Against Personal Testimony

• "appropriation" (arrogation, confiscation, seizure of concepts;
  ideas owned and sold at will, are proper-ties) with
  
• "intuition" (in-appropriate, not appropriable,
  nothing gets accumulated, diverse, diffuse).

now involved in projects such as Distance Learning Classroom Using Virtual Harlem Virtual Harlem Main Page Electronic Visualization Laboratory

(For more on alternative reality games, see on-line conversation
with Brian Clark, an experimental narrativist,
on Narrative, Science and Unpredictability)

More reactions here?
Gail Chavenelle '67, "Sosnoski": I found it interesting that Sosnoski's article was organized and presented in exactly the male classic falsification style which he is exposing...

III. Turning Today to Someone Else who wants her "work to be a counterfriction to the machine..."

Linda Kauffman

Kauffman is quite conscious that she is challenging
some of "our" deepest held beliefs, and is
convinced of importance of her doing so:

"Feminism is far more than the effort to express women's personal experience...I want continually to cast doubt on the status of knowledge---even as we are in the process of constructing it...

Continually exposing and undermining the construction of knowledge is vital to every project of redefining feminism. That project is perpetual....

Feminism's greatest strength has always been its capacity for self-critique. I think we still have the most to learn from the ruptures, limitations, and contradictions in our thinking....
[remember Sosnoski on "error as heuristic?]

I enact a conscious strategy of "infidelity"...one can show how one's own arguments may...become inadequate...confess how one's desires may be in conflict with the theoretical stances one endorses....

[Sandra Harding's similar argument, to] "engage in tratorious readings of the assumptions we make."

The central infidelity, the core tratorious reading here is the
challenge to the authority of personal experience.

Mary Clurman '63, "What is a Feminist?": Va. Woolf "is arguing...for the ideals of individualism..."

Nora on "Reading as a Feminist":
"feminism should be personal first in order to know what to build upon."

What are Kauffman's reasons for "going against the grain" of individualism? Let's see if we can find out, first, by

doing something experiential: tell us a fact about your self.

--the social construction of internal experience
"what we call the psyche is influenced by social, political, and economic traumas....'what one comprehends as subjective are in fact material, economic, and interpersonal social and historical relations' (Teresa de Lauretis)"

* it redirects attention from what is important
"Personal testimony...reinforces the...belief that we are all intrinsically interesting, unique, that we deserve to be happy. My happiness...is not very important in the grand scheme of things. I never though feminism was about happiness. I thought it was about justice..."

Bringing it Home:
Rachel Donadio's "Revisiting the Canon Wars," NYTimes (9/16/07):
'On campus today, the emphasis is very much on studying literature through the lens of “identity” — ethnic, gender, class....You no longer have a university, but a series of identity constituencies all studying themselves....identity-based thinking is at odds with the true purpose of education..."What Americans yearn for in literature is self-recognition".... Wrestling with difficult, often inaccessible works is "the most alienating experience possible"....education should be transformative ...should remove students from the confines of their own backgrounds to engage with books that open up new realms of meaning..."rid themselves of the opinions of their parents"....[but] whether students today see college as a time of freedom or a compulsory phase of credentialing is an open question.'

Discussion continues in the Course Forum Area....
go there and add your thoughts!