Adrian Piper
This is my much-belated response to Adrian Piper’s article, Ideology, Confrontation and Political Self-Awareness. This article was kind of a treat, it seemed like something I would have loved to have given a read at any point in the past few years of my life, but with mid terms and the big presentation in this class, I kept putting it off until mid last week… “Doubt entails self-examination because a check on the plausibility of your beliefs and attitudes is a check on all the constituents of the self.” Yeah! That’s my kind of jargon! This made me wonder about the purpose of beliefs, the ideology(ies) that we all live with… the author seems to suggest that beliefs are the most primal, keystone elements of identity (“constituents of the self”) that’s a pretty hard statement to disagree with or to prove, it sort of forgoes debate and goes right to a realm of psychoanalysis or philosophy… it is, in a word, an ideology… and, in the grand style of the best of devil’s advocates, I’m going to go ahead and say that Piper’s whole essay is based on her own ideologies, and that’s its biggest restraint, she doesn’t compromise her exposition of the implications of her claims to support their basis (and I wonder if someone can support statements the necessity of confronting oneself to achieve self-awareness. One particularly rough spot for me was: “Here, you defend your ideology by convincing yourself that the hard work of self-scrutiny has an end and a final product, i.e. a set of true, central and unique, defensible beliefs about some issue … since there is no such final product…” I was at a loss when I read that… it’s so obviously an example of Piper’s own paradigm, which borders on nihilism in that no one can ever really know how they feel about an issue, with it’s paired implication, no one can ever really understand an issue (or, even more challenging, the author’s implication that no one can understand oneself…) I’m a bit versed in different philosophies, and I’m pretty content with ideas like infinity and emptiness and all that, but I don’t think those are mutually exclusive to an idea of “arrival,” of a completed process, and extinction (the literal translation of the Sanskrit word “nirvana”…)In my conflict resolution class, we talked about the way that conflict was pervasive in our culture and our mentalities by the choices of words we use (italics are mine)—“Unless you are confronted with a genuine personal crisis, or freely choose to push deeper and ask yourself more disturbing questions about the genesis and justification of your own beliefs, your actual degree of self-awareness may remain relatively thin.” For Piper, this article relays her sense of immediacy and violence in the process of self unfolding (my term, this is what I related the growth of self awareness to)… why does there need to be some sort of cognitive dissonance for consciousness to expand, for opinions to change? Piper later qualifies this statement by saying that this is how it is “for most people” but doesn’t explain the quality of the person or realization that doesn’t necessitate, in Piper’s view, this kind of confrontation, which was, I felt, an important subject, the antithesis to Piper’s paper, which was given a superficial treatment by casing it as the qualifier to a repetitive assertion of the general theory of confrontation.
The “unexamined life” that Piper seems to be challenging “is blindness to the genuine needs of other people, coupled with the arrogant and dangerous conviction that you understand those needs better than they do…” while I appreciate the compassion here, it’s still in a language of conflict and debt—as if we somehow owe it to one another to intuit each others needs… while service is my aspiration, I would think it a delusion of grandeur to suppose that I could precisely anticipate other’s needs (via auto-ideological confrontation or otherwise) rather this sort of meeting others needs comes from my doing my best to do what I see fit, not a feeling that if I only challenge my every move enough that I will reach some kind of ascetic transcendence that would make me a better servant—that would be, in my language, a god complex.
That being said, I loved the article and I think it’s really important for people to participate in auto-ideological confrontation (as far as I know, I just made that word up, but I like it so I’m going to use it!). I think people live blindly like they know it all, and I think to really be “in the know” means to know you know nothing, or, at least, not much… I think Piper calls this one of the hidden catches in the process of self confrontation—that one eventually gets to a point where they feel they have reacherd the end of the process of self confrontation, but nonetheless, I think it becomes a habit after a while, and when it’s part of your attitudes, then you are “finished”—you don’t have to willfully engage in the process, rather it sort of engages you…
Epilogue:
Wow... I just read her wiki pretty impressive career! Giving her work with Kant and practicing yoga for 40+ years, she could probably toast me on the philosophy, anyway, that's the fun part about being devil's advocate :) I think that that's my way of helping others engage in 'auto-deological confrontation'!
Also, her art which the article doesn't talk about at all, is pretty good... worth checking out! :)
posted by Unknown @ 11:04 PM
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