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I despair sometimes when I see the kind
of work undertaken, and taken seriously, in contemporary
academia. I subscribe to an academic mailing list and
have been notified of a November conference at Manchester
University, and the following is just some of the content.
You know what they are trying to say - roughly
- but this is quite strange stuff, and not untypical.
It has a general tone of trying to create a semantic
world, with quirky newspaper-like titles. Where if
you subject it to common sense, it doesn't make
sense. Anything goes, so long as it's well argued, cites
the academic high priests, and appears to offer something
new; fuck content (and also Fuck Content), it's the form
that counts.
It's a strange world. Do you remember
the ending of David Lynch's Blue Velvet, where
the latter is a concluding remark? "It's a strange
world" indeed, and some of it takes place in academia,
not in the deliberately strange world of a David Lynch
movie. Here it is - well some of it anyway:
SEXUALITY AFTER FOUCAULT
HERMAPHRODISM AND THE SEXED SELF
So the self is "sexed"? Explain.
Actually no don't, because I can predict the kind of sociological
stuff you will spout. There is such a thing as a male
and female body. That staement makes me, presumably, an
ignorant person who doesn't understand your premise. Ahem.....
"Gender and/in Intersexuality and Transsexuality:
The Direction of Future Theory"
Biological sex is a phenomenological
fact regardless of what "theory" says.
"Rethinking the Body: Gender, Identity and Transgender"
Ah, that old subject. If you think
about the body differently it changes the body. Male or
female is a sociological or maybe a political construct.
"The Historical Emergence of the 'sexed self' as
Counterpart of the Objectification of the Sexed Body"
Eh? Oh I seeee! Of course! It's the
'sexed self' again - relative, debateable, questionable,
intellectually changeable etc.
"Time, Space and Sexuality"
Phew! Einstein eat your heart
out.
"The Female Nude and the Invention of Male Heterosexuality
(c. 1880-1980)"
OK here we go again. Biological
fact? Naah, it's all a social construct, innit?
"Resisting Sexual Normalization: Sex-Gender, Sex-Desire,
and the Deployment of Sexuality"
Resisting? Well excuse me for
being shallow and ignorant. For not being interested in
"resisting" it. For quite liking it, in fact,
for what it is....
"The Sexual Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing But
the Truth..."
Tell me more....
1.00-2.00pm LUNCH
Phew! I need it....
"The New Lesbian Body as a Semantic Field"
Eh?
"Queering the Cosmology of the Vikings: A Queer
Analysis of the Cult of Odin and 'Holy White Stones'"
Oh for fuck' sake....
EROTICS AND ANALITY
Of course.....
"'Our Lips Met Harshly': Eroticism, Emotion and
Extremity in the First World War"
Hmm OK this is interesting. It
must have been an incredibly poignant experience.
"Sphincterism: Lubricants, Fisting and Power"
OH FOR FUCK' SAKE!
"Cruising the Internet, Queerly"
I don't want to know!
"W/riting the Heteronormative Body: Women Embodying
and Enforcing Gender and sexuality in Courtship Context"
Ah OK, back where we began. Body
is what we SAY body is. Excuse me for having phenomenological
experience....
10.45-11.15am SHORT BREAK
Phew! I need it.....
I'd have to research this further before
I made any kind of definitive statement, but I supect
the following is what has happened. In the 60s and 70s,
people/sociologists began to recognise the formative influence
of society, ie the way cultural and social pressures mould
the personal self. This is a perfectly sensible proposition
indeed an obvious fact. If it's not clear from sociology,
then a little anthropology might help. I suspect that
over the last few decades this concern has become a specialised
and enduring interest where the limits ie parameters of
the subject have been ignored. Like overflowing water,
it has burst the banks and created a muddy mess: the 'self'
is regarded only as a cultural construct and
then if that wasn't extreme enough, now the body is too.
Which is a very stupid idea. As Mary Midgely says in The
Myths We Live By we are not victims of "a mysterious
supra-personal entity called society". This is a
convenient/political stance used as part of a wider polemic.
These conference topics are spin-off examples, and they
are (sometimes) irrational. As Midgely says:
| Mind/body problems, being queries
about ourselves, never do present themselves to us
directly...They always appear in our lives in terms
of myth, and the current myths are shot through with
dramas about gender |
Mind and Body
This philosophical subject ultimately
lies at the heart of my critical (and ironic!) remarks.
That is, what difference does it make to the body by 'thinking'
about it or theorising it, and what is the nature of 'mind
stuff' in relation to biological or physical fact? I assert
that this has become a very confused academic subject.
As a trained Alexander Technique teacher (non-practising),
experienced in several martial arts, yoga, and the Feldenkrais
Method, I would go further and say that mind/body problems
are both phenomenological and non-academic. You can think
and speculate as much as you like, and it makes no difference.
There are ways of understanding this subject
"directly", and you don't find them by reading
a book or writing supposedly impressive theory.
Trapped Mind
Some academic theory is peculiarly hypnotic.
Let me explain. By 'hypnosis', I mean a process by which
sensory/empirical/cognitive data is excluded. Thus in
a consulting room, a hypnotist asks you to concentrate
on a sensation, a spinning disc etc ie temporarily exclude
the greater panorama of information. This is an essential
component of the hypnotic trance. Academic theory sometimes
does a very similar thing: it excludes the wider panorama
of available knowledge/experience/information and thus
creates a semantic world which, when subjected
to this wider critical context, actually makes no sense.
I am therefore questioning the nature
of theoretical or cognitive process when it operates in
this way. The sex subject makes for a colourful debate,
but the same point applies across wider academia, typically
in matters of 'cultural studies'.
Wider Perspective
Everyone has heard of the old Zen question
"what is the sound of one hand clapping?" Zen
koans are quite sophisticated. What they do is frustrate
the ordinary cognitive or intellectual mind with irresolvable
contradictions. If you work at them, eventually you experience
a kind of philosophical breakthrough. The ordinary thought
process can't deal with it, and you have to 'let go' of
this and experience - for want of a better ie more precise
word - an intuitive apprehension. Thus, they are an
implicit criticism of thought itself. The answer to
'what is the sound of one hand clapping' is thus, very
roughly, 'don't be silly: stop approaching external reality
with that kind of insistent mentation'. It's a kind of
philosophical joke which you understand and can only
understand when you manage to 'let go' of the grasping
nature of the mind. What difference does it make whether
you say the sound is sssshhhhhh or zzzzzzz or anything
else? None at all, since the concern is the cognitive
premise of the question, rather than your intellectual
response. Conference subjects like the above effectively
dance around at a superficial level, trying to answer
what the sound of one hand clapping is.
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