Feminisms+2+(BB)


 * DEEP Biology**
 * "PSYCHIC ACTION IN THE GUT"**

"...hysterical paralyses are notorious for their capacity to mimic organic paralyses, in fact they differ from organic conditions in important ways: for example, hysterical paralyses are excessively intense, and they are more precisely delimited in their effects than organic conditions." (p. 66-7)

"Freud enacted a conceptual distinction that would be very influential on feminist theories of embodiment: he detached the hysterical body from the anatomical body. Organic paralyses, he asserts, are the result of an underlying biological lesion; more precisely, they are governed by 'the facts of anatomy—the construction of the nervous system and the distribution of its vessels'." (p. 67)

Freud: "...hysteria behaves as though anatomy did not exist or as though it had no knowledge of it." (p. 67)

"...hysteria is an alteration of the everyday body..." (p. 67)

"...it is an engagement of the body as we know it colloquially -- as we imagine, love, or despise." (p. 68)

"[Freud] claimed that conversion hysteria is the transformation of psychic conflict into somatic symptoms..." (p. 68)

"...organs, limbs, and nerves are transformed according to a symbolic or cultural logic rather than according to the dictates of anatomy." (p. 68)

"... this dissociation of ideation and biology (and the concomitant distaste for explanation via the biological) is deeply problematic." (p. 69)

"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. Put another way, in discounting an etiology based in biological damage, Freud minimizes the involvement that biology in general might have in the provocation, maintenance, and treatment of conversion symptoms." (p. 69)

"...hysterical materialization phenomenon..." (p. 73)

"Materializations are not the effect of a leap from the mental to the somatic; rather, they are the product of a regression to a protopsychic state." (p. 74)

"...ontogenetic and phylogenetic events are coeval..." (p. 74)

"...two kinds of psychosomatic organization...":
 * 1) "the psyche-soma relation as it exists under normal conditions... Pathologies in this organization are treatable according to the dictates of classical Freudian analysis: interpretation of ideational content as though anatomy did not exist. This body is neurotically inclined, symbolically guided, and analyzable."
 * 2) "...primordial psychic powers emerge after normal psychic structures have been violently destroyed by trauma..." (p. 75)

"These biological knowledges think of organs only in terms of their utility for the preservation of life. Instead, biology must be approached “from the other side”; that is, from the direction of psychoanalysis. 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." (p. 76)

"Behind what [Ferenczi] calls the facade of conventional biological description there is a biological unconscious. This biological unconscious motivates all organic activity...[long elision] ... Ferenczi uses an analysis of materialization to reveal the plastic nature of all organic substrate. In so doing, he generates a schema for feminists wanting to think about biological substrate as another scene, rather than as bedrock... [long elision] ... Under Ferenczi, biology is strange matter, proficient at the kinds of action (regressions, perversions, strangulations, condensations, displacements) usually attributed only to nonbiological systems. Clearly, hysteria comprehends more about the body than just what is given by perceptual and tactile data (which, in effect, limits hysteria’s reach to the surface of the body); hysteria also enacts some knowledge of the biological unconscious—the ontogenetic and phylogenetic impulses that motivate the body’s substrata. Conversion is an immediate and intimate psychosomatic event. It is not an ideational conflict transported into the bodily realm; it is not the body expressing, representing, or symbolizing a psychic conflict that originates elsewhere." (p. 77-8)

"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. It seems to me that the lack of a clear path from one cause to one effect, from one organ to another, or from the psychological realm to the biological and back again, indicate not a lack of conclusive data but the workings of the biological unconscious made manifest." (p. 83)

"The logic of interaction, addition, or supplementarity presumes that the entities at stake are already, radically detached. I am arguing that antidepressants alleviate bulimia because there is no radical (originary) distinction between biology and mood. Mood is not added onto the gut, secondarily, disrupting its proper function; rather, temper, like digestion, is one of the events to which enteric substrata are naturally (originally) inclined." (p. 85)


 * Neural Geographies**

"Our relation to any metaphysical concept is complex: Neither able to rid ourselves of it (as it enables our very critique) nor able to accommodate its violences, we are forced into an endless negotiation with its constitutive and its constraining effects." (p. 27)

