Tabula Rasa Issue 3 (Claremont Colleges Philosophy Journal)

Aaron Morgan (Pomona ’25) Aven Patterson (Pomona ’24) Emily Stoutjesdyk (Pomona ’25) 1 TR2 Lavi Echeverria (Pomona ’23) Maya von Hippel (Pomona ’24) Sam Hernandez (Pomona ’24) Sophie Krop (Pitzer ’24) Tristen Leone (Pomona ’26)

Tabula R asa

Fall 2022

The Claremont Colleges Journal of Philosophy

ISSUE 3

staff EDITOR IN-CHIEF Sam Hernandez (Pomona ’24) MANAGING EDITORS Jon Joey Telebrico (CMC ’23) Maya von Hippel (Pomona ’24) Sunny Jeong-Eimer (Pomona ’25) SENIOR EDITORS Hannah Frasure (Pomona ’24) Jack Stern (CMC ’23) Phillip Kong (Pomona ’24) Soo Bin Cho (Pomona ’23)

Tabula Rasa is the undergraduate philosophy journal of the Claremont Colleges, founded in December 2020. Tabula Rasa is published biannually and includes both written pieces and artwork within the realm of philosophy. In creating and publishing Tabula Rasa, we hope to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas and creative work among undergraduate students interested in philosophy.

Etymology: (/’tæbjələ rasə) is the Latin term for “blank slate.” In philosophy, the term is associated with John Locke’s theory that individuals are born without innate mental content, and so knowledge is gained exclusively through sensory experience and perception.

SENIOR ART EDITOR Fangzhangyi (Kylie) Chen (CMC ’23) LAYOUT EDITOR Aaron Morgan (Pomona ’25) DIGITAL COORDINATOR Maggie Zhang (Pomona ’26) CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Aaron Morgan (Pomona ’25) Aven Patterson (Pomona ’24) Emily Stoutjesdyk (Pomona ’25) Lavi Echeverría (Pomona ’23) Maya von Hippel (Pomona ’24) Sam Hernandez (Pomona ’24) Sophie Krop (Pitzer ’24) Tristen Leone (Pomona ’26) RESIDENT ARTISTS Aaron Morgan (Pomona ’25) Adrian Flynn (CMC ’25) Charles Becker (Pomona ’23) Gabe Schuhl (Pomona ’25) Jadyn Lee (Scripps ’24) Joshua Suh (Pomona ’23)

Cover by Lavi Echeverría

Letter FROM the editor I’m very proud to be able to present the Fall 2022 issue of Tabula Rasa. This fall was a stressful time, but the incredibly capable and hardworking staff of the journal worked tirelessly to bring this third issue to fruition. The topics discussed in both art and writing in this volume are wide-ranging, perhaps achieving the broadest scope in the history of the journal: from treatises on religious ethics to the political formations of poststructuralism, from historical examinations of indigenous epistemology to explorations of queer temporality, the Fall 2022 issue is both intellectually rigorous and curious. This volume pushes the boundaries of philosophy, expanding its traditional scope to underdiscussed yet incredibly interesting territory with both the analytical diligence and accessibility of style Tabula Rasa has always sought. We also are happy to present the work of both new and returning artists to the staff, working across an impressive variety of mediums, all engaging philosophical themes in unique and commanding ways.

I want to thank, as always, our faculty advisor, Michael Green for his continued support of the journal; without your help, this volume would not exist today. I also want to thank Patrick Liu, last year’s Editor-in-Chief, for being an invaluable mentor, support, and friend — and for showing me that persistence, above all else, is what counts. I’m also indebted to the Fall issue’s Managing Editors, Jon Joey Telebrico, Sunny Jeong-Eimer, and Maya von Hippel, for their incredible diligence throughout a very difficult semester, as well as to the Senior Editors who made this issue possible: Hannah Frasure, Jack Stern, Phillip Kong, and Soo Bin Cho. Finally, I, and Tabula Rasa as whole, owe an unpayable debt to all of my friends — Aven Patterson, Lavi Echeverría, Maya von Hippel, Sophie Krop, and Aaron Morgan — who contributed additional pieces to this issue to make sure there was a Fall issue to publish. As I’ve already said, probably too much, this semester was hard, and without the immense support of and incredible number of hours put in by everyone here, I am not sure that Tabula Rasa would have survived into the spring. Now, however, having felt the support of the philosophy community here at the Claremont Colleges in the journal’s time of need, I’m optimistic that Tabula Rasa has a resilient and close-knit community behind it, and I have no doubt that I’ll be able to leave the journal in good hands for next fall. Until then, I’m excited for the spring!

As always, please visit our website, tabularasaclaremont.com, to read past issues or submit a piece of your own for the next one. Questions are always welcome at tabularasaclaremont@gmail.com, and submissions at tabularasaclaremont.com/submissions.

Enjoy the issue!

Sam Hernandez, Pomona 25’ Editor-in-Chief

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Contents / fall 2022 Markets, Freedom, and Critique: A Reassessment, Sophie Krop . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Queer Temporalities, Emily Stoutjesdyk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 E-reum, Joshua Suh . . .4. . . . . .TR2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Choosing to Submit, Tristen Leone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 On Predicate Nominatives, Lavi Echeverria . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Ugly Unlovable Objects: Capitalism (Un)veiled, Gabe Schuhl and Aaron Morgan. . . . . . . . 32 Experts and Echo Chambers, Maya von Hippel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Entrapment, Charles Becker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 Rewriting Brotherhood, Aven Patterson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 Directionless, Adrian Flynn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Towards a Critique Without Bannisters, Sophie Krop . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Within Locked Boxes, Aaron Morgan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 Temporality, Jadyn Lee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 Differentiating Difference in Derrida and Deleuze, Sam Hernandez . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

To read this issue online and listen to audio pieces, visit our website:

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Markets, Freedom, and Critique: A reassessment Sophie Krop, Pomona ’24

Markets traditionally have justified themselves by arguing: we just produce what you want. That, as a society, we prioritize the endless proliferation of disposable consumer goods over future planetary viability, or the channeling of research and development resources into F1 racing innovation instead of cancer research, or efficiency gains over community stability, ought not to be seen as an indictment of markets themselves – these liberal theorists rush to remind us – instead, however unfortunately, it is a product simply of our choices within them.

To an extent, they are right. We go to the stores, we create the demand. We may be horrified when we learn that 500 billion dollars of our society’s resources went into the wildly mediocre Avengers movie we didn’t even enjoy - but, we still go to see it. However, we might want to burst out, there is something obviously wrong with this claim. Of course, we want to reply, this reality doesn’t reflect our substantial values; we all would rather live in a world where society’s resources went to cancer research and ending world hunger, to good schools, not to research and development for the 100th Doritos flavor. But, if this is the case, where is the disconnect? After all, as these market enthusiasts point out, we have ethical brands, we can donate to charities1, etc. We could vote with our dollar differently if these really were our values. There is nothing, they contend, intrinsically wrong with markets as a form of decision-making. The problem is simply what we choose to decide; it is our own nature which we must decry.2 In appealing to consumer desires as a means of legitimizing the outcomes of markets, these desires are thus posited as exogenous to entry into the marketplace in which they are expressed. A crucial contribution of critical theory has been to expose how these sorts of claims, which appeal to a subject radically outside of the power structure it then subsequently consents to, are in fact always a 1 As will become clear I hope later in my paper, I regard these sorts of solutions with significant skepticism; especially the pretension that often comes along with them that this range of solutions and choices - those that can be expressed via my choice as an individual consumer alone, and perhaps at the ballot box as well,– constitutes the entirety of what political participation and choice ought to mean. I see it as a radical, and insidious, restriction of what meaningful political participation requires.

2 Economic liberalism’s starting point of analysis is the self-interested, rational individual; making decisions that maximize their utility. What constitutes this utility (an individual’s preferences, what makeup of consumptive capacity vs. leisure time, hotdogs vs. hamburgers etc. will make them happiest) is taken by economics to be exogenous to its models, a given.

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crucial ruse of power. These“juridical notions of power”3 – those that treat power as something which negatively acts upon one from without – always conceal the fact that “the subjects regulated by such structures are, by virtue of being subjected to them, formed, defined, and reproduced in accordance with the requirements of those structures…and these political operations are effectively concealed and naturalized by a political analysis that takes juridical structures as their foundation.”4 Thus, when these consumer preferences are taken as the starting point – only upon which the judgment of market outcomes take place – what is concealed and protected from scrutiny is the very operation that must most vitally be critiqued: the formation of these preferences and desires and the way this is effected by and channeled through – rather6 than independent of – the form of decision making (the market) in which TR2 they are expressed. Horkheimer and Adorno concur. For them, the market’s self-justification consists in “the industry bow[ing] to the vote it has itself rigged.”5 They insist that any hope of understanding the social situation we find ourselves in is abandoned when we make the mistake of treating these sorts of empirical observations as the whole story6; an error – an uncritical subservience to the given, or to the “myth of that which is the case”7 that they see as constituting the essence of the positivist mode of thought at the heart of liberal economics and much political science as well. This leads them to insist that the indispensable contribution of critique is to maintain a critical relationship to these surface facts and behaviors (what I will call in this paper, in terms of the behavior we express in the market, our “surface preferences”).

However, the incontestable recognition that our preferences are not innate, pure, expressions of our autonomous and authoritative will, but are instead contingent, socially formed, at least to a degree, inheritances of the worlds we inhabit, has almost invariably been followed by a further claim: as Horkheimer and Adorno continue the above quote, ”the mentality of the public, which allegedly and actually favors the system of the culture industry, is a part of the system, not an excuse for it”8.

The desires we express in the culture industry’s favor are merely the products of false consciousness, which, therefore, they conclude – and this is the fatal step – we can safely simply dismiss. However, in order to denounce a given political regime or social situation, and insist it must be dismantled, one must inescapably rely on some normative reference point from which such a critique is waged. We must have a notion of our “true interest” in order to declare another to be “false” 9. However, this sort of normative 3 A notion which undergirds the notion of freedom markets operate upon more generally as well, one that says markets best realize our freedom because it minimizes external imposition upon this freedom.

4

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 2011), pg. 2-3.

5 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, ed. Gunzelin Noeri (Stanford University Press, 2002), 106.

6

Max Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” Critical Theory: Selected Essays 188, no. 243 (1972): 1–11.

7

Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment. xii.

8

Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 106.

9 For example, when Marx argues alienation is a social pathology, he is arguing that it is a social condition that harms society as a whole because it prevents us from realizing the good life – defined as the realization of our essential humanity (or species being) through acting upon the world and seeing the world reflected back to us (as the objectified form of our labor) affirming this essence Marx and Engels, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” 1978

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reference point – which always seems to fall back upon a form of legitimation that takes the form of, “because our human nature is x” or “it follows from universal human reason that the just or ideal form of political organization or ethical like is y” – is precisely what we have just exposed as a central ruse of power10. The minute I make such a claim, I seem to fall back into the very same trap as the liberal theorists I just denounced. There is no critical position that could legitimately justify knowledge of our true interest that follows from our true nature as it exists “before” or “outside” of power.

That we are without recourse to these certain foundations, which have provided the traditional means of waging social critique – a true self or interest “behind” or “before” power11 – does not mean we are without the indispensable resources without which politically engaged critique cannot proceed12; 7 TR2 far from it. To embrace this fact of being without recourse is finally to free critique from its fetters, and to release its full potential. What is necessary is thus a model of immanent critique, in contrast to the old foundationalist model: a critical posture that begins with, rather than attempting to find its “point of departure” “behind” or “beyond”, the present moment13. In contrast to the old models of critique which articulate a demand for emancipation from a dominating power structure via recourse to a descriptive appeal to an essential nature that exists safely outside of power – impeded by the power configuration – only upon the arrival at which we will finally be able to declare the authenticity of our decision as a meaningful expression of our true will14. Karsten Schubert identifies in Foucault’s thought an alternative vision of freedom, a redefinition that understands the condition of possibility for freedom in “the capability to criticize one’s own subjectification”; in short, a vision of “freedom as critique.”15 Schubert also makes the case that this redefinition of freedom offers a powerful new political principle by which to judge political institutions. I insist that instead of locating our demand for freedom in a pre-specified content, we might appeal instead to a notion of freedom that is made possible through the form in which our decisions are made; that demands the conditions by which we can make the preferences we express more “substantial”16 (a solely immanent notion, always only partially, provisionally, realized).

10 I am borrowing this general Schema of the problem faced by the traditional critical project of social philosophy from Axel Honneth’s 2021 lectures for his course European Social Philosophy, which offer a refined reformulation of the account he gives in Axel Honneth, “Reconstructive Social Criticism with a Genealogical Proviso: On the Idea of ‘Critique’ in the Frankfurt School,” in Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory (Columbia University Press, 2009) 11

Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” in The Foucault Reader (Pantheon Books, 1984).

12 Nancy Fraser, “Foucault on Modern Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions,” Praxis International 1, no. 3 (1981): 272–87), as Nancy Fraser famously accuses Foucault and, implicitly poststructuralism/postfoundational critique as a whole in her seminal piece; see also the debate staged in (Seyla Benhabib et al., Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (Psychology Press, 1995)) between Fraser (and Seyla Benhabib), taking this position, arguing that a politically engaged critique cannot proceed without the possibility of recourse to these securely established legitimating normative grounds and Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell who argue in defense of the viability and potential of a postfoundational politics and critique.

13

Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” pg. 39.

14 A model that requires that one be able to articulate in advance what autonomous action would look like – i.e. how do I know I am free? because I am acting in this way that if I were truly free I would realize is really in my interest etc.

15

Schubert, Karsten. “Freedom as Critique: Foucault Beyond Anarchism.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 47, pg. 635.

16 This notion of substantial preference– a notion I use as sort of immanent reference point, to distinguish between a preference formed immediately within a set terrain and another, formed in the wake of critical reflection upon said terrain

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In short, one that demands a notion of freedom as critique, a freedom that opens towards itself when the terrain upon which the decision is made, the contours of the field in which it proceeds, are exposed to us. I thus aim to exemplify what critique can give us by applying its tools to the market model and its mode of legitimation that I seek today to make a political argument against. In so doing, I attempt to make a case for critique as an indispensable component of our freedom substantially understood.

Thus, far from making such a politically engaged critique impossible, a critique that proceeds without foundations is one that most compelling can argue against the foreclosing, foundationalist, contentions of the market model. For, if the condition of my freedom is the unceasing, “difficult”17 “work”18 of putting my surface preferences under critical inspection, then a market model that gives these initial 8 TR2 preferences an absolute primacy (“consumer sovereignty”19) – and which naturalizes this move in the very terms by which it justifies itself20 – seems to be a mode of political organization that, far from maximizing my capacity to make meaningful choices about my life as it claims to, is, in reality, a serious impediment to it.

One of the most indispensable things that critique can do for us is to give us the capacity to take a step back from the immediacy of the present moment, and the powerful habituation we experience within it. What this sort of practice most often reveals is that for most of us, most of the time, the way we do things and the way we live are not a reflection of what I will here, under erasure, call our “substantial preference”, but rather simply the product of unexamined inheritances. We don’t do the things we do because we think they are the best way they could be done – and the other options have been thoroughly considered21 – but rather because it has never occurred to us that there was a choice to be had at all. Genealogical critique “exposes the power of terms by which we live; it does violence to their ordinary ordering and situation, and hence to their givenness.”22 Critique exposes the terrain in which

which thus contains a greater awareness of the parameters in which my choice proceeds – will become a key theme as my paper proceeds. I will argue that this is all we have. A central project of my paper seeks to locate a value that can be placed on this notion of substantial preference, a notion which I contend is substantial only when it is understood as being in a permanent state of becoming; the accompaniment to a notion of freedom as critique. I argue that a political model that places value upon creating the conditions for the development of substantial preference is more desirable than the current liberal models that give an uncritical primacy to “surface preference”. I thus use these terms as indicators of a value upon critical reflection and continual revision of the desires we have. In short, a value on a model of critique and a means of locating a notion of meaningful choice in the absence of foundations.

17

Foucault, What is Enlightenment, pg. 41

18

Ibid. pg. Foucault speaks of the “The undefinable work of freedom” 46

19

Nancy Neiman, Markets, Community and Just Infrastructures (Routledge, 2020), pg. 13.

20 Foreclosing the field of choice by eradicating a vocabulary which could even see the constraint involved here,as it equates freedom of choice with a freedom of acting upon unmediated/immediate surface preference (thus concealing the ways that this choice is limited.

21 Of course, the terms I am speaking in here must be understood as always partial, just as I try to distinguish in this paper between surface and substantial preference, I think there are more or less through considerations of options, and thus more or less meaningful choices, and I think I can make this claim despite the fact that the field of choice is always limited, that critical reflection upon this terrain will always be only “partial” and limited. Wendy Brown, “Politics Without Banisters: Genealogical Politics in Nietzsche and Foucault,” in Politics Out of History (Princeton University Press, 2001).

22

Brown, “Politics Without Banisters: Genealogical Politics in Nietzsche and Foucault,” pg. 95.

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a decision is made that has hitherto been naturalized - it thus functions to open up the limits of our thinking by exposing these limits for what they are; expanding the realm of the thinkable to interventions and transformations that would have otherwise remained invisible to us. The role of critique then is to map out the terrain along which judgment proceeds; the grooves in which our thought tends to be channeled, the presumptive habitual moves in which it takes comfort. It seeks to make visible to us how these channels operate, what they foreclose and make invisible, and what they might aim to consolidate.

For example, when in a situation in which the only thinkable avenue for expressing one’s desires is through “voting with one’s (or even with a literal vote at a poll) this channel inevitably prefig9 dollar” TR2 ures the form these desires take. How do I express my wish for social change? I must become an ethical consumer. However unconsciously, I may find myself seeking remedies for my loneliness and isolation by buying products that sell me the promise of community and belonging. Of course, all I am really buying is a new car; thus my desire remains unfulfilled. Even the nostalgic wish for a sort of production before the alienating and dehumanized form of capitalist production itself has been incorporated, with labels such as “made-by-hand” and “home-made” turned into a branding mechanism to increase value.

Here the promise of a meaningful, unalienated, form of relating to each other and to goods we produce is packaged and sold; incorporated into the logic of the commodity relation. The desire for authenticity, meaning, or interpersonal connection, is incorporated and fed back to the consumer, promising falsely this desire can be filled by more consumption. Community, meaning, and belonging, are deployed (as hollow, empty versions of themselves) as marketing devices, something that can be obtained through consuming goods.23 Fulfillment, we are told, is there for us to be found through consumption. Its promise is always dangled over our heads, just out of reach, promising that if we can just buy a little bit more, we will finally attain it. It is an elusive promise. This is because, of course, consumer goods cannot fulfill these desires; but this constrained frame places in the realm of the unthinkable the real means of redress for my loneliness and isolation – community belonging, etc. –and instead leaves me turning towards solutions which can only ever leave me unfilled, but stuck chasing after its endlessly deferred promise. This form of compulsive consumption24 is what the old critical theory would call pathological.

A term with a strong normative valence (presuming a notion of what a healthy society requires that it sets this picture in relief against). However, recognizing the cycles and patterns that any current model channels our decision-making through can be undertaken separately from the process of normative judgment.

Our capacity to meaningfully decide the course of our lives is constricted by the very form in which these decisions take place. Genealogy “aims to make visibly why particular positions and visions

23 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, pg. 111, “The culture industry endlessly cheats its consumers out of what it endlessly promises. The promissory note of pleasure issued by plot and packaging is indefinitely prolonged: the promise, which actually comprises the entire show, disdainfully intimates that there is nothing more to come, that the diner must be satisfied with reading the menu. The desire inflamed by the glossy names and images is served up finally with a celebration of the daily round it sought to escape.”

24

Nancy Neiman, Markets, Community and Just Infrastructures (Routledge, 2020).

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of the future occur to us, and especially to reveal when and where those positions work in the same register of ‘political rationality’ as that which they purport to criticize”25 To reveal functions of our current values that we have hitherto left unexamined. The most radical circumscription of our freedom happens at the moment when we are told that the only legitimate avenue for the expression of our freedom, in fact, the most perfect one (freedom’s very definition), occurs through this channel alone. Precisely because this is what we are told freedom means, we lose the vocabulary to even articulate what is wrong or undesirable about this picture. What is there to complain about, we are the ones making these choices. There is no power impeding them. Critical light thus cannot be shown upon (so long as we accept this frame) the most vital 10 question TR2 of why we make the choices we do, and how the parameters are insidiously set in the making of this formally free choice. The focus on consumer sovereignty as the very definition of freedom thus removes any vocabulary through which we could gain any critical relationship to our preferences as individual consumers, and to the model of decision-making which gives them absolute priority.

I expect many of those reading my paper will hear these market enthusiasts claim that markets are just a reflection of how we really feel and what we really want, and will respond by saying wait a minute that feels wrong. In fact, in my daily life, I don’t feel I am making meaningful choices about the society I am in and the values I want to govern it. Instead, I get the sense that most of us feel radically disempowered, confronted from without by a social world that we feel is guided by social forces we can’t begin to understand and feel powerless to change. If I were to tell people about the romantic terms in which these economists speak on the street, went to them and said: isn’t it wonderful – it is us who, the everyday people in your community, decide how the world works, what we should values, where our societal resources are best spent – I think the vast majority would think I was from an alien planet. This experience of a disconnect, of an impasse26, between the terms and vocabulary that are available to me, and a sense that these terms are overly constrictive upon my capacity to have a meaningful life, “ is the juncture from which critique emerges, where critique is understood as an interrogation of the terms by which life is constrained in order to open up the possibility of different modes of living”27. I have sought to exemplify in the above critique the operation of the naturalizing fiction (negative freedom and its narrow definition) by which markets justify themselves, and how critique can give us a vocabulary through which we can articulate this feeling of a disconnect.

My paper has set out to undertake a double task. On one hand, it has sought to employ, and 25

Brown, pg. 109-110.

26 Butler reminds us that critique always begins from an impasse. From a problem that emerges from within the present moment. This offers immanent critique a means to justify, solely immanently (in contrast to models that condemned the order they sought to critique through appeals to transcendental principles such as a certain knowledge of what the good life would require derived from our true human nature) a means of normative justification. Critique that begins only from the present moment can argue that the present moment must be intervened in simply as a product of a recognition that the current set of terms are not working (judged solely against this immanent yardstick of “contemporary reality” (Foucault, What is Enlightenment, pg. 46) and thus propose that, provisionally, an intervention might help alleviate this impasse; always made with the understanding that these new set of terms will require further critique, and revision. Judith Butler, “What Is Critique?” in The Judith Butler Reader, ed. Sara Salih (Wiley, 2004), pg. 308.

