![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Reading Notes: Colebrook, "How Queer Can You Go?"
Opens with a citation from Deleuze --- YES I GET IT ALREADY I SHOULD READ DELEUZE
"model of theoria as a distanced look or regard taken upon an object is intrsinically normalizing," as opposed to queer --- lines up with Kristeva talking about eruption between subject and object, Colebrook cites Irigaray who I think of as doing similar work, and Heidegger, who I know ~nothing about. Attempts to place something fundamentally disordered under a system of order? Also on a less oh my god my brain hurts level, seems to call for more theory that isn't distanced, that is, more first-person, lived-experience, disruptive? I think.
"reversed or radical Platonism... a new and positive notion of queerness: not as destabilization or solicitation of norms, but as a creation of differences that are no longer generated in either the subject or generating life." Looking at events that transcend bodies. "Ask not what it means but how it works" say Deleuze and Guattari. Be interested in potentiality rather than relation to system. So is Colebrook suggesting that we look at things outside of context? That to me would clash with my understanding of the first paragraph, the suggestion not to take a distanced look.
Colebrook talks a lot about how "subjective" things are "implicated in a highly normalizing ethos" and I don't think she's using "subjective" the way I would normally read it. Or maybe in a sense she is --- defined by the subject, that is, experienced from within a conscious mind that parses itself as having gender? I think there's more to the subject/object dichotomy a lot of these theorists throw around than just "self/other" in the Lacanian sense that I sort of understand it. Is Colebrook saying that a theory is insufficiently queer, or that a way of thinking is insufficiently queer, if it recognizes the boundary between self and other and treats that as axiomatic in its analysis? Actually that might be what she's getting at.
Oh look: "...not simply to challenge the norms that dominate a theory --- for example interrogating psychoanalysis from within by isolating its unquestioned assumption of male-female relations --- but would contest just what it means to theorize. Only then would our theory be queer." Also: "A radical metaphysic of transcendental empiricism would free sexuality from organized bodies." Have to stop and think here for a minute. This is related to Deleuze's whole "body without organs" thing which of course I haven't read and is in the reading for week 4. (Not reading these things in chronological order is actually very challenging for me.) What would it mean to free sexuality from organized bodies? I'm going to step away from the text for a while and muse on that. Right now I think of sexuality as something that's enacted or desired or imagined between one or more embodied people --- their bodies may be modified (surgery) or augmented (strapons) or even virtualized (Tapestries) but it's still fundamentally somatic. But I guess desire or longing doesn't necessarily have to be directed toward a body --- I could desire a feeling or a locus of ideas, and in some ways, do. Could desire or longing also not come from a body? Some sort of primordial ooze that wants to bang itself? I dunno. I'm gonna go back to the text for now and come back to this maybe.
Whoah this is critiquing a privileging of life? And here I was nervous about applying our ideas about subjectivity to animals when thinking about animal abolitionism, radical veganism, &c. --- Colebrook's leapfrogged me and is saying not "we should apply subjectivity to things that aren't us" but "maybe we shouldn't apply subjectivity to ourselves either," at least if we're going to have a really queer theory. Deleuze wants to go back to Plato's discussion of Ideas "beyond the lived experience of self" but rather than cover them up with subjectivity, create "a liberation of essence and distinction from the lived world." For my later notes, this doesn't help the rest of you, footnote five is BADASS BADASS BADASS. It makes sense to me. Actually here: The gist is that rather than drag being an embodied man taking on a female presentation in some gendered matrix of understanding, it's a particular enactment of the non-inherently-bodied-vector "becoming-woman." I need to read this, like, five more times. ...this paper's footnotes are way more cogent than the core paper to me.
"Once something is clear --- recognizable as this or that delimited and perceived object --- it loses its distinction." Um. What? I think the previous sentences are supposed to make this one make sense, but they don't.
"The subject is not the foundation of experience but is effected through experience." OK, I can buy into that. We talked last week in class about making a fundamental cut across all things in order to define the self and indeed to define the world of the self/other boundary, and how we could choose to parse that cut as a wound best left open. "The self is nothing other than repeated performances, and is at once always different from itself." OK. Except that's not going far enough either? According to Deleuze, "intensities are potentialities for differential relations which, when enountering other intensities, produce quantities of this or that quality." This feels very scifi to me, very "there are various potential vectors that could add up to outcomes depending on how they happen to interact." I feel like I'm looking at the whiteboard in the lounge where the math majors at MIT collaborated on their homework, except the process of doing mathematics has been queered and they are using words instead. It would almost be easier if it were math because the words wouldn't all already mean something when I looked at them outside of Special Theory Context Time.
This is really making me think of the mythology of Last and First Men by Otto Stapledon. Ideas that exist outside and beyond any actualizing or understanding of them? Thought liberated from the Image. Huh. This is like the opposite of everything I understand about Barthes, which admittedly isn't that much.
