GIVMGNAME TO THE NAMELESS: HETERODOXNONPROPOSITTONAL UNDERSTANDING AND LIBERATORY PERSONALTRANSFORMAT~ON
Alexis Shotwell
Submiaed in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Joint Women's Studies Programme
Da1 housie University Mount Saint Vincent University Saint Mary's University Halifax, NS
March, 2000
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Abstract
Chapter 1 : Introduction
Chapter 2: Personal transformation and nonpropositional undentanding
C hapter 3 : Personal transformation and identity
Chapter 4: Narratives
Chapter 5: Conclusion Abstract
Systems of oppression have an impact on almost everything we do, whether oppression is experienced from the point of view of the oppressor or from the point of view of the oppressed. In l ight of the pervasiveness and the power of such systems, 1 am interested in the fact that people are able to act in ways that challenge and change them. That is, because 1 think that dominant ideologies are stmctured so as to rnake dominant groups appear to be logically or naturally dominant. 1 am particularly interested in liberatory consciousness as it arises in people who belong to oppressed goups. 1 argue that being able to act counter to dominant noms otten involves developing what 1 cal1 heterodox nonpropositional understanding and that such knowledge is necessary to individual transformations of consciousness. In this thesis 1 give an account of personal transformation in which 1 attribute importance to the role of nonpropositional anti-oppressive understandings of oneself and one's world. One of my main projects here is to draw on Susan Babbitt's theoretical model of nonpropositional knowledge and transformation in a reading of the personal narratives of Audre Lorde and Dorothy Allison. First. 1 add theoretical resources to Babbitt's account of the importance of rionpropositional knowledge to liberatory transformation through readings of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Sandra Bartky, Diana Tietjens Meyers, and Ronald de Sousa. Second. I address her conception of selfhood. or what is transfomed in liberatory transformation. using the work of Sandra Harding, and Maria Lugones. I found these theorists' contribution to Babbitt's theory necessary for me to adequately look at Audre Lorde's and Dorothy Allison's persona1 narratives. Acknowledgments
1 would like to thank my thesis supervisor. Sue Campbell, and my cornmittee member. Ann Manicorn. Both have been kind. precise. and ruthless. and I have appreciated their intelligence and support tremendously throughout this process. 1 can't imagine better mentors. 1 was fortunate to have Susan
Shenvin as a extemai examiner. Thanks to the faculty and staffof the Joint
Women's Studies Graduate Programme. who have created a unique opportunity to study feminist theory. and to Dalhousie's Faculty of Graduate
Studies for kind support of rny work during this degree. I am always grateful to rny family. who are loving and delightful beyond reason. My thanks particuiarly to Caleb Toombs. for being thoroughly generous.
vii Chapter One Introduction
In 1 772, Phillis Wheatley defended her personhood to a group of Boston's most distinguished citizens. She was a black woman, a slave, had written a book of poems and, with the help of her owner, intended to publish them. The group of respectable Bostonians was assembled to test whether she was capable of writing poetry. This test was part of a debate begun in the sixteenth century as to whether the "Afncan variety" of humanity bore any relation to the "European variety"; if so, perhaps they were not fated to be slaves.' When Phillis Wheatley defended her ability to write poetry, she was asserting an ability and an identity radically different than that her world assigned her.
When 1 entered my second year of university 1 identified myself as a non- feminist. That year 1 took a course in feminist philosophy. At the end of the term 1 identified myself as a feminist. Phillis Wheatley and 1 have very little in common, and 1 am not claiming any deep connection in our stories. 1 think they do have something in common, though: a change in self-articulation that (to varying degrees) functions in opposition to a prevailing norm. I am interested in the background underlying such changes.
In this thesis 1 give an account of persona1 transformation in which 1 amibute importance to the role of nonpropositional anti-oppressive understandings
1 of oneself and one's world. This project is linked to a more general epistemic one, as it addresses a lack in much current epistemology - the absence of an account of that which underlies propositional knowledge. It is based on Susan Babbitt's mode1 of nonpropositional knowledge and transformation. Her argument for the role of nonpropositional knowledge in persona1 liberatory transformation lays out a new and rich theoretical framework for thinking about transfonnation. One of the main projects of this thesis is to draw on Babbitt's theoretical mode1 in a reading of two women's persona1 narratives. 1 intend to contribute to her framework, by drawing on the resources of several other theorists; their work enriches and deepens Babbitt's, in two ways. First, 1 add theoretical resources to
Babbitt 's account of the importance of nonpropositional knowledge to liberatory transformation by drawing on Ludwig Wittgenstein, Diana Tietjens Meyen, and
Ronald de Sousa. Second, 1 address her conception of selfhood, or what is tnnsformed in liberatory transformation, using the work of Sandra Harding and
Mana Lugones. 1 found these theorists' contributions to Babbitt's theory necessary
for me to adequately look at Audre Lorde's and Dorothy Allison's persona1
narratives. Susan Babbitt's theory was the most useful tool 1 found in thinking
about issues both Lorde and Allison raise, but it required fleshing out in these two
areas in order to fùlly address their work.
I begin this chapter with a bief definition of the ternis 1 use throughout this
thesis. I then set out the epistemological framework of this work by discussing the propositional bias of much epistemology, and by introducing the idea of nonpropositional understandings.
In Chapter Two, I argue that the nonpropositional is important to knowledge. 1 then refine and deepen a theory of nonpropositional understanding, beginning with Susan Babbitt's account of transformation and nonpropositional knowledge. 1 continue with an analysis of Ludwig Wittgenstein's discussion of certainty, arguing that his account gives a useful picture of the role of nonpropositional understanding in the formation of propositional certainty. Ronald de Sousa's argument that the emotions are important determinants of salience is helpful to understanding how nonpropositionai understanding can change a person's frame of reference, and contribute to political action. Diana Tiejens
Meyers gives a useful discussion of heterodox moral perception and 1 tum to her account to brhg out the sense in which nonpropositional knowledge can be heterodox.
In Chapter Three, Iextend Babbit's arguments about persona1 transformations wi th a look at Sandra Harding and Maria Lugones. Both theorists argue that liberatory knowing and acting are a result of a nonunitary self. Neither of them is primarily interested in transformation, and they do not use the teminology of transformation. Their views, however, rely on and present a strong case for positive transformation, and for the sort of identity necessary to liberatory transformation. Sandra Harding links epistemic shifts with identity, arguing that the knowledge generated fiom identities that have been traditionally despised as knowledge generators holds liberatory potential. She argues that the liberatory self is bifurcated, that it hnctions as a nonunitary entity, and that this quality is an important source of nonoppressive knowledge. Harding's view of consciousness as bifurcated seems to me to highlight the importance of an account of the self as multiple. Such an account is helpful io thinking about the liberatory transformation of oppressed peoples; it will prove especially useful in my consideration of Audre
Lorde's personal narratives and poetry.
Maria Lugones offen a very convincing argument about transformation in the context of systernic oppression, and 1 examine her argument for the account s he offers of liberatory consciousness. 1 find her understanding of lirnenality very usehl in thinking about transformation generally, and Susan Babbitt's account of transformation particularly. Lugones' discussion of acting out of a position of limenality in such a way that one changes the logic of one's position offers a different and, 1 argue, necessary account of how oppressed people are able to act against oppression. It is, like Harding's argument, explicitly based in the premise that multiple identities are the source of liberatory knowledge and any potential for liberatory action.
Having attempted, in chapters Two and Three, to give a detailed account of the mechanisms of liberatory nonpropositional shifts in consciousness, I tum to
Audre Lorde's and Dorothy Allison's theory, personal narratives, and creative work. In Chapter Four, 1 offer a reading of some of Audre Lorde's theory on nonpropositional understanding and poeûy, and look at places in her autobiographical narrative where that theory seems to manifest in her account of her experience. Dorothy Allison's use of storytelling illuminates some of Lorde's work. Both Lorde and Allison serve to both test the theory of the rest of the thesis and bring out subtle aspects of it. Specifically, their work grounds the discussion of the nonpropositional as linked to multiple selves; it resonates with much of my discussion of transformation. Both writers theorize and illustrate the importance of persona1 transformation, and discuss the conditions under which liberatory transformation became possible for them. 1 am particularly interested in where t heir writing displays the importance of nonpropositional knowledge to the formation of liberatory consciousness.
Transformation
Feminists often find themselves wanting, and perhaps needing, to daim that some women are mistaken about what is in their best interest, and that their mistaken beliefs are actively harmfùi to them. This position irnplies the need for transformation. Many people who belong to oppressed groups are subject to systemic degradation. Systems of oppression have an impact on almost everything we do, whether oppression is experienced fiom the point of view of the oppressor or from the point of view of the oppressed. In light of the pervasiveness and the power of such systems, 1 am interested in the fact that people are able to act in ways that challenge and change them. That is, because I think that dominant ideologies are structured so as to make dominant groups appear to be logically or naturally dominant, 1 am particularly interested in liberatory consciousness as it anses in people who belong to oppressed groups. 1 will argue that being able to act counter to dominant noms ofien involves developing what 1 will cal1 heterodox nonpropositional understanding2 and that such knowledge is necessary to individual transformations of consciousness. Further, 1 argue that individual transformations of consciousness are necessary for broad or systemic change.
I think that in many cases, people must undergo persona1 transformation in order to conceive of themselves as possessing basic human dignity. The sort of transformation that I am interested in is the sort that anses out of, and contributes to the development of, a liberatory consciousness. Such a transformation might be the change that a person who has been subject to systernic oppression undergoes in order to think of herself hlly human.
1 am interested in laying out an account that is not only theoretically coherent, but also mie. To this end, 1 offer a textual analysis of Audre Lorde and
Dorothy Allison's persona1 narratives and present aspects of their theoretical work. My intention in using these texts is twofold. First, 1 think that the narratives serve to test the theory. My argument, that heterodox nonpropositional understanding is necessary to liberatory personal transformation, is a fairly broad argument. If it is a valid argument, it will be applicable to al1 liberatory transformation experiences, and it will resonate with accounts of transformation.
Second, the theory helps to illuminate the narratives. Reading persona1 narratives with a theory of the role of nonpropositional knowledge in transformation enhances an understanding of what the writers themselves identim as pivota1 experiences in their lives.
Episternology & Norrpropositional Understanding
Much epistemology, traditionally, has been concemed with what it is to know, and with questions around knowing - what is an adequate analysis of belief, certainty, grounds for knowledge claims, or mith, for example. The knowledge discussed in many beginning philosophy classes takes the fom of discussion about the classic proposition "s knows that p". "S" is often claimed to know "p" if
S believes p, if S has good reasons to believe p, and if p is the case. 1 am interested primady in the "knows that" portion of the classic proposition, or, more precisely, in what "knowing that" omits. Knowledge that "p" is propositional knowledge, the sort of knowledge that can be articulated fairly easily. 1 think there has been too little attention paid to the nonpropositional, or that which is not easy to Say
propositionally. As Susan Babbitt notes3, some nonpropositional understanding could be taken to be the same thing as Gilbert Ryle's understanding of knowing how, as against knowing that. Ryle contrasts knowing-how with knowing-that
through articulating the goals of each sort of knowledge. He says: "Though knowing- how enters into both theoretical and practical activities, knowing-that is the goal of theoretical activities, and it is not the goal of practical ones"! Knowing how, having behavioral cornpetence (knowing how to ride a horse, play croquet, read a book, for example), seems to be a species of nonpropositional knowledge, but not to encompass it. Other sorts of nonpropositional knowledge might be emotional understanding and the sort of nonpropositional knowledge involved in knowing another person - "knowing who".
As 1 note above, 1 am not claiming that the nonpropositional can stand in for propositional knowledge, nor do 1 think that it holds the same quality of achievement that knowledge is classically understood to impart. That is, knowledge is classically defined as justified mie belief, or mie belief supported by evidence. This means that a person cannot claim knowledge of something if that knowledge is a hunch, or lucky supposition. So imagine that we are having a conversation about coffee, and 1 Say, "The cup of coffee I'm drinking was organically grown in the rainforests of Central America". Traditionally, this would not be a knowledge claim unless it was both a mie belief, and 1 had some justification for making it; if I'd had a conversation with the person that bought and roasted the coffee, and seen pictures of the forest in which it was grown, perhaps. If 1 were drinking the coffee and believed it to have been grown in that situation, but had only made a lucky but unjustified guess about its past, my claim would likely not be considered knowledge. It seems to me that making claims of nonpropositional knowledge is less subject to tests of justifiability, and that nonpropositional knowledge itself is somewhat closer to hand. There is a significant crossover between nonpropositional knowledge and propositional knowledge, traditionally conceived and generally. Many propositional claims anse out of nonpropositional understandings, and are affected by them. In this sense, the nonpropositional seems to me to undetlie and shape propositional knowledge. 1 will discuss this notion further in both Chapters Two and Four. It is difficult to articulate the nonpropositional, or to look at it in a way that maintains it as nonpropositional; much of my discussion of it centers on examples fiom fiction, poetry, and persona1 narratives that 1 think express nonpropositional knowledge, or shifts in it.
Hetevodox Nonpropositional Understanding
Heterodox nonpropositional understanding is a complex of beliefs, feelings, inclinations, attitudes, and so on that challenge orthodox, generally oppressive noms. Such an understanding is heterodox in the sense that it manifests at least independently, and often in opposition to, standard and often harmful beliefs, feelings, attitudes, and so on. It is nonpropositional in that it does not have primarily to do with the sort of understanding one could easily express in words and sentences. 1 will argue that such understanding describes the underlying structure, or fiamework, of Our propositional knowledge, and that it is important to any change in propositional knowledge. It is understanding in that it is a complex of many ways of perceiving, reacting to, and thinking about the world. 1 take it that the concept of "understanding" has a strong relationship with the concept of
"knowledge" and 1 use the words "understanding" and "howledge" somewhat interchangeably. While this project is linked to an inquiry into the epistemic status of nonpropositional understanding, 1 am not strongly committed to the idea that nonpropositional understanding is knowledge. 1 argue that there is significant nonpropositional content to epistemic standards, and that to ignore the nonpropositional results in an inadequate epistemology. 1 now turn to an examination of nonpropositional understanding, beginning with Susan Babbitt's understanding of liberatory transformation. Chapter Two Persona1 transformation and nonpropositional understanding
Introduction
Making claims about beneficial transformations involves the danger of making claims about others' perception of their lives - both episternically and politically. Theonsts have attempted to work with this danger in a number of ways. Liberalism is a particulariy influential account of how to work with the tension of acknowledging individual agency while also making judgments of others' decisions. 1 begin this chapter with an examination of Susan Babbitt's articulation of persona1 transformation, which anses in response to the liberal account of undentanding another person's interests. I go on to discuss several accounts of nonpropositional knowledge, which 1 argue fil1 out some aspects of
Babbitt's thought on transformation. This chapter begins, then, where Babbitt begins - by articulating a mode1 of persona1 transformation in which the nonpropositional is very important. The main focus of the chapter, however, is on the nonpropositional, bringing into view its function as a network that underlies and can change propositional knowledge; it is the root of liberatory transformation, and is the source (following Ronald de Sousa) of paradigrn shifis in salience. 1 bracket the discussion of transformation in order to clearly lay out a refinement of nonpropositional understanding. In Chapter Three 1 discuss
11 transformation itself in more detail.
Susan Babbitt
The liberal view of objective interests and decision making.
The liberal view of better and worse states of being rests on the premise that there is a strong connection between the determination of objective interests and rational decision making. The liberal approach can be seen in John Rawls's work A Theory of Justice On Susan Babbitt's reading, Rawls' argument takes it that a person's rational choice is what she would choose to do under a number of conditions. In order to make a rational choice, in Rawls' sense, that person must first have the ability to think rationally, to reason. Second, she must possess comprehensive information about the choice she is making. Third, she must have the ability to "vividly imagine the consequences of her actions".' These three conditions are sufficient, on the liberal view, to make a rational choice about one's best interests. Two aspects of this view are important to Babbitt's account of rational deliberation, which amount to two unstated premises about the person making a decision. First, the complete information required for rational choice is taken to be propositional information - the sort of knowledge one could easily convey in speech. Second, the liberal view as expressed by Rawls takes it that the self a decision-maker projects into the future is a self unchanged fiom the present.
In other words, the self she vividly imagines as she makes a rational choice is fundamentally the same self as the one deliberating. Susan Babbitt discusses persona1 transformation and nonpropositional understanding in response to these two premises of conditions for rational choice, on the liberal view. First, Babbitt thinks that the liberal account is too limited in its understanding of what counts as knowledge, and that it does not allow for important sorts of nonpropositional knowledge. Second, she thinks that the liberal view is mistaken in holding that the self must be an unchanged self. She argues that in many cases persona1 transformation is a significant contributing factor to one's ability to determine one's objective interests. In this chapter, 1 address
Babbitt's comments on the first point, and enrich her account of nonpropositional knowledge through readings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ronald de Sousa, and Diana
Tietjens Meyers. In Chapter Three, I take up the argument that the self making a rational decision may be a transfomed self. Babbitt argues that the self possesses integrity and is unitary; 1 offer two altemate viewpoints, of the self as multiple.
Sandra Harding and Maria Lugones give convincing accounts of liberatory consciousness that rely on a nonunitary sense of self. They are more adequate to explain Lorde's and Allison's stories and creative expression than Babbitt's account.
As I note in Chapter One, 1 am not convinced that nonpropositional undentanding is knowledge in a strong sense, while Babbitt is in interested the project of articulating the nonpropositional as knowledge, in the sense that epistemologists use the term "knowledge". 1 think that giving an account of the nonpropositional is very important, however, to an adequate epistemology.
Babbin's project, and my own interests, lie not simply in supporting the claim that sometimes people do not know what is in their best interests, even given the liberal conditions of selfhood. Rather, she is engaged in illuminating how people - particularly deeply oppressed people - can know, given the naturalized and intemalized nature of oppression.
