SPAT_09_LN

FURTHER FEMINISMS

...In the neural network, many disparate, decentalized embodied entities, working together as one? Slime-mold comes to mind...




 * __ Gut Feminism __**

This model [of hysteria] 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. This essay begins with the conviction that this dissociation of ideation and biology (and the concomitant distaste for explanation via the biological) is deeply problematic (70-69).

// In such moments, when the psychic system fails, the organism begins to think. // (Clinical // 5–6 // ) (75)

This body is neurotically inclined, symbolically guided, and analyzable. Ferenczi describes a second organization of psyche and soma wherein primordial psychic powers emerge after normal psychic structures have been violently destroyed by trauma (“the organism begins to think”). Here, organic substance is intrinsically, primitively psychic (“impelled by motives”) (75).

“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)

In the same way that Freud used hysteria to reveal the neurotic/fantastic nature of the normally functioning psyche, Ferenczi uses an analysis of materialization to reveal the plastic nature of all organic substrate” (77)

On the contrary, it directs us right back into the heart of organic matter; hysteria is one particular mode of biological writing. If this seems to render hysteria prosaic, is this not because we have known biology only in its most inert forms? (78)

“the biological unconscious” (80)

The terms of 'biological writing' and the 'biological unconscious' open up new ways of thinking between the discursive and the material manifestation of things. Helpful for conceptualizations of embodiment - giving life and new meaning to component parts of the biological.

My argument is that the bulimic capacities of the throat should draw our attention not just to behavioral intent or cultural transformation or disorder in higher cortical centers or mechanisms of unconscious representation but also to the Ferenczian language of the digestive organs. 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. (81)

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. As is so often the case in contemporary biomedical literatures, there is an overriding concern with clearly demarcating causal primacy (what causes what?)—as if determination is a singular, delimited event. (83) This relates to Grosz’s reconceptualization of freedom --- situating her theory of freedom separately from determinism as well as ‘freedom of choice.’ Freedom couched within actions, the 'freedom to' and an instantiation of embodied tendencies. There is no singular determined event of causation....

In alliance with the biological sciences, feminism could build conceptual schemata about the body that are astute both politically and biologically—schemata in which it is possible to imagine that in cases of severe and chronic bulimia, the capacity for organic thought saturates the more familiar ideational, cognitive, unconscious, and cerebral mechanisms. I have provisionally called this method gut feminism—a feminism that is able to think innovatively and organically at the same time (86)


 * __ Neural Geographies __**

Antiessentialism as naturalized, as presuppositions not questioned : “[…] arguments driven by critiques of essentialism have not only become de rigueur, they have become the foundational supposition of many contemporary critical projects” (1)

“These readings limit our political options to a choice between subversion or hegemony, or, in what amounts to the same thing, that routinized concession “kinda subversive, kinda hegemonic”, ” (3).

Connectionism -- does it really work with or exhibit a kind of deconstructionism? Thinking, most likely not....

“Where conventional models take cognition to be the manipulation of symbols in accordance with pre-existing computational rules, connectionist models figure cognitive processing as the spread of activation across a network of interconnected, neuron-like units” (6)

“Can we read the internal machinations of traditional empiricism in ways that do not return us to the routinized accusations of essentialism, reductionism, and political stasis? Specifically, does connectionism offer a political reading of psyche, cognition, and biology not despite its neurocomputational inclinations, but //because of them?”// (14)

“A large part of the difficulty in generating politically engaging feminist critiques of the biological and behavioral sciences must be attributed to feminism’s own naturalized antiessentialism” (15) -- What Gut Feminism is also contending with

Derrida’s deconstruction as not negating metaphysics, not a complete turn on structure… “Let me respond bluntly: This claim that deconstruction positions itself against metaphysics is //incorrect.// A more careful inquiry into any of Derrida’s texts would demonstrate the great care he takes to formulate deconstruction as something other than the argumentative antithesis of a pathologized metaphysics” (24)

WHAT DECONSTRUCTION ACTUALLY DOES:::

Derrida within Wilson: “Doubtless it is more necessary, from within semiology, to transform concepts, to displace them, to turn them against their presuppositions, to reinscribe them in other chains, and little by little to modify the terrain of our work and thereby produce new configurations. (Derrida 1981, 24)” (25) --- Grosz gets to this a bit when talking about the different characteristics of concepts

“Rather than negating the binary, moving outside it, destroying, trivializing, or neutralizing it, the hinge term seeks to expose and internally displace its operations […] these hinge terms have no value as generalized methodological tools. Deconstruction, then, is a close and particular procedure; it is never interested in generalized methodologies. It is interrogation of specific concepts/texts and their enabling effects, rather than a generalized critique of binaries, that is deconstruction’s concern” (26)

Globus and Kurtzman are confused in their application and reading of deconstruction, they instead end up reinforcing and using it to uphold the typical “conventional notions of scientific or epistemological progress” which Derrida is trying to eschew.

