was probably my first and last experience unadulterated pain, which perplexed me more than it hurt me."

- pg 16, Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face

How much suffering is in our head?