hegel, my father

Music: Susanna & the Magical Orchestra: Melody Mountain (2006)

I'm taking a break from prepping a lecture for the haunting seminar tomorrow; we are reading Kelly Oliver's Witnessing: Beyond Recognition this week. Oliver's work is the only thing that we are reading this semester that questions the assumptions the course is based upon. That's why I assigned it, frankly. I wanted to be . . . well . . . I wanted to be hospitable! This is also why the book annoys me. I knew it would annoy me, of course, but knowing before being annoyed and the process of annoyance are different (oh, I'm annoyed now, really). I know this is a much beloved book, but it really does push my theoretical buttons in ways I do not like, and I'm faced with the dilemma of graduate course prepping: do I write a lecture that registers my reservations (thereby putting all my cards on the table, as I'm wont to do)? Or do I try to remain open to the possibility Oliver has figured out an answer---or at least a plausible one---to the question of violence? Oliver is wicked smart and certainly on to something, it's just that I'm inherently suspicious when someone pulls out the "love" card. I'm always suspicious of "love"---but perhaps no more so than when bell hooks went on NPR touting the project of "love" as her new endeavor, all the while knowing this woman is the most unloving wart of a unfriendly being in person . . . (sorry, but stories about hooks' not practicing what she preaches so darn well are legendary).

Anyhoo: what's the gist? Well, Oliver argues that all Project-of-the-Post theory, most especially that of Judith Butler, carries over, and largely unwittingly, a Hegelian understanding of self-other. She assumes readers know what she means by Hegelianism—and perhaps to her detriment. Basically, Hegel's understanding of self-consciousness involves a "better than nature" assumption that builds to the ultimate master/slave problem. The idea is that self-consciousness in humans results in the idea that the self is better than nature, and that to prove to him/herself this fact, humans first consume, then compete, then "recognize." I won't go into all this Phenomenology of Spirit stuff except to say that it all results in a "bad infinity" Robert Smith more aptly put as "it's never enough." For Hegel, the end to bad infinity was to stop demanding recognition from the Other. Of course, Oliver in a strange way speaks with Hegel but nevertheless disparages the "Hegelian" dyadic as sort of enacting a built-in violence. She claims that Butler's argument that a primary subjugation yields subjectivity is wrongly (and mistakenly) agonistic, guaranteeing in advance identitarian (that is, sameness-inspired) violence. Another way to put this is that pomo/postruc theories of subjectivity begin by presuming the original act of self-consciousness was the violence of independence (e.g., I am NOT my mommy), and that such a mythic assumption guarantees that self will always be defined against Other. Oliver argues instead for a non-aggressive understanding of individuation (although what the heck that is seems to be fiated . . . it's just not clear). Of course, this is a gross generalization (which is what blogs are for, frankly), but that's pretty much what's going on. Instead of the deadlock of self/other that affords the other no constative subjectivity (for in Oliver's account of Hegel, the other is just a placeholder of sorts), Oliver forwards a kind of oceanic subjectivity in which self is an assembly of "social energies."

Flashback to Saturday, a phone call by my father, an unsolicited solicitation to help me out. I am rendered child, small other, "fruit of my loins," as I am addressed. Yes, this is cryptic, but all y'all my age probably know what I mean: the struggle begins where the cherubic becomes the aged (but not without a fight). And I am led to think: in some sense, Hegel is right: oh, how much individuals assert their domination over nature by claiming to produce "children" . . . .

But I digress. Oliver's case studies are amazingly written and insightful (especially the stuff on affirmative action and race), but the theory seems over-argued. I don't buy the argument that posty ontology has become normative: that is, understanding self-consciousness as the denial of mother somehow becomes agonistic and accusatory as an ethic. Klein says that, rather, the subtension of woman leads to an ethics/affective gravity of "reparation." I just don't understand how one can understand the Self without a formal antagonism or recalcitrance---without some primary "no." And I don't think this "no" is necessarily a violence or that it precludes loving relations. Love without a prior "no" is like the primordial soup that never was.

I do worry---perhaps in some solidarity with my more materialist, street-marching comrades here at UT---that Oliver succumbs to what Isaac Balbus terms the "idealism of affects." But should I say this aloud in class since I required this reading? I dunno. I hate the pedagogy of bashing, so I probably will not do that. But at this late hour, finishing reading this book, that's what I want to do.

I won't do it. I will sleep on it instead.