(No part of this re/inter/view discussion may be published elsewhere without written permission from victor j. vitanza and the individual posters.) --Full Copyright notice is at the end of each file.
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The PreText Conversations held a Re/In/View with Jane Gallop, beginning January, 1998. The subject of conversation is/was Jane's Feminist Accused of Sexual Harrassment (Duke UP, 1997). |
Dear Todd (& T.R.), While I'm more than happy to flirt w/ Todd (I mean anyone who is writing a dissertation w/ his mouth & nose, or have I got the orifices wrong...) I don't believe in the distinction between eros & transference. Todd says he's left psychoanalysis ofr the schizokind & that probably explains this desire to escape the realm of transference. I remain a Freudian (tho a preety unorthodox b/c insistently upbeat, funloving one) & follow what Lacan said (I notice TR cites him so...) when he said that love is transference. Forget about my teachers & students. If I look at my love relationships, particularly if I analyze some of the symptomatic moments, I see transference there. Now we could discuss issues like working thru the transference etc, but I'm not buying the distinction. I guess I'd also like to say that I in general don't buy such neat separations to clear things up. Now, I'm not saying there isn't more to love (or sex) than transference. I'm not being pessimistic. But then there's more to teaching than transference. In fact there's more to psychoanalysis than transference. And if the history of the discourse on love continually evokes pain (just think cupid's arrows for short, since Valentine's Day is on the way), then we might think that's b/c love is transference (if I follow what T R is saying about pain & love). Hope it's ok to answer to posts in one, or was I supposed to pretend to at least a serial monogamy.
Happy Valentine's Day,
For David Reider, I consider my book an attempt to make knowledge because in it I look at what happened to me in the same way I look at texts in my scholarly writing, in my teaching etc. That way may not be familiar to you, but it is a brand of close reading. I took certain salient aspects of this experience, treated them like text, & did my best to interpret. In the course of it, I feel like I figured a number of things out about the state of sexual harassment today, about the relation between sex & feminism, about sensationalism, to name a few. I felt what I figured out was valuable, as I understood a number of things better. Some other people have corroborated that, finding my insights useful. I was not trying to figure out what happened to me, or whether or not I was guilty. I already knew those things. I was trying to use this odd but somehow exemplary experience to figure out some more general cultural things. It wasn't self-understanding (I try to leave that out of my writing) but an attempt to understand better some general trends in the culture, but written not from some empyrean overview but from the place in which I inhabit & am entangled in the culture. Whether you consider it knowledge or not is probably separate from whether that was my intent. Tho if no one did, I would have to consider whether I was completely self-deluded. But I applied to it the methodology &protocols that I use for my research, that I train my students in, that I was trained in. It is that sense of methodology that I'm referring to in terming this an attempt to make knowledge. My sense of the book as making knowledge is also in contrast w/ an earlier writing experience. In response to the charges against me I wrote a manuscript somewhat longer than this book. And completely different. There it was my task to defend myself. And I did it successfully. I didn't like doing that kind of writing, felt it as violence to my belief in a writing that is NOT adversarial, but exploratory, committed to recognizing ambiguity. Now that writing was completely defensive. And not one sentence of the book corresponds to that earlier manuscript. I wrote the book because I wanted to get beyond defense into some more useful understanding. You may believe I failed, I may in fact have failed, but I want to say that that was in fact my reason for writing. Believe me if it was my goal to defend myself I would not have spent time talking aobut my affairs with students. That felt like a very large risk in an atmosphere in which that is widely condemned. In the book I confessed things much more "guilty" than anything I did in the case. I hope you'll consider that in trying to determine if I was merely being defensive. Writing about my past affairs w/ students felt like putting myself way out there. I was scared to do it. Felt I would be immediately condemned as immoral. If my goal was defensive, I'd have left it out (it was not part of the discourse around the case, not known by my accusers or investigators). But I needed to put it in so as to consider as honestly & openly as I could my topic, which in that case was consenting teacher-student relations.
