Sara – Page 66

Teaching (and learning) how to question

One key aspect of my own pedagogy of troublemaking is the belief that asking and exploring lots of questions is very important. I have devoted a lot of attention to the value of asking questions on this blog. I have written about Judith Butler and why, Paulo Freire and learning to question, Cynthia Enloe and curiosity, and Padgett Powell and the interrogative mood. Today I want to add another entry on this topic to my blog: Patricia A. Johnson and the art of genuine and playful questioning (a la Hans-Georg Gadamer and Maria Lugones).

While browsing through the stacks the other week, I happened across Philosophy, Feminism and Faith. Why did I pick it up? I can’t remember but it must have had something to do with my own religion and philosophy backgrounds (I have a BA in religion, a MA in theological studies and ethics, and my secondary discipline for my PhD was philosophy). By chance, I found an article by Patricia A. Johnson entitled, “Learning to Question.” Just glancing at the opening epigraphs, I knew that I would appreciate her perspective:

Questions always bring out the undetermined possibilities of a thing (Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method).

Interrogation itself becomes an act of critical intervention, fostering a fundamental attitude of vigilance rather than denial (bell hooks, Yearning).

In her essay, Johnson divides the essay up into three sections, each speaking to a different (and sometimes in conflict) community to which she belongs: trained philosophers, active feminists, and practitioners of the Quaker religion (Friends). In my brief engagement with Johnson’s work, I want to focus on these first two communities which Johnson discussions in relation to Gadamer and Lugones.

Gadamer and philosophy: The art of genuine questioning

Drawing upon Gadamer and his work in Truth and Method (which I think I own, but can’t find–sigh), Johnson argues for the value of learning how to ask genuine questions. Genuine questions are only possible when we recognize (and embrace?) our unknowingness and when we become “motivated by a sincere desire to know” (142). She distinguishes genuine questions from false ones which are disingenuous and not aimed at gaining new knowledge but at directing others towards one’s already established beliefs. I like how Johnson describes false questions in the context of teachers who ask their students questions–in class or on exams–that “do not allow our own presuppositions to be questioned” and that “clearly require that our own unexamined prejudices be accepted” (142). This is important because it is not only students who need to learn how to answer (and ask) genuine questions; teachers need to learn how to ask (and answer) genuine questions too. Johnson also distinguishes genuine questions from distorted ones that misdirect our explorations of ideas. Because distorted questions can get us off track, we need to make sure that we are constantly (and vigilantly) reflecting on why, how and when we ask questions (143). Finally, Johnson argues that genuine questioning requires that we consider the many sides of our question, the context in which it is asked and the communities in which we (the askers and answerers) live.

Lugones and feminism: Learning to question playfully

After discussing questioning in relation to philosophy, Johnson reflects on it in relation to her feminism. She argues that genuine questions also demand that we adopt a playful attitude (a la Lugones) and an “openness to the reconstruction of of one’s self and one’s world” (147). I really like how she brings in Lugones and her playful attitude. Lugones is a big influence on my own troublemaking work and I have written and thought a lot about the playful attitude in relation to virtue ethics. In fact, I just wrote about the playful attitude yesterday (here). When I have more energy and time I should revisit how Lugones fits in for Johnson and for my own teaching philosophy.

Here are a few succinct summaries that Johnson offers:

Philosophy first led me to question and to ask about the nature of questioning. Philosophy taught me to recognize that I must know when I do not know. I must distinguish genuine from false and distorted questions. I must recognize that addressing a question requires investigating the many sides of a question. I must ask questions in the context of community. Feminism showed me the complexity of communities and the importance of being a question (149).

In reference to being a question, Johnson writes:

to be a feminist in the Academy required one to learn how to raise questions that others preferred not to address and did not even see as questions. I have also learned that as a feminist, my simple presence is sometimes a question (144).

A few random thoughts:

I want to re-visit Gadamer’s Truth and Method, especially this section.
I wonder about this desire to know–what if we imagined our questions to be motivated by a desire to feel or to experience? While I think we can gain new understandings through our exploration of questions; we still can’t ever really know. Maybe unknowing is a good (as in stimulating, productive, creative) place to stay?
Being a question–what are the dangers of being a question? What are the differences, particularly in terms of our agency and how we are understand as subjects, between asking questions and being a question?

