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<DIV>>I like Alec Cat. It's very jazzy. </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Yes, I thought it was appropos.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>> I just noticed the shift to Snit, <BR>>and the d-c-m on your
e-address, that's why I made the joke.<BR></DIV>
<DIV>Borrowed e-mail address. Finally figured out how to change the
from-name. Snit as appropriate but generally more because I don't feel
like typing out all the r's as the number of r's *means* something though it's
constantly shifting--the meaning behind the r's--so that it's difficult to keep
up.</DIV>
<DIV><BR><BR>>Hmm. But I don't think performativity is reducible to
performance art, <BR>>some of which works, some of which doesn't.
</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Perhaps not. But this is where _Gender Trouble_ was taken by
its readers. And by Butler. The Madonna Industry was in full gear at
the time, too, you'll recall. But below is what she wrote, no?</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><EM><FONT color=#000000 face="Times New Roman">"Practices of parody
can serve to reengage and reconsolidate the very distinction between a
privileged and naturalized gender configuration and one that appears as derived,
phantasmatic, and mimetic--a failed copy as it were...The parodic repetition of
gender exposes the illusion of gender identity as an intractable depth and inner
substance. As the effects of a sublte and politically enforced
performativity, gender is an 'act' as it were, that is open to splittings,
self-parody, self-criticims, and those hyperolic exhibitions of 'the nature'
that, in their very exaggeration, reveal its fundamentally phantasmatic status?
(146-7)</FONT></EM></DIV>
<DIV><EM><FONT color=#000000 face="Times New Roman"></FONT></EM> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Times New Roman">This, of course, has strategic, political
ramifications w/ regard to feminist politics:</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Times New Roman"></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Times New Roman"></FONT><EM><FONT
face="Times New Roman">"the reconceptualization of identity as an effect,
that is, as produced or generated, opens up possibilities of 'agency' that are
insidiously foreclosed by positions that take identity categories as
foundational and fixed. For an identity to be an effect means that it is
neither fatally determined nor fully artificial and arbitrary...Construction is
not opposed to agency; it is the necessary scene of agency, the very terms in
which agency is articulated and becomes culturall y intelligible. The
critical task for feminism is not to establish a point of view outside of
constructed identities; that conceit is the construction of an epistemological
model that would disavow its own cultural location and, hence, promote itself as
a global subject...The critical task is, rather, to locate strategies of
subversive repetition enabled by those constructions, to affirm the local
possibilities of intervention through participating in preceisely those
practices of repeition that constitute identity and, therefore, present the
immanent possibility of contesting them...The deconstruction of identity is not
the deconstruction of politics; rather, it establishes the very terms through
which identity is articulated....The task here is not to celebrate each
every new possibility qua possibility, but to redescribe those
possibilities that already exist, but which exist within cultural domains
designated as culturally unintelligible and impossible"
(147-9).</FONT></EM></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face="Times New Roman">The thing about Butler is that
she (and most of her fans and critics) fails to realize that this stuff has
already been written about before, though not with the same political
intentions. Erving Goffman wrote about the Presentation of Self in
Everyday life in which he argued that the self performs on a shifting stage
every day, but even this analogy is inaequate, he insisted, because there is no
true self behind the performing self. He also wrote a short little piece,
Gender Advertisements about gender performance. And I think another one
about being fooled by a transvestite. Something like that
anyway.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face="Times New Roman"></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV>I love Genny Cream Ale. We <BR>>drank it alot back in
college. Most people I meet can't stand the stuff
<BR>>though. </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face="Times New Roman">You know I once worked in a
classy little joint--hey Alec, they used to have live jazz with the likes
of Buddy Rich and Dizzy 'cause my boss hung out in dark little jazz clubs
in the 40s with the likes of Rich and Dizzy--and my boss considered himself a
connoisseur of beer and wine. A blind taste test revealed that Schmidt's
(in them thar short stubby brown glass bottles) held up to the finest beers
around the world.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face="Times New Roman"></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV> But hey K, how many working class folks were at the conference?
