epistemergency

[epistemergency]

The content will improve

The whole university thing I was talking about, that there are people deemed best suited to direct student's thinking toward an achievable knowledge, relies on a model of objectivity. Objectivity in the ingewikkeld sense used by Kenneth V Hardy in The Enduring Invisible and Ubitquitous Centrality of Whiteness. As a style, ethic of professionalism, and epistemic claim, objectivity is intertwined ideologically with realism and the idea that what is true is true regardless of the vantage point, and the product of an Enlightenment model of rationalism that divorces reasoning from the body and from the emotions. Which is to say, objectivity is not only normative in this institution, it presupposes normativity.

I've been on a training montage for my PhD, reading primary sources and secondary sources and trying to understand how they can actually be the same thing. One thing in particular I have been working on is my note-taking. Throughout undergrad, I never took notes, especially not when reading. I would maybe cut and paste quotes from a book into long documents that I emailed to myself. My essays involved sculpting these quotes in collages with other quotes according to the deterministic logic of prepositions. It worked, I got the grades, but I think perhaps I suffered in my ability to notice and value the opportunities for growth that each text contained - the questions I had, the words I didn't know, the disagreements I had, the associations I saw and forgot a few short paragraphs later. It's most noticeable in conferences and talks, where I just lurk creepily, failing to meet the demands of what Margaret Price calls kairotic space.

So I have been working on my note-taking. Except when I'm reading The Enduring Invisible and Ubiquitous Centrality of Whiteness. I have returned to passive reading with this text, often reading at the end of the day in bed. I don't know what this says about me, or the text, or the relationship between me and the text, being white. Seems like that's something I might usefully notice while reading. The book appeals to and challenges academic genres, almost least of all with autobiographical entries in each chapter. It seems hyperbolic and dramatic, appealing to an unassailable authority I call the step beyond - like a brother who will always be older than you no matter how old you get, or that same brother who started meditating before you and so there is always a gap that you can never understand. I'm talking about objectivity.

Let's take another example from another book, Critical Race Narratives. The book mentions, almost in passing, the issue of agency and responsibility as it is viewed by the criminal justice system. This model views crime largely as something an individual person does against another individual person. And this fails to acknowledge the injuries incurred by structural oppression, and fails to account for how structural oppression contributes to the criminalisation and worse of black people. Let's add objectivity to the mix, assuming that the criminal justice system (by determining and deeming the facts of a case) appeals to objectivity by the other word of impartiality. Here, objectivity assumes individualism normatively - of course, being an institution that protects neoliberalism. A judge is another type of person deemed to be in the best possible position to direct a person toward a certain understanding and/or behaviour.

[epistemergency]

Practice More

A few short months after my life went spectacularly to shit, I was finally prepared to take study seriously at age 27. Despite my best of intention, however, I was woefully unprepared for the lengths tutors will go to to be likeable. And, believe me, been there. Still am there, depending on who I'm talking to. Latching on to any relatable reference, mimicking their language, smiling and laughing. Inuring yourself to the person, or people, in front of you. The difference is the unclarified sense I had, like holding a a neckweak baby in my arms, that they were getting too close. The constant references to memes in class, and random conversations on reddit, and lyrics and tiktoks and all that phatic allusion. Their conversations scraped against things I overheard at the pub and facebook posts that appeared in my feed. At my age, many of the musicians I spent time with outside uni were friends with my tutors. As in, running into my tutor at a gig, drinking a beer and talking about Portuguese directors friends. Perhaps someone else would think of this as an opportunity; I have described it as swatting flies in summer - flies and flies and flies and flies. But the feeling was something more than nuisance. A salient scheme, dispersed and diluted throughout every room I entered, a slowly circulating air moving in and out from the mouths of certain, well-positioned people.

Anyway, that is why the actual words that made it into my sexual harrassment report about my PHIL1001 tutor were "supergroup" and "bacon ice cream". I say sexual harassment report. I had only said to my tutor that I think these terms and relationships are inappropriate. He reported my report to the Dean of Humanities, who escalated it to the level of a formal complaint. When I made the report, I was forbidden from attending classes, or taking tests in the same room as other students. When the report was dismissed and they tried to kick me out of uni, I dropped out of philosophy altogether.

