A couple of days ago I posted another Random Wildeism, which I noted parenthetically was a personal favorite of mine, “The Queen is not a subject.” A friend wrote to express his perplexity at this choice, and so I thought I’d add a bit of back-story to explain my appreciation.
Wilde had once famously bragged at a dinner party that his wit was so ready and so capacious that he could say a supremely witty thing on literally any subject at any time, and so people loved throwing random topics at him out of the blue to try to catch him out. Inevitably, he managed something relatively clever to say (as this recurring MundiMotif amply attests, after all).
But one evening some meanspirited dumbass witwoud (I imagine him a Bush-Voter precursor type) called out the topic “The Queen!” knowing that on this of all topics most successful witticisms would be impolitic, and so Wilde would be stymied into silence and embarrassed however he responded.
Wilde’s comeback was instantaneous and withering: “The Queen is not a subject.”
The aphorism was positively perfect in every way. Not only did it evade the dilemma Wilde’s antagonist had set for him altogether, it included an inoffensive pun that demonstrated Wilde’s wit in any case, thereby satisfying the rules of the game in spite of everything.
Considering the circumstances of Wilde’s later life, martyred by appalling hypocrites for a rare lapse into earnestness, it seems to me this phrase manages to be one of the few witticisms that includes being prophetic along with being pithy among its virtues. Wilde, possibly the world’s very first queen in an important sense, oracularily delineated his own dilemma to come.
Given the extended meditation on the status of the “subject” in queer theory, this phrase also makes Oscar Wilde the fledgling discipline’s perfectly perverse and queerly legitimate founding father (just in case the essays in Intentions hadn’t already garnered him that status).
Anyway, that’s why this otherwise apparently only modestly witty Wildeism remains one of my favorites.
Tuesday, March 29, 2005
Monday, March 28, 2005
Morphological Freedom and the Conservatism of "Recovery"
Why does it so often seem that those who would "err on the side of life" in so doing are impelled to denigrate consciousness and violate consent? It sometimes seems as if the advocates of "choice" are the only real defenders of personal lives.
People live lives different from the lives of snails. Personal lives are uniquely lived in the webs of meaning and thought and conversation woven by public beings, lives that reverberate with choices, with desires, with injuries, with deeds.
All the while the dread armies of the conservative so-called "culture of life" seem to defend life in some more vegetable or mineral mode, always best exemplified by organisms who have not yet arrived among the community of poets and peers, or of those who have already departed from the scene.
Technoprogressives maintain that technological development has become a revolutionary force, that it undercuts the normative weight of claims made in the name of the "natural," and that consensual genetic and cognitive modification are prosthetic practices of self-creation that are likely to be this generation's contribution to the ongoing conversation of humankind.
I use the term "morphological freedom" to describe the ways in which consensual prosthetic practices are enlarging the scope of freedom, even while they derange our expectations, demand new responsibilties, and introduce unprecedented possibilties as well of injustice, violation, and harm.
There is quite alot in the ongoing hysteria provoked by the long-dead but occasionally still-agile body of Terri Schiavo that troubles me (apart from the obvious disgust with conservative hypocrisies it has mobilized, worries about American anti-scientific benightedness, concerns about greedy politicians usurping the rule of law, et cetera), but I want to think out loud a bit more about how the prejudices being aired so passionately at the moment are occasioned by the sense of an emerging technoconstituted morphological freedom weaving its way into our cultural life, making new demands, holding out new hopes, and altogether confusing our sense of what we properly have a right to expect from human experience.
It is well-known that many bioconservatives claim to fear that new technologies will "rob" us of our humanity. But it has always seemed to me that the "essence" of our humanity, such as it is, is simply our capacity to explore together what it means to be human in the first place. Surely no sect, no tribe, no system of belief owns what it means to be human. Humanity can be denied by violence, degraded by poverty, diminished by tyranny, but it cannot be robbed because nobody owns it.