<BR>>What kind of conference was it? I'm just
curious. </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face="Times New Roman">Well I suppose it depends on who
constitutes the working class. Can such a thing, such an entity be
constituted? Anyway, it was in Flint Michigan. Do I rack up any
street cred for that? I can't remember the dang name of the conference but
I do know that it included lots of folks involved in various kinds of social
movment work as well as in social work. It was about bridging theory and
practice.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face="Times New Roman"></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><BR>>Let us consider that a subject is not only formed in subordination,
but <BR>>that this subordination provides the subject's continuing condition
of <BR>>possibility. A child's love is prior to judgment and decision;
a child <BR>>tended and nourished in a "good enough" way will love,
and only later <BR>>stand a chance of discriminating among those he or she
loves. This is <BR>>to say, not that the child loves blindly (since
from early on there is <BR>>discernment and "knowingness" of an
important kind), but only that if <BR>>the child is to persist in a psychic
and social sense, there must be <BR>>dependency and the formation of
attachment: there is no possibility of <BR>>not loving, where love is bound
up with the requirements for life. The <BR>>child does not know to what
he/she attaches; yet the infant as well as <BR>>the child must attach in
order to persist in and as itself. No subject <BR>>can emerge without
this attachment, formed in dependency, but no <BR>>subject, in the course of
its formation, can ever afford fully to "see" <BR>>it. This
attachment in its primary forms must both *come to be* and *be <BR>>denied*,
its coming to be must consist in its partial denial, for the <BR>>subject to
emerge. </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face="Times New Roman">Okay, I can read same in, say,
Penelope Leach's books on childrearing. Yes. Freud foregrounded this
reading with his discussion of eros and thanatos, a life instinct and a death
instinct which only means that in order to develop psychically/socially one must
come to destroy and preserve at the same time that which one loves.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face="Times New Roman"></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV>> That accounts in part for the adult sense of humiliation when
<BR>>confronted with the earliest objects of love--parents, guardians,
<BR>>siblings, and so on--the sense of belated indignation in which one
<BR>>claims, "I couldn't possibly love such a person." The
utterance <BR>>concedes the possibility it denies, establishing the
"I" as predicated <BR>>upon that foreclosure, grounded in and by
that firmly imagined <BR>>possibility. The "I" is thus
fundamentally threatened by the specter of <BR>>this (impossible) love's
reappearance and remains condemned to reenact <BR>>that love unconsciously,
repeatedly reliving and displacing that <BR>>scandal, that impossibility,
orchestrating that threat to one's sense of <BR>>"I."
"'I' could not be who I am if I were to love in the way that I
<BR>>apparently did, which I must, to persist as myself, continue to deny and
<BR>>yet unconsciously reenact in contemporary life with the most terrible
<BR>>suffering as its consequence."<BR> </DIV>
<DIV>My grad school mentor used to read (to intro students for pete's sake) the
story of the daughter of a Nazi somethingerother who'd escaped to Brazil.
When confronted w/ the knowledge of the crimes her father had committed, she
told a story about how he'd hold her hand as they looked out the stars in the
skies and he'd delight her with stories about the constellations. He is
that and he is not. I loved that man and I did not. How could I love
that man and how could I not?<BR><BR>He also used to talk about a man he'd heard
about when he was young, (he was an exile from Nazi Germany) who loved patent
leather shoes. He'd stand at the bottem of escalators and steal the left
(only the left) patent leather high heeled shoe off the unfortunate woman
wearing hers that day. What this had to do with anything was beyond
me, something about Commodity Fetishism as he read from Marx soon after
that discussion.<BR> </DIV>
<DIV>>I read this all in the overarching movement from foreclosure to
<BR>>melancholia. That movement as the site of vanquishing, primarily
the <BR>>Hegelian "loss of the loss". P.
24:<BR>><BR>>Is this what Hegel called "the loss of the loss," a
foreclosure that <BR>>constitutes an unknowability without which the subject
cannot endure, an <BR>>ignorance and melancholia that makes possible all
claims of knowledge as <BR>>one's own? </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face="Times New Roman">Yes, this is why I call it the
Opaque Self. The self, if it is anything, is a center of
opacity--unknowability--that is required in order for the self and
self-reflection to be.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><BR>>Oh heck, here's a little more, about going from the subject to
politics, <BR>>p. 29 (by the way, I'm not too far along in the book, just in
the first <BR>>chapter on Hegel):<BR>><BR>>A critical analysis of
subjection involves: (1) an account of the way <BR>>regulatory power
maintains subjects in subordination by producing and <BR>>exploiting the
demand for continuity, visibility, and place; (2) <BR>>recognition that the
subject produced as continuous, visible, and <BR>>located is nevertheless
haunted by an inassimilable remainder, a <BR>>melancholia that marks the
limits of subjectivation; (3) an account of <BR>>the iterability of the
subject that shows how agency may well consist in <BR>>opposing and
transforming the social terms by which it is spawned.<BR>> Although
such a formulation can hardly be the basis for an optimistic <BR>>view of the
subject or of a subject-centered politics, it may stand as a <BR>>provocation
and as a caution against two forms of theoretical desire: <BR>>one in which
assuming and stating a "subject-position" [us bisexual <BR>>queers?
- Alec] is the consummate moment of politics; </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face="Times New Roman">I think there is a difference
between saying " I am ____therefore____" and saying "hey what
about us Black women?" to the binary discourse of man/woman of white middle
class feminists or "hey what about us bisexuals?" to the binary
discourse of het/homo. The former does insist on a stable identity from
which one may speak; the latter does and it does not.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face="Times New Roman"></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV>>and another in <BR>>which the dismissal of the subject as a
philosophical trope <BR>>underestimates the linguistic requirements for
entering sociality at <BR>>all.<BR><BR>>Haven't been able to find Hegemony
and SS. The SF public library <BR>>doesn't have any listings for
Laclau. I did pick up Mouffe's Return of <BR>>the Political the other
day. But hey, I've got to finish the German <BR>>Ideology first!
There's some interesting stuff in Althusser's _For <BR>>Marx_
also.<BR>><BR></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face="Times New Roman">Well. Do you want to read
Butler with me n Frances or not? Eliding the demand will not work with me
Alec Cat.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face="Times New Roman"></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Times New Roman">Snit</FONT></DIV>
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