Scribblings with Green Chalk

(Image found when googling Virginia Woolf; astoundingly, that’s pretty much what I look like in the morning)

If a room of one’s own is all you need to unleash your hidden Shakespeare’s sister, why does it not seem to be working for me? Apparently, the brilliant writer/scholar in me, once unleashed in my room, is primarily interested in dusting the bookshelves and washing the dishes. Vacuuming is also good, as is unclogging the kitchen sink. She is the artist of domestic neuroses. If I had a striped wallpaper, I’d have phantom women figures pulling at the bars whenever I was left alone.

It’s all much better when I put Virginia Woolf’s ideas in a box and go write in cafes or the library. No dramatizations of “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” no cleaning, perhaps no genius. But text. As far as I’m concerned, that’s what the game is about.

Maybe Shakespeare didn’t have a sister for a reason? (Maybe he did, I don’t know; maybe Anne Hathaway wrote his books anyway, and no, not wearing Prada.) Or I could never be her, not just because of temporal impossibility.

Yet another maybe: Maybe there is a good reason why Virginia Woolf wasn’t an advice columnist? Having servants could have skewed her understanding of the domestic, since she never attended to the hygienic and aesthetic aspects of the water-closet.

Sunday. Birds and all. Rain clouds hanging in lazy indecision. Open text document devouring on my screen. I’ll face some more hours, having cleaned everything in the house, and skip the walk to the river.

Thesis is being written. I can’t tell you how exactly but it’s happening. With the side-effect of a big dent in my provisional “coffee fund.”

The project isn’t gone, but I had a lot of doubts about posting and halted that part. I’ve thought about the pros and cons of putting up posts and questions vs. just writing the thesis on found and idiosyncratically compiled blog entries. I haven’t resolved it yet.

Meanwhile, in blogland, a post appeared mentioning Sara Baartman. I recommend Janell Hobson’s Venus in the Dark if you’re interested in the making (and unmaking) of the Hottentot Venus. You will want to sink under ground, reading about the brainlessness of European “science” in the 19th century. The anti-logic of racism never ceases to surprise: while “theorizing” the black female body shape as illness (steatopygia–because it sounds smart if you invent a word), Europeans found it a titillating fashion inspiration. The bustle, a scaffolding-like device inserted underneath ladies’ dresses, compensated for the flatness of the–supposedly ideal–European derriere. The pornographic interest showed by visitors to the exhibitions where Bartman was displayed (much like an inanimate object) is quite terrifying even to read about. Interestingly, the perception of how acceptable this kind of interest was did differ: a sketch reprinted in Hobson’s book shows that some of the contemporaries considered it outright morbid that “gentlemen” and “ladies” alike would scrutinize the details of someone’s anatomy under the pretence of scientific interest.

Patricia Hill Collins’ thoughts on the easiness of objectifying others (Others) shed some light on what happened then and what keeps happening to Baartman. Even today, despite of best endeavors, many academics researching Baartman end up presenting her as a non-person, Collins observes. Pretty slideshows begging for the use of pictures and pointers can turn an informed discussion of the body into a freak show in which again we watch it as a curious object, as if it didn’t belong to a human being. Read more in the sections of Black Feminist Thought devoted to Baartman and pornography.

More arguments for my developing conflict with the idea of the Muse.

Forgive me, I’ve been away with my head. Unaware of the intricacies of blog etiquette, I didn’t leave a hiatus post.

While I was gone, my absent blog persona was tagged by the lovely Wildly Parenthetical. Since we don’t have that much of a personality split, I reply–though outrageously late.

Here it comes:

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.

Having put aside the Polish edition of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception and the German edition of Szczypiorski’s Początek (do read that novel!), I reach for the book I don’t seem to be able to finish: Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain. It’s on my bedside table most of the time and we’re outwaiting each other. I have not gotten to page 123 yet, so it’ll be a surprise:

That the war deaths occurred on behalf of a terrain in which pianos could be played and bicycles could be pedalled, where schools would each day be entered by restrained and extravagantly gesturing children alike, must be indicated by appending the direction of motive, “for my country,” since the deaths themselves are the unmaking of the embodied terrain of pianos and bicycles, classmates, comrades, and schools.

For My Country. Thus “to kill and die”–or in the idiom that embraces both simultaneously, “to hurt” (to hurt within one’s own body) or to “alter body tissue”–are alike in having no interior referent and, if they are to have one, requiring a separate specification. But precisely because there is nothing “interior” that itself stipulates and in doing so limits its referent, the act of “dying” or “killing” can be lifted away and coupled with a different referent. (Scarry 123-124)

Earlier, Scarry writes about the image of war in Homer and gets Homeric with her syntax, so I might have lost count.