Keeping that in mind, read this passage of Gramsci with me:

The validity of ideologies. Recall the assertion frequently made by Marx about the "solidity of popular beliefs" being a necessary element of a specific situation. He says, more or less: "when this mode of thinking acquires the force of popular beliefs," etc. (Look up these observations by Marx and analyze them in the context, wherein they are expressed.) Marx also stated that a popular conviction often has as much energy as a material force, or something similar, and it is very important. The analysis of these statements, in my view, lends support to the concept of "historical bloc" in which in fact the material forces are the content and ideologies are the form. The distinction between form and content is just heuristic because material forces would be historically inconceivable without form and ideologies would be individual fantasies without material forces.

Oof. In the first instance, I had to look up materialism. There is a whole discourse there that does not suit my spoons or need for a quick answer. Then I had to look up "historical bloc" and understand it through a wikipedia article that links to a hundred other wikipedia articles that link to a hundred other wikipedia articles. I feel the full force of my nap this afternoon, in my dry eyes and in my morals as a PhD student.

What I am confident to say is that in this section of Prison Notebooks, Gramsci is translating work and grouping together some thoughts on praxis - theory and political action combined. He describes "practical" philosophy - or perhaps I saw the word practical and I jumped on the one word in a hundred that I could define. I am also interested in practicality. Specifically, in academic fields with a strong praxis or activist element, how are writers balancing knowledge and persuasion? Specifically, in terms of their use of autobiography in these writings - as in the work of someone like Audre Lorde.

An element of this practicality may be that writers and readers most affected by the theory being produced are excluded from the academy. At unequal rates. In historical and ongoing ways. According to Margaret Price's research, over 80% of students with mental illness drop out before completing their degree. At least I think it was in Price, and I think it was over 80%. Engaging with Mad Theory like Price's involves answering the call to decenter the academy, and center voices that are excluded from what are aptly called its disciplines. To use our intellectual labour and privileged access to the academy to create supportive structures that enable these voices, and to reform the academy to make hearing and including these voices possible. And so: work produced from inside the academy may, as a matter of practicality, need to be accessibly written in popular narrative forms. And so: work produced from inside the academy may, as a matter of practicality, need to be informed by ways of knowing and doing that are not enshrined as epistemologies and methodologies.

As a matter of practicality, the people most affected by academic approaches to mental illness are those with least access to academia. As a matter of practicality, the people most affected by academic approaches to mental illness are those with least influence over popular beliefs held about people with the diagnostic labels they attract. As a metter of practicality, those labels are applied by people who have never been excluded from the academy, and the people most affected by academic approaches to mental illness are popularly held to be the least capable of labelling themselves correctly.

From my notes on how Price uses autobiography in Mad at School:

"Significantly, the organizer I approached intervened without question or hesitation—that is, there was no “Why can’t you ask them yourself?”"

Enthymemetic: Price does not explain why she required this accommodation. But - Knowing this scenario/as an elicited recognition? How familiar with the stress of that conflict is the assumed reader who needs to be informed by this book about the types and necessities of accommodations? Is that conflict something that can be read/ shaped by our ongoing relationship with Price, or her empathic attendance to others needs? I imagine her having a headache, a hand at her temple. I feel her lying down on the cots.

I ran out of time for this post today, I will continue with it tomorrow. Frustrated because despite my attempt to relate as a persona to the material, I have still fallen into autobigography as illustration.

I don't have confidence in these notes, as I don't have confidence in my interpretation of Gramsci above or in the nature of the distress I felt that ended my potential career as a philosophy and my capabilities with critical theory as a scholar. All for the same reason: I have - over and through a decade of psychiatric treatments and a general defensiveness when I assert myself - come to question the validity of my interpretations. If I were telling you about my boyfriend, you'd probably say he was gaslighting me and I should dump him. But because I have the schizaophrenic label, the assumption is my interpretations are not credible.

This is not an acoustic phenomenon, but I want to compare it to what Matthew Tomkinson calls "mishearing":

