“Censorship and censorial debate are denials of our right and our capacity to explore and change our alienated and/or colonised selves and the discourse which continues to mystify our conditions.”
- Marica Langton, Well I Heard it on the Radio, and I Saw it on the Television …., 1989: 57.
Diversity Boat, World Social Forum, Porto Alegre 2005.
Big Gay Al’s Big Gay Boat Ride, South Park, 1997.
The “alternative thesis topic” being “Boats in Multiculture: a history from colonisation to activism”.
“The axiomatic distinction between the utopic on the one hand and the utopian on the other can be described in terms of the latter as a perversion, a rigidification of the former. The utopic is a disposition, a manner of speech, an attitude, a procedure in semiosis, even if that procedure necessarily bears a proximity to the Kristevan semanalyse, the semiotic critique of the semiotic. Utopia is a fixed form. This analysis flies in the face of that line of interpretation that sees Utopia as heteroglossic. The heterological character of the discourse characterises the utopic. Utopia is the monoglossic face of the utopic. In Kristevan terms it is thetic, according to the categories of Roland Barthes it is doxic, a monologic discourse invariably constructed in terms of ideas by which contradictory and inevitable exclusions are defined.” (…)
“The utopic is the disagreement that Utopia cannot sustain. Utopia is the dream of perfect control, of both culture and nature. The definitive totalitarianisms of the twentieth century have utopian motivations, motivations resulting in the figure of perfectibility. Utopia is spoken in the language of domination, and speaks it.” (…)
“The utopic is marked by an excess of signification, Utopia by its formalisation. In the totalised ideological mise-en-scene that is late capitalist language, the utopic is the space of the displaced discourse, the internal exile of the concept.”
- Bernhard Sachs, ‘In the General Gouvernement of Semiosis/Against Utopia: Utopic Articulation as Act’, The Office of Utopic Procedures, West Space, 2002.
“You can look at a war as a massing of arms and matériel and troops, but you can also see it as something else - as a delicate web of interwoven choices made by human beings, made out of a certain consciousness. The decision to order an attack, the choice to obey or disobey an order, to fire or not to fire a weapon. Armies and indeed, any culture that supports them must convince the people that all the decisions are made already, and they have no choice. But that is never true. So, mad as it may seem, this is the terrain upon which we base our defence of this city - the landscape of consciousness.”
- Lily Fong in The Fifth Sacred Thing, by Starhawk.
A reminder, to me anyway, of how to explain why nationality and sexuality should be, and are, studied together:
“the national project - animating the raison d’etre of every country and political society in the history of the world - maintains itself in complicated ways by regulating kinship, that is, by enforcing rules that reproduce the membership of that society and by establishing zones of legitimate sexual relationships.”
- Jacqueline Stevens, ‘The Politics of LGBTQ Scholarship’, GLQ Forum, 10:3, 2004.
“A discipline is always something other than an exploitation of this territory, and therefore a demonstration of an idea of knowledge [savoir]. And this idea of knowledge [savoir] should be understood as a regulation of the rapport between … [knowledge and ignorance]. It is a way of defining an idea of the thinkable, an idea of what the objects of knowledge themselves can think and know. It is therefore always a certain regulation of dissensus, of its dehiscence [écart] in relation to the ethical order, according to which a certain type of condition implies a certain type of thought. (…)
… a discipline is always much more than an ensemble of procedures which permit the thought of a given territory of objects. It is first the constitution of this territory itself, and therefore the establishment of a certain distribution of the thinkable. As such, it supposes a cut in the common fabric of manifestations of thought and language. The disciplines found their territory by establishing a dehiscence between what the phrases of the woodworker say and what they mean, between what the woodworker describes to us and the truth hidden behind the description. (…)
In-disciplinary thought… must practice a certain ignorance. It must ignore disciplinary boundaries to thereby restore their status as weapons in a dispute. This is what I have done, for example, in taking the phrases of the joiner [woodworker] out of their normal context. This normal context is that of social history, which treats them as expressions of the worker’s condition. I have taken a different path: these phrases do not describe a lived situation. They reinvent the relation between a situation and the forms of visibility and capacities of thought which are attached to it. Put differently, this narrative [récit] is a myth in the Platonic sense: it is an anti-Platonic myth, a counter-story of destiny. The Platonic myth prescribes a relationship of reciprocal confirmation between a condition and a thought. The counter-myth of the joiner breaks the circle. The indisciplinary procedure must thus create the textual and signifying space in which this relation of myth to myth is visible and thinkable. (…)
This implies another practice - an indisciplinary practice - of philosophy, of its relation to the human sciences … seiz[ing] the moment in which the philosophical pretension to found the order of discourse is reversed, becoming the declaration … of the arbitrary nature of this order. (…)
… at the moment in which it [philosophy] wants to found its status as a discipline of disciplines, it produces this reversal: the foundation of foundation is a story. And philosophy says to those knowledges [savoir] who are certain of their methods: methods are recounted stories. This does not mean that they are null and void. It means that they are weapons in a war; they are not tools which facilitate the examination of a territory but weapons which serve to establish its always uncertain boundary.