"Deconstruction does not produce new, improved theories from its labors. Deconstruction cannot found a new scientific practice. On the other hand, we cannot presume that the value of deconstruction to criticism in the biological and behavioral sciences is that it brings critical sophistication to a politically naive or politically recalcitrant domain. When carefully deployed the conjunction deconstruction-empiricism will arrest both the progressivist presumptions of much empirical work and the antiempiricist presumptions of our own critical habits. If deconstruction is not an analysis from the outside, if it is not a nonempirical endeavor that is brought to bear on empiricism from elsewhere (philosophy? literature?) -- that is, if deconstruction and empiricism already cohabit or are mutually implicating and enforcing -- then we will need to map this relation with great care." (p. 23)

The "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. As Spivak patiently reminds us, "Deconstruction is not an exposure of error, nor a tabu lation of error; logocentrism is not a pathology, nor is the metaphysical closure a prison to overthrow by violent means" (Spivak 1993a, 130). It is an interrogation of the enabling limits of metaphysics, not their eradication, that is deconstruction's goal. For Derrida, it is never a matter of progress by ridding ourselves of certain methodological or epistemological concepts that are deemed metaphysical in favor of some allegedly nonmetaphysical concepts (in the first instance, the notion of a concept itself is indebted to the metaphysical distinction between the intelligible and the sensible). Where Kurtzman, for example, claims that deconstruction can be used to //negate// the metaphysical concept "structure" in cognitive psychology, Derrida is more circumspect. In speaking of "structure" in semiotic theory, he offers the following account of how deconstruction operates with such a concept:

"'The case of the concept of //structure// ... is certainly more ambiguous. Everything depends upon how one sets it to work. Like the concept of the sign -- and therefore of semiology -- it can simultaneously confirm and shake logocentric and ethnocentric assuredness. It is not a question of junking these concepts, nor do we have the means to do so. 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)" (p. 24-5)

"Feminism has been as deeply implicated in routinized antiessentialism as any of our critical procedures." (p. 14)

Who is the antiessentialist? Those of us who study //after// some white euro dudes. We find //danger// in neurological //explanation//. I'd like to know in what that danger is legitimated, because I can think of a few beyond simply that "reductionism is a bad thing."

For one, biology and neurology are methodological, linguistic and metaphorical systems often, though not always, are employed with the intention and belief that these offer unique and superior access to Reality. That neurology possesses a naturalism, materialism, and empiricism that is absent among some critical theorists that could benefit from a dose of these is not something I would dispute. That neurology often demonstrates a methodological rigor and systematicity that is more transparent than the procedures critical theorists use is something I would accept. That neurology uses a metaphorical system that may produce compelling texts is not something I would reject. That neurology occasionally produces reliable explanations of simple causal relations is obvious. What is likely in held among many of the critics (and who are they?), and one that I hold rather strongly, is that the danger of neurological influence in critical theory is that its position is frequently one as offering privileged access to a singular, universal, and relatively stable Reality. Further, this purported access is believed to offer unique abilities to intervene in that Reality in ways that are as normatively plain as are its final explanations. That its explanations might be reliable begs the question: reliably toward what? And what is it about this approach to knowing that offers unique capacities to intervene? And, shall we see this bridge as unproblematic? Or...Dangerous?

"My ambitions for reading neurology are different. Avoiding the correspondingly banal position that neurological theories of psychological or behavioral tendencies are liberatory, I will argue that the neurological facets of connectionism are indispensable to rethinking cognition, psyche, and biology." (p. 13)

Writing in 1997, Wilson saw the triumph of anti-essentialism and such a demand that theory be liberatory that she calls this imperative 'banal.' I would suggest that 16 years later, the status quo among critical theorists is that their own enterprise of critique is suspect and that the assessment that liberation is banal is ... universal. What the benefit of rethinking?

"Paul M. Churchland (1990), for example, argues that the computational neuroscience promised by connectionism will eventually displace or eliminate psychological theory."

THAT SILLY ALARMIST! Let's dismiss that prognostication in 1997, because that would //never// happen.

