Essential Spacing

Male Feminism as Oxymoron

2011-03-31T12:00:00.002-04:00

In response to Male Feminism as Oxymoron by betenoire:

If I were to imagine a feminist revolution, I know who would have my back and be an ally and I know who would stab me in the back. Sfguy would NOT be an ally.
This wannabe in sheeps clothing is too busy patting himself on the back as a SELF-proclaimed feminist than he is willing to listen to feminists he might disagree with. He is more concerned with how men are represented than he is about listening to feminist's divergent opinions. He is also more eager to give a smackdown to uppity feminists who dare to critique men and to put these uppity feminists in their place. Calling women "man-haters" - Oh yeah sfguy, you are the EPITOME of feminism....
Well, I'm calling you on your shit Sfguy - you are no feminist ally of mine.
* * * *
Male Feminism as Oxymoron
PDF: http://www.uofaweb.ualberta.ca/philosophy/pdfs/kahane_oxymoron.pdf
An essay by David J.Kahane, (University of Alberta) in Men Doing Feminism,Tom Digby, ed. (New York: Routledge): 213-236.
"This essay is meant to be a skeptical intervention on the issue of men doing feminism, but not a pessimistic one....
* * * *
(iii) Engagement in activist friendships and communities
To the extent that a man understands feminism in more than a shallow way, he faces epistemological uncertainty, ethical discomfort, emotional turmoil, and extensive political demands. It can be difficult to figure out where to start, how to proceed, or when to allow oneself to rest. One can’t solve these dilemmas through mere reflection, and especially not through solitary reflection. Rather, it is through action that one finds ways to negotiate these dilemmas. How you act and how your actionsaffect those around you are more adequate indicators of your feminist commitment and consciousness than how you imagine yourself. What’s more, men gain a clearer understanding of gendered power, in its complexity and intractability, by actively struggling against it .

I'd invite a perusal of The Feminist Memoir Project (Duplessis & Snitow, editors), which I am reading now.

First (setting aside for the moment the imagination/behavior distinction quoted at the end of OOP's citations from the Kahane text), I'm not sure how anyone can identify with the category feminist but by being "SELF-proclaimed" (so long as we allow, arguendo the Cartesian fallacy of "self"). Indeed, the literature is replete with individuals distancing themselves from the label "feminist" (not, interestingly, because they are against the project of feminism, but because they do not believe their own work/activism sufficiently obtains to a feminist standard as they understand it). There is no governing authority or standard arbiter of what constitutes a "feminist", and it historically has even been a point of heated contention when individuals and groups have put themselves forward as epitomizing or exemplifying feminism (take the anxieties of the members of Cell 16, as an exemplar).

Likewise, the above-recommended text offers many autobiographical accounts of situations in which female-bodied feminists encountered within the feminist movement other female-bodied and self-identified feminists that did not seem inclined to listen all that much to feminists they happened to disagree with, those disagreements often festering and wedging apart otherwise productive collectives and/or rearing their head in intersectional disputes that are still even today to be worked out in the broader feminist discourse. Feminism is not a unified front: not unified by female-bodiedness, nor white skin, nor middle class privilege, nor liberal ideological commitments, nor Western culture, nor Northern geography, nor any other source and standard of exclusion/inclusion. Indeed I might suggest that it does a disservice to feminist cause(s) to behave as if it is or ever were, as this plays into the patriarchal (or, in the very least, conservative) rhetoric that would dismiss feminism as its stereotyped caricature, such rhetoric including terms such as "man-hater". To claim authority to deign who is and who is not a feminist by some standard of what a feminist is or is not is to purport just such a unified ideal.

That all said, the weaker claim "you are no feminist ally of mine" comes closer to the mark, I believe. There is no reason to say that any two feminists (however identified) are allies in any meaningful sense of the word. Again, I offer Duplessis & Snitow's anthology. Like any -ism, there are always those who own the label but do not own one another in any form of comraderie.

As for the substance of the whole "man-haters" epitet. It is a sentiment (if perhaps not a specific terminology) that might very well have been considered by female-bodied feminists with reference to other, more radically militant, female-bodied feminists at different historical (although, to the best of my knowledge, no longer contemporary) moments during the second wave.

Alice J. Wolfson's "Clenched Fist, Open Heart" (in above-mentioned volume) describes the schism around 1971 of D.C. Women's Liberation: "It seems incredible, looking back on it, that we could have allowed such a thing to happen. A small group of gay or gay-identified women successfully imposed an ideology identifying male children as the enemy and refused them access to the Women's Liberation office. These women, perhaps twelve or fifteen in number, eventually formed a collective called The Furies." (p. 277)

Although the phrase never appears in Wolfson's telling, I can't help but imagine that in that circumstance the conversation did not work it's way round to identification of The Furies, if only in the distancing of by other feminists of themselves from such indentification, with the "hatred" of men (and by extension, boy children). Mind you, these "ten or fifteen" women were hardly representative of feminism (or, for that matter, of gayness); the formation of the Furies wouldn't have, couldn't have, "destroy[ed] the women's movement in Washington, D.C." if all feminists were aligned with the boy-children-prohibited office policy. The breakdown of the movement in that city came of the differences within the movement represented in that anger and tensions responsive to this stance, not the unified nature of said movement.

Nor is this representative of the movement in a specific city. Wolfson notes that "[s]everal of the women were from out of town." Of one of the "powerful and magnetic" leaders of the Furies, says Wolfson, "I have always wondered if she was an agent"--a suspicion that speaks both to how very non-representative this one individual was of feminism as a whole and to how very broad and inclusive feminism was and is that an agent provocateur could be imagined to be actively passing as a feminist even as they pushed for such radical positions.

Which brings us to the "imagined/behavior" distinction in OOP's closing bit of quotation. We may choose not to associate with someone because of how the act and how those actions effect (I consciously refuse the vogue of writing "affect" here--as affect is an important but not inclusive mode of effect) others, we may even choose to withhold from them recognition of their own self-identification as within the umbrella of our own claimed -ism. Nonetheless, as long as we are dealing in the Cartesian subjectivities of "self" and other, we recapitulate relations of power, and in the case of doing so with regard to bodily sex (whether through hateful [and hate referencing] language or through suggestion that male-bodied feminism is oxymoronic), we approach much too closely, IMHO, to reifying the very gendered power that we would seek to struggle against.

This all said, I'd question whether anyone who would use the term "man-hater" with reference to our OOP has been at all paying attention. One who would direct fellow OkJournalistas attention to this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUYaosyR4bE -- clearly is not operating out of a place of hatred. Disappointment and dissatisfaction, certainly, but not hatred.

500+ comments follow the original version of this post.

Is this not relevant?

2011-01-24T12:00:00.001-05:00

In response to a comment by mcbirdie on her post Is this not offensive?, I offered a comment, OOP replied, and I responded. This is a further response, via OOP's reply to said responsive comment.

THE ORIGINAL TOPIC

Why is it such a struggle to consider the topic of whether or not this advertisement is in fact sexist to a degree which is offensive and then whether or not it is acceptable that we still advertise in this fashion? It just seems like so many people need to take it to the direction of the oppression of men, the proper definition of feminism, and a dozen other unrelated issues. Is is that the question is too difficult or so simplistic that the answer seems obvious?

Okay, first let me address your concern about the original topic. I have yet to comment on that, as I have not decided for myself where exactly I stand on the issue. Do I find the advert sophomoric and objectifying, yes. Am I offended by the same advert? I'm not sure that that is the emotional quality of my experience, and I haven't yet come to a place of understanding as to why.

My interjection was merely to offer an alternative to dismissing the argument of one standing against feminism as an unrelated distraction, by showing that they, in fact, are using the very historical, political, and methodological arguments they seek to debunk to make their case against feminism and/or women's concerns about objectification. That parental leave or the seriousness of rape are contemporary gender-discrimination issues (the gender of the individuals effected notwithstanding) is the very reason that those of us identifying as feminist continue to make such noise about these issues, and justifiably so.

Insofar as people seek to justify their acceptance of something that is undesirable on the grounds that they or their gender category have to accept things undesirable happening to them, this is a related issue. Connecting with the universality of oppression (whether gender oppression or any other form) gets everyone on the same page. From there, we can choose to be apologists (people get a raw deal, deal with it) or meliorativists (people get a raw deal, do something about it).

The problem is, when anti-feminists take the apologist stance, they don't do it from a place of connection, but from a place of competition. They're reading feminism as a zero-sum us-vs-them game. It isn't. We can turn their arguments around and show how they're operating ultimately from the same needs for a fair and just society as we are, or we can dismiss their arguments as a distraction, and thus play the very same zero-sum us-vs-them game.

THINKING ABOUT EQUALITY

I feel like this is the sort of thing that people start saying when they've spent so much time thinking about the theory of equality that they forget that equality does not mean the same. I mean, by your token, why don't we just schedule all new fathers in for a bit of surgery when their partners are in labour? I'm sure with a bit of creativity the medical profession can come up with a way to make the pain equivalent.

So here we get to the question of "the proper definition of feminism". I suggest that there is no such thing. The feminists I speak with readily speak of feminisms, not simply feminism as a singularly defined term. There is no proper definition, but there are definitions.

Failing to acknowledge this plays into the hands of those who will not willingly recognize objectification when it is staring them in the face, because to do so would be to concede to feminism as they insist it be defined, as if there were no other definitions out there.

When we do acknowledge which feminism we are speaking from, our logic is clearer, and we have the opportunity to show that not all feminisms are the feminism that some would rail against. If not debunking a straw man, we can at least avoid fishing for red herring.

My own feminism is not a feminism of equality. Yet I can and do use the tools of a feminism of equality because those tools are useful and effective. I also use the tools of other feminisms.

INTERESTS OF SOCIETY

For instance, you seek to undermine my argument by suggesting satirically that men should have a medical procedure following the birth of their child so as to have equal bodily suffering. Here I would draw on the feminism of embodiment.

Equality does not mean the same. I agree. Here's the thing, child birth and child bonding are not the same. Child birth does not equal child bonding. Rechal, meanwhile, introduced a point about nursing. Nursing does not equal bonding, either. They are all related, but they are not the same.

Here we have three interests of society. First, the interest in childbirth. Second, the interest in nursing. Third, the interest in parent-child bonding.

The first interest is perhaps the most significant: no children born eventually means no society. The second interest concerns the lifetime health of those children: so long as we believe (as I do) that human milk is superior to other alternatives in maximizing the health and disease resistance of newborns. The third interest regards the behavioral health (what used to be psychological health) and lifetime societal contribution of children: we all benefit from children forming secure attachments and long-term healthy relationships with their parents.

To this, I would add a fourth societal interest (the relevance of which will become apparent below), the interest in employers benefiting from the knowledge, skills, and abilities of their employees.

Now, historically the first three interests have been bundled under the concept of "maternity leave", while the last two, I would suggest, are caught up in the fraught concept of "paternity leave". This bundling confounds distinct interests of society, and conflates bodily sex with cultural gender. This bundling is less and less defensible in an era of same-sex marriage, surrogacy, breast pumps, and yes, even paternity leave. Heck, it was problematic even when the only recognized non-traditional family arrangement was that of adoption.

Let's take gender out of this. Imagine we have a pair of parents. (We'll limit our consideration to two-parent families.) These could be a man and a woman, two women, two men, a transexual in transition and an androgene: it doesn't matter for my argument here. Actually, what matters is that the gendered "one man, one woman" model is not definitive of "a pair of parents".

THE INTEREST IN CHILDBIRTH

Our first interest concerns the delivery of a child into the world, and by extension, the nine months of pregnancy leading to this. Female-bodied persons willing to undergo the physical effects of pregnancy and child-birth are arguably necessary to society, at least until a societally-acceptable technology enables us to gestate and bring to term human life by other means. This interest is reflected in the historical understanding of maternity leave as a time for the mother to recover from both pregnancy and giving birth.

(Before that, termination of employement due to pregnancy and/or childbirth arguably even more tightly bundled the interests of childbirth, nursing, and bonding than they are now. We have inherited this bundling of motherhood as all of a piece from the patriarchal injustice that preceded it.)

However, what if the birth-mother is not either of our pair of parents? What if our couple, for whatever reason, chooses to have a third party carry and deliver their child? In this case, the benefits society grants for recovery from childbirth are by right those of the birth-mother, not either of our pair of parents. As it is the birth-mother who underwent the physical labor of pregnancy and delivery in which society has an interest.

This in no way detracts from society's other interests. Society still has an interest in nursing and in bonding, and while the birth mother might contribute initially to the former, it is our pair of parents who engage exclusively in the latter.

This is why I argue that maternal medical leave should be held distinct from parental leave, and should be based on the health consequences of individual pregnancies. Now, I would note here that any attempt to negotiate concerns of both health and employment is fraught with problems. Anyone who has any experience with a workers compensation board knows that one's right to fair treatment is often hard won, if won at all.

Nonetheless, even baring any improvement in such systems, a regime that grants medical leave apart from parental leave would be preferable to a regime that requires that female-bodied persons who are both bonding with their new child and recovering from the birth of that child to balance both these interests within the same time frame as a co-parent who had no such physical trauma. Birth and bonding are not equal, and should not be treated as if they were.

THE INTEREST IN NURSING

Let's consider again the case of a pair of parents who choose to have a surrogate carry and deliver their child. Now, imagine that one of our pair of parents is female-bodied (without considering the body of the other parent), and chooses to voluntarily undergo a procedure to induce lactation, so that they can nurse the child upon delivery by the birth-mother.

This nurse-mother would not benefit from maternal medical leave, as it was not their body that carried and delivered the child. However, this does nothing to negate the physical sacrifice they are making to nurse the child after the birth.

Again, this has historically been bundled together with childbirth and bonding under the concept of "maternity leave". Again however, as birth is not bonding, so too nursing is not birth. That one typically follows the other does not mean society's interest in both need necessarily be treated as equal. Children can and are raised without a nurse-mother. Society has an interest in this happening less often than more often, but that interest is separate from the interest in childbirth.

Thus, in our scenario above, the nurse-mother who does not actually give birth would still be undergoing physical strain for which some measure of benefit should be available. Unlike maternal medical leave, however, here I would not argue for a health test to determine term of benefits. Nursing is too intimate and personal, in my humble opinion, to be treated like recovery from a C-section, and unlike such an obvious trauma, the effects of nursing on the mother's body are far more nuanced than would merit, again in my opinion, micromanagement of leave accounting.

Here, instead, I would argue for a graduated term-based benefit scheme. Say society values its interest in nursing during the first three months of life as worth 26 days of nursing leave, which works out to about 2 days per week during the first three months. The same society might value the next three months of nursing at only 20 days, or about 1.5 days per week. Again, as we're not bundling the interests here, such nursing leave would be independent of either maternal medical leave or parental leave.

ALLOPARENTS AND WORKING MOMS

Another scenario can help to explore this. Imagine one of our pair of parents is the birth mother, but there is a medical reason that she cannot nurse her child. Perhaps she is diagnosed with cancer in her third trimester, and while the baby is safely delivered, her doctor advises that she start chemotherapy immediately to maximize her own chances of survival. Chemo would make her milk unsafe for the child, and so nursing is not an option for her.

However, a relative is willing to voluntarily undergo the same procedure as our first nurse-mother, above, inducing lactation so that they can nurse the child on the birth-mother's behalf. Let's bracket for the moment the slippery slope that this portends toward commodification of bodies, and assume that we're looking at a society that deems surrogate nursing to be no more objectionable than surrogate pregnancy. Here, the nurse-mother, who was not the birth-mother, nonetheless is making a physical investment that, in society's own interest, should be recognized in terms of nursing leave, irrespective of who benefits from maternal medical and/or parental leave.

Now, let's imagine a society that does not want people other than the parent of a child inducing lactation. The birth-mother is still in chemo, but now no one is nursing the child, instead the parents are giving the newborn formula or some other substitute from the outset. Well, now there is no physical strain put on any individual body to nurse the child (the physical strain of chemo is a separate issue), and so no nursing benefit would be available, but this doesn't take anything away from maternal medical and parental leave (and any other medical leave due with respect to the cancer treatment), as these things are not equal.

One last example to fully explore this model. Let's imagine, again, one of our pair of parents is birth mother, and following maternal medical leave, she chooses to return to work, her partner taking the first round of parental leave. The birth mother, however, takes a breast pump to the workplace, so that the child will continue to receive at least some of the benefits of nursing. The fact that the nurse-mother is working does not mean that there isn't still a physical consequence of continued lactation for her body. If society values nursing over substitutes, then the benefit of nursing leave would accrue whether or not the nurse-mother returns to work.

Perhaps she takes one day off a week to rest and recuperate, perhaps she banks all the time for her period of parental leave. However it is worked out, the nurse-mother would recieve benefit irrespective of benefits received for recovery from childbirth or caring for their newborn.

Indeed, even if the nurse-mother only returns to work after exhausing all maternal medical and parental leave, if society values their continuing to provide their own milk to their child, then a nursing benefit would still continue to accrue for however long said society was willing to incentivise continued lactation.

THE INTEREST IN BONDING

The more recently historical movement toward paternity leave speaks to the importance of parental bonding, irrespective of whose body or bodies are involved in birth and nursing. A male-bodied parent neither gives birth nor lactates, but they still form an attachment with their child that impacts upon that child's subsequent development and maturation. Birth and bonding are not equal. Nursing and bonding are likewise not the same. That we historically have bundled all three does not mean that we must continue to do so. Thus, while a male-bodied parent deserves neither the benefits of maternal medical leave or nursing leave, society still has an interest in their having the benefit of parental leave.

Here society's interest in parental leave for both parents is equal, irrespective of the body of either parent. Both members of a pair of same-sex parents should derive the same benefit, regardless of their body sex, as both members of a different-sex parental pair. Society's interest here is in bonding (and coincidently, infant care), not in the bodily sex of the parents doing the bonding.