Hope this helps you see what I mean,
Lizzy, I'm gratified that what I said about writing connects to your experience as a writer & editor. I'm particularly gratified by your praise of my plainspeaking. It has taken me two decades to learn how to do this & I agree that obscurantist discourse is easier. And of course I believe your understanding of this is another aspect of your understanding of what I say about writing. It matters how you say what you're saying & one has a responsibility to consider who you're talking to & how your writing affects them. And I consider that not secondary but part of thinking itself. I think better, more clearly since I've tried to write clearly. I couldn't figure out how to access all your fancy attachments. I'm at a pretty primitive relation to my computer. I'd love to see Radical Journey (tho I regret not getting to see that wonderful mermaid image). You could send it to me at Dept of English, U of Wisc-Milwaukee, P.O. Box 413, Milwaukee, WI 53211.
Thanks for the honesty & openness of your voice,
Victor, First of all, as my host on this list, you need to know that on Feb 11,I'm going out of town for more than a week. If the re/inter/view isn't done by then, I think it'll have to end then (i.e. I can't contribute after Feb 10). Second, as my host on this list, you do a huge percentage of the talking (big even by posts, but enormous by words (characters). I'm uncomfortable w/ that. Makes me feel like you invited me to a dialogue with you in front of an unseen audience. Had you issued such an invitation, I'd have considered it, but I did not understand that to be what we would be doing. The above may just be my irritated response to the sheer length of you post. I couldn't possible respond to it. And I kinda suspected that some affect (perhaps anger) was generating what came to feel like a barrage of words. Out of my commitment to dialogue, I will nonetheless attempt to respond. (If I really didn't want to deal with people's responses I'd have never agreed to do this, never have published the book etc. I'm not THAT naive). A few points that seem clear to me: 1) What I meant when I said you were not treating me like the author of my book referred not to your asking questions about the case, but to your framing those questions in the words of books written by other authors. As I tried to make clear in my last reply, it was the juxtaposition of the 2 parts of your message that produced my sense of not being treated like an author. Maybe it's because whereas you think it your ethical/political duty to ask about what isn't in a book, I think it my ethical/political duty to hear the terms in which someone speaks, to attempt to understand what she's trying to say & to question her in terms of that, rather than APPLY some terms to her. This is in fact the heart of my ethics as a close reader. Since I, to my knowledge, do not talk about "pain" in the book, I wondered why Iwas being asked to reply about pain. I of course know the world is full of people who read things in terms of preexisting frameworks, fitting things in. To me that is a refusal to read, to learn. It is my strongest ethical principle (something like "listening to the other rather than just projecting our preexisting assumptions on her") and the heart of what I teach & what I try to do when I listen to someone. 2) By "limit case" I NEVER meant anything like a limitation on what we could talk about. Don't know how you got that idea. I get the term from the French "un cas limite" where it is used (in the general pre-deconstructive aura, by people like Bataille & Blanchot) to talk about a fringe example which allows us to "redescribe" (I'm picking that up from you, it's not part of my vocabulary, but I'm always willing to learn) the whole. Focusing on "limit cases" is part of deconstructive procedure as I understand it. It's connected to that interest in marginalia often seen in deconstructionists. But it's not b/c one is interested in the whole. It's from a methodological assumption that if we shift our focus from the center to the margin, the whole pattern will look different. For me the best example of that is Freud's study of sexuality. By looking at the "aberrations" rather than at normative reproductive heterosexuality, he produced a stunning redescription of sexuality (one that of course ultimately redescribes heterosexuality itself). I saw my "case of sexual harassment" as a "limit case" because it was a kind of fringe example, a feminist accused of harassing feminists rather than the usual male pig accused of harassing a female subordinate. I wanted to redescribe sexual harassment from that perspective to show that in fact we've come to misunderstand what harassement is. My interest was not actually in my case itself (I'd already argued for my innocence where it mattered). It was the new perspective on harassment that came from my case. This is what I meant by my interst in "making knowledge," I was trying to use my case to understand more about the relation between sexual harassment & feminism. I feel like I in fact figured out a lot which remains unclear if we focus only on the classic case & reason outward. I wanted to focus on the limit case & reason inward. The students' version was not