who and God had a lot of things in common

If Frank Schaeffer and Pearl S. Buck are my MK cousins (that is, are evangelical Christian missionaries' kids, like me), then Rachel Held Evans is similarly kin to my spouse (whose parents are in full-time Christian education and churchwork).  She recently finished Held Evans's book Evolving in Monkey Town: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask the Questions, saying how it really resonated with her, and so now I'm reading it.  Just a few pages in, I'm struck by how the author describes her parents, and how differently.  Through daughter and little girl eyes, she somehow finds God like father but mother otherwise.  Take a read and see for yourself.  A telling contrast comes in the final sentence of the four paragraphs excerpted below.  I don't have much time really to say more here at the blog but have been thinking about this all day, about imagination and where it ends up sometimes before it can evolve elsewhere.  Your thoughts?

The daughter of a genuine, certified theologian, I'd memorized the "Four Spiritual Laws" before I'd memorized my own address. My father earned a graduate degree from Dallas Theological Seminary, a school famous for producing megachurch pastors like Chuck Swindoll, Tony Evans, and Andy Stanley. Instead of pursuing full-time ministry, however, my father committed his life to Christian education, which I suppose explains the plastic cups. A college professor, he often invited his brightest students over for coffee and long talks about hermeneutics and eschatology and epistemology. I loved falling asleep to the sound of their voices undulating from the living room. I felt secure in knowing that while I slept, my father was awake having important conversations about God.

I always looked up to my father with a sense of reverent awe. It wasn't that I thought he possessed supernatural powers or anything; I just imagined that he and God had a lot of things in common, that they subscribed to the same magazines and wore similar shoes. Looking back, I realize how important it was that my father loved me so openly and listened so carefully. My first impressions of my heavenly Father were that he too was gentle, playful, and kind.

Despite knowing about dispensationalism long before I probably should have, I never felt trapped in a world of endless churchgoing. My mother had been raised Independent Baptist and as a girl was forbidden to dance and go to movies. Determined to avoid legalism, she let Amanda and me wait until we were good and ready before we got baptized, took communion, or asked Jesus into our hearts. Her private disdain for potlucks and church business meetings kept us from being at church every time the doors were opened, and I noticed that she got a little fidgety whenever the pastor discussed wives submitting to their husbands. I loved this about her, the same way I loved the scent of her cherry-almond lotion when she tucked me into bed at night.

A substitute teacher at my elementary school, my mother earned a reputation for doting on the needy kids. Those with absent parents, stained shirts, runny noses, and learning disabilities always left her classroom beaming with self-confidence. I think I must have gotten my bleeding heart from her, which, combined with my father's cautious idealism, accidentally made me into a liberal. If my father gave Christianity a head, my mother gave it a heart and hands, and it was her tender telling of the story of the cross, mingled with cherry almond, that first moved me to ask Jesus into my heart.

What They Learn (Especially Our Daughters): Teach Your Children Well

I will have to say, however, that [Monica A. Coleman's] assessment that Black theology was for both black men and boys is wrong.  In fact, very little theology is written with children in mind, girls and boys alike. There is a certain amount of subjectivity and experience assumed on the part of the theologian. How can a person's embedded theology go under deconstruction if that person is a child, and does not know anything about God?  Also, do the experience of children contribute to scholarship? Are they able to think theologically? I would affirm both.

-- Rod of Alexandria

Often disconnected from their native taxonomies, the Présence Africaine was manifest in the secret syntactical structures through which other languages were spoken, in the stories and tales told to children, in religious practices and beliefs, in spiritual life, the arts, crafts, musical forms and rhythms of both slave and postemancipation societies. Africa, the signified that could not be represented directly in slavery, remained and remains the unspoken, unspeakable "presence" in Caribbean culture and, arguably, elsewhere in the Americas. It is "hiding" behind every verbal inflection, every narrative twist.... Pedagogically, the Présence Africaine revised or signified or "reread" every Western text, including the Bible.... The heuristic goal, if not the reconstruction of Western civilization, was and remains the representation of the African Diasporic presence.

