There shall be none!
Eonsish after the fact, I'm here and happy to be posting. I’m Jesse and will give a brief précis of Pamy’s topic (this happened almost a full two months ago), my topic (from this past weekend), and every topic thereafter. Scout’s honor I will. It seems we lost a step or two in the second half of this semester, for whatever reason. Nevertheless, we’re back on track and amassing—hopefully between these two posts and after a meeting in a week—a formidable little corpus of banter and recoil. I’ll try to incorporate comments from e-mails in the exchange leading up to our meetings and keep a rough outline of topics we cover when we get together. I divulge my name so that readers know to whom they can vent frustration or send corrections. Obviously, what I write has to be filtered through a slop of cognition that focuses as much on oatmeal cookies as any of these so-called “issues” we’re engaging at the Cache Club. So, I’ll try to reconstruct clarifications or further exegeses the presenter may have given and follow up with essence quips and questions.
Buddha, ya'll: “Enlightenment is not the answer, it’s the question.”
And now, a blessing that comments may be liberated from tongues, so as to enrich ongoing dialogue; and that they may be more in conjunction with what your Id is whispering at you, so as to get the authorities on to our tail and shutting our outfit down. Niyabinghi!
Friday, December 18, 2009
Cats? Ew. Sick.
The actual cat massacre chapter from Robert Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History gave us a good look at the power given to people who decide what stories will be told.
The beauty of cultural history is its desire to reconstruct the cultural climate within which historical narrative is set. The chapter we read illustrates the circumstances of journeymen printers in 18th century France. It is significant to understand their situation because it fills in the contextual holes that a review of the French Revolution can leave. It by no means suggests that the French Revolution was caused by ruffian printers on Rue Saint-Severin. Its scope is much more limited than that, but with large implications. Instead, it attempts to recreate the workaday circumstances that the printers lived with and show an episode illustrative of their ability to manipulate symbols and humiliate their boss, to live life and experience the occasional triumph. A hundred years before Marx was writing and generations before the Industrial Revolution would sweep across Europe, it is significant to read about the glory of a printer in the early 18th century France. The reader may feel surprised to find out that it wasn’t all about plotting to overthrow the monarchy and gain rights, but more about being tricksters or besting their masters. Other accounts in cultural history from the time period show that the journeymen would often control much of the pace of the work and were not the disparate batch of robots that some historians would lead us to believe.
Such is the problem with historical writing generally. In trying to “make sense of the past,” historians almost always go too far and present a convincing case that allows a person to apply the story into their own lives. While it is beneficial and necessary to apply stories from the past into one’s life, it must be done with care. If an author has made the past’s socio-political landscape any more decipherable than the present’s, a red flag should go up. It would be ignorant of anybody to assume there were ever “simpler times,” thus necessitating every reader to bear in mind what lies at the heart of every historical battle: an argument not of existence, but of emphasis.
So.
There seems to be a correlation between the fields of science and humanist research insofar as pioneering projects are able to probe only a proscribed amount of what its scope surveys, thus creating more arenas for future research, and the political jockeying that getting research published entails. The question becomes what manner of institutional or cultural constraints could be used to create more of a home-boy congeniality between different researchers?
Noting the evolution of social corps (“groups,” not classes) disparity (from journeyman vs. master to consumer vs. the exploited) and its juxtaposition with the impressive body of information that we have amassed in the modern world, the paradox brought up a question of the Virtuous Move Forward, the VMF. Is it a race of creating a virtuous world and hoping that the injustices that are being enacted upon people doesn’t create too large of a hate complex to the point that folks want to blow folks up?
Getting deliciously apocalyptic, Joe highlighted the journeymen’s use of symbols to vent tensions felt toward their masters as “writing on the wall.” As was stated before, this incident didn’t cause the French Revolution, though it displayed cultural quirks that were at work in the time period and explained a great deal of how these things could have happened. He mused on his own indifferent feelings when he sees folks at home or abroad burning American effigies and carrying on. Is there some sort of writing on the wall that we would do well to take notice of? Has the age of capitalism and nationalism given the developed world a furtive dose of sleeping pills that will presage its demise? Does it scare us at all to see instances of rather barbaric mid-modern Europeans moving with the social dexterity that they do? Does it scare us to see how folks with seemingly futile capacities for defiance experience their moments on top?
Giant parentheses! (This set of questions is probably more inimical to Americans with a big A than the ones we discussed during Pamy’s previous presentation, though the answers are certainly further from potential reconciliation. I vonder vhat zis means…)
Shameful as it is to see no trace of distinctly female representation in this collection of stories, we must wonder just how silenced the feminine role was in this time. Could the people of the time even possessed the channel capacity to engage in gender issues?
