Troubling Rationality

Conclusions

2010-05-03T15:54:32Z

Well, it's that time. Time to wrap up the blog. Let's start with a recap.

I began the project with the aim to look at the insufficiencies of rationality, understood to refer to the Enlightenment mode of thought/argumentation. For me, these insufficiencies are twofold: first, on an affective level, the rational does not seem capable of describing many essential aspects of our existence; second, rational discourse, framed in terms of logic and objectivity, inhabits a very particular and exclusive structure. In looking at feminist critiques of rationality, or examples of feminine non-rationality, I hope to highlight some of the workings of that structure and various ways around it. Here is an overview of my sites of inquiry:

Gertrude Stein: Here, I looked at linguistic constellations and rhythmic patterns, which highlight the associative (rather than the linear) qualities of thought.

Julia Kristeva: In Kristeva, poetic language produces an excess of meaning that is not only feminine (through references to the unnameable and the void), but also transcends the rational.

María Lugones and Gloria Anzaldúa: Both women emphasize play and spirituality as alternative modes of thinking, and both highlight the ways that rationality excludes both women and non-white people, instead advocating "curdled" or "mestiza" consciousness.

Psychoanalysis and Surrealism: In different ways, these two strains of thought both have the right ideas about non-rationality and the unconscious, but both have been used to misogynistic or otherwise problematic ends. Although they are not inherently problematic, I hesitate to use them as models because of their tendencies for misinterpretation.

Women's Ways of Knowing took a social-scientific approach to paint a picture of the ways that women understand the world. Although it didn't seem to me that the model of knowing was particularly woman-specific, it provided interesting "hard evidence" that there are many ways to knowing, not all of them what we think of as rational.

Eight Women Philosophers: What this book didn't do was to show that women think differently, on an individual, cognitive level (in my mind, a good thing); what it did, rather, was to place women's thought within persistently male-dominated systems of education and knowledge-production - a project which can and should be continued for more contemporary thought.

Other avenues for (non-rational) thought include: affect, queer thinking, children, the erotic, and the physically embodied. I am particularly interested, in the future, in thinking about the last category, and how different genres and styles of performance might access rational and non-rational centers of thought in different ways.

To wrap up, I think that what I've taken from this project is (maybe oddly) an attention to form. Rationality seems highly bound up, not in what we think, but in how we think and how we express those thoughts. Perhaps this is way rationality, as a system, is particularly vulnerable to becoming discriminatory against all those who express themselves differently from the norm, whether that manifests itself through Anzaldúa's spirituality, the girls in Women's Ways of Knowing who must learn to think "how They want you to think," or common tropes of the hyper-emotional woman.

And yet these different modes of expression are vital. To demonstrate the power of this kind of unexpected variation in tapping into different centers of the brain, I will leave you with a series of photos from a performance piece by Marina Abramovic (the same woman I cited in the last entry). In this piece from MoMA, entitled "Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present," Abramovic sits silently at a table and lets her audience stare for as long as they wish. Follow the link for photos of the results: a diversity of humans, a diversity of responses, all reacting to one woman sitting in a totally non-rational way.

"Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present": portraits on MoMA's Flickr account.

Performance and the Non-Rational

2010-04-26T16:57:18Z

So far, I've done a little survey of some literary attempts at the non-rational, and this makes sense for a couple of reasons. First of all, a rational argument seems to invite a written process of laying down an argument in a logical order. Secondly, the inverse: writing - the act of conveying information to an audience - requires a certain amount of comprehensibility in order to reach its audience, which often leads to a rationalist logic. Of course, this second part is arguable; we've seen that Stein's work isn't "comprehensible" in the traditional way, but it has still reached an (albeit limited) audience.

The point being, I've been focused on the written non-rational partly because it's more immediately available to me as a grad student, but also because it seems to try and beat rationality at its own game. If writing is the rational genre par excellence, then it's been valuable to look at the way writers have undermined the predictable structures of language. For this last blog or two, though, I want to look at genres where the non-rational might feel a little more at home: visual/musical/performance art.

]]> First, though, I just want to muse on what would make a rational visual or auditory experience. For me, I go back to the baroque and classical periods, to Bach and Mozart, for rational listening (no coincidence, I think, that it coincides chronologically with the birth of the Enlightenment). At the same time, though, I think some more modern "mathematical" music that employs rule-oriented principles like 12-tone rows could also be called rational, because to put it overly simply, the composition process works through the head, not through the heart. I think there are similar points to be made in painting and sculpture, for example, although the visual arts aren't really my field.

Let's get to the non-rational. I want to start with this clip, just to highlight the "impracticality" of art. Practicality is not the same as rationality, but the juxtaposition of art vs science, and of art as being the more enriching of the two is interesting... especially since the artist never quite says why. (I also recommend the other clips in this art:21 series: short, entertaining, educational.)

Now, here is an example of a very evocative (and oddly disturbing) performance art piece by Marina Abramovic:

I think what this gets at, actually, is a sort of cognitive dissonance. We want to understand this rationally, but what is so troubling about it is that we can't. I think this is what a lot of good performance artists are striving to do - to create an affective experience.

Another way to experience this is in contrast. Here are two videos: the first is a clip from a production of "Swan Lake" which I would argue strives for ultimate orderliness. The second, from PUSH Physical Theater, tries to physicalize a text, creating meaning on a different level than the cognitive.

This next one is long, but skip to anywhere, and it'll be interesting.

I realize that what I'm doing here is showing without explaining, and that demonstrates exactly why I think art is important - because we have a hard time explaining it. What I need to do more thinking about is this: classical art/music seems to access different parts of my brain than, say, the experimental works I've posted. That isn't to say it doesn't create an affective experience; a Mozart symphony could be incredibly moving if played in the right context. But I do think there is something different about, for example, the movement piece above. The problem is, what is it? I think cognitive dissonance begins to get at the experience of watching some of these, but I am far from being able to formulate this more precisely, or to draw any conclusions about the possible potential of art to create change by way of these non-rational processes.

The Erotic's Non-Rational Potential

2010-04-24T21:11:44Z

I'm just going to cite this straight out, because Gretchen Legler (discussing Audre Lorde) says it better than I can (from Legler's book, All the Powerful Invisible Things: A Sportswoman's Notebook:

We live in a racist, patriarchal, and anti-erotic society, Lorde writes in "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power." We live in a pornographic society that insists on the separation of so many inseparable things; that insists on ways of thinking that separate the body from the world, the body from the mind, nature from culture, men from women, black from white; a society that insists on bounded categories of difference.

