On Stand With Alison
It is likely that you are interested in philosophy and in women, so I have written this for you. (Incidentally, I am only moderately interested in one of them, as Julia-with-a-J recently pointed out.) Current affairs has provided many possible entrances, all of them dire, into a critical reflection on gender-based inequality. Globally, one in three women experience physical or sexual violence in their lifetimes, according to a new WHO report. Nationally, the murder of Sarah Everard, and subsequent events at her vigil, has inspired not-enough outrage. But let's look local. Last month, we learnt that the Director of the St Andrews Institute for Gender Studies in the Department of Philosophy, Dr Alison Kerr, will be made redundant by summer this year. Everything I know about this incident comes from this website and open letter written by her defenders, and we are not given specific reasons that prompted this move from management. We don't need those to point out the problem. A woman educating future leaders on her expertise is being replaced by two non-expert men. Her expertise also happens to be gender studies which intellectually sets up the social condition for gender-related awareness and discourse. The message that emerges from this narrative is socially irresponsible and destructive to the young generation (us) placed under this university's care. It provides another example in which the woman is dispensable. It quietly suggests that critical examination of gender questions can be devalued (e.g. led by two non-experts). This is precisely the set of ethics that tolerates sexual violence, which the university also happens to accommodate in its quiet ambiguous manner.
I am not writing to villainise the university or its Decision Makers, as Stand With Alison so innocuously call their addressees. Philosophy is supposed to have grown out of good and evil by now. In Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, Friedrich Nietzsche criticised the unquestioning attitude with which his predecessors assumed such dichotomies like good and evil, master and slave, objective and subjective, men and women [1]. His thesis was moreover a metaphysical one, in that these assumptions are implicated in Reality rendered by philosophy. In other words, we (the students) are taught to understand the world — therefore engage with it, operate within it — in accordance with the problematic dichotomy, whether or not we are conscious of it. Our working presumptions that depend on an external and objective world (such as science) are the products of those who theorise in order to hide their moral prejudices. Specifically, this prejudice is the moral tradition to prioritise the 'origin' over the 'consequences'. For example, the sceptical Descartes [2] only triggers an epistemological crisis if we believe that a firm 'origin' of our knowledge is necessary for our knowledge to qualify as truth. But the dichotomy between 'truth' and 'untruth' is in itself entrenched in the arbitrary, political decision titled Good and Evil.‘It is no more than a moral prejudice that truth is worth more than appearance,’ concludes Nietzsche (§32, Beyond Good and Evil).
To restate the problematic in more immanent terms, society operates through language. We talk to each other, negotiate and convince each other to actualise the simplest decisions, like which sauce to use on pasta night (chunky mushrooms? herbs and garlic?) But persuasion is nothing but a competition within 'rationality', a comparing between reasons against some standard (e.g. garlic is such a rude vegetable, while mushrooms are creative). If the reasoning process for social decisions plays within a fundamentally prejudiced (language) game, then we have problems. In fact, the primary prejudice is that our negotiations are structured as games; that we worship 'the Rational' and prioritise rationality over the consequences of whatever practical process we undergo as a collective.
Let us indeed turn to gender studies to articulate the problematic structure of these games. In Gender Troubles, Judith Butler reflects (not without allusion to her predecessors, lineage of which I shall not trouble over here) that there is not two genders/sexes [3] but one: the woman. The man is not gendered but the default person, the individual, prior to being marked by sex. The woman necessarily makes no presence in our language; she is defined by her absence and understood only as the difference between the 'rightful' entities within the operating system. Because of his lack, the human is endowed with ‘a breath of life’, and it is possible to build an agential trajectory around his own completion. Hence, within this system, the woman is written out of language and must be kept outside. Hypothetically: if having a job (e.g. staff at a university) is a recognised symbol in our social language, then the woman, by being excluded from that position, or permitted to hold only the ‘semblance’ of that position (e.g. receiving lower pay than her men colleagues) is constantly being written out of the 'rightful' social discourse. Gawking at that same philosophical attitude, Ernesto Laclau points out that the 'hegemon' as a philosophical and political structure is a core symbol that represents, simultaneously, the impossible and the necessary. It is therefore an empty symbol, but required to motivate all operations within the system. Reflected in our social reality, this logic constitutes a hegemonic ethical attitude [4], where the moment of totalisation or universalisation is indefinitely (and never successfully) postponed. Units of social decisions are intentioned upon this postponement, justifying sacrifices on its