Regimes that bundle the first three interests come in two forms, so far as I'm aware. In one form, maternity leave and paternity leave are treated as fixed blocks of time irrespective of medical necessity. A mother (perhaps even if not the birth-mother) of a new infant gets a fixed period of maternity leave, irrespective of whether she had an easy pregnancy or nearly died due to complications. A father gets a fixed period, often much shorter, irrespective of the needs his family may have for additional care due to the physical trauma of a difficult pregnancy.

In the other form, citied to by the OOP in the case of Finland, the parents together share a single block of time, so far as I understand sequentially (although were it to be concurrent, it would still be problematic), and without regard to complications in pregnancy and/or delivery or the extra physical stress of nursing if one partner can and does do so. Here, it as if rather than unbundle bonding from childbirth and nursing, the attempt instead has been to bundle both parents into a single body, one of which is always at their desk, further confounding distinct societal interests.

Here we don't even need to look to such historically new issues as surrogacy or same-sex parenthood. Consider the case of adoption. Perhaps more than any other scenario, society has an interest in the formation of a healthy bond between an adopted child and their adopted parents.

Let's assume the adopted child is already old enough to have been weaned. Neither parent undergoes the stresses of childbirth to bring this child into the world. Neither parent will naturally or artificially lactate to nurse this child. Yet they both need time to bond with this child. This is true whether they are a traditional partnership representing two genders or a same-sex partnership. Society doesn't benefit only from the mother bonding with her child, but from both parents doing so, even if neither is a "mother".

The parental leave that would be due under these circumstances has nothing to do with recovery from childbirth or with the physical stresses of nursing. Bundling these interests only means that a nursing birth-mother with a C-section scar plus internal scars due to near fatal hemorrhaging and an adoptive mother who only feeds their adopted child Gerber products would derive the same maternity leave benefit (or, in the alternative only the former would, the latter deriving no benefit), even though they are not the same. Their partners, meanwhile, would most likely derive a different, shorter benefit, if any at all. Even though society's interest in their having a strong bond with their child is the same.

THE INTEREST IN KSAs

Knowledge, skills, and abilities: the stuff you seek to represent on your resume. Society has an interest in these. When an employer hires you, the expect to derive benefit from your KSAs, and insofar as they do derive such a benefit, society benefits from the economic productivity that results.

In the case of maternity leave, historically, the contention has been one of how to value the interest in KSAs against the value in the bundle of childbirth, nursing, and bonding. Paternity leave, more historically recent, has only weighed the value of KSAs against the value of bonding (and coincident care). The result is that even in societies where there is a system of maternity leave, there is little or no system of paternity leave.

Say we have a policy of three months of maternity leave and three weeks of paternity leave. If we were to weigh the bundled interests irrespective of gender, this would indicate that childbirth and nursing, together, were valued as worth 10 weeks of leave, without regard to trauma undergone during childbirth or stresses endured during nursing, and without regard to whether the bonding-mother was birth-mother or is nurse-mother. The mother is deemed woman, and thus gets a block of time without regard for her individual circumstances.

Meanwhile, we have bonding leave valued at three weeks. Perhaps that's what bonding of each parent with the child is worth in this society (although it seems insufficient to me). Which would be fine, if is were not confounded with medical conditions and nursing stressors. When it is, we have unequal situations where a life-threatening pregnancy and an atypically easy pregnancy are both valued as the same, even though the reality is that the latter birth-mother is in much better physical condition to bond with and care for their newborn than the former birth-mother, and so gets far more bonding benefit from bundled maternity leave than either the difficult pregancy birth-mother or the partners of either birth-mother.

By unbundling these interests, we can still have a block of time, extended within reason to allow for recovery from physical (or even mental/post-partum) trauma. This does not require a medical intervention to have fathers undergo equivalent physical trauma, as OOP opined, as the interest in childbirth is distinct from the interest in parental bonding. Intentionally traumatizing the partner's body in no way serves society's interest in childbirth.

UNBUNDLED BENEFITS OVER TIME

However, the other unbundled benefit schemes would not require a block of time. The nursing leave benefit, as already noted, might be taken piecemeal over the course of many weeks, during which time the nurse-mother's employer benefits to a large extent from the nurse-mother's KSAs, where they would not if the nurse-mother were staying home during an undifferentiated bundled block of time, while the nurse-mother still has an opportunity to recuperate from the stresses of nursing, even if indirect nursing via some technology. Here, societies interests in nursing and in KSAs (including maintenance and continued development of the human capital represented by those KSAs) are both served.

(I don't know that there are not already parental leave schemes that allow for such flex-time or partial-return-to-work arrangements. My understanding of the cases I know of is that it is typically a one-size-fits-all model where the birth-mother stays home for a fixed block of time, and then that time expired, returns to work full time.)

Likewise, if both parents received parental leave benefits, distinct from maternal medical leave and nursing leave, these benefits would not need to be treated as an undifferentiated block. Rather than one parent taking off for three weeks of parental leave and then the other parent doing the same, one could imagine a non-birth parent taking their parental leave concurrently with a birth-mother's maternal medical leave, giving both the birth-mother and the child the care they need when they most need it. This needn't even be done all at one time. Fifteen days of paternal leave might be spread over one or more months, again allowing the non-birth-parent to relieve some of the strain on their partner during their recovery while still delivering benefits to their employer.

Again, this has nothing to do with the gender of either parent. A pair of female-bodied parents would derive the same unbundled parental leave benefits irrespective if either was birth-mother, nurse-mother, both or neither.

Of course, there would be an opportunity for coercion on the part of the employer to have the employee-parent conform to a leave schedule that suited the employer more than the employee-parent. No system is perfect, but unbundling the various societal interests in the very least ameliorates the all-or-nothing return to work as if somehow after x months there is no further societal interest in parental bonding (and care) except if one parent can afford to give up a continued relationship with their employer.

Another variation on this would be a staggered work arrangement, where both parents reach agreements with their employers to work a two or three days a week during the term of their respective parental leaves, such that both parents have time to bond with and care for their child even as both parents' employers benefit from the KSAs of their employees.

As with the nurse-mother benefit discussed above, the employees likewise derive benefit from being able to stagger work and bonding, as they are able to keep their KSAs relatively current and carry projects important to their careers through to completion even as they are both being allowed time to bond with their new child.

SUMMING UP

As I've stated at the outset, I have not come to a definite conclusion as to how I feel about the advert mcbirdie offers for comment. Nonetheless, I believe that when the argument turns to how men get a raw deal, on account of being men, this is entirely related to the advert. This argument seeks to dismiss gender-discrimination by citing to other cases of gender-discrimination, and those of us who identify as feminists dismiss such an argument at our peril.

Likewise, it is important to be clear about which definition of feminism we're working from, especially when our interlocutors would dismiss our arguments about gender-discrimination by attacking feminism as they would unilaterally define it. When someone claims that you have no basis to be offended by something that is gender-discriminatory, and they wrap this claim in an attack on an idea of what feminism is or one gender's concerns are, it is useful to discern how their definition and our own may differ, so as to avoid talking past one another. This is Lakoff's argument about fairness.

Finally, my argument about unbundled leave comes from an understanding that equal does not mean the same, which is why I prefer to make arguments from within a framework of embodiment. Different bodies, individual bodies, have different capacities and suffer different hardships. A two-sizes fit two-genders model that assumes all mothers have the same bodily experiences does a disservice to mothers and to women, at the same time as it creates at least the appearance of gender-inequality.

Unbundling the interests of society and structuring benefits to reflect the bodily realities of individuals with respect to each interest, while entailing a more complex regime, would both better serve society's interests and obviate arguments about men getting inequal treatment with regard to parental leave.

The advert that spawned this discussion does not exist in a vacuum, but rather in a complex society with many such adverts and many other gender-discriminatory practices besides. An attempt to discuss the advert in a vacuum does not serve anyone's interests, except those who would seek to debunk our concerns about one little ol' advert as insignificant. A discussion that recognizes how the advert is embedded in broader and deeper biopolitical regimes of regulating bodies may seem to be a distraction, but it is anything but.

Not your mom's common sense, or yours

2011-01-09T12:00:00.002-05:00

Okay, finally, I get to Groucho. Mind you, he still has a tantalizing good question on another thread, but I'll get to that in due course. For now, let's address what he had to say more recently on my original feminism thread.

Here's the relevant portion of my comment, as quoted by Groucho:

Inhabiting a body with features that enable one to perform certain biological functions says nothing about that body's ability to assist another body in the performance of such biological functions held in common. Having a body that is adept at circulating blood throughout the organs and tissues of that body says nothing about the knowledge, skills, or abilities that body might bring to the task of vascular surgery upon a second body, or even CPR. Common, sense isn't.

To which Groucho's response began:

W/ respect, that's a terrible analogy. A body doesn't "assist" another body - a person does.

WHOSE BODY IS IT?

Yes, very true. A person, however, inhabits a body. I use this language to get away from the nonsense about "mind" that dominates the humanities. Cartesian dualism is a trap best left for others. (Some may think I'm just replacing mind with person but talking about the same object. We can discuss that if anyone is interested.)

I raise the issue of body here, further, because you introduce the capabilities of the bodyinhabited by a person (without using the words "body" or "person", those are my terms to achieve clarity in our analysis) as somehow qualifying them for a particular career related to the capabilities of someone else's body.

FIREFIGHTERS, DOULAS, AND AGGREGATES, OH MY!

I want to be clear about just which body we're talking about. If we're going to make biological arguments (and the citing to the capability of giving birth is a biological argument), then let's be clear about the relationship between individual persons and individual bodies. (Of course, even if you didn't choose to make a biological argument, I'd still find a way to bring it round to biology. This really confuses my peers in the humanities.)

A firefighter has to have a certain amount of strength because their job involves lifting and carrying heavy, often unwieldy, objects. This is about how the capabilities of the body of the person having a career of firefighter relates to the tasks of the career of firefighter.

A doula, on the other hand, does not have to have to have a body that has the ability to give birth. This capability or noncapability of their body does not bear on the tasks of the career of doula. It is not they who perform the task of giving birth as part of their job.

So, to recap. Firefighters need to inhabit bodies capable of lifting heavy objects, because that is a career in which firefighters inhabiting such bodies do indeed lift heavy objects. Doulas do not need to inhabit bodies capable of giving birth, because that is not a career in which doulas inhabiting such bodies do indeed give birth.

Thus, your belief (and you do identify it as what you believe) that women (in aggregate, or otherwise) make better doulas because they are capable of giving birth does not stand logical inspection. You may believe it, but that's all it is, a belief.

PERSONS VS. AGGREGATES

Picking up where we left off:

The question of firefighter vs doula pay is a separate question, and clearly a cultural matter. But the idea that in the aggregate women are better suited to doing that work seems commonsensical to me,

Yes, you've said both those things before. To which I responded, first, women in the aggregate aren't better suited to do anything, because women the category (whether the category carries with it through an attempt at syllogism the additional term of in the aggregate or not) is not a person. Only individual persons are better or worse suited to do any particular thing.

(Further, any given particular person who happens to be woman is not better suited to doing the work of a doula, for the reasons I've just outlined, not simply on account of being of the category woman. Any given individual, irrespective of gender, might be better qualified to be a doula, but that is because of the knowledge, skills, and abilities they bring to the actual tasks of the job, not the capabilities their own body may or may not have that they will not be called on to exercise in their performance of the job.)

And, second, common, sense isn't. That it seems commonsensical to you tells us what you see as commonsensical, not what is actually discernible from any logical argument. It's common sense isn't a logical argument, it's an appeal to the wisdom of custom.

Interestingly, my date last night has several times raised the importance of "the idea", citing to Mao of all people. That's coming from someone in the humanities. Guess what, I think ideas are interesting phenomena, but not as powerful as people often make them out to be, which brings us to the question of "common sense".

HOW TERRIBLY COMMON

Look, I love Thomas Paine. Really, I do. But he really could have chosen a better metaphor from which to hang his arguments.

I can cite all sorts of examples of what was common sense once and isn't common sense now, or what is common sense in a foreign country today but isn't common sense here in our land. I won't because that would just be a distraction. Common sense is merely what we believe reasonable people to believe.

Worse, common sense has a way, if we follow it's reasoning to a logical conclusion, to some truly horrific places. Anyone familiar with Jonathan Swift has an understanding of this.

Moreover, insofar as common sense might happen to be common, then it runs the risk of being common in the same sense as we might speak of something being second-rate. I don't mean that you intend it that way, but that is a meaning of common.

We, of course, could rescue this and say that common sense is the sense of the commons, the sense of the public at large, sense as known by a community, as shared in common with other individuals, as familiar, and best known and most frequently seen.

However, this again exposes the logical fallacy of argumentum ad antiquitatem. That this is the way a public or a community commonly see the question, that this is sense that is familiar or most frequently seen, tells us nothing more than that this is the way a public or a community commonly see a question, that this is a sense that is familiar or most frequently seen. To draw from that an assertion that this sense is therefore reflective of truth is to engage in false induction.

A QUASI-RELIGION IN COMMON

Continuing with your comments:

and the kind of common sense that gets washed away by quasi-religious proclamations

The whole project of the Enlightenment was one of washing away quasi-religious proclamations, in particular, the then quasi-religious proclamations of what was then contemporary common sense (the term used at the time was "superstition"). It's actually a game of cleaning house that was engaged in by the established church for many centuries before that. Washing away the quasi-religious proclamations of those we disagree with is a tried and true practice.

Now, I take issue with much of the Enlightenment project, yet it nonetheless seems to me that to profess that "I believe" and "it's commonsensical" sounds like taking a quali-religious position. Of course, I have no problem with taking a quasi-religious position, and do not take that as an accusation I need to defend myself against, I am quite confident that I have done so, but I don't see it as only happening where I'm standing. Nor would I expect it to be.

You acknowledge them as beliefs, and yet still hold them as true. Plenty of religious folk who would make the same move. "I believe in a God that..." "Well, sorry honey, but there is no God." "I don't care what you say, I believe in God, so there!"

It's true because I believe it to be true and it is commonly held to be true by the community that I identify with (not your community of quasi-religious practictioners, my community of people who know common sense when they, ehm, sense it): well, that's just an appeal to beliefs held in common, which is really just what any community, religious, quasi-religious, or non-religious, tends to do. Thus, I expect nothing else.

SPEAKING OF COMMON SENSE

It is certainly what is done in the humanities. I had a conversation on my date last night where I cited to biological studies, and her very quick reply, cutting me off mid-sentence, was that all those studies have been discredited because... No, I responded, cutting her off, they haven't been discredited; they've been dismissed.

See, this is the common sense held, in common, by people in the humanities. To talk about biology is regressive thinking, it harkens back to social Darwinism and measuring people's skulls to identify racial characteristics. It's the sort of things Nazi's do, not people who think for themselves. (Yay for Godwin's law!)

Whenever you see a study that claims to have found a biological difference between people, you don't even need to read it, you already know it was so-called "research" done by someone who refuses to accept the common sense notion that biology is strictly a cultural construction. It's sad really, because we keep telling them they're wrong, but they won't listen.

No matter, they've been discredited, so don't waste your time reading what they have to say. (That it has been discredited also being common sense.) It's sociobiology, or evolutionary psychology, or something equally commonsensically regressive, and we should give it no further consideration. (See "Yet Another Aside On Relating to Categories", in another long-winded post of mine for more on this.)

This is common sense in the humanities. Few question it, because it is how the liberal public (the only public that matters--the rest of you aren't the *real* public, no way) and academic community commonly sees the question, it is the sense that is familiar and most frequently seen by those who hold it to be common sense.

It is also argumentum ad antiquitatem, that is, false induction.

THINKING DOESN'T MAKE IT SO

that nature has no shape and is only shaped by cultural tropes. Again, thinking doesn't make it so; far more likely that nature exerts some shaping force, and then culture is a (heavy) overlay.

Again, I'm leaving the territory of nature alone, because I don't find that to be a useful argument from either side, although I'm open to discussing it, if there's any evidence that we've made progress in better understanding one another on some of the points already on the table. I have the argument often enough with people in the humanities who try to dismiss what I'm saying as regressive notions about the reality of nature.

You've very much correct. Thinking doesn't make it so. I agree wholeheartedly. Thinking that women in the aggregate are better suited to be doulas doesn't make it so either. I don't care if everyone on the planet but me thinks that, it still doesn't make it so. It just makes it common sense, which is not anything more or less than a sense that is all too common.

Likewise, I agree with you that there are shaping forces that determine the structures of culture. Harpy has raised the issue of institutional structures, which I intend to address in more depth on that thread, but in short (as I said on my date last night, in fact), I don't give truck to the top-down arguments that culture makes people. People make people. Persons inhabiting bodies. And people make culture. Again, persons inhabiting bodies.

I'm very much interested in structures. My interest is in the embodied structures that open onto the possibilities of institutional structures. This is why I look so very carefully at how arguments are put together, at how logic is or is not employed. Because I'm trying to get a deeper understanding of how distinctly opposed ideological stances can take hold, in bodies that otherwise have an awful lot in common. Common senses (in the plural) are fascinating to me, because they are only possible in bodies that with features that grant the capacity to hold a sense in common with other bodies.

CITING AGAIN TO REN'S FAV COMMENT

Crow made a terrific point i/t/r: "Even before they were exposed to too great an amount of societal pressure it was obvious that the girls *liked* pink and playing with dolls whereas my boy's favourite activities are running around and shouting." No one responded to that point - b/c there is no response.

Actually, I did respond to the comment by Ineke that I believe may have prompted Crow's comment. Ineke commented:

Boys still get engineering toys, girls get humanity toys. Boys are still taught to be competitive, girls are taught to be kind.

To which I replied:

Ineke, this is where Groucho gets up in arms about the whole "strictly cultural" claim that many in the humanities put forward, marshaling just these sorts of examples.
Yes, boys and girls are given differently culturally sanctioned toys, and are encouraged to behave in certain culturally expected ways, but like everything else, it's more complex than that. For children exhibit choice in how to play with the toys that they have, and that choice isn't necessarily informed by the attitudes of modern doctorates in area studies, but rather derives from much more ancient capacities.
"Young Female Chimps Cradle Stick-Toys like Doll", reports Scientific American. What are we to make of this?
* * *

You are welcome to read the rest of my response. As I note, I am proud to have receivedRenaissgrl's seal of approval on that one. I think you will see that I do take into account the sentiment that Crow's comment touches upon, even if I did address him or his words directly.

