The following is not entirely organized, but I don't have time right now to clean it up into something more legible.
I was recently in a brief altercation with a fellow literature student over a contemporary sonnet sequence. Unfortunately I don't remember the poet's name or the title of his book, but the reason for our debate was the fact that the sequence was written for a 14 year old girl. My friend's argument was, quite simply, "that's f*cked up." My argument was that there is a long tradition of female exploitation by male authors, particularly in sonnets. From Petrarch on, men are looking at women, idealizing them, removing their speech, and then using them as objects of praise to stroke the male poet's ego. Thus, I was arguing that, as disturbing as the sequence may be, it seemed to me that part of its value was that it radically called attention to that exploitative and, at times perhaps pedophilic tradition.
My friend wasn't convinced.
As I thought about it more, I realized that this poet's move was even more powerful than I thought. Suppose you responded with the general liberal ethos of "perhaps girls as young as 13 or 14 are married off in other times and places; that was ok in that context, but we, of course, are not in that context." The poet (lets call him Jeff) is calling you on it and asking you "why can't I?" If, however, you take the more hardnosed and "realist" perspective, you would say "it's wrong for them to do it then and its wrong for us now." Ah, responds Jeff, but in that case you'll want to throw out Plato (double whammy, since he was sleeping with 12 year old boys), Shakespeare, and the entire Western literary tradition of exploitation and violation, the very tradition to which you appeal to make your moral argument. Hell, maybe even the Bible. The Virgin Mary was pretty young, after all.
The fact of the matter is that to live as responsible human beings we have to be able to say that something is wrong while recognizing the very limitation of our ability to do so. An epistemological double-movement, so to speak, exactly the kind of move made by our risk-taking sonnetteer. Essentially, we have to be willing to condemn ourselves while we condemn others: "Yes, ethnocentrism is wrong. And yes, so is female genital mutilation."
I bring all of this up as an indirect response to the number of interesting comments made by friends at home and abroad regarding the recent furor over certain cartoons, as well as the gyrations Western media and governments have been demonstrating in an effort to save face and free speech at the same time. It seems to me that we are in a difficult position. If we say "don't do things that are going to upset group X, since they get really mad," then we are setting ourselves up as "the grown ups" managing an unruly child. A position of superiority. If, on the other hand, our response is "screw you, you need to grow up". . . well, you see where that gets us. The exact same place.
Of course, there are those who would say "But we are superior and we don't need to worry about acting that out. In fact, your weeny liberal introspection just makes matters worse." The fact is that ethnocentrism is more problematic than we often think. In fact, the nature of subjectivity, being limited, reveals that we just don't know everything and that we often do things we think are right only to result in terrible consequences. Thus, I cannot see the superiority argument doing anything but create a huge blindspot, the blindspots which historically tend to result in a moral backalley.
But that doesn't mean we don't act. Here's where we have to make the double-move I was talking about earlier, which doesn't feel very comforting but has to be done. We have to defend the right to publish freely while calling for people to act responsibly with that right. We have to defend the right of people to get pissed off and organize protests when someone publishes something they don't like (a part of free speech). We have to stop people from killing other people, even if their epistemological and ethical and political values are radically and fundamentally in opposition. And we have to recognize that such opposition is not something we can just ignore or shake off.
Essentially, we have to act in different ways at the same time. If we don't, we'll be in trouble.
Posted by pjaussen at February 10, 2006 06:49 PM | TrackBack