Playgrounds, kids and making trouble

I really like Rebecca Mead’s article about children’s playgrounds in the July 5th issue of The New Yorker: “State of Play: How tot lots became places to build children’s brains.” She describes the history of playgrounds in the U.S. and the shift that is occurring in the philosophy and design of them. Playgrounds used to be designed primarily for regulating children’s behavior, training them to be good (as in disciplined) citizens. With their carefully planned swings, slides, sandboxes and seesaws (the four S’s), playgrounds were intended to give otherwise out-of-control children a place to direct their immense amount of physical energy towards productive, responsible and physically appropriate actions. Now, new playgrounds, like David Rockwell’s Imagination Playground, are being designed to encourage children to be creative and engage in their own imaginative (not-so-directed) play. The 4 S’s are being replaced with loose parts like foam blocks and tubes that can be moved around by kids and put together in expected and unexpected ways. Instead of regulating kids’ unruly behavior, playgrounds are being designed to train kids’ brains so that kids use their imagination more and learn how to creatively explore their own (as opposed to parents’ idea of appropriate) play. Here’s Rebecca Mead’s summary of the change in playground philosophy:

Over the past century, the thinking about playgrounds has evolved from figuring out how play can instill youngsters with discipline to figuring out how play can build brains by fostering creativity and independent thinking. The hope of Rockwell’s playground project is that children who have experimented with fitting together oversized blocks and cogs—and who have learned to navigate a place where social challenges of sharing and collaboration are built into experience—will be better equipped to handle the complexities of twenty-first century life (37).

Sounds great, right? In many ways, yes. I’m all for encouraging kids to be creative and designing playground equipment that fosters their imaginations. I also appreciate the emphasis on play as being driven by kids themselves as opposed to their over-bearing parents. However, I am troubled by how this play is still framed almost exclusively in terms of how it can train kids to be good adults. Whether playgrounds are designed to curb the behaviors and bodies of unruly, troublemaking kids (which Mead indicates were some of the original reasons for developing playgrounds in the early 1900s) or to shape and train their brains to better function in the 21st century (one current playground philosophy), the end goal is always about disciplining children and about “developing [the child’s] abilities, their individual judgment, and their sense of moral and social responsibility” and training them “to become a useful [and productive worker?] member of society” (35).

What’s fun and playful about that? It sounds like more work. Sure I appreciate the shift in emphasis from controlling bad behavior to inspiring creative engagement, but by understanding imagination and creativity primarily in terms of how it trains/disciplines kids to be more creative and able to direct their own actions, a lot of what is fun (and creative) about play is, at best, not valued, and at worst, pushed aside in favor of one version of productive, useful and serious play. In the hyper-competitive, capitalist-driven environment of New York City (where many of these playgrounds are making their debut), these new “imagination” playgrounds could have some contradictory/conflicted results: “achievement-minded New York parents will likely flock to the place” (37), hoping to give their kids’ one more advantage (creative imagination!) for their future in the highly-competitive marketplace. So, play isn’t about playing; it’s about acquiring more tools for success.

Whenever I think about the value of play, I am reminded of Maria Lugones’ wonderful example of playfulness in “Playfulness, World-Traveling and Loving Perception“:

Being playful and playing doesn’t always have to be guided by rules or some larger aim (to be successful at being creative); being playful can (and should) be fun and freeing and not work. Kids know and embrace this. And no matter how hard playground designers, play experts and parents try to shape how they play, kids find ways to have fun on the playground. They use the equipment improperly (by climbing up the outside of the slide) or ignore the equipment altogether (by climbing random trees instead of jungle gyms). Often I have found myself exasperated by my son’s refusal to play on the equipment “properly.” I am sure I have even uttered, “why does he have to make this so difficult–why can’t he play the right way?” (I know, even troublemakers like me reinforce the rules sometimes). While sometimes he is just being difficult, maybe sometimes he is practicing resistance and making trouble for the system and its efforts to mold him into a good little worker. Maybe the playground is full of little-troublemaking revolutionaries? Cool.