"...does connectionism offer a political reading of psyche, cognition, and biology not // despite // its neurocomputational inclinations, but // because of them?" // (p. 14)

The intervening decade and a half has produced a large body of research and a commentary by Chemero in his //Radical Embodied Cognitive Science// that I follow enough to confront this question with considerable skepticism. I'm left to wonder if in this time she has tempered her advocacy for computationalism?


 * Freedom**

'Bergson's position on the question of freedom is more complex than either the determinist or the libertarian view. For him, 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"** **.** 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 a subject, **they express** ** all ** **of that subject -- in other words, they are integral to who or what the subject is**.

'In this understanding, **there is no question that the subject would or** **would not make the same choice again**. **Such a situation is impossible**. **The precise circumstances cannot be repeated, at the very least because the subject is not the same.** The subject has inevitably changed, grown older, been affected by earlier decisions, become aware of the previous choice, and so on. If the subject were absolutely identical in the replaying of a particular choice, neither the determinist's nor the libertarian's position would be affirmed. All one could say is that the subject is the self-same subject. Yet even in the case of an example favored by the determinist -- the subject under hypnosis -- there is a measure of freedom insofar as the act performed through suggestion must still be rationalized, integrated in the agent's life history, given a history, and qualitatively inserted into all the agent's other acts in order to be performed.

'With even this most constrained and manipulated of circumstances, when one person's will is imposed on another's without their conscious awareness, Bergson argues that there must nevertheless be a retrospective cohesion between the subject's current act and the previous chain of connections that prepared for it and made it possible. Even in this case, **it is only retroactively, after the act is completed, that we can discern or mark the distinction between a cause and an effect**, for in psychical life there cannot be the logical separation of cause from effect that characterizes material objects in their external relations to each other. 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. Psychical states are not like objects for they have no parts, they cannot be directly compared, they admit of no magnitude or degree.

'__**Psychical states**__ have three relevant characteristics:


 * 1) first, they **are always qualitative, and thus incapable of measurement without the imposition of an external grid**. (This characteristic alone makes psychical determinism an incoherent position -- if causes cannot be measured and precisely calculated, even if determinism is in principle correct, ironically it remains unable to attain its most explicit goal, prediction. )
 * 2) Second, psychical states **function, not through distinction, opposition, categories, identities, but through "fusion or interpenetration"** **,** through an immersion or permeation that generates a continuity between states or processes and makes their juxtaposition impossible (this is the basis of Bergson's critique of associationism, the empirical principle that explains the connection between one term and another through their common or frequent association).
 * 3) And third, they **emerge or can only be understood in duration rather than through the conventional modes of spatialization that generally regulate thought**, especially scientific or instrumental thought -- that is to say, any mode of analysis or division into parts. Parts, elements, states, are only discernible as spatial categories or terms. 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.

'**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". Acts are free insofar as they express and resemble the subject, not insofar as the subject is always the same, an essence or an identity, but insofar as the subject is transformed by and engaged through its acts, becomes through its acts. As Bergson describes, ''Those who ask whether we are free to alter our character lay themselves open to this objection. Certainly our character is altering imperceptibly every day, and our freedom would suffer if these new acquisitions were grafted on to our self and not blended with it. But, as soon as this blending takes place, it must be admitted that the change which has supervened in our character belongs to us, that we have appropriated it". (Grosz p. 64-6)

"**Freedom is** thus not **an activity** of mind but one **primarily of the body**: it is linked to **the body's capacity for movement** and thus **its multiple possibilities of action**. Freedom is not an accomplishment granted by the grace or good will of the other, but is attained only through the struggle with matter, the struggle of bodies to become more than they are, a struggle that occurs not only on the level of the individual but also of the species." (p. 72)

"**The problem of feminism** is not the problem of women's lack of freedom, or simply the constraints that patriarchal power relations impose on women and their identities. If women are not, in some sense, free, feminism could not be possible. 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**. The problem is not how to give women more adequate recognition (who is it that women require recognition from?), more rights, or more of a voice, but **how to enable more action, more malting and doing, more difference.** That is, the challenge facing feminism today is no longer only to give women a more equal place within existing social networks and relations but **to enable women to partake in the creation of a future unlike the present.**" (p. 73)

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 * Viscera **