PROPHETS

I take it back. This is what I tell myself, as I answer questions about the relevance of Valerie Solanas’s radical feminism for today’s women (and men) posed to me in an interview by Johan Vardrup, a journalist with the Danish newspaper Berlingske Tidende. What I take back is my statement made exactly 40 days ago in a post, Dust Cult, about the small chance that I might get some of my research into the popular media. As with my writing, so with my research: it divides waters and opinions into three: there are those who adore it, there are those who detest it, and then there are the few who fall in love with it. This often makes me feel like a prophet whose name shall remain nameless, but whom we all know to have been known for getting ideas while wandering in the desert 40 days. (There are other examples as well of the significance of the number 40, for some.)

I want to be clear so I offer Johan what I think is a coherent narrative. I begin with some tedious background declarative sentences: as we know, when Solanas achieved her moment of fame which culminated with the shooting of Andy Warhol in 1968, her now classic and iconic manifesto SCUM (the acronym refers to the Society for Cutting Up Men) was not exactly considered a work of art or politics in any significant way. Quite the contrary, many feminists at the time, who knew Solanas, were not so keen on identifying with her radical propositions which included the idea of getting rid of men all together.

Then I get to the core of the matter and advance the suggestion that we should certainly keep re-valuing Solanas today precisely because of her spark of genius in recognizing a number of things regarding the general predicament of being a woman in the 60s. She wrapped the problem that had no name in a particularly interesting way: SCUM Manifesto is a work which not only suggests, but also performs the idea that not only politics, but also art should be the prime business of women. Art and politics together, inseparable, and indissociable. We find in Solanas three concerns which support her artsy activism.

First, there is the question of language. As any writer who is really good, Solanas understood that there is something in language that represents men and women differently. For example, the prevalent idea is that men are rational, hence they can write, whereas women are emotional, hence they ruin writing – and Solanas, one has to remember, saw herself primarily as a writer before she saw herself as a representative of the counter-culture movement. Solanas, and for that matter the rest of us, who don’t necessarily need to read Foucault but have enough common-sense, can easily see that language has an institutionalizing power. For example, those in dominant positions, usually men, will always justify their choice to be righteous at the expense of others. From that position it is easy to make a logical inference and say that what will be expected from those in inferior positions in relation to righteousness is some sort of virtue. Just look at the representations of gender in 40s and 50s movies. In her manifesto, one of the first things that becomes apparent and clear is that Solanas hates being virtuous. And a good thing she does, so that we can all be inspired. There’s nothing symmetrical in the relation of men’s (ultimatelly emotional sense of) righteousness to women’s (ultimately rational) virtues, or their so-called lack of it.

Second, while Solanas sees women as being interested in ethics in comparison to men, whom she thinks have no sense of justice, she is not interested in moral issues. Any woman today, in fact, can’t afford to waste her time asking questions that are not political in their thrust. So there is something liberating and challenging about the attempt to occupy the position between art and politics, bypassing moral philosophy that has no real answers for the question of choice and self-interest. Those that have the power are also the ones who set the agenda for who, or what is to serve whose, or what interests.

Third, there is the question of the body. Solanas was a writer who, apart from identifying the discursive power in language, was also good at creating and conjuring good reading experiences. Anyone reading the first line in her manifesto is bound to go, wow! There is a force and passion in her writing that is extrapolated from and used against what is otherwise identified as male linear discourse, and hence devoid of emotion. Basically what she says is this: women need to do 4 things: overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation, and destroy the male sex. A very clear message. A message that makes us tremble (maybe with excitement) at the idea of a full-frontal collision with clichés. It’s the specialty of governments to serve us those in abundance. So Solanas is relevant today because she busts moral and political institutions from the position of the artist who has both, everything and nothing to lose. Neat complexity.

