the beastly, the black, the sinful, the irrational, the sexual, the necessary, or the mortal

I have posted this essay in other forums, but I just wanted to repost it here because I like it. It's the spiel I was going to give prior to introducing Dr. Kwasi Wiredu at the African Philosophy talk I organized; at Dr. Edidin's suggestion I cut it down to a paragraph or so. But the full version is reprinted here.


Something which is becoming significant to me, which is also becoming significant to others in the pursuit of philosophy -- it could be called an issue in linguistics or philosophy of language, but in fact, I think it has roots to which those titles confer nothing except a technical gloss. This issue is one of personhood, but first and foremost, it is a question. The question is -- what is language? Letting the many other questions encapsulated there flake away -- is language first an alphabet, a grammar, a syntactic structure? Is it first a context-specific language, so that French and Japanese, as soon as they come into existence, change the very definition of what a language can be? Is language a symbol, a tool, a weapon, an anesthetic, a lesson, a game, a home, a gesture? Yes.

Language in some situations is a weapon -- albeit a symbolic one, still a weapon which causes very real bloodshed, which even gives us a certain power in constructing and destructing what is real at all. Language becomes a weapon, for one, by systematically distributing itself to controlled populations. Language can do this this by forcing certain kinds of vocabularies on some groups of people, denying that vocabulary to others, privileging still more with another kind of language altogether. Language can do this by erasing parts of itself -- erasing entire languages, cultures, and thus the people who speak it.

For example -- the English we speak is not the English you will hear in low-income neighborhoods down the street. It can sound completely different, be used completely differently, serve a completely different purpose and have a completely different level of priority in life -- and yet they are both called English. In both cases the language provides listeners with a sign to interpret, a password -- but in each case, the password provides, or forces, access to a different society. Whereas some dialects signify entrance into certain types of poverty, ours happens to appeal to a certain elite, academic, liberal-democratic demographic of people -- and thus gives us an entry into an extremely privileged society.

Upward mobility is the work of language as much as of anything. So say that we were entirely selfish and, rather than worry about those folks who are excluded by our language, we were to simply congratulate ourselves on learning it. Even in this case, there would still be a valid criticism of the scenario as it exists. Because -- isn't there still something missing? Isn't this specific language, the academic language, so dry and arcane, so fluffy and cumbersome -- completely unintelligible to most people -- isn't it lacking something? bell hooks, a prominent African-American writer and radical feminist, says that a great secret white supremacist capitalist patriarchy keeps from those who can't or don't read much is that all of the really powerful information is kept hidden away, in books. If you watch television instead -- well, pray to the gods that you will be able to afford cable if you hope to find anything worth talking about at all.

But does this have to be? Why should encode all of our most valuable information solely into written languages? Does this have to be the authority? Although I couldn't possibly memorize what the New College library contains, I could certainly spend some time telling you about things in there which are most relevant to my life. Why do we trust the internet more than our own memory, and how much sheer information do we really need? How do we ourselves benefit? Isn't this, at worst, suffocating more relevant experiences we could have here? Isn't this, at best, just boring?

Nietzsche said he knew of few things worse than rising early in the morning, when the light and air are bright and electric, only to go hide in a dusty room and squint at the yellowed pages of some book. So how did we come to think that language works best when it is written out? Maybe we were really proud of our ability to use tools, like the hallowed calligraphy pen. Maybe we were afraid of public speaking. Maybe we were really ugly, or had ugly shoes, and thought that people would take us more seriously if they never had to be in the same room with us. This is the best explanation I have been able to come up with. Armed with this excuse, we can now employ our dusty paper weapons against the uncivilized world. And anything which we hear, which we don't like, we can simply mistranslate, or refuse to write down. Which is what "anthropologists" visiting Ghana in the 1850's did with the entirety of Akan culture and philosophy.