27

Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (Psychology Press, 2004), pg. 3-4

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exemplify, a set of critical tools whose aim was to make visible the set of naturalizing moves by which markets seek to legitimate themselves as just that. In so doing, my paper has attempted to contribute to the vocabulary by which one could begin to recognize the operations of the markets in narrowing the choices available to us. I seek to locate here a set of tools by which this demand for change might be articulated, what its initial targets might have to be (a notion of freedom itself that market logics consistently attempt to consolidate, a vocabulary for identifying how this legitimating claim functions). It might point us towards considering a different model of political decision-making altogether, one which places greater value on iterative experimentation, critical reflection and reevaluation, and debate; such as a deliberative democratic11political TR2model. Certainly, a political movement that puts such a model on the table at least would serve to contest a narrative about what freedom means that seems to constrain us, empowering us to realize that the extent of our freedom is not simply to react but to decide and revise the frame of our decision itself, again and again. A deliberative democratic model seems to be a step towards this foregrounding where the locus of our freedom resides, not in the content of the solutions to which we arrive – in what we decide – but rather, in the act of deciding and reflecting itself, together.

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Queer temporalities: on childhood, heternormativity, and resistance Emily Stoutjesdyk, Pomona ’25

On November 14th of this year, a school board in Keller, Texas passed a measure to pull all books from the library shelves that depict any sort of gender fluidity. As the measure was deliberated, war waged between the supporters of the board and the defenders of trans and nonbinary students. Suicide statistics collided with bible verses, accusations of Satanic radicalization against cries for recognition and representation.1 Among the community members in favor of the ban, one talking point emerged time and time again: “protect the youth’s innocence.”2 This slogan posits that childhood innocence is antithetical to queerness. Framing gender fluidity as a threat in this way implicitly associates it with dangers of impurity and moral degradation. Through these assertions that trans and nonbinary narratives have no place in any present or future desired for children, queerness is relegated to a temporality of its own.

This violence of removing trans and nonbinary narratives from archives extends across the country, beyond just this Texas town I called home for years. Though these measures are portrayed as being for the sake of the children’s futures, removing trans and nonbinary narratives communicates that trans and nonbinary people have no place in history, the present or the future. This forced nonexistence invokes emotional distress in trans and nonbinary people who are essentially forced back into the closet and told that they do not belong. The queer child, however, complicates these motives for violence, for they contain both oppositional forces of childhood innocence and queerness. This complication calls into question the accuracy of values ascribed to concepts of time, such as childhood and the future. If these notions of temporality can be used to uphold structures of cisheteronormativity, what possibilities of resistance lie in a queer temporality? Using the works of Lee Edelman, Jack Halberstam, Sara Ahmed, and José Muñoz, this paper sets out to use the Keller ISD book ban on gender fluidity in order to interrogate the positioning of queerness as oppositional to childhood innocence. Using queer theories of temporality to reject this binarism reveals possibilities for stepping outside of the drive towards 1 William Joy, “Parent of nonbinary student pushes back on Keller ISD’s new book ban,” WFAA North Texas, November 15th, 2022, https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/local/parents-push-back-against-keller-isd-book-ban-nonbinarytransgender-characters/287-04d3f985-61d0-4ae2-880d-2fbe47215c63.

2 KellerISD, “Keller ISD Board Meeting | November 14th, 2022,” YouTube Video, November 14th, 2022, 3:09:13, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOhv1ovQZ10.

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cisheteronormative futures.

This essay will draw on Cathy Cohen’s description of queerness as everyday existence that embodies “sustained and multisided resistance to systems that seek to normalize our sexuality, exploit our labor, and constrain our vulnerability.”3 This definition of queerness emphasizes the way that members of the LGBTQ+ community are defined through their gender or sexuality’s resistance to dominant power structures. Queerness is the embodied opposition to nonconsensually being forced into the heteronormative constraints of straight time. Straight time refers to the social scripts for living one’s life in accord with heteronormativity. Under straight time, one is expected to enter into a heterosexual partnership, get married, and 13 reproduce TR2 biological offspring within the nuclear family structure. Though there are many queer people who happily live in this structure, straight time’s assertion that it is the only morally acceptable way to live one’s life causes harm.

In order to analyze the opposition set up between queerness and childhood, it is imperative to define what values underlie the conception of youth that KISD sets out to protect. For queer theorist Lee Edelman, the image of the child symbolizes innocence and purity. He posits that the public imagination considers childhood as a time of dependency and helplessness. The child’s purity and inexperience signals an untapped future potential that marks them as a prime object of protection and preservation. For this reason, the child is often invoked as a key concern in political discourse. As Edelman puts it, “the Child remains the horizon of every acknowledged political horizon, the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention.”4 He observes that political appeals to protecting the children are often presented self-evidently as reason for policy action. However, these assumptions are wrongly justified. Edelman is correct that childhood is often viewed as a time of innocence and helplessness.

However, children are not a monolith of purity. Many of them demonstrate independence, knowledge, and maturity. Moreover, children are capable of possessing traits, such as queerness, deemed antithetical to innocence. Under the false binary between childhood and innocence seen in Keller ISD’s policy, the queer child is deemed both the object of protection and the threat itself. Thus, imperatives to protect youth innocence from depictions of queerness are not coherent.

Despite this precarity, the association between childhood and innocence is still often invoked in defense of actions that reproduce implicit scripts of heteronormative futurity. Reproductive futurism holds that political action ought to strive towards futures that reproduce both children and cisheteronormative structures. Edelman describes how reproductive futurism “imposes an ideological limit on political discourse as such, preserving in the process the absolute privilege of heteronormativity by rendering unthinkable [...] the possibility of a queer resistance.”5 Under reproductive futurism, the value of children resides in their promise of reproducing the heteronormative futures that straight time prescribes. Not only are today’s youth the citizens of tomorrow, but they are the bearers of the next generation of children. Reproductive futurism assumes the capacity to produce the next batch of pure 3 Cathy Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian & Gay Studies, 1997, 440.

4

Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Duke University Press, 2004, 3.

5

Edelman, 2.

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innocence and perpetuate the ideal of the nuclear family to be universally desirable by all. There is an economic motivation to this reproduction as well. The next generation of children are also the next generation of workers and consumers. Reproductive futurism encourages the perpetuation of the economic conditions necessary for heteronormative nuclear families to thrive. Thus, straight time is not just a call for individuals to follow certain relationship structures, but a method for reproducing social, economic, and political conditions in accord with the status quo. Thus, political calls for the preservation of youth perceive this cycle to be natural, unavoidable, and immensely desirable.

The queer epitomizes the anti-child due to its opposition to reproductive futurist ideals. In his analysis of homosexual male literary figures, Edelman casts queerness as the daring choice to not desire 14 ofTR2 children, to live a life in rejection the demands of heterosexual reproductivity. Though his narrow scope disregards the queer subject who does opt to have children or engage in heterosexual partnerships, queerness can contradict straight social norms in many ways, such as through its celebrations of pleasure, nonproductive indulgences, disorder, and self-expression. For this reason, anti-queer rhetoric views queerness as the antithesis of the moral values ascribed to childhood. By refusing these values, the queer figure exists as a denial of the political per se and of heteronormative futurity as a whole.

Keller ISD’s rhetoric surrounding the ban on books containing gender fluidity cites a reproductive futurist motive of preserving childhood innocence for the sake of the future. In giving this motive, it is evident that the district views queerness as a threat to their desired future, and thus, ignores queer interests in their policy decisions.

However, queer temporality is not merely constituted by its disavowal of straight time. Queer temporalities emerge in the ways that queer people creatively reinhabit time in reproductive futurity’s absence. Through his analysis of queer media, historical archives, and subcultures, queer theorist Jack Halberstam examines the ways that records of past queer practices illuminate alternatives to straight time. Additionally, these archives highlight the manner in which temporalities rooted in heteronormativity and demands for economic productivity uphold one another. Largely, value and meaning is assigned to time “according to the logic of capital accumulation.”6 In the dominant US work culture, time spent working is prioritized over leisure time, family time is morally privileged over time spent with other figures, and time spent aiming at production is valued above all else. In these logics, production is thought of as for the sake of the family. In this way, economic demands for production and heteronormativity support one another, as working is necessary for the support of a nuclear family and the reproduction of children is necessary for creating the next generation of workers. While straight time attempts to naturalize itself via calls for childhood innocence as morally justified, it is simultaneously an assertion of political and economic control. Thus, the queer subject not only denies heteronormative family structures, but the productivity-focused work culture that upholds its structures.

This heteronormative working culture holds adulthood in higher esteem than adolescence due to its value of maturity. Youth subcultures, in particular queer youth subcultures, often exist in opposition to the economic norms that preserve heteronormativity. Rather than live steadily in a manner

6 Halberstam, Jack. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. Sexual Cultures. New York University Press, 2005, 7.

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conducive to capital accumulation, many queer youth subcultures are characterized by living quickly, in short bursts. Halberstam gives the examples of “ravers, sex workers, club kids, drug dealers”, and more.7 Not all young queer people are a part of these groups, and not all members of these groups are queer in their sexuality or gender. However, these subcultures are subjects of queer theorizing due to the manner in which they inhabit times and spaces outside of the logics of straight time. Many of these communities gather at night under the cover of darkness, outside of the working hours of 9 to 5 and the daylight in which family-centered activities take place. These groups inhabit physical spaces such as clubs, sex shops, back alleyways, and streets that oppose the domestic and work spheres. These queer subjects blur boundaries by15working in areas typically relegated to the private, creating homes in areas TR2 that others have abandoned, and trafficking in the hours others spend sleeping. Archives of these creative inhabitations of time and space provide fodder for imagining how queer lives can exist outside of the dictates of cisheteronormativity.

This importance that Halberstam places on the archive further highlights the threat that the Keller ISD book ban poses to queer youth. His work illustrates the necessity of archival knowledge for imagining alternative queer temporalities. However, by banning any depiction of gender fluidity from their libraries, Keller ISD is effectively erasing any narratives of trans, nonbinary, and gender-variant existence. Without these gestures at alternative ways of being beyond the straight cisgender blueprint, the genderqueer child may be stifled from expressing their queerness and embodying queer time. By denying queer youth the necessary tools to access queer temporalities, the reproductive futurist project further strengthens itself.

Queer temporality draws strength from the past in manners beyond just the archive. Philosopher Sara Ahmed proposes a queer temporality that draws on a phenomenological account of “turning to the past” as a corporeal phenomenon. Phenomenology is characterized as “a turn towards objects, which appear in their perceptual thereness as objects given to consciousness”.8 Consciousness is shaped by the direction of one’s orientation towards objects of their attention. So, depending on the direction one turns their attention to, different relations and perceptions emerge. For Ahmed this “attention involves a political economy”.9 The conditions that orient our attention towards certain objects and not others arise out of our bodily dispositions and unconscious habits. Ahmed’s temporality is specifically concerned with past experiences of unnoticed arrivals. She holds that paying attention to the history of how objects arrived into the preceptory field of our consciousness allows for an interrogation of which objects we are oriented towards.

Applying this phenomenological approach to the concept of sexual orientation allows for the uncovering of unnoticed restrictive ways of being that necessitate reorientation. Unconscious habits are influenced by normative structures that go unnoticed. This shaping takes on a spatial element as

7

Halberstam, 10.

8

Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke University Press, 2006, 25.

9

Ahmed, 32.

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“bodies are sexualized through how they inhabit space.”10 For instance, a woman making herself small through unconscious slouching demonstrates a bodily habit shaped by patriarchal expectations that women not take up space. Similarly, bodies living in a cisheteronormative society are conditioned to turn towards certain objects of affection. In Ahmed’s phenomenological account, sexual orientation operates as a projection towards objects that exceed the objects themselves and inform a way of inhabiting space overall. A heterosexual woman’s experience of entering a party full of strangers may be shaped by the way she consciously or unconsciously turns her gaze towards the men in the room and seeks to attract them. Even women who do not experience attraction to men may fall into this habit due to 11 compulsory heterosexuality.

16 In turning TR2 their attention elsewhere, a queer subject may have an entirely different experience of the same party and the people there. In this way, queer sexual orientations are not merely a turning towards a different object of sexual attraction than is prescribed to them, but an entirely different mode of existence in time and space.

This phenomenological account pairs well with Halberstam’s focus on the archive as a source of queer resistance. Queer narratives facilitate the reflection on unconscious habits that encourage turning attention away from objects of cisheteronormative power structures. Though it is possible to orient attention elsewhere without the aid of these stories, Keller ISD’s book ban still inhibits students from accessing the tools that aid in this turning away. Everywhere where there is a lack of queer visibility, queer reorientation is inhibited. However, this does not entirely prevent one from orienting themselves away from straight time. Ahmed’s queer temporality proves more optimistic than Halberstam’s because she emphasizes the individual’s power within themselves to reorient towards queer time and space rather than being dependent on the archive.

While queer temporalities turn to the past as a site of power, the embodied resistance that results takes place in the present. Though Edelman offers the pessimistic outlook that there is no future for the queer subject, it seems that this resistance must be for some sake. Philosopher José Muñoz views queernesses as a horizon of future utopia. Rather than aim for mere acceptance and assimilation into existing legal structure, he advocates engaging in radical optimism and imagining idyllic futures for the queer subject. However, he is not concerned with arriving at these futures. Even though material conditions may render achieving an idyllic queer future impossible in some respects, imagining one can encourage reflection on ways of breaking out of cisheteronormative structures in the present. Power is thus found in the continual act of striving towards something better, though this better future may always be just out of reach. Just as archives of others’ lives and turning to one’s own past shed light on ways to subvert straight time, imagining a hypothetical future free from these power structures allows one to make changes in their current life.

This future-oriented temporality roots itself in joyous, queer moments of the everyday. Muñoz stresses that utopian moments can be accessed through “glimpses of utopian bonds, affiliations, de-

10

Ahmed, 67.

11

Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Feminism and Sexuality, 1996, 130–43.

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signs, and gestures that exist within the present moment”.12 For the queer subject, these ecstatic moments may occur as experiences of intimacy, community support, or gender euphoria. These everyday positive experiences provide reason to strive towards a future full of similar joy. This queer futurity of hope provides a viable alternative to reproductive futurism. When told by oppressive structures that they have no place in the future, the queer optimist finds solace in mundane delights. Having experienced this reprieve, the queer subject can find hope in striving towards a future full of similar freedom.

This harnessing of the everyday allows for queer resistance in places such as KISD where queer narratives have been sanctioned. Even in the wake of archival erasure, queer joys will continue to occur in private everyday spaces. These provide hopeful motivation for the continued resistance to 17 moments TR2 the weaponization of childhood innocence and straight time’s demand of cisheteronormativity.

The events in Keller, Texas serve as a case study for the queer child’s complication of reproductive futurist narratives. However, the weaponization of childhood innocence against queer people highlights the way that values ascribed to temporality can cause harm, not just in Keller but everywhere.

Reproductive futurism’s insistence on heteronormativity and economic productivity nonconsensually forces people into life paths in accord with straight time, and pushes policies that erase queer subjects straying from these prescriptions. The queer theories of Edelman, Halbertstam, Ahmed, and Muñoz not only call for the revaluation of the values ascribed to time, but they hold the key to reimagining them.

Whether it be through turns towards past archives, their own present lived experiences, or imaginings of better futures, the queer subject has the power to embody time and space in opposition to oppressive norms. The queer subject demonstrates that notions of temporality in one’s life are not as fixed as they seem. In this fluidity, resistance is possible for both the genderfluid child in Keller and the marginalized queer subject anywhere.

12 Muñoz, José, “Queerness as Horizon” in Cruising Utopia 10th Anniversary Edition: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York University Press, 2019, 22.

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E-reum Joshua Suh E-reum is a piece written for solo piano improvisation. The concept that I’m choosing to focus is the question: “What does it mean, then, when an individual deems inadequate a name that has been perfectly successful at picking them out and starts going by a different name?”.

The main melody starts off in Bb emphasizing the pitch “F” and slowly introduces the pitch “E”, representing the individual rejecting the name given and deciding to go by a new name. Slowly the piece explores this new piece before modulating fully into a piece now no longer in Bb but now in A where the pitch “E” is much more stable. Finally, I chose to title the piece E-reum/ as it comes from the Korean word for name and emphasizes the final pitch “E” that our individual has settled on.

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Choosing to submit Tristen Leone, Pomona ’25

Within present dating culture, there is a dissonance between the internal desires and external actions of women-identifying1 people. While men are able to exist as a subject, women are forced, through socialization, into objecthood where they must repress their own impulses within themselves.

The idea of being a subject allows an individual the capacity for revolt while prioritizing their own desires. Conversely, being an object, in the context of being a woman, means to act as an object of pleasure for male consumption.2 Written by Kristen Roupenian in 2017, the viral short story “Cat Person” reflects this turmoil through Margot, a 20-year-old college student who goes on a date with Robert, a man many years her senior. The date culminates in their having sex, despite Margot’s hesitancy and repulsion in doing so. Roupenian reflects on Margot’s decision and feelings: “That option, of blunt refusal, doesn’t even consciously occur to her—she assumes that if she wants to say no she has to do so in a conciliatory, gentle, tactful way.”3 Instead, she decides to ignore her impulse to say no and ends up trying to, in other words, bludgeon her subjecthood into being a sexual object limited by patriarchal desire. Margot’s discomfort exemplifies how women’s submission to men is not a blind, natural instinct.

Natural predisposition to submission would not require Margot to internally battle her resistance into silence. In fact, after reading “Cat Person,” many women voiced that they identified with Margot. Given the backdrop of the #MeToo movement, women have increasingly vocalized how dating culture can be anxiety inducing and can often lead to unwanted sexual experiences.4 Through Margot’s internal turmoil, it becomes clear that as girls become women, a distinction forms between the external performance of womanhood as submission and the internal dialogues with 1 I will be using “women-identifying” to inclusively represent the entire group of people who identify as women, whether they were assigned female at birth or not. If I ever use “woman” or “women,” please assume I am referring to the whole group of people who identify as women.

2 For the purposes of examining gender dynamics in dating and sexual encounters and women’s tendency to submit, I will specifically be focused on heterosexual relationships that women-identifying people engage in. Of course, I acknowledge that many women-identifying people also engage in relationships with people of other genders, but my focus will stay within the scope of the heterosexual in order to analyze the impact of patriarchal implications on the psyche of women.

3

Treisman, Deborah. “Kristen Roupenian on the Self-Deceptions of Dating.” The New Yorker.

4 Walsh, Kelly, and Terry Murphy. “Irresolute Endings and Rhetorical Poetics: Readers Respond to Roupenian’s ‘Cat Person.’” Style 53 (1): 88–104.

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the self that try to reject such a performance. Throughout the night, Margot voices her discomfort in her mind as she thinks about stopping him, but “the thought of what it would take to stop what she had set in motion was overwhelming.”5 As Roupenian suggests, processing our own discomfort and weighing decisions that are the least strenuous and taxing is at the heart of becoming a woman. In her book The Second Sex, feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir discusses how external social intervention pressures women into performing the gendered role of submission.

Beauvoir argues that “one is not born, but rather becomes, woman”6 as a result of external pressure. With this idea, Beauvoir suggests that womanhood is not inherent; being a woman does not come with specific, 20 biological TR2 tendencies or traits that are present in all women. Instead, women-identifying people are trained in how to act, think, and behave due to the societal norms that are expected of women. These specific societal norms are informed by the patriarchal world in which we live; the passivity and submission that women frequently perform is a learned behavioral practice rather than one they possess on the basis on sex. This is precisely the difference between what it means to be something versus become something. Beauvoir discusses this being versus becoming in her analysis of the development of girls in Volume II: Lived Experience of The Second Sex. She begins with unpacking a girl’s childhood in the experience of “becoming” a woman. She explains how although girls act with “the same behavior” and show “the same intellectual aptitudes” as her male counterparts: if well before puberty… she already appears sexually specified, it is not because mysterious instincts immediately destine her to passivity, coquetry, or motherhood but because the intervention of others in the infant’s life is almost originary, and her vocation is imperiously breathed into her from the first years of her life.7 While Beauvoir also argues that in their childhood girls are mostly unbothered by external pressures and, thus, tend to perform at the same level and with the same ferocity as boys, this changes as she becomes a woman. The “intervention” of external factors push her impulsive behavior to the side in order to create more passivity in the actions of women. As she points out that women do not inherently possess traits that place them as inferior to men, she makes certain to recognize the differences in gender, but highlights the importance of equality. A review summarizes Beauvoir’s sentiment that “equality is not a synonym for sameness.”8 Just because there are some biological or inherent differences between the sexes, which Beauvoir does not dispute, this does not prohibit equality between the sexes. Rather, socialization and patriarchal expectations force women-identifiers into a submissive position.

As I engage with modern conceptions of sexual autonomy and the submissive acts of

5

Roupenian, “Cat Person.

6

Beauvoir, 330.

7

Beauvoir, Simone De, Constance Borde, Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, and Inc OverDrive. The Second Sex, 337.

8 Bergoffen, Debra, and Megan Burke. 2021. “Simone de Beauvoir.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited

by Edward N. Zalta.

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women, Beauvoir’s quote “one is not born, but rather becomes, woman”9 is ever important to put in conversation with modern feminist philosophers. While we should hope that Beauvoir’s ideology would be a theory of the past, continued discourse on feminism and consent reveals that issues of sexual and romantic submission due to male sexuality persist, and, thus, feminism is still a much needed movement. In We Are Not Born Submissive, contemporary French philosopher Manon Garcia elaborates on Beauvoir’s discussion of women’s submission. Whereas Beauvoir’s philosophy may stop at asserting that women are trained to submit to male dominance, Garcia adds how women may even enjoy this submission. Garcia thus writes that “philosophy fails to take seriously 10 the fact that some people21 might want TR2 to obey other people and take pleasure in doing so.” Due to socialization and societal pressure under patriarchal structures, the concept of women’s enjoyment is conditioned to align with men’s enjoyment. However, this is an entirely socialized outcome of sexual submission, and, as Beauvoir discusses, not inherent to womanhood. Feminist philosopher Ellie Anderson’s review of We Are Not Submissive provides a succinct summary of Garcia’s answer to this divergence between socialization and inherent nature of submission: “femininity is itself structured as submissive, and hence women take pleasure in submission because it appears to be the best of their limited options.”11 It might be easy to assume that women can decide to simply not submit to male sexuality. However, female submission seems to be deeply ingrained in the fabric of our society, and, thus, many women choose to submit rather than engage in a tiring and uphill fight for the equality that most women wish we had.