But we can use erotic power to resist those splitting forces. The erotic is the sensual bridge that connects the spiritual and the political. It has something to do with love. The word itself comes from the Greek word eros, the personification of love in all its aspects - born of Chaos and personifying creative power and harmony. Eros is a non-rational power. Eros is awareness. Eros is not about what we do but about how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing, says Lorde. Its opposite, the pornographic, emphasizes sensation without feeling. Pornographic relationships are those that are born not of human erotic feeling and desire, not of a love of life and a love of the body, but those relationships, those ideas born of a fear of bodily knowledge and a desire to silence the erotic.

Everything we have ever learned in our lives tells us to suspect feeling, to doubt the power of the erotic and to confuse it with the pornographic. But the two are at opposite ends of the world.

What can I add to that? This just goes to show that when you have your eyes out for something (anti-rationality), it just starts popping up everywhere...

Things to Think About

2010-04-19T16:33:58Z

This being a blog about non-rationality, I wanted to finish off my last couple of entries with some non-scholarly thoughts. While I'm contemplating what form that's going to take, I wanted to point out some more scholarly-type issues which I won't have time to thoroughly discuss this semester. Since they add to the whole non-rational matrix, though, I am jotting down some notes for further investigation and questioning:

affect: How do affective experiences contribute to our non-rational experience of the world? I cite, in the bibliography, a good paper by Margaret Olivia Little which outlines the Enlightenment compartmentalization of reason vs. affect, and the ethical possibilities of affect.

queer possibilities: Are there queer critiques of rationality that take a different tack from feminist critiques? They may not differ from feminist writing on the subject, since Enlightenment binaries relied more overtly on sexual difference than on sexual orientation; however, what about those who don't fit neatly into sexual binaries at all? While some of my writing here has grouped transfolk (for example) in with all that is not-male/rational, that isn't necessarily quite right either. Would a trans critique of rationality look like Anzaldua's mestiza consciousness, or could it act differently?

children: Are children non-rational, or pre-rational? Women and children are traditionally often lumped together as less-than-rational; if we are critiquing the teleological narrative of rationality from a feminist perspective, then does that leave us open to children's ways of thinking as well? In another post, I co-review Kathryn Bond Stockton's The Queer Child and her idea of growing sideways. To our repertoire of thinking like a cubist or thinking across borders, could we also add "thinking sideways"?

Eight Women Philosophers: Not Finding What Isn't There

2010-04-15T00:10:08Z

When I checked Eight Women Philosophers, by Jane Duran, out of the library, I was hoping to find some common thread in philosophical thought by women that would support some vague non-rational thesis of this blog. Well, I didn't. But the book was interesting anyway, so this blog post will be just a short little overview of why, even if it turns out female philosophizing didn't always diverge much from the male philosophers of their time, it is still important to talk about it.

]]> First, a brief sketch of the book. Jane Duran looks at biographical and historical data on, as well as the philosophical works of, eight Western European women across 700 years - Hildegard of Bingen, Anne Conway, Mary Astell, Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Taylor Mill, Edith Stein, Simone Weil, and Simone de Beauvoir. Duran's aims in doing this are multiple: first of all, she is engaged in a rehabilitation project, and for that reason alone, she seems to argue, it is important to talk about these philosophers as women whose writings (in most cases) have been swept under the rug for at least some period of time. She is also interested in historicizing their work; she points out, for example, that it is impossible to fully understand the philosophy of Edith Stein or Simone Weil without thinking about their relationships to Judaism and to World War II - and historical conditions are equally relevant for the other philosophers she discusses. Finally, Duran is interested in the implications each of the eight philosophies have on contemporary feminist thought.

In one section of her conclusion, Duran is concerned with finding the commonalities between all eight women, perhaps to bolster the sense that there is something particular about being a woman philosopher (though, at the same time, she is careful not to overestimate or overessentialize that commonality). She finds that each woman, albeit in different ways, has a certain concern for particularity and/or empathy that differs (again, some more than others) from the male thinkers of her time. Each woman also works from a gynocentric standpoint in the sense that they are all working from a place of exclusion.

This is, I think, where this book has something to say to my previous blog post on Women's Ways of Knowing. It is clear that women can think and can know in the same ways as their male contemporaries - as evidenced here by Anne Conway's clear engagement with her male counterparts such as Henry More, or by Harriet Taylor Mill's contributions to the thinking of her husband (John Stuart Mill) - but looking at the way each woman has responded to her excluded status, no matter how that status manifested itself historically, gives credence to the need for theories of women's ways of knowing.

Jane Duran points out in her conclusion that although there may be a time when a gendered approach to literary/philosophical revitalizing projects may not be urgent, that time isn't anywhere on our horizon. Gender is widely recognized as a social construct, but it is a social construct that begins so early in a child's life - even before the development of speech, with subtle (or not-so-subtle) parental cues - that it continues to be a relevant and problematic concept. I must admit, when reading Women's Ways of Knowing, I wondered if it was becoming outdated by (for instance) the rising female enrollment in liberal arts colleges. I think that Eight Women Philosophers has cast a new light on this issue, convincing me that while a woman's gender may be less important to her thinking on an individual cognitive level, it remains urgent to consider women's thought - and that other genders that one would consider "excluded" - on the basis of its relationship to an unfortunately persistent male-centered system of education and power.

Women's Ways of Knowing: a Foray into the Social Sciences

2010-04-06T06:35:43Z

Taking a break from the poetic and the philosophical for a moment, I want to take a little jaunt into my sociological background to point a little spotlight on a very important book, Women's Ways of Knowing by Mary Field Belenky, Blythe McVicker Clinchy, Nancy Rule Goldberger, and Jill Mattuck Tarule (henceforth BCG&T). Originally published in 1986 (I'm drawing from the 10th anniversary edition), this is an analysis of 135 interviews with women in different forms of formal and informal education, from prestigious colleges to programs through human service agencies. Using models of development from Carol Gilligan and William Perry as a baseline and sounding board, these interviews revealed ways in which these women's experiences and "ways of knowing" provide an alternate model of epistomological development. This book was initially so influential because it provided a new, empirically-grounded paradigm for thinking about how women think; now, I see it as required reading for anyone reflecting on their own intellectual development or concerned with the development of others (male or female).

]]> BCG&T propose a categorization of certain types of thinkers - and this word categorization is key, because while some of their respondents transitioned between categories in a seemingly developmental progression, BCG&T resist ascribing their categories to particular age ranges or to an evolutionary model. Certain categories end up seeming more desirable than others; rather than chalk this up to authorial bias, though, it seems that the desirability factor stemmed from the respondents' own sense of emotional and intellectual fulfillment.

