Well, he does do a good job explaining the classics and their relevance to “modernity.”

But then I spent the winter, spring and summer — while moving, being unemployed and getting a new job — reacquainting myself with anthropology, including some postmodern thought, brief familiarity with folks like Foucault, and Richard Rorty’s ironism (I still like his peculiarly American, pragmatic version of continental postmodernism), and … well let’s just say, once you start seeing “Western Culture” as just one more possibility within the realm of human existence, just one version of humanity’s attempt to negotiate existence together… you start to think, “huh, a lot of this Western Philosophy, the discourse of the Western world trying to make sense of itself, is pretty parochial. It’s pretty self-referential and kinda irrelevant.”

This week, to take a break between getting CompTIA A+ certified, and then starting to pretend I’m preparing for a graduate education, I decided it might be fun to listen to Rick Roderick’s “Self Under Siege – Philosophy in the 20th Century” audio lecture (also on the previous link), in which he’ll cover Foucault, Habermas, Derrida, and presumably (hopefully) some others like DeLeuze and Baudrillard.

To be fair to him, I haven’t even finished the first lecture yet, but my goodness. I keep finding myself annoyed with him and finding his take, his views, irrelevant. Granted he’s speaking in the early 1990s, and the problems in America, while much the same today, were pretty different, and interpreted pretty differently.

But, so far, it seems he’s clearly coming from a place where he wants to defend the traditions of his discipline. He seems caught in the trap of concerning himself with peculiarly parochial Western questions regarding religion and “the self.” He even name-checks Rorty in the first lecture, as having written a paper with the attitude of, “Those old questions of philosophy haven’t been answered in 2,500 years, so who cares?” And he feels really upset by this.

I happen to agree with Rorty. Maybe the old questions of Western philosophy are just the wrong questions to be asking. Maybe they’re just concerned with ancient cosmologies of the world that aren’t really important anymore. Except I must remind myself, he was a Texan in the late 20th century, and even today, these questions are still so important to so many people because they’re brought up conventionally. These traditions are still very much alive in society, and of course the foundations of contemporary statehood and economics… and that, I think, is part of the problems.

Fundamentally, it seems Roderick wants to address the crisis of meaning to the Self in the modern world. He is suggesting in the start that, once upon a time, folks had “worldviews” (I would say cultural cosmologies) in which they could place themselves and then drive meaning. He is explaining how the classic texts of Freud, Marx and Nietzsche drew suspicion on these worldviews, and how nowadays people find themselves adrift.

I look forward to hearing the rest of his narrative and views, but I can say right now, I think that’s false. I think people are perfectly capable, and always have been, of creating their own meaning. It’s difficult, at first — I think Western culture has certainly had a tradition of “mother/father/authority figure” as the source of one’s cosmology and place in the world, and is still struggling to adjust out of that.

But I don’t think it’s a problem. I think it’s an advancement. That old stuff doesn’t need to matter anymore. We can deal with each other and create our own meanings. We all are born needing some help, some welcoming into this world and maturing, but we don’t need to be told who we are and what it means to be alive, other than, “Welcome! Here we are, let’s make the best of it!”

(This may also be part of the real major crisis of the contemporary world: the actual globalization going on is empowering non-Western cultures, and the Western world feels afraid of finding its traditions as irrelevant as it once saw those of other peoples.)

As a final note, what really bugs me about Roderick is this constant facade of folksiness, which isn’t really a facade, but is irritating because his dialog is constantly with old philosophers, and modern philosophers, and hypotheticals in everyone’s head. A number of examples he puts forward, and ideas about living in the world, seem very much a projection, and not about the real lived experience of everyday people, hence why the “folksiness” bugs me, because it implies he’s connected to everyday people. But again, he lived in Texas, so mayhap he was.

It’s just, I crave empiricism. “Stop being in your cave looking at shadows and come out here in the world with us.” Rex on Savage Minds recently said of anthropology, “It is surely one of the most unique things about our discipline that we are committed to the idea that being human with other humans is a far more sophisticated way of learning about them than any other sort of method that works from the outside in.” Indeed. In fact, of all disciplines, philosophy seems to me to peculiarly attempt to work “from the outside out.” (Or from the inside in?) Philosophers, go be human with other humans, and write about that. Become anthropologists. We could use your brains.

Mind you, it’s good to study that old stuff, for historical reasons, to inform understanding of how the world got to be the way it is. But it’s also time to step off the “train of history” and start making our world on our own.

Also, clearly the ethics of things like contemporary anarchism have roots in some philosophical musings on how to live and treat other people, and I think that’s a good thing, and am being slightly hyperbolic in this post.

Once upon a time, to devote yourself to your work became a way to glorify God. To work was to be virtuous, to try to demonstrate that you must be a good person, even though you might not be because, of course, the final arbiter was post-life.