-- Leslie R. James 

"The African Diaspora as Construct and Lived Experience"

The Africana Bible

      In the following paragraphs, I give a brief overview of the context that contributes to my identity as a stranger.  Foreignness among others characterizes one's exilic state.  Having been born wearing a darker skin color in apartheid South Africa meant becoming a foreigner from the moment of birth, ironically a stranger in the land of one's ancestors.
      Such foreignness was compounded in baby girls' lives given the underlying African cultural perception that a girl child "naturally" belonged to her future husband's home, a situation that also privileged boy children over girl children in terms of education (Masenya ["'... But You Shall Let Every Girl Live': Reading Exodus 1:1-2:10 the Bosadi (Womanhood) Way," Old Testament Essays Vol 15] 2002: [page] 99)
      My gender continues to determine my place in a patriarchal context.  Life in the latter context is typified by constant fear on account of the pervasive acts of violence perpetuated against female bodies.  One's sex still has a say in the place where and the extent to which one can exercise one's God-gifting in ministry.  Whether one is at home or in the public sphere of work, church, and the broader society, one remains an exile -- despite fourteen years of independence in South Africa!

-- Madiapoane Masenya (ngwan'a Mphahlele) 

"Exiled in My Own Home:  An African-South African Perspective on the Bible" 

The Africana Bible

Ways of Translation: Part 2, Language as Imposition

The telling strategy assumes that people are guided by reason.... Telling often leads to resistance. The forcing strategy assumes that people are resistant and must be coerced into changing.

--Robert E. Quinn, Change the World : How Ordinary People Can Achieve Extraordinary Results

כִּי כְּמֹו־שָׁעַר בְּנַפְשֹׁו כֶּן־הוּא אֱכֹל וּשְׁתֵה יֹאמַר לָךְ וְלִבֹּו בַּל־עִמָּֽךְ׃
פִּתְּךָ־אָכַלְתָּ תְקִיאֶנָּה וְשִׁחַתָּ דְּבָרֶיךָ הַנְּעִימִים׃

--Solomon, Proverbs 23:7

I must have told you a thousand times. You know better than that. Since you're obviously not capable of hearing what I said, kid, let's see if you can't feel my belt. Now, bend over.

--my father

Part 1: Review

In part 1 of this series on ways of translation, I noted how many linguists follow Aristotle in conceiving of Language (or "logos") as Proposition (or as "logic," as purely defined binary categories or sets of oppositional features, as naturally-ordered statements toward conclusions). It may be Noam Chomsky's divisions of Language vs. languages, of Competence vs. Performance, of plus / minus features - or it may be Relevance Theorists' divisions of explicatures vs. implicatures with respect to propositions and divisions of types within those two different and distinct categories and divisions of the message that's delivered and processed and the message that is not. The conclusion, therefore, about translation (given Language as Proposition) is generally that there is a transfer of the relevant categories or features of the source language (especially the intended message or proposition of the speaker or writer) into the target language. The more the binary categories match, the better the transmission of the proposition. The more equal the features on both sides of the equation, the better the translation. The Language-as-Proposition Problem is that the logos falls by the wayside. The seed emitted never gets transmitted. In the bible, Mark's translation of Jesus's parable of the sower (in Mark 4) starts with this problem. Mark hearkens back to the LXX translation of the story of spilled seed, of the sin of Onan in Genesis 38. The function of language as Proposition requires that it is either a successful transmission of the message or it is not.

Part 2, Language as Imposition

In part 2, we come to the post-proposition problem. Language does not always have the effect the speaker or writer wants. Language, at that point, then, is viewed less as propositional and more as impositional.

Jesus speaks to this (as Mark translates him in Mark 4, in the parable of the sower).  After he notes the problem of sown seed falling by the way side and after he gets to the explanation of the proposition heard but lost on deaf ears and stolen from the heart, he gets to problems of force.  He says: "5 Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil, and immediately it sprang up, since it had no depth of soil. 6 And when the sun rose, it was scorched, and since it had no root, it withered away." And the explanation speaks to other difficulties of force: "16 And these are the ones sown on rocky ground: the ones who, when they hear the word, immediately receive it with joy. 17 And they have no root in themselves, but endure for a while; then, when tribulation or persecution arises on account of the word, immediately they fall away."  I've given this to you in the forceful ESV translation, but I might as well have given it to you in Mark's forceful Greek translation.  The nature of force reminds us of things Gorgias wrote in original Greek when he tried to excuse Helen for leaving the men of Greece for barbarians.  He wrote, playing with language without translating:

εἴτε λόγῳ πεισθεῖσα
εἴτε βίᾳ ἁρπασθεῖσα

either she was by proposition seduced
or else she was by imposition induced

In Genesis 38, as translated into Greek, we see something similar.

