schaffer_neurofeminism

"Simply put, paranoia tends to be contagious; more specifically, paranoia is drawn toward and tends to construct symmetrical relations, in particular, symmetrical epistemologies." (TF, 126)






 * EXCITED ABOUT SPEECH**
 * "The sphere of language has become a privileged domain in which to interrogate the cause and effects of social injury." (71)
 * "In the context of hate speech controversies, a recent view of speech is emerging that troubles any recourse to such a strict distinction (between speech and conduct); that view holds that the very "content" of certain kinds of speech can be understood only in terms of //the action that the speech performs//. In other words, racist epithets not only relay a message of racial inferiority, but that "relaying" is the verbal institutionalization of that very subordination. Thus hate speech is understood not only to communicate an offensive idea or set of ideas but also to enact the very message it communicates: the very communication is at once a form of conduct." (72)
 * "….how one might at once affirm that language does act, even injuriously, while insisting that it does not directly or causatively "act on" the addressee in quite the way that proponents of hate speech legislation tend to describe. instead, the act-like character of certain offensive utterances may be precisely what keeps them from saying what they mean to say or doing what it is they say." (72)
 * "Does the figure of the sovereign performative compensate for a lost sense of power, and how might that loss become the condition for a revised sense of the performative?" (74)
 * "Utterance itself is regarded in inflated and highly efficacious ways, no longer as a representation of power or its verbal epiphenomenon, but as the //modus vivendi// of power itself." (74)
 * "Matsuda's assumption is that calling someone a name or, more specifically, being addressed in an injurious way establishes that person's political subordination and, moreover, has the effect of depriving the addressee of the capacity to exercise commonly accepted rights and liberties within either a specific context (education or employment) or within the more generalized context of the national public sphere." (75)
 * "…//the state produces hate speech//, and by this I do not mean that the state is accountable for the various slurs, epithets, and forms of invective that currently circulate throughout the population. I mean only that the category cannot exist without the state's ratification, and this power of the state's judicial language to establish and maintain the domain of what will be publicly speakable suggests that the state plays much more than a limiting function in such decisions; in fact, the state actively produces the domain of publicly acceptable speech, demarcating the line between the domains of the speakable and the unspeakable, and retaining the power to make and sustain that consequential line of demarcation. **The inflated and efficacious utterance attributed to hate speech in some of the politicized contexts discussed above is itself modeled on the speech of a sovereign state, understood as a sovereign speech act, a speech act with the power to do what it says**. This sovereign power is attributed to hate speech when it is said to "deprive" us of rights and liberties. The power attributed to hate speech is a power of absolute and efficacious agency, performativity, and transitivity at once (it does what it says and it does what it says it will do to the one addressed by the speech)…The problem, then, is not that the force of the sovereign performative is wrong, but when used by citizens it is wrong, and when intervened upon by the state, it is, in these contexts, right." (77)
 * "The difficulty of describing power as a sovereign formation, however, in no way precludes fantasizing or figuring power in precisely that way; to the contrary, the historical loss of the sovereign organization of power appears to occasion the fantasy of its return--a return, I want to argue, that takes place in language, in the figure of the performative. The emphasis on the performative phantasmic ally resurrects the performative in language, establishing language as a displaced site of politics and specifying that displacement as driven by a wish to return to a simpler and more reassuring map of power, one in which the assumption of sovereignty remains secure." (78)
 * "The elaborate institutional structures of racism as well as sexism are suddenly reduced to the scene of utterance, and utterance, no longer the sedimentation of prior institution and use, is invested with the power to establish and maintain the subordination of the group addressed." (80)
 * "This phantasmic of the culpable speaking subject, spawned from the constraints of legal language, casts subjects as the only agents of power." (80)
 * "…racist speech does not originate with the subject, even if it requires the subject for its efficacy, as it surely does." (80)
 * [what exactly is Butler talking about when she talks about porn?]
