“Comrade, you’ll be tickled pink…”
Nicholas Hanford
October 31, 2013
Feminist Cocktail (Week 8)
Unethical Readings
“…self-defeating strategies…” (ES, 137)
“…likely to be based on deep pessimism…” (ES, 138)
“…it would be hard to learn…” (ES, 132)
“…even in its hyperbolic mode…” (JB, 77)
“…you’ll faint from ennui every minute you’re not smashing the state…” (ES, 146)
“…the contagious tropism of paranoia…” (ES, 131)
“Lacan aside…” (ES, 132)
“…inexorable, irreducible, uncircumnavigable, omnipresent…” (ES, 132)
“…you the finger-worn dossier…” (138)
“…find it shocking that ideologies contradict themselves…” (ES, 141)
“Hope, often a fracturing, even traumatic thing to experience…” (ES, 146)
Ethical Readings
Butler – Excitable Speech
"...that view holds that the very 'content' of certain kinds of speech can be
understood only in terms of the action that the speech performs." (72)
"...conceptualizing utterances as both 'expressive' of ideas and as forms of 'conduct'
in themselves..." (73)
"Recently, however, jurisprudence has sought the counsel of rhetorical and
philosophical accounts of language in order to account for hate speech in terms of a
more general theory of linguistic performativity." (73)
"Matsuda's assumption is that calling someone a name or, more specifically, being
addressed in an injurious way establishes that person's social subordination and,
moreover, has the effect of depriving the addressee of the capacity to exercise
commonly accepted rights and liberties within either a specific context...or within
the more generalized context of the national public sphere." (75)
"Here an act of speech in which a sexual intention is stated or implied becomes
oddly indissociable from a sexual action." (76)
"My concern is not only with the protection of civil liberties against the incursion of
the state, but with the peculiar discursive power given over to the state through the
process of legal redress." (77)
"I mean only that the category cannot exist without the state's ratification..." (77)
"The problem, then, is not that the force of the sovereign performative is wrong, but
when used by citizens it is wrong, and when intervened upon by the state, it is, in
these contexts, right." (77)
"Diffused throughout disparate and competing domains of the state apparatus, and
through civil society in diffuse forms as well, power cannot be easily or definitively
traced to a single subject who is its 'speaker,' to a sovereign representative of the
state." (78)
"Thus, the law requires and facilitates a conceptualization of injury in relation to a
culpable subject, resurrecting 'the subject' ... in response to the demands to seek
accountability for injury." (78)
"...the political problem is cast as the tracing of the harms as it travels from the
speaker to the psychic/somatic constitution of the one who hears the term or to
whom it is directed." (80)
"...producing at that moment the linguistic occasion for an imagined relation to an
historically transmitted community of racists." (80)
"Figuring hate speech as an exercise of sovereign power implicitly performs a
catachresis by which the one who is charged with breaking the law (the one who
utters hate speech) is nevertheless invested with the sovereign power of law. What
the law says, it does, but so, too, the speaker of hate." (81)
"The speech of the addressee no longer has the power to do what it says, but always
to do something other than what it says...or to mean precisely the opposite of what it
intends to mean.” (82)
"This is what some would call a performative contradiction: an act of speech that in
its very acting produces a meaning that undercuts the one it purports to make." (84)
"...for speech is taken to be a sign of agency..." (84)
"Hence, one of the problems with pornography is that it creates a scene in which the
performative dimension of discourse runs counter to its semantic or communicative
functioning." (84)
"...pornographic representation discredits and degrades those whom it depictsmainly women-such that the effect of that degradation is to cast doubt on whether
the speech uttered by those depicted can ever be taken to mean what it says." (85)
"This seems to be the very project in which Habermas and others are engaged-an
effort to devise a communicative speech situation in which speech acts are
grounded in consensus where no speech act is permissible that performativity
refutes another's ability to consent through speech." (86)
On equivocity of the utterance - "the very words that seek to injure might well miss
their mark and produce an effect counter to the one intended" (87)
- There is an echo of this within Sedgwick, quoted later.
"For if one always risks meaning something other than what one thinks one utters,
then one is, as it were, vulnerable in a specifically linguistic sense to a social life of
language that exceeds the purview of the subject who speaks." (87)
"We are no longer considering what constitutes hate speech, but, rather, the broader
category of what constitutes a reasonable criteria by which protected speech is to be
distinguished from unprotected speech." (88)
"...performative contradiction is crucial to the continuing revision and elaboration of
historical standards of universality proper to the futural movement of democracy
itself." (90)
"In this instance and through this strategy of relying on established conventions of
universality, do we unwittingly stall the process of universalization within the
bounds of established convention, naturalizing its exclusions, and preempting the
possibility of its radicalization?" (90)
"...one who is excluded from the universal, and yet belongs to it nevertheless, speaks
from a split situation of being at once authorized and deauthorized." (91)
"...both contend that political participation requires the ability not only to represent
one's intention in speech but to actualize one's intention through the act of speech."