Yet if we are quiet for a moment -- and ask ourselves why we use language, in any form, to begin with -- the meaning language has in our lives is not itself written down. I think language justify itself almost entirely in our desire to remember and give ecstatic descriptions of the world, of ourselves, of others -- to others. Don't the roots of language itself run straight under our skin, deeper than any book? Don't these roots spring from the desire to affirm everything that exists in this world, and not in books? Language can be a weapon, but it can also be a gift, which gathers together everything in the world, and gives everything, named, back to that world. Books help with all this, certainly -- but so do crutches, if your legs are broken. This distinction -- between written language and speech -- is what is becoming significant.

I am irreverent because I think what is at stake when writing, which originated out of speech and gesture, tyrannizes them, is the very way we inhabit our own bodies, our own mouths, our own voices. Also, our relationship to the bodies, mouths, and voices of the world we encounter. This prioritizing goes right along with a Cartesian mind-body dualism which subordinates the body to a supra-natural mind. Why have we inherited a tradition which mistrusts the respectability of any language that first explodes outward, like dynamite, from a tongue between two lips, or in the gestures of two hands? It seems that such a mistrust amounts to nothing more profound than a mistrust of the body and, to again defer to Nietzsche -- maybe all of Western philosophy has been a misunderstanding of the body. Maybe historically, white supremacist capitalist patriarchy -- forming the writers and readers of most canonical Western science and literature -- has endeavoured quite nerdily to use writing in order to free a certain privileged population from the terrible burden that is having a body. Hence the body is labeled the beastly, the black, the sinful, the irrational, the sexual, the necessary, or the mortal -- and history's wives, slaves, and serfs are burdened --not with bodies, which they had always already had -- but with that rejection of the body, and those labels.

What was the goal behind this trend? To leave our bodies and go to heaven? We simply wanted to die? A question for the audience -- how do you feel about that? I, for one, don't dislike myself nearly that much. For to free someone from the body would be, I think, to free them from themselves. Admittedly, there is ultimately something uncanny about the way language, as speech, possesses the space around it like lightning. It strikes and individualizes the speaker, illuminating his world, and illuminating he, himself, to the world. If you don't like the sound of your own voice, the anonymity of the page will be preferable. However -- if you find you can sing --



"All through his life and right into his death, Socrates did nothing else than place himself into this draft, this current, and maintain himself in it. This is why he is the purest thinker of the West. This is why he wrote nothing. For anyone who begins to write out of thoughtfulness must inevitably be like those people who run to seek refuge from any draft too strong for them. An as yet hidden history still keeps secret why all great Western thinkers after Socrates, with all their greatness, had to be such fugitives. Thinking entered into literature. And literature has decided the fate of Western science."

-- Martin Heidegger, What Calls For Thinking?

Dream Log

I gave Kim Jong-Il a handjob for $$$.

Dream Log

I am standing in a health food store, filled for some occasion by New College students -- Lea, Zachariah. Everybody European cheek-kissing. Wandering the aisles. A male in a hooded sweatshirt begins bordering the crowd, quiet. I somehow become aware that his plan is to leave the gathering for a while, then reappear, taking the group hostage, going on a shooting spree. Somehow he makes this obvious, somehow we all know, but no one moves to lift a finger. He leaves.

He returns, wrapped in cellophane, standing next to me. I consult a few guys who are leaving the party -- fraternity boys, not who I have any desire to spend my time with, except out of desperation. They live high up, high above the store, almost in the mountains, but they allow me to flee with them. We climb a tree-ladder, almost like the bamboo rungs that took me once to the roof of Pei. Then I go upstairs in their house, which is full of mahogany wooden paneling -- and the boys are gone. Only downstairs, the lumbering of wide grizzly bears, the same color as the mahogany. Rummaging in the fridge, on the kitchen counter.

Somehow I escape through the roof -- but there was no roof, only an opening. To a fenced area, where I can look down to see a procession of people leaving the store, in single file. Everyone was safe, but I don't think the killer was arrested. Lea was there. Then we are driving away, I am following he down a hill, but I can't drive. I am only keeping my car in the lane by leaping up intermittently and holding onto the traffic-lights until the car is re-aligned. But Lea turns on the highway and I know that I can't be carried by momentum in the same way there, so I tumble out the side door before the car hits the highway.