Persona2 Transformation
Babbitt argues that in many cases, people must undergo personal transformation in order to conceive of themselves as fùlly human. Babbitt uses the term "personal transformation" to mean a transfomative liberatory shift in consciousness. She thinks that the necessity of such shifts is particularly clear in cases of systemic oppression, where members of oppressed groups must think outside the (oppressive) interpretative fiamework provided for them. Babbitt argues that in order for members of deeply oppressed groups to gain access to their objective interests they must sometimes undergo liberatory persona1 transformation. Such a transformation would include the sort of change that a person who has been deeply discriminated against might have to undergo in order to think of herself as possessing inherent dignity.
In illustration of this point, Babbia discusses Thomas Hill's example of the
Deferential wife6. The Deferential Wife is a woman who defines herself in term of her subordination to her husband, and who regards deference and devotion to him as constitutive of her total happiness.' The Deferential Wife might possess al1 the characteristics of a rational decision maker; she could be a reasoning agent, have full and complete information about her situation, and be able to vividly imagine herself in the future. Nevertheless, decisions she makes based on a non- autonomous, servile self will be decisions that we generally reject as the rational choices of a person aiming for her best interests. For instance, imagine that the
Deferential Wife's Husband has suffered a downtum in fortunes, to the extent that he is no longer able to buy enough food to feed two people weli. Say that his incorne will feed both of them adequately, but in a style that will make the
Husband less than completely happy. It is imaginable that the Wife might evaluate al1 the information about their financial state, the cost of food, and decide to feed herself so little that she will become malnourished, so that her Husband will have food enough to be content. In order for her to make a decision conducive to her own happiness and survival, the Deferential Wife would have to change her self, such that she would evaluate her dietary needs as equally important as her
Husband's. Her untransforrned self is one defined by servility. In order for her to make an autonomous decision in her objective interest, the Wife would have to change her very self. Such a change is ruled out by the liberal requirements for the vividly imagining self to be the same at the time of rational choosing and in the
future imagined.
Bab bitt c laims that in certain cases, political and persona1 transformation experiences are the source of understanding what it would be to flourish. 1 read her as saying that members of marginalized groups are particular candidates for transformation experiences - that existing outside the noms of a dominant culture may actually require one to undergo conversion experiences, simply to make possible thinking of oneself as a self at all. 1 take it that communities cm not only exist outside the noms of dominant culture, but can support the development of robust senses of self in members of those communities; 1 discuss the relevance of community to liberatory transformation in the second section of this chapter, and in Chapter Three. Related to the daim that sometimes people must transform in order to think of themselves as possessing basic dignity is the idea that there are cases where action seems irrational from the point of view of dominant ideologies, but is rational from the stance of an individual acting as a hl1 human agent.
Babbitt's discussion of liberatory persona1 transformation focuses on Sethe, a character from Toni Morrison's novel, Beloved. Sethe takes the seemingly irrational action of attempting to kill her children to prevent them fiom being retumed to slavery. She succeeds in killing one of her daughters in an act that is, at first pass, quite irrational. Her act is irrational from two viewpoints, though
Babbitt discusses only one of these. The first is the viewpoint of schoolteacher,
Sethe's enslaver and the man fiom whom she and her children escaped. This is a view in which Sethe is a slave, and from it, her action is at least inconceivable and practically impossible. When schoolteacher sees Sethe, about to kill her second daughter, his imrnediate reaction is of dismissal and erasure: "Right off it was clear, to schoolteacher especially, that there was nothing there to c~airn".~.One of the men who came to get Sethe back says over and over "What she want to go and do that for?" To the white slave-owner's mind, the act of a slave killing her children is outside of logic; there is simply no way to conceptualize such an act.
Frorn the point of view of Paul D, one of the men Sethe was enslaved with,
Sethe's act is equally irrational, and, 1 argue, for similar reasons. To be a slave is, arnong other things, to refrain fiom "loving big". When Paul D hears Sethe's explanation of why she killed her baby, he knows what she means. She tells him about her discovery of agency, that she got herself and her children away fiom slavery and that the act of doing so allowed her to access a whole realm of experience she had not touched. One part of that realm was the fieedom to love her children without reserve not to "love small". Sethe says ". ..maybe I couldn't love em proper in Kentucky because they wasn't mine to love. But when I got here, when 1 jumped down off that wagon - there wasn't nobody in the world 1 couldn't love if I wanted to". Paul D understands what Sethe means, understands that to love that way meant fieedom. He can't accept it as reasonable, though, to take action based on loving big because he understands himself and Sethe, at this point, to be constrained by the strictures of slavery. When he perceives Sethe as not constrained by those rules - among them the protective undentanding to love small- he is shocked. Looking at her, he realizes: This here Sethe talked about love like any other woman; talked about baby clothes like any other woman, but what she meant could cleave the bone. This here Sethe talked about safety with a handsaw. This here new Sethe didn't know where the world stopped and she began. Suddenly he saw what Stamp Paid had wanted him to see: more important that what Sethe had done was what she claimed. It scared him. 'O
Both schoo1teacher and Paul D see Sethe's actions as illogical within the logic of slavery, where Sethe is bound by the constraints of that logic. II
The second point of view from which Sethe is irrational is fiom the viewpoint in which she is a full human. Here, my interpretation differs slightly
from Babbin's claims about Beloved; she argues that Sethe's action is rational
from the point of view in which she is a full human. 1 think that in a possible world in which Sethe had always been accorded and able to manifest full human dignity, always been able to choose what she loved and how much, there would be no construction of her action in which killing her daughter was logical. This viewpoint is, 1 think, that of most people before they read this book. Without an understanding of slavery, the conditions such that a person would kill her children rather than let them be re-enslaved are not accessible, or at least not readily accessible, to a post antebellum logic. 1 think that most readers of BeIoved have to become used to the particular space in which Sethe acts, because Momson brings
the reader to some understanding of the horror of slavery. Without the context of
the book, Sethe's act would remain illogical, irrational. Sethe's sense of self has
changed fùndamentally; she is no longer a person who cm love small, as a slave should, and she has never been a person who could love big in the uninterrogated way a woman who has never been enslaved might. Her sense of self has shifted so that it includes both an understanding of her self as a former slave and as an escaped slave, a free woman.
The third viewpoint, fiom which Sethe's action is rational, is a limenal logic. When Sethe takes the action of attempting to kill her children rather than allow them to return to slavery, she is neither a slave nor a full human. She exists between those States, or in some other state altogether, and it is her existence in the interstice of her world that allows her to act outside the logics of her world. She contains the knowledge both of enslavement and of fieedom, and it is through the connection of those experiences that her action makes sense. I will return to the importance of this sort of limenality in Chapter Three, in my discussion of Maria
Lugones.
Nonpropositional Knowledge
Babbitt raises the issue of nonpropositional understanding in response to the tint facet of the liberal view of rational decision-making, that the full and complete information required in the decision-making idealisation is the sort of information that could be spoken, expressed in words. The individual is assumed to make choices based on propositional information. This assumption excludes nonpropositional knowledge. In Babbitt's words: "The idealizations do not include complete access to a different kind of knowledge - knowledge people possess in the form of intuitions, attitudes, ways of behaving, orientation, and so on".'2
Babbitt takes nonpropositional knowledge to be an important kind of knowledge, and argues that it is the source of transformation experiences. As 1 note above,
Babbitt understands certain sorts of transformation experiences to be a key process
in fiill human flourishing. She argues that nonpropositional undentanding is crucial to developing the ability to think and act outside of oppressive or
inadequate noms. Despite the importance of the notion of such understanding to
Babbitt's account, there are three areas in which 1 think her account needs to be
further developed and clarified. First, Babbitt does not adequately distinguish
between nonpropositional knowledge and resistant knowledge. Second, Babbitt
does not sufficiently explicate nonpropositional understanding, and the
c haracteristics of such an understanding that would enable it to effect liberatory
transformation. Third, she is unclear on the role emotions play in nonpropositional
unders tanding.
In this section, I attempt to address these three unclarities in Babbitt's
account. First, 1 explore how Babbitt herself explains nonpropositional
understanding. Second, 1 look at Ludwig Wittgenstein's conception of the
underpinnings of propositional knowledge, and argue that it contributes to an
understanding of the role nonpropositional knowledge plays in changing
propositional knowledge. Third, 1 consider articulations of outlaw, or heterodox,
emotions, and argue that these articulations help us to get at the transfomative potential of a certain sort of nonpropositional understanding.
Babbitt uses the term "nonpropositional understanding" interchangeably with "implicit understanding" and bbnonpropositionalknowledge". She includes intuitions, beliefs, ways of behaving, orientation, and feelings. 1 will use both the terrn "nonpropositional understanding" and the tenn "nonpropositional knowledge" throughout my discussion of her work, as 1 think that the idea of
"implicit" understanding fails to encompass the complexity of understanding that cannot be easily articulated propositionally.
Babbitt begins her discussion of nonpropositional understanding with the claim, above, that the idealisations of the liberal view do not include it as an important part of rational decision making. Babbitt thinks that this sort of knowledge is important, in part, because it gives people the resources to understand ideological oppression, of which they rnay be a victim; 1 will discuss how such knowledge may do so below. Because such an understanding can amount to a change in people's interpretive position, it is doubly inadmissible as a candidate for the liberal view's use of knowledge. As I have discussed above, the
Rawlsian mode1 of vivid imagining requires that the decision maker retain her initial perspective through the decision making. If a particular self-understanding results in persona1 transformation, and that transformation involves a deep change in a person's self, or her interpretive frame, it is inadmissible to the (Rawlsian) rational decision making procedure. l3 In order to get at what these inadmissible sorts of knowing are, Babbitt looks at the relation between people and the society they live in, claiming that that relationship helps determine the sort of knowledge one can have. She says: "Being in a particular state and relationship to society constitutes a kind of undentanding that could not be acquired through an examination of the expressible truths of that society".'' For example, societies have routinely in the past, and do routinely in the present, considered some parts of society non-citizens; people who fit that category may have an understanding of their position that cannot be adequately stated propositionally. It is important to note, however, that not al1 nonpropositional understandings are resistant understandings. One can have a nonpropositional understanding of one's relation to society that is in accord with standard, oppressive noms. Babbitt does not address non-liberatory nonproposi tional understanding, focusing instead on resistant or antihegemonic understanding. It may be that she does this because resistant understanding is the only sort that interests her, the only sort that is relevant to the project of looking at
1iberatory transformation.
1 think it is important to articulate, or at least acknowledge, that people have al1 sorts of harmful nonpropositional undentandings of their world and their place in it. For example, in her article "Shame and en der,"" Sandra Bartky talks about shame-evincing behavior of many women in classrooms. Their nonpropositional understanding of their position in the classroom affects their posture, their tone of voice, and their confidence in speaking in such a way that
they communicate a sense of unworth. Most women would not Say ''1 feel that I'm
not as smart as the boys in this class, that my work isn't as good, and that 1 don?
really deserve to be here, let alone speak," but they might feel that way. That
feeling, or that sense, is comrnunicated, however, if a woman begins each sentence
by saying "This is probably a stupid question, but.. .," or if she apologizes for the
quality of a paper she's just written as she gives it to her teacher. Bartky thinks
that what needs to be examined about the way that women's emotions differ €tom
men's is "not only their relationship to typical gendered traits or dispositions but,
following Heidegger, the way in which such attunements are disclosive of their
subjects' 'Being-in-the-world,' i.e., of their character as selves and of the specific
ways in which, as selves, they are inscribed within the social totality"16. The
shame she is discussing is somewhat amorphous but profoundly implicated in the
"self and situation" of women and their emotions. An example of this implication,
and of the way certain emotional responses demonstrate some of what de Sousa
calls salience, is the experience of women in the classroom, and their
corresponding manifestation, or way of being, in that environment. Bartky daims
that the classroom cm be taken as a good example of the systematic, and
somewhat non-propositional way women lem what to feel and how to act, based
on that feeling. She says that because
the sexist messages of the classroom are transmitted in a disguised fashion or else both sent and received below the level of explicit awareness, what gets communicated to women does not take the form of propositional meaning and what they take away fiom the situation is not so much a belief as afeeling of inferiotity or a sense of inadequacy.17
The oppression expressed in the self-diminishing behavior of women in the
classroom is not simple. It is a somewhat mystified oppression, that purports to be
one thing, and partially is that thing, and actually also is something else. That is,
the classroorn purports to be a fieely communicative environment, in which al1
çtudents have an equal chance to succeed and express their intelligence, and on
some level the classroom is al1 that. This framing of the classroorn is often
expressed propositionally, at least to teachers. Another hming of what goes on in
the classroom is an implicit understanding of it as a competitive environment, in
which some people are winners and othen losers. This fkaming is expressed in part
when certain members of a class are not accorded the respect and attention given
to their classrnates, and in part through more forma1 structures of class structuring
and grading. The explicit understanding of the classroom as a place where
everyone can do as well as anyone else is in conflict with the implicit
understanding that some people are simply not capable of thinking as well as, or
achieving as much as, others. Women in classrooms, then, correctly perceive two
conflicting messages: that they are as smart as the boys, and that they are much
stupider than they are. These understandings, self valuing and self denigrating, are
competitive, and give rise to the conflicted expressions of shame Bartky lays out.
I think that Bartky's understanding of shame as a systemic reinforcement of particular, gendered roles is a useful one, particularly as it clarifies the importance of conceiving of negative nonpropositional understandings as having a relationship to oppression, and not simply as an appropriate response to individual failure or wrongdoing. An analysis of how nonpropositional understandings contribute to the maintenance of oppression is as important as an analysis of how resistant understandings undermine oppression. This is particularly the case if it is precisely that understanding that must change in order for people to begin
1iberatory persona1 transformations.
Susan Babbitt uses the fictional example of Celie, a character fiom Alice
Walker's book The Colour PU*'' in her discussion of the liberatory potential of nonpropositional knowledge. Celie is a black wornan raised in rural Georgia. The novel tells the story of her youth, her mamage, and her life after she leaves the county of her birth to create a new life and in many ways a new self. Celie's life is marked by hardship, and by a persona1 transformation that is illustrative of many of Babbitt's claims about the role of nonpropositional knowledge in persona1 transformation. Over the course of the book, Celie changes her understanding of herself; at the beginning of the story, she perceives herself as worthless, and expresses that perception in a number of ways. The tuming point in the book cornes when Celie begins to conceive of herself as having basic human dignity, and acts from that standpoint.
On Babbitt's view, Celie manifests a self that calls into question much of the propositional framework of her society. Within that framework, Celie cannot be both a person and a black woman - the categories are mutually exclusive. To the extent that she understands and expresses herself as a person, she is anornalous, and contradicts part of the framework that cannot conceive of her as a person. Babbitt argues that because Celie's understanding of herself and her situation has changed, she is able to understand and express herself as a person; when she acts as a person, she acts out of a conceptual framework that can explain that action. Such a conceptual framework is necessarily more complex than her previous, inadequate fiamework. It includes, for Celie, her former understanding and her changed understanding. The change in her nonpropositional fiamework is the sort of change that allows her to proceed as a person with basic human dignity.
1 want to illustrate these claims with material fiom the book. At the beginning of the story, Celie leaves that house she grew up in for mamage to
Mister, a man with three children fiom a previous mamage. Shortly after she moves, her sister Nettie is forced to leave her, and much of the book involves the sisters' loss of one another, and their eventual reunion. The eldest of her stepchildren, Harpo, marries a woman named Sofia. Sofia is portrayed as having a sense of her own worth, which she expresses in part through her bearing, how she talks to Mister, and through visiting her sisten. Harpo cornes to his father and asks him how to make Sofia "mind," saying that she is too independent, and that he'd like her to be more like Celie. Mister recommends that Harpo beat Sofia. Celie, listening, thinks about Sofia, agrees with Mister, and says, "beat her". When Sofia confionts Celie, later, and asks why she told Harpo to beat her, Celie says "'1 Say it cause I'm a fool, I Say. 1 Say it cause I'm jealous of you. 1 Say it cause you do what 1 can't.' 'What's that?' [Sofia] Say. 'Fight' 1 say".I9 Celie's position here, her understanding of herself, is one in which she can recognize and admire Sofia's strength but is unable to imagine exercising that strength herself. Much of the reader's understanding of Celie in this part of the story is given through what other people in the book Say about her; their cornments, and her recounting of them, portray her as passive, inactive, and someone aiming for bare survival.
Celie's persona1 transformation begins with encountenng Shug, a blues singer Mister loves, who cornes to their house when she is ill. Shug is instrumental in the development of Celie's personhood in a number of ways. First, Celie fails in love with her, which marks the fint time, after Nettie's departure, that Celie extends herself toward another person. Second, Shug values Celie in a way not even Nettie did; she is able to affirm her penonhood in concrete ways. This affirmation is manifest through Shug bnnging Celie letten fiom Nettie, which
Mister had hid fiom her, and through Shug taking Celie away from Mister and encouraging her to pursue her own livelihood. Reading Nettie's letters changes
Celie. She says, "Now I know Nettie alive 1 begin to stmt a little bit. Think, When she corne home us leave hereY20 Having access to Nettie through her letters gives
Celie access to a sense of self she had not touched before. It is Nettie's Ietters, and Shug, that enable Celie to leave Mister. As Celie leaves, Mister scoffs at her, saying "Who you think you is?. ..Look at you. You pore, you black, you ugly, you a woman. Goddam, he Say, you nothing at all". Celie responds, as they drive away: "I'm pore, I'm black, 1 may be ugly and can't cook, a voice Say to everything listening. But I'm here". 21 This assertion is a signal of Celie's transformation, which continues through the rest of the book.
On a persona1 level, this transformation in her knowledge of herself enables
Celie to change her life. Celie knows her personhood. Babbitt argues that because she is acting as a person, although the conceptual fiamework around her denies her personhood, she has access to interstices in the structure of power around her, gaps through which she changes her life. Until Mister was forced by Celie's depamire to see her as an agent, he was in a position of power that enabled hirn to ignore the potential of her personhood. His position allowed him to not simply ignore, but to have no knowledge of Celie. Her activities had aiways been such that they facilitated his cornfort, in many ways; fiom the day Celie amves in Mister's house, she cares for his children, cooks, cleans, and so on. Her activities allow
Mister to proceed without consideration for the lacks in Celie's life. The space between Mister's perception of Celie's potential and Celie's actual potential is one gap that is made visible to him when she leaves him. Such gaps are what Babbitt calls "inadequacies in the dominant conceptual framework - ones that could not be identified, zisrially because they do not have to be identzped to proceed. by someone in a position of relative power".u The lack of epistemic resources and practical hardship of Celie's life was not visible to Mister - did not need to be visible to him - until Celie made that gap present to him through assuming agency.