This passage encapsulates what drew me to the book in the first place. Scarry’s thesis is that pain is mostly uncommunicable, transcending language. Transcending our ability to relate. What does it mean to empathize, when oftentimes we can’t even see that the person next to us is in pain? Even when we notice, we never feel their pain… Is our mental image of their pain anything close to what they could be feeling? Is pain just an “element of blank” to the one who isn’t experiencing it, like one of Dickinson’s poems tells us? And the person in pain… a body, distant in its suffering? If so, how easy is war?

My on and off reading of the book does not allow me to offer a full-blown meditation on these questions. I’ve got reader’s block. Don’t pick on me.

I tag the following charming people, who hopefully cannot empathize with me in my predicament: Denise of Wohnen in Wien, Bowleserised, Aulelia of Charcoal Ink, Anthony, and BD (do I have the right link?).

Those self-righteous uppity bitches just don’t know when to stop. They throw at you that twisted nonsense divorced from reality, cos they’re closed off in their own world. They’re loud and ridiculous. Vicious and competitive. Turn off the volume and you get an amusing pantomime. Caricatures of women. They’re like half-women, trying so hard to be like men. If they knew the meaning of the word “moderation,” they’d just shut up.

Sorry. Did I forget the quotation marks? I was so focused on translating. I’ve always been quite gifted with languages, supposedly because I have ovaries. Or because I inherited the talent from my father. Either it’s irresistible biology, my small, comely feminine brain, or my masculine side, making me an exceptional token woman, almost as neat as a guy. Theories of intelligence are exciting, really. And they’re oh so objective and oh so neutral.

There is an interesting post on Shakesville about this article. Sadly, the comments shifted quickly from theories and perception of intelligence to whether men are “maybe, just maybe, actually smarter.” Good luck arriving at conclusions beyond the shadow of a doubt. But just how do you plan to “see” and evaluate intelligence? I might have old information, but for all I know no one has procured the philosopher’s stone and we’re stuck in a world of perceptions, misperceptions, and inferences.

The first paragraph is, as I hinted, a translation of a message I’ve heard many times. In its most polite formulation meant as “good advice,” it sounded like this:

“Modesty is the greatest virtue. A truly modest person will be content with possessing knowledge and keeping it to herself. She will answer only when asked directly. She will help others, give them the answer, because she knows she has a moral duty toward the group to work toward achieving harmony, to cooperate.”

Quotation marks duly inserted. Emphasis mine. The only thing this vision lacks is a deathbed scene wherein a grateful crowd gathers over the heroine’s body (after her last breath) to say how wonderful she was. Hearing the accolades would be to immodest, of course she has to be dead. Why do I make “person” feminine? Because I got this wonderful lesson of “true womanhood” from someone who was very concerned about my modesty. It’s a picture of what I should have become but never could.

Looking back, I can say I am greatly indebted to my native culture and system of education for the following: for not knowing what “intelligence” should mean, having heard smart and accomplished women described as bitter bitches (worse if they happened to be childless and/or unmarried), for not having a sense of reality that would allow me not to feel like the world’s biggest hoax, an award and national contest winning idiot, for recognizing my curiosity as inappropriateness, stupidity, a desire to be “one of the boys,” for translating my ambition as “trying too hard,” ” an anti-social impulse.”

Abiding by the rules of “modesty” does not let a woman excel. But that is not a problem, given that an “immodest” woman is evil. And, as so many will let her know, she is not a woman at all, because she supposedly wants to be a man, as shown by her sins against femininity.

The performance of intelligence is gendered, and intelligence itself, the “essence” is beyond reach. You never experience someone’s naked intelligence. There’s always gender trouble and intellectual cross-dressing involved.

When you hear a man disclaiming his contribution with “This may be stupid or irrelevant…” or “I’m sorry…”, let me know. I never have. If that happens somewhere in the world maybe we can talk about those IQ tests.

Waving frantically and mouthing “no” is about all I can do. These days, I can’t help feeling like a bull an elephant in a china shop. I cross out the bull in accordance with the Polish version of the saying, where the elephant is the culprit. The elephant conveys my inept reaction to the red rag.

Here’s the menagerie of my thoughts at this moment. The earlier assertion that cats won’t be hijacking this space seems a bit humorous several cat posts later. Perhaps I should change my nom de plume (nom de keyboard?) to “Derrida’s Cat,” since Haraway’s presentation of the thinker’s dilemma has moved me so much. However, with a drawerful of notes and a stack of books and articles, my original MA thesis remains unwritten, still waiting for a better time. At the same time, though, animals are thought.