Suddenly I am barefoot and half-dressed on the side of the road, clamoring for help. A man in something like a UPS truck stops. He speaks English, but it is not my language. He doesn't understand, but takes me to the yard of a church, where an older blond woman with leathery skin and powder-blue eye make-up stands in the fading light. She tells me I am in trouble, that I had better stick my chest out and pull my stomach in for The Lord, "not sexually or anything, but, you know."

The New World

In his first TV interview with al-Arabiya, President Obama suggested, by way of reconciliation, that the Muslim world remember that "America was not born as a colonial power," that the war in Iraq was an exception to the 'rule' of the Revolutionary United States. Ultimately, this amounts to the same defense as McCain's of himself: that America was the underdog. Indeed, we were fleeing an oppressive regime in Great Britain. Could Obama have forgotten that as we fled one regime, we instituted our own?

The most effective ethnic cleansing is the one that is totally forgotten.

In theory, if we who presently claim to be human were to forget our efforts to find the traces of divine movements in our own actions, our fate should be something like the people in Popol Vuh. For them, the forgotten force of divinity reasserted itself by inhabiting their own tools and utensils, which rose up against them and drove them from their homes.
Today they are swinging through the trees.

--Dennis Tedlock

Space Moms

i love you because

when you're hard up you pawn your
intelligence to buy a drink and when
you're flush pride keeps
you from the pawn shop

lolz

"Criticizing pornography doesn't mean you're anti-sex
any more than criticizing McDonald's means you're anti-food."

--Gail Dines

Break Bread.

Painting is the residue of
chasing after something else.

Motto for Painters.

I do what I do and you do what you can do about it.

Hypatia rebuffed a suitor by showing him her menstrual rags, claiming they demonstrated that there was "nothing beautiful" about carnal desires.[13]

Britney Spears - "Circus": "Circus"

like a killer whale trapped in a bay

the black man
operates garbage truck
the white man
trims his own leaves

i smoke
one cigarette and
watch the boy
polishing in the morning
his own mercedes
near the ocean.


Gardener and garden.-- Out of damp and gloomy days, out of solitude, out of loveless words directed at us, conclusions grow up in us like fungus: one morning they are there, we know not how, and they gaze upon us, morose and gray. Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him!

from Nietzsche's Daybreak, s. 382, R.J. Hollingdale transl

In this time of excess and recess

Everybody everwhere needs to listen to Kaki King. Last November, I left a friend waiting in a park for several hours. I also ignored a hangover and braved expensive cabfares. All just to see her with The Mountain Goats in Manhattan, at Webster Hall. John Darnielle started out Way Back When by repping her on his own blog when people hated on her whispery singing style. Her singing has since improved. And at this concert, it became clear that John and his bandmates had been doing their best to emulate her stringed-instrument technique. I'm glad he knows when to stand down.

Listen to Kaki King's new album, Dreaming of Revenge, while avoiding painting an oil portrait of your father. Kaki King. I would in all likelihood be willing to have a few of her children. I would also, for the first time (that's a lie), be interested in purchasing the ipod vibrator in order to listen to her. She is one of the best guitarists around, period. She is a gorgeous person. And, she has good taste in art (above by Marcel Dzama).


Consolidate your student loans, people.

Sleep Log

I had a dream that I lived in a prison that was ten-stories high, and every room was a closet, that opened onto another closet. There was a middle aged man above me, who was in for murder, and he kept pounding on his closet doors speaking in his broken English. He was Chinese. The entire facility was. Down in the kitchen there was an old man, and I was there with a little baby, who I think was my sister Nicolette, but as an infant. I was feeding her long, pale blue cellophane noodles. The old man watched a woman learning her craft and became visibly concerned I was going to feed her too much. He didn't speak, though, for so long I didn't think he could. He saw me shaking and realized I was frightened because of the man upstairs.

