Funny you mentioned that, just yesterday I was thinking about how annoying it is that everybody always says "I can't imagine how x person/demographic/race/etc. feels, and will never understand," and so on. I don't see that literature has much of a point - or empathy, for that matter - if it's so 100% certain we can't understand each other.
Yes, I agree. But there are some identity and ideological gaps that require pretty herculean leaps of imagination. And I suppose there is also the accompanying question these days of whose story a given experience is to tell. I bristle at the territorialism, but I also understand how master narratives silence other stories and how the marketplace of ideas is weighted with power and privilege. So it is not so simple, and I think if one is attempting to "perhaps" the experience of another or to render it in fictional form, there ought to be some real care taken to be thoughtful, to avoid stereotypes, etc. This is necessary on a human level -- basic decency -- but it is also necessary in practical terms, as a way of mindfully anticipating one's audience.
And there is also the false assumption that we understand ourselves.
Josh, and some of your others may be creative fiction writers, and any dramatist must know that this nugget is key to so much literature and narrative.
So, how can we know that we cannot imagine, when we know not ourselves?
This is an everyday issue for me as a professor, because I'm constantly trying to get my students to understand their own biases, assumptions, preconceptions, etc. so that they can bracket them to complete various conceptual tasks.
I’m thinking about the ways we’ve centered internal, by-definition unverifiable interpretations of “identity-as-self” and...what you say here, Jason. Can we fully understand ourselves? If we can’t, then what? If we can understand ourselves but not others (“I can’t imagine...” as a way to privilege the Other’s ‘special’ experiences), then what?
History seems to require perhapsing. Perhaps the Dutch Jews packed into trains, headed to their murders, knew their destinations. Perhaps the lonely person stepping off the boat at Ellis Island knew they’d never see native land again.
Re: “I can’t imagine...”, I try to imagine anyway. “I can imagine that might be hard.” Or “I can imagine that that would hurt.”
Wow -- what a nugget: "internal, by-definition unverifiable interpretations of 'identity-as-self.'" Quite right. Identity is not necessarily the self. According to Montaigne, "There is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and others.”
Self-identity. Social identity. Biological and cultural identity. Narrative (self-) identity. Essential and dialectical. Identity through negation, e.g., Nietzsche and resentiment or Butler's never-never of heterosexual performance.
Josh, elsewhere you use the term "performance," and unless I'm mistaken that was popularized if not coined in Butler's _Gender Trouble_.
We cannot fully understand ourselves, as the self is never present; it is not a thing but a performance. Hence, even if we could solve the problem of knowing it, there is not a thing to know ... which is not the same as nothing. But that's also why I'm skeptical of "privileging other's special experiences." The problem is that addressing injustice, ameliorating evil, and what have you, is too often filtered through subjective lenses and fabrications of what one wishes to find special in oneself. Given that social, cultural, biological, etc. identities can be fairly objectively studied, we can have productive discussions of who we are without utterly privileging the subjective, private self-narrative.
So, for example, the arguments for gay marriage based on "love is love" or "people have the right to love who they wish and therefore have all the cultural trappings, etc" leave themselves open to vile critiques that I won't repeat, as their based on subjective appeals to desire fulfilment. On what "makes *me* feel happy," and people just want others to do what makes them feel happy ... while ignoring that we as a society constantly restrict behavior based on subjective desire fulfillment and with good reason." Better arguments are based on the core notions of liberal democracy, such as a right to pursue happiness without interference regardless of anyone's self-identity as a principle of freedom. Or that the union of marriage appears almost throughout the history of the species in almost every known culture and thus has extraordinary evidence that it's a natural right and thus cannot be infringed. Buuuuut ... those arguments don't appeal to the zeitgeist, which wants to argue so much based on narrative self-identitiy.
Rebecca, I do appreciate your perhapsing. Perhaps the greatest act of griefstruck love is the resurrection of the lost in imagination and memory to tell the story they could never tell. Identity can be a gift given to others, as any parent knows.
I gift my sons with an upbringing of gender non-conformity so that they needn't grow up in the straight-jacket of military masculinity that I grew up it. Child both need the gift as they have no identity, but they are empowered in limited by it. So, going full circle with Josh, perhapsing is a extraordinary creative power that can do great evil.