What is interspecies companionship and, delving further, what does failure in fulfilling the obligations of companionship consist in?

Haraway starts with the failure of perception, drawing attention to Derrida’s revelation of seeing his cat in her separateness and individuality, recognizing her intense presence. I’m not sure that sight as a sense is the source of failure, but it’s the model sense for explanations, so let’s stay within its realm. Stripped to simplicity, this is a problem of a commonly accepted blind spot blotting out animals as animals. What kind of presence do you experience when you look at or touch your pets? Do you ever wonder what the animal is thinking — stopping there, at that sense of wonder, at the question mark, not pushing toward an answer — what the animal feels?

I see two paths, intersecting at many points. Two paths that give different meaning to separation. One uses separation as a device creating distance to enable sight and an understanding of difference. The other separates the human from the world so that thinking becomes frozen within an exclusive human space, with metaphors of otherness created in the realm of human-only interaction. The first path leads us to seeing space through the animal presence, reflecting upon ourselves through it, retaining distance. Whereas the other entails the danger of smothering the animal in thought by translating its presence into comparisons and parallels that cannot do it justice.

Over at Wohnen in Wien, I commented on Jessica Valenti’s idea of treating pets as “starter babies.” In my momentary old-saying elephantine clumsiness, I’m afraid it came out as a criticism of Denise’s interest in the idea and I didn’t mean it that way. (Apologies again, Denise.) I understand the idea’s appeal. I don’t think that people who have pets are driven by ulterior motives. However, I believe they can be very, very wrong in their thinking about animals.

Here’s where I start waving. Frantically.

The catchiness of the term “starter baby” makes me cringe. Is this a new take on euphemism, where the animal is the unspoken, the abject, too “impure” to be noted in language? Or is this meant to uphold Paul Shepard’s tenet that pets serve as stand-ins for teddy bears? I should hope there is more to pet-keeping than human narcissism.

Wouldn’t it be too easy if one experience could serve as practice ground for another? Yet life doesn’t have a pause button, there is no draft phase. Everything is for real and really present. It’s happening. Parallels and simplifications help us organize our thinking about experiences and phenomena but they do not change the reality of the said experiences and phenomena.

Your dog is not a baby surrogate. It’s a dog. Please take your catchy blindfold off and see it as who it is. Taking care of animals does teach us responsibility; this is hardly a new discovery. Recasting it in the frame of parenthood training ground makes it sound like a revelation, whereas it really is a reduction. It takes our attention away from the question of animal rights, animal consciousness, and the conditions of human-animal co-existence and companionship.

Loving animals, feeding them, dealing with their feces is not in any way comparable to rearing a child. It won’t take the shock and difficulty away from parenthood. There are no stand-ins for experiences. Especially experiences as complex as both the relationship between parent and child and that between human and animal.

Coming back to Derrida’s cat: discovering the animal’s intense presence is a revelatory moment in Derrida’s essay, in his experience, and in Haraway’s framing of the story. Something Joyce would call an epiphany. Seeing the animal means mapping space differently. The intersection of the human and the animal gaze is an invitation to seeing oneself through the idea of an unfamiliar animal consciousness. The human’s inner otherness responds to the otherness embodied in the animal. Is this the entry to a new realm of perception?

Whatever it means in individual experience, it’s a gift, an impulse to thought. In order to approach the question of interspecies companionship (not yet define it), one must allow the animal to enter the eye. Derrida’s failure to build upon the encounter lay, according to Haraway, in his immediate turn towards translating it into purely human metaphors and parallels. The animal doesn’t exist there.

The first obligation of companionship is seeing the companion. Would the second be avoiding allegorizing and comparing?

Let’s start with seeing. Let the dog be a dog, not a “starter human.” It’s not a stub, it’s a fully-fledged being. PLEASE LOOK AT THE DOG AND SEE A DOG. This is how your story of companionship begins.

Jacques Derrida has a cat. It made my day.

One morning, Monsieur D. discovered that his feline companion was looking back at him…

He understood that actual animals look back at actual human beings; he wrote at length about a cat, his small female cat, in a particular bathroom on a real morning actually looking at him. “The cat I am talking about is a real cat, truly, believe me, a little cat. It isn’t the figure of a cat. It doesn’t silently enter the room as an allegory for all the cats on the earth, the felines that traverse myths and religions, literatures and fables” (374). Further, Derrida knew he was in the presence of someone, not a machine reacting. [...] He came right to the edge of respect, of the move to respecere, but he was sidetracked by his textual canon of Western philosophy and literature and by his own linked worries about being naked in front of his cat. He knew there is no nudity among animals, that the worry was his, even as he understood the fantastic lure of imagining he could write naked words. [...] But with his cat, Derrida failed a simple obligation of companion species; he did not become curious about what the cat might actually be doing, feeling, thinking, or perhaps making available to him at looking back at him that morning. [...] Incurious, he missed a possible invitation to other-worlding.