At the end of my tirade, Johan clearly wants me to stick to Solanas’s message as he thinks we find it in the content of her book, but I find myself resisting his insistence that what Solanas proposes is really non-sense, and hence without consequence or import for today’s women’s rights’ activism. I tell Johan that if he persisted in dissociating Solanas’s art from her politics then he obviously would have to draw the conclusion that Solanas’s ideas are utter crap, at least where politics is concerned. He is almost pleased, but I say, 'not so fast.' I tell him downright to stop asking me to corroborate his hypothesis, and instead focus on the value of the nonsensical in Solanas’s otherwise very sensibly written work. I ask him about his own experience of Solanas, and I find that what he gives me already proves my point that there is nothing in Solanas’s writing that invites her readers to settle for a sensible articulation of ideas. As her writing is, above all, performative – every manifesto is, or at least aims to be – today’s readers of her work will have to take their cue from her and start making a gesture towards articulating not the power behind her thought, but the power behind her language as a construct. As it turns out, Solanas is relevant, not only for me, right at this moment, but also for Johan, precisely because she makes a gesture towards considering what it means to be in this world on a premise that is original in its approach to the question of all things essential. What Solanas invites us both to consider is this: rather than saying, ‘this language constitutes me’, we should both prefer saying, or seek to be enabled to say: ‘this language sounds good to me.’ Women as political artists should not be a contradiction in terms.

Here I make an apposition and tell Johan out of the blue that I really think that Heiddeger would have been a better philosopher had he read Solanas. He would have had a different understanding of the notion of dasein. At that point, as Johan is trying to escape being under my scrutiny, I make another gesture: 'Johan, stop writing and think: if I gave you one single word, prophet, what would you say?' He ponders and answers with a question in turn. Fair enough. He is, after all, the journalist. ‘So, you see Solanas as a prophet,’ he advances? I reply, ‘no, that’s not what I mean. What I mean is for you to consider that what makes Solanas really interesting is not the possibility that she might have been a prophet, but the possibility that she was the kind of prophet who was very much aware of the fact that her interpreters were more powerful and, hence, more important than her.’ It is that awareness that turns me on. Johan balks, so I pose his final question to myself: 'why do I read Solanas? Because she makes me laugh. This disturbing laughter is what enables me to visualize Solanas as a Nietzschean Übermensch, ‘a mutant Nietzschean,’ as Avital Ronell suggests in her marvelous introduction to the 2004 edition. I tell Johan that I subscribe to Solanas’s call to have more ‘secure, self-confident, nasty, violent, selfish, independent, proud, thrill-seeking, free-wheeling, arrogant females’ at the top.

I perform a final gesture, and tell him that, as he ponders on what to select from my ranting, if this thought befalls him: ‘this Camelia Elias is something else,' as in 'she is outstanding,' just as Solanas was, I will have achieved not only my own performative aim, but also that of Solanas’s: to construe a narrative that goes against the grain, against the language that makes this society, as Solanas puts it: 'an utter bore.'

Solanas and I, regardless of the games we play, are not in the business of following Boethius: si tacuisses, philosophus manisses.

FASHION GEOMETRY

The fourth installment in the series The Power of Thought on the topic The Philosophy of Mathematics (the show is hosted by my colleague at Roskilde U. Vincent F. Hendricks) begins for me, per se, with the ending – with Hendricks’s announcement of the next week’s topic: on aesthetics. At that point I was already half way to heaven swooning over the beauty of all those ideas that have to do with notions such as infinity, the geometry of circles and spheres, and sensible skepticism that situates itself between reality and fiction.

Depending on the dominant discourse of each age marked by some sort of enlightenment, one tends to go with the swing of the pendulum either towards the one or the other side. This was emphasized equally beautifully by my other colleague at Roskilde U, Stig Andur Pedersen, called in to initiate us in some of these matters. He did a good job. His talk and examples of different worlds and dimensions – and how it’s difficult for us to stick our heads out of the dimension and world we find ourselves in, and perhaps test parallel worlds by observing them from our own vantage point – trigger the part of the imagination that has to do with pure beauty. While I intend to watch the next week’s installment, I can, however, already declare that on the question of aesthetics I’ve already gotten what I want.

