methodology 4

So, I suppose what I'm talking about is actually what is meant by methodology, which has to do with the philosophy behind a choice of methods--the unifying concept that makes them right for the project. It's like what Matthew Crawford (the motorcycle mechanic) said about working on older bikes, where the manual of standard procedures sometimes has to take a back seat, so to speak, to a more lively, imaginative engagement with the machine: "Good diagnosis requires attentiveness to the machine, almost a conversation with it, rather than assertiveness" ("The Case for Working With Your Hands", pg. 4). My methodology is interested in finding out what the constellation of objects that make up my argument want, rather than being a set of rules I can apply. Teresa Brennan, in her book The Transmission of Affect, writes about something she calls "living attention" (23, 25, 37, 41, 130, etc.). It appears as "its other variants...: love, optimism, logic" (130) and requires--precipitates--attachment to those around oneself. To Brennan, being "coldly detached is being much to preoccupied with one's own position, and it narrows one's focus. It forecloses the feeling intelligence...in which one is open to new ideas about the other" (131). I would like to think that a methodology which borrows what it needs as the need arises--which is responsive and responsible--is one that examines with a living attention the texts that it finds.

A living attention requires more than a scholarly attention that is somehow still detached--Brennan writing on affect, Jean-Luc Nancy writing on listening both talk about the way that affect or sound reconnect the subject with itself. When you feel you are reminded of your bodily self and you are re-entered into a position of subjectivity; for Nancy, the subject is "that part, in the body, that is listening or vibrates with listening to--or with the echo of--the beyond-meaning" (Listening, 31). And Jean-Luc Marion writes that "one must speak of love as one must love--in the first person....I will not be able to hide myself behind the I of philosophers, that I who is supposed to be universal, a disengaged spectator or a transcendental subject" (The Erotic Phenomenon, 9). Writing from the position of a feeling subject, a subject who is, whether we'd like to admit it or not, marginalised by the academy, the writer has to acknowledge the limits of her own knowledge. It's a fundamentally respectful way of approaching a text.

And, since the writer who writes from feeling (if feeling is first)--from affect, from the position of an affective subject--will find herself on the outside of certain kinds of discourse, what recourse does she in fact have but to go about picking here and there? It's liberating to feel a little bit 'outside', because it gives one the freedom to take what is useful and leave the rest--although it does come with the burden of proving that this is indeed useful after all, and the danger that then it will become a static or unquestioning way of seeing, in a methodological spiral that does no one any good!

(More tomorrow. Part 1. Part 2. Part 3.)