SIDENOTE: Almost every time I go to a park I witness how disciplining is done by parents to their own children and to others’ children. Of course, children aren’t the only ones disciplined; parents spend a lot of time at the park disciplining each other (in subtle and not-so-subtle ways). After I started reflecting on these ideas of disciplining and parks, Foucault immediately popped into my head and I knew that if I searched for it, I would find some great articles on Foucault and the playground. I was not disappointed. I can’t wait to read this totally awesome-sounding essay by Holly Blackford entitled “Playground Panopticism : Ring-Around-the-Children, a Pocketful of Women” which I originally found in the journal, Childhood. Doesn’t it sound cool?

In this article, the author invokes Michel Foucault’s analysis of panopticism to understand the performance of mothering in the suburban playground. The mothers in the ring of park benches symbolize the suggestion of surveillance, which Foucault describes as the technology of disciplinary power under liberal ideals of governance. However, the panoptic force of the mothers around the suburban playground becomes a community that gazes at the children only to ultimately gaze at one another, seeing reflected in the children the parenting abilities of one another. The author analyzes the elaborate rules of playground etiquette and social competition that occupy the mothers, linking their social discourses to the public neighborhood playground as a symbol for child-centered (suburban) ideology.

Excellent. I need to read this article and then re-read KCF’s guest blog entry on The Elf on the Shelf.

The Value of Failure: Versions 1, 2 and 3

Note: This blog entry is posted on all three of my blogs: (making/being in/ staying in) trouble, It’s Diablogical!, and Unchained.

Right now I am attempting to juggle three different blogs. I really like how they highlight different aspects of my writing/thinking/feeling self. On trouble, I focus on giving critical (and serious, extended) attention to trouble in feminist and queer contexts. Frequently I write about Judith Butler and the ethical implications of her work. I also devote a lot of time to working through my own (hopefully) book project on trouble as a virtue. On Unchained, I experiment with developing/practicing virtue ethics (in relation to breaking, reworking, transforming consumption habits) through and in connection with blogging. I co-write this blog with my partner, STA, as we try to figure out ways to reduce consumption, make better (whatever that means) choices, and model “good” behavior for two crazy, yet wonderful kids, FWA and RJP. Finally on It’s Diablogical!, I diablogue with my writing partner and good friend, KCF, about blogging and feminist pedagogy. Our blog is part of a larger writing project on teaching with blogs and blogging while teaching.

Sound like too much? While it can feel overwhelming at times, all three of these writing projects inspire and invigorate me (at least, so far. I just started Unchained and It’s Diablogical! this summer. It is possible that my brain will melt once I start prepping for my classes later this month). The specific content of each blog is different, yet all three connect, sometimes in unexpected ways. Like right now. As I was preparing to write more on Unchained about failing, I realized that I have A LOT to write about the issue of failing and FAIL, and that what I want to write is relevant to each of the blogs I write on. With that in mind, I have decided to try an experiment in this entry. I want to write about failure in the context of each of the three blogs. If I like how this works, I anticipate experimenting with it more in future entries. I plan to post this entry in each of my blogs. So, here goes nothing…

First, my overarching statement: Failure is valuable.

VERSION 1: in the context of Trouble

Making, being in and staying in trouble is all about valuing failure: closely and critically examining it, learning from it, developing questions around how/why it happened, being devoted to claiming/exposing it, never concealing it. Throughout her work, particularly in Gender Trouble and Undoing Gender, Judith Butler discusses the potential value (and danger) of our various failures to fully embody/live up to gender norms and our proper gender roles/rules. Check out what she says about her parents’ gender failures in Judith Butler: Philosophical Encounters of the Close Kind. In the first 2 minutes of this youtube clip, Butler describes how her various family members were unable to fully live up to the gender/race/class norms as embodied by famous Hollywood actors. Then, at 2 minutes and 19 seconds in, Butler says:

My conclusion was that anyone who strives to embody them [gender norms–being a “proper” man or woman], perhaps also fails in some ways that are more interesting than their successes.