Before understanding how Beauvoir and Garcia respectfully view the submissive position of women in order to suggest ways of combating women’s submission, it is imperative to understand what becoming a man entails. Just as processing discomfort and submitting to male preference is at the heart of becoming a woman, Manon Garcia explains what is at the heart of male sexuality and how this affects a woman’s “becoming”. Drawing on Catherine MacKinnon’s theory of sexuality, Garcia writes that “sexuality is constructed by male domination… this derepression hypothesis–MacKinnon deliberately avoids talking of sexual liberation–is in reality serving male sexual desires.”12 Under a patriarchal society, sexuality revolves around the desires of men, and, thus, disempowers women to understand their own sexual desires outside of this patriarchal framework that works to exclusively legitimize male desire. Garcia goes on to say that “not only [do] men have sexual power over women but also… dominance is at the heart of men’s sexuality just as much as sexuality is at the heart of their dominance.”13 Given MacKinnon and Garcia’s claims, it is impossible to discuss sexual and bodily autonomy without 9

Beauvoir, 330.

10 Garcia, Manon. We Are Not Born Submissive: How Patriarchy Shapes Women’s Lives. Princeton University Press, 2021, 3.

11

Anderson, Ellie. “Review of Manon Garcia, We Are Not Born Submissive.” Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 1.

12 34.

Garcia, Manon. We Are Not Born Submissive: How Patriarchy Shapes Women’s Lives. Princeton University Press,

13

Garcia, We Are Not Born Submissive, 35.

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closely analyzing gender dynamics. While disproportionate gender power relations exist in all aspects of patriarchal society, power based on gender becomes most pronounced in dating and sexual encounters.

Of course, I argue that women do not actually make a fully autonomous choice to put themselves at a disadvantage. Instead, I propose that we return to the idea of subjecthood versus objecthood and how women, under patriarchal standards, are forced to repress their own desires to prioritize male preference.

Like Beauvoir, Garcia asserts that we cannot assume that there is something feminine in sexual female submission submission because women are “in a situation where submission appears to be one’s destiny.”14 As aforementioned, 22 women TR2 are entirely resigned to submission due to the impact that male dominance has on both women’s social and sexual lives. Garcia derives her conclusion that women are conditioned to be submissive directly from Beauvorian philosophy. In The Second Sex, Beauvoir writes: For the most part, women resign themselves to their lot without attempting any action; those who did try to change attempted to overcome their singularity and not to confine themselves in it triumphantly. When they intervened in world affairs, it was in concert with men and from a masculine point of view.15 While Beauvoir and Garcia suggest that many women do resign themselves to submission, Beauvoir also addresses the women who reject such standards here. However, there are a variety of shortcomings even when women advocate for themselves due to the nature of the patriarchy. Because men have an advantage in places of power, Garcia illuminates how women are expected to function under male assumptions even if they attempt to overcome societal expectations of submission. Just as women feel they must either submit or function under male preference in social and political spheres, this quote can also inform why women feel they must resign their bodily autonomy to men in sexual scenarios. And this is precisely what Anderson highlights as a possible shortcoming in Garcia’s work: “consent to submission is prescribed to them by social norms.”16 Beauvoir largely focuses on the becoming a woman and what this entails while Garcia assumes women to be in a place where they feel forced to submit from the onset of their lives.

In fact, Beauvoir dedicates large portions of her book to the study of female childhood, as previously discussed. She observes that before puberty, girls are equal to male counterparts and regularly engage in competing with males in all areas.17 Instead, once children are exposed to a variety of societal norms, they begin to feel differences in their genders on a social level. As girls grow into women, they are socially trained to understand that they are inferior to men in social, political, economic realms, and, thus, remove themselves willingly from powerful realms. Both Garcia and Beauvoir express valid conclusions; however, I challenge the idea that women take direct pleasure in submission. Instead, given Beau14

Garcia, We Are Not Born Submissive, 42.

15

Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 182.

16

Anderson, “Review of Manon Garcia.”

17

Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 330.

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voir’s ideology of coming to terms with the expectations of womanhood, women can willingly choose to submit. There is a difference between willingness and pleasure. Given this Beauvorian analysis of the social and professional worlds, we can apply this feeling of inferiority to sexual encounters. If women are made to feel that they must live by the rules of men outside of sexual encounters, then they must feel similarly in sexual encounters as well, and given the expressed relation to the story “Cat Person” and Margot, it seems that many women do feel the need to submit to male sexuality.

In a further effort to explore ways to fight against women’s submission in sexual scenarios under a Beauvoirian theorization, comparing that of Beauvoir to the recent philosophy of Kate Manne can further illuminate the reasons submission in sexual encounters. Down Girl: The Logic of 23 for women’s TR2 Misogyny by feminist philosopher Kate Manne seeks to examine how misogyny works as a system within patriarchal society. She argues that sexism, which denotes women as holding lower status than male counterparts, is present in society, but it is misogyny that enforces the “laws” of sexism.18 Manne works in dealing with how misogyny can affect the lived experiences of women. Misogyny punishes women if they are successful or becoming more powerful than men. In Audrey Yap’s review of Down Girl, she specifies that misogyny can take “the form of anger and hostility towards successful women, rising, perhaps, above their station, or taking positions that men should rightfully be holding.”19 Specifically, this relates philosophy to the lived experiences of women and leads us to where Beauvoir and Manne converge.

Beauvoir discusses the same lived experiences that Manne writes about as girls become women and quickly lose power to men. While men “can at every instance revolt against the given and thus have the impression of actively confirming it[what he believes to be true in the world] when he accepts it; the latter [women] only submits to it; the world is defined without her, and its face is immutable.”20 In this way, men are allowed the ability to authentically revolt whereas women are not, especially in sexual encounters. With the rise of the #MeToo movement, the slogan “no means no” has gained traction on social media and much attention from other media sources. In reaction to Beauvoir’s ideas about revolt, the idea of “no means no” is simply not enough.21 Firstly, the simple “no” is a result of hesitation to submit, yet a filter created by pressure to remain palatable to men. Active revolt, or blunt refusal of male preference, in a sexual encounter is not as simple as saying “no” to the male desires. Men are given the opportunity to fully express their ideas and opinions without question, but due to the obstacles women face in standing up for themselves, they feel as if they cannot express that they do not want to engage with a man sexually. In this case, many women who are saying “yes” are not authentically consenting as they do not feel empowered enough to express their dissent because of the social stigma of denying a man what he wants. Within this context, revolt, as Beauvoir describes it, involves women becoming the 18

Chontiner, Isaac, “The Costs of Male Entitlement,” The New Yorker.

19 Yap, Audrey. “Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, Oxford University Press, 2017.” Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal.

20

Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 398.

21

Mariam, Simra. “‘No’ Means ‘No’: It Really Is That Simple When It Comes to Consent.” HuffPost.

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subject by asserting their own desires against men’s impulses; “no” is not enough for women to assume subjecthood.

Just as Manne and Beauvoir examine the lived experiences of women and what this means in sexual encounters with men, Caleb Ward and Ellie Anderson further explore the philosophical significance of women’s sexual objectification. Returning to Beauvoir, they discuss the ambiguity that entails being a woman: “this is the ambiguity I already mentioned: the woman does not sincerely seek to take leave of what she detests.”22 This idea encapsulates the dialogue thus far between Manne, Garcia, and Beauvoir as all three explore the meaning of being a woman, specifically as a sexual object. Ward 24 TR2 and Anderson join the conversation: “Simone de Beauvoir uses ambiguity to characterize an irreducibly dual character of human experience: as living in a world always shared with others, persons are unavoidably both subjects (for themselves) and objects (for others).”23 In a sexual context, like the context that Ward and Anderson use, women experience objecthood as they are socialized to act as an object of pleasure for male consumption. This is precisely women’s lived experience in romantic scenarios with men. While women might not necessarily always feel harmed by men or forcefully made to submit, they fear that they must submit because male sexuality and dominance demands it.

Submission happens because women fear for their character in the eyes of men: they might seem like a “tease” or “spoiled” if they were to deny a man what he wants, all because of what society expects of women. Despite Ward and Anderson’s analysis that humans experience ambiguity as both the subject and the object, in many sexual scenarios, women are denied the human experience of “dual character” because they accept themselves fully as the object of the other, the man. She feels as if she must defer her own agency to the societal expectation for her to be an object in relation to a man.

Taking into account the duality of living both as a subject and as an object is ever-important to understanding women’s tendency to submit their bodies to male power. This duality of subjecthood versus objecthood complicates the way many people think of women’s struggles. In this sense, as I mentioned previously, the “no means no” movement is drastically harmful to push feminist activism because it disregards many women’s true thoughts, feelings, and experiences. The communicative act of saying “no” is disingenuous because it is unclear as to whether her dissent is a genuine exercise of autonomy. Women are predisposed to relinquishing freedom in making themselves objects for the other. A yes versus no idea within consent is extraordinarily reductionist to the psychological effects that women experience as a result of being trained to submit amidst a patriarchal world. Moreover, it ignores the evident dissonance between internal desires of women versus the pressurized external actions as a result of divergence between subjecthood and objecthood.

In putting a number of contemporary feminist philosophers in conversation with Beauvoir, we address the complexity of the scenario in which a woman feels that she must submit. As Ward 22

Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 726.

23 Ward, Caleb and Ellie Anderson, “The Ethical Significance of Being an Erotic Object,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Sexual Ethics, 3.

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and Anderson suggest, we must radically change the way that we view consent in a sexual scenario: this risk [of harming another due to moral objectification] cannot be eradicated through more explicit norms of sexual communication or a more airtight definition of valid consent. People must become more skillful at navigating the ambiguity of intimate encounters, including developing an embodied habituation and attunement to the wider range of expressions of others.24 Here, Ward and Anderson suggest that in order to move toward eradication of women’s submission in sexual and romantic encounters, all partners must use communication with a wider understanding of what constitutes consent. course, navigating the ambiguity of intimate encounters alone will 25 OfTR2 not altogether defeat women’s submission. However, better and more effective forms of communication are integral to understanding women’s submission. We must think beyond prevalent reductionist views of “no means no” and saying “yes” means consenting. By becoming trapped in the static binary, we drastically lower the bar for sexual and romantic relationships as well as the moral responsibilities we have when interacting with other subjects. Such reductionism paves the way for violence and emotional trauma that many people face as a result of harmful romantic interactions. If we continue to listen to the lived experiences of women and attempt to understand the psychological damage that unwanted sexual encounters can cause, we can, as a part of our ethical responsibility, continue to advocate for the liberation of women and their bodily autonomy.

24

Ward and Anderson, “The Ethical Significance of Being an Erotic Object,” 22.

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On Predicate nominatives Lavi Echeverría, Pomona ’24

“I never trust a woman who’s not blonde. Except for my friend Serena, but that’s only because she’s a blonde at heart.” – Elle Woods Here I explore the intuition that utterances of statements such as ‘Elle Woods is a blonde’ can differ in meaning from utterances of statements such as ‘Elle Woods is blonde’. These intuitions are not sufficiently explained by Bertrand Russell’s theory about denoting phrases, nor by appeals to pragmatics. Instead, I echo Katherine Ritchie in arguing that statements such as ‘x is a y’ encode that x is a member of psychologically essentialized kind y.1 This explains how uses of predicate nominatives differ from uses of predicate adjectives, which explicitly ascribe a particular characteristic to their subject. This thesis is informed by recent explorations into the explanatory power of psychological essentialism’s framework for issues relevant to the social philosophy of language, such as Sarah-Jane Leslie’s account of the connection between generics and stereotyping and Eleonore Neufeld’s explanation of slurs’ linguistic characteristics and prejudicial effects.2 3 Psychological studies suggest that essentialism underscores our reasoning about categories.4 My query here digs into the relationship between this psychological phenomenon and nouns as a lexical category. I will conclude by positing that this kind membership thesis might be too strong to properly characterize all cases of nominative predicates, and that a more general ascription of group identity might be more adequate.

Consider the following statements: 1a) Elle Woods is blonde.

1b) Elle Woods is a blonde.

These are intuitively similar statements, both in form and meaning. In both, the name ‘Elle 1 The thesis I present here was developed independently than the one presented by Katherine Ritchie in “Essentializing Inferences”, where she also argues that predicate nominals differ semantically from predicate adjectives in that they attribute kind membership.

2 Leslie, S. J. (2017). The original sin of cognition: Fear, prejudice, and generalization. The Journal of Philosophy, 114(8), 393–421.

3

Neufeld, E. (2019). An essentialist theory of the meaning of slurs. Philosophers’ Imprint, 19(35), 1–29.

4 Neufeld, E. (2022). Psychological essentialism and the structure of concepts. Philosophy Compass, 17( 5), e12823. https://doi.org/10.1111/phc3.12823

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Woods’ is linked to the word ‘blonde’ with the linking verb ‘is’. Intuitively, they both express that Elle Woods has blonde hair. However, they are not the same statement. In 1a), ‘blonde’ is an adjective. In 1b), ‘blonde’ is a noun, preceded by the indefinite article ‘a’. They differ in form. Intuitively, they can also differ in meaning. Utterances of statement 1a) express something about Elle Woods’ hair color. But utterances of statement 1b) seem to be able to say more about Elle Woods than those of 1a). For example, someone might infer from hearing 1b) that Elle Woods likes pink, or that she meets some other stereotype about blondes.5 These differences between uses of predicate nominatives and adjective nominatives become particularly salient when considering examples such as the following two statements: 1c) 27 Elle Woods TR2 is not only blonde, she is a blonde.

1d) Ele Woods is blonde, but she is not a blonde.

1c) and 1d) are intuitively meaningful and express something that could be true. 1c) affirms both 1a) and 1b). This intuitively expresses something more than what 1a) does alone: that Elle Woods has blonde hair and that she fits some stereotypical descriptions of blondes. 1d) affirms 1a) and denies 1b).

This intuitively expresses that Elle Woods has blonde hair but is not a stereotypical blonde.

This all suggests that 1a) differs in meaning from 1b). The predicate nominative ‘a blonde’ seems to be able to function differently from its adjectival counterpart ‘blonde’ in describing Elle Woods.

This phenomenon is not unique to statements 1a) and 1b). Intuitively, something similar is happening with the following examples: 2a) Alejandro is American.

2b) Alejandro is an American.

3a) She is intellectual.

3b) She is an intellectual.

In the a) statements, the subject is modified by a predicate adjective. In the b) statements, the subject is modified by the same word, but in its predicate nominative form. Intuitively, predicate adjectives and their predicate nominative counterparts perform a similar function in sentences. They provide a description of the subject. However, even though it can intuitively seem that one is warranted in inferring that one is true from learning that its counterpart is true, this is not the case. The adjectival form can be denied while the nominative is denied, and vice versa. Utterances of statements using predicate nominatives seem to be able to provide additional descriptions than those entailed by statements using their predicate adjective counterparts.

Before proceeding to discuss possible explanations for this phenomenon, let me generalize the statement forms in question. x is a variable for any grammatical subject, and y is any word that can be used as a predicate adjective and as a predicate nominative. a) x is y. b) x is a y. c) x is y and x is a y. d) x is y but x is not a y.

5 Notice that this is not a random additional inference. It seems like inferring this from 1b) is different than inferring that, for example, she is human.

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In “On Denoting”, Bertrand Russell argues that sentences containing denoting phrases express existential propositions in first order logic. By ‘denoting phrase’ he means expressions of the form ‘the y’, ‘a y’, ‘some y’, ‘all y’, ‘any y’, or ‘some y’, where y is a noun. The predicate nominatives in the examples I’ve provided are all examples of such phrases. When translated, these phrases take up the same position and function as other predicate phrases. According to his theory, 1a) and 1b) express the same proposition when translated to 1st order logic, where Bx = x is blonde, and e is a logically proper name denoting Elle: 1a’) ⟦ Elle Woods is blonde⟧ = Be. 1b’) ⟦ Elle28WoodsTR2 is a blonde⟧ = Be. Furthermore, Russell holds that the meaning of any natural language sentence is equivalent to that of its translation to first order logic. If this is the case, and if 1a) and 1b) are indeed logically equivalent, then these statements mean the same thing.

If i) is an appropriate translation of 1a) and 1b), then any pair of a) and b) statements express the same proposition in first order logic and mean the same thing. Predicate nominatives are only different to their predicate adjective counterparts in surface structure. a’,b’) ⟦ x is y ⟧ = ⟦ x is a y ⟧ = ∃xYx This consequence of Russell’s view succeeds at explaining the intuitive similarities between these pairs of sentences. From hearing a b) statement, one can infer its a) counterpart, since they mean the same thing.

However, it fails at explaining the intuition that utterances of b) statements can express something different than utterances of their a) counterparts. If a’, b’) is true, then c) statements do not express anything other than what a) statements alone do: c’) ⟦ x is y and x is a y⟧ = ∃xYx ∧∃xYx Furthermore, d) statements cannot ever be true, as they express a contradiction when translated into first-order logic. d’) ⟦ x is y and it is not the case that x is a y.⟧ = ∃xYx ∧ ¬∃xYx So far, I have pointed to an intuitive difference between statements using predicate adjectives and those using predicate nominals, and argued that Russell’s account, on which the semantic content of these statements is the same, fails to capture this difference. As a result, Russell’s account is insufficient for explaining the semantic properties of predicate nominals.

One possible objection here is that we can explain this difference between predicate adjectives and predicate nominatives by appealing to pragmatics, without having to reject the view that their semantic content is equivalent. Statements that semantically speaking are false may still express true pragmatic content through implicature. This is evident in our common use of language – often, utterances of false statements are felicitous and successfully convey something meaningful. For example, someone could successfully refer to Elle Woods by saying that “Elle Woods is the blonde who always wears pink” even if it is not actually the case that she always wears pink. It might be that the intuitive difference in what a) and b) statements mean can be explained as implied content.

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However, implicature (and possibly pragmatic content more generally)6 is not an appropriate explanation for our intuitions about d) statements. It is a necessary condition of implicature that it be cancellable (i.e. deniable) without resulting in a contradiction. When I imply G by uttering ‘U’, I can deny that I mean G without contradicting myself. However, I cannot deny my uttering of a d) statements without contradicting myself. Under the semantic theory presented by Russel, d) statements express contradictions. If this is so, then denying any pragmatic content that may be implied by an uttering of a d) statement leaves the speaker asserting that d), the contradiction itself, is the case. So, as the supposedly implied content of 1d) is not cancellable, this appeal to pragmatics is inadequate for explaining this phenomenon. In ‘Essentializing Ritchie also refutes this appeal to pragmatics by pointing 29 Inferences’, TR2 to evidence in psychology showing that labeling (i.e. using a nominative) itself generally elicits stronger inferences than adjectival descriptions, and that it is unclear how this inferential disposition could be explained as pragmatic content, or canceled to meet the cancellable condition.7 An initially compelling answer to this question is simply to see predicate nominatives as adding more descriptions than their counterparts. Specifically, adding descriptions of a stereotypical member of a category. This could be formalized akin to the following, where Bx = x is blonde, Szx = x meets stereotypical feature z, and S1 through Sn are all the features associated with blondes.8 1a’’) ⟦ blonde ⟧ = Bx 1b’’) ⟦ a blonde ⟧ = Bx ∧ S1x ∧ … ∧Snx However, 1b’’) will not suffice. If one of the stereotypical features of blondes were not true of Elle Woods, then 1b) would be false. If Elle Woods did not wear pink, or if she weren’t blonde, then she couldn’t be described as ‘a blonde’. This is intuitively not the case. Additionally, statements such as 1d) would still express a contradiction.9 While 1b’’) is inadequate, its intuitive appeal suggests that stereotypes must be a part of the picture. Research and discussion in linguistics, psychology, and philosophy suggests that stereotypical features are generics about psychologically essentialized kinds.10 Psychological essentialism is the idea 6

I do not know enough about pragmatics in order to confidently assert my intuition that the expression of all prag

matic content can be explained through implicature or at least meet some relevant conditions for implicature. For an example using the necessary condition I cite later, when I imply G with gesture H, I can deny that I meant G without contradicting myself.

7 Ritchie, K. (2021). Essentializing inferences. Mind & Language, 36( 4), 570– 591, (528-529). https://doi.org/10.1111/ mila.12360 8

This possible formalization was proposed by Derick Li in class discussion for CM Phil 195 on 08/21/22.

9 One may attempt to resolve this problem by changing the conjunctions in the list of descriptions for disjunctions.

However, this would entail that meeting only one of any of the stereotypical characteristics is sufficient for someone to be truthfully described as ‘a blonde’. This is also inadequate.

10 See: Sarah-Jane Leslie (2019).; Bastian, B., & Haslam, N. (2006). Psychological essentialism and stereotype endorsement. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 42(2), 228–23 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2005.03.003.; Gallagher, N. M., & Bodenhausen, G. V. (2021). Gender essentialism and the mental representation of transgender women and men: A multimethod investigation of stereotype content. Cognition, 217, 104887. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.COGNITION.2021.104887.; Levy, S. R., & Dweck, C. S. (1999). The impact of children’s static versus dynamic conceptions of people on stereotype forma-tion. Child Development, 70(5), 1163–1180. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8624.00085’.; Levy, S. R., Stroessner, S. J., & Dweck, C. S. (1998). Stereotype formation and endorsement: The role of implicit theories. Journal of

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that certain categories have an underlying essence that cannot be directly observed. Having this essence is taken to be both necessary and sufficient for an x to be a member of kind y. If someone believes that x is a member of kind y, they will be disposed to infer that generalized features of the kind are true of x – i.e., that x is a stereotypical y. Crucially, meeting stereotypes of kind y is neither necessary nor sufficient for an x to be a member of kind y.

I believe that the salience of stereotypes in describing the differences in what a) and b) express is a result of and indicates the influence of psychological essentialism in making inferences about the subject of the statement. What I propose is that predicate nominatives do not modify their subjects by associating certain characteristics with 30 TR2 them, like adjectivals do, but instead express that the subject belongs to or is a member of a kind. In other words, predicate nominatives attribute kind membership.11 Consider the following formalization, where Yx = is y, Mxy = x is a member of y, and the extension of M is <individual, kind>. a’’’) ⟦ x is y. ⟧ = ∃xYx b’’’) ⟦ x is a y. ⟧ = ∃x∃y(Mxy) As I’ve mentioned, this proposal both accounts for and explains the salience of stereotypes in the intuitive differences between a) type statements and b) type statements. Because 1b) encodes that Elle Woods is a member of the kind ‘blondes’, one is predisposed to infer that she meets stereotypical features of blondes – such as that she likes pink. This explains why b) statements can express something different about the subject than their a) counterparts. It also explains why c) statements mean something different than a) or b) statements in isolation: they express that characteristic y is true of x and that x is a member of kind y. d) statements are also not contradictions under this view – because having characteristic y is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a member of kind y, either a) or b) can be affirmed of x while the other is denied. This allows us to make sense of how, as Elle Woods claims, Serena can be a blonde at heart without being blonde.

