Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

How does it feel to inhabit the post-disciplinary?

To belong to too many communities of practice all at once? And none of which speak to each other?

To belong to too few communities of practice that know they aren't the center of how it should be? Who fantasize that if they don't understand something it is not understandable, or if they do, that that is the standard of good practice?

To constantly be trying to explain mistakes and misrecognitions?
Mistaking new sensations for pain? mistaking honor for destruction? mistaking another's practice for your own done badly?

Belonging otherwise?

Building new vocabularies as ends in themselves?

Taxonomizing without someone else's telos of a real argument, a real interpretation, a real analysis, a real ethnography, a real history, a real discipline?

To be sloppy, speculative, too personal, without enough examples, or the right examples, or someone else's examples?

To have not included something pivotal from another community of practice that requires your participation?

To offensively violate rules for practice, consciously or not?

To be only too aware of how many rules and practices there are among your constituencies and to be unable to satisfy them all, indeed to even know what they all are?

1 comment:

freespeechlover said...

great title for this entry. yes, i think this kind of post-disciplinary space is how you describe it. I feel similarly, like there's no center, and in my head, there are all these networks; i guess you could call them communities. Most of them are anonymous in the sense that i have never met these people who i read and sometimes enter into discussion with. but then benedict anderson argued the nation was an imagined community, and i remember anna tsing and paula ebbron in women writing culture arguing that the nation is a kind of dominant model for ethnic communities in the U.S. the difference between anderson's analysis (and lisa bloom drew on this in her book, gender on ice) is that the print media or newspaper was key to the origins of the modern nation state on the european model that then traveled to its colonies, etc. here i'm thinking of rashid khalidi's work on palestinian nationalism, an embattled work, that is a work in which he was establishing against israeli national mythology that there was indeed palestinian nationalism, that there were people who identified themselves as palestinians and there was such a thing as palestinian nationalism. he used newspapers with titles referring to "falasteen" as evidence.

well, as we/they say, we're not in kansas anymore. now it's the internet, where the pace is dizzying, disorienting (no that doesn't have to be negative but let's face it the pleasures are not always enjoyable), but you know freud had a lot to say about ambivalence; perceptions change so quickly and the demands that are placed on us psychologically are sometimes galling.

yes, i think i'd like to share this blog with you. i think it would help me to get my ideas out, and i like being reconnected to "theory" vis a vis your ideas, because i've felt very much "in the field" for a while now and would like to reenter hisconland or herscamland.

sorry for the no caps, but i can type faster without them.

okay, i'd like to blog about "galling flexibilities." here i'm thinking of what i learned in the field, and i'm going to not get into a long discussion at this point about "the field."