Download Wk 10 - Hanford

Nicholas Hanford
Week 10 Writings
Ethical Readings
Grosz, becoming undone, Ch. 4
"Instead they have functioned as a kind of mantra of liberation, a given ideal, not
only for a politics directed purely to feminist questions, but to any politics directed
to class, race, national, and ethnic struggles." (59)
"Thus, instead of linking the question of freedom to the concept of emancipation, or
to some understanding of liberation from or removal of an oppressive or unfair
form of constraint or limitation, as is most common in feminist and other antioppressive struggles and discourses, I want to explore concepts of life where
freedom is conceived not only or primarily as the elimination of constraint or
coercion, but more positively as the condition or capacity for action." (60)
- Isn't this just agency? I find the distinctions between autonomy, freedom
and agency to be under-explained.
"The distinction between freedom-from and freedom-to is to a large extent
correlated with a conception of freedom that is bound up with, on the one hand, a
shared existence with the other and the other's power over the subject, and, on the
other, a freedom directed only to one's actions and their conditions and
consequences." (61)
"...'freedom from'...best addresses and attempts to redress wrongs of the past
without providing any positive direction for action in the future. It entails that once
the subject has had the negative force of restraints and inhibitons limiting freedom
removed..." (61)
"For him, it is not so much subjects that are free or not free; rather, it is acts that, in
expressing a consonance (or not) with their agent, are free (or automatized) and
have (or lack) the qualitative character of free acts." (64)
"Yes even in the case of an example favored by the determinist - the subject under
hypnosis - there is a measure of freedom insofar as the act performed through
suggestion must still be rationalized, integrated in the agent's life history, given a
history, and qualitatively inserted into all the agent's other acts in order to be
performed." (64)
"This subject from which acts spring is never the same, never self-identical, always
and imperceptibly becoming other than what it once was and is now." (66)
"Neither understands that the two options were never of equal value because
neither exists in itself as an abstract possibility." (66)
- In her explanation of Bergson I have to wonder why we don’t see Goffman
and the presentation of the everyday self here. I understand that probably
falls under the category of ‘freedom-from’ (which is entirely fuzzy in this
piece), but it does offer a more social understanding of agency without falling
back on decontextualized notions of freedom.
"Freedom has no given content; it cannot be defined." (67)
- Horseshit, of course it can and it is being defined through your uses here!
Everyone needs to get over the idea of the ‘undefinable’ as it posits that
definitions are perfect, stable, and unchanging.
"If freedom is located in acts rather than in subjects, then the capacity to act and the
effectiveness of action is to a large extent structured by the ability to harness and
utilize matter for one's own purposes and interests." (68)
"...freedom is not the transcendent property of the human, but the immanent and
sometimes latent capacity of life in all its complexity." (68)
"Matter must contain as its most latent principle, its most virtual recess, the same
indeterminacy that life returns to it." (70)
"Materiality tends to determination; it gives itself up to calculation, precision,
spatialization. At the same time, it is also the field in and through which free acts are
generated through the encounter of life with matter and the capacity of each to yield
to the other its forms and forces..." (70)
"Freedom is the realm of actions, processes, events that are not contained within or
predictable from the present. It is that which emerges, surprises, and cannot be
entirely anticipated in advance." (72)
“Freedom is thus not an activity of mind but one primarily of the body: it is linked to
the body’s capacity for movement and thus its multiple possibilities of action.” (72)
- Please tell me how this doesn’t lead to ableism?
"It is this indetermination - the discriminations of the real based on perception, the
discriminations of interest that consciousness performs on material objects,
including other bodies - that liberates life from the immediacy and givenness of
objects, but also from the immediacy and givenness of the past." (72)
"...but how to enable more action, more making and doing, more difference." (73)
Grosz, becoming undone, Ch. 6
"Instead of affirming the absolute specificity of our sexual and social identity, its
unique particularity, through a concept of 'diversity'...I am more concerned with
destabilizing identity, and addressing social and political problems." (88)
"How can we transform the ways in which identity is conceived so that identities do
not emerge and function only through the suppression and subordination of other
social identities?" (89)
"Difference is what underlies identity. Perhaps identity is the misunderstood
concatenation and congealing of the unstable play of differences without positive
identity." (90)
"Differance is the unrecognizable movement by which different things differ, but it
cannot be identified with these different things insofar as it is both the condition of
their appearance and also their dissolution as things." (91)
"What I am interested in is an understanding of difference as the generative force of
the world, the force that enacts materiality (and not just its representation), the
movement of difference that marks the very energies of existence before and
beyond any lived or imputed identity." (91)
"Difference is diverted through identity, analogy, opposition, and resemblance
insofar as these are the means by which determination is attributed to the
undetermined, in other words, insofar as difference is subjected to representation.