I’ve thus talked about predicate nominatives with predicate adjective counterparts. If this theory is true then it should extend to other cases of predicate nominatives, or at the very least those in which the noun is preceded by the indefinite article ‘a’. At first glance, it seems like this is the case – considering ‘Elle Woods is a law student’ and ‘Underdog is a chihuahua’, ‘law student’ refers to a social kind, while ‘chihuahua’ refers to a natural kind. However, how we talk about novel arbitrary groups complicates this.

For example, assume that a classroom is randomly split into two groups: one is team ‘Rutabaga’, the other is team ‘Sunchoke’. Intuitively, it would be felicitous to describe a member of team ‘Rutabaga’ as being ‘a Rutabaga’. However, it does not seem that this group or category can be appropriately described

Personality and Social Psychology, 74(6), 1421–1436. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-514.74.6.142.; Yzerbyt, V., Corneille, O., & Estrada, C. (2001). The interplay of subjective essentialism and entitativity in the formation of stereotypes. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 5(2), 141–155 11 Katherine Ritchie argues for a similar theory on the semantics of predicate nominatives in: Ritchie (2021). She proposes that predicate nominatives attribute kind membership, which then triggers essentialist presuppositions. By triggering this presupposition, the kind is assumed as essentialized; which makes my claim essentially the same as Ritchie. Ritche is just more explicit about how essentialism fits into the picture.

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as a kind. Viewing a category as a kind depends on much more than some external categorization, but instead presupposing some internal essence of great inductive potential. Surely, we don’t assume this of any member of any group. It might be that kindship is only one of multiple ways in which we recognize and think about groups.12 If so, this theory should be revised – a weaker claim of predicate nominatives as broadly ascribing group membership, instead of kind membership, might be a more appropriate account of predicate nominatives’ semantics.13 In this paper I’ve focused on a narrow set of nominatives, wherein the noun is preceded by the indefinite article ‘a’, has an adjectival counterpart, and is in the sentence’s grammatical predicate. But I believe that this view can be 31generalized TR2 to nominatives at large. Statements containing a noun preceded by an article express an existential proposition, where the nominative phrase acts as a predicate, as per Russell’s view. My view simply expands on these nominatives as a distinct kind of predicate, expressing kind membership instead of a single explicit characteristic. When in plural form and not preceded by an article, nouns refer to all members of the kind (or group), or the kind (or group) itself.

12 Ny Vasil and Tania Lombrozo argue for structurally construed categories as distinct from essentialized kinds in Vasilyeva, N., & Lombrozo, T. (2020). Structural thinking about social categories: Evidence from formal explanation, generics, and generalization. Cognition.

13

Special thanks to Prof. Neufeld for helping me think through this objection.

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Ugly Unlovable Objects: Capitalism (Un)veiled Gabe Schuhl and Aaron Morgan Can we find beauty in a Target aisle? As consumerism pushes a relentless tide of new and newer objects, beauty seems to become less and less tangible. Our latest purchases seem entirely incompatible with the beauty of our favorite painting or a breathtaking landscape. The everyday item is something so mundane that it could never hope for the title of beauty.

So what could beautiful objects really be like? Can beautiful objects ever exist under capitalism? In this podcast, Aaron Morgan and Gabe Schuhl discuss beautiful objects and their possibilities under capitalism. With the guidance of writings from Yanagi Soetsu, Byung-Chul Han, and Sara Ahmed, Aaron and Gabe take on the challenge of the Target aisle. Given a chance, there might be hope yet for our most ugly, unlovable objects.

Works Discussed: The Beauty of Everyday Things, Yanagi Soetsu Saving Beauty, Byung-Chul Han What’s the Use?, Sara Ahmed

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Experts and echo chambers Maya von Hippel, Pomona ’24

In a discussion of the moral virtue of open-mindedness, Nomy Arpaly brings forth the case of Ignaz Semmelweis.1 After enforcing handwashing between autopsies and handling living patients, Semmelweis saw that patient deaths, such as deaths during childbirth, dropped dramatically. Semmelweis hypothesised that handwashing was the cause of this decrease in deaths, but when he brought this hypothesis forward to his colleagues he was disbelieved, ridiculed, and disgraced. Given the decisive nature of Semmelweis’ evidence, Arpaly questions the other doctors’ refusal to believe, asking “Why were they not simply elated at finding a way to reduce the rate at which patients in their care were dying?” (Arpaly 81).

Arpaly’s theory is that we tend “to resist evidence that conflicts with cherished beliefs in a closed-minded way” (Arpaly 81) and Semmelweis’ colleagues held cherished beliefs about not being implicated in the deaths of innumerable patients. But Arpaly fails to account for the fact that midwives had been washing their hands long before Semmelweis noticed that childbirth death rates were far lower for those who delivered with a midwife rather than a doctor.2 A theory that does account for the midwives comes from Miranda Fricker’s discussion of prejudicial credibility deficit.3 Prejudicial credibility deficit is an “undermining of the speaker qua knower” (Fricker 3.1), where one assigns a speaker less credibility as a knower than is their due (hence, deficit), on the basis of prejudice or prejudicially driven judgements (hence, prejudicial). Before Semmelweis’ colleagues failed to give him due credibility in his claims about handwashing, they failed to give midwives due credibility in the efficacy of their handwashing practices.

The reason behind this failure seems due to the prejudices they held towards the supposed4 non-experts—so due to the position of the midwives as women in a time when most men could not conceive of women as capable of intelligence, much less capable of expertise.

One could claim that the prejudice only went so far as an unconcern with the practices of mid-

1 75–85.

Arpaly, Nomy. “Open-Mindedness as a Moral Virtue.” American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 48, no. 1, 2011, pp.

2

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3807776/.

3

Fricker, Miranda. “Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing.” Oxford Scholarship Online, 2007.

4 It is unclear to me why the midwives would not be considered medical experts, particularly when they were more successful at keeping patients alive than the doctors with whom they share the field.

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wives due to the prejudicial assumption that there could be nothing worthwhile to learn. But if this is the case then Semmelweis’ claims should have been able to shatter this perception, and this was not so.

It seems that the doctors were committed to their knowledge and expertise in such a way that blinded them to the evidence. Arpaly points to such a commitment as the close-minded vice to Semmelweis’ open-minded virtue. In fact, Semmelweis’ virtue is contingent on the vice of his colleagues: “the person who displays a particular virtue does well in the sort of situation in which people tend to fail” (Arpaly 80).

But, if this were merely a case of human tendency and tilt to vice, Semmelweis’ story should not be of one man alone disgraced by his entire field, even if “moral open-mindedness is a hard virtue” (Arpaly 82). Semmelweis’ responsiveness to the evidence should not have been so wholly anomalistic; prejudice 34 TR2 and closed-mindedness alone fail to paint a satisfactory picture of what went wrong for his colleagues. A theory that explains how Semmelweis’ sensitivity to evidence could be so exceptional is provided by Thi Nguyen’s discussion of echo chambers.5 Nguyen defines echo chambers as “a social epistemic structure from which other relevant voices have been actively excluded and discredited” (Nguyen 141). The midwives could be excluded on the grounds of prejudice, but when Semmelweis put forth the same views “he was dismissed from the hospital and disgraced by the medical community” (Arpaly 81), that is to say, he was actively excluded and discredited. The fact that Semmelweis was so alone in his beliefs makes sense on Nguyen’s claim that those in an echo chamber “have been brought to systematically distrust all outside sources” (Nguyen 141), and “other voices are actively undermined” (Nguyen 141). Echo chambers explain why “exposure to evidence” (Nguyen 141) was insufficient to sway Semmelweis’ colleagues, as “escape from an echo chamber may require a radical rebooting of one’s belief system” (Nguyen 141). It is far more believable that only Semmelweis was capable of such a “radical rebooting” (Nguyen 141) than it is that only Semmelweis was free from the vice of close-mindedness. And perhaps in the context of close-mindedness, an echo chamber can be understood as a type of close-mindedness that is systematic in nature.

Thus, Arpaly’s identification of Semmelweis’ colleagues seemingly spectacular display of closed-mindedness to evidence is made more comprehensible. Arpaly asks “Why did they act this way?”

(Arpaly 81). And the answer requires less suspension of disbelief if one accounts for the doctors’ epistemic position as that of being in an echo chamber, and once the difficulty of escaping an echo chamber becomes known.

While this conclusion clarifies the matter into something more believable, it also replaces Arpaly’s already hard solution that the doctors needed to acquire the hard virtue of open-mindedness for Nguyen’s harder solution; the doctors needed to be motivated into a “social epistemic reboot” (Nguyen 157).

The fact that Semmelweis “spent the rest of his life trying desperately to convince people of the criminality of the doctors who kept ignoring his results” (Arpaly 81) shows that such a reboot never came. As handwashing did not become standard practice until forty years later,6 the eventual shift in the field at

5

Nguyen, C. “Echo Chambers and Epistemic Bubbles.” Episteme, vol. 17, no. 2, 2020, pp. 141–161.

6

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/handwashing-once-controversial-medical-advice.

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large bears no implication that Semmelweis’ original colleagues ever changed their minds.7 Further, there is a concerning fact revealed in defining Semmelweis’ colleagues’ epistemic position as in an echo chamber: Something about the position of these experts was such that they were particularly liable to forming an echo chamber that excluded anyone outside of their field.

Nguyen specifies that echo chambers are “created through manipulation of trust” (Nguyen 142), thus implying intent and a culprit; this does not seem applicable to the experts in question. Nevertheless, it remains the case that for Semmelweis’ colleagues “other relevant voices have been actively discredited” (Nguyen 142) in the manner of an echo chamber. Furthermore, “echo chambers can explain… resistance to clear evidence” (Nguyen 142); 35 TR2 such resistance is undeniably present in the case of Semmelweis’ colleagues. A group of experts do not need a leader to push for discrediting because the discrediting is already a present possibility. Experts will relate to laypersons as those who know less on their topic of expertise because, inherent in the fact that they are experts, they know more than a layperson does about a certain topic. There exists an unfortunate pipeline from this expert-layperson knowledge disparity to a wider discrediting of layperson views as irrelevant and necessarily uninformed and uninformative. Thus, experts may begin to look to each other as the only relevant knowers on a given topic, and what is liable to follow is also constitutive of the formation of an echo chamber: “systematically isolating their members from all outside epistemic sources” (Nguyen 142).

Nguyen’s discussion of echo chambers keeps to cases of extremists, cultists, conspiracy theorists and so on. So, while entrapment in an echo chamber may be difficult to diagnose in oneself, for the cases of Nguyen’s focus an echo chamber is obvious to outsiders, and thus those in echo chambers tend also to be discredited by the rest of society. However, if experts can form such echo chambers, there is a concerning addition of power and credibility, and an already troubling issue is made more so by the possibility that even those outside the echo chamber will be blind to its existence.

7 One could claim that there were colleagues who agreed with Semmelweis but took up handwashing silently so as to avoid the same ridicule to which Semmelweis was subjected. But if this were so, death rates should have dropped at least somewhat, and no such drop occurred.

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Entrapment, 9” by 12”, mixed media on panel Charles Becker

Younger?

Much younger.

I’ll act like I am. Pause. Pause. I’m confused.

How’d I end up in your face?

Be calm. Stay still child.

No. I’m here.

Foreboding. I run inside to the core. I enter through the mouth. There’s a sickness, a shaking, a body moving, and a room that’s tilting; there are muffled sounds heard in the distance.

I really am here. I really am all alone.

And I’m back in my body. And things don’t really feel wrong. Though I’m in a daze. A swaying. A vibrating, numb figure of mine.

I’m alright. Yes. . . . .I think I am.

I should get going.

Yes. I should.

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Rewriting Brotherhood Aven Patterson, Pomona ’24

Brotherhood is frequently appealed to as a relationship of unity and understanding; to treat someone as one’s brother is to recognize your commonality and embrace shared experiences. Cain and Abel, the sons of Adam and Eve, are the first brothers introduced in the Bible.1 In their story, each brother offers a sacrifice to God. Cain gives Him “the fruit of the soil,” while Abel offers “the firstborn of his flock” of rams. 2The boys bring their sacrifices to God and “YHVH had regard for Hevel [Abel] and his gift, for Kayin [Cain] and his gift he had no regard.”3 God’s lack of appreciation for his sacrifice feels like a betrayal to Cain. Each brother gave God what he believed to be the greatest gift, one was lauded, the other was dismissed.

Cain’s disappointment and hurt at God favoring Abel does not fade. “But then it was, when they were out in the field that Kayin rose up against Hevel his brother and he killed him.”4 Cain’s belief that God betrayed him is the impetus for Cain’s own betrayal of Abel. Finding only Cain, YHVH said to Kayin: Where is Hevel your brother? He said: I do not know. Am I the watcher of my brother?”5 Jealousy and competition laid the groundwork for the Bible’s first fratricide. The story of Cain and Abel sets the theme of brotherly feud, now a ubiquitous feature of religious texts and literary traditions. Shakespeare’s The Tempest tells of this brutality of brotherhood, where Prospero, the rightful Duke of Milan, was ousted by his brother.6 The Bible continues by taking up the task of responding to Cain’s rhetorical question to God. It cannot be that Cain’s killing of Abel is justified, so now God must demonstrate that everyone indeed ought to be their brother’s watcher. This demonstration rests is in the relationship between Ishmael and 1 The stories that I discuss in this paper are found in many different religious texts across the Abrahamic faiths. For ease of reference and understanding, I will be referring to them as Bible stories as the quotations included are from Everett Fox’s Bible translation. However, this does not mean that these stories can only be found in one text or that they belong only to one religious tradition.

2 Genesis and Exodus: A New English Rendition ; Translated with Commentary and Notes, Genesis and Exodus: A New English Rendition ; Translated with Commentary and Notes (New York: Schocken Books, 1991), Genesis 4:3-4.

3

Ibid. Genesis 4:5.

4

Ibid. Genesis 4:8.

5

Ibid. Genesis 4:9.

6 William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. David M. Bevington and David Scott Kastan (New York, NY: Bantam Books, 2006).

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Isaac. Sons of Abraham, these brothers are likewise caught in the midst of jealous competition prompted by the concerns of their parents. Ishmael is Abraham’s eldest son, born to Hagar, an enslaved woman.

Isaac is Abraham’s eldest legitimate son, born to his wife Sarah after years of trying in vain for an heir.

Their story begins with the two boys playing together. This friendliness between the boys upsets Sarah. “She said to Avraham [Abraham]: Drive out this slave-woman and her son, for the son of this slave-woman shall not share-inheritance with my son, with Yitzhak [Isaac]!”7 In Sarah’s eyes, any recognition of brotherhood or sense of equality between the boys threatens the legitimacy of Isaac’s inheri8 tance of the land promised38 to Abraham’s TR2 descendants by God. Abraham loves both of his sons and knows that to abandon either would be wrong. Seeing Abraham’s struggle “God said to Avraham: Do not let it be bad in your eyes concerning the lad and concerning your slave-woman; in all that Sara[h] says to you, hearken to her voice, for it is through Yitzhak that seed will be called by your (name). But also the son of the slave-woman-a-nation will I make of him, for he too is your seed.”9 With God’s blessing, Abraham ignores his trepidation and casts Ishmael and Hagar out into the wilderness, upholding Isaac as his rightful heir.

After Ishmael is sent away, Abraham receives another command from God.10 “He said: Pray take your son, your only-one, whom you love, Yitzhak, and go-you-forth to the land of Moriyya/Seeing, and offer him there as an offering-up upon one of the mountains that I will tell you of.”11 Once again, Abraham is asked to hold faith in God over his own moral beliefs, and once again Abraham complies. He and his son climb to the top of the mountain, build a site for the sacrifice, and Abraham prepares to sacrifice the boy. Just as he brings the blade of his knife to his son’s throat, one of God’s messengers intervenes.

“He said: Do not stretch out your hand against the lad, do not do anything to him! For now I know that you are in awe of God- you have not withheld your son, your only-one, from me.”12 In reward for this proof of faith, God gives Abraham and his son a ram to sacrifice instead and blesses Abraham with descendants who will spread across the whole world.

On some readings, the sacrifice story is a lesson in faith; Abraham was called by God to commit the unthinkable act of sacrificing his own son and because of his perfect faith and compliance, he is rewarded. However, there is much more at stake in this story. Across retellings of the story in Jewish, Muslim, 7 Genesis and Exodus: A New English Rendition ; Translated with Commentary and Notes, Genesis and Exodus: A New English Rendition ; Translated with Commentary and Notes (New York: Schocken Books, 1991), Genesis 21:10.

8

Ibid. Genesis 12:7.

9 The equality of Abraham’s love for his sons is the topic of much academic discourse. Genesis 22:2 opens with God’s command of Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. “He said: Pray take your son, your only-one, whom you love, Yitzhak…” While the first three phrases can be read as simple restatements of Isaac, it can also be argued that these phrases mark a conversation between Abraham and God: “Your son.” “Which son?” “Your-only one.” “I have two sons.” “The one whom you love.” “I love both of my sons.” “Isaac.”

10

Ibid. Genesis 21:12.

11

Ibid. Genesis 22:2.

12

Ibid. Genesis 22:12.

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and Christian traditions, there is no consensus as to which son was intended for the sacrifice. There are compelling arguments for both Isaac and Ishmael13—claims as to which son was indeed intended for the sacrifice are beyond the scope of my paper, I instead refer to him only as “the son.”14 The son’s compliance in the act of his own sacrifice is imperative to understanding this story.

Reuven Firestone’s exploration of different retellings of the sacrifice story in the Qur’an and other Islamic texts provides us with more detailed accounts of the sacrifice than the Fox Bible. Most importantly, we get a closer look into the son’s willing compliance in his own sacrifice. Across all the Qur’anic versions of the sacrifice that 39Firestone TR2 compares, the general dialogue between Abraham and his son is as follows: “‘O my son, I see in a vision that I will sacrifice you. So look, what is your view?’ The son said: ‘O my father! Do as you are commanded. If God wills, you will find me patient and enduring!’”15 In many cases, the son is even more active in ensuring the success of the sacrifice, telling his father to “Tighten his bonds so he will not squirm, keep back his clothes from him so that no blood will soil them and cause [his mother] grief, move the knife quickly to his throat so that death will be easiest, [and] give greetings (salām) to his mother when he returns.”16 The extension of dialogue in these versions of the sacrifice story paints a clearer picture of what kind of a person the son is. He is neither duped nor coerced into complying, in fact he is not merely compliant at all but rather a willing and active participant in the sacrifice. Beyond going along with his father’s plan, he offers practical advice and seeks to make his sacrifice as logistically and emotionally easy as possible, both for himself and for his parents. This raises the question of why the son would agree to be sacrificed. It can be read analogous to Abraham’s part of the story: a test of faith that shows that the power of God’s love is the most important thing of all. However, I think there is a more compelling reading available. In agreeing to be part of this sacrifice, the son is securing his brother’s future. If either of the sons dies, the other would certainly be Abraham’s rightful heir. By agreeing to sacrifice himself, the son chooses his brother over himself. Like Prospero, this son would not choose to punish his brother.

Even further, this active participation in the sacrifice declares that the son would rather die than benefit from his brother’s death.17 This reading is furthered by the reward that God gives Abraham. God’s decision to give Abraham a ram to sacrifice, is by no means picked at random. As recounted by Firestone: “The ram said: ‘O Friend 13 Reuven Firestone, Journeys in Holy Lands: The Evolution of the Abraham-Ishmael Legends in Islamic Exegesis (Albany (N.Y.): State univ. of the New York press, 1990), 107-159.

14 It is important to note the religious significance of determining which brother was the intended sacrifice. The inheritance of the promised land is highly important to each of the Abrahamic faiths, and opting out of answering the question of which son is sacrificed eschews this significance. However, in discussing the story of the sacrifice, this paper focuses on what the willingness to be sacrificed says about both of the brothers, regardless of the religious implications of which one was “actually” chosen.

15

Ibid. 109.

16

Ibid. 116.

17

I owe this argument to an interpretation given by Oona Eisenstadt in class on October 20, 2022.

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of God, sacrifice me instead of your son, for I am more appropriate of a sacrifice than he. I am the ram of Abel, son of Adam, who gave me as an offering to his Lord and whose offering was accepted. I have grazed in the meadows of the Garden for forty autumns!”18 This ram, once the catalyst for brotherly betrayal, returns to redeem brotherly sacrifice. Thus, Ishmael and Isaac have restored the name of brotherhood.

The return of the ram highlights the interconnected world of the characters of the Bible. While they are teaching us how to live, they likewise teach one another lessons about how to treat each other.

The Tempest will help us take a closer look at the implications of the returning ram. The action of the play begins when Prospero’s brother, Antonio, passes by the island where Prospero has been exiled via 40 TR2 a ship. Prospero conjures a storm that shipwrecks Antonio and his crew on the island. Once stranded, Antonio and his crew are at the whims of Prospero and his magic. Prospero himself is set on regaining his dukedom. By the conclusion of the play’s action, among many developments, Prospero’s dukedom has been restored. Instead of keeping Antonio trapped on the island and punishing him for his cruelty against him, Prospero chooses to abandon his magic and forgive Antonio. Throughout this play, Prospero and Antonio’s brotherhood develops from betrayal and feuding (Cain and Abel) to reconciliation and forgiveness (Ishmael and Isaac).

However, even this reconciliation is not enough to save Prospero. His monologue in the epilogue creates a new tension that can only be resolved by the audience. “I must be here confined by you/ Or sent to Naples. Let me not,/ Since I have my dukedom got/ And pardoned the deceiver, dwell/ In this bare island by your spell,/ But release me from my bands/ With the help of your good hands.”19 Prospero, though in a place of resolution with respect to the action, cannot enjoy any of the things that he has worked for throughout the play if he remains stuck on the island. The only way to release him is for the audience to give him the proper applause.

