Week 11 Reading Facilitation Outline, Bahl and Kendrick

bell hooks and Stuart Hall, Uncut Funk: A Contemplative Dialogue (first half)

Media Example

Up, opening scenes: "Married Life" Up (2009)

Key Terms / Concepts

• Unconscious resistance
• Essentialism
• Heterosexual matrix
• Space/Home
• Writing vs. Speech
• Narrative and history

Themes

The Power and Potential of Conversations

• “Conversation has a polyphonic variety. You can move in it from the mundane to the profound. It ranges from lessons to be learned about the mundane to something that is deeper and more exciting” (hooks 2).
• In addition to the topical fluidity possible between aspects of a particular conversation, conversations have a capacity to be inter-topical in the sense that they bring to bear a plethora of different issues such as sexuality, class, ethnicity, etc. that can either be explicitly discussed or implicitly present.
• “Stuart: Yes, sharing across those boundaries. One of the nice things about conversation, as opposed to conferences and fixed formalized occasions, is, of course, its fluidity. It can move from the trivial to the profound, in and out, across boundaries of sexualities and genders, boundaries of experience. It gives you a sense of the dialogic, of conversation as exchange.” (Hall and hooks 5)
• Dialogue in this regard is not only the explicit act of communication between two or more actors but in the nature of the conversation itself there are multiple conceptual dialogues happening. (A good connection could be drawn to Mikhail Bakhtin’s work in “Discourse in the Novel”).
• Silence acts not only as a method of nondisclosure, but in some regard it posits its own narrative function as an implication of the unsaid and its associated feelings.
• Conversations provide opportunities for learning/teaching, play, and connection. However, where conversations happen matters; place can limit or enable their generative and pedagogical potential.
• The narrative function of conversation is an always apparent attribute to the dialogic utterance as communication is often centered either on the explicit narration of a story or on the connectivity of ideas which proceed akin to narrative structure. Conversation itself can be seen as a narrative in this regard, a metanarrative perhaps.
• Intergenerational conversations involve differing power dynamics and may produce different effects for their participants. For instance, they might be generative for some, but induce sadness in others. For Hall, intergenerational conversations do not solely relate to time, but also space: “...there is already one generation that I have lost, the generation I was schooled with, the generation of my teenage life…They are no my interlocutors anymore…I feel that with some of them I couldn’t even have a conversation now, because they haven’t a clue as to who I am” (10).
• One issue that can arise when participating in public conversations and discourses is that individual speakers can be made into symbols or representatives of a particular subject or topic which not only diminishes the variety and breadth of their individual voice but also centralizes discourse into one figure which can facilitate the construction of hegemonic structures. An example of diminishment is provided when hooks discusses Lorraine Hansberry: “Lorraine Hansberry is another central model for me of a public intellectual whose political involvement with Africa and Ethiopia in particular is forgotten. The irony is that as she becomes more and more claimed as a lesbian icon people pay less and less attention to how progressive she was on so many different fronts” (36).

Boundaries and Rupture

• Setting boundaries can be beneficial, but if they are too rigid and do not allow for expansion and growth, then they become too limiting and potentially harmful.
• Hall and hooks discuss the “crapping on the coffee table” metaphor from Hall’s discussion of feminism’s influence on cultural studies. They agree that these moments of rupture are not always attractive and are usually messy, but occur as a necessary response to rigid and restrictive boundaries.
• With rupture and change comes resistance, though it is sometimes unintentional. This kind of unconscious resistance is generally linked to feelings of nostalgia for an earlier time (e.g., before the moment of rupture). Facing one’s unconscious resistances requires an interrogation of how authority operates (before and immediately after the rupture) and coming to terms with one’s fear of displacement.
• Consistent rearticulation and reinteraction is required to facilitate change over a period of time. A model of erosion rather than idealized spontaneity.
• Rupturing discourses can ossify and become their own hegemonies of be recapitulated back into preexisting hegemonic discourses.
• The intersection of public and personal lives are a requirement for substantive political movements as the private life is where rearticulations occur and reinteractions are always present (ex. Hall and his partner’s relationship). 
• The construction of discourse is dependent on the presence and recognition of the identities of its practitioners and must be rewritten with the entrance of new groups and individuals 
• Identification with the lived experiences of others helps facilitates the capacity to listen which is a requirement for effective discourse.
• When engaging with a discourse which acts counter-hegemonically, one has to “decolon[ize] one’s mind” (20), or attempt to recognize, interrogate, and change their unconscious biases for hegemonic discourses.

