Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Who is the Other?

I just realised now that the Other as a concept can be prominalised as either "you" or "them." This differential pronominalisation has massive consequences for the ethical relationship between the Self and Other.

If the relationship is "you and me/us," then there is a connection, a dialogue, arguably an ethical relationship. This is a relationship between two subjectivities.

By contrast, if the relationship is "them and me/us," this is an objectifying relationship, one that does not entail dialogue, relationship or connection.

I read the following passage in an article I was reading for my thesis (Riggins, 'The rhetoric of Othering'): "Self and external Other may be understood as unique individuals (I and You) or as collectives that are thought to share similar characteristics (We and They)." I think Riggins here is trying to contrast the idea of individuals vs collectives (singular vs plural), but in shifting from the singular to the plural, he also changed person - from second to third. This slippage seems remarkable to me, but is perhaps common.

I wonder if this has a relationship with how people perceive Others - like you know how prejudiced people sometimes individualise the specific Others that they know, in contrast to the amorphous Them? So for example, you get sentiments like "I don't like Asians, I know Michael is Asian, but he's different to the rest of them" or "Homosexuals are such and such, but Jane is OK."

I've been thinking for a while now that part of the process of de-Othering is establishing relationships of dialogue, changing "us/them" relationships into "us/you."

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

timetabling my life

For the past fortnight, I've been time-tabling my time on study days (Monday-Friday). It was something I've known for a while would help to increase my productivity, but at a cost of sponteneity and a sense of freedom. I used to do it in the later years of high school, and it worked well, but meant that I wasn't very spontaneous or social. So for several months I resisted the idea of getting back into that way of being. But I realised that a lack of structure also had its own associated stresses for me - ironically, I was increasingly coming to feel like I had no control over my time, because every minute could be thesis time! And, my notes and texts and forms were all getting jumbled on my desk, and it was all seeming to get more and more out of control.

I think the main problem is that I LOVE to read, and I LOVE to garden, and I LOVE to make things, and I LOVE to hang out with my loved ones, ... well the point here is that there are many things that I love, and they could theoretically fill all my time. But doing a Phd also involves things that are less fun, like writing up my notes (way less interesting than reading new material), organising my materials (again, less interesting than other stuff), etc. So, some things simply weren't getting done - there was always something more fun to do.

I was getting stressed, though, cos these "unfinished" things were all mentally filed away somewhere in my head as "things I should have done." It's like that some people can work quite happily like that, either getting through with a degree of disorganisation, or just knowing how to work things out for themselves. But it was driving me nuts!

So I've been experimenting with making lists every morning (what a treat! I LOVE making lists! ticking things off is such a delight!), dividing up my time, usually with a few hours of unstructured time (before 9, around lunch and early evening) to do whatever I please. That allows me a degree of sponteneity, and if something comes up during "work" time, I have some flexibility to shift time around. And, I take notes at the end of each day on how my timetabling worked out in practice (e.g. "Need a full half-hour to get ready for and then get to pilates;" "needed two-hour block, not one-hour block, for writing", etc).

It's working so far. I feel like I have MORE time to do what I want. Which is cool. We'll see if after a while it feels draconian or imprisoning. But I'm definitely getting more work done and my stress levels are way better, so that's it's thumbs up so far.

Thursday, September 13, 2007

territorial propriety

Rey Chow, an American cultural theorist with roots in Hong Kong, writes that she speaks from a position as someone who does "not have claims to territorial propriety or cultural centrality." I'd never really thought about the spatial nature of cultural marginality before.

But when I think about it, I recognise this in myself as a queer, and in the context of disability too. For example, one of my texts claims "this is our community" referring to disabled people; but in doing so, the text reflects the fact that this could be doubted; it's kinda like John Howard (was it?) declaring to a room of Greek-Australians that "I see before me Australians". Like anyone else present doubted this??

Historically, disabled people have been socially excluded spatially, like non-Anglos have been, internally contained in institutions, and prevented from entering the country through immigration policies (that continue to this day to specifically exclude disabled people as potential migrants).