Yes, there is a tendency among little boys to behave in certainly culturally expected ways (i.e., the culture aligns with the way individual persons who happen to inhabit male bodies are most likely to behave) and a tendency among little girls to behave in certain culturally expected ways (i.e., the culture aligns with the way individual persons who happen to inhabit female bodies are most likely to behave). We see that in chimpanzees, we see it in humans.

This, however, tells us nothing about how an individual person we have yet to observe is inclined to behave. This is why we are doing a dangerous thing when we try to make an argument about men in the aggregate or women in the aggregate. Induction from statistical probability is a method of reasoning, but not a method of proof. It is only a means of obtaining an educated guess. But that's all it is, a guess. Translating that guess into a belief is to engage in the common sense game.

FUNDAMENTALIST COMMON SENSE

Even a po-mo fundamentalist, to coin a phrase, has to be mute in the face of actual experience - an experience which other (academic) parents have expressed to me.

Trust me, they aren't mute. They're quite vociferous: saying anything they can to avoid actually addressing the empirical evidence, because to do that would be to deny the quasi-religious authority of common sense.

Bottom line: I'm dreadfully sorry if the world doesn't conform to your presuppositions. What's the joke? "An intellectual is someone who worries that what works in practice won't work in theory."

That knife cuts both ways. One can be just as unconcerned that what works in theory doesn't work in practice. That's what the "in the aggregate" argument shows, a lack of concern for how the theory that "gender x in the aggregate is better suited for" does not always work in practice, even if it does much of the time.

Close enough isn't good enough. Reducing individual persons to a commonsensical theory about what is true in the statistical aggregate: this is fundamentally bad practice.

ON THE ISSUE OF LEGISLATION

Moving on. I subsequently said the following.

Uh, Groucho, proud libertarian here, but not quite the objectivist that I believe businesses can operate in a legislation-free regime.

To which you replied:

Where did I ever say there shouldn't be legislation?

You didn't. You did seem to be making the argument that legislation was incompatible with business, at least certain types of legislation, which I interpreted (wrongly, it would seem) as an argument that anyone in favor of legislation was anti-business.

Contract law is part of what makes markets work - a huge part. Indeed, China needs more of the right kind of laws, the kind that are based on fairness and transparency rather than state power and government fiat.

Agreed. I would, however, note imbtween's argument (which I have disagreements with) that laws are "inherently punitive" (an assertion he has made at least twice). i.e., by that argument, which has some merit, but also some flaws, laws based on fairness and transparency are no less punitive. Where they effect business, they still interfere with the operations of business. Even a law enforcing fairness is government fiat in the end.

LAW OF CONTRACT

Now, you specifically speak of "contract law" above. Here's the thing. Employment law is contract law. To hire someone and be hired by someone is to have a contractual agreement, even if nothing is put on paper.

A large part of contract law, meanwhile, is about spelling out contractual terms that are assumed unless the contracting parties choose to stipulate otherwise. This is done both to reduce paperwork (why spell out the same terms in a million contracts if they can be spelled out once in an act of legislation) and to protect contracting parties from unfair practices, where a dispute turns into a game of "but that wasn't in the contract, so I'm not bound by it".

Legislation specifying that employers may not discriminate in setting wages then, as an example, is essentially specifying default terms to employment contracts. Undersigned employer agrees that they will not pay undersigned employee less than other employees performing the same tasks and having the same level of seniority, without respect to their gender, or some such.

Now, the difference here is that neither employers nor employees have the option to put terms in their contract that authorize the employer to discriminate, on the basis of gender, in the payment of wages. I said above that contract law specified assumed terms of contract unless the parties choose to contract according to other terms. Here, however, we have a law that is prohibitory. It doesn't allow the default terms to be modified.

Well, we can have a discussion about that. I'm sure if I thought about it I could come up with examples of prohibitory laws that nonetheless are commonsensically designed to enforce fairness and transparency. I'm not going to just now, however, but if you want we can explore that issue further.

ONCE AGAIN, ON THE MATTER OF FAIRNESS

On the point of fairness, please see the Lakoff quote at the end of my last post. The entire argument you were having with Slowbie, so far as I understood it, was an argument about what is fair.

If we look at the ten types of fairness Lakoff outlines, I'd predict that you would identify some of those types of fairness as more directly related to your argument against certain types of legislation, and Slowbie would identify others on the same list as more directly relevant to her argument in favor of the same legislation. Were you both to identify the same types of fairness in common, I suspect that the analysis Lakoff engages in, showing how the metrics we use to employ any particular type of fairness can differ wildly, would hold true for the two of you, also.

In other words, Slowbie as I understood it, was arguing that the United States needed more of the right kind of laws, the kind that are based on fairness and transparency. Meanwhile, you were arguing, about the same laws, that they are the wrong kind of laws, because they are unfair (whatever you might say about whether they are transparent or not) to businesses. That's what I understood of the argument, anyway.

EVERYONE ELSE IS DOING IT

I just get fucking pissed off when people ignore the positive re BOTH the private and public sectors. "Hey, I don't have to point out the virtues of [the sector I want to disparage] b/c everyone else is doing it."

Yes, some people do have a bug up their butt about groups they don't look favorably upon. I'm waiting for you to point out the virtues of those in the humanities who you seem to disparage so. :/

This isn't to justify the unwillingness of those who have a grudge against some group of people or other to ignore things that are of meaning and value to others. It is only to note that we all do it. I hear that you get fucking pissed when you hear it done to sectors you value. I'm guessing that Slowbie gets fucking pissed when she hears it done to sectors, or groups, or ideological camps, that she values.

Everyone is doing it. We're all hearing what we don't like about what the other side is saying, and that makes it very hard for us to actually have a meaningful conversation with them. It's so much easier to dismiss the other person's commonsensical (to them) beliefs in favor of our own commonsensical (to us) beliefs.

The sooner we stop relying on common sense, and start actually trying to make sense of what the other person might be pissed off about (rather than telling them what we believe they're pissed off about), the sooner we can have more meaningful discussions. That's my belief, anyway. I don't always do what I proscribe here well, but that's what I aim to do as much as possible.

A WORD ABOUT RELATIVISM

I hear the charge of relativism being readied as I type. I'll save you (if not Groucho, then someone) the trouble. Relativism is a position, as I understand it, that says no one's truth is really true, because everyone else have different truths, which are all equally true, and thus also not really true. That's not what I'm saying here.

The problem I have with relativism, is that it's the last defense of hypocrites. It's all relative, which is why my truth is the only truth that matters. Or, it's all relative, which is why we have no authority to take action when we see something as unfair or immoral. Yeah, okay, go meditate over there for a while. See if you can do it until you die of dehydration. I'll just be over here, trying to understand other people's truths and seeking to intervene where I relativistically believe it's necessary.

What I am saying is that the stories we tell about what is common sense divert our attention from truth, rather than point to it. There is truth, not in the materialist sense of something one can find or reveal or unearth, but in the libidinal, even essentialist, sense of there being something that organizes the world we live in into coherent, meaningful experiences.

I just don't believe that truth is related to through stories, or judgments, or diagnoses, or sense, common or otherwise. That's like trying to relate to gravity through the planets. We have a relationship to gravity, so do the planets, but we don't experience our relationship to gravity through the planets, we experience our relationship to gravity through gravity. We certainly have a relationship to the planets, a relationship mediated by our relationship with gravity (as our relationships to all objects of any mass are mediated by gravity), but it's a different relationship from our relationship with gravity as gravity.

So, I profess, it is with our relationship to truth. It isn't to be found in common sense. It isn't even going to be found in logic. It is found in the embodied structures that mediate our relationships to both common sense and to logic.

TOO FUCKING MUCH

Is it too fucking much to ask that people should modulate their POV to reflect, uh, the way things actually are, and in this case specifically our dependence on both spheres? I don't think so.

Is it too fucking much to ask people to modulate their point-of-view to reflect, uh, the way we believe things actually are? No, it is not too fucking much to ask that.

Is it too fucking much to expect people to modulate their point-of-view to reflect, uh, the way we believe things actually are? Yes, I think it is. That won't stop me from asking, though. I try very hard to modulate my own expectations on that front.

Is it too fucking much to tell people they should modulate their point-of-view? Yes, I believe it is. You have a choice to ask someone to do something, you can make a request, and they can make a choice to honor that request or not. You likewise have a choice as to whether you modulate your expectations as to their honoring your request or not.

You even have a choice of declaring that someone "should" do something you are wanting them to do. You can certainly make that demand, if you so choose. I, however, believe that is too fucking much. Just sayin.

Comments follow the original version of this post.

Not your mom's feminism

2011-01-07T12:00:00.002-05:00

I'm making this a new journal post, following from my original feminism thread, as my commentary on this question is pretty in-depth. Here, I am responding to imbtween's challenge to the following statement by me:

The project of feminism is to challenge the legitimacy of the categories people do not choose, not to unseat the legitimacy of categories freely chosen

The reply from imbtween begins thusly:

Is that really true? Even in its most basic definition, feminism is about *empowerment* of category:female.

ON FEMINISMS

So, let's talk about the distinction made nowadays between feminism and feminisms. Yeah, I know, it's not a distinction made in everyday discussion, but it is a distinction made among feminists, at least those of the so-called "third wave".

We talk of feminisms to indicate that those who identify with the category feminist do not necessarily hold the same views about what feminism is or how feminism would best be enacted. We agree often on outcomes, but how we define and judge those outcomes varies considerably. We say feminisms to move away from the myth of feminism as a monolithic front.

We have the definition of feminism you put forward, imbtween. That's a definition of a feminism. It is arguably the definition of the feminism that most know and have strong feelings about (for or against). It most certainly is the definition of feminism that is the most etymologically sensible, given the root of the word being a reference very specifically to the category female, or perhaps more accurately characteristics associated therewith.

MY FEMINISM

What I might have said, to be more clear and accurate in my statement, is that "the project of the feminism I am most interested in is..." This would have at least hung a lantern on the fact that I was not, in any sense, talking about any of the feminisms commonly categorized as "first wave" or "second wave". It might still have prompted a very similar question from you nonetheless, but it would have at least been truer to my concerns.

In other words, what I'm speaking of, well, is "Not Your Mom's feminism."

For those more interested in some of the ways different feminisms might be thought about,there's a useful test here on OkCupid that explores this.

This, of course, begs the question: Well, if you aren't really talking about what most people understand by the term "feminism", then why don't you call it something else?

Well, because no one has come up with a better name, for starters. :/

More to the point, the tools we use in the various feminisms to enact those various feminisms are largely the same. We're drawing on the same methods of inquiry, and once again, we're seeking much the same outcomes, whatever we define our feminism as, even if we don't articulate those outcomes according to the same yardsticks.

ON SAYING SOMETHING NEW

Which brings me to the next part of your comment.

This is not a leveling of categories to the point where all are "equal", but it is an enhancement of a specific category that members and sympathizers believe has been treated, categorically, unequally.

So, before, you used the word "empowerment", and here you invoke "equal" and also, although not yourself quoting it, "leveling". I would note that I have yet to use any of these terms in my arguments (except to talk about persons choosing to be unequal), and I don't expect that I will do. Those are yardsticks of a different feminism from the one that interests me.

I will draw the reader's attention back to my tirade against protests as broken records, just briefly. These terms are examples of where we aren't saying anything new, on either side of the argument. Those words had power (we'll get to empowerment in a moment) when they were first brought forward in political action. Now they just sound trite to those who have stopped listening, and sound obvious to those who can't understand why people won't listen to them.

ON EMPOWERMENT

My feminism is not spoken in terms of "empowerment", because I am neither seeking to obtain the tools to take political action previously denied me nor to give such tools to others previously so denied. There is a place for empowerment, and many worthy organizations engaged in that work every day, but as a political innovation... well, the patent rights have pretty much expired on that one. (Yet, even aspirin is still useful as a generic, of course.)

I'm much more interested in designing, validating, and distributing tools that will enable those already acting politically to act more effectively, and will encourage those not presently acting politically--not because they have been denied, but because it's a lot of work they're not inclined to do--to being doing so, using tools that require less effort than what came before.

Whatever this is, "empowerment" is a poor term for it. Perhaps I'll start calling it "enleverment", as that continues the physics metaphor at the root of em-power-ment, while capturing the idea of doing more with less.

ON EQUALITY

What about the term "equal"? Well, the equality question has already come up on this thread. As with you're earlier questions about choice and choosing, imbtween, I've, for the most part, not engaged the comments dealing in equal and equality, because, once again, I saw that as an argument with someone other than me.

Equality is a very useful legal fiction. By legal fiction, I do not mean that it is false. Rather, a legal fiction is something used in legislatures and courtrooms to organize the performance of the law. It doesn't have to be demonstrably true, because it is what is used to determine what is demonstrably true, or rather what may be found as fact, to use the language of the courtroom. A legal fiction, in that sense, operates as a postulate or axiom does in logic, or a stipulation in contract.

Politically, however, "equality" has no where near as much force as it did back in the days when it was nestled in a triumvirate with "liberty" and "fraternity". Again, it's one of those terms that is either heard as trite or obvious (or perhaps both at the same time), and does very little meaningful political work anymore, so far as I can see. People aren't shouting it from the rooftops all that much, and when they are, no one much cares.

DECISION-MAKING

If not equality, then, what is the feminism, that interests me, about? Well, it's actually about something very much related to your initial concern in this discussion, imbtween. My feminism is about decision-making. Choice, which is the term you introduced, is interesting, of course, or I wouldn't have devoted so much of my last post to establishing my position with regard to it, let alone bring it up again the the comment renaissgrl so enjoyed. But decision-making isn't choice,per se.

Choice is an existential question, and I'm all about existential questions. I'm the Lord High Phenomenologist, after all. :/ (Groucho, where did you make that comment? I want to link to it!) However, decision-making is about the mechanisms of a body that open on to an experience of choice. It is what makes the existential possible.

Choice, ultimately, can lead us to arguments pitting determinism against free will. That debate has been going on for so long that I think we can safely agree it isn't going to be settled. People will still be arguing about it in a thousand years more. (Well, assuming nothing bad happens.)

Decision-making, on the other hand, doesn't truck that rabbit hole, and focuses instead on how choices happen. (An example of this sort of research was posted on Seeking_uno's journal yesterday.) Not whether they are free or not, but what actually happens when we choose (and by "we", here, I mean not just humans, but a much broader category of things that choose, or in the very least, decide).

My conviction (much more than a belief) is that the deeper our understanding of decision-making, the more readily we will be able to make enlevered choices, both in our own lives, and in our dealings with the political other.

ON LEVELING

This brings us to "leveling". Now this is a term fraught with problems. It deals in verticality, in hierarchy, and ultimately in the monological eye. It proscribes a spatial relationship between entities, having one of three values: "above", "below", or "level", where here level is taken as synonymous with equal. It further proscribes that such value judgments are empirically evident, universally discernible. Assuming the position of Laplace's daemon, it understandably riles up the animosity of those who put no stock in the determinism implied by it.

My own feminism is not one of making level, whether by propping one category of persons up or knocking another category of persons down (that does not mean that I dismiss out of hand legislative efforts to do either). Rather, the feminism that interests me is one of being present.

There is still a spatiality to presence, but it is not the spatiality that expects anyone to crane their neck or touch their chin to their chest. Instead, it is a spatiality of being with another person, wherever they happen to be, without reference to hierarchy or what is supposedly empirically given.

SEMANTICS

Let me finish up by addressing the rest of your comment, imbtween.

This is, admittedly, pure semantics, but when any -ism provides advantage for itself at the detriment of others, it is flawed. I mean, even the rats in NIMH realized they could not live ethically as long as they got by on stealing...

Agreed, on both counts.

This is pure semantics. That's why it's so important

What does it mean to be a woman, or a man, or a feminist, or a citizen, or a political actor? What does it mean to identify with or refuse to identify with a category, or a cause, or a story of who you are?

What does it mean to use words that have become so hackneyed that no one really thinks about what they mean anymore? What does it mean to listen to people make the same argument, once again, that we believe we've heard far too many times?

What does it mean when we use the same word in debate with another party, both sides understanding it to mean incommensurable things, all the while each expecting the other to mean it the way we mean it?

WHAT IS FAIR

Let me close on this last question, and a quote from George Lakoff's book, Moral Politics.

Children learn very early what is and isn't fair. Fairness is when the cookies are divided equally; when everybody gets a chance to play; when following the rules of the game allows for an equal chance at winning; when everybody does his job; and when you get what you earn or what you agree to. Unfairness is not getting as many cookies as your brother; not getting a chance to play; cheating, or bending the rules of the game to increase your chances of winning; not doing your job and therefore making others do it for you; or not getting what you earn or what is agreed upon.
In short, fairness is about the equitable distribution of objects of value (either positive or negative value) according to some accepted standard. What is distributed may be material objects--say cookies or money--or metaphorical objects, such as chances to participate, opportunities, tasks to be done, punishments or commendations, or the ability to state one's case.
There are many models of fairness:
Equality of distribution (one child, one cookie)

Equality of opportunity (one person, one raffle ticket)

Procedural distribution (playing by the rules determines what you get)

Rights-based fairness (you get what you have a right to)

Needs-based fairness (the more you need, the more you have a right to)

Scalar distribution (the more you work, the more you get)

Contractual distribution (you get what you agreed to)

Equal distribution of responsibility (we share the burden equally)

Scalar distribution of responsibility (the greater your abilities, the greater your responsibilities)

Equal distribution of power (one person, one vote)

Here, procedural fairness is the impartial rule-based distribution of opportunities to participate, talk, state one's case, and so on.
One of the most basic conceptions of morality we have conceptualizes moral action as fair distribution and immoral action as unfair distribution. However, different versions of what constitutes fairness result in different versions of Morality As Fairness. Equality of distribution is very different from equality of opportunity. Rule-based fairness invites a dispute over how impartial the rules really are. Rights-based fairness differs according to one's conception of what counts as a right. The communist slogan "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs," is a composite of two schemas: the scalar distribution of responsibility and need-based distribution. It therefore invites twochallenges: Is need-based distribution moral? And is the scalar distribution of responsibility moral? In short, seeking morality as fair distribution raises another set of thorny questions.
Another issue in fairness is what is to count as an instance of distribution in deciding upon an equitable distribution. Is it distribution over individuals or over groups defined by race, ethnicity, or gender? Is it a single act of distribution or multiple acts? Is it a distribution at a single time or over a period of history? Disputes over whether affirmative action is fair (and hence moral) are disputes about such matters. Both sides in affirmative action assume the concept of Moral Action As Fair Distribution, but differ over such issues. In general, conservatives and liberals agree that Moral Action Is Fair Distribution, but they disagree strongly about what counts as fair distribution...