 * "Pornography, like the Freudian unconscious, knows no negation." (84)
 * "Although this attribution of a reversed intention effectively violates the sovereignty of the speaking subject, it seems equally true that this account of pornography also exploits a certain notion of liberal sovereignty to further its own aims, insisting that consent always and only constitutes the subject." (85)
 * "(Pornography debases the utterance to the status of rhetoric, and exposes its limits as philosophy.)" (86)
 * "In this sense, being able to utter the performative contradiction is hardly a self-defeating enterprise; on the contrary, performative contradiction is crucial to the continuing revision and elaboration of historical standards of universality proper to the futural movement of democracy itself." (89-90)
 * "The task of cultural translation is one that is necessitated precisely by that performative contradiction that takes place when one with no authorization to speak within and as the universal nevertheless lays claim to the term. Or, perhaps more appropriately phrased, one who is excluded from the universal, and yet belongs to it nevertheless, speaks from a split situation of being at once authorized and deauthorized (so much for delineating a neat "site of enunciation)." (91)
 * "The problem is not simply that, from a theoretical point of view, it makes no sense to assume that intentions are always properly materialized in utterances, and utterances materialized in deeds, but that the insight into those sometimes disjunctive relations constitutes an alternative view of the linguistic field of politics. Does the assertion of a potential incommensurability between intention and utterance (not saying what one means), utterance and action (not doing what one says), and intention and action (not doing what one meant), threaten the very linguistic condition for political participation, or do such disjunctures produce the possibility for a politically consequential //re//negotiation of language that exploits the undetermined character of these relations? Could the concept of universality become exposed to revision without the presumption of such a disjuncture?" (92)
 * "More generally, the circulation of the pornographic resists the possibility of being effectively patrolled, and if it could be, the mechanism of patrol would simply become incorporated into a pornographic thematic as one of its more savory plots concerning the law and its transgression. The effort to stop such a circulation is an effort to stop the sexualized field of discourse, and to reassert the capacity of the intentional subject over and against this field." (95)
 * "In each of these cases, the state not only constrains speech, but in the very act of constraining, produces legally consequential speech: not only does the state curb homosexual speech, but produces as well--through its decisions--a public notion of the self-censoring homosexual; similarly, it produces a public picture of an obscene black sexuality, even as it claims to be curbing obscenity; and it produces the burning cross as an emblem of intelligible and protected speech." (97-8)
 * "Indeed, their repetition is necessary (in court, as testimony; in psychoanalysis, as traumatic emblems; in aesthetic modes, as a cultural working-through) in order to enter them as objects of another discourse." (100)
 * "…I do think that the ritual chain of hateful speech cannot be effectively countered by means of censorship. Hate speech is repeatable speech, and it will continue to repeat itself as long as it is hateful. Its hate is a function of its repeatability." (102)
 * "There is no possibility of //not// repeating. The only question that remains is: How will that repetition occur, at what site, juridical or non juridical, and with what pain and promise?" (102)


 * TOUCHING FEELING**
 * "To know that the origin or spread of HIV realistically //might have// resulted from a state-assisted conspiracy -- such knowledge is, as it turns out, separable from the question of whether the energies of a given AIDS activist intellectual or group might best be used in the tracing and exposure of a possible plot." (124)
 * "Patton's response to me seemed to open a space for moving from the rather fixated question Is a particular piece of knowledge true, and how can we know? to the further questions: What does knowledge //do --// the pursuit of it, the having and exposing of it, the receiving again of knowledge of what one already knows? //How//, in short, is knowledge performative, and how best does one move among its causes and effects?" (124)
 * "…but it seems to me a great loss when paranoid inquiry comes to seem entirely coextensive with critical theoretical inquiry rather than being viewed as one kind of cognitive/affective theoretical practice among other, alternative kinds." (126)
 * "Simply put, paranoia tends to be contagious; more specifically, paranoia is drawn toward and tends to construct symmetrical relations, in particular, symmetrical epistemologies…It sets a thief (and, if necessary, becomes one) to catch a thief; it mobilizes guile against suspicion, suspicion against guile; "it takes one to know one." A paranoid friend, who believes I am reading her mind, knows this from reading mine; also a suspicious writer, she is always turning up at crime scenes of plagiarism, indifferently as perpetrator or as victim; a litigious colleague as well, she not only imagines me to be as familiar with the laws of libel as she is, but eventually makes me become so. (All these examples, by the way, are fictitious.)" (126-7)
 * "I am saying that the main reasons for questioning paranoid practices are other than the possibility that their suspicions can be delusional or simply wrong. Concomitantly, some of the main reasons for practicing paranoid strategies may be other than the possibility that they offer unique access to true knowledge. They represent //a// way, among other ways, of seeking, finding, and organizing knowledge. Paranoia knows some things well and others poorly." (130)
 * "As Miller's analysis also suggests, the temporal progress and regress of paranoia are, in principle, infinite. Hence perhaps, I suggest, Butler's repeated and scourgingly thorough demonstrations in //Gender Trouble// that there can have been no moment prior to the totalizing Law of gender difference; hence her unresting vigilance for traces in other theorists' writing of nostalgia for such an impossible prior moment. No time could be too early for one's having-already-known, for its having-already-been-inevitable, that something bad would happen. And no loss could be too far in the future to need to be preemptively discounted." (130-1)
 * "Indeed, from any point of view it is circular, or something, to suppose that one's pleasure at knowing something could be taken as evidence of the truth of the knowledge. But a strong theory of positive affect…is no //more// tautological than the strong theory of negative affect..." (138)