He smiled and said, "we are actually lucky to have such a sadistic prison warden," Laughing. "Because it means this man would never get free before being punished, severely. You have nothing to worry about."

Just as he said that, I started walking away from the prison, towards the parking lot of a store selling Lebanese food. I suppose I had the privileges to leave intending to return. I was about to close the door when I saw the angry man driving his dusty turquoise Cadillac towards the door. He did not have those privileges, but I realized I would rather have him escape than live next to me any longer. So I left the closet door open. The old man gaping, horrified, and the baby forgotten, the murderer drove through the wide closet doors. I ran, quicker and quicker, wearing high khaki wooden heels, wearing a sparkling blue high-waisted skirt, realizing that because of these things, he might chase me.

The man sped down the street, screaming hoarsely, over his thick Chinese accent,

"AMERICA.
AMERICA.
AMERICA."

Then, as I suspected, his car pulled into the darkened parking lot where I was, leaving no chance of escape -- except waking up. So I woke up.

Although, the celebratory shouting of the name of my country continued to reverberate in my ears, even then.

This followed the cycle of being woken up by a nightmare to return to happier dreams. Later, my brother was accidentally spilling personalized greeting cards he had bought for my mother, with her name misspelled on them the way the electric company misspells it; "LAURIE BROWN."

There was another Sesame-Street style speculation, complete with diagrams of receding roots, that made very real the tradeoff that animals make, between having roots and having mobility. Watching housewives strike deep taproot. Thinking, we really could turn back into plants if we wanted. It would take several million years. But life really is that malleable.

What I Am Learning

All things, even mundane things, are very difficult, if you do them right.

In India they wished I would visit and
I felt sad to leave them by waking up.
We shot black snakes of coal in the
dirt and sparks in the air.
My sister was there.
Hovering, hot no mosquitos touched
no hovering, hot

In India Hxxxxx Sxxxxx grew up in the
Himalayas. He thinks art is crazy
and that he must be crazy because
he likes art. When he was small
he was in the snow. When he was old
his parents made him be
an engineer
So now he tries to buy
my wanting

He can't win

We are warm in our hidden room down here

Water massages as a treatment for hysteria c. 1860.

Kate: I wrote this partially in response to this blogpost you wrote back in mid-June.

No one worth their salt should be suggesting that to be female means being 'effeminate' or, strictly speaking, 'unreasonable.' But I am not sure in your post you go far enough. I think that any necessary association between 'femininity' as it identifies a class of people and any property, whether it be good or bad, is already misguided -- and I even go as far here as to problematize the equation between bodily anatomy and, not just gender, but physical sex.

And while I agree that no one should force the equation "femininity = unreason" on anyone, I also don't think that the correct response to that is to enforce the claim that "femininity = reason." I guess what I'm saying is that you don't seem to question the normative assertion that unreason is a bad thing. And I actually think that the extent to which our society accords respect to mechanical rationality at the neglect of 'barely-clothed embodiment,' as you call it, is a pervasive tendency which I think is at root of most, if not all, of the worst things about Western society. This is important for feminism because it is important to remember that, while we need to cast off demeaning aspects of feminine stereotypes, we also need to be able to re-evaluate potentially liberatory aspects of those same old categories of femininity.

Example -- my grandmother is dying. She is, in each admittance to the hospital, informed that there is only one specific reason for her maladies -- first it was dangerously low blood pressure, and currently it is a fracture of the third and fourth vertebrae of her neck. They give her surgery, steroids, and Dilaudid. They assess whether she has what her living will calls "a reasonable expectation of recovery," based on the outcome of these treatments. And yet.