a "classic case." Because in a classic case I'd have had to be a man. Already my sex & my feminism made this from any perspective an anomaly. Because I was not writing about the case in & for itself but only for the light it could shed upon larger issues, there were many many things about the case I did not discuss in the book. I chose only to discuss those things, those details that when interpreted could yield wider understandings, understandings that could produce new knowledge, a redescription (am I using that word right, I seem to have seized upon it) in the theoretical debates I wanted to enter. Which is why I don't much talk about the students. To me the fact that they accused me of things I didn't do is not very theoretically interesting. I understand it pretty simply. (and this may address your pain questions). My negative judgments of their work caused them pain. That often happens with students. These particular students found my negative judgments of their work intolerable & rather than just choosing not to work with me (which both had already done a year before they lodged their accusations), they tried to get their revenge. It is not unusual for students to find negative evaluations intolerable & to get angry & want to hurt the teacher back. But it didn't seem something that woudl produce much knowledge. I only could have counteraccused them, written a book about what bad students they were & blind, angry people. I thought that would be tacky, beneath me, so I chose not to discuss that. What seemed to me much more worthy of consideration is why these obviously spurious charges could garner so much credibility. It was the atmosphere that received & responded to the angry students which seemed worthy of interpretation & analysis, not the students themselves. And so the book focuses on the general climate on sex & pedagogy, sex & feminism as well as the specific movements on campus around sexual harassment. I want my readers, if they agree with me, to be moved to resist the current climate, to resist the academic policies which are dangerous to knowledge. It would be silly & petty to want to move my readers to do anything about the specific students. I see the book not as a defense actually but a call to arms. But the enemy isn't the two sad, angry students; it's the anti-sex, anti-knowledge climate which I see as a threat to feminism & to intellectual inquiry. Hope this makes some of what I was trying to do clearer. Jane
Jane writes:
Victor,VVell, it appears that we are going to lose our guest very, very soon. I've asked my overwhelming 3 questions. If you have questions, it would be good to get them in pronto. Normally, re/inter/views last from 6 weeks to 2 months. That was our understanding, but we also understand that the road calls. There is no reason, however, why the discussion must stop. So feel free to continue discussing Jane's answers to date and the book as you re/read it. In other words, talk amongst yourselves. I will continue to update the Website until your last posts. Jane's "Host" (with all of its etymological possibilities), vv
Jane, we invite you to return to the list after your trip.
Hello Jane-- First, let me say I enjoyed your book. It answered for me the question I had about you, namely the one you pose near the beginning, "what kind of feminist gets accused of sexual harassment?" I saw you writing to a feminist community, one that perhaps felt betrayed by you, in an attempt to reestablish your feminist "credentials" and in the process redefine (redescribe) the terrain of feminism. And it got me thinking about some of the implicit, unstated utopias we live our lives by. It seemed to me different theories, politics, imply different utopias and that these are in part why ideologies clash. You seem, by invoking the "nostalgia" Victor notes, to be in part arguing for a utopia that has disappeared from feminist discourse. And I suspect differing utopias are at work on this list as well (as well as huge gaps between/within differing disciplines!) I don't have your book anymore (Give it back, G!!) so I can't be specific as to page # etc.--and I realize it wasn't your intention to deal w/ your students' "pain"-- but I want to bring up the part where you mention how your students' written complaints addressed your propensity to "make knowledge" from your life experiences. (I wasn't sure I understood the nature of their fears. There seemed to be a lot more at stake for these students than protecting their own privacy or enacting some sort of pre-emptive prior restraint on your speech/thinking in order to hit you where you live.) It seemed to me, reading between the lines and perhaps this is just a matter of what you deliberately decided to omit, that above all what your students feared from you was your intellect. Perhaps this is natural, given your negative assessment of their intellectual work. But-- _____ perhaps they were also trying to create/redescribe a new category to describe their "violation," something along the lines of "intellectual harassment" or "theory terrorism"? Is this possible? And if so, do you think such categories might be worth addressing here? Johanna
Hi there, Jane.
Just got your book, and had a chance to read it through last night.