In order to outline BCG&T's categories, I want to first point out what they're writing against; namely, William Perry's 1970 research on Harvard undergraduates (mostly male, though including some women). Perry maps a progression through four phases of development:

basic dualism, in which the world is polarized into a system of right/wrong handed down by authorities

multiplicity, in which absolute authority is questioned and everyone is recognized as having the right to their own opinion

relativism subordinate, where analytic evaluation of these multiple opinions is encouraged, and finally,

full relativism, in which knowledge of the world is understood to be context-sensitive, and relativism understood to extend beyond the classroom.

The problem with the Perry scheme, suggest BCG&T, is not that it's wrong, but that it presupposes an educational privilege which allows for access to all four stages. Many of their interviewees, for reasons of upbringing, socioeconomic status, education, etc did not fit neatly into these categories; BCG&T suggest that an educational model based around the Perry scheme - which was, after all, founded on a study of Harvard students - might not take these differences sufficiently into account.

Instead, BCG&T grouped their respondents into five types of thinkers. I will try to be brief here, but be aware that this book has a lot of very astute things to say about each category.

Silence: Those who, for whatever reason, believe themselves subject to authority. According to them, their voices carry no weight, and their conception of self is dependent on how others see them. Language is not cultivated as a way of developing conceptual thought.

Received Knowledge: Those who learn through listening. They often see things in terms of right/wrong, true/false, because they are often concerned with taking in the "right answer" from a perceived higher authority. This is similar to Perry's dualism, but with a crucial difference: men, in Perry's study, seemed to identify more with the authority ("authority-right-we"), while the women interviewed tended to perceive themselves as separate and the authority as inaccessible ("authority-right-they").

Subjective Knowledge: Those who mistrust authority, and rather rely solely on their own experience and "gut instinct." This often comes at great social and professional cost, since as BCG&T point out, Western thought emphasizes rationality while Eastern philosophy may be more amenable to intuitive understanding (55). Subjective knowers sometimes feel that they are in a sea of possibilities, but without the guidance of any authority, they can feel lost, isolated, and alienated.

Procedural Knowledge: Those who, either through "separate" or "connected" knowing, learn how to play by the rules or mold their subjective knowledge into a framework of received knowledge. "Separate" knowers, much more common in formal higher education, perceive the self as separate from a system of "how They want you to think" (103). They may, for example, learn to write a paper the way a teacher wants them to, but may have no personal stake in the content of that paper. This problem can be exacerbated by debate or doubt, which can undermine a student's confidence in the worth of her personal experience in the classroom. "Connected" knowers, on the other hand, value personal experience over the dictates of the authorities, and they attempt to see others in the others' own terms (putting themselves in others' shoes). This learning through empathy can, however, lead to loss of a sense of valued selfhood. For both separate and connected knowing, form triumphs over content: "both learn to get out from behind their own eyes and use a different lens, in one case the lens of a discipline, in the other the lens of another person" (115).

Constructed Knowledge: Those who are "passionate knowers," who strive to integrate personal experience with the the voices and expertise of others. Knowledge is contextualized, with attention to the fact that all knowledge is constructed through a combination of internal and external forces. This seems to be the most rewarding type of knowledge for BCG&T (and I would personally have to agree), although they do point out that constructivist knowers sometimes have difficulty finding relationship partners (and satisfying conversation partners) who operate on a similar plane, and will sometimes shut down if they sense that their audience is not receptive to such complex thought.

This was a long description, but an important one for a discussion and critique of rationality. One concept which BCG&T bring up in their "procedural knowledge" section is that of methodolatry (not their term: it comes from Mary Daly). This has a great deal to do with rationality as a method: in short, methodolatry holds that the result is less important than the fact that you've considered the problem thoroughly and academically. This has a number of scary ideological issues - BCG&T evoke the image of military strategists coolly debating cost-benefit ratios of different forms of weaponry - but more pertinent to this blog, BCG&T's problem with a methodolatrous form of rationality is that women were not part of the process of creating this method:

Methodolatry may be especially dangerous for women, because women, after all, have not participated in designing the procedures developed by the various disciplines for acquiring knowledge; and the procedures may make it difficult or impossible for women to acquire the knowledge they need... The methodolators, although ostensibly basing their decisions upon form, implicitly decide upon content... In learning to "do philosophy," Faith [one respondent] learned how to formulate questions; but the questions had to be of a particular kind, and the questions she might have formulated on her own might have been quite different from those she was being taught to ask (95-6).

BCG&T fail to adequately (for me) prove why this might be more of a problem for women than for men; in many places in this book, I found myself think they've essentialized certain gender differences a little bit too much. On the other hand, I do believe that many men are taught to operate more on a confrontational model (in, for example, philosophical debate) which may lead many women to a sort of procedural knowledge which is uncomfortable for them and which eventually shuts them down academically.

In short (ha!), Women's Ways of Knowing has a lot to tell parents and educators about the way learners - and I want to say all learners, regardless of gender - might need different forms of support. In that way, it is a potent critique of rationality as one of many methods of learning, a method which often subordinates intuition and personal experience. (The predominance of men in the sciences might suggest that, aside from many obvious structural inequalities, men may have struggled less with this process of emotional subordination.) While some thinkers react by rejecting this method altogether (the subjective knower) or by embracing it single-mindedly (the received and the procedural knowers, in different ways and for different reasons), it seems that the constructed knower learns to accept rationality as a facet of a more complex and contextual truth - and that in the classroom, for whatever reasons, women have traditionally had a hard time reaching this stage of engagement. BCG&T's focus on adults leaves ample room for speculation on how to apply their model to issues in childhood education - for example, why some adolescent girls shut down in the classroom. But if it shows us anything for sure, it is that women interact with knowledge from a historically subordinate position, and although this is certainly changing, we may need to revise our definitions of knowing to fit the steadily growing place of women in academia.

The Unconscious (and Surrealism), Part Two

2010-03-26T20:57:00Z

In his 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism, André Breton writes:

We are still living under the reign of logic: this, of course, is what I have been driving at. But in this day and age logical methods are applicable only to solving problems of secondary interest. The absolute rationalism that is still in vogue allows us to consider only facts relating directly to our experience... Experience itself has found itself increasingly circumscribed. It paces back and forth in a cage from which it is more and more difficult to make it emerge. It too leans for support on what is most immediately expedient, and it is protected by the sentinels of common sense.
... It was, apparently, by pure chance that a part of our mental world which we pretended not to be concerned with any longer - and, in my opinion by far the most important part - has been brought back to light. For this we must give thanks to the discoveries of Sigmund Freud... The imagination is perhaps on the point of reasserting itself, of reclaiming its rights (9-10).

What reason, I ask, a reason so much vaster than the other, makes dreams seem so natural and allows me to welcome unreservedly a welter of episodes so strange that they would confound me now as I write? And yet I can believe my eyes, my ears; this great day has arrived, this beast has spoken (13).