 * "Like the deinstitutionalized person on the street who, betrayed and plotted against by everyone else in the city, still urges on you the finger-worn dossier bristling with his precious correspondence, paranoia for all its vaunted suspicion acts as though its work would be accomplished if only it could finally, this time, somehow get its story truly known. That a fully initiated listener could still remain indifferent or inimical, or might have no help to offer, is hardly treated as a possibility." (138)
 * "The monopolistic program of paranoid knowing systematically disallows any explicit recourse to reparative motive, no sooner to be articulated than subject to methodological uprooting. Reparative motives, once they become explicit, are inadmissible in paranoid theory both because they are about pleasure ("merely aesthetic") and because they are frankly ameliorative ("merely reformist"). What makes pleasure and amelioration so "mere"? Only the exclusiveness of paranoia's faith in demystifying exposure: only its cruel and contemptuous assumption that the one thing lacking for global revolution, explosion of gender roles, or whatever, is people's (that is, other people's) having the painful effects of their oppression, poverty, or deludedness sufficiently exacerbated to make the pain conscious (as if otherwise it wouldn't have been) and intolerable (as if intolerable situations were famous for generating excellent solutions)." (144)
 * "In these cases, it would make sense--if one had the choice--not to cultivate the necessity of a systematic, self-accelerating split between what one is doing and the reasons one does it." (145)
 * "Comes the revolution, Comrade, you'll be tickled pink by those deconstructive jokes; you'll faint from ennui every minute you're not smashing the state apparatus; you'll definitely want hot sex twenty to thirty times a day. You'll be mournful //and// militant. You'll never want to tell Deleuze and Guattari, "Not tonight, dears, I have a headache." (146)
 * Litvak: "Doesn't reading queer mean learning, among other things, that mistakes can be good rather than bad surprises?" (147)
 * "But isn't it a feature of queer possibility--only a contingent feature, but a real one, and one that in turn strengthens the force of contingency itself--that our generational relations don't always proceed in this lockstep?" (149)
 * "To view camp as, among other things, the communal, historically fence exploration of a variety of practices is to do better justice to many of the defining elements of classic camp performance…As in the writing of D. A. Miller, a glue of surplus beauty, surplus stylistic investment, unexplained upwellings of threat, contempt, and longing cements together the amalgam of powerful part objects in such work as that of Ronald Firbank, Djuna Barnes, Joseph Cornell, Kenneth Anger, Charles Ludlam, Jack Smith, John Waters, and Holly Hughes." (150)


 * GUT FEMINISM**
 * "//the lesion in hysterical paralyses must be completely independent of the anatomy of the nervous system, since// in its paralyses and other manifestations hysteria behaves as though anatomy did not exist or as though it had no knowledge of it. (SF 169, quoted on 67)
 * "The idea that psychic or cultural conflicts could become somatic events was one of the central organizing principles of feminist work on the body in the 1980s and 1990s. This model allowed feminists to think of bodily transformation ideationally and symbolically, without reference to biological constraints. That is, to think about the body as if anatomy did not exist." (68-9)
 * "What this approach does not pay attention to, however, is the role played by biology that is not damaged; that is, how the everyday, minute-by-minute, routine action of biological systems (e.g., surges of biochemicals; metabolic activity; synaptic communication; muscular contractions) might be caught up in, and contributing to, hysterical symptomology." (69)
 * "...we have come to be astute about the body while being ignorant about anatomy and that feminism’s relations to biological data have tended to be skeptical or indifferent rather than speculative, engaged, fascinated, surprised, enthusiastic, amused, or astonished." (69)
 * "The aid given by the musculature of the intestines is not that of passive substrate awaiting the animating influence of the uncon- scious but, rather, that of an interested broker of psychosomatic events." (73)
 * "If biological substrate was studied dynamically, the excessive concern with the utility (rationality) of organs that characterizes traditional biological knowledges could be supplanted with a more intricate account of their capacity for pleasure, for the expression of wishes, and for complicated thought." (76)
 * "Behind what he calls the facade of conventional biological description there is a biologi- cal unconscious. This biological unconscious motivates all organic activity; in certain (usually pathological) circumstances the phylogenetic and ontogenetic capacities that compose the biological unconscious come to “dominate the vital activities with their archaic impulses in the same way as the normal consciousness is inundated by psychological archaisms in the neuroses and psychoses” (Thalassa 83)." (77)
 * "The vicissitudes of ingestion and vomiting are complex thinking enacted organically: binging and purging are the substrata themselves attempting to question, solve, control, calculate, protect, and destroy." (82)
 * "It has been my argument, via Ferenczi, that these Boolean demarcations among organs and between psyche and soma are intelligible only within a conventional (flat) biological economy." (83)
 * "Perhaps the lability of eating and mood—their tendency to align and dissociate under the influence of certain medications—speaks to an ontological organization that is at odds with organic rationality." (83)
 * "The gut is sometimes angry, some- times depressed, sometimes acutely self-destructive; under the stress of severe dieting, these inclinations come to dominate the gut’s responsivity to the world. At these moments any radical distinction between stomach and mood, between vomiting and rage is artificial. Here, a clear indication of what is meant by radical (pertaining to the root: foundational, essential, originary, primary) is important. I am not arguing that organs are indistinguishable from one another, or that psyche and soma are the same thing. Rather, I am claiming that there is no a priori, fundamental demarcation between these entities." (84)
 * "The efficacy of antidepressant medications in the treatment of bulimia can best be explained in a conceptual field where the relations between head and gut; between thinking and eating; among serotonin, appetite, and mood; among disgust and antiperistalsis and the esopha- gus; among anger and hunger and loneliness and the stomach are more than juxtapositions or utilitarian relations of otherwise disjunct realms. Feminist theory is very well positioned to generate just these kinds of conceptual models—if only it could be in a more open and generative relation to biological data, if only it could allow a less antagonistic, a more amphimixic relation between itself and the life sciences." (85-6)