For Celie, proceeding as a full person "both presupposes and requires the development of explanatory resources that constitute or can constitute a more appropriate evaluative (theoretical) perspective".23In order for Celie to act in a way that challenges Mister's conception of her, her undentanding of herself, in relation to him and as separate from him, had to shift. This shifl means that she has explanatory resources that he lacks; simply, she knows things that change her activity. Those things are not accessible to him, and in some way cannot be. This project, then, is centrally an epistemic one; Celie knows certain things, has an understanding, that allows her to struggle to be a full human being.
Celie's nonpropositional understanding, then, is the basis of her ability to make judgements and take actions outside of the fiamework of the propositional knowledge available to her. Babbitt thinks that Celie's nonpropositionai understanding anses from her relationship with others, her position in the world.
Her self change is sparked by her relation to others. This relation, and the change in it, is not something Celie fully articulates. Even her assertion that "I'm here" is a proposition that points toward a changed nonpropositional understanding both of herself and of the people around her, but does not hlly express that "here-ness". In Babbitt's words "Celie's existing in a certain relation to society constitutes a kind of understanding of that society that cannot be expressed entirely in propositions".24 It is the basis of her ability to struggle. Her struggle makes her become a full person - her nonpropositional knowledge becomes, or in fact already is, a transformation experience.
But a question anses at this point, one that I am not sure Babbitt addresses.
1s there a difference between Celie's knowledge as nonpropositional and her knowledge as a challenge to the dominant conceptual fiarnework? Babbitt sornetimes seerns to conflate these two qualities. For example, Babbitt says:
[t]o the extent that Celie's personal struggle explains her coming to know certain things and that struggle itself is explained by feelings and intuitions she acquires as a result of her situation, Celie's feelings and intuitions are epistemically significant. Indeed, in this kind of case, namely, one in which her intuitions provide perhaps the only possible access to knowledge, Celie's intuitions would appear to constitute und ers tan dit^^"^^
The conflation lies in the important claim that Celie's knowledge of her position in society has epistemic significance. On Babbitt's view, the inexpressibility of
Celie's understanding is not the kind of nonpropositional knowledge al1 of us participate in - Babbitt gives examples like "knowing what it is like to hear a trumpet" - rather, "what she understands but does not completely express provides, or potentially provides, the interpretative standards that could make an alternative expressive version of her experience possible".26 Celie's nonpropositional knowledge is epistemically significant not simply because it is nonpropositional, but because it challenges dominant interpretative standards.
Those interpretative standards govem both ways of knowing and what can be known; to the extent that Celie's knowledge shows that framework to be inadequate, her knowledge is epistemically significant. For it to be nonpropositional knowledge, and epistemically significant, however, does not automatically imply that Celie's knowledge is liberatory. Recall Bartky's example of the epistemic relevance and inexpressibility of shame; similarly, 1 would argue that Celie's perception of what Harpo should do io make Sophia mind ("Beat her,
Isay") is epistemically significant, but is in line with oppressive noms of rnamage, and appropriate activities within rnamage. I would like to bring out what
1 think is Babbitt's implicit daim about nonpropositional knowledge, in an attempt to articulate the importance of the nonpropositional more explicitly than she does.
I do this through a consideration of Ludwig Wittgenstein's comments on certainty.
When hinge propositions shift
One interesting notion about nonpropositional understanding is the idea that it underlies and infoms our unspoken ways of thinking and being. Ludwig
Wittgenstein is a philosopher who has talked extensively about propositional understanding, and about the way that systems of propositional knowledge form our apprehension of the world. In his book On Wittgenstein is interested in the question of how we are certain of a variety of seemingly certain propositions. He looks at the structures of propositional knowledge, and implies that those structures are nonpropositional underpinnings. Further, Wittgenstein argues that the srnicturing of our propositions is the source of Our certainty. 1 think that his articulation of that srnichiring is similar to Babbitt's understanding of implicit knowledge. I will examine some of Wittgenstein's comments on belief and experience, and their role in determining our certainty of some propositions.
1 am pnmady interested in what Wittgenstein calls "hinge propositions;" the concept of Ianguage games is also relevant to rny understanding of nonpropositional knowledge. On Wittgenstein's usage, hinge propositions are those which must stand fast for us in order for other propositions to make sense.
They are "exempt from doubt, are as it were like hinges on which [doubts and questions] turn".2s They are assumed, constitute a stable background that we do not question, and make up a substratum of meaning. Hinge propositions provide the space in which testing of truth and falsity happens, and without which such interrogation could not It is important that hinge propositions be relatively fixed, for ". ..we just can't investigate everything, and for that reason are forced to rest content with assumption. If 1 want the door to tum, the hinges must stay put".30 AIso in Wittgenstein's words:
Much seems to be fixed, and it is removed fiom the traffic. It is so to speak shunted ont0 an unused siding. Now it gives our way of looking at things, our researches, their form. Perhaps it was once disputed. But perhaps, for unthinkable ages, it has belonged to the scaffolding of our thoughts. (Every human being has parents.)3'
Hinge propositions cease to stand fast, to be uncontrovertible, at the point at which we cm question them - the point at which we bring them back into play.321 am not suggesting here that hinge propositions are analogous to implicit knowledge, in Babbitt's sense. Rather, I think that implicit knowledge can cause hinge propositions to shifi, and that Wittgenstein points toward this possibility.
Language games are activities in which systems of propositions play a part.
They exist insofar as they are acted "[o]ur talk gets its meaning fiom the rest of our proceedings,"3" and we learn to play the game well by playing it.
Wittgenstein daims that:
A totnlity of judgements is made plausible to us. When we fint begin to believe anything, what we believe is not a single proposition, it is a whole system of propositions. (Light dawns gradually over the whole). It is not single axioms that smke me as so obvious, it is a system in which consequences and premises give one another mutual support.3s
The network of propositions is given to us not as discrete pieces of a whole, but as a web containing those pieces. Language games are the context in which certainty aises. Hinge propositions are central to the rules connecting propositions, and other sorts of propositions are made to stand fim within the game, as rules by which it is played. As we move further fiom hinge propositions, we discover that expressions or assertions on the outskirts of the web are more easily questioned than those at the centre.
Hinge propositions can take many fons. Wittgenstein thinks of them as those propositions that we cannot doubt, because to doubt them takes us out of the bounds of the language game we are a part of. Some of the examples he gives are of the statement "1 am certain that this is my hand," or "That is a tree" - statements that may be acceptable in particular circumstances, but generally are so assumed that it does not make sense to assert them. Another example he gives is of the daim that he has not been to the moon, nor has anyone else been. At the time
Wittgenstein wrote this book, no one had yet landed on the moon. He died before the possibility of a human walking on the moon was close to reality, and it made sense to him to present it as a hinge proposition, one which held fast, and around which other claims could turn. Before people began travelling in space, if you and
1 were having a debate about the possibility of moving to another planet, it would make sense for me to Say: "We'll never move to another planet! It's impossible!"
Now, it might make more sense; you could Say: "Why is it so impossible? Humans have been to the moon, after all". Three things have changed between the time that
On Certaine was written and today: Many space flights have happened, and most people believe that they have happened. Some people have experienced them. The background to propositions about the moon has changed, and that changes the truth of statements about it. This background is similar to the nonpropositional knowledge Babbitt discusses.
Like Babbitt, Wittgenstein does not speak of emotion, but rather of belief and experience. He takes belief and experience to be quite important to propositional knowledge, both in the way propositional knowledge is acquired and in the way it is used. He says: The child learns to believe a host of things. Le., it learns to act according to these beliefs. Bit by bit there foms a system of what is believed, and in that system some things stand unshakably fast and some are more or less liable to shift. What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast what lies around it. One wants to Say "Al1 my experiences shew that it is so". But how do they do that? For the proposition to which they point itself belongs to a particular interpretation of them. "That 1 regard this proposition as certainly true also characterizes my interpretation of e~~erience~"~
We learn the language game we use through our experiences, which teach us what to believe, what to rely on, and what is unquestionable. A system of beliefs is based on nonpropositional experiences, which constitute an interpretation of propositions. It is leamed experientially, as are hinge propositions. Wittgenstein says: "1 do not explicitly leam the propositions that stand fast for me. I can discover them subsequently like the axis around which a body rotates. This axis is not fixed in the sense that anything holds it fast, but the movement around it de termines its irnm~bility".~'If the movement around a hinge proposition changes, that proposition can change as well. As in the example of flight to the moon, changing either the empirical reality of a hinge proposition or the beliefs about flight to the moon can make that hinge proposition fluid, and othen hold firm. It seems clear that this does happen, and in fact that this sort of making fluid what was ngid is what Celie does in her "But I'm here" response to Mister. By asserting her place as a black woman in the realm of "personhood," changing the movement around the proposition, she changes what may have been close to a hinge proposition for him. It is important that propositions are part of a larger language garne. Hinge propositions exist systemically; they have their nature only insofar as other propositions revolve around them. Again in Wittgenstein's words: "Experience can be said to teach us these [(hinge)] propositions. However, it does not teach them in isolation: rather, it teaches us a host of interdependent propositions. If they were isolated 1 might perhaps doubt them, for 1 have no experience relating to them".38 Experience changed Celie's beliefs about henelf, and her ability to assert propositional knowledge. In other words, her nonpropositional understanding enabled her to vocalize a systemic change in her language game. When Mister tells Celie that she is nothing, he is resting that daim on a fairly solid understanding of what counts as "something," or personhood. That understanding, around which much else tums, does not include Celie. When she responds to him by saying "I'm pore, I'rn black, 1 may be ugly and can't cook.. .But I'm here" she is vocalising, propositionally, a shift in a very fundamental perception of herself and her world. That is, it is clear throughout Walker's novel that Celie began her l i fe wi th a substantial understanding of herself that did not include personhood.
The proposition that black women were not penons held just as fast for Celie as it does for Mister. Her nonpropositional understanding of henelf changed when
Shug came to stay with Celie and Mister. Shug provides Celie with alternative understandings of herself, significantly by the way she interacts with her. Celie's shift in her underlying beliefs about her world gives rise to a propositional shift, one that allows communication and broader social movement. Nonpropositional understanding and the individual 3 eflect on the
Based on an understanding of nonpropositional understanding in which it gives sense to the propositional knowledge of how to be and think, one way to change the way a person thinks and acts in the world might be to change their
nonpropositional understanding. More specifically, one way to change a penon's
way of being would be to shifl their hinge propositions, in Wittgenstein's sense.
This sort of change - change in othen' hinge nonpropositional understanding - is just as important as change in one's own nonpropositional understanding. 1 think
Babbitt implies the importance of societal transformation, and not simply persona1
transformation, through her use of exarnples in which people interact with others.
Babbitt takes the role of community to be important to the development of an
individual's nonpropositional knowledge. Though she does not Say so, 1 think it
can be argued that she takes the individual to be equally important to the
community's nonpropositional understanding. For the first point, 1 will look at her
treatment of another Alice Walker story, ~eiPn)~.For the second, 1 wiil retum
to The Color Pur&.
In Meridian, the main character undergoes a conversion experience rooted
in her interaction within a community. Babbitt says: "[Meridian's] actual
situatedness within a network of political, and emotional relationships itself
provides her with epistemic standards, making interpretations possible that were not so previously .. . she has acquired relations, attitudes, and ways of behaving that constitute a more adequate interpretative frame~ork"?~Meridian's social relations and the commitments that aise out of them give her a nonpropositional, emotional undentanding of her situation. Her persona1 expet-ience of the moral cornmunity she enters does not simply reveal ways of being and knowing that
Meridian always and already had. Rather, the connections she forms bring about changed nonpropositional knowledge and epistemic transformation; without those connections and interactions, she would not have generated more adequate interpretative fiameworks. Relationships with others, then, are vital to Babbitt's account of making possible seeming impossibilities.
In The Color Pu&, the importance of relationships to the change of consciousness is demonstrated in reverse. For Celie to proceed as a person is for her to change the dominant interpretative structure of her world. And that interpretative structure inheres in others more than it inheres in Celie. When Celie says ". . .But I'm here" she asserts more than her personal understanding of herself as human. She forces Mister to participate in her here-ness, in her changed understanding of herself. That understanding is transmitted not simply by what a person says, but also by the way she holds herself, her tone of voice, and her actions. The epistemic significance of Celie's changed nonpropositional understanding is that Mister has to acknowledge Celie's self hood, first when she leaves his house, and second when they meet again much later in life. In a similar way, successful flight to the moon changed the interpretative fiamework of a society that could not conceive of spaceflight. It made the impossibility of spaceflight no longer stand, as it did for Wittgenstein, as a hinge proposition.
Spaceflight activities created the conceptual and then the actual possibility for al1 building a rocket, and that creation happened significantly societally. Such shifis in the axis of belief take place through both shih in reality and shifts in cultural and societal nonpropositional understanding.
Salience, heterodoxy, and emotions.
Throughout this discussion, 1 have followed the by now standard practice of talking about things like beliefs and experiences as though they were the only interesting sort of nonpropositional understanding available to us. 1 think there is a general cultural bias to count emotion as the primary nonpropositional understanding we have of the world, though there is clearly a philosophical bias to not count ernotions as interesting at all. In this section, 1 bring in some discussion of the ernotions. I begin with a look at Ronald de Sousa's argument that emotions determine our reasoned activity through detemining what is salient to us. 1 will look at Diana Tietjens Meyers' argument for the eficacy of heterodox emotions in the discovery of previously unseen wrongs; 1 take her argument to be an example of the sort of shifts in salience for which de Sousa argues. These two theorists have usehl contributions to make to broadening both to Babbitt's understanding of changes of consciousness, and Wittgenstein's articulation of shifts in the grounds of certainty. Having considered aspects of their arguments for changing the normative fiame of emotions, 1 consider the question of whether these sorts of emotions are a type of nonpropositional understanding, or whether they underlie and inform implicit knowledge in the same way 1 have argued implicit knowledge underlies and infonns propositional knowledge.
Ronald de Sousa presents a helphl argument for the role of emotions in determining the salience of some aspects of our experience over others. He sees the emotions as necessary to our ability to structure the world, and to determine rational action within the world. 1 am interested in two aspects of de Sousa's daims about salience and the emotions. First, the view of emotions as patterns of attention, that "shifts in emotion are primarily shifts of salience'"'. Second, the idea that our emotional repertoire is fomied through somewhat malleable paradigm scenarios.
The first claim can also be stated as: "Emotions are species of determinate patterns of salience among objects of attention, lines of inquiry, and inferential
~trate~ies"''~.Emotions, on this view, structure Our perception of and response to the world. They function as both a filter and to shift our attention, weeding out what we do not care to pay attention to and actively tuming our interest to things that we do care for. De Sousa uses two examples in illustration of this point:
Iago's manipulation of Othello's emotional perception, through which he becomes jealous of Cassio's attentions to his wife, and Ivan Ilyich's perception of his own
death, the alteration of which causes every experience in his life to be interpreted
in terms of his death. "Once attention is thus directed, inferences which on the
same evidence would before not even have been thought of are experienced as
~orn~ellin~"~~Emotions cause a change in what one pays attention to, and how
those things are perceived. For Sethe, in Momson's Beloved, experiencing
selfishness in the way she did afier escaping slavery, making a dress for her
daughter held different meaning than it did while she was enslaved; her feeling of
freedom changes the import of that activity.
The second claim, that emotions are formed through paradigm scenanos,
capable of change, is relevant to the sort of shift in nonpropositional understanding
1 have been interested in throughout this chapter. De Sousa claims that when a
"paradigm scenario suggests itself as an interpretation of a current situation, it
arranges or rearranges our perceptual, cognitive, and inferential dispositions in
terms of some real configuration of human experience"? Paradigm scenarios, on
de Sousa's view, are drawn fiom Our daily life, particularly our childhood
experience, and refined by the culture we engage. They provide us with
characteristic objects of emotions, and generally accepted ("normal") responses to
the situations of paradigm scenarios. De Sousa acknowledges that this mode1 of
emotional formation can be read as an overly restricted one, and provides this
account of changing paradigms: "A paradigm can always be challenged in the light of a wider range of considerations than are available when the case is viewed in isolation. It can be revised in the light of competing paradigms that are also applicable to the situation at han&"'. Such challenging of paradigms is, 1 think, is something like what shifis hinge propositions and nonpropositional undentanding generaily. 1 turn to Diana Tietjens Meyers' account of heterodox moral perception for an example of shifts in both emotional salience and paradigms that amount to a shift in nonpropositional knowledge.
Heterodox mord perception
Diana Tietjens Meyers says that she wants to understand "how people discover heretofore unacknowledged kinds of ~ron~s''~~and advocates heterodox moral perception as an avenue for such discoveries. Heterodox moral perception is that through which
one sees social life in ways that challenge established cultural values and noms; one sees suffenng or hann that others do not notice, beauty or wisdom that others regard as ugliness or folly, live options where others feel constraint, and so forth.. .heterodox moral perception is indispensable to social and political reform. Unless some people discem injustice and oppression that others deny, there will be no impetus for change.'"
Meyers thinks that important sorts of orthodox moral perception are structured in ways that carry political implications; she points to cases in which moral perceptions of an individual are guided by the histoncal subjugahon of a group of people to which that individual belongs. Meyers says that in such cases "the prejudicial structure of moral perception militates in favor of moral judgements and actions that are unfair to those individuals and that are inimical to social justice. My question is how moral perception can be configured to expose these
~ron~s"."~This reconfiguration of moral perception can be seen as a process of making fluid certain propositions that stood firm for the moral perceiver. One such might be the proposition that a black woman is not a person.