While comedic, Prospero’s request is also tragic. Prospero is just a character whose life is used in service of telling a story; without understanding and recognition from the audience, this life ceases to have resolution. He is forced to remain at the center of this story so long as people continue to listen to, watch, and read the play. His request for release is both a tongue-in-cheek request for praise from the audience and a desperate plea to be allowed to exist outside of Shakespeare’s narrative.

Prospero’s request for the audience to set him free raises the question of what we owe to the characters in our stories. I think it is especially interesting to apply this question of obligation to characters who are themselves teaching us how to be ethical. Thus we return to the brothers of the Bible. Do these characters need the audience’s help to set them free from their stories?

Let us first look to Cain and Abel. Abel is forever trapped in this story because it marks where his life ends; in death he has lost the opportunity to continue to grow and develop. Likewise, Cain is also trapped. As penance for his killing of his brother, God “set a sign for Kayin, so that whoever came upon

18

Ibid. 126.

19 William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. David M. Bevington and David Scott Kastan (New York, NY: Bantam Books, 2006). 163.

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him would not strike him down,” thus forcing Cain to continue to live in the confines of this story.20 Just as each of them are trapped within the confines of their story, they are also chained to the concept of brotherhood. The names Cain and Abel stand for sibling rivalry gone wrong, a cautionary tale of what happens when brothers are pushed apart and fail to see the good in one another.

However, Cain and Abel are freed from this curse by none other than Ishmael and Isaac. This next pair of brothers take on the challenge of sibling rivalry and favoritism, overcoming dire circumstances through their love and respect of one another. Pitted against one another since birth, one of them nevertheless chooses to give his life for the other, and it does not matter which. In essence, the story of Ishmael and Isaac rewrites the story of Cain and Abel, a brother dying for his brother replaces a 41 TR2 brother killing his brother. As thanks for being released from their story, Cain and Abel send Abel’s ram to take the place of the son in the sacrifice.

However, now Ishmael and Isaac are in a similar predicament. Though theirs is a story of brotherly love not betrayal, they have not been set free. Just as Prospero requires the audience’s aid to return to Naples, it seems that Ishmael and Isaac will be trapped as the image of brotherly sacrifice unless we, the audience, act.

Perhaps, given all the time we have spent taking lessons from Ishmael and Isaac’s story, we have a duty to free them from it. It seems that the best way of fulfilling this duty is to learn from the very story that created this duty. We ought then to follow the lead of Ishmael and Isaac. While we are not characters in our own religious myths, the best way to understand the lessons that these stories impart may be to act as though we are. That is to say, when we read about characters like Ishmael and Isaac, we ought to think of their lives as bearing on our own with the same immediacy and import that Cain and Abel’s lives bore on theirs. In doing so, when we live our lives, we cast ourselves as the characters and reimagine the themes and lessons of the stories themselves. Thus, we free the characters of the original stories from the trap of defining their stories, while likewise giving ourselves the freedom to rethink how we ought to bring the lessons of the past into the future. Instead of learning statically from the familiar tropes of traditional stories, we must free the protagonists by earning the ram they send us and receiving it as such, rewriting their stories through the ways we live our lives.

20 Genesis and Exodus: A New English Rendition ; Translated with Commentary and Notes, Genesis and Exodus: A New English Rendition ; Translated with Commentary and Notes (New York: Schocken Books, 1991), Genesis 4:15

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Directionless, Adrian Flynn

This piece, entitled “Directionless”, was made by taking guitar strings (cut in order to install on an instrument) and arranging them so as to define spaces and boundaries on the canvas. Each session of painting thereafter was done without prior planning. Representations of dualities and balance dominate the space, even though it has no clearly defined direction for the eye to follow.

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Towards a critique without bannisters1 Sophie Krop, Pitzer ’24

1

In the mid-1980s, a vigorous debate took off as Critical Theorists2 raised worries about where poststructuralism, in its attempt to rip away the possibility of recourse to secure normative foundations, would leave social theory3. If power is not only negative, but, following Foucault, productive as well, and if it is not localized but diffuse – acting through us, rather than simply upon us – liberation becomes a far more complicated picture than the earlier emancipatory narratives had promised. It is not simply a matter of toppling an oppressive regime or even transforming the relations of production. It is no longer clear that the desire for freedom we have is not, itself, a product of the power that subjects us. Not only 1 I borrow this phrase from Hannah Arendt’s notion that we must learn to “think without banisters”, however, in this paper, I use the phrase ‘guardrails’ as I think it gets more clearly at the same idea. I keep her phrase in my title as a tribute to my indebtedness to her concept. Hannah Arendt, “Hannah Arendt on Hannah Arendt,” in Thinking Without a Banister: Essays in Understanding, 1953-1975 (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2018), pg. 473.

2 In this essay I will use the designations Poststructuralists and Critical Theorists as rough indicators of the two groups in this debate (with the Critical Theory camp taking up the argument that critique needs to be grounded in a strong preestablished normative theory)(following Benhabib (1987)); the debate staged in (Benhabib et al. (1995)) layed out the two camps along these lines as well). Of course, Critical Theory (I am using the term narrowly here to encompass that specific tradition of the Frankfurt school and its descendents) is not the only critical approach that is threatened by poststructuralism’s attack on these secure foundations. In fact, central to my paper is the identification of this reliance upon stable foundations as being at the heart of almost all of hitherto existing critical/philosophical thought. My focus on Critical Theorists is motivated by the fact that in many ways they share an aim with poststructuralist critique. Their concern is that doing away with foundations disables the sort of critique poststructuralists themselves articulated as their objective: politically engaged critique. Thus, I felt that it usefully isolated the problematic at hand.

3 See Mayes (2015) for a useful survey of this debate, what he calls the “the mid- 1980’s…debates about normativity and the possibility of resistance to power”; as well as Schubert (2021). Key touchstones in this debate include Fraser (1981); Taylor (1984), Honneth (2009)), along with the dialogue staged in Feminist Contentionss mentioned above. Schubert also identifies what he calls a “second phase” of this debate – which attempted to salvage a notion of freedom in Foucault’s thought by turning to his later work, for example, The Subject and Power, in which Foucault argues that we are not solely determined by power, insisting that where there is power there is resistance (Allen (2013)) serves as a useful reference point for the arguments of this ‘second phase’.). But this defense does not deal with the more substantial part of the problem posed by poststructuralist’s demonstrations that there is no outside of power –with what Schubert calls “the problem of subjectification”, in contrast to the related “problem of power determination”, – which is that if resistance is itself not grounded in secure normative foundations outside of power, it seems that it does follow from demonstrating the possibility of change that this change is therefore substantial or valuable: a reflection of a meaningful choice. On its own, this defense does not give us any reason to think the new (the situation that results from our resistance to power) could or would be “better” then the current situation as it evacuates the normative resources required to make such a claim. Thus, while this defense of Foucault locates a possibility for change within the system, on its own, it is incapable of demonstrating the value of such a change; it believes it has located a possibility of freedom in Foucault’s work, but without the old foundations in which this freedom was grounded it seems an insubstantial or purely “analytic” (Schubert, 638) notion. In this paper I seek to locate a more substantial notion of freedom that can be found in the aftermath of foundations.

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might it not be the case that the preferences we hold might be false but, further, it might be that there are no true preferences beneath or behind the false ones. In such a case, is an articulation of a democratic or emancipatory vision desirable, or even intelligible?

These anxieties are understandable. Poststructuralism does dislodge precisely the certain truths which have been the bedrock of our emancipatory political projects, as we have understood them since the enlightenment. Democracy has been understood as a means towards the realization of the ideal of self-determination; emancipation has concerned the liberation of our ‘true selves’ from the domination of imposing forces that seek to obscure these presumed essential truths. All of these values have been built, brick by brick, upon these and the poststructuralist critique upends them. How could 44 foundations, TR2 we not fear that all the values that we hold most dear (democracy, justice, opposition to domination, etc), built so fragilely upon them, will come tumbling down as well?

The ideal of freedom understood, along the traditional model, as the possibility of becoming unhindered4 in the expression of one’s pure and uncontaminated will, is irretrievably lost. There is no outside of power; no Truth beneath the facade of ideology and false consciousness to which we can have recourse when establishing the ground from which to launch a critique of power. However, this need not result in paralysis. Quite the opposite; it is precisely what enables us to move forward, to act.

Rather than an original sin, a fall after which we are all now groping in the dark, irrevocably limited in our political ambitions; this absence is, in fact, constitutive. There is no original truth of ourselves, masked by power, waiting to be revealed and emancipated. But this is not a cause for despair; instead, I argue, it enables a different and more substantial sort of emancipation. I suggest that this emancipation becomes possible only when we finally let go of this old ideal (and, as I will argue, the foundationalist, centered model of thought it is embedded within). This ideal, far from being indispensable for our liberation (as the Critical Theorists contend) is, in fact, a key means of keeping us in chains. We must finally release our anxiety-riddled grip on these sure foundations. It is only here, when we truly give freedom “a chance”5, that democracy might become a substantial practice. Substantial freedom will not mean the absence of power or domination. So long as this remains our ideal, we will remain stuck following the well-worn grooves of a form of thought whose essential logic is a static representationalism. We must finally liberate ourselves from a model of thought and critique which requires and presumes a pure, power-free normative foundation from the outset. Instead, I will argue, we must embrace a notion of freedom and democracy6 which is always only “to come”; and for which this paradox is precisely its

4 Purified from outside inheritances of cultural prejudice and bias, or manipulations by ideological apparatuses obscuring this truth.

5 Jacques Derrida, Taking Chances: Derrida, Psychoanalysis, and Literature (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). In which Derrida meditates on the irreducibility of the risk of the encounter, we never know how our acts will land.

6 I fluctuate in this paper between the terms democracy, freedom, and politically engaged critique. This is because I seek to emphasize that what I take to be at stake in my paper is the possibility of all three. In short, the possibility of a notion of meaningful choice (which I see all three notions as depending upon: the demand for each is a version of a demand for any one of them) is at the heart of what my paper seeks to locate. I conclude meaningful choice is paradoxically, only made possible when it is embraced as never finally settled or arrived at, in short, through a foregrounding of its “impossibility (as pure)” Anderson, Alter Ego: Toward a Response Ethics of Self-Relation, pg. 89.

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condition of possibility. The requirement of our freedom cannot amount to our ability to step outside of the conditions of possibility that we never choose; which have shaped not only our possibilities but our desires and will. Freedom must be rigorously situated in a temporality of becoming; as being made possible not in spite of but, paradoxically, precisely because of the inescapable fact of being caught within a power to which there is no ‘outside’7; a freedom which will never finally arrive at itself; but is made possible only through its deferral.

The presentation of poststructuralism as solely a negative project of dismantling is too often where we stop. Even among many who accept poststructuralism’s insights, it is agreed that poststructuralism leaves us with uncomfortably 45 TR2 anemic grounds for politically engaged critique. The problem is framed as a matter of finding a way to salvage any normative political project from the ruins. In this essay, I aim to engage the “normativity debates” of the ‘80s between Critical Theory and poststructuralism; arguing against Critical Theory’s charge that poststructuralism evacuates the essential resources for politically engaged critique and asserting that, in fact, the opposite is the case. The foundations that poststructuralism dislodges are not the indispensable prerequisites of politically engaged critique, as the Critical Theorists claimed. Rather, I challenge the traditional framing of this debate. Instead of a reactive defense of poststructuralism on the terms of the old model, this paper attempts to intervene in this framing by exposing the model of thought in which it resides. Through these interventions, one can begin to see how, in fact, the problem might be more productively framed the other way around. It is this model of thought’s requirement of certain foundations that has contained and impeded the normative political project. Poststructuralism is not simply a negative movement of dismantling - instead, it is an enabling breaking open. I will therefore reframe the debate around what I take to be its real dividing axis – two divergent models of critique – and demonstrate how this alternative model of thought, what I call that of postfoundational critique, is able to free itself from the constraints of the old model, opening up the conditions for a substantial notion of freedom for the first time by locating itself in a permanent temporality of becoming.

In the first section of my paper, I will elaborate on the traditional model of thought, and its insistence that politically engaged critique legitimate itself through recourse to a timeless domain of universal, secure foundations outside of contingency and power as its indispensable precondition. I will identify how this has functioned, essentially, as an unnecessary container on critique. Then, I will demonstrate how poststructuralism proceeds along a different model of thought - one that, far from abandoning the urgent necessity of politically engaged critique and transformation - makes it possible for the first time.

Two Models of Critique: Towards a Critique Without Bannisters The dominant reception to poststructuralism’s dismantling of the certain foundations upon

7 We are constituted invariably and from the start, by what is before us and outside of us. My agency does not consist in denying this condition of my constitution...That my agency is riven with paradox does not mean it is impossible. It means only that paradox is the condition of its possibility” Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (Psychology Press, 2004), pg. 3.

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which critique has traditionally proceeded has been one of fear and nostalgia. Fraser’s famous entry into this debate, “Foucault on Modern Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions” serves as a useful touchstone8. Speaking in the name of the indispensable urgency of politically engaged critique, she charges poststructuralism (specifically Foucault) with evacuating the normative recourses from which this vital critique must proceed. Traditionally, critique began with a presumed notion of the good, the true, or the just and then set out to demonstrate how the current social order undermined the conditions for the realization of that ideal9. All of the grand social theories of the 19th and 20th centuries, from Rousseau to Durkheim to Horkheimer and Adorno, undertook their ambitious projects on these terms. For example, the 46 Marxist TR2 theory of alienation and reification argued that life under capitalism prevents all people living under it from realizing the good life because it prevents us from realizing ourselves, our essential humanity – or “species being” – through unalienated labor10. Any claim that a society is being harmed by a given social situation relies on a normative reference point - an operative understanding of what the good entails - that one can then claim is being undermined. Narratives of emancipation almost invariably have attempted to ground the normative reference points they employ via recourse to the higher-order, legitimating realm of Truth. They claim to have discovered our true nature, the true definition of a just society as God intended it to be, the rational way of ordering a political system or an ethical system, etc. Even Marx falls prey to this temptation: why is the way capitalism alienates us from our labor bad? Because it undermines our ability to realize our true nature, our essential “species being”. Without starting from these secure normative reference points, without recourse to a legitimating metaprinciple that justifies one’s judgment of a political regime as unjust because it impedes this universal principle, as the old model of critique did, how can critique proceed?

Jean-François Lyotard argues that this method of legitimation–the requirement that this ground be located, that political claims proceed with the legitimating backing of objective necessity–is at the heart of modern knowledge.11 This claim enables those acting in its name to wield this Truth like a bludgeon, dismissing all contrary claims as impossible in advance of political negotiation. In order to wield this powerful force, any given knowledge-regime or “language game” (a set of rules governing what will count as a true statement) requires a legitimation beyond its own terms. They have to claim for themselves not the status of merely one set of rules among others, but rather to be a set of rules by which one could legitimately judge all others. Their governing rules must thus be established not simply as the product of the contingencies of a historically specific, and thus relative, set of values and beliefs, but in

8 Nancy Fraser, “Foucault on Modern Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions,” Praxis International 1, no. 3 (1981): 272–87.

9 I am drawing here on a formulation Axel Honneth proposed in his 2021 lectures for his course European Social Philosophy, in my reading, they provide a slightly more refined formulation of the account he gives in Axel Honneth, “Reconstructive Social Criticism with a Genealogical Proviso: On the Idea of ‘Critique’ in the Frankfurt School,” in Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory (Columbia University Press, 2009)) 10

Marx and Engels, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” 1978

11

Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (U of Minnesota Press, 1984).

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a domain beyond the lowly trenches of political life– the transcendental and timeless realm of necessary, universal, objective Truth. This purity – the demonstration that the centering principle or foundation for one’s knowledge claim is secure and necessary– is the indispensable requirement of a form of political claim making that seeks the force and guarantees of necessity.

To expose, as Derrida does, that “the center is not the center,” that the structure is only ever contradictorily coherent, is thus uniquely a problem for such discourses, as the precise function of a center (this is why Derrida formulates his thesis as a paradox, rather than simply saying the structure is governed by a principle outside of it) is to be the principle of coherence for a structure whose primary 12 ordering law and aim is totality 47 . This TR2exposure – which thus upends the basic assumptions which made these truth-claims possible – is one which poststructuralism, as a whole, performs in various registers.

Lyotard demonstrates something similar when he exposes scientific knowledge as being perpetually dependent upon extra- scientific discourses to legitimate itself, to supplement its absent center. Deleuze does the same when he demonstrates that the ordering principle of the traditional image of thought, in its presumption towards pure beginnings, always in fact rests upon merely disavowed “subjective presumptions”, taking the form of ultimately unjustifiable “everybody knows”- isms13.

To reveal – as poststructuralist critique does14 – the rigorous standard of admissibility which scientific knowledge (the most recent of knowledge-regimes which claim for itself the status of objective truth) has set for itself as not being secured, as it proclaims, in a domain of universal timeless validity, but rather only upon the contingency of a subsequent belief, unjustifiable beyond its own terms, is to threaten it existentially. Lyotard sees the arc of modern philosophy (an extra-scientific metadiscourse) as precisely the project towards establishing and securing this always-threatened legitimacy15. This instigates a procession of what Derrida would call centering fictions, what Lyotard

12 Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play,” in Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pg. 279. If God exists, or if Man is a rational subject, then I can safely assume the coherence of the world in which I reside.

God guarantees that I can trust all knowledge for which I achieve clear and distinct perceptions as Descartes has it; universal reason guarantees a universal principle by which I can therefore legitimately judge all knowledge and ethical systems, across diverse cultures and historical moments. These centers thus serve as an “organizing principle” (279) that allows for the internal “coherence” of a total system). It is this “pretensio[n] to totality” (Lyotard, 65) that is required for a system to be stable, to reduce the immanent possibilities of change contained always within a structure precisely as a product of its absent center; the center’s role thus is always to secure the totality as a totality, a closed system. Thus even the sign, in defining itself as the connection of a signifier to its signified – a signifer, thus, “different from its signified”(Derrida, 287) – an of attachment made possible via a moment of synchronically immediate negative differentiation (it is not every other thing in the signifying system) requires this total field and its closure to secure itself. Without this closure, the notion that a signifer will ever finally arrive at its underlying and stable “signified” is impossible. We are, rather, inescapably caught in the play of supplementing signifiers, circling around, but never finally arriving at a discrete and self-same signified.

13

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Columbia University Press, 1994), 129–30.

14 In poststructuralist’s eyes however, this dismantling was not carried out from without. Instead, modern knowledge, from the start, carried the “seeds” of its own destruction (Lyotard, pg. 38). As Lyotard points out (but so does Derrida, in for example, Structure, Sign, and Play), the old grand narratives dissolution is a trajectory of an “internal erosion” (Lyotard, pg.

39) as its requirement that it rid itself of presumptions inevitably fails, resulting in a vicious self-cannibalization as a result of this untenable standard.

15 This is why Descartes needs recourse to God,– needs to establish some “first proof or transcendental authority”– to provide such a foundation for scientific knowledge Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, pg. 29.

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calls ‘legitimating metaprinciples’ or ‘grand narratives’ (which range from a theological guarantee, to an appeal to a universal Reason (with the teleological course of human history it implies), to teleological theories of an essential dialectical struggle16. A key contribution of postfoundational critique is the exposure of these truth claims for what they are: always centering fictions attempting to reduce political life; presenting themselves as natural and inevitable dictates, foreordained and indisputable, in order to mask their nature as contestable and contingent political claims, ways of ordering our lives that are changeable. Once we finally accept that no such recourse to an objective legitimating metaprinciple exists and that there is no guidebook to tell us with certainty how we must live together, we can open ourselves to the fact this decision is, irreparably, a political one. The condition of our freedom is that we 48 TR2 17 must do the “difficult” work of deciding this for ourselves.

Far from being indispensable, requiring the establishment of secure foundations as a necessary precondition for critique functions to prematurely circumscribe the possible realm of political transformation. Foucault argues that to attempt (and require) that we begin at the beginning, that critique move from secure foundations – outside of power and history and its contaminating (contingent, rather than necessary) biases, presumptions, and unjustifiable habits of thought – is always, in fact, to fall back into these presumptions, but even more uncritically. It is thus to end up relying upon and reinforcing a certain domain of ‘unquestionables’ which are often the very assumptions and habits of thought that are most powerfully impeding emancipatory projects. As an example of how these pre-decided normative criteria, formulated as foundational starting points for critique, renders them thus outside of the legitimate domain of critical reflection and political contestation, take the frequent approach taken by emancipatory movements that locate a criterion for a just political system in an absence of domination.

This criteria for what an absence of domination would require (how we can know when we have arrived) must be set out in advance: in this hypothetical example, suppose they choose negative freedom - others could include a different pre-decided criterion such as the realization of a (pre-established and specified) true interest that must be freed from ideological manipulation, etc.). One of Foucault’s key insights was that, rather than taking it as a timeless given, we must historicize the conditions of possibility for the distinction we have between domination and its absence. A crucial part of the project of Discipline and Punish was to expose how the oppositions we have between consent and coercion, between spectacular violence and leniency, between legitimate and illegitimate power, have been a central ruse of power18. A means of protecting itself from scrutiny, all while productive modes of power have operated beneath this ostensible and formal consent, rendering that consent insubstantial. Thus, a criterion for a legitimate power-knowledge regime located in negative freedom - figured as the absence of domination judged as formal consent to the power-regime in which one lives – would thus function to render outside of the sphere of legitimate political contestation and critique the question of why we consent to 16 Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play,” pg. 279 “the center…can also indifferently be called the origin or end, archē or telos”. Lyotard also describes these different and largely sequential “substitutions of center for center”, as Derrida puts it, as he charts the project of metaphysics throughout The Postmodern Condition.

17

Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” in The Foucault Reader (Pantheon Books, 1984), pg. 41.

18

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Vintage Books, 1995), pg. 28.

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what we do (a product of the more insidious and, Foucault demonstrates, pervasive productive operation of modern power): which is precisely what must be most rigorously critiqued. Emancipatory claims that demand a notion of negative freedom – one which, they fail to realize, is itself an inheritance of, and a tool by which, the power structure they aim to dismantle legitimates itself – end up, unknowingly, functioning in the service of the power they aim to critique. Thus, this demand is, in fact, a barrier to precisely the type of urgently needed political action in the name of which Fraser makes her claims.