FEMINISM IS FLAWED

If the -ism is about providing "advantage for itself at the detriment of others", it is, indeed, flawed. If it is about making moral decisions about what is fair (there's that decision-making again), in a way that recognizes that others are also making moral decision about what is fair, and not necessarily working to the same accounting...

Well, as I say in one section of my profile: "There are no character flaws. Character is what we do with our flaws."

The feminism that interests me, the feminism that I seek to enact, is a feminism with character.

50+ comments follow the original version of this post.

Not your men, or in the alternative, not you

2011-01-05T13:00:00.000-05:00

First, I want to thank everyone who commented on my last journal post for their warm (well, mostly) and generous expressions and encouragements. I wish to respond to what was said there, and I will. Before I do, however, I owe renaissgrl the courtesy of a consideration of her arguments on my prior feminism-related journal post.

WARMING UP

Let's begin with imbtween's comment, and my contextualized response to it:

The choice by women during the baby boom to choose mothering as their career is backsliding? Why is that any less legitimate a career choice as lawyer or dr?
The assignment of any career to a specific gender category is backsliding, yes.

Now, my response here came from a distinction between "choice", as such, and the structures that determine the "choices" readily available to be made. From that position, the issue wasn't one of "choice": everyone makes choices, every day, every minute of their waking lives. To claim that people "have no choice" is to describe a world that doesn't exist. I thus dismissed this line of inquiry as a strawman, but failed to make my dismissal of it explicit, as I really didn't give it that much thought.

That I wasn't giving it that much thought doesn't mean that imbtween was as unconcerned with the question as I.

what was "assigned" about it? Most, as far as I know, chose it....
(emphasis mine)

There's that word again. He went on to develop his point. But I wasn't listening, because again I saw him as arguing against a strawman. We had no disagreement: people choose (not women, people, individual persons). That had nothing to do with my argument about the structure of choices readily available.

That word, "readily", is important here. I will link to a podcast that develops this idea, in terms of "default" choices, in the comments. It is not to say there aren't other choices available, but that what's available, as compared to what's readily available, are experienced very differently. That's the stuctural argument.

ROUND I

Groucho contributed a response here, but I believe I responded to him there (at least on that point--there's clearly been a lot of activity on that thread since then), so let me focus onrenaissgirl's words. She wasn't about to see me brush off imbtween that easily.

imbetween did not say "assign"; he said "choose and choice." it's so interesting how you interpreted his words. you project your ideas onto them.

So, let's recap. I did interpret his words. I didn't interpret his words to make "choose and choice" synonymous with "assign". I interpreted his words as making an argument against a strawman, a fictional dystopia in which there is no choice--and gave it no further thought.

As such, I sought to bring the discussion back to what I saw (remember, this was my perspective: your milage may differ) as reality. Not an argument about having choice or not, but an argument about the structure of the choices one obviously (because it is not possible to not have choice) has.

I wasn't projecting my ideas onto his words. I was trying to actually express my ideas, and his words seemed to be ignoring those ideas in favor of ideas I did not hold and could not possibly imagine anyone successfully defending if they did hold them. As far as I was concerned, he was projecting his ideas onto my words, which is why I was so adamant about what words I chose and that they were my words, not his.

No, ren, I said assign. Btween explicitly questioned my use of the term. I defended that use. You may not judge my defence [sic] inadequate [sic], but I did not project words onto his argument, I used them for my own.

Notice, however, that I still haven't actually engaged imbtween's argument, which renaissgirlwas taking on for her own, because I simply didn't see it as an argument that was being had with me, but with some imaginary person who believes in worlds without choice.

ROUND II

renaissgirl, clearly, was not satisfied with my choice (see what I did there) not to engage the argument.

you just repeated back to me the point i made to you....
you responded to his use of the word "choice" by using the word "assign" and, as i pointed out, that is quite telling about how well you were paying attention.
because women ARE choosing to stay home if they can. many woman can't stay home and be integral in their children's lives and are not happy about it.

I acknowledged the point made to me, yes, and made my point that the point being made to me had nothing to do with me (although not as clearly as I could have), as I was talking about something else entirely. I was paying attention, but what I was paying attention to was that there was this argument going on with a strawman, and that wasn't my argument, and I really, really, wanted to get back to my argument dammit! :/

Yes, many women are choosing to stay home. As for the many women "can't" stay home claim: well, there's that fancy of a world where choice doesn't exist again. They are choosing to work. They could stay home. They'd sacrifice many of the things they would choose for their children if they did, but they have that choice.

Many women make that choice. Society generally doesn't look to kindly upon them for doing so, but they do. There is always choice.

This is the nature of the structure of choice. It isn't enough to say that someone chooses something, just as it is fanciful to claim that they can't choose. Choices are far more complex than that.

I said as much in my reply, quoting from an earlier reply directed at imbtween.

I repeat, for ren's benefit: "The issue of choice is more complex than whether persons from one culturally defined category decided to do something or not."

Yes, that was snark.

ASIDE ON COMPLEXITY

Some will say that I am over-complicating the matter. A choice is a choice, simple as that.Complication is, to my ears, another strawman. Most things in this world are complex, simple as that. Things only get complicated when we refuse to acknowledge that complexity and insist that everyone operate as if things are really simple.

As I did when I bypassed imbtween's and renaissgrl's argument about choice as simply having nothing to do with my argument. Their argument, like everything in this world, has far more complexity to it than I (and perhaps they, I don't know) was willing to admit. I tried to dismiss it as too simple, and as a result, complicated the discussion.

I'll note that I did next to Groucho's argument what I had been doing to the argument being discussed here. I dismissed it as not being the argument I was having. I wasn't "avoiding and begging the question", as he then asserted--that would have been to give me far too much credit--so much as seeing the question as simple, distractingly so, and doing my best to get him to just agree with me that it was simple and move on.

Failing to see the complexity of things tends to complicate things unnecessarily.

ROUND III

But let's get back to responding to renaissgrl. Here was here follow-up.

"The issue of choice is more complex than whether persons from one culturally defined category decided to do something or not."
well, those are a bunch of words strung along together in a sentence format.
what do you know about what it is to be a women and not have a choice about whether to work and try to raise children or just spend time raising children? uh, nothing? amirite? i am right. you have no idea what it's like to be a woman that has born children. this is not about cultural definitions, not what i'm saying. again, projecting wrong meanings onto my words (my words now) based on your notions of what my words mean.
but rabid, extreme feminists...they don't women as people but as womyn. or some such nonsense.

To which I replied:

well, those are a bunch of words strung along together in a sentence format.
Try as I might to hew to Martha Nussbaum's standards of clarity, I still find my sentences received like those of Judith Butler.
...what it is to be a women...
Do I touch it. No, that would be ad hominem. I'll leave it alone. Really. ;)

I'd stopped reading at this point. So let me have a go at it now.

ASIDE ON CLARITY

First, quickly, for those who care, Nussbaum's critique of Butler can be found here. I'm not finding a response by Butler, but from my understanding of it, it can be summarized as: "If you don't understand my sentence, you aren't working hard enough."

I long to be able to adopt the attitude I ascribe to Butler, but keep finding myself wanting to side with Nussbaum, even if I don't see my way clear to writing the way she advocates.

Someone commented recently that they prefer to use vernacular. Another way one might say this is that one speaks clearly (or writes clearly). I've often found that using clear words is not the same idea as communicating an idea with clarity. Often, the vernacular obscures or even leaves unsaid the very things one most wants to say.

Or, to formulate it differently: I could say something the way you want me to, but then I wouldn't be saying what I sought to say, I'd be saying what you want me to say, which is something else entirely. Here, I find myself squarely in Butler's camp.

ON THE SINGULAR PLURAL

But let's consider renaissgrl's construction "a women", not because I want to make another veiled ad hominem attack, but because I think it points eloquently to the very point I was making against Groucho's line of argument, which renaissgrl begins to employ here. Terms that recruit indefinite or definite articles often tell us very important things, and this is certainly no exception.

Let's look at both permutations of this construction.

OF A CATEGORY

What do I know about what it is to be a woman? Absolutely nothing. I am not of that category. Nothing about the body I inhabit allows me to know the experiences of any individual person who has a body associated with the gender "woman", where those experiences are opened upon and constrained by the very features of their body that I don't share.

But then again, nothing about the body I inhabit allows me to know the experiences of a person of any other category. A diabetic, a gymnast, a octogenarian, a five year old, all are equally closed to me, because while the body I inhabit may have had or one day may have features in common with any of those categories, right now, inhabiting this body, I am not inhabiting the body of the five year old standing in front of me.

What do I know about what it is to be a man? Again, absolutely nothing, unless that man is me. Nothing about the body I inhabit allows me to know the experiences of any individual person who has a body associated with the gender "man", because those experiences are opened upon and constrained by the very features of the body of that individual man that I don't share.

I and "a man", not me, have features in common, sure, but then I have features in common with "a woman", also. Features in common are not shared features. Features in common does not make my features their features, my body their body, my experience their experience.

I cannot know what it is to experience life as any individual person that the one I am. All I can know is what any given individual, woman, man, five year old, etc. tells me about their experience. Even then, I may not know as much as I think I do or would like to be able to.

A CATEGORY OF

What of the alternate permutation?

What do I know about what it is to be women? Again, absolutely nothing. I am not a category. Nothing about the body I inhabit allows me to know the experiences of the body imagined for the category "women", where said imagined body is constructed and subverted by the features of bodies, within said category, outside of it, and in opposition to placement within or without, all of which but one, I do not inhabit.

But here again, nothing about the body I inhabit allows me to know the experiences of any other category. Categories don't have experiences, despite all the experiences imagined for them. What do I know about what it is to be men? Absolutely nothing, I don't inhabit that imagined body. Nobody does, although many find themselves contained within it, assigned to it.

ASIDE ON MY OWN GENDER IDENTITY

Indeed, despite such an assignment, I do not think of myself as a man. I acknowledge that I have a body of the category male, but the body of the category men is so very alien to me that I do not relate to it in countless ways. Likewise, I often find the experiences of those who identify as men, as they describe those experiences to me as the experiences of men, unfathomable.

Now, I do have a choice here. I could stake a claim to the category man. I could inform the person speaking to me about their experiences--which they describe as their experiences as a man--that they are entitled to their experiences, but they don't speak for men, because I am a man, and those are certainly not my experiences as a man.

I could point to some category that they use to identify themselves other than that of "men" (perhaps, "masculinist"?), and argue that they do men a disservice by claiming to speak for men, because they certainly don't speak for me. If I really wanted to make my point, I could add some adjectives to the front of that category, let's call them "rabid, extreme masculinists", and then I really could be on firm ground saying well, you can go be rabid and extreme all you like, but you don't speak for men, so stop claiming you do.

FURTHER ASIDE ON WHO MAY BE SPOKEN FOR

I could do that. I don't however, because a category is not a person. One can speak for a man, or a woman, or a five year old. These are each persons. One may speak for a person. One cannot speak for a category (no matter how much they may claim to), because a category is not a person for whom one may speak.

Thus, rather than lay claim to the category to which I would otherwise be assigned, I choose not to identify with it. It's easier than trying to speak for something that is not a someone that can be spoken for.

This is a major division between feminists of the so-called second wave and those of the just as dubiously termed third wave. An individual "second wave" feminists will likely stand right up and pronounce that they are speaking for women. An individual third wave feminist will (assuming they are not cowed by their elder's much longer tenure as a champion of women's rights) often challenge this claim, making an argument very similar to the one I make above.

YET ANOTHER ASIDE ON RELATING TO CATEGORIES

The importance of the distinction between a category and a person, meanwhile, is central to my own work. I have been building a case for nearly three decades now that, while many entities we encounter in our world are not persons, we relate to them as if they are. My argument here is that our ability to relate to any given set of phenomena as if it were a flesh-and-blood person makes possible all the multiplicity of institutions, artifacts, systems, and yes, categories, that populate our worlds.

This is in direct contestation of the claims held dear in modern humanities departments. Within the halls of academe, any time it appears that we are relating "as if" something is an individual biological human, when it in fact is not a biological human, we have fallen into the trap of anthropomorphism. I reject this claim, arguing that anthropomorphism may occur when we tell ourselves a story in which we portray a set of phenomena as a person, but this is conditioned first by our capacity to relate to it as if it were a person about which a story might be told.

Features our bodies have in common, in particular features of the brains that are compnents of those bodies, grant us this capacity. That's anathema to anything anyone in the humanities is willing to hear. That would be some regressive brand of evolutionary psychology, which clearly has been soundly debunked, or horrors, of horrors, a revivication of sociobiology! One step removed from social Darwinism! Batten down the hatches! We're being boarded! Send that fellow to the plank! He clearly isn't one of us!

Yeah, well, anyway.

RETURNING TO THE MATTER AT HAND

Having explored that, let's take the question a bit further. To refresh:

what do you know about what it is to be a women and not have a choice about...

Oh, well there I do know something. I know that I do not believe in the reality or even the potentiality of a world in which any person does not have a choice, regardless of the category or categories they may find themselves in. I believe any such world to be a fanciful construction.

This all started with imbtween pointing out, quite rightly, that people make choices. Actually, his initial formulation was "the choice by women", which I reject, as a category cannot make choices, only people can make choices. If I must be pedantically ironic about it, people have no choice but to make choices. Categories aren't in that position, because a category isn't a person.

Be that as it may, I read imbtween as asserting that individual persons in the category women made choices. I had no argument here, and had no interest in nailing myself to a post to play the strawman so that there could be an argument there, so I didn't give the question any further thought.

Now that I have, however, I am struck by the defense of that very position I found to be uninterestingly simple (a mistake I will hopefully learn from), by a question concerning a category of persons that do "not have a choice". Uh, sorry, as a certain cable television personality would say "I reject your reality, and substitute my own." There is no such world in which any person does "not have choice." There is always choice. The question, again, goes to the structures in which that choice is embedded. At least, that's the question I want to talk about. I'll leave a discussion of the imaginary world where choice does not exist to someone else.

FINISHING UP

Once more, here's the rest of renaissgrl's final volley before I dropped out of the discussion:

what do you know about.... uh, nothing? amirite? i am right. you have no idea what it's like to be a woman that has born children. this is not about cultural definitions, not what i'm saying. again, projecting wrong meanings onto my words (my words now) based on your notions of what my words mean.
but rabid, extreme feminists...they don't women as people but as womyn. or some such nonsense

Yes, you are right. I know nothing about what it is to be a woman. I know nothing about what it is to be women.

This is, however, most certainly about cultural definitions. All categories are culturally defined. I don't care what features your body have in common with mine, and what features your body does not have in common with mine. You are who you are. I am who I am. And "women" is a cultural category that is used to organize the bodies that you and I inhabit. (I shall resist the temptation to start down the path of discussing biopolitics, here.)

No, it's not what you're saying. That's entirely my point. You're saying that because I don't know what it is to be a person assigned to the category you find yourself assigned to, I lack the authority to speak as I do. I won't go into a discussion of just what I mean by authority, here, although I suspect I'll be accused of projection again, for those were not your words. That was, however, the substance of your interrogatory, so far as I could make out. Another, more clear language way to translate it might be: "You're not a woman, so shut the fuck up." That's a bit stronger than perhaps you intended, but that's the impression you comment, as I read it, leaves me with.

REALLY FINISHED, HONEST

What I am saying is that I don't know what it is to be a person assigned to the category you find yourself assigned to. I don't know what it is to be a person assigned to the category I find myself assigned to. I can only know what it is to be me, and what you tell me of what it is to be you.

Projecting meanings onto categories that neither of us can speak for only diverts us from that very truth. I won't go so far as to say projecting "wrong meanings", because how can you project wrong meanings onto something that is culturally defined? It means whatever it means.

All I want to talk about is how those meanings structure the choices readily available to individual persons. Dammit! :/

30+ comments follow the original version of this post.

Not your mom

2011-01-04T12:00:00.000-05:00

In response to Not your mom by betenoire:

The "seeds of the good girl are planted very early, as adaughter observes the way the individuals in her home interact witheach other and absorbs the messages her parents send ...
* *

Rather than hijack betenoire's journal, I decided the points I've raised might best be discussed here.

It is work and work that is often required of women.

This is a rather strong claim. Many of the items on that list are not "required" at all, but are optional. If neither parent (assuming the patriarchal model of two-adult childrearing) chose to engage in them, the children would most likely still turn out just fine without them.

That there is a correlation of gender with performance of these tasks is important to look at, but that does not indicate that the performance is a necessity.

I dislike when people try to persuade me that being single is somehow a deviation

May I suggest surrounding yourself with a better class of people. We do exist.

but many women already realise that hence why marriage is declining.

Actually, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy would argue that marriage (and TFR in affluent Western societies) is declining because of evolved propensities to offset childbearing so long as environmental conditions continue to appear to be improving.i.e., as long as a better, more abundant future, is anticipated, investing in the cost of lifegiving in the present is ecologically irrational.

This ecological heuristic did not evolve in environments where conditions continued, more-or-less, to improve throughout the lifespan. (There was no career advancement or entrepreneurship for our primate forebears.) This is the SES-TFR paradox.