Meyers argues that a number of emotional attitudes that are "normally considered to be epistemic vices can be feminist epistemic virtues" but thinks that to see these as virtues necessitates taking on a view of moral identity as societally influenced product. She examines the formation of moral paradigms, and argues that the unstated cultural value of membership in a particular social group provides individuals within that culture with a prejudicial moral repertory. That repertory reproduces the moral agency of a dominant social group over a subjugated group, and thereby subliminally subverts responsible moral perception. Racism is an example of a culturally reproduced stereotype, one that informs moral perception of individuals. In Meyers' words:
When a xenophobic or rnisogynist schema is structuring perception but is not consciously avowed (or is consciously repudiated), it subverts moral judgement. If one does not see women as full-fledged persons, or if one cannot see a wornan's anger as warranted, one is not likely to enact one's cornmitment to gender equaliSf9
It is accordingly important to have an account of moral perception that addresses the deep-seated nature of moral repertories, and the difficulty of changing people's way of seeing the world through rational argument.'' Meyers thinks that a first step toward such an account arises out of an emphasis on diversity, and the creation of moral economies that acknowledge heterodox emotions. The diversity she is interested in is both social and intemal. The emotions that she picks out as potentiall y useful are hypersensitivity, paranoia, anger, and bittemess - panicularly when those emotions are justified, but socially disallowed. Their usefùlness lies in a politicization of moral perception, one which takes into nccount the points at which it is accurate to be angry although the social context does not understand anger as a rational response to a situation. Heterodox emotions, and a community that can accommodate their expression, are useful resources for the creation of responsible political action.
An example of a heterodox emotion might also be the feeling Sethe (in
Toni Momson's Beloved) has toward her children when she arrives at her mother in law's house after she has escaped fiom Sweet Home. Being fiee, she is able to
"love big"; that very loving is heterodox. When she is talking about loving big to
Paul D, he understands, and expresses the sense in which it is heterodox. He describes "Listening to the doves in Alfred, Georgia, and having neither the right nor the permission to enjoy it because in that place mist, doves, sunlight, copper, dirt, moon - everything belonged to the men who had the guns. .. . So you protected younelf and loved small. Picked the tiniest stars out of the sky to own; lay down with head twisted in order to see the loved one over the rim of the trench before you slept9'". In conditions of slavery, a slave's very feeling of loving big runs counter to orthodox moral repertory. It is disallowed, impossible. Loving big cha1 lenges foundational noms of the possibilities of a slave's perception.
Heterodox moral perception is one way to think about shifis in the pattern of how we decide-in de Sousa's words-"what to investigate, and what inductive niles to adopt. No logic determines salience: what to attend to, what to inquire about"". Likewise, no logic determines heterodox emotions - they are hndamentally illogical, in that they are reactions outside of the understood parameters of ernotional reaction. They are heterodox precisely because they are deteminations of salience where other people don? see salience. For example, a heterodox response to a racist joke might be anger - the person who experiences that emotion is paying attention, attending to the salience, of a different aspect of the joke than the person telling it likely is. In one case, attention is to the racist content. In the other, the attention is presumably to the idea of the joke as funny.
Reattaching salience through heterodox ernotional perception can lead to action that disrupts the power that produces, for example, gendered shame.
Conclusion
1 have articulated an understanding of nonpropositional knowledge that 1 think is in line with Susan Babbitt's use of the notion, but that deepens her account. 1take it that nonpropositional understanding in some way anses out of heterodox emotions, and that it is significantly infomed by the emotions. 1 find that the notion of nonpropositional understanding, in Babbitt's sense, resonates well with Wittgenstein's account of the source of propositional certainty, particularly his comments on the role of experience and belief in the shifting and making fluid of hinge propositions. It has also been fiuitfùl to draw on de Sousa's and Meyers' accounts of the way emotions affect rationality and perception.
Nonpropositional understanding, as I have presented it here, is a complex of beliefs, emotions, presuppositions, and many other unstated ways of relating and responding to the world. It underlies and structures propositional knowledge, and in a significant way detemines it. Such understanding is important to any change in propositional knowledge, and to transformations of consciousness. I retum now to the central concem of this thesis, the transformation of consciousness, with an examination of Sandra Harding and Maria Lugones. Chapter Three Personal Transformation and Iderttity
Introduction
In Chapter Two, 1 examined Susan Babbitt's response to the first of two aspects of the liberal view of conditions for rational deliberation. Recall that these conditions were that a person must be rational, have full information about the choice she is making, and be able to vividly imagine the consequences of her choice. Babbitt argues that this account of rational deliberation has two underlying premises: that the complete information required for deliberation is propositional information, and that the self a decision maker imagines in the future is an untransformed self. I have now examined Babbitt's argument about the first point
- that the nonpropositional is important to accounts of rationality - and found that it is generally both useful and sound. In order to give a fûller account of the nonpropositional, 1 discussed and addressed three areas of her argument. First, 1 discussed the difference between nonpropositional understanding simpliciter and resistant nonpropositional understanding. Second, 1 gave a fbller explication of various sorts of nonpropositional knowledge, focusing on Ludwig Wittgenstein and Sandra Bartky. Third, 1 discussed the role of the emotions in nonpropositional understanding, by looking at Ronald de Sousa and Diana Tietjens Meyers.
In this chapter, 1 examine the second underlying premise of the iiberal view
- that the self remains unchanged through the process of making rational decisions. Though this discussion of the self is rooted in the fairly narrow scope of the liberal assessrnent of conditions of rational deliberation, I expand this inquiry to examine models of selfhood, of the type of consciousness which leads to liberatory knowledge. 1 argue, with Babbitt, that people ofien must undergo liberatory transformation in order to manifest full human dignity. 1 differ from her view in my undentanding of whether the self that undergoes transfomation is a unitary or a multiple self.
The project of endorsing persona1 transformation presupposes an understanding of what sort of state it is desirable to transform to. In thinking about themselves and other people, many theorists want to be able to make claims about the usefulness, helphlness, and adequacy of ways of thinking and leading lives.
These claims are grounded in some conception of liberatory consciousness- sometirnes articulated as feminist consciousness, lesbian consciousness, or race consciousness. In this chapter, 1 explore two articulations of a sort of consciousness that gives rise to liberatory knowledge. 1 examine Sandra Harding's and Maria Lugones' views on the source of liberatory consciousness and shifis of identity, and link their theories with Babbitt's understanding of persona1 transformation. In t his chapter, then, I retum to personal transformation, offeting accounts of transformation based on multiplicity of identity. Because identity has a strong epistemic dimension, the discussion of knowledge in the last chapter and of the self in this chapter together offer an articulation of the self as an epistemic project.
The Self as Multiple and the Self as Unitary
This articulation is very much in line with Babbitt's view - she sees the self
as unitary and as an epistemic project. In this chapter 1 do not question Babbia's
understanding of the self as an epistemic project, but do question the idea that the
self is unitary, through looking at two accounts of the self as multiple. This is in
contrat to Babbitt's understanding of the self; she argues for a self in which the
adequacy of persona1 identity is measured in tems of the persona1 integrity
available to a person.') As I discuss below, 1 think an epistemically-rooted
articulation of the self allows the inclusion of the knowledge people have access to
in various aspects of their experience - knowledge that in one part of their life
may be unproblematic, but in another might present problems. It points toward the
possibility, or the importance of, conceiving of the self as multiple. Both Harding
and Lugones focus on what it is to know oneself in multiple life worlds, and what
implications such knowing has on selves. Though neither Harding nor Lugones
uses the language of personal transformation to the extent that Babbitt does, they
offer accounts of oppression, conditions for liberation, and the process of
achieving such conditions.
1 am interested in Harding and Lugones in particular because they integrate
an understanding of the self as multiple with an articulation of the process of
having liberatory knowledge and taking liberatory action. 1 want to start this discussion by touching on Maria Lugones' expression of "world" travelling and its relation to the self as many. In her article "Playfulness, 'WorldY-Travelling,and
Loving ~erce~tion"~',Lugones describes her experience as someone who is
Forced, as a penon outside the mainstream, to travel between many different frames of reference, many different "worlds". She discusses particularly her experience of herself as both having and not having the attribute of playfulness; in some parts of her life, both she and people around her identified her as playfûl. In othen, she and others identified her as not playful - as very serious. These self- charactenstics are not just happenstance; they are linked to broader perceptions about things like race and ciass, perceptions that shape what is possible for a self in V~~OUScircumstances. She says "Those of us who are 'wor1d'-travelers have the distinct experience of being different in different 'worlds' and of having the capacity of remember other 'worlds' and ounelves in them"? The differenmess
Lugones is talking about here is not like changing clothes; it is, rather, a shift fiom being one person to being a different person. It is not a matter of acting like someone else, pretending to be another penon; in one "world", one is a different person than in another "world". This different person-ness is a multiplicity of self.
In Lugones' words:
One does not pose as someone else, one does not pretend to be, for example, someone of a different personality or character or someone who uses space or language differently than the other person. Rather one is someone who has that personality or character or uses space and language in that particular way. The 'one' here does not refer to some underlying '1'. One does not experience any underlying c 1Y .56 The absence of any underlying "1" is also an absence of a unitary self; it implies at least doubleness of self, plurality.
In situations of oppression, 1 think a mode1 of the self as multiple is valuable; 1 have been convinced of this largely because of my reading of
Momson's Beloved. As 1 note above, my reading of Sethe's actions differs fiom
Babbitt's - where Babbitt argues that Sethe's action in response to impending re- enslavement is understandable fiom a point of view on which Sethe is a full human being, 1 argue that her action is understandable only because her self is a product of fundamental limenality. This difference has implications not only for an understanding of nonpropositional knowledge, but, more deeply, for a theory of selfhood. 1 would like to interrogate Babbitt's articulation of what counts as an adequate sense of self, then discuss Harding's and Lugones' theories as examples of usefùl alternative conceptions of selfhood.
Babbitt roots her discussion of persona1 integrity and selthood in the argument that sometimes it is necessary for people to act "ahead of reality"" - to act in such a way that their action itself changes their reality. She thinks this is particularly the case in situations of deep oppression, in which an oppressed person might have to change their reality in order to act at all, or as a
nonoppressed person might act. Babbitt says: "1 understand the term 'personal
integrity' to refer to the adequacy of identity, where by 'identity' 1 mean the sense
of self presupposed in an individual's deliberations and action^".'^ This aspect of Babbitt's definition of identity is fairly uncontentious; it is the sense of self presupposed in deliberations fiom which one acts. However, Babbitt argues that a more substantive notion of identity is a normative one, a sense of self people try to achieve. In her words: "the kind of self-concept people try to discover and develop to act autonomously, to be in control of their lives, where control is the realization of real interests. And persona1 integrity, therefore, might be understood as the achievement and presupposition of such a self concept - a distinct identity - or of an adequate sense of individua~it~".'~That is, sometimes, in order for a penon to develop persona1 integrity, that person must act as though she already possessed it.
Babbitt thinks that sometimes people have to anse as more than they are in order to be able to evaluate what is in their best interests - they have to act ahead of their current reality. This view is in opposition to the liberal view (as expressed by John
Rawls) that people can evaluate what is in their best interests without any sort of deep transformation.
Babbitt's discussion of personal integrity, individuality, is strongly tied to an account of rational choice. She wants to define integrity in terms of the possibilities available to a person for acting in ways that make her situation more conducive to manifesting things like dignity and self worth. These possibilities are often just that - possibilities, not already existing actualities. In her words: "in significant cases, persona1 integrity is defined, in important part, in ternis of imagined possibilities for pursuing human flourishing, even though these possibilities may not be imaginable by the people in question at the tirneY6*
Babbitt has a strong cornmitment to the idea that people do at times, and particularly in situations of oppression, act ahead of reality in ways that change reality. There is no sense, on Babbitt's view, in which this sense of self in either its diminished or adequate manifestations is fragrnented or multiple. It is, rather, coherent and unified. Christine Korsgaard offers an account6' of self unity that seems to be in line with what Babbitt has in mind when she hoIds to a unified conception of the self. It is one that offers non-metaphysical (what Korsgaard calls
"practical") reasons to think of the self as coherent and unified over time. She offers two main reasons to understand the self in this way. The first element of pngrnatic unity is that we act, that we are able to eliminate conflict between divergent motives or desires. In Korsgaard's words: Tou are a unified person at any given time because you must act, and you have only one body with which to ac , this view of unity partially rests, then, on the practicalities of having a body. The second element is "the unity implicit in the standpoint from which you deliberate and ch0ose".6~So, while it might acnially be the case that our strongest motivation "wins" - that it decides for us how we will act - we experience the process of deciding as rooted in something expressive of our self, a reasoning capacity that "provides reasons that regulate [our] choices among [our] desires"?
The unified self, on Korsgaard's view, is necessary to action. Babbitt posits a similar self in her account of acting ahead of reality. Some of the examples Babbitt uses to illustrate her claims about personal integri ty, and conditions for individuality, are drawn fiom Momson's book,
Belove& and Sethe's story. Babbitt argues, based on this notion of acting ahead of reality, that when Sethe claims the capacity to love big, to love her children in a way that was impossible as a slave, she is claiming a possibility that did not exist bcfore she claimed it. In other words, attempting to kill her children brought about the conditions under which such an act could be understood as loving big. "She makes a claim on the strength of intuitions that cannot be explicitly justified, probably not even to herself. And it looks as though her making the claim is precisely what is required for the discovery of such justification"." Babbitt thinks that justification for Sethe's claim to loving big is based on taking a view on which Sethe possesses full humanity, and in which it is reasonable for Sethe to move toward self respect. As 1 have noted above, and explore in more detail below, my reading of Sethe's story, and what it is for her to love big, differs fiom
Babbitt's. It seems to me that Sethe does not have a relatively unitary self, which transforms in such a way that she cornes to think of herself as possessing full human potential. Rather, 1 think that Sethe contains within henelf the selves that she has been, the person she has become, and because of the relationship between those self-understandings, the persons she can imagine henelf as in the future.
Babbitt's rnodel of selfhood, based on acting ahead of reality, seems to me to be overly mystified; the mechanisms of how such a self actually produces positive change are unclear. 1 think this mystification is in part due to Babbitt's allegiance to the idea that the self transforms in order to create the conditions in which it is possible for it to fully flourish and that such transformation creates further
unity.
Harding and Lugones both argue that it is through the interactions of a
person's multiple selves that liberatory knowledge can anse. They take it that
"who we are" is at least two selves, rooted in different social locations. Lugones
says: "1 am giving up the claim that the subjcct is unified. Instead 1 am
understanding each person as many'? As 1 touch on briefly, above, she roots this
claim in the experience of bi- and multi-cultural people, who have "desires,
character, and personality traits" different in one social world than in another. In
her article on "world travelling, Lugones discusses this difference in tems of the
trait of playfulness, which she possesses in one "world" she inhabits but lacks in
others. Seeing that possession, and that lack, gives Lugones a window into
stereotypes and noms of both "worlds". The experience of multiplicity, Lugones
argues, provides the space in which one can act outside the noms of worlds in
which one lives. She thinks of this as living in the limen, a concept 1 discuss in
more detail below. Harding also argues that the expenence of multiplicity is a
valuable source of liberatory knowledge and activity. In her words:
Beanng an identity or speaking fiom a social location that is perceived as a contradiction in tems can be a serious disadvantage within political, economic, and social structures, but such an identity cmbe turned into a scientific and episternological advantage. In activating our identities as women scientists, women philosophers, Afncan Amencm women sociologists, lesbian literary theotists - women subjects and generators of thought, not just objects of others' thoughts - we exploit the fiction, the gap, the dissonance between multiple identities?
Existing in more than one reality, living a multiple reality, can be the source of nonpropositional knowledge that allows the formation of liberatory selves. An important part of reality, on Lugones' view, is the people who contribute to that reality.
This understanding of communities as contributors to identity can be linked to Lorraine Code's argument for a communal basis of knowledge. 1 would like to briefly lay this argument out; it gives an account of the sort of situated knowledge important both to Sandra Harding and Maria Lugones. Code gives a useful account of how the social uptake of a person's experience can either validate and make possible or deny that experience. She links knowledge and identity, argui~g that identity anses out of communal practices of epistemic activity. Knowledge is a joint production of individuals, and vital to the development of possibilities for full human flourishing.
Social knowing
Code has argued that characteristics such as one's gender, race, class, and age have epistemic sig-nifi~ance.~~The assumed knower in epistemic inquiry has been, on Code's view, "adult (but not old), white, reasonably affluent (latterly middle-class) educated man of status, property, and publicly acceptable accomplishments"69.Counting as a knower has required, on Code's view, two charactenstics: objectivity and autonomy. She defines objectivity as the view that objects of knowledge are unaffected by knowers, and that they could be known in the same way by different knowers at different times. In her words, objectivity is
"the conviction that objects of knowledge are separate fiom knowers and investigators and that they remain separate and unchanged throughout investigative, information-gathering, and knowledge-construction processes".70
Autonomy, for Code, has to do with the knower as self-sufficient and as not related to their objects of knowledge. Autonomous knowers provide a transparent screen, through which objects of knowledge appear, as they (objectively) are, in the world. In Code's words: "Detached, neutral, objective observations, possible for al1 'normal' knowers under 'normal' observational conditions, are the basis of empiricist-positivistic know ledge c laims"." 1 focus here on Code's argument for communal, nonautonomous, knowing.
Code argues that "the autonomy-obsession of androcentnc thinking endorses a stark conception of individualism that overemphasizes self-realization and self re~iance"'~.She argues that a mode1 of knowledge based on rnutuality is more adequate than one based on a putatively autonomous knower. Overly privileging objectivity and autonomy (as laid out above), she argues, results in a dichotomy through which "adequate" knowledge can be produced only by individuak unconnected to communities of knowers: "self-reliance and reliance on other people are constructed as mutually exclusive and the achievement of self- reliance is thought to require a complete repudiation of interdependence"73. In contrast to such a model, Code examines and to some extent endorses Annette
Baier's conception of "second persons", a conception that argues against individualisrn in both ethical and epistemological manifestations of the nom. This phase of her discussion is focused on a moral account of personhood. Second persons (or persons simpliciter, on this model) are the result of interdependence with others resulting in the acquisition of what Baier tems "arts" of personhood.
Code thinks that epistemic activity is a result of communal knowledge, of interacting with an epistemic community that trains its members in conventions of belief, affirmation, and thinking. Such interaction is ongoing, and allows both flexibility in the formation of penonhood and knowing and change in that state.