It's less clear how queers are spatially excluded. As a queer, I read in the papers today that Howard continues to assert that people in same-sex relationships should not have equal rights as de facto heteros; Romana the queer officer at UMPA wrote a great article in the recent UMPA mag about how queers are excluded on campus through the heteronormativity of the environment- that is, even where homophobia isn't as overt as Howard wishes it were, there is an exclusion through a lack of visibility, or overt inclusion.

By the way, as a complete aside, one of the women in a reading group I'm in said yesterday that the Vietnamese expression for "Vietnamese-Australian" is "Australian with roots in Vietnam". Isn't that interesting? I think it conveys a relationship with Vietnam and Vietnamese identity that is quite different from the essentialising expression "Vietnamese-Australian."

reading in a beautiful place

was just thinking this morning that one of my greatest pleasures in life is reading something intellectually stimulating and personally grounded, while enjoying a beautiful physical location , like a park on a sunny day, or somewhere indoors with a view on a stormy rainy day, or Coburg square when its humming with activity, or anywhere with jessie sleeping up against my body.

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

-isms and -centrisms

I've been thinking about how there's no word for "disablism" comparable to sexism, racism and homophobia. But, there is a concept-word ableism (comparable to androcentrism, ethnocentrism/Eurocentrism/Anglocentrism, and heterocentrism). And yet, the texts that I have been collecting for my thesis that theoretically challenge "disablism" don't challenge ablism, in fact they tend to reproduce it. I think that's likely to be one of the observations that I explore - the fact that challenging the "-ism" often takes the form of reinforcing the "-centrism".
So, for example, there's this poster I've been analysing (you might have seen it around, especially at train stations, it's pretty common). It has two men-of-colour standing next to each other in a train, with their faces visible, and two separate white women sitting with their faces turned away or heavily cropped. The text says "We're working for our future. Just like you." I'm arguing that this text creates an (objectified) "us," who is coloured, and a (subjectified) "you" (the viewer) who is white; the poster tries to combat racism - stigmatisation of coloured people - by saying they are the same as white people. This reinforces the centrality and even the "normality" of whiteness. It also serves to erase any distinctiveness of people of colour (as either a group, or as many different groups. In fact, I'd argue that the grouping of the two men together (with quite visible "racial" differences) contrasts with the separateness of the two white women - suggesting a sense of "them" (coloured people) being a homogenous group, while white people are allowed to be individuals). The text reinforces Anglo-centrism, while trying to challenge racism.

Another poster (it's less common and it took me ages to find one I could photograph) has the icon for a disabled person, but holding a tennis racquet. The main text says "See the person, not the disability" while much smaller text says "Disability means possibility" Again, while this text is obviously trying to combat "disablism" - stigmatisation of disabled people - it does so by reproducing ableism. It does this in several ways. It objectifies disabled people (who are the person seen, not the person seeing), while subjectifying non-disabled people (because those with disabilities don't just see disability, they experience/live it!). It also tells the viewer to ignore any distinctiveness associated with disability, erasing disability culture(s), disabled experiences and disabled perspectives on the world. And, the word "possibility" to me is like Yooralla's "People helping people achieve" - what is "possible" seems to be things commonly associated with ability - like playing tennis. It reminds me of something I read that suggested the internet was created by people on the aspergers-autism spectrum, to meet their needs (intellectual and communicative). What this idea opened up for me was the idea that people with disabilities aren't just impaired able-bodies, who are able to do things that able-bodied people do, but not so well (unless they are super-crips, as Eli Clare calls them) - disability is a mode of inhabiting the world that has various limitations and various possibilities - possibilities that aren't immediately obvious to people whose main experience of disability is ableism. I believe that the experiences of disabled people are a necessary part of an elaborated understanding what disability can mean.

Sunday, September 9, 2007

epistemic privilege

I'm interested in the concept of "epistemic privilege" - the idea that those who are marginalised occupy a position of privilege in terms of understanding "how the world works".

I'm not sure who first used this particular expression, but it probably originated in Marx's claim that the ruling ideas of any historical period are those of the ruling class. This starting point has been elaborated into "standpoint theory" (e.g. by Nancy Hartstock, Sandra Harding), which focuses beyond class to looking at marginalised people and their (our) exclusion from the construction of knowledge. Harding argues that marginalised people are in a privileged position to access "objective truth" (she writes about science), because marginalized groups learn the dominant viewpoint while experiencing its limitations, and hence are in the best position to see its limitations. This certainly resonates with my experience, especially in the context of mental health diagnosis.

