Week 12: Something a little different!
In place of a weekly question, I’d like to invite you to share a single (relatively brief) passage from one of the readings which you’d be especially interested to discuss in class. You’re welcome to share some provisional thoughts about your choice, or to comment on the selection when we meet on Thursday.
12 Comments
Serena
Tomkins via Sedgwick
“Any theory of wide generality is capable of accounting for a wide spectra of phenomena which appear to be very remote, one from the other, and from a common source. This is a commonly accepted criterion by which the explanatory power of any scientific theory can be evaluated. To the extent to which the theory can account only for ‘near’ phenomena, it is a weak theory, little better than [a description]. As it orders more and more remote phenomena into a single formulation, its power grows. […] We can now see more clearly that although a restricted and weak theory may not always successfully protect the individual against negative affect, it is difficult for it to remain weak unless it does so. Conversely, a negative affect theory gains in strength, paradoxically, by virtue of the continuing failures of its strategies to afford protection through successful avoidance of the expreince of negative affect…”
134, Paranoid Reading
Elizabeth Alsop (she/her)
Great quote, Serena, but I think you are flashing forward to next week when we’ll be reading Sedgwick. Tomorrow we have Foucault, Butler, Muñoz, and Brim on the agenda!
Alex Lleras
The PDF won’t let me copy paste the text directly, and apologies that my selection is rather long:
“This is the point where Warhol’s particular version of the queer utopian impulse crosses over with O’Hara’s.” — to the end of the following paragraph — “They are nonetheless indispensable to the act of imaging transformation.” (Muñóz 7-9)
Also, less of a comment and more of a co-sign, but this passage (as well as the piece in its entirety) struck me once again as impossibly brilliant:
“It would make no sense, then, to define gender as the cultural interpretation of sex, if sex itself is a gendered category. Gender ought not to be conceived merely as the cultural inscription of meaning on a pregiven sex (a juridical conception); gender must also designate the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established. As a result, gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which “sexed nature” or “a natural sex” is produced and established as “prediscursive,” prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts. This construction of “sex” as the radically unconstructed will concern us again in the discussion of Lévi-Strauss and structuralism in chapter 2. At this juncture it is already clear that one way the internal stability and binary frame for sex is effectively secured is by casting the duality of sex in a prediscursive domain. This production of sex as the prediscursive ought to be understood as the effect of the apparatus of cultural construction designated by gender.” (Butler 11)
Irene
“We are informed that if repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able to free ourselves from it except at a considerable cost: nothing less than a transgression of laws, a lifting of prohibitions, an irruption of speech, a reinstating of pleasure within reality, and a whole new economy in the mechanisms of power will be required. For the least glimmer of truth is conditioned by politics. Hence, one cannot hope to obtain the desired results simply from a medical practice, nor from a theoretical discourse, however rigorously pursued.Thus, one denounces Freud’s conformism, the normalizing functions of psychoanalysis, the obvious timidity underlying Reich’s vehemence,
and all the effects of integration ensured by the “science” of sex and the barely equivocal practices of sexology.” (Foucault 5)
Joanna
“To what extent does the body come into being in and through the mark(s) of gender? How do we reconceive the body no longer as a passive medium or instrument awaiting the enlivening capacity of a distinctly immaterial will?” (Butler 13)
I find this passage interesting firstly because this is one of many examples of Butler posing (rhetorical) questions – this stylistic choice seems indispensable and inherent to ‘queer theory.’ Secondly, I’m wondering, just because of Butler’s word choice, whether “the body as a passive medium,” or medium in general (not necessarily passive), could be discussed within media theories, whereby the medium is the message etc.
Francesca
The notion of repressed sex is not, therefore, only a theoretical matter. The affirmation of a sexuality that has never been more rigorously subjugated than during the age of the hypocritical, bustling, and responsible bourgeoisie is coupled with the grandiloquence of a discourse purporting to reveal the truth about sex, modify its economy within reality, subvert the law that governs it, and change its future. The statement of oppression and the form of the sermon refer back to one another; they are mutually reinforcing. To say that sex is not repressed, or rather that the relationship between sex and power is not characterized by repression, is to risk falling into a sterile paradox. It not only runs counter to a well-accepted argument, it goes against the whole economy and all the discursive “interests” that underlie this argument.
Foucault, 8
Alex Riedel
Prof. Alsop: my apologies for not submitting this earlier (again) – Fordham’s semester ended today (read: today has been quite a day)!
