The ideal man! And which is he, if you please?
There are other men in me, besides this patient ass who sits here in a tweed jacket.
I'm not a fan of identity politics whose adherents, it seems to me, start off by affirming their difference, only to end by reinforcing a narrow, narcissistic and needy conception of self based upon a reactive morality that fetishizes victimhood and reinforces the very marginalization that they complain about via a process of auto-segregation. Thus, whenever I turn on the TV and hear some politician or activist begin a sentence with the words 'Speaking as ...' X, Y, or Z, I immediately want to throw something at the screen.
It's not that I demand people think of themselves as impersonal abstractions founded upon some fantasy of a universal subject. But I don't want them to speak either as if they were not only defined but determined by some piece of bio-cultural fate and had entirely forgotten the strategic (and ironic) nature of their essentialism.
What, then, do I want?
I suppose it's a kind of ontological intersectionality. That is to say, I want individuals to acknowledge that the self is a crossroads amidst a dark forest; that the grammatical unity of the 'I' disguises a vibrant plurality of often competing forces. Of course, this is something that many poets, philosophers, and theorists have acknowledged, including D. H. Lawrence in his astonishing Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) ...
I suppose it's a kind of ontological intersectionality. That is to say, I want individuals to acknowledge that the self is a crossroads amidst a dark forest; that the grammatical unity of the 'I' disguises a vibrant plurality of often competing forces. Of course, this is something that many poets, philosophers, and theorists have acknowledged, including D. H. Lawrence in his astonishing Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) ...
From the opening line of his chapter on Benjamin Franklin, Lawrence makes it clear what his theme is going to be: I am many men. And because his self is multiple (and non-ideal) in nature, he can never be perfected. At the very least, we are all of us double and the self we like to think we are and present to the world is twinned with "a strange and fugitive self shut out and howling like a wolf".
This, I think, calls for a queer politics; but it problematizes any naive (single-issue) identity politics. Those who would speak as if they were destined only by their race, gender, or sexuality, for example, deny their own complexity and, in so doing, restrict their own freedom; for how can anyone be free, without an illimitable background?
Notes
D. H. Lawrence, 'Benjamin Franklin', Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2002).
The original 1923 text is available online thanks to the University of Virginia and can be accessed by clicking here.
Readers interested in the theory of intersectionality as conceived by Kimberlé Crenshaw and in how it's currently used - and misused - within contemporary debate, might like to read Eleanor Robertson's article 'Intersectional-what? Feminism's problem with jargon is that any idiot can pick it up and have a go', in The Guardian, (30 Sept 2017): click here.
I realise, of course, that I would probably be one of the idiots that Robertson refers to; i.e. one who has appropriated a term without really caring about its origin, or showing due fidelity to its original meaning.
The original 1923 text is available online thanks to the University of Virginia and can be accessed by clicking here.
Readers interested in the theory of intersectionality as conceived by Kimberlé Crenshaw and in how it's currently used - and misused - within contemporary debate, might like to read Eleanor Robertson's article 'Intersectional-what? Feminism's problem with jargon is that any idiot can pick it up and have a go', in The Guardian, (30 Sept 2017): click here.
I realise, of course, that I would probably be one of the idiots that Robertson refers to; i.e. one who has appropriated a term without really caring about its origin, or showing due fidelity to its original meaning.
Adherents of the ideal must shrink, distort and dehumanise those who don't fit - much as the ghastly, depressing Nabe ink & watercolour does. Thus the dreadful stigmatising of Lawrence himself by those in conventional straightjackets.
ReplyDeleteAlas, dear Badger, philistinism is itself a type of restrictive narrowness - and what is more conventional than an insensitivity to art?
ReplyDeleteThis and other works by Marc-Édouard Nabe in his Lawrence series, are very lovely I think. But you need to open more than your eyes ...
It is little short of bad-mannered bullying to lambast as philistine those whose wide-eyed, open-minded sensitivity precludes their joining in the general genuflection towards all art, and are weary of the stereotypical caracature of Lawrence as a tortured tormented soul.
ReplyDeleteIt is little short of narcissism to make every conversation all about yourself ...
Delete