When critique presumes foundations, it forecloses critical reflection upon them, thus consolidating rather than contesting their claim to immutability. By requiring that I presume this normative standard as the starting point 49 for my TR2critical inquiry, I have already undermined my capacity to accurately understand how this normative standard has functioned; how it has shaped my thinking. Thus, this “rush to judgment” forecloses critical reflection on the way the very criteria I use to judge are themselves products of the power regime I aim to denounce19. This is why Foucault insists, in Fraser’s terms, upon “bracketing” normative judgment, in his genealogical method20. Instead of beginning critique from a pure transcendental position presumed to be outside of power (thus foreclosing critical reflection upon the ways in fact the judgments I make are inescapably its products), I must begin my critique from the impure, contaminated position of being always-already within the power-knowledge regime I aim to critique. Foucault therefore offers a model of critique21 which foregrounds the inheritances of the critic rather than disavows them; indeed, it takes these as the most indispensable object of critique22. It is an unflinching interrogation of the conditions of our constitution; of our inheritances and imbrications in the power regime we aim to critique. The aim of critique is not to reveal the dictates of a foreordained destiny, or unearth a hidden truth of ourselves to be realized. Instead, it is a project of opening up the present moment, working at its limits (what it has foreclosed as unthinkable); to “gives new impetus, as far and wide as possible, to the undefined work of freedom”23 by exposing this fallacy of the given in its contingency; stripping it of its veneer of necessity24.

As discussed above, it is existentially threatening to a model that insists upon grounding its political claims in the force of necessary truth to expose this impurity – the contingencies and inheritances that inevitably shape the normative reference points upon which we rely. However, to recognize that we 19

Judith Butler, “What Is Critique?” in The Judith Butler Reader, ed. Sara Salih (Wiley, 2004), pg. 305.

20

Fraser, “Foucault on Modern Power.”

21 In his essay What is Enlightenment Foucault distinguishes two models of critique, one – for which he finds an exemplary figure in Kant, proceeds transcendentally, at the level of generalizations and abstractions, and sets out to discover the”necessary limitation[s]” and “universal structures” that timelessly govern the realm of possible human knowledge – and another, which begins not from the “pure beginning” of a transcendental timeless nature of ourselves, but rather a “historico-critical” mode, whose “point of departure” is, vitally, only the present, and which undertakes a “critical ontology of ourselves”.

22 This model of critique undertakes a “historical ontology of ourselves; seeking to historicize the present; expose what appears to be timeless ontological certainties are in fact only historically so.

23

Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” 1984, pg. 46.

24 “[T]he function of any diagnosis concerning the nature of the present...does not consist in a simply characterization of what we are but, instead–by following lines of fragility in the present–in managing to grasp why and how that which-is might no longer be that-which-is.”

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are inescapably products of history is also to expose that this is all we are. Poststructuralists’ insight that there is no outside of power, that we (as subjects, as critics25) are inescapably constituted by the configurations of power that we aim to critique, does not imply that we are hopelessly and totally determined by these forces. In fact, it is exactly the absence of these foundations that make our freedom possible; “If history does not have a course, then it does not prescribe the future; the ‘weight’ and contours of history establish constraints but not norms for political action”26. There is no inner truth of ourselves to be unmasked but, rather, only a contingent self to be continually reworked. Thus, one of genealogical critiques vital functions is to rupture the assumed continuity between critique (a descriptive endeavor 27 aiming at the diagnosis of the 50 contours TR2 of the situation in which we live) and normative judgment .

There is no foreordained, necessary, path of historical movement; no objectively locatable grand narrative (guaranteed by Reason, God, or the historical materialist dialectic of struggling classes) through which normative justification can be neatly secured, outside of power and politics, pre-decided for us, wielding the force of necessity. The role of critique cannot be to reveal or establish this sure ground for normative judgment; “rather than promising a certain future, as progressive history does, genealogy only opens possibilities through which various futures might be pursued”28. It is only from here that we finally become free to truly decide. However, my freedom is never pure. The minute I take my will as such – as radically volitional, untainted by inheritances from an outside power – the condition of possibility for my freedom has already been abandoned; as I have compromised my capacity to interrogate the ways in which my desires, invariably, are determined by forces outside of me, limiting and channeling my will towards aims that might be undermining my well-being. Instead, as I will argue in the next section, my freedom is only made possible when it is situated in a permanent temporality of becoming.

Section 2: “Thus we are always in a position of beginning again”29 Judith Butler argues that to take seriously the inescapability of the fact of the critics imbrications in power requires that we proceed from a model of critique which understands our normative commitments as immanent to the power configuration one is attempting to critique, and thus one must insist that they themselves must be continually interrogated30. Butler, then, in contrast to the old critical theory which assumes that “such presuppositions must be sorted out prior to action”31 argues that, instead, 25 Judith Butler, “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism’” in Feminists Theorize the Political (Routledge, 1992), pg. 6 “power pervades the very conceptual apparatus that seeks to negotiate its terms, including the subject position of the critic”.

26

Brown, “Politics Without Banisters: Genealogical Politics in Nietzsche and Foucault,” 117

27 Brown, pg.119, “A genealogical politics has no necessary political entailments: indeed, the particular kind of discursive space it affords for political thought, judgment, and political interventions is precisely a space free of the notion of necessary entailments.”

28

Brown, “Politics Without Banisters: Genealogical Politics in Nietzsche and Foucault,” 2001, pg. 104.

29

Foucault, What is Enlightenm

30

Butler, “Contingent Foundations,” 1992

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critique is made possibly only when we suspend, or defer, the ontological certainties of the terms by which we proceed; when we “forthrightly”32 presume their impurity, and thus their provisionality33. In short, when we situate the normative judgments we make, the temporal position from which critique proceeds, in a permanent temporality of becoming. These new “contingent foundations” must “be left permanently open, permanently contested, permanently contingent” rather than presupposed “in advance”34 of critique and thus secured from critical scrutiny35. These new foundations are not outside of power. Our foundations are contingent because they are fundamentally formulated within the “limits” of the now, and it is precisely this horizon that we seek to expand.

Critique will never arrive.

ItTR2 is never going to get outside of power, never going to get to the 51 solution. It is striving for a “better” than the now, but without predefined criteria from which outside position one could judge ones arrival. This is the heart of Fraser’s concern36. In the aftermath of poststructuralists’ dismantling of foundations, we are left compassless37. Without recourse to the old evaluative metrics for judging the validity of a current regime of power, how can we locate a value in change?

If there is no outside of power, but simply different ways of being in it, how could we justify our claim that change is valuable? In short where, without foundations, can we locate our notion of a “better”?

Is it not simply another product of power? I have demonstrated how poststructuralism dismantles the old means of legitimating our demands for political change, but I have not yet elaborated what an alternative, immanent means of legitmation might look like. If there is no getting outside of power, it is not intrinsically bad to be caught within it. This means our ideal cannot be getting outside of power,

31 Judith Butler, “For a Careful Reading,” in Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange, by Seyla Benhabib, Nancy Fraser, and Drucilla Cornell (Psychology Press, 1995), pg. 129.

32 “A genealogical politics has no necessary political entailments: indeed, the particular kind of discursive space it affords for political thought, judgment, and political interventions is precisely a space free of the notion of necessary entailments. This characteristic is often considered a failing when viewed from a perspective in which legitimate political positions must flow directly from the endpoint of ‘objective’ or ‘systematic’ political critique, but genealogy refuses this ruse and features instead forthrightly contingent elements of desire attachment, judgment, and alliance as the compositional material of political attachments and positions.” (Brown, “Politics Without Banisters: Genealogical Politics in Nietzsche and Foucault,” 2001, 119, emphasis mine) 33 As an example of how this sort of postfoundational posture could function, Sara Salih points to Judith Butler’s own style of writing. Their frequent habit of formulating their central propositions and arguments in the form of unanswered questions, becomes visible, within this frame, as essential to their understanding of what the critical practice entails. (Sara Salih, The Judith Butler Reader, ed. Judith Butler (Wiley, 2004), pg. 303) 34

Butler, “Contingent Foundations,” 1992, pg. 3

35

Butler, pg. 8.

36 Fraser, “Foucault on Modern Power.” pg. 283, “Foucault calls in no uncertain terms for resistance to domination. But why? Why is struggle preferable to submission? Why ought domination to be resisted?”

37 Deleuze, seeking to intervene in the negative valence placed on this lack of orienting principle, proposes we take as the exemplary figure for his alternative model of thought thought, one who “lacks the compass with which to make a circle” (Deleueze, 130), one who ventures forthrightly into the dark. We must refuse to be afraid of the dark, an inevitable product of embracing the openness of the structure, the condition for the realization of our freedom, is that we cannot predict or foresee “in advance” where we are headed, the unpredictable difference that emerges within the repetition of the same (as Deleuze thematizes in this chapter, within the “eternal return”, the circle he refers to above) a fear which, as Cixous teaches us (Cixous, 878) has been a key enclosing tactic of phallogocentricism.

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uncovering a true self “behind”38 powers facade. When we give up this ready-made yardstick, political life becomes much more challenging, for we need now to decide these normative criteria for ourselves, “in medias res”39. This alternative post-foundational means of legitimation must find its resources solely immanently; proceed according to the provisional, definitionally impure, claim not towards the true but towards an immanently located sense of the better. This model of critique begins not from a pure position outside, but instead from the catalyzing force of the impasse40: from the moment of saying, from the muck of political life, that what currently exists is not working, and we believe something else might be better. Political change is valuable not as a means of getting closer to the true and just society waiting to be revealed, but instead52 to makeTR2 life more livable in the “here and now”41.

Releasing ourselves from the requirement that we legitimate our political claims in something beyond them, enables making these sorts of claims, for, perhaps the first time, as truly political claims.

Claims whose means of legitimacy, whose political force, does not come from the necessity of universal truth; but instead, must be compelling as political claims42. They must seek to convince and compel, rather than coerce. Not: you must accept this Truth, but: I believe we would have better lives if we choose to live this way together, do you agree? The normative aims (political values and aspirations) from which I must make my argument – or am compelled by another’s – are not established but, rather, in a permanent temporality of becoming; they are justified to the precise extent that they are provisional.43 38 Critique’s object is “not beyond the present instant, nor behind it, but within it.” Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” 1984, pg. 39 39 Butler, “For a Careful Reading,” 1995. Pg. 131, “It is that continuing need to literalize the ground, that sure anchor, that transcendental and, hence fundamentally religious consolation, that keeps us from learning, from being able to hear, and to read how it is that we might now live politically in medias res.”

40 Butler reminds us that critique doesn’t come about because we recognize some error, ontologically, in our system of knowledge. Rather, Butler points out, critique always emerges from an impasse; because we have run into a problem we want to solve. For example, we do not need to claim access to an unmediated truth of gender or any other prelinguistic reality to recognize the dissonances that result from this constricted field and thus demand it be opened up; not abolished in favor of the true nature of gender etc. which we see ourselves as liberating from the false constructions; but, rather, in favor of a more open set of, still equally constructed, terms with further livability as its aim. Then, when these terms inevitability run into problems of their own – reach impasses – we will then need to begin to change them again. Thus, it is not a matter of moving from a set of terms that are within power (socially constructed) to a liberation of a true gendered essence. Instead, the animating motivation behind this attempt at resignification is solely the immanent recognition that lives are not livable within these set of terms and we need to open them up for that reason. (Butler, “What Is Critique?” 2004, pg. 308) 41 This solely immanent yardstick of our desires, aspirations, and concerns in “contempory reality” alone is finally “good enough” – to borrow a phrase from Maggie Nelson’s the Argonauts, which attempts to designate the enabling potential of this immanent and provisional yardstick in (Nelson, 2016). One of the most indispensable recources postfoundational critique gives us is the means to refuse the dangerous attempts to deny the legitmacy and value of our desires as they currently exist – dismissing peoples real needs and preferences in the here and now as simply a product false consciousness – so much terror has been carried in the name of this sort of attempt. But in maintaining the provisionality of the judgements we make on their behalf, it simultaneously avoids the alternative danger of overly reifying these desires in the immediacy and thus foreclosing critical reflection up them.

42 I am indebted to Wendy Brown for this distinction between truth claims and political claims. (Wendy Brown and Charlie Bertsch, “Interview with Wendy Brown,” in The Anti-Capitalism Reader: Imagining a Geography of Opposition, by Joel Schalit (Akashic Books, 2002), pg. 176) See also, (Brown, “Politics Without Banisters: Genealogical Politics in Nietzsche and Foucault,” 2001) where Brown thematizes this distinction, considering the role truth claims have played in circumscribing political life. She argues the need to release our political claims from their compulsive need to seek the securities of the legitimating backing of certain truths, “Conviction...was never the right modality for belief within a democratic polity.” (93).

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“It is true that we have to give up hope of ever acceding to a point of view that could give us access to any complete and definitive knowledge of what may constitute our historical limits.

And from this point of view the theoretical and practical experience that we have of our limits and the possibility of moving beyond them is always limited and determined; thus we are always in the position of beginning again.”44 My political judgments are always made solely from within. I thus can never know, with certainty, once and for all, that the “better” I am arguing for is one that will be, finally, “desirable” (judged, against the imperfect and constantly shifting, immanent yardstick of “contemporary reality” alone)45.

All I can do is “experiment”. “[T]est”46 my provisional and contingent claim that a different practice 53 TR2 or mode of social organization might be better, and, when I reach a new impasse, I revise and “begi[n] again”.

Section 3: “The beyond of the closure of the book…is there, but out there, beyond, within repetition, but eluding us there.”47: “Anticipation is imperative” “The future must no longer be determined by the past. I do not deny that the effects of the past are still with us. But I refuse to strengthen them by repeating them, to confer upon them an irremovability the equivalent of destiny, to confuse the biological and the cultural. Anticipation is imperative.”

At first glance, Cixous’s project to bring forth a women’s writing might appear naive. We might be tempted to read Cixous’s claim that “the future must no longer be determined by the past” as taking aim at Derrida. In contrast to Derrida’s claim that all there is is repetition, it might sound here as if Cixous is calling instead for a clean break; as if we can only have politically engaged critique by stepping outside. However, on a second glance, one sees that Cixous’ proposal is for a method that is the very heart of Derrida’s project. Cixous’s piece is a polemic not against Derrida’s insistence that all there is repetition but, rather, it wields this insight against the enclosing procedure which assumes that because there is no outside, we are therefore inescapably totally determined, solely inside; as she charges structuralism48 – whom this passage takes aim at most directly – with performing. Far from calling for 43 If I were to affirm their absolute legitimacy, I would fall back into the old model. As I would foreclose the realm of critical inquiry into the ways in which my criteria for political judgment are themselves inheritances of the power structure I am inescapably stuck within. I would be “settl[ing] for the affirmation or the empty dream of freedom…[in order to avoid this] it seems to me that this historico-critical attitude must also be an experimental one. I mean that this work done at the limits of ourselves must, on the one hand, open up a realm of historical inquiry and, on the other, put itself to the test of reality, of contemporary reality, both to grasp the points where change is possible and desirable, and to determine the precise form this change should take.” (Foucault, pg. 46) 44

Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” 1984, 47.

45

Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” 1984, pg. 46, for full quote see footnote below.

46

Foucault, pg. 46.

47

Jacques Derrida, “Ellipsis,” in Writing and Difference (University of Chicago Press, 1978) pg. 300.

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a simple stepping outside, Cixous rejects this frame –which offers a false alternative between a radical determinism and a naive volunteerism – as a product of the closed/centered models of thought which are her piece’s primary target49. She demonstrates that, instead, one’s agency becomes possible when one refuses to shy away from one’s exterior determinations – when one finally releases oneself from the containing ideal of autonomy in favor of an agency whose condition of possibility is paradox. To say we are inescapably within (variably, power, metaphysics, etc.) is not to “den[y] all pertinence to the event”50– the possibility of change and transformation, or more vitally, of critical distance. Instead, poststructuralism finally gives us the recourses to think the event’s conditions of possibility (more effectively than the determined models that levy this charge against it); precisely because it finally thinks our 54 TR2 inescapable immanence for the first time, takes seriously the “structurality of structure”51. The structure is irreducibly open, constantly changing, precisely because it is centerless, because there is nothing outside of it, tethering it in place.

To take seriously the inescapability of determination – that there is no underlying truth of ourselves to which we can have recourse – is also to reveal that this is all we are. The old model of freedom was not a notion of freedom at all; in fact, “to be so grounded is nearly to be buried”52. Its outcomes were pre-decided. “Modern man…is not the man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets and his hidden truth; he is the man who tries to invent himself”53; an invention made possible because there is no true self to discover; “Paradoxically, self-making and de-subjugation happen simultaneously when a mode of existence is risked, which is unsupported by what [Foucault] calls the regimes of truth”54.

Poststructuralism, in contrast to centered discourses that only offer a”false movement”55 and a false politics, a false agency in the guise of an ossified autonomy, whose actions are legitimate only if they are pre-guaranteed, takes seriously the real possibility of a “real movement” for the first time, and elabo-

48 Structuralism, “confuse[s] the biological and the cultural” by retaining the fixed immutability of the structure. It imposes the determinism of a necessary and innate nature, now in the guise of a false relativism that has failed to think itself through. In retaining a model of a closed system, reducing the diachronic (Derrida, Force and Signification), they have failed to think the structurality of structure.

49 This binary opposition between the inside and the outside is a strategy of enclosure; containing the threatening excess, immanently within the structure, that exposes it not to be stable over time but, rather, uncontainably and unpredictably in flux. “We have to move beyond the outside-inside alternative; we have to be at the frontiers.” (Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” 1984, emphasis mine) We must begin to understand the aim of, and condition of possibly for, critique – the condition, the modality, of freedom – not as arriving at a position purely outside of a subjecting power, but instead in a permanent mode of becoming (an opening towards an outside, a distancing). Critique in fact moves from within, it pushes at limits from the present moment, at the frontiers of the present moment.

50 As Foucault once accused Derrida of doing, Michel Foucault, “Appendix III: Reply to Derrida,” in History of Madness (Routledge, 2006), pg. 557.

51

Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play” pg. 354

52

Butler, “For a Careful Reading,” 1995, pg. 131.

53

Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” 1984, pg. 42.

54

Butler, “What Is Critique?” 2004, emphasis mine.

55 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, pg. 8 which he charges Hegelian dialectics with failing to move beyond. He contrasts this to a “real movement” which, paradoxically, can only come about through, rather than in opposition too, repetition, pg. 10.

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rates the conditions upon which this would be possible. As I demonstrated in the first section of this paper, it offers a genealogical critique that exposes and embraces the “contingency of [the] encounter”56, the fact that historical movement proceeds not along the lines of necessity, but through the paradox of the event, an event that therefore poststructuralism, in refusing to reduce the contingency of historical movement (our inescapable situation solely immanently within, without guardrails) finally thinks for itself for the first time.

Cixous begins her essay by declaring the indispensable necessity of politically engaged critique not from a point of sure ground, but through a starting point that foregrounds its absence. From paradox.“The future must no longer determined by the past”, and yet, as Cixous reminds us further down 55 beTR2 the page, the past is all we have. However, this is not, for that reason, to “confer upon [it] an irremovability the equivalent of destiny”, “Since these reflections are taking shape in an area just on the point of being discovered, they necessarily bear the mark of our time–a time during which the new breaks away from the old...Thus, as there are no grounds for establishing discourse, but rather an arid millennial ground to break, what I say has at least two sides and two aims: to break up, to destroy; and to foresee the unforeseeable, to project.”57 All we have is the past, but it is for that very reason we are not solely determined by it. Cixous’s demand is made not from stable foundations, but rather from the insight which destroys them, and thus enables our capacity to move without them. As Cixous puts it, “there are no grounds for establishing discourse, but rather an arid millennial ground to break.” This passage articulates the position from which a postfoundational politically engaged critique moves. It begins from the impossible, contaminated, impure position of being irrevocably caught within; from a situation where the beginning has always already begun. In contrast to the traditional image of thought which locates beginnings condition of possibility in its purity– its absence of “presuppositions”58–this alternative model of thought, by contrast, proceeds instead “with no ally but paradox”59. The heart of Cixous’s essay is this rigorous situation of critique in the impurity of a point of departure that is only ever the present moment, but a “certain attitude”60 towards the present. A critical posture61 that boldly reaches for it limits, always “anticipat[ing]” its futurity; attending, and opening itself, to the alterity (the seed of a future) it contains within itself. “Thus” she declares, as in exactly because this outside position is impossible – exactly because the actual position from which we write is inescapably inside – we are freed from the containing model of thought that requires we establish certain foundations. We must begin our critique from a beginning which has always already begun, not from the after of the break but from within the process 56

Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, pg. 139.

57

Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Pg. 875, emphasis mine.

58

Deleuze, Difference and Repition, pg. 129

59

Ibid, pg. 132.

60

Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” 1984, pg. 39

61

“A limit-attitude” Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” 1984, pg. 45.

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of “break[ing]”. We cannot critique from an outside position, there are no stable grounds to which we can have recourse. We need to locate a position from which to birth the new discourse (which is one we will never finally arrive at) from within. Cixous thus insists we must situate our refusal of the domination of the present (against its naturalizing claim to irremovability) in a temporality of becoming: “Anticipation is imperative”.

Self-determination is not an ideal to which we will ever arrive. Instead, democracy (or meaningful choice, freedom) must be understood as made possible, paradoxically, precisely because it is only ever “to come”62. We must rigorously situate our model of critique in an understanding that the final arrival at “solutions”63, the 56 ideal utopian TR2 social order, is permanently deferred, an ultimately unreachable horizon. The foundation we posit – always made from the moment of “break[ing]” away but having not yet achieved a break, not yet arrived, that we seem to irrevocably be caught in – must thus be thus always only provisional, open to revision. It is in this permanent temporality of becoming that the political opens towards itself64; not as the promise of the future “perfectibility”65 of democracy, but the promise that democracy has a future; that it is unpredictably, uncontrollably, open. A postfoundational politics “gives chance a chance and gives the other its due by creating a space for its arrival… In expecting the unexpected, deconstruction raises the expectations of politics by opening politics onto a future beyond the traditional end of politics”66. Critique is a “means for”67 a future, towards a different and more desirable set of norms and knowledge regimes, only because it suspends or defers this future horizon; because it opens itself towards futurity and alterity by refusing to presume anything “in advance” of putting it to the test. The unthinkable cannot yet be thought, but it can be “anticipa[ted]”. We must open ourselves toward the arrival of the other – of a future we cannot predict “in advance”. A model of critique which demands an artificial “end of politics” – demands that thought must finally arrive, that there be an “end of history”, a utopia whose contours are specified – rather than an infinitely deferred horizon68, is always an enclosing one: most dangerously, and so frequently, enacted, as Fraser does, in 62 The crucial Derridean insight that anythings condition of possibility is always only possible through paradox; provides the basis for my suggestion that a postfoundational mode of critique redefines agency and freedom; as always made possible through “its impossibility as pure”.Like Derrida’s notion of life-death (Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing”), agency and freedom are similarly made possible through a structure of deferral; made possible through the deferral of their final arrival, through their situation in a permanent status of being “to come”.

