it begins

I have only 67 more class sessions this semester.

It's taking a little while to gear up for this term. My usual level of enthusiasm for teaching at the beginning of a year is around a 12 on a scale of 2.7 to 14. This year, on a scale of π to 136, I'm only around 72.1-ish.

But, let me look back on the summer, and see how many of my goals I accomplished. I had some plans for reading and writing philosophy. A panel I submitted on the experience of orientation and disorientation was accepted by a conference coming up this fall, and I wanted to pursue those, and the concept of normal, as regular readers of this feature will perhaps recall. To that end, I intended to read Experience and Judgment, From Affectivity to Subjectivity, Refiguring the Ordinary, Assuming a Body.  Check.

I did not intend to read The Normal and the Pathological, but I did. I certainly did not intend to go back yet again into Phenomenology of Perception, but I did a lot of that, too. Four chapters worth, actually. I did not intend to read The Problem of Embodiment, but I did that, too.

I intended to read Getting Back into Place, and I read a lot of it, but got to a point that I felt like it was doing what Hegel called presenting clever remarks. Sorry, Ed. Maybe I just don't get it.

I wanted to look up stuff on the affective experience and worldhood of those who lose their memories, or a particular sense, or who otherwise undergo fairly radical alterations of "normal" orientation to the world.

I didn't think I'd be spending quite so much time revising an article. That's okay. The suckers printed it!

Unrelated to any of that, I wanted to read some of The Transgender Studies Reader, and some of The Prison Notebooks. Not as much as I'd hoped. Gramsci's kinda bitchy.

One of my worst emotional habits is comparing myself to other people, using an external criterion of my progress, and worse, my worth. Looking back at what I've done academically this summer, I think, "Um, is that good?" I don't know. I am fairly chuffed that article got published. I hope I scandalize people.

Possibly my greatest accomplishment this summer was reading all of Don Quixote. This is the kind of book, especially at this late date, that you could make a tidy academic career out of -- there are so many allusions to Cervantes' contemporary world to track down and decipher, so much to do to relate it to our own world, and it's so long that there can't be more than a few dozen people who've read the whole thing. It's perfect fodder for literature folks.

I wanted us to play a gig. We did that. I think we should have played more, but we didn't, mainly because of mental health. It went pretty good, though, and I hope we can do more in the future.

I wanted to write several songs. I ended up writing several tunes, and several very, very bad attempts at songs, that I have wisely destroyed. So much for my goal of recording a new CD. It's been two years now since Do Paper Cats Dream of Origami Birds?

Again, I dunno, is that good?

what we've learned

Time's about to run out on summer's reading activities. Do I now understand more about orientation and the normal? Or about embodiment and subjection?

I began with wondering about orientation, again, continuing from last year. That led me to the way the concept of normal keeps circulating around in phenomenology, and the relationship between the equivocal phenomenological concept and certain other, critical concepts of normal, in particular Foucault's and Canguilhem's. (Canguilhem's critical history of the scientific and knowledge claims of medicine, The Normal and the Pathological is brilliant, tremendously insightful as a way of thinking about the development of medicine as a consumer product, and astonishingly under-read and under-appreciated, given that he wrote in in 1963!)

I haven't gone back through and done the scholarly folderol to unpack this whole business, and probably should while I have the chance. Who knows, it could result in another bizarre polemic that is unaccountably published.

I have just learned today that what I've been doing the last three summers was presaged by Gabriel Marcel in the 1910s. It's a fundamental paradox of individual human existence and our knowledge and understanding of it, and what Marcel concluded was the impossible quest to give ourselves assurance that we exist as well as knowledge and understanding of the meaning of existence. We're each assured we exist by our own subjectivity -- basically, by the self declaring itself. But we can't cash out the meaning of that existence as a kind of knowledge -- an objective knowledge -- precisely because we can't take an outside perspective on it. In a nutshell, to have both assurance and understanding of our existence, we would need a perspective that was somehow both subjective and objective.

Marcel was certainly partly wrong, and not because we have psychologists and such -- since they can only take an objective view, since no one can declare for me that I exist, and no one else can enter the world through my subjectivity and perspective. He's wrong because this metaphysical way of looking at the problem harbors a dualism. Where I've been going has been to blur the subjective/objective "line" by looking at the ways we (subjectively) undergo our own subjection: we undergo that which establishes our subjectivity. So, rather than begin with the assumption that assurance is a subjective declaration, and knowledge and understanding have to be systematic and objective, I'm performing a classic destructive dilemma. My conclusion is: neither is it the case that subjectivity begins or is assured by the "I exist!" declaration, nor is it the case that knowledge and understanding have to be, or even can be (entirely) systematic and objective.

It looks like a Kierkegaard move, but I'm not as pessimistic about human understanding or as optimistic about god and the leap of faith (to say the least).

summer reading

The last three years, I've had a great time reading and writing during the summer. I think I've learned a lot, and developed some intuitions into real insights. The way it has worked is that I gather a reading list during the academic year, of anything that comes up related to some glimmer of an idea I have. This year, it hasn't worked out so well, because it has been so exhausting and crappy. But I do have a couple things on the agenda.

Assuming a Body, by Gayle Solomon, a transsexual. The book is about her experiences as understood from the standpoint of philosophical thought about embodiment.

The Transgender Studies Reader.


Transgender Migrations, edited by a colleague on campus, Tristan Cotten, who is cool.

White Coat, Black Hat, a muck-raking book about the business of medicine, which will make me feel sick.

The Body, by Donn Welton. Last summer, I came to the conclusion that the word "the body" is already a fetish, and that even "embodiment" is troublesome. So I have an agenda about this one.

Wanna read some Gramsci, maybe some Fanon.

The last few summers my reading has had a very clear direction. Other than sex and gender, I don't seem to have a direction. And it's a little disturbing to me how little phenomenology is on the agenda.

Maybe that's good. I'm moving outside my intellectual comfort zone, and although that means I will likely have less chance of generating some kind of publishable or conferenceable paper, I could learn more as a result. As I wrote a while back, since I'm among the tenuous-track faculty, projects are less important than ways of life.

summertime blues

They say there ain't no cure.

So far this has been the summer of miscellaneous busy-ness. The result: I have a chest cold.

It's also been the summer of updating, sprucing, and in general making happy little improvements in the material conditions of life. We bought grass-fed meat. I made a new batch of demi-glace. I have my new contact lenses, which I'm adjusting to fairly well. Lauren has new glasses. I have a new guitar, I'm futzing with several new tunes.

This has all involved a lot of driving hither and yon, culminating in the week of Bobo the Wandering Pallbearer's visit, during which I drove approximately 23,400 miles.

So, as I sit here resting and recuperating, with little energy to do much else, it occurred to me that I do have all that to recuperate from. That makes a little more sense, which somehow makes it a little bit better.