brown, halley, filing
Eric reminds me that Wendy Brown’s new book, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire, is out. I’m looking forward to reading it — Politics Out of History wasn’t my cup of tea, and States of Injury has been cited far too many times in things I’ve written to bear much more. If I owned a copy of the latter, it would be faded, battered and dogeared. Instead I just have numerous photocopies of the same chapters from moments when I couldn’t find them in my enormous photocopy piles.*
Speaking of the US feminist/queer left (or maybe queer leftists Taking A Break from feminism) I finally started reading Janet Halley’s book Split Decisions after BitchLab’s enthusiastic recommendations. (Princeton University Press: what all the cool kids are wearing this season.) One of the things it does very well is to rearticulate some of Wendy Brown’s thought about rights, democracy and coalitions in a manner akin to how Kate Bornstein’s My Gender Workbook made trans theory immediately conversational, personal and ‘tasty’ reading ten years ago.
But with an added kick. Reading Split Decisions is a bit like doing a one-night refresher class in queer and feminist theory over tequila shots, one shot per theorist. It can make you feel a little drunk. There’s an amazing recapitulation of Leo Bersani’s “Is the Rectum a Grave?”, which makes me yearn for thinkers like Bersani. Obstinately Freudian and only interested in ‘gay men’ he might be, but at least he never wanted to assimilate. Not even deep down. He just wanted to be taken apart.
I feel particularly gleeful about Halley’s reading of Jay Prosser’s conflicted relationship to Butler — “an oedipally murderous prodigal son who wants his father to approve the prodigal’s depredations at the homestead.” Ouch, Jay. She just said your book was all about daddy issues. (With a daddy like Butler, no wonder you got issues, boyfriend.) Actually, this has got to be the most incisive and perceptive reading of Second Skins I’ve encountered. Halley neither bows to Prosser’s demand that we read his interpretation of the transsexual body as the only one available, or tries to water down the more useful claim that trans politics cannot collapse its deeply conflicting claims into one united community.
I’m not sure if it was reading Spilt Decisions that fired me up, or because I stopped working on the most boring chapter in the history of theses and got cracking with a paper on Paper Dolls, but I’ve been working very hard this last week. I’ve also been experimenting with filing notes, full-text articles and writing drafts in Keynote, this tree-structured note manager. It’s fully searchable, which is a huge improvement on the strange collection of word documents I’ve collected in my phd folder that all seem to called ‘plan.doc’ or ‘thoughts.doc’. I’m now wishing I could combine EndNote, Keynote and a note manager that read pdf’s and multimedia files, so all my references, articles, random notes and chapter drafts could be accessible in the same interface. If anyone knows of such multi-tasking software, I’d be very interested in finding out more.
*Memo for November: buy a freakin’ filing cabinet.
Hey Az, go that filing cabinet! Being a mac user I can’t help you out on the notetaking stuff, but a good place to research is 43folders.com
Brown book sounds great. Quick question - I recognise your response to Bersani, even if I don’t totally understand that kind of identification myself (for obvious reasons of being largely on the dominant side of most kinds of subjectivity distinctions). But I wonder, on a deeper level, how much the desire for research/knowledge is the desire for assimilation? It’s a question that troubles me a lot (not with any easy resolution) and one that I think is central to why I find your current research so interesting.
(BTW, I’m just enrolling at the same institution as you, p/t in MediaComms!)
Comment by danny — October 12, 2006 @ 11:57 am
Danny, that’s great that you’re enrolling in Media/Comm. They need more good people. So does that mean you’re going to live here, or are you making some nifty distance ed arrangement?
But I wonder, on a deeper level, how much the desire for research/knowledge is the desire for assimilation?
I certainly haven’t ever thought of it that way, and I wonder what you mean, or what kind of assimilation you’re talking about. Are you suggesting that research/reading/thinking is inevitably a process of situating oneself in relation to other theorists, and thus becoming part of the machine?
Bersani is probably worth returning to, because his ideas about queerness and assimilation were always centred on the body: sex is dangerous, because it’s “anticommunal,
antiegalitarian, antinurturing, antiloving.” He even accuses Gayle Rubin and Pat Califia of pastoralism, wanting to water down and sanitise BDSM and to claim that it’s not dangerous. Which is a feat. His solution is to want to go ahead and ‘be sexual’ but with eyes wide open about the power it entails and the explosion of self it involves. Which, I guess, is the only way to refuse assimilation. On the other hand, perhaps modes of assimilation are specific to their locations.
(The Bersani article is accessible on Jstor in October journal volume 43, for anyone who’s interested.)
Comment by Az — October 12, 2006 @ 4:18 pm
Thanks Az - I’ll be around from time to time but not fully relocating!
Ah hah! I’ve just realised I misread your statement - when you said that Bersani didn’t want to assimiliate, I took it to mean that he didn’t want to assimilate [something/someone] into him, and re-reading I think you meant that he didn’t want to assimilate into “society” or larger and more recognisable forms of being.
Well, maybe that’s not an unproductive train of thought, even though it’s not directed toward your point about Bersani in the same way, but I wonder if it’s related. I guess that for me the acquisition of new knowledge (especially in the sense we understand “research”) seems some how bound up with the incorporation of that knowledge, from outside, into the self. What motivates that desire is quite specific I agree - and yet, when you noted your attraction to Bersani because of his lack of desire to assimilate (again, I was inventing objects for him to assimilate: maybe e.g. trans theory), I felt you were identifying a kind of hegemony of assimilation going on, perhaps one which posed a threat to your subjectivity by incorporating it (here the link beteween those two senses of assimilate). And as I said, I recognised that resistance, but feel for myself that the very nature of research seems to take me further into being changed by and changing others’ information/experience (I guess perhaps an analogue in the way my subjective experience of class seems to be assimilating others and assimilating myself within a broader range of class locations, for better and worse.) So the kind of resistance you identify in Bersani I read as almost a mourning/nostalgia kind of a vibe, one which is drawn out when the assimilating tendencies of research hit a lack of consonance with subjective experience, and for me those moments throw into question the value of research/production, and also raise the question of whether research is necessarily bound up in an assimilation dynamic (in both senses!)
Or maybe I’ve been reading too much Butler this week!?
x.d
Comment by danny — October 12, 2006 @ 8:46 pm
To be more specific about my interest in your project in this regard - the whole philosophy of movement and travel in the western tradition (and particularly more popular deleuze-inspired work imho) has an uneasy relationship with the colonial. I see this as largely a problem of idealism. So when you engage these questions of movement in an embodied way, I’m intrigued to see how you negotiate the “assimilation” of colonised experience that’s embedded in that philosophical history, and (after getting your point I hope) your own assimilation or lack of into the categories and power relationships that unavoidably structure the project. From my POV those categories are more often denied (idealism) rather than confronted/deconstructed, and I got the feeling from your thesis outline that there will be some valuable outcomes from your work for my own thinking about colonial history, among other things!
Comment by danny — October 12, 2006 @ 9:29 pm
You know, those questions are big, and important, and worth a new post to discuss — when I’ve had enough sleep and can compose coherent sentences. Til then!
Comment by Az — October 14, 2006 @ 4:29 am