"becoming-woman" as the first move away from "the image of thought of bourgeois thermodynamics." "At least one other possibility for thinking beyond the man of reason."
Whoah Billy Budd?? Did queer theorists have a huge thing for Billy Budd before Sedgwick? Because she's the one who got me thinking about it. (Also, a TEXT! I love texts! (I love Bastiodon!)) ...Reading of the Idea of Reading? Immanence? (Oh, immanence.) "Qualities or predicates that are actualized but not exhausted by bodies." Actually I can see that in Claggart's view of Budd. It's not just the body that Budd has, it's the ideas that that body represents; and it's not even necessarily Claggart's desire for those ideas, but the potentiality of said desire. I guess that comes back to the earlier point about freeing sexuality from bodies.
We were supposed to read this week's reading with an eye to how the transsexual disrupted the traditional ideas of Australian third-wave feminism. I do not see the connection. Clearly I need to read the rest of the papers and then come back and synthesize. And then read this one, at least, again --- but I pulled a few connections between it and other things, and between parts of it, out and named them. I'll take that for now, and go do an easier reading for another class for a while. Oof.
"model of theoria as a distanced look or regard taken upon an object is intrsinically normalizing," as opposed to queer --- lines up with Kristeva talking about eruption between subject and object, Colebrook cites Irigaray who I think of as doing similar work, and Heidegger, who I know ~nothing about. Attempts to place something fundamentally disordered under a system of order? Also on a less oh my god my brain hurts level, seems to call for more theory that isn't distanced, that is, more first-person, lived-experience, disruptive? I think.
"reversed or radical Platonism... a new and positive notion of queerness: not as destabilization or solicitation of norms, but as a creation of differences that are no longer generated in either the subject or generating life." Looking at events that transcend bodies. "Ask not what it means but how it works" say Deleuze and Guattari. Be interested in potentiality rather than relation to system. So is Colebrook suggesting that we look at things outside of context? That to me would clash with my understanding of the first paragraph, the suggestion not to take a distanced look.
Colebrook talks a lot about how "subjective" things are "implicated in a highly normalizing ethos" and I don't think she's using "subjective" the way I would normally read it. Or maybe in a sense she is --- defined by the subject, that is, experienced from within a conscious mind that parses itself as having gender? I think there's more to the subject/object dichotomy a lot of these theorists throw around than just "self/other" in the Lacanian sense that I sort of understand it. Is Colebrook saying that a theory is insufficiently queer, or that a way of thinking is insufficiently queer, if it recognizes the boundary between self and other and treats that as axiomatic in its analysis? Actually that might be what she's getting at.
Oh look: "...not simply to challenge the norms that dominate a theory --- for example interrogating psychoanalysis from within by isolating its unquestioned assumption of male-female relations --- but would contest just what it means to theorize. Only then would our theory be queer." Also: "A radical metaphysic of transcendental empiricism would free sexuality from organized bodies." Have to stop and think here for a minute. This is related to Deleuze's whole "body without organs" thing which of course I haven't read and is in the reading for week 4. (Not reading these things in chronological order is actually very challenging for me.) What would it mean to free sexuality from organized bodies? I'm going to step away from the text for a while and muse on that. Right now I think of sexuality as something that's enacted or desired or imagined between one or more embodied people --- their bodies may be modified (surgery) or augmented (strapons) or even virtualized (Tapestries) but it's still fundamentally somatic. But I guess desire or longing doesn't necessarily have to be directed toward a body --- I could desire a feeling or a locus of ideas, and in some ways, do. Could desire or longing also not come from a body? Some sort of primordial ooze that wants to bang itself? I dunno. I'm gonna go back to the text for now and come back to this maybe.
Whoah this is critiquing a privileging of life? And here I was nervous about applying our ideas about subjectivity to animals when thinking about animal abolitionism, radical veganism, &c. --- Colebrook's leapfrogged me and is saying not "we should apply subjectivity to things that aren't us" but "maybe we shouldn't apply subjectivity to ourselves either," at least if we're going to have a really queer theory. Deleuze wants to go back to Plato's discussion of Ideas "beyond the lived experience of self" but rather than cover them up with subjectivity, create "a liberation of essence and distinction from the lived world." For my later notes, this doesn't help the rest of you, footnote five is BADASS BADASS BADASS. It makes sense to me. Actually here: The gist is that rather than drag being an embodied man taking on a female presentation in some gendered matrix of understanding, it's a particular enactment of the non-inherently-bodied-vector "becoming-woman." I need to read this, like, five more times. ...this paper's footnotes are way more cogent than the core paper to me.
"Once something is clear --- recognizable as this or that delimited and perceived object --- it loses its distinction." Um. What? I think the previous sentences are supposed to make this one make sense, but they don't.