Since I believe that consensual prosthetic practices of self-creation are indispensable contributions to the conversation we are having about what humanity is capable of, it can come as no surprise to discover that I likewise believe it is the ones who would freeze that conversation in the image of their pet platitudes who look the most like thieves today.
Similarly, I share the concerns of many "disability" activists that there is something quite pernicious in the liberal discourse that claims that if Terri Schiavo had a real "chance at recovery" they, too, would demand her "life" be preserved. These activists are rightly suspicious that the idea of "recovery" in such arguments mobilizes what is in fact a highly restrictive normative concept of the sort of lives that are "lives worth living" -- a concept that denigrates many differently-enabled people who, whatever their struggles or sorrows, have lives with dignity, joy, and value worth affirming and supporting the same as anyone else.
I strongly agree with the clinicians whose thorough examination of the evidence locates Schiavo's body with the dead rather than the disabled, and in any case I affirm the necessity to respect her own decisions as these have been best ascertained by a number of courts where matters of the care of her own body are concerned. But it is clear nevertheless that the figure of disability is circulating here in ways that would have to matter to disability activists as well as to advocates and scholars of morphological freedom.
There are many disabled people who will seem superficially similar to Schiavo to an untrained eye, after all, and whose lives are routinely dismissed as "not worth living" in consequence. Disability activists fight fraught heartbreaking battles to champion the rights and standing of such people every single day. As I have written before, it is especially interesting for me to note the extent to which so many of the differently-enabled depend on ongoing cyborgization and prosthetic practices to find their ways to more enriching lives on their own terms: communicating through computer interfaces, locomoting in motorized conveyances, and engaged in sometimes lifelong bioremedial procedures of extraordinary intimacy and profundity.
From the perspective of morphological freedom it seems to me the standard of "recovery" is always worrisomely conservative, naturalizing some contingent standard of proper health as more desirable than indefinitely many alternate possibilities. Morphological freedom is precisely never a matter of any coercive imposition of a normative body in the name of a moral standard of "health," but is an embrace of genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive modification practices in the name of a proliferation of ways of being properly and meaningfully in the world.
What it must mean to respect the differently-enabled as the actually fully-real people they are is to respect them and support them in their differences whenever they affirm the value of these differences on their own terms, just as it must likewise require the best provision of prosthetic avenues for rewriting their bodies and lives in the image of their own desires, also on their own terms.
To take up a different example that concerns some radical technophiles, even from the standpoint of resuscitating vitrified wards awaiting advanced medical treatments the issue may not usefully be thought of best in terms of a "recovery" of information, memory, or function, but as the constitution to the contrary of adequate (in both the subjective and objective senses) narrative continuity in a subject to support her ongoing personal practices of informed, competent, intelligibile, self-determinative consent as well as the public scene on which those practices depend.
The process of "life" in bioremedial technocultures is one of ongoing practices of genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive modification in pursuit of personal meanings, responsibilties, and pleasures that are quite as likely to strain against the imposition of a normative conceptions of "wellness" as anything else.
To the extent that the rhetoric of "recovery" impels us to misrecognize some manifestations of diversity as disability technoprogressives would seem well rid of it. And to the extent that technoprogressives will sometimes affirm the desirability of "better than well" healthcare provision this would seem to encourage a repudiation of the discourse of "recovery" as well. The distinction of therapy from enhancement on which so much contemporary bioethical discourse depends, is rendered either altogether obsolete or at any rate radically historically contingent in such technoprogressive bioethics.
This is not a recommendation of morphological relativism, since for one thing one can still prefer one's own path of self-determination for communicable reasons. And to an important extent the public provision of the resources that enable prosthetic practices of self-creation also demands the maintenance of intelligible standards to ensure democratic accountability, fairness, security, and meaningful deliberation in that provision.
The key for me is a shift in the focus for such standards from a moral(istic) concern with health/beauty/righteousness into an ethical concern with the meaningful consent of peers with whom one may or may not identify morally in the slightest.
Morphological freedom prevails to the extent to which discernible differences among peers arise from consensual prosthetic practices of self-determination or self-creation, rather than being imposed or unduly durressed by conditions of exploitation, violence, or ignorance (any of which might broadly mobilize responsible intervention).
