Week 11 Handout: Discourse and Datcourse
Media example: Rent, “No Day But Today”
Keywords: Psychotherapy, “to the couch,” Afrocentrism, counter-hegemony, monologic vs. dialogic models of discourse
Hall, Stuart, and bell hooks. Uncut Funk: A Contemplative Dialogue. Routledge, 2018.
Psychotherapy and Therapeutics
(Identifying and solving emotional or mental health issues through talking)
Feminism
Non-monogamous relationships and lifestyle were “at the heart of the sexual liberation and women’s liberation” - hooks (71), a paradigm of mutuality, of both autonomy and togetherness
“We sat around apartments and dormitory rooms talking endlessly about these questions of monogamy.” - hooks (71)
These types of conversations diminished and no public discourse on the topic.
Feminism needed to move away from the stagnant idea of a fixed identity and lifestyle especially with regard to sexuality and heterosexist norms. There is difficulty in finding alternative modes of relating.
“I wonder how much of that is linked to the fact that those of us who were really trying to have fundamentally different sexual practices did not talk about those things.” -hooks (71)
“Most of the people I know have negotiated very complicated, very changeable ways of living their desire, but they don’t talk about it as if it adds up to a more general case somehow.” - Hall (79)
Class
Conversations are had with therapists to help through the pain and problem caused by a lack of multiplicity and diversity.
Access to therapy is specific to those in a class that can afford therapy
Living a life that goes against the grain is hard and painful and requires a place to talk about it
Race
Afrocentrism (centering experiences, histories and relationships of the African diaspora) - keeps us from facing the mental health crisis that is present in the Black community. Black psychotherapists and psychoanalysts could employ these practices of talking and revelation
“It is an enabling, romantic, utopian myth that is enchanting to so many people precisely because it keeps them away from the recognition of the state of our woundedness, of our collected woundedness.” - hooks (87)
As a culture, knowing when to share is the problem. “This is one thing that happened, and this is the impact.” - bell (88)
Public intellectualism: the stakes of vulnerable discourse
Making the private public
Writing the private in public-facing criticism is not weighed the same across all communities (“valorization” for some, “ostracism” for others).
Vulnerability on the part of the writer/speaker—Hall or hooks—is one thing, but where others are implicated, there may be “hurt.”
Hall: “I have long thought about things which I have not felt able to write or to talk about, or to speak about publicly” (83).
The confessional and political consciousness
The stakes of public-facing writing amid a time of “to the couch” confessionals.
White feminists from privileged backgrounds vs. working-class feminists and their ability to use psychotherapy to vocalize and work through the personal and private.
hooks: “I was saying that as a working class person, and I find this to cut across race often, there was no valorization of speaking about things inside the family outside” (84).
hooks: “white feminists from privileged class backgrounds were able to employ the confessional in a catalytic way for political consciousness-raising precisely because many of them had had long traditions in therapy of utilizing the confessional as a point of transformation, whereas it was unprecedented in our family life for someone to go outside the family and speak publicly about matters that took place in the family” (85).
Hall points out the remove that psychotherapy provided; just enough distance that the personal could be accessed without implicating others.
Hall: “psychoanalytic language has provided a way for many feminists of talking about the personal without running all the risks of talking in a more directly documentary or experiential way. It has been an acceptable code of going to the level of the personal, the emotional, the psychic while not implicating…other people in the landscape” (85).
Point of discussion: no discourse is off-limits to hooks or Hall. As a model of political consciousness, both realize that bringing the private to bear on the public is meaningful discourse, a step toward the “plurality” and expansiveness that are essential to bucking restrictive paradigms. But both hooks and Hall are sensitive to the fact that their private lives are not theirs alone but implicate others. They raise the question of public and private as discrete identities, to which both intellectuals say the categories themselves are too solidified. We are both public and private individuals, moving among and between our multiplicity.
Question: we have already encountered hooks and Hall writing the private into public discourse in ways that are theoretically enriching, provoking, and also scholarly. What do you think of this model? What barriers to this more intimate mode of criticism remain?
End of Movement/End of Stage Toward Death
End of Movement
Understanding our own mortality shifts with the various life stages and the feeling of defeat during certain movements and social interventions. When we haven’t accomplished our agendas in the public sphere or see a movement end, it deeply affects the feeling we have not only about our society, but of our personal fears and anxieties.
“This very often coincides with certain generational changes or stages in life so that it intersects with certain key life transitions.” - Hall (92)
“When there is a sense of the ending or transition of a struggle that coincides with the sense of transition of one’s own life that does create a depressed climate and ethos, a very personal one.” - Hall (93)
End of Stage/Death
Proximity to death can make one more aware of their mortality whereas others may not reconcile their mortality until it is present in their own generation. “They are gone. It is a kind of anticipation of death, almost in the dying of others.” - Hall (59)
Realizing your mortality results in reflection over your life
“What do you want? What is going to happen if you don’t finish that? Is the world going to come to an end?”
Growing old does not equate to fulfillment
Medical advancement has made space for longer lives which can either mean looking at each day as a gift to do all you can or possibly putting off tomorrow what could be done today. “I couldn’t conceive of it so I didn’t live in the present so much.” - Hall (58)
Seeing the next generation’s life choices, which are typically different, make them reflexive of their own, sometimes causing friction between mother and daughter. -
Illness
AIDS - An illness that “has been disastrously connected with pleasure and desire in the culture.” - Hall (57) Showed up seemingly out of nowhere and affected people on such a scale that even younger generations knew people that died.
Broke the social taboo of public discourse around the topic of death and elicited more conversations about other diseases, hereditary or otherwise (Lupus, cancer, etc.)
