Uncouth Reflections

Fenster writes:

When making sense no longer makes sense it is very tempting to stop making sense, this urge itself a form of sense-making.  In 1984 the interrogator tells Winston Smith that two and two can equal five if the state says so.  But on this point Dostoevsky has the better take: “the formula two plus two equals five is not without its attractions.”  People can be drawn to a lack of sense as moths to a flame, if the alternatives are less palatable.

In this regard, consider the rich night soil that is the modern postmodern mind.  It is a fecund thing but it lies shallow on the earth, discouraging the deep rootedness that would provide for sturdy growth and favoring instead the rapid spread of a kind of mental kudzu across the landscape.  It is hard to hold this kind of thing in check, and no good solution has yet to be found.  The limited success to date has come from a kind of “fighting fire with fire”, as with the famous Sokal Hoax.

When Sokal wrote his debunking piece in 1996 the kind of postmodern writing at which he took aim took the form of gibberish, and his spoof was structured as meaningless tripe.  As you will recall it was waved through the gates of the journal Social Text by the peer review watchmen and the rest is, alas, mostly only history.  The Sokal Hoax caused delight in some quarters and consternation in others but it hardly stopped the kudzu spread.

In part this hardiness is a function of adaptation.  In some measure meaninglessness has given way to meaning again and this is, in a way, a kind of progress.  A lot of writing nowadays may be nutty but it is getting explicable.  It is trying to say something.

Here’s an abstract from a recent issue of Social Text:

Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In is a film whose glossy surface belies its investment in history—cinema’s history, Spain’s history, transnational history. It tracks a correspondence among cinema, transsexuality, and medium specificity through the trope of transgenesis: skin has been manufactured by the film’s plastic surgeon to cover the character upon whom he has also forced a sex change. The transgenic skin is also produced extratextually, by way of a digital effect that implicates cinema’s analog-to-digital transformation. Both of these technological transformations—the cinematic and the biological—carry with them ethical and political implications, which are explored in the film. For this purpose, the article contends that Almodóvar brings his own cinematic language to its limit, particularly around his representation of transsexuality, as if to point us toward the limit that a politics of representation has reached in our increasingly biopolitical environment. The article argues that the film’s digitization of artificial skin functions as an anchor for a complex imagining of the sociopolitical contexts that bind identity to history. The surface of the skin, as deployed in the film, melds political and cinematic memory to resurrect traces of repressed histories and absent bodies, allowing Almodóvar to build a transtemporal and transnational allegorical universe that moves against the grain of the loss of history that cinema’s digital transformation purportedly represents.

Hold on, one more:

Considering the question of the recovery of marginalized voices in the archives, this article reflects on the problem of finding and interpreting the personal responses of African Americans to the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in 1865. Black freedom was central to the post–Civil War nation, yet direct black voices remain submerged, available most often in public sources like newspapers and sermons or in scant and skeletal personal writings. The most vivid black voices are to be found in more troublesome sources: those mediated by sympathetic whites who recorded the words and actions of African Americans. Such sources lack a crucial dimension of experience found in the more voluminous direct personal responses of Lincoln’s white mourners: the persistence of everyday life (matters of labor, health, romance, leisure) in the face of shock and grief, an absence that stems from the particular motivations of white observers. Scholars must also reckon with the question of how to present these methodological challenges to our readers and how to shape both the content and structure of our narratives to move marginalized voices to the center. In sum, ventriloquized voices in the archives must not be dismissed but must instead be approached with rigor and imagination.

Sorry, last one:

This article cross-reads the 2005 trial of Chai Soua Vang, a Hmong American man who was convicted of murdering six Caucasian hunters in Wisconsin, with the 2008 film Gran Torino, a story of a Korean War veteran who mentors a Hmong American teenager. An examination of the trial transcript and journalistic coverage of the Vang case illustrates a need to establish a history of racial violence in order to explain the altercation in the woods. This need assumes that a history of racism must be identified in order for a word to be considered racist and that acts of violence can be explained only through that corresponding history. This article uses speech act theory to problematize that assumption, arguing instead that the power of hate speech rests in its ability to displace history rather than affirm it. Coverage of the case demonstrates this displacement, as Vang is positioned via multiple and contradicting contextual frames. In turn, Gran Torino, which this article reads as a response to the Vang case, illustrates how codes of conduct shift depending on who is in the position to dictate them, and how words that historically signify a racial threat can also erase the very histories that give those words meaning. Thus, the film offers an explanation for why Vang’s claim to racial victimization could not hold.

While these abstracts give off a certain forbidding air there seems little question but that the authors are trying to do more than display their knack for unintelligible prose.  They are taking aim at things.  Hallelujah they are starting to make sense!

Thus it is that as the kudzu adapts and morphs a new generation of weed retardant is called for.

A updated version of the Sokal Hoax arrived in the form of the article “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct” by Jamie Lindsay and Peter Boyle, which appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Cogent Social Sciences.  This is the article that made the connection between the penis and climate change, a connection that had somehow been overlooked until 2017.

Once again, the abstract:

Anatomical penises may exist, but as pre-operative transgendered women also have anatomical penises, the penis vis-à-vismaleness is an incoherent construct. We argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a social construct isomorphic to performative toxic masculinity.  Through detailed poststructuralist discursive criticism and the example of climate change, this paper will challenge the prevailing and damaging social trope that penises are best understood as the male sexual organ and reassign it a more fitting role as a type of masculine performance.

Yes, this is a rich stew of words but, like the Monkees, it’s got something to say! Perhaps a conversation is possible. If and we can see which sensemaking is the most sensible.