To Appear Other to Itself Anew
Response Data
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7459293 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Patti Lather |
| Year | 2008 |
| Volume | 8 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 369-371 |
| Publication date | 2008-07-16 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Culture Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1532-7086 • E-ISSN: 1552-356X |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/1532708607310797 |
| OpenAlex | W2081008086 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 5 |
September 2006 Dear Victoria: Sometimes a book writes us. While Chris and I wrote Troubling the Angels (Lather & Smithies, 1997) with a great degree of intentionality, we also made it up as we went along, often driven by very pragmatic circumstances. And some of it worked below the surface of our efforts to do our knowing from our doing. In excess of subjects presumed to know about objects presumed to be knowable, we were “out ahead of ourselves” in the format. For this, I have greedily attended to reader response to learn what comes about when readers are positioned as thinkers and writers know they are in over their heads. Here we are enriched by the Deleuzean “fold” of what Elizabeth St. Pierre (1997) calls “response data” where “the audience teaches you something,” perhaps particularly that “we need other people to help us think.” Hence I/we especially appreciate you as one of the more “astute” readers of the place of the angels in the book and the pages they take up and whether their presence is justified or even ethical. The angels as bad (girl) behavior is just one of the best readings ever for how the angels are (mis)read in ways that bring their work in the book “to containment within the personal.” That you situate this reductionist reading of the angels within Beauvoir’s understanding of what happens to women’s dissident thinking is on target, I think, and contributes to understanding a sort of rationality that is embodied and perspectival, quite other to “a hidden isomorphism with our cultural structuration of masculinity” that so shapes dominant rationalities (Hass, 2002, p. 71). Here where there is only room for a very complicated truth, an entirely different logic is called for, a logic grounded in not knowing as a way of moving into a nonauthoritarian sort of (im)possible future. Things that Chris and I were aware of but that you express so well
Aesthetics · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Reading (process · Reductionism · Sociology · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Psychology · Philosophy
| Highly cited | No |
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