#janet halley

[sisididis]

There’s this quote by author Janet Halley that goes “the line between prophetess and madwoman is very thin and constantly moving,” and although it speaks of how women must go to greater lengths than men to earn their credibility, it always makes me think of Elain.  

“The line between prophetess and madwoman is very thin.”

[wgs285f18]

Images: Image of slide show and white board from October 10, 2018. Link to slides: HERE

[kaylievezina]

[whinyidiot]

So what is the value of critique, and why should the left in particular cherish it both intellectually and politically? Critique offers possibilities of analyzing existing discourses of power to understand how subjects are fabricated or positioned by them, what powers they secure..., what assumptions they naturalize, what privileges they fix, what norms they mobilize, and what or whom these norms exclude... Let us admit forthrightly, however, that critique does not guarantee political outcomes, let alone political resolutions. Yet, rather than apologize for this aspect of critique, why not affirm it?... Indeed, one of our worries about legalism pertains to its impulse to call the question too peremptorily... Surely we should not disavow a left critique of the tensions and contradictions in affirmative action simply because that critiques does not deliver in advance a blueprint or set of strategies for achieving racial, gender, or class justice in America. Not knowing what a critique will yield is not the same as suspending all political values while engaged in critique. It is possible to care passionately about offering richer educational opportunities to those historically excluded from them while subjecting to ruthless critique the institutional and discursive practices that have thus far organized that aim... And even if critique reveals problematics that shake those commitments... the resulting disorientation remains deeply political. and so, although political commitments may constitute both the incitement to criticize and the sustaining impulse of it, these commitments themselves will almost inevitably change their shape in the course of its undertaking. Critique is worth nothing if it does not bring the very terms of such commitments under scrutiny, if it does not transform its content and the discourse in which it was advanced.

from the introduction to Left Legalism / Left Critique, by Wendy Brown and Janet Halley

[countererotics]

Split Decisions (ii): Convergentism and intersectionality

Is feminism obliged to produce a global account of social reality? For Janet Halley, the possibility of entertaining such an obligation, and so working to reconcile feminist insights and truth claims with the insights and truth claims of other radical movements, should always be considered alongside a second possibility: that of allowing that there may be situations in which feminist analysis can only go so far. "Taking a break from feminism", in this context, means identifying boundary conditions, break points beyond which the feminist axiomatic (m / f, m > f, and "carrying a brief for" f) is no longer able to name and take hold of the kernel of the situation. A "split decision", indeed, is one in which the axiomatic-feminist response to some situation must coexist with a non-feminist (if not anti-feminist) response, one oriented by a different set of preoccupations and employing different analytic instruments. (The obvious example here is queer theory, whose history of differences with feminism Halley tracks through an avowedly tendentious and characteristically illuminating account).

For Halley, such moments of "splitting" are essential to her own erotics of thinking: the point at which narratives fail to converge, to intersect cleanly, is experienced as a kind of productive confusion, a moment of suspension and disorientation in which new ways of linking one narrative to another must be found. These moments Halley identifies as "postmodern" in their demand for an irregular, creative and perhaps logically precarious response. When a split decision arises, we enter the territory of what Lyotard calls "legitimation by paralogy", where the legitimating authority of existing narratives falters and we are obliged to entrust our thinking to the retroactive authority of logical inventions.

Halley further identifies a split within feminism between two moral tendencies, which she labels "convergentist" and "divergentist". The convergentist tendency holds the production of consensus to be a moral and political imperative: feminist theory must be successfully articulated with queer theory, with critical race theory, with disability theory (and so on) in order to give a full account of social reality, one that is capable of measuring up to the manifold character of oppression. The failure to produce such an articulation would cause feminism to default to being the "feminism of the oppressors": of bourgeois, white, straight, cissexual, able-bodied (and so on) women. The underlying anxiety here is perhaps that of failing to manifest an appropriate awareness, and of being ensnared by prejudicial assumptions of which one had remained unaware; "privilege theory" costumes this anxiety with an ensemble of standpoint epistemology and somewhat tortuous etiquette (the exhortation to "check your privilege" being an exemplary expression of the latter).

"Divergentism" is perhaps tricker to define, since it does not frame an antithetical moral imperative so much as simply suspend the convergentist imperative in the interests of inhabiting and exploring the spaces between discourses. Halley's polemical animus here is fairly clear: it's not so great to be "moralistic", worse still to be seized by "ressentiment", and self-evidently both more grown-up and more fun to be comfortable with dissensus and contradiction, to be at home (but never too comfortable) in the milieu of a partial, unsettled, positionally undecidable caesura of "awareness". There is a note in all this of an old, familiar, soi-disant "postmodernist" triumphalism, which found cause for celebration in the condition of dissensus diagnosed by Lyotard, and sought in the thematics of incommensurability and undecidability an alibi for relinquishing, in the name of a joyful Nietzschean dance of metaphors, all manner of onerous ethical and political commitments. Halley herself shows an alarming willingness to simply drop the "brief for f" and stick the boot in to opponents she sees as insufficiently liberated from moralism, gleefully stigmatizing one woman who has had the temerity to seek legal redress for her ex-husband's patently abusive behaviour as a "Valkyrie" intent on stamping his sexually deviant desires under the boot of state-backed, injury-centred moral authority.