I'm not sure many experienced memoirists believe that they fully understand themselves, but it's a fair point. It's one thing I enjoy about creative nonfiction and memoir that is harder to pull off in fiction -- the way that nonfiction allows us to often step back and muse on our past selves. The terms we typically use are the "voice of innocence" (the younger self immersed in a moment) and the "voice of experience" (the seasoned narrator now looking back to put that experience into context, speculate about the motivations of others, and scrutinize the self). These two modes, as you suggest, are also habits of mind that liberal arts education encourages.
Part of the difficult of "perhapsing" is that the total dominance of identity politcs has told a false story of how identity works. That is, self-identity (I am who I say I am) and essential identity (some aspect of my history or biology totally determines my identy) has become almost the only forms of publicly recognized identity. Hence, writing or speaking about an identity other than "your own" is seen as necessarily problematic because of the implicit assumptions of what identity consists.
But the popular discourse is wrong.
I feel this keenly. Were you to meet me on the street, you'd seen a middle-aged American white man, as I bear all the external markers of it. Well, not today, as I'm wearing vaguely Islamic Mediterraenean clothing that Americans wouldn't recognize as such... My early years were outside western culture and in total ignorance of my so-called racial or ethnic group to the extend that I was very behind in my native language as I didn't often encounter it. And this displacement persisted until my teens when I finally became fully immersed in white, rural, American culture. I credit this background to why I've often been the lone "white guy" who's able to join Spanish-speaking soccer leagues, or the Nepalese, Chinese, or Saudi teachs and leagues. As my good friend Juan once said to me, "you have never looked at me like ... they ... do," referring to most Americans he's met.
And yet, in recent times, I am routinely referred to and treated as just another privileged white male (American implied). My foreign mannerisms and eetiquette are treated as quirks and oddities, and only my fellow foreign nationals (as I have begun to think of myself) truly seem to get this. Hungarian. Chinese. Russian. Cultural mutt (me).
I am offering myself as a limit or test case, and not only because of my unusual background. I'm also a scholar of imagination, especially "moral imagination," which is explicitly about one's ability to conceive the first-personal lives of others as a mode of social-emotional development and the ability to think the ethical. As a scholar, part of the problem is the monolithic conception of identity that excludes the fact that identity is no monolithic or monadic. It's fragmented. Fractured. It's social identity. It's, per Meadian symbolic interaction theory, a concrescence of various social reactions that slowly form into fragmentary identitiess from which the conscious self selects some to call "self-identity." Identity, which includes ethnicity, race, and religion, is almost entirely a social construct, of which self-identity is a tiny subset.
"We live in an epoch of caged identities" -- a pithy sentence. Yes, indeed. There are times when the parlance about privilege could use more nuance. The experience of a white male who grew up in a wealthy family, attended elite prep schools and graduated from an Ivy League institution is quite different from a white male who grew up in rural America. The ways that patriarchy manifest in those two different communities are different, and I think working class people see themselves in some of the rhetoric that other marginalized communities use. So to be marginalized further and lumped in with Richie Riches in the bargain is a bitter pill.
Another word for social construct is "performance." And as Carol Roh Spaulding was writing about recently on Inner Life, race can also be a performance. And when a performance is leveraged as "essential identity," a whole lot can go wrong.
Yes, "race" is performance. That's actually the concept that gets my ethics classes so riled up, because they're all race essentialists, and they just don't realize it. The same is true when gender comes up, as I typical show photos of gender nonbinary persons and read their self-descriptions of who they are and the photos. I don't expect the response to be any different outside the student demographic, and if anything, to be more violent and volatile.
There is such a lack of public imagination, even in the act of trying to think social divergence, that divergent identities get forced back into the cage. That was also the point of the mentioned NYT photo essay.
I really miss the time of my youth where it felt like we could naively imagine. But I was probably just naive myself. For instance, one of my strongest memories of undergrad was when a professor asked the student next to me, in a contemporary Continental European philosophy course, when he chose "to be straight" during a discussion of Foucault and the History of Sexuality. The student sputtered and was unable to answer, but, I think, got the message. I've been asking questions like that all the decades since.
Sometimes we cage ourselves, and sometimes we cage others, and all too often the bonds are neither I nor them, but dialectical. The self and other are, in fact, falsely dichotomized. But so is being empowered or enchained by bonds written into our flesh that makes us who we are. I think of that often when pondering upon the movie Brokeback Mountain, which really crystallized that concept ... humanized it. In that case, the self is flagellation.
Fair questions - similar to ones floating around literary criticism for fiction, especially in commentary on autofiction (which might put the lie to real division between novels and perhaps-ing memoirs).
How have you thought about relational trust when writing about your family members? In particular, writing about your grandmother and grandfather while trying to imagine their gender-based and religious seems something you could do fairly even without that firsthand experience for yourself, a sort of imagination of respect that they could've trusted. Not necessarily respect as in deference, but as in fairness: weighing as much of them as you can, avoiding belittling or contempt where you honestly can, but not leaving out your relevant personal impressions either. Memoir is equally about the writer as about the writer's subjects, and so a respectful imagination could strike the balance between them?
Trying to understand what you mean by "relational trust." I think the difficulty of writing about family is that sometimes those people betrayed your trust, or didn't make an effort to bridge the gap between your views. Sure, a writer can rise above that by trying to be fair. This is what I did in my memoir by telling some version of my parents' stories as young people, mainly to avoid simply airing grievances about how I was raised. What I'm speaking to are things like what my grandfather might have been feeling emotionally when he answered an altar call or asked Jesus into his heart, or whatever he did to feel that he had crossed over into a community of believers. I have felt the desire to belong to that kind of community, and I have done all kinds of imitations of the things that people who say they have been converted do, but nothing ever clicked for me, I never felt anything real. I don't feel contempt for my grandfather's experience, but I'm not sure that I could render something so private, something he viewed thereafter as the cornerstone of his existence, in anything approaching fairness. Does that make sense? In fiction, of course, I could disguise all of my speculation with the third person point of view (or even adopt the first person point of view and inhabit my grandfather's character). But in that case, no one except maybe readers of this comment thread would be reading that fictional narrative as a representation of my grandfather's actual experience. It would be a step removed, more figurative than literal. Perhaps I'm simply confusing the issue.
It does make sense that you worry over rendering something so private and crucial fairly, given that you haven't yourself experienced it. But it does seem that his conversion is central to your memoir involving him, and so the risk (of writing it inaccurately, even unfairly, to the eyes of some) seems worth it, right?
Not technically, but that's an application of the idea that I'll sign with enormous block letters for a public billboard!
I haven't read it so I'll keep it speculative: "Spare" seems like a cartoonish instance of disrespectful imagination in memoir, closer to aggrieved cross-examination than imagination.
Funny you mentioned that, just yesterday I was thinking about how annoying it is that everybody always says "I can't imagine how x person/demographic/race/etc. feels, and will never understand," and so on. I don't see that literature has much of a point - or empathy, for that matter - if it's so 100% certain we can't understand each other.
Yes, I agree. But there are some identity and ideological gaps that require pretty herculean leaps of imagination. And I suppose there is also the accompanying question these days of whose story a given experience is to tell. I bristle at the territorialism, but I also understand how master narratives silence other stories and how the marketplace of ideas is weighted with power and privilege. So it is not so simple, and I think if one is attempting to "perhaps" the experience of another or to render it in fictional form, there ought to be some real care taken to be thoughtful, to avoid stereotypes, etc. This is necessary on a human level -- basic decency -- but it is also necessary in practical terms, as a way of mindfully anticipating one's audience.
And there is also the false assumption that we understand ourselves.
Josh, and some of your others may be creative fiction writers, and any dramatist must know that this nugget is key to so much literature and narrative.
So, how can we know that we cannot imagine, when we know not ourselves?
This is an everyday issue for me as a professor, because I'm constantly trying to get my students to understand their own biases, assumptions, preconceptions, etc. so that they can bracket them to complete various conceptual tasks.
I’m thinking about the ways we’ve centered internal, by-definition unverifiable interpretations of “identity-as-self” and...what you say here, Jason. Can we fully understand ourselves? If we can’t, then what? If we can understand ourselves but not others (“I can’t imagine...” as a way to privilege the Other’s ‘special’ experiences), then what?
History seems to require perhapsing. Perhaps the Dutch Jews packed into trains, headed to their murders, knew their destinations. Perhaps the lonely person stepping off the boat at Ellis Island knew they’d never see native land again.
Re: “I can’t imagine...”, I try to imagine anyway. “I can imagine that might be hard.” Or “I can imagine that that would hurt.”
Wow -- what a nugget: "internal, by-definition unverifiable interpretations of 'identity-as-self.'" Quite right. Identity is not necessarily the self. According to Montaigne, "There is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and others.”
Self-identity. Social identity. Biological and cultural identity. Narrative (self-) identity. Essential and dialectical. Identity through negation, e.g., Nietzsche and resentiment or Butler's never-never of heterosexual performance.
