Positive Incomprehension (& the dissertating subject)

I can't make it cohere.  

~ Pound mournfully mutters to Ginsberg.
   (Good thing too, says me.)

Picking up where I left off yesterday with the slogan (peeps are hearing the Jameson echo there, right?) Always Free Associate!  But specifically in what I am posting below I am interested  in looking not so much at meaning as at knowledge. Where yesterday's post suggested a different model of what counts as meaning — it eschews the One Line Summary approach to that idea and advocates an incessant, generative, production through free association. & so, when working on the dream Freud associates endlessly on every detail that the dream presents (initially at least) not forcing these many scattered details to cohere. 

So this meaning, newly framed is not The Meaning, not definitive, not "The One True…", never final — but simply more, an excess of meaning, a potentially endless proliferation of signification (just what the anti-postmodernist version of the postmodernist is most resolutely against). & ignoring for the moment the "reasonable" or pragmatic question of how such a writing might be contained in a book or even an essay. 

Cixous is here talking about a number of things and I hesitate to either trim this down to "get at" the meaning that is so brightly lit up for me in what she says (as that would be a covert inversion of the approach to meaning that I am advocating). But it should perhaps be mentioned that here Cixous is not talking about "meaning" so much as comprehension (& much else). & with that shift many things realign for me too. Here I cannot escape the framework of Lacan's Discourse of the University, where the agent of the discourse speaks on behalf of S2, knowledge. There can be a variety of unpleasant (alienating) consequences of this discourse as well. Without getting into all of that here, what I like about Cixous' comments below is that — without her using this phrasing — she seems to be arguing for a different sort of knowing (comprehension), one that is not unknowing or "unknowledge" but… perhaps… produces a knowledge that is not equal to S2, or a knowledge that is situated in the beyond, or a knowledge in excess of S2. There is so much more to think about that idea. (& yeah, I can go to Bataille from here, but for now will not)

Here though is Cixous, talking about the shock of the other, and detailing two modes of incomprehension of the other, the negative and positive — the latter of which she aligns with love and "friendship-love". That said, much of this seems to spin more toward romantic love and while that is not uninteresting, my interest in this exceeds its locus in love or friendship-love, I want to extend it into the anti-hermeneutics that Dean (and Laplanche) are interested in (see yesterday's post). 

Cixous

"To return to the eventual shock with the other, the violence of the other: there is one that happens daily, that is up to us to manage. We are always in a relation with negative incomprehension; not even an incomprehension, but very often a non-comprehension. Simply put: there is no openness. And this spreads out infinitely, in all our relations. But there is also a positive incomprehension. It is perhaps what we discover in love; or in friendship-love: the fact that the other is so very much other. Is so very much not-me. The fact that we can say to each other all the time: here, I am not like you. And this always takes place in the exchange, in the system of reflection where it is the other we look at—we never see ourselves; we are always blind; we see of ourselves what comes back to us through (the difference of) the other. And this is not much. We see much more of the other. Or rather, on the one hand, we see an enormous amount of the other; and on the other hand, at a certain point we do not see. There is a point where the unknown begins. The secret other, the other secret, the other itself. The other that the other does not know. What is beautiful in the relation to the other, what moves us, what overwhelms us the most—that is love—is when we glimpse a part of what is secret to him or her, what is hidden, that the other does not see; as if there were a window by which we see a certain heart beating. And this secret that we take by surprise, we do not speak of it; we keep it. That is to say, we keep it: we do not touch it. We know, for example where the other’s vulnerable heart is situated; and we do not touch it; we leave it intact. This is love.
          But there is also a not seeing because we do not have the means to know any further. There are things that we do not understand because we could never reproduce them: behaviours, decisions that seem foreign to us. This also is love. It is to find one has arrived at the point where the immense foreign territory of the other will begin. We sense the immensity, the reach, the richness of it, this attracts us. This does not mean that we ever discover it. I can imagine that this infinite foreignness could be menacing; disturbing. It also can be quite the opposite: exalting, wonderful, and in the end, of the same species as God: we do not know what it is. It is the biggest; it is far off. At the end of the path of attention, of reception, which is not interrupted but which continues into what little by little becomes the opposite of comprehension. Loving not knowing. Loving: not knowing." (16-17)

To unravel or unpack (and leave a mess) here are some of my thoughts about this passage…

She claims that the shock, even the violence of the other is something that happens daily. & that it is up to us to manage this shock, this violence. What shock and violence does she mean? Her lowercase o-other makes me think of actual other persons rather than the Other of lacanian thought, but I am far from sure that Cixous is making such a distinction and I rather think not. 

But the shock, the violence? Does my recognition that there are others who are radically different, whose thoughts and feelings and beliefs are not simply opposed to mine or unlike mine but beyond what I am able to imagine constitute a shock that I feel daily and am forced to somehow manage or cope with? My answer would be no, that such a recognition — which I do have now and then, whether as a consequence of experience or arrived at intellectually — but I am not aware on a daily basis of this shock, at least not as such, though I may feel overwhelmed by the social, by the experience of others, and thus in need of retreat, of solitude. 