9 γνοὺς δὲ Αυναν ὅτι οὐκ αὐτῷ ἔσται τὸ σπέρμα ἐγίνετο ὅταν εἰσήρχετο πρὸς τὴν γυναῖκα τοῦ ἀδελφοῦ αὐτοῦ ἐξέχεεν ἐπὶ τὴν γῆν τοῦ μὴ δοῦναι σπέρμα τῷ ἀδελφῷ αὐτοῦ

9 But Onan had birthed knowledge that the sperm-semen seed would not be born to him. So whenever he went in to his brother’s birthing wombman he would waste it on the ground of birth, so as not to give the sperm-semen seed to his brother.

10 πονηρὸν δὲ ἐφάνη ἐναντίον τοῦ θεοῦ, ὅτι ἐποίησεν τοῦτο,
καὶ ἐθανάτωσεν καὶ τοῦτον

10 It was wicked, in fact, appearing in the face of God, this mess that was created,
and so he put him to death and so that was that.

At this point, no one using language is thinking about making it easy. We're thinking about what happens when propositions emitted fail. There usually comes force afterwards, an imposition like a rock or heat or judgment and death. George Steiner, in his little essay "On Difficulty" in his book by the same title, gets at this some. He first talks about the information gaps in poetry first as a difficulty. When a poet uses a proposition and the reader or listener doesn't get it, there's a problem. But then there's more: Steiner mentions how the poet sometimes will make a poem difficult because of authorly decisions to slow the reader down or to force a reader's eyes one way or another on a page or to impose a particular rhyme and rhythm on the reader's ears or to put in metaphorical rootlessness or rhetorical tribulation in the mix.

Language as post-proposition Imposition is beginning to sound a bit literary. And yet it's much more profound than that. Aristotle created "logic" but, for Alexander the Great, it wasn't enough. There was the move from Nature to human nature, and I want to suggest that the human condition is gendered. I'm suspecting that "logic" (for Aristotle and his students) gives way to "phallo-logic." So a little later in this post, we'll get to that suspicion with some observations from Nancy Mairs. But first, I want to go back to the beginning of the post and to the quotations there from three men, Robert E. Quinn, Solomon, and my dad.

My epigraphs to start this post get at just how deep Language as Imposition can be.

Quinn: Two Conceptions of "Language," for Change

Quinn is an expert in human change, especially in the context of businesses and organizations. After surveying the literature in his disciplines, he found that there are a very limited number of reasons adults change. Similarly, there are just a few respective strategies that CEOs and leaders of businesses use to effect corporate change. In the quotation above, only two are mentioned: the telling strategy and the forcing strategy. Does that sound familiar? We might as well call these "the propositional strategy" for change and the "impositional strategy." These two, Quinn says, are most common both in the literature of business scholarship and in the practice of business change. A CEO who employs the "telling" strategy might propose a "mission statement" or might send a directive by official memorandum. When the strategy fails, then language becomes force. The CEO will likely next engage in the "forcing" strategy. Let me include half of Figure 1.A in Quinn's book Change the World because I'd like you to see how Aristotelian the notion of "telling" and how Alexandrian the concept of "forcing." And then we can talk more about language and translation - as imposition.

In the world of business, and this is the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Western world, the telling strategy owes much to Aristotle. There's the emphasis on facts, the method of rational persuasion (i.e., logical rhetoric), and logical argumentation among other things. In addition, the forcing strategy in our day looks much like it did in the day of Alexander the Great. The bit about "controlling the context and flow of information" is what jumps out at me with respect to language.

Now, when a context and flow of information has authority, then I tend to think of discourse and of texts such as Aristotle's Organon. And I think of the Hebrew scriptures, and the Christian Bible, and the Qur'an of Islam. The purists and fundamentalists who most prize these texts resist their translation. That is, the authority who possess the texts preserve them rigidly in untranslated and original form.

For example, expert and authoritative Aristotle scholar, Thomas M. Conley, works against rhetoric students reading Aristotle's Rhetoric in anything but Aristotle's original Greek. And in a published article entitled "The Greekless Reader and Aristotle's Rhetoric," Conley disparages all rhetoric teachers and students of rhetoric who would read Aristotle in translation; and he disparages all English translations, and one in particular. The force of Aristotle, in language, is in his original, so argues the authority. Ironically, Conley must resort to making his arguments by proposition, and by proposition in English. However, if he could force such a thing, Conley might ban all English translations of Aristotle's Greek works.