Medicine is taking us on a path from recovery to creation, with all its pleasure and danger, but our language has not yet managed to keep up. The heartbreaking and hysterical public spectacle of the dead prostheticized body of Terri Schiavo attests to our perplexity and our present distress. There are many such spectacles to come.
People live lives different from the lives of snails. Personal lives are uniquely lived in the webs of meaning and thought and conversation woven by public beings, lives that reverberate with choices, with desires, with injuries, with deeds.
All the while the dread armies of the conservative so-called "culture of life" seem to defend life in some more vegetable or mineral mode, always best exemplified by organisms who have not yet arrived among the community of poets and peers, or of those who have already departed from the scene.
Technoprogressives maintain that technological development has become a revolutionary force, that it undercuts the normative weight of claims made in the name of the "natural," and that consensual genetic and cognitive modification are prosthetic practices of self-creation that are likely to be this generation's contribution to the ongoing conversation of humankind.
I use the term "morphological freedom" to describe the ways in which consensual prosthetic practices are enlarging the scope of freedom, even while they derange our expectations, demand new responsibilties, and introduce unprecedented possibilties as well of injustice, violation, and harm.
There is quite alot in the ongoing hysteria provoked by the long-dead but occasionally still-agile body of Terri Schiavo that troubles me (apart from the obvious disgust with conservative hypocrisies it has mobilized, worries about American anti-scientific benightedness, concerns about greedy politicians usurping the rule of law, et cetera), but I want to think out loud a bit more about how the prejudices being aired so passionately at the moment are occasioned by the sense of an emerging technoconstituted morphological freedom weaving its way into our cultural life, making new demands, holding out new hopes, and altogether confusing our sense of what we properly have a right to expect from human experience.
It is well-known that many bioconservatives claim to fear that new technologies will "rob" us of our humanity. But it has always seemed to me that the "essence" of our humanity, such as it is, is simply our capacity to explore together what it means to be human in the first place. Surely no sect, no tribe, no system of belief owns what it means to be human. Humanity can be denied by violence, degraded by poverty, diminished by tyranny, but it cannot be robbed because nobody owns it.
Since I believe that consensual prosthetic practices of self-creation are indispensable contributions to the conversation we are having about what humanity is capable of, it can come as no surprise to discover that I likewise believe it is the ones who would freeze that conversation in the image of their pet platitudes who look the most like thieves today.
Similarly, I share the concerns of many "disability" activists that there is something quite pernicious in the liberal discourse that claims that if Terri Schiavo had a real "chance at recovery" they, too, would demand her "life" be preserved. These activists are rightly suspicious that the idea of "recovery" in such arguments mobilizes what is in fact a highly restrictive normative concept of the sort of lives that are "lives worth living" -- a concept that denigrates many differently-enabled people who, whatever their struggles or sorrows, have lives with dignity, joy, and value worth affirming and supporting the same as anyone else.
I strongly agree with the clinicians whose thorough examination of the evidence locates Schiavo's body with the dead rather than the disabled, and in any case I affirm the necessity to respect her own decisions as these have been best ascertained by a number of courts where matters of the care of her own body are concerned. But it is clear nevertheless that the figure of disability is circulating here in ways that would have to matter to disability activists as well as to advocates and scholars of morphological freedom.
There are many disabled people who will seem superficially similar to Schiavo to an untrained eye, after all, and whose lives are routinely dismissed as "not worth living" in consequence. Disability activists fight fraught heartbreaking battles to champion the rights and standing of such people every single day. As I have written before, it is especially interesting for me to note the extent to which so many of the differently-enabled depend on ongoing cyborgization and prosthetic practices to find their ways to more enriching lives on their own terms: communicating through computer interfaces, locomoting in motorized conveyances, and engaged in sometimes lifelong bioremedial procedures of extraordinary intimacy and profundity.