The contemporary reactivation of identity politics is perhaps an indication that the postmodernists' triumphal parade has finally passed, and that "positionality", together with the identitarian narratives that assist in locating and articulating specific subject positions, is back on the agenda. The moral claims of "intersectionality" and "kyriarchy", two key terms which concern the commensurability of such narratives, are evidently convergentist in character: they simultaneously assert the intrinsically "interlocking" nature of oppressions, and the desirability of producing a faithfully "interlocked" theory with which to confront them. (That is, they suture an ontological claim, concerning the composition of social reality, to an epistemological claim concerning the best way to "map" or "reflect" this reality).

Against this, one might join with Halley in recommending that feminism, queer theory and so on be treated as local procedures of investigation and analysis, with their own separate commitments and intrinsic limitations, and be prepared to suspend the requirement that they be brought into theoretical lockstep. As against a composite, coherent, consensus-oriented image of political identity, we might want to reserve space for split identities which are not so much "intersectional" as generatively antagonistic, fundamentally entangled with the unnameable Real. But we may also wish to split from Halley at the point where her Nietzschean inscription of her own pleasures and rancours draws her into an instrumentalisation of "divergence" as a tool for discrediting claims for collective injury and redress. A "hedonics of critique" so relentlessly attracted by the gravitational pull of erotic self-interest produces its own effects of convergence, its own streamlining of complex realities, its own heedless conversion of others' lives and harms into the banal figures of the solitary imagination.

[countererotics]

Split Decisions (i)

In Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism, Janet Halley extracts from feminism three axioms, which she labels m / f ("there are two genders", male and female), m > f (the male is placed in a position of dominance with respect to the female), and "carrying a brief for" the female (seeking to identify and redress the wrongs produced as a result of gender inequality). Halley's argument is that it is sometimes useful to suspend one or more of these axioms, in order to "see around corners" that the feminist axiomatic introduces into our view of the world.

For example, we may sometimes want to suspend, if only temporarily, our assumption that binary genderism is essential to the way gender is practised and experienced (even by those who refuse, or find it impossible to accomodate themselves within, a binary-gendered "world of men and women"). One argument for doing so would be that the experience and practise of gender dissenters already prefigures and realises - if only locally and precariously - a world that is not a "world of men and women". The global consistency of gender, its thoroughgoing structural power, meets its limit at the point where gender-alternative "spaces" are able to come into being. Thinking according to the feminist axiomatic will tend to frame such spaces as exceptional enclaves, endangered (and perhaps inevitably doomed) reservations of utopian possibility that remain ultimately subject to the heteronomy of the law of gender. The gamble Halley proposes is that thinking that suspends the feminist axiomatic might be better able to think in accord with the experience that such spaces embody and preserve, an experience of already-realised, this-worldly autonomy.

Feminists have understood that binary genderism is "the law", and framed their analysis accordingly; but this analysis may founder when it encounters the social fact of "outlaw" existence. There is sometimes a conflict between two antinomianisms, one apocalyptic (there will come a time when the entire system of gender will be overthrown) and the other insurgent (the law of gender is murderously oppressive, and in order to live at all it is necessary and possible to live outside this law). Apocalyptic antinomianism maintains a strategic "pessimism of the intellect", constantly spying-out the ruses and deceptions of the law (radical feminists have been prone to seeing trans activists, for example, as infiltrators or unwitting shock troops of a patriarchal backlash). Insurgent antonomianism embodies an "optimism of the will", a belief that meaningful autonomy is possible, that a good life can be lived in (and indeed explicitly against) a bad world.

With respect to gender, trans (or more generally gender-dissenting) politics could be considered "non-feminist" (non-standard with respect to the axioms of feminism) without thereby being "anti-feminist"; and indeed the categories of "cissexism" and "transmisogny" generated by trans politics may be said to constitute a powerful extension to the conceptual armoury of feminism.

[rogueish]

Mandated multiplicity, dissolved identity, mix-and-match all the way down—these might, moreover, not make everyone feel good. Any leftist with a serious heterosexual fetish for the erotic connection between masculine men and feminine women is going to discover in Sedgwick's list a certain limit: its ambitions to infinitude, and her relegation of that desire, that personhood even, to "and so on...," might make such a person feel...a bit forlorn, left out of the party. (Janet Halley, Split Decisions, 206).

I love Halley's phrase "serious heterosexual fetish" here. It make me think of someone raising their eyebrows, peering over their glasses, and saying "You're...heterosexual. My goodness, how recherché." It's an interesting theoretical exercise to imagine what the world would have to be like to make such a statement possible.

[rogueish]

Oddly, though, the actual theory that people think is queer theory remains, often, homo-supremacist and gender-mobility-supremacist. The symptom of this return to feminist terms, which I will note whenever it appears, is its failure, so far anyways, to produce interesting nondismissive and normatively unfraught work on the queerness of masculine male heterosexual desire for the sexy femininity of women.

Janet Halley, Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism