Pretty in Punk: Girls' Gender Resistance in a Boys' Subculture
by Lauraine Leblanc
New Jersey: Rutgers University Press
2008
from p2 (this comes as part of the story of how the author was expelled from high school for dressing as a punk): "Even more distinctly, I remember how I felt: bewildered, frustrated, angry, powerless. It was like a bad anxiety dream, the kind where you talk or scream but no sound comes out. Of course, in reality, I was talking out loud. But still no one heard me."
from p4: "It seemed at the time that everyone had a theory about who I was, what I was doing, and what I was declaring, and people often "shared" these with me, in a most unpleasant and confrontational manner. No one ever asked me, or really listened to what I was saying. I was dying (dyeing?) to tell people what was on my mind. My adoption of the punk style was an attempt at communicating what I thought and felt about nuclear war, sex, religion, language, politics, racism, classism, or any other topic, but no one wanted to hear it. I was a fifteen-year-old girl challenging the entire world on a number of fronts, but no one cared to listen."
from p44: "Given the complexity and ambiguity of the stylistic minutiae of punk style and politics, its meanings varied with each reading; whereas experienced punks could decipher the message, the uninitiated may have received quite an unintended impression."
from pp46-47: "However, the success of early female punk performers' attempts to desexualize the clothes they wore in such a parodic fashion is debatable. Whereas punk women intended to present these garments in such a way as to discredit their effect as fetishistic, sexually titillating items, the overriding cultural view of women as sex objects may have worked at cross-purposes with their intent... While striving to counter stereotypes of women in rock, punk women were repeatedly described as sluts, perverts, whores, and junkies by those outside the subculture."
from p54: "This punk anarchism was not based primarilyupon textual sources, but rather on a grassroots interpretation of antiauthoritarianism and personal responsibility. Punk anarchism stressed not revolution, but education towards liberation, primarily through personal choice and responsibility, leading to an ethic of individualism."
These quotes, taken together, reveal an interesting problem. On the one hand, there is the proseletyzing tendency of punk: they intend to make others see the error of their ways (the error of being bound by socially acceptable horizons of possibility, standards of _____, etc.). They do this through parody of many of these standards. But somehow nobody gets the joke! In other words, this is just another example of how very difficult it is to change people's worldviews, their ways of seeing the world.
Alternatively, one can take punk's aims to be different. It doesn't aim to convert everyone - just those who have ears that listen and eyes that see. And for those people it provides another, more supportive world than the mainstream. It gives them a place where there are others like them.
(You can see many parallels to all this in Revolutionary Road, in which the neighbors, rather than being shocked into seeing their world / worldview differently by the Wheelers' unusual plan, dismiss it as variously crazy, immature, impractical, etc.)
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Monday, January 19, 2009
problems with authors
It strikes me that there are potential pitfalls involved in reading books written by people. That is, it can incline us to confront the author, not the book (not the ideas). For example, upon reading, the competitive edge in me out, and I immediately see the book as something to be refuted; I don't even take its ideas under consideration (though I may think about them a great deal). I could go on in this vein for a while, but I won't. The basic point is that it might be better if I read a book as if I had written it myself, as if I were whispering the words into my own ear - as if they appeared in my mind from nowhere.
But this is not quite right either. After all, the point of all this has to do with what we believe, what we value, etc. To paraphrase Aristotle, the point of our inquiry, our reading and writing and discussing, is right action. So - if another person has made a mistake, then I would be well-served to tell them - or to show them - to help them realize their mistake. This is essentially connected with seeing a person (this person) as the author of the work.
But this is not quite right either. After all, the point of all this has to do with what we believe, what we value, etc. To paraphrase Aristotle, the point of our inquiry, our reading and writing and discussing, is right action. So - if another person has made a mistake, then I would be well-served to tell them - or to show them - to help them realize their mistake. This is essentially connected with seeing a person (this person) as the author of the work.
the relevance of philosophy, academia
http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/18/the-last-professor/
"The Last Professor"
by Stanley Fish
January 18, 2009
The New York Times
In this article, Fish makes the point that academia, properly understood, has no relevance to anything beyond itself (or, perhaps better: that its purpose is nothing beyond itself). Here's a quote:
"This is a very old idea that has received periodic re-formulations. Here is a statement by the philosopher Michael Oakeshott that may stand as a representative example: “There is an important difference between learning which is concerned with the degree of understanding necessary to practice a skill, and learning which is expressly focused upon an enterprise of understanding and explaining.”