Along this line, yet on a more concrete level, towards the end of the show I couldn’t help making the analogy between infinity and Vincent’s interminably long legs, all dressed in black. Good choice. Step into the black to paint infinity on cloth. This latter observation, it occurs to me, stems from the fact that what I imagine about math comes from an angle that is definitely not the manifestation of any formal training. For me, numbers that run off to form complex equations are pictures of juxtaposing different numerical textures that we find particularly in Judaic philosophy. The Kabbalists, for instance, were known to invent one baloney idea after the other about the uncertainty of numbers in relation to infinity by making recourse to fabrics. When Andur mentions the interesting dilemma regarding the container/contained dichotomy, his illustration of two sacks, one containing an infinite number of objects, the other empty but ready to be filled with some of these objects, I think, silk sack or linen sack? – that is, before I think of the problem that arises if we want to do a ‘complete’ job, alas, only to discover that we can never finish either emptying or filling the containers. On another plane, I think there is something reassuring about Andur’s potential reaction to my associations, had I been one of his pupils: ‘ignorance, my dear, is bliss.’ Especially when it’s well dressed.

What I liked about this particular show is the fact it threw the uninitiated in the philosophy of mathematics right into the core of what is most interesting: the question of uncertainty. Hendricks started with his specialty: a quote regarding the relation of philosophy to mathematics: in philosophy we have aims that don’t have rules; in mathematics we have rules that don’t have aims. So we shoot aimlessly but think about the act in formal terms. Grammars of creation. The philosophy of mathematics is thus the philosophy of the impossible in the possible, and the possible in the impossible.

For those in need of scenarios, choreographies, and costumes, the good news about imagining abstract situations is that they always relate to some concrete reality. We make analogies between dreams and numbers. Take my meeting the other day with my bank manager. While he was trying to explain to me alternatives for a major loan for the beautiful apartment I’ve just bought outside the university – so I can be closer to the universe, obviously – all I could think and dream about was the probability of winning the lottery and hence pay with cash for my extravaganza. I said to myself that that event is probably as likely as my figuring out Riemann’s hypothesis. Now, there was an analogy. Since its inception by Bernard Riemann in 1859, mathematicians have been working to find a proof for it. Riemann’s hypothesis seeks to explain where every single prime number to infinity will occur. Karl Sabbagh’s book Dr Riemann’s Zeros (2003) explains also by anecdote how the ‘simplicity’ of a number such as zero has made it into a prize. An American foundation offers 1 million US dollars to the first person to demonstrate that the hypothesis is correct, so the joke is that many mathematicians are now 'stalking' Riemann’s conjecture by trying out different disguises. (See also Dan Rockmore’s Stalking the Riemann Hypothesis (2005)).

I’ll take my cue from Hendricks: keep wearing black, escape down the spiral, and come out on top from the other side, ready to hijack the geometry of money.

ATTITUDES

I've just returned from France where I've been at a conference on The Cultural Kernel. For those interested in playful academic writing that draws on collaboration, in this case par excellence, may have a look at a preview of my paper Hard-core Divas Hit the Stone: Sharon, Gertrude, Lynn. I've chosen to pre-publish the piece on the Atlantic Community's site, as there was popular demand for it. Some people can't wait for the print version in the journal Imaginaires, so there.

So I have collaboration on my mind. In respect to the conference I was already grateful to my colleague at Roskilde U. for his generous contribution in terms of wordplay in my essay. Hartmut Haberland is one of those few people who can actually read, so, when he reads my stuff, which I sometimes share with him because he likes it, he always has an insight that I can use, right then and there. So I give, and he gives back. We are both language enthusiasts, and we are both generous. In the French context, I particularly enjoy taking the idea of generosity at a performative level, so I give the audience in Reims a smash performance that includes an intertwining of embedded roles to play: Gertrude Stein, Lynn Emanuel, Sharon Stone, myself, and Hartmut are all playing the roles of divas who know a thing or two about dramatic grammars.

So I have play on my mind. So far so good, I tell myself, being aware of the fact that even though the conference was over, I was still playing a role - that of a devout church-goer. I find myself standing in the Reims cathedral attending the mass and being moved to tears by the organ and the singing. I like this role, especially as it affords me some counter leeway - I'm not sentimental. I'm pissed at the vicar for dragging it too long and interfering with what I came there for - the silence, or in its absence, the sound of baroque technology.