Nowadays, God doesn’t get much of a lick in anymore, but by golly if we haven’t replaced God with capitalism and productivity. And you women really aren’t cooking or minding the children as well as you used to…

Which reminds me, I’ve been thinking about public health issues and how any society does have some legitimate cause for encouraging healthy practices and setting standards of behavior on issues that go beyond an individual’s body. Infectious diseases, smoking, things like that, a society has some merit in monitoring. But the point should be “everyone’s health and happiness,” not productivity. And if what you’re doing only affects your body, I don’t care. I guess capitalists view productivity as affecting everyone – if too many people are ill or unproductive, “the economy” suffers, and so do others in society. We all have to do our part!

All glory to constant work! All glory to the hypnotoad!

African homophobia does not exist, nor does European homophobia, Asian homophobia or South American homophobia. Acts of homophobia occur in each of these spaces.

…African conceptions of homosexuality are shaped by factors including nationalism, globalisation, migration, ethnicity, and religion. They are shaped by labour practices and national politics, by participation in sports and watching movies…

Homophobia in Africa is a problem, but not as African homophobia, a special class that requires special interventions. And certainly not the kinds of special interventions that reconsolidate old, ongoing and boring oppositions between a progressive west and an atavistic Africa.

Indeed. Enough primitivization and infantilization of the other peoples of the world. We are all here, in the current “modern” era. All people, together, trying to figure this dumb old world out.

Not that it’s always easy to figure things out. I’d not heard the story of Agnes before.

It’s worth reading the whole story, if you’re not familiar with it. I wasn’t, and I wouldn’t want to spoil the twist ending. Suffice to say, Agnes was a transgender person who encountered the medical science complex in the late fifties, and was written about in depth by a Dr. Garfinkel. Quoting from his book, eastsidekate writes:

[Agnes] wanted to know as well whether [further research] would help “the doctors” to get to the “true facts.” I [Dr. Garfinkel] asked Agnes, “what do you figure the facts are?” She answered, “What do I figure the facts are, or what do I think everyone else thinks the facts are?” [emphasis original]

Agnes’ question, in a nutshell, summarizes the key dilemma that I think LGBTQ people have faced, (that I have faced) for generations. I know very well that I’m a woman, but I have to manage myself very carefully, as other people are prone to think otherwise… Furthermore, there are often seriously good reasons why I may not want them to understand the facts as I do.

We have spent generation after generation “passing”, painstakingly manipulating and carefully disclosing bits and pieces of the way we “really” are. A lot of time, people don’t see us, and sometimes, that’s because we know it’s not safe for us to be seen. This is a particularly troublesome proposition for transsexual people– to the extent that we’re out as such, cissexual society often views us as somehow “not really” the men and women we claim to be.

…My dream, for Pride month and beyond, is for all of us to envision a world where passing isn’t necessary. I can’t imagine living in a world where simply being one’s self is sufficient grounds for full membership in society. That said, I can’t imagine a more beautiful goal.

Hear hear.

And this post is already too long, but let’s throw this in: Faustus at Erosblog takes note of a book about a New Jersey woman who found herself joining a Malay prince’s harem — more than once. It seems a fascinating story, and I couldn’t help thinking of Faustus’ highlighted passage when reading the above stories and pondering the murky waters of identity, including my own:

There’s a persona you create to fill in for you on the strangers’ laps all day, or to lie forgotten about between the black silk sheets in a prince’s office bedroom. The persona is sexier, bolder, wilder, and inevitably feels less pain than the real you. If she doesn’t, you haven’t done a very good job inventing her. So maybe you start to visit that persona once in a while when you’re not at work. On weekends, you know, just when you’re being socially awkward at a party, or when a friend hurts your feelings or you’re out on a date and feeling vulnerable. And you find out that she helps you, that brazen stripper, that sophisticated call girl.

…that girl who wears the thong so effortlessly in public might not be the one making the major life decisions for you.

I’m not making any sort of strict comparison here, for such would be unfair. The cis person drawing on a specific alter-persona as needed has the privilege of not having to “pass,” having her “real” self accepted much more readily and more often than does the LGBTQ person. Still, it speaks to the need for more queer discourse, feminist discourse, more stories told and awareness of the variety of possibilities available within the human experience. Perhaps one day there will be little to no need to adopt a persona or a wall to be accepted as valid.

It bears repeating: “I can’t imagine living in a world where simply being one’s self is sufficient grounds for full membership in society. That said, I can’t imagine a more beautiful goal.”

Hear hear.

Grad school is a marathon not a sprint, and one of the big reasons people burn out in grad school is that they apply 20-something strategies of brute-force [instead of] slow but steady, 30-something tactics that get you through…

…you are at your most productive after you wake up, and that you’ve basically got about 4-5 hours of genuine, hard-core concentration in you per day — what I call ‘being on the bottom of things’: the ability to ignore the world and just drill down to super-concentration level. When that’s done, it’s done.

That’s why you spend the rest of the day keeping ‘on top’ of things — browsing, scanning, surfing, paying the bills, spell-checking, going to lectures, and otherwise getting ready to dive down back to the bottom.

(via Feminist Review, where you can read what the heck it’s about, because it’s early and I have to go to work)