Cixous then implies that the management of this daily happening is managed, in the sense of being routinized and that there are two general modes of such management. There is negative incomprehension — a mode we are always in a relation with, which is perhaps not even "incomprehension" but simply non-comprehension. This non-comprehension, or perhaps better said, this refusal to attempt to comprehend, refusal of comprehension as a valid response to the other would seem painfully common. & her further gloss gets at this "Simply put: there is no openness. And this spreads out infinitely, in all our relations." We are not open to the other in its strangeness, in its particularity, we see it — much as Nietzsche's famous example of the leaf — not as a unique other but as mere type, whose needs and desires are distasteful, whose demands we seek to evade. 

Here I think of an unkindness that I am guilty of now and then when someone approaches to ask for money. I often give money to people but can be very impatient with the demand itself. I don't want to hear the reasons or the rationale, I want them to take the fiver and let me return to my monadic bubble (with earbuds). Surely this is negative incomprehension, in Cixous' terms. 

But there is another model for how we respond to the shock of the other, what she calls positive incomprehension. 

She gets at this way of responding to the other via love and friendship, and they make a natural fit I think. Difference being what stimulates friendship and love (though this stimulus may not always be unerringly a boon to either relation). Also, while it is not the aspect that I wish to bring into my writing practice, I am interested in the moment where, in looking at the other at a certain point we do not see, this being where the unknown begins. With her invocation of the "secret other, the other secret, the other itself. The other that the other does not know." That is, there is an insight in this passage which I at least feel. I've friends and even acquaintances who I think I know and then see in this way, and I have certainly learned that what I see is not something that should be simply given away, not even to the other in question. To do so is perilous. & so much as she writes I do not touch it; I leave it intact. Where I perhaps differ is that I do not always feel this as love, even as love may be a part of it. Compassion perhaps?

Cixous gets to the phrases that most excite me relative to my own projects of the moment in the second paragraph when she speaks of a not seeing because we do not have the means to know any further. Here then is a recasting of that passage as a means of prospecting for the sort of writing I am seeking…

To write in excess of Knowledge is to arrive at the point where the immense foreign territory of the other begins. The immensity, the reach, the richness of it, this attracts us — we then begin to create, produce, generate… (waste) meaning. This meaning one makes is not the discovery of the other, it remains undiscovered country. We do not know what the other is. The other is vast and far off. At the end of the lengthy path of our attention, of our reception, there is no 'end' but only a continuing into what gradually becomes the opposite of comprehension. Meaning not knowing. Meaning: not knowing.

______________Source

Hélène Cixous and Mireille Calle-Gruber

Rootprints: Memory and life writing

trans. Eric Prenowitz

Routledge 1997

Always Free Associate!

If Robert Frost is a poet, I don't want to be a poet.              ~David Antin

I've written now and then, here and elsewhere about my extant and emerging issues with scholarly writing. Sometimes I approach these issues through Lacan's discussion of the "discourse of the university," at other times in other modes of critique, or (in disregard of my New Years Resolution) complaint. Antin's quote above is but a piece of a longer statement where he also refuses poetry on the model of Robert Lowell, but opines that "If Socrates was a poet, I'll think about it." Involved in his rejection of Frost here is a poetic that wants more than to provide the moral commentary that one finds — everywhere — in Frost. & it is also not a poetic that aspires to platonism, but one that is engaged in the process of thinking, a thinking as talking, or as writing. A poetic that does not present its findings so much as its search — one where findings might be found, but who knows. Let this poetry-inflected opening color what follows, a collection of observations or quotes or thoughts which all seem to lead toward this other way of writing that I am seeking. 

Here is Mari Ruti talking about her sense of the conflict between the writing she aspires to and that which is demanded, a conflict between "professionalization and inspiration," which is bedeviled within the academy in that "we wish to advance knowledge, yet we simultaneously seek to ensure that this 'advancement' takes place according to relatively narrow rules and regulations that govern each discipline". This accounts in her view for the contrast, so often marked, between the American and French styles, where the former are characterized by "meticulous research, exegesis, criticism" and the latter by "confident and far-reaching theories, hypotheses, and lines of questioning" what she characterizes as a "propositional mode" (23). & Ruti is alive to the problem this clash of demands has, particularly on younger scholars — "One of the most frustrating dilemmas of academic work is that it seems commonly acknowledged that the most groundbreaking inquiries often challenge disciplinary boundaries, yet professionalization has made it more and more difficult to engage in such inquiries" (24). 

Rather than building up meaning, the analytic method breaks it down. ~ Tim Dean

To give a global interpretation, one which says this-is-what-it's-all-about, is what "building up" means above, the "analytic method" (i.e., free association) is what "breaks [meaning] down". These terms, up and down, are merely convenient. I could as easily claim that free association, by its productivity, builds up meaning and that the what-it's-all-about interpretation breaks it down, reducing it to a sound byte, to the moral of the story. Free association aligns with productivity, with the generation of more, and thus with excess… excess as a value. 