There is no assured boundary separating the territory of sociology from that of philosophy of that of the historians from literature. No well-defined boundary separates the discourse of the woodworker who is the object of science from the discourse of science itself. After all is said and done, to trace these boundaries is to trace the boundary between those who have thought through this question and those who have not. This boundary is never traced other than in the form of a story. Only the language of stories can trace the boundary, forcing the aporia of absence of final reason from the reasons of the disciplines. (…)
The poetics of knowledges does not claim that the disciplines are false knowledges. It claims that they are disciplines, ways of intervening in the interminable war between ways of declaring what a body can do, in the interminable war between the reasons of equality and those of inequality. It does not claim that they are invalid because they tell stories. It claims that they must borrow their presentations of objects, their procedures for interaction and their forms of argument from language and common thought.”
- Jacques Rancière, trans. Jon Roffe, Thinking between disciplines: an aesthetics of knowledge, Parrhesia, No.1, 2006, pp.1-12.
“The lesbian critique of woman-identification and the queer critique of the lesbian feminist critique of sadomasochist practices has been so embracing that it is now hard to imagine that lesbian feminists had any fun in the 1970s. While I share the view that lesbianism is a sexual orientation, which is about desire rather than identification (or desire as well as identification), I would question the distinction between “prosex” and “antisex” within some queer work. Such work tends to posit a new set of “sexual ideals” premised on liberation from what has become known as the moralizing terms of radical lesbian feminism (…). In fact, in reading backward from queer studies to the earlier work of radical feminism I was surprised to find that the most erotic and daring work, the work that moved me the most, was the earlier writing. I found the work of radical lesbian feminists both erotic and demanding, even in the mode of its critique between sex and power. Such lesbian feminists, in writing about male power, also search beyond their critiques for a new sexual vocabulary in which women’s desire for women can be put in other words [and, I would add, in which sexual desire in general can be put in other words, as far as that does not co-opt or appropriate spaces occupied by lesbian desire].
Marilyn Frye, for example, calls for a sexual vocabulary that is open to the different possibilities for action when women’s bodies get closer: “Let it be an open, generous, commodious concept emcompassing all the acts and activities by which we generate with each other pleasures and thrills, tenderness and ectsasy, passages of passionate carnality of whatever duration or profundity. Everything from vanilla to liquorice, from pure to chanteuse, from velvet to ice, from cuddles to cunts, from chortles to tears” (1990:314). In offering a vocabulary for lesbian sex, Frye and other radical lesbian feminists embrace how lesbian orientations can take many social and sexual forms precisely because they do not depend on the terms available within existing sexual vocabularies.”
- Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, pp.194-195.
g-string feminism: this category is dedicated to the g-wearin’ woman who told the g-watchin’ man she was with that she wore g-strings because they stimulated her sexually, and the man who then used this anecdote to encourage his new female partner to wear them (c’mon, some women find it really sexual! it’s empowering! it’s not about being pleasing to the hetero male gaze at the expense of your own physical pleasure at all … wedgies are totally hot right now! et cetera). Likewise dedicated to those gender & sexuality academics and activists who use prosex, queer and BDSM to run down other forms of desire and intimacy - or, as Ahmed puts it, “to posit a new set of sexual ideals”; a project which strikes me as, above and beyond anything else, rather lacking in imagination.
And with my sincere apologies to readers who love the string in their/its own right.
“And so, if part of my task here is to do justice, not only to my topic, but to the person I am sketching for you, the person around whom so much has been said, the person whose self-description and whose decisions have become the basis for so much … theorizing, I must be careful in presenting these words. For these words can give you only something of the person I am trying to understand, some part of that person’s verbal instance. Since I cannot truly understand this person, since I do not know this person, and have no access to this person, I am left to be a reader of a selected number of words, words that I did not fully select, ones that were selected for me, recorded from interviews and then chosen by those who decided to write their articles on this person for journals (…). So we might say that I am given fragments of this person, linguistic fragments of something called a person; what might it mean to do justice to someone under these circumstances? Can we?”
“I do not know how to judge that question here, and I am not sure it can be mine to judge. Does justice demand that I decide? Or does justice demand that I wait to decide, that I practice a certain deferral in the face of a situation in which too many have rushed to judgement?”
- Judith Butler, Undoing Gender, p.68, p.71
“It is also extremely pleasurable to be the object of Guatemalan solidarity work: to be the addressee of testimonial (…). Being hailed, or called out in this way functions like a seal of approval in these days of intense critique of the white first-world I-eye. Recourse to the politics of solidarity can offer a space of innocence for the gringa, a site cleansed by good intentions and activist “politics”, from which we can still speak unproblematically of the Other”.
- Diane Nelson, A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala, p.57
“Interspecies love is all ri-ight, so come on baby turn out the li-i-ight ….”
*Affective Communities, pp. 100-105
“…the “political” has come to be viewed exclusively as a sign of the philosophical and ethical exhaustion of religion. Our conception of the “political” or “ethical” is in many ways hopelessly circumscribed by the secular, rational calculations which underscore the movement of modern European thought - from Europe “out” into the (post)colonial world; (…) predicated upon a [Kantian autonomous] subject who is constitutively transcendental, self-sufficient, unified, and as such invulnerable to both desire (…) and prayer (…).
[a certain stream in Derrida] nags relentlessly at the contradictions inherent in Kant’s extradition of religion from the realm of ethics and justice. It does so to posit a certain type of metaphysical experience (Derrida calls this “fiduciary” faith) as a profound and utopian address to the other.”
- Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship, Duke University Press, 2006, p.116-117
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