Halloween+Needs+Some+Feminism

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Sov ereig n Perfo rmatives

“Clearly, the law has definitions to offer and those definitions often institutionalize catachrestic extensions of ordinary understandings of speech; hence, the burning of a flag or even a cross may be construed as "speech” for legal purposes” (72).

“I propose to review some of the senses in which "verbal conduct" is thought in the proposed hate speech regulation, and to offer an alternative view of 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. Indeed, 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).

“I read the figure of sovereignty as it emerges within the contemporary discourse on the performative in terms of the Foucaultian view that contemporary power is no longer sovereign in character ” (74).

“Paradoxically and poignantly, when the courts become the ones who are invested with the power to regulate such expressions, __new occasions for discrimination are produced__ in which the courts discount African-American cultural production as well as lesbian and gay self-representation as such through the arbitrary and tactical use of obscenity law ” (75).

“ As difficult and painful as it is to imagine, could the military have targeted this form of utterance as a codifiable offense without the precedent of sexual harassment law and its extension into the areas of pornography and hate speech?” (76).

“That formulation is this: // 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 publically 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” (77).

“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. __ Does this theoretical move not constitute an overdetermination of the scene of utterance, __one in which the injuries of racism become reducible to the injuries produced in language? And does this not lead to a view of the power of the subject who speaks and, hence, of his/her culpability, in which the subject is prematurely identified as the "cause" of the problem of racism?” (80).

“As Hill utters the sexualized discourse, she is sexualized by it, and that very sexualization undercuts her effort to represent sexualization itself as a kind of injury. After all, in speaking it, she assumes it, furthers it, and produces it ; her speaking appears as an active appropriation of the sexualization she seeks to counter. Within pornography, there is no countering of this sexualization without having that very countering become a sexualized act. The pornographic is marked precisely by this power of sexual appropriation” (83).

“… is precisely that it //recontextualizes// the intended meaning of an act of speech, where that act of speech intends a "no" -or is figured as intending a "no" -and that recontextualization takes the specific form of a //reversal// in which the "no" is taken as, read as, a "yes:' The resistance to sexuality is thus refigured as the peculiar venue for its affirmation and recirculation ” (83).

“This is what some would call a performative contradiction : __an act of speech that in its very acting produces a meaning that undercuts the one it purports to make__. To the extent that she speaks, she displays her agency, for speech is taken to be a sign of agency, and the notion that we might speak, utter words, without voluntary intention (much less //unconsciously)// is regularly foreclosed by this construal of pornography. Paradoxically, the problem with the pornographic construal of her speech is that it sets her words against her intentions, and so presumes that the two are not only severable, but able to be posed against one another. Precisely through this display of linguistic agency, her meaning becomes reversed and discounted. The more she speaks, the less she is believed, the less her meaning is taken to be the one she intends. But this remains true only as long as the meaning she intends is consonant –with the sexualization of her utterance, and the one she does not intend is in opposition to that very sexualization” (88).

“Indeed, it seems important to consider that standards of universality are historically articulated and that exposing the parochial and exclusionary character of a given historical articulation of universality is part of the project of extending and rendering substantive the notion of universality itself” (89).

“To claim that the universal has not yet been articulated is to insist that the "not yet" is proper to an understanding of the universal itself that which remains "unrealized" by the universal constitutes it essentially” (90).

“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 renegotiation of language that exploits the undetermined character of these relations__?” (92).

“ The putative repression of sexuality becomes the sexualization of repression” (94).

“This odd dependency of the very existence of the hateful utterance on the voice-over of the court means that the hateful utterance is not finally distinguishable from the speech of the state by which it is decided” (96-7).

“And yet, even MacKinnon's act of-advocacy in which she represents a woman's ''yes" and //"no”// depends upon a recontextualization and a textual violence of sorts, one that Matsuda, in the case of the law, elevates to the level oflegal method under the rubric of doctrinal reconstruction. In bothcases, the utterance is uncontrollable, appropriable, and able to signifyotherwise and in excess of its animating intentions” (98).

“__No one has ever worked through an injury without repeating it__: its repetition is both the continuation of the trauma and that which marks a selfdistance within the very structure of trauma, its constitutive possibility of being otherwise” (102).

