Can't keep up

I haven't posted anything on Cixous, Plath, Under The Skin, and I've got tonnes to say, and upcoming is Kafka--suffice to say I'm getting pretty stressed out. All my own undoing, notwithstanding. Sigh.

My body feels claustrophobic everytime I think about how much I want to say, afraid it'll end up in verbal diarhorrea. My mind feels all murky and jumbled up--like too much seaweed and the tide's going down.

I wonder why there's this relation (almost a direct one at that, I think) between what I think and what I feel bodily. Like if I'm stressed as mentioned, I'd feel nauseous.

Why??? Are there theories on that? Is it just purely scientific and biological, or are there other non-material reasons?

Reading Grosz (Again)

She's critical of how, amongst feminists, "there is still a strong reluctance to conceptualize the female body as playing a major role in women's oppression" (31). I found this an extremely interesting proposition--something I've never seen explicitly articulated before. She goes on to talk about how feminists should be paying more attention to the role of the female body because of the binary structure, and how males, in subsuming knowledge as theirs, have come to be associated with the mind; and how in dissociating from the body, the body becomes associated with the female, etc.

She then claims that all knowledges are therefore masculine (38). That these 'masculine' knowledges are then culturally and socially inscribed onto all bodies (male and female) to take precedence as something neutral, something eternal, and something true. I find this extremely problematic. First, she has no evidence that men, in "appropriating the realm of mind for themselves", has in fact "disavowed" their bodies ("physicality", to quote Grosz). This claim proceeds on grounds that the binary structure is already in place BEFORE this 'appropriation' of the males. While I agree it is true that traditionally, in most societies, patriarchy reigned supreme and therefore by default, men's opinions/thoughts/works etc. were 'canonized' and made integral to the society's backbone, I find that this does not neccessarily point to Grosz's simple equation that patriarchy = men's 'knowledges' as The Way = men "disavowing" their bodies, or as Grosz puts it, men's "disembodiment" (39).

Another thing that bothers me in her article is when she talking about "isomorphism" (38).

"This correspondence is a function of the systems of representation that traverse and constitute both men's bodies as such and the criteria for the evaluation of knowledges. [...] Instead of seeing man as the active creator of discursive and epistemic values, the male body must be seen as an inscribed product of the intervention of meanings into the way men live their bodies." (Grosz, 38-39)

It is admirable that she is attempting to make a case for men here--"It is not really a question of blaming men...". But it seems to me that this plea is rather futile. This whole 'crisis of reason' is a result of "the correspondence" between the men's bodies and external inscriptions. Now, if the society she referred to is a patriarchal one, then the "systems of representations" and the "criteria for the evaluation of knowledges" AND the "intervention of meanings" ARE ALL SET BY MEN THEMSELVES. They have created their own vicious cycle and are now trapped in it, embroiling women in the process, and now finding that there is a 'crisis' to their knowledges.

Perhaps Grosz is simply rallying for us to be critical of all knowledges; now that we know most, if not all, knowledges are 'masculine'. She is perhaps asking us take the cue from Irigaray, to re-evaluate knowledges as merely perspectives bound by significant sexual (and therefore bodily) differences. As such, does this mean the guys in this class will read the texts in a similarly different way from the girls?

It is still very confusing. But I think two of the more useful ideas are Irigaray's point about "returning the male body to its products" (42), and her attempt to "reveal a politics of truth, logic, and reason" (42), which means to me that she is not trying to debunk/negate 'masculine' knowledges, but more to reveal the tensions that produced the knowledges. I think this might be useful to keep in mind when we consider the other texts for this module.

On Elizabeth Grosz

I don't particularly take to Grosz's convoluted and ambiguous style, but she has raised some interesting (and controversial) points.

To summarize, she conceptualized the crisis as reason's "inability to rationally know itself, to enclose and know itself from the outside: the inadequation of the subject and knowledge" (26). To me, this means the failure of using reason to understand reason. Put another way, how do you know 'reason' is 'reason' when you use 'reason' to understand 'reason'?

That's like saying, that big comfy thing you sit on in the living room is a couch because that's the only thing I know that people sit on in the living room. It is that, because that is the only thing I know. And that is the crisis that she's trying to make us panic about. Our knowledge of things is 'knowledge' to us, not because the things are REALLY as they are, but because we understand them to be such.

In a word, she's saying, how can we ever know anything? She is problematizing knowledge as something fluid and susceptible to external inscriptions; therefore there is no Truth in the big somewhere out there.

I think there IS a truth out there--just that we probably won't ever get to it. As Grosz pointed out (most excruciatingly), it's not just our methodology that is flawed--our very beings, this body that we use to understand everything around us, is bombarded by so many factors that it becomes quite impossible for us to ever get to a neutral, eternal Truth about anything.

An Introduction, Of Sorts

If you're here, chances are you are a fellow peer in the course. For the benefit of (un)fortunate blog-hoppers who stumbled here, this blog is a reading journal for a literature module. I will be doing reflections and ramblings of sorts about the body: seemingly innocent, consciousness-carrying, walking vessels that roam this world. (Ripped from Dr. Yeo's mouth, but I found 'carrying consciousness' rather intriguing, so, here it is.)

Anyhow, here's short introduction about myself. My name is Catharine, or you may call me Cat for short. I'm a Year 3 (struggling) Literature major. This semester started on pretty rocky grounds, so I'm still in a semi-forlorn state. I'm going to Canada next January under the SEP, so if anyone wants Canadian Candy Bars, place an order with me. Haha.

Alright. That's it for the first introductory post.