Reverting back to sexual violation, we agreed that sex should be something that both parties want to engage in together (what would Freud have to say about this move?). That is to say that if a person doesn’t want it, the situation should end right there. So how do you get the passive characters, the ones that are so responsible for the others’ sexual comportment, to be able to express themselves and light fires? Seems a little bit weird in our eyes, I suppose.
The beauty of cultural history is its desire to reconstruct the cultural climate within which historical narrative is set. The chapter we read illustrates the circumstances of journeymen printers in 18th century France. It is significant to understand their situation because it fills in the contextual holes that a review of the French Revolution can leave. It by no means suggests that the French Revolution was caused by ruffian printers on Rue Saint-Severin. Its scope is much more limited than that, but with large implications. Instead, it attempts to recreate the workaday circumstances that the printers lived with and show an episode illustrative of their ability to manipulate symbols and humiliate their boss, to live life and experience the occasional triumph. A hundred years before Marx was writing and generations before the Industrial Revolution would sweep across Europe, it is significant to read about the glory of a printer in the early 18th century France. The reader may feel surprised to find out that it wasn’t all about plotting to overthrow the monarchy and gain rights, but more about being tricksters or besting their masters. Other accounts in cultural history from the time period show that the journeymen would often control much of the pace of the work and were not the disparate batch of robots that some historians would lead us to believe.
Such is the problem with historical writing generally. In trying to “make sense of the past,” historians almost always go too far and present a convincing case that allows a person to apply the story into their own lives. While it is beneficial and necessary to apply stories from the past into one’s life, it must be done with care. If an author has made the past’s socio-political landscape any more decipherable than the present’s, a red flag should go up. It would be ignorant of anybody to assume there were ever “simpler times,” thus necessitating every reader to bear in mind what lies at the heart of every historical battle: an argument not of existence, but of emphasis.
So.
There seems to be a correlation between the fields of science and humanist research insofar as pioneering projects are able to probe only a proscribed amount of what its scope surveys, thus creating more arenas for future research, and the political jockeying that getting research published entails. The question becomes what manner of institutional or cultural constraints could be used to create more of a home-boy congeniality between different researchers?
Noting the evolution of social corps (“groups,” not classes) disparity (from journeyman vs. master to consumer vs. the exploited) and its juxtaposition with the impressive body of information that we have amassed in the modern world, the paradox brought up a question of the Virtuous Move Forward, the VMF. Is it a race of creating a virtuous world and hoping that the injustices that are being enacted upon people doesn’t create too large of a hate complex to the point that folks want to blow folks up?
Getting deliciously apocalyptic, Joe highlighted the journeymen’s use of symbols to vent tensions felt toward their masters as “writing on the wall.” As was stated before, this incident didn’t cause the French Revolution, though it displayed cultural quirks that were at work in the time period and explained a great deal of how these things could have happened. He mused on his own indifferent feelings when he sees folks at home or abroad burning American effigies and carrying on. Is there some sort of writing on the wall that we would do well to take notice of? Has the age of capitalism and nationalism given the developed world a furtive dose of sleeping pills that will presage its demise? Does it scare us at all to see instances of rather barbaric mid-modern Europeans moving with the social dexterity that they do? Does it scare us to see how folks with seemingly futile capacities for defiance experience their moments on top?
Giant parentheses! (This set of questions is probably more inimical to Americans with a big A than the ones we discussed during Pamy’s previous presentation, though the answers are certainly further from potential reconciliation. I vonder vhat zis means…)
Shameful as it is to see no trace of distinctly female representation in this collection of stories, we must wonder just how silenced the feminine role was in this time. Could the people of the time even possessed the channel capacity to engage in gender issues?
Reverting back to sexual violation, we agreed that sex should be something that both parties want to engage in together (what would Freud have to say about this move?). That is to say that if a person doesn’t want it, the situation should end right there. So how do you get the passive characters, the ones that are so responsible for the others’ sexual comportment, to be able to express themselves and light fires? Seems a little bit weird in our eyes, I suppose.
