ENG 319 4.T: Categorical Identity

Today’s Plan:

• A Quick Question
• Let’s Do a Thing! (Word Responses)
• Categorical Identity
• Let’s start reading Blankenship
• Reading / Write-Up HW

Categorical Identity

Today I want to develop a bit of a mini-lecture that transitions us from our first project-thinking about problems with demagoguery and contemporary politics-to our second project-which will focus on developing a framework for how we might address those problems. Quickly: I think Miller does an excellent job of outlining a problem and proposing a functional system for remedying that problem (those contemporary stases of ill and policy). But I tend to question the appeal of her system; I doubt whether folks would be willing or capable to enact it. Let me quote Miller:

…the best way to [counter] demagoguery isn’t by aspiring to some emotion-free hyper-rationalism; it’s by practicing compassion for those demagoguery says we should treat as Other. Its by imagining things from their perspective.

Well and good. Agreed even! But *how* do we motivate people to give a damn about other people’s perspectives, especially people who have overdosed on more and more of “the same”? I believe enacting Miller’s stases of ill and policy would require a seismic shift in how we conceive of and conduct education. At almost all levels. And not just to teach people how to analyze policy. I mean, that too, but that’s not the seismic shift. Rather than thinking about the transmission of knowledge, we have to think about the cultivation of an attitude. Specifically an attitude toward others. A friend shared a meme the other day which I will share here.

A utopian desire? A practical impossibility? Is the utopian desire naive, or is it the dismissal of such desire as naive itself a kind of fatalism?

Are their decisions in which we cannot condone, accept, allow an other to be other for the sake of others (third parties, neighbors)? What do we do when we are dealing with lives instead of light bulbs?

Break.

I do not want to underestimate how difficult it will be to enact such a shift in contemporary K-12 schools, since public education at all levels have become knowledge factories. My wife teaches 5th grade and her students take an assessment test every 4-5 days to make sure they are on track. They are not on track. They are all behind. The curriculum is so ridiculously paced and packed that they cannot possibly be anything but behind. Teachers will be evaluated (and, in some cases, fired) because they cannot deliver an impossible curriculum. A curriculum designed by private corporations (teachers working for private corporations, sure, sure). A curriculum sure to fill every second of every day with productive learning. Utter madness, utter impossibility, leaving no room for failure, struggle, reteaching, exploration, experimentation. Just a demand to endure surrounded by monstrous positive toxicity. Humans are not computers. Learning is not an easy frictionless transfer of information. Capitalism has ruined education. Lots of enthymemes in that paragraph that I do not have time to unpack and illustrate. And, in laying out the critique of education, I think I have lost the thread. So…

Let me summarize what I think we’ve come to accept: Miller’s argument centers around the problems of identity. What happens when political decision-making, which should largely be a matter of logos, of weighing propositions, estimating costs, imagining side effects, and choosing the most expedient and efficient proposal out of a limited and realistic set of options, what happens when that all gets erased? repressed? ignored? in favor of a system built around identity, about voting for the “good” folks rather than the “bad” folks? I am old enough to remember when presidential debates centered around specific problems and pieces of legislation. When candidates had to lay out policy proposals while campaigning and discuss specific details. I don’t feel like this is the world in which we live, when legislation might have a name (“Build Back Better”) but little cognitive energy is invested in discussing the specifics. Even this year, I listen to Biden talking about preserving reproductive rights, but, um, exactly how does he plan on doing that?. Okay, I’m losing the thread here. The thread is that identity has become a problem.

Obviously, I believe Jim Corder and Lisa Blankenship supply us with productive ways to think about how to curtail the potentially toxic issues caused by an over-addiction to identity. But before I do that, I want to explore the idea of identity a bit more, to show that it isn’t suddenly a problem, but rather has been under scrutiny for the past 50 or so years. In short: postmodern theorists from a wide variety of disciplines have been skeptical of identity for quite some time. Their skepticism towards identity and Truth (understood as transcendental, certain, and/or universal) stem from some of the more horrific events of the 19th and 20th century. Particularly genocide: the genocide of Africans (particularly in the southern quarter of the continent), of native Americans, and, of course, of Jews during the Holocaust. It is the latter that fundamentally rattles Western philosophy. Let me move quickly here: for many postmoderns what authorizes the horrors of the Holocaust is the certainty that one category of humans is vastly superior to another category of supposed non-humans. Categorization, coupled with lingering vestiges of the 18th century’s “Great Chain of Being” (the Christian idea that God had hierarchically ordered all beings in exist from least to greatest), produces a position from which one can authorize the enslavement, deportation, relocation, or even genocide of others. Mere meager others. Because they are not the same category of us (remember that Aristotle’s language for ontology, for categorization, is genus and species). This isn’t merely a problem of “us” and “them.” It is when they come to be some-thing other than us. A different, inferior species. Humans invent categories that authorize them to be evil.