My grandmother received a pacemaker two weeks before her neck spontaneously fractured due to osteoporosis. Osteoporosis is a degenerative disease affecting one's entire bone structure. Her living will says that unless there is a reasonable expectation of recovery, she does not want measures employed to rescussitate her, and "artificially prolong the process of her dying." But because it does not specify whether there needs to be reasonable expectation of her recovery generally or from one specific ailment, she continues "living" -- on steroids, in a neck brace, on intravenous Dilaudid, not walking, eating through a tube, for two weeks. She weighs 90 pounds. Her neck brace is gruesome. Her skull has had holes drilled into it and screws inserted because she cannot hold her own head up without her neck fracturing. She has a spine built out of metal, an artificial heart. She is making the hospital huge amounts of money. She is on so many drugs for Parkinson's, anxiety, pain, that she can barely give consent and when she is home and sober she says she wants to die. My grandmother worked as a R.N. in a retirement home for 30 years. She knew then what the elderly go through and was adamant enough about avoiding that scenario that she went to a lawyer and wrote a living will.

That she is still alive is to the immense benefit of her hospital, her rheumatologist, her cardiologist, her neurologist, her multiple surgeons, her pharmacist. It is to the immense benefit of the standing Christian norm of the 'sanctity of life.' The more cattle are alive and calving, the more prosperous the farmer.

That she is still alive is to the detriment of her dignity and, more to the point, her capacity to die a free death. Strict logical analysis of the situation gives us a medical reason to expect her recovery from any one specific ailment, but says nothing of her quality of life generally. Economically it is easy to see why keeping her alive in this state is "the right thing to do." Legally, medically, we have reason explaining how this is true, why this is true, but offering little by way of a justification for whether it is right or wrong. How do we rationally answer the question of whether she would be happier if she were allowed to die? Or the question of whether the hospital wants her to stay alive for the same reasons that we do? It is difficult to use symbolic logic to explain why it is not enough that the material end -- in this case my grandmother's continued existence -- is the same.

April Flakne used to suggest that ethics happens in a sphere where we do not say "A light switch is turned on because of electrical currents," but "A light switch is turned on because I want to see your beautiful face." She did not say it exactly like that, but the highlight of that wanting, what Nietzsche called the will to power, is distinctly bodily. It is important to be able to recover the primeval and creative aspect --the physical aspect -- of thought, and language, to be capable of undoing the damage wrought on this planet when language is capable of calcifying, like steel screws, slowly replacing organic bone, a bone which heaves and disintegrates not because of a malfunction or a failure but because it must disintegrate, it loves disintegration, it craves renewal, not rescussitation. Language can recover the creative and physical potency which I am tracking here, but not if we cling to an idea that persists residually in the assumption that, say, all efforts that seem unreasonable, or all traits that valorize sexuality or the body are inherently going to be oppressive to women. The problem is not solved by making women 'rational.' Reason, whether of God or man, is the guiding force behind white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.

To assert that to aspire to become a beautiful body is necessarily to become oppressed is another essentialism redoubling over the original, problematic one. It cancels out the exact same thing that Sex and the City does. In both cases, language is enforcing only one interpretation and only one. One type of beautiful clothing, as much as one type of death -- is the only type that is beautiful, or the only type of illness from which she may die. The problem is one of hermeneutics. My grandmother's death is not a single fact, but multiple events, each with possible interpretations but no necessary interpretations. Health then incorporates an ethos where the rational individual is not liberated, but submissive -- originally a trait 'enforced' in women, except in this case what is submissive is submissive to that which is greater, if indemonstrable -- to the primeval self-becoming which rational science covers with the mask of Being. That is to say, the mask is submissive to the actor.

All the girls are sitting on a pile of gold.

I should be sleeping. I woke up at midnight to N asking me to call AAA while he was stranded on the side of a Bradenton road with a dead battery and no gas. I am singing there is one singing in the back of a U-Haul truck to an appreciative crowd and a quick tempo. Talked to a lady at a Racetrack gas station at 5:30 in the morning who wanted $3.00 for milk to give her youngest child -- she said wouldn't have been there if it weren't that he wouldn't stop crying. She asked me if I wanted one of her children.