Home, Kinship, and Family

• There are specific conditions that allow us to leave home. Hall left home because the way he internalized race was different from the way his family did. hooks says that feminism allowed her to leave home and she works to enable other Black women to leave home by bringing “feminism into the discourse of race” (21).
• As stated above, space can become a determinant factor of conversation. Space physically (or the lack of space) can facilitate or inhibit the explicit act of communication and interaction (ex. hooks’s time at college). Space more abstractly as the close proximity of subjects also can hinder or facilitate conversation (Hall’s example of Oxford). This latter definition of space can allow us to abstract the notion of home not as just the physical presence of the home space or the physical presence of family but rather as a position in a discursive network and a body of conversations.
• The capacity for one to not just move discursively but literally becomes a determinant for the availability of information and the access one has to developing discourses and changes. This capacity of movement is often dictated by hegemonic discourse such as class, gender, national identity, among others (ex. Hall being able to move to England for study while his sister was unable to). While home can facilitate a center of comfortability and stability, it can also become a place from which we cannot leave dependent on the availability of certain discursive currents. 
• Reinventing the notions of home and family: Is the notion of home just nostalgia for the patriarchal paradigm or are home and family an act of resistance? While hooks proposes the former, Hall argues the following: “The constitution of the family itself under slavery was an act of resistance…tied up with freedom, autonomy, and reclaiming control over your life…the family is a kind of last refuge, the first refuge and the last refuge” (24).
• In their discussion of home and family, Hall and hooks also address kinship and the sense of belonging. We might become kin with others intellectually or personally, but that sense of belonging is critical to our growth and development.

Writing as Differentiated from Speech

• Communication as manifested through different mediums (oral and written in this case) can be understood as requiring or facilitating different practices. For Hall, writing is a more meticulous practice and is more of specific articulation whereas speech is usually more casual and is not as precise,
• “Stuart: Writing is for me a much more isolated thing, but that is not to say that there isn’t a conscious adoption of what might be called the conversational voice. In my writing I am more aware of speaking what I am saying than of writing it. When I write only, I write in a very clotted way, but as soon as I think about writing as I would speak it, I write in a much more accessible, vernacular way. There is a trace of conversation in spite of the fact that it hasn’t actually come out of talking with others” (Hall and hooks 7-8).
• One thing we must consider is the differences of ephemerality between speech and writing as the former loses the particularity of reference after an utterance has been issued while the latter always possesses a referent to what has been said due to the material consistency of the word on the page.
• While writing may provide for a greater capacity of articulation, certain forms of writing (such as literature) can exist as ambiguous in their meaning both allowing for potent critiques such as satire but also potential confusion. 
• Different mediums of communication impact the pervasiveness of particular discourses. The accessibility of mediums such as music and television may make certain perspectives more popular or present as opposed to those presented in less accessible mediums such as books (ex. Hall’s discussion of black musicians in the UK and the discursive ties between the music and prevalent cultural codes). 
• In written articulations of experiences and perspectives one must beware of the ideas which underlie the writer’s presentation of information and style. Hall’s example of Angela Davis: “They [readers] quote her [Davis] for the experience that she records but not for the ideas that are implicit in the experiences that she is recording which is often how knowledge gets distorted when it appears in another aesthetic form” (36).
• “What this suggests is not so much that I’ve changed, so much as my relationship to writing has changed. Therefore, writing at one stage, writing in a serious intellectual way required excluding or expunging from the prose those things which I have always done which is to take pleasure in thinking and talking. A lot of people always find me talking easier to get hold of than me writing. I have an easier relationship with talking, lecturing and so on. It is because in speech I love the playful side of me quite a lot” (48).

Intersectionality and Feminism

• Men and feminism: “Once the mood of that particular moment, the moment feminism is entering through the window and working as an intervention, once that moment of militancy passed then it was possible for a lot of men to go back to a space and a location where they didn’t think about feminism. The men who remained fully and deeply engaged on an emotional and intellectual level with feminist thinking in their private lives, as well as in their public lives, were not able to do that kind of backtracking” (hooks 13). Hall and hooks agree that the intersections of one’s intellectual work and one’s private life are a key factor in the internalization of a new paradigm.
• Essentialism is the main barrier to solidarity and critique (see examples below).
• Believing that only women can learn and benefit from the feminist movement
• Believing that critiquing one’s “sisters” is a “mockery of sisterhood” (hooks 17)
• Forgetting the hostilities: As intersectionality has become embraced within feminist and cultural studies discourses, people have come to forget their ferocious resistance to discussions of race and the multiplicative nature of identity. This act of forgetting inflicts a form of harm on Black women, who worked to heal from these resistances, despite continuing to be placed in the position to negotiate both their blackness and womanness.
• The idea that one cause “supersedes” (34) another can contribute to the negation of intersectionality and can place arbitrary boundaries between discourses. We should always analyze “the rhetoric of subordination to the greater cause” (34) to make sure the perspectives of others are not being silenced when pushing for change.
• One issue we have to recognize about ourselves is that our perceptions of how someone comes to their perspectives on certain issues may be pre-coded by the biases of hegemonic discourses like patriarchy.
• “Also, it is not a willful neglect, it is more an inability to see into the complexity of intellectual and political formation that is going on. Men think that women must come to these insights along a given, rather straightforward emotional feminized root, and so they don’t look at these careers in the way in which they would look at the complexity of masculine careers as if they were very deep, having many ruptures, phases and evolutions. We don’t get accounts of the politicization of women which take those complex histories into account, and consequently the prophetic insides of a lot of women’s work are lost, because people don’t see quite how original they were.” (37)

The Margins, the Black Body, and Homosexuality

• Black gay male theorists have worked within the margins and “have been willing to stand outside” certain notions of masculinity (hooks 25).
• Hall points to the attention toward the black body as “the only way of getting past some of the constructions that have been put in place, through to where the complexities of the feelings are where this double inscription really operates” (26).
• In their discussion of gay black masculinity, Hall states this particular identity threatens the heterosexual matrix and its heterosexist norms. This is especially relevant to “a myth of black gayness being anti-family” (hooks 26). This type of misreading places gay black masculinity into the margins, as an unfamiliar form of blackness.