Admittedly, many women have made an informed choice about their reproductive futures--including the institutional forms they are willing or not willing to adopt in furtherance of their choices to reproduce or not--having immersed themselves in feminist history and theory enough to really think such issues through.

Many, however, are simply pursing the economic and personal freedoms that feminists before them won the hard way, the decisions about marriage and childbearing being more an ultimate outcome of their more mundane day-to-day evaluations of the opportunities before them than a conscious decision to avoid the shackles of marriage.

In a sense, we've out-evolved ourselves: our very affluence (achieved, in large part, through feminism) keeps us from reproducing or engaging in economic arrangments (however oppressively or non-oppressively structured) that organize the activities of reproduction.

By us, of course, I mean the most affluent, as those who continue to live in less favorable SES strata continue to evaluate the opportunities before them, and make decisions resulting in higher total TFR. Feminism can only reach these populations by giving them the tools of greater economic choice.

Of course, this results in forms of racial and class oppression. (Who's children will predominantly be paying for your social security and medicare benefits in a few decades? What color will their skin be? What language will have been spoken at home when they were growing up?) But I've already gone well beyond the scope of this thread.

300+ comments follow the original version of this post.

A Venn Diagram of My Research

2010-10-15T22:00:00.001-04:00

Ah, patriarchy in language.

2010-09-09T12:00:00.000-04:00

On my OkCupid home page today, a profile edit that lists among the things this profile author enjoys "being wined and dined".

Because enjoying an alcoholic beverage (for those who engage in such intake) and consuming a late day meal is something that is done to a person. The deconstructionist in me is having a field day, but I want to hear what others have to say. Case of self-objectification? Unexamined adoption of passivity?

Ars Ethica: Political Quadrants and Ethics of Superiority

2010-05-18T04:13:00.001-04:00

There is an old joke among research psychologists, that the discipline suffers from "physics envy". Alluding to a pronouncement of Freudian analysis, and thereby casting research psychologists in the position of emasculation, the assessment is marshaled to account for the recourse research psychologists often make to numbers to bolster the validity of their claim to psychology as a "science" on par with the "hard" sciences (the "hard" and "soft" distinction between disciplines already conveying a gendered discursive assessment that the "physics envy" quip exploits). Reading Rabinow and Bennett's Ars Synthetica, I found myself wondering if we were not here presented with a case of computer science envy, or more specifically, invoking the connection with MIT, artificial intelligence envy. Indeed, the extensive formulaic tables given in this text are reminiscent of the knowledge structures conceived of by A.I. researchers intent on representing (and implementing) in computer code the representation of real world knowledge in human minds. As with such A.I. research, which seeks to represent a Cartesian mind apart from a body, and which has proven less successful than building "artificial life" from basic embodied (albeit robotic and/or virtual) components (perhaps an inspiration for the MIT "parts" initiative), one is left to wonder just what all this abstraction accomplishes or can accomplish.

Yet, just when all hope of Rabinow and Bennett's project uncovering anything interesting is nearly lost, they enter into a trial run of their "diagnostic". Here we are presented with three primary figures in relation to embryonic stem cell research: embryo defense, human protection, and future abundance. The description and analysis of each of the three would seem to map (using Mary Douglas's and Paul Rubin's respective nomenclatures as projective reference points) to the Hierarchist/Efficiency, Egalitarian/Insurance, Individualist/Efficient-Flattening quadrants of ideocosmological phase-space. Further, insofar as the authors' invocation of a conception of in vitro stem cell remediation as an expression of "capacities [that] do not violate living systems" appears to represent their own views, and not necessarily the figure of future abundance, we would have the fourth, Fatalist/Insured-Flattening quadrant. (Interestingly, where the other three quadrants are well represented in anthropological encounter, and in other analyses--of data from Pew Center for the People and the Press--appear each to account evenly for a third of U.S. voters, this last quadrant is dismissed by Douglas as a potential not realized in actual cultures, and likewise shows in said data analyses as a largely unpopulated portion of the map.) The figural analysis offers additional material, however, as the discussions of variant figures reveals how political-discursive strategies aligned in their conclusions may nonetheless emerge of or straddle neighboring quadrants. The figural variation of "duty to heal" from Jewish tradition, for instance, while aligned with a future abundance figure, would seem to be situated more in the Egalitarian/Insurance than the Individualist/Efficient-Flattening quadrant. This speaks to the importance of identifying underlying heuristics determinative of an ideocosmological topology, as different ecologically rational needs/drives often articulate through strategies that appear, at the level of ontology, superficially similar.

This all said, it is unclear how much the diagnostic tables actually contributed to the uncovering of these figural variations, or if the same variants might have been revealed without recourse to such diagrammatic abstractions. Nonetheless, I found myself eagerly plunging into the text further, hoping to find the same figural analysis applied within the space of synthetic biology, only to be disappointed when none appeared.

Instead, we are treated to repeated complaints about the unwillingness of life scientists to "collaborate" with the authors' project. The authors' learned the language and the science of the life scientists, but lament that the life scientists are uninterested in doing the same. Implicit here is an appeal to mutuality and equity, reminiscent, if I may be a bit judgmental, of playground politics: having made an effort on their part, they are expecting to be met halfway by the other children--despite the fact that the other children never asked to play. Here, one wants to take the authors aside and suggest, drawing on the most basic insights of nonviolent communication, that in a situation where one does not like the strategies being actualized by another party, it is perhaps not the most effective approach to demand of that party that they use your preferred strategies instead, simply because you would have them do so. Where the authors do approach an understanding of the feelings and needs that might contribute to the attachment, on the part of life scientists, to certain strategies (as investment in career paths, for instance), there seems to be no willingness to go deeper, let alone to hold and honor the needs apparent in those commitments as real and valid for those life scientists. (Although the discussion of trust and confidence, in the context of familiarity, is promising, it seems isolated in a text otherwise inattentive to such needs.) Instead, we get the sense that Rabinow and Bennett would prefer that life scientists just transcend such petty concerns as an economically and intellectually fulfilling life-path out of a recognition of the overriding importance of conformance to strategies of "ethics" deemed essential to a 21st century science for all concerned. Somehow, an ethics that relegates the needs of others to "blockages" hardly seems to be one conducive to "flourishing".

Epilogue: A Vigorous Standard

2010-05-13T00:16:00.001-04:00

I end this second semester, and the last of course of our core curriculum with a petulant refrain: I am so done with ethnography. It is not that I do not enjoy reading ethnography as literature, but rather that my anthropology, my study of the human, is not one in which ethnography features as a prominent technology, or at least, not one in which ethnography as it is currently conceived so appears. My critique of ethnography is something I am still working out, but it boils down to the productive temporality of ethnography, insofar as the hermeneutic work of the ethnographer is generative of histories, of stories. This narrative productivity is a failing that redoubles upon itself in the "present" or the "contemporary" mode, for where, to invoke Ricoeur, the traditional historian may configure an interpretation of a prefigured archive to produce a refigured experience in a reader, the anthropologist treads the dangerous terrain of configuring the archive in media res, reversing the position of present and past, such that stories are not excavated so much as elicited, the archival material following on the heels of the archivist.

Further, the product of ethnographic work, the story, however far any particular ethnographic text may stray from classical narrative forms, obscures the embodied experience of the populations studied behind the genre embodiment of the storyteller. The hermeneutic tradition of thick description, with its attention to the prefiguring situatedness of actors in a story, unfortunately, fails to account for the very real effects of our situatedness within a genre, both the configuring situatedness of the author and the refiguring situatedness of the reader. Research conducted by Jerome Bruner and Carol Feldman at NYU, when I was a research assistant in their laboratory as an undergraduate, and subsequent work by others, including linguist George Lakoff, call into question the Geertzian paradigm. When a mere variation in introductory label, "spy story" or "travelogue", for instance, can significantly transform not only the interpretation of events in a story, but produce markedly different recall of the sorts of details upon which an interpretation would presumably be based--including the recall of details entirely absent from the story, yet consistent with the label--ethnography is placed in the unenviable position of unanchored pliability. In contrast with commonly held standards of "rigor", the issue here is not that ethnography lacks rigidity, but that the yielding plasticity of the ethnographic form lacks the firmness, the vigor, of secure fixity at a point of soundable depth. Or, to use a different metaphor, pliability is at best complaisance, absent secured rootedness in firm ground (from which a range of flexion takes shape). This standard of vigor affords a suppleness unattainable within a regime of rigor.

It was from a more nascent form of this critique that I entered Sites of Contention in Contemporary Ethnography, and embarked upon the first of our readings, No Aging in India. My response to that text might be summarized as an appeal for just such an anchoring, in the face of a genre-embodied account that was troubling not merely as an example of hermeneutic narrativity, but also on the basis of the neo-colonialist genre position adopted by the author, as tourist in a foreign land of the aged, told from the geography of a visitor to a historically colonized people. My request was and is a simple one, root such an inquiry in the conditions by which age is encountered, as such. Begin with the singular human encounter, and then perhaps particular human experiences might be articulated from that anchor point. Tsing's Friction, the next text on our reading list, was all the more frustrating, so shrill was the superficial squealing about "the global" (demonstrating a conflation of scale and scope deserving a discussion well beyond the remit of this essay) that even an otherwise potentially deep insight, that of friction, dangles precariously from dirigible mooring lines trailing in a hyperbolic wind.

With Farmer (Pathologies of Power) and Holmes (Integral Europe), however, a potential redemption of ethnography appears. These two authors, in their own ways, map out ideological territories (for Farmer: neoliberalism vs. liberation theology; for Holmes: social modernism, Catholic social doctrine, neoliberal fast-capitalism, and right-wing integralism) that may provide cross-cultural verification of a vigorous theory of ideocosmological plasticity rooted in pliantly entwined fairness heuristics, deeply anchored in singular human needs. Unlike Tsing's freely traveling universals, here we make claim not for concepts that do work, but the conditions of fixity by which such work is articulated. Here, it is not the temporality of situated narrative, but the situatedness of actors in conflict within the narrative, that tills the soil in which testable hypotheses may take root. Would a post-Geertzian deep description of strategies of structural violence and liberation theological activism identify constellations of shared flattening fairness heuristics coupled with disparate heuristics of efficiency and insurance? Can a nonviolent inquiry uncover the needs that commonly anchor situated ideologies ranging from Catholic social doctrine, to civil libertarianism, to Ghandian solidaritism, to Douglas's Fatalism? Can Farmer's and Holmes's respective territorial maps be shown as cartographic projections of the same space as the Nolan chart, the Tripartisan Triangle, the New Political Compass, and the vulgar left-right spectrum? Are the culturally articulated politics of international market interventions and nationalist resistance to post-national regimes of governance traceable to common anchors in the ground of mediated sociality by which animals cohere in stable groups?

Unfortunately, after these promising (if troubling in other respects) texts, we find ourselves back in the realm of traveling universals, although without the same reflexivity as Tsing offers, as Das (Life and Words) imports a universal concept of "the state" no less pernicious than "the global". Mired in the same conflation of scale and scope that troubles Tsing's work, Das provides a rigidly unanchored account of bodies animated as if by magic, a necromatic conjuring of marionette actors, strings pulled by apparatus of rumored "state" agency. That in the course of this hand waiving, Das reproduces a post-Lockean misreading of Hobbes (who arguably offers a exemplary vigorous ontology of relation unrecognized in today's traffic of traveling universals), only compounds, upon an unmoored traveling universal, a genre embodiment in which gendered bodies are flourished in a slight of hand of theoretical misdirection. Clothing an essentialist hauntology (with all the convolutions of temporality Derrida sought to evoke with this term) in a feminist critique (let alone a critique that poorly represents feminism, so weakly anchored is it in the text that is its object), Das casts an illusion neither fixed nor pliant.

We do get another glimpse of ideological territories, with Rabinow and Bennett (Ars Synthetica), as figures of embryo defense, human protection, future abundance, and a fourth potential "non-violative capacities" figure, are offered up in a test run of a diagnostic that would seem at once unnecessarily abstract and ultimately underutilized (there being no similarly developed figural analysis of the primary subject of the text, synthetic biology). Yet, insofar as it might have served to uncover figural variations, where the same discursive conclusions appear to be reached from different heuristic constellations, it might hold some promise worthy of further investigation (as does, for that matter, the resonances of "vigorous assurance" to a standard of vigour as anchored pliability). Fortun (Promising Genomics) and Helmreich (Alien Ocean), meanwhile, thankfully rescue us from the epistemology of scale, offering new ways of articulating the indeterminate (χ) and of conceiving differently scoped bodies that operate across political, sovereign, somatic, and spatial territories. Dealing not in universals (traveling or any other sort) so much as relationalities, Fortun and Helmreich prepare us for Langlitz's chapter on contextual mediation, as read through Latour, Gomart, and Wallace. Indeed, it is with relationalities, both orthogonal relations and topological relations, that we find ourselves back at a critique of ethnography, both in its narrative involution of the temporal relations between pre-, con-, and re-figuration, and the second-order to first-order relation of different genre embodiments of interpreter and interpreted. It is in just such circumstances that a vigorous anchoring, of methods that favor suppleness over rigidity, emerges as the defining characteristic of any meaningful study of the human.

Discussion about a Culturapology Historicized

2010-04-26T12:13:00.001-04:00

As I have noted elsewhere, my anthropology, my study of the human, asks questions about how a particular species is equipped to encounter singular social and political worlds. Employing an existential-historical-libidinal materialism, these questions can be said to interrogate the historical as an object, without taking up the historical as a site. Evolutionary trajectories of a species may be bounded in time, and may be enacted across temporalities, but any narrative accounting which may gloss (a term making explicit the double articulation inherent to a narratological trace) such rhizomic vectors are, in a Korzybskian sense (as contrasted with the Deleuzean), maps, not territories. Thus, "the contemporary", from a position of applied evolutionary phenomenology, appears as a property attributed to particular encounters with social and political worlds, in the sense of Aristotle's conception of the past and the future as brought by the human to an encounter with movement in a physical world, for which theoretical work would offer explanatory tools (i.e., as to the material transmission of said attribution, and as to its situatedness within a topological space of possible attribution), but not a site to be entered into as a position of observation.

Thus, a Design for an Anthropology of the Contemporary largely leaves this reader unengaged, its discussants chewing over problems that simply do not resonate, so focused are they on a "peculiar burden" apparent from a stakeholder appeal for the continuity of a discipline conceived of, not so much as a study of the human, but rather as a study of the epistemological and behavioral properties of particular human-nonhuman assemblages, which we might term ethne (so as to differentiate the assemblage from its property set, culture, or its intra-relational set, society). What we might call culturapology, or even colerepology, with its methodological attachment to ethnography, narratives derived from situated encounters in relation to particular ethne, is at best epiphenomenology in relation to a study of the human that interrogates the conditions of possibility for ethne configurations, as such, let alone the properties thereof. Indeed, even the turn to questions of identity, for our discussants, devolves upon particularity of cultural properties.

The lack, even explicit disparaging, of theory, as compared to "concepts", simply does not offer much of interest. The only point at which the discussion between Rabinow, Marcus, et al., would seem to provide purchase for an applied evolutionary phenomenology is in a brief consideration of a "triad", consisting of the emergent, and citing to Raymond Williams, the residual and the dominant. It is perhaps no small coincidence that this appears in the passage on temporalities within the context of timing. For it is upon the scaffolding of the emergent vis a vis the residual, whereby spandrels of evolution are occupied in the very occupation by a species of the niches opened upon by those spandrels, that an applied evolutionary phenomenology operates. This double movement conditions ethne, and thereby dominant particular elements of the sets culture and society, and thereupon ethnographic accounts derived from such particulars, including those of any particular contemporary. The historical (and too the prehistorical), in this conception, appears of the pendular ticking through Serresian intransitive spaces, the temporalities of particular ethne tracing singularly mutually inclusive scopes. It is this very ahistoricity as conditioning history, this contemporaneous reciprocal movement of which all stories are determined, that is taken as a site of an applied evolutionary phenomenology.

That said, there is little in these dialogues to suggest that an anthropology, a study of the human, that does not adhere to the concepts of contemporary culturapology would have any place in the design studio proposed. One that finds the emergent and the residual not merely in culture, but as conditioning the possibilities of culture, of which the dominant appears as a determination of such conditioned possibilities, even less so.

Book Imagined: AEP in Abstract

2010-04-22T18:01:00.001-04:00

Back of the Book Jacket:

What does a dog's bark have in common with a human laugh, or both have to do with the ultrasonic emissions of a bat? Dogs and monkeys, crows and cows, white tail deer and cellular automata, gods and corporations, Toxoplasma gondii and a cat named Searle: just some of the cast of entities that accompany the reader on this nonlinear journey through the evolution of the queerest of psychologies, that attributed to an organism embodied through the very ambiguity of its body. This foundational text in applied evolutionary phenomenology will have consequences not only for humanist philosophy, but for the very ways we communicate with our domestic animals, our love interests, our political opponents, and our own reflection in the mirror.

Book Proposal:

Beginning from a historical praxiography uncovering a Leviathan populated by human-nonhuman assemblages and self-reflexive identities, tracing the conditions of nature that organize the mechanisms of society, we explore the uncanny spaces opened up through mimetic extension and surplus sociality. Leaving behind mushroom men to visit the Middle East some 15,000 years ago, we imagine the early interactions of a pack of small wolves and a band of extroverted humans as a cybernetic symbiosis of food and sentry flows are augmented by a playful loosening of agency perception. This move from codependence to codomestication, however, will have occurred following a transformation of human signaling from reflexive to reflective, from ecological to technological, which we shall explore with the help of white tail deer and common corvids, modern dogs and ancient Homo habilis. A linguistic revolution, it will be argued, where instrumental signaling with tools coincides with instrumentalization of communication as tool, broadened the scope of human language beyond sociality, even as the scope of sociality was expanding beyond both the human and the living. It was from this space, formed at the conjuncture of multicast social grooming and universal agency perception, that the first human-nonhuman hybrid societies would emerge.

