Reparations

…”it’s often the ludicrous anachronisms within a given object or practice that operate as portals to other uses [...] like what Sedgwick means by reparative criticism: that because we can’t know in advance – we can know only retrospectively, if even then – what is queer and what is not, we gather and combine eclectically and idiosyncratically, dragging a bunch of cultural debris around with us and stacking it in eclectic piles [... A]esthetic objects – especially outdated ones – ‘make time appear’ in ways that contest dominant modes of writing and feeling properly historical: they demand that we read, and they themselves write, historiographically aslant.  The apprehension of thus requires a certain stillness.”

-Elizabeth Freeman, 2007 (“Still After.”  South Atlantic Quarterly 106(3). Pg. 497-9.)

Dialogue and its Discontents

“The very notion of ‘dialogue’ is culturally specific and historically bound, and while one speaker may feel secure that a conversation is happening, another may be sure it is not.  The power relations that condition and limit dialogic possibilities need first to be interrogated.  Otherwise, the model of dialogue risks relapsing into a liberal model that assumes that speaking agents occupy equal positions of power and speak with the same presuppositions about what constitutes ‘agreement’ and ‘unity’ and indeed that those are the goals to be sought.”

-Judith Butler, 1990.  (Gender Trouble.  New York: Routledge.  Pg. 20)

Partial-Vision

“the alternative to relativism is not totalization and single vision, which is always finally the unmarked category whose power depends on systematic narrowing and obscuring.  The alternative to relativism is partial, locatable, critical knowledges sustaining the possibility of webs of connections called solidarity in politics and shared conversations in epistemology.  Relativism is a way of being nowhere while claiming to be everywhere equally.  The ‘equality’ of positioning is a denial of responsibility and critical inquiry.  Relativism is the perfect mirror twin of totalization in the ideologies of objectivity; both deny the stakes in location, embodiment, and partial perspective both make it impossible to see well.  Relativism and totalization are both ‘god tricks’ promising vision from everywhere and nowhere equally and fully, common myths in rhetorics surrounding science.  But it is precisely in the politics and epistemology of partial perspectives that the possibility of sustained, rational, objective inquiry rests”

-Donna Haraway, 1988 (“Situated Knowledges”  Feminist Studies 14(3) Pg. 584.)

Posturing

“And as for the style of detachment, surely the posture of neutrality is just that, a posture recognized as such, a charade acknowledged as a public secert by one and all? This would make most social scientists and their funding agencies even better material for study than Andalusians”

-Michael Taussig, 1999 (Defacement. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. Pg 75)

Counting (methodological) chickens

“…Hence inquiry begins midstream, always already embedded in a situation, one both settled and unsettled…

“…There are situations that may reach a determined state rapidly and others where it is not possible to tell before the inquiry is well underway whether, and in what manner, and for how long, it will take to move beyond a first loose state to one in which both the situation and its determinants become clearer, more determinate.  Thus, to claim to know beforehand precisely what one is going to do, or to find, as grant proposals demand, would constitute bad method, poor logic, and falsely disciplined inquiry.  Or, more accurately, it seems to me, run the risk of no doing inquiry at all…

“…since inquiry arises within a problematic and indeterminate situation, the inquirer is not outside the situation, nor is she in a position such that she could construct something that was not to a degree present already…

“…Hence, problems and solutions are terms that are joined in practice and in that sense coproductive…The solution to a particular problem consists in a series of steps whose particularities are not know before those steps are undertaken”

Paul Rabinow, 2008.  (Marking Time.  Princeton NJ: University of Princeton Press.  Pp 8-10)