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Date: 10/6/96 1:17 PM
To: Geoffrey Williams
From: xmca who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu
Eugene offers some good points regarding the complex issue of
positionality and social interaction. Perhaps our difference is
largely one of optimism (for him) vs. pessimism (mine).
I agree that _mere_ positionality does not guarantee likeness or
the ability to represent, and so I can accept up to a point that
it also cannot totally block the possibility of like-mindedness.
But my notion of positionality was, I hope, carefully defined
_not_ as categorial position (though unfortunately my examples
all had to be stated in our categorial vocabulary: male, female;
white, black; gay, straight; old, young etc.) which I
increasingly reject as contrary to human complexity, but in the
Bourdieu-an trajectory-and-habitus sense. This latter notion
means that our positionality in society is a function of how we
have lived, how we have been treated, who we have interacted
with. That is, it foregrounds the same features Eugene does: our
social interactivity.
So I might well concede that a transexual who had long identified
as, been accepted socially as, and generally lived as a woman
could represent a viewpoint substantially enough similar in many
regards to those born female (and who lived as such, etc.) for
many purposes. Is this a man representing women? the question
doesn't make sense once categorial positionality is decomposed
into life-trajectory positionality. It still matters of course
that there are and are seen to be differences in masculine and
feminine viewpoints, created by cultural practices; this is a
relevant dimension of the social space in our culture.
Individuals trace trajectories however that cannot be so easily
categorized (all individuals, not just transexuals; we all are
more 'feminine' in some respects and 'masculine' in others,
changing over our lives and in different activities; the 'ideals'
or stereotypes normatively conflate qualities that do not have to
go together and quite often don't, making too many people feel
'inadequate' when they are just somewhere in the space of
sociopersonal possibilities for the culture).
Likewise just because someone gets categorized on some criteria
as, say, 'working class' does not mean they can be relied on to
represent the viewpoints of the majority of others so
categorized; it depends which viewpoints or dispositions we're
talking about and who the person is. I don't, however, for a
moment believe that the Congress of men who approved votes for
women in the U.S. consisted of very many males who were doing
this because they were seeing the situation from a female (or
feminine) point of view. More likely most of them were
calculating self-interest and politicking their votes in a
complex and very culturally masculine game of 'winning'
something. I'd be more ready to believe that a Congress of women
actually had some empathy for another gender and some altruistic
motives ... or maybe not a Congress, maybe just a random sample
of American women. The life-trajectories that lead to Congress
don't seem to me terribly consistent with picking up a lot of
non-masculine dispositions.
I think what is conceptually difficult here is to shift our
notions of such things as masculinity/femininity, or typically-X-
group vs. typically Y-group, from common and shared traits of
members of a group to a sort of culturally salient grid of
characteristics against which we array uniquely disposed
individuals. If we reject categorial positionality, it should not
be only in order to fall back on pure individualism. The kinds of
differences among individuals that our culture produces and
notices and which make a difference for so many purposes do
correspond in some way to the positional categories, even if real
people do not. And the stereotypical constellations that name and
define the categories are cultural artifacts of great importance,
but still need to be decomposed into the myriad details said to
naturally co-constitute them -- so that we can then see that real
people inhabit the much larger space of all the combinatorial
possibilities among such features, and not just the boxes in
which they all go together in the stereotypically expected ways.
JAY.
All in all, I still doubt that we can take the viewpoint of
someone who's life history and most formative experiences have
been radically different from our own, and I believe that such
trajectories and dispositions do tend on the average to be more
divergent across positional categories than within them.
------------
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
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Date: Sun, 09 Jun 96 22:15:33 EDT
From: Jay Lemke <JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU>
Subject: positionality & representation
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