From the perspective of morphological freedom it seems to me the standard of "recovery" is always worrisomely conservative, naturalizing some contingent standard of proper health as more desirable than indefinitely many alternate possibilities. Morphological freedom is precisely never a matter of any coercive imposition of a normative body in the name of a moral standard of "health," but is an embrace of genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive modification practices in the name of a proliferation of ways of being properly and meaningfully in the world.
What it must mean to respect the differently-enabled as the actually fully-real people they are is to respect them and support them in their differences whenever they affirm the value of these differences on their own terms, just as it must likewise require the best provision of prosthetic avenues for rewriting their bodies and lives in the image of their own desires, also on their own terms.
To take up a different example that concerns some radical technophiles, even from the standpoint of resuscitating vitrified wards awaiting advanced medical treatments the issue may not usefully be thought of best in terms of a "recovery" of information, memory, or function, but as the constitution to the contrary of adequate (in both the subjective and objective senses) narrative continuity in a subject to support her ongoing personal practices of informed, competent, intelligibile, self-determinative consent as well as the public scene on which those practices depend.
The process of "life" in bioremedial technocultures is one of ongoing practices of genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive modification in pursuit of personal meanings, responsibilties, and pleasures that are quite as likely to strain against the imposition of a normative conceptions of "wellness" as anything else.
To the extent that the rhetoric of "recovery" impels us to misrecognize some manifestations of diversity as disability technoprogressives would seem well rid of it. And to the extent that technoprogressives will sometimes affirm the desirability of "better than well" healthcare provision this would seem to encourage a repudiation of the discourse of "recovery" as well. The distinction of therapy from enhancement on which so much contemporary bioethical discourse depends, is rendered either altogether obsolete or at any rate radically historically contingent in such technoprogressive bioethics.
This is not a recommendation of morphological relativism, since for one thing one can still prefer one's own path of self-determination for communicable reasons. And to an important extent the public provision of the resources that enable prosthetic practices of self-creation also demands the maintenance of intelligible standards to ensure democratic accountability, fairness, security, and meaningful deliberation in that provision.
The key for me is a shift in the focus for such standards from a moral(istic) concern with health/beauty/righteousness into an ethical concern with the meaningful consent of peers with whom one may or may not identify morally in the slightest.
Morphological freedom prevails to the extent to which discernible differences among peers arise from consensual prosthetic practices of self-determination or self-creation, rather than being imposed or unduly durressed by conditions of exploitation, violence, or ignorance (any of which might broadly mobilize responsible intervention).
Medicine is taking us on a path from recovery to creation, with all its pleasure and danger, but our language has not yet managed to keep up. The heartbreaking and hysterical public spectacle of the dead prostheticized body of Terri Schiavo attests to our perplexity and our present distress. There are many such spectacles to come.
Saturday, March 12, 2005
"Ranting, Raving, Writing"
I'll be teaching a couple of courses in the fall at SFAI, and I just submitted my course descriptions and provisional reading lists to the office. The first is a composition class in the expository writing sequence. Here's my description:
"Ranting, Raving, Writing"
The word argument comes from the Latin arguere, to clarify. And contrary to its cantankerous reputation, the process of argumentation can be one that seeks after clarity rather than one that seeks always to prevail over difference.
We argue to inquire what are the best beliefs when we are ignorant or unsure of ourselves, we argue to interrogate our own assumptions, we argue to clarify the stakes at issue in a debate, we argue to gain a serious hearing for our unique perspective, we argue to find the best course of action in the circumstances that beset us.
This is a course in argumentative reading and writing, which means for me a course in expository writing and critical thinking. But the works we will be reading together are anything but exemplary argumentative texts. Our texts rant and rave, they are brimming with rage, dripping with corrosive humor, suffused with ecstasies. In ranting and raving arguments are pushed into a kind of crisis, and in them rhetoric becomes a kind of poetry.
What does it tell us about argument in general to observe it in extremis like this? How can we read transcendent texts critically, in ways that clarify their stakes without dismissing their force, and enable us to communicate intelligibly to others the reactions they inspire in us and the meanings we find in them?
