[Helen Beetham] Ohmigod I'm doing it, I'm actually replying to XMCA. I must be having
a particularly queer day today.
Jay seems to be trying to distinguish between internalisation and appropriation by introducing
'intentionality' into the equation, something which runs through his contribution (down to the 'deliberate
twisting'). But if, from a CHAT (and indeed a queer theory perspective) 'I' am constituted only in and
through discourse with others, who an 'I' and where am 'I' standing when 'I' reject or 'twist' the
assumptions inherent in any particular discourse, dominant or other? Whence the 'intentionality'?
And maybe if we are 'queer' in any way (gender/sexuality, but also lots of
other and linked dimensions of human variation, and degrees of
stigmatization or danger-to-status-quo as well), then we cannot NOT twist
as we appropriate, because we are not the 'intended readers', do not live
and do in the ways the learning is supposed to support. And of course we
are all queer in one way and another, fortunately.
[Helen Beetham] Well all normalising discourse addresses us 'queers' as intended readers
as well as all non-queers, it just addresses us differently. And isn't this one indication of the
inadequacy of either 'internalisation' or 'appropriation' as terms - implying simple acceptance
or rejection or even (if we 'twist' it) 'mishearing' of a particular message. 'It' is not the message it
is the mode of address, Althusser's 'shout in the street' which brings us into existence as social
beings. We don't respond 'yes' or 'no', we respond, 'who, me?'. And so in being for the other etc etc
Herewith a strong hypothesis. The most radical twisting occurs by
internalization in the queerest of us, and it is much harder and much rarer
to get such radical twisting by deliberate appropriations or efforts to twist.
[Helen Beetham] Judith Butler et al have pointed out that every body is queer; the so-called
'naturalness' of the body is itself constituted in and through discourse and in recognising our embodied
selves in sensory experience we can't help 'missing' ourselves on the way back out the door of linguistic
representation. So who is queerer than who?
If we accept that we are all differently positioned in relation to and within different discourses, the question
for me is how we can resist the dominant discourses - where can we stand to do so? If we accept the radical
postmodernism of e.g. Lyotard and Baudrillard there is no solution in collective action - which only instantiates
new forms of power and fails to do 'justice' to the incommensurability of different local narratives - the extreme
of locality being individuality or monism ('no such thing as society', as Thatcher told us). The deconstructive
solution is not concerted collective action but individual creative responses such as parody, ventrioloquism,
deconstructive theory itself, or just the 'queerness' of being queer. This seems to me dangerously close to
what Jay is advocating when he argues against 'deliberate appropriations or efforts to twist'. Surely new forms
of collective activity engender new forms of discourse and understanding? And surely we can use tools from
one discursive arena to critique another, refusing to do the 'justice' of respecting the 'incommensurable' boundaries
between them?
I don't have the answers to how this works but, echoing a previous contribution, Harraway's idea of the 'modest
witness' seems to me a productive one: recognising that we are implicated and embedded in a whole series of
discourses and power relations which 'press against our eyes' (Monique Wittig), so that we don't see clearly;
but within that, bearing witness to the possibility of change. Perhaps collective action in the cultural-historical
realm (i.e. collective action) like action in the ontogenetic realm, is unconscious first i.e. for the other
(e.g. in opposition to a dominant discourse) and only subsequently becomes theorised for ourselves? But
we should always act with the conscience of witnesses i.e. the will to make it conscious. Pessimism of the
intellect; optimism of the will (or in another register, where id was, there ego shall be).
Helen
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