"The subject is not the foundation of experience but is effected through experience." OK, I can buy into that. We talked last week in class about making a fundamental cut across all things in order to define the self and indeed to define the world of the self/other boundary, and how we could choose to parse that cut as a wound best left open. "The self is nothing other than repeated performances, and is at once always different from itself." OK. Except that's not going far enough either? According to Deleuze, "intensities are potentialities for differential relations which, when enountering other intensities, produce quantities of this or that quality." This feels very scifi to me, very "there are various potential vectors that could add up to outcomes depending on how they happen to interact." I feel like I'm looking at the whiteboard in the lounge where the math majors at MIT collaborated on their homework, except the process of doing mathematics has been queered and they are using words instead. It would almost be easier if it were math because the words wouldn't all already mean something when I looked at them outside of Special Theory Context Time.
This is really making me think of the mythology of Last and First Men by Otto Stapledon. Ideas that exist outside and beyond any actualizing or understanding of them? Thought liberated from the Image. Huh. This is like the opposite of everything I understand about Barthes, which admittedly isn't that much.
"becoming-woman" as the first move away from "the image of thought of bourgeois thermodynamics." "At least one other possibility for thinking beyond the man of reason."
Whoah Billy Budd?? Did queer theorists have a huge thing for Billy Budd before Sedgwick? Because she's the one who got me thinking about it. (Also, a TEXT! I love texts! (I love Bastiodon!)) ...Reading of the Idea of Reading? Immanence? (Oh, immanence.) "Qualities or predicates that are actualized but not exhausted by bodies." Actually I can see that in Claggart's view of Budd. It's not just the body that Budd has, it's the ideas that that body represents; and it's not even necessarily Claggart's desire for those ideas, but the potentiality of said desire. I guess that comes back to the earlier point about freeing sexuality from bodies.
We were supposed to read this week's reading with an eye to how the transsexual disrupted the traditional ideas of Australian third-wave feminism. I do not see the connection. Clearly I need to read the rest of the papers and then come back and synthesize. And then read this one, at least, again --- but I pulled a few connections between it and other things, and between parts of it, out and named them. I'll take that for now, and go do an easier reading for another class for a while. Oof.
no subject
... Germaine Greer?
I have no point here, I just like to sing
no subject
(no subject)
no subject
Is there a word left out there, or not? Is there a "that" between "object" and "is," or not? Because otherwise I can't actually parse this sentence, though perhaps it would make more sense in-context.
I've never heard of Irigaray. Thoughts on where to start reading?
Forgive me, but WTF does "a fundamental cut across all things" mean? Is it cut in the sense of mental dissection, getting deeper into the heart of the self through interrogating everything? How is one supposed to perform this cut?
I read this twice:
Actually here: The gist is that rather than drag being an embodied man taking on a female presentation in some gendered matrix of understanding, it's a particular enactment of the non-inherently-bodied-vector "becoming-woman."
And then I understood this:
a liberation of essence and distinction from the lived world."
Ok, so. But does it somehow...sully those Platonic ideals, sully the queering of the theory, when they're brought into the real world to be enacted, by men in drag or whomever? (If so, then does that make platonic ideals that cannot yet be enacted in the real world, like phantom wing syndrome, more queer as ideas than, say, gender theory?)
Also, holy shit. Are all these people you cited here just things you downed in your spare time while no one noticed?
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
I'm working on the original
Footnote five is badass, but wouldn't the push back against embodied theory run into conflict whith the desire for less-distanced theory?
Even vectors have a system of planes in which they are embedded. One of my math/vision professors constantly complained about people ignoring the imaginary spectrum of the Forier transform because that is where the shape-informations is. You can find all sorts of patterns and typical structures in the real domain, but not the whole of any one thing.
Actually it kind of fits. In the frequency domain you'd have a cluster of "becoming women", but it wouldn't tell you anything about the performers. Were they transgressing or normalizing? Motivated by self or others? We'd need the phase domain to know. A perfectly queer image would be white noise? I have clearly taken this analogy far to far, but I think part of my resistance is that vectors are always incomplete descriptions of the world.
Re: wound of self-definition: I wonder how body mod/bdsm re-interpretations of wounds/pain/desire could influence the separation of self and resistance to emeshment (if that's the right word for the opposite). If such things are taken on willingly and consciously... I'm curious now about traditions of conscious self-other separation in place of unconscious and Othering separation. It might lead to true celebration of diversity/queerness?
Re: I'm working on the original
Re: I'm working on the original
no subject
Most of this post, I can at least sort of follow, but I have to admit, this bit looked to me like a bunch of random words strung together. :D
Thermodynamics? I think that's the word that threw me most here. I'm having trouble understanding the concept of bourgeois thermodynamics, or how thermodynamics relate to queer theory.