Next door to the cathedral, however, while playing the role of the champagne connoisseuse, I realize that what I have to say is not heard by the seller. He constantly turns to my husband and inquires: qu'est-ce que vous aimez, monsieur, Pol Roger - a brand I mention as it fits what I can afford - où le Gosset - another brand I want to buy. Le monsieur in this case, couldn't be bothered less about what we bought as he hardly ever drinks. If he does it's coca-cola. Fair enough. Of course, there is always something that can save the damsel in distress who, yet again, has to put up with the French and their stupid assumptions that it must be the man in the house who is always in the know in drinking matters - and all other matters, now that I come to think of it. That something is my credit card. As I swing it, I say, thank you Marx for the illuminations, and enjoy the man's distress: merci beaucoup madame. I'm out of the church so I murmur: up yours.

Next, as I like to keep it simple, I declare my wish to eat raw oysters, uncontaminated by dressing and other such abominations, and drink a lot of champagne at the Grand Café, Le Spécialiste des Moules. But I need to go to the bathroom first. My hands feel dirty after having been coerced into keenly rubbing my plastic money. By the toalette, a cleverer man than the champagne cretin, and one who could obviously identify a diva who was not kidding, pulls himself most courteously aside to let me pass, and starts explaining: "this room, my dear madam, is occupied. The one next to it is not so good, but please, try the third one. You should like that one for sure." My goodness, I was beginning to think that except for a few other people I know, I must be the last person on earth who knows a thing or two about performing good manners in that unmistakably genuine, yet blunt way that combines elementary social intelligence with the aesthetics of being. A votre santé, monsieur!

When in Reims stick with the bathrooms. It is not always shit that goes in and out of them.

FUZZY PERCEPTIONS

I’m tempted to say that I feel a moral obligation to continue writing a short note on the 10 installments in the series The Power of Thought on the Danish DK 4 program hosted by my colleague at Roskilde U, Vincent F. Hendricks. I’ve started last week with a first comment which I can boil down to this: on the program: great, if you want to know some essential things about philosophy: on the first topic: a hassle, if you are not into moral philosophy. I endorse some views where morality is concerned, especially when I want to use morality to my own ends (as everyone else does, as established in my previous blog called uninspiringly on purpose Morality). Like right now. I want to defend my choice to comment on the show because Hendricks himself, the host of the program, has given me his blessing to say whatever crosses my mind. He doesn’t know what he had just bargained for when I last saw him, but as any good merchant, who is willing to play the game, he takes risks without hesitating. Smart move.

The topic this time around is consciousness and subjectivity. Dan Zahavi introduces us to some key notions and I like the premise from the beginning. Unlike in moral philosophy where the aim and research is directed towards understanding everything (and I’m suspicious of those that understand everything; just think of Bush), here the scope is more modest: if we can understand anything at all about the workings of the mind, that would already be more than enough. About consciousness: we know nothing. About subjectivity: we know nothing. In my opinion this is already much more interesting. I’m attracted to the way in which the ‘nothing’ conjures the ‘already’. It points to something Zahavi came around to quasi articulating towards the end of the show when he suggested that there is a relation of dependency in phenomenology that needs to concern us. In a system of relations we can start by looking at ourselves (1) not just inwardly, as if we were some ‘pure’ subjects whose condition of constitution depends on nothing but our own intelligence or some similarly idiotic idea, but also (2) in relation to the system of which we are part, and (3) in relation to others perceiving the system and ourselves in it. Says he, almost adopting a Derridean posture: there is always already a first person, second person, and third person point of view in the constitution of subjectivity. Here is a scenario: if Wittgenstein gives me a headache (here the enunciating subject 'I' is also the first person who has firsthand access to the pain), it doesn’t necessarily follow that somebody else, especially a scientist who happens to ask me to submit my head to a scanner, cannot have (some) access to that pain (thus offering objective second person enunciations that may constitute me and my pain; usually we can’t feel the pain of others, which judging by Hendricks’s reaction, is something that he and the rest of us are grateful for).