“The end effect of these unions between deconstruction and psychology (even if it is not Kurtzman’s and Globus’s said intention) is to add a certain radical shine to psychology’s empirical projects without in any way contesting the integrity of the psychological domain in general” (27)

“There are three broad implications of deconstruction that I wish to introduce here (although these are not exhaustive of deconstruction’s political effects): negotiating the necessary and the impossible: the problem of solutions: and acknowledging complicity” (27).

“While feminism seems to be grounded in an antiessentialist philosophy, Kirby makes it clear that we are not able easily to avoid essentialism’s ruses, and moreover we may find that the domain of antiessentialism is equally problematic in that it seems to rely on a covert and indispensable essentialism as its excluded other” (28).

“If the goal of classical projects in the sciences and humanities alike has been to halt the proliferation of knowledges, to bring an end to writing, history, politics, and experimentation, then it is deconstruction’s place to investigate this goal and expose its effects” (29).


 * __ Grosz “Feminism, Materialism, and Freedom” __**

Moving beyond the typical traditions of exploring agency/freedom/subjectivity for “a more archaic tradition but also a more modernist one that feminists have tended to avoid, the one I have tried to follow throughout this book – the philosophy of life, the philosophy of biology, the philosophy of nature, initiated to some extent by the pre-Socratics and developed in the writings of Spinoza but fully elaborated primarily in the nineteenth century through the texts of Darwin, Nietzsche, and Bergson” (60)

“I hope to elaborate a new understanding of freedom, agency, and autonomy, not in terms of a concept of “freedom from,” where freedom is conceived negatively, as the elimination of constraint, but in terms of a “freedom to,” a positive understanding of freedom as the capacity for action, reframing the concept of freedom by providing it with a different context that may provide it with other, different political affiliations and associations and a different understanding of subjectivity” (60)

“Freedom to” not “Freedom from” as the focus within Grosz’s work, which I think does interesting and important work for moving forward and beyond some “stabilizing” feminist practices or cyclical ‘essentializing non-essentialisms’ rhetoric – working in the positive instead of the negative, a bouncing off of Foucault’s conception of productive power mechanisms which structure themselves separately from repressive and limiting mechanisms as a “positive understanding of power as that which produces or enables,” (61)

The flip-side becomes how to utilize this “positive power” mechanism to think of “positive freedom” mechanisms that rely on “the haves” (not the have nots) and empowering of subjects from within or without or just differently in power struggles.

“Is feminist theory best served through its traditional focus on women’s attainment of a freedom from patriarchal, racist, colonialist, heteronormative constraint? Or by exploring what the female – or feminist – subject is and is capable of making and doing? It is this broad and overarching question – one of the imponderable dilemmas facing contemporary politics well beyond feminism – that is at stake in exploring the subject’s freedom through its immersion in materiality” (61)

Deterministic vs Free-will forces – two sides of the same coin? Oppostional structures that share common ground and constraints in how they define themselves – defined in opposition, thus created in a binary, dichotomous structure off one another… Bergson pushes against both of these structures::: “Bergson’s position is both alluringly and nostalgically metaphysical and strikingly simple: free acts are those that spring from the subject alone (and not from any psychical state of the subject or any manipulated behavior around the subject); they not only originate in or through subject, they express //all// of that subject – in other words, they are integral to who or what the subject is” (64).

“In this understanding, there is no question that the subject would or would not make the same choice again. Such a situation is impossible” (64). Psychic states cannot be set aside one another and compared – no external grid or structure can help to compare, predict or quantize these states – “they are always qualitative” (65)

“…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).

“We are free when our acts spring from our whole personality, when they express it, when they have that indefinable resemblance to which one sometimes finds between the artist and his work” (Bergson, //Time and Free Will,// 172) (quoted in Grosz 65).

“Having been undertaken, free acts are those which transform us, which we can incorporate into our becomings in the very process of their changing us. Free acts are those which both express us and which transform us, which express our transforming” (Grosz 66) --- I don’t know quite why, but this calls to mind the trope of the nerdly kid finally fighting back and changing their character in their own eyes and the eyes of others – I'm thinking Back to the Future where Crispin Glover punches out Biff and he changes the future path. Yet this example is pretty deterministic in that Michael Fox is trying to get him to make a 'free' move to get history 'back on track' so that him and his siblings exist in the future that he wants -- so that their images don't disappear in that photo, a textual inscription of the true real path that he needs to affirm. Of course, this culturally, in that moment, begs the question of who has the ability or 'freedom to' change the future through actions. The signifying act had to come from McFly -- why not from Loraine?