Anonymous, “Fuck the South”
Plato, Symposium
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo
Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”
Fiodr Dostoievski, “Notes From the Underground”
Virginia Woolf, Orlando
Allen Ginsberg, Howl
William Burroughs, “Immortality”
Film, Network. Dir: Sidney Lumet
Valerie Solanas, The SCUM Manifesto
Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs”
Gary Indiana, “Reproduction”
Diane Dimassa, Hothead Paisan
Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body
Cintra Wilson, “Statement of Intent”
The second course is an introduction to critical theory. The potted description in the catalogue which all its instructors will variously incarnate helpfully proposes that "[t]he Critical Theory sequence develops students¹ facility in understanding and assessing theoretical models such as psychoanalysis, historical and dialectical materialism, structuralism and semiotics which extend their understanding of the visual image, the written word, and cultural phenomena."
My reading list begins with the very basic post-Emersonian turn against Platonic philosophy (in Europe post-Nietzschean philosophies, in America pragmatisms) and so Richard Rorty's “Hope in Place of Knowledge” provides a broad situation, then we shift into ideologiekritik, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, into culture and ideology, Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” Roland Barthes, Mythologies, and then use Louis Althusser's, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” to take us from ideology into subjection. For subjection we read from Michel Foucault's, History of Sexuality, Part One, then Wendy Brown, “Wounded Attachments” and Judith Butler, “The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary,” turning then to Franz Fanon's, Black Skin, White Masks, and then read Gayatri Spivak's, “History.” There we turn into "prostheses," techocriticism and technopolitical discourses, Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Marshall McLuhan, “Understanding Media,” Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” sections of Hannah Arendt's magisterial, The Human Condition, and then conclude with Donna Haraway's, “Manifesto for Cyborgs.”
I regret that there will be no place for Raymond Williams, more Foucault ("Two Lectures," "What Is An Author"), Carol Adams, Baudrillard, and Paul Virilio. But I'm already unloading a huge amount on students and expect if anything the list will be further truncated. And of course my students are largely working artists and part of any course will be my ongoing efforts to respond usefully to their needs, which are always just a little perpendicular to my own expectations as a theory-head.
Of course, part of the reason to blog this stuff is because it is preoccupying me in this moment, and many of my preoccupations find their way onto my blog. Another reason is to provide a place for prospective students to find information (I know that some of my students at SFAI and Berkeley already keep tabs on me through my blog, for example).
But the real reason to mention these courses is to register a mild uneasiness I feel about them. I received the offer to teach these fall courses quite recently, and didn't have much time to put the reading lists and descriptions together, and so in the absence of that time I fell back on my habits. It worries me that looking over these two courses they come so close to representing the kinds of readings and overall organization and themes I would have proposed to teach fully a decade ago, if I were putting together comparable courses back then.
Here I am struggling to finally get the PhD. and move from my presumably preparatory inhabitation of the academy into some more fully-fledged and professional version of things and yet already I worry that my intellectual joints are stiffening and fuddy-duddiness is becoming all too evident.
Definitely one of the first things to do once the dissertation is in hand is just to do a crash course of reading in a hundred different directions, to find altogether new writing that shakes the plaster loose. Then again, part of this may simply be that these are more general sorts of classes already outside of the media criticism and technoethical stuff in which I am paying closest attention these days to new provocations. Hopefully, the technoethical course I teach at Berkeley this Summer and then the digital aesthetics and politics course I teach next Spring at SFAI will feel more bracingly cutting edge to me...
"Ranting, Raving, Writing"
The word argument comes from the Latin arguere, to clarify. And contrary to its cantankerous reputation, the process of argumentation can be one that seeks after clarity rather than one that seeks always to prevail over difference.
We argue to inquire what are the best beliefs when we are ignorant or unsure of ourselves, we argue to interrogate our own assumptions, we argue to clarify the stakes at issue in a debate, we argue to gain a serious hearing for our unique perspective, we argue to find the best course of action in the circumstances that beset us.