Anyway, here’s the quote:
“The statement of oppression and the form of the sermon refer back to one another; they are mutually reinforcing. To say that sex is not repressed, or rather that the relationship between sex and power is not characterized by repression, is to risk falling into a sterile paradox. It not only runs counter to a well-accepted argument, it goes against the whole economy and all the discursive ‘interests’ that underlie this argument” (8).
(Note the “lyricism” mentioned earlier in the page as well. I mention this excerpt in light of how, say, poetry can speak silence, or to speak of the silence that a poem exhibits; or, rather, to talk nothing or to mention muteness, to talk of a nothingness that such “talk” is supposed to “be” or to mention a muteness that such a “mention” is supposed to “be.” That is, how can something negate presence with absence while still “being” that presence? To talk about Foucault and the particular circumstances he’s talking about: how can the statement “Sex is NOT repressed” retain whatever sort of signification it may have without somehow “including” within that signification the significations of the statement “Sex IS repressed” (or, at least, “Sex HAS BEEN repressed”)? Once we are met with undecidability, what else can we “do,” where can we “go”; how are we then supposed to read, what orientations are effected or allowed by undecidability?)
Alex Riedel
Oops – Francesca mentioned the excerpt I chose as well! (I didn’t refresh the page before submitting my response.)
Alice Ascoli (she/her)
From Butler’s Gender Trouble:
“Irigaray would maintain, however, that the feminine ‘sex’ is a point of linguistic absence, the impossibility of a grammatically denoted substance, and, hence, the point of view that exposes that substance as an abiding and foundational illusion of a masculinist discourse. This absence is not marked as such within the masculine signifying economy—a contention that reverses Beauvoir’s argument (and Wittig’s) that the female sex is marked, while the male sex is not. For Irigaray, the female sex is not a ‘lack’ or an ‘Other’ that immanently and negatively defines the subject in its masculinity. On the contrary, the female sex eludes the very requirements of representation …” (15). I’m choosing this passage because it is fascinating yet not at all straightforward to me. Could we find an example (of an absence? an ellipses?) for Irigaray’s “linguistic absence”? And, in thinking again of Johnson, where does or can existence and power lie outside of language?
Peter
Brim, 2
“The men’s food does not only look and taste better; the Oxbridge meal also lights a little fire in the spine (there is wine, I should mention), the glow of which travels anatomically upward toward its greater purpose: powering the famously, androgynously, incandescent mind. The food and wine, it turns out, are not sufficient in themselves to create genius, but they prepare the way.”
This highly visual narrative of contrasts gets its hooks into the reader, which made me think of our conversation the other week about the place of an introduction within academic writing. We also spoke about overtly masculine and feminine styles of criticism, clarity for its own sake, or obfuscation as a virtue of intellectualism. Interesting to read Brim next to this Brooks piece from The Atlantic, especially in light of Brim’s discussion of Ivy League student sourcing, “under the lamppost.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/12/meritocracy-college-admissions-social-economic-segregation/680392/
Paraskevi Gkana-Alberico (She/Her)
“Certainly, there have been plenty of debates: Is there some commonality among “ women” that preexists their oppression, or do “women” have a bond by virtue of their oppression alone? Is there a specificity to women’s cultures that is independent of their subordination by hegemonic, masculinist cultures? Are the specificity and integrity of women’s cultural or linguistic practices always specified against and, hence, within the terms of some more dominant cultural formation? If there is a region of the “specifically feminine,” one that is both differentiated from the masculine as such and recognizable in its difference by an unmarked and, hence, presumed universality of “women”?” (Butler 7)
Coco Fitterman
“The modern world is a thing of wonder for Bloch, who considers astonishment to be an important philosophical mode of contemplation. In a way, we can see this sense of astonishment in the work of both Warhol and O’Hara. Warhol was fond of making speech acts such as “wow” and “gee.” Although this aspect of Warhol’s performance of self is often described as an insincere performance of naiveté, I instead argue that it is a manifestation of the utopian feeling that is integral to much of Warhol’s art, speech, and writing. O’Hara, as even his casual readers know, was irrepressibly upbeat. What if we think of these modes of being in the world—Warhol’s liking of things, his “wows” and “gees,” and O’Hara’s poetry being saturated with feelings of fun and appreciation—as a mode of utopian feeling but also as hope’s methodology?”
(Cruising Utopia, Intro, p.5)