(Haraway 19, 20; emphasis mine)

Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet arrived in the mail yesterday. I started reading it right away, like those distracted people who grab at books and life greedily and without a concept. (I am one of them.) I’m amazed and curious how she develops her idea of interspecies companionship, how different it is from Shepard’s.

Talking about companionship, or rather “bonding,” or not even that, since it could be merely a catchy theme… I saw SAD on several blogs recently. January appears to be a breaking point. Either that or it’s everyone’s New Year’s resolution to talk about their emotions.

Pets are out there too. I find the idea of pets as “starter babies” uncanny and… well… somehow disrespectful of animals as who they are. Reductive and blind to the otherness and the specific character of human-animal interaction. Denise wrote about it (commenting on Jessica Valenti’s article), I replied. I couldn’t disagree with Valenti more; I get the points, but I don’t accept them.

Time’s dust is slowly accumulating between me and my essay on Elizabeth Bishop’s conception of poetry as a glass eye gifted with sight. I decided to close the process of revision and consider the essay done, though I still can’t read it without thinking that it could be improved in many ways. Today, I would also add other questions to my original inquiry. But that could be a separate essay, couldn’t it? The question of creative and created sight remains open.

Because the most interesting points about sight were made by Bishop, not by me, I hesitate to paste here any excerpts from my paper. One possible point of departure for more questioning would be this paragraph, which brings together many of the ideas that interested me then: Probing the limitations of perception is one of Bishop’s idées fixes. Regardless of whether we are dealing with objectivized narration or an emotionally-colored description, the problem of the sense and aim of observation inevitably returns. The knowledge gained through watching the world closely is always questionable, being a combination of what one sees and what one only desires to see. By recreating visual experience through linguistic means, the poem becomes, out of necessity, also a tale of the act of perception. References to other senses not only emphasize certain characteristics of the object but, above all, expose the limitations of sight, its dependence on memory and imagination. Naturalness and artificiality are therefore present in observation from the very beginning.

I’m glad I used “objectivized” and not “objective,” which settles the Krapp argument tentatively in favor of me being the same person now and then. Sight as Bishop constructed it in her poetry was never “pure,” innocent, or unquestionable. Not all-embracing, not all-knowing. Tricky.

About sight in poetry, she wrote:

Off and on I have written out a poem called “Grandmother’s Glass Eye” which should be about the problem of writing poetry. The situation of my grandmother strikes me as rather like the situation of a poet: the difficulty of combining the real with the decidedly un-real; the natural with the unnatural; the curious effect a poem produces of being as normal as sight and yet as synthetic, as artificial, as a glass eye.

(Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box 212).

Although this applies to representation of sight, I think it could be extended first to extraliterary representation and then to conceptualizing sight as such. Not that this hasn’t been done, because it has — if it hadn’t, I wouldn’t even be asking about this, because the notion of disembodied objectivity still has rather strong appeal.

I’m thinking of Bishop’s modesty as pitted against the Objectivity of scientific representation. Remember what she did in Georgaphy III? The series of questions that opens that volume creates a skeptical lens through which to view space, distances, places, and phenomena from the poems. Sight according to Bishop is a modest sense. So modest that in “Poem” Bishop cuts it off from visionary pretences–

Our visions coincided—“visions” is
too serious a word—our looks, two looks

Is modest sight too dubious for science? Is vision the locus of objectivity? How can objectivity be questioned?

I could probably turn now towards modest sight as a david to scientific vision’s goliath in Bishop’s poetry, but in this sketchy post I’ll go in the other direction.

Whether scientists like it or not (and I know a few who don’t, because they will insist that linguistic is not a “real” science), language plays with them and their findings. The “objectivity” that is touted as the ultimate truth of inquiry and representation is language pulling their strings (and having its strings pulled to some extent). The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis after a bath in champagne. The legacy of sentimental novels, newspaper articles, and political propaganda entering “serious” research (not like the wishy-washy humanities) all the time, quietly, unnoticed. Sic!

Apologies for enjoying the irony so much (with probably more than a hint of a humanities “complex”). Being in language is inescapable as is being in culture, politics, society. An objectivity which claims that this is possible has ulterior motives. It’s an enticing objectivity, with pretentions of godhood, one floating above the mundane in an impossible trick of its vision.

