A Journal of Humor and Verbal Anarchy

 

off the cliff notes

You live in a college town with all these wunderkinder walking around. Some of them spend upwards on $30K a year to acquire wisdom. That's more than double than you will ever earn making subs at Short Stop or brewing Joe at Juna's.

Do you occasionally feel like a complete moron when you happen to overhear a conversation between a couple of these wannabe Heideggers.? (see notes.) Have trouble finding anything published after 1976 at the TCPL? Want to stay ahead of the curve next time you happen to catch a discussion of Judith Butler at the Chanticleer?

What is it that they learn up there on the Hills? Besides how to dissect cats, breed bovines with bigger bust lines , use a credit card and make dinner reservations?

Finally, a series of college guides for the rest of us! Ithaca Sucks introduces Off the Cliff Notes, an exciting and dynamic sequence of purloined lecture notes, term papers retrieved from dumpsters, knowledge gleaned from old textbooks off the Autumn Leave $1 cart, as well as occasional graffiti. Many PhD dissertations were actually inspired by scribblings on the stalls up at Cornell.

Let's get started!

Today, we're discussing Performance Theory.

No, it's not about sex. College students, however, do think a lot about sex. We can only hope they receive a better education than we did! What goes on behind those ivy-covered, Neo-Gothic brick facades might astound you. Any one of those pimply faced undergraduates might make Dr. Ruth look like Curly from the 3 Stooges when it comes to sex.

Performance Theory is about how we perform our roles in society. How we perform, for instance, the difficult task of tanking up our Camry when we find ourselves in a self-pump state like New York. A lot of people living in New Jersey, for example, never leave their cars when they pull into a gas station. It requires that you deconstruct terms like 'nozzle' or complex instructions such as 'pay inside.' Living in NY State means that you have to re-evaluate your role as a consumer of gasoline.

Without further introduction, let's dive into the stimulating world of Theory. First, you are asked to read and comprehend a sample text. Later, we'll quiz you on your understanding of the passage.



"If, as Haraway says, "feminist embodiment resists fixation and is insatiably curious about the webs of differential positioning" (Modest_Witness 196), I think we can productively use Butler's call for radical performances of gender to change the arguments about what might constitute a gendered academic body or a gendered technological body when it is performed on the web.
       A quick reprise of Gender Trouble*:
       While second-wave feminism (womenÕs liberation) had no problem speaking for and to the categories "woman" or "women," more recent (third-wave feminist) understanding of the exclusionary and non-representative nature of such categories leads Butler to explore the origins (genealogy) of the implicit binaries (man/woman, male/female) of which "woman" is the "other" half. She begins by detaching "gender" from "sex" (or vice versa) and arguing that both might be either pre-determined or open to construction, depending upon the terms of the debate, and uses three theorists to posit alternatives to a masculine, binary, empirical, hierarchical, equally constructed "norm."
~ Simone de Beauvoir proposes that one "becomes a woman," rather than "being" one, but that there is a strong cultural compulsion to do so that works against the idea of "becoming a woman" (or not) as a free choice. Beauvoir problematically retains the binary (man/woman, One/Other, first/second), but
~ Luce Irigaray claims that women are outside of, unrepresentable by, the dominant discourse on gender, which constitutes a closed, phallogocentric system in which men are both the subject and the Other.

Wittig introduces the concept of compulsory heterosexuality as a regulatory practice, a way of reproducing man as the "universal" subject and woman as "sex," understood primarily as her/its bodily manifestation. Although the idea of woman as "marked" by sex is institutionalized, Wittig believes that contesting male/female binary through practices and language can erase or trouble Irigaray's "hegemonic signifying economy."

Butler offers these theories (radically oversimplified above) on gender, sex and desire as ways of deconstructing the hegemonic, naturalized discourse on sexuality. However she is not optimistic (naive?) enough to believe that this rhetoric alone will effect any change in the circumstances of woman/women/any particular woman. Rather she argues that an understanding of how discourse shapes the ability to act will allow individual destabilization within (because there's no place outside it) the framework of the dominant discourse, and that this destabilization should take the form of performances that "trouble" that discourse on sex and gender.
Butler famously suggested drag as the gender performance of choice. However, as noted above, performance of gender as a technological body is an alternative "troubling" that might also effect destabilization of the sex/gender discourse.

Several options are open for women as they consider creating their own web site:

The performance of non-performance
One approach is refusal, fueled by either technophobia or a belief that "It's not my job"; but such a refusal is itself a definitive performance of gender, accepting the position of "Other" to the technological male;
Performance by citation
This is the model of the academic sites explored here. By definition, citation of institutional templates and hierarchies is a reduplication of the unified subject, a fictive presence that serves the needs of the institution rather than its own.

The performance of insurrection
A repudiation of the juridical constraints that artificially regulate the academic technological body might require what Katharine Young* calls a "realm shift," but the movement of the body to the web constitutes a new realm, and the possiblity of a new discourse. Rejecting unity, linearity, closure and control in favor of promiscuity, instability, and excess is not easy; nor is accepting incommensurability. Performance exceeds intention. Bordo's comment on inhabiting different locations, and letting each speak in turn, applies here:

[T]he security and elegance of theoretical unity are replaced by the different satisfaction of having sometimes incommensurable realities (that is, real life) described with precision, intelligence, and honesty.

Quiz:

1.What are the author's main points? Do you care? Have you even made it this far?
2.Do you feel this text improves your understanding of Cornell students? Do you feel pity, sorrow, jealousy? Appreciation of the fact that you only have to deal with the Ithaca Journal and the menu at the State St. Diner?
3.Do you feel the text improves your understanding of Performance Theory?
4.Are you ready to move on to the Off the Cliff Note Taking Your Cat's Temperature?
*Martin Heidegger. Nazi philosopher; wrote Being and Time. Skip it and read Anne Landers' essay on being on time instead.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 7:05 AM