One of the principal functions of our dialogue here on xmca, as probably of
all dialogue where contexts are remote and intertexts not always shared, is
that we spend a lot of time being amazed at the possible readings of what
we thought we'd said so clearly (an illusion I've disabused myself of, but
the amazement persists!), and doing the useful and constructive work of
saying some more to make the meaning more communally workable (never
shared, though; another illusion I've lost). It fascinates me as a
discourse analyst how MUCH we often have to say or write (or invoke through
immediate contexts and the past trajectories of dialogues) to actually make
a meaning for more than just ourselves. I've argued for years in the field
of text semantics that, out of context (and intertexts), single sentences
don't make the sort of specific meanings usually claimed for them. They
just narrow the range of meanings of the words they contain, more
specifiedly than those words' (and their simple semantic relations) meaning
potentials outside of sentences. Sometimes you have to write a whole BOOK
to make one really specific meaning.
So some amplification by way of clarification in response to Helen's response.
By intertexts, old timers of xmca will know that I'm a very strong
anti-intentionalist when it comes to meaning and notions of
mind/cognition/semiosis. But intentionalist locutions are very hard to
avoid when writing in 'natural-' sounding ways, or briefly. I did at one
point write in my message about _agency_ (rather than intention) as one way
of looking at the difference between internalization and appropriation.
Elsewhere I wrote about a 'doing' view vs. a 'happening' view, which is a
colloquialization of another semantic distinction. In other words, I was
trying to speak in linguistic terms in place of intentionalist mentalistic
terms. I use the linguistic terms as placeholders for social semiotic terms
that we don't really have yet in our shared vocabulary.
This possible confusion also may affect readings of my suggestion that
spontaneous twisting as a result of someone's being in a subaltern location
may be more effective than deliberate efforts to resist or appropriate
dominant discourses and practices. I was not 'arguing against' deliberate
twisting -- I'm all for it as an effort, as an expression of our anger and
our will to be/do otherwise -- just suggesting that the spontaneous
twisting that we can't help doing, and which may take us quite a while to
realize that we've already done (i.e. to articulate) is really just a lot
more effective, more inherently radical. Revulsion in the gut, far more
than reasoned revolution, is for me the motor of cultural change. Reason is
far more likely to be discursively re-routed back into dominant paths, only
superficially different. Discourses are still needed tools, but they need
to speak to gut feelings that arise from the basic mismatch between 'bodily
truth' and everything we are told makes sense, is logically, culturally and
empirically 'true'. Faith in reason, and even in will, in deliberate
action, has deeply betrayed us. We are promised autonomy and self-control
and a role in making the world differently, but the tools that implement
that promise are designed against us. (cf. the master's tools, master's
house-wrecking debates) Where can the new tools come from? from the ways
our bodies' truths twist every discourse and practice, twisting them at
first into pre-discursive, not-yet-speakable, body-meanings that, with work
and luck and pain, can come to be said to others, can come to be tools for
doing otherwise in ways that express that we already are otherwise.
Finally, are we all queer? In all such matters of categorial attribution, I
prefer a view that is multi-dimensional, and in every dimension, a matter
of degree. So we may all be queer, but in so many different ways; many of
us may be queer in some of the same ways, but to very different degrees.
Dominant culture clearly creates a sort of center-periphery topology (or
top to bottom of the pyramid) in its self-serving oversimplifications of
real lived human diversity of feeling, experience, and action. Builds its
oversimplifications (gross dimensional reductions: male or female,
masculine or feminine, gay or straight, queer or normal, working/middle
class, black/white, etc.) into our available discursive tools. And
stigmatizes all but the tiniest fraction of human realities. What I mainly
meant by queer in the context of 'twisting' is the ways and extent to which
our bodily experiencing will not fit with what we are told, or with ANY
discursive possibility that can be constructed with the discourses we are
socially taught. A little queer, a little uncomfortable (and always only in
some contexts, situations); queerer, more deeply distressed by the
mis-fits. Who, queer in what way, and to what degree, rebels in their gut
against what discourses and norms and 'realities'? and how exactly can we
understand what's happening in this deeply important process, in ourselves?
perhaps in others?
Call me millennarian, but I would like to believe that the thought of
another thousand years of the total human emptiness that our dominant world
sociocultural order naturalizes is enough to make a lot of us willing to
make a radical break with it. Or maybe we're just feeling the torsion of
the twist before something on a very much larger scale snaps.
jay.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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