methodology 2

I began thinking more about my methodology while writing a chapter on Toni Morrison's 1987 novel Beloved, with which I'd guess many of you are familiar. If you're not, it's about a family of slaves who have escaped slavery; when the overseer from the farm where they had been kept arrives to 'reclaim' them, Sethe, the mother, kills one child (and, it's intimated, would kill all four) in order to keep them from being taken into slavery. The book deals with ideas of love--how it is enacted, what it can be, what it means to be beloved and to love--but it also questions the transmission of knowledge, how the means of transmission are normalised, and the kinds of violence that knowledge and 'truth' can do. I felt even more strongly that while looking at a work like this I didn't want to rely exclusively on a tradition that had been used oppressively toward the people in the text, and to which reference is made. (The overseer in Beloved is called Schoolteacher, and the indoctrination he gives to his nephews is referred to pretty much exclusively as 'education'.)

The system of classification, taxonomy, and valuation that arose from and alongside our tradition of philosophy can be violent; it does not, in Derrida's words, assure "an affirmative desire towards the Other--to respect the Other, to pay attention to the Other" (interview). I wanted to find a middle way, one that would engage with the tradition of critique while respectfully interjecting that it was not, perhaps, quite as complete as it might be thought. I found support for this idea everywhere from Derrida himself (in the idea of the supplement) to an article in the New York Times by Matthew Crawford, a political-philosopher-cum-motorcycle-mechanic, who wrote that when it comes to actually putting theory into practise, "you put the manual away and consider the facts before you. You do this because ultimately you are responsible to the motorcycle and its owner, not to some procedure" ("The Case for Working With Your Hands", pg. 3). That was it exactly; I felt responsible to the text, but not to a particular way of looking at it or working with it.

(More tomorrow. First part here.)