Lynn Worsham "The Question Concerning Invention" Pretext (8.3-4) 1987 p. 214
What, finally, are we to make of the posthuman? At the beginning of this book, I suggested that the prospect of becoming posthuman both evokes terror and excites pleasure. And the end of the book, perhaps I can summarize the implications of the posthuman by interrogating the sources of this terror and pleasure. The terror is relatively easy to understand. "Post," with its dual connotation of superseding the human and coming after it, hints that the days of "the human" may be numbered... ...Humans can either go gently into that good night, joining the dinosaurs as a species that once ruled the earth but is now obsolete, or hang on for a while longer by becoming machines themselves.
(N. Katherine Hayles How We Became Posthuman 283)
Joseph Campbell "The Impact of Science on Myth" from Myths to Live by 17
I say "woman," I'm speaking of woman in her inevitable struggle against conventional man; and of a universal woman subject who must bring women to their senses and to their meaning in history. But first it must be said that in spite of the enormity of the repression that has kept them in the "dark"--that dark which people have been trying to make them accept as their attribute--there is, at this time, no general woman, no one typical woman. What they have in common I will say. But what strikes me is the infinite richness of their individual constitutions: you can't talk about a female sexuality, uniform, homogeneous, classifiable into codes--any more than you can talk about one unconscious resembling another. Women's imaginary is inexhaustible, like music, painting, writing: their streams of phantasms is incredible.
(Hélène Cixous "Le Rire de la Méduse" as quoted in The Rhetorical Tradition Eds. Bizzell and Herzberg 1524)
The pedagogy of taste, I would argue, is such a policing mechanism. It is the means through which young men were taught to internalize the marks and limits of bourgeois subjectivity (read "white, straight, male, comfortable, christian” subjectivity). The ability to discriminate the bad from the good, in concert with his fellows, marks the bourgeois subject for membership in the community. Just as surely, this mark distinguishes him from those others who are not so disciplined, those who are roughened by toil and hard circumstances that they ignore beauty altogether, like Newman’s laborer, or those, like Quackenbos’s savages, who revel in the coarse or the bizarre. (Sharon Crowley Composition in the University 42)
From Judith Butler's book Gender Trouble, Chapter 3, "Subversive Bodily Acts" p. 148
Note 33: Wittig "The Mark of Gender" p. 4
Note 33: Wittig "The Mark of Gender" p. 4
Antithesis
Furor en la calle, oscura en la casa
Antithesis is the ur-figure, and it demonstrates a parallel structure. Out in the street you welcome the lights and shine beneath them, but at home, you fall into shadow. Your being “on” requires another being “off.” And as it turns out, that other, whose offness you need in order to be “on,” it is actually “you.” Just not right now, while you are on and not off, like I am, here in the shadows But what about chiasmus? The light shines on you out there when you’re on the street, but at home you hide in the shadows. You leap, leap, leap, out and under the light of the street, but at home you retreat into shadows. But I am mistranslating furor as light: Fury on the street, obscured at home. On the street, fury; obscure at home. Fury on the street, at home obscure. Distinguishing the world, moment by moment, it pours into being from nothing, again and again, showing and showering the shadows with light. |
“Al? What are you doing?”
He began a sentence: “I am—”
but when he was taken by surprise,
every sentence became an adventure in the woods;
as soon as he could no longer see the light of the clearing from which he’d entered,
he would realize that the crumbs he’d dropped for bearings had been eaten by birds,
silent deft darting things which he couldn’t quite see in the darkness but which were so numerous and swarming in their hunger that it seemed as if they were the darkness,
as if the darkness weren’t uniform,
weren’t an absence of light but a teeming and corpuscular thing,
and indeed when as a studious teenager he’d encountered the word “crepuscular” in McKay’s Treasury of English Verse,
the corpuscles of biology had bled into his understanding of the word,
so that for his entire adult life he’d seen in twilight a corpuscularity,
as of the graininess of the high-speed film necessary for photography under conditions of low ambient light,
as of a kind of sinister decay;
and hence the panic of a man betrayed deep in the woods whose darkness was the darkness of starlings blotting out the sunset or black ants storming a dead opossum,
a darkness that didn’t just exist but actively consumed the bearings that he’d sensibly established for himself, lest he be lost;
but in the instant of realizing he was lost,
time became marvelously slow and he discovered hitherto unguessed eternities in the space between one word and the next,
or rather he became trapped in that space between words and could only stand and watch as time sped on without him,
the thoughtless boyish part of him crashing on out of sight blindly through the woods while he,
trapped,
the grownup Al,
watched in oddly impersonal suspense to see if the panic-stricken little boy might,
despite no longer knowing where he was or at what point he’d entered the woods of this sentence,
still manage to blunder into the clearing where Enid was waiting for him,
unaware of any woods—“packing my suitcase,”
he heard himself say.
This sounded right.
Verb, possessive, noun.
Here was a suitcase in front of him, an important confirmation.
He’d betrayed nothing.
He began a sentence: “I am—”
but when he was taken by surprise,
every sentence became an adventure in the woods;
as soon as he could no longer see the light of the clearing from which he’d entered,
he would realize that the crumbs he’d dropped for bearings had been eaten by birds,
silent deft darting things which he couldn’t quite see in the darkness but which were so numerous and swarming in their hunger that it seemed as if they were the darkness,
as if the darkness weren’t uniform,
weren’t an absence of light but a teeming and corpuscular thing,
and indeed when as a studious teenager he’d encountered the word “crepuscular” in McKay’s Treasury of English Verse,
the corpuscles of biology had bled into his understanding of the word,
so that for his entire adult life he’d seen in twilight a corpuscularity,
as of the graininess of the high-speed film necessary for photography under conditions of low ambient light,
as of a kind of sinister decay;
and hence the panic of a man betrayed deep in the woods whose darkness was the darkness of starlings blotting out the sunset or black ants storming a dead opossum,
a darkness that didn’t just exist but actively consumed the bearings that he’d sensibly established for himself, lest he be lost;
but in the instant of realizing he was lost,
time became marvelously slow and he discovered hitherto unguessed eternities in the space between one word and the next,
or rather he became trapped in that space between words and could only stand and watch as time sped on without him,
the thoughtless boyish part of him crashing on out of sight blindly through the woods while he,
trapped,
the grownup Al,
watched in oddly impersonal suspense to see if the panic-stricken little boy might,
despite no longer knowing where he was or at what point he’d entered the woods of this sentence,
still manage to blunder into the clearing where Enid was waiting for him,
unaware of any woods—“packing my suitcase,”
he heard himself say.
This sounded right.
Verb, possessive, noun.
Here was a suitcase in front of him, an important confirmation.
He’d betrayed nothing.