LN_Feminisms

__ REMIXXXXXX::::: Updating soon material is being taken forward, for now some quotes from Butler __

__ Excitable Speech: __

“MacKinnon’s use of the performative engages a figure of the performative, a figure of sovereign power that governs how a speech act is said to act – as efficacious, unilateral, transitive, generative” (74)

“This idealization of the speech act as sovereign action (whether positive or negative) appears linked with the idealization of sovereign state power or, rather, with the imagined and forceful voice of that power. It is as if the proper power of the state has been expropriated, delegated to its citizens, and the state then reemerges as a neutral instrument to which we seek recourse to protect us from other citizens, who have become revived emblems of a (lost) sovereign power” (82) à things cannot really be neutral, there is still precedence and pre-cursor values that form that ‘neutrality.’ There is still a right or wrong, and who really gets to decide what is the right and the wrong? The state is still made up of groups and individuals, some who have more power to decide what that ‘neutral instrument’ is.

Homogenized = “equal under the law”

In relating, talking about the issue of framing pornography as hate speech. The core problematic as then taking any power away from the women being depicted à “Understood as hate speech, pornography deprives the addressee of the power to speak. The speech of the addressee is deprived of what Austin called its “illocutionary force.” The speech of the addressee no longer has the power to do what it says, but always to do something other than what it says (a doing distinct from the doing that would be consonant with its saying) or to mean precisely the opposite of what it intends to mean” (82).

The interminiability of both psychoanalysis and of politics – you’re not gonna arrest it, cat and mouse games

__ Gut Feminism __

Materialism and the thinking body.

This model of hysteria, and Freud’s emerging preference for psychogenic etiologies over biological ones, 3 has been enormously infl uential on feminist accounts of embodiment. The idea that psychic or cultural confl icts could become somatic events was one of the central organizing principles of feminist work on the body in the 1980s and 1990s. This model 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 (Gut Feminism 70-69)

that the most compelling analytic registers for thinking about the body are symbolic, cultural, ideational, or social rather than biological, and that political or intellectual alliances with the biological sciences are dangerous and retrograde. It is my concern that we have come to be astute about the body while being ignorant about anatomy and that feminism’s relations to biological data have tended to be skeptical or indifferent rather than speculative, engaged, fascinated, surprised, enthusiastic, amused, or astonished (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)

Rather, the soft tissue at the back of her throat (as with Robinson and Grossi’s bulimic patients) has become alive to a number of different ontogenetic and phylogenetic possibilities (i.e., to what Ferenczi calls the biological unconscious). (80)

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 infl uence 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)

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 __

“Sedgwick and Frank suggest that 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 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)

Phenomenology-scientism :: “[…] it produces a theory of affect that would not otherwise be available. That is, there is a contingent relation between the difficulties of this conjunction and what is generated by this conjunction To separate affect from these biological, cybernetic, and neurological tenets is to miss this point, and to destroy the tension, and thus the vigor of Tomkins’s theories under the imperative of sanitizing, compulsive critical practice” (3)

“The seamless incorporation of these debiologized or descientied Freudian elements as theory indicates the indispensability of a disjunction between science and interpretation to the infrastructure of o” ur present reading habits and procedures” (4)

“”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 behavoioral sciences must be attributed to feminism’s own naturalized antiessentialism” 15)

“I will be concerned with the nature of cognition itself: How does such a seemingly benign and indispensable notion (cognition) act in the service of phallocentric authority?” (19)

“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)

Not quite sure I’m grasping what a “Double gesture” quite is from this reading…