Splitting and Antidiscourse as platforms on which to study society and history. "the idea that processes such as projection and introjection, splitting and fragmentation, occur routinely, if viarably, within institutions at the level of the dynamics of group culture, rather than simply due to the aggregate dynamics of individual members." (Born, 373)."Splitting, then, involves a reductive form of thinking: objects are either all good or all bad. Te integrity of the object is fragmented, as is the perception of it and the ambivalence that it evokes...simple difference becomes inbued with extrame evaluation." (p. 374).Klein and Lacan approach differently: "in different views of the potential outcome of the clinical process...linked in turn to different attitudes to the potential for transformation and change." (Born, 375)."...gender classification amounts to systems of beliefs and/or practices...which devalue or oppress the category 'woman,' which is implicitly defined in some way by opposition the category 'man.'...this most basic of classification systems...characteristically evinces splitting...they are derogatory, reductive, emotive, reified, naturalized, and legitimized by reference to physiology or to powerful metaphors." (p. 376)
- the distinction between Jews and non-Jews, ethical and unethical, clean and dirty, mentally fit and not, pure and impure, etc. rhetoric used by the Third Reich and Nazi ideology capitalize on this process as well, using perceived physiological splits to legitimize the subordination of non-Aryan to Aryan
"Classification plis splitting equals ideology." (p. 376)"the tendency for binary oppositions and the classificatory systems that encompass them to be experienced antagonistically and evaluatively, the systematic idealization or advocacy of one pole and denigration of the other...splitting can provide a crucial link for theorizing the relation between classification and ideology in general...insight into their subjective internalization, reproduction, and power." (Born, 376). "the arbitrariness of of the evaluation attributed to the object of splitting: the interchangabiloty, in priciple of idealization and denigration or fear, and the unstable oscilation between the two...characteristic of many gender ideologies with their prominent Maddona/whore duality...of racism in which the body of the other (again physiology as the sign of identity) is alternatively perceived as a phobic or ideal/erotic object." (p. 376)"antidiscourse...this phenomenon of a discourse that is produced in the process of simultaneously denying another, coexistent, and rival discourse...refers not simply to purely linguistic forms but to discourse more broadly conceived, in the Foucauldian sense, to include characteristic practices, social relations, institutions, technologies, and forms of knowledge." (p. 379)"antidiscourse...is engaged in the denial or 'absenting' of the existence of a rival discourse...may thus be as characterisitic of hegemonic cultural systems as suboridinate ones. It may also be central to the reproduction of dominant cultural systems over time." (born, 379)."...in deciphering the reproduction and transformation of cultural systems it is necessary to explore the interplay of structure and practice, to take account of both internal logics of change and external conditions." (p. 380)"...certain dominant cultural systems tend toward continuity and the absorption or suppression of difference because of the cumulative momentum of historical authority and power..." (p. 380)"Far from indulging in a poststructuralist fetishim of difference, the intention must be to generate emperical fuel for a more complex and adequate account of cultural historical process." (Born, 382).
- :(
- I guess she's kind of right? I like my fetishism of difference, when used productively in the way that others employ it (such as my best friends Deleuze and Guattari)
- Actually, I think she's gone a bit far here, since difference is generally employed this way, to account for cultural or psychoanalytic or linguistic/ideological differences and argue that the hierarchy determined through splitting has been socially fabricated, and is, therefore, not inherent
- I wonder where this line falls between fetishizing difference and employing it to account for historical processes