Being Irrationally Troubled (big project update #2)

I just posted a (maybe too) lengthy comment on your first entry. I had a lot of fun engaging with your blog and it got me thinking about my own ideas concerning rationality, critical thinking, maturity, and ethics. Thanks for the inspiration!

In terms of a "non-rational argument," what about using a direct-action performance from queer activism--like the ACT-UP die-ins from the late 80s/early 90s. Here is what J Butler has to say about them in an interview:

But I also think that subversive practices have to overwhelm the capacity to read, challenge conventions of reading, and demand new possibilities of reading. For instance, when Act Up (the lesbian and gay activist group) first started performing Die-ins on the streets of New York, it was extremely dramatic. There had been street theatre, a tradition of demonstrations, and the tradition from the civil disobedience side of the civil rights movement of going limp and making policemen take you away: playing dead. Those precedents or conventions were taken up in the Die-in, where people "die" all at once. They went down on the street, all at once, and white lines were drawn around the bodies, as if they were police lines, marking the place of the dead. It was a shocking symbolisation. It was legible insofar as it was drawing on conventions that had been produced within previous protest cultures, but it was a renovation. It was a new adumbration of a certain kind of civil disobedience. And it was extremely graphic. It made people stop and have to read what was happening. There was confusion. People didn't know at first, why these people were playing dead. Were they actually dying, were they actually people with AIDS? Maybe they were, maybe they weren't. Maybe they were HIV positive, maybe they weren't. There were no ready answers to those questions. The act posed a set of questions without giving you the tools to read off the answers. What I worry about are those acts that are more immediately legible. Those are the ones that I think are most readily recuperable. But the ones that challenge our practices of reading, that make us uncertain about how to read, or make us think that we have to renegotiate the way in which we read public signs, these seem really important to me.

Are these performances rational--if so, how? Or do they disrupt the rational? How do we understand them in the context of rationality?

Your blog is great, Sophie. I was engaging in similar questions for my Rhetoric of Democratic Struggle class this week when we put Seyla Benhabib and Iris Marion Young in conversation with one another (on the topic of deliberative democracy, but rationality was used throughout). They might be interesting to explore too.

In terms of non-written stuff, why not "vlog" like Angela does? Make a video...talk, stream of consciousness even, through your trouble with this. Maybe?