mmm…insanity

Not entirely cer­tain work­ing on this thesis is good for a person losing their grip on real­ity. Oh well.

Today’s thoughts: uncer­tainty is one of the key exper­i­ences in a world of cap­it­al­ist post-mod­ern­ity (cf Bau­mann, Ang). We create strategies to deal with the ongo­ing ambi­gu­ity, includ­ing attempts to ‘map’ iden­tity, cul­ture etc, fix them in a way that makes everything stable and safe again. Two guys called Offord and Cantrell argue that Buddhism offers an altern­at­ive to this and lets you float and accept the ambi­gu­ity. they then dis­cuss the dif­fi­culties of chan­ging legal sys­tems to remove dis­crim­in­a­tion if you reject iden­tity polit­ics. Interesting. 

I’m all for the Deleuzian pro­ject of des­troy­ing cat­egor­ical grid­ding (to use Mas­sum­i’s words). But I’m also a poster child for inab­il­ity to deal with the shift­ing sands of uncer­tainty. I keep doing this “truth in labelling” rant that smacks of des­per­a­tion for fixity and my best friend makes her living as a tax­onom­ist, arbit­rar­ily assign­ing cat­egor­ies to the fluid world of flowers.

On the prac­tical side, I can think of a very good case study to dis­cuss how iden­tity polit­ics can sab­ot­age the pro­cess of pre­vent­ing dis­ad­vant­age and dis­crim­in­a­tion: the NSW racial and homo­sexual vili­fic­a­tion laws, which rely on a defin­i­tion of mar­gin­al­ity rather than cat­egor­isa­tion per se. This allowed the Gay and Les­bian Rights Lobby to say they would­n’t sup­port a person with bisexual prac­tice com­plain­ing of dis­crim­in­a­tion unless they claimed the dis­crim­in­a­tion was due to the iden­tity as gay or les­bian or their affin­ity with the G&L ‘com­munity’.

Gack. Aca­demia as ther­apy. It can’t be good for you.