Alexi's Response

[Larsson, Anna]

#679

I first want to mention that, before class began last week, a few of us were discussing the fact that there wasn’t much we could think of to write in response to the Felt Sense readings. It’s worth noting that most of us had probably read the texts by then, but weren’t sure how to connect it to the other texts or say something else.

It’s interesting that a conflict between a deconstructionist outlook and embodied knowing is mentioned. I’ve been wondering about the difference between embodied knowing and self-scrutiny. In a postmodern conceptualization of self-scrutiny, in which the inside/outside dichotomy is less of an inherent divide than a result of cultural internalization and performance. I will quote from the text this makes me think of, here:
“Interiority became an effect, and not a cause, of the cultural regulation of always already identified bodies, bodies that were sexed and gendered, bodies that were deemed unruly or grotesque. Interiority, in complicated ways, became the effect of the surface politics of the body, its physical characteristics, gestures, behaviors, location. And the cultural affirmation of a normative “self” became an effect of the evacuation of unruly heterogeneity within the individual and within the body social and politic”(109-110).

The above quotation was taken from an essay on autobiography, but I think the way Smith discusses “surface” and “interiority” in writing autobiography could be useful for our thinking. Smith is drawing on the De Certeau’s “hegemonic ‘strategies’ for for the cultural reproduction of normative selves”(109), and although (again) we’re not limiting the writing in this class to self-narratives, they do seem to come into play frequently in our class writing. I’ve taken this to be an invitation to focus on new media–its technologies as well as digital & visual rhetoric–without having to do much extra research. On the other hand, it may be a particularly fruitful place to begin tapping into our “felt sense,” because that involves experiencing our interiority. The question I have, a postmodern question, isn’t so much whether the material I create from this experience is “new.” That question is secondary to what Smith brings up for me: whether the embodied knowing isn’t essentially an embodied uptake of cultural norms and gendered/classed/raced muscle memory of political experience, emerging as a sense not so much that “this is new” or “this is right” but “this is right because it’s what I’ve learned to do.”

Smith, Sidonie. “Performativity, Autobiographical Practice, Resistance”. Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader. Madison: U Wisconsin Press, 1998.

[Author]

Posts