With this, Breton hearkens the coming of the surreal. But is his "beast" the same as Anzaldua's "Shadow Beast"? Is his rejection of the rational as liberating as he believes?

]]> What I want to briefly sketch out here is why I think Breton's anti-rationalism - and he is anti-rationalist - is not feminist; in other words, how this idea of anti-rationality can be (like any other artistic/ideological framework) be manipulated. This ties in very closely with work I'm doing on Breton's Arcane 17 and its relationship to a short story by Gisèle Prassinos, so I'll be skating a very thin line between going overboard and holding back too much!

Breton, and many other Surrealists, privileged the idea of the femme-enfant, the woman-child, as the ideal surrealist figure. Halfway between psychological maturity and childlike innocence, the femme-enfant was considered to have the greatest access to the unconscious realm. Breton compares her to a fairy in his Anthologie de l'humour noir, and to a mermaid-like figure in Arcane 17. The connection between Breton's femme-enfant and Anzaldúa's mestiza is actually not a far-fetched one to make: both inhabit liminal spaces, traversing the boundaries between the real/unreal/surreal, or between real life and the spirit realm.

The trouble with this comparison is not necessarily the concept in and of itself, but the use to which Breton puts it. In Arcane 17, Breton frames the femme-enfant as the ideal of female agency and power but also as a state which, more than empowering women, reflects back on men:

Qui rendra le sceptre sensible à la femme-enfant? Qui déterminera le processus de ses réactions encore inconnu d'elle-même, de ses volontés sur lesquelles est si hâtivement jeté le voile du caprice? Celui-là aura dû l'observer longtemps devant son miroir et, au préalable, il lui aura fallu rejeter tous les modes de raisonnement dont les hommes sont si pauvrement fiers, si misérablement dupes, faire table rase des principes sur lesquels s'est édifiée tout égoïstement la psychologie de l'homme, qui n'est aucunement valable pour la femme, afin d'instruire la psychologie de la femme en procès contre la première, à charge ultérieure de les concilier. Je choisis la femme-enfant non pour l'opposer à l'autre femme, mais parce qu'en elle et seulement en elle me semble résider à l'état de transparence absolue l'autre prisme de vision dont on refuse obstinément de tenir compte, parce qu'il obéit à des lois bien différentes dont le despotisme masculin doit empêcher à tout prix la divulgation (A17, 64).

Who will attune the scepter [authority] to the femme-enfant? Who will determine the process of her still-unknown reactions, of her desires which are so hastily covered with the veil of caprice? ... It will be necessary to reject all the modes of reasoning of which men are so proud, ...to clean the slate of the principles on which we've built the psychology of man, which is not at all valuable for women... I choose the femme-enfant... because it seems to me that in her and only in her, in a state of absolute transparency, resides the other prism of vision which we obstinately refuse to acknowledge, because it obeys completely different laws which male despotism tries to keep hidden at all costs. [sloppy, short-cut translation mine.]

Sorry, I know this is a mouthful, particularly in my brilliant 5-minute translation/hack job...! The point is this: I don't want to accuse Breton of outright misogyny here, since - for a book written in the mid-1940's - this is quite liberated. On the other hand, there is a clearly paternalistic impulse here, particularly in attributing a certain form of transparency to the femme-enfant. Asking who will help the femme-enfant, Breton has very little faith that a woman can achieve a state of liberation on her own. And as it turns out, his idealization of the femme-enfant leads to some uncomfortable parallels to an instrumentalized and fractured body (which I will be discussing in my upcoming paper on Prassinos).

Without going to deeply into the ways in which the femme-enfant becomes (to Breton) a fractured consciousness, I think it's sufficient for blog purposes to just reiterate the problems that arise when the unconscious is mishandled. According to Breton, men are the keeper of the keys to a certain form of consciousness. Even though he would like to promote what he sees as "female" consciousness, he does this through the lens of a dominant male ideology, not acknowledging that a) this consciousness may be able to blossom without a man's help, or b) this consciousness may have existed already without Breton's knowledge. In other words, it is quite presumptive of him to assume that he is exposing a certain new knowledge to the world, when the only world he is addressing is the world of men.

Can Breton's "beast" or the "femme-enfant" still be useful to women? I think they certainly can; however, I think the idioms need to be re-appropriated in a context that grants women more agency in the formation of this type of consciousness (a move that Anzaldúa - whether or not she is conscious of her reflection of Breton - seems to start to make).

And... for a female point of view (indirectly) on this issue, you'll just have to read my paper on Prassinos (once it gets written), since she deals with the whole issue of fragmentation which I've avoided talking about here.

Tackling the Unconscious

2010-03-14T00:34:41Z

One of the threads that I would like to pick up in this post (and perhaps future posts) is the problem of the unconscious - or, backing up yet again, the question: Is the unconscious a problem?

We need to back up in order to move forward. It seems as though many of the writers I've tackled so far could be said to have called upon a certain access to the unconscious as a way around rationality - whether that unconscious aspect lies in non-syntactical constellations of meaning, as in Stein, or in a more spiritual realm of dreams, as in Anzaldúa. Personally, I am not really sure if I agree with this: there is much to be said for these meanings to be created completely consciously, just along networks or webs that could not be said to be "rational" in the "systematic and orderly" sense.

However, my illustrious psychoanalyst father keeps dropping hints about how Freud makes a strong argument for non-rational systems of thought in his theories of the unconscious (for instance, in The Interpretation of Dreams), so it may be time for me to look down over the great abyss of psychoanalytic criticism and come down on one side or the other.

]]> Sorry, folks, but I am going to evade the question. I am not a psychoanalyst, or engaged at all in psychoanalytic theory, and when pitting myself against such an enormous body of work - and body of criticism - I don't know where to begin.

The sheer volume of writing on the subject makes me think that it is not going to be productive to tackle Freud directly, since that has obviously been done extensively, by both feminists and non-feminists with greater credentials than me. Instead, I want to spend a minute, with the help of Lynne Segal's essay "Cautionary Tales: Between Freud and Feminism," on how Freudian theory has been used and why it is a particularly challenging model for feminists. Segal doesn't directly address rationality and the unconscious, but as a jumping-off point, I hope she will be useful.

In this essay, Segal attempts to address the question of why feminists are so attracted to psychoanalysis, despite its contentious legacy. For the very reason of its emphasis on childhood and unconscious formation of subjectivity (including gender and sexuality roles), psychoanalysis is pessimistic about the possibility of the intellect as a vehicle for change; it is this pessimism (according to Segal) which "produces its own paralyses for those who wish to transform the links it describes (and helps reinscribe) between knowledge and power, sexed identity and social hierarchy" (61).

