shabbat shalom.
the wonderful thing about consciousness-raising is that, because one goes 'around the circle,' one discovers that the strangest people know the 'right' answer.
judy chicago, through the flower: my struggle as a woman artist, 1975
jane gallop, feminist accused of sexual harassment, 1997
notes from free space: a perspective on the small group in women’s liberation, pamela allen, 1970
“this was very much what early wl [women’s liberation] was about. women getting excited about thinking.”
packing up for the summer and found these quarantine quotes from alice, summer 2020, age 4
“i like that my voice doesn’t sound smart.”
“all you need to do is make art that inspires yourself and you will become smart like me. i’m not trying to be mean.”
“people who make great art are people who are smart.”
“you can’t be mean to people who are working really hard.”
“i just want to have friends these days. i want someone to play with. you and dad are always working.” (she didn’t play with another child for 6 months last year)
“what’s a jerk?”
“i’m pretending to do important work like you. i’m pretending to do french like mom.”
“mom, i can translate animals and robots.” “how do you know how to do that?” “it’s just how i live.”
“i just knew that because I’m a really smart kid, just like taylor swift knew stuff when she was younger.”
“my art is really important. it’s all about homes and making stuff for me to play in.”
“i’m going to do a little art maybe? because you know it’s my job.”
“i’m not a serious artiste. i’m just a person who loves art.”
“interesting people talk a lot.”
“i’m going to be an artist. and I’m going to be a mom.” her drawing teacher replied, “yep, that’s what i always said.”
“i think i would swim in a pool of glitter and if it was pink i think my mom would like it.”
“we sang a song today about how you need to love yourself. i do love myself for two reasons: i’m interesting and i have good hair. and i’m happy because i’m an artist.”
my art is really important. it’s all about homes and making stuff for me to play in.
alice during quarantine last summer
alice understands the humanities (last summer, age 4)
kj: no, i am a doctor. but i'm a doctor of philosophy.
a: what's that?
kj: it's a doctor of thinking. i think about what makes a happy life.
a: so it's still about making your body okay.
an aptitude for inhabiting this world without objectifying it, to page through it without mechanically assigning it a meaning, to subjectivize oneself in it but also to desubjectivize oneself in it. french theory, in bypassing the accepted discourse of argument, and constantly reaffirming the motifs of dispersion and the multiple subject, encourages its readers ‘without published works’ to lose themselves, to reach a position of quasi fusion with the text.
françois cusset, french theory: how foucault, derrida, deleuze, & co. transformed the intellectual life of the united states, 228
alice says she has created “girl place” and that it includes “everything girls like: nail polish, a tzedakah box, and something you can draw on so you can figure out your problems.”
i like that girl place is framed by in a different voice and hystories. also reading the romance; the dialectic of sex; undoing gender; and doin’ it in public. the feminist memoir project; this sex which is not one; simians, cyborgs, and women; the archival turn in feminism. men, women, and chain saws. yesterday alice saw a girl peeing in the park and started screaming like it was the murderer who had just appeared from behind the tree. then she covered her eyes, kept screaming, and pretended to stumble away. “alice, give her some privacy,” i said a few times, loud enough so that the mom wouldn’t be mad at me. but the final girl scream is her new move—she does it all the time—and it is extremely funny.
the other day she asked if any of my feminist books were written by a person with her name. we were sitting right next to alice echols’ daring to be bad. my alice looked concerned; i explained that it was the kind of bad where you don’t do what boys tell you to do because they are wrong. earlier this week, she was crying after school because the boys had wrecked the house that she had been building with her girlfriends. “boys are puh,” she said to me and pretended to spit, which is her other new move, and new saying. it doesn’t feel great to deride five-year-olds, even when they are boys, even when they’re being mean, but i remember what it’s like to be a five-year-old girl with a burgeoning feminist consciousness, and the teenage posturing she has learned from watching “my little pony: equestria girls” is cute. i laughed.
in the land of the transparent sign and of transitive science, a small crew of desperate men and women of letters thus dared to indulge very textually, and very obstinately, in the shadowy pleasures of opacity.
françois cusset, french theory: how foucault, derrida, deleuze, & co. transformed the intellectual life of the united states
not long before he died in 1969, theodor adorno told an interviewer: 'i established a theoretical model of thought. how could i have suspected that people would want to implement it with molotov cocktails?'
the first sentence of grand hotel abyss: the lives of the frankfurt school by stuart jeffries
“from its inception in 1923, the marxist research institute that became known as the frankfurt school was aloof from party politics and sceptical about political struggle. its leading members--theodor adorno, max horkheimer, herbert marcuse, erich fromm, friedrich pollock, franz neumann, and jurgen habermas--were virtuosic at critiquing the viciousness of fascism, and capitalism’s socially eviscerating, spiritually crushing impact on western societies, but not so good at changing what they critiqued.”
“in his 1969 paper ‘marginalia to theory and praxis,’ adorno noted that a student had his room destroyed because he preferred to work rather than take part in student protests. someone had even scrawled on his wall: ‘whoever occupies himself with theory without acting practically is a traitor to socialism.’”
“that paradox, the oppressive call for liberating action, made adorno and many others of the frankfurt school queasy. jurgen habermas called it ‘left facism,’ and adorno, his former teacher, saw in it the rise of a grisly new mutation of the authoritarian personality that had thrived in nazi germany and stalinist russia.”
“what is striking about adorno’s critical thinking in 1969 is that he took the authoritarian personality type that thrived under hitler and its attendant spirit of conformism to be alive and well in the new left and the student movement. both postured as anti-authoritarian but replicated the repressive structures they ostensibly sought to overthrow. ‘those who protest most vehemently,’ wrote adorno, ‘are similar to authoritarian personalities in their aversion to introspection.’”
“now was not the time for the easy posturing of action, but for the hard work of thinking...theory was...principled withdrawal into a fortress of thought, a citadel from which, periodically, radical jeremiads were issued. for adorno, thinking rather than sit-ins and barricades was the true radical act. ‘whoever thinks, offers resistance; it is more comfortable to swim with the current, even when one declares oneself to be against the current.’”
“certainly, the frankfurt school over which adorno prevailed as the leading intellectual force venerated theory as offering the only space in which the prevailing order could be indicted, if not overthrown. theory retained--unlike everything tainted by exposure to the real, fallen world--its lustre and its untameable spirit...this was where the frankfurt school felt most comfortable--instead of getting caught up in delusive revolutionary euphoria, they preferred to retreat into a non-repressive intellectual space where they could think freely.”
“if critical theory means anything, it means the kind of radical re-thinking that challenges what it considers to be the official versions of history and intellectual endeavour.”
on the death of one of my favorite rabbis
(notes from my drafts on carol gilligan and rabbi jonathan sacks from early in the pandemic:)
i had to fill out a form for a neighborhood mom group i am a part of, but i think i missed the deadline: i don’t know how to answer the question about what i do after i put alice to bed every night because what I do is sit down on the couch and watch whatever program is on the jewish broadcasting service. marc turns it on before he goes to the kitchen to make dinner.
a few weeks ago, i watched a video of feminist psychologist and girl culture heroine carol gilligan; rabbi jonathan sacks; and choreographer, dancer, lgbtq activist, and author marcia pally speak on a panel that took place at alice’s school. sacks claimed that jews are among the world’s best speakers and the world's worst listeners. i think this is true. in biblical hebrew, he said, there is no word for “to obey”; the word the bible uses is shema: “to listen, to hear, to understand, to internalize, and to respond in deed...the key and fundamental mitzvah in judaism is to listen.”
gilligan had just been to israel; talked about freud and hysteria; referenced her own years in hebrew school; and touted “radical listening” in which you are willing to be truly changed by the encounter. she also said that she thinks the idea that eve is created to be a helpmeet to adam is a mistranslation of the hebrew and that eve was actually created to be helpful through a kind of opposition. sacks didn’t seem so sure about this interpretation, but gilligan’s work is dedicated to girls and women speaking their moral truth to men, and she didn’t seem to care.
karaj reblogged
it’s hard to know what to say about dandi meng’s incredible, generous piece on my work at Jacket2. i’m not that good at what’s pretty; i can only say how it feels. it’s the only thing i’ve ever been good at. i’ve read her essay now, three times over and it’s still a heavy thrill. not nostalgia, but the instant recall of deep sense memory and something else, what’s new for me these days–an immense gratitude in recollection. Of when i lived here on tumblr, now almost a decade ago. the parts of me that shifted and the parts that remain frigid in the archive, kept awkwardly on ice.
what dandi’s piece feels like: skin smear on my phone screen. in other words, what doesn’t get captured in the screenshot– that anticipatory feeling when your thumb hits send and you float your content past the digital boundary into the ether. suspended space of not knowing, when and how, and if it will glance past another person. maybe not. but then sometimes, the screenshot will return to confront you, emerging from deep within the scroll. i can’t quite believe it did. it feels really special.