Afrocentrism and Black Nationalism

• Whose blackness “counts” and what form of blackness is “authentic”? In their discussion of Afrocentrism and black nationalism, Hall and hooks take up the subject of authenticity. Whereas Afrocentrism and black nationalism sought to contain blackness (e.g., denying any non-black influence), hooks proposes that laying claim to “authentic blackness” requires one to claim every influence and force in one’s life (45). 
• Containment is positioned as the opposite of diversity. As desegregation took hold and containment ceased to be the primary experience, people were confronted with a changing notion of blackness. As hooks says, “What does blackness become in the context of this diversity and this variety?” (44).
• Ultimately, one must resist essentialism, while maintaining love and respect for blackness: “you can love blackness and simultaneously have this expansive interest in many other things” (hooks 40). Hall adds to this point in the following statements:
• “...one always speaks out of a particular space, or spaces, out of a site, out of particular languages, and you are going to love, and respect, and honor those languages that have allowed you to speak at all, which enable you to speak at all. Everybody comes from somewhere” (41).
• “...we have to recognize the degree to which ordinary black folks depend on essentialist politics to preserve their lives...Until we can defend them in some other more expansive, more open way, we can’t just crap on what they have left, on what they have been thrown back to” (41).

Pleasure, Desire, Humor, and Play

• There is an absence of humor and play within the academy, even though play is necessary to the process of critique, as well as the growth of movements.
• In their discussion of playfulness, Hall and hooks come back to masculinity, suggesting that playful masculinity might be capable of disrupting the guardedness of patriarchy. They mention the playfulness of Rastafarianism as something that distanced the movement’s associated masculinity from patriarchal masculinity, though it “didn’t problematize masculinity in any way” (54).
• The stamping out of playfulness also entailed making sexuality, pleasure, and desire taboo subjects within intellectual discourse. For hooks, this was particularly frustrating within the feminist movement for the following reasons:
• Birth control accessibility was crucial to the claiming of agency and freedom for women
• Discussions of sexuality, pleasure, and desire created space for the critique and interrogation of:
• Monogamy and women’s freedom (or lack thereof) within such a system
• Double standards in the heterosexual matrix (e.g., men are allowed and encouraged to explore their sexual desires, while women were not)
• The effectiveness of cultural critiques as engaged with play and pleasure can be seen with aesthetic entities such as films and novels. Due to the greater accessibility these mediums have as compared to academic articles and monographs, they become a vehicle through which desire and pleasure can be mobilized into and as socio-political critique. Images of speculation and counter-hegemony can be more easily displayed to an audience imagitistically with film and can become experiences individuals can empathize with as narratives.
• “Which is why of course we continually think about the film industry. Some of them do break out of that sculptural fetishization” (53)

Illness, Aging, and the "Art of Dying"

• “Dying was something you did at home” (hooks 58). Public attention to and discussions of AIDS became an entry-point for conversations about death and dying. Prior to this moment of rupture, death and dying were private and taboo subjects, not to be discussed in polite conversation nor within intellectual projects.
• The “art of dying” can be understood as being satisfied and content with one’s life and choices upon being confronted with the realness of death (e.g., immediate possibility or certainty, or closeness to its inevitability). There is also the sense that if one is content and satisfied, then they will move gracefully toward the end. Hall and hooks this is where the bitterness of old age begins, because one cannot move gracefully toward the end if they are filled with regret or feel they did not accomplish anything significant.
• Giving up the idea of the “art of dying” is a shift in its definition. Instead of being totally content and satisfied, the “art of dying may have to be the coming to terms with messiness and inadequacies of the life one has actually lived” (Hall 62). 
• As generations age, generational conflicts arise. Medical advances allow older generations to live longer, placing them in the position to witness the world they knew change, so much at times that it is unrecognizable. Technological advances, cultural paradigm shifts, and other profound changes pull younger generations further from their elders, significantly reducing the overlap of their experiences.

Questions

• How does reading this conversation change our dialogic relationship to the ideas being presented? As students and people who are constantly participating in discourses on the topics discussed, how does the presentation of their ideas as a conversation rather than a cowritten article or essay impact our engagement with the themes and ideas? Are we allowed more of a participatory role as readers in the exchange as opposed to the usual essays we read or are we still at some distance from what they are putting forward? Is there even a distance present when we read the other pieces from this course? 
• How does this dialogue influence the way we understand conjuncture and the necessity of moments of rupture? What, if anything, did this dialogue generate for you?