Another Perspective

This post was made by one of the smartest people on tumblr, invertebrateparty, who always has something smart to say about politics and theory. This is a response to my Persephone Post. So please enjoy this really wonderful perspective.

Sympathy for the Devil

This began as a comment on sallysassypants’ lovely Persephone piece posted on Friday, but became entirely too long and involved, so rather than writing an essay there, I decided to post my thoughts here.

As individual subjects, we hold multiple personal and social positions. I am related to people x, y and z. I am from place p. I am friends with l, m, and n. I have income ∂. I live in g. I am ƒ years old. My ethnic background is t, u, and v. I have had life experiences p, q, and r. Those positions are not necessarily constant; many change over time (or disappear completely) - by chance and by choice - and neither do the ways in which those positions interact remain the same. Moreover, these positions may be ordered differently at any given time, and some may be salient in some contexts and not in others. The world I imagine as someone who has experienced q may be very different from the world I imagine as someone who lives in g. And, these imagined worlds - these systems of beliefs, of right actions, of practical knowledge, etc. - may very well be in tension, or even in contradiction, with one another. They don’t form a cohesive whole by themselves.

On this point, ailanthusaltissima invoked Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” in response to the Persephone piece -

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

There is no shame in tension or contradiction in one’s own identity. However, in the West at least, logic and rationality have a stranglehold on how we construct and assess worldviews, whether our own or others’. We’re not allowed to be self-contradictory, or to be hypocrites. We have to follow point A to point B to point C in steps that are traceable and well-defined, so as others might be able to figure out how we got where we are and why. But human experience defies this. Maybe we visit points A, B, and C simultaneously, or we never get there at all, and end up down a dark alley somewhere hunting for rainbows. Expecting that we can resolve our multitudes into a simple proof and judging others when we observe they can’t do so? What a tragic narrowing of the human experience; what a tragic flattening of the subject. Yet human beings are pattern seekers; we have a very weak grasp on things that aren’t related or threaded together and we need something that ties our positions together into an identity (or identities).

Making sense of one’s own life - one’s experiences and the positions one occupies - doesn’t mean we’re stuck shoe-horning it all into some sort of facile rational template, however. Confession, as sallysassypants describes it, is a self-reflective process that is really about imposing a narrative on the many parts of yourself, about finding a way to order and to make sense of the multiple positions you occupy and the multitudes you contain. Confession is loose, flexible, and creative, allowing for tension and contradiction to be explained (if you so choose) but not smoothed over or, worse, forced to disappear. Yet imposing that order, or that narrative, tends to “clean up” the ugly bits that might make you who you are, the things you as the present subject want to sweep under the table, or, more benignly, the things that don’t appear to you important from your current temporal position. A confession is just snapshot in time - aided by a little (or a lot of!) mental Photoshop - a picture of the present self you see. So, in short, the ultimate problem with this sort of straightforward confession is that it makes static a self that is profoundly dynamic … just like a photograph.

Of course, others might see you differently from the way you see yourself. To continue the photograph metaphor: the way you frame your self-portrait will likely be quite different from the way another individual would frame you. After all, those frames - whether your own or others - are also influenced by your or others’ positions. Because I am positioned differently from you, I may take a wildly different photograph of you than you would take of yourself … even if I knew everything about you. My experience as k and your experience as j would result in that. In the real world, though, you are quite likely to not know everything about me and your portrait of me will come out “wrong” from my perspective. Unless I tell you otherwise, you probably won’t know that I think your framing is off, or that don’t find your portrait quite right.

This is the root of a vast number of misunderstandings between individuals. My subjectivity is not your subjectivity, and vice versa. But where does this leave us? We can’t run around trying to figure out the entirety of everyone else’s positions and how they view those positions and what is salient now and what is not and what phase of moon it is and whether they had enough fiber for breakfast. Such a thing is practically and epistemologically impossible. What we have to rely on is communication. I show your my self-portrait, I give you my confession … you give me yours. Intersubjective knowledge allows for this to happens, allows for us to share our worlds and to share a world.

But, sharing requires some level of mutual trust. It requires that I won’t piss all over you and try to shut you up if you share with me your self-portrait, but it also requires a different kind of trust … it requires that I trust you with your own image, your own narrative, your own confession. I have to acknowledge that I can’t tell you better than you can tell yourself, even if I know full well that the process of confessing, of self-portraiture, is not perfect.

