So, Margaret Price and Judith Butler Walk into a Bar

Part of my task for the remainder of this semester is to get all of the theorists in whom I'm (supposedly) interested in conversation with each other. What do I want to take from each theorist? How might all of this theory fit together - or not? What would Judith Butler say to Margaret Price at the bar? And would Margaret Price pull out her brass knuckles in response?

Butler: Oh, hey Marge! I was just sitting here thinking about the collectivity of humanity over this appletini.  Why don't you join me?

Price: I don't know, Judy. You always get to lofty when you drink appletinis. But I never get out, so I guess I'll listen to you this one time. Bartender - a Long Island Iced Tea, please.

Two hefty drinks in their hands, the ladies settle in for a conversation on the intersections of disability theory, autobiography, and identity. 


B: So, I assume you've read Precious Life. Everyone has, you know.

P: I actually only got to chapter two so far, but it's been interesting. I assume you've read at least chapter 5 of Mad at School?

B: But of course! Here's one question I've been dying to ask you - how do the disability autobiographies you wrote about fit into concept I wrote about in my book - that our identities depend on each other?

P: Honestly, I wasn't thinking about your book when I wrote mine, but since you asked, I'll think about an answer. (Stares off and takes a long sip of her drink.) Well, I suppose pronomial variance in autobiography extends the experiences in an autobiographical text beyond the narrator. I think a question of ownership has to be explored here. Who owns a story? The person who lived it? The people who relate to it? The people who read it? And does collective ownership of a story or experience imply a collective identity?

B: My book laid out the concept of collectivity in a philosophical sense. What we seem to be trying here is an application of philosophy. Can we see the principle of collectivity in textual life stories? Autobiography, by nature of the genre, is meant to reflect one person, but it inevitably incorporates the environment and people who surrounded that person as she or he went through life. Thus, the personal narrative rests upon its human and environmental circumstances. Are life narratives written without the context of others being present? I imagine if they were, then the story would focus on the absence of characters, and would thus still be dependent on human connection (or lack thereof).

P: I've been interested in acknowledging personal differences without casting those differences as a reason to "other" a group. How do differences fit into collectivity? How do we not "other"?

B: Collective identities are focused on the fact that we all bear the human condition. It is our broader connections that I focused on. If we concentrate on those broad human connections and see the smaller individual ones (or ones unique to a specific subset of people) as less important than our collective human qualities, then it will be difficult to "other".

P: That seems a bit impractical. I mean, we can't always focus on broader connections? We do, to some degree, have to acknowledge the individual. The disability narratives I analyzed focus on resisting diagnostic genres, thereby resisting traditional conceptions of autobiographies. Surely, we have to have some deviation to make progress. And deviation is derived from otherness. Can we then conclude that otherness can drive social progress and that it may, in certain circumstances, be a beneficial thing?

B: (Finishes her appletini in one sip.) Perhaps, then, collectivity is the goal. Or acknowledged collective identity. Look, right now we see that we are all intertwined and interdependent. But we think of ourselves as individuals. Our perceptions deviate from the truth, but that doesn't mean the truth of a collective identity doesn't exist.

P: Ok, so collective identity exists and pronomial fragmentation and variance pushes toward that collective by pointing out instances of othering and attempting to smooth them over by extending "personal" life stories to a person beyond their supposed author?

B: That sounds plausible.

P: I have a headache. I don't know if it's from the Long Island or you. I think I'm going to go home.

B: Lightweight. But it was nice talking to you.

P: Indeed.

Was this a little silly? Yes, but it did work to put these two theorists in dialogue for me. More experiments to come...

Margaret Price - She's Pretty Cool (And by "She" I Could Mean "I" or "We"...)

When I met with my thesis advisor last week, she suggested I read two works - the Butler chapter about which I already wrote and chapter 5 ("Her Pronouns Wax and Wane": Mental Disability, Autobiography, and Counter-Diagnosis) of Margaret Price's Book, Mad At School. Though in my theory-resenting state I, well, resented the fact that I had to read yet another theoretical piece today (you know, when I could have been sleeping or eating), I actually found Price's article to be close to exactly what I'm looking for in a theoretical lens for my thesis. 

Let's face it - I'm some weird mix of psychology student and English major, and my interests usually lie in clinical literature over rhetorical analysis. So imagine my delight when I discovered that disability studies could be applied to mental health issues, which all could then be applied to autobiographical literature. Now that I've shared my (temporary) academic excitement, on to what Price actually says...