In other words, if subjectivity is rooted in the unconscious, then we are faced with a series of contradictions which pose problems for a feminist/queer agenda. Since these problems are incredibly complicated, they are clearly best summed up in bullet points.

Gender identity is unconscious? That explains the "global tenacity of male domination" and why it is so difficult for feminists to fight (62).

Wait. The very unconscious nature of this construction of subjectivity can be used to challenge normative roles by highlighting the "inevitable tensions, uncertainties, and inherent ambivalence at the heart of sexual difference" (62).

Wait. If psychoanalysis poses such a challenge to sexual binaries, then why has it been used with such great success by conservatives trying to ascribe certain roles to women on the basis of essential sexual difference?

The point is, Freud seems to reduce sexual differentiation to the essential formative moment of a child's development, and to feminists, this is both frustrating (in its reductionism) and attractive (in its room for uncertainty in the process of differentiation).

So, what does this have to do with rationality? Well, as Segal moves to Lacan, we start to get a clue. Lacan's point is [did I just say that? I mean - the overly reductive use I am making of Lacan is] that femininity is based on a) the lack of a phallus; and b) a "jouissance" (female sexual satisfaction) which is "unique to her, outside symbolization and intelligibility" (65). This is where we start hearing resonances of Kristeva - whom Segal doesn't mention - and of Cixous and Irigaray, whom she does. These theorists attempt to "express the female 'imaginary' in texts characterized by playful excess, disruption, grammatical and syntactic subversion, and other ambiguous games within the 'masculine' Symbolic order" (65). In a sense, Cixous and Irigaray make do with what they haven't got (a phallus) but create a certain indefinable pleasure (jouissance) within that lack.

One problem with this is, of course, the defining feature of femininity being a lack of a phallus, which is to my mind completely arbitrary. (If the early psychoanalysts were women, who knows - maybe masculinity would be qualified by an excess, rather than femininity by a lack. And god forbid you try and fit a transperson into this equation!) Questions of genitalia aside, however, Segal also points out the very practical limit that a focus on the lack of a phallus puts on diversity and conflict:

With the Lacanian gaze focused firmly beyond the individual, forever tracking down further support for its philosophical analysis of desire-as-lack, there is little interest in the particulars of actually conflicting desires, or the possible diversity of subject positions, meanings, and experiences (68).

Anyone else see Lugones and Anzaldúa in a nutshell? It seems to me that they operate on a different plane than the Lacanian lack; in other words, the conflict and moving-between that the two theorists engage with creates an abundance of meaning which seems to go beyond jouissance.

What this is leading me to is a moment to refine my thinking, or to reiterate a way I've been thinking all along. I don't want to suggest that using Freud would be wrong, but that just that psychoanalytic models tread on some uncomfortable ground. It seems to me that the legacy of psychoanalysis is a sometimes painful reliance on a the conscious/unconscious binary, where in truth, I think our experience of reality is tied up too closely to both the conscious and the unconscious - and to the conflicts between the two - to even talk about them as two sides of the same coin. I'd rather talk about the middle of the coin, which would be neither rational or anti-rational, but some mixture which precludes a purely rational approach, but which allows for interplay between the two. I know what my dad will say to this - that psychoanalysis does, in fact, get at that mixture and the interplay that I'm talking about - but I worry that psychoanalytic theory, as applied to literary texts, often misses the point.

I think Anzaldúa starts to get at that amalgam of conscious and unconscious, rational and non-rational. But I still wonder: what would this kind of mixture look like, not only in literary practice, but in scientific or political practice as well? Is it even possible?

Lugones and Anzaldúa: Borders, Multiplicity, and the Spirit

2010-02-28T22:34:06Z

María Lugones' Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes and Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands have a lot to say about rationality, although it is not explicitly stated as their main purpose. Both writers deal with multiple, often fragmented or "curdled" identities (to use Lugones' vivid descriptor of an impure mixture of consciousnesses). Both paint beautiful, inspiring pictures of alternate ways to think of groups and political resistance. Through images of traveling or inhabiting the border between worlds, they also - implicitly and explicitly - condemn the rational framework and suggest alternative ways of thinking as a means of political empowerment and liberation.

]]> I am going to begin at the end, where the critique is most clearly spelled out. Towards the end of P/P, Lugones defines rationality in a way that emphasizes its potential to act as an oppressive methodology:

Rationality is understood as this ability of a unified subject to abstract, categorize, train the multiple to the systematicity of norms, of rules that highlight, capture, and train its unity from the privileged vantage point... A passionate, needy, sensuous and rational subject must be conceived as internally separable, as discretely divided into what makes it one - rationality - and into the confused, worthless remainder - passion, sensuality (p. 129).

The normative function of rationality, then, asserts the rational subject as a unified subject, and according to Lugones, the only simple, unified subject is the one that is never faced with the fragmentary, non-belonging facets of their identity - in other words, the "Christian white bourgeois man" (p. 131) [to which I would also add "heterosexual" and "able-bodied," among other possible qualifiers]. For blog purposes, I don't want to enter into too much detail about Lugones' definition of "fragmentary" and "curdled" consciousnesses, but I think anyone who has had to force themselves into a Christian/white/bourgeois/[and/or]male standard will know instinctively what she means by fragmentation. And Lugones' theory has the advantage of opening the door, not only to a feminist critique of rationality, but to a critique from anyone who has been marginalized, who has not - for whatever reason - been allowed access to this "privileged vantage point."

So what does Lugones propose to get around rationality? Though she suggests "sensuality" and "passion" as alternatives, I think the crucial component to understanding Lugones is the idea of plurality as standing in direct resistance to a univocal rationality. In a footnote, she advocates "playfulness" - a playfulness which carries no regard for "rules of the game" - as a possible form of "ontological pluralism" (55), a new stance against unity. Lugones is speaking here specifically about bilingualism, but one can easily see how this sense of play could take on different forms, both literary and otherwise:

I speak [in many tongues] because I want to point to the possibility of becoming playful in the use of different voices... The more fully this playfulness is appreciated, the less broken I am to you, the more dimensional I am to you. But I want to exercise my multidimensionality even if you do not appreciate it. To do otherwise would be to engage in self-mutilation, to come to be just the person that you see. To play in this way is then an act of resistance as well as an act of self-affirmation (p. 41).

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Anzaldúa's take on rationality is much more deeply spiritual. Although she writes chronologically before Lugones (and at times, Lugones addresses Anzaldúa's ideas directly), I wanted to discuss her work second, because it will be more difficult for a scientific mind to embrace (which is something of the point). A small note here, too: in many ways, I'm rehashing some of the exact same points Amala Levine makes in her suspiciously blog-relevant essay, "Champion of the Spirit: Anzaldúa's Critique of Rationalist Epistemology." (See? I'm not the only one thinking about these things! The advantage to Levine's work, though, is that it draws on interviews with Anzaldúa, as well as on Borderlands.)