For Butler, failure is not just more interesting than success; failure is a crack in the system. When we fail we can begin to see the limits of the system and how/when it doesn’t work. Maybe, especially if we gravitate towards trouble, we might wonder about what these limits say about the system and why the system has to be the way it is or why it couldn’t function in a different way (perhaps in a way that enable our norms to be guided by our actions instead of our actions dictated by our norms). When we succeed at living up to gender expectations (what Butler might describe as achieving a proper gender performance), we aren’t prompted to ask questions about the system and how it might work differently or better. And we aren’t inspired to think about the gender binary system or its rigid rules about what it means to be a man or a woman. In fact, sometimes success is more of a failure; to succeed can contribute to a failure to think, to question, to wonder, or to resist. I could say more about failure in relation to Michel Foucault’s limit attitude, but I want to stay focused so that I don’t lose my various readers here (especially the ones who might read Unchained, but not trouble. Yes, STA, I’m talking to you…)

VERSION 2: In the context of It’s Diablogical!

To embrace failure, or to at least recognize that it is not something to avoid or conceal, can open us up to other possibilities and other ways of knowing and being. When we begin to understand that failure is inevitable and necessary, we can shift our focus away from always being right or having the right answer or even believing that there is one right answer. Instead, we can focus more of our attention on all the different ways that others could be right (or, at least not wrong). When we don’t worry so much about failing (and then being seen as a Failure), we aren’t as invested in proving that we aren’t ever wrong. This enables us to make room for exciting and inspiring conversations with others that involve much more than concluding who got it right and who didn’t. Failure also encourages us to experiment and be creative with how we approach ideas, problems and people. This is especially true when we don’t imagine failure as something that threatens to undermine us and our authority and when we embrace it as a necessary and invigorating part of the process (of thinking, writing, learning, engaging).

While there are many ways to practice and promote this vision of failure (as contributing to openness, as encouraging experimentation), I am particularly interested in how blogs (my personal ones and the ones I use in my class) can serve as powerful spaces for valuing failure (and valuing vulnerability, openness and experimentation). Here, let me briefly explain how I used my blog for my spring 2010 Contemporary Feminist Debates course to explore and practice the idea of valuing failure.

Instead of using the language of failure (which is negative and can immediately induce fear and suspicion amongst the students), I described the process of not being right or failing to be right in terms of uncertainty, contestability and curiosity. I reworked one traditional notion of debate by shifting our focus away from the contesting of competing claims to the critical and creative exploration of negotiating between (and living with) multiple visions of what is or should be right. In this way, I transformed the idea of failure from being wrong to not being the only one right.

The course blog played a central role in this process of imagining and practicing a new vision of feminist debate-as-curiosity. Because this blog entry is getting way too long (surprise, surprise), I want to highlight one particular blog exercise that I used to reinforce the idea of failing (that is, failing to know) as valuable. I developed a category on the blog titled, “This is a feminist issue because…”. Students were required to post one example of something that they believed to be a feminist issue and then respond to at least two other students’ examples. Here is my explanation :

So, this category is for posting images, news items or anything else that you feel speaks to issues related to feminism. It could also include anything that you believe especially deserves a feminist analysis. And it could include topics, issues, or events that you feel are connected to feminism or deserve a feminist response, but you are not sure how or why. Entries filed under this category should invite us to apply our growing knowledge of feminism/feminist movement/s to popular culture/current events or should inform us about ideas, topics, or images that are important for feminism. When posting an entry/example, you could pose a question to the reader or provide a brief summary on the example and/or why you posted it.

While the purpose of this blog category was to document a wide range of feminist issues and approaches, the unanticipated (and somewhat anticipated) effect of this category was to demonstrate to students that feminist movement is not any one thing and that we can’t ever fully know what feminism is or how it should proceed. While this made some students angry (“if feminism is too broad, it becomes meaningless!”) and many uncomfortable, it made other students curious and inspired them to rethink debate and feminism outside of its rigid borders. In the context of this blog, the failure to come up with any definitive or comprehensive conclusions of what feminism or a feminist issue is resulted in a larger success–it opened them to new ways of thinking about feminism and enabled (at least some of) them to embrace not knowing (check out what I write about this idea in my final thoughts entry).

VERSION 3: In the context of Unchained

Failure is very important part of the process of breaking old habits and creating new ones. So much so that I have included a category on that blog entitled, Failure. While there is much that could be said about how failure (that is, doing things in un-virtuous or out-of-balance ways) is an important part of our moral and practical education, I simply don’t have the energy to write much more about that right now. At some point soon, I would like to carefully read and maybe comment on Putting on Virtue in relation to this question. But, I digress.

From my perspective (STA has a different perspective), I am interested in exploring my/our various habits of consumption and how to break and/or rework them. Perhaps one of my central approaches to this breaking/reworking process is to give some serious attention to the moments when I fail. I like to analyze why it didn’t work and ask lots of questions–what happened? how could it happen differently? what are some of the deeper issues that prevent me from breaking habits that I know are bad, harmful, unjust? Why do I have so many half-finished bags of tortilla chips? Why did I panic and buy the processed ham? And why did I order the large beer sampler?

Some people might imagine such a focus on failure to be depressing or discouraging; I find that not focusing on how/when I fail to be unproductive, uncritical and (almost) a guarantee that I will fail again.

Caring too much (or not enough)? The virtue and vices of caring

I am trying to shift my attention away from care ethics for now. No, really, I am. I can’t help it that articles about care ethics just seem to find me. Like this one: “What feminists get wrong about family, work and equality,” which is part of a special issue, entitled Mothers who care too much, for the July/August 2010 issue of the Boston Review. I found a link to it on twitter and I couldn’t resist reading (and now writing about) it. In this article, Nancy J. Hirschman reflects on how caring and an ethics of care are being used uncritically to justify irresponsible and uncaring actions by full-time mothers. She writes:

Significant trends within feminism, grouped under the label of care feminism, have long emphasized the socially important work that women do rearing children. I have pursued such arguments in my own work but lately I have grown worried that feminists such as me have exaggerated the importance of care, ignored the inadequate ways in which it is often performed. We have failed to acknowledge that the louder we applaud it, the more we enable its perversion.

In the article, Hirschman focuses on stay-at-home moms and how their care work has been overvalued (or at least too uncritically valued). She argues that not enough critical attention is given to how and when that care work is not performed responsibly–like when a mother, while claiming that she cares for her college-aged student, lies for that student so that they can get an extension on their take home exam or so they can plagiarize a big chunk of their paper (these are examples she gives at the beginning of the essay). We spend a lot of time vilifying rich women who exploit their nannies or working mothers who selfishly prioritize their jobs over their children, but we can’t seem to expand our critique to include women who are full time mothers:

We hear a lot about the evils of working mothers, how they are too busy or selfish to pay attention to their children. And everyone loves to pile on rich men’s wives who are obsessed with getting their children into the right preschool yet consign them to the care of nannies. But we don’t often talk—either within the academy or outside of it—about the comparable failings of full-time mothering, about the women..who devote their lives to caring for their families, while producing outcomes that arguably undermine such basic political values as freedom, equality, and engaged citizenship.

Is it just me or does her mention of “piling on rich men’s wives” seem a little too flippant? Hirschman’s response to this problem is to suggest that a feminist ethics of care might be a big part of the problem:

If the work of care feminists can be put to use for ends opposed to those for which it was intended, maybe something is wrong with the theory itself.

She wants us to examine the unexpected consequences of a promotion of care as a valued, public good (which is a move that many feminists, including her, have supported): 1. When we value care as a public good, we subject care work (in its many forms) to public scrutiny/regulation/judgment. This scrutiny has led to an increased hostility to welfare and those caregivers (i.e. poor mothers) who were unjustly and erroneously depicted as bad mothers. 2. Valuing care by providing caregivers with adequate resources and sufficient support does not guarantee that the products of care (children) will be responsible and good citizens. Hirschman writes:

…many parents with more-than-adequate resources do an atrocious job teaching their children the sense of social responsibility and community that care feminists see as the natural outcome of caring work.