Sedgwick Paranoud Reading and Reparative Reading Or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think The Essay Is About You

“ Supposing we were ever so sure of all those things- what would we know then that we don't already know ?" (123).

“I’ve found enabling about it is that it suggests the possibility of unpacking, of disentangling from their impacted and overdetermined historical relation to each other some of the separate elements of the intellectual baggage that many of us carry around under a label such as "the hermeneutics of suspicion" (124)

“That knowledge //does// rather than simply //is// it is by now very routine to discover.”

“Yet it seems that a lot of the real force of such discoveries has been blunted through the habitual practices of the same forms of critical theory that have given such broad currency to the formulae themselves.”

“Not surprisingly, the methodological centrality of suspicion to current critical practice has involved a concomitant privileging of the concept of paranoia.”

“But the truth value of the original axiom, assuming it to //be// true, doesn't actually make a paranoid imperative self-evident. Learning that "just because you're paranoid doesn't mean you don't have enemies," somebody might deduce that being paranoid is not an effective way to get rid of enemies. Rather than concluding ''so you can never be paranoid enough," this person might instead be moved to reflect __ "but then, just because you have enemies doesn't mean you have to be paranoid." __That is to say, once again: for someone to have an unmystified view of systemic oppressions does not //intrinsically// or //necessarily// enjoin that person to any specific train of epistemological or narrative consequences” (128).

“For Klein's infant or adult, the paranoid position- understandably marked by hatred, envy, and anxiety-is a position of terrible alertness to the dangers posed by the hateful and envious part-objects that one defensively projects into, carves out of, and ingests from the world around one. By contrast, the depressive position is an anxiety-mitigating achievement that the infant or adult only sometimes, and often only briefly, succeeds in inhabiting: this is the position from which it is possible in turn to use one's own resources to assemble or "repair" the murderous part-objects into something like a whole-though, I would emphasize, //not necessarily-like any preexisting whole.// Once assembled to one's own specifications, the more satisfying object is available both to be identified with and to offer one nourishment and comfort in turn. Among Klein's names for the reparative process is love.”

Paranoia is //anticipatory.// Paranoia is //reflexive// and //mimetic.// Paranoia is //a strong theory.// Paranoia is a theory of //negative affects.// Paranoia places its faith in // exposure. //

“Furthermore, __the force of any interpretive project of //unveiling hidden violence// would seem to depend on a cultural context__, like the one assumed inFoucault's early works, in which violence would be deprecated and hencehidden in the first place. … In the United States and internationally, whilethere is plenty of hidden violence that requires exposure there is also, andincreasingly, an ethos where forms of violence that are hypervisible fromthe start may be offered as an exemplary spectacle rather than remain to beunveiled as a scandalous secret…. not an unveiling of practices thathad been hidden or naturalized, but a wrestle of different frameworks //of// visibility. That is, violence that was from //the beginning// exemplary and spectacular,pointedly addressed, meant to serve as a public warning or terror tomembers of a particular community is combated by efforts to //displace and redirect// (as well as simply expand) its aperture of visibility.”

“If there is an obvious danger in the triumphalism of a paranoid hermeneutics, it is that the broad consensual sweep of such methodological assumptions, the current near professionwide agreement about what constitutes narrative or explanation or adequate historicization may, if it persists unquestioned, unintentionally impoverish the gene pool of literary-critical perspectives and skills. The trouble with a shallow gene pool, of course, is its diminished ability to respond to environmental (e.g., political) change” (144).

“While paranoid theoretical proceedings both depend on and reinforce the structural dominance of monopolistic "strong theory," there may also be __benefit in exploring the extremely varied, dynamic, and historically contingent ways that strong theoretical constructs interact with weak ones in the ecology of knowing-__ an exploration that obviously can't proceed without a respectful interest in weak as well as strong theoretical acts” (145).

“At a textual level, it seems to me that related practices of reparative knowing may lie, barely recognized and little explored, at the heart of many histories of gay, lesbian, and queer intertextuality. The queer-identified practice of camp, for example, may be seriously misrecognized when it is viewed, as Butler and others view it, through paranoid lenses. As we've seen, camp is most often understood as uniquely appropriate to the projects of parody, denaturalization, demystification, and mocking exposure of the elements and assumptions of a dominant culture. And the degree to which camping is motivated by love seems often to be understood mainly as the degree of its self-hating complicity with an oppressive status quo” (149).