63

Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, pg. 164.

64 “Derrida’s politics is a politics of the future, one that is not given or pre-programmed according to any knowable model or theory…Rather it is a performative and transformative critique which opens itself to the unpredictable and unknowable intervention of the future as the arrival of the other.” Martin McQuillan, “Introduction: The Day After Tomorrow… or, The Deconstruction of the Future,” in The Politics of Deconstruction, ed. Martin McQuillan, Jacques Derrida and the Other of Philosophy (Pluto Press, 2007), 1–14, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt18dztjp.5, pg. 3.

65

McQuillan, “Introduction: The Day After Tomorrow… or, The Deconstruction of the Future”, pg. 3.

66

Ibid.

67 “critique…is an instrument, a means for a future or a truth that it will not know nor happen to be, it oversees a domain it would want to police and is unable to regulate.” Michel Foucault and Lysa Hochroth, “What Is Critique,” in The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series (New York: Semiotext(e) : Distributed by the MIT Press, 1997), pg. 42 68

José Esteban Muñoz, “Queerness as Horizon: Utopian Hermeneutics in the Face of Gay Pragmatisism,” in Cruising

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the name of emancipatory aims. In contrast, a postfoundational politics is “open-ended and alive. It is always in process, without limit, telos or regulative principle” - it is precisely this fact of being, irreparably, “in process” that makes possible its “aliveness”, its freedom.69 Conclusion: “The undecidable in view of which a decision must be risked”70 Fraser and Cixous both begin from the recognition of a vital–and vitalizing– sense of political urgency; the sense that politically engaged critique is indispensable, that it “must” proceed. I follow in this tradition here. My paper, like theirs, begins with this urgency. However, my paper seeks to demonstrate that there are better and worse 57 ways TR2of demanding that we must proceed; of unflinchingly continuing to make political/normative claims for a better world71. We can proceed from the dangerous naivete of presuming the possibility of this step, and thus inevitably continue to fall into the trap of simply “philosophizing badly”72 (this is the error Fraser falls into, ending up, despite herself, operating in the service of the power her aim is to resist). Or, instead, we can do as Cixous does and demand that we “must” move, must “risk decision”, posit or “project”73 contingent foundations that enable us to move forward, – to strive for a better world “in the here and now”74 – while remaining, essentially, open to alterity; to the “unforeseeable”. We must decide while foregrounding, rather than disavowing, the fact that this decision always takes place within a situation of “radical undecidability”; as it can only occur within, rather than outside, of its inheritances within the power situation it aims to critique. We must keep the inescapable fact of an irreducible “undecidability” “in view”, at the foreground, as we “risk” “decision”; and thus maintain the provisionality, the contingency, of the foundations we posit; see them as “always partial and local inquir[ies] or test[s]”75. Far from shying away from this urgency, as it is so often accused, poststructuralism, at its best, takes it up most unflinchingly. It embraces the enabling openness that comes from being “without recourse”, as always the position from which we must nevertheless act.

This urgency for change in the here and now (the moment of the impasse), far from being placed on the back-burner by poststructuralism, is brought to the fore; thematized for the first time as the true engine and ultimate “why” for politically engaged critique.

Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (NYU Press, 2009) 69

McQuillan, “Introduction: The Day After Tomorrow… or, The Deconstruction of the Future,” pg. 3.

70

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “French Feminism Revisited,” in Feminists Theorize the Political (Routledge, 1992), pg.

71 There is no possibility of stepping outside, of avoiding our imbrication in the system we aim to critique. We cannot avoid operating through these inheritances, “But if no one can escape this necessity…this does not mean that all ways of giving into it are of equal pertinence.” Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play,” pg. 282 72

Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play”, pg. 288

73 Derrida, Taking Chances. Highlighting their similarities on this point, I could easily cite Derrida or Cixous here, as both repeatedly deploy this phrase to emphasize the necessarily unpredictable or controllable nature of action/speech/ writing in the absence of transcendental guarantees of foundations. Derrida like Cixous formulates this positing of contingent foundations, this decision in the face of the undecidable, the acting as if decision or transparent communication were possible, as the necessary position from which writing (and political action, as I argue in this paper) proceeds. It is a closure which, unexpectedly, gets towards a beyond.

74

McQuillan, “Introduction: The Day After Tomorrow… or, The Deconstruction of the Future,” pg. 4.

75

Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” pg. 47

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Within locked boxes: Indigenous Epistemology and logics of extermination Aaron Morgan, Pomona ’25

Indigenous history in America is one that, in many ways, problematizes what it means to do history. For instance: it is not in filing cabinets and locked boxes that life is lived, and so it is reasonable for one to wonder why, oftentimes, it feels that history is written from the locked box. It is said that the job of the historian is to listen to the voices of the past and, from them, weave together a narrative that is comprehensible in the present—and voices are not an easy thing to hear, hundreds or thousands of years later. Yet, we are told, they are present on the page, present in the records that are kept and the stories that are preserved. But locked boxes as a form of institutional or personal property are not neutral spaces, and colonial sources in particular are inevitably shaped by the fact that they were likely kept in a colonizer’s box. In this particularly Western mode of historicizing, the archive as a locus of historical preservation becomes an active force in the creation of history, and the archivist or the filer almost as important as the historian themselves. Camilla Townsend, in her book Fifth Sun, and Allison Margaret Bigelow, in her paper “Gathering Indigenous Knowledges”, both attempt to subvert the colonial archivist—they work to hear indigenous voices from the boxes, or even in the words, of the colonizer. In this paper, I will argue that assimilation into colonial society meant the adaptation of indigenous knowledge-making to the colonizer’s method of documentation, narrative, and historicizing, and that while this was a necessary aspect of survival for indigenous peoples, it instantiated a settler colonial assimilationist logic of epistemic extermination, one that fundamentally altered the indigenous world and reconfigured indigeneity away from an indigenous epistemology.

Settler colonial theory holds that what separates settler colonialism from other forms—franchise, administrative, metropole, to name a few—is the ultimate teleology of genocide; or, as put by Patrick Wolfe, “settler colonizers come to stay” (Smallwood 409). The invasion is not an event but a structure, one that aims to eradicate all peoples and societies who have called that land home in an attempt to arrogate indigeneity for the newcomers, the strangers. Although Wolfe became the reference point for theorizing settler colonialism, other theorists such as Stephanie E. Smallwood and Shannon Speed have set out to elaborate the forms it can take, crucially pushing back against Wolfe’s conception that requires an outright or explicitly stated goal of native extermination (although many such examples can be found). Smallwood and Speed describe the logics and strategies of extermination, whether they play out “through direct physical or assimilationist violences,” in order to argue that these logics apply equally to Latin America as they do to paradigmatic cases of settler colonialism such as North America

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or Australia (Speed 787).1 Assimilationist violences are those that aim to exterminate indigenous people in ways that are not simply physical—Speed uses the example of mestizaje, an ideology that promotes racial mixing between indigenous and Spanish people in Latin America. In creating one singular race from many peoples who don’t all identify with a particular nation state or regional group, mestizaje works toward a world in which indigenous people are no different than the colonizers and hence do not exist, therefore instantiating the settler colonial logic of extermination and teleology of genocide.

Allison Margaret Bigelow’s work in “Gathering Indigenous Knowledges,” on the way indigenous knowledge and ways of knowing become audible in colonial sources, provides an example of an indigenous epistemology illustrates how knowledge and ways of knowing go hand-in-hand in 59 andTR2 constituting a pre-colonial indigenous world. Bigelow points to the neologistic phrase “coger oro”—to gather gold—used by Columbus in his infamous diary when describing mining practices in the Caribbean, and argues that it shouldn’t only be understood as a euphemistic expression for exploitative resource hoarding, but also an expression that indicates an awareness of indigenous practices. According to Bigelow, the existence of this new phrase reveals that Columbus judged, consciously or otherwise, that there is something new to describe between the gold mining of Europe and elsewhere and the gold mining of the Taíno—an ethnic term that refers “not to a self-contained Indigenous population but to a broader community” of indigenous Antillean people (Bigelow 26). Metalworking played a large role in Taíno culture, from the collection to the use and symbolism. Bigelow describes how, in Taíno cosmology, gold is understood to grow “like a plant or flower, with its own time for gathering,” and that when infused with herbs and made into gold-copper alloys called guanin, serves as a powerful philosophical and spiritual substance that gives form to the invisible energies they believed to animate the universe (33). For Taínos, the universe is made of “spiritually active entities that maintain the world,” and gold in the form of guanin connects them phenomenologically to this ontology of “world making, world destroying spirits” (33-4). Gold has a “meaning and worth” for Taínos that is fundamentally different from that of the Spanish, and as such the world of the Taínos cannot be understood only through a Spanish metallurgical lens (34). If the use of “coger oro” wasn’t enough to indicate the impression of indigenous knowledge, Columbus ordered his miners to follow Taíno ritual and ceremony of gathering gold (33).

At least for a moment, Columbus thought they knew something he didn’t—it was not just knowledge about specific mining practices, but a larger set of meanings and ways of meaning-making instantiated in those practices (specifically ones that an epistemology grounded in a Christian faith or rational empiricism would preclude) that Columbus recognized when he put pen to paper and wrote “coger oro.”

While Bigelow aims to show it is still possible to, as she puts it, gather indigenous knowledge from the archives of non-indigenous sources, she ends up detailing how societal change can manifest an epistemic extermination that is compatible with the preservation of indigenous knowledge. Bigelow does not makes any claims about the relationship between the Taíno pre-colonial world and the knowledge that can be recovered in her linguistic analysis, as her project seems to be one of post-hoc citation, making clear the influence of indigenous practice and knowledge in the nascent industry of Spanish

1

Emphasis mine.

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colonialism. But to understand settler colonial logics and what exactly is exterminated, it is crucial to clarify that while knowledge can be recovered from colonial archives, the accompanying episteme cannot. After all, Bigelow discusses how “the idea of community is [etymologically] embedded in the Taíno expression for gold”—the practices of collection and guanin production, the communal and ritual meaning-making and knowledge-making surrounding, in this case, gold and metallurgy: this combination of knowledge and epistemology is what constituted the Taíno world (30). And then the destruction wrought by Columbus and the Spanish came, and the Taíno population went from 250-500,000 to 11,000 in only 26 years following 1492. Taíno society underwent “every imaginable form of cultural change,” and only six sentences Taíno language, and a handful of phrases, are still known (27-9). The 60 ofTR2 phenomenological world of the Taíno Caribbean—a holistic, sensorially rich and spiritually interconnected world—cannot be found in the language of the Spanish, language that stripped ritual, spiritual, and philosophical meaning from the knowledge that was implicitly (or in other cases of Spanish writers, explicitly) documented in the archives. The knowledge of the Taíno can be recovered through the voices in the margins of Columbus, but the epistemology that helps constitute a mental world grounded in communal practice and experiential engagement with the world cannot. A byproduct of violent societal destruction, in the case of the Taínos, is epistemic extermination.

Bigelow’s work on Taíno knowledge and culture describes an indigenous epistemology that becomes inaccessible through violent extermination; Townsend, on the other hand, describes in her account of Mexica history—otherwise known by the colonial name of the Aztecs—an assimilationist logic of epistemic extermination. The Mexica are part of a larger group of indigenous Nahua peoples that migrated likely from the southeastern US into the central valley of Mexico and founded Tenochtitlan in the mid-1300s, the powerful city-state-like polity that Hernán Cortés defeated in 1521 (Townsend 31, 127).

Townsend’s project in the book Fifth Sun is, in a sense, to decolonize the story of the Mexica by telling it only from Mexica sources; where Bigelow must draw out indigenous knowledge from Spanish sources, Townsend draws from “the annals,” a body of sources written in Nahuatl by various Mexica intellectuals from the mid-to-late 1500s and early 1600s. The annals, as Western historians have named them, were written a few decades into the colonial occupation of Tenochtitlan, during a period where coercive control over Mexica elites still played an important role in colonial rule and forced urbanization through the burning of villages made it easier to Christianize the indigenous population, tax them, and maintain social control (130-3). Various Nahua writers—the “most prolific” of which being don Domingo de San Antón, who styled himself and became known by the Nahuatl name Chimalpahin—responded to a series of epidemics and the general loss of many indigenous people in the early 1600s with an attempt to write down their own history, documenting everything from creation stories to ancient history to current events (218). The annals form a fascinating look into, as Townsend puts it, the “private conversations” of the Mexica: who they are and how they see their own history, unmediated by Spanish perspectives (211).

As with the indigenous knowledge of the Taíno, the historical knowledge of the Mexica did not come without a specific way of knowing, an epistemology that was embodied in the form of the xiuhpohualli or “yearly account”. If Chimalpahin was to write a Mexica history, he saw to it that it would be in

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the tradition of Mexica history-telling, a tradition of many centuries that conceptualized an inherently polyphonic, living, and interconnected historical narrative. Chimalpahin wrote in Roman letters, and hence his work made it into the locked boxes of New Spain, something Townsend describes as “a wellloved innovation the Spaniards had brought” (5). But this script was a form of Nahuatl that was a recent innovation in itself. The Nahuatl language did not have a script-based writing form, but was rather pictographic; and while beautiful books of record-keeping and religious significance were produced, history and other forms of knowledge production took the form of spoken tradition (4). Xiuhpohualli was such a tradition, and it involved a few trained historians performing a spoken summary, in careful chronology, of the important events from 61 the past TR2 year. But it was also much more—as described by Townsend: “In moments of high drama different speakers stepped forward to cover the same time period again, until all perspectives taken together yielded an understanding of the whole series of events. The pattern mimicked the rotational, reciprocal format of all aspects of their lives: in their world, tasks were shared or passed back and forth, so that no one group would have to handle something unpleasant all the time or be accorded unlimited power all the time.” (4) Speakers brought voices to life, their own or others’, when xiuhpohualli were performed.

Tensions and moments were reenacted, and in that sense there was no univocal narrative—no one historian wove together the voices but rather let them speak unencumbered for themselves.

As Townsend writes, “to them, truth was necessarily multiple; they knew that no single person could give a full account of an important moment” (179). Ritual, medium, form, and style all worked together to create an Mexica epistemology of time, causation, narrative, and history.

Chimalpahin attempted to write in the form and style of xiuhpohualli; and according to Townsend, the extent to which he was successful (along with other Mexica historians in the same tradition) is what accounts for the difficulty of deciphering his work, and is what made the annals such an inaccessible and academically-overlooked source (211). The annals are difficult to understand as historical texts because they seem “not always directly relevant to the questions of interest to outsiders,” an observation that suggests there is something epistemically impenetrable about the Mexica mode of history-telling even when translated (211). While Townsend portrays Chimalpahin’s project of writing a comprehensive xiuhpohualli as successful, there is also a sense in which Chimalpahin was forced to play his part in the assimilation to the colonizer’s method of documentation, narrative, and historicizing, as the only way the story of him and his people could be remembered was through the archive, through the univocal synthesis of sources into narrative. This shift in medium and form, from the communal spoken word to the singular written document, was not simply a functional or logistical one. Townsend details a change in the genre that progressed year by year: as xiuhpohualli were being created in writing, they slowly became more and more similar to yearly logs of European convention until they became “a simple annual record of major events” (5). The “unpredictable and wide-ranging statements” of early written xiuhpohualli slowly became more predictable and less wide-ranging—the polyphony and inter-

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connectedness that constituted the Mexica epistemology slowly morphed into univocality and decipherability, both in style and in content (211).

This change in the style and form of the annals reveals how, in the courageous attempt to preserve one’s history and culture, Chimalpahin and the writers of the annals did not manage to escape participating in the settler colonial logic of epistemic extermination. These new xiuhpohualli, attempting to recreate a traditional Nahua history, found themselves coercively stuck in the structure—the locked box—of the colonizer. Their history needed to be one that could be filed away, just as their community needed to be one that adapted to colonial society. Chimalpahin and other indigenous writers did what could only be done to62 preserve TR2what was accessible to them, the stories and events of their shared past and present; but even in presenting what is veritably indigenous knowledge from indigenous sources, an aspect of the pre-colonial world was made entirely inaccessible. Townsend writes that many indigenous people after Chimalpahin, who managed to avoid colonial urbanization and social rule, “continued to speak the languages of their ancestors and to organize their mental worlds at least partly along traditional lines” (205). Yet by the second half of the 18th century, “virtually no one” remembered how to read, write, or engage with xiuhpohualli (206). The disappearance of this aspect of the indigenous mental world, I would argue, is exactly the epistemic extermination that occurred with assimilation.

Townsend seems to argue that, while there was undoubtedly an unfathomable loss that occurred with colonization, a sense of being indigenous and of being Mexica continued to thrive. “On one level,” she writes, “Chimalpahin… had nothing to fear” (206). Indigeneity surely was not exterminated; but rather, I would suggest what can be seen in Townsend and Bigelow is a reconceptualization of indigeneity, whereby an indigenous episteme became no longer necessary for what Townsend describes as “native people’s sense of themselves” (206). In the same way that mestizaje works towards a world where there is no difference between the indigenous and the settler, the assimilationist logic of epistemic extermination works towards a world where there is no difference between the mental worlds of the indigenous and the settler—essentially, a world where you can be indigenous or a settler and the only difference is an identification with knowledge that both have equal access to. In recognizing the categorically distinct mental worlds of those who continued to speak Nahuatl and organize their lives in traditional ways, Townsend is acknowledging that even if the narratives and voices can be heard through a colonizer’s epistemology, something is fundamentally different about an indigenous subjectivity and a colonial subjectivity. Yet this indigenous subjectivity is, at least in part, exterminated from the collective conception of what it is to be indigenous, both because it is impossible to maintain under colonial rule and because it is the teleology of colonial rule itself to exterminate it. It is this subjectivity that is at stake in attempts to revive speaking communities of Nahuatl, to decolonize education and thought, to critically interrogate colonial structures and logics.

As Townsend describes at length in Fifth Sun, the settler colonial project creates a fight for the survival of indigenous people. To survive requires not the continuation of past or current ways of life in full, but rather the retention of what is necessary—what, if lost, would constitute the loss of an identity, a people. And survive the Mexica did. To the extent that an indigenous episteme relies on the continuation of indigenous ways of being and social organization to exist, or the engagement with ritual and the

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active reproduction of ways of knowing, it is obvious that the occupation of indigenous lands and the creation of a colonial society would largely preclude its continued existence. Yet the subtle shift from an indigeneity constituted by knowledge and epistemology to an indigeneity only constituted by knowledge is evidence that the settler colonial logics of extermination worked, and are working, as intended.

What we can know and how we can know, as read through history and historiography, can itself be read as a shifting of worlds. The story of Chimalpahin and the Mexica questions why it is that we take for granted an archival history, and asks what can be told or known in what medium, from what perspective; it is this sense in which we continue to write from the locked box. History as listening may be all we can do now, or simply all63we canTR2 do while relying on Western sources, languages, and perspectives.

It may be an essential act that keeps alive a culture, a heritage, and a people. I only want to emphasize what listening can and cannot do. To resurrect the voices of the Taíno and the Mexica is one thing, but to resurrect their worlds is another entirely—and one that might look less like theory and more like practice.

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Temporality. Digital drawing. Jadyn Lee ‘24 In drawing this piece, I sought to examine the concept of death. My artwork is meant to convey a sense of waiting, as if at the precipice of something; and the uncertainty that stems from being on a journey with no known destination.

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Differentiating difference in derrida and deleuze Sam Hernandez, Pomona ’24

Introduction Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze stand as two heavyweights of the poststructuralist tradition — French, esoteric, and nearly impossible to decipher without a graduate degree in philosophy.

Yet, working in a tradition that generally seeks to eschew grand narratives and claims to objective truth, both thinkers construct theories that prioritize difference over identity, repetition over constancy, and virtuality and absence over presence. These methods pry open new avenues of exploration in philosophy, tear down old walls, and question the presuppositions of philosophy itself. Most acutely, they articulate the fragility of philosophy, its vulnerability to the plays of power, and its foundational reliance on contingent moments in history that it instead presupposes as necessary. An examination of the operations of difference in the works of Derrida and Deleuze opens an attempt to locate whether these concepts strike at the same type of difference or operationalize thought entirely differently.

Emerging from the French structuralist moment via difference in the 1960s, both Derrida and Deleuze seem incredibly similar in their approach to looking to difference as the foundation of the formation of identity and searching for the operation of instability in the face of structuralist discourses. Derrida, in his eulogy for Deleuze, went as far as saying that Deleuze was the one among their generation of French philosophers to whom he considered himself closest, with a “nearly total affinity” concerning the ‘theses’ of Deleuze’s œuvre.1 It is therefore necessary to establish that in most key ways, Deleuze and Derrida share a near imperceptible difference, centered more on the movement of their thought than its core tenets.2 This similarity is manifest in their joint obsession over difference, their explorations of repetition, and their skepticism of identity and the givens of philosophy taken for granted. This ‘near total affinity’ between the two figures should not be understated, especially in light of the wide variety found in the poststructuralist tradition. Clearly, the difference they both seek to think — in language, in philosophy — has an immense affinity.

1 Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 192-193.

2 Though ‘tenets’ is likely a dangerous word for both, wary of condensing difference into a solid identity rather than a fluidity open to play and repetition, I mean mostly that they share an affinity on many conclusions even if their process of thought has different paths. Further, Derrida’s use of theses makes me slightly more confident in the usability of this word here.

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Yet, similar as their projects may appear, Deleuze and Derrida remain markedly singular thinkers.

To return to Derrida’s own words, there remains a large gap in the way between Derrida and Deleuze in terms of “the ‘gesture,’ the ‘strategy,’ the ‘manner’ of writing, of speaking, of reading perhaps” that separates them.3 The strategy and manner, however, go beyond a question of method and toward a more fundamental orientation toward writing, toward difference even, but what does that separation entail? By explicating on the difference in gesture, strategy, manner, and reading in their work, I hope to clarify what tools each offers us for thinking and relating to the political status quo in new ways. In this paper, I argue that Deleuze remains true to his project of an affirmative difference which enables a new metaphysics while Derrida’s of difference in the negative opens itself to the play of creativity 66reading TR2 but remains perpetually unstable.

