Categorization and the charade of identity

In their post from last week, Bryan and Zach argue that the panoptic and the biopolitical, as the two complementary forms of power theorized by Foucault, are irreconcilably enmeshed in one another.  To me, this claim is not wildly contentious in and of itself—I’d argue that many of us, as critics, defer to Foucault on this point.  Further, though, Bryan and Zach argue against Nancy Armstrong and claim that “identity and … our relationship to the biopolitical and the panoptic” are not reducible to gender, race, class, or any other easily extricable heuristic of identification.  This may be true enough in an abstract sense—as commentators on Bryan and Zach’s post suggest, the formal constraints of chapters, articles, or blog posts are sometimes the primary or only reason (right or wrong) for isolating single vectors of identification for analysis.  But should we dismiss the notion that the “charade” of isolating identities can be critically productive?  This is a question we have grappled with previously:  what kind of longevity do fields like Chicano/a studies, African American studies, feminist and gender studies, or queer studies have (if “longevity” is an accurate barometer of critical value)?

Implicitly, Bryan and Zach raise a question that Jasbir Puar addresses within the realm of contemporary queer studies, namely, whether the stabilizing qualities of an intersectional analysis of identity (taken as a “standpoint epistemology”) preclude political and critical utility.  Of course it’s true that identities as such are capitalist-neoliberal fictions, but I would argue, alongside Puar, that there is no outside of identity (because, similarly, there is no outside of power or capital).  Our critical methods require revision when they treat identity as a means of naming difference, not when they use identity, charade though it may be, as a tool for interrogating subjection.  Puar, for example, at times advocates Deleuzean assemblage in place of intersectionality, noting that assemblage theory conceives of “[c]ategories—race, gender, sexuality— … as events, actions, and encounters between bodies, rather than as simply entities and attributes of subjects.”  These categories are constantly in flux and in re/negotiation, not in a performative sense, but in the sense that a single subject’s gendering, for instance, is neither constant nor generalizable.  The biopolitical and the panoptic may work “upon all members in a society, simultaneously,” as Zach and Bryan argue, but identity as a product of such subjection may still be singularly categorized at a particular moment, encounter, or event.

Consider Mel Chen’s “Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections.”  Her discussion of the “toxic sensorium”—her own “set of states and experiences” that have been categorized as heavy metal poisoning (273)—demonstrates the fleeting or highly contextual quality of what Chen calls “individuated property-assignation” (274), a version of the categorization that Puar mentions.  This property assignation occurs, for Chen, by encounter and event.  Despite her disclaimer, Chen very self-consciously produces a narrative of herself as the “perfect” toxified subject (273) because this is the only categorized subject that can emerge from the narrative she presents.  This is not to say that her turn to the first-person is “fiction” in a derogatory sense, but only that it is one autobiographical fiction among multiple, simultaneous narratives of the categorized (identified) subject.  Consider also Claire Vaye Watkins’ performative, fictionalized self in “Ghosts, Cowboys.”  Watkins makes only allusive gestures to categorization as a form of subjection, but her production of a “fictional” self-as-narrator who, in turn, narrates simultaneous “fictional” histories of herself and her family suggests the critical necessity of fabrication.  Of course these forms of inquiry are, at some level, charades, but does this mean that they cannot participate in what Chen calls “knowledge production” (273)?

word count:  614

Move along, now.

The snake is eating its tail. I originally wanted to put Chen in dialogue with Bryan’s October 19th post, “Dead Text, Living Text.” I was going to draw some pithy connections between Colebrook and Chen, then transition into problematizing some matters of semantics -- question whether the text need be “‘dead’ in and of itself” if we might instead place it along some spectrum of Chen’s animacy, etc. Maybe remind us all of the couch image since that was rather funny and it lightens the mood a bit etc. Nice clean little blog post to wrap up the quarter and let me get back to my very messy seminar papers.

Unfortunately Bryan has beat me to it (you can’t just respond to your own post, Bryan! That was not in the prompt!) and furthermore he has opened up a can of worms (you can’t talk about how a text makes you feel, Bryan! Save all this empathy and compassion for creative writing™) so stark and scary and honest that I think I need to start digging in the dirt, too.

The reason I don’t like writing these posts about my primary text anymore (sorry John, Janie, Tea Cake) is that there is something about performing this exercise again and again (and again) that sets off that muttering, mumbling little voice about the work of writing about literature.

I’ve heard a thing or two about monotony, about stakes. Everyone in my family does that sort of endlessly repetitive labor that could prompt an existential crisis if they weren’t already so damn tired. Punching holes in course readers until computers learn to do it faster, better. Picking up heavy boxes and putting them down somewhere else. Job-not-a-career-sort-of-work. Your-labor-doesn’t-define-you-sort-of-work. Pack-up-for-the-day-go-home-and-hug-your-kids sort of work. My parents do it. Lots of people do it.

But academia is supposed to be different, right? (This is really a question). There is supposed to be something intrinsically different about knowledge production as opposed to bound course reader production or picking up heavy shit production. When I write up another nice tidy little blog post about Their Eyes Were Watching God and deconstruction I am ostensibly doing labor that is in some sense meant to be outside the production/consumption machine. I’m adding to a body of knowledge. I am contributing to a discourse. One day I will enter the classroom and facilitate the development of critical thinking.