“Like Proust, the reparative reader ''helps himself again and again"; it is not only important but //possible// to find ways of attending to such reparative motives and positionalities. The vocabulary for articulating any reader's reparative motive toward a text or a culture has long been so sappy, aestheticizing, defensive, anti-intellectual, or reactionary that it's no wonder few critics are willing to describe their acquaintance with such motives . __The prohibitive problem, however, has__ __been__ __in the limitations of present theoretical vocabularies rather than in the reparative motive itself__. No less acute than a paranoid position, no less realistic, no less attached to a project of survival, and neither less nor more delusional or fantasmatic, the reparative reading position undertakes a different range of affects, ambitions, and risks. What we can best learn from such practices are, perhaps, the many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a cultur e-even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them” (150-1).

Wilson ---

“the theoretical habits and procedures of such projects-specifically, their compulsive antiessentialism-have become not merely routinized, but naturalized. That is, arguments driven by critiques of essentialism have not only become de rigueu r, they have become the foundational supposition of many contemporary critical projects”

“Tomkins captivates Sedgwick and Frank, even though he is a figure whom our/their theoretical habits and procedures __would censure instinctively__. His theories of innate affect systems are at once compelling and irresistibly easy to discredit, at once captivating and simplistically, scientistically quaint .”

“We may find that our critical habits draw us into gestures of adjudication-specifically, into gestures that have been formulated through an increasingly commonplace critical choice: //either// How subversive is this theory of affect? //or// To what extent does this theory of affect propagate certain normative, hegemonic, or restrictive expectations? 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" (1995, 5).

“For Sedgwick and Frank, these gestures of adjudication produce impoverished readings -readings that cannot accommodate the nature and productivity of the "peculiar double movement" that the conjunction phenomenology-scientism incites.”

“Situated at the nexus-at once unlikely and overdetermined-of cognitive psychology, deconstruction, psychoanalysis and feminism, this book takes recent developments in connectionist theory as the means by which a number of questions can be asked not only about cognition, the brain, and psychology, but also __about the politics of feminist-critical interventions in contemporary scientific psychology__. What will be at stake is not simply a critique of contemporary cognitive theory, but the nature-the presumptions and aspirations-of such critiques in general .”

“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. If neurology has been one of the vicissitudes that has been foreclosed in traditional psychological and computational theory, then its reinjection into that field, while risking a generalized reductionism, also promises to refigure and rejuvenate cognition. Rather than reducing the possibilities of thinking cognition and psyche, neurology may give access to an internal movement in cognition that has hitherto been foreclosed by traditional cognitivism.”

"The important conceptual point for Freud is that in hysteria the “material substratum” (i.e., cortex) is undamaged, but ideas about the body have undergone some kind of alteration. The idea of the arm, for example, has become associated with a large “quota of affect,” and this prevents it from being involved in any associative links with other ideas or organs. It has become ideationally sequestered (lost to consciousness) under the weight of this quota of affect. The arm is liberated from its paralysis only when this affective burden is removed, and the idea of the arm becomes accessible again to “conscious associations and impulses” (171). This model of hysteria, and Freud’s emerging preference for psychogenic etiologies over biological ones, has been enormously influential on feminist accounts of embodiment. 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.”

__“Most troublingly, it seems that the very sophistication of feminist accounts of embodiment has been__ brokered through a repudiation of biological data__. Too often, it is only when anatomy or physiology or biochemistry are removed from the analytic scene (or, in what amounts to much the same gesture, these domains are considered to be too reductive to be analytically interesting) that it has been possible to generate a recognizably feminist account of the body. Taking the eating-disordered body as its case in point, this paper argues that biological data are indispensable to feminism’s conceptual and political efficac y. The exclusion of biological data from feminist accounts of eating disorders has narrowed their explanatory power, and has bequeathed to feminism models of embodiment that cannot engage easily with the contemporary life sciences. This paper argues that what anatomy (specifically, the gut) can know, in hysterical and non-hysterical states, is perhaps the most vital lesson to emerge from the eating disorder epidemic.”