Race Census Aff – mags compiled by Lenny Brahin Jaden Lessnick Jillian Gordners Brian Roche 1AC
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- Subjecticvity = gendered +AT: psycho
- Method turn
Environment kPermPolyculturalism and environmental movements were meant to be togetherAlexenberg 2008 (Melvin L. Educating Artists for the Future: Learning at the Intersections of Art, Science, Technology, and Culture. Bristol, U.K.: Intellect, 2008. Print, LB) In my ten years living in Miami, it became clear to me that polyculturalism and ecological perspective are related. Both promote multiple views of the whole and of dynamic interrelationships in growing ecosystems that embrace nature, society, and media. Twenty-two young artists in the senior class of the NWSA high school worked on an art project, Miami in Ecological Perspective, with me and biologists from the Everglades National Park (Alexenberg 1994). These Miamians and their parents were born on five continents, in sixteen countries, and in twelve states. Miami is a lively international city framed by the mangrove swamps of Biscayne Bay and the wide saw grass river of the Everglades. Its future is related to how its ethnic communities bring their numerous viewpoints together in a common enterprise and how it protects and honors its natural environment, its primary source of revenue. Thousands leave a shivering winter of snow and ice to sun themselves on the palm-studded beaches, swim in warm blue waters, and marvel at the flight of flocks of great white egrets and the movements of giant alligators in the Everglade’s waters. Under the guidance of the Everglades biologists, the students waded through the Everglades, a shallow river 60 miles wide flowing 300 miles from the Kissimmee River to Florida Bay. It was the time of year that the waters receded leaving fish no choice but to find refuge in waterholes that alligators had dug under the water. When birds came to eat the fish concentrated in the waterholes, the alligators could choose the birds or fish for their breakfast. The students documented the dynamic interrelationships of the numerous species of animals and plants to each other and their environment using observational drawing, photography, and verbal and statistical notation. These studies became the raw material for artworks. Their scientific study of ecology was coupled with artistic explorations that expressed ecological perspective in relation to their environment and their place in it and with social action cleaning up trash thrown in the water by tourists in the national park. The ecological perspective begins with the view of the whole, an understanding of how the various parts of nature interact in patterns that tend towards balance and persist over time. But this perspective cannot treat the earth as something separate from human civilization; we are part of the whole too, and looking at it ultimately means looking at ourselves. (Gore 1993) The students studied how artists shape worldview by their perspective inventions. The artists of the Renaissance, for example, created logical perspective by visually representing three-dimensional space from a single point of view and time as a cross section of a one-way linear path. Most people in the industrialized world continue to see the world through the eyes of these Renaissance artists. Before Renaissance perspective spread from Italy throughout Europe, artists employed a mythological perspective that arises from an auditory experience of space as two-dimensional and of time as cyclical. People from most pre-industrial cultures continue to experience space and time from a mythological perspective. Today, artists have an opportunity and responsibility of once again reshaping humanity’s worldview by inventing an art of ecological perspective. Whereas the aesthetic perspective oriented us to the making of objects, the ecological perspective connects art to its integrative role in the larger whole and the web of relationships in which art exists. A new emphasis falls on community and environment…The ecological perspective does not replace the aesthetic, but gives a deeper account of what art is doing, reformulating its meaning and purpose beyond the gallery system, in order to redress the lack of concern, within the aesthetic model, for issues of context or social responsibility. (Gablick 1991) FemSubjecticvity = gendered +AT: psychoThe conception of subjectivity is always based on a masculine subject – embracing the multiplicity of identity is necessary to implode thatAlcoff ‘6 (Linda Martín Alcoff, Prof. of Philosophy at CUNY, Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self, Oxford Scholarship Online, LB) The problem of conceptualizing ‘‘woman’’ as a form of subjectivity and an associated category of identity can best be approached through combining three elements: the idea of experience as a reflective practice, the intuition behind identity politics, and the concept of positionality. Teresa de Lauretis’s influential book Alice Doesn’t develops an account of experience through an eclectic weaving together of psychoanalytic and semiotic theories. The underlying motivation for developing this account is her concern to understand the link between gender, a social construct, and subjectivity, which involves human agency. The book is really a collection of essays organized around the difficulty of conceptualizing woman as subject, not the generic human as subject but a particularly gendered subjectivity. But immediately a problem arises as to the relation between ‘‘woman’’ as ‘‘fictional construct’’ and ‘‘women’’ as ‘‘real historical beings’’ (1984, 5). The idea of gender raises the specter of ‘‘woman,’’ so how does one correct the gender-neutral errors of modern notions of subjectivity without getting embroiled in these hegemonic gender discourses? De Lauretis explains the problem: The feminist efforts have been more often than not caught in the logical trap set up by [a] paradox. Either they have assumed that ‘‘the subject,’’ like ‘‘man,’’ is a generic term, and as such can designate equally and at once the female and male subjects, with the result of erasing sexuality and sexual difference from subjectivity. Or else they have been obliged to resort to an oppositional notion of ‘‘feminine’’ subject defined by silence, negativity, a natural sexuality, or a closeness to nature not compromised by patriarchal culture. (161) Here again is spelled out the dilemma between a poststructuralist genderless subject and a cultural feminist essentialized subject. As de Lauretis points out, the poststructuralist alternative is constrained in its conceptualization of the female subject by the very act of distinguishing female from male subjectivity. The dilemma is that if we degender subjectivity, we are committed to a generic subject, and if we define the subject in terms of gender, articulating female subjectivity in a space clearly distinct from male subjectivity, then we become caught up in an oppositional dichotomy controlled by a misogynist discourse. A gender-bound subjectivity seems to force us to revert ‘‘women to the body and to sexuality as an immediacy of the biological, as nature’’ (161). De Lauretis takes a large dose of social construction for granted, especially in its psychoanalytic variant. If the subject is constructed via discourse, then the feminist project cannot be simply to reveal ‘‘how to make visible the invisible.’’ Yet de Lauretis does not give up on the possibility of producing ‘‘the condition of visibility for a different social subject’’ (8–9). In her view, a nominalist position on subjectivity can be avoided by linking subjectivity to a Peircean notion of practices and a further theorized notion of experience (11). De Lauretis’s main thesis is that subjectivity, that is, what one ‘‘perceives and comprehends as subjective,’’ is constructed through a continuous process and ongoing constant renewal based on an interaction with the world, or, in a word, experience: ‘‘And thus [subjectivity] is produced not by external ideas, values, or material causes, but by one’s personal, subjective engagement in the practices, discourses, and institutions that lend significance (value, meaning, and affect) to the events of the world’’ (159). This is the process through which one’s subjectivity becomes engendered. In reality, subjectivity is neither overdetermined by biology nor by ‘‘free, rational, intentionality’’ but, rather, by experience, which she defines (via Lacan, Eco, and Peirce) as ‘‘a complex of habits resulting from the semiotic interaction of our ‘outer world’ and ‘inner world,’ the continuous engagement of a self or subject in social reality’’ (182).7 Given this definition, can we ascertain a ‘‘female experience?’’ Can we discern ‘‘that complex of habits, dispositions, associations, and perceptions, which engenders one as female?’’ (182). In a later work, de Lauretis claims that identity is constituted through a process in which one’s history ‘‘is interpreted or reconstructed by each of us within the horizon of meanings and knowledges available in the culture at given historical moments, a horizon that also includes modes of political commitment and struggle. ... Consciousness is, therefore, never fixed, never attained once and for all, because discursive boundaries change with historical conditions’’ (1986, 8). Agency consists in this process of interpretation, such that identities are not simply ‘‘prefigured ... in an unchangeable symbolic order,’’ or produced by external structures of meaning, or construed as merely ‘‘fragmented or intermittent,’’ that is, undecidable or always indeterminate. The individual has agency on this account but is also placed within ‘‘particular discursive configurations’’ (de Lauretis 1986, 9). Method turnAffirm the destruction of what we know to be a womanAlcoff ‘6 (Linda Martín Alcoff, Prof. of Philosophy at CUNY, Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self, Oxford Scholarship Online, LB) Applied to the concept of woman, poststructuralism’s view results in what I shall call nominalism: the idea that the category ‘‘woman’’ is a fiction without objective basis and that feminist efforts must be directed toward dismantling this fiction. ‘‘Perhaps ... ‘woman’ is not a determinable identity. Perhaps woman is not some thing which announces itself from a distance, at a distance from some other thing. ... Perhaps woman—a non-identity, non-figure, simulacrum—is distance’s very chasm, the out-distancing of distance, the interval’s cadence, distance itself’’ (Derrida 1978, 49). Derrida’s interest in feminism seems to stem from his belief, expressed above, that woman may represent a potential rupture in the discourses of hierarchy and the metaphysical violence of Kantian ontology. Because woman has in a sense been excluded from this discourse, it is possible to hope that she might provide a real source of resistance. But her resistance will not be at all effective if she continues to use the mechanism of logocentrism to redefine woman: her resistance will be effective only if she drifts and dodges all attempts to capture her. Derrida hopes that the following futuristic picture will come true: ‘‘Out of the depths, endless and unfathomable, she engulfs and distorts all vestige of essentiality, of identity, of property. And the philosophical discourse, blinded, founders on these shoals and is hurled down these depths to its ruin’’ (1978, 51). For Derrida, women have always been defined as a subjugated difference within a binary opposition: man/woman, culture/nature, positive/negative, analytical/intuitive. To assert an essential gender difference as cultural feminists do is to reinvoke this oppositional structure. The only way to break out of this structure, and in fact to subvert the structure itself, is to assert total difference, to be that which cannot be pinned down, compared, defined, and thus subjugated within a dichotomous hierarchy. Paradoxically, it is to be what is not. Thus feminists cannot demarcate a definitive category of ‘‘woman’’ without eliminating all possibility for the defeat of logocentrism and its oppressive power. Foucault similarly rejects all constructions of oppositional subjects—whether the ‘‘criminal,’’ ‘‘homosexual,’’ or ‘‘proletariat’’—as mirror images that merely reenforce and sustain the discursive influence of the contrasting term, the term by which they are defined and gain their meaning (e.g., the ‘‘normal citizen,’’ or ‘‘heterosexual’’). As Biddy Martin points out, ‘‘The point from which Foucault deconstructs is off-center, out of line, apparently unaligned. It is not the point of an imagined absolute otherness, but an ‘alterity’ which understands itself as an internal exclusion’’ (1982, 11). Following Foucault and Derrida, an effective feminism could only be a wholly negative feminism, deconstructing everything and refusing to construct anything. This is the position Julia Kristeva adopts, herself an influential poststructuralist. She says, ‘‘A woman cannot be; it is something which does not even belong in the order of being. It follows that a feminist practice can only be negative, at odds with what already exists so that we may say ‘that’s not it’ and ‘that’s still not it’ ’’ (1981b, 137; my italics). The problematic character of subjectivity does not mean, then, that there can be no political struggle, but that the struggle can have only a ‘‘negative function,’’ rejecting ‘‘everything finite, definite, structured, loaded with meaning, in the existing state of society’’ (166) Directory: file -> view view -> Western Europe after wwii view -> Author study: paul fleischman view -> Qpa1 7ela study Guide view -> Arctic Oil/Gas Neg view -> November 1970 Approximately 150,000-500,000 deaths Bhola Cyclone Bangladesh view -> Grade Level: 6 Unit of Study: Caribbean glce view -> Citation: Duffield, Katy view -> Table of Contents Lesson # view -> Chinese Wind Energy Disad Download 0.87 Mb. Share with your friends:
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