Josh, elsewhere you use the term "performance," and unless I'm mistaken that was popularized if not coined in Butler's _Gender Trouble_.
We cannot fully understand ourselves, as the self is never present; it is not a thing but a performance. Hence, even if we could solve the problem of knowing it, there is not a thing to know ... which is not the same as nothing. But that's also why I'm skeptical of "privileging other's special experiences." The problem is that addressing injustice, ameliorating evil, and what have you, is too often filtered through subjective lenses and fabrications of what one wishes to find special in oneself. Given that social, cultural, biological, etc. identities can be fairly objectively studied, we can have productive discussions of who we are without utterly privileging the subjective, private self-narrative.
So, for example, the arguments for gay marriage based on "love is love" or "people have the right to love who they wish and therefore have all the cultural trappings, etc" leave themselves open to vile critiques that I won't repeat, as their based on subjective appeals to desire fulfilment. On what "makes *me* feel happy," and people just want others to do what makes them feel happy ... while ignoring that we as a society constantly restrict behavior based on subjective desire fulfillment and with good reason." Better arguments are based on the core notions of liberal democracy, such as a right to pursue happiness without interference regardless of anyone's self-identity as a principle of freedom. Or that the union of marriage appears almost throughout the history of the species in almost every known culture and thus has extraordinary evidence that it's a natural right and thus cannot be infringed. Buuuuut ... those arguments don't appeal to the zeitgeist, which wants to argue so much based on narrative self-identitiy.
Rebecca, I do appreciate your perhapsing. Perhaps the greatest act of griefstruck love is the resurrection of the lost in imagination and memory to tell the story they could never tell. Identity can be a gift given to others, as any parent knows.
I gift my sons with an upbringing of gender non-conformity so that they needn't grow up in the straight-jacket of military masculinity that I grew up it. Child both need the gift as they have no identity, but they are empowered in limited by it. So, going full circle with Josh, perhapsing is a extraordinary creative power that can do great evil.
I'm not sure many experienced memoirists believe that they fully understand themselves, but it's a fair point. It's one thing I enjoy about creative nonfiction and memoir that is harder to pull off in fiction -- the way that nonfiction allows us to often step back and muse on our past selves. The terms we typically use are the "voice of innocence" (the younger self immersed in a moment) and the "voice of experience" (the seasoned narrator now looking back to put that experience into context, speculate about the motivations of others, and scrutinize the self). These two modes, as you suggest, are also habits of mind that liberal arts education encourages.
Part of the difficult of "perhapsing" is that the total dominance of identity politcs has told a false story of how identity works. That is, self-identity (I am who I say I am) and essential identity (some aspect of my history or biology totally determines my identy) has become almost the only forms of publicly recognized identity. Hence, writing or speaking about an identity other than "your own" is seen as necessarily problematic because of the implicit assumptions of what identity consists.
But the popular discourse is wrong.
I feel this keenly. Were you to meet me on the street, you'd seen a middle-aged American white man, as I bear all the external markers of it. Well, not today, as I'm wearing vaguely Islamic Mediterraenean clothing that Americans wouldn't recognize as such... My early years were outside western culture and in total ignorance of my so-called racial or ethnic group to the extend that I was very behind in my native language as I didn't often encounter it. And this displacement persisted until my teens when I finally became fully immersed in white, rural, American culture. I credit this background to why I've often been the lone "white guy" who's able to join Spanish-speaking soccer leagues, or the Nepalese, Chinese, or Saudi teachs and leagues. As my good friend Juan once said to me, "you have never looked at me like ... they ... do," referring to most Americans he's met.
And yet, in recent times, I am routinely referred to and treated as just another privileged white male (American implied). My foreign mannerisms and eetiquette are treated as quirks and oddities, and only my fellow foreign nationals (as I have begun to think of myself) truly seem to get this. Hungarian. Chinese. Russian. Cultural mutt (me).
I am offering myself as a limit or test case, and not only because of my unusual background. I'm also a scholar of imagination, especially "moral imagination," which is explicitly about one's ability to conceive the first-personal lives of others as a mode of social-emotional development and the ability to think the ethical. As a scholar, part of the problem is the monolithic conception of identity that excludes the fact that identity is no monolithic or monadic. It's fragmented. Fractured. It's social identity. It's, per Meadian symbolic interaction theory, a concrescence of various social reactions that slowly form into fragmentary identitiess from which the conscious self selects some to call "self-identity." Identity, which includes ethnicity, race, and religion, is almost entirely a social construct, of which self-identity is a tiny subset.