Question: Do all care feminists argue that the natural outcome of caring work is that it produces good citizens and that all caregivers just know how to engage in proper and effective care-giving work? I am bothered by the use of natural here and its concealing of the difficult labor that goes into determining how/when care is effective. This might be a place to read care and care work through virtue ethics. Care as a virtue would require that we think about how to distinguish effective/responsible care (virtue) from caring too much (vice of excess) or too little (vice of deficiency).

Okay, returning to the list of unexpected consequences of an emphasis on care: 3. Thinking about care as a public good (one that should be valued and compensated as such) gets complicated when we think of the benefits that caregivers already receive from their care work. If mothers are compensated for the burdens of watching children, should they also be taxed for the love that they receive from that same care work? and 4. “The focus on care has done little to change the sexual division of labor” (this is her big point and the title of another article that she contributes to this special issue).

After offering an insightful discussion of the sexual division of labor and care’s contribution to keeping that division unequal (note: she makes some interesting points in this section which I don’t have time to mention here), Hirschman offers this proposal for how to rethink (or think beyond) care:

Care feminism wants to make us think more in terms of connection and relationship, but if men have no incentive to give up their power and follow the care model’s recommendations, then women continue to represent “the family” and men remain “individuals.”

Care feminism has long been critical of individualism; but perhaps the best way to achieve the goals of the care model is for women to become stronger in individualist terms by gaining and retaining economic clout and social status, thereby giving them leverage to get men to change, and to care more.

This may mean that the vision of care that feminists promote—the kind of care that we produce—has to change as well, become less ideal, more pragmatic, without abandoning its commitments to progressivism or civic-mindedness: more like “tough love” than empathic giving. This may sound counterproductive to the ideals of empathy, responsibility, and connectedness that care theorists have advocated. It may seem overly sanguine. Some care theorists may claim that that is what they have been trying to do all along. But theorizing care from the perspective of the power dynamics to which we have inadvertently contributed is essential to its success. Because ultimately it is women’s power, not care itself, that will enable gender equality.

Hmm…I am trying to think about all the different ways in which her suggestions seem problematic to me. I bristle at the phrase “tough love”—is it possible that I might be taking it out of context and just remembering my recent critique of harsh criticism as tough love? Maybe. I am also surprised at her seemingly singular focus on gender at the expense of considering how the question of care and parenting is necessarily implicated in unequal power distributions based on race or class or sexuality or nation. In focusing only on the need for women (which women?) to get jobs or, more broadly, attempt to acquire power/status/money, we aren’t able to consider the important questions: Who (that is, which individuals) have access to economic clout and social status via jobs?

While much more could be said about the limits (or possibilities?) of her proposal, that is not my goal in this entry. I chose to write on this essay because I was struck by the author’s engagement with feminist care ethics and her reinforcement of the popular and too-narrow idea of care as uncritically linked to the nurturing mother. As I hinted at before, I think linking care with troublemaking might be a way to get beyond (or beside?) this narrow framing. I also chose to write on this essay because I was struck by the title: Women who care too much. The idea of excessive caring makes me think of Aristotle and his ethical framework for cultivating virtue in relation to its vices (its excesses and deficiencies). Okay, I really need to stop thinking about care ethics right now. Time to think about one of my other blog projects.

Once more with feeling: Aristotle remix (blog mash-up 2, part 2)

For some reason, I am drawn to musical references. First, mash-ups and now remixes. Why? Not sure.

Last week I finally got my copy of Sara Ahmed’s latest book, The Promise of Happiness. I’m very excited to read it (and hopefully teach it) in the fall. You may recall that I have written about and taught parts of the book already. With all of my other writing to wrap up, I haven’t had a chance to do a close reading (or even much of a skim) yet. I anticipate that this book will be extremely helpful as I continue to think through troublemaking and its political and ethical value; I see lots of connections between Ahmed’s feminist killjoy and unhappy queer and my troublemaker.

