hdh-feminism2

I have been wanting to re-write my artist statement lately and I thought I would try to incorporate some of my thoughts as they have emerged/been shaped by the readings and discussions in this class. Here are some words I am working with presently...

//Preliminary thoughts on my artistic process / goals// I would really love feedback on this so feel free to email me with any thoughts... deweyh at rpi

Since 2001, I’ve been working at the intersection of art and science, with an emphasis on conceptions of the natural and the artificial. Drawing from diverse practices including sound, sculpture, biology and computation, I engage in art as interdisciplinary research; a means of exploration to probe the deep and often hidden structures of media/technology/science that dominate the contemporary moment and frame our cultural imagination.

My work is project driven and my projects generally begin with a question.The questions that intrigue me are philosophical, scientific, political and theoretical. I have long been fascinated by language and speech, by learning and knowledge representation, by algorithmic models and metaphors, by biological and ecological systems, and by the cultural organization/interpretation of data as information.

These questions become a fascination, a fascination becomes an obsession, and the artistic product is a document of this process of engagement with the materials, theories and history. My process is a form of intimacy with my subject that comes from a place of love and respect / indebtedness. Through close reading and careful writing of the material of a subject, I aim to subject it to critique, open it to play, and sometimes to subvert it.

Due to its liminal status, art at the intersection of science is uniquely poised as a critical practice. Its form manifests as a kind of ‘double gesture’, the ‘necessary and the impossible’ collide in a type of self-reflexive art that examines its own terms. This doubling is both a critique and homage. By dissecting its very materials, this conceptually driven form utilizes a medium to reflect upon itself. It is an understanding that perhaps we can only come to know something by engaging it very deeply. We can only criticize that which we have lived. Such a double form comes from a place of passion for the beauty and elegance of science, of genuine love for the act of experimentation, combined with an endeavor to realize its framing, an attempt to understand its flaws, limitations, and biases.

It is my hope that coming from this place of conflicted [infatuation and critique/admiration and scrutiny] empowers my work to tackle issues and ideas that are difficult to articulate with conventional media. Often it is through the process of experimentation, through hands-on work with the material of a discipline that its organizational contradictions come to light. By physically engaging with the production of scientific knowledge and technological application I hope to untie some of these more hidden knots, and to use materials of the discipline to show rather than say what I find.

--- and notes on/quotes from the readings


 * Evelyn Fox Keller** - by [|Natasha Whitton]

...the importance of recognizing the social construction of gender, and the deeply oppressive consequences of assuming that men and women are, in Simone de Beauvoir's words, "born rather than made." All of my work on gender and science proceeds from this basic recognition. My endeavor has been to call attention to the ways in which the social construction of a binary opposition between "masculine" and "feminine" has influenced the social construction of science.

The first step, of course, is to abandon the myth that the opposition between "masculine" and "feminine" is somehow "natural," and therefore fixed.

McClintock spent her years of study on the maize plant. While the scientific community moved on to phage and bacteria, she labored in the field harvesting a minimum of two crops a year and spending the rest of her time carefully examining each kernel of her precious yield. Her study of corn was devoted to complete understanding of the organism, not to experimentation directed to discern a particular fact. In her interviews with Keller, McClintock continually emphasized the special relationship that she was able to establish through her work. She felt that she was a part of the corn. She actually got to a point in her career where she could look at the corn kernels and accurately predict the genetic makeup that lay in the genotype.

Science continues to be, for her, "the search for reliable, shareable knowledge of the world around us"

Although Keller claims not to have been aware of the controversy that the book would cause during the writing process, she did begin to realize when the advanced copies arrived that she might, in her own words, be torn "limb from limb"

Keller's prevailing thesis through all three sections is that scientific thought utilizes a male-dominated discourse. She supports her claim with a thorough interpretation of the founding of modern science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, an examination of Freudian psychoanalytic conceptions of gender, and how her philosophy may be applied to everyday scientific practice.

Our task as historians and philosophers of science is to make sense of the successes of science in terms of the particular linguistic and material conventions that scientists have forged for their sorts of muddling through.

**Grosz, Elizabeth, 2011** **Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art** **ch 4. Feminism, Materialism, and Freedom** *page numbers refer to PDF page numbers 2. autonomy, agency, freedom - central terms by which subjectivity has been understood in the 20th c. and early 21st- have been central to feminist politics for over 1/2 a century… however they been rarely defined, explained, or analyzed.

3. 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. In doing so, I hope to elaborate a new understanding of freedom, agency and autonomy, not in terms of *"freedom from"* where freedom is conceived nagatively, as the elimintaion of constraint, but in terms of *"freedom to"*, a positive understanding of freedom as the capacity for action…

Is feminist theory bext served through its traditional focus on women's attainment of freedom from patriarchal, racist, colonoialist, heteronormative constraint? Or by exploring what the female - or feminist - subject is capable of making and doing?

4. On the other side is the libertarian or free will position, whch asserts that even if determinism regulates the material order, in the realm of the human subject there is an inherent unpredictability of effects from given causes… Freedom is understood… *as the performance of an act by someone who could have done otherwise, even under the same conditions.

