Liz+and+Liz

Liz & Liz

__Charitable Readings__

Wilson writes that ‘we have come to be astute about the body while being ignorant about anatomy and… feminism’s relations to biological data have tended to be skeptical or indifferent rather than speculative, engaged, fascinated, surprised, enthusiastic, amused, or astonished’ (69). In other words, opening up to a wider range of affects that could drive inquiry and establishing useful relationships with types of ‘hard scientific’ data that have been largely ignored could help us account for exceedingly complex situations and navigate difficult decisions that must be taken despite a great deal of uncertainty.

The call for charitable readings where there has previously been a monopoly of skepticism seems consistent with the strategy in ethnography and other research methods to not impose our preconceptions on data. It also resonates with ‘using the tools of the master’ as when the editors of Adbusters magazine appropriate techniques of persuasion from companies they critique. But Adbusters remains largely oppositional. We might also consider what loose and heterogeneous alliances might be formed that play off various double-binds.

__Organic Thought__

‘The psychotic disintegration consequent of severe trauma reveals to Ferenczi a bedrock of organic thought…’ (75).

I just watched a special on Dateline (or some such show) that investigated ‘broken heart syndrome.’ In states of extreme psychological distress, some patients’ hearts became very rigid and could not pump blood effectively, leading to what looks like a heart attack. Is the rigid heart another example of ‘organic thought?’

‘The aid given by the musculature of the intestines is not that of passive substrate awaiting the animating influence of the unconscious but, rather, that of an interested broker of psychosomatic events’ (Wilson, 73).

‘Most of the body’s serotonin (about ninety-five percent) is to be found in the complex neural networks that innervate the gut’ (85).

I’m not sure I quite understand Wilson’s concept of ‘organic thought,’ but it seems that, in part, she is arguing that the body isn’t just a machine controlled by the brain. On the contrary, thought is distributed throughout the body. But thought can’t be contained in individual bodies. The ‘actual,’ ‘physical’ orientation of my brain and body is directly related to interaction with other humans, pets, and nonliving matter. If the fact that anti-depressants work directly on the gut is evidence for organic thought, would anti-depressants given to a family member that ‘cure’ my own depression be evidence for collective consciousness?

__Dynamic__

Bio: ‘If biological substrate was studied dynamically, the excessive concern with the utility (rationality) of organs that characterizes traditional biological knowledges could be supplanted with a more intricate account of their capacity for pleasure, for the expression of wishes, and for complicated thought’ (Wilson, 76).

Politics: ‘These essays speculate on the becoming-art of politics; that is, they share a common interest in advocating a politics of surprise, a politics that cannot be mapped out in advance, a politics linked to invention, directed more at experimentation in ways of living than in policy and step-by-step directed change, a politics invested more in its processes than its results’ (Grosz, 2). ‘…we can subscribe to a theory of the impersonal (and ultimately a “politics of imperceptibility,” the opposite of identity politics: a politics of acts, not identities), in which inhuman forces, forces that are both living and nonliving… are acknowledged and allowed to displace the centrality of both consciousness and the unconscious’ (Grosz, 190).

Ontology: ‘The covered-over debt that knowledges, epistemologies, methodologies – that is, various practices of knowledge-production – owe to that which conditions and incites knowledge: the real, the outside, materiality, things, forces, events, that which preexist knowledge production, signification, or representation and constrains and limits, as well as provokes and engenders, the production of knowledges, including the natural sciences… ‘The real,’ ‘being,’ ‘materiality,’ ‘nature,’ those terms usually associated with the unchanging, must themselves be opened up to their immaterial or extramaterial virtualities or becomings, to the temporal forces of endless change…’ (Grosz, 5).

Nature: ‘Nature is understood in terms of dynamic forces, fields of transformation and upheaval, rather than as a static fixity, passive, worked over, transformed and dynamized only by culture, a view prevalent in social, political, and cultural theory’ (Grosz, 7).

Life: ‘Life is a mode of self-organization that overcomes itself, diverges from itself, evolves into something different over time.’ ‘Darwin’s gift to the humanities and social science, a concept of life as dynamic, collective, change’ (Grosz, 36).

Darwin: Offers ‘…a profound and complex account of the organic becoming of matter, of the strategies of survival and the generation of multiple modes of becomings in the face of the obstacles or problems of existence that life poses for them’ (33). ‘…being is transformed into becoming, essence is transformed into existence, the past and the present are superseded and overwritten by the future’ (Grosz, 36). Darwin thus offers ways to theorize anti-essentialism and anti-teleological accounts (determinism).

Culture: ‘It is the insistence of such intractable problems, problems that do not have solutions but generate styles of living, that prompts human, or cultural, innovation and ingenuity, self-overcoming, and the creation of the new. Cultural life does not assimilate and make over the natural order; instead, it endlessly narrows down and simplifies, but also complexifies and expands the natural’ (Grosz, 52).