We live in an epoch of caged identities.
"We live in an epoch of caged identities" -- a pithy sentence. Yes, indeed. There are times when the parlance about privilege could use more nuance. The experience of a white male who grew up in a wealthy family, attended elite prep schools and graduated from an Ivy League institution is quite different from a white male who grew up in rural America. The ways that patriarchy manifest in those two different communities are different, and I think working class people see themselves in some of the rhetoric that other marginalized communities use. So to be marginalized further and lumped in with Richie Riches in the bargain is a bitter pill.
Another word for social construct is "performance." And as Carol Roh Spaulding was writing about recently on Inner Life, race can also be a performance. And when a performance is leveraged as "essential identity," a whole lot can go wrong.
Yes, "race" is performance. That's actually the concept that gets my ethics classes so riled up, because they're all race essentialists, and they just don't realize it. The same is true when gender comes up, as I typical show photos of gender nonbinary persons and read their self-descriptions of who they are and the photos. I don't expect the response to be any different outside the student demographic, and if anything, to be more violent and volatile.
There is such a lack of public imagination, even in the act of trying to think social divergence, that divergent identities get forced back into the cage. That was also the point of the mentioned NYT photo essay.
I really miss the time of my youth where it felt like we could naively imagine. But I was probably just naive myself. For instance, one of my strongest memories of undergrad was when a professor asked the student next to me, in a contemporary Continental European philosophy course, when he chose "to be straight" during a discussion of Foucault and the History of Sexuality. The student sputtered and was unable to answer, but, I think, got the message. I've been asking questions like that all the decades since.
Sometimes we cage ourselves, and sometimes we cage others, and all too often the bonds are neither I nor them, but dialectical. The self and other are, in fact, falsely dichotomized. But so is being empowered or enchained by bonds written into our flesh that makes us who we are. I think of that often when pondering upon the movie Brokeback Mountain, which really crystallized that concept ... humanized it. In that case, the self is flagellation.
Fair questions - similar to ones floating around literary criticism for fiction, especially in commentary on autofiction (which might put the lie to real division between novels and perhaps-ing memoirs).
How have you thought about relational trust when writing about your family members? In particular, writing about your grandmother and grandfather while trying to imagine their gender-based and religious seems something you could do fairly even without that firsthand experience for yourself, a sort of imagination of respect that they could've trusted. Not necessarily respect as in deference, but as in fairness: weighing as much of them as you can, avoiding belittling or contempt where you honestly can, but not leaving out your relevant personal impressions either. Memoir is equally about the writer as about the writer's subjects, and so a respectful imagination could strike the balance between them?
Trying to understand what you mean by "relational trust." I think the difficulty of writing about family is that sometimes those people betrayed your trust, or didn't make an effort to bridge the gap between your views. Sure, a writer can rise above that by trying to be fair. This is what I did in my memoir by telling some version of my parents' stories as young people, mainly to avoid simply airing grievances about how I was raised. What I'm speaking to are things like what my grandfather might have been feeling emotionally when he answered an altar call or asked Jesus into his heart, or whatever he did to feel that he had crossed over into a community of believers. I have felt the desire to belong to that kind of community, and I have done all kinds of imitations of the things that people who say they have been converted do, but nothing ever clicked for me, I never felt anything real. I don't feel contempt for my grandfather's experience, but I'm not sure that I could render something so private, something he viewed thereafter as the cornerstone of his existence, in anything approaching fairness. Does that make sense? In fiction, of course, I could disguise all of my speculation with the third person point of view (or even adopt the first person point of view and inhabit my grandfather's character). But in that case, no one except maybe readers of this comment thread would be reading that fictional narrative as a representation of my grandfather's actual experience. It would be a step removed, more figurative than literal. Perhaps I'm simply confusing the issue.
It does make sense that you worry over rendering something so private and crucial fairly, given that you haven't yourself experienced it. But it does seem that his conversion is central to your memoir involving him, and so the risk (of writing it inaccurately, even unfairly, to the eyes of some) seems worth it, right?
So, Kevin, you're saying "don't write a book like Spare?" ;)
Not technically, but that's an application of the idea that I'll sign with enormous block letters for a public billboard!
I haven't read it so I'll keep it speculative: "Spare" seems like a cartoonish instance of disrespectful imagination in memoir, closer to aggrieved cross-examination than imagination.
I have read excerpts, reports, analyses, etc.
basically, I was highlighting that there's some problems with "relational trust" in that book.