This sort of fluidity stands in contrast to the autonornous model of the knower; on an autonomous model, there would be a point at which penonhood is complete, mature, and self-sufficient. In Code's words: "The expectations posit a sharp discontinuity between developmental processes and their alleged 'products', irnplying that there is a point in life history at which development is completed.
These presuppositions leave no space for the disruptions, decenterings, and contradictions that require constant leaming and relearning of the 'arts of personhood"'7J. Noms of an autonomous knower limit the range of possible change to that knower.
The epistemology particular to an autonomous model of personhood is,
Code argues, traditionally an autonomous mode1 of reason. The autonomous epistemic agent acquires knowledge in an independent quest, fiat "undertaken separately by each rational being; and second, that quest is a joumey of reason alone, unhindered - and hence also unaided - by the sen se^"'^. The knowledge extracted in inquiry by such a knower is reducible to propositions, verifiable by the external world, and in some respects produced by objects external to the knower. It is replicable and impartial. While 1 am not convinced that Code has laid out an accurate view of the history of epistemology76,1 find her comments on communal knowledge helpful.
Code argues that, contra the above mode1 of knowing, knowledge is created out of in tenu bjective relationships between knowers. In her words: "Knowledge is an intersubjective product constructed within communal practices of acknowledgement, correction, and critique"". Adequacy, on her view, is a result of communal working-out of tems of adequacy, credibility, and mith. This idea is embedded in the notion that thinking, about knowledge and other things, happens on a deepiy relational level; the relations that effect knowledge are also the relations that affect the knowers. Knowen are embodied, socially located, bearing gender, race, culture, and history. These factors shape the process of knowing:
"every cognitive act takes place at a point of intersection of innumerable relations, events, circumstances, and histories that make the knower and the known what they are, at that time.. . A recognition that knowledge construction is dependant on
its 'location' is not tantarnount to the claim that knowledge is detemined &y it"''. Rather, these conditions are the medium of knowledge, that out of which knowledge arises and is shaped. Code Mesthis as an ecological mode1 of knowledge. in which parts of the whole rely on one another for their health and nature. Community standards of cognitive practice could shift and evolve, into, for example, nonoppressive modes of thinking and acting.
Sandra Harding
Having laid out Lorraine Code's argument for the importance of the social nature of knowledge, I would like to move to Sandra Harding's discussion of shifis in self. It is explicitly based in an account of the epistemology of selfhood and transformation. Harding looks at the importance of community to the development of, for example, feminist consciousness. She frames this understanding as a process of moving fiom a "perspective" to a "standpoint". 1 begin with an explication of the tems "perspective" and "standpoint," and continue with a discussion of her idea of a bifurcation of consciousness as a source of liberatory consciousness. Harding uses the term 'perspective' to mean the social location a person holds just in virtue of being bom in particular circumstances; her economic situation, her race or ethnicity, the religion or lack thereof among her farnily and fiiends, her community - al1 the things that contribute to basic assumptions she makes about the world. A white Protestant boy growing up in
Iowa has a different perspective than a Latina girl growing up in south California; in this sense, having a perspective is not a matter of choice. On some level, a perspective, as Harding uses the term, is the backdrop we assume in acting out social and political roles, the stage on which we move. A perspective is not actively chosen. It is shaped by circumstances outside us; we interact with those circumstances, and they shape and change us, but Harding takes it that we can lead a life without rnuch questioning our perspectival assumptions." In many ways,
Harding's articulation of what it is to hold a perspective is reminiscent of
Wittgenstein's idea of hinge propositions, as the background and underlying structure of Our perceptions, understandings, and certainties.
Harding maps out a standpoint as the place we get to through interrogating out- given perspective, developing a thought out understanding of it. A standpoint is a mediated perspective. This might be termed also as a shift in hinge propositions, or as a process through which our attention shifis to make salient different things about Our perspective. Take a story from my life as an example: my grandmother is a woman who has always prided herself on her physical fitness, and who relentlessly encourages people around her to exercise. As a child visiting my grandparents, 1 always felt guilty when my grandmother told me 1 ought to exercise or become totally obese. As an adult, 1 feel something quite different when 1 have essentially the same conversation with my grandmother. I feel a complicated mixture of what 1 identiQ as my feminist understanding of the politics of women's bodies and how those politics have an impact on my life, a sympathy for my grandmother's life, which 1 think was more closely tied to ideas of how she ought to look than my life is, resentment that we are having the same conversation now that we had ten years ago, and so on. There is a non-trivial difference between my early life expenence of this sort of conversation with my grandmother, and my present life understanding of similar conversations with her.
On Harding's view, this difference anses out of both the experiences and interactions of my past ten or so yean, and the ways of thinking and reacting I've developed over the same time. It is the change from a perspective to some sort of standpoint - not necessarily a feminist standpoint, but a standpoint in any case.
Thinking through a perspective, then, gives nse to a standpoint. Having a standpoint requires a mediateci understanding, a working out, of a perspective; it is the result of a certain amount of effort. As Harding says:
Only through such struggles can we begin to see beneath the appeannces created by an unjust social order to the reality of how this social order is in fact constnicted and maintained. This need for a stmggle emphasizes the fact that a feminist standpoint is not something that anyone can have simply by claiming it. It is an achievement. A standpoint differs in this respect from a perspective, which anyone can have simply by "opening one's eyes".80
Harding's articulation of the process of moving from a perspective to a standpoint is vital to her understanding of how we achieve a feminist standpoint. It involves a look at how Harding thinks feminist consciousness anses at al1 - how this process of developing a standpoint begins.
Harding posits what she calls a 'bifùrcated consciousness' as the origin of feminist consciousness and liberatory thought. She says that the subject of feminist knowledge is multiple in at least two ways: women as a group are the subject of feminisi knowledge, but that group is constituted of multiple individuals, leading disparate lives, and those lives may be in conflict (as a union representative and the CE0 of a Company rnight be in conflict). The subject of feminist knowledge is also split in the sense of an intemal conflict within an individual. Harding claims that
standpoint arguments daim that knowledge aises from the bifùrcated consciousness, the contradictory loyalties, of women who try to fit their understandings of their lives and the understandings they get through feminist politics into the dominant culture's ways of conceptualizing wornen's lives."
This contradiction might be understood as a conflict between heterodox proposi tional knowledge and orthodox propositional knowledge, or between heterodox and orthodox nonpropositional knowledge, in the sense I discuss in
Chapter Two.
For Harding, feminist consciousness begins fiom a foundational lack of harmony within a self; without this dissonance, there is no space for generating knowledge that does not simply replicate the views and reaiity of the dominant discourse. Harding takes this dissonance to be similara2to the experience of
Patricia Hill Collins' "outsider ~ithin",8~whose expenence includes the position of a marginalized social group and a privileged class experience - a black woman professor, for example. There is a gap between the norms of the "professor" location and the norms of the 'black woman" location not only in the way others look at her, but also in how she perceives herself When Celie read Nellie's letters, she began to experience such a gap between her habitua1 perception of Mister and her changed perception of his action, in the past and present.
A more preliminary sort of split might anse more subtly. Consider the experience of a woman working in a watch factory in Peterborough, Ontario.
Among her ordinary cornpetencies would be the stamina to work long days, the strength to operate machines to punch holes in metal dies, and so on? Part of the ordinary discourse of her day might be assumptions that she is too weak to lift her groceries into the car. These two sides of her ordinary life - Say, the wage work side, and the "feminine" side - are in conflict. They express different aspects of her experience, and they are aspects that significantly Say different things about who she is and what she can do. In many ways, these aspects of her self-understanding are contradictory. These gaps, dissonances, bifurcations, anse out of the experiences of differences and contradictions in a penon's life as she leads it.
It is important to Harding's understanding of bifurcations of consciousness that they do not anse in a social vacuum - they corne about through our interactions with people. She does not state this outright, but her examples and discussions of the epistemic process of achieving a standpoint are explicitly grounded in something like identity politics - in any case, she is very much talking about socially situated knowledge. The social quality of our identity as knowers - our relationships with others - allows bifurcation to happen. The watch maker's bifurcation of consciousness would anse not simply as a result of differences in her activities, but also because of her CO-workers'view of her as a competent die- puncher and the grocer's view of her as an incompetent grocery-lifter. This social requirement of change holds for the shift from a perspective to a standpoint, as well. As the initial split cannot happen in isolation, so the widening of that split must happen in a community. This argument is reminiscent of Babbitt's discussion of Meridian, and the importance of community to her change of consciousness.
Harding claims that "communities and not primarily individuals produce knowledge .. . what I believe that 1 thought through al1 by myself (in my mind), which I know, only gets transfomed fiom my persona1 belief to knowledge when it is socially legitimized".85 A communal thinking through of perspectives provides a wider and fiiendlier space to explore identities arising out of bifurcated consciousness. The social character of knowing Code lays out, which 1 discuss above, also has this quality of productive legitirnization of knowledge. In fact, it is possible that some sort of communal sharing of knowledge is the only way an individual can see contradictions in her being such that she can begin to develop a consciousness contradietory to dominant discourses. That is, it may be that unless a wornan has contact with a community in which there is a questioning of sexist noms she will not develop a feminist consciousness.
Harding's claim is that researchers and scientists in particular can produce more adequate knowledge by basing knowledge acquisition in women's everyday lives. In her work of the early 1990s, this claim is explicit and often stated; she is articulating a fairly narrow account of feminist standpoint theory. 1 think this account of the acquisition of knowledge, and the potential for liberatory transformation out of that knowledge, benefits fiom an explicit account of the role of the nonpropositional in forrning new knowledges. That is, while Harding is explicitly interested in primarily propositional shifis, experience is significantly nonpropositional. Experience is important to Harding's account; it is lived experience through which bifurcations anse. The importance of the nonpropositional is mostly unacknowledged, though; the use of experience manifests in the propositional outcome of bifurcation. Harding claims that that the source of liberatory consciousness is an initial bifurcation of consciousness, while
Babbitt argues that conversion expenences arise out of nonpropositional or implicit understanding, grounded in potential worlds, possible fiames of understanding.
There are a number of similarities between Babbitt's undentanding of the importance of transformation expenences and Harding's conception of the shift
Born perspectives to standpoints. They are both radical shifis in self- understanding, both rest on an assumption of the desirability of undertaking projects of liberatory consciousness, both articulate a move fiom a less adequate to a more adequate view of one's self in relation to one's world, and both discuss the importance of social relationships to change. Many of their claims are illuminated, as well, by the more precise articulation of the shifting of hinge propositions 1 offer in Chapter Two.
While I argue that Harding's claims about the self are valuable to the project of looking at persona1 transformation, 1 think that her account requires the sort of complexity Babbitt offen in her articulation of nonpropositional understanding. Harding's conception of the developrrtent of consciousness is very much grounded in propositional epistemology, and her account benefits from the understanding of nonpropositional knowledge 1 lay out in Chapter Two. 1 examine her account because I think it is one that accurately theorizes the epistemology of liberatory transformation, and better accounts for much of what Dorothy Allison and Audre Lorde articulate about liberation in their persona1 narratives. 1 think that
Lugones' understanding of liberatory consciousness also fills out Babbitt's understanding of Iiberatory persona1 transformation and heterodox nonpropositional understanding.
Maria Lugones: Limenal transformations and memory
Maria Lugones offers a valuable account of agency under oppression, explicating an argument about memory that deepens Harding's account of bifurcation and an argument about limenality that deepens Babbitt's understanding of acting ahead of reality. These accounts are valuable to the project of articularing persona1 transformation in part because they offer a non-homogeneous understanding of reality, the sort of understanding that opens the possibility of the thinking ahead of reality, in Babbitt's sense. 1 examine Lugones' argument about the possibilities of subjective liberation with an eye toward how her conception of the liberatory self illuminates some of what 1 have discussed above. 1 focus particularly on three aspects of her discussion: what it is to act outside the logic of oppression, the importance of memory, and role of limenal experience in liberation.
Lugones thinks that many accounts of oppression themselves leave "the subject trapped inescapably in the oppressive ~~stern".~~She uses the exampies of
Karl Marx's account of capitalism's oppression of laborers and of Marilyn Frye's account of the (usually male) arrogant perception of women. About Marx,
Lugones says: "The proletarian joining with other proletarian in class struggle is not countenanced by the logic of class oppression. 1 do not undentand the subjective mechanisms of its Al1 the activities open to the worker, in Marx's analysis of capitalist oppression, end in a propagation of their own oppression; to be a worker is to be limited by the bounds of capitalism - it is why one works, in that frarnework. This is what it is to be trapped in a (Aristotelian) practical syllogism structured by the oppressor's logic. In the same way, the arrogantly perceived woman of Frye's analysis is constructed such that she cannot, by definition, liberate herself. To be arrogantly perceived is to be incapable to do anything but that which the arrogant perceiver wills. That is what it is to be a
proletarian, and that is what it is to be an arrogantly perceived woman. These structural observations about oppression theory lead Lugones to Say that "It is a desideratum of oppression theory that it portray oppression in its full force, as inescapable, if that is its full force".88 She looks at this idea in a discussion of the practical syllogism.
Aristotle's practical syllogism is one that ends in action, or, for Lugones, and in the case of oppressed penons, inability to act. Lugones' discussion of the practical syllogism is particularly interesting to me because 1 think it speaks to precisely the point Babbitt makes, about the necessity of dreaming possible worlds before they can exist. This is how:
Lugones thinks that there is a similarity between Aristotle's account of the slave's relation to the master's syllogisms, and the arrogantly perceived woman's syllogisms in relation to the arrogant perceiver's syllogisms. The similarity lies in the structuring of the perceived's syllogisms by the perceiver's. Differences lie in the fact that the arrogantly perceived woman has a syllogism at al1 - for Aristotle, the slave lacks reason; "The master reasons and the slave d~es".~'For Lugones, the arrogantly perceived woman has practical reason, but it is smictured, or mediated, by the arrogant perceiver. Celie, in Alice Walker's book The Color
Purple, is a good example of the structuring power of arrogant perception. When she tells Harpo to beat Sofia, she is responding in a way deeply influenced by how people around her perceive Sofia and her actions. This means that her syllogism, the logic of her action, is limited by the sorts of logical choices the arrogant perceiver allows. As Lugones says: "In a world tightly and inescapably structured by arrogant perception, lesbian reasoning, woman-loving reasoning, lacks authority or is impossible".90 This means that in order to act according to reasoning that does not fit with arrogant perception we must construct practical syllogisms that are illogical according to the arrogant perceiver. We have to step outside the structure of oppression, and work within a fiame consistent with the logic of alternative syllogisms. Syllogisms that are illogical fiom the point of view of oppressors but logical to the oppressed emphatically underline the soundness of new sorts of practical syllogisms.
Notice the similarity between this account and Babbitt's reasoning that in order to act outside of the structures of oppression we must act outside of, or through breaking apart, apparent logics of action. I think that Lugones would Say that Sethe's decision to kill her child was rational, as Babbin does, on the grounds that for Sethe to refiise the actions available to her was for her to choose another conclusion to her syllogism. Those available to her - to return her daughter to slavery, to "love small" - made perfect sense within a logical structure of slavery.
The action she takes - to kill her daughter rather than retum her to slavery - is illogical within that Framework.
Lugones advocates a conception of oppression such that the conception is itself liberatory; it includes rather than precludes the possibility of liberatory knowing and action. Such a theory of oppression implies ontological pluralisrn. Lugones grounds her articulation of the source of liberatory consciousness in this conception of pluralism. The ability to construct new syllogisms anses fiom an open-endedness, which "is possible because the self is not unified but plural".9'
Lugones bases her claims about the rnultiplicity of selves on the examples of experiences of bicultural people who, she says, are familiar with the experience of being more than one. They experience reality differently in different realities. I have a former classmate who expressed this by drawing a comparison between the self he was in his predominantly white philosophy classes at Dalhousie, and when he visited his black relatives in Ghana. In one reality, he said, he manifested a different physicaiity and way of speaking than in the other - his sense of self was different. In both, though, he camed his memory of one into the other. Further, his lived experience of Daihousie was a presence with his extended family in Ghana - their perceptions of his other life was important to his relationship and way of behaving with them. This experience is related to Harding's undentanding of bifurcation. Lugones notes that it is unclear that the self could contain two sorts of consciousness (a liberatory and an oppressed consciousness, for example) and be a unitary self." Along with this conception of plurality is a shift in practical syllogisms. In her words: "[tlhe practical syllogisms that they go through in one reality are not possible for them in the other, given that they are such different people in the two realitie~".~~That the activities and thinking of one reality do not necessarily carry over from one reality into another is expressed in the non- continuity of syllogisms from one to the other. Lugones examines this lack of transferability of practical reason fiom one world to the next in two ways: first, as practical syllogisms relate to her claim that the self is multiple, and second, as the construction of syllogisms relate to liberatory experience and action.
Memory is the link between practical syllogisms and multiple selves; it is the factor of self understanding that allows a person to access liberatory multiplicity. The possibility of rernembering the intentions, meanings, and actions of one world afler one moves into another is important. Memory is what opens the possibility of Sethe taking apparently non-rational, arguably rational, action; she remernben herself as unenslaved, as a full human, even afler she re-enters the reality where her child can be taken from her and enslaved. In Lugones' words:
"One understands herself in every world in which one remembers oneself. . . the task of rernembenng one's other selves is a difficult liberatory task",O4 Memory in this sense is the meaningful retention of selves that oppressive control renders invisible and erased.
Practical syllogisms become liberatory syllogisms in the space between constnicted, hierarchical realities, in the limen. The liberatory potential of the limen lies in its nature as a social state between social states-"it contains both the multiplicity of the self and the possibility of structural critique. Both are important components of the subjective possibility of ~iberation".~~The limen is the space where liberatory syllogisms are possible in that it is a space separate £iom the manipulation of the arrogant perceiver. It is the perspective fiom which certain hinge propositions are fluid, and fiom which changes can cause other propositions to stand fast. Liberatory theory, the practical syllogism, and the multiplicity of selves corne together in Lugones' claim that "the oppressed know themselves in realities in which they are able to form intentions that are not among the alternatives that are possible in the world in which they are bnitalized and
~~~ressed".~~This knowing is linked to having and telling stories of one's multiple and shifting selves.