Dean's line appears as a gloss on Laplanche (who is turn writing about Freud) and the larger context is useful for me here, so;

"Laplanche shows how the original edition of [The Interpretation of Dreams] broke with hermeneutics by outlining a method that refused all syntheses of meaning. It was only in later editions (published after 1900), he suggests, that hermeneutical codes of symbolism and typicality were added to the text, in its burgeoning footnotes, addenda, and interpolations. Laplanche connects this eclipsing of Freud's original insights — by Freud himself" (38). The linchpin of this break with hermeneutics is free association… "the method of free association breaks things down, dispersing attention in multiple, often contradictory directions. The free associative method represents Freud's greatest discovery (…) because it is a method correlative to its object — the unconscious. Laplanche is fascinated by those passages (…) where for pages and pages Freud laboriously traces the associations of discrete components of a single brief dream (such as the famous dream of Irma's injection), without ever gathering together these associations into a final meaning or interpretation. It is Freud's reluctance to specify one-to-one - correspondences — his refusal to say: 'the dream means X' — that permits Laplanche to argue that the associative method represents a break with hermeneutics. Rather than building up meaning, the analytic method breaks it down" (38).

There is much in what Laplanche has to say about Freud that is interesting too and I'll need to go and read him more carefully, but what I am intrigued by here is simply this break with hermeneutics, with a method that "breaks things down, dispersing attention in multiple, often contradictory directions" and with excessive tracing of associations to any and every discrete component "without ever gathering together these associations into a final meaning or interpretation." & here again Ruti has something to add as in her book she seeks "to take the notion of narrativization in a different direction and to align it with psychoanalytic practices of free association and narrative self-constitution which, while granting meaning to the subject, do not aspire to any degree of self-mastery" (10). I am less concerned with narrativization as such than with the generation of meaning and the eschewal of mastery in so doing.

I've used the word excess a couple of times already and so let me also stress the emerging connection therein to Bataille whose notion of expenditure as waste in what he calls a "general economy" (opposed to the "restricted economy" of narrowly utilitarian ends) also appeals to me, even as I am so newly introduced to the idea that I am uncertain yet about how it might affect my desires as stated above. But Bataille's vision of so much of what we might otherwise think of as productivity, or the products thereof, he recodes as waste or excess. So where he writes of potlatch ceremonies and the willful destruction of goods I find myself thinking of the essay that I have been attempting to write about Nina Arsenault since I returned from seeing her OPHELIA/MACHINE show in December. The reason that association is so assertive for me is that the draft of this essay "about" Nina has been written, and deleted, written again and deleted again, something like a dozen times now. It was once over 40 pages in length only to be cut down to a few paragraphs. What is all that labor but sheer waste in Bataille's sense of the term? None of those lost drafts is any longer extant and none of them can be used, can serve any significant utilitarian end. 

Here, as if in illustration of my point, Nina is present but unclear
hidden behind string or lines (of description) and words on paper
which being somewhat clear are so, only by making her a blur.
Precisely the scenario I hope to avoid in the writing to be done.

In fact, Nina (by which I mean both her work and her person) is an exemplary case for the sort of writing that I aspire to do for the very reason that I cannot even pretend to explain her work to anyone. It's challenge and complexity make me painfully cognizant that any "building up" of meaning, or offering of a "global interpretation" of some work of hers will falsify it, reducing it to the limitations of my explanation. In a sense, though I was already struggling not to write of her show under the compulsion of hermeneutic interpretation, many of the blanket deletions that I made of such struggled-over writing was due to recognition that even at the scale of description, that the words we choose imply certain trajectories of meaning, and thus certain narratives and assumptions and again and again, I found these lacking, as not up to the challenge of writing about Nina in a way that does not reduce her.

It is thus in light of these varied ideas; of a prospective writing that is unafraid to offer far-reaching hypotheses; of a freely associative writing that that is not delivering an interpretation that wraps its object up in paper and bow, but one that loses itself in them, letting them send it wherever; a writing that embraces excess and the "breaking down"— which is to say the proliferation — of meanings rather than their reduction to the answer-to-all-questions. What then would such a writing be like? Where would it start, how would it progress, how would it (and could it) ever end? How might it be received in an academic space where the global interpretation, even if obviously inadequate, is given more props than a reading which stresses the inadequacy of such? How will it answer to the demands of utility (given that I wish it to be counted as a dissertation after all) and to the questions of readers, such as the pedestrian but unavoidable "What's it about?" 

Wait, is this an ironic comment or somehow illustrative?

My thought, in the last day or so is that I might model a mode of writing on Freud's repeated traces of associations and that just as in analysis, such chains of association are interrupted or link up suddenly with other clusters of ideas and so on… that I would allow this too. With such a model for how the writing would emerge, I would then simply keep writing, finding the links between all the areas that I wish to write about and when the link goes there, so do I. The link has the precise looseness that it has for my own unconscious or for Monty Pythons' Flying Circus. The link need not be judged as such, simply followed. Given this, might the dissertation unfold in whatever fashion so long as it links the many clusters of interest that I have in a way that is revealing of connections, allows for the making of arguments, and does much of the same work as a more predictable text but without the lock-step aspects and need to demolish all counter positions along the way? That is, I am attracted to the non-utility of Bataille's economy and yet, I am not averse to certain ends being reached.