Difference is always reduced to, as well as mediated, constrained, and translated by,
the identical, the similar, the analogous, or the opposite..." (93)
"Indeed, in spite of its claims to proliferate and acknowledge differences, such
intersectionality actually attempts to generate forms of sameness, similar modes of
access to social resources, through the compensation for socially specific modes of
marginalization."
- I really don't understand the fear of sameness in every possible
instantiation. Does setting up that dichotomy help? Ontologically, maybe, but
rhetorically they might be able to be viewed both as tools instead of as
essential characteristics of humans/movements.
- If we were to establish difference as the overriding concept of humanity instead of
identity how would laws be put into place? Can any of these suggestions be
pragmatically used?
"In this case, identity cannot be understood as what we are, the multiple,
overlapping categories that make us into subjects; rather, we are what we do and
what we make, we are what we generate, which may give us an identity, but always
an identity that is directed to our next act, our next activity, rather than to the
accretion of the categories that may serve to describe us."
- I think the biggest issue that I have with Grosz is the constant move toward
privileging the production of humanity and not allowing for non-production.
It reeks of neoliberalism and ‘making yourself’ to me, but maybe I’m reading
too much into this.
Wilson, Neural Geographies
"What sense can be made of a text that so persistently invokes both our keen
interest and our keen distrust?" (2)
"...such a distinction can only serve a number of suspect critical ends: to ascertain
the extent to which phenomenology can be rescued from scientism, or the extent to
which phenomenology has emerged despite scientism, or the extent to which
phenomenology has been compromised by its juxtaposition with science." (3)
"The utility of Freud to many theoretical-critical projects seems to depend on the
ease and clarity with which certain concepts...can be disassociated from the
biological or scientific foundation that Freud ascribes to them." (4)
"...moment before the establishment of certain contemporary demands: the conjoint
moment of structuralism and cybernetic theory before the installation of theories as
Theory, and before the ascendancy of contemporary cognitive models of affect." (4)
"Where conventional models take cognition to be the manipulation of symbols in
accordance with pre-existing computational rules, connectionist models figure
cognitive processes as the spread of activation across a network of interconnected,
neuron-like units...It is the connections between these units, rather than the units
per se, that take on the pivotal role in the functioning of the network." (6)
"It was in this period that our notions of cognition and computation became
synonymous with the processing exemplified in AI models." (7)
"The task was performed entirely on the basis of the flow of activation through the
network and the subsequent changes in the weight of connections between units.
These units and connections are cognitively empty...Instead information...is
distributed across the network...in the differences between connection weights..."
(9)
"Rather than reducing the possibilities of thinking cognition and psyche, neurology
may give access to an internal movement in cognition that has hitherto been
foreclosed by traditional cognitivism." (13)
"Rather than being the object or endpoint of analysis, or even the solution to the
problems I raise, connectionism serves as the means through which I can gain
leverage on both scientific cognitive theory and our own critical habits and
procedures." (14)
"The body is read as a social, cultural, experiential, or physical object that touches
on the biological realm only lightly, discreetly, hygienically." (15)
"It is culture or the environment that delivers difference and malleability to
otherwise barren neurological matter." (16)
"This gesture to a nonneurological culture or environment not only misrepresents
the complex relation between neurology and its outside, but also, by locating
malleability, politics, and difference only in the domains of culture or
environment..." (16)
"...by a persistent hostility toward any systematic examination of the theoretical and
political foundations of their own feminist presumptions." (16)
"If it has been in the interests of scientific and phallocentric authority to divide its
knowledges between those about women and those about the world..., then it is
crucial that we investigate the effects of that division." (19)
"...deconstruction is engaged in an examination of the conditions that make such
projects possible and the implications and effects of their operations. ...
deconstruction can articulate the problematic foundations of our currently founded
political programs." (22)
"A more careful inquiry into any of Derrida's texts would demonstrate the great care
he takes to formulate deconstruction as something other than the argumentative
antithesis of a pathologized metaphysics." (24)
On hinges: "They undo the self-evident character of the binary division by
manifesting the point at which such a division becomes unworkable or incoherent.
Rather than negating the binary...the hinge term seeks to expose and internally
displace its operations." (26)
"...deconstruction eschews the possibility of definite breaks or revolutions in the
structure of knowledge and that deconstruction has little to do with conventional
notions of scientific or epistemological progress." (27)
"The double gesture of deconstruction could be understood as the conjunction of the
necessary and the impossible." (27)
"...we are not able easily to avoid essentialism's ruses, and moreover we may find
that the domain of antiessentialism is equally problematic in that it seems to rely on
a covert and indispensable essentialism as its excluded other." (28)
"...deconstruction is wary of the desire in such classical projects to produce an
empirical or theoretical solution, to articulate a final synthesis..." (28)
"...Deconstruction has effect by inhabiting the structures is contests. This means, of
course, that deconstruction and its practitioners are always internal to and
complicit with the structures they examine." (29)