I am hovering My grandmother has been sedated on a ventilator in the hospital for about a week. I am not sure whether the medical procedures being performed on her are in accordance with her living will, which asks that we not needlessly, "artificially extend the process of her dying." I have thoughts that I can't articulate about biopolitics here. Tell my mother that we all have a right to life because the live-stock farmer makes more money with every calf born. I can't help it if my father has a high school education and that in this country mind is only exercised ex officio. But I can help it if I stay up all night drawing a mural and making powerful friends who will help me find as many loopholes out of poverty as are there, waiting, risky, unexamined. Charity and self-interest are coextensive. I don't want to stand above morality with the anxious stiffness of someone who fears falling -- I want to float.

Poverty
is a pretense, as is
wealth.

A painting that has dried has a primeval person in it. She is on yellow, offering darkened grapes to a black horse. Old roommates spent nine dollars on each bottle of foul-smelling beer. I am awed at the horrible insignificance of it and admire their dance.

Q spoke to me for three hours on the phone and told me to keep my mouth shut. She says that women infuriate her husband by propositioning him at the drive-thru of one of their dry-cleaning franchises which are not flourishing in Tampa. "Shy Rose Cleaners." Q says that she is a mother to X, the boy she calls my boyfriend, now that his own mother has died. Q says that the government in the United States is like the government in Myanmar. We have no reason to trust it.

In Myanmar, Q was drugged and given an abortion without consent. Q recommends that any woman receiving an engagement ring of any import take it privately to a jeweler's and have it checked for authenticity. She says the problem of the Cubix Zirconium is one problem they didn't have in Myanmar.

Q says I should be making powerful friends and finding ways to set myself up with an apartment in New York. X and I speak early in the morning 12 hours apart, laughing incessantly whenever English fails us. He doesn't mention my visit. Q says that he doesn't want me to visit him in Singapore yet because he is not sure what his roommates will do to me. We will wait until they move out or find girlfriends. He says nothing to me about this, but sends me messages which say -- "i remember u." I have not yet met X but he still sends kind words on the day my grandmother has several screws deadbolted into her third and fourth vertebrae.

Y grew up in the Himalayas and tells me that Americans don't understand friendship.

For Langston Hughes and Nancy Brown.

The dog that walks

has a leash.

The cardinal on my chair

sings.

"I have been a hard-working person

all my life -- strong

and look at me now."

The dog that walks

has a leash.

The cardinal on my chair

sings.


I vomited my meal into

my hands.

My mother consulted with

homicide.

Tampa is a place where I brew

green tea and take

calls for Nelson Brown.


The number is wrong.

The number

sings.


Grandma, laugh.


Man can laugh louder but

I can

I can

I can

I can

I can

310 - The Gay Science

Will and wave.-- How greedily this wave approaches, as if it were after something! How it crawls with terrifying haste into the inmost nooks of this labrynthine cliff! It seems that it is trying to anticipate someone; it seems that something of value, high value, must be hidden there.--And now it comes back, a little more slowly but still quite white with excitement; is it disappointed? Has it found what it looked for? Does it pretend to be disappointed?--But already another wave is approaching, still more greedily and savagely than the first, and its soul too, seems to be full of secrets and the lust to dig up treasures. Thus live waves--thus live we who will--more I shall not say.

So? You mistrust me? You are angry with me, you beautiful monsters? Are you afraid that I might give away your whole secret? Well, be angry with me, arch your dangerous green bodies as high as you can, raise a wall between me and the sun--as you are doing now! Truly, even now nothing remains of the world but green twilight and green lightning. Carry on as you like, roaring with overweening pleasure and malice--or dive again, pouring your emeralds down into the deepest depths, and throw your infinite white mane of foam and spray over them: Everything suits me, for everything suits you so well, and I am so well-disposed toward you for everything; how could I think of betraying you? For--mark my word!--I know you and your secret, I know your kind! You and I--are we not of one kind?--You and I--do we not have one secret?