the Beatles on scientific epistemology

c'mon...tell me you see it too...

"Nowhere Man"

He's a real nowhere Man,
Sitting in his Nowhere Land,
Making all his nowhere plans
for nobody.

Doesn't have a point of view,
Knows not where he's going to,
Isn't he a bit like you and me?

Nowhere Man, just listen,
You don't know what you're missin',
All the world's at your command.

He's as blind as he can be,
Just sees what he wants to see,
Nowhere Man can you see me at all?

Nowhere Man, don't worry,
Take your time, don't hurry,
Leave it all 'till somebody else
lends you a hand.

Doesn't have a point of view,
Knows not where he's going to,
Isn't he a bit like you and me?

Nowhere man please listen,
you don't know what you're missin'
Nowhere Man, the world is at your command

He's a real Nowhere Man,
Sitting in his Nowhere Land,
Making all his nowhere plans
for nobody.
Making all his nowhere plans
for nobody.
Making all his nowhere plans
for nobody.

fish are friends (not food?)

If you've got a toddler living in your house, you recognize that line. Finding Nemo's character Bruce the Shark's 12-step program for "nice sharks, not mindless eating machines" begins with a pledge that concludes with the mantra: "fish are friends, not food." Nemo is Clare's current TV obsession; so Bruce the Shark's fish-friendly mantra has been repeated about three times a day for the past week during Clare's mid-winter break. (Don't worry, we've done other stuff too--fingerpainting, trips to the playground, a quick jaunt out to Princeton to say goodbye to friends moving overseas, that sort of thing. It's not all glassy-eyed TV coma around here.) She's a mimicry machine these days and so of course, not only is Bruce repeating his mantra three times a day, Clare wants to remind me too: fish are friends, not food.

We also made a short little shopping trip and picked up Eric Carle's Mister Seahorse for Clare. It's a beautiful book, with a cute little story about (of course) Mr. Seahorse and other various fish for whom the "daddies" are the primary nurturers of their offspring. [pause for tangential children's book critique: while I love the role reversal that is the theme of the book, the Mr. and Mrs. names for all the fish pairs irk me a bit, and when Mr. Bullhead tells Mr. Seahorse proudly that his eggs have hatched and he is now "babysitting," I can't help but hear echoes of a friend's anecdote about the absurdity of calling a daddy's care of his own kids "babysitting."] Mr. Seahorse, who keeps the seahorse eggs in his pouch; Mr. Kurtus, who sticks them on his head; Mr. Pipe, who keeps them on his belly; and Mr. Tilapia, who carries them in his mouth.

On this week's menu: pecan-crusted tilapia.

I'm not sure Clare will eat it. She might refuse on toddler-intuited principle. And hell, even my vegetarian baby sister will eat fish occasionally. (Pesky-vegetarian.) (Just kidding, mei-mei. You are a delightful vegetarian who makes a kick-butt curried butternut squash bisque.)

But the problem's worse than whether or not I can convince my toddler to ignore her Nemo-indoctrination and eat her fish, because the real issue to decide beforehand is whether or not I should. Aside from the fact that my Shoprite-bargain frozen tilapia fillets hail from China rather than sustainably managed US farms, (damn! should've known), the prior philosophical dilemma of how we define food and how to eat well are raised.

This is an ongoing negotiation for me. Not convinced yet that vegetarianism is mandated, I try to at least consume meat responsibly; this means, basically, eating less meat, and whenever possible, taking into account the practices that provide our meat. (These two things are mutually reinforcing, since free-range/organic/sustainable meat is more expensive.)

Fish are friends, not food: it's a curious mantra when you get down to it, the opposition of "friends" and "food" as categories. It reminds me of one of Mary Warren's seven multileveled criteria for personhood, specific personal relationship. She argues that even if you don't consider cats (for example) as "persons" categorically speaking, you're pretty likely to consider your own cat a "person," or something like a person, because you have a relationship with that specific cat. Now this makes sense, but by itself, the logic is inadequate. The big loophole of course is that we could turn it around and say, "I don't know you personally therefore you are not a person"--leading to a great rationalization for, say, killing people in a war. Just for example. We have a word for this of course: dehumanization. (Warren's proposal balances this criterion with several others, so this is not a criticism of her proposal as a whole.)