One of my own rhetoric professors, Richard Leo Enos, has written a fine rebuttal to Conley's argument, calling it a "country-club mindset." (The article's entitled, “The Classical Tradition(s) of Rhetoric: A Demur to the Country Club Set.”) I think Enos is on to something, that Conley's emphasis is "authority" and by it his method is what Quinn sees as "leveraging behavior." Enos says further that "The entire point of translations . . . is to put wisdom in the hands of readers who have an expertise other than philology, so that their insights can enrich our understanding in another dimension . . . . Aristotle’s Rhetoric can continue to enrich our discipline [of rhetoric]." But I believe that not all translators have such a point of enrichment. In fact, it seems to me that most Christian Bible translation publishers tend, at times, to employ a forcing strategy. There is, in many cases, a political reality for the translation teams.

If you hang around the biblioblogosphere for any time at all, you get the sense that there are Bible translation fights over methods (i.e., formal equivalence vs. dynamic equivalence), arguments about approaches (i.e., "theological" vs. "linguistic"), vigorous disagreements about gendered language (including not only male vs. female language but also straight vs. gay language), disputes about the sort of English to be used (i.e., biblish vs. natural vs. poetic, etc.), and contentions about resources (particularly whether the English bible is getting way too much attention when the bible is not available yet in translation in many, many, many other languages). Of course, there is the telling strategy - the use of propositional language - to build the case for one's cause(s). And yet, there is the forcing strategy - the use of impositional language - to force agenda for particular translation teams and companies and the like. Many of you would be better prepared to cite specific examples than I am. The snobbish "country club" mentality that appears to me to have set in among several Bible bloggers makes me unhappy to mention anybody. (This blog of mine catches enough unhappiness from bible bloggers already, I'm afraid).

Solomon:  The "Logos," Vomitted with Force

So that brings me to the second epigraph. Whew! Some wisdom, finally. It's Solomon. His proverb is translated: "For as one that hath reckoned within himself, so is he: 'Eat and drink', saith he to thee; but his heart is not with thee.   The morsel which thou hast eaten shalt thou vomit up, and lose thy sweet words." If I read that well enough, Solomon at least means that proposition and imposition go hand in hand.  

In English, the traditional propositional understanding has been from the KJV - "For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he" - focusing on the first part of the first verse (and ignoring the last part of the previous verse and anything else following here).  Whatever is rational is part of the agency of power of a human.

In Hellene, the Jews translating in Alexander the Great's great city of Alexandria rendered the proverb with force, especially toward the end of the last verse - ἐξεμέσει γὰρ αὐτὸν καὶ λυμανεῖται -- τοὺς λόγους σου τοὺς καλούς, which means something like "It will, in fact, be vomited out and rottenness imposed on -- that proposition of yours, that sweet emission."

In either language, there's a profound connection between Language as Proposition and Language as Imposition.  Kenneth L. Pike's Tagmemics, with his emphasis on Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior - about which I may say more in another post sometime because Pike knew and published in both rhetoric and composition, where the force of language is important - and John R. Searle's "Speech Acts" theorizing are examples of Language as Imposition. (And Language as Imposition is part of the human condition, and the human condition is gendered.)

Dad:  Language as Imposition

If you've read some of my blog before, then you've heard me talk some about my birth father.  He's a changed and changing man.  But when I was younger, he was more abusive, with language as proposition and as power (as imposition).  Sometimes the difference blurred for me between what he did and what he said.  He was, I must clarify, a very logical man (and boasted that his mark in a college "logic" course was slightly higher than mine -- three decades apart, we'd had the very same professor of logic as undergraduate students).  He was also a very forceful man.  The change began for my father, in part, when he realized what his language and his behavior was like for my mother and for their children.  The first time I ever heard him apologize to her was when I was home from college my first year; he'd just come home too from a conference for evangelical Christian pastors (which he was) in which there was a look on the inside and not just at words and actions on the outside.  The proverb I heard him repeating all week, the week I was home, was this:  "We practice daily what we believe.  All the rest is religious talk."

Now, here's a turn, a change, for me.  When I was doing a Ph.D. in rhetoric and composition a couple of decades after getting an M.A. in linguistics, I was most startled by Nancy Mairs.  My formal language background hadn't prepared me for her.  However, my life with Dad had.  I read one of Mairs's books for a course my very first semester:  Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer.

