Response+to+Grosz

=**Response to Grosz**=

Quotes in **bold**


 * Chapter 4 – Feminism, Materialism, and Freedom**

Grosz undertakes a re-examination of the concept of freedom, finding a new way of understanding it that may be more useful for feminist projects:


 * “I want to explore concepts of life where freedom is conceived not only or primarily as the elimination of constraint or coercion, but more positively as the condition of or capacity for action” (60).**


 * “Is feminist theory best served through its traditional focus on women’s attainment of a freedom from patriarchal, racist, colonialist, heteronormative constraing? Or by exploring what the female—or feminist—subject is capable of making and doing?” (61).**

The basic difference is between active and passive, freedom //from// and freedom //to//. This is a fairly straightforward concept. She acknowledges that this distinction is not new (61). However, she wants to work this new conception of freedom—based primarily on Bergson—into **“possibilities for new concepts of politics.”** Though she often waxes abstract, it is important to keep in mind that the purpose for her philosophy is to re-think the way people do politics; she has a fundamentally practical motive.

Let’s look at Bergson’s concept of freedom a bit.


 * “For him [Bergson], it is not so much subjects that are free or not free; rather, it is //acts// that, in expressing a consonance (or not) with their agent, are free (or automatized) and have (or lack) the qualitative character of free acts. An act is free to the extent that ‘the self alone will have been the author of it, and…it will express the whole of the self’” (64, quoting Bergson, //Time and Free Will//)**


 * “Free acts are those that spring from the subject alone” (64)**

It is hard to understand at first what benefits this language of “springing from” provides compared to the conventional formulation of a subject “doing.” Perhaps it takes responsibility //away from// the subject (which is what physical determinists would have), while still locating the subject as the //place// where the action occurs, as somehow the fertile ground for the action.

Certain Nietzschean concepts help me understand this “springing” a bit. “Will to power” is almost like a universal force that permeates all matter (not just human beings); it incites striving, it induces action. Human beings strive according to its compulsive power without a need for “**the subject’s stable, ongoing self-identity” (63)** (the subject is always putting on new masks, self-overcoming).

However, I am not sure how to understand acts as “expressing the whole of the self.”

Not necessarily by way of an answer (and perhaps getting even further from an answer), I will once again connect a Bergson/Grosz passage with another Nietzschean idea:


 * “Free acts erupt from the subject insofar as they express the whole of that subject even when they are unexpected and unprepared for: ‘We are free when our acts spring from our whole personality, when they express it, when they have that indefinable resemblance to it which one sometimes finds between the artist and his work’” (65, quoting Bergson, //Time and Free Will//)**

Bergson’s reference to the self-determining freedom of the artist reminds me strongly of a passage from //Beyond Good and Evil//:


 * “What is essential and invaluable in every system of morals, is that it is a long constraint… everything of the nature of freedom, elegance, boldness, dance, and masterly certainty, which exists or has existed, whether it be in thought itself, or in administration, or in speaking and persuading, in art just as in conduct, has only developed by means of the tyranny of such arbitrary law… //Every artist knows how different from the state of letting himself go, is his "most natural" condition//, the free arranging, locating, disposing, and constructing in the moments of "inspiration"—and //how strictly and delicately he then obeys a thousand laws//, which, by their very rigidness and precision, defy all formulation by means of ideas (even the most stable idea has, in comparison therewith, something floating, manifold, and ambiguous in it)” (BGE, 188)** (emphasis mine).

Here, like Bergson, Nietzsche is comparing the freedom of the artist to how we ought to understand freedom in general. Bergson talks about the “indefinable resemblance” between the artist himself, and his work; the artist’s work speaks of his entire personality, it is his self, it is self determining self.

Nietzsche puts this another way. He interposes the middle term of the law. The artist, in his “most natural” condition (when he is being an artist), does not just do whatever, does not act randomly. “//Laisser-aller//” is not freedom. Rather, the artist formulates “a thousand laws,” and then submits himself to them fully. I see Nietzsche as providing a sort of mechanism that Bergson leaves out, the mechanism whereby the artist’s production has come to resemble the artist. However, Bergson (or at least Grosz) never says anything about this self-legislating. This must not be the model they are using. Perhaps it is still too active, requires the subject to “do” something in the old-fashioned, conventional sense? Or perhaps Nietzsche was using it merely as a metaphor?

Phrasing this concept of freedom as “transforming” is easier for me to grasp:


 * “Free acts are those which both express us and which transform us, which express our transforming” (66).**

Also, acknowledge that freedom **“is a matter of degree” (67)**, that not all of our acts are free, that many are “routinized” or “habituated,” (68) helps me understand the notion as well.

Grosz also draws on a distinctly material aspect of Bergson’s concept of freedom:


 * “If freedom is located in acts rather than in subjects, then the capacity to act and the effectiveness of action is to a large extent structured by the ability to harness and utilize matter for one’s own purposes and interests. Freedom is not a transcendent quality inherent in subjects but is immanent in the relations that the living has with the material world, including other life forms” (68).**

Again, this is similar to Nietzsche’s will to power (which I come back to often, because I have some degree of familiarity with it, and can use it as a point of comparison).

As interesting and compelling as this physical, act-oriented, subjectless concept of freedom may be for getting around certain problems, it does suggest that there is no such thing as freedom of the mind, or freedom in thought. Basing my criticism both on personal experience and a very limited understanding of certain other compelling thought traditions (such as Buddhism), this would seem to be a bit of a gap. Freedom of thought seems to be a legitimate form of freedom. Internally, one may “habituate oneself,” or “choose,” or whatever, to respond differently to similar events or stimuli. These differing “internal” reactions can make all the difference in the world for the experience of life. What is the status of this seeming degree of internal freedom, freedom that does not materialize in the “harnessing and utilization of matter”?