Here then are some clusters of thought (I am leaving many aside for the moment) — sometimes discrete ideas, other times specific cases/arguments that I could flesh out in a pinch or perhaps just stuff I want to talk about. 

This lattice is not a very adequate map of the totality, and it even neglects some obvious connections
that should be made here, but one could read it as a map of a single attempt to talk my way through
the topics here and thus as something which could have been connected otherwise any other time
I made such an attempt.

__________Sources 

Dean, Tim
"Art as Symptom: Žižek and the Ethics of Psychoanalytic Criticism"
Diacritics (Nov 2002) 32:2 (21-41)

Ruti, Mari
Reinventing the Soul; Posthumanist Theory and Psychic Life
Other Press 2006

Foreword by Stephen Whittle, from The Transgender Studies Reader (quotes interspersed with my babble)

The Transgender Studies Reader

Edited by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle

Routledge, 2006.

This began as quote poaching, then I started rearranging the quotes and seeing interesting things in the new juxtapositions, and that led to some dictation and some thinking and wandering and much else. 

Also note - and cut & paste that nifty trans symbol, ⚧

"Increasingly we presume that language, as another predeterminant of humanity, overrides the determinant of biological sex: that is, a person is the gender they claim to be, regardless of sex status. But the language of sex and gender is inherently limited. As trans people challenge their exclusion from language, and therefore from basic human rights, sex itself is increasingly becoming an unsafe foundation for the legal foundation of the order of human life."(xiii)

"Having a sex is apparently a prior determinant of being human, but as such it begs the meaning of what 'human' is."(xiii)

Does sex need laws?

I'm not sure what that question is about. I heard it. So I wrote it. (dictation)

One can object to the question in so many ways and sidestep imagining any answer. 

One can tarry over the terms and the options of relating them. So many inflections, contexts, would have beens… 

The safest course is to understand it as you like and/or walk away.  

To say what sex "means" so as to consider the question as such ties one back into laws of various orders, yet we know it is not a free-for-all - as much as that fantasy is available in the culture - that is to say, whether one is born into a body that accords with their desire, or not, does not seem an issue of choice in the usual sense of that term.

At a tangent from that - but again (dictation) - I just heard it, 

…Neither is who you want to fuck.

Perhaps we need more space simply for not knowing?

Is it just the largely contingent emergence of law-like behaviors that have outgrown their utility but which sprang from out of greater potentialities at some point in the past and those potentials are now needed once again? 

Too utopian? all that foggy ancient wisdom potential once the b-movies move on it?

Sorry, I am not terribly in control of the throughput just now. After the above, I slept reading this sleeping this and now this, here. 

Kinda the beginning of Swann's Way, but less dreamy perhaps - doesn't everyone have that? that thing where you are so deep into the text that your sleep is an extension, your thought perhaps clopping along at the characteristic pace of what you'd been reading? 

Where could I stand to pronounce on what is or is not legitimately of the human?  I laugh at me for thinking it.

As to the limitations to our language for sex and gender, and he could have added orientation and expression etc etc (both terms seem to provoke endless internal descriptions and exponential external ramifications)… yes, of course. 

But how to be alert to and differently responsive to the places where it breaks down so frequently with negative consequences for bodies, lives, etc.? That is the question that needs answering. 

⚧ 

"For the trans person’s understanding of the self, the question becomes whether gender, at the heart of self-understanding, can be theoretically recuperated. It is all very well having no theoretical place within the current gendered world, but that is not the daily lived experience. Real life affords trans people constant stigma and oppression based on the apparently unreal concept of gender." (xii)

"This new politicization forged a determination to change the world, by every means possible, for the next generation of trans youth. Significant changes have indeed taken place. At the very least, where once there was pure ignorance and prejudice of trans issues, we now see informed prejudice and discrimination, which is more easily addressed through the courts and legislature."(xii)

One is placed regardless of how they would place themselves. If that accords, so easy not to even recognize it happening. Indeed, would it not simply seem to be how things are if what you thought was what everyone else asserted? Ought I to have said 'how things were'? it is what I first typed (is that dictation?) (yes, it's dictation)

The first of these quotes seems to argue that, viable or not, recuperable or not, unreal of not, gender remains a social mandate.

Gender (and sex) would then be one of the things that those subjects supposed to believe, believe in. & as difficult as it is to combat the beliefs which are supposed by subjects, themselves merely suppositional - I'd argue that this is a better situation than one where we had compelling evidence that all but a few of 'us' do in fact believe. It's better as what supposes subjects are supposed to believe is largely a fantasmatic construction based upon the this or that person's grasp of the cultural dialogue about whatever (sex & gender, in my example)… & thus a construct that is only as strong as the individual who supposes such other believing subjects own need for this belief. 