Political attitudes arise as a result of one’s multitudinous personal and social positions and the way one reflects on those positions. I think many among you all - my followers here on Tumblr - will take this to its obvious conclusion, the conclusion that, for example, as a cisgendered, heterosexual, middle-class, educated, liberal, childless, etc. woman in my late 20s, I can’t tell the story of someone who is not one of those things. However, that’s only part of the conclusion. You can’t only trust the confessions of those with whom you already agree, or with whom you share known political commitments. This applies to everyone. Rather than saying (to pick a suitably general liberal feminist attitude), “Women who vote Republican are stupid and self-hating,” maybe we ought to actually listen to women who vote Republican, just as rather than saying, “The veil is oppressive to Muslim women,” maybe we ought to actually listen to Muslim women who “veil” themselves.

If the devil represents a person with whom we vehemently disagree, then I think we have to have sympathy for the devil. But having sympathy for the devil is not the same as agreeing with the devil and sending out invitations for a party in hell. It means looking. It means listening. It means paying attention to the devil’s story. It means accepting that the devil isn’t a static, monolithic evil, but is a dynamic, complicated subject like yourself. It means accepting that the devil may not always be the devil, or that the devil wasn’t always the devil. (With some fear of driving the devil analogy in the ground, it means thinking about Satan like Milton did, and not like the authors of the Bible.)

In the end, we have to all remember that we all contain multitudes … unique, dynamic multitudes inside every last one of us. We may not be able to ever see all of those multitudes contained in others, but it is important to realize that they are there. And, if we are to encounter a devil, and we remember this, and have sympathy for her enough to listen to her confession, we might learn what has brought her to an unsavory social or political attitude. It might not be what we think, when we finally uncover the narratives and self-understanding. And … if we really care and have the effort to expend, we might be able to give that devil a new understanding, a new experience, a new encounter, or a new dialogue that might push her toward a new, more savory social or political attitude. That’s what the dynamic subject allows for that the static subject does not. As we live, we learn new things and create new self-portraits and share new confessions. We can become better.

Yes, even devils. (Because we’ve all been devils once, haven’t we?)

A Few More Thoughts on Kateb

A funny thing about academic writing is that a lot of it is done in pieces. You write a chapter for a conference or for a journal and at some point these get mashed into one text and you have a book. This means that you have the option of reading a book out of order, or of just reading one chapter. That said, when you read an entire book you get to the end and maybe have a little sympathy for the author.

I said yesterday that I was concerned that Kateb's writing comes across as very male. He turns to Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman to describe his ideal of the democratic individual. All of these authors are pretty progressive about things like gender and concepts like the hermaphrodite are not unfamiliar to them, though even in their balanced view of the world, the male side generally gets the benefit of the doubt. I think Kateb himself is likely very progressive about these things, but I wish he would think harder about the implications of the word individual because I'm sure the moment we hear the words American Individual, Homer Simpson is probably more likely to pop into our heads instead of say Kima from The Wire. In other words, Kateb's individual is more than likely white and male.

I further suspect that the individual comes from a privileged position because Kateb finds groups to be the root of most evil (I would say all, but I wouldn't ascribe to anyone so thoughtful such an all-encompassing word.) Kateb is consistent on this point - he finds identifying oneself with any group to be problematic, whether that group is a nation, an army, or a group with some commonality. I see his point - he wants to avoid absorption into the whole and the potential for docility that comes with joining others in solidarity (what a rational choice person might call a collective action problem.)

This is something that only someone in an insular academic setting for their entire life could possibly come up with because they really haven't had to deal with the day-to-day bullshit of systems that consistently kick you in the ass because you are female or black or brown or someone who pursues some alternate lifestyle. Those of us who do feel it daily find hope in groups and see them as necessary to finding individual freedom and rights. Kateb, I'm sure, would say that these groups are okay because they are either a) temporary or b) in contestation of government. But the groups I'm thinking of are ongoing in a fight and not necessarily against government. I myself identify as a feminist and see this as a group I will be a part of for my entire life and what I fight isn't necessarily part of a government institution.

Kateb spends a few pages on Foucault in a way that is interesting to me. He brushes everyone's favorite theorist of docile bodies aside because he thinks that Foucault doesn't understand the complexity of the individual. In other words, Kateb's individual isn't docile because his individual is too complex to be formed by being named an individual. I think quite the opposite. Foucault sees the individual as so complex that docility requires a certain internal strength to see where one is being defined and to slowly undo the systems of oppressive definition within ourselves.