Alright. Borderlands contains both a critique of rationalism and a demonstration of how an alternative might work, something that Lugones only scratches the surface of with her forays into bilingual text. Anzaldúa's critique operates through a series of equivalences that act in opposition to the regulatory forces of culture:

Like many Indians and Mexicans... I allowed white rationality to tell me that the existence of the "other world" was mere pagan superstition. I accepted their reality, the "official" reality of the rational, reasoning mode which is connected with external reality, the upper world, and is considered the most developed consciousness - the consciousness of duality. The other mode of consciousness facilitates images from the soul and the unconscious through dreams and the imagination. Its work is labeled "fiction," make-believe, wish-fulfillment (p. 37).
Humans fear the supernatural, both the undivine (the animal impulses such as sexuality, the unconscious, the unknown, the alien) and the divine (the superhuman, the god in us). Culture and religion seek to protect us from these two forces. The female, by virtue of creating entities of flesh and blood in her stomach (she bleeds every month but does not die), by virtue of being in tune with nature's cycles, is feared... She is man's recognized nightmarish pieces, his Shadow-Beast (p. 17).

In attempting to work out a synthesis, the self has added a third element which is greater than the sum of its parts. That third element is a new consciousness - a mestiza consciousness - and though it is a source of intense pain, its energy comes from continual creative motion that keeps breaking down the unitary aspect of each new paradigm (p. 80-1).

What is powerful about Anzaldúa's critique is its simultaneity. She captures Kristeva's yearning for the generative power of the female while rejecting Freud's cordoning off of the unconscious by terms such as wish-fulfillment. She predates Lugones' reasoned advocacy of plural identities with a literary demonstration of that plurality, mixing not only English and Spanish, but also genres of poetry and prose, recollection and imagination, history and fiction and philosophy. Anzaldúa presents a visceral depiction of the practical problems of fragmentation that come from living on the border, but she also links these dilemmas of language and self-presentation to the more spiritual ramifications of this constant code-switiching - what Anzaldúa calls a mestiza consciousness. And, perhaps best of all, she does not neglect the danger inherent in a consciousness that lives between, that strays from the white light of rationality.

One difficulty with this text, however, is that it often places the woman, the Mexican, and the lesbian in the same boat, inhabiting the same borderland. Granted, we are talking about feminist critiques of rationality, but I do think it's important to note that while a Mexican man or a gay man might not identify with Anzaldúa's "Shadow-Beast" (or, for that matter, with mestiza consciousness), either one of them might find something useful in Lugones' sense of playfulness and "curdled" consciousness. Lugones' work, then, might have built on Anzaldúa's to create a broader reach.

Another challenge to reading Anzaldúa is that according to Levine, she got much of her philosophy through intense spiritual experiences, including several brushes with death. Unlike Lugones, whose arguments speak more directly to the "rational" reader, Anzaldúa's writing requires a certain openness to the spiritual in order to begin to appreciate it in the first place. In this respect, Anzaldúa has some interesting resonances with Stein. To close with a well-worded encapsulation by Levine:

To the limited, rationalist consciousness reality appears as objectively existing matter; from a spiritualized perspective matter dissolves into a flux of possibilities co-existing in a web of potential interrelationships, the evanescent raw material for our creation of self and world. This holographic view also holds the answer to postmodern deconstruction's almost exhaustive reliance on a rationalist epistemology that rarely sees beyond atomistic fragmentation (175).

Webs, constellations, holograms, play. I sense some patterns are emerging...

The Irrational Woman: what does it mean to be an anti-rational feminist?

2010-02-22T02:39:51Z

Doing this project has been making me think about a lot of things, and I think it's important to take a little pause here to clarify my motivations. I touched upon these ideas a little bit in my "About the Blog" post, but I would like to spell them out more explicitly.

If you do a quick Google search for "irrational woman," you will get a whole list of links to advice: how to deal with irrational women, why women are so irrational, and (my personal favorite) are all beautiful women irrational?

There are some important concepts here that I'm worried will get confused: to begin with, the identification between men and rationality.

]]> Men and Rationality
I am not a historian of ideas, so I don't know when and how this association came to be, but it seems that for at least the past few centuries of Western literature and philosophy, men have been identified as rational or logical, and women as emotional or intuitive. I could make a case for this idea stemming from menstruation and the lunar cycle being more in tune with non-human natural processes; the trope of the crazy PMS woman is certainly common in today's pop culture. [Side note: wouldn't it be interesting if someone, like Margaret Mead with adolescence, did a cross-cultural study of PMS? I bet you there are places where it exists in a much different form.]

Whatever the reason, there is a stereotype of women as irrational. Women say men are pigs; men say women are crazy and incomprehensible - and many women seem to accept that, as if what we represent as a gender still needs to be dictated by men.

Rationality and Access
The problem with this identification of the rational man - aside from the fact that it is stereotypical and incorrect - is that ever since rationality was posited as a central Enlightenment value (and a value which we still foster in our educational system), it has been tautologically exclusive to men. In other words, rationality is a male characteristic because only men have it. Therefore, women don't and can't.

Irrationality and Arationality, or Anti-rationality
This is where my critique comes in. What concerns me is that a feminist critique of rationality might be seen as implicitly supporting the idea that rationality just isn't for women, that we, as less rational beings, just don't have access to the same kind of logic and must come up with an alternative. This is why I have been careful so far to avoid the use of the word "irrational."

Instead, I want to talk about arationality or anti-rationality. By this, I want to propose an alternate means of understanding the world. And when I talk about anti-rationality as a feminist, I want to talk about ways this type of understanding might undermine the structure of pure logic that has been placed in such high value by our intellectual founding fathers.

I make no claims to biology; I don't think individual women or men are inherently better at any style of thinking. On the other hand, I am beginning to think that embracing anti-rationality - in whatever form that takes - may be an inherently feminist act. Anti-rationality subverts the route to intellectualism that was for so long traditionally denied to women, and in doing so, it may open up a new pathway that has not yet been monopolized by any particular group. And more than a feminist act, anti-rationality may also be an anti-colonial, anti-racist, anti-heteronormative, anti-classist act - an act of resistance by any group who has been told they aren't capable of intellectual thought. These groups continue to show that they are capable (though unfortunately many people still don't believe it); now, I wonder if it's also important to show that we don't care, that the dominant way is not the only way to think productively. In other words: Is there a route to anti-rationality that can be used as a unifying counterhegemonic tool?