Is that clear?

Probably not.

Ok, the idea is an development of Lacan's concept of the subject supposed to know, i.e., the analyst. Analysands, of necessity impute knowledge to their analysts (at least neurotics do, not sure this applies to every structure). The end of analysis, if it goes well, requires the fall of the analyst, the moment when the analysand recognizes that it is they, the analysand who has done all the work, all the analysis, and is the only one who can declare that things are over, that the symptom has been interpreted, etc. None of that supposed knowledge was the analyst's at all, it all belongs to the analysand. So far so lacanian…

Žižek is the one who develops this into the subject supposed to believe. My example will be yard mowing, I think I took this specific example from Levi R. Bryant who used it  years ago on the Lacan listserv, but I like it so much because of certain personal experiences with 'yard nazis' in the Chamblee part of the greater ATL. Anyway, let's say you live in a housing development sort of neighborhood and you really do not like mowing the yard, in fact you find it a waste of time, after all the grass hurts no one when allowed to grow, so what's the big deal? But you nonetheless believe that the neighbors are all deeply invested in lawn lengths as falling between certain parameters which your own grass has woefully exceeded. You note that your grass is the longest of any yard's on the block and you conclude that all those other subjects (everyone else in your hood) believe there is a length for grass which is simply too long. Grumbling you mow your yard under the imagined pressure of the neighborhood, though in theory every single local resident might feel exactly as you do. 

Great theory. Likewise, it can be very useful in explaining why people do certain things - say with regard to the stock market. 

But… when I lived in Chamblee, though my ex supposed the subject of the hood to have certain feelings about the yard, I didn't give it much thought at all and in time the landlord was given a letter of complaint by one of our neighbors about the height of our grass.

That fact is maybe funny at this point though, right?

But that, as that quote I keep tossing around goes: "Over the last decade, more than one person per month has died due to transgender-based hate or prejudice, regardless of any other factors in their lives. This trend shows no sign of abating" (Gwendolyn Ann Smith, p90 - in Beemyn & Rankin, The Lives of Transgender People) …or as Whittle puts it above "life affords trans people constant stigma and oppression" - the only strategy that makes any immediate sense against this is education, or dare I say consciousness raising. 

Yes, I too am squirming at that.

So, while I am in no way suggest that an strategy of educating people should be in any way diminished, just as I don't think that symptoms of unconscious desire can be explained away as irrational or counterproductive or whatever (as this addresses only the conscious ego), so too, educating - perhaps especially when it's motivations are to 'raise consciousness' seem very likely to produce in some of the 'astudied' formations of desire that are reactive, built upon the Imaginary and expressed through aggressivity. 

The Discourse of the University 

Calling those who are to be 'educated' the "astudied" is also a Lacan quote, or pun, neologism… which emerges in Seminar XVII when he is discussing the Discourse of the University. Across the top line of the discourse we see S2, knowledge in the position of the agent, the operator of the discourse. The agent as knowledge addresses an other who is the object cause of desire. In one scenario, consider the teacher (filled with "positive" intentions) speaking on behalf of all that they know (that people are just people no matter where you go, that being gay or straight of bisexual or asexual, intersexed or transgendered or transsexual or genderqueer or of any height or weight or race or ethnicity or by approximation to ideals of beauty - that none of this should matter) and aiming to convince the student, or students, thus the (objet petit a)-students, those who the teacher wishes to usher into hir own libidinal attachment to this set of beliefs. The lower level of the graph shows us something else… 

Below the agent is S1, the master signifier - that thing you reach when you keep asking yourself why you believe ____ to every given answer… You reach that which you believe because you just do (damn it!). (& I suspect that when it comes to things like transphobia or homophobia, misogyny, racism, etc… that while some of these have visible 'superstructures' of Imaginary and Symbolic contents - that what makes them so often expressed through violence is the very same thing that makes them difficult to change simply by presenting arguments - these would of course be unconscious investments). But here, in the University Discourse, though the agent will stage, launch and purport to defend the content of their speech with logic and stats and reasoning and examples, the motive will ultimately be otherwise. There will be a belief that is believed simply because it is believed, a belief which can't be uttered and owned as the agent's own without it invalidating the working of the discourse itself. & then, on the right hand side, regardless of how the other responds to the discourse, to the extent that they do respond, the excess, the waste product of having been interpellated by the discourse here produces a deepening of the split within the subject ($). 