Stepping back into our theoretical present, we explore an architecture of spandrels, and the spaces cleared by these necessary byproducts of life. Exploring the latest studies in emotion psychology and embodied philosophy, we ask how what we perceive may be conditioned by our repertoire of available responses. We look to the architecture of social groups, to consider how spandrels of shared space come to be occupied by percepts of social affect, and how these coorganized spaces operate as public goods conferring fitness upon groups that condition genetic advantages to individuals and kin. Prepared with this theoretical framework, we examine the mediation of contemporary, even virtual, human courtship display through lek formation, as a demonstration of evolved capacities that operate independently of procreative potential, as they operate indiscriminately across gender and gender preference.

With this approach of queer evolutionary psychology, we return to our now rapidly evolving Mesolithic assemblages, as the uncanny confluence of tool language and object sociality opens upon yet more spandrels, as, from agriculture to city-states, a neurophysiological ceiling on network capacity that bound primate social relationships having been obviated by inter- and non-specific meshwork identities, agents are increasingly encountered as organs without bodies, enacted in surplus spaces of mimetic prosthesis. Yet even with the most "post"-modern of such augmentations, these configurations and constellations nonetheless trace historical-libidinal material existence, affective-perceptive flows that, however refracted, still originate with embodied organisms. Picking up again with our spandrelist model of group selection, we examine the cosmological spaces opened onto by pre-Mesolithic affective-perceptive group processes, as scaffolds for ideological niches occupied within the environment of today's Leviathan, and consider the possibilities of nonviolent communication as a political strategy to turn the instrument of language toward the rearticulation of sociality with even the most nonhuman of agents: ourselves.

Media Orthogonal: Science and Religion, Experiment and Experience

2010-04-21T14:47:00.001-04:00

Langlitz, in an article/chapter concerning the "Contextual Mediation of Drug Effects" in pharmacological research, cites to observations by Anthony Wallace, in the 1950s, that the same hallucinogenic substance was observed to produce markedly different effects in population of whites under laboratory conditions as compared to native peoples in religious ceremonies. Where Wallace attributes these effects to culture, which he argues needs to be taken into account as an independent variable in scientific experiments, Langlitz hints at another dimension, in providing an example of a trial run where two researchers, both presumptively of the same "culture", insofar as that term might be usefully used without reification, nonetheless experience wildly different reactions to the same test substance, in part, we are given to believe, as a function of their social (rather than "cultural") relationship to the substance, the experiment, their institutional setting, and to one another. More on this in a moment.

The characterization of this as a dimensional difference is important here, as like Latour's characterization of the religion and science as not being commensurable nor incommensurable, there being "no point of contact between the two, no more than nightingales and frogs have to enter into any sort of direct ecological competition", I would suggest that any idea of "culture" as interacting with, of being in any way commensurable or incommensurable with, the variables of scientific experiment is likewise, again in Latour's words, a "category mistake". That said, unlike a nightingale or a frog, we cannot say that there is "no point of contact" between experimental variables and cultural conditions. The very challenge of contextually mediated pharmacological effects is that cultural conditions and experimental variables make contact at every point. When the very architecture of the space in which the experiment is conducted is a factor in the dependent experiential variables--the decorating of the walls in the lab by our two experimenters mirroring the introduction of wire mesh into rat cages in the experiments described by Gomart in his discussion of methadone substitution treatments for heroin addiction--makes evident that there is no point at which culture does not intersect with experiment. This state of neither commensurable nor incommensurable is thus best described as orthogonal. It is not simply the lack of opposition between nightingale and frog, but the lack of opposition between up and left. Indeed, going back to Latour's discussion of icons in religion, and referencing Wallace's discussion of the architecture of religion, it is perhaps not too much of a stretch to claim that religion and science two, rather than being Gould's non-overlapping magisteria, the most uninteresting of Venn diagrams, religion and science hold an orthogonal relation congruent to that of culture and experiment, making contact at every point, without having to "enter into any sort of direct ecological competition".

Let us, however, come back to the example of two experimenters subjecting their experimental setup to a trial run, acting themselves as test subjects. If we hold that culture and experiment are in orthogonal relation, that they intersect at all points, what are we to make of the very different reactions of the two experimenters in the position of experimental subject? If both are permeated by the same cultural and experimental axes, what is different? Here, Gomart provides insight, when he describes the interaction between clinic, professionals, patients, methadone, and the jointly enacted "performance" of substitution treatment. Drawing on Foucault's conception of capillary power, we find a mode of control, given and received, prepared for and depended upon, a bidirectional flow of control, in every way reminiscent of the flow invoked by Latour in his attempt not to speak about religion, but to speak religiously, to perform religion, just as one performs an experiment, in some other dimension. In the story related by Langlitz, it is the experimenter who "wanted to keep everything under control", yet "was losing control", who "got all worked up" and thereby had deeply troubling hallucinations during the course of the experiment.

Here, we are not talking about culture, nor experiment, but relation. The experimenter in his dual role of experimental subject and experimental lead "tried to stay in charge supervising how Anna was looking after me", all the while trying to act both as observer of the experimental setup of which he was the subject. These relationships play upon the field of which culture and experiment are dimensions, but are not dimensional themselves. Rather, these relationships, the possibilities for flow, like the agape relationships explored by Latour in mundane love language, (de/in)form the topological geometry of the points at which culture and experiment orthogonally intersect. Just as with love language, there is a movement, close or distant, the dimensions warping as points play in relationship.

What then, of Langlitz's hope that "second-order observation should inspire the invention of new practices of first-order observation"? If the first-order observer must always contend with a shifting field of orthogonal dimensions, where the weft of the scientific method of the experiment and the weave of culture (including religion) of the self-reporting subject describe a non-reproducible fabric of experience, how then can any practice relate meaningfully to these dimensions? Experimental controls fail insofar as they fail to control culture. Geertzian thick description meanwhile strand us in second-order observations, an unwefted weave of how out of relation to what. Langlitz places methods "based on reductionism" in antagonism with "the complexity of life itself", yet perhaps the issue is not reduction, so much as reduction along a single dimension in ignorance of orthogonal relations. I would suggest that the practice Langlitz seeks might be found by turning an orthogonal corner, to examine what elements of substantive experience might be found configured to play coincidently with the configuration of chemical elements that perform a pharmaceutical substance.

Cybernetic Difference

2010-04-20T17:51:00.001-04:00

In a discussion of Kittler's Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, it has been argued that the author narrates the subsumption of difference by the war machine. Whatever else Kittler may be doing in his text, I would suggest that he cannot successfully demonstrate the eliding of difference by technology, as a brief consideration of early microcomputer architectures can elucidate.

Let us consider the machine instruction sets of two early personal computers, both of which I had the opportunity to become quite acquainted with as a child. The first, we might note, was designed with a decidedly spare command set, emulating a Turing machine without a marked degree of redundancy. We find, for instance, an operator that might be translated as "if the accumulator contains zero, jump to the address of my operand". In this particular architecture, the complementary operator for not equal to zero is absent.

This places the operator subsequent to the conditional operation in a position of privilege with respect to the distal operator targeted by the same conditional, a privilege necessitated by the inarticulability of the condition of the subsequent. Unable to speak "not equal to zero", the processor must seek the operator of that unspeakable condition immediately proximate, where the distal operator reached by the spoken conditional may be positioned anywhere--except in the position of the subsequent.

In this privilege, difference is evident. The subsequent operator does not merely perform difference, is occupies difference, determines its own position through an uncanny difference from that which may be spoken.

Such architectures did not last long, however. We find in latter computers a much denser command set. Not simply an "equal to zero" conditional but also its complement, "not equal to zero". With this, the privileged position of the subsequent is vacated, as the position of subsequent and distal may be arbitrarily interchanged through an inversion of the conditional with its complement.

Yet in this evacuation of privilege, difference is not eliminated, but relocated. Where before the inarticulable possessed a position determinative of the structure of the program, now structure hinges on, is articulated by, the arbitrary occupancy of the conditional position. The difference between conditional and its complement is the difference between the performance of functionally isomorphic but structurally distinct programs.

Here, we move from the realm of what has been called "spaghetti code" to the regime of subroutine. The structure of programs no longer dictated by the poetics of inarticulability, the linear sequence of code may be strategically segmented and segregated, just as the hierarchical strata of corps are segmented and segregated in a modern military structure. And just as with war machine subdivisions, for war machine subroutines difference in position is determinative: as any German general speaking "eastern" or "westward" would know.

In the circuit, position makes all the difference.

Abstract Imaginary: Potential Projects for an AEP

2010-04-07T00:00:00.001-04:00

Abstract 1:

Leviathan Multiple: Ontology in Social Contract Theory

Two central concerns of applied evolutionary phenomenology ("AEP") are the excorporation of an experiential body through emgroupment, and the encounter of non-cospecific social entities as enabled by a tolerance for ambiguity in agency perception. Where the former approaches identity as a process of reterritorialization of sedimented agentic singularities onto a body map, the latter uncovers the capacity for uncanny percepts emergent of deterritorialized deployment of sociality heuristics among coevolved codomesticates. Hobbes, in the ontological girding of his Leviathan, anticipates an AEP both of excorporate identity, articulated through the actor-author structure, and uncanny encounters with a non-cospecific, multitudinous other. Unfortunately, these insights are obscured in contemporary readings which conflate a "Mortall God", multitude in mediated relation to itself, with the actor upon which this identity relation hinges, nominally "sovereign", which unmoored of this fundamental structure, is reified as a heliophallic power over. This work of historical praxiography begins an excavation of the corpuscular objects by which Leviathan was enacted within the mechanistic philosophy of its day, and the very different objects enacted as Leviathan today. A reading that disentangles a "condition of nature" from post-Boylesian "states of nature" (ascendant in subsequent social theory) presents Leviathan as a foundational text of AEP.

Abstract 2:

Just So Queer: Group Selection for Human Courtship Mediation

Research conceived of as evolutionary psychology tends towards a caricature of evolutionary theory as reducible to adaptations within a species as linear correlates to problems of biological reproduction and survival encountered by ancestral individuals. Seeking legitimacy by grounding its hypotheses and results in implicit narratives of genetic fitness, such research more often than not founders on its own production of quasi-teleological explanations for patriarchal, heteronormative social behaviors witnessed among some human populations. Adopting instead a spandrelist approach to uncover common phenotypes as necessary byproducts of scaffold architectures of sociality, an applied evolutionary phenomenology ("AEP") examines predictions of group selection theory with regards to the reproduction of public goods upon which genetic transmission of particular individuals is contingent but not determinative. Drawing upon micro-political feminist theory and queer theory critiques of identity consolidation, this research situates leks, and specifically, human leks, as emergent of natural selection upon social groups, such that the mechanisms of lek formation and courtship mediation therein can be shown to operate in human social groups irrespective of the sexed bodies or gender identities of which such leks may be constituted. Potential paths of further application of group selection and feminist-queer theories within AEP going forward are outlined.

Abstract 3:

Deep Description: Approaching an Empathetic Practice of Ethnography

A methodology of thick description, as taken up within anthropology, rests on two corollary epistemological commitments: (i) that inherent in any observed act is a meaning that can only be determined through interpretation within its cultural context; and (ii) that given enough cultural contextual description, a rational observer can accurately arrive at the singular meaning of said observed act. Within an applied evolutionary phenomenology ("AEP"), by contrast, meanings are understood not to inhere in acts, but rather in the diagnoses, or analyses, that attach to such acts as objects enacted by situated observers. Acts, here, as the constituting elements of practices, are not possessed of meaning given by context, but rather are appropriated by an interpretation (also, notably, an act) according to which meaning is attributed. Drawing on the practice of nonviolent communication, an AEP seeks not to describe the particularity of context en route to a hermeneutics of specific meaning, but rather to hypothesize singularities of affect pointing to activations of general needs, and then to seek falsification (and/or elaboration) of those hypotheses through joint inquiry with informants. Such a "deep description" is explored as an ethnographic method for tracing common conditions of human acts, including interpretive acts.

Contract and the State: a Violent Recourse to Magic

2010-03-24T10:21:00.001-04:00

Once again, we encounter a text that makes its argument through a misreading of Hobbes. Here, it is Das's Life and Words, in which the author cites to an analysis by Severance. The argument given, which Das invokes as explanatory of both abduction and rape occurring during Partition and the national government efforts of "recovery" following Partition, is that a hierarchical relationship between the father and the family mirrors a hierarchical relationship of the sovereign to subjects, such that "fatherly authority [is] based on consent", "within the framework of the seventeenth-century doctrine that women are unfit for civil business and must be represented (or concluded) by their husbands". Severance is quoted here as stating "the members of each individual family 'consent' not to the sovereign's but to the father's absolute rule; they are not parties to the 'contract' that brings the commonwealth into existence." The flaws in this argument are multiple. First, Hobbes goes to great pains to establish an actor-author structure whereby participation in contract may extend to entities through representatives. This structure is articulated as affording three ontological positions: (i) a natural person, with authority to contract, on whose behalf a representative acts; (ii) an artificial person or person without reason, whether madman, child, animal, idol, building, or other fiction, without authority of its own, represented by an actor on the authority of the commonwealth; and (iii) either the Immortal God, with whom a natural person may enter into contract only indirectly, through His representative, on the authority of God, or a multitude, which likewise may not enter into contract directly, but only through a representative, acting on the authority of each member of said multitude.

With respect to Severance's argument, drawn on by Das, we are presented with a multitude, or in the very least, a plurality: namely, the family. Now, as the argument here is one of gender, we must consider the members of this body: some number of men, women, and children. Implicitly, there is only one man here: if there were more, then we would have a condition in which one man consents to representation by another man, nominally father, which being entirely in keeping with Hobbes's actor-author structure would serve only to distract from Severance's claims. Therefore, we proceed from a model of family in which there is only one man. The issue of the children of this multitude is easily addressed through reference to Hobbes's own ontology: a child lacks authority to contract directly, and thus is only representable in contract by an actor upon the authority of the commonwealth. Thus, there is no question of "consent" where children are concerned. Thus represented on authority of the state, however, children participate in contract as would any other artificial person. Accordingly, as under Hobbes's laws of nature, contract is only legitimately enforceable within commonwealth, children, through their representatives, necessarily participate in the contract of commonwealth, despite lacking the authority to contract directly as natural persons, as they could not possibly be represented in contract except through their participation in commonwealth. Now, Severance would claim that women are likewise, by doctrine, unable to contract directly, and thus must be represented. (How many women? How nuclear is Severances's family, one wonders?) In this case, either women are of the same category as children, animals, madmen, and fictions, and may be represented only on the authority of commonwealth, or else they are of the same category of the Immortal God and a multitude, having authority but nonetheless only participating as parties in contract by mediation of the actor-author structure. If Severance's assertion is in fact accurate, that women "consent" to their representation, said representative being named "father", then Hobbes's ontology would place women not in the same position as children, but rather in the position of God and multitude! For children, animals, madmen, and fictions can not consent (with or without scare quotes), but God and multitude can. Setting aside the radicalism of this result, we can see that Severance's conclusion that women were not party to commonwealth fails. If Hobbes would say that women lack authority, which Severance would seem to indicate he does not, then they participate in commonwealth through their commonwealth authorized representatives. If, however, women have authority, can consent to their representation, then they participate in commonwealth through their representatives acting on their authority.

Why is this important in the context of Das? Well, first, because Das founds some of the argument of Life and Words on a patriarchal model of national masculinity evident at the time of Partition. That such a gendered expression of nationalism was at play is not in question, but grounding an explanation of the phenomena of the violence of both Partition and state "recovery" campaigns in India on a second-hand misreading of a European theorist serves only to distract from, and ultimately runs the risk of undermining, that explanation. Second, and perhaps more importantly, such ill-informed invocations of Hobbes signals a reified conception of "state" that runs through Das's text, but becomes most explicit in her ninth chapter. Here, in a self-parody of anthropology that evokes Horace Miner's Nacirema, Das resorts to claims of the "magical" in her discussion of the illegibility of "the state" as an apparently holistic entity. Somehow, the national state of India, the city of Delhi, and the territory of a single police station, are collapsed with various bureaucracies, self-interested functionaries, and political actors, to a single index of "the state". Setting aside the absurdity of making the "founding violence" of India somehow contiguous with the civil authorities of a city that existed well before even the British Raj (unless we would say that there was no Delhi, with its bureaucrats and police officials, before it was founded in the violence of Partition), Das produces "the state" as an externally situated phantom force permeating life, yet not life itself. The actions of a police official engaged in vigilante terror and of low-level civil servants trying to interpret undocumented directives are merged, by Das, into a single stream of action, such that the affective relationships individual actors have with each of these entities is mystified and obfuscated. Having thus reduced everything to "the state", Das has no recourse but to appeal to "magic" as explanation.

This is all the more unfortunate, in the case of this text, as Das thus performs the very sort of violence that the work was meant to uncover. Here, it is not "the state" but the deployment of "the state" as conceptual frame, that "withholds recognition from the other, not simply on grounds that she is not part of one's own community but that she is not part of life itself". Recourse to "the state" as explanatory language amounts to "denial of accepting the separateness of the other as a flesh and blood creature". "The state" is not a flesh and blood creature for Das, but rather a spirit inhabiting rumor, having no body of its own, but speaking through the voices of those it possesses. Hence the recourse to magic as explanation: the theorist's fetish of "the state" allows no other explanation.

Monopoly Violence not Sovereignty: Leviathan as the Gift

2010-03-18T11:52:00.001-04:00

Klima, in his otherwise compelling "ethnography as theory", drawing on the social exchange with the dead and of images of death in a Thailand vacillating between democratically elected and military junta regimes, makes a questionable aside, in the midst of his ethnography, by invoking a muddled theory of Leviathan. He begins by arguing for "two sovereign powers that emerged" from massacre of protesters at the Democracy Monument in Bangkok, which Klima identifies as the public sphere, enacted through free market capitalism, and the monarchy, expressed through a feedback loop between public confidence and international opinion. Unfortunately, his argument here confuses power of commodity flows and reputation flows (both free exchange between parties, whether or not mediated by representatives) with "sovereign power" (the powers vested to a designated representative upon the authority of a multitude in enactment of contract with itself). That is, Klima conflates the powers of multitudinous exchange between parties, on the one hand, with the rights of a representative, nominally "sovereign", to exercise powers exchanged by the multitude with itself, on the other. "This is perhaps the meaning of sovereign power," says Klima. Or perhaps not.