I'd already read lots of Aristotle, had already read lots of Paul (because my reading of him was imposed by my father).  We read Cheryl Glenn's Rhetoric Retold first, and I was unprepared for the things she heard Aristotle and Paul say in their silences that I'd never listened to.  Then we read Mairs.

I'd like to read some of Mairs's sentences right here at the blog.  And yet I have to warn you, you might not be ready.  It's not just that there's sexual language, metaphorical stuff.  (Which reminds me when, a few courses later in the program, I began giving an oral presentation on Helene Cixous for the required Literary Criticism course.  The professor, a male, interrupted me by saying, "No dick jokes," and everyone laughed.  So please let's continue, if you will look and listen only).  There's language here that betrays the impositions of the propositions.  After reading "dominate" and "force" and "imposition" and "phallus" and "father" and the "male human", -- here's a father's proposition and imposition, from page 41:

. . . . What is hers by right he [the father] must take [from the mother] by force, through law, by giving it [Jacques] Lacan's Name-of-the-Father: "the patronym, patriarchal law, patriarchal identity, language as our inscription into patriarchy. The Name-of-the-Father is the fact of the attribution of paternity by law, by language." With his own tongue the father has named the baby. Now it is his. . . .

Once he gets her settled into domesticity, however, and gets a baby, the baby seems to belong to her, not him. They are forever together, nuzzling each other, rocking and humming and babbling. This doesn't much matter if it's a girl baby, since some stranger will one day get his own baby out of her; but if it's a boy baby, it's of his line, and he must wrest it away from its tricky mother and insert it into the chain of immortality he is forging. "No," he bellows, louder than Rumpelstiltskin, at the cowering child behind her skirts. "You can't have this one. This one is mine. He is my son." And named by the father, the child becomes a man.

In order to get what he wants, then, the father must have power to coerce those around him to meet his demands. To have power is to alienate oneself, however, because power is always power over and the preposition demands an object. The fundamental structure of patriarchy is thus binary: me/not me, active/passive, culture/nature, normal/deviant, good/bad, masculine/feminine, public/private, political/personal, form/content, subjective/objective, friend/enemy, true/false. . . . It is a structure, both spatial and temporal, predicated upon separation, not relation. It demands rupture, the split into halves engendered by the abrupt erection of the phallus: those who have and those who have not. It speaks the language of opposites.

Reading Mairs is a bit different from reading Quinn only in the fact that the former suggests, like Solomon and Jesus and their translators do, that proposition does not need necessarily to come before imposition.  In fact, for many men, Language as Proposition IS Language as Imposition.  Alexander is a good, rational student of Aristotle, who is just as forceful.

If I ever have time for blogging again, we just might look together at Language as Transposition and Language as Ap(p)osition.  In other words, we might think together about ways Language and Translation might be differently conceived, different from how Aristotle tells us it is and would force it to be.

Encomium of Arlen Specter, Mark C. Taylor, David Plotz, and Helen

Arlen Specter, Mark C. Taylor, and David Plotz have abandoned their own and have, according to their own kind, run off with the enemy. (Yesterday, we read how Specter dumped his political party for the other; how Taylor systematically trashed his American University system for a proposal sounding as foreign as the film Gung-Ho, and how Plotz rejected reading The Good Book as his fellow Jews would [i.e., "Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, or none of these, every Jew who is not totally alienated from his people"] for the practice of reading "the Hebrew Bible as you'd peruse the newspaper.")

They sound like Helen, don't they? I mean Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore of whom Bettany Hughes writes and remembers so beautifully. Remember, Helen abandoned the Hellenes and ran off with Alexander and the other non-Greek Trojan men.

How could Helen be praised? How could she be defended for her defection? And how now Spector, Taylor, and Plotz?

Hughes gets us thinking about the "how"s of rhetoric:

When, in Ancient Greece, the rhetorician Gorgias stood up and delivered his 'Encomium of Helen' (a defence of Helen of Troy's indefensible character) - this was a great joke. How can you laud the most sluttish femme fatale of all time? But the rhetoric also got people thinking - maybe, just maybe the skilled speaker had a point.

Can we listen, and think? Why, oh why, why, why why would Helen (the most beautiful woman in the world) abandon the men, the Hellene men, who had her first?