In his essay “Earslips: Of Mishearings and Mondegreens,” the literary scholarSteven Connor (2009) echoes my earlier claim that “all hearing is mishearing”. Tracing the etymology of the word “mishearing,” he notes that early uses carried a more active connotation, implying deliberate acts of auditory disobedience, unlike the simple mondegreen or the misheard song lyric. The poets and coauthors David Huebert and Andy Verboom (2017) have characterized deliberate mishearings as “full mondegreens,” which refers to their formal approach of misconstruing and reshaping canonical poems in order to challenge their representational politics, or as Verboom puts it, “to bite the heads of some fathers”. They rewrite William Carlos Williams’s poem “The Red Wheelbarrow,” for example, with the misheard title: “The Dead Feel Narrow.” On the other hand,routine and systematic mishearings are fraught with epistemic violence and can be a form of silencing. The legal scholar James Parker and curator Joel Stern remind us that mishearing is also “an auditory efect of colonialism,” wherein white ears disregard Indigenous testimony (2019, 19). Speaking to the ethics of the full mondegreen, Huebert (2017) acknowledges that “there are many other poets and poems whose mondegreening by me would be a violent colonizing enterprise”. As such, he chooses his mishearings carefully, grappling with source poems whose politics warrant thorough pushback. Rather than an unwillingness to hear, then, mad listening should model a willingness to hear diferently—in deferance to, and not compliance with, systems of oppression. In doing so, the mad listener might work toward rethinking, rewriting, and re-sounding mad representation. Recently, I heard Elton John’s “Madman Across the Water” for the frst time, and searched for the song on a misheard lyrics website. There, someone has written the following mondegreen: “get a load of him, he’s sewing sand.”

As an example, Joel Stern the curator was one of the musicians I happened to spend some time with outside uni who holds a powerful place in the academy. This, naturally, or perhaps not so naturally, coloured my reading. Affectively, but also in terms of the content: This article is close to me, as a proximity, but what is the nature of that closeness? Does Tomkinson know I will read their paper? Does Tomkinson address me?

What I want to say, though, is by Tomkinson's own definition mishearing could perhaps be usefully reworded as just plain old hearing: "to listen madly is to recognize that all hearing involves mishearing, and that the binary of mad and sane is confounded by the persistent presence of one inside the other." Perhaps the instinct is to say, no, we know what the misheard musical lyric actually is. We know because, maybe, we consulted the musician who sang it. Or we know because we had a measuring thingamabob that tells us exactly the phonemes used. What Tomkinson argues for is "epistemic uncertainty", arguing that "to listen madly is to inhabit ... indeterminacy, perhaps even to embrace it." If we imagine, for instance, the innate lossiness of communication as a result of context, discourse, and positionality, we might find something to celebrate in unexpected interpretations, perhaps a seed of our humanity.

If we believe the instinct toward objectivity, we often take the next step toward one of the lynchpins of academia: a hierarchy of epistemic authority. That is, some people are in a better position to determine that objective reality. (Like how some people are considered capable of labelling someone with a mental illness to the extent that are to be believed over the person who has lived that experience.) And those people ought to oversee and correct and influence the production of further knowledge.

Which brings me back to Gramsci, though I doubt he originated the idea. Gramsci sources the seed of humanity in historical context, and comes up with an idea of selfhood that is always in a process of "becoming":

That "human nature" is the "ensemble of social relations" is the most satisfying answer, because it includes the idea of becoming - man becomes, he changes continuously with the changing of social relations - and because it negates "man in general". Indeed, social relations are expressed by diverse groups of men that presuppose one another, and their unity is dialectical, not formal. Man is aristocratic insofar as man is a serf, etc. ... One could say that the nature of man is "history" (and in this sense, since history = spirit, that the nature of man is the spirit), if history is taken to mean, precisely, "becoming" in a "concodia discors" that does not have unity for its point of departure but contains in itself the the reasons for a possible unity. Therefore, "human nature" cannot be found in any particul;ar human being but in the entire history of the human species (and the use of the word "species", with its naturalistic timbre, is itself significant). In each single individual, on the other hand, one finds characteristics that are brought into relief by their discrepancy with the characteristics of others.

Here, we see situatedness and difference as positive markers of selfhood. Thus, I call the term "discipline" for an academic field apt.

Next week I'll write about the problems of objectivity and hierarchical thinking from two Critical Race Theory books I'm reading, and how in particular these effect - in a very practical way - our understanding of injury.

This is better. There is a dynamic play between the autobiographical details that inform the theory (can we trust my interpretation, and if not then how do we feel about the possibility of not being able to trust my interpretation, and if so then how do we feel about epistemic discipline) and the theory that informs the autobiography in turn (what does it say about my life story that I am being disciplined by this system).

[epistemergency]

More practice

The writing and feedback.