Things start getting relatively hairy at this point. That is, in my use and my understanding (undoubtedly both open to critique) none of these discourse models is transparent within a given sample of speech or text. Lacan is careful to distinguish discourse from speech at the beginning of the seminar. But just a statement can mean differently in differing contexts, so too the same utterance could function within multiple discourses. And just as, for Freud - unlike the grocery store line 'dream handbook'  with its many X means Y claims about 'symbols' and so forth - an element of the dream text has no determinate meaning in advance of its interpretation in the context of the dreamer's own associations… what precise S1 is repressed in this or that Teacher's discourse when they are speaking as the agents of knowledge is going to have to vary from person to person. Just the same, the product of the Uni Discourse, the deepening or furthering of the split within the subject ($) might be experienced as alienating and painful - furthering one's sense of being unable to put one's suffering into words - or it might come as a relief, as when - after countless doctors and no answer to what ails you, a diagnosis is finally given. A 'diagnosis' of one sort could serve to anchor a claim that your suffering is absolutely and utterly not your fault, thus freeing you from guilt or stigma, but how many of us notice that this also denies us any agency? That these new signifiers which are the meaning of our suffering are not open to our agency, they require our submission. 

All of this makes me wonder again at the "new style" of Master signifier that Lacan speaks of in Seminar XVII. 

&, at the same time, whether there might be a way to saturate the culture with images and narratives and concepts which would not be prone to being experienced as a University Discourse at all. & looking at Whittle's thoughts above, where he writes "where once there was pure ignorance and prejudice of trans issues, we now see informed prejudice and discrimination" I find myself asking whether - given the understanding that is afforded by the subject supposed to believe, whether there might be a way to target that? 

Bear with me, I am struggling to make this make sense for myself as well. 

That is, rather than a Uni Discourse scenario, where I would be trying to make you invest in the beliefs and positions which underpin the many things I am concerned about (already a rather suspect aim, no? even if I am promoting peace and love…) that instead, I ask myself what is it that contributes to certain beliefs (the people phobias and isms mentioned above) being believed - supposed (imputed to) - some them ('everyone', 'most people' 'right wingers' 'vegans' etc) and how that impression might be altered. Essentially - to stick with the trans context (but it could be applied to any I suppose) How to make it appear that regardless of what phobia or fear or rage or whatever you may feel in your black little heart, that everybody knows that is totally wrong because everybody knows that trans people are people just like every other kind of people are people. 

Or who knows, maybe that's just a shoddy containment strategy, after all, what white person doesn't know to not use the N-word and does that in itself prove that there is less racism? 

Nope.

But, perhaps it does equate to "informed prejudice and discrimination" and thus to not sucking quite so thoroughly? 

⚧ 

"I am part of the cultural crisis of the new millennium."(xiv)

"It is now possible, simply by 'telling' or theorizing my own life and the lives of other trans people, for me to build an academic career based on the fascination of the 'Other' with people like me. It is their obsession that has given us the opportunity to use the power of the media to tell our stories, to theorize our lives, and to seek equality and justice."(xii)

Irony here too in lots of ways, too many to compass. But the central one being that the academic activism against Othering is to some degree facilitated by that very Othering. 

Does that mean they might be able to cancel out eventually? 

That was probably a dumb question.

On the grumpy side, if - as seems so amazing obvious - one's sex/gender/whatever - is so tightly wrapped up in one's subjectivity that relatively minor infractions of the ordering principles assumed to depend upon it leads all too often to explosions of dangerous affects - rage, violence, etc.. in light of this, it seems unlikely that it will be, in any sense of the word, easy, to make large scale alterations to.

But then it is also pretty easy to point to significant changes and developments and so forth as well. 

& this seems to lend itself to various narratives which, at the extreme, are utopic in character. & that troubles me as I'm just too much of a curmudgeon to invest in a time share in Utopia without a lot of skepticism being work through first. Though I suppose that I needn't take that narrative seriously in order to recognize that positive social changes have occurred. 

I may be doing Whittle a small disservice here in that he sets up the one line above, "I am part of the cultural crisis of the new millennium" with some care, and does not deliver this line with the sort of I am trans hear me roar, vibe that it has when floating alone and out of that context.

But, I wanted it to resonate like that.

I wanted, dear (largely hypothetical) reader, for you to feel some crisis. If, that is, you were not already.

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"Frequently, many non-trans theorists have used trans identities to support constructivist arguments. But increasingly, trans people are questioning whether the deeply held self-understandings they have can be entirely due to nurture and environment." (xiii)

"...the formal psycho-medical theories are falling rapidly by the wayside, and nothing has appeared in their place except some very limited evidence of biological differentiation that is so problematic that it cannot yet be said to have any proof value." (xiii)

Not sure where to step. There is a tension between these two quotes that I can sketch in big dumb strokes but it feels like it needs a definitive question to cut through it somehow. Both concern the body, or almost the bodies of the body - the empirical body of science, the imaginary body of ego identification, the erotic body of drives and merger, the raced, sexed, aged, coded bodies that are all ours, each of us, specifically, particularly, to the culture, etc.

I've aired my concerns about biological explanations for transgender phenomenon, how they might have some benefits and aid in some efforts for recognition but that they also open the door to scary places - places where something would be fixed or prevented or 'hygienically' cleaned-up and corrected. 

But, to spend much time concerned over such things now is also foolish. The "limited evidence" at the moment "is so problematic that it cannot yet be said to have any proof value." If such evidence were to arise… then one can start asking how much the trans persons' agency has been taken away by the scientific account of cause.