The Price chapter focuses on the structure of "disability" autobiographies, claiming that some autobiographies "challenge both existing theories of autobiography and the genre itself thought a strategy [she] call[s] counter-diagnosis" (177). "Counter-diagnosis" refers to an autobiographical work that refuses to embrace the "dominant script of disability as an individual tragedy (and potential source of triumph to "overcome")" (178), and accomplishes this task by distorting many of the structural cues we associate with normative autobiography. For example, Price talks about how linearity, grammatical structures, and pronomial distortions of the "I" all contribute to a narrative that resists the autobiographical genre and the public's tendency to gawk at disability. Counter-diagnostic narratives, then, "claim authority not in spite of, but through and because of, [the narrator's] mental disabilities" (179). These narratives "draw power from the shape-shifting nature of counter-diagnosis, accepting, rejecting, mimicking, and contesting the diagnostic urge in various ways" (179-80). 

Price then goes on to examine, using three autobiographical texts which involve mental disability as examples, how pronoun use specifically contributes to counter-diagnostic narratives. She writes that the conventions of the genre assume that the "I of autobiography is unified, and tends to progress through a linear narrative" (180). By contrast, the "I" of a counter-diagnostic narrative is "essentially disorganized and incoherent" (180), thus causing multiplicity to appear in the "I." In one of the texts which Price analyzes, this multiplicity is evident in "the proliferation of I into we" (182), which indicates "emphasis not on . . . individual experience, but rather on the varied and collected experience of all the persons described and addressed therein" (184). In another text, the presence of a disabled I shows that the "empirical truth is no longer a given feature of diagnosis" (183). Further, the integration of outside voices into the "I" - voices of doctors, family members, friends, etc. - tests the reliability of the "I" as a single, coherent, and trustworthy narrative entity. 

Autobiography assumes the presence of a narrative "I", but as Price points out, this "I" can be fragmented into "you", "s/he", and virtually any other pronoun. Far from claiming that this seeming pronomial confusion results in fragmented identity, Price suggests that the confusion isn't confusion at all and rather reflects a more accurate way of portraying mental disease. The variation of pronouns may instead be "direct expressions of identity" (186). Since "I" situates itself in a normative world, the pronomial fragmentation of the "I" then suggests that "the so-called rational world does not truthfully reflect [the disabled author's] experience" (186). The use of pronouns like "s/he" and "they"resist the "diagnostic urge" (190) to find out "what is really wrong with [the author]" (190) and, I would suggest, extend the author's experience to the general population. In assigning a nondescript "she" or "they" the supposed true-life stories of the author, the author then implicitly claims that any "she" or "he" or "they" could have had the experience. There lies perhaps a furthering of Price's counter-diagnostic argument - that ownership of an experience belongs to a population greater than the author. 

Price closes with an exploration of what it means to use "you" in autobiography and how "you" "disrupts [the] dynamic [between "a normate reader . . . and a "freakish narrator"] and relocates the dominant gaze" (190). "You"forces understanding between the reader and the author and renegotiates the power dynamic between the two. No longer is the reader removed from the text. Instead, the reader becomes part of the text and is asked to experience what the author describes. Further, Price claims, by using "you", the author "play[s] with various possibilities for whom you might be" (193), and in doing so adds to the overall distortion of narrative, thereby resisting "diagnosis." 

What I think is most interesting about Price's chapter, however, lies in her analysis of "Her Reckoning: A Young Interdisciplinary Academic Dissects the Exact Nature of Her Disease" by Wendy Thompson. Near the end of the chapter, Price writes:

. . . [In Thompson's essay,] pronouns do not necessarily denote individuals, but also refer to larger cultural and political forces. "Her Reckoning" repeatedly connects individual experiences of mental disability to cultural experiences of trauma (192). 

I know I'm not supposed to mention Hornbacher, but I just can't resist it here. Within Hornbacher's pronomial un-centeredness in Wasted, she effectively analyzes the sociopolitical forces on the female body that contribute to eating disorders. By using varied pronouns, she constructs eating disorders as reflections of societal pressure on all females - all of the "she-s" and "we-s" and "you-s". I'll stop the Hornbacher analysis here, but I think it's evident through this short example that the Price article might be awesome for my thesis. 