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I hope this has clarified where I'm coming from with this; next up will be a look at María Lugones and Gloria Anzaldúa, two women who have explore what it means to take anti-rationality as a broader tactic of resistance.

Call for Questions

2010-02-18T22:33:08Z

I just wanted to put up a little note. I'm not sure how many people are actually reading this as I post, but if you are:
If you have thoughts about the ideas I'm pursuing...
particularly if you have ideas that you'd like to see developed further...
even more particularly if you have an idea of some author or artist or theorist who can be put into conversation with those ideas...

I always appreciate comments and will try and use them as a jumping-off point for future posts!

Kristeva: Revolution and Dissidence

2010-02-15T05:11:13Z

Julia Kristeva - who I'm reading in translation, for the purpose of this blog - is one of the most opaque writers I have ever read, particularly since I have no background in semiotics or in the kind of psychoanalytic language that Kristeva deals in. However, I have managed to decipher some points from Revolution in Poetic Language and A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident which seem to speak directly to Stein's breed of linguistic detour - and, more generally, to a feminine break with rationality.

]]> Starting with Revolution in Poetic Language, I present an illustration - Kristeva 101, if you will (adapted directly from my notes):

Got that? In other words, since poetry has no identifiable referent, it enters the world of the symbolic - and in so doing, it desanctifies the absolute relationship between subject and object. The symbolic is, however, mediated by external forces which impose order and situate poetic language within a sphere of meaning. (In other words, if I say "patriarchy," your education and cultural background will color your interpretation of the word; it will not float in an ungoverned sea of nebulous meaning.)

So where does this become a feminine process? Here:

Indifferent to language, enigmatic and feminine, this space underlying the written is rhythmic, unfettered, irreducible to its intelligible verbal translation; it is musical, anterior to judgement, but restrained by a single guarantee: syntax. (p. 97)

Not to toot my own horn, but doesn't this sound just a little like what I was saying earlier about Gertrude Stein's rhythmic constellations? And to put a finer point on Kristeva's feminism, I turn to A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident.

Here, Kristeva argues that, because they are not a part of the masculine logic which governs politics and history, women are dissidents. They can only take part in society if they adopt masculine logic; however, operating from a space of exile, the symbolic order of the feminine - concerned with the savage generative forces of maternity - is deeply connected with life, death, and creation (both physical and artistic). For your delectation, I reprint the concluding paragraph of The Dissident:

If it is true that the sudden surge of women and children in discourse poses insoluble questions for Reason and Right, it is because this surge is also yet another symptom of the Death of Man (with all the intolerable consequences that this entails for classical rationality and individuality). So the sole sublation of Death is perhaps not a Resurrection: what form could the Transcendence take, if the Beyond has already become incarnate in Madness? And it is even less a Renaissance: since the enlightened Prince has ended up working for the Politbureau or the Corporation. But through the efforts of thought in language, or precisely through the excesses of the languages whose very multitude is the only sign of life, one can attempt to bring about multiple sublations of the unnameable, the unrepresentable, the void. This is the real cutting edge of dissidence. (p. 300)

Though Kristeva and Stein approach the subject from diametrically opposite poles, they both come to the same conclusion: through poetic language - particularly through a uniquely feminine excess of meaning - we can revolt against the rational and draw constellations around the void.

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Addendum: Not directly related to this, but certainly relevant, are debates surrounding the value of academic, scholarly, or "inaccessible" language (I'm thinking specifically of Judith Butler, partly because I'm reading her at the moment but also because, as well as being difficult to read, she happens to also deal with gender issues). Opacity is not equivalent to feminism (obviously) - and given the social context it can be used as a tool of intellectual exclusion. However, the fact that Kristeva, Stein, and Butler are all hard to read in different ways makes me wonder if there might be a qualitatively different "feminine opacity," as opposed to a traditionally masculine academicism, which seems to manifest itself in tortuous syntax and mind-numbingly precise lines of argumentation.

It seems to me Kristeva is using "masculine" logic to argue for a feminine madness, an unnameable, inaccessible void - and in many ways, Gertrude Stein seems to come to the same conclusion by a more "feminine," anti-syntactical route. Butler, perplexingly, argues for inaccessibility as a means of stimulating more critical reading, yet she views this criticism within the (already "masculine") construct of what it means to be critical.

Hmph. This will have to remain an open question - we will see how these ideas are borne out as the semester progresses...

Patriarchal Poetry she did she did. (Gertrude Stein)

2010-02-11T18:45:55Z

This blog post is about Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), but Gertrude Stein deserves more than a blog post. (A dissertation chapter, perhaps? **cough cough** Thanks to my sister for introducing me to G.S.!) There are too many ways to talk about Stein for just a few hundred words. We could talk, for example, about her literary interpretation of cubism, about the aurality of her writing, or about her personal life as a rather masculine lesbian in a lifelong relationship with Alice B. Toklas (of the famed brownies).

I want to talk about Patriarchal Poetry, and about not talking about patriarchal poetry.

]]>

Patriarchal Poetry reclaimed renamed replaced and gathered together as they went in and left it more where it is in when it pleased when it was pleased when it can be pleased to be gone over carefully and letting it be a chance for them to lead to lead to lead not only by left but by leaves.

They made it be obstinately in their change and with it with it let it let it leave it in the opportunity. Who comes to be with a glance with a glance at it at it in palms and palms too orderly to orderly in changes of plates and places and beguiled beguiled with a restless impression of having come to be all of it as might as might as might and she encouraged. Patriarchal Poetry might be as useless. With a with a with a won and delay. With a with a with a won and delay.

He might object to it not being there as they were left to them all around. As we went out by the same way we came back again after a detour.

That is one account on one account.

- from Patriarchal Poetry, 1927

Now read it again, out loud.

Reading this poem is a visceral experience. Read it with an ear for grammatical analysis, and spend hours deciding where to place punctuation. Voice it aloud, and stumble over the repetitions and the variations. Do you speak it in a monotone, or do you attempt to impose your own grammar? One conclusion emerges: this is not a rational text. Not a crazy or an illogical text, either, but rational is not the word for Stein's engagement with language.

For all her many repetitions of the words "patriarchal poetry," Stein does not put forward any concrete feminist agenda - nor does she really "discuss" patriarchy at all, at least not in the way that we usually understand intellectual discussion. Rather, she inhabits varying overlapping spaces of fragmentation, refusal, forms of natural beauty (periwinkle, lamb, May, daisies), rearrangement, and degrees of engagement from "negligence" to "insistence." She plays with words like "pleasant," "charm," and "desirable." This constellation of ideas is not random - and neither is my use of the word constellation. By bypassing traditional logic, Stein creates a visual or auditory space in which her words can re-signify themselves through movement through an interconnected web. In the case of "Patriarchal Poetry," she weaves her web around issues of power, gender, and interpretation.