More interesting to me, though still not the intervention between these two quotes I was hoping for, if one has a "deeply held self-understanding" going back to the moment when one was operating in language but hardly only just… does this in itself argue for a nature, rather than nuture argument? I'm not trying to adjudicate the answer based on whether this is or is not a valid supporting claim, just wondering about the somewhat catch-all character of "deeply-held understandings."

I guess as so many of my deeply-held understandings have been proven limited, if not wrong, through the years.

Also here is the recognition that the default assumption of mental illness of one kind or another is on the outs - though it seems to me that many trans people still have to reckon with it's lingering effects.

Then there is the business about the 'non-trans theorists' which, if I deserve the mantle theorist, I'll surely also rate non-trans or cis-gendered. Though whether I'll be caught making a constructivist arguments (not usually my thing) is less obvious. I get that trans people can quite legitimately feel like objects of convenience for theorists of all sorts, but I'm holding out for the possibility that I, as a non-trans person, might eventually have something meaningful to say (this issue deserves a post of its own, and to refer to a number of other writers about this question). But I will note that I am somewhat nervous about that issue - given that Patricia Elliot writes of the many criticisms she has be treated to - and I read her book thinking about what a great job she did of not being potentially offensive.

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"In recent years, embracing the trans community and its culture has led us to an exciting position at the cusp of one of the most significant social and political changes in the postmodern world. The struggles of trans people could have significant impact on all of our freedoms, depending upon who wins the war of ideologies surrounding the meaning of gender and sex."(xiv)

"But the questioning that trans people present to others’ identities is a growing challenge to all who place their confidence in the binary rules of sexed lives: man/woman, male/female, masculine/feminine, straight/gay."(xiii)

Doesn't the mere existence of trans people suggest that there is so much about being human that most humans do not have even any ideas about? 

Likewise, in other areas of thought, when an idea (the ether wind) for example finds it's experimental invalidation (the Michaelson-Morely experiment - though it was intended to measure the ether wind's direction and speed, not to find that it was not there at all) there might be some squawks about it, but it tends to get dropped (witness: the theory of the humors,  phrenology, neuroscience… ok, joking about that last one, sort of…) and yet copious counter evidence to the conceptual adequacy of our conceptions of sex and gender, male and female, masculine and feminine are all over the place and yet… The terms are no sensed by most as discredited and untrustworthy. 

Why not?

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"The work of trans academics and theorists is increasingly moving trans people away from the discredited status of being mentally disordered, towards having expert knowledge of those who struggle to maintain the current strict gender regime, referred to by Kate Bornstein (1997) as 'gender defenders'."(xiii)

"The empirical and sociological analyses undertaken have shown that it is only by understanding and accepting that linguistic barriers still exclude the vast diversities of trans and non-trans identities, that we can possibly begin to accept that gender, like race, simply does not exist other than as an idea that has gained immeasurable power within the economies of social discourse."(xiv)

. . . so like money? that is, Whittle mentions "the economies of social discourse" and characterizes gender as something that does "not exist other than as an idea that has gained immeasurable power"… How different is that to the money form itself? 

Here is much of a paragraph from a piece I wrote on Žižek's "How did Marx invent the Symptom" which is the last chapter of Mapping Ideology (Žižek ed. - and to which my page references refer) and also included in The Sublime Object of Ideology. & here is that entire text from back in July 2011 (while I was basking in the lovely heat of New Orleans), it's gonna be rather thick with missing context (sorry):

Users of money understand that currency is simply paper (and coins, metal), that it gets old, wears down, etc. Yet “in the social effectivity of the market we none the less treat coins as if they consist of an immutable substance” (303). Žižek evokes the notion of disavowal and stages it for this case as “I know that money is a material object like others, but still... [it is as if it were made of a special substance over which time had no power]” (303). Žižek opines that Marx never solved this problem, that of the “sublime material” or the “immutable body” of money (303). “This immaterial corporeality of the ‘body within the body’ gives us a precise definition of the sublime object” though Žižek insists that we must recognize how the “postulated existence of the sublime body depends upon the symbolic order” that its very immutable nature is “sustained by the guarantee” of the symbolic (303). 

(…) 

But the same blindness is present in every act of exchange in which we “misrecognize the socio-synthetic function of exchange: that is the level of the ‘real abstraction’ as the form of socialization of private production through the medium of the market” (304). Given this “the social effectivity of the exchange process is a kind of reality which is possible only on condition that the individuals partaking in it are not aware of its proper logic” (305). Žižek dubs this “the fundamental dimension of ‘ideology’” (305). As such “a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence” is what we must see as ideological (305). This in a sense, turns the conception of false consciousness ‘on its head’. “'Ideological’ is not the ‘false consciousness’ of a (social) being but this being itself in so far as it is supported by ‘false consciousness’” (305). At last the symptom enters the discussion here as Žižek offers a “possible definition” of it as “a formation whose very consistency implies a certain non-knowledge on the part of the subject” as when, by virtue of analysis and interpretation the subject brings this knowledge to consciousness, the symptom dissolves (305). 