Also, (and this is more of a side note to myself) the Price article kept referencing this guy named Couser. I think I might get some use out of reading the article that was referenced. 

I'm Not a Fan of Judith Butler, But I Guess She Can Be in My Thesis

I’ve been holding Judith Butler at arms-length all semester. Admittedly, I stay as far away from theory (and theorists) as possible, and the fact that Judith Butler has had a bandwagon following on my campus for the past few months didn’t help matters (let’s be honest – I’m clearly a nonconformist). So I wasn’t thrilled when my major advisor suggested I read chapter 2 (“Violence, Mourning, Politics”) of her 2004 book, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. But being the ever-dedicated student I am, I swallowed my theory-reluctance and broke the binding anyway. What follows is my attempt to a) debunk Butler’s complex academic writing and b) respond to her complex academic writing.

Butler had me interested for roughly the first half of her chapter. She writes that “[t]he body implies mortality, vulnerability, agency: the skin and flesh expose us to the gaze of others, but also to touch, and to violence, and bodies put us at risk of becoming the agency and instrument of all these as well” (26). This concept seems to be contrary to how we humans typically view ourselves. Because we have individual perspectives (or assume we do, anyway), we believe we are all “I’s” looking out at the world, and we believe in a clear and evident separation between our own bodies and the bodies of those around us. By extension, this separation also guarantees the separation of our own identities from the identities of others. Our inclination is to view our bodies and identities as separate and to view group identities and bodies as secondary to our “selves”.

Butler is asking us to reverse our individualist thinking and see our bodies as having an “invariably public dimension” (26). Butler states, “[M]y body is and is not mine” (26), and that the existence of the individual’s body and identity is dependent on (and perhaps secondary in importance to) the existence of the collective body. Thus it is impossible to develop individual autonomy without considering the social environment within which the possible individual’s body may exist.

After she constructs her self-within-and-never-without-community argument, Butler extends herself by talking about representation of the self and how that self-representation risks violence to the community because it is inherently exclusive (28). If I perceive boundaries between you and I, she argues, then that creates room for me to other you. Only when we perceive shared boundaries (that, referencing the earlier part of her argument, are the only real boundaries since the self is derived from and dependent on the collective) can we eliminate “othering.”

But why would we want to stop othering people and groups we see as separate from ourselves? (I mean, apart from those ethical reasons.) Butler claims since that since each “individual” is the compilation of the larger community’s characteristics and influences, by dehumanizing those we perceive as “others,” we, in turn, dehumanize parts of ourselves. Since the individual’s identity cannot exist apart from the larger social context, and since the larger social context requires that each individual is inextricably connected, severing ties between the individual and those in the social context result in a loss of autonomy and individual identity.

Butler then moves into a discourse on violence how violence

is surely a touch of the worst order, a way a primary human vulnerability to other humans is exposed in its more terrifying way, a way in which we are given over, without control, to the will of another, a way in which life itself can be expunged by the willful action of another (29).

Violence, argues Butler, results from individuals refusing to perceive themselves as a collective, thus disrupting the precarious balance between the interwoven components of the community. On a grander scale, political violence then finds it source when an individual group (such as a nation or race) tries to exercise autonomy not within the collective context of humanity, but outside of it. It is in these instances that the othered become faceless and lose their right to exercise autonomy within the collective. While I understand what Butler’s attempting to say (I think), I can’t help but wonder if she’s taken her argument too far. How does she define individual collectives versus the entire collective? Surely the motives behind political conflict must be more complicated. 

I think Butler’s idea of the individual arising from and being defined by (and within) the collective is perhaps most interesting (and most useful) for my intended discourse involving development of narrative identity, mental illness, and feminist modes of discourse.  I’m not going to put this idea in the context of Hornbacher’s memoirs yet (although I’m itching to, I swear), but I do want to talk a little about where I might take her ideas. Over the next few days, I’m going to look at Margaret Price’s Mad at School, a book about disabilities in educational settings. Price has a chapter on pronomial identification, which I think might be interesting to put into a dialogue with Butler’s self/community arguments. I also want to look at Ochs and Capp’s article about the function of life stories and (if I have time) I’ll look at Twohig and Kalitzkus’ volume, Making Sense of Health, Illness and Disease. My goal is to put these theoretical texts into conversation with one another so that I may (eventually) find a solid theoretical lens through which I may deal with Hornbacher’s memoirs.