Klima would have the power expressed through the action of flowing commodities (the market of the charnel grounds) and the action of the flow of trust (the reputation of the king) be "a power exceeding" the power of the junta, expressly because the power of free flow is not derived from a monopoly of violence (an exclusive freedom to act), whether legitimate or illegitimate. It is here that Klima first invokes the Leviathan, assigning to it a power "to cow the awed and frightened populace into submission". Except this is not the power of the Leviathan as Hobbes set it forth. Quite the contrary: the power of Leviathan is achieved through the covenant of each natural person in the multitude to give up their freedom to cow others into submission, so as to be free of the risk of being arbitrarily cowed into submission. In giving up this freedom, a monopoly on cowing to submission, on violence, is established, yes, but this is a freedom to act, not the power of any such act. The "awe" of Hobbes is a common power, but awe can mean veneration and/or wonder, just as easily as it can mean dread, and very little evidence to suggest that Hobbes uses the term in the latter sense. Indeed, to venerate one's king, to stand in wonder at images of atrocity, seems more congruent with an expression of awe than facing off defiantly against armed soldiers.

The junta may exercise a monopoly on violence, but such monopoly is enacted through international conventions of monopolized of violence. That is, it is not that the Thai multitude are "united by consent" in the artificial person of which the junta is sovereign representative, but rather that the monopolists of violence are united by consent to territories of monopoly. (At best, we might say that the artificial person of the junta acts on the authority of the multitudes of those true Leviathans that would cede other multitudes to conditions of war so as to preserve their own peace.) Just because a "state" is recognized, in modern usage, as "sovereign" by other states (sovereign being a nominal designation, always), does not mean that recognition of such entity from without confers upon it the status of Leviathan, by Common-wealth, as conceived by Hobbes, where "sovereign" denotes a representative of a multitude in contract with itself. The condition of nature described by Hobbes is one in which "the nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary." So long as there is a "known disposition" to fighting, whether such disposition is monopolized by a military junta or freely available to an anarchic multitude, the conditions from which Common-wealth naturally proceeds have not yet produced the conditions of Common-wealth as enacted.

"The power of a man", begins Hobbes, in his discussion on the subject of power, "is his present means to obtain some future apparent good, and is either original or instrumental". Here, the flow of commodities, of photos of the dead and bootleg satellite news video of the killing and dying, is at once original and instrumental: original as an expression of "the faculties of the body" (here, its faculty for death), and original also as "eloquence", instrumental in that, such commodities are "acquired" by the faculties of body and mind and/or "by fortune" of a global infrastructure. The flow of reputation, meanwhile Hobbes deals with quite succinctly: "Reputation of power is power; because it draweth with it the adherence of those that need protection." With international investors and local populations both needing protection, the reputation of the king plays like the valuation of any floating currency: just as the value (and thus, the power) of the U.S. dollar is buffeted by confidence in its value, which in turn is influenced by confidence in how confident others are about its value, so the same occurs for the Thai monarchy.

The powers of Ratchadamnern market and of King Bhumipol, both being "compounded of the powers of most men" (indeed, where "most", here, includes persons natural and artificial not even of the Thai Common-wealth), may exceed the powers of the junta state, even if these are not compoundings "united by consent, in one person, natural or civil": the market does not appear as a person, and insofar as the King participates in unity, it is a reciprocal unity of confidence, local and foreign, in the King, like confidence in any currency, and not unity in the King per se. One need not invoke a monopoly of violence (or its lack) to understand why this might be. The market and the king might both be greater, without being the "greatest of human powers", because the junta was not greatest, was not even "compounded of the powers of most men", whether "as is the power of a Common-wealth...of a faction, or of diverse factions leagued", even if the junta were a compounded of the powers of some faction of men. The junta had the freedom to let violence flow, but doing so was not, as it turns out, a "means to obtain some future apparent good" for the junta. Their actions compounded not "the powers of most men, united by consent", but rather compounded powerlessness: if "riches joined with liberality is power", then control of television broadcasts surely serves to "defend not, but expose men to envy"; if "reputation of love of a man's country, called popularity," is power, then unpopularity surely is the opposite of power; if "reputation of prudence in the conduct of peace and war is power"... need more be prudently said?

Instead, Hobbes's conception of power is perhaps the very Maussian gift Klima seeks to uncover (and to contrast with the gift of Derrida): "For the nature of power is, in this point, like fame, increasing as it proceeds", says Hobbes. "One can see how if you are really adept at generosity, there is no limit...to the merit that can be made, shared, produced, and returned to you in greater proportions the more you give it away", says Klima. Indeed, Hobbes's Leviathan is produced through covenant, a giving with only a trust of receipt, but here it is a covenant between a multitude and itself, "so that", in Klima's words, "it is terribly difficult to say who among [the multitude] are the givers and who are the receivers".

"There is no other kind of economy than gift economy. There is always a return on any transaction, whether visible or not. There is nothing outside the gift." This is not a surrogate or new Leviathan. Common-wealth, conceived of as a contractual transaction with nothing outside of it (unlike contracts that are valid or invalid by justice of Common-wealth), whereby a "spiritual value" deemed Mortall God is enacted, "is only a clumsy signifier for this kammic effect of generosity so unlike the utilization of things, in the sense that the mode of its production is also its mode of expenditure, and spending is its accumulation." The freedom to give is not the power of generosity, rather the power of generosity is the gift enacted. So too the freedom to kill is not sovereign power, rather the power of the sovereign is the covenant of peace.

Fast-bigotry and Obligatory Obscurity: Revisiting Holmes

2010-03-16T19:04:00.001-04:00

[The below is a more concise statement on the text originally reviewed in this blog on March 9.]

While honest bigotry has numerous consequences, proximal and distal, at least the honest bigot is not sanctimonious. Not so for the hypocritical bigot, whose disdain for honest bigots serves as shibboleth for inclusion in the superior class. Holmes, in his Integral Europe, is unrepentantly of this latter type, formulaically delivering at once obligatory and offensive aren't-these-people-delusional commentary throughout. That said, Holmes does at least seek to engage the honest bigots.

Unfortunately, Holmes does so through jargon held forth as words of significance, without signification. Two terms, in particular, go unsatisfactorily explained throughout the text, despite frequent invocation. The first, subsidiarity, is at best approached obliquely. The closest we get to a definition is that "Subsidiarity requires..." on p. 52. Indeed, had this sentence begun "The principle of subsidiarity is...", we'd have had an adequate definition, but instead we are offered a requirement of an undefined. This, after a disingenuous claim, on p. 30, that "The effort to define subsidiarity discloses not merely a single concept but a range of concepts...". No such range is ever demarcated, and the only effort required would have been to actually say "this term means", rather than such hand waiving. The very next sentence tells us that "Subsidiarity denotes a means for...", following upon which we are told something about what it does, but again, not what it is. "Hammering denotes a means of fixing materials to a surface." would be a comparably unelucidating move.

Holmes likewise foists upon us the hyphenated fast-capitalism as a shroud of obscurity, or perhaps vapidity. Our author notes that his source for the term (Agger) "steadfastly refuses to define" it, by which Holmes apparently gains license to likewise use the word without definition. A (very sparse) Google search result suggests two usages: a) the edging out of capital production by financial speculation in instrumental markets; or b) the convergence of capitalism, per se, with globalization, that hobgoblin of liberal thought we last encountered with Tsing. In the former case, calling it "capitalism", fast, slow, orange, or strange, serves only as epithet. In the latter, the "fast" prefix (again, how does "fast-" work?) is so much hyperbole. Given that Holmes attributes immigration to London's Isle of Dogs to the forces of "fast" capitalism, I will hazard to guess that it is in this latter sense that he uses the term, but an explanation, both of what the term means, and why it and not merely "capitalism" or some other vernacular would have been insufficient to express his conceptual intent, is, it would seem, intentionally withheld.

Yet hidden in this prejudice and obfuscation is what might be a useful account of political topology. French social modernism, Catholic social doctrine, neoliberal "~~fast~~" capitalism, and right-wing integralism, as developed by Holmes, seem recognizably congruent with political quadrants that recur in other models of ideological space for nominal political types in other sites. Despite glaring flaws in his work, Holmes has provided a frame for development of deeper cross-cultural comparison of political cosmologies.

Keep Meeting Up!

2010-03-16T15:01:00.001-04:00

Three years ago, inspired by my experiences with Meetup groups in the city, and wanting to share my pedestrian lifestyle with others in and around my then home in central Nassau County, I launched the Nassau County Walking Meetup Group. At that time, my goal had simply been to see if I could find some friends to experience the diversity of Long Island's communities by foot. The response was unexpectedly enthusiastic!

At that time, very few Meetup groups were available for Long Island residents to come together and share activities in their own neighborhoods, and many groups that were launched previously had struggled to get established and so subsequently closed. A group that held regularly scheduled events, with an organizer who was willing to start small, and let participation grow as a function of word of mouth, was just what many of you had been waiting for.

A group dedicated to walking was likewise well received. The few walking and hiking related organizations located on Long Island having been founded prior to the ubiquity of the Internet--and still operating through snail mail calendars and newspaper listings in order to communicate with current and prospective members--it was the Nassau County Walking Meetup Group that would show up in Google search for walking on Long Island. Those older organizations, likewise, tended to meet at times or in places that were inconvenient for casual walkers, and here again the Nassau County Walking Meetup Group filled a need.

Given how much interest was shown in that first group, I created the Nassau County Brunch Friends Meetup Group, which over time co-hosted events with the walking group, and also developed a series of special events and games nights as additional activities beyond those of the walking group. All the while, members would approach me from time to time suggesting ideas for events. In response, I asked some of those members to join on as assistant organizers. They were then able to contribute more directly to organizing and hosting events. Thank you to Kathleen, Glenn, Joanne, and Helen for all your hard work making the groups so successful!

Others suggested ideas that fell outside the scope of my groups as I saw them, and so I encouraged those individuals to consider starting their own Meetup groups, thereby creating even more opportunities for Long Island residents to come together and share their interests and one another's company. Eventually, based on these conversations, I started my third Meetup group, Making the Most of Meetups, with the intent of creating a community of Nassau/Queens area Meetup organizers, assistant organizers, and those interested in organizing Meetup groups around their favorite activities and passions.

Among those members who decided to take on the challenges and pleasures of running their own Meetup groups, two have been especially successful in building interesting and energetic Meetup communities. Lee Zett presently organizes three Meetup groups, B O A R D W A L K, Long Island Dining Out, and (([ FLICK-PICK ])), and Paul Levine organizes the Long Island Gardening & Arboretum Walks Meetup Group, Long Island Meetup and Go, and the Young Entrepreneurs Meetup Group of Long Island. If you haven't joined any of these groups yet, I heartily encourage you to check them out!

Both Lee and Paul began their first groups after discussions with me about potential walking events. Lee thought it would be a great idea to hold walks on the beaches of Long Island, Paul was really excited about the prospect of leading walks at various horticultural preserves on Long Island. Now, the Nassau County Walking Meetup Group was focused primarily on suburban walking, encouraging members to take advantage of their own neighborhoods as venues for healthy activity, but what Lee and Paul envisioned were amazing ideas just the same. Indeed, many of the members of my group had asked for just these sorts of events, and I told Lee and Paul as much when they offered the same ideas. Where these two individuals made the difference was when I asked if they'd each be willing to create their own groups to host just those sorts of events. First Lee and then Paul, each after careful consideration, decided to go for it! I, like many others, am glad they did!

Other active Meetup groups on Long Island that I have been privileged to see launch and develop are The Gamer's Table, the Long Island Compassionate Communication Network, Mo'Joe Mondays: Games Nights, and Caring for the Caregiver. However, a lot has happened in the past three years, as well. When the recession hit, I lost my job, and made the decision that it was time I leave Long Island and return to school. I am now in my second semester at the New School for Social Research, in New York, pursuing a Master's degree in anthropology, with a focus in applied evolutionary phenomenology. Additionally, this winter season, I also got married, and am now learning (slowly) to balance the demands of an intensive degree program, an ongoing job hunt, and the responsibilities of being a spouse.

As it is, I have not been hosting events through any of my Meetup groups for some time now. Nor do I expect to be doing so in the future, as, while my partner and I have not yet decided on a place to settle down (she is currently completing a degree in Glasgow, and then has a teaching commitment in Silicon Valley for a year after that; I have at least one more year of my program here in New York), it is unlikely that we will be moving to Long Island.

This being the case, when my Meetup organizer subscription came up for renewal this month, I decided not to continue said subscription. As a result, when my subscription expires in the coming days, the Nassau County Walking Meetup Group, the Nassau County Brunch Friends Meetup Group, and Making the Most of Meetups will each be without an organizer. My hope is that one or more people will be willing to take up the reigns of leadership and transform each of these groups into something more amazing and inspiring than even I could have imagined. If this does not happen, and the e-mail alerts sent to members of these groups asking for someone to step up as organizer go without response, then these groups will close forever.

All things come to an end, of course, even as new things come into being. I am thus all the more grateful to all the members, assistant organizers, and new organizers who have gone on to contribute to and build other Meetup groups on Long Island. There are so many more opportunities on Meetup today for Long Island residents to come together with neighbors and friends than there were only three years ago, and it is due to people like Kathleen, Glenn, Joanne, Helen, Lee, Paul, and all the other Meetup organizers and Meetup members who during my time on Long Island brought their enthusiasm and friendship to Meetup group events.

Then again, we could still do with many more Meetup groups on Long Island. What is your passion? What do you enjoy doing that would be even more fun with a few (or even more than a few) new friends to do it with you? What sort of events would you organize, if you had the chance to do so? Because of course, you do have that chance! There's a new Meetup group waiting to be launched. Consider organizing it!

Beyond Bigotry: European Political Types

2010-03-09T22:57:00.001-05:00

I've said elsewhere that I am the worst kind of bigot: I am bigoted against people who are bigoted against bigoted people. Call me a bigot in the third degree. As much as I may disagree with the sentiments held by honest bigots, I am nonetheless deeply offended by the sanctimonious attitudes held by hypocritical bigots. This, of course, makes me all the worse, as being bigoted against hypocritical bigots is still to be bigoted against bigots (even if they are bigots of the second order), but that is a cross I shall have to bear. Holmes, in his Integral Europe, is unrepentantly a second-degree bigot, and this being the case, his obligatory aren't-these-people-delusional commentary throughout this text is deeply offensive, at least to me.

That said, Holmes's does at least seek to engage the honest bigots he holds in such disdain. He deserves credit for this. Unfortunately, he does so through a cloud of jargoned theory that does more to mystify, in his opening chapters, than to clarify his project. Two terms, in particular, go unsatisfactorily explained throughout the text, despite frequent invocation. The first, subsidiarity, from Catholic social teaching, is repeatedly waved about in an oblique manner, yet never explicitly defined. The closest we get to a definition is that "Subsidiarity requires..." on p. 52, this after a claim, on p. 30, that "The effort to define subsidiarity discloses not merely a single concept but a range of concepts...". No such range is ever demarcated. The very next sentence tells us that "Subsidiarity denotes a means of...", following upon which we are told something about what it does, but again, not what it is. ("Hammering denotes a means of fixing materials to a surface.") Despite a footnote claiming the contrary, Holmes never marks an actual definition of subsidiarity, preferring instead to tell us repeatedly of its centrality to Catholic social theory. For a theme so central to the author's argument, it does not bode well that one must appeal to Wikipedia to get a clue what he's going on about.

His use of the term fast-capitalism is likewise shrouded in obscurity, or perhaps vapidity. Here, however, even an extensive Google search did little to clarify what the term means, as the resources using it all seem to assume its definition (much like Holmes does). As near as I can make out, fast-capitalism (since when was "fast" a prefix?) refers either to: a) the edging out of capital production by financial speculation in instrumental markets (as evidenced by share of GDP); or b) the convergence of capitalism, per se, with globalization, that hobgoblin of liberal thought we last encountered with Tsing. In the former case, calling it "capitalism", fast, slow, orange, or strange, serves only as epithet. In the latter, the "fast" prefix (again, how does "fast-" work? is this like "post-"?) is so much hyperbole in the tired vein of "omg, the world is faster! smaller!! flatter!!! the singularity approaches!!!!") Given that Holmes attributes the migration of southeast Asians to London's Isle of Dogs to the forces of "fast" capitalism, I will hazard to guess that it is in this latter sense that he uses the term.

What is most unfortunate about the above, is that hidden in this jargonbabble and racist baiting is what might be a useful account of political topology. French social modernism, Catholic social doctrine, neoliberal "~~fast~~" capitalism, and right-wing integralism, as developed by Holmes, seem recognizably congruent with the four political quadrants that recur in a number of models of ideocosmological space articulated in the American context. This would bode well for a cross-cultural study of political typology, and in this sense Holmes has provided a rich analysis that would inform the development of such deeper investigation.

Ghost of Meaning: Marx est mortuus lingua

2010-03-06T14:10:00.005-05:00

"In like manner a beginner who has learnt a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he has assimilated the spirit of the new language and can freely express himself in it only when he finds his way in it without recalling the old and forgets his native tongue in the use of the new." So says Marx as quoted by Derrida. What then, of one who never knew the "mother tongue", who finds their own tongue does not contort to pronounce the spectral words of a maternal (paternal?) fear?

Derrida might channel ghosts of a man, but it is a man who was perhaps apparition even in life. There are moments of meaningful clarity here ("no Dasein without the uncanniness...of some specter" would seem to bespeak specter as immanent soul distinct from transcendental spirit; "then impossible to discern between the specter and the specter of the specter" can be heard to voice a plane of immanence), but largely Derrida is speaking what, to my ear, is a foreign language, an Orue-Nacirema dialect of magical idiom no doubt freely expressing the fears and terrors of a discourse born of 20th century wars and thrown into ecstatic confusion in that Jericho moment that was 1989.