Here's a little of the answer: the joke, the reasoned rhetoric, the poetry (the confessed word-play of Gorgias), and a good part of it even rhymes:

ἢ γὰρ τύχης βουλήμασι
καὶ θεῶν βουλεύμασι
καὶ ἀνάγκης ψηφίσμασιν
ἔπραξεν ἃ ἔπραξεν,

ἢ βίᾳ ἁρπασθεῖσα,
ἢ λόγοις πεισθεῖσα
ἢ ἔρωτι ἁλοῦσα
. . . .

πῶς οὖν χρὴ δίκαιον ἡγήσασθαι
τὸν τῆς Ἑλένης μῶμον,
ἥτις εἴτ' ἐρασθεῖσα
εἴτε λόγῳ πεισθεῖσα
εἴτε βίᾳ ἁρπασθεῖσα
εἴτε ὑπὸ θείας ἀνάγκη ἀναγκασθεῖσα
ἔπραξεν ἃ ἔπραξε, πάντως διαφεύγει τὴν αἰτίαν

Rosamond Kent Sprague translates these words as beautifully with:

For either by will[ed decision] of Fate
and [willed] decision of the gods
and vote of Necessity
did she do what she did,

or by force reduced
or by words seduced
or by love possessed.
. . . .
How then can one
blame of Helen as unjust,
since she is utterly
acquitted of all charge,
whether she did what she did
through falling in love
or persuaded by speech
or ravished by force
or constrained by divine constraint?

Plato, of course, can't stand it. So he writes his own play, the dramatic dialogue we call "The Gorgias" in which the central character is this slick sophist named Gorgias playing with words and taking money for it right out in public. But in this play of Plato, in which he plays with words all on his own, Plato has his teacher Socrates calling Gorgias out. Gorgias is the defender and praiser of the defecting defective woman - saying she may have been in "love." But the man Gorgias is just a "word lover," as vulnerable as Helen. In Greek, love is ἔρωτι /eroti/. This word plays (in Greek) with Plato's own play on words, the philosopher's neologism: ῥητορικῆς /rhetorikes/. Plato's Socrates gets Plato's Gorgias shamelessly to confess that what he's doing is "rhetoric" - something as filthy as "erotics." So, do we notice the hypocrisy of Plato? By putting words in the mouth of Gorgias, he actually invents here the word "rhetoric."

But we digress - isn't wordplay fun?

Now, French rhetorician Laurent Pernot explains:

Gorgias undertakes to excuse her by arguing that... she [Helen] could only have done so [run off with a non-Greek man] for one of these four reasons: (1) she obeyed the gods' commands; (2) she was carried off by force; (3) she was persuaded by speech; (4) she succumbed to love.

What Pernot (or perhaps our translations of Gorgias) fails to mention is that Helen, according to Gorgias, is worthy of praise for her decision. She's not just a passive damsel or a some-how compelled defector. No, she's also the master of her own destiny. She's a dissident. And men don't like it one little bit. The patriarchy is threatened. (Which brings up entirely different questions about whether and how Spector or Taylor or Plotz should be praised.)

Luce Irigaray gets at the questions of change, profound change, and who best might be the agents for such:

Patriarchal culture is a culture founded upon sacrifice, crime, and war. It lays upon every man the duty and the right to fight for food and shelter, to defend his possessions, and his family [even his women in and around his family] and [his] country as possessions. A decision about war from the patriarchy is necessary at this point but it will fall far short of providing cultural mutation. . . . Men are always plunging deeper and deeper into exploitation and plunder--without understanding very well why. Men go out in search of something they imagine they need without questioning who they are and the relationship between what they do and their identity.

To address such failures of understanding, I believe that the race of men needs the help of persons whose function would be to promote self-understanding among men and to set limits. Only women could fill this function. Women do not belong to the patriarchal culture as fully responsible subject. Hence they have the potential to interpret this culture in which they have fewer vested interests and involvement than men and in which they themselves are not so much products of the system as to be blinded by it. . . . Furthermore, women are not, in principle, supposed to be in hierarchical relation with men. All other minority groups are caught up in such hierarchies. And it is with a completely patriarchal, unconscious or cynical condescension that politicians and theoreticians interest themselves in such minorites and exploit them, with all the risks of the possible reversals of the master-slave relations. --Sexes and Genealogies, pages 186, 87.