…OK, I know that might have come from out of left field, but let's play substitution games for a bit and see what happens.

Users of the ideas sex and gender understand that these things are not simple binary terms, that there are intersexed bodies, that gender attributes are culturally specific and mutable, they understand that these concepts are increasingly out of sync with the bodies and subjects around us and that they're wearing out. Yet, in the social effectivity of symbolic exchange we none the less treat assigned sex or gender as if they were the unmediated and inescapable evidence of those concepts as bodily substance. So then yes, this is a disavowal, "I know very well that feminine is a culturally specific set of beliefs about what characterizes the female, and that this concatenation of ideas is largely contingent, but still… [it is as if, when I read a body as female, I know it through and through, I know it as "feminine".] This would make of "sex" or "gender" something quite like a "sublime material" or an "immutable body" beyond the anatomical. This immaterial corporeality "Gender" (or is it "Sex"?) of the ‘body within the body’ gives us a precise definition of the sublime object (read: objet petit a) though the postulated existence of the sublime body depends upon the symbolic order, such that its very immutable nature is sustained by the guarantee of the symbolic. (…)

[To be clear, the Symbolic is not immutable at all - and Žižek knows this very well - he is referring to the way in which subjects treat the Symbolic, how it works within a discursive situation for example, or in fantasy - as the big Other. It is this Imaginarization of the Symbolic which leads us to credit it so thoroughly, as an Other without lack, a Symbolic where every answer could in principle be found, a fantasy world where "the truth (really is) is out there". Object a's place as sublime within fantasy or social discourse is sustained by that, but they (the object and the Symbolic) are not of the same stuff, the object is not Symbolic but Real.]

(…)

But the same blindness [that philosophy has to the unconscious] is present in every act of gendering in which we systematically misrecognize the socio-synthetic function of gendering: that is the level of the ‘real abstraction’ as the form of socialization of bodies through the medium of the categories language has as yet allowed for. Given this the social effectivity of the gendering process is a kind of reality which is possible only on condition that the individuals partaking in it are not aware of its proper logic. Gender then, pace Žižek, would display the fundamental dimension of ‘ideology’. As a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence. None of truly know what the hell sexual or gendered 'identity' is truly all about, but we can master the linguistic terms well enough to use them and navigate social discourses and even to find lovers, so to the extent it continues to "work" (at all) we treat it as a guide to essence as, all to often, we believe there is one and thus wish to speak of it. It is this that we must see as ideological. This in a sense, turns the conception of false consciousness ‘on its head’. A gender identity (of any sort) is not the ‘false consciousness’ of a social being but this being itself in so far as it is supported and socially-constituted by the ‘false consciousness’ that the historical moment and current state of the Symbolic and Imaginary allow when attempting to think Sex or Gender. Gender then appears as symptom,  a possible definition of which might be, a formation whose very consistency ("I am a man") implies a certain non-knowledge (of what being a "man" or "woman" or whatever would truly entail) on the part of the subject, as when, by virtue of an analysis yet-to-come and its interpretation the subject might bring this knowledge to consciousness and dissolve gender as symptom so as to assert it (or something like 'it') as sinthome, as the support needed for subject in order to be able to live, love, work, play without unnecessary suffering. 

⚧ 

Stephen Whittle

I'll let Stephen Whittle's text have the last word as I have been rambling so much above. There are a few things in the passage below that catch my eye. The 1st of these is the injunction to claim "the transsexualism of the self"… and my curiosity is as to whether this might be something that the non-trans person might also have a share in. I rather hope so. Of course there is also a bit of the manifesto here as well, and I do love manifestos when they're well done… even as I shy away from many utopian futures foretold. 

Anyway, this Foreward is a great read and raising many interesting questions that I didn't even allude to. Also, if you are curious about who this Stephen Whittle is, here are two links to find out [one and two]

"The public articulation of a trans voice and trans consciousness has not only influenced sex and gender studies, but it also impacted on trans people themselves, and has provided a collection of materials that coherently explain their own experiences as genuine. Amongst other things, it has created new ways in which to be an activist, as well as new ways of being trans. It is now possible:

• to acknowledge and fight the injustice of transphobia, and to be trans publicly in order to truly represent transphobia’s victims;

• to be in charge of what we do to our own trans bodies, and to take risks in the art of our bodies;

• to become queer, by refusing gender ascription and by claiming the transsexualism of the self;

• to turn away, ultimately, from the relative safety of queerness and go beyond that to claim a unique position of suffering; and finally,

• to welcome the rage afforded by that experience of suffering, a suffering that is part and parcel of being trans.

Teaching transgender theory is itself an activist process as well as an explorative process. The field is expanding exponentially along with the cultural changes that accompany it. It also poses a daunting problem—in order to hear the voices of trans people, as justice demands, one has to acknowledge the limits of sex and gender and move into a new world in which any identity can be imagined, performed, and named."(xv)