I'll give it another read soon, but I wanted to toss a couple of
questions out, partly to address some immediate concerns, and partly
to mitigate the vveight of vvords from vvictor
For my first question, I'd like to piggy-back on the front part of
Johanna's post, where she writes:
I'm not sure that I would describe your audience in the same way, esp
since journals like lingua franca got a hold of this particular saga,
but I don't question that there is a "feminist community" being
addressed. What I do question, or rather, what I'm asking you to
elaborate upon, are your perceptions about such a community. My own
experience and engagement with feminism(s) are such that I have
trouble writing the word feminism without the obligatory,
parenthetical s. In other words, my perception is that there are
multiple feminist communities, which may or may not be reconcilable.
I am not accusing you (or johanna, who writes "a" rather than "the"
feminist community) of assuming a monolithic feminism. Quite the
contrary, you ask what kind of feminist is it that gets so accused.
And, on p. 71, you discuss "power feminism" and "victim feminism" as
two possible threads. At the same time, though, when discussing your
preparatory meetings for the conference on pedagogy and the personal,
it seemed to me that you felt somewhat betrayed by the fact that
there was dissension between you and other feminists (I hear this on
p. 62, in the otherwise simple description "All around the table were
feminists"), which does seem to lean towards such an assumption.
Perhaps what I am noting is a desire on your part for a community,
against which occurs the "double foundation" that you discuss in the
pages following. It seems easy to me to map that double foundation,
however, across the same terms of lack and plenitude that Todd raises
in reference to eros/transference. And then I hear your suggestion
that such categories are not as neat as all that. I'm not looking to
pin the deconstructive tail on the text here, but I'm not sure that
there's any way to ask this without sounding critical (in the
negative sense). _____Does your text simply speak from the "power"
position across the gap to the "victim" position? Or are there other
feminisms to which it additionally speaks? Is there such thing as a
post-feminism, for instance, and does your book speak to it/them?
Let me add a little more here, because I just thought of another way
to frame this question. It seems to me that the way that the
dialectic b/w power/victim that you discuss, particularly as it gets
explained in terms of oppression and liberation, leaves out some
prepositions. That is, it is oppression (by) and liberation (from),
both of which, of course, summon up MEN. I want to make it clear
that I'm not arguing this, but some have argued that neither half of
that particular dialectic is necessary any more. In terms of your
book, I think of your description of the dance in 1971, where you
manage to create a women-only space, one that is initially formed in
response to men (in a very physical sense in terms of blocking the
door), but which moves on to something else. That dance, that
frenzy, is not political in the same way that burning bras in public
is, is it? What I'm suggesting, and would like to hear your thoughts
about, is whether there is a space outside of that power/victim
dialectic (I must confess I hear master/slave whenever I write it)?
Does your book move us in that direction?
I had another question, more directly related to the title of my
post, but I'll save it for later. I tend to circle, ramble, etc.
Thanks,
Collin
The re/inter/view with Jane began with Victor's message in which he wrote:
Re/inter/views have a life of their own. I usually send out the first
question (signaling the beginning) and then others jump in.
In his last message Victor wrote: "I've asked my overwhelming 3
questions." Here then are those 3 questions:
What's going on in terms of point of view in your book?
Is your writing of this book an 'experiment' in some special sense of the
word?
Have you responded in un/kind to the audience the way that they have
responded to you?
What for you is "teaching"?
When you teach do you cause pain?
If so, What are your thoughts about causing students to be in pain?
Do you think it is possible to teach without causing pain? Would you still
call it "teaching"?
Do you think that the students who brought the sexual harassment charge
against you were in pain?
Do you think the charge was brought about by your causing them pain? or
caused by the "relationship"?
Do you think that these two students are still in pain? Can they reconstitute
themselves?
What have you learned about teaching and pain, if anything, in relation to
the ... let's say "event(s)" leading up to and following the sexual harassment
charge?
Do you ever ask the question, Did I cause these students pain (meaning the
pedestrian notion of simple discomfort)?
Are you concerned about that? Or Is your life story (in a self-tabloid
style) the only important issue here?