Jane Stranz got me rereading Irigaray yesterday when she quoted her and then quoted Grace Jantzen quoting her:

"Love of God ... shows the way. God forces us to do nothing except become. The only task, the only obligation laid upon us is: to become divine men and women, to become perfectly, to refuse to allow parts of ourselves to shrivel and die that have the potential for growth and fulfilment."
--Luce Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies

"According to Irigaray the wisdom that women and men in the postmodern world most require is the wisdom of becoming divine, without which we 'shrivel and die'."
--Grace Jantzen, Becoming Divine.

In light of the praise of Helen by Gorgias and the agency of women within the patriarchy where we find ourselves (as noted by Irigaray), Jane's quotations do offer men and women hope. Notice how a woman (unlike either the man Plato or the man Gorgias) is able to see love and God and words (without force) as agencies for change. If there is force, it is never forcing, and it is never war or abduction or abuse or rape.

If I were like Gorgias, I might ask you to pay me for this post and any cleverness therein. If I were like Plato, I might be a hypocrite by criticizing another for doing the very thing I was doing in my critique of him. If I were going to try to teach wordplay and poetry, to get students to overcome difficulties, I might have them look for examples (even in this post) of what George Steiner calls "epiphenomenal" or "tactical" or "modal" or "ontological" difficulties. If I were going to try to change the world myself, to abandon my own kind for the opposers, I think I might consider (more than the "telling strategy," more than the "forcing strategy," and even more than the "negotiating strategy") what Robert E. Quinn classifies as the self "transformation strategy."

I'm thinking instead about some fragmented (perhaps final) lines of Sappho's poem on Helen:

εὶ μεν ἴδ]μεν οὔ δύνατον γένεσθαι
λῷστ᾽] ὀν᾽ ἀνθρώποις, πεδέχην δ᾽ ἄραστηαι,
[τῶν πέδειχόν ἐστι βρότοισι λῷον]
[ἢ λελάθεσθαι.]

And about Anne Carson's even more fragmented translation of them:

]not possible to happen
]to pray for a share
]
]

I think by now you may have figured that I really do think some change is needed. I think by now you may also have figured out that I have enough on my plate for myself. I think by now you may have considered even that I'm not going to praise or criticize, to defend or denigrate, Specter, Taylor, Plotz, or even Helen. Are you?

"Against the patriarchal backdrop": the Bible's "Private, Complex Subjectivity"

This is a post of two long but important observations of Carolyn Custis James and Tod Linafelt, respectively, about the literary play in the Bible. By "play," I mean both interpretive "wiggle room" and hermeneutic "playfulness." It's the kind of "reading" against which Aristotle taught. It's the kind of perspective that feminists tend to find useful in overcoming profound misogyny and gynophobia in texts that would perpetuate sexist or racist inequalities.

James is a speaker, researcher, and writer who is the founder and president of the Synergy Women’s Network, Inc. Linafelt is an associate professor of biblical literature at Georgetown University and a humanities professor in the English department at Loyola College in Baltimore.

James writes in The Gospel of Ruth (pp 30-33):

I once asked a seminary professor if he saw a pattern in the biblical text where men interacting with strong women become stronger themselves. I'll never forget the blank look I got in return. In Christian circles, there is sometimes an assumption that when women step into the spotlight, the men will pay a price. The spotlight of recent research may train its sights on Naomi and Ruth, but until now this beam of light belonged to Boaz, the Kinsman-Redeemer Christ figure, traditionally identified as the hero of the story. . . .

[A] Western, American, middle-class point of view can actually interfere with our understanding of God's Word.

The story of Naomi and Ruth takes place against the backdrop of an ancient patriarchal culture. If we want to grasp the message, we must enter Naomi's world. We can do this better with the help of our sisters in the Third World whose cultures more closely resemble the ancient biblical culture. The payoff is well worth the effort, especially in biblical passages that focus explicitly on women, as we are about to see. Against the ancient patriarchal backdrop, the Bible's strong message for women packs a punch that we completely miss when we ignore the [male-dominant] cultural context. . . .

In five short verses, death wipes the men off the scene, leaving three grieving widows behind. In a male-centered culture that ascribed value to women based on their relationships to men, these husbandless, sonless women hold no interest to anyone. In many minds, especially in the minds of the three women themselves, the story is over. Nothing is left to tell. Yet ironically, this is where the narrative heats up as the biblical spotlight settles on Naomi and an all-female case. Now the real story begins.

