LP+Week+8


 * // Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech //**

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)

When the scene of racism is reduced to a single speaker and his or her audience, the political problem is cast as the tracing of the harm as it travels from the speaker to the psychic/somatic constitution of the one who hears the term or to whom it is directed. The elaborate institutional structure 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. (80)

Indeed, racist speech could not act as racist speech if it were not //a citation of itself//; only because we already know its force from its prior instances do we know it to be so offensive now, and we brace ourselves against its future invocations. The iterability of hate speech is effectively dissimulated by the “subject” who speaks the speech of hate. (80).

Significantly and paradoxically, the argument against pornography seeks to limit the first Amendment rights of pornographers but also to expand the sphere of first Amendment protection for those depicted and (hence, ostensibly) “addressed” by pornography: pornographic representation discredits and degrades those whom it depicts – mainly women – such that the effect of that degradation is to cast doubt on whether the speech uttered by those depicted can ever be taken to mean what it says (85).

An effort to retether the utterance to the sovereign intention, the an tipornography stance opposes the state of disarray into which the utterance has apparently fallen: the utterance risks meaning in ways that are not intended or never intended; it because a sexualized act, evidencing itself as seduction (hence, as perlocutionary) rather than as truth-based (hence, as constative). (85-86)

Hate speech is a kind of speech that acts, but it is also //referred// to as a kind of speech that acts and, hence, as an item and object of discourse. Although hate speech may be a saying that is a kind of doing or a kind of conduct, it can be established as such only through a language that authoritatively describes this doing for us; thus, the speech act is always delivered twice-removed, that is, through //a theory of the speech act// that has its own performative power (and that is, by definition, the business of //producing// speech acts, thus redoubling the performativity it seeks to analyze). The description of this act of speech is a doing or a kind of conduct of an equally discursive and equally consequential kind. (96)

An aesthetic enactment of an injurious word may both //use// the word and //mention// it, that is, make use of it to produce certain effects but also at the same time make reference to that very use, calling attention to it as a citation, situating that use within a citational legacy, making that use into an explicit discursive item to be reflected on rather than taken for granted operation of ordinary language. (99)

Hate speech is repeatable speech, and it will continue to repeat itself as long as it is hateful. Its hate speech is a function of its repeatability. Given that the slur is always cited from elsewhere, that it is taken up from already established linguistic conventions and reiterated and furthered in its contemporary invocations, the question will be whether the state or public discourse will take up that practice of reenactment. (102)

There is no possibility of //not// repeating. (102)


 * // Wilson, Elizabeth. "Gut feminism." //**

Rather, hysteria “takes organs in the ordinary, popular sense of the names they bear: the leg is the leg as far up as its insertion into the hip, the arm is the upper arm as it is visible under the clothing” (169). That is, hysteria is an alteration of the everyday body (especially as it is understood through tactile and perceptual data); it is an engagement of the body as we know it colloquially – as we imagine, love or despise it. (67-68)

Too often, it is only when anatomy or physiology or bio-chemistry 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. (70)

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. (74)

Instead, biology must be approached “from the other side” (104); 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. (76)

More problematically, much of the feminist work on embodiment seems to gesture towards a flat organic realm elsewhere as a way of securing a more valuable or dynamic account of the body closer to home. The organic – conceptually dull and politically dangerous – lurks at the periphery of these texts, underwriting the claims about embodiment that are made. (79)

There are a number of demarcations that these etiological discussions in the literature seem to force on the reader: depression //then// binging; satiety //or// mood; brain //not// gut. 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. (83)

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 determinism is a singular, delimited event. (83-84)

The gut is sometimes angry, sometimes depressed, sometimes acutely self-destructive; under the stress of severe dieting, these inclinations come to dominate the gut’s responsivity to the world. At these moments a radical distinction between stomach and mood, between vomiting and rage is artificial. (84)

The efficacy of antidepressant medications in the treatment of bulimia can be best explained in a conceptual field where the relations between head and gut; between thinking and eating among serotonin, appetite, and mood; among disgust and antiperistalsis and the esophagus; among anger and hunger and loneliness and the stomach are more than juxtapositions or utilitarian relations of otherwise disjunct realms. (85)

I have provisionally called this method gut feminism – a feminism that is able to think innovatively and organically at the same time. (86)


 * // Wilson, Elizabeth. Neural Geographies: Feminism and the Microstructure of Cognition. //**

These maneuvers with Freudian theory are indicative of a more widespread imperative to force a disjunction (or enforce a hierarchy) between science and criticism, between biology and politics – the end effect of which has been to cripple our critical abilities and thereby blunt the cogency, force, and political efficacy of the readings what we produce. (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 [...] It is the connections between these units, rather than the units per se, that take on the pivotal role in the functioning of the network. Thus, //connectionism//. (6)