Stein creates these networks in all her writing. There's nothing special distinguishing the form of "Patriarchal Poetry"; I could've excerpted from just about any other page in a collection of Stein and come to the same conclusions about how to read her texts. In other words, Stein is not writing in a particular way in this particular poem in order to prove a particular point about patriarchy. On the other hand, there is something highly gender-conscious about Stein's grammar and form, beginning with her choices of masculine or feminine subjects and extending to more explicit references to gender:

I ought to be a very happy woman.
Premeditated meditation concerns analysis. Now this is a sentence but it might not be.

Premeditated. That is meditated before meditation.

Meditation. Means reserved the right to meditate.

Concerns. This cannot be a word in a sentence. Because it is not of use in itself.

Analysis is a womanly word. It means that they discover there are laws.

It means she cannot work as long as this.

It is hard not to while away the time.

It is hard not to remember what it is.

With them they accord in the circumstances.

- from Sentences and Paragraphs, 1930

There are so many places to go from here. Who are "they"? What is it that we are remembering? What does "womanly" analysis look like, and how does it relate to Stein's unconventional grammar? Rather than answer these questions, I would like to take a moment to think about the fact that Stein is asking them in the first place - and the way in which she does it. As we gaze up at the night sky and draw imaginary lines between stars, we know these constellations hang over a void of inaccessible space - space so inaccessible, in fact, that we hardly know which questions to ask about it. In the same way, Stein invites us to wonder about what lies in the gaps between her rhythmic networks of words.

Our difficulty with Stein, it seems to me, is not that her writing is opaque. Rather it is that we are unaccustomed to thinking, not in lines of rational thought, but in broad and spiraling webs. It is difficult to hold an entire web in one's head at once, and it is even more difficult - and might even do an injustice to Stein - to find precise language to speak about something so linguistically amorphous.

I would like to close this entry with a question: what if we were brought up to think in webs, and not in lines? to access the more associative, emotional side of language rather than to seek rational justifications?

One children's book writer, Jonah Winter, may have been wondering the same things as he wrote this book, Gertrude is Gertrude is Gertrude is Gertrude. Way to go, Jonah Winter.

... and, next up will be a look at Julia Kristeva and how she might deepen our understanding of how Stein's poetry might operate along a revolutionarily feminist symbolic logic.

About the Blog... or, how to fight with dead European white guys

2010-02-03T23:24:39Z

Welcome! A word of introduction: I'm a first-year graduate student in French, jumping into the deep end with a bunch of courses outside my department - including GWSS 8190: Feminist & Queer Explorations in Troublemaking, for which I have created this blog. I am a visually-oriented, practically-minded person, and as such, I am interested in how we can put theory to good use, which seems more often than not to require ruffling some theoretical feathers.

]]> So let's jump in and start with a syllabus. Not the syllabus for GWSS 8190 - another syllabus, the one for a course I'm taking in the theater department entitled "Performance and Political Modernity." Readings for the first class session:

Kant: "What is Englightenment?" "Towards a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose"

Mill: from "The Spirit of the Age," and "On Liberty"

Hegel: from "The End of Art," "Symbolic, Classic, Romantic," "Dramatic Poetry"

Simmel: "The Metropolis and Mental Life"

Baudelaire: "The Painter of Modern Life"

Marx: "The Communist Manifesto"

Weber: from "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism"

What do these readings all have in common? Yeah. They're all written by dead European white guys. I'm not here to critique the syllabus, since I (and the professor of this theater course) believe that it's important to understand where we're coming from in order to be able to critique it. But this critique can come from a variety of different angles, and that's what I want to address in this blog.

The discourse of modernity that these (and many other) dead white gentlemen address is complex and multi-faceted, encompassing issues such as historical progress, the relationship between the private individual and the social sphere, and what it means to be human. I want to focus on one specific element of this discourse: the emphasis on rationality.

For Kant, rationality is a sign of development out of a state of "immaturity," and what's more, is a natural right:

Once nature has removed the hard shell from this kernel for which she has most fondly cared, namely, the inclination to and vocation for free thinking, the kernel gradually reacts on a people's mentality (whereby they become increasingly able to act freely), and it finally even influences the principles of government, which finds that it can profit by treating men, who are now more than machines, in accord with their dignity. What is Englightenment?, 45-6.

Let's unpack this a bit, shall we? Within this one sentence, we discover:
- Rationality is the result of a process (of becoming more than machines).
- This process establishes a developmental hierarchy between the rational and the non-rational.
- Rationality - the result of a higher stage of development - is natural, and therefore desirable, inevitable, and accessible for use in every situation. Kant later makes use of this idea in his theory of a universal history, basing his hypothesis of mankind's progress on the assumption that nature, as an aggregation of human action, will follow a rational course.

My intention here is not to provide an analysis of the concept of rationality in Western thought. That would be impossible. However, the primacy of rationality has been a foundation for many of the thinkers above, and for many more scholars whom I have not cited, as they grapple with questions of freedom and historical development. But to whom does this rationality belong?

John Stuart Mill, when discussing the sovereignty of the individual, uses this provocative qualifier:

We are not speaking of children, or of young persons below the age which the law may fix as that of manhood or womanhood. Those who are still in a state to require being taken care of by others, must be protected against their own actions as well as against external injury. For the same reason, we may leave out of consideration those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered in its nonage. On Liberty, 136.

On the one hand, Mill reveals himself to be something of a feminist. On the other, he is pretty darn racist as well.

The race side of things is being handled by the aforementioned theater course, in which we will be interrogating what it means to speak of modernity in different locations and whether modernity is a purely Western or European phenomenon. For this class, Feminist & Queer Explorations in Troublemaking, I would like to tackle the issue of modernity from a gender and sexuality perspective. What would it mean to trouble the roots of rationality itself? Given tropes of the "emotional woman," can we say that rationality itself is a gendered concept?

As Dipesh Chakrabarty writes in his introduction to Provincializing Europe, "postcolonial" - and I would add feminist and queer - "scholarship is committed, almost by definition, to engaging the universals - such as the abstract figure of the human or that of Reason - that were forged in eighteenth-century Europe and that underlie the human sciences" (5). I want to try, at least, to engage these universals from a semi-non-rational perspective, although I'm not yet sure how. This project may be in constant flux throughout the semester. My jumping-off point will be a series of responses to established feminist & queer critiques of the rational, but I welcome any suggestions for other directions to take my research, with the central question:

In troubling rationality, how do we open the door for new kinds of productive discourse?