Comments on: noble numbers… and mean girls

By: Susan McLean

Susan McLean — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 18:23:35 +0000

Thanks for the link to the article on mean girls. I did get a poem out of it, though mine has nothing to do with muses.

By: Jeannine Hall Gailey

Jeannine Hall Gailey — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 18:34:17 +0000

Thanks for this intelligent commentary, Stephen, in what continues to be a fascinating discussion to me.

By: Steve

Steve — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 19:53:08 +0000

That’s what I meant by “talking past each other,” above. Ashton is (correctly!) attacking a certain kind of essentialism which identifies all the interesting aspects of certain poems with gender– but I don’t think that kind of essentialism is something Spahr and Young are committing (nor do I think it’s in some of the other places where Ashton finds it); Spahr and Young are attacking what lawyers call discriminatory effects (and sometimes alleging discriminatory intent). To put it another way, I’m not sure that either participant in this debate is applying, or working hard enough to apply, the principle of charity: they’re not construing their opponents so as to avoid accusing those opponents of errors, when such constructions seem available and plausible. OTOH I’m glad the debate’s taking place.

By: Bobby

Bobby — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 17:18:23 +0000

I don’t think bringing in experience solves the problem, at least not as long as that experience is pegged to a certain kind of body. The question is not whether there are experiences available only to certain sexes–of course there are–but rather why this should determine in advance what or how a person writes. This is different from saying that a person’s sex doesn’t have anything to do with what he or she writes. Ashton explains it best in her CR article:

If what [Spahr and Young] have in mind [when they talk about essentialism]…is something like the belief that the anatomical differences between bodies contribute, like many other contingencies, to the situation in which a poet (or any person) finds herself, and thus to some of the limits and opportunities she faces, then their definition would indeed be something quite apart from the theoretical mistake that I identify with the discourse of “innovative” women’s poetry. That essentialism would not be damning from my perspective either. I may be extending too much benefit of the doubt here, but I do think Spahr and Young understand very well that it’s one thing to think that a poet makes her formal choices in the context of a situation—a situation that inevitably includes her sex—and quite another to think that her sex dictates those choices in advance. Both involve essentializing sex, but the second kind of essentialism involves a mistake about the relation between bodies and forms that the first does not.

By: Steve

Steve — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 16:48:42 +0000

Keeping one eye on the far horizon sounds good; beating yourself up for being situated in a particular way isn’t, and a lot of the rhetoric I now hear about the situatedness of domestic politics in “developed” (rich) countries sounds, to me, too close to beating yourself up. I’ll check out Saba Mahmood when I can.
I suppose it is essentialist by some definitions– would it still be essentialist in the form “no one who has not had X experience could have written text T, and almost everyone, if not indeed everyone, who has had X experience, as far as I know, is female?” What I was trying to get at there was the distinction between the philosophical sense of “necessary condition” and the vernacular sense in which it has causal force. But I don’t think I did a very good job– in fact– such is the advantage of blogging– I think I should go and untangle those sentences, by rewriting them, now.

By: Bobby

Bobby — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 14:34:09 +0000

Dear Steve,
Thanks for spending so much time on these essays. I’m especially glad that you brought up the Grossman and Wright. But there’s a couple of things in this post that aren’t clear to me.
First, how is saying “that no man could have written a particular poem” not essentialist?
Second, is it really so easy to sift out our (political/ethical) lives into independent causes as you suggest? I think what Spahr and Young are responding to is a sense that feminism (as a cause) is not one cause among many but is a position that is (or should) be related to a person’s whole way of acting in the world. It may be tired or predictable to say that feminism has to do with race, class, and international politics, but it’s no less true for being so. The plumber/carpenter analogy is actually an accurate one. No, the plumber doesn’t “have to worry about not being a carpenter” but he does have to worry at least a little about carpentry itself (so that he can figure out which walls can accommodate pipes, and so on…) Saba Mahmood has written well on this subject (feminism, not plumbing) studying, for example, the way in which Western feminist rhetoric was deployed in the French veil controversy. Her conclusion (in an article with the forbidding title “Feminism, the Taliban, and the Politics of Counterinsurgency”) is that “we tend to forget that the particular set of desires, needs, hopes and pleasures that we embrace do not necessarily exhaust the possibilities of human flourishing.” It’s always seemed to me one of the great strengths of the best feminist (and more recently, queer) theory that it’s been able to keep at least one eye on that far horizon, i.e., the general question of human flourishing.
Anyway, thanks again for the discussion.

By: Steve

Steve — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 13:12:38 +0000

The Sighted Singer is really two books, a long and often rambling interview with Mark Halliday and a hyperintelligent, wise, profound novella-length essay in numbered sections called Summa Lyrica. Skip the interview and read Summa Lyrica. (The face-to-face Levinasian stuff is in there: Stewart almost certainly got it from him.)

By: Ange

Ange — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 11:26:29 +0000

I have been reading Grossman's criticism, and while The Long Schoolroom thrilled me (the first two essays in particular left me lightheaded, literally: I had stopped breathing at points) I'm finding The Sighted Singer somewhat harder going (any tips for entry points, etc.?). Last time you mentioned Grossman it was in connection to the "face-to-face," which I associate with Stewart's Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, not Grossman. Can you tell me where in his criticism he talks about it? Thanks!