(92)
"That the utterance can be turned, untethered from its origin, is one way to shift the
locus of authority in relation to the utterance." (93)
“That discourse itself proliferates as the repeated enunciation of the prohibitive law
suggests that its productive power depends upon its break with an originating
context and intention, and that its recirculation is not within the control of any given
subjects.” (94)
“Hate speech is a kind of speech that acts, but it also referred to as a kind of speech
that acts and, hence, as an item and object of discourse.” (95)
“And yet, the speech of the law is considered to be resignifiable beyond any limit:
the law has no single or essential meaning; it can be redirected, reserviced, and
reconstructed; its language, though harmful in some contexts, is not necessarily
harmful, and can be turned and redirected in the service of progressive politics.
Hate speech, however, is not recontextualizable or open to a resignification in the
way that legal language is.” (99)
"...whether written in his text or cited here, has another connotation..." (100)
- Such a short phrase, but so much!
“To give the task of adjudicating hate speech to the state is to give that task of
misappropriation to the state.” (101)
“There is no possibility of not repeating.” (102)
Sedgwick – Touching, Feeling
“I suppose this ought to seem quite an unremarkable epiphany: that knowledge does
rather than simply is it is by now very routine to discover.” (124)
“If paranoia reflects the repression of same-sex desire, Hocquenghem reasoned, then
paranoia is a uniquely privileged site for illuminating not homosexuality itself, as in
the Freudian tradition, but rather precisely the mechanisms of homophobic and
heterosexist enforcement against it.” (126)
“Given that paranoia seems to have a peculiar intimate relation to the phobic
dynamics around homosexuality, then, it may have been structurally inevitable that
the reading practices that became most available and fruitful in antihomophobic
work would often in turn have been paranoid ones.” (127)
“That is to say, once again: for someone to have an unmystified view of systemic
oppressions does not intrinsically or necessarily enjoin that person to any specific
train of epistemological or narrative consequences.” (127)
“The first imperative of paranoia is There must be no bad surprises, and indeed, the
aversion to surprise seems to be what cements the intimacy between paranoia and
knowledge per se, including both epistemophilia and skepticism.” (130)
“…paranoia requires that bad news be always already known.” (130)
“Paranoia seems to require being imitated to be understood, and it, in turn, seems to
understand only by imitation. Paranoia proposes both Anything you can to (to me) I
can do worse, and Anything you can do (to me) I can to first – to myself.” (131)
“But, for example, in this post-Lacnian tradition, psychoanalytic thought that is not
in the first place centrally organized around phallic ‘sexual difference’ must
seemingly be translated, with however distorting results, into that language before
it can be put to any other theoretical use.” (133).
- Why revert back to previous ideas in order to contextualize in a way? Is this
an issue of disciplinarity where anything within the psychoanalytic realm has
to go back to this point? Or, is this a statement on the sexist patriarchy and
the importance of reflecting that within a given theory?
“An affect theory, is, among other things, a mode of selective scanning and
amplification.” (135)
“Allow each theory its own…” (138)
- This would ordinarily fall into the ‘unethical readings’ section of my
explication, but I want to unpack it a bit and that section is for short, shitty,
decontextualized things that I find interesting or funny. If we end this
statement prior to an ellipses, I think we see something incredibly important
within theory. First of all, “each theory” puts these as distinct and singular
objects that need to be taken as such. Secondly, ‘its own’ shows the necessity
of keeping theories within their own contexts and denying a manifest destiny
of theory. If we’re going to pick up a theory and place it somewhere not ‘its
own,’ there is a requirement by the writer to recontextualize. This is
something that I’ve harped on before, but its one of the main issues I have
seen all over media and cultural studies (particularly within criticism texts)
for several years.
“‘The modern liberal subject’…Where are all these supposed modern liberal
subjects?” (139)
“Does it matter when such projects misdescribe themselves or are misrecognized by
readers? I wouldn’t suggest that the force of any powerful writing can ever attain
complete transparency to itself, or is likely to account for itself very adequately at
the constative level of the writing.”
- This reminds me of a point Butler was making when discussing the
difficulties in transmissions of meaning through language.