This is a course in argumentative reading and writing, which means for me a course in expository writing and critical thinking. But the works we will be reading together are anything but exemplary argumentative texts. Our texts rant and rave, they are brimming with rage, dripping with corrosive humor, suffused with ecstasies. In ranting and raving arguments are pushed into a kind of crisis, and in them rhetoric becomes a kind of poetry.
What does it tell us about argument in general to observe it in extremis like this? How can we read transcendent texts critically, in ways that clarify their stakes without dismissing their force, and enable us to communicate intelligibly to others the reactions they inspire in us and the meanings we find in them?
Anonymous, “Fuck the South”
Plato, Symposium
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo
Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”
Fiodr Dostoievski, “Notes From the Underground”
Virginia Woolf, Orlando
Allen Ginsberg, Howl
William Burroughs, “Immortality”
Film, Network. Dir: Sidney Lumet
Valerie Solanas, The SCUM Manifesto
Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs”
Gary Indiana, “Reproduction”
Diane Dimassa, Hothead Paisan
Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body
Cintra Wilson, “Statement of Intent”
The second course is an introduction to critical theory. The potted description in the catalogue which all its instructors will variously incarnate helpfully proposes that "[t]he Critical Theory sequence develops students¹ facility in understanding and assessing theoretical models such as psychoanalysis, historical and dialectical materialism, structuralism and semiotics which extend their understanding of the visual image, the written word, and cultural phenomena."
My reading list begins with the very basic post-Emersonian turn against Platonic philosophy (in Europe post-Nietzschean philosophies, in America pragmatisms) and so Richard Rorty's “Hope in Place of Knowledge” provides a broad situation, then we shift into ideologiekritik, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, into culture and ideology, Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” Roland Barthes, Mythologies, and then use Louis Althusser's, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” to take us from ideology into subjection. For subjection we read from Michel Foucault's, History of Sexuality, Part One, then Wendy Brown, “Wounded Attachments” and Judith Butler, “The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary,” turning then to Franz Fanon's, Black Skin, White Masks, and then read Gayatri Spivak's, “History.” There we turn into "prostheses," techocriticism and technopolitical discourses, Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Marshall McLuhan, “Understanding Media,” Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” sections of Hannah Arendt's magisterial, The Human Condition, and then conclude with Donna Haraway's, “Manifesto for Cyborgs.”
I regret that there will be no place for Raymond Williams, more Foucault ("Two Lectures," "What Is An Author"), Carol Adams, Baudrillard, and Paul Virilio. But I'm already unloading a huge amount on students and expect if anything the list will be further truncated. And of course my students are largely working artists and part of any course will be my ongoing efforts to respond usefully to their needs, which are always just a little perpendicular to my own expectations as a theory-head.
Of course, part of the reason to blog this stuff is because it is preoccupying me in this moment, and many of my preoccupations find their way onto my blog. Another reason is to provide a place for prospective students to find information (I know that some of my students at SFAI and Berkeley already keep tabs on me through my blog, for example).
But the real reason to mention these courses is to register a mild uneasiness I feel about them. I received the offer to teach these fall courses quite recently, and didn't have much time to put the reading lists and descriptions together, and so in the absence of that time I fell back on my habits. It worries me that looking over these two courses they come so close to representing the kinds of readings and overall organization and themes I would have proposed to teach fully a decade ago, if I were putting together comparable courses back then.
Here I am struggling to finally get the PhD. and move from my presumably preparatory inhabitation of the academy into some more fully-fledged and professional version of things and yet already I worry that my intellectual joints are stiffening and fuddy-duddiness is becoming all too evident.
Definitely one of the first things to do once the dissertation is in hand is just to do a crash course of reading in a hundred different directions, to find altogether new writing that shakes the plaster loose. Then again, part of this may simply be that these are more general sorts of classes already outside of the media criticism and technoethical stuff in which I am paying closest attention these days to new provocations. Hopefully, the technoethical course I teach at Berkeley this Summer and then the digital aesthetics and politics course I teach next Spring at SFAI will feel more bracingly cutting edge to me...
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