Hi,
I haven't been at my desk for a while but anyway, Lennard wrote:
>
>Well, I don't think I need to reply now since I basically agree with what
>you've said. I suppose I have somewhat more of a sense that if you ignore
>history that you are doomed to repeat it. I know you are not ignoring it
>at all but weighing the usefulness of certain kinds of historical
>procedures and methods of disseminating information. Again, I agree that
>we need to be suspicious of history since it can be used to justify
>anything in the present.
Ok so far
>
>On the other side, revisionist history has to a large sense empowered
>groups, albeit at the price of reinscribing binaries. I like the work of
>Wendy Brown, (have you seen it?) STATES OF INJURY (Princeton, 1995) who
>talks about how identity politics comes at the price of ratifying certain
>norms and maintaining a "wounded" identity to keep the sense of difference
>alive--the same difference that created the injured state. I just wrote a
>piece for NOVEL on the subject. I think it will be out within a few months.
I too have used Wendy Brown's more recent work on practices of cultural
regulation in a recent piece for Disability & Society, which should be out
next year. I wonder how States of Injury would engage with our
understanding of Deaf identity in relation to deaf identities? I also
wonder why so many people in Disability Studies resist postmodern analyses
when it is clear that the dual processes of collective empowerment and
reinscription of binaries must be key processes in the production of
fractured identity politics.
>
>Another point, the distinction between readers of the past (ie historians)
>and readers of the present (ie people who live in the present). This has
>always struck me as a spurious argument since people living in the present
>are no better readers of "now" then they would have been of "then." Newt
>Gingrich and I both inhabit the same contemporary moment but read the
>present as differently as we read the past. Likewise, Sir Francis Galton's
>reading of his moment is not necessarily more correct than my reading of
>his moment.
Yes, same for me and Margaret Thatcher, but this doesn't relate to what I
was saying. I was talking here, I think, about POLITICAL ACTION and how,
whereas present action can certainly be informed by the past, it does not
make sense for activists to confine action to forms that are SOLELY
informed by the past or conceived as a result of and within specific
cultural and historical contexts. As a 'present' example, I would suggest
(again) that kinds of action appropriate to the US might not work here in
the UK nor in the Phillipines, Thailand or Australia, for example. Owen
Wrigley notes in 'The Politics of Deafness' that concepts of 'rights' (in
the Western sense) are an anthema to Deaf people in Thailand. This leads me
to question why it is that many Deaf people from ethnic minorities in the
UK reproduce this uneasiness with rights and with overt forms of political
action (I'm not engaging in cultural stereotyping here just making an
observation). On another level as more overt forms of political action are
often couched in war-like performance, what does this mean in a cultural
context where peace is valued? So, from the point of view of politics, I
guess I would argue that politics has to be reflexive and adaptable - much
like theory.
>
>I do think that in your work with Deaf children, you have to perform a
>complex task of balancing what is going on in a particular situation with
>what you know, what others have known, what others have said and done, and
>the demands of what is being said and done now. This is the complex dance
>of theory and praxis, but as Marx said to mother, you can't have one
>without the other. And part of theory involves a synchronic element but
>also a diachronic one.
This is also the complex dance of contemporary ethnography - polyphonic
storytelling, reflexivity and multiversimilitude - which is occurring, for
me (as researcher) at any rate in a textual-visual-spatial dimension. Was
the 'D' a Freudian (or Marxist) slip, perhaps?
>
>Re: binaries. I'm not for them, but they do, according to a Sausurian
>model, create meaning. OK, Derrida shows us that this model is ultimately
>false because all meaning comes from deferring difference. But this
>explanation doesn't mean that we should not think using the meaning that
>binaries create. It is sort of like the fact that we live in a Newtonian
>world although the rules of his physics don't apply to off-Earth
>situations. We maintain that consciousness, although we still operate as if
>only Newtonian rules apply. It is perhaps certain binaries we don't like
>because they create or participate in oppressive systems. I like to
>resolve the binary problem throught dialectics. This gives me a way to
>understand the binary and transcend it when necessary.
And I through deconstruction. Again, Derrida appeals to me because Derrida
is about text, and yes, text is just words and can appear in-human. My
reading of Derrida is that it is also about the meaning created in the
space between the binaries but because the binaries themselves are not
fixed, essential or central this creates defferal. But one certainly
wonders about the worlds of deaf people (and others) which are made up of
these texts and what that means for identity and politics....
Best wishes
Mairian
*********
"To understand what I am doing, you need a third eye"
*********
Mairian Corker
Senior Research Fellow
University of Central Lancashire
c/o 111 Balfour Road
Highbury
London N5 2HE
U.K.
Minicom/TTY +44 [0]171 359 8085
Fax +44 [0]870 0553967
Typetalk (voice) +44 [0]800 515152 (and ask for minicom/TTY number)
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