Sethe's actions when schoolteacher comes to enslave her provide a good example of the three threads of Lugones' thought 1 have discussed here - the logic of anti oppression activity, memory, and limenality. As I discuss in Chapter Two, I differ fiom Susan Babbitt on her reading of Sethe's actions, and my difference anses out of my reading of Lugones. 1 agree with Babbitt's argument that Sethe's action is illogical within schoolteacher's fiamework, but disagree with her claim
Sethe's killing her daughter is logical fiorn a framework in which she is fiee, in which she is a Full human being. Sethe's action is logical, but it is logical fiom neither of those standpoints. The only hmework within which it makes sense for
Sethe to kill her youngest daughter and attempt to kill her other children is one in which she contains the consciousness of both fieedom and enslavement. She btings with her, into freedom, her memory of herself in the world of Sweet Home, as a slave. It is intrinsically part of her perception, her emotions, and her deepest nonpropositional and propositional knowledge of herself and her world. And when she reaches Baby Suggs' house, and fteedom, she draws into her and contains within her the knowledge of what it means for her to be there. And containing the knowledge of both those states, both those realities, she says to Paul D about coming to Baby Suggs:
It was a kind of selfishness 1 never knew nothing about before. It felt good. Good and right. I was big, Paul D, and deep and wide and when 1 stretched out my arms al1 my children could get in between. 1 was that wide. Look like 1 loved em more after 1 got here. Or maybe 1 couldn't love em proper in Kentucky because they wasn't mine to love. But when 1 got here, when 1 jumped dom off that wagon - there wasn't nobody in the world 1 couidn't love if 1 wanted to.. . 1 couldn't let al1 that go back to where it was, and 1 couldn't let [my baby] nor any of em live under SChoolteacher. That was out."
The memory of enslavement is the root of the new logic Sethe follows. It changes her paradigm, her determinants of salience. She knows what she has to keep her children from - returning to Sweet Home because she is holding together the memories of both her past existence there and her present existence at Baby
Suggs. Her action anses out of her limenal experience because, containing within her the knowledge of both lives, she sees schoolteacher's hat, as he cornes to recapture her. That sight indicates that Sethe is no longer fi-ee or yet re-enslaved.
She moves to kill her children in a limenal space, where that action is logical only because she is outside both fiameworks of logic. If Sethe were acting based on an understanding of herself as a full human being, her action would be illogical. To possess full human dignity, and be able to act accordingly, presupposes that one's children will not be taken fiom you, that you will not be enslaved, and that if such things happened, they would be wrong, or illegal, or punishable. If Sethe was acting based on an understanding of herself as a slave, and her children as slaves by definition, her action would be illogical, and is, fiom the point of view of the men who corne to take her. Because she is no longer fiee - schoolteacher is there at the gate - but not enslaved, she can act outside the logics of either of those frameworks. In killing her daughter, Sethe acts based on a bifurcation of consciousness that makes fiuid for her what are hinge propositions for othen. Her transformation of consciousness is based on acting outside the logic of her oppression through her limenality, her rnemory of herself in at least two different worlds.
Conclusion
1 have articulated an understanding persona1 transformation and identity that differs from Susan Babbitt's understanding of identity. The understanding 1 offer of selfhood as multiple, following Harding and Lugones, is a mode1 that seems to me to more closely capture the way consciousness aises, and how it can come about in relation to dominant, and most ofien oppressive, ideologies and realities. It fleshes out the nuances of the rnovement fiom the impossible to the possible, fiom a perspective to a standpoint. There is a strong resonance, though, behveen Babbitt's articulation of self-change, where the participants in change are affected by the social and political environment around hem, and in tum make possible actions and identities that were not possible before, and Harding's and
Lugones' undentandings of the formation of liberatory consciousness. This is to
Say, as Babbitt d~es~~,that perhaps certain selves develop in spite of their seeming impossibility, and that their development makes imaginable conditions of full human flourishing, for al1 sorts of people. It just may be that that development is not the result of unitary selves' transformation ahead of their reality, but rather a result of several self-undentandings' interaction. Chapter Four Narratives
1 turn now to several works by Audre Lorde and Dorothy Allison. 1 examine some of Lorde's theoretical work and poetry, and offer a reading of her autobiography. 1 then examine aspects of Allison's theory, and discuss her autobiography. As 1 note in Chapter One, I tum to these writers, and particularly their personal narratives, for two reasons. First, the narratives aid in, and deepen, an analysis of the arguments above. The claim that heterodox nonpropositional understanding is epistemically significant and crucial to liberatory persona1 transformation ought to be applicable to al1 liberatory transformation expenences.
Men it is laid against accounts of transformation, the theory should ring mie.
Second, the theory can explain the narratives. Reading these autobiographical narratives with a theory of the role of nonpropositional knowledge in transformation illuminates aspects of Lorde and Allison's histories that they identiS, as important to them. 1 focus paticularly on the expression, in both
Lorde's and Allison's work, of their understandings of the importance of nonpropositional knowledges, of the process of liberatory transformation, and on the importance of interpersonal relationships to such transformation.
Audre Lorde says: "Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be tho~~ht".~Much of Lorde's theoretical work, as well as her autobiographical narratives, deepen the notion of nonpropositional understanding 1 discuss in Chapter Two. 1 begin with a discussion of Lorde's articulation of poetry and the erotic, fiom her book &ter Outsider, and then look at her persona1 narrative Zami: A New Spellh of My Nm.1 continue with an examination of
Allison's understanding of storytelling, and embodied knowledge &in: Tau
About Sex. Class. and Literaturc, and then look at her personal narrative Two or
Three Things 1 Know for Sure. In my reading of these books, 1 focus on three aspects of their theory and narratives: first, 1 look at what Allison and Lorde Say about nonpropositional understanding; second, 1 discuss their accounts of liberatory persona1 transformation; third, 1 look at the argument that connection with others is important to persona1 transformation, through bnnging out aspects of Lorde's and Allison's narratives.
Audre Lorde: Poetry and the Erotic
The mnpropositional
Audre Lorde writes about the nonpropositional in two senses; she thinks that poetry, in her particular sense, is nonpropositionally important and that the erotic, also figured in a particular way, is crucial to realizing human potential. On poetry, Lorde argues that the interior hmework of our perception of our lives is important to the lives we are able to lead. She discusses this notion using the concept of "poetry as illumination," which she defines as a space within which people are able to transfomi themselves and their world. In Lorde's words: "The quality of light by which we scrutinize Our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bnng about through those lives. It is within this light that we fom those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized9, .100 1 think this is an apt metaphor for two reasons.
First, the notion of illumination, of light, draws out the contrast between what is seeable and what is not. For something to be unilluminated is, broadly, for it to be hidden, unperceivable. Many times that which is unseen under an oppressive understanding of the world is precisely what must be illuminated in the lifting of oppression. Perception of what was unperceived is a redetemination of salience, in de Sousa's sense. 1 take it that Lorde uses the phrasing of light, and illumination, in part to point to the potential for showing unperceived oppression, and unperceived potential, and for coming to use a new paradigm. Second,
Lorde's discussion of a qiiality of light evokes the vast changeablility of light, and points to the impact that changeablility can have on what is perceived by its light.
For example, the noon Sun in Mexico permits and disallows very different things than the moon light just past dusk. Baldly, at noon we may be able to see for some distance, but be unable to travel very far in the heat. At night we may be unable to see as well, but more able to move about. Light itself has subtleties and shadings that change what we see - the proverbial monster in the corner that £iom another angle looks more like a shirt draped over a chair, for example.
In Lorde's sense, the quality of light by which we examine our lives is vital to Our ability to imagine the change those lives can produce. If we see Our lives in light that diminishes our selves, our desires and needs, we are less able to manifest
Our selves, our desires and needs. The idea of nonpropositional understanding 1 discuss, above, has a great deal in common with Lorde's notion of the quality of light within which we shape ourselves. Wittgenstein argues that propositions have sense through their existence in a web of meaning, and that they rest on an underlying structure of nonarticulate hinge propositions. His claims are not the same claims Lorde makes. Both notions, however, take it that there is a backdrop, a space, which underlies and surrounds Our expressive behavior and our perception. Lorde's use of the idea expands on the argument that nonpropositional knowledge is an important source of liberatory transformation. When Lorde speaks of poetry, she uses the terni to point toward inner places, within which people can nourish their potentiality. Poetry allows the expression of what Babbitt talks about as "the impossible dream"; that which we could not Say, or necessarily think, before the poem. Lorde says this is "poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are - until the poem - nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt9, .IO1 Poetry changes the light by which we perceive ourselves and our world, and both illuminates and forms that which was unseen. It expresses and creates a nonpropositional understanding with liberatory potential, a seed of freedom.
Lorde sets poetry, in this sense, against a traditionally western, intellectual, proposition-based way of knowing the world. In her words:
When we view living in the european mode only as a problem to be solved, we rely solely upon our ideas to make us fiee, for these were what the white fathers told us were precious. But as we corne more into touch with our own ancient, noneuropean consciousness of living as a situation to be experienced and interacted with, we leam more and more to cherish our feelings, and to respect those hidden sources of our power fiom where mie knowledge and, there fore, lasting action cornes. 'O'
Lorde sees these two approaches as complementary, as together important for
flourishing. This presentation of two ways women undentand their world could
also be stated in the ternis Harding and Lugones use to talk about plural
consciousness. For Harding the difference between poetry (in Lorde's sense) and a
traditional white-father way of interacting with the world would be a bifurcation of consciousness, a duality that allows the space to acquire more adequate knowledge of one's world. For Lugones, the difference Lorde explicates could be phrased as a difference between worlds, a plural consciousness that includes the limenality of existing in both the traditional european world and the experiential world of poetry. Like Harding and Lugones, Lorde argues that the CO-existence,or the contiguousness, of these ways of being in the world is important to the production of iiberatory knowledge.
Despite the possibility of bringing them together, Lorde places her
emphasis on the unsayable - on a consciousness of living as a situation to be
experienced rather than only thought about in ideas. This emphasis is in part a
result of her conviction that the world of the european mode is one that takes ideas and only ideas to be relevant to how we live. Lorde takes it that such a bias has a negative impact not only on people's capacity to be fiee, but also on their ability to survive. On her view, rationality, or the idea, has its place; it is important to bnng i t together with the experiential, the poetic. She claims "[Rationality] .. . serves the chaos of knowledge. It serves feeling. It serves to get fiom this place to that place.
But if you don? honor those places, then the road is meaningless. .. . ultimately, I don't see feel/think as a dichotomy. 1 see them as a choice of ways and combinations99 .103 The combination of feeling and thinking is an important liberatory project, which relies on refining and bringing out the relationship between ideas and lived experience. In Lorde's words: "At this point in time, I believe that women cany within ounelves the possibility for fusion of these approaches so necessary for survival, and we corne closest to this combination in
"'04 It our poetry . I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distiilation of experience. . . follows from her daim here that only through poetry, or some combination of idea and feeling, it is possible to bring about positive change. This change is both political and personal, and encompasses how we act in the world and how we understand ounelves. Lorde's articulation of poetry resonates with Diana Tiejens
Meyers' understanding of heterodox emotional perception, which changes the framework of thinking through changing an emotional fiamework.
A second phrasing of Lorde's conception of things nonpropositional is what she calls "the erotic," a resource "firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling3, .105 Like poetry, the erotic is a storehouse of potential and actual power, unspoken but significant. It can also be seen as the "feeling" aspect, the unsayable, of the feekhink dichotomy. Lorde articulates it as different fiom poetry, however, claiming that the erotic is the force that allows us to recognize the best in and truest in ourselves, the most powerful, that which "liberatory" frees. Toni Momson's book, Belove& depicts a number of events that express something of Lorde's sense of the erotic. In one scene, which 1 discuss above,
Sethe tells Paul D about getting her children out of slavery, and her own escape.
She says about the feeling she had then: "It was a kind of selfishness 1 never knew nothing about before. It felt good. Good and right. 1 was big, Paul D, and deep and wide and when 1 stretched out my arms all my children could get in between. 1 was tltat wide rr .106 One of the fint things Sethe does is make a dress for her eldest daughter, something she had not been able to do in slavery. "So when I got here, even before they let me get out of bed, 1 stitched her a little something fiom a piece of cloth Baby Shuggs had. Well, al1 I'm saying is that's a selfish pleasure 1 never had before7, .107 Sethe identifies that pleasure as what makes her refuse to send her children back into slavery. That feeling, and the action that Sethe takes as a result of having it, resonate with what Lorde claims about the erotic: "The erotic is a rneasure between the begimings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an intemal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves99 .108 It is one way of looking at the limenality, in
Lugones' sense, of selfhood in people whose selfhood has been systemically denied; it provides a reference for fieedom, a step into another world, and the beginning of a joyful bifurcation. The erotic is an assertion of selfhood, a measure by which Lorde thinks we can live Our fullest potential. It is felt, and felt individually allows individuals to manifest their fullest selves.
The erotic, then, can be seen as a vital, nonpropositional, aspect of the ingredients for liberation. Lorde thinks that the erotic, or the unspoken poetic, must be linked to more traditional ways of knowing. That linkage is the function of the poetic. Without it, we are unable to imagine futures that are different than our presen,t. Because she sees great importance in the meaningful joining of propositional and nonpropositional knowing, Lorde claims that
For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of Our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of Our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved fiom the rock experiences of Our daily lives.lo9
Poetry, in Lorde's sense, has some similarity with what Susan Babbitt calls
"the impossible dream" - acting ahead of current reality in such a way that one changes that reality. it is sometimes necessary for a person to "choose what is not there to be chosen in a particular society at a time9' .110 On Lorde's account, poetry is the mechanism by which people are able to imagine liberatory funires, able to choose what they can only imagine.
Transformation
Lorde is explicit about her view that unified, poetic understanding has the potential to make imaginable what was not. This claim is central to her understanding of how transformation can happen. She articulates feelings and the exploration of feelings as a space within which audacious ideas can germinate and grow. 1 picture this space as something like the environment in which bread is most cornfortable rising. It is best, fnendliest to the bread, to knead the dough, and put it in a warm, even-temperatured spot, covered with a damp cloth. In that environment, the yeast in bread is at its best, and through being in that environment, the yeast changes and enhances its environment. It makes a delectable smell, and it begins to chemically alter the other ingredients that comprise the dough.
Analogously, if the environment in which we relate to our feelings, thoughts, and perceptions is hospitable, we can undergo deep positive change. We also have a better chance of effecting change on Our environment. On Lorde's view, the feelings "become a safe-house for that difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action". They are necessary for change in part because they provide the proper environment, and in part because ihey are the source of changing what we attend to, what is salient for us. One function they perform is to make possible the conception of propositional knowledge that is difficult to think; through poetry, previously inaccessible ideas become accessible. In Lorde's words:
Right now, 1 could name at least ten ideas 1 would have found intolerable or incomprehensible and fiightening except as they came afier dreams and poems.. .We can train ourselves to respect Our feelings and to transpose them into a Ianguage so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dreams and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of Our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across Our fears of what has never been before.' "
Lorde describes her own use of poetry in forming and expressing the nameless. In an interview with Adrienne Rich, she tells Rich that when she was young she
would respond to questions about henelf with poems. For Lorde, poems held emotions. symbols, which expressed what was preverbal and closest to tnith.
When there were no poems that expressed her feelings, Lorde explains that she had to write her own: "[Poems] were my way of talking. To express a feeling, I
would recite a poem. When the poems 1 memorized feli short of the occasion, 1 started to wnte my own 99 .112 And: "There were so many complex emotions for
which poems did not exist. 1 had to find a secret way to express my feelings". Il3
Through poetry, what was unexpressed, and perhaps unexpressible, becomes
communicable. It functions both as a descriptive tool and as a prescriptive one;
poetry can both articulate what cmot be simply stated, and create the conditions
for that articulation. It is both the source and the numiring force for liberatory
transformation.
There is a poem, one of the last Lorde wrote, called "Today 1s Not the Day". It begins: "1 can 'tjust sit here/ staring death NI the face/ blinking and asking for a new name/ by which to greet her ". It is a poem about her own death, a litany of moments that read as expressions of the erotic:
the taste of loving doing a bit of work having some fun riding my wheels so close to the line my eyelashes blaze. ' ''
It also reaches across "the bridge of our fear of what has never been before" and, 1 think, looks at death as a transformation. Lorde acknowledges, bnngs together, her consciousness of her death and her passion for her life. She does this not by saying outright "1 know I'm going to die, but I still really love my children, my fkiends, the people who have loved me". She does it by evoking the joy of her experience, and laying alongside it the impermanence of it. It is hard to know, of course, if writing this poem expressed, for Lorde, a complex feeling for which she had no name in the way she talks about poetry expressing the unnamable, above. Reading it, though, evokes a cornplex and inchoate feeling and, at least potentially, a changed understanding of dying.
The interpersonal
Audre Lorde's autobiography, A New Spel- of my Natells the story of her ciiildhood and early adult Iife. 1 would like to look at Lorde's descriptions of a number of interpersonal relationships: with her mother, Linda, wi th the almost entirely white lesbian community in New York, and with two of her lovers, Eudora and Muriel. Lorde's presentation of these relationships illuminates much of my argument for the importance of heterodox nonpropositional understanding. Recall that by this terni, 1 mean that complex of feelings, inclinations, attitudes, and so on that challenge orthodox, generally oppressive noms. It is an underlying framework that informs and shades expressive behavior.