What become the consequences of our “freedom to”’s…are consequences what hold us back from fully exerting our free acts? Do enabling constraints fit into this framework?

“Freedom is not a quality or property of the human subject, as implied within the phenomenological tradition, but can only characterize a process, an action, a movement that has no particular qualities. Freedom has no given content; it cannot be defined” (67)

Materialism of Freedom:::::::::

“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 forms of life” (68)

Vegetal states seen as not having freedom of choice – but what about the choice to grow a branch here or there, to put down roots, to spread seed – is the branching off in certain patterns a choice of sorts, some form of a collective conscious?? Intelligence of slime mold – through a maze? Most optimal routes?

“At its most contracted, the material universe is regular, reborn at each moment, fully actual and in the present; but at its most expansive, it is part of the flow of pure duration, carrying along the past with the present, the virtual with the actual, and enabling them to give way to a future they do not contain. The universe has this expansive possibility, the possibility of being otherwise not because life recognizes it as such but because life could only exist because of the simultaneity of the past with the present that matter affords it” (71)

“The problem rather, is how to expand the variety of activities, including the activities of knowledge production, so that women and men may be able to act differently, to open up activities to new interests, perspectives, and frameworks hitherto not adequately explored or invented” (73).

Freedom and its relation to innovation, to invention – how is this recontextulized in the current trend towards innovation/entrepreneurial practices? Makerspaces and hackerspaces are trying to make environments for open making and bricolage – but who is this truly open to? Is there really full access and openness? A real 'Freedom to'? How to ensure those who are marginalized also get access to this "Freedom to"....


 * __ The Future of Feminist Theory or Man, this delineation of concepts would have been really helpful in Nancy's class last year __**

“…feminist theory…has become in many situations normalized, rendered into an entity, a knowable thing, surrounded by and aligned with history and methodology courses, even as it remains highly contested and without any agreed upon content, canonical texts or named authors” (75)

In rethinking feminist theory, need to rethink what theory itself is and might become in the future – rethinking concepts as well – generating, innovating beyond the present

“One suspects that theory has become theory, has renamed itself as theory, only in reaction to the hijacking of philosophy by the most narrow and conservative of intellectual forces, which make the discipline as devoid of social effects and social criticism as it can possibly be” (76).

Concepts as looking forward toward the possible – not concrete, but fully intereconnected with one another – they vibrate and resonant with each other. Linked in a chain to “potentially infinite other concepts” 6 key components:

1. Have components which are themselves concepts 2. Creates a consistency both internal and external with other aligned concepts – shifting produces new concepts 3. It is “emergent from its features, not once and for all, but continuously” (79) 4. “Incorporeal or virtual even though it is “effectuated” through bodies and events” (79) * 5. Cannot be identified with propositions, statements, discourse or representations – cannot be submitted to truth or to intension – can be representable, but not reducible to discourse/representations as a root way in which they exist. 6. not isolated though they are cohesive – linkings and interconnectedness with other concepts

The virtuality and substantiation of concepts within the real – “Concepts are thus ways of addressing the future, and in this sense are the conditions under which a future different from the present – the goal of every radical politics – becomes possible” (80)

“Thus the concept is central, indispensable, to addressing the new, not through anticipation or forecasting but through the task that it performs of opening up the real, the outside” (80)

BUT OH BOY THIS TENSION BETWEEN THE VIRTUAL AND THE MATERIAL – THE IMMATERIAL AND INTANGIBLE CONCEPT AS FREEING, AS PROMISING AND “THE HORRIFYING MATERIALITY, THE WEIGHTY REALITY, OF THE PRESENT AS PATRIARCHAL, AS RACIST, AS ETHNOCENTRIC, A BALLAST TO ENABLE IT TO BE TRANSFORMED” (80). THEN LOOKING AT GUT FEMINISM, THAT PULL OF THE REAL, OF THE BIOLOGICAL THAT CANNOT BE CONCEPTUALIZED AWAY – HOW TO RECONCILE THESE TWO STANCES – WHERE DO THEY MEET ON THE INBETWEEN? AS CONCEPTS AND INSUBSTANTIATED INTO THE MATERIAL? THROUGH ACTION? THROUGH THE ‘FREEDOM TO?’

“Feminism abdicates the right to speak about the real, about the world, about matter, about nature, and in exchange, cages itself in the reign of the “I”: who am I, who recognizes me, what can I become? Ironically, this is a realm that is increasingly globally defined through the right to consumption, what the subject can have and own” (84).


 * __ Differences Disturbing Identity __**


 * “How can we transform the ways in which identity is conceived so that identities do //not// emerge and function only through the suppression and subordination of other social identities?” **