i haven’t thought about Hunting Season in a long time, I haven’t thought about performing in a long time. i still hold all the movements in my body, neat tic of my wrist, teary vocal whine, pristine choreography of manufactured blood, but they’re drier now, desiccated. less from misuse than from no longer being able to push myself to the emotional limit where i can spill with my whole body, thread the edge of that gush. i miss it, the freedom of lapsing. the unclarity of it. it’s funny, when i stopped, i was so tired of the fritz.
i used to compare my performances to throwing trash in the air, repetitive, fickle facsimiles of myself. dandi talks about this, shedding data, she says, and the uncontrollable minutiae of petty affect. she’s right. maybe what was important was that i was present in the only way i could be, unprocessed, undead so i could be witnessed. i don’t know, i do it over and over again, make things specifically to court the complexity of other people looking, and no matter how it happens, no matter how i rig the machine, it still feels insane. in the end, a lot of people do look, but it doesn’t happen in a real way very often, like how it happened in her piece; being perceived.
i loved tumblr because it was as estranged as it was intimate, as democratizing as much as it was a space to admire, the glossy cool girls i put on a pedestal; @karaj, @whateverjeanne. tumblr was this aching, immutable surface within which, upon which i could endlessly project a series of emotions. relieved and fatigued, i never had to try to understand, and for no reason other than i didn’t want to. confession and its lie; an eternity of unmaking and reconciling and revising. others and myself; memory and affect too big to hold, it had to go somewhere, why not here. why not like this. i absorbed so much material and reproduced, repurposed it. thin ephemera, but it was a feint. at its interior, there was still work, a labor of living, a labor of myself, not veneered, but intractable, all twined up with painstakingly curated style. i did not want to admit this for a very long time.
dandi’s piece too, although i cannot speak for her, is maybe is a feint, in that it is comprised of analysis and screenshots and objects, of which my work is one. but it is just so full–on its own terms, and within its own context. so flush with the kind of unique thinking that can come only from writing critical theory by living it, and from choosing to experience oneself as an unmediated part of that critical theory. a mutable, organic project. i’m so hungry to hear more. i feel undeserving. so lucky and honored to have snuck in.
typing into tumblr, like i never left. time is a shell sometimes. hard candy. thank you dandi, for breaking it in your hands. i can’t resist; i crush. <3
“i don’t know, i do it over and over again, make things specifically to court the complexity of other people looking, and no matter how it happens, no matter how i rig the machine, it still feels insane” and “typing into tumblr, like i never left.”
on our walk home, alice said she had told her teacher that she felt sad her best friend wasn’t in school today and asked, “can you help me?” and i thought it was so profound that after six months away from school, and less than two weeks back, in this new version of school in which she wears a mask for six hours a day and walks through the hallway where adrienne rich once signed my copy of the dream of a common language and up six flights of stairs without me because i am no longer allowed in the building, she had the ability to tune into her own feelings, the fortitude to ask for help, and the trust that she would get it. she turned five yesterday.
“but what are the conditions that allow one to dream, vision, and imagine the world as it should be? who does and doesn’t get access to rest and care as a basic human right?”
mierle laderman ukeles, maintenance art event XI--“washing,” 1974
“but wages for housework emerged out of debates within italian marxism, whereas ukeles’s maintenance art emerged out of the artist’s devout judaism (she is the daughter of an orthodox rabbi, after all). thus, while one wages for housework proposal was that housewives perform the necessary work of the home but treat it like alienated labor (“more smiles? more money!“), ukeles’s move was in the other direction, bestowing the sacralizing aura of art on domestic routine.
for a work at new york’s A.I.R. gallery in 1974, she would scrub the sidewalk as a public performance. to explain the meaning of that action, she posted a long, mystical quote that read, in part, “the face of the holy is not turned away from but towards the profane,” from rabbi abraham isaac kook...
distinct in inspiration, wages for housework and maintenance art were also opposite in trajectory: the former brought the language of workplace struggle to the domestic sphere; the latter took ukeles’s spiritual redemption of housework into the workplace. the most well-known example is her year-long project with the new york department of sanitation, touch sanitation (july 1979-june 1980).”
--ben davis, “what mierle laderman ukeles’s ‘maintenance art’ can still teach us today,” artnet, september 20, 2016