4.13.09
I wrote this post in two segments. One, as I was reading the introduction on Saturday morning, the second as I finish the book Sunday night – I’ve labeled the two different entries.
Saturday Morning.
Two weeks ago in Professor Gallego’s class on Western theories of subjectivity we were discussing Luce Irigaray’s book That Sex Which is Not One. During the course of the conversation, we came to the question of what she was attempting to accomplish by writing the book. As a feminist scholar, her work deconstructs or points out the constructed nature of linguistic and cultural systems as patriarchal. Several people offered ideas about her aim, most centering around the idea of deconstructing this patriarchal linguistic system in order to then re-create the symbolic order in a way that was not patriarchal. However, this reading of the book, we discovered, missed much of her point – this being that such a recreation would result in the same structural problems, but with only the possibility of a different ordering content (instead of men as patriarchs, we could have matriarchal systems, but they replicate the same problem with different tools). As these non-solutions were being offered, Professor Gallego interjected and told us that we were still “thinking like men” (the class being comprised of about 90% men). The impossible key, he implied (I think), was to think like women. Impossible not because we were men and therefore couldn’t think like women, but because we can’t not think in terms of symbolic structures, which are by necessity already patriarchal (or whatever structural analog comes to do the same task of creating order). The point I want to take away that might be useful for our class, is that it is possible for a person to think in a way that is not totally defined by their identity (recognizing that this is a kind of deconstructive non-thought), “like men” in our case in that conversation, or in expected ways, to follow Deloria’s metaphor about Indian identity in the U.S. He writes in the introduction to his book that his aim of pointing out the relationship between expectation and difference or stereotype is
not to argue the familiar cliché about the winners writing the history. Rather, it is to ask us to consider the kinds of frames that have been placed around a shared past. It is not simply to assert that ideology and domination have made certain histories unable to be spoken. Instead, it is to ask how we came to certain kinds of tellings and not others. (7)
This assertion is not asking us to make space for othered people and groups to speak, but instead to listen, as they are likely already saying something we cannot (or choose not to) hear. (The “we” here is the dominant center, necessarily undefined in itself, but defining for that which exists around it; we can fill it with who or whatever does not think about their/its own identity because it appears transparent). In other words, he’s asking us not to think in expecting ways, but to listen to the tellings that are usually, systematically, ignored. I haven’t read the rest of the book yet, but I’m willing to bet (expect, perhaps) that this aim will not reconstruct another system of expectation, but rather, will describe or ask for a critical practice of not coming to rest in expectations or systematic understandings. To go back to my story about Irigaray, this conception would parallel that aim of not inscribing another symbolic order, since it will operate by ordering logic, even if women are in power. (Women in power are not really women, she argues, but are symbolically men). The problem, as I indicated before, is that this goal is impossible. This, I think, is the same thing that Deloria suggests in this introduction – it is impossible to exist and think without expectations, but we can continually question those expectations as a means of lessening their impact on our shared existence, or everyday life. If we take this as a means of confronting, or living through the everyday, I think it offers a useful or interesting perspective. The everyday as an object (the “thing itself” to use Kantian terminology), is impossible to perceive or understand. This does not mean it is not real, but simply that its totality is beyond our comprehension. Our systems of knowledge, our symbolic networks capture a part of it, but cannot encompass it. Geertz told us a few weeks ago that we can tell someone something about something (to paraphrase badly). It seems like we have a similar conclusion here (though, as I tell my students constantly, not a tidy resolution); that we can know something about the everyday, but we cannot know all of it because our expectations, while necessary for symbolic order, limit our knowledge. Deloria’s aim seems to be to expand this limit, or challenge us to realize its constructed nature.
Sunday Night:
After reading the rest of the book, Deloria appears to work in a way that supports my reading of the introduction. The chapter on representation, for example, gets at some interesting ways of thinking about this problem of expectation. Describing Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, for instance, tells us that the Indian’s camp, ostensibly backstage, was incorporated into the show through timely curtain raises and its use as an entry portal for audience members to the arena. A few pages later he writes that this and other techniques meant that “in the smothering omnipresence of a white racial gaze, show Indians were, in fact, always performing Indianness, whether they wanted to or not, twenty-four hours a day” (67). This forced performance might seem to only be exploitive use of Indians to fulfill audience expectations for Indian Identity. However, as Deloria shows in other parts of the chapter, the show, and later film industry, were also spaces that performers were able cultivate other forms of representation as well as their own relationships with modernity. This participation was not only a challenge or resistance to the space of white modernity then; it was also an appropriation of the expectations of white Americans to meet other ends.
Yet, Deloria notes in the conclusion that “many of these pioneering efforts in cultural politics failed, even on their own terms,” which might lead us to think that the (mis)use of representational space was an empty gesture. However, he goes on to say that these failures “were not simply the product of Indian failure. That is, they cannot be seen simply in the economic terms of competition—as an inability to offer Indian selves and products capable of succeeding in a marketplace of culture and consumption” (233). He argues that they were also products of the transition from one cultural economy to another in the dominant society. I would add that it also indicates a failure on the part of white, or European-Americans to listen or see the alternative representations that were presented to them by these producers of culture. This willful inability to recognize another form of representation might be inescapable; as I noted before, symbolic systems always have limitations but are (apparently) necessary, and we can only interpret what we see or hear through symbols. In other words, we accidentally miss something of what life presents to us, and do it on purpose. Returning to the woman who sat in the salon chair in the introduction, Deloria tells us that
we will probably never know, of course, what Red Cloud Woman thought she was up to—her personal history of modernity will remain a secret history. But we owe her the courtesy of taking her seriously as a shaper of images, a member of a cohort, a participant in a politics of race and gender representation, an Indian person acting with intent and intelligence in one of many unexpected places. (240)
Thus, we have a double removal from the representational act: Red Cloud Woman thinks she’s up to something, but may not know its final effect, and we can’t know what her intent is in the first place. The point, to be repetitive, seems to be that we should recognize this limitation and then listen as carefully as possible to what is said, but also to how we’re responding, and what this tells us.
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