BERNEVAL

Catharine R. Stimpson is for me one of the unrivalled masters of peroration. The endings of her essays are designed to carry your thought forward in an amiable meditation on what has been presented. Take for example the lines just preceding the conclusion to “Tillie Olsen: Witness as Servant (1977)” from Where the Meanings Are: Feminism and Cultural Spaces. It is so easy to lift and retain in memory. It is meant to.

[T]he artist must continually invent extraordinary classrooms and curricula. He or she must in life, become an intellectual alternative.

One reads here the shadow of Gramsci’s organic intellectual. And something more — intellectual with Stimpson is an adjective as well as a noun. The life of the mind is celebrated as is difference. This sets the stage for the approaching the act of witnessing as a way of seeing a way out.

The act of witnessing, when it returns to the shadows of the past and becomes elegiac, sees possibilities of wretchedness that, somehow, the witness evaded; the final losses that the ego did not, after all, have to endure. The act of witnessing, when it records the dreams that animated the past and were a source of its dignity, sees possible alternatives to wretchedness. In both cases, the witness is, in effect saying, “I wish my work to so alter circumstances that if I were to be born again, I would not have to fear death, and the death of my dream, as I once did.”

This is a life lived well beyond survivour guilt.

And so for day 690
02.11.2008

Sheila Rowbotham. Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World

Oppression is not an abstract moral condition but a social and historical experience.

More along the same vein:

The Ruling class grows sentimental at its own convenience.

And a little factoid in need of updating:

The Chase Manhattan Bank estimated a woman’s overall working hours as averaging 99.6 per week.

Brute facts sometimes point to poignant stories.

And so for day 688
31.10.2008

I found these two quotations transcribed on separate index cards and am pleased to juxtapose them here.

Mothers may weep goodbye or wave their sons into manhood with patriotic fervor, but they cannot prevent them from going. No need to. No matter how far a son may travel, he will never really leave home.

Never will man find a woman as able, as willing, to give birth to him again.

[From Phyllis Chesler About Men]

And now for the almost obverse view:

But sons grow up
imaginary ones as well,
and perpetual children are tedious

[Thom Gunn, “Selves”, The Passages of Joy]

Ursula K. Le Guin once published a lovely book plus cassette tape entitled Always Coming Home. And we conclude that our relations are not so much about place as about process.

And so for day 686
29.10.2008

Towards the end of “What Matter Mind: A Theory About the Practice of Women’s Studies (1973)”, Catharine Stimpson comments on the open-endedness of self creation. She observes that loneliness and insecurity

[…] are transformed into humility, a recognition that the self cannot be an exemplum, only an experiment.

She goes on to link humility, tolerance and faith in reason.

Humility is a quality of the tolerance that is a consequence of reason. But then, I have faith in reason and in the benefits of rational activity. My faith reaffirms, in the teeth of an irrational educational system, the mind matters.

I am moved to ponder if a smidgen of pride is not also important for the recipe to succeed. Indeed does not the curiosity and the impetus to know stem from a feeling of one’s assurance in one’s right to know? A little boldness assists the gendered being in inhabiting an intellectual universe where one is sometimes cut off. It is worth experimenting with the thought (and reading Stimpson’s full essay collected in Where the Meanings Are: Feminism and Cultural Spaces).

And so for day 683
26.10.2008

One of the best descriptions concerning the circularity of interpretation and the steps of the hermeneutical endeavour is to be found in the pages of a book by David Couzens Hoy (The Critical Circle: Literature, History, and Philosophical Hermeneutics)

Language […] it brings certain features of each world or horizon to light, it conceals other features. Similarly, the text itself must have functioned in the same way, clarifying certain features of the actual situation that were perhaps only dim adumbrations before, at the same time concealing other features. Language is essentially entrenched in history, then, insofar as it is the same time limited to particulars and can never reveal the whole as such. At the same time language is the essence of history, for it is this process of revealing and concealing that demands further accounts and further actions. Accounts and actions are linked, for an action is taken according to the account that is believed, while accounts are themselves actions, since they structure the situation and sometimes alter it.

It is important to note that what is at play here is a gap between revealed and concealed and that “”Language” here means the way the situation is encountered, the way problems are phrased, and the way the future is anticipated.” An encounter, a phrasing, an anticipation, it is not difficult to see (and hear) the moment where the gap gives rise to metadiscursivity, a reasoning about the reasons and the wherefore of action.

And so for day 682
25.10.2008

Sorry I will not quote an extensive swath of his prose and thereby impinge upon your attention.

Excuses betoken, we might say, the incessant, unending vulnerability of human action, its exposure to the independence of the world and the preoccupation of the mind.

And a page later we may read

Excuses mark out the region of tragedy, mark it as the beyond of the excusable, the justifiable, the explainable, (the sociable?). Who among philosophers has a theory of forgiveness, and whether it is giveable? It must be a theory of comedy.

There is far more in the context of this rift on Austin’s How To Do Things with Words by Stanley Cavell in his Bucknell lectures published under the title Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida. You may wish that I had quoted more. You may even be sorry that I haven’t. And yet you may be happy and not sorry at all that what little is given here impels you to Cavell or to Austin or to both.

And so for day 681
24.10.2008