In discussion with Adrienne Rich, Lorde says "[fiom my mother 1 learned] the important value of nonverbal communication, beneath langage.. .that there was a whole powerful world of nonverbal communication and contact between people that was absolutely essential and that was what you had to leam to decipher and use 77 .115 Lorde begins her narrative with a litany of her mother's knowledge, and a description of her mother. This knowledge includes practical knowledge about cold, food, how to prevent infection, and how to keep children happy on shopping trips. It includes spiritual knowledge, knowledge of how to live in New
York City, and "how to make virtues out of necessities". It includes that "she knew how to look into people's faces and tell what they were going to do before they did it ... Linda knew green things were precious, and the peaceful, healing qualities of ~ater"."~Lorde explicitly identifies these things as held by her mother as knowledge. In her description, and perhaps in Linda's life, various knowledges are mixed together, presented as equally valued, and equally qualifjmg as knowledge. The list of knowledges Lorde's mother held is consistent with Gilbert Ryle's understanding of knowing-how, and with knowing-who, species of nonpropositional knowledge 1 discuss in Chapter One. It is procedural cornpetence, which allows her to proceed in her life in New York. Her knowledge, heterodox and orthodox, provides the ground for Audre Lorde, as her chiid, to develop critical, heterodox knowledge.
Lorde begins her description of her mother by linking her mother's qualities to her own life path. She says
1 have always wondered why the farthest-out position always feels so right to me; why extremes, although difficult and sometimes painful to maintain, are always more cornfortable than one plan tunning straight down a line in the unruffled middle. What 1 really undentand is a particular kind of determination. It is stubborn, it is painful, but it often works."'
She immediately follows this statement with: "My rnother was a very powerful woman. This was so in a time when that word-combination of woman and powerfrd was alrnost unexpressible in the white american common tongue.. .~rt18
The linking of Lorde's existence at the extremes, at the margins, with her mother's powerfulness brings up another expression of her mother's knowledge. This knowledge is embedded in her mother's self understanding, how she expressed her sense of herself. In a poem called "Legacy - Hers", Lorde says:
Menlove leaps fiom my mouth cadenced in that Grenada wisdom upon which 1 first made holy war then 1 must reassess al1 my mother's words or every path 1 cherish.' l9 The transmission of wisdom fiom her mother to Lorde is not explicit, and Lorde is clear throughout her story of her mother that her unspoken words were often more communicative than her spoken ones. The knowledge Lorde receives from her mother is cadenced in the rhythm of her speech, bound up with a complex of resistance and acceptance.
The descriptions Lorde gives of her mother revolve around how her mother carrîed herself and behaved, and how other people related to her. Lorde describes her mother primarily as different fiom those around her, and different in that she behaved and was treated as powerfùl, as a person who could be tmsted to be competent and correct. People on the street, Lorde says, would defer to her mother on questions of taste, opinion, and moral behavior. She was respected, and cornported henelf as someone who was worthy of respect. Lorde says: "Nobody wrote stories about us, but still people always asked my rnother for directions in a crowd. It was this that made me decide as a child that we must be nch w .120 nis selfipresentation was at least in part conscious. In the late thirties, the area of
Harlem where Lorde's mother shopped was a racially mixed area, with high inter- racial tension on the street and in the stores. Lorde describes being spat at on the street as a little girl, and how her mother impressed upon her that it was a random occurrence, a result of people spitting into the wind without looking. For Lorde, this is an example of her mother's approach to oppression; she says: "It was so typical of my mother when 1 was young that if she couldn't stop white people fiom spitting on her children because they were Black, she would insist it was something else. It was so often her approach to the world to change reality. If you can't change reality, change your perceptions of it9, .121 It seems to me that Linda
Lorde's understanding of herself and her world was heterodox in a meaningful way, and that Lorde's depiction of her draws out the quality in her mother of that understanding being rnostl y unspoken but vitally important nonetheless.
In Chapter Three I argued that there is an importantly communal aspect of
nonpropositional understanding. In w,Lorde tells the story of two relationships particularly important to her persona1 transformation, and to her ability to manifest
herself. The first is a woman named Eudora, whom Lorde falls in love with while she's living in Mexico. The second is Muriel, whom Lorde lives with in New
York.
In talking about her time in Mexico, Lorde expresses the importance of
being seen, being acknowledged in al1 her aspects, and in a positive way. It was
important that people in public saw her, saw her blackness and acknowledged it as
beautihl. Beyond a public visibility, Eudora's perception of Lorde is crucial to
Lorde's perception of henelf. She says: "It was in Mexico that 1 stopped feeling
invisible. In the streets, in the buses, in the markets, in the Plaza, in the particular
attention within Eudora's eyes. Sometimes, half-smiling, she would scan my face
without speaking. It made me feel like she was the first penon who had ever
looked at me, ever seen who 1 was. And not only did she see me, she loved me, thought me beautiful ,Y .122 Eudora's love and regard is illurninating, and in some way makes Lorde visible to herself. She provides Lorde with a link into what
Lorde identifies as a web of connections of women exchanging strengths. At what tums out to be the end of their relationship, Eudora sends Lorde away; Lorde says it is vital that although Eudora is rejecting her, she does not ignore Lorde, but acts directly toward her. She says ''1 was hurt, but not lost. And in that moment, as in the first night when I held her, 1 felt myself pass beyond childhood, a woman connecting with other women.. . r, 123 This transfomation is directly connected to
Lorde's personal, emotional, and nonpropositional connection to Eudora and her experience of being visible to others in Mexico.
In contrast to her feeling in Mexico of being seen and to a large extent part
of a broader community, Lorde's discussion of her relationship to the New York
lesbian community highlights her feeling of isolation. She articulates her
loneliness as a combination of her identity as Black and as a lesbian. She says:
"There were no mothers, no sisters, no heroes. We had to do it alone, like our
sister Amazons, the riden on the loneliest outposts of the kingdom of Dahomey.
We, young and BIack and fine and gay, sweated out our fint heartbreaks with no
school nor office chums to share that confidence over lunch h~ur".'~~Lorde talks
about the gap between her and her straight white room-mate, Rhea, a gap that is
expressed in Rhea's unspoken refusa1 to see or acknowledge that Lorde is gay. In
contrast to Eudora's treatment of Lorde, this ignonng is, obviously, profoundly disjoining. Lorde says that similarly, her straight Black fnends "either ignored my love for women, considered it interestingly avant-garde, or tolerated it as just another example of my craziness9, .125 In contact with her straight fnends, Lorde's lesbianism is effaced by its being willfùlly unseen. Lorde also examines her experience of being Black in the lesbian community, and says that this difference was similarly effaced. She says that her identity as Black was not something she could easily talk about: ''1 was gay and Black. The latter fact was irrevocable: annor, mantle, and wall. Often, when 1 had the bad taste to bring that fact up.. .I would get the feeling that I had in some way breached some sacred bond of gayness, a bond which 1 always knew was not sufficient for me".'26 Lorde identifies her difference, both fiom conventional society and from the Black and lesbian sub-societies, as an aspect of her experience that made her stronger through making her stmggle for her identity. This struggle shaped Lorde's nonpropositional understanding of her life and how she could expect to live it. The struggle of her position within these broader communities is the converse of her relationships with Eudora and Muriel, both of whom give her a powerfully positive understanding of herself and her life. In the context of worlds in which she functions, but never with a whole, unified identity, Lorde is functioning both
limenally and with a bifùrcated consciousness. She brings with her into both the
New York lesbian community's world and Rhea's straight world the memory of
the other worlds, and herself in them. This doubleness is important to her ability to
Iive in those worlds, and also to move outside of them. Audre Lorde says about meeting Muriel, her lover of two years, that: "From our very first meeting and without explanation, Muriel made me feel that she was understanding whatever 1 was saying, and, given the massive weight of my inarticulate pain, a great deal of al1 that 1 could not yet put into words".12' This connection, again, is one that gives Lorde access to a self-understanding she may not have been able to reach without the support of positive relationships with others. In her descriptions of her relationship with Muriel, Lorde consistently uses a language of unspoken understandings, of a quality of light generated by their interaction. 1 would like to quote Lorde at length. In her words:
To go to bed and to wake up again day afier day beside a woman, to lie in bed with our arms around each other and drift in and out of sleep, to be with each other - not as a quick stolen pleasure, not as a wild treat - but like sunlight, day after day the regular course of our lives. 1 was discovering al1 the ways that love creeps into life when two selves exist closely .. .U'hen 1 recall the time Mune1 and 1 spent together, 1 remember the assurances we gave each other, the sense of a shared niche out of the storm and the wonder grounded in magic and hard work. I remember always the feeling that it could continue forever, this moming, this life. 1 rernember the curl of Muriel's finger and her deep eyes and the smell of her buttery skin. The smell of basil. 1 remember the openness of our loving that was a measurement against which 1 held up whatever was called love; and which I came to recognize as a legitimate demand between al1 lovers. "'
The understanding Lorde manifests over the course of her relationship with Muriel is one that she identifies as a changed undentanding. It is extended into the fùture and shades her understanding of the past. The experience of being with Muriel like sunlight, as the regular course of their [ives, is in contrast to her previous relationships, and changes the context of her past. The openness of their loving is held as a standard for the future, a grounding of expectations.
Much later in her life, in the journals Lorde wrote after discovering she has cancer of the liver, she is explicit about the importance of her communities, both closely persona1 communities and broader ones. Penonal connections, like the ones Lorde had with Eudora and Muriel, underlie much of what she talks about in tems of connections with others. Those close supports are assumed, necessary, and in her journals she refers to them ofien, but rarely as explicitly as she does to more communal, or public, communities. In one journal entry, she talks about her expenence of connecting to black German women, while teaching a course in
Berlin. She talks about creating connections with her students, and discovering what it means for them to be Afican-Gerrnan. In her words:
It means my pleasure at seeing another Black woman walk into my classroom, her reticence slowly giving way as she explores a new self- awareness, gains a new way of thinking about heeelf in relation to other Black woman. "I've never thought of AhGeman as a positive concept before," [one student] said, speaking out of the pain of facing to live a difference that has no name speaking out of the growing power self-scmtiny has forged f?om that difference.Iz9
Her connection to the community of Afncan-Gennan students she taught in
Berlin, and to communities like them, of young women of color doing creative work, is important to Lorde. She identifies these connections as a life-giving force in her life, something that deepens the intrinsic value she sees in her poems, essays, and political work. She says: "For Black women, learning to consciously extend ourselves to each other and to cal1 upon each other's strengths is a life- saving strategy. In the best of circumstances surroundhg our lives, it requires an enormous amount of mutual, consistent support for us to be emotionally able to look straight into the face of the powen aligned against us and still do our work with joy Y, .130 Communities, persona1 interactions, are important, in part because they provide the space and the strength to do hard work with joy, and in part because they provide interpretive resources that are the source of motivation to do that work.
Dorothy Allisoo
Dorothy Allison, like Audre Lorde, has written theory, poetry, and autobiographical narratives. 1 tum now to some of Allison's theory, and some of hcr personal narrative. I focus on her articulation of the role of memory, nonpropositional understanding, community, and storytelling in liberatory transformation. 1 begin with a discussion of the notion of knowledge, as Allison uses it, continue by giving a reading of some essays from Allison's book Skin;
Talkirig About Sex. Cla-d Lwturg, and then look at her persona1 narrative
Two or Three Thiuw for Sure.
Two or three things I know
One of the significant tropes in Dorothy Allison's autobiography is her use of the phrase "two or three things I know for sure", a statement that both rests on and alters the standard idea of what it is to know. She says: "Aunt Dot was the one who said it. She said 'Lord, girl, there's only two or three things I know for sure.'
She put her head back, grinned, and made a small impatient noise. .. . 'Only two or three things. That's right,' she said. 'Of course it's never the same things, and I'm never as sure as I'd like to be."'"' The framework for Allison's use of the term
"know", then, is rooted in a sense of far greater uncertainty than we normally allow for it. ffiowledge, standardly conceived, connotes surety, certainty, and stability. Even speaking non-philosophicaIly, "to know" implies knowing the same things, and being sure about them. So Aunt Dot's, and Dorothy Allison's, use of this phrase expresses a bifurcated understanding of knowing. On one hand, it directly contradicts the "S knows that P" certainty ofjustified true belief. On the other, it requires and invokes that notion and that stability. Throughout the book,
Allison uses this phrase, and means for it to be taken as true, as a strong claim for her knowledge and certainty. In the background of this use, though, is her Aunt
Dot's uncertainty about her knowledge. This doubleness about the meaning of knowing provides Allison with a framework that both uses and repudiates knowledge, traditionally conceived. And much of her knowledge encompasses both nonpropositional and propositional knowing.
The itonpropositional
One of the central threads running through is Allison's discussion of storytelling, particularly of the stones she tells about the impact class has on her life. For me, reading her account of growing up poor in South Carolina, and her theory about the need to make class visible, brought out much ofLugonesY argument about liberatory transformation. Allison articulates through her story the importance of nonproposi tional understanding to transformation. Where Lorde discusses the transformational potential of poetry, in both the ordinary sense, and in her usage of the term, Allison talks about the necessity of writing stones for both herself and others. She says:
The need to make rny world believable to people who have never experienced it is part of why 1 write fiction. I know that some things must be felt to be understood, that despair, for example, can never be adequately analyzed: it must be lived. But if 1 can write a story that so draws the rcader in that she imagines herself like rny characters, feels their sense of fear and uncertainty, their ho es and terrors, then 1 have corne closer to knowing myself as real.. .rri f' 2
The expression of her world, her experience, is not one that can be phrased simply as an explanation. For Allison, telling stones serves two purposes. First, it is a way to communicate what might be unexplainable to others; it allows readen or listeners to imagine themselves as the character Allison tells, to begin to have a sense of the lived expenence behind the story. Second, stories are a way for
Allison to change both herself and her world through the retelling of henelf; they are necessary to survival.
Allison thinks that storytelling can comrnunicate to others what they have not lived or do not understand, that it can reveal what could not be sirnply explained. The sort of writing, of story telling, that Allison is interested in, is the sort that conveys meaning and tnith, and that invokes change. She says: "1 have wanted everything as a writer and a woman, but most of al1 a world changed utterly by my revelations.. .When 1 sit dom to make my stories 1 know very well that 1 want to take the reader by the throat, break her heart, and heal it again".'j3 It is not an intellectual exercise, or a matter of shifiing people's propositional knowledge, though those things are at play in Allison's politically informed stories. Telling stories with the intention to communicate in this way presupposes that the important sort of change a person can undergo also takes place on a nonpropositional level. Recall Lorde's discussion of "giving name to the nameless so that it can be thought" or her claim that poetry, in her sense, functions as a revelatory distillation of experience. Allison makes a similar claim: that through telling stories, a person can reach another's interiority and transfomi it. In her words: "Two or three things 1 know, two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that to go on living, I have to tell stories, that stories are the one sure way 1 know to touch the heart and change the world3, .134 Stones, like poetry, evoke what could not be explained.
This use of storytelling to evoke change is like Lugones' conception of the importance of memory. Much of Allison's early work is rooted in the expression of her mernories of one world in the context of another world aitogether. In the preface to her collection of short stones, M, a piece called "Deciding to Live",
Allison talks about how she began writing her story as fiction, as stories, and describes re-reading some of them. She says:
I could not stand it, neither the words on the page nor what they told me about myself. My neck and teeth began to ache, and 1 was not at al1 sure 1 reûlly wanted to live with that stuff inside me. But holding on to them, reading them over again, became a part of the process of survival, of deciding once more to live - and clinging to that decision. For me those stories were not distraction or entertainment; they were the stuff of my life, and they were necessary in ways 1 could barely ~nderstand.'~~
Allison contains the memories of her life. She cames them with her, creates herself in relation to them. Lugones says, in her discussion of memory, "the liberatory experience lies in this memory, on these many people one is who have intentions one understands because one is fluent in several 'cultures,' 'worlds,' realities. One understands herself in every world in which one rememben oneself.
This is a strotig sense of persona1 identity, politically and morally strong99 .136
Allison's past selves are vital to her self-knowing and her ability to tell stories that change herself and her reader. Because she rememben her other selves, she communicates their knowledge and the experience of being between her past and curent worlds.
Transformation
In concert with the role hearing or reading stot-ies plays for others, Allison brings out the persona1 importance of the telling of stories for the teller. Allison's discussion of this point both draws on the larger implications of the term "story" in many places, and rests on a more formal understanding of a story - a written narrative. For example, Allison is talking about a broad understanding of storytelling here: "When I began there was only the suspicion that making up the story as you went along was the way to survive. And if 1 know anything, 1 know how to survive, how to remake the world in story99 .137 She describes telling stones to her sisters in her early life, and her lovers later on. This storytelling is itself a liberatory act, in the sense that through it Allison refigured the world of the story, and the world itself; through her stories, Allison says, she remade the world such that everything was possible. "Two or three things I know for sure, and one of theai is ivltnt it nieans to have no loved version ofyour Ive but the one y011
~rinke". /.'' Through stories, Allison alters her understanding of her life; it allows her to tell the mith about her life, and also to imagine possibilities beyond what was available to her.
The liberatory potential Allison evokes in storytelling is partially a response to being sexually abused as a child, and being both silenced and disbelieved when she talked about it. She contrasts the teiling of her story, which includes the story of being raped, with an attempt to explain her story. Telling the story is a transformational act, for both the listener and the teller, and it is a markedly different activity than explaining the events of the story. To quote Allison:
Al1 the things 1 can Say about sexual abuse - about rape-none of them are reasons. The words do not explain. Explanations almost &ove me cnzy, other people's explanations and my own. Explanations, justifications, and theories. I've got my own theory. My theory is that rape goes on happening al1 the time. My theory is that everything said about that act is assumed to Say something about me, as if that thing 1 never wanted to happen and did not know how to stop is the only thing that can be said about my life. My theory is that talking about it makes a difference - being a woman who can stand up anywhere and Say, 1 was five and the man was big. 13'
For Allison to talk about it, to tell the story of being raped, is both to heal herself and to provide an oppositional account of rape. For her story to be told and heard is to make it clear that rape is not the only thing that can be said about her life.
Telling it many times, Allison says, enables her to move past anger and to become something else - "adamant, unafiaid, unashamed, every time - to speak my words as a sacrament. a blessing, a prayer. Not a curse. Getting past the anger, getting to the release, 1 become someone else, and the story changes 3, .140 The story telling makes possible such a self-change, through a corresponding change in the story.
This is also a change in the syllogism of Allison's possible actions, the creation of a liberatory framework. In Lugones' words: "the oppressed know themselves in realities in which they are able to form intentions that are not among the alternatives that are possible in the world in which they are bnitalized and oppressed"'"'. Allison's ability to form such intentions anses out of her stoned transformation, and her ability to voice what was silenced. Stories are then transfomative and liberatory.