I had a wonderful experience reading recently. A chapter in Mad Scholars mentioned writing without coherence. She called such thinking alinear and tangential, as opposed to what a psychiatrist might call circuitous, which of course had me initially rankling working as I do with hypertext. Later, though, she specifically mentioned "narrating myriad, multilevel (and “subordinate”) clauses in my communication—at times to my own detriment because of how my “style” has the potential to frustrate rather than support others, regardless of my intentions (to be inclusive and nuanced)". It was thrilling for me. My supervisor regularly calls me out on my clauses and I feel very much the way this writer feels - that clauses qualify and specify where qualification and specification is required. Beside my bed I have book upon book laying open, face down, hugging each other where I abandoned them halfway through. Perhaps the word anhedonia is how someone else would describe the way I find myself flicking ahead, counting the pages until the end of the chapter, sighing, and giving up. I so rarely feel addressed by a book. The bed itself is loose: the blanket is loose from turning when I can't sleep; the fitted sheet is loose because it, like me, has lost its youthful elastin. This looseness allowed me to respond to this chapter with my full body. I lurched up, thrust my open palm into the godded air, and yelled "yes!"

Previously only Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has achieved this, writing about intersubjectivity in the therapeutic session in her memoir A Dialogue on Love. Which is very much how I want to situate this post. Responding to the chapter above, I felt the twinges of reference and passivity that I always feel, though comfortably so, thinking when the author writes about being a spy in academic spaces that she is addressing me personally and assigning me a role (or, perhaps, describing my role). More on this in another post perhaps. I read wondering what does it mean to be a spy in academia. Beyond a device (symbolic, characterful, metaphorical). She does not say.

It is a thing in life writing at the moment to be aware of our emotional reasoning. Perhaps after Paul John Eakin brought Antonio Damasio into the conversation, but not in exactly the same way. In reaction to the absent body, to the absent selfhood of supposed objective, heteropatriarchal white pov in academic genres, acknowledging emotions looks to be a sort of reflexivity and positionality statement. Why it interests me in my side project studies is a bit different, though related: knowing I have sensitivities around reference and passivity, how is reasoning through a diagnosis of impaired reasoning like/not like reasoning with emotions?

Finally finished Mimi Khúc's dear Elia. And by finally, I mean I was going really well with it, until one day I put a few too many items on my to do list, and I was at the end of a manic week of pure motivation having been accepted into the PhD program and wanting to do all the things. I picked up the final chapter, looked at the number of pages, and was suddenly hit in the solar plexus by a lack of spoons: 72 pages. I didn't read it that day.

When I did read it, it was wonderful in the creative critical sense. Khúc seems to acknowledge, in a metaphorical structure, that this chapter is draining. She sets it up as a navigational problem that mimics the chaos and disruption of mid semester, when all your well laid plans fall by the way and you just have to deal with things as they come. Specifically, in the context of the extremely disruptive covid, but it is familiar beyond this, and I think deliberately so. Then she closes by explaining that it's amazing to achieve, but asks why we demand achievement as a determinant of value, of worth, of being deserving of love and care. It was an incredibly validating way of making her point - creating a slightly abusive structure out of academic tropes, and then commenting on what that structure elicits from your bodymind. She helped me label my limit.

In Shayda Kafai's words, borrowing from Schlauderaff, "'Thoughtfeeling' is a concept created by the Queer Futures Collective, a way of acknowledging that our thoughts and feelings inform each other. Rather than distinct responses, thoughtfeelings are interwoven and reciprocal". But I want to follow Kafai and bring Sara Ahmed in here and consider emotions as orienting, in the way we may think an emotion has an object, but frequently our emotions have histories that precede our interaction with that object - histories that orient us toward (or away from) the object that our emotions 'stick' to.

Because, of course, without doubt, Khúc has written an affective arc. I am responding to that affective arc, which is to say my emotions as a form of reasoning are structured by Khúc. I do not think I am her ideal reader, but I am in a receptive place that makes me able to appreciate her message - I can read critically, I can synthesise what she has said with my experience of work, academia, and mental illness, and I can appreciate her message of strucural care as an intervention in ableism. What is perhaps unique about my impaired reasoning is that that intersubjective, scaffolded affect I draw from her book - noticing being guided toward an emotion by an author - is something I extend beyond the boundary of the book into the experiences that make me receptive to her message as though those experiences were also authored. Perhaps not by an individual - a discourse would suffice, but as far as my medical team and peers at work are concerned even this is discounted as a possibility, as a sort of disciplining not unlike the disciplining I will engage in during the PhD process and (as far as my supervisor is concerned) vice versa. The word handed to me for this phenomenon is paranoia. I found pronoia on my own.

