the incommensurable

i believe we do a disservice by attempting to take account of difference. - that again, is the process of sameing difference. we do violence by using one register to speak to self and other, to difference, to the complexities and varieties of life. registers need be multiple, need be protean. here enters postmodernity and the skepticism of single registers, of grand narratives, of ultimate truths. we can never speak of value without asking 'who's value.' to live in this world, an ethics requires that we ask by who's standards and to what effects?

thinking difference

i was mesmerized when i first read hegel. the idea of ourselves as constructed through another (the idea of the self as constituted by the other) - that it is never simply "I" or "You", but the space in-between that defines us - this elated me. yes, i said, it isn't about monadic individuals who are self-contained and make choices and live their lives by their own accord. hegel, to me, spoke of interconnectedness and the ways we collectively define the world and each other. when i read haraway, i was blown to bits by her rendering of the dominant self - the One that relies on the Other, but negates the Other to assure an autonomous Self. "One is too few, but two are too many." that was 5 years ago. i am now trying to reengage. these ideas lost hold of me for a time, yet their crucial importance to me never fully abated.

In Yegenoglu's book, Colonial Fantasies, this quote caught me, "The Hegelian assumption is that the other shares the same universe with the subject." it caught me because all of a sudden difference was too different to be held within the self-other dialectic. i am thinking about the relation of self and other in Hegel as one constituted by (again) a certain way of knowing - a Western/European, White, Male configuration (of course). But what is beyond this? Can we only find ourselves within this relation to the dominant? How do we get out of the relationship that binds us here? - binds us to a dominant idea of success, of meaningfulness, of the value of our lives? this is where difference is needed, yes? but two things may happen that trip us up: 1. we recreate and reinforce the self/other binary by flipping it -- 'since we are other, we will be the other that is not the self,' 2. by our attempts at reconstructing a language that defines us differently, we lose the ways in which difference has been constructed and utilized by the dominant . but how then do we move? for we can never take it all into account because accounts aren't finite. difference can never be accounted for because it is a process of posing, positioning always in relation to that which itself is not finite. there are clues in these books i am reading, clues in the language that they are utilizing, the spaces they inhabit. but they are only clues (often incomprehensible) and i am left with shifting sand.

this here. a possibe place.

Marx writes: "Every beginning is difficult, holds in all sciences."
Hemingway writes: "The hardest part of writing is the words."

i use these two quotes to give validity to my overwhelming difficultly in this, our endevor. i am without words and i offer no beginning. only, something needs to be tried. you know it because this world doesn't make sense and we are at odds with our sanity. we need our own hands to grapple with the dirt. and we need the dirt to balance our sails, steady ourselves. we need dirt because we need flight. here i/we am/are spirling out of control. may my words be my ballast. may our words be our world made sane.