Thursday, May 14, 2009

Susanne Gannon: Writing into the Space of the 'Other'

“How can I tell this woman’s story? What right do I have to enter a space that is not mine? What are the politics, the ethics, of imagining a life and giving voice to a character who does not exist?”

--(Gannon, 2005, 625)


Writing into the Space of the 'Other'
by Susanne Gannon
Outskirts

...

Laurel Richardson, in the new edition of the famous Handbook of Qualitative Inquiry (Denzin and Lincoln, 2006) argues that we will be more present, honest and engaged in research if we begin writing from our selves. I suggest otherwise in this paper. I argue that it is writing into the imaginative space of the Other that might make us more present in the world and more engaged. When I write myself from myself I am limited by my gender, my sexuality, my ethnicity, my nationality, and all the elements of my particular peculiar history. From some angles, this seems alarmingly consistent with the individualized imagination of neoliberal corporatism. In attempting to write into the space of the Other, I work at imagining the range of possible fictions that might open if I were more than just the me here writing this to you.

The rigorous exercise of the imagination opens up the possibility of tentatively accessing subject positions that do not match our own embodied experience, creating other possibilities and discursive positionings that provide momentary but powerful fictions of how the world is and how it might become. Traces of these fictions stay with us, enrich our positions, give us some grounds for action, perhaps even some grounds for hope. Such hope might emerge as an impetus for political change, as a troubling of binaries that construct us/ them, me/ you, as an expansion of the imaginary, or as a disruption of the power structures that order processes of subjectification. The rhetorical staging of fiction brings in the unthinkable via emotions, bodies and senses that are harder to grasp in more conventionally academic rhetoric and craft. Writing is a relational act. Readers, writers and characters engage and interact, fall in and out of love with one another. Playwright and literary theorist Hélène Cixous talks of “the infinite domain of the human subject” (1994, xvii) where writing is "the passageway, the entrance, the exit, the dwelling place of the Other in me - the other that I am and am not, that I don’t know how to be, but that I feel passing, that makes me live- that tears me apart, disturbs me, changes me" (1986, 85-86). Writing changes me, she says.

Adriana Cavarero (2000) suggests that it is storytelling in particular that changes us; the desire for narrative, specifically the desire to be narrated by another, is what brings us into being, what creates us as human subjects. Judith Butler, influenced somewhat by Cavarero in her recent work, Precarious Life (2004), argues that our humanity and our intelligibility as human subjects are reciprocal, reliant on the recognition of ourselves by an Other. Both Cavarero and Butler take up a relational view of human subjectification. Both have written explicitly about the Other and his/her relation to the subject. The individualist doctrines of enlightenment/ modernist philosophy and psychology recognise human subjects as having the quality of interiority. In contrast, from their feminist and poststructural perspectives, Cavarero (2000) and Butler (2004) make relationality the very condition of subjectification. The ontological status of the who, says Cavarero, is wholly external: “exposed, relational, altruistic” (2000, 89). She elaborates that we become individual subjects not because we are free of others, singular, unique and capable of self analysis and reflexivity, but because our recognition of ourselves as unique is realised through and thus contingent on relations with others. Thus the human subject, and the processes of subjectification as a speaking and writing subject, are marked by exteriority, by an orientation towards those outside ourselves. Both claim an interest in materiality, in corporeality. Butler invokes the figure of “the face” and the notion of an “address” that calls one into an ethical relation, a relation of responsibility towards the Other (2004, 90-91). Cavarero brings the body – and love - to the scene of the story where “the beat of body language and the language of storytelling” together form “a secret rhythm” (2000, 109).

Roland Barthes predicted long ago that literature and science would collapse into one another, that the only difference between them is that “literature has not said what it knows” like Science, but “it has written it” (1989, 10). Cavarero, looking back to Plato, reminds us that poetry and philosophy have been at war since their beginnings. Poetry, Cavarero says, including narrative and storytelling in its scope, is the “art that appeals to the passions… that stages human fragility, inducing the spectators to participate in it and share in its emotions” (2000, 95). Philosophy, in contrast, is a “realm of pure thought” where human plurality, singularity and materiality are superfluous (96). Philosophy is the “art of definition” (73). Similarly, through its own technologies of truth-telling, sociology is interested in the “what” of human subjects – in “the qualities, the character, the roles, the outlooks” (73) that can be generalised, in the “representation of the universal” (50). In contrast, literature – narrative in particular - is interested in the “who” of human subjects, in the life story that persists through time, that offers a “unique unity” (72), a story that can be told by another. Theoretically, Cavarero suggests that this is a key distinction. Problems with the slippery concept of identity emerge, she suggests, from confusion of the “what” – that is, the generalisable, multiple and infinitely mutable qualities of human subjects - with the “who” – that is, the one who is born at a particular time and place and dies at a particular time and place, and who is continually exposed and exhibiting a particular self, a self “that cannot be transcended” (73). Her project is, in part, though without abandoning the insights of poststructuralism, to recover the uniqueness of the human subject, and of her story. Storytelling, she says, like love, addresses the “uniqueness of the who [who] always has a face, a voice, a gaze, a body, and a sex” (109), a “who” who is “concrete and insubstitutable” (73).

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