Understanding and explaining what? The answer is understanding and explaining anything as long as the exercise is not performed with the purpose of intervening in the social and political crises of the moment, as long, that is, as the activity is not regarded as instrumental – valued for its contribution to something more important than itself."
One of the things that I do is interview applicants to a prestigious university. This is not a straightforward task. I have forty-five minutes in which to ask whatever questions I desire. I probably want to talk about classes they've taken, subjects they're interested in, activities they've done or are involved in, their reasons for wanting to come to the university, etc - and other things. How do I break this time down? How much do I allocate to classes, how much to sports, how much to school newspaper, etc? In order to answer these questions, I'm going to need to understand how the interview figures in the overall application process. Is there some deficit it's meant to compensate for? Or is the purpose more vague? Either way, this implies an answer to the question: what are we looking for in applicants? And that's a tough question. What balance of academics vs. "roommate factor" do we want? Should we start doing statistical analyses, looking for correlations between what we know about students when they apply, and their outcomes after four years? Five years? The amount they wind up donating? To answer these questions, we need to start asking ourselves, what is the point of this University?
Another thing I do is Krav Maga, an Israeli martial art. One day, we were doing a ground fighting technique that ends in an arm break (before the break it is just very painful). We train fairly slowly, so that we don't accidentally damage our partner. A student asks, "Is this the speed we should do it at on the street?" Our instructor pauses a moment, then admits that they would probably do it very quickly, just snap the arm, because they don't think they could handle pleading and cries of pain. The instructor then goes on, and says that this is a lot like learning certain knife moves - most of which end by slitting your opponent's throat. The instructor says: at this point, you need to start asking yourselves, what do I want to be trained to do? Do I want my instinct to be to snap the arm - to slit their throat? To answer that question, we'll have to ask: what situations do we think we'll be in? Will we be attacked - where? Will we be attacking other people (e.g. getting into bar fights)? If someone attacks us, attempts to mug us - is it okay to kill them? Answers to these questions will dictate how you train - even what you focus on (e.g. defenses against chokes, bear hugs, etc vs. various sparring techniques).
The point of these two examples is to try and show how traditional philosophical / ethical questions play important roles in pretty basic activities that we engage in - e.g. what we do at work. And, I contend, it is the point of ethics, of anything that engages with moral questions (and this is far more than just philosophy) to bear on such questions.
"The Last Professor"
by Stanley Fish
January 18, 2009
The New York Times
In this article, Fish makes the point that academia, properly understood, has no relevance to anything beyond itself (or, perhaps better: that its purpose is nothing beyond itself). Here's a quote:
"This is a very old idea that has received periodic re-formulations. Here is a statement by the philosopher Michael Oakeshott that may stand as a representative example: “There is an important difference between learning which is concerned with the degree of understanding necessary to practice a skill, and learning which is expressly focused upon an enterprise of understanding and explaining.”
Understanding and explaining what? The answer is understanding and explaining anything as long as the exercise is not performed with the purpose of intervening in the social and political crises of the moment, as long, that is, as the activity is not regarded as instrumental – valued for its contribution to something more important than itself."
One of the things that I do is interview applicants to a prestigious university. This is not a straightforward task. I have forty-five minutes in which to ask whatever questions I desire. I probably want to talk about classes they've taken, subjects they're interested in, activities they've done or are involved in, their reasons for wanting to come to the university, etc - and other things. How do I break this time down? How much do I allocate to classes, how much to sports, how much to school newspaper, etc? In order to answer these questions, I'm going to need to understand how the interview figures in the overall application process. Is there some deficit it's meant to compensate for? Or is the purpose more vague? Either way, this implies an answer to the question: what are we looking for in applicants? And that's a tough question. What balance of academics vs. "roommate factor" do we want? Should we start doing statistical analyses, looking for correlations between what we know about students when they apply, and their outcomes after four years? Five years? The amount they wind up donating? To answer these questions, we need to start asking ourselves, what is the point of this University?