Repetition and Trace Derrida’s difference, différance, is perhaps most centrally demonstrated via the concept of trace, which is the neither presence nor absence of associations and other meanings latent in the text, affective and differential. The trace is what remains in a reading yet is not present in the text itself; it is in trace that meaning presents itself as self-effacing, peripheral and fleeting in the margins of the text itself. Derrida writes of archi-trace as “erasure: erasure of the present and of thus of the subject,” engaging this play of a trace which erases and is erased through its operation.4 Trace is therefore the eradication of a metaphysics of presence by specifically locating meaning outside pure presence but rather emerging through the deferral of meaning between signs and within the differentiation of presence and absence. Meaning always escapes the text into the chain of implicit signification and evoked absences such that there is always an indefinite suspension of a finalization of meaning. He also makes trace the erasure of the subject — which he sees as necessarily subscribing to a prioritization of the present insofar as the subject is always active (and therefore present) — negating the ground for a pure subjectivity.

Trace’s contingent nature operates via repetition. Each text is always-already repeated, already-read, and cannot be followed back to some originary reading the trace of which can be found in later readings. In fact, “repetition is the first writing,” an instantiating repetition in which difference and trace are produced that escapes a discourse of a real origin of the work.5 The text always operates within the sphere of archi-writing, always borrowing from an already existing language and repeating it — both its present meaning but also repeating the trace of absent significations. The self-same difference of the text means that each reading is different from the last, operating in a different temporal frame and with different traces lingering just out of frame. Repetition for Derrida therefore ensures that each reading of the text is a distinct interpretation that cannot be reduced down to or captured entirely within the 3

Derrida, The Work of Mourning, 192.

4 Jacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017), pp. 196-231, 229.

5 Jacques Derrida, “Ellipsis,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017), pp. 294-300, 295.

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structure of the book, as meaning always emerges through the split origin of an always-already repeated text; the failed presumption of structuralism in believing it possible to close the text in on itself stumbles on exactly this ground. The repetition of the text invokes trace not only within the text itself but from a multiplicity of sources, casting doubt on the concept of a bounded text itself, shattering the inside-outside text dichotomy insofar as the text is never even whole unto itself. The temporal nature of repetition operates on the level of the text itself as well — the text and its reading unfold in time and holding it together as a whole is itself an act of repetition; one repeats the already-read as they read to create a notion of the text as a structural whole. Thus, it is from repetition and not a notion of a virginal text itself that meaning emerges.

67 TR2 Deleuze’s project in Difference and Repetition, however, is more abstractly founded and engages in an overtly metaphysical project more so than Derrida’s essays in Writing and Difference, which tend to focus on more concrete topics. When he writes of pure difference or difference without a concept — which is the same, for him, as repetition — he does so not as a critique of language and its limits but as a statement on the nature of things itself. Seeking “to overturn Platonism,” which he sees as having dominated philosophy for millennia, prioritizing identity and obscuring the role of difference in identity’s creation, he writes Difference and Repetition as a singularly original work wherein a new metaphysical terrain is uncovered: the field of differentiation.6 This subordinating of identity to difference is not just an arbitrary move in philosophy, it reverberates on all levels of reality. Deleuze, in wanting the reader to think difference, opens up concepts, desire, language, and freedom to new lines of flight and enables new modes of being apart from the identity-centric regime of Platonism and its descendants.

While Deleuze also looks to repetition as a generative force, he emphasizes repetition as repetition not of the identical but of pure difference. Specifically, he begins Difference and Repetition by contrasting repetition from generality to establish repetition as the repetition of singularity rather than particularity. Generality, for Deleuze, is the type of ‘repetition’ in the sense of instances like natural laws, where the particulars of a given law are commensurable to possible subjects — for example, each rock of a given shape and weight will always fall at the exact same speed. Operating via resemblances, generality centers interchangeable identities and a flattening of difference insofar as one particular is just as good as the next. This substitutability implicitly relies on difference not as productive but as secondary — a byproduct of two stable identities that can be exchangeable if their margin of difference is small enough. Repetition, however, “as a conduct and as a point of view concerns non-exchangeable and non-substitutable singularities.”7 Repetition is not about a duplication of an identity, a repetition of some original of which the repetition is merely a copy. Repetition is always a repetition of the singular which can never be commensurate with anything else. One example of repetition Deleuze references in passing is twins — both are a repetition of the same exact DNA yet at the same time each twin is an entire person unto themselves, such that what defines each twin is not what is the same but the pure dif-

6

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1994), 59.

7

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 1.

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ference between them. Moreover, this example illustrates the lack of origin to be repeated; there is not one twin which is original and another which is a copy — both are repetitions without a first instance.

This account of repetition, though not centralized on language, does still touch on Deleuze’s view of linguistic comprehension and extension. Words, for Deleuze, are a fundamental example of repetition because two uses of the exact same word are never quite the same. The “repetition of a single word” must be taken as a “‘generalized rhyme’” in the way that it affects the language around it, which he explains can happen in two different ways.8 The first is that many words can be taken in more than one sense, and the use of the word in one sense may still invoke a hint of the other sense in its use in a sentence. This latent wordplay may not affect the direct meaning of the sentence itself, but it still 68 TR2 can touch the associations and conjured images of the sentence in general. For example, if a player is ‘cut’ from a team, nobody would take ‘cut’ to mean that the player was literally sliced, but the association of a cleaving of some sort still comes to mind — a different image than if the player was ‘dropped’ from the team instead. The word ‘cut’ repeats itself in its single utterance to play with this double sense of the word. The second manner of repetition in the word is the way that a word may sonically echo in the words around it and affect the sense in which they are taken. A line of a poem beginning with the word ‘Hurry!’ might convey a certain urgency on the words following such that it changes the way they would otherwise be read, and therefore that ‘Hurry!’ repeats in the background each of words in the rest of the line. But how might this repetition of the word compare to Derrida?

It becomes very clear that Derrida and Deleuze do not refer to entirely disparate phenomena when each describing repetition. A key shared skepticism is of some originary point to be taken up and repeated in the act of repetition. Both Deleuze and Derrida insist on repetition as an originary act itself: Derrida’s split origin of repetition as first writing and Deleuze’s clarity in asserting that “there is no first term which is repeated”;9 as repetition is always-already repeated, repetition is always repeating itself. This turn in both Derrida and Deleuze demonstrates their commitment to moving away from an absolutism of presence and the regime of structuralism. By leaving behind an origin point — deeply related to a center in structuralism — and focusing instead on an endless chain of repetition or trace, both philosophers open the terrain of philosophy to the play of difference. Importantly, they also shift the direction of philosophical investigation. Rather than necessitating a genealogical or historical account of origins (imagined or otherwise), Derrida and Deleuze can look immanently at the world around them to see the operation of difference, because insofar as there is no first repetition to find that determines all others, difference is always at work and able to be observed.10 Shifting away from a past-looking method and toward a philosophy of immanence further grounds the post-structural similarity of their work, repeating the present in on itself.

8

Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 21.

9

Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 17.

10 Hegel’s ‘first man’ in the lord-bondsman dialectic in The Phenomenology of Spirit and Rousseau’s inquiries into the state of nature in The Social Contract are examples of such originary accounts. While neither necessarily take their stories to be historical, even this mythological view connotes the search for origins and first principles that grounded much philosophy to date.

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At the same moment, while Deleuze and Derrida are immensely similar in their theses on repetition, there remains discord between each of their descriptions of the movement of repetition itself, both in its nature and in the aspects that are emphasized. Deleuze places much weight on singularity in repetition, repetition as the repetition of singularity specifically, pushing back on resemblances and generality as genuinely repeatable. For Deleuze, repetition is a product of univocal pure difference, an unavoidable consequence of a difference that prevents stable self-same identity. Therefore, repetition may manifest in reading and language, but merely as an instantiation of an ontological principle of pure difference. When Derrida speaks of repetition, however, he places it in the context of deconstructing an existing presupposition 69 to show TR2 its assumed simple origin to be false, a phantasm of phonologocentrism. Repetition is the origin of the text, an origin of all writing — the principle of arche-writing, the always-already-there repeated in any use of language. Moreover, Derrida directs this repetition toward a deconstruction of assumed hierarchies, showing them to be false dichotomies in order to destabilize systems of opposition. Deleuze, on the other hand, makes no such presumption of an oppositional force within difference. If difference is the univocal producer of all identity — if all comes down to a pure monistic difference — then difference is an affirmative rather than a negative force. And for Derrida, while there is no true origin, repetition does reinscribe a false origin in retrospect, building up the “metaphysics of presence” in a mythical hindsight.11 On the other hand, the similar yet not identical Platonism Deleuze targets is much less a product of repetition for Deleuze than a misunderstanding carried on by Western philosophy.

Toward a Differentiation of Difference Finding a terrain of difference upon which one can find the delineation between Derrida and Deleuze is an immensely difficult task, made no easier by the obscurity of their respective writing.

In Derrida, différance is coined as a neologism in “Cogito and the History of Madness” to separate his new difference from its conventional associations, implying that his difference is not just a difference between things unto themselves but a principle of deferral and differentiation much more fundamentally.12 This différance absorbs rather than narrows from the dual meaning of différence in French, meaning both difference and deferral, indicating that the sign is always defined differentially but also through reference only to other signs, starting an endless chain of deferred meaning. Différance is therefore an internal difference within the sign from which the sign derives its referential meaning and definition.

Yet Derrida’s unwillingness to close the sign structure is crucial as well, separating him from a Saussurean linguistics of difference insofar as while he agrees with Saussure that linguistic identity is merely the product of differentiation from other signs, he maintains that the system is always incomplete. His insistence that the “center is not the center,” that a structure (or text) is never fully present unto itself 11 Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017), pp. 278-293, 281.

12 Jacques Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017), pp. 31-63.

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and always has some outside, excessive element that threatens to fracture the stability of the whole foreshadows the way Derrida weaponizes différance via deconstruction.13 Derrida insists that deconstruction is not quite a method nor a practice but an “event,” immanent within the text, perhaps drawn out by a diligent reader.14 Derrida’s deconstruction is not neutral but specifically aimed at hierarchies — the most famous being the privileging of speech over writing — with deconstruction attempting to show the mutual interdependence of both terms of the binary such that a dichotomous opposition no longer appears feasible. By targeting a “deconstruction of logocentrism” — by which he means to question the historical Western obsession with presence, logic, and crucially, speech — Derrida 70 wields TR2 différance and trace to undermine philosophy’s privileged terms and demonstrate their reliance on that which they push to the margins.15 Speech, as traditionally conceived, is the primary mode of communication, of which writing is a mere derivative insofar as it simply transcribes the spoken word, thus taking on a secondary status to it. Yet, for Derrida, speech is always surrounded and inscribed by the trace of a prior writing — for instance, when one speaks, one has the words they plan to say next, in a sense, already written before them, an internal script that calls into question speech’s superiority over writing. Trace, as the manifestation of Derridean difference, in this way operates on a terrain of radical negativity, pressing so hard on the oppositional nature of differences that they implode in ritual destabilization. The Derridean act of deconstruction is fundamentally an act of conflict taken past its limits, overwhelming the stability given to binary oppositions in a structuralist view.

The negativity of the deconstructionist gesture can be further demonstrated in Derrida’s unwillingness to define deconstruction in anything but entirely negative terms. He is clear that beyond not being a method, deconstruction is “not even an act or an operation” insofar as both terms apply a passivity to deconstruction and an activity to a deconstruct-er, whereas Derrida wants to emphasize the activity of deconstruction itself.16 In fact, deconstruction exists only negatively, a move of radical negativity. For Derrida: “What deconstruction is not? everything of course! What is deconstruction? nothing of course!”.17 This wariness of applying a positive essence or definition to deconstruction goes beyond a hesitance to prioritize identity in the face of difference but rather demonstrates the move of deconstruction as a move of not-That, escaping categorization through a radical No. Whatever deconstruction may produce or open is accessed through the not- which destabilizes oppositions and breaks new paths. This ‘manner of reading,’ for the deconstructivist, is a reading that moves negatively. The event of deconstruction, as Derrida articulates it, is a self-effacing, self-effecting gesture — “it deconstructs

13

Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play,” 279.

14 Jacques Derrida, “Letter to a Japanese Friend,” in Derrida and Différance, ed. David Wood and Robert Bernasconi (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), pp. 1-5, 3.

15

Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” 230.

16

Derrida, “Letter to a Japanese Friend,” 3.

17

Derrida, “Letter to a Japanese Friend,” 5.

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it-self” and unmoors the false hierarchies presupposed in and by the text.18 Derrida reads negatively by negating the text as a text, as a coherent whole with clear delineations between it and the outside-text.

He takes his negative reading further when he never allows that negativity to recuperate itself in a new text-in-itself, a new ossified meaning reincorporated into a static whole. Even if he and Deleuze both end in a reading of difference within the text and agree on the false suppositions of philosophy, the gesture with which Derrida does so is distinctively and radically negative in a way that Deleuze is not.

Derrida is cautious of being classified as doing “negative theology,” the project of describing God only through what God is not, on the grounds that this theology, however negative, remains theological — it pronounces God as the71centerTR2 even if that center can only be circumlocuted.19 The pronunciation of a God, however articulated, remains the announcement of the supreme center, that to which all else is fundamentally indebted. To the extent that a negative theology proclaims a theological structure which “has its center elsewhere,” a God which escapes the possibility structural discourse is still a God and must be treated as such.20 However, a “negative atheology,” though still an “accomplice” of a negative theology, opens new negative possibilities.21 The bemoaning of the center which ties even a negative atheology to negative theology is articulated as “a function of play itself, the indestructible itself,” which admits that even after decentering, the desire for the center still exerts a certain pressure on play.22 This tension is a necessary part of writing — the hesitation between the movement of decentering and the movement of play — which entangles writing with death, the anguish for the center which does not exist and cannot appease. Thus, it appears that a negative atheology is not as non-affirmative of play as Derrida initially supposes — rather, through its negation it enables that hesitation between play and longing for the decentered center that invokes the necessity of death in the form of writing.

Deleuze, on the other hand, works difference much more affirmatively, as a constructive force that need not fall necessarily into opposition or conflict. The non-conceptual difference Deleuze sets out to think finds itself not located within pre-existing or pre-supposed hierarchies it sets out to destabilize but as generative of the entire edifice of reality. Deleuze writes of “wild or untamed differences; a properly differential and original space and time” which founds opposition rather than acts as the negative possibility of its overcoming.23 By grounding identity as its differential origin, both conceptually and spatiotemporally, difference becomes the condition for the possibility of opposition in the first place. In fact, not only does opposition not come as a Hegelian founding event for Deleuze but when it collides with difference often “betrays and distorts it.”24 To oppose terms or concepts via contradiction presupposes a fixity and positivity of their identity from which an oppositional difference can 18

Derrida, “Letter to a Japanese Friend,” 4.

19

Derrida, “Ellipsis,” 297.

20

Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play,” 279.

21

Derrida, “Ellipsis,” 297.

22

Derrida, “Ellipsis,” 297.

23

Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 50, emphasis mine.

24

Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 51.

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arise, forcing difference back into the negative of a dialectic movement. Moving outside a framework of contradiction to a thinking of pure difference requires moving away from a negativity towards an affir mative difference. In this schema, each and “every object, every thing, must see its own identity swallowed up in difference, each being no more than a difference between differences” — not the rejection but the swallowing of identity is what is entailed by a Deleuzian difference, a difference which on every level differs and differenciates;25 a “theatre where nothing is fixed, a labyrinth without a thread.”26 This terrain of affirmation does not even negate identity but rather affirms the differencial layering of differences.

Throughout Difference Repetition, Deleuze engages in much of his argumentation by taking 72 andTR2 aim at the history of philosophy which has curated a certain image of thought, a certain regime of Platonic identity whose presuppositions dominate present discourse. Perhaps the single biggest offender for Deleuze is Hegel, who ultimately absorbs all difference in the aufhebung, which sublates the initial movements of oppositional negativity into a positive recuperation where the differential terms come together as one. Against Hegel, Deleuze insists that difference is “light, aerial and affirmative… a No which results from affirmation,” demonstrating that even as difference appears to separate and divide, it does not take the character of negativity or opposition.27 Avoiding the structure of the negation of the negation altogether, Deleuze joyously opts for Nietzschean affirmation of the singular and of primordial difference. Deleuze turns to Nietzsche and the eternal return, which he reads as an active forgetting that expels “all that denies, all those average affirmations which bear the negative” as their origin.28 The eternal return is instead the perpetual repetition which births the always new, which repeats difference in itself rather than repeating the movement of negation. In the centrifuge model Deleuze gives of the eternal return, with difference as its self-effacing, de-centered center, it is “negation as a consequence” that “consumes all that is negative,” a move which places negation as derivative of difference and which mobilizes eternal return as an affirmation that overcomes the negativity of the Hegelian dialectic.29 Derrida too is skeptical of a Hegelian aufhebung in which negativity is ultimately made complete by turns of a dialectical movement, but equally resists a Deleuzian anti-Hegelianism. Much like his view of metaphysics — perhaps because Hegel is in many ways the epitome of Western metaphysics of the modern era — Derrida finds the pretension of stepping outside Hegel a region prone to error, citing how a mishandling of Hegel (a vulgar anti-Hegelianism) merely “extends its historical domination.”30 To pretend to be able to escape Hegel is exactly when one finds themselves thoroughly reincorporated exactly into the Hegelian system. So just as Derrida does not hope to do away with 25 Deleuze coins a neologism for the activity of his difference, which differenciates rather than differentiates. This uniqueness specifies the role of difference as a primordial condition rather than something derivative of identity.

26

Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 56.

27

Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 54.

28

Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 55.

29

Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 55.

30 Jacques Derrida, “From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism Without Reserve,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017), pp. 251-277, 251.

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metaphysics, he neither strives to do away with Hegel. But Derrida equally resists dialectical operation in deconstruction, engaging a non-recuperable negativity that forecloses the possibility of an ultimate sublimation. Derrida’s negativity, a fundamental force of destabilization that unroots structures and tears down hierarchies, finds no final resting place in happy positivity. Trace and repetition ensure a perpetual shifting terrain that always negates oppositional constructions but also realizes the necessity of oppositional interaction. The condition of the possibility of these oppositional binaries — the subordination of a term and subsequent elevation of its opposing term — becomes the mutual condition of its impossibility, but at the same time, the pure negativity of Derrida requires a constant deconstruction.

The prioritization of this constant taking-apart necessitates a turn away from the pure affirmative (and 73 TR2 its constructive possibilities) and past the Hegelian negative (and its sublimations) to a negativity even more radical.

However, this focus on deconstruction does not mean that Derrida rejects creativity — construction and creation are not interchangeable terms in a Derridean schema. In fact, Derrida repeatedly uses terms such as path-breaking and play to emphasize the opening up that occurs in deconstruction, even if that opening is to unstable terrain that resists the concretization of any solid metaphysics.

If play is “always play of absence and presence,” or, radically thought, “before the alternative of presence and absence,” it becomes impossible to establish a pure affirmative play or a metaphysics of play — play specifically arrives in the deconstruction of the metaphysical edifice, the breaking down from the solidity of a given structure.31 It is this oscillation, this escaping of absence and presence in play that constitutes the nature of play; to pin it down into an ontology of its own is to end the play of signs itself. And just as he does on Hegel, Derrida remains more indeterminate than Deleuze on Nietzschean affirmation. While he credits Nietzsche with the “joyous affirmation of the play of the world,” Nietzsche remains one among two interpretations of play, between which he does not see “any question of choosing”; rather, in the double interpretation of play there must be found a “common ground…the différance of this irreducible difference” between a joyous affirmation and a “Rousseauistic” negation.32 Unlike Deleuze, Derrida is not willing to fully affirm difference — too embracing of a mere inversion of the structuralist program — and thus finds différance and play in this hollowed space between presence and absence, between affirmation and negation. Yet it is specifically this refusal that places him squarely in a movement of radical negativity; the absolute destabilization of deconstruction itself ensures a constant interrogation of interpretation that resists ever being fully affirmed but is always at least partially negated.

Deleuze, however, is much less worried about a politics of inversion or the metaphysical risks in starting entirely anew. In his chapter on the image of thought, Deleuze disdainfully explicates the manners in which the “dogmatic image of thought… crush[es] thought under an image which is that of the Same.”33 He elaborates that “the conditions of a true critique and a true creation are the same: 31

Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play,” 292.

32

Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play,” 292-293.

33

Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 167.

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the destruction of an image of thought which presupposes itself.”34 Deleuze seeks destruction, affirmative destruction by way of a new creation of difference. While Derrida always qualifies his interaction with the history of philosophy, Deleuze, like Nietzsche, seeks to do philosophy with a hammer, inverting its presuppositions to reveal the metaphysics, the univocal ontology, of difference in itself, brought out by the willingness to do new metaphysics while rooting it only in the absence of the old. It is not a negation of Platonism, dialectically or deconstructively, which Deleuze seeks but an affirmation of his own project of difference, an affirmative No to the regime of identity and philosophy thus far. Even the idea of a ‘true creation’ would be foreign to the Derridean gesture, which stays in the muck of the discourses which precede it, refusing the 74 concept TR2 of a pure creation as overly optimistic of the possibility of any pure act. Deleuze, however, is willing to engage a transcendental project of difference that Derrida does not undertake; repetition for itself and difference in itself stand for themselves the beginnings of a new ontology that pays homage to the discourse in which it emerges only in their affirmative and creative destruction.

The consequences of these differences in the gesture, strategy, and manner of reading, of philosophizing, is not necessarily immediately obvious. In many ways, it perhaps remains an esoteric consideration unnecessary for the application of their work. As two of the foremost poststructuralists, Deleuze and Derrida are largely in agreement in their skepticism of identity and structuralism, and a general conciliation of the respective thrusts of their work is generally possible. Yet there is a certain difference in the movements of their thought that potentially yields different political consequences implicit in their work. Derrida, and deconstruction, emphasize the fragility of assumed hierarchies and presupposed oppositions. Writing obliquely about the political, Derrida generates the tools for pulling loose threads in hierarchies presumed to be static. The political destination of the Derridean movement appears as a terrain of uncertainty that offers little room for the construction of a new politics — deconstruction is always submerged in the terms which precede it. Deleuze, on the other hand, proliferates an affirmative politics that, as willing to found a metaphysics of difference, claims a cleaner break with the political moment from which it emerges. The thinking of an affirmative difference perhaps offers a view of possible alternative futures in a way Derridean différance does not, a politics which seeks to create a new world rather than emphasizing the fragility of the one in which we exist. The difference in the gesture of their politics provides two different avenues for political movement, but that which best supplants identity for a politics of difference is known only to the future.

34

Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 139.