February 26th Class Notes

Elizabeth Mack

26 February 2014

Outline:

I.               Business

II.             Postmodernism

III.           Scott: The Evidence of Experience

Business/Announcements:

- If you are writing the lead post, remember to post by 9pm the night before so that everyone can post on time/at a time that is convenient for them.

Readings: Jane Flax, “The End of Innocence” (1992) pages 445-450 and Joan W. Scott, “Experience” (1992) 

Modernity                                         

Truth

objective

aperspectival (anybody, no matter their position can come to know Truth)

ahistorical (can happen anytime, anywhere)

universal

grand narratives (oversimplified, casts a large net over a long history)

assumptions about progress

singularity/unity (which eventually takes on a form of dualism)

foundationalists (rationalism and empiricism)

Postmodernity

truths (many truths)

intersubjective

perspectival

historically, temporally situated

particular

partial, situated, local narrator

multiplicity/heterogeneity

anti- or non- or post- or contingent foundations

Description

Historians (of difference) are using foundationalist accounts of experience that treat experience as truth that is incontestable, preexisting, transparent, and directly accessible.

knowledge/truth

^

experience

^

preformed individuals

Analysis

Problems with this is that it:

1.     naturalizes difference as different

2.     masks questions; does not ask how categories themselves are constructed; part of the category is the history of how it was constructed

3.     reifies agency as inherent to individuals

4.     does not lead us to ask other questions and do other political work

Historians are relying on a “referential account of language.” A “referential account of language” assumes that the function of language is to describe experience/reality or that language can provide access to truth; 1:1           

Vision

- Historicize experiences

- Historicized identities attend to the historicizing processes, that through discourse, position subjects as different and produce their experiences

- No Truths; just contextual truths

- No innocence, just responsibility

- Need to understand how we come to identities

- How does experience constitute subjects?

- Experience gives you the identity rather than the identity gives you the experience.

Solutions

- Refuse the separation of language and experience

- Do not assert experience as true or accessible

- Historicize identities and then do the work of expanding the history and contextual meanings behind those identities

- Postmodernism deconstructs this:

freedom/Progress/Innocence

^

truth/objectivity/knowledge

^

reason

and says to feminists, that one cannot make claims about truth or objectivity that resolves one model is better than the other

Next class we will discuss, relativism!