So what is this ruddy work of teasing out arguments about literature? When I finish a seminar paper, am I practicing a craft or just producing my worth? Is it too unprofessional to say that what I find enjoyable about writing papers is the illicit, biased, subjective, creative work of taking someone else’s text and making it speak a certain way? To think alongside an author, but ultimately aim to make a “creative” work of my own, a text with some literary chops of its own?

I want to support the union. I want to understand how TAs are underpaid and adjuncts are wrenched into a broken machine like some underhanded duct tape repair job. But I’m getting paid more right now than my parents ever have to do I-don’t-even-know-what. Am I a producer, a consumer, or a fraud?

So this isn’t really about Janie or Tea Cake or Chen, Colebrook, or Bryan. I just want to know if other people are struggling with the same questions. If nobody is going to read our dissertations, why bother writing them? If the importance of reading literature has something to do with bettering ourselves as people -- getting students to think for themselves, develop empathy, carry that empathy and compassion and search for that disorienting heartfull sort of feeling that reading truly good books gives us -- then why don’t we drop the pretense and focus on teaching? (This is also really a question).

Reading Gawain and Making Manifest (A response to Kate and my last post for President Obama)

In her post “Amnesia and the Problem of ‘Invisible’ Institutions,” Kate asks:

How do conscious participation and endorsement play a role in the power of the institution? What would it mean for Big Criticism and its offshoots to forget the influence of institutions on their historical present?

In Kate’s formulation, this overlooking is “forgetting” and “an inability to see or remember one’s institutional indebtedness…causes a sort of pathological rupturing.” In my response to Kate’s post that week:  “I would argue that where your post states an ‘amnesia’ on Faraday’s part about the institutions in flux, I read a suspension of disbelief, a willing delusion that an older system to which one is complacent in, comfortable with and reverent to is actually thriving.” The question, in this formulation, is not “What would it mean for Big Criticism and its offshoots to forget the influence of institutions on their historical present?” but rather “what would it mean for Big Criticism and its offshoots to disbelieve the influence of institutions on their historical present?”

Yet in Sir Gawain, we find that the green girdle operates as a nexus of seeing, remembering and believing for Gawain and his supporting cast; even further, the green girdle is arguably where Gawain experiences his pathological rupture where discontinuity between escaping death and realizing defeat maps itself. When Gawain goes to meet the Green Knight, the latter points to the former’s girdle and says “that is my belt…I know well the tale…and it was all my scheme”  (2357-2360). In this manner, the Green Knight uses the girdle to first reveal himself and then to reveal that he cares less about Gawain and his wife and more “that [Gawain] loved [his] own life” (2367).

Just as Bertilak uses the girdle to reveal his values, so does Gawain; in these valuations we find rupture. By seeing the girdle initially as “a pearl for his plight” (1856), Gawain himself invests the girdle with his personal trepidations and the ability to solve them. Hence, when the Green Knight indicts Gawain, he reacts by grabbing his girdle and pronouncing:

Behold there my falsehood, ill hap behide it!

Your cut taught me cowardice, care for my life,

And coveting came after, contrary both

To largesse and loyalty belonging to knights. (2375-2378). 

This time, the girdle does not simply symbolize his “cowardice” and “care for [his own] life” but as proof of his “falsehood.” The change from magic to falsehood exposes Gawain’s rupture from a pre-girdle “loyalty belonging to knights” to a post-girdle greed for self-preservation. Even further, the transference of the girdle’s initial meaning as a magical object to now an object of falsehood exemplifies Gawain’s act and materials of reading. He moves from dealing with a magical/miracle tale to an object lesson. Or we could also say, more glibly, that Gawain first accepts the girdle perceptually but afterwards places faith in it didactically.

At stake in Gawain’s girdle holding two meanings is not simply what the object means but the activity of making an object mean something. In pronouncing different judgments on the girdle, Gawain engages not merely in drawing out a symbolic meaning hidden in the girdle, but in making a meaning: reifying it. The work of reifying is to believe in the abstract and to make this belief incarnate. We find that at first, Gawain values magic and his own safety. After realizing Bertliak has bested him, we find that Gawain values his fallen integrity and the desire to learn from his mistake.

What we find in moving away from the perceptual-didactic binary of belief, or even the question of whether one believes at all, is that belief permeates the very acts of making and reading significance. In order for Gawain, or the reader of Gawain, to gain access into what items, individuals or texts mean, both Gawain and we summon forth and place before us our beliefs and values. Reading, then, is always reification. But then—what does that mean for the question we started with: “what would it mean for Big Criticism and its offshoots to disbelieve the influence of institutions on their historical present?” To disbelieve our institutional indebtedness to Big Criticism and the like would be to not read it into our work as what we do. Or more simply, we will it out. In Steven Justice’s formulation: "the presence of [will as] voluntary determination distinguishes belief not only from knowledge, but also from other forms of incomplete cognitive security, like assumption and opinion. Absent evidence of the will’s operation, the discursive traces of belief will be simply indistinguishable from thought as such" (14). Believing, then, is not seeing. It is willing. And in our neat circle of terms, to will for something not to be there, is to reify its absence and to collude with our texts and our eyes to not read it into who we are.