Of course, this idea must be elaborated to explore complexities, e.g. (i) how far does epistemic privilege extend? e.g. do marginalised people have a privileged understanding of phenomena beyond the specificities of their marginalisation (e.g. of "science" as Harding claims)? (ii) surely men can come to understand relations of sexism, or does their position of privilege intrinsically preclude their understanding? (iii) how do multiple axes of marginalisation intersect? (iv) is it intrinsic to the positioning, or does one have to have "class consciousness" to have access to epistemic privilege? - I know Marx has ideas on this, but I haven't read any Marx.

While this idea could be problematic if it essentialises or reifies the centre/margin distinction, there's definitely something to it. Like all operations of privilege, it has to encompass plurality and diversity (without losing sight of hierarchical relations within diversity).

Also, to finish off, here's a passage from Said's work (the guy who wrote Orientalism and inspired postcolonialism as an intellectual enterprise). I think this captures the relationship between personal experience and political ideas:
"There is therefore this quite complicated mix between the private and public worlds, my own history, values, writing and positions as they derive from my experiences, on the one hand, and on the other hand, how these enter into the social world where people debate and make decisions about war and freedom and justice." (Representations of the Intellectual, 1994:9)

Saturday, September 8, 2007

maxim of relevance?

I've been thinking about a particular element of thesis lately - the idea that when you state something, you invoke its opposite. So, for example, when you say something like "Disability no barrier to artistic ability" (as one of my texts does), this invokes the suggestion that "disability is a barrier to artistic ability" or perhaps something like "some people think that disability is a barrier to artistic ability". I just realised that one way of explaining this is with recourse to Grice's maxim of relevance.

OK, quick crash course in pragmatics. A guy called Paul Grice suggested (in 1975) that people basically tend the follow these rules in normal conversations:
(i) Maxim of Quality: do not say what you believe to be false or what you lack evidence for;
(ii) Maxim of Quantity: be as informative as required (but neither more or less so);
(iii) Maxim of Relevance: be relevant
(iv) Maxim of Manner: avoid obscurity, ambiguity, prolixity, etc. be orderly.
He argued that people don't always follow these maxims, but when they do, they can be understood as "violating" one (or more). So, for example, if you do say something that is apparently irrelevant, the hearer assumes that there is some reason for this - eg. that the statement is actually relevant (somehow), or that the speaker is intending something else to be understood.

Anyway, I've been thinking that the statement "Disability no barrier to artistic ability" is interpretable as consistent with the maxim or relevance only in a context where there is a prior assumption that "some people think that disablity is a barrier" ...

anyway, Jan's pestering me (in a lovely way) to walk Jessie with her, so I'll leave it there ...

Thursday, September 6, 2007

apocalypto

do you ever have a sudden realisation that futuristic apocalyptic visions in movies are unnecessary - we're already living in a synthetic concrete grimy life-destroying world? this morning, i was walking up sydney rd (not the most lushly vegetated street in melbourne), going to get money out of the atm. the sky above me was grey and there was a low-flying aeroplane that was suddenly seemed a terrifying, mechanical bird. all around me were rows of concrete boxes ("shops"), asphalt underfoot where there should have been dirt and things growing, everything was covered with a layer of of toxic filth, scraps of synthetic trash floated along various surfaces, and then there were the cars ... do cars ever suddenly appear to you (like they probably do all the time to non-civilised animals) as terrifying, sliding smoothly but so quickly in their mechanical linear motion? in my hand was a piece of plastic, plastic that i needed so i could get food, by sticking it in a big metal machine that gave me bits of plastic that i could exchange for plastic food (coffee and croissants).

lately, i've been reading R.D. Laing (anti-psychiatrist, "The politics of experience"). he argues that being "normal" in this world means assimilating into a crazy world. the radical environmentalist Derrick Jensen argues similarly, that we must all be mad to keep on pretending that the levels of environmental and other abuse that we depend on to maintain our way of life is somehow "normal". ... maybe this was an experiential expression of
these intellectual engagements, but i suspect it was the animal me, barely awake from sleep and not yet fully in "civilised human" mode.

i really need to move to the country some time ...