#willful subjects

[aliteraryprincess]

October Wrap Up:

Featuring Butters being a curious kitty! (After I got this photo, he proceeded to knock off some letters off the board. Typical cat. 😆) 

Well, October went by quick. Kind of a bummer since it’s usually one of my favorite months. But at the same time, it means this year is closer to being over. So I can’t complain too much. Onward to November. Hopefully it goes by quickly too. 

Books Read - Goal: 8  Total: 7

I almost hit my goal! Not that it really matters since I’m definitely not hitting my overall reading goal for the year at this point. But I’m happy that I’m reading a bit more now. The Death of Jane Lawrence was by far my favorite of the month (and perfect for the season). Staying with the Trouble was my least favorite and the first book I’ve rated one star in quite a while. It made no sense to me, yet somehow everyone in my feminist theory class loved it. 🤷‍♀️ Also, I finally finished Middlemarch!

Gender Trouble by Judith Butler - 2 stars

The Death of Jane Lawrence by Caitlin Starling - 4 stars

Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene by Donna Haraway - 1 star

Nothing But Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw - 2 stars

Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times by Jasbir K. Puar - 4 stars

Middlemarch by George Eliot - 3 stars

Willful Subjects by Sara Ahmed - 3 stars

On Tumblr:

Not much here, but go look at the pictures of my kitties. They’re cute, as you can see from this month’s wrap up pic.

Book Photography: If We Were Villains by M. L. Rio

Book Photography: The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher

Cat Photography: Cozy Boys

On the Blog:

Two reviews and some other odds and ends. I didn’t end up hitting the other book on my Victober TBR, but did I mention I finished Middlemarch? 

Victober 2021 TBR

Review: The Death of Jane Lawrence by Caitlin Starling

Review: Nothing But Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw

September OwlCrate Unboxing: Haunted Hearts

My Top 6 Spooky Books

A Season in Middlemarch, The End

[maaarine]

MBTI & Ideas

Willful Subjects (Sara Ahmed, 2014)

“The history of the word “will” also implies a different kind of relation to futurity than do “wish” and “want.”

Although the words “wish” and “want” can imply intention, they do not tend to be used in the same way to denote a subject’s commitment to a future action.

You can wish and want without doing anything; you can even withdraw from the immediacy of action by becoming wishful. (…)

Willing might be how we encounter an obstacle as that which is to be overcome: we might perceive the will as a resource insofar as it is bound up with a scene of overcoming.

We do not have to give power to the will to suggest that how we experience willing is involved in how we experience power (understood here as capacity or competence). (…)

This idea of the strong will as a way of unifying impulses is widely articulated from writers working in quite distinct intellectual traditions:

for example, Adorno describes the will as the “centralizing unit of impulses, as the authority that tames them and eventually negates them”.

Although Nietzsche calls the idea of weakness of will “misleading,” he describes “weak will” in terms of 

“the multitude and disaggregation of impulses and the lack of any systematic order among them” and a strong will as “their coordination under a single predominant impulse”.”

[andthecynicswereoutraged]

I would argue that feminist history involves a history of becoming conscious of how troubling attributions such as willful fall, unevenly, on subjects. It is not simply that you are charged with willfulness; you become conscious of the violence of the charge.

Sarah Ahmed, Willful Subjects

[zielenna]

It is the reduction of body part to function (the functional body) that makes the disabled body dysfunctional as well as incomplete.

Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects

[tenderculture]

When racism recedes from social consciousness, it appears as if the ones who "bring it up" are bringing it into existence. To recede is to go back or withdraw. To concede is to give way or yield. People of color are often asked to concede to the recession of racism: we are asked to "give way" by letting racism "go back." Not only that: more than that. We are asked to embody a commitment to diversity. We are asked to smile in their brochures. We are asked to put racism behind us as if racism is behind us. The narrative often exercised is not that we "invent racism," but that we preserve its power to govern social life by not getting over it. I have an alternative. I call it my willfulness maxim: Don't get over it, if you are not over it.

