Chris
in line with what I wrote just in the context of Dominc's post I assume
therefore that 'problematise' is an inept formation from 'problematic'
(which this is becoming) rather than from 'problem' as then one might be
tempted to infer that 'problematise' meant 'to make something a problem
which isn't one'.
Which _would_ be a problem.
Best
Dave
David Bircumshaw
Leicester, England
Home Page
A Chide's Alphabet
Painting Without Numbers
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----- Original Message -----
From: "ccjones" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, January 29, 2002 3:15 AM
Subject: Re: Problematise this
I'm in agreement with Dominic. Problematise is a fairly basic technical word
in philosophy and literary theory. Being such it requires technical skill in
philosophy and creative writing. Right now I am in the process of
problematising the poetics of Realist fiction and Gothic fiction where
Realist poetics requires a transcendental dualist system with the
transcendental elided into the empirical in order to produce formal
categories which are said to be Real, for example the dualism of ideal
gender, man and woman, is elided into the claimed biologically empirical
fact of sexual reproduction. Gothic poetics works more with an immanent
field
or plane of composition where anything is possible and is not constrained by
Leibniz's idea of what is compossible and determined externally in order to
focus Realist Monadic point of view nor by Hegel's Absolute History as
determining what is Real by reflection and in this case by Leibniz's
reflective differential parabolic lens. (In philosophy, a dialectic which is
itself problematic.)
Gothic poetics, as problematised, then both problematises and critiques
Realist poetics. The problem then becomes not that of the man and woman
human
sex but the third non-human sex which is immanent as Karl Marx problematised
gender. Karl is a bit of a Goth. All of this is immediately useful to me in
solving the problems I am having with my novel as well as re-stating in
terms
of the problematised Gothic poetics my suspicion that Realist poetics cannot
sustain the formal distinctions it insists on between the prose novel and
poetry claimed as being verse. If you want to find poetry, don't look to
language.
best wishes
Chris Jones.
PS. I just read Karl Heinrich Ulrich's Gothic tale _Manor_ (1885). Ulrich,
of
course, was the gay rights activist who theorised homosexuals, uranians
as he called them, as a third sex. Based on his tale, a third non-human sex,
it may appear. More Gothic poetics; Queer Gothic. (see:
http://www.queerhorror.com)
On Tue, 29 Jan 2002 07:50, you wrote:
> "Problematise" is Foucauldian amongst other things. I don't know what
> register it slots into in the French- not managerial/Americanese in the
> first instance. A problem in Foucault is an artifact, something with a
> genealogy which can be traced. How do sex, drugs, food (onanism, opium,
> oysters) etc. get to be problems? How do moral and epistemological and
> administrative imperatives come to be brought to bear on them? The
> questions are sexy, and even by asking them you sound like you're
answering
> them, which more or less sums up Foucauldian chic.
>
> My one-time English tutor Stephen Gill also used to tell his undergraduate
> students to "problematise, not deproblematise" - don't try to straighten
> works of literature out, go for the kinks and niggle at them. I don't
think
> he was speaking Foucauldian, though. Generally he treated English with
> respect - more I think than I did, or do. My undergraduate essays were
> written in halting, and later fluent, Derridean. There was a particularly
> bad patch shortly after I finished reading Lyotard's Libidinous Economy
> (sounds like a textbook H. Potter should be forcibly kept away from).
> Everything was an orifice for a while.
>
> Dominic
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