Another thing I do is Krav Maga, an Israeli martial art. One day, we were doing a ground fighting technique that ends in an arm break (before the break it is just very painful). We train fairly slowly, so that we don't accidentally damage our partner. A student asks, "Is this the speed we should do it at on the street?" Our instructor pauses a moment, then admits that they would probably do it very quickly, just snap the arm, because they don't think they could handle pleading and cries of pain. The instructor then goes on, and says that this is a lot like learning certain knife moves - most of which end by slitting your opponent's throat. The instructor says: at this point, you need to start asking yourselves, what do I want to be trained to do? Do I want my instinct to be to snap the arm - to slit their throat? To answer that question, we'll have to ask: what situations do we think we'll be in? Will we be attacked - where? Will we be attacking other people (e.g. getting into bar fights)? If someone attacks us, attempts to mug us - is it okay to kill them? Answers to these questions will dictate how you train - even what you focus on (e.g. defenses against chokes, bear hugs, etc vs. various sparring techniques).
The point of these two examples is to try and show how traditional philosophical / ethical questions play important roles in pretty basic activities that we engage in - e.g. what we do at work. And, I contend, it is the point of ethics, of anything that engages with moral questions (and this is far more than just philosophy) to bear on such questions.
Saturday, January 17, 2009
tragedies
http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Lower_Decks_(episode)
[nerd hat]
In this episode of TNG, a junior officer who's had some trouble with the concept of being a Starfleet officer (she feels that the Fleet has been unjust to her in various ways, troubles with authority, etc) is sent on a dangerous mission. Part of this involves being sent back to the Enterprise aboard a tiny life capsule; there's a good chance that she'll be killed. As it happens, she is.
[/nerd hat]
When I saw this episode, I was struck by the question: is her death a tragedy? I guess the answer is: it depends. If, during that long dark journey, she was alone and terrified, quaking in fear of her death - that would be a tragedy. But if she were okay with things - if she really accepted the consequences of her decision (she volunteered for this mission) - and thus the chance of her death - then from that perspective her death is not such a tragedy. (On the other hand, it would perhaps be a great loss to the rest of us if we were to lose such a person - the world perhaps needs more such people. This is a paradox*).
It is these thoughts that led me to think of a myth, of sorts. (I'm into created mythologies). While Sito was taking that long dark trip, maybe she had the chance to talk to someone - someone who helped her accept the possibility of her own death, and be okay with that, so that when she died, she was not afraid. The myth is that everyone, before they die, has that chance - to talk with someone (in the myth, one particular person) until they can accept the contingency and finitude of life. (I think Nietzsche might say: until they learn to love fate).
This myth has a dark version. In this version of the myth, everyone talks to someone - but this conversation is not about acceptance; it's about - let's say the realization of the unalterability of sin. I say "let's say" because this pair of myths have an interesting feature: only one of them can actually make sense. It's meant to be a conversation, one that enables the dying individual to see a truth - not a coercive process meant to bring them to believe something, by any means necessary. And only one of these two opposing visions of the world can be true. The question is: which? (If you want a good fictional exposition of the dark myth, go watch Hard Candy).
* The paradox is, I think, only apparent; but it's important and revealing to figure out how it is resolved - to see how these two perspectives on death interact. Part of this, I think, involves seeing why the fact that deaths are (in some cases) no tragedy does not make it okay to kill people. I think that this involves understanding that the business of human life is action: we do the best we can, but what happens, happens; it is the past, and our actions all concern the future.
[nerd hat]
In this episode of TNG, a junior officer who's had some trouble with the concept of being a Starfleet officer (she feels that the Fleet has been unjust to her in various ways, troubles with authority, etc) is sent on a dangerous mission. Part of this involves being sent back to the Enterprise aboard a tiny life capsule; there's a good chance that she'll be killed. As it happens, she is.
[/nerd hat]
When I saw this episode, I was struck by the question: is her death a tragedy? I guess the answer is: it depends. If, during that long dark journey, she was alone and terrified, quaking in fear of her death - that would be a tragedy. But if she were okay with things - if she really accepted the consequences of her decision (she volunteered for this mission) - and thus the chance of her death - then from that perspective her death is not such a tragedy. (On the other hand, it would perhaps be a great loss to the rest of us if we were to lose such a person - the world perhaps needs more such people. This is a paradox*).
It is these thoughts that led me to think of a myth, of sorts. (I'm into created mythologies). While Sito was taking that long dark trip, maybe she had the chance to talk to someone - someone who helped her accept the possibility of her own death, and be okay with that, so that when she died, she was not afraid. The myth is that everyone, before they die, has that chance - to talk with someone (in the myth, one particular person) until they can accept the contingency and finitude of life. (I think Nietzsche might say: until they learn to love fate).
This myth has a dark version. In this version of the myth, everyone talks to someone - but this conversation is not about acceptance; it's about - let's say the realization of the unalterability of sin. I say "let's say" because this pair of myths have an interesting feature: only one of them can actually make sense. It's meant to be a conversation, one that enables the dying individual to see a truth - not a coercive process meant to bring them to believe something, by any means necessary. And only one of these two opposing visions of the world can be true. The question is: which? (If you want a good fictional exposition of the dark myth, go watch Hard Candy).
* The paradox is, I think, only apparent; but it's important and revealing to figure out how it is resolved - to see how these two perspectives on death interact. Part of this, I think, involves seeing why the fact that deaths are (in some cases) no tragedy does not make it okay to kill people. I think that this involves understanding that the business of human life is action: we do the best we can, but what happens, happens; it is the past, and our actions all concern the future.
kant on lying
on a related note
There is a famous argument in Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals which purports to show why the categorical imperative (act only on that maxim you can will as a universal law of nature) dictates that we do not lie. It tries to show that a world in which everyone lies to attain their ends is not a coherent one. That is, if I know you're going to lie to me, you can't lie to me.
But things are trickier than this. After all, the essence of lying does not consist in intentionally making false statements. If that were the case, then the world where we all lie would be straightforwardly pointless. But things are trickier. For example, if I know that you know that I'll lie to you (and you do not know this), then if I make a true statement, you'll believe it to be false and thus believe it's negation - and I will have succeeded in deceiving you.
Of course, if everyone knows that everyone lies, and we recurse this as far as it goes (forever), then things are much trickier. That is, there is no equilibrium. Consider: if I know that you know that I intend to lie to you and I also know that you know that I know that you know, but you don't know that, then telling a false statement will get you to believe the false thing. But if we never hit an item of knowledge that one of us knows and the other doesn't, then there is no straightforward answer as to what to do. It's a lot like playing rock-paper-scissors.
What all this means, actually, is that words would - at least from one perspective - lose their meaning (it is perhaps in this sense that the world is incoherent). After all, in such a situation, sentences would be treated as merely causal objects by everyone - we'd all know that everyone's utterances are responsive not to the truth, but to their causal effects on the world (e.g. us). And if that's the case, then sentences wouldn't mean anything.
This does not mean that such a world is incoherent - at least I don't think so. It just means that we'd all be treating each other as mere means, as merely causal objects. Meaning, normativity, right and wrong - well beyond merely moral matters - would drop out.
(This is as far as I've thought things through).
There is a famous argument in Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals which purports to show why the categorical imperative (act only on that maxim you can will as a universal law of nature) dictates that we do not lie. It tries to show that a world in which everyone lies to attain their ends is not a coherent one. That is, if I know you're going to lie to me, you can't lie to me.
But things are trickier than this. After all, the essence of lying does not consist in intentionally making false statements. If that were the case, then the world where we all lie would be straightforwardly pointless. But things are trickier. For example, if I know that you know that I'll lie to you (and you do not know this), then if I make a true statement, you'll believe it to be false and thus believe it's negation - and I will have succeeded in deceiving you.
Of course, if everyone knows that everyone lies, and we recurse this as far as it goes (forever), then things are much trickier. That is, there is no equilibrium. Consider: if I know that you know that I intend to lie to you and I also know that you know that I know that you know, but you don't know that, then telling a false statement will get you to believe the false thing. But if we never hit an item of knowledge that one of us knows and the other doesn't, then there is no straightforward answer as to what to do. It's a lot like playing rock-paper-scissors.
What all this means, actually, is that words would - at least from one perspective - lose their meaning (it is perhaps in this sense that the world is incoherent). After all, in such a situation, sentences would be treated as merely causal objects by everyone - we'd all know that everyone's utterances are responsive not to the truth, but to their causal effects on the world (e.g. us). And if that's the case, then sentences wouldn't mean anything.
This does not mean that such a world is incoherent - at least I don't think so. It just means that we'd all be treating each other as mere means, as merely causal objects. Meaning, normativity, right and wrong - well beyond merely moral matters - would drop out.
(This is as far as I've thought things through).
Thursday, January 15, 2009
living is a risky business, part two
part one
I think that Christine Korsgaard's The Sources of Normativity is actually a particularly good example of what I talked about in the previous post. In her account of ethical living, Korsgaard places foundational importance on (in other words, she attempts to make into an Archimedean point) this notion of reflectivity: the idea that we can (or must; it's unclear) bring any of our values / impulses to action (again, unclear) into question. But as her account progresses, she systematically obscures the fact that we can question (in a certain sense) the value of being reflective. Or, put another way, she seems to offer a perfectly correct account of how to reflect on one's values.
(I will here skip some technical bits).
The upshot is that while reflection, I believe, is a key component of the good life, there's no way to be sure that you're doing it right. There is one extreme of total unreflectivity, of never wondering about the rightness of one's actions; besides being dangerous, this is a little inhuman, and perhaps even lax. There is the other extreme of spending all one's time on reflection and none on action, of holing up in one's room until you get the answer exactly perfect.* This is equally pathological: reflection that's lost its point: right action.
Unfortunately, striking a balance between reflection on action and action is a tricky business.** They are each demanding occupations, liable to take up a good amount of time. In other words, deciding how much time to allocate to each is yet another decision which we can screw up, or not. We can do our best, of course; there are cases where reflection is pretty clearly the wrong decision (e.g. when we have a drowning baby on our hands), and to do otherwise would be to clearly make a mistake. But in the end, we can't be certain ahead of time that we've done it right: the problem of allocation recurses endlessly. So we might, despite the best of intentions, screw things up rather badly. Living is a risky business.
* http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/15/magazine/15japanese.html
"Shutting Themselves In"
by Maggie Jones
January 15, 2006
The New York Times
"Hiroshi didn't say why working would have been better or why it was too late at age 26 to start a career. He said only that he wouldn't leave the house "until I know exactly what I want to do." It was typical hikikomori thinking: better to stay in your room than risk venturing into the world and failing."
** To get back to Korsgaard, her work solves (avoids) this problem by making it seem as if reflection can be done in an instant, as if it were something that took no time at all. If that's the case, striking a balance between the two is not even a problem. The reason that this is symptomatic of a split between philosophy and the good life is that, if it were clear that the same sort of reflection that Korsgaard thinks is so central to the good life were exactly the sort of reflection her book engages in (or that she engaged in when she wrote the book), it would be fairly obvious that reflection takes time. After all, I could spend my time reading Korsgaard, studying Korsgaard (I personally find her works intelligible at the level of sentences but exceedingly difficult at higher levels), or out canvassing for Obama, etc.
I think that Christine Korsgaard's The Sources of Normativity is actually a particularly good example of what I talked about in the previous post. In her account of ethical living, Korsgaard places foundational importance on (in other words, she attempts to make into an Archimedean point) this notion of reflectivity: the idea that we can (or must; it's unclear) bring any of our values / impulses to action (again, unclear) into question. But as her account progresses, she systematically obscures the fact that we can question (in a certain sense) the value of being reflective. Or, put another way, she seems to offer a perfectly correct account of how to reflect on one's values.