I am writing about this in another blog where I discuss being a flower seller at the time when Celeste Caeiro dies. What does it mean that my name recalls the tattoo of the fleur de lys?

[epistemergency]

Practice blending ab with theory and criticism:

Do you remember "inb4"? Inb4 not following the rules of recontextualisation is always and only an antisocial theft of content.

i learned a word for this sort of throwing other activist's interests under the bus: disavowal. but i'm interested in it as a consequence of (deliberate manipulations of) discourse. I don't know what this says about me, but things other people deem a crisis are often things that alleviate my stress. When covid hit, for instance, the government lifted mutual obligations and doubled entitlements. For the first time in my life, I had an in case of emergency cushion. I was still ants in the pants to get a job and secure a future of employment, so I applied for one through a Disability Employment Service. To give you an idea, I consented to disclosing my illness to my employer, but the DES provider thought that would be a bad idea.

Suicidality, for me, has always been structural. Having worked in silver service restaurants for a decade, it was a shock to be suddenly tasked with squeezing processed chicken out of its bag into the metal container for the bain-marie. On the scale of indignities this is low, however nauseating. But the owner would tell me without fail that I wasn't squeezing the chicken out fast enough. So they obviously couldn't trust me to serve the food.

I wrote around this time that the very visible disability rights action plan to make workplaces more accessible conflicts on this issue with the mad rights movement which is often more concerned with state coersion. I mean, my employer had actively applied to higher people with disability into a go nowhere position with little job satisfaction and active bullying besides. They were, of course, incentivised with money for each hire. Elyn Saks writes of people with mental illness having access to work that is satisfying, something that might inspire you to work a little harder at it at least, but perhaps that's asking for something more than the average person.

I, and I alone, responded to this by thinking I should not be pressured into a job. Job as the whole grab-bag and umbrella of labour-for-hire. I imagine this all or nothing response as a consequence of inaccess. Of only ever having a job where I am alienated, exploited and replaceable. Of not ever having a job where I can imagine and enact transformation.

In the blog, I discussed how responses to injustice experienced as injustice can sometimes fall into step on the side of a dichotomy that reinforces an oppressive sytem simply as a response to previous exclusion. Not only the accessibility issue which, many scholars argue, is unusually subject to oppressions labeled "care" and "support". Fighting for equal pay reinforces existing labour for hire economic systems. Fighting for marriage equality reinforces the economic unit of the couple reframed as the happiest day of your life. (I have since read Maggie Nelson's Argonauts and do not mean to imply these are not worthwhile, transformative goals, only goals that work within a system rather than - what?) And it touches a mad nerve: who do these movements serve and, through that question, who are the authors of such movements?

I was happy today to read arguments that worked on the binary of accessibility. Mia Mingus writes that accessibility is not equivalent to liberation, unless "we can use access as a tool to transform the broader conditions we live in, to transform the conditions that created that inaccessibility in the first place". And Mimi Khúc argues that "anyone doing this must continually ask the hard question of whether inclusion by way of teaching the vulnerable how to navigate a deeply flawed system is for the sake of the vulnerable, [or] the system" because "they run the risk of ... pushing all of us to meet ideals that [businesses and, through businesses disciplining us to become ideal workers, ourselves] unquestioningly uphold and reify and press upon the most vulnerable."

Khúc's book, dear Elia, performatively transforms academic work in its style and genre-bending twist on the tenur book. She refuses respectability, swearing in frustration about a former colleague failing to defend her precarious position at the university. But it's her work eliciting readers to reveal the disciplines of discourse that inflame my mad reading. The book is in places a work book, with space provided to respond to prompts. After you fill it in, she guesses what you might have written there, assuming you are replying in earnest. She is usually correct, even as she extends across racial lines to address me at the same time as her ideal Asian-American reader. As a person with passivity, this is a threatening and exciting dialogic device - I find myself thinking things at the beginning of the chapter that she successfully deconstructs as the chapter proceeds, searching back through the paragraphs for some sign that she had seeded the idea in some indirect way. Of course, she has not, these ideas are all around us and move through us waiting to be coaxed into words.

If Khúc can do this, and I can read Khúc doing so, why not apply this scrutiny to our impassioned demands for justice and ask where and when and why we might be reinforcing the systems that exclude us?