Which is also why I think groups can be important to the individual. How do you recognize that you are docile? Perhaps when you talk with a friend and recognize you manifest the same behaviors that have contributed to your oppression. Foucault encourages critical thinking within the individual and part of that critical thinking, I would argue, is to recognize what disciplines you and those like you adopt.

I wonder if Kateb is weak on this point because he sees the only real threat to the individual as governmental. Other individual-threatening entities, in particular the corporation, enter no where into his argument. I’m not the only one who notices this – Thomas Dumm notes, “His [Kateb’s] admirable faith in the capacity of all of us in our own ways to participate in liberal democratic culture sometimes operates as a rhetoric for evading a confrontation with the most damaging conditions created and sustained by its corporate underpinnings (33).”

Where I do fall in love with Kateb, though, is at the end of The Inner Ocean when he talks about Whitman. I think I mentioned before that I love Whitman. He's so earthy and weird. I can't help but feel moved by Whitman. Kateb writes about Whitman in the final chapter and he is so very earnest and honest. Here his individual takes on some depth. Kateb's Whitman-reading individual loves life and seeks it out in themselves and in others, and in doing so leaves room for all manner of being. This I love and can totally endorse.

Things I Read While Writing This
The Inner Ocean by George Kateb
united states by Thomas L. Dumm
I also thought about Foucault in a very general way, but didn't think about one particular text.

Something that is not pretentious to clear your palate:

Some Initial, Disorganized Thoughts on Kateb

I've been reading George Kateb's  The Inner Ocean. It was something I read in undergrad but didn't really understand mostly because I cared too much about understanding it correctly. I picked it up because I was thinking a bit about the role of the American individual nowadays and the sub-title of the book is Individualism and Democratic Culture, so I thought there might be some insight.

A bit on why I am interested in this whole individual business: the Tea Party. They are obsessed with the individual. Individual freedom. Individual tax-burdens. Saving the individual from the monster of socialism. The individual they talk about is distinctly American, too. When they talk about immigration they like to say that we are all just individuals. American individuals. Which is funny because it absorbs unique individuals into a mass of white Americanness, but I digress. The Tea Party just fascinates me and I'm trying to understand a bit where their vocabulary comes from. It doesn't come from Kateb (they've probably never heard of him), but Kateb writes a lot about the vocabulary we use in American politics. So, there's that.

Back to Kateb. Kateb thinks the individual is pretty stinking important. In particular, he thinks individual rights are important and that socioeconomic equality is a threat to those rights (sound familiar?) A democratic culture supports the individual. And here we come to the title of the book and one of the more pretentious sentences I have ever read, "I find the theory of democratic individuality, like some other individualisms, cultivates a sense of individual infinitude; that is, a sense of one's inner ocean, of everybody's inexhaustible internal turbulent richness and unused powers (Kateb 34)."

I can get behind this to a point. I'm American and, technically, a liberal theorist, so I do get a little uncomfortable when you start to push the individual into a mass. But I also think the individual can find more room to move when they feel safe, and much of how our government and socioeconomic structure doesn't offer safety to the individual, which I think means we don't get much space to recognize our inner ocean.

Something that worries me more, however is how Kateb's idea of the individual is really masculine. I'm not sure if this is a valid critique, but the dudes (and they are dudes) he talks about are really, really male. In particular, he likes Thoreau, Whitman and Emerson. I love all of these guys. I'm even considering a tattoo of a line from Song of Myself. That said, these dudes have always been for me dripping with the ideal of the lone American male, self-sufficient and able to shape themselves into anything. They'd be Marlboro-men if the Marlboro man was a philosopher. There's also this line from Emerson that Kateb makes use of, "Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members (Emerson quoted by Kateb on page 86)."

It's not that Kateb or Emerson is against women. Hardly. They just have an image of the individual that is male. A female individual simply doesn't enter the equation.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with that idea. This is a blog, so it'll progress and maybe not as rigorously as I'd like, but this concerns me because if our American liberal philosophies are grounded in this idea of the (male) individual, then I'm a little worried about what we really mean when we defend the American individual in philosophy and other popular texts.

Stuff I Read While Writing This
The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture by George Kateb

Something that is not pretentious to clear your palate

Make your own hipster Ariel