for example, one of my favorite quotes (and why the old blog took on the name, queer dewd):
"I suspect it can be a good thing to be internally riven: Teiresias was a prophet, after all, not the village idiot. But even if it's bad to be internally riven, many of us (the postmodernists) just are. ... A certain politics (and a certain hedonics) of the complexly constituted erotic self have arisen for me as the writer of these pages. I have held every position I describe in this book; I have abandoned many of them, often with cries of pain but also with swoops of joy. ... And there have been the pleasures of being wrong and changing my mind: if the project began as an effort to beat back the influence of Catherine A. MacKinnon in left thought and practice about sexuality, it has brought me to a vital new respect for her early, radical, and even critical work and a wish to promote and disseminate it. ... I have often said of this book, "I need to finish it before I change my mind" only to change my mind and set in motion a round of revisions equally humiliating and exhilarating. And if I could click my heels and become "a gay man" or "a straight white male middle-class radical," I would do it in an instant wouldn't you? Even if certain identity strictures forbid me to claim to be Leo Bersani or Duncan Kennedy ... the erotic interests that (these two men) put on the map are, to me, virtually my own.
On the downside, that means that I can easily come into conflict with myself. As a gay man, I could want some things that hurt me in my life as a woman. I'm acquiring a deep sense that the resulting inner cacophony is fun. The project for me, then, has been to find a politics of internal-riven-ness a discomfited politics that is equally fun.
– Janet Halley, p 12-13 in Split Decisions
I think if that kind of attitude is appealing, then none of this stuff is especially threatening. To read someone talk about her own changing mind and still decide to read her as someone worth reading... that isn't something always comforting to everyone. for Halley, there's not much she can do about that, except to do her thing and, as she often says, "That's what I think. That's why I like it. I hope you will too."
i suspect that the problem boils down to something halley also describes in the book: a difference in political stylistics. I can't rehearse the whole thing here, but she provides us with a bunch of lists produced by different kinds of theorists. she's speaking specifically about 'queer' theory here, but what she's really talking about is postmodernizing theory.
She takes on the criticisms, that postmodernizing theory is often childish, "bratty, smug, and unserious" and says, "the critics have a point."
and then she says, "so?"
so, I'll quote the key bits from the passage, pp 192-207
"the affects I'm trying to test for are the feeling-state of loving paranoid structuralism and the moralized mandate to converge, or finding them to be paralyzed and paralyzing; the feeling-state of living the exploded list with its lush expansiveness, or rage (or some other emotion) at its irresponsible diffuse shapelessness, nausea in the face of its sheer aporetic openness, or even disappointment when its hidden structural tenets come to light. I'm invoking a politics of style, in which (structuralists) present consolidated, compact, unified lists and (postmodernizing theorists reply) with exploded ones.
Prescriptive paranoid structuralism insists that, in the world of experience, a vast array of apparently distinct events are actually, when fully revealed, the same. And so people producing this politics are strongly drawn to the word "and," grammatical parallels, and the rhetorical trope 'anaphora'. Rape and pornography and sexual harassment and domestic abuse and prostitution and sex work and marriage and makeup and the Boy Scouts -- they are all mere instances of the structure of male dominance and are basically all alike. Following Butler, I will designate this collection of stylistic strategies the 'copula'.
(you can see this if you happen to think that point of investigating any differences at all is to bring it all back to, say, class conflict. if the goal is to explain the world in terms of marxist theory, then you are probably working with the 'copula'.)
(Postmodernizing theory) seems to have a very different hedonics of the list. The early years of queer theory produces lists following Foucalt, who began The Order of Things with Borges's list of incommensurables and thus signaled the postmodern and critical will to put the practice of taxonomy in question. ...
Pursuing this hedonics, (postmodernizing theory) produces lists that emphasize not repetition, homology, analogy ,and sameness, but variety, incommensurablity, and endless difference -- and it seeks something like Foucault's sense o f surprise, wonder, comedy, and the frisson of epistemic disorientation.
..
What affects do these exploded lists provoke? The form launches an open-ended trajectory ending with implicit ellipses leading out to infinity; it multiplies taxonomies. It invites emotions of childish exploration, delighted surprise, hushed anticipation that one has found an analytic antimortality strategy.
This effect provokes intense resentment... (Postmodernizing) theory's claims to infinite mobility are read as elite confidence that (postmodenizing) theory will be perpetually apropos ... To be sure, the invitation to ramify everywhere has been invoked to authorize dizzyingly random scholarly efforts and to ratify as high politics private hedonic projects that utterly fail to face up to the challenges posed by the social violence in which we live. The tone of (postmodernizing) theory when it does this is bratty, smug, and unserious. The (critics) have a point.
....
A more fully critical engagement with (postmodernizing) theory's exploded list would note that, even when it ramifies all over and multiplies possibilities to infinity, it is nevertheless a list. At the top is a structuralist tether: all queers, all sexuality, all the time. ... (These) lists can produce the difficult-to-describe feeling of being disconcerted, disappointed, even a little confused ...
Mandated multiplicity, dissolved identity, mix -and-match all the way down -- these might, moreover, not make everyone feel good. Any leftist with a serious heterosexual fetish for the erotic connection between masculine men and feminine women is going to discover in Sedgwick's list a certain limit: its ambitions to infinitude, and her relegation of that desire, that personhood even, to "and so on...," might make such a person feel ... a bit forlorn, left out of the party."
"let's be civil and nice, but not to the point of obeying the rules of debate as defined by liberal blackmail (in which, discomfort caused by a challenge is seen as some vague form of harassment)."
-- Dwayne Monroe, 11/19/08
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws