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! :)
Chiapas / Zapatistas
Hrm... I was hoping Emily would head up a conversation about this (I probably should have actually said that, ay?) Anyway, I was left a little groundless after reading the Chiapas chapter... I feel like i didn't completely understand all that was going on and I felt like I was hoping for more info on Haiti and just understanding that one issue more deeply and *poof*, nope, on to Chiapas... Anyhow, it just kind of increased my sense of "There's so much going on that I know nothing about!!!"
Anyhow, I'm still pretty focused on my consumerism stuff and I guess that's taking the foreground for me... Emily, what did you say you were going to present?
Adjust : Sodomy Is.
Adjust : Sodomy Is.Hopefully my telling of all this will give it justice (and accuracy), but I thought it was relevant to class :)
For any of you who didn't see this..... Story is that in response to some kind of small minded stuff and homophobia on campus, Pride Alliance has been doing a lot of chalking on the sidewalks, promoting their events...
A few people were offended by Pride's open advertising, and starting writing "Sodomy is Sin" near Pride's chalkings....
So Jess said she had a sleepless night thinking about what to do... the next morning (Thursday), she tackled some of the graffiti on the sidewalks 'erasing the Sin' (So it just said "Sodomy Is") And she spent a few hours painting this banner and figuring out how to hang it (on the overpass that goes to the fine arts building in front of the JC)
I saw it was still hanging at midnight on Thursday, and it was gone before one of Jess's friends came into the fine arts building at nine the next morning.... so, that's the scoop as I know it! :)
Arundhati Roy quote...
I just heard this at the tail end of the Democracy Now, May 23rd 2006 interview with Arundhati Roy... (the whole text /audio / video of the interview is available at Democracynow.org ... the whole interview is wonderful... packed with coolness...)
I like this quote because I feel like I've become less and less identified with "being an artist", yet, the same energy which fueled my art when it was at it's best is now behind more and more of everything I do and how I actually live my life... thought it was relevant to the class (and Makes me wonder why I still haven't read Howard Zinn's "Artists in a Time of War"... hrm... new homework!)
AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask in our last 30 seconds: the role you see of the artist in a time of war?
ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, I think the problem is that artists are not a homogenous lot of people, and some of them are as rightwing and establishment as they can get, you know, so the role of the artist is not different from the role of any human being. You pick your side, and then you fight, you know? But in a country like India, I'm not seeing that many radical positions taken by writers or poets or artists, you know? It's all the seduction of the market that has shut them up like a good medieval beheading never could.
Chapters 1 & 2 (Catch-up!)
I guess I wanted to at least cite some things I appreciated in Chapter 1…
I liked what Farmer describes as the “exoticization” of suffering, and how it ‘others’ the victims of structural violence. (p. 40)
He goes on to talk about liberation theology, and I thought his description of it as dealing with suffering and meaning was interesting, so I poked around on Wikipedia to see what I found. That kind of led to my understanding that liberation theology is trying to emulate Jesus’ role as liberator and establisher of justice, and that some of the people who are involved with liberation theology are more involved in Christian socialism, which lead me to social gospel… who knew all this cool stuff was out there? I love Wiki.
Anyhow… the depictions of the suffering in the Guantanamo Bay stories are really terrifying. This made me reflect a lot on the way media distorts news—“55 percent [of those polled] said [immigration for Haitians] should be more difficult. After a decade during which less than 0.5 percent of Haitian applicants were granted asylum, one wonders how much more difficult it could be.” (p68) I was impressed when Farmer later followed up with the comparisons with Cuba. I feel blessed to have recently made a friend in www.democracynow.org , which has lots of multimedia downloads and news feeds of news that I imagine is at least a little bit more balanced… Anyhow, I guess one of the issues really relevant to welcoming more refugees and people immigrating from averse conditions is what the author quotes one lawyer saying: “We need to make it cost-effective [for the US Government].” I was left wondering that if we had more open doors, would the racism and deprivation and human-rights violations just take place increasingly inside US Borders… Farmer promises to present ‘possible ideas for solutions’ in the book, so I really hope that includes ways that our political and economic structures all over the world can grow to fulfill the needs of those who have been most neglected in the world. Anyway, for now I’m just left thinking “Down with the media!” (except wikimedia…)
Blog beginning
hi! I'm excited to venture more into this class... I think there was a commentlast class about how people often didn't want to educate themselves about these global power issues because they were affraid they would have to change their lifestyles and do something... I was left thinking "Yeah, I feel like I'm affraid to learn too much too!" Anyhow, my main feeling is that there seems like so many issues that it's possible that they seem unrelated, and I feel like a lot of activists put their energy into different areas-- say, someone who is working for issues that they haven't connected in three different continents.
What I really want to understand for myself, the approach I want to take, is understanding how our consumerism in America effects different parts of the world that might be left as "producers" for our goods or be left in deprivation when we are living in abundance. This is a lot more relative for me because then I know how I can change my own life and educate others... it's more down to Earth for me than being an activist whose concerns all live on the other side of the world... I think there is a lot of potential for change in "enlightenned consumption"... it's definitely what I want to do research on :)
More later when I've read this weeks selections, I just wanted to put something up on the blog...