Allison describes a shifi in the story she told to herself, of herself. She says that she convinced herself that she was unbreakable, that nothing could damage her. She told people "1 am one woman but I carry in my body al1 the stories 1 have ever been told, women 1 have known, women who have taken damage until they tell themselves they can feel no pain at all". Allison says: "That's the mean story. That's the lie I've told myself for years, and not until 1 began to fashion stories on the page did 1 sort it al1 out, see where the lie ended and a broken life remained 79 .142 This self-telling begins, Allison says, with an assertion of a self rooted in a particular self denial. Retelling that story allows Allison to see the difference between life and lie. She says about wnting that "[it] is an act that daims courage and meaning, and tums back denial, breaks open fear, and heals me as it makes possible some measure of healing for al1 those like me".lJ3Writing is one of the keys to transforming both the story and the nonpropositional understanding that underlies it.
Pe~*sonnlconnections and transformation
Dorothy Allison articulates several illuminating examples of liberatory transformation rooted in shifts in nonpropositional understanding. She talks about transformation in ternis of her underlying state, and in terms of an opening of that state, an unfolding. "Tivo or three things I know for sure. and one of them is tlzat change ivlzen it contes cracks everything open PP. 144 An important aspect of personal transformation, for Ailison, is the complex of beliefs, inclinations, feelings, and so on, that informs the self. For example, she describes what changed for her when her family moved fiorn South Carolina to Florida:
We al1 imagine our lives are normal, and 1 did not know my life was not everyone's. It was in central Florida that 1 began to realize just how different we were. The people we met there had not been shaped by the rigid class structure that had dominated the South Carolina Piedmont.. . Suddenly 1 was boosted into the college-bound track, and while there was plenty of contempt for my inept social skills, pitiful wardrobe, and slow drawling accent, there was also something I had never experienced before: a protective anonyrnity, and a kind of grudging respect and curiosity about who 1 might become. Because they did not see poverty and hopelessness as a foregone conclusion for my life I could begin to imagine other futures for mysel f. 'IS
This description brings out two things that are important to the formation and transformation of nonpropositional understanding. Fint, the dificulty of seeing one's life as being not normal, in the sense of its being aiterable. In an environment where there are limited understandings of what is possible for a person's life, that person will have difficulty manifesting a broader understanding of their possibility. Second, the role others play in making what were impossibilities visible, accessible. For Allison, moving to a state in which her family was not known freed her from generations of comrnunity expectations of her family. Those expectations were at root limitations, in which poverty and hopelessness were the only imaginable funires. They hinctioned almost at the level of hinge propositions - persona1 hinges, though Wittgenstein wouldn't like the term. What I mean by it is that for Allison, and for her close and extended family, there were understandings so basic that they did not need to be, and could not be, stated. In that context, those understandings held as firm for Allison as any of
Wittgenstein's examples of hinge propositions. When the context changed, many things that were normal became abnormal to Allison; various things that were solid grew fluid, and capable of change. To grow up in a structure that understands you to be worthless makes it very hard to for you to conceive of younelf as having worth. In Allison's words: "Women lose their lives not knowing they can do something different. Many eat themselves up believing they have to be the thing they have been made. Chilâren go crazy. Really, even children go crazy, believing the shape of the life they must live is as srna11 and mean and broken as they are told".'%n important aspect of transformation, on Allison's view, is a shift in belief; people become able to believe that their life is not small, mean, and broken.
They do this through a shifi in their deepest understandings of themselves and their world.
There are a number of places in Allison's autobiographical works that reveal such shifts. In one, Allison describes a fundamental transformation in her self understanding during a karate class. She and a fiiend, Flo, started the class because they had been told that there were no women allowed in it, and continued taking it to prove that they were capable. Every class started and ended with a run from a parking lot to the place the class was held. Allison describes both the mnning and the class as grueling, and says that if it were not for the boys in the class laughing at her she might not have been spurred to stay in the class or to push herself so hard. Then, four weeks into the class, the karate teacher's wife cornes to the class. She is everything that Allison feels she lacks: she is undaunted, graceful, powerfil. She has a "body that had never forgotten itself' and looking at her, Allison begins to feei what it would be to love her own body. She describes the run back to the parking lot that day: Running the quater mile back fiom that class, 1 started to cry. I made no sound, no gesture, and kept moving and letting the teardrops sheet down my face. Everyone was way ahead of me. My hands were curled into fists, pumping at rny sides. The tears became sobs, heartbroken and angry, and 1 stumbled, almost falling down before 1 caught my footing in a different gait. My hips shifted. Something in the bottom of my spine let go. Something disco~ectedfiom the coccyx that was shattered when 1 was a girl. Something loosened fiom the old bruised and tom flesh. Some piece of shame pulled fiee, some shame so ancient 1 had never known myself without it. 1 felt it lifi, and with it my thighs lifted, suddenly loose and strong, pumping undemeath me as if nothing could hold me down. 1 picked up speed and closed in on the boys ahead of me, Flo there among them like a female gazelle .. . I breathed deep and feit the muscles in my neck open, something strong getting stronger. If there was love in the world, 1 thought, then there was no reason 1 should not have it in my life. That moment of perfect physical consciousness was more often memory than reality. 1 did not become suddenly coordinated, develop perfect vision in my near-blind right eye, or tum jock and take up half a dozen sports. Al1 I gained was a sense of what I might do, could do if 1 worked at it, a sense of my body as my own. And that was miracle enough.'"
Allison describes a transformation from a state she has always and only known to a new, previously unknown state. She presents the shifi as a bodily experience, a physically changed gait that releases an ancient shame. It is in part an experience of the erotic, in Lorde's sense; a moment of joyful experience that serves as a reference and source of liberatory strength. The linkage between Allison's body and the framework of her self undentanding is underlined; taking karate is consciously meant to address and counteract her feeling of being physically inadequate because she is a woman. Wordlessly claiming her body allowed that deep shame to be released; the transformation is nonpropositional both in the sense that it is directly tied to the body, and in that it changes Allison's pervasive feeling toward herseIf. Another transformational moment is revealed in Allison's story of her sixteenth birthday, the last time her stepfather beat her. He hit her in the guise of giving her a birthday spanking, and when he reached sixteen blows, Allison broke free and said: "You can't break me. And you're never going to touch me again".
About this story, she says:
It was a story I tell myself, a promise. Saying out loud, 'you're never going to touch me again' - that was a piece of magic, magic in the belly, the doorned kingdom of sex, the terror place inside where rage and power live. Whiskey tush without whiskey, bravado and determination, this place where for the first time I knew no confusion, only outrage and pride. In the worst moments of my Me, 1 have told myself that story, the story about a girl who stood up to a monster. Doing that, I make a piece of rnagic inside myself, magic to use against the rneanness in the world. '"'
This story, like the moment of perfect physical consciousness, running, is both a transformational event in itself and a transformational account. That is, the act of saying "you're never going to touch me again" evinces and makes real Allison's changed relationship to her stepfather; where she felt confused, she feels outrage, an attitude that cornes from a very different understanding of herself and her situation. The changed understanding is a nonpropositional one that underlies and makes possible her changed propositional expression. The story of this event also acts as a talisman, a touchstone, or a reference for her; the memory and the retold story of that event reinforce the self that was able to stand up to a rnonster.
Dorothy Ailison argues that storytelling is both a rneaningful and a
Iiberatory act. She thinks that through stories people are able to undentand things they would not grasp outside the context of the story. For Allison, stories also hold the potential for self liberation, or at least survival. Her argument toward this point, and the examples that support it, seem to me to be based on a premise similar to my premise of Chapter Two: that a complex of beliefs, inclinations, emotions, and attitudes must change before external change is possible. Chapter Five: Conclusion
In investigating heterodox nonpropositional knowledge, and how it relates to transformation, 1 have focused on three theoretical threads. These are: the notion of heterodox nonpropositionality, liberatory transformations, and the relationship of persona1 interactions to heterodoxy and transformation. 1 have argued that the nonpropositional is important to propositional knowledge, both in its manifestation as orthodox nonpropositional knowledge and as heterodox nonpropositional knowledge.
In order to provide a fiamework for thinking about nonpropositionality, I began with an examination of Susan Babbitt's conception of nonpropositional understanding. 1 argued that while her understanding of nonpropositional understanding was valuable, it lacked three things. First, it did not adequately
distinguish between orthodox and heterodox nonpropositional knowledge. Second,
it did not give a rich enough account of nonpropositional understanding,
particularly considering the importance of the notion to Babbitt's conception of
transformation. Third, it lacked an account of the emotions in relationship to
nonpropositional understanding.
1 argued that Ludwig Wittgenstein's arguments about certainty, and hinge
propositions, provided a useful understanding of one sort of nonpropositional
framework, and a mode1 for how propositional change could happen. 1 then
discussed Ronald de Sousa's theory of emotions as determinants of salience, Diana Tietjens Meyers ' argument for the significance of heterodox moral perception, and Sandra Bartky's articulation of sharne as a nonpropositional attitude.
1 joined this discussion, in Chapter Three, with an examination of the nonunitary self as an important aspect of transformation, with an explication of
Sandra Harding's understanding of bifurcations of consciousness and their role in transformation and Maria Lugones' articulation of the importance of memory in the formation of liberatory syllogisms. Their understandings of transformation were important to my discussion of Audre Lorde and Dorothy Allison. In that discussion ! examined the notions of heterodox nonpropositional knowledge and liberatory transformation through the lens of Lorde's and Allison's theory and persona1 narratives.
Throughout this discussion, 1 have rested my arguments for the importance of nonpropositional understanding to liberatory transformation on a number of examples, many of them fictional, of what I take to be expressions of this importance. I have argued that it is important to acknowledge the relationship between nonpropositional and propositional knowledge, and to integrate the nonpropositional into analysis of epistemic daims.
1 would Iike to conclude by btiefly considenng of the relationship between the nonpropositional and expressiveness. 1 think this is a particularly important note on which to close this thesis, primarily in light of the reading that 1 have given of Audre Lorde and Dorothy Allison. The relationship between the nonpropositional and expressive activity is very clear in their work, and it is never a relationship that gives rise to silence. The nonpropositional, whether it is phrased as the erotic, that which poetry expresses, that which underlies the story 1 tell, or the physical consciousness of freedom, is not nonarticulable. On the contrary. The nonpropositional, as Lorde and Allison use it, is very ofien the source of meaningful expression. Heterodox nonpropositional understanding gives Dorothy
Allison the ability, the power, and the wish to talk about being raped by her stepfather. It allows Audre Lorde to form poems that articulate and communicate revolutionary anger, love, fear, and passion. In Lorde's words: "1 have corne to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood 99 .149
Lorde and Allison share this understanding, and I think it expresses a general point about what we do with liberatory knowledge, liberatory selves. We share them.
T here is another quote fiom Lorde's piece, entitled "The Transformation of
Silence into Language and Action", which expresses something of the importance of making articulate and communal what was unspoken. After her first breast biopsy, Lorde says she realized that, in her words:
1 was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not 1 had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt 1 had ever made to speak those tniths for which 1 am still seeking, 1 had made contact with other women whiIe we examined the words to fit a world in which we al1 believed, bndging Our differences. And it was the concern and caring of al1 of those women which gave me strength and enabled me to scrutinize the essentials of my living.'50
Speaking yourself, bringing out what it most dear and important, makes a communal space in which others' nonpropositional undentanding can shift, grow, and become strong. Having a community sympathetic to the development of resistant understanding makes that development easier. And in order to develop such communities, it is at least helpful and in many cases necessary to express unspoken knowledge. 1 think this is one thing Allison is saying when she says "1 have wanted everything as a writer and a woman, but most of all a world changed utterly by my revelations". Significantly, that change is a transformation of nonpropositional knowledge. To remake the world in story, in poetry, is not only to remake the world in stories and poems. It is also to remake the world. Endnotes
' One account this event can be found in William L. Andrew's introduction to & Women's Slave Narratives. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press. 1988) p. Vlt - SlV ' I fol low Diana Tiejens Meyers in rny use of the tenn "heterodox," though Meyers is interested primarily in heterodoxy as it manifests in the ernotions and in moral perception. 3 Babbi tt. Susan. lrn~ossibleDreams: Rationalitv, Integritv. and Moral Imagination. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press. 1996) p. 52-53 44 Ryle. Gilbert. Aspects of Mind. (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Press, 1993) p. 26 ' Babbitt, p. 40 "Babbitt. p. 4348 7 Babbitt. p. 43 ' Toni Morrison. Beloved. (New York. NY: PlumePenguin. 1998) p. 149 Morrison. 1998 p. 163 IO Morrison, 1 998. p. 164 " Babbitt. p. 13-48. '' Babbitt. p. 50 l3Babbitt. p. 50 Babbitt. p. 50 " Sandra Bartky. Femininitv and Domination. (New York. NY: Routledge. 1990) pp 83-98 Bartky. p. 84 17 Bartky. p. 94 '' Alice Walker. The Color Purple (New York, NY: Pocket Books. 1985) p. 43 " Walker, p. 43 '"Wal ker, p. 1 54 " Walker. p.? 13 --7 7 Babbitt. p. 3 1 " Babbitt. p. 52 '"Babbitt. p. 5 1 '' Babbitt. p. 52 '"Babbitt. p. 50 27~udwig Wittgenstein. On Certainty. Translated by G.E. M Anscombe and Denis Paul (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969) '* Wittgenstein. Paragraph 3 14 " Wittgenstein. Paragraphs 83, 105,205,359,410. '"Wittgenstein. Paragraph 343 3 1 Wittgenstein. Paragraphs 2 10-2 1 1. Emphasis in original. " Wittgenstein. Paragraphs 95-97 " Wittgenstein. Paragraph 152 " Wittgenstein. Paragraphs 274 " Alice Walker. Meridim. (New York, NY:Simon & Schuster, 1986) ''O ''O Babbitt, p. 54 '" Ronald de Sousa. "The Rationality of Emotions" in Amelie Rorty, ed; Exblaininp Emotions. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980) p. 139 "'Ronald de Sousa. The Wtvof F-. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987) p. 196 43 de Sousa. 1987, p. 196 44 de Sousa. 1987, p. 201 4 5 de Sousa. 1987, p. 187 4 0 Diana Tietjens Meyers. "Emotion and Heterodox Moral Perception: An Essay in Moral Social Psychology" in Diana Tietjens Meyers, ed. FewtsRew the Self(Bou1der. CO: Westview Press, 1997) p. 2 10 47 Meyers, p. 198 JX Meyers, p. 198 4 0 Meyers, p. 201 50 Meyers. p. 204 5 1 M0rrkon.p. 162 '' de Sousa. 1980, p. 137 53 Babbitt, p. 104- 129 51 Maria Lugones. "Playfulness, 'Wor1d'-Travelling, and Loving Perception" in Womea Knowleds. adRe&. Ed Ann Garry & Marilyn Pearsall (New York, W.Routledge, 1 992) p. 275-292 " Lugones, 1992, p. 283 a6 Lugones, 1992, p. 283 j7 Babbitt, p. 37-60 and 77-80 '' Babbitt, p. 104 Babbitt, p. 105 "O Babbitt, p. 116 6 1 Christine Korsgaard. "Personal Identity and Unity or Agency: A Kantian Response to Parfit" in D. Kolak and R. Martin, eds Self 62 Korsgaard, p. 324 " Korsgaard, p. 324 64 Korsgaard, p. 324 O' O' Babbitt, p. 35 66 Maria Lugones, "Structure/Antistructure and Agency under Oppression," Joirrnal of Pliilosop&, 1990, p. 503 67 Sandra Harding, Whose Scke?Whose I(oowle? hmWown 9 s 1.1- ves. (Ithaca: Corne11 University Press, 1991) p. 275 68 Lorraine Code. What cdheUow? (Ithaca, NY: Comell University Press, 1991) Code, 1991 p. 8 'O Code, 1991 p. 32 " Code, 1991 p. 114 72 Code, 1991 p. 275 73 Code, 1991 p. 74 '.'Code, 1991 p. 85 7 5 Code, 1991 p. 112 7 O In particular, 1 am still thinking through Louise M. Antony's "Quine as Feminist:. . The Radical Import of Naturalized Epistemology" (in Mdof One's Own: Fe- Es= on Reason & Objectivity Louise Antony and Charlotte Witt, eds; Boulder, CO; Westview Press, 1993). In it, Antony offen a trenchant critique of Code's arguments. 7 7 Code, 1991 p. 224 7 X Code, 1991 p. 269 7 '1 Harding, 199 1 especially pages 106- 187
RO Harding, 1991 p.127 " Harding, 1991 p. 185 " Harding, 1991 p.268-295 s3 Patricia Hill Collins, "Leaming fiom the Outsider Within".. in. Joan E. Hartman and Ellen Messer-Davidow, (En-wleae: Femtin Acderng. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 199 1) s-l 1 draw this exarnple from Joan Sangster's book -~ect : the lives of worm women in small-town Ontano. 193.0-196Q (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 1995) Y5 Sandra. .Harding, "Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What is 'Strong Objectivi ty?"' in FemintstEoisternolo- edited by Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter. (New York: Routledge, 1993) p. 65
Maria Lugones, 1990, p. 500 Lugones, 1990, p. 501 Lugones, l99O,5O 1 Lugones, 1990, p.. 502 Lugones, 1990, p. 503 Lugones, 1990, p. 503 Lugones, 1990, p. 501 Lugones, 1990, p. 505 Lugones, 1990, p. 504-505 Lugones, 1990, p. 506 Lugones, 1990, p.. 505 Wolker, p. 163-164 Babbitt, p. 174 Audre Lorde. "Poetry is not a Luxury" in Sister Outsider. (Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1984) p. 37 100 Lorde, 1984; p. 36 Io' Lorde, 1984; p. 36 'O' Lorde, 1984; p. 37 'O3 Lorde, 1984; p. 100-101 IO4 Lorde, 1984; p. 37
146 Allison, 1996, p.5 1 147 Allison, 1996, p.64-66 148 Allison, 1996, p.68 149 Lorde, 1984, p. 40 150 Lorde, 1984, p. 41 Works Cited
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