Are you concerned about these students? while being concerned about your
career,about the issue of sexual harassment as a special "limit case"? in your
case? their cases? etc.
RRorty refers to the typical examples of "books that help us to see the
effects of social practices and institutions on others" (e.g., _Uncle
Tom's Cabin_ or _Black Boy_) (in _Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity_
141). Does your book fit into this category?
Did you get yourself and the two students to do or say things publicly
that *you were able* to cope with having done (or thought) but that *they
have not been able* to cope with but remain now in silence because unable to
remake their world or any world in which to live?
Are you able to cope because you wrote an elaborate, idiocyncratic,
theoretical piece of tabloid-expressive discourse called _Feminist Accused..._
that would deflect what you had done and make it impossible for the students to
respond?
Have they [the students] been able to reconstitute themselves? Been able
to move toward a better life? AS A RESULT OF YOUR BOOK?
Is there another possible place for them in your theory? In your
expressive rendering of what happened and how it is to be judged?
Should they be like you were way back in 1971?
If you had written the book in another form of discourse--with the focus
off of yourself and your career--would you have thought about the problem
differently, would the book have been read or received differently?
If you cannot answer these question, then Is it because I have been cruel
to you?
Are you oblivious?
Have I reset a "limit" for the discussion that makes it impossible for you
to respond?
I want to make clear that although I am present on this list only because
I am receiving and forwarding posts for Jane as her GA, I am writing this
message not because I wish to "take her side," but because Victor's posts
represent for me a kind of academic discourse and posturing I find most
irritating. Victor is interested in asking provocative, difficult,
challenging questions:this is a good thing. But I believe that his
questions are seriously undermined by the way in which they are posed.
Gary Weissman
Gary, I baited the hook with precisely the kinds and flavor of questions I
wanted to ask and I got from Jane precisely and unsurprisingly what I
thought she would say and once again demonstrate. The questions were not
supposed to be effective, sweet, ingratiating questions; they were not
so-called balanced, diplomatic aristotelian questions. Instead, they were
questions that arose from the dark and silent (in between the lines)
sections of Jane's book. What Jane repeatedly demonstrates (on every page
of her book and in every nonanswer to and deflection of the questions) is
an apparent inability to sympathize with or have empathy with her two
accusers. I would like to see some evidence that she can identify with
them. Why? Because I am interested in the kind of politics and ethics that
arise from this inability to attend to others as it is manifested patently
in _Feminist Accused..._. I am interested in the kind of ethics and
politics and pedagogy that come out of ap/parent forms of Narcissism, as
manifested in _Feminist Accused..._. But evidently, all such concerns are
irrelevant to Jane's book! But in the _facelessness_ of such Narcissism,
Gary, I will continue to be irreverent. Does this all speak to your
concern about my posts to Jane? If you have additional comments or
charges, send them on. I would love to respond to them. V
In answer to Gary's post on the questions posed by VV.
I see no reason for my defending V's position on asking Jane his questions
pertaining to her book. He is quite capable of doing that himself and
seems to be doing a more than an adequate job. It strikes me that Jane
agreed to do this re/interview and if she finds the questions asked too
painful (there is "that" word, again) to address she certainly has the
option, which V has stated many times, not to address them. In fact, from
her responses to the questions V has posed her choice has been made quite
clear; she has addressed those she wished to answer and has not answered
the rest.
What I question here is the peculiar focus on his asking of his questions
and the ignoring of many of the questions submitted by others. Why is
this? What might have been taken as a discretionary silence earlier has
now taken on the appearance of an abyss.
Gary, the devotion you have displayed for Jane is, perhaps, commendable,
but your commentary apparently attempts to re/direct the issue of pain, and
pain has obviously become the central issue of this re/interview, if not
the central issue of Jane's book. I think your response to V's questions
validate the issues he has raised in his questions to Jane.
If Jane does not wish to address the questions and issues raised by V, she
certainly has a range of other questions and issues waiting to be addressed
by those who have taken the time to pose and post what on their minds in
regards to __Feminist Accused__.
Let's put all this aside and get on with things.
Ron Hugar
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