I’m doing an independent study on Queer Theory this semester and we started by reading Annamarie Jagose’s 1997 book Queer Theory / An Introduction. Jagose traces a history of gay and lesbian political movements dating back to the early 20th century. Those initial movements, called the homophile movements, sought if not political, at least cultural, recognition based on categorizing same-sex desire as a “disease.” Their arguments were that if the newfound science of psychology could identify sexual deviancy, then homosexuals (the brand new scientific term of the day) deserved not vitriol but sympathy and understanding. We can look back and judge that movement now, but they were attempting to take rhetorical advantage of an emerging power (medical discourse) to carve out a space in which they could exist. This movement carries on in various forms for about 50 years. In the 60’s gay and lesbian movements inherit the more radical notions of change and rebellion from the black power and women’s liberation movements. Young activists in the field reject the homophile approach, refuse to see themselves as diseased, and begin to demand equality.

However, as Jagose noted, such movements were highly modern in their structure. In order to provide their people with a sense of community and belonging, working from an established political–philosophical template–they centralized a particular universal sense of the “proper” gay and lesbian identity. The familiar template here is the “ethnic” template; to think of being gay or being lesbian as stemming from a universal, identifiable, stable, set of values, experiences, and desires. They could articulate what it meant to be gay. What it meant to be a lesbian. Once defined, you are capable of organization. Once organized, you can speak with a greater, louder voice. Jagose writes of these new liberation movements:

The process of stabilization–even solidification–enabled lesbians and gays to be represented as a coherent community, untied by a collective lesbian and gay identity. […] Those alienated from the ethnic model consolidated by lesbian and gay identity did not simply demand to be included but also critiqued the fundamental principles which had centralized that specific (although supposedly universal) identity in the first place. (62). […] These debates about the validity of sexual variations–so vehement at times that they have come to be known as the “sex wars”–impacted most significantly on lesbian feminist circles, where lesbian sexuality had been theorized predominantly as a counter to masculine sexuality, which feminist analysis represented as overwhelmingly oppressive and objectifying. […] Lesbian feminism [in its ethnic-identity form] has generally argued that exceptions to the “standard” forms of lesbian sexuality [short version, Platonic intimacy over desire]–such as bisexuality, sado-masochism or butch/fem relations–are ideologically suspect assimilations of patriarchal values. Bisexual women are thus lesbians who maintain their heterosexual privilege instead of identifying fully with a devalued [and thus good and pure] social identity. […] Lesbians who identify as butch or fem belong to a pre-feminist era of lesbianism and consequently are thought to be either heroic or tragic, having internalized the heterosexual necessity for gender differentiation within a sexual relationship

Let me stop here. What’s happening? Let’s look at Jagose on 77-78 & 82. [Queer = Deconstructive] I want to use this introduction to queer theory as an introduction into “sophistry” or, more commonly, “postmodern philosophy.” Let’s look at some passages from three different theorist. Kenneth Burke, who isn’t necessarily postmodern. He’s going to claim we cannot escape identity as us vs them. Victor Vitanza, who wants to argue that, perhaps, we can escape the binary–or maybe that we have to be hyper vigilant, not just sort of vigilant, about its impositions. Kenneth Burke, <em (1969), Identification isn’t as Idealist as Persuasion. We need not be Heroic Heroes?