And so we begin our journey by entering a downward spiral of suffering with Naomi, the female Job, who from ground zero of her own life wants to know, "Is God good for women?"

Linafelt writes in "The Bible's Literary Merits":

David's sexual taking of Bathsheba . . . is indeed reported [in the Bible] as [his] seeing Bathsheba bathing and then [his] acting to bring her into his bed. David's thinking isn't reported, but the reader is nonetheless encouraged [by the silence in the text] to imagine what David is thinking. After seeing Bathsheba, David pauses and considers his next action: He sends to "inquire about the woman" and learns that she is "the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite." Only after learning those things does David carry out his act of adultery.

Why? Well, he learns that the woman's husband is a Hittite, and so perhaps we are to understand David as having fewer scruples about taking the wife of a non-Israelite. (There is irony in the fact that, as the story unfolds, Uriah in fact proves a much better keeper than David of Israelite law.) David learns too that Bathsheba is the daughter of Eliam, who in turn, the attentive reader will notice, is the son of Ahithophel, one of the court counselors who will soon betray David by siding with David's son Absalom in his attempted coup.

What, then, motivates David's taking of Bathsheba? [One easily] assumes that David is "instantly struck with lust" upon seeing her. Perhaps, but in fact the narrator never reveals whether David lusts after Bathsheba or not. And it is possible to imagine his taking of Bathsheba as a calculated political act against a rival faction within the court. Besides, lust and political ambition are far from being mutually exclusive. The point, in any case, is that though we are not told David's motivations, he clearly has some.

In biblical narrative, such examples of unstated but important character motivation abound. What are Eve and Adam thinking when they reach for the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? What is God thinking in forbidding that fruit? (Despite Christianity's long tradition of original sin, the answer to neither of those questions is immediately clear, and both prove quite interestingly complex if taken seriously.) Why does Moses kill the Egyptian who is beating a Hebrew slave in Exodus 2? (It is not clear whether Moses, raised an Egyptian, knows that he was born a Hebrew; and so his motivation might range from an elemental sense of justice, unrelated to ethnicity, to a specifically ethnic identification with the victim.) What is going through Aaron's mind when his two sons are burned alive with fire from God in Leviticus 10? (The narrator reports only that "Aaron was silent." Does that indicate mute acceptance? Crippling grief? A barely controlled anger? Pure shock?) Why does Naomi try to send Ruth back to her Moabite family in the first chapter of the Book of Ruth? (Is she genuinely concerned for Ruth's welfare, or does she simply want to be rid of the burden of a non-Israelite woman as she returns from Moab to Bethlehem?)

As those examples show — and there are many, many more that could be adduced — biblical narrative counts on and exploits . . . a genuine inner life and a private, complex subjectivity.

Unequal Future: Alarms in the Academy (then in your Home)!

What contrasts! Here are two unequal perspectives on women and men in American universities (and on what that may mean to you).

Today, Dr. R. Albert Mohler, Jr. sounds the alarms on his blog:
There's "the emergence of a new American matriarchy"! "Ideological feminism can only applaud this reversal of history. Yet, truth be known, even many social liberals must find the trend worrisome." What now about the "biblical model of marriage and gender relations" and "the rightly ordered family and church"? "What about our own sons? Are they being encouraged toward education and leadership in the home, the church, and the culture? If not, we will surely reap what we sow." And "In reality, most people are likely to experience the intuition that this is not a good development. A look into the future is truly troubling."
"Is Matriarchy the Shape of the Future?"

Today, blogger telbort alerts readers at "Feminist Philosophers":
"We know things were bad for women and minorities in philosophy thirty or more years ago. We also know from Sally Haslanger’s paper that they aren’t all that good now. But reading some of the comments coming from those that aspire to staff philosophy departments for the next thirty years, the future doesn’t look all that rosey either." And still we hear "a lot of white male philosophers . . . complaining that women and minorities who get these jobs are doing so purely by dint of their gender or race and at the expense of their more qualified white male counterparts ('Its reverse discrimination I tell ya'). And the men are still arguing these claims: "girls can’t do metaphysics" and "the real reason women aren’t getting jobs easily and need 'reverse discrimination' to help them out is because hard-core philosophy is abstract, and women prefer things with material results."
"The Future State of Equality in Philosophy"

Whose rhetoric is closer to yours? Whose reality? Whose future? Is there some false binary here, some false binaries? How will the shape of the American university shape where you live?