Today I took a quick peek at the book. Since I am thinking a lot about virtue with my current mash-up, I decided to check her index for Aristotle. I found him. On pages 37-38, she discusses habit, happiness and Aristotle’s (mis) treatment of feelings. While Aristotle claims that being good and happy (and having a good life) are not the same as feeling good and feeling happy, Ahmed argues that he continues, through his emphasis on the regulation and balancing of feelings (between excess and deficiency), to link the two in ways that make one seem to naturally follow from the other: “we assume something feels good because it is good. We are good if it feels good” (Ahmed 37).

Check out what she has to say about feeling good and being good and their connection to the regulation of desire:

A happy life, a good life, hence involves the regulation of desire. It is not simply that we desire happiness but that happiness is imagined as what you get in return for desiring well. Good subjects will not experience pleasure from the wrong objects (they will be hurt by them or indifferent to them) and will only experience a certain amount of pleasure from the right object. We learn to experience some things as pleasure–as being good–where the experience itself becomes the truth of the object (“it is good”) as well as the subject (“we are good”). It is not only that the association between objects and affects is preserved through habit; we also acquire good tastes through habit. When history [of repeated habits?] becomes second nature, the affect seems obvious or even literal, as if it follows directly from what has already been given. We assume that we experience delight because “it” is delightful (Ahmed 37).

So, being good and feeling good are inextricably linked; when we feel good it is because we did something good and when we do something good our reward is that we feel good. One naturally follows from the other and we are able to neatly balance/regulate/guide our feelings in the “proper” direction. Ahmed sees this as a problem because the connection is not natural; it is produced through repeated habits that reinforce the connection between what feels good and what is good. Moreover, what is “proper” gets narrowly defined and is guided (almost exclusively) by a particular vision of the future–in other chapters (and previous excerpts that I have read), she discusses the heteronormative future, where the end goal/the happy ending is heterosexual marriage. Feelings get regulated through this narrow vision, making anything that doesn’t fall in line with it (say, anything that falls outside of Rubin’s charmed circle or that doesn’t reinforce heteronormative desires) as producing bad feelings or bad (as in unhappy, non-flourishing) lives.

Ahmed wants us to pay attention to feelings and how our responses to certain objects get regulated/shaped/determined in ways that dictate what sorts of actions and objects of our pleasure are deemed proper (and good) and which are not. And she wants us to challenge (make trouble for, perhaps?) the ways in which Happiness, as an end goal, so often only directs us towards certain paths (at the expense of others).

In what I have read so far by Ahmed on Aristotle (pages 36-37 and earlier versions of “The Unhappy Queer” and “Feminist Killjoys”), I don’t think that she wants to reconsider Aristotle. Aristotelean virtue ethics seems to be too mired in a limited and regulating view of happiness, one that overemphasizes naturalizing our habits and our emotions and directing them towards one universal vision of the Good. In thinking about these last two sentences some more, I happened across this passage by Ahmed which reinforces my own assessment. She writes:

I will not respond to the new science of happiness by simply appealing for a return to classical ideas of happiness as eudaimonia, as living a good, meaningful, or virtuous life….Critiques of the happiness industry that call for a return to classical concepts of virtue not only sustain the association between happiness and the good but also suggest that some forms of happiness are better than others (12).

So Ahmed is not interested in thinking (too much) about Aristotle in relation to her analysis of happiness and unhappiness (this is clearly evident in her index; out of 233 pages of text, Aristotle is only referenced briefly). But I am. How much attention do I want to give to Aristotle? At this point, I’m not sure. I do know that I want to take up Judith Butler’s challenge–the one that I mention here, here, and here–to rehabilitate Aristotle. While Butler suggests that we rehabilitate Aristotle through Foucault, I want to add a few more thinkers into the mix with him: Butler and Sara Ahmed. Hence, the title of this entry. My revisiting (remix) of Aristotle is one that involves an emphasis on and serious critical attention to feeling (both good and bad feelings) and how they circulate within our experiences of and discourses on goodness, flourishing and virtue ethics. I’m not sure if this makes sense yet….

Because I was curious, I looked up the phrase, “once more with feeling.” I was pleasantly surprised to find that it is the title of the Buffy Musical Extravaganza from season 6. Cool.