(I will here skip some technical bits).
The upshot is that while reflection, I believe, is a key component of the good life, there's no way to be sure that you're doing it right. There is one extreme of total unreflectivity, of never wondering about the rightness of one's actions; besides being dangerous, this is a little inhuman, and perhaps even lax. There is the other extreme of spending all one's time on reflection and none on action, of holing up in one's room until you get the answer exactly perfect.* This is equally pathological: reflection that's lost its point: right action.
Unfortunately, striking a balance between reflection on action and action is a tricky business.** They are each demanding occupations, liable to take up a good amount of time. In other words, deciding how much time to allocate to each is yet another decision which we can screw up, or not. We can do our best, of course; there are cases where reflection is pretty clearly the wrong decision (e.g. when we have a drowning baby on our hands), and to do otherwise would be to clearly make a mistake. But in the end, we can't be certain ahead of time that we've done it right: the problem of allocation recurses endlessly. So we might, despite the best of intentions, screw things up rather badly. Living is a risky business.
* http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/15/magazine/15japanese.html
"Shutting Themselves In"
by Maggie Jones
January 15, 2006
The New York Times
"Hiroshi didn't say why working would have been better or why it was too late at age 26 to start a career. He said only that he wouldn't leave the house "until I know exactly what I want to do." It was typical hikikomori thinking: better to stay in your room than risk venturing into the world and failing."
** To get back to Korsgaard, her work solves (avoids) this problem by making it seem as if reflection can be done in an instant, as if it were something that took no time at all. If that's the case, striking a balance between the two is not even a problem. The reason that this is symptomatic of a split between philosophy and the good life is that, if it were clear that the same sort of reflection that Korsgaard thinks is so central to the good life were exactly the sort of reflection her book engages in (or that she engaged in when she wrote the book), it would be fairly obvious that reflection takes time. After all, I could spend my time reading Korsgaard, studying Korsgaard (I personally find her works intelligible at the level of sentences but exceedingly difficult at higher levels), or out canvassing for Obama, etc.
living is a risky business
This is going to be really quick, abstract, and vague, but:
I think that a flaw that corrupts some philosophy, whether it be in ethics or metaphysics, is the desire to give a final, perfect answer. In ethics, this would be a way of living that is, once and for all, morally unimpeachable. If we could just get things right, there would be no danger of acting wrongly (acting wrongly even with the best of intentions). I don't think there is any such answer, any such way of living. Life is a risky business. We can't eliminate the possibility of mistakes, of failures, of one sort or another.
One of the ways that philosophy tries to avoid the point that there is no such answer is by divorcing philosophy and its subject matter. There is the good life, and there is philosophizing about the good life. That is, it would be moronic (or exceedingly arrogant) for a philosopher not to acknowledge that their theories are controversial, doubtful, subject to criticism and revision. But by separating the good life from their philosophizing about it, they can separate it (the good life) off from all that controvesry, doubt, criticism, and revision. This is both wrong and bad.
I think that a flaw that corrupts some philosophy, whether it be in ethics or metaphysics, is the desire to give a final, perfect answer. In ethics, this would be a way of living that is, once and for all, morally unimpeachable. If we could just get things right, there would be no danger of acting wrongly (acting wrongly even with the best of intentions). I don't think there is any such answer, any such way of living. Life is a risky business. We can't eliminate the possibility of mistakes, of failures, of one sort or another.
One of the ways that philosophy tries to avoid the point that there is no such answer is by divorcing philosophy and its subject matter. There is the good life, and there is philosophizing about the good life. That is, it would be moronic (or exceedingly arrogant) for a philosopher not to acknowledge that their theories are controversial, doubtful, subject to criticism and revision. But by separating the good life from their philosophizing about it, they can separate it (the good life) off from all that controvesry, doubt, criticism, and revision. This is both wrong and bad.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)