karaj

notes from free space: a perspective on the small group in women’s liberation, pamela allen, 1970 

“i like that my voice doesn’t sound smart.”

“all you need to do is make art that inspires yourself and you will become smart like me. i’m not trying to be mean.”

“people who make great art are people who are smart.”

“you can’t be mean to people who are working really hard.”

“i just want to have friends these days. i want someone to play with. you and dad are always working.” (she didn’t play with another child for 6 months last year) 

“what’s a jerk?”

“i’m pretending to do important work like you. i’m pretending to do french like mom.”

“mom, i can translate animals and robots.” “how do you know how to do that?” “it’s just how i live.” 

“i just knew that because I’m a really smart kid, just like taylor swift knew stuff when she was younger.”

“my art is really important. it’s all about homes and making stuff for me to play in.”

“i’m going to do a little art maybe? because you know it’s my job.”

“i’m not a serious artiste. i’m just a person who loves art.”

“interesting people talk a lot.”

“i’m going to be an artist. and I’m going to be a mom.” her drawing teacher replied, “yep, that’s what i always said.”

“i think i would swim in a pool of glitter and if it was pink i think my mom would like it.”

kj: no, i am a doctor. but i'm a doctor of philosophy.

a: what's that?

kj: it's a doctor of thinking. i think about what makes a happy life.

françois cusset, french theory: how foucault, derrida, deleuze, & co. transformed the intellectual life of the united states, 92-93

“beyond the profitability offered by theory, and the politically defiant stances of minority students, the language and arguments of the theoretical approach lend themselves much more readily than traditional methods to the development of insiders’ codes and playful reappropriation. they are better suited to the empathetic and lighthearted qualities of student conversation and its free use of tactics such as name-dropping and spontaneous association of incompatible concepts, a heady collage of notions in which thinking up the most incongruous notions is a mark of intellectual ease and brilliance. the referential chain was broken, or seriously compromised; it was no longer necessary to present the credentials of works one has mastered or canons one has studied to make an attempt at theorizing oneself...paralogical or ironic reasoning prevails over the slower and less easily mastered tactics of argumentative rationality. what is unjustifiable becomes a justification in itself: quotations taken out of context or misplaced arguments are legitimate as such, in opposition to grand logical constructions, seen as massive, musty, and unfashionable. for those too young to master all the implications of a text, theory provided a great windfall.” (219) 

“the theoretical posture: wily, mobile, corrosive, an enemy of first truths and of all dualisms.” (106)

“conceptual figures and theoretical allegories, encountered during bookish wanderings, become markers, fetishes, or refrains of a countercreed. even if they do not always fully master these elements of theory, they appropriate them as a form of opposition to the prior world of the family, and to the external world of professionalization, or to fill a melancholic void. this process offers students a sense of initiation, which is strengthened by the rite-of-passage aspect of these few years, during which one can construct oneself on neutral ground. thus, as the term bildungsroman appeared in the nineteenth century in germany, referring to a literature of initiation, avidly consumed by adolescents, we might venture to coin the term bildungstheorie for this new theoretical presence, intimately embraced by many students for its familiar otherness, so different from other required readings. in this way, theoretical texts came to guide the student through the confusion of tangled discourse—in the various spheres we might call social, intimate, domestic, cultural, and professorial—into which student life propels young people.” (224) 

alice says she has created “girl place” and that it includes “everything girls like: nail polish, a tzedakah box, and something you can draw on so you can figure out your problems.”

i like that girl place is framed by in a different voice and hystories. also reading the romance; the dialectic of sex; undoing gender; and doin’ it in public. the feminist memoir project; this sex which is not one; simians, cyborgs, and women; the archival turn in feminism. men, women, and chain saws. yesterday alice saw a girl peeing in the park and started screaming like it was the murderer who had just appeared from behind the tree. then she covered her eyes, kept screaming, and pretended to stumble away. “alice, give her some privacy,” i said a few times, loud enough so that the mom wouldn’t be mad at me. but the final girl scream is her new move—she does it all the time—and it is extremely funny. 

the first sentence of grand hotel abyss: the lives of the frankfurt school by stuart jeffries 

“from its inception in 1923, the marxist research institute that became known as the frankfurt school was aloof from party politics and sceptical about political struggle. its leading members--theodor adorno, max horkheimer, herbert marcuse, erich fromm, friedrich pollock, franz neumann, and jurgen habermas--were virtuosic at critiquing the viciousness of fascism, and capitalism’s socially eviscerating, spiritually crushing impact on western societies, but not so good at changing what they critiqued.”  

“in his 1969 paper ‘marginalia to theory and praxis,’ adorno noted that a student had his room destroyed because he preferred to work rather than take part in student protests. someone had even scrawled on his wall: ‘whoever occupies himself with theory without acting practically is a traitor to socialism.’” 

“that paradox, the oppressive call for liberating action, made adorno and many others of the frankfurt school queasy. jurgen habermas called it ‘left facism,’ and adorno, his former teacher, saw in it the rise of a grisly new mutation of the authoritarian personality that had thrived in nazi germany and stalinist russia.”  

“what is striking about adorno’s critical thinking in 1969 is that he took the authoritarian personality type that thrived under hitler and its attendant spirit of conformism to be alive and well in the new left and the student movement. both postured as anti-authoritarian but replicated the repressive structures they ostensibly sought to overthrow. ‘those who protest most vehemently,’ wrote adorno, ‘are similar to authoritarian personalities in their aversion to introspection.’”

“now was not the time for the easy posturing of action, but for the hard work of thinking...theory was...principled withdrawal into a fortress of thought, a citadel from which, periodically, radical jeremiads were issued. for adorno, thinking rather than sit-ins and barricades was the true radical act. ‘whoever thinks, offers resistance; it is more comfortable to swim with the current, even when one declares oneself to be against the current.’”

“certainly, the frankfurt school over which adorno prevailed as the leading intellectual force venerated theory as offering the only space in which the prevailing order could be indicted, if not overthrown. theory retained--unlike everything tainted by exposure to the real, fallen world--its lustre and its untameable spirit...this was where the frankfurt school felt most comfortable--instead of getting caught up in delusive revolutionary euphoria, they preferred to retreat into a non-repressive intellectual space where they could think freely.”

(notes from my drafts on carol gilligan and rabbi jonathan sacks from early in the pandemic:)

i had to fill out a form for a neighborhood mom group i am a part of, but i think i missed the deadline: i don’t know how to answer the question about what i do after i put alice to bed every night because what I do is sit down on the couch and watch whatever program is on the jewish broadcasting service. marc turns it on before he goes to the kitchen to make dinner. 

a few weeks ago, i watched a video of feminist psychologist and girl culture heroine carol gilligan; rabbi jonathan sacks; and choreographer, dancer, lgbtq activist, and author marcia pally speak on a panel that took place at alice’s school. sacks claimed that jews are among the world’s best speakers and the world's worst listeners. i think this is true. in biblical hebrew, he said, there is no word for “to obey”; the word the bible uses is shema: “to listen, to hear, to understand, to internalize, and to respond in deed...the key and fundamental mitzvah in judaism is to listen.”