Willful Subjects (p 168), Sara Ahmed

[tenderculture]

Apartness becomes an orientation towards bodies, a way of differentiating between bodies who can receive sympathy, who become sympathetic, and those who cannot. Apartness can also be used as a threat, as a way of announcing the cost of deviation. To come out as queer can involve being threatened with apartness: "You are no longer my child"; "You are no longer part of the family." To follow queer desire can mean to be perceived as willfully cutting yourself off from the family, as if that is what your desire is intending. When your desire causes unhappiness, you can be judged as desiring unhappiness. Wandering away from the straight path of happiness can lead to acts of disowning: not part.

Willful Subjects (p 118), Sara Ahmed 

[ckyliu-blog]

Will and Queerness in Part to Whole Relationships

This week’s reading by Sara Ahmed titled The General Will is admittedly dense but truly fascinating. Ahmed takes us through a philosophical journey unpacking the relationship between the general will and the particular will as part to whole relationships (i.e. hand/arm to body, child to family). Ahmed begins by elucidating the contradictions of the argument surrounding free will, such that individuals are forced to obey the general will in order to exercise freedom, with “force” and “freedom” as the opposing conditions. Throughout the chapter Ahmed highlights the mutual dependence between part to part as well as the more hierarchical, servile, conditional nature of the relationship between part to whole. The nuance of the disproportionate power dynamic (that I interpreted from this reading) of the function and duty of the part to please/serve the whole at the risk of its own survival is then applied to the value system capitalism sets up in our “civil society”. When various entities both material and immaterial are assigned value based on the State Regulated Free Market™️ (one that is a (historically) violent, racist, ableist, homophobic and transphobic expression of supremacy), issues arise. Deviants from traditional values begin to obstruct expectations and, perhaps in the eyes of some, negatively affect production/productivity. The most salient example that Ahmed presents to us is the role children play in the nuclear family. The family, specifically the membership and continuity of the family, is the go-to method of reproducing, accruing, preservation of capital. Therefore, the instability that the queer child creates in the function of the family, that is, inheritance and social and “biological” reproduction, is punishable by the cis-het capitalist society. Those viewed as unproductive vagabonds who make themselves un-exploitable are problematic and dangerous to the status quo. This makes the queer experience both vulnerable within the normative society in which it was born, and, more optimistically (yet laboriously), the site for denaturalizing, disrupting, and emphasizing oppressive systems of conformity and exploitative relationships between part and whole and particular will and general will. Ahmed’s arguments and methodologies are of course much more complex and rigorously laid out than I have attempted at explaining here. What’s both inspiring and interesting in this reading is its relationship to architecture. This entire semester we have been studying and putting into practice part to whole relationships. Whether it is the geometries that create the Sol Lewitt designs, the tabs that bring together unrolled surfaces, the wood block’s relationship to its original state of being (tree), the aggregate to the mass, or the ABB machine to us, architects and the discipline of architecture are constantly asked to understand the relationship between part and whole throughout the design process from the inception of an idea to the final presentation/construction. I really want to explore the extents or non extents of queerness in architecture. How can we reimagine the processes and the relationships we form with our materials and machines and technologies to be anti-normative and as intentional challenges to the cis-het bourgeois architecture we we know and interact with? How can queer processes translate into architectural spaces? Can architectural spaces be anti-normative? Can architectural spaces be queer? What are the limitations of “queer architecture” and can they even be called revolutionary or anti-normative within the normative society?

[dngrcpckwithmurdericing]

Willfulness might be what we do when we are judged as being not, as not meeting the criteria for being human, for instance. Not to meet the criteria for human is often to be attached to other nots, not human as not being: not being white, not being male, not being straight not being able-bodied. Not being in coming up against being can transform being. This statement can be heard as aspiration [...].

Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects