When I try to think about thinking, for instance retracing where an idea of mine came from, the limitation of English force me to say that “I” produced and “idea.” But none of these things are stable entities, and this grammatical relationship among them is misleading. The “idea” isn’t a finished product with identifiable boundaries that one moment sprung into being — one of the reasons artists so hate the interview question, “So what was your inspiration for this?” Any idea is actually an unstable shifting intersection between myself and whatever I was encountering. By extension, thought doesn’t somehow inside of me, but between what I perceive as me and not-me. Cognitive scientists Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Elenaor Rosch back up this intuition with fascinating scientific studies in The Embodied Mind, a book that draws comparisons between moden cognitive science and ancient Buddhist principles. Using examples like the coevolution of vision with certain colors that occur in nature, they fundamentally complicate the idea that perception mere gives information about what’s “out there.” As they put it, “Cognition is not the representation of a pre-given mind but is rather the enactment of a world and a mind.”
Jenny Odell, How to do Nothing, p. 142
Category: Feminisms
in hindsight, only men could make teen sex comedies
[Roxane] Gay is fascinating on the “goodness” of girls – as a societal requirement, as an often impossible standard; on how often being good is a matter of being “one who knows how to play by the rules and cares to be seen to be playing by the rules”; who knows how to be liked… Above all, on goodness as vulnerability, not least because she knows, in the most visceral way possible, what that can mean. One day, when she was 12, a handsome classmate took her on a bike ride to an abandoned shack in the woods where a pack of other boys, fuelled by drink, were waiting. “There is a before and an after,” she writes, in Hunger. “In the after I was broken, shattered, and silent.”
Roxane Gay: ‘Public discourse rarely allows for nuance. And see where that’s gotten us’, The Guardian, 27 December 2018
GROSS: When you were 13 and you had friends who were girls, did you understand anxieties from a girl’s point of view? For example, something I think you handle really well in the film is how a 13-year-old girl might deal with it if a boy, you know, just a little bit older than her tries to come on to her and to push her sexually to a place that she’s not ready for. It’s so uncomfortable and awkward and embarrassing for a young, inexperienced girl to say no.
BURNHAM: Yeah. You know, honestly, I don’t think I knew that perspective when I was that age. And I think – I mean, I didn’t do anything equivalent to what that boy does in that scene, but, you know, part of the movie for me was trying to go back and investigate that time and realize that there was a whole other population of people experiencing maybe the exact same circumstances I was experiencing from a different perspective.
And even in film, you know, there’s this sort of teen sex comedy which is, you know – in hindsight, only men could make teen sex comedies just, you know, that teen sex would only be comedic. Of course that seems like it’s from a male perspective.
Director Bo Burnham On Growing Up With Anxiety — And An Audience, Fresh Air with Terry Gross, December 27, 2018
Obedience to the elders and the reproduction of their thought.
That led to the three books you mentioned plus another to come that are indeed a cycle about rewriting radical modernity. Not that this is the only alternate path through the archive, but it’s an attempt to suggest a different relation to the archive in general, to see it as a labyrinth rather than an apostolic succession; a kind of “no-dads” theory, but full of queer uncles and batty aunts…
I find it enervating when people simply try to squeeze the present into the old patterns set by Walter Benjamin or whomever, and add just a tiny bit of novelty to how we read such a canonic figure. Why not read other people, or read the present more in its own terms? Ironically, to best honor Marx or Benjamin one should not simply be their exegetes. So my job is to corrupt other people’s grad students. To be the odd uncle (or auntie) who whispers that one can dissent from the great academic patriarchy (and even its subsidiary matriarchy) where one only succeeds through obedience to the elders and the reproduction of their thought.
Alexander R. Galloway — An Interview with McKenzie Wark, b2o, April 7, 2017
Academia is about – especially if you are a woman – academia is about hierarchies. It is very much about knowing your place and kowtowing to the people above you and knowing when you are allowed to speak and not and who to cite and who not to, not for good political reasons but because of the politics of who you are aligning yourself with.
Hannah McGregor, “Episode 3.12 Not Nice, Not White, and Not a Lady with Tara Robertson“, Secret Feminist Agenda [around 26 minute mark]
Affective Labor, Resistance, and the Academic Librarian
Given the ongoing and increasing machinization of immaterial modes of production, an attention to the affective nature and labor of technology in life and work and the ways in which it also impacts human subjectivity and gender seems a fruitful new line of inquiry for feminist thinkers concerned with labor issues. If we take up a call to arms to think about life and work and the subjects we wish to become, how might new technologies enhance, augment, or limit our feminist political desires for subjectivities free from domination? In the context of the academic library, how does the disruption of the digital library allow us to rethink and revalorize the subjectivity of the librarian?
Sloniowski, Lisa. “Affective Labor, Resistance, and the Academic Librarian“, Library Trends, Vol. 64, No. 4, 2016 (“Reconfiguring Race, Gender, and Sexuality,” edited by Emily Drabinski and Patrick Keilty), pp. 645–666.
Donna Haraway, Situated Knowledges
I want a feminist writing of the body that metaphorically emphasizes vision again, because we need to reclaim that sense to find our way through all the visualizing tricks and powers of modern sciences and technologies that have transformed the objectivity debates. We need to learn in our to name where we are and are not, in dimensions of mental and physical space we hardly know how to name. So, not so perversely, objectivity turns out to be about particular and specific embodiment and definitely not about the false vision promising transcendence of all limits and responsibility. The moral is simple: only partial perspective promises objective vision. All Western cultural narratives about objectivity are allegories of the ideologies governing the relations of what we call mind and body, distance and responsibility. Feminist objectivity is about limited location and situated knowledge, not about transcendence and splitting of subject and object. It allows us to become answerable for what we learn how to see.
Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspectives“, in Feminist Studies, pp. 575–599, 1988.