For the hard-core determinist… What lies behind each variation of this position is the belief that if one could know the brain's structure or genetic or behavioral patterns intimately enough one could predict future behavior, whether criminal, sexual or cultural.

both sides of the free will-determinism debate are problematic, and share assumptions that enable them to regard the other as their opposite

5. Bergson's position on the question of freedom is more complex than either the determinist or the libertarian view. For hi, 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"`

psychical states: 1. are qualitative 2. function through interpenetration 3. can only be understood in duration - not a division into parts

6. What both the determinists and libertarians misunderstand is the very notion of *possibility*… Both assume, given two possible outcomes, x or y, either that one was never in fact possible or that both are equally possible. Neither understands tht the 2 options were never of equal value because neither exists in itself as an abstract possibiity.

actions express freedom not subjects

Only after one of the option has been chosen can we see that the unchosen option is not preserved in its possibility but entirely dissolves, becoming simply a reminiscence or projection.

8. Bergson argues, matter as a whole, the material universe, must contain within itself the very conditions for teh indeterminancy of life which it generated, those mixtures or compounds which may yield memory, history, the past and make them linger , press on, and remain relevant to the present and future. Matter must conatin as its most latent principle, its most virtual recess, the same indeterminancy that life returns to it.

the question of freedom for women, or for any oppressed social group, is never simply a question of expanding the range of available options so much as it is about transforming the quality and activity, the character, of the subjects who choose and make themselves through how and what they do.

9. the challenge facing feminism today is n longer only to give women an equal place within existing social networks and relations but to enable women to partake in the creation of a future unlike the present.

Being gay or straight for example is not a question of choice… but an expression of who one is and what one enjoys doing, of one's being. It is an expression of freedom without necessarily constraining itself to options already laid out. the challenge facing feminism today is n longer only to give women an equal place within existing social networks and relations but to enable women to partake in the creation of a future unlike the present.

**ch. 6 Differences Disturbing Identity: Deleuze and Feminism** 2. the problem of identity is one of the current limits of feminist thought

we need to overcome somehow the overwhelming power of identity politics, by which I mean the overriding concern with questions of who the subject is and how its categorical inclusion in various types of oppression is conceived. We must affirm… that such specification of identity in terms of race-class-gender-sexual orentation-ethnicity must ultimately lead to individuality alone, to unique subject positions which then lose any connections they may share with other women in necessarily different positions.

3. What I am interested in is an understanding of difference as the generative force of the world, the force that enacts materiality (and not just representation), the movement of difference that marks the very energies of existence before and beyond any lived or imputed identity.

4. one of the problems of feminis theory is its reliance on images of social relations conceived in terms of identities, even if those identities are rendered more complex through intersectionality, that is, through imagining a kind of series of interlocking oppressions

Each oppression, while perhaps sometimes invisible to some, is ultimately assumed to be determinable, recognizable, and separable from the other forms of oppression with which it engages

Deleuze identifies 4 philosophical techniques which reduce difference to representation: identity, analogy, opposition, and resemblance.

5. difference abounds everywhere *but* in and through the sign.

How to bring about change, how to transform the present, not just reproduce its privileges which are now distributed to those previously subordinated? It is the task of the philosopher to address and welcome the question, the call, of the future…

6. The concept of difference entails that there cannot be a unified subject position, no matter how specified and hyphenated it may be.. that there cannot be one aim, goal, or ideal for all sexes, races, classes, or constiuencies, no common goal, interest, terrain of negotiation.

But without this call to the future that philosophy, along with the arts, offers, difference inevitably becomes bound up with difference between things which already are, rather than the generation of difference to come.

Patriarchy, racism, and classism are the labels we attach, for the sake of convenience, a form of shorthand, to describe this myriad of acts we believe are somehow systematically connected.

The second implications of using the indeterminable concept of difference is that this perspective… provides a new framework and connection, a new kind of liberation for the subject, who understands that culture and history have an outside, are framed and given position, only through the orders of difference that structure the material world. This is the work currently explored by Deleuzians in relation to social networks or assemblages.

Oppression is made up of myriad acts… I am not suggesting that patriarchy or racism don't exist or have mutually inducing effects on all individuals. I am simply suggesting that they are *not* structures, *not* systems, but immanent *patterns*, models we impose on this plethora of acts to create some order. What exists, what is real, are these teeming act - the acts of families, of sexual couples, and of institutions and the very particular relations institutions establish between experts and their objects of investigation.

a 3rd implication of this concept of difference, is that difference is the undoing of all stabilities, the inherent and immanent condition for the failure of identity

7.

In this case, identity cannot be understood as what we are, the multiple, overlapping categories that make us into subjects; rather, we are what we do and what we make, we are what we generate, which may give us an identity, but always an identity that i directed to our next act, our next activity, rather than to the accretion of the categories that may serve to describe us.

--> Interesting to note the way our class divides along lines of identity, groupings of individuals by seating arrangement...