On the question about the relation of consciousness to language, Zahavi, again goes with the ‘nothing’. Smart move. Can a stone think? Good question. Implicitly he talks again about the relational aspect between the thinking subject and an object. Here is a second scenario: I ask the stone: stone, what is your opinion about subjectivity? The stone is silent. Insofar as it has no language, it cannot be aware of its own existence, we may, however fallaciously, conclude. The evidence is too weak for a contrary argument. So we dismiss it, and get on with the program (unless, we have to mend our pain, if a stone has just proved its existence by hitting us on our heads).

What I like about theories of consciousness is the implicit argument that we all play chess with each other. You are conscious of your existence or your thinking only to the extent that you can figure yourself as a relational self. What conditions your subjectivity is the extent to which you can calculate your opponent’s next move. Subjectivity is all about observing. And thank God for that – I can imagine how uninteresting life would be, if we were all to decide that we need no others, especially the strange ones, to tell us something about ourselves. In this relation it was interesting to note that when Hendricks asked Zahavi about the unconscious, he was quick to point out that when philosophers talk about the unconscious in theories of consciousness they don't refer to Freud's odd theories. Judging by Zahavi's body language, concentrating so that his tongue wouldn't slip, it looked to me like he was trying not to think of his mother. In phenomenology, the witch you dream about, is definitely not your mother.

On perception, can we have more fuzzy logic in it?

MORALITY

I'm watching the first episode out of ten in the new series on Danish television, DK4, Tankens Magt (The Power of Thought). This is a very good initiative started by my colleague at Roskilde U, Vincent F. Hendricks. Hendricks is a professor of formal philosophy interested in the relation between math, logic, and the everyday life. As far as I can gather, one of the aims of the series is to demystify the role of philosophy as far as the masses are concerned. The argument is that we use philosophy every day, even when we don’t always begin our mornings with questioning what the meaning of life is. So philosophy, apart from posing big metaphysical questions, also poses small questions, self-evident questions, irrelevant questions, interesting questions, boring questions, subtle questions, disturbing questions, comforting questions, appealing questions, revolting questions. The list can go on.

The first out of ten male philosophers on the program hosted by Hendricks himself is another colleague Jesper Ryberg. He kicks off the series with his specialty, moral philosophy. This is all very good. He talks eloquently and engagingly about what we think morality is, why it is relevant that we pose moral questions, and why we should care at all to be interested in moral issues. Again, this is all very good. His examples are taken from everyday life discourse, such as the following moral dilemma: why do we tend to think that artificial insemination is more natural to go for when the couple who needs it is heterosexual rather than gay? This is even better, but towards the end of the 30 minutes it occurs to me that the two potentially more interesting questions in what I myself think is the least fascinating branch of philosophy, namely moral philosophy, are eschewed: choice and self-interest.

In my opinion morality is not a philosophical question, but a political one. People always morally defend their choices as long as it serves their self-interests. It is as simple as that. Even a 5 year-old can grasp this self-evident truth. Morally defending one’s agenda is one of those daily activities that people and institutional organs alike engage in, from the lowest ranking to the highest. Why it is morally defensible to send some soldiers to Irak to kill some Muslims, while at the same time it is not very good to do the same on the streets in Copenhagen is really linked to the norms people are being fed, in this case, by their nation states. Ryberg warns against such double standards, which is all very good, only, in reality there is no political system that is not already fraught with double standards. It’s the standard of all political standards to operate with double standards.

As a more bizarre occurrence, and perhaps as a counter to moral philosophy’s failure to go beyond self-evidence, Ryberg mentions that morality preoccupies all sorts of philosophers. Some even go so far as to scan people’s brains in order to investigate their responses to moral dilemmas when asked to take a stance. As far as I’m concerned, what is being measured is really people’s norms, not their ability to demonstrate that biology rules over governments. On morality, I’d say, let’s go once more around the block.