In such models, cognition is taken to be isomorphic with the sentential and propositional operations of standard computational programming. Specifically, cognition is a formal logic system wherein cognitive symbols are manipulated and transformed according to stored universal rules. (8)

Instead information (orthographic-semantic associations) is distributed across the network – it is “stored” not in designated locations, but in the difference between connection weights (see Plaut and Shallice 1994 for an extended discussion of this work). (9)

Any lesion to a traditional information-processing model results in system failure: If any part of the structure of a traditional AI model is removed, then the model itself will cease to function. Such models are said to be brittle, for small alterations to the structure or function of the model will leave the model crippled. Brittleness is not a feature of human cognitive systems; they are remarkably resilient to all manner of lesions and alterations. When they are damaged, the tend to decay gracefully rather then crash. (11)

The body at the center of these projects is curiously abiological – its social, cultural, experiential, or psychical construction having been posited //against// or //beyond// any putative biological claims. (15)

For most feminist critics in the sciences, the force of the conjunction feminism-science operates in only one direction: feminism critiquing science. In a reversal of fortune, science becomes the object of feminism’s masterful interrogations. Moreover, the ground from which such feminist critiques emerge is taken to be self-evident: the explicitness of a feminist signature guaranteeing the political and epistemological ambitions of such interventions. (16)

What is required most urgently from feminist criticism in the sciences is a clear demonstration that such neutral sites are no less implicated in the deployment of patriarchal presumption than are those sites marked as sexed. (19)

There are many vicissitudes of these antideconstruction misreadings: deconstruction simply reverses binaries, privileging the secondary term; deconstruction destroys binary structures; deconstruction makes knowledges impossible; deconstruction is rhetorical free play; desconstruction marks the end of politics. These concerns – often owing more to a popularized understanding of deconstruction than to a close reading of any particular deconstructive texts – have become the commonsense political responses to the complexities of deconstructive procedure. (21)

These hinge terms do not provide a solution to the binary; they do not pursue synthesis. Instead they serve to inflame that binary. They undo the self-evident character of the binary division by manifesting the point at which such a division becomes unworkable or incoherent. Rather than negating the binary, moving outside it, destroying, trivializing, or neutralizing it, the hinge term seeks to expose and internally displace its operations. (26)


 * // Sedgwick, Eve Kosofksy "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You" //**

What does knowledge //do// – the pursuit of it, the having and exposing of it, the receiving again of knowledge of what one already knows? //How//, in short, is knowledge performative, and how best does one move among its causes and effects? (124)

My impression, again, is that we are liable to produce this constative formulation as fiercely as if it had a self-evident imperative force: the notation that even paranoid people have enemies is wielded as if its absolutely necessary corollary were the injunction “so //you can never be paranoid enough.//” (127)

Concomitantly, some of the main reasons for practicing paranoid strategies may be other than the possibility that they offer unique access to true knowledge. They represent //a// way, among other ways, of seeking, finding, and organizing knowledge. Paranoia knows some things well and others poorly. (130)

The unidirectionally future-oriented vigilance of paranoia generates, paradoxically, a complex relation to the temporality that burrows both backward and forward: because there must be no bad surprises, and because learning of the possibility of a bad surprise would itself constitute a bad surprise, paranoia requires that bad news be always already known. (130)

The contingent possibilities of thinking otherwise than through “sexual difference” are subordinated to the paranoid imperative that, if the violence of such gender reification cannot be definitively halted in advance, it must at least never arrive on any conceptual scene //as a surprise//. In a paranoid view, it is more dangerous for such reification ever to be unanticipated than often to be unchallenged. (133)

Whatever account it may give of its own motivation, paranoia is characterized by placing, in practice, an extraordinary stress on the efficacy of knowledge per se – knowledge in the form of exposure. Maybe that’s why paranoid knowing is so inescapably narrative. (138)

The monopolistic program of paranoid knowing systematically disallows any explicit recourse to reparative motives, no sooner to be articulated than subject to methodological uprooting. Reparative motives, once they become explicit, are inadmissible in paranoid theory both because they are about pleasure (“merely aesthetic”) and because they are frankly ameliorative (“merely reformist”). (144)

...and suppose that one doesn’t want to draw much ontological distinction between academic theory and everyday theory; and suppose that one has a lot of concern for the quality of other people’s and one’s own practices of knowing and experiencing. In these cases, it would make sense – if one had the choice – not to cultivate the necessity of a systematic, self-accelerating split between what one is doing and the reasons one does it. (145)

Hope, often a fracturing, even a traumatic thing to experience, is among the energies by which the reparatively positioned reader tries to organize the fragments and part-objects she encounters or creates. Because the reader has room to realize that the future may be different from the present, it is also possible for her to entertain such profoundly painful, profoundly relieving, ethically crucial possibilities as that the past, in turn, could have happened differently from the way it actually did. (146)