 * Chapter 6 – Differences Disturbing Identity**

To transition into talking about this chapter, I will discuss a notion that appeared prominently in Ch. 4, but which I didn’t mention above—the difference between the spatial and the durational.

Grosz has a thing against drawing boundaries. She seems really into trying to think continuity.


 * “What characterizes psychical life, Bergson insists, is not the capacity to lay parts (in this case, psychical states) side by side, for this only accomplishes a certain spatial ordering not possible for or lived by the living being, who requires the immersion and coherence of a being in time” (65).**


 * “While these attributes or divisions may be imposed on the continuity of life and consciousness, they do not arise from them, for life is as much becoming as it is being. It is durational as much as it is spatial, though we are less able to see or comprehend the durational flux than the mappable geometries of spatial organization” (65).**

Living beings derive their sense of coherence from their immersion in the continuous flow of time. Durational flux is what makes consciousness continuous. When we try to break that continuity into pieces so that we may name them, sort them, “lay them side by side,” we are destroying the continuity of lived experience. Thinking of Gieryn’s writing on “boundary work,” the map is really just a metaphor for the process of classification, or perhaps they are essentially the same activity, but we have multiple ways of describing it. Either way, the conclusion is that all categorization is basically a spatial form of reasoning. No such spatial explanation can be an accurate description of lived experience. Unfortunately, however, “we are less able to see or comprehend the durational flux than the mappable geometries of spatial organization.” Our poor, feeble little minds.

In Ch. 6, Grosz criticizes intersectionality, which, she says, is often thought of as **“a kind of series of interlocking oppressions” (92).**

As the word itself suggests, is a fundamentally spatial concept. When I think of intersectionality, I think of the intersection of two streets, or a Venn diagram.

In this chapter, we get at the inadequacy of spatial reasoning through dismantling the conventional concept of the subject. I am not a subject who carries around different qualities like labels—female, white, short, etc. that determine in which area of the Venn diagram I stand, thus determining which varieties of oppression I will be subjected to. Thinking through “pure difference” allows us to understand that there is no such subjectivity to lend itself to spatial categorization, just as there is no continuous, self-identical subject that “chooses” to do things in her earlier discussion of freedom.


 * “This pure difference in itself, this process of self-differentiation that has no self before it begins its becoming, is the undermining of all identities, unities, cohesions, under the differeing movement that both distances and decenters all identity” (93).**

Difference **“is the force that underlies all temporary cohesions [which are identities] as well as the possibility of their dispersion” (94).**


 * “Difference is not a vagueness or indetermination, an imprecision or failure of identiy, but precisely ‘the state in which one can speak of determination as such’[quoting Deleuze]. Difference is determination, specificity, particularity. Difference in itself msut be considered primordial, a non-reciprocal emergence, that which underlies and makes possible distinctness, things, oppositions: ‘Instead of something distinguished from something else, imagine something which distinguishes itself—and yet that from which it distinguishes itself does not distinguish itself from it. Lightning, for example, distinguishes itself from the black sky but must also trail it behind, as though it were distinguishing itself from that which doesn’t distinguish itself from it”**
 * Difference is internal determination. Difference is the point at which determination, the lightning, meets the undetermined, the black sky” (93).**

There is a sort of pulling-oneself-up-by-the-bootstraps in pure difference. It is a sort of making something out of nothing—suddenly, there is lightning, where there was before only darkness; who is responsible for this? The lightning. Or no one. It is a happening. We can see the similarities to Grosz’s previous discussion of freedom as an expression of the entire personality, etc. No subject “does” difference, yet it happens, and its constant happening sort of produces incidental clusters, patterns, that we call “the subject,” or “identity.”


 * “Thus difference is not, as the intersectional model implies, the union of the two sexes or the overcoming of race and other differences through the creation or production of a universal term by which they can be equalized or neutralized…Indeed, in spite of its claims to proliferate and acknowledge differences, such intersectionality actually attempts to generate forms of sameness” (94).**

This would seem to strike a bit of a blow at “human rights.” We should not, and cannot, try to universalize “humanity,” even for the sake of justice. This reminds me of Haraways distinction between reflection and diffraction (another spatial metaphor). Intersectionality attempts to think differences as reflections of some universal humanity, while Haraway suggests embracing the fundamental non-sameness of various actors.

Getting back to the “human rights” idea, though:


 * “The concept of difference, ironically, does link together various categories of subject, various types of identity, humanity itself, not through the elaboration of a shared identity, but through the common variation or difference that the human, in all its modalities, asserts from the inhuman, both the subhuman (material, organic, and living forces) and the superhuman (the cultural, the collective, the cosmic, and the supernatural)” (96).**

This //would// allow such a concept as “human rights,” but only by seemingly undoing everything she’s argued so far.

What is the “common variation or difference” that distinguishes the human from the inhuman?What happened to freedom being a matter of degree, and the idea that **“the most elementary forms of mobile life, animal existence from the protozoa upwerad, exhibit an incipient freedom in some of their most significant actions” (69)**? What happened to continua? How can we so easily differentiate between the human and the non-human? Why does “human” contain infinite shifting identities, constantly negotiated, while identities are, for some reason, not negotiated across the human—non-human boundary? I was really unconvinced by this sudden attempt to rally the human race together, an attempt that, we are to believe, is somehow was not based on inadequate spatial/categorical modes of thought. I think animals are people, too, and probably better people than some people.