“We need never deny the presence of strife, enmity, factions, as a characteristic motive of rhetorical expression. We need not close our eyes to their almost tyranneous ubiquity in human relations; we can be on the alert always to see how such temptations to strife are implicit in the institutions that condition human relationships; yet we can at the same time always look beyond this order, to the principle of identification in general, a terministic choice justified by the facts that the identifications in the order of love are also characteristic of rhetorical expression.” (20) — “Insofar as the individual is involved in conflict with other individuals or groups, the study of this same individual would fall under the head of Rhetoric. . . . The Rhetoric must lead us through the Scramble, the Wrangle of the Market Place, the flurries and flare-ups of the Human Barnyard, the Give and Take, the wavering line of pressure and counterpressure, the Logomachy, the onus of ownership, the War of Nerves, the War.” (23)

Burke-identity *by* division. Burke would argue, contra the Utilitarian and Queer hope, that identities are inevitable. They stem from a deep human need to belong and from a political requirement to process, debate, and decide. Were it only one source, we might be able to over come them. But, pressed together, nature and culture make their gravity inescapable. For Burke, what matters is that we police our own commitments and monitor the humanity of our gates. For more radical theorists, like Jacques Derrida, Victor Vitanza, or Diane Davis (one old guard pomo and two fairly contemporary postmodern rhetorical scholars), the Burkian resignment to identity needs more radical challenge. Burke refers to categorical identity, categorical ontology, as What Vitanza would as negative dialectic (something *is* by way of what it *is* not). Heterosexual only enters the lexicon after the clinical establishment of homosexual, which itself represses a wide range of sexual questions and phenomena, reducing it simply to “object choice). Vitanza (indebted to Burke but also skeptical):

“While the negative enables, it disenables. As I’ve said, it’s mostly a disenabler because it excludes. Something is by virtue of Nothing, or what is not. The negative–or negative dialectic–is a kind of pharmakon, and in overdoes, it is extremely dangerous (e.g., a little girl is a little man without a penis! Or an Aryan is not a Jew! And hence, they do not or should not–because in error–exist.) The warning on the label–beware of overdoses–is not enough; for we, as KB says, are rotten with perfection. We would No [kNOw]. That is, say No to females, Jews, gypsies, queers, hermaphrodites, all others. By saying No, we would purchase our identity. Know ourselves. By purifying the world, we would exclude that which, in our different opinions, threatens our identity. (We have, Burke says, “the motives of combat in [our] very essence” (1969, 305). Hence, we build gulags and ovens so as to have a great, good place. It [the standard, Aristotelian, school-book History of Rhetoric] is a momument built by ways of exclusion. I am against monuments, edifying pretensions.

Let me just point to a few other quotes here, quotes that let me end by showing a range of thinkers tackling a similar set of problems: how to shift the first, foundational, obligation of philosophy from Truth to Alterity. How to grapple with the gravity of identity, to wonder if we can escape its terminal orbit. How to become more comfortable asking questions that make us uncomfortable. How to avoid final solutions. I have more to write here today. But I want to end hanging on the question of identity, its power in the way we think about ourselves, a question of whether it can be transcended. If we are to radically change education, to save democracy, or–at the very least–to temper the growing addiction to demagoguery, if we are to engender in others a care for others, then I think rethinking identity has to be among our first baby steps. If, as Miller argues, self-skepticism is key to healthier dialogue, then we need a better language, more sophist-icated lenses, for thinking about our (many, constructed, conflicted, inherited, created, messy) selves. Note: Baudrillard and the desire for perfection (the perfect idea-abstract map of the realm/human/being. The desert of the real. The critique that has run out of steam. Borges’ short fable. Baudrillard, opening of Simulation and Simulacra.

Homework

Remember that the Corder / Blankenship write-up is due on Thursday. Here is the standard list of reading questions I give with the Corder reading:

1. What challenge does Corder issue that problematizes all rhetoric, but especially positivistic rhetoric? What does Corder mean by the idea that we make narratives? Why do said narratives complicate traditional notions of argument and rhetoric?
2. Why is Corder opposed to framing Rogers as a model for *all* argument? (His critique of Maxine Hairston, which involves one of the greatest “shade” sentences in the history of academia)
3. What dimension does Corder add to argument (rhetoric) that is often ignored? In answering this question, think about the meaning(s) of the long anecdote Corder uses later in section 8 of the essay? Why include it? What claim/idea does it support?
4. Why does Corder use the word “love”? In what way is Corder’s approach to rhetoric like “love”? [That’s a really interesting terministic choice. I have a few ideas that I’ll share with you in class, but I am interested in how you interpret his decision. Note that I think this is *by far* the hardest question]