Gender Issues: A Most Shameful Euphemism
From Octoberish:
For permission to chat with Pamy:
http://www.jacksonkatz.com/pub_interview.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/magazine/23Women-t.html?_r=3&emc=eta1&pagewanted=all
And for supplemental—and lively—discussion, we thank Missy:
The crux of Katz: we can deal with “women’s issues” (i.e. rape, domestic violence, etc.) by making them men’s issues. In his succinct words: “name the problem as men’s attitudes and behaviors in patriarchal culture,” so that we can move beyond “just cleaning up after the fact.” Forward thinking and paradigm shiftacular (thanks, Pamy, we expect no less from you) as this is, we began by working backwards—I blame patriarchy—by discussing semantic devices and the consequent creation of a Great White Male Anonymity, popularly known in my head as GWMA. Classy as its acronymystical moniker is, GWMA’s employment of the passive voice to discuss “women being raped” and crafting of curricula to inform women that to wear a short skirt is “asking for it,” among other things, has shifted much culpability for sexual violence onto females and given GWMA free reign at aggressing sexually and suppressing instrumental reform. We felt it necessary to briefly muse over the origins of femaleness; apparently there’s no better way to clean up than find where the bomb went off.
The crux of us: what had relegated women time and again to passive and objectified roles? A turn to the Standard Social Science Model helped us feel confidently lost. Joseph provided insight, explaining how it is that reinforcement schedules and environmental contingencies combine to create a powerful set of reactions within a person. When mastered, these principles can control behavior. In a word on this line of reasoning, the most powerful source of behavior control is our environment. Though some of us have the question; what if [feminine nurturing] [female tenderness] [passivity of the girl] is an instinct and, if so, what role does cognition play and what is its interface with the environmental factors? Couched in the abstruse? Yes, it is. Fortunately, a function of the honesty that this interdisciplinary club demands, Pamy’s subsequent story muddied the waters and illustrated that we have a long way to go before we solve the world’s problems. She told of a woman who suffered a miscarriage and, when her three year-old daughter found out there wouldn’t be a baby anymore and started crying, she asked her daughter why she was so upset. The daughter asked if it was her own fault that the baby had died. We all took a breath at that and kind of moved on, most likely because none of us feel confident in understanding how to begin understanding the dynamics of this situation, let alone spell it all out. Shame on us.
A comment popped out about seeing less machismo in our generation. The hope is that we’re not as chauvinistic as the characters we see on older television programs. The following situation is a common motif, common to many elder-younger interactions.
The story goes that a cross-generational gathering comes about and a conversation between folks with common socio-economic or religious background arises, usually between folks who don’t know each other all too well and need to rely on a set of cultural values that had already been established in previous meetings of similar groups (oh, bless this transparent mess). An older gentleman might say something to catch the attention of the younger members of the group, who are usually slow to speak up for any number of reasons (desire to establish rapport, desire to avert upsetting the man providing some sort of financial nourishment, etc.). Instead, looks are shot to the ground and oblique language is employed in order to cope with what is happening.
This scene does more than just quantify the amount of male chauvinism that we find in our societies, it raises topics of linguistic pragmatics, seniority scripts, faith that unwanted pasts are indeed being shed, and even intracultural us/them mentality.
Boom. We started talking about the actual paradigm shift from blaming the women to blaming the men. Accepting now the need for action and potential remedies as proscribed by Katz and co., we became interested in the shock factor that comes. Often an older generation would be jerked too greatly by a complete polarization of values (as this regard for tradition continues to evoke transparency, bwaa ha ha).
To rationalize our position to the ghosts that be, we discussed how rape isn’t about sex. It sits on a different line along with involvement in pornography and masturbation. These activities utilize the convention of stimulation-orgasm-habit to teach folks that sex is about power and domination, not love and selflessness. Such a contradiction is harrowing, though very accessible to cultures of self-service and relativist spin. Perhaps the key to accepting Katz’s ideas in their fullest deals with viewing sex as a medium through which people can display respect for peoples’ agency of choice. Certainly a good creed to place in a utopia’s constitution, this conclusion may be accurate, though it must be supported by coping methods for the interim.
Joe suggested some kind of an inchoate research model regarding social contingency introduction. The method would give reforming perpetrators (or those who simply harbor attitudes) choices rather than questionnaires. The hope would be that looking for answers to questions like “why did you hit her?” that run deeper than “I was mad” might reveal what the perpetrators are seeking and provide them with socially acceptable alternatives for them to take control of and work towards.
Love, ya’ll. Here’s some more ideas that may or may not have come up and may or may not be possible to integrate into the conversation:
“No, no, no don’t read the us/them here. He’s inclusive.”
“Relapse is inevitable. Polarization will occur.”
“Take it too far and you’ll turn people off.”
“Paradigm shift is to A=B=C life, just so you can later remove the lines.”
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