An experience of time as "out of joint" (whether we read this through the French idiomatic translations of "time is off its hinges", "time is broken down, unhinged, out of sorts", "the world upside down", or "this age is dishonored", as Derrida explores in chapter 1) is not something this reader is finding within the realm of grokability. Could we ever say that gravity is off its hinges? That electromagnetism is broken down, out of sorts? That space is upside down? That quantum dynamical processes are dishonored? Like the rhetoric of the "world will never be the same again" that characterized events in 2001, the end of history hysteria of 1989 simply doesn't (nor did it at the time) resonate (even if only as a strawman for Derrida's critique).

Indeed, the chorus to Billy Joel's patter song released the same year (after the mass migration of East Germans via eastern bloc countries had begun, but before protesters in East Berlin has begun to demolish the wall) sums up my sentiment on the issue pretty clearly: "We didn't start the fire \ It was always burning \ Since the world's been turning." The "world" (which world? whose world?) is "going badly" only insofar as we human beings are aware of a world, as such. So it was in 1949 ("Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray..."), so it was in 1989, so it was in 2001, so it is today. Derrida was right to dismiss the claims to the "end of the problem of social classes", but his laundry list of societal ills is just that, a laundry list. There will always be dirty laundry.

After that, his text descends into barbar gibberish, at least to this ear. If Marx speaks contradictory nonsense, Derrida's attempt to channel the ghost(s) of Marx amounts to speaking in tongues.

Borders of Agency

2010-03-04T17:28:00.001-05:00

The question of "self" and "other" may be read to interrogate how the border between these two categories is drawn. If in a developmental mode, we might begin with Freud's account of differentiation between infant and mother. In a socio-cultural mode, we might explore processes by which outgroups are produced across borders of identity and identification. Any such approach, however, begins with an implicit expectation that there are entities that might be sorted into self and other, me and you, us and them, mine and thine. Yet, we might also differentiate between those that might be self or other, and those which are neither. The infant that smiles and coos in recognizing its mother as other reserves such affect for her and like entities, and not for bottle, crib, chair or bib. The individual who identifies according to borders of nation, ethnicity, religion, region, profession or class, relates differently to the outgroup "other" than to the assortment of material and immaterial objects by which such borders are marked and enacted.

The border between self and other, then, is predicated upon a border between selves and things. Yet, where a story can be told for how the border between self and other is worked out through mechanisms of sociality, the working of the border between selves and things is not so readily discernible. Attempts to historicize this border fail to fully account for other expressions of the same mode of distinction, as made among animals human and nonhuman. There is a salience to this category comprised of self and other, of selves, that conditions the affective economy of cultural and social discrimination. This salience points to a perceptual border, by which territories of sociality and physicality are ordered.

It is through crossings of this border, between a kingdom of selves and a kingdom of things, that a world of hybridization emerges. Immigrants from the region of things are excorporated by selves, as bodies and identities are extended outward in new modes of sociality and physicality. Imports from the domain of selves are subsumed as components of things, inhabiting and informing structures and architectures as new artifacts and situations. In encountering such assemblages of trans-border migration, the perceptual is challenged. The salience conferred by the border is rendered in an uncanny register, as we encounter entities in the act of crossing.

It there is a history to the border, it is an evolutionary history. This border differs from species to species, both in where it is drawn and in how easily it is crossed. In human animals the border guards seem especially lax, such that assemblages of selves and things pass easily from one realm to the other. Increasingly, such assemblages seem content to straddle the border. Things act as if selves. Selves perform as if things. Hybrid entities lay claim to citizenship in both countries. Less a third estate, than a state of flux, these nomads are encountered as wave forms, arriving at no particular point either side of the border.

Manifest Ontology of Agency

2010-03-01T22:50:00.007-05:00

"My strategy is to focus attention on the distributive and composite nature of agency," states Joan Bennett in her account of a electricity blackout that effected North America in 2003, "Are there not human, biological, vegetal, pharmaceutical, and viral agents?" The answer is mu (無). To respond to this question otherwise would be to reproduce what might be termed a compatibilist realism, whereby something akin to a will (although for Bennett, perhaps not as strong a nominee as "free will") is deemed to inhere in an otherwise historically determined assemblage, or else be forced (by way of the inclusion of the "human" in her query) to abandon ourselves to a nihilist solipsism, in which we can not even admit to our own ineffable experiences as agents. Although Bennett would rightly move the loci of agency from subjects, relocating it to assemblage, nonetheless she retains an idea of agency as inhering in such loci. Agents, here, are still things-in-the-world, even if those things aren't specifically human bodies. It is telling that she adopts Latour's term for such nonhuman agents, actants, a term taken up from narratology. Narrative actants are not found in the world, they are found in the stories we tell about a world. If it has become my tired habit to parrot Korzybski, this would be the time to do it: "The map is not the territory."

Bennett's constellation of efficacy, directionality, and causality, can help explode this notion of inherent agency. For efficacy, Bennett would "locate intentions within an assemblage". Here, theory of mind rears its head: for how exactly do we "locate intentions", whether within a human, a nonhuman, or an assemblage constituted of any number of both, except through a working theory of that presumes such intentions? Are intentions more observable in an assemblage than in a human? If yes, then we have empirical access to an assemblage that is deemed impossible with a human: which would cast a human as ontologically not an assemblage! If no, then we "locate" such intentionality only insofar as we tell ourselves a story about it. As for directionality, Bennett's elaboration on Derrida's account clearly undermines the essentialism of inherent agency: "things appear to us only because they tantalize and hold us in suspense" and, quoting Derrida now, "someone or something that, in order to happen . . . must exceed and surprise every determinate expectation". Directionality here "appear[s] to us", "hold[s] us in suspense", "surprise[s] every determinate expectation": directionality as experiential, phenomena as an existential encounter. Finally, in her movement from "efficient causality" (ringing back to efficacy) to "emergent causality" to Arendt's sources (falling back to "intentionality"), agentic processes are revealed as distinguishable from deterministic processes only insofar as the agentic effect "can never be deduced" from its originating source. To draw upon Hacking's historical ontology, the agency of assemblage comes down to our inability to deductively "make up" their cause. Would Laplace's demon (with omniscient "degrees of possibility") find our world so populated by agents?

It is Hacking's dynamic nominalism, whereby he differentiates between a realist account of horses and planets and a nominalist account of gloves and multiple personality, that provides a way to approach Bennett's agency of assemblage. To do this, however, we must explode the dichotomy that Hacking likewise takes as a given: "a contrast between people and things". For, Hacking tells us, in contrast to horses and camels, and other such things (when not interfered with by us), "some of the things that we ourselves do are intimately connected to our descriptions". But this is our critique of Bennett's constellation! Where we can "locate intentions", when "things appear to us" that "surprise every determinate expectation", that is, their effect "can never be deduced" from an originating source, then we name such things agents, or actors, or actants. Bennett's shi then is a property not of an assemblage, but of our encounter with and description of said assemblage. However, we can be more exacting here, for an encounter is not a description, and indeed, it can be argued that the latter is predicated on the former. For both Bennett and Hacking implicitly admit into their arguments a raw ontological distinction: as much as the world may contain real things in which we do not "locate intentions" and which do not "surprise every determinate expectation", so too the world is peopled by actants, ourselves among them, "intimately connected to our descriptions" of them. It is on this basis that I would augment Hacking's dynamism with a manifest nominalism, whereby, in order for our descriptions of agentic people "to happen", there must be the surprise encounter, holding us in suspense. Such a nominalism is manifest, as opposed to say, evident, in that such agency, whether of people or assemblages, is perceived by the surprised senses, felt by the suspense-bound body, before any conclusion is drawn, any description formulated, any intention located. Agency, by this argument, is not a real thing-in-the-world, not an empirically accessible essential property of actants, but rather the perceptual predicate for our naming of agents as such.

Statement of Purpose

2010-03-01T14:36:00.004-05:00

My study of humanity, my anthropology, is organized by a singular question: how is a human organism equipped to encounter social and political worlds? I have come to term this project Applied Evolutionary Phenomenology (AEP). AEP is a phenomenology, in the existential sense, in that it seeks to reveal a structural ontology that conditions consciousness, whether conceived in terms of rationality, narrative, ideology, humor or empathy. Drawing together insights from historical-libidinal materialism, praxiography, object-oriented programming, and nonviolent communication (NVC), AEP as phenomenology looks at the ways in which a human being does its humanity. AEP is an evolutionary study in that it carves out a field of perception as an ontological space, distinct from cognition and deeply intertwined with affect, the formation of which space can be looked for in the evolutionary trajectory of a species. Distinct from adaptationist modes of evolutionary psychology, AEP adopts a spandrelist stance, asking not how conditioning structures solved environmental problems in a prehistorical environment, but rather how said structures—as byproducts of adaptive traits—opened up new environments of possibility, across which subsequent adaptations might play. AEP is an applied study, in that it would support the work of political organization, social activism, NVC practice, and peace and conflict studies, by articulating an understanding of human being based not in rational subjectivity, but instead in terms of excorporate bodies and enmeshed spheres of sociality. Providing an alternative to humanist epistemology, situated in movements of scope rather than degrees of scale, AEP is positioned to shape new approaches to governance, social justice, strategic choice, community organizing, and conflict resolution.

"Isn't it strange that evolution would give us a sense of humor?", asks Calvin, the perpetually 6-year-old boy featured in Bill Watterson's popular syndicated comic strip, "When you think about it, it's weird that we have a physiological response to absurdity. We laugh at nonsense. We like it. We think it's funny. Don't you think it's odd that we appreciate absurdity? Why would we develop that way? How does it benefit us?" The response given by Hobbes, Calvin's constant companion, stops the precocious philosopher in his tracks, at once awestruck and deeply unsettled: "I suppose if we couldn't laugh at things that don't make sense, we couldn't react to a lot of life." Laughter, an embodied response that takes up the whole of our organism, is here presented as integral to our ability to act. Moreover, this action is oriented to things that "don't make sense": laughter as an alternative to sense-making, yet implicitly these "things that don't make sense" are still encountered through our senses. If we can laugh at it, we can act concerning it, we can think about it ("We think it's funny"), and we humans laugh and think about things that appear to elicit no discernible response from other species. Laughter, as understood through an AEP, is an essential perceptual apparatus, by which a human is able to encounter a significant range of phenomena that are simply not sensible by nonhuman lives. There is a congruence here between affect and percept: emotion emerges as essential to sense. Homo sapiens as Homo sentiens.

Laughter is one site of inquiry for this AEP. Agency is another. Here agency is a perceptual category, a sense experience according to which an organism discriminates situations for which an innate theory of mind might be activated from those where less expensive forms of cognition can be relied upon: a percept of agency determines whether an animal interacts or merely reacts. Agency, in this model, is recognized by an animal just as faces are recognized by a human: so as to preferentially orient to some configurations of stimuli over others. Where it may be adaptive to perceive faces or agency, however, so-called "false positives" can result when systems must be tolerant of ambiguous inputs. Where the "agency detection" hypothesis (promulgated by some evolutionary psychologists) begins with predator-prey dynamics however, agency perception is posited as a condition of sociality. The question then becomes: how has an increased tolerance for ambiguity in agency perception among humans—this, an adaptation to sociality among co-evolved domesticates—opened an environment populated by phenomena inaccessible to other forms of life? Intergroup relations, cultural institutions, social categories, market exchange, mechanical Turks, corporate identity, social contract, all become possible where social affect is loosed to shape interactions with entities markedly unlike ourselves.

With laughter and agency as sites of inquiry, AEP also includes fairness. Here, we examine a tension of multiple fast and efficient heuristics—by which the social cohesion of groups as public goods is maintained—and their double articulation across the phenomenological environment opened on to by the forgoing forms of sociality. Again, the affective-perceptive structures of divergent fairness heuristics may be adaptive, but their confluence describes a phase space of possibility, with stable attractors taken up as niches for new adaptations: cosmologies and ideologies staked out as territories in an environment of risk perception and cultural norms. Where a capacity for laughter opens up a space in which the nonsensical may be sensed, and a tolerance for ambiguity in agency perception may admit humans into worlds populated by plethora of social phenomena, the topological surface emergent of differential fairness perception conditions our encounters with politics, ethics, morality, and justice.

This all said, it has become clear in the last semester that there may not yet be an audience prepared to embrace an AEP. Thus, I have begun exploring how I might set aside further inquiry into the foregoing sites, so as to focus instead upon one of three less audacious bridge projects, to serve as abutments from which a fuller study of AEP might, at some time in the future, be built: (a) a historical praxiography of Leviathan as a work of science; (b) a queer evolutionary psychology of lek formation; or (c) a development of nonviolent communication as ethnographic method. Each bridge project would serve as a stepping stone toward a deeper study of AEP, but I have not yet settled on one over the others, and will be looking to my experience here at the New School to determine what that next step might be.

A Nonviolent Political Ethics

2010-02-24T06:58:00.003-05:00

Farmer's invocation, in Pathologies of Power, of the methodology of liberation theology—"observe, judge, act"—as a way to organize an ethics of human rights in the face of structural violence, relates to a similar methodological rubric, "observation, feelings, needs", this from the practice of nonviolent communication.¹ It is informative that the "observe" of liberation theology, as described by Farmer "implies analysis", given that, as Farmer states "[t]here has been no shortage of analysis from the self-appointed apostles of international health policy". By contrast, the "observation" of nonviolent communication is understood as operating as an alternative to a habitual tendency to analysis, judgment or diagnosis as a precursor to strategic action. This contrast thus, likewise, encompasses the "judge" of liberation theology (per Farmer, "nonetheless important even if it is, in a sense, pre-judged"). Nonviolent communication, responding to a structural violence embedded in the very tendency to "pre-judge" in the name of observation, offers an alternative to compounding violent communication through reproduction of the methods of "self-appointed apostles".

In nonviolent communication, observation as starting point endeavors to be descriptive, emptied as much as possible of explanation, so as to open a space of hypothesis. When we witness a specific event or behavior, we guess at the feelings that such event or behavior may elicit and/or express, and if possible, seek to verify, to test, our hypothesis. With confirmation or revision of such hypotheses, the next step is to guess as to the needs such feelings might speak to, seeking, again as much as possible, to verify this hypothesis in turn. Were nonviolent communication to be employed in the context of Farmer, we would employ this method with regards not only to the poor of Haiti and Zapatista protesters, but likewise to neoliberal policy makers, medical ethicists, Russian prison health officials and their NGO interlocutors, and yes even to Farmer, and for that matter, ourselves in our encounter with his text.

For the purposes of this response, I shall leap-frog a further elucidation of this methodology to focus on the concept of needs, through the lens of Farmer's argument regarding "social justice". George Lakoff, commenting on Rawls's famous social thought experiment, notes that the "result of justice is seen as fairness", but then problematizes this by identifying no less than ten models of fairness, each intuitively apparent when taken alone, and yet in tension if held simultaneously.² Paul Rubin takes up Lakoff's types of fairness in his argument for countervailing drives organizing the affect and behavior of members of social groups, suggesting, for instance that five of Lakoff's models of fairness, namely "procedural distribution, rights-based fairness, scalar distribution, contractual distribution, and scalar distribution of responsibilities" in different ways fulfill a basic drive for "efficiency".³ Rubin's application of Lakoff's fairness kinds can be shown to describe attractors upon a topological phase space of fairness heuristics, which phase space, in turn, corresponds with various projections of political and cosmological types, among them, Mary Douglas's Cultural Theory of Risk⁴. Here, the attractors for "efficiency" would match up with Douglas's "Hierarchist" quadrant. What Lakoff's fairness models point to, as developed by Rubin, and from the perspective of nonviolent communication, are a cluster of unarticulated needs, needs that tend to elicit particular cosmologically-informed judgments and strategic responses, as described by Douglas.

Neoliberalism, as encountered by Farmer, here, would appear to straddle a space between Rubin's pure "efficiency" and a "flattened" variation thereof, corresponding to Douglas's "Individualists". Farmer, by contrast, would appear to be balancing a cluster of needs-based fairness and equality of distribution (two additional models of fairness, which Rubin identifies as associated with a drive for "insurance"), corresponding with Douglas's "Egalitarian" quadrants, with the same "flattening" drive (which Rubin explains as effecting greater freedom from hierarchical constraints), which Rubin associates with Lakoff's "equality of opportunity, equal distribution of responsibility, and equal distribution of power", insofar as Farmer is appealing to an ethics of individual, rather than purely state, action. This final quadrant, to which Farmer is not entirely committed (still framing his argument in terms of the "the more you need, the more you get" logic of Lakoff's needs-based fairness), is called by Douglas "Fatalist"~~, but by more recent authors, "Communitarian"~~.

[Subsequent reading has revealed that the "Communitarian" label, as used in Cultural Cognition of Risk Theory, despite appearing in models derived from Cultural Theory of Risk, and in fact is counter to the Fatalist quadrant. The confusion results from the transposition of the other three quadrant labels of the Cultural Theory of Risk model to polar positions on the dimensional model of Cultural Cognition of Risk Theory.]

Understood in this way, the tension between Farmer's proposed ethics, and that of neoliberals, in terms of the needs being spoken to in both fairness regimes, becomes more explicit. For as much as Farmer favors Rubin's "insurance" over the standards of "efficiency" (i.e., "cost-effectiveness") of the neoliberals, he would appear to share with them a similar cluster of needs around freedom (here, freedom from want). This, in the end, is the ultimate purpose of the methodology of nonviolent communication, to identify where the needs of parties otherwise bent on markedly divergent strategies, nonetheless converge.

notes

¹Rosenberg, M. Nonviolent communication: A language of life.

²Lakoff, G. Moral politics: how liberals and conservatives think. pp. 20, 61-2.

³Rubin, P. Darwinian politics: the evolutionary origin of freedom. p. 79.

⁴Douglas, M., Wildavsky, A., Risk and culture: an essay on the selection of technical and environmental dangers.