“If they are not dying they are now struck by an illness that is life threatening that they will now have to live with until their death. So just the awareness of that as a new dimension of the way we live with other people is a very striking reality.” - Hall (60)
“The art of dying may have to be the coming to terms with messiness and inadequacies of the life one has actually lived. That is another way of putting it. If you think of it as an art which will complete an arch, as it were, then you will build the satisfaction into it.” - Hall (62-63)
The public intellectual and the institution
Teaching
Desire for solidarity and dialogue among intellectuals, but also an acknowledgment of the struggles of being an intellectual and bearing up under the weight of a taxing occupation as well as the issues implicit in Academe and its institutions.
Both hooks and Hall agree that teaching is a mode that spans discourses (public, political, private, subjective)
Hall: “I enjoy it because beyond the very public occasions teaching does give you an opportunity to cross some of these registers between one domain and another, in the domain of political involvement, in the domain of subjective experience, in the domain of private dreams, disillusionment and obsessive despair” (101).
hooks and Hall both taught and found balancing their teaching with their other modes of activism difficult.
hooks: “As you were speaking about your own over exertion, the image I had of myself was as someone who comes home from teaching, and then writes into the wee hours of the night interspersed with several hours on the phone with various students that I am counseling on the various directions that they want to go in their lives. As all of this is going on I begin to wonder where the space is for me to have a balanced life” (103).
hooks and Hall ponder if a balanced life is indeed “utopian,” for them specifically.
Hall [speaking of those who manage to teach and write]: “I am not saying that they have it easy or anything like that, but I wouldn’t say to them, “It is utopian.” But I think for us it is” (104).
Critique of the Academy
Hooks and Hall, true to their more expansive desires for cultural studies and discourse, are suspect of academic narrowness: “text” (monograph) as coin of the realm, but dry, divested of the on-the-ground practicality activism requires.
hooks: “I don’t think it is positive that every thinker, intellectual be in an institution, because I believe institutions are, by their very nature, imposing of restrictions and limitations both on thought and action” (109).
hooks: “The loss of a popular pedagogical model was through the academicization that led to the linking of tenure to the writing of a certain kind of academic text that therefore has no relation to the notion that we actually serve the masses, that we don’t just serve the students who can pay to come to our classes” (121).
Of note, the format of this book, Uncut Funk, counters the standard academic mode of address. It is improvisational, rather than thesis-driven; it meanders, rather than being tightly bound; it moves backwards and forwards, building a braided momentum rather than snowballing toward magnificent conclusions.
The Black Intellectual
Returning to a discussion of the intersection between class and race, Both thinkers express concern over what opportunities are being represented to Black communities in poverty compared to what is being “served up” to middle- and upper-class Black individuals.
The Black intellectual and the “doctor who will speak”; hooks and Hall discuss DuBois’ “Talented Tenth” model and his reservations concerning the efficacy of racial uplift and class conflict.
Hall: “You see the class factors begin to play and appear on the page, between different minority groups, black between Afro-Caribbean groups…class fractions…The minorities who are able to have a perspective of writing in the social strata now have a very different attitude to this whole project of black culture, as opposed to the majority…” (112).
The mainstream
The mainstream has a conservatizing effect, hooks asserts. She posits that Hall has achieved stardom because he didn’t try to be a star and acquire a fanbase.
Hall: “One chooses to go to the mainstream if one takes the opportunity. Sometimes one wins, and sometimes one loses. It is not an open space. If you occupy it too long without thinking about what you’re doing you’ll find yourself gliding into respectable language which smooths down the rough edges of the critique, and so on” (118).
Hall: “The mainstream shouldn’t keep us out of it, but it shouldn’t keep us in it without some strong critical sense that you need all your wits about you” (118-119).
hooks: “I wouldn’t say that I haven’t engaged the mainstream with my work, but I have tried to do that without surrendering the language of radicalism…Ultimately, the test does not lie there in our theories, but to the degree to which we are able to groom these theories into concrete strategies for our lives and not simply the eloquence of how well we theorize” (119).
Return to love: Uncut Funk‘s call to action
Hall: “Love…it is also a conversation, the right kind of conversation. It is also a pleasure in the fullest giving birth to conversation. It has something to do with the nature of the inventiveness that one brings to conversation of that kind that somehow can get lost, and its boundaries dissolve as something new arises which is neither one nor the other, but a space in between” (120).
hooks: “Part of the intervention that the conversation makes is to counter the hegemony of the critical essay” (121).
Hall: “Again, academia, despite its precision of thought, its privileging of rational modes of argument, it still has an enormous amount of crap saddling around it” (122).
hooks and Hall’s call to action
hooks: “I have always felt that dialogic is the model. It is the model of love” (122).
Uncut Funk calls for a different kind of scholarly model of encounter, which we in this room are asked to seriously consider, being academics in an institution that very much prizes the individuated work of monograph and essay.
Returning to a familiar refrain, hooks and Hall conclude their conversation by commenting on this interview format as a counter-hegemonic dialogue, in that it privileges improvisation, incompleteness, digression, plentitude and multiplicity, the organic, and above all, a lovely reciprocity of ideas. Thinking across this semester, much of what Hall seems to have been urging us to do and be as thinkers and activists, is dialogic, and improvisational. Hall everywhere urges us to think “deeply and profoundly,” but his conversation with hooks in Uncut Funk suggests that the forum in which we do this deep and profound work is important.
Question: in response to Hall’s urging, and with a “what should we take with us, what should we leave behind” mindset, what are your thoughts about this counter-hegemonic mode of production? For those of you who teach now or intend to teach at some point, how might this dialogic model be a useful pedagogy? What can we take from it? What should we leave behind?
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