Whatever I could say has already been said in a more cogent and convincing way by Donna Haraway, so I will let the quotes from “Situated Knowledges” do my work for me.

I would like to insist on the embodied nature of all vision, and so reclaim the sensory system that has been used to signify a leap out of the marked body and into a conquering gaze from nowhere. This is the gaze that mythically inscribed all the marked bodies, that makes the unmarked category claim the power to see and not be seen, to represent while escaping representation. [...]

The visualizing technologies are without apparent limit [...]. [...]Vision in this technological feast becomes unregulated gluttony; all perspective gives way to infinitely mobile vision, which no longer seems just mythically about the god-trick, this eye fucks the world to make techno-monsters. [...]

A tribute to this technology of direct, devouring, generative, and unrestricted vision, whose technological mediations are simultaneously celebrated and presented as utterly transparent, the volume celebrating the 100th anniversary of the National Geographic society closes its survey of the magazine’s quest literature, effected through its amazing photography, with two juxtaposed chapters. The first is on “Space,” introduced by the epigraph, “The choice is the universe–or nothing” (Bryan, 1987, p. 352). Indeed. This chapter recounts the exploits the exploits of the race and displays the colour-enhanced “snapshots” of the outer planets reassembled from digitalized signals transmitted across vast space to let the viewer “experience” the moment of discovery in immediate vision of the “object.” These fabulous objects come to us simulataneously as indubitable recordings of what is simply there and as heroic feats of techno-scientific production. The next chapter is the twin of outer space: “Inner Space,” introduced by the epigraph, “The stuff of stars has come alive” (Bryan, 1987, p. 454). Here, the reader is brought to the realm of the infinitesimal, objectified by means of radiation outside the wavelengths that “normally” are perceived by hominid primates, i.e., the beams of lasers and scanning electron microscopes, whose signals are processed into the wonderful full-colour snapshots of defending T cells and invading viruses.

But of course that view of infinite vision is an illusion, a god-trick. I would like to suggest how our insisting metaphorically on the particularity and embodiment of all vision (though not necessarily organic embodiment and including technological mediation), and not giving in to the tempting myths of vision as a route to disembodiment and second-birthing, allows us to construct a usable, but not an innocent objectivity.

(Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of the Partial Perspective.”The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader. New York: Routledge, 2004. 86-87)

I don’t know what’s happening with psychology today, but it seems like it’s embracing the accusations of being a pseudo-science. I don’t find it remotely amusing.

Thanks to Denise for linking to Slant Truth’s analysis of an outrageously inane piece on “human nature.”

For a while now I’ve been trying to figure out a response to a thread on Feminism 101 about rape and evolution. The problem is that I don’t follow closely what is going on in psychology, I tend to read only what I find interesting for my own work, and that isn’t necessarily very recent… Evolutionary psychology has, in my opinion (and I haven’t read more than a handful of articles), a cool name like a fig leaf covering its intellectual poverty. Furthermore, the explanation of everything as “natural” and “an outcome of evolution” as practiced by its proponents is far more damaging than extreme relativism. Who can argue with “human nature,” since we don’t even know what it is? So when we get aberrations from racism to rape explained by the notion of “human nature,” what else is there to do but sit down and cry?

This is psychology at its worst, stabbing itself right in the heart. If it’s all just evolution and overpowering nature, then there is no point in any kind of therapeutic work or any theorizing beyond this slavish essentialism. If psychology as a discipline and practice disappears, it will only have to thank this trend to portray deviations as something natural and organic as carrots.

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I’m slow. I wish I had found it earlier, but it’s no use crying over spilt milk, so I link now (lepiej późno niż wcale): The Evopsych Bingo is fabulous. Found on Punkassblog via Hoyden About Town. Kudos for the brilliant idea.

Thinking is dirty. Let’s outlaw it. There is nothing more violently protested against than thinking. It verges on the obscene, it’s everything our traditions despise. Let’s write manuals against thinking; teach your brain to be moderate — know when one ought to defecate, when to say thank you, and halt right there. Let’s make it new modesty: “don’t you dare show off those gray cells, don’t you dare overexercise them!”

Should someone still be tempted to engage in the outrageous activity, we will make them feel sordid and guilty. Let’s give them a lesson on how to behave, let’s unwind their brains and eat them out with teaspoons. Till all we have is the regular ticking of clockwork people.

That’s just me, reading about yet another brilliant strategy to convert women to embrace “modest behavior” (here). If you had the impression it was about sex, do some dirty thinking, because that’s what it is about. Congratulations on the sophisticated strategy, dear guardians of morals; how noble of you to use guilt and shame as arguments against free thought and choice. How dirty it is to think one is allowed to think.