Fish are friends, not food: what kind of relationship is necessary with another creature to preclude categorizing it as 'food'? Pretty much everyone will stop short of human cannibalism; pretty much everyone would refuse to eat their own pet; pretty much everyone would refuse to eat other animals of the same kind as their pet. This is true even in places in China where dog is an acceptable meat for some dishes; I learned in Changsha that there is a particular breed of dog for eating, and it is not a dog one would keep as a pet--it has its own distinct ontological category. I wonder if people who keep aquariums feel queasy about eating fish. I bet most of them, like dog-eaters, accommodate by drawing more specific ontological boundaries.

What will I tell Clare? Will she connect the pecan-crusted tilapia fillet on her plate to Nemo and Mr. Tilapia, the good daddy fish with his mouth full of baby fish eggs? Or will there be an obvious and distinct ontological boundary provided, courtesy of the rounded edge of her plate--separating food from the rest of the natural world--to prevent her from making that connection?

The truth is, "there is no way to eat and not to kill, no way to eat and not to become-with other mortal beings to whom we are accountable, no way to pretend innocence or transcendence or a final peace" (D. Haraway, When Species Meet, 295). But this admission is no blank check, as if by acknowledging that we live via the practice of consuming our others, we put ourselves beyond redemption and therefore accountability. It matters how we eat, by what lives and in what we ways we sustain ourselves. Recognizing that the category of "food" overlaps with the categories of other creatures with whom we have relationship (acknowledged or not, functional or dysfunctional, personal or not, sustainable or unsustainable) is part of what it must mean to well, and not blindly. Bruce reassures us: "I am a nice shark, not a mindless eatin' machine." We too can at least aspire to be more than mindless eating machines. That fillet in my freezer is a fish: once a living, swimming creature with physical needs and competencies and intents, different from my own, but no less vital from the fish's point of view. Perhaps that fish once carried his baby fish eggs in his mouth, like Mr. Tilapia of Eric Carle's story. If Clare can make that connection, how can I deny it? Certainly not without distorting reality for the sake of maintaining a false purity of boundaries in pursuit of the innocence Donna Haraway assures me does not exist--and which, in the end, if she learns anything from me, she will dismantle as an adult. Maybe it's too difficult a truth for a toddler to understand, that killing and eating cannot be hygienically separated...and yet, Nemo's mommy gets eaten, as do all his siblings, at the very beginning of that Disney narrative; and Bruce the Shark's mantra is bookended by Nigel the pelican's dry comment, "Fish gotta swim, birds gotta eat."

same and different

Clare's really into this now: same, and different. [I'm not; in the "game time" segments on Noggin, invariably the different object is always missing something. Not just different, but deficient: an implicit message that to deviate means to be lesser. To be different is to lack. "One of these things is not like the others, one of these things just doesn't belong"...we've updated the words nowadays to be less harsh, but the message is still there.]

She really likes having two pink pacifiers, so that she can point out that they are the same, but the blue and the pink 'fiers are different. Yes, my daughter chose to abbreviate pacifier into "fire" instead of "passy." Hmmm.

She has been doing this for a long time with her stuffed animals, though without the categorical labels of "same and different." Awhile back she started intuitively grouping them into "families" by kind, and then defining their familial relationships by relative size. Daddy Tick and baby Tick were the first. (In case you're wondering, The Tick was--is--my favorite cartoon, dating back to college days and one of the few happy legacies of an ill-fated relationship. I have two Tick figurines, one large and one small.) Then the trend spread to other groups, like The Elmos, of which we have three: Mommy Elmo, who despite her diaper is still the largest, Brother Elmo and Baby Elmo. And her doggies. And her bears. And well, anything at all really. I'm always having to explain that the categories of "big" and "little" are expressed as "daddy" and "baby" in Clare-ish.

Recently, however, Clare has bucked the trend and announced cross-stuffed-species familial ties. Two frogs now have a baby duck. (She has also started using a gender-inclusive word for sibling relationship: brister, though Brent doesn't believe me.)

Donna Haraway would be proud. And so am I.

Maybe I'm overthinking it (oh, who would believe that? of course I'm overthinking it! why else would I have a blog?), but I find in this the same evidence for openness to relationship and capacity to identify with the other that I saw in Clare's unhesitating finger when she points to the little black boy holding his daddy's hand and says "that's Clare, that's Daddy." Does it matter that she's female, blond and blue-eyed and looks nothing like that little boy? Does it matter that two frogs will never beget a duck? Only if we make it matter. Only if someone comes along and tells Clare, "no, honey, that's not you. you're a white girl." Only if someone comes along and tells her that frogs could never love baby ducks. Because they're not the same, they're different.

I won't be. I won't be telling her anything, because on this matter I think she's telling me.

And now I'm telling you.

Frogs can love baby ducks.

and so it begins

The mantra seems to be that we as a people have again affirmed the American Dream narrative in a new and rather more significant way: that anyone can indeed become anything, whatever they want, in this country. Well, that plays well. An oldie but a goodie, and everyone knows how to dance to that tune, so I reckon we should just go with it.

But for me personally, the major achievement represented by the election of a man named Barack Hussein Obama is somewhat different than the above. I just heard an exchange on MSNBC with some guy named Tucker Carlson who kept insisting that celebrating the election as "historic" (meaning, it's important that we have elected our first African-American president) tends toward the implication that all those who didn't vote for Obama now find themselves on "the wrong side of history" (an interesting new euphemism employed in this conversation to avoid using the blunt label, "racist"--because despite it all, we still cannot discuss race and racism in this country without euphemisms). Carlson insisted on also at the same time interpreting the election in pragmatic terms--that many people did not self-consciously cast "a historic vote" but simply a vote for the candidate that they agreed with, whose policies they judged to be right for the country, so that people "on the wrong side of history" aren't made to feel like racists.

I think he's right at the same time that he's wrong.

The real achievement of this election is that people did cast a pragmatic vote for the candidate they agreed with, whose policies they judged to be better for the country--and that this judgment could be made across multiple demographics without necessary reference to the identity category of "African-American." To separate the pragmatic from the historic vote is a mistake, because it misses the point that up till now, a black man was always black first, and then whatever else second. Now we have proven--not just to the world, but to ourselves as a country--that we can put aside the category, the label, the box, and make a judgment based on more than that.

This is the real achievement of the campaign itself, and it would have stood as monumental even with a loss at the end of it, though it would have been harder to see, and harder to celebrate, without the final vindication of a win.

I'm not saying that it doesn't matter that Obama is the son of a black Kenyan and a white Kansan. It does--but it doesn't matter in the same way that it would matter in the old, constricting framework of identity politics as usual. He didn't win because he was black. Neither did he win despite being black. I think enough Americans experienced the breakthrough that this fact of his biography did not preclude a common vision, did not mean that he could never see from a white person's point of view, that a white person could never see from a black, or Hispanic-, or Asian-American, or even international point of view. We can, at least in part, if we choose to try. We can relocate our gaze, in a gesture of kinship. This is the change that has become real, because we finally believed enough in the possibility to choose it.

Identities, Cyborgs, Children's Books and Politics

And just like that, my worlds collide. Dissertation, children's books, presidential campaigns. An implosion Donna Haraway could be proud of!

Clare and I sometimes read a book before bedtime titled, Only You. It's a little love poem from a parent to a child, with lovely illustrations of waking up, playing, bathtime, bedtime--the daily routines which are the stuff of life lived together. Some of the pictures are of mommies and babies. Some are of daddies and little kids. Some are white. Some are black. Clare will often point to the mommy and say "mama." She used to point to the baby and say "baby"--now she points and says, "Clare." And then you turn the page, and see the illustration of a black man holding his little boy's hand as they walk through autumn leaves. And Clare points and says, "that's Daddy." And "that's Clare."

What I love about this is that she either doesn't notice at all, or doesn't know that it matters, that these pictures don't look like her or her Daddy. What defines the correspondence is not the identity of the people--it's the relationship depicted between them.

Clare is already beyond identity politics. I wish to God the rest of us really were, and I pray to God that somehow, I can mother her in a way that protects her from being dragged into them.

You're probably tired of hearing about cyborgs and transgressed, permeable, blurred boundaries from me. But all that ontological talk, while sometimes useful, obscures the real motivation for introducing cyborg discourse. The cyborg is, always was, a political figure. The cyborg is meant to signal the hope of breakdown of identity politics. After all, when you have no stable, categorical identity with which to label yourself, you can't really engage in the Us vs. Them of identity politicking. When you know you are both Us and Them...who do you pick a fight with? How do you choose sides?

Haraway writes, “With the hard-won recognition of their social and historical construction, gender, class, and race cannot provide the basis for belief in ‘essential’ unity…Gender, race or class consciousness is an achievement forced on us by the terrible historical experience of the contradictory social realities of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism. And who counts as ‘us’ in my own rhetoric? Which identities are available to ground such a potent political myth called ‘us,’ and what could motivate enlistment in this collectivity?” ("Cyborg Manifesto," in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, 155). To decode: when you realize that there's nothing essential about the identity of Woman, Blacks, The Poor--a realization easy to come by when you fit into multiple categories at once, since essential identity is presumably a coherent unity, who you really are--then you also realize that there's nothing automatically binding you together with other women, blacks, poor people in some mystical, magical, transcendent understanding. If there's understanding, it's forged through the difficulties of navigating similar social/historical circumstance--the same thing that categorizes you in a lump to begin with. But that understanding must be actively constructed, not assumed. Assuming those essential identities as the political starting point not only accepts the -ism spawned systems which birthed them, it opens the door to what Haraway describes as "endless splitting and searches for a new essential identity" (155).

The cyborg sidesteps this dizzying circle of identity politics with its tautological reasoning and categorical essentialism, because the cyborg knows from the beginning that its identity doesn't fit in the available identity boxes. So: "From the perspective of cyborgs, freed of the need to ground politics in 'our' privileged position of the oppression that incorporates all other dominations, the innocence of the merely violated, the ground of those closer to nature, we can see powerful possibilities... To recognize 'oneself' as fully implicated in the world, frees us of the need to root politics in identification, vanguard parties" (176).

I don't need to be like you to work together with you. I don't need to have the same categorical identity as you to have the same goals. I don't need to feel like we are, in some deep way, the same.

Andrew Sullivan sees Barack Obama as having skipped the dialectics of racial identity politics in this campaign. I said it long ago: he's the cyborg candidate.

But Sullivan says something else, too, something that I've been noticing more and more as the campaigns drag on and on. Identity politics may not be a part of Obama's campaign. But they have become a part of the McCain/Palin campaign.

When I blogged about Joe the Plumber's mythological existence--he's right up there with dragons, ghosties, Tinkerbell, and Santa Claus--this is what I was trying to express. Somehow, Joe the Plumber became the representative of Real America. Imagine--I mean, wow, the unprecedented move of choosing a white man to represent all American citizens. But beyond my knee-jerk gag reflex...the more terrible truth is that Joe the Plumber wasn't really meant to represent all American citizens. Joe the Plumber represents Real America, not all America. The America inside America: the small town values, the pro-America areas of America, the hard-working America, the patriotic America. We will fight for you, Real America. We understand you. We are just like you. As for Barack Obama, we don't know who he is. He has a weird middle name and lived overseas and his black preacher seems pretty pissed about stuff we don't want to talk about and there's that Weather Underground dude back in his hood in Chicago, also. So we are pretty sure he's not like you. And that means he won't be fighting for you.

How effective is it? Well, it's what we're used to. It's what we know: Us vs. Them is a game we get, a language we speak fluently. Tina Graham gets it: "'I never really thought about whether or not that I was racist, or however you want to put it,' said Tina Graham. She fears Obama would focus on African-Americans at the expense of poor white people like herself. 'It's just the fact that I think that he will represent them, and what they want, and what they need. ... They're his people, they're his race.'" (You can listen to the NPR story here.)

Is it racism? Maybe not. Maybe having a black friend saves you from having to claim that shameful label. Maybe it's just, as Sullivan puts it, "the reductio ad absurdum of political appeals based purely on cultural or ethnic identity." It's absurd all right. But it's also powerful.

Don't get me wrong. This sort of divisive identity politicking happens everywhere. Bill Maher trades in it every time he says there are two Americas, one progressive, European country trapped inside this backwards conservative evangelical country (I've heard this statement twice, once on Charlie Rose and once to Jon Stewart, who, to his credit, didn't seem to buy it). The simplistic antagonistic atheism of Maher meets its religious mirror image in the FotF 2012 letter. Despite the ideological gulf, they are indeed mirror images of the Same, mimicking each other in an endless recursion of self- and other-defeating suspicion.

In a presidential campaign that contains both the defeat and the revivification of identity politics, we have a choice. Do we, as a nation, succumb to the tempting, security-blanket familiarity of voting our Identity? Or do we take the huge step of recognizing that we don't need to have the same categorical identity to have the same goal of building together a liveable world, for everyone who lives in it? Can we follow the lead of a politician whose own personal identity, bridging the categories we like to think within, provides a starting point that sidesteps the necessity of Identification for political cooperation, whose campaign has steadily resisted drawing the boundaries between our various American identities that we all wish weren't there?

the cyborg candidate

Disclaimers:

1. This is not a post about the governor of California.


2. I'm no conspiracy theorist. Calling Obama the cyborg candidate doesn't mean I think he's remote controlled through a chip in his brain by extremists. (Although I expect that rumor's already circulating somewhere; last week I received a forward that Obama is the Anti-Christ. Which, as Scott Freeman points out, doesn't really tell you whether the Left Behind-ists will vote for or against him...)

So, now that the crazy options are out of the way you may be wondering just what the heck I do mean. Well, while I sincerely try to avoid discussing my dissertation topic when in polite company, I do occasionally vent my enthusiasm for the posthuman here on the blog.

But this cyborg stuff isn't all academic. In the beginning, the cyborg was political, not academic. And while this aspect of the cyborg may indeed have gotten "lost" along the way, it's not been lost on me; and the bottom line, evident in Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto, (or you may prefer the comic version), is that the cyborg is about dropping essentialisms and identity politics so we can get together and finally get some things done.

Now, does that sound familiar, anyone?

Before I go any further, let me unpack a bit. What is a cyborg? A cyborg is a creature that breaks down the ontological boundary between organism and machine: part organic, part mechanical. The word was coined in 1960 by a couple of scientists dreaming up ways to explore space; it seemed like a lot of trouble to engineer a mobile life-sustaining environment to meet all of the needs of the earth-bound human body...so they thought, why not engineer the body to dispense with those needs, or meet them some other way? Of course we haven't quite achieved this yet, although the cutting edge technology in things like prostheses and silicon chips that allow quadriplegics to manipulate computer cursors is pretty damn amazing. But that's not really the point. The point is, the cyborg represents a form of life that refuses to fit neatly into our conceptual categories: person/thing, alive/inanimate, human/machine, etc. The cyborg has a foot in both worlds, and to ignore that fact means pretending it doesn't exist, refusing to see it as it is.

Writers in postcolonial theology muse on cultural/social/racial hybridity in a parallel way: neither one category or the other, they forge identity out of between-ness, the both/and, the neither/nor. And this brings us to Obama, who is hybrid in a way similar to these postcolonial theorists: the son of a white mother and a black father.

The disappointing thing to me about the Rev. Wright stuff is not really in what the man said, or even how what he said was twisted around and used against, not him, but someone else...as if, should Joe Hays ever do/say something crazy prophetic, it would somehow reflect on me personally. (Joe, I know you're crazy prophetic all the time. Keep on.) No, what's disappointing to me is that this in effect reintroduces, with a vengeance, into the campaign discourse the very thing Obama has been seeking to transcend: identity politics. If he stands with Rev. Wright, then he's too black and scary for comfortable white folks, too revolutionary, too angry to be trusted...If he disowns Rev. Wright, then he's too white and scared for righteously angry black folks who understand the truth in the Reverend's prophetic utterances. It's all about trying to make Obama declare himself: are you white, or are you black? Are you or aren't you running as a black candidate, to become the first black President?

The fact that Obama's response to this provocation was a speech on race in America indicates to me that he gets it. It's not really enough to claim a hybrid pedigree personally, although I think it's evident that growing up with a sense of not knowing to which category you belong--and constantly being recategorized as the Other by everyone you come across--shapes your experience in a way that makes the limitations of those categories painfully obvious. Obama's not simply the cyborg candidate because he's the offspring of a black-white hybrid family. He's the cyborg candidate because, like Haraway, he realizes that it's not desirable or even possible to dream of uniting people on the basis of common identity anymore. That's not what we want. That's not the goal. It doesn't work. Haraway's point about the cyborg is that there's nothing basic, essential, on which we can unite. Haraway realized this in 1985, reflecting on the fragmentation of the feminist movement in the U.S. Even white women in America, who briefly came together and united on the basis of a fabricated common identity as Woman, found out the hard way that oops, we're actually a bunch of women who are all different...and that was before we learned the even harder lesson that we shouldn't have left out the black women, the Latina women, the Chinese- and Japanese- and Korean-American women (not Asian-American! Asia's a continent not an ethnicity!), all the women in other global contexts who have something to tell us about their own experiences and needs and hopes.

Obama articulates the same realization when he urges us to unite in order to work towards common goals despite differences in color, creed, and experience. What's so impressive about his candidacy is that he has somehow managed to do this--every CNN retrospective breakdown of every primary, you see votes busted up: the white vote, the black vote, the Hispanic vote, the women vote, the white male vote. And despite the fact that these categories are so taken for granted in America today that we receive this kind of categorical analysis as normal and coherent, what we see is that Obama's candidacy makes these taken-for-granted lines, drawn and redrawn in every political analysis, obsolete. Perhaps a better word than "unity," which seems to indicate a seamless whole, is Haraway's "coalition," a word Obama also employs; coalition doesn't imply melting into one another and merging into a whole that obliterates the differences between us that are real and important--those differences that make us, for better or worse, who we are. Instead it's through those differences, the recognition and communication and comprehension of them, that we come together; that is coalition. Haraway talks about it as chosen affinity, a matter of conscious alignment with one another; sometimes she talks about it as kinship--but not the kinship of blood relation, more like the kinship of adoption. A chosen affinity, a coalition of difference...but not, for that reason, any less real or potent.

In fact, for that very reason, all the more so. This is what I, very hopefully, see in Obama's candidacy. An option for coming together that skips the necessity of me being like you.

Now, if we could just learn this lesson theologically and ecclesially, maybe Jesus could come back already. Because Obama's right on something else, too: the most segregated hour in this nation happens on Sunday mornings. But if Jesus' speaking to adulterous women and traitorous tax collectors and dirty Samaritans hasn't somehow hammered the lesson that "me being like you" is not a prereq for unity, then the reiteration of that message from a political candidate, even a cyborg candidate, may fall on deaf ears; those who have ears to hear, let them hear.

warm fuzzy

I like being tagged for blog memes, it makes me feel warm and fuzzy. Thanks, Krister!

The game is:
Pick up the nearest book of at least 123 pages
Find page 123
Find the first 5 sentences
Post the next 3 sentences
Tag 5 people.

Attempt #1: Haraway's Modest_Witness displays a painting by Lynn Randolph, "Self-Consortium," on page 123. Haraway uses quite a lot of Randolph's work in this text. Randolph also produced the painting below, entitled "Cyborg," in response to Haraway's famous "Cyborg Manifesto."

So, attempt #2:

The third goal is to demonstrate what practical difference this counter discourse might make in respect to the formation and performance of Christian convictions within an emerging technoculture. This objective is completed in the final section by focusing on the central role of formative practices.

It was argued in the previous chapter that Christian theological claims about providence and anthropology are devoid of any meaningful content in the absence of eschatology.

My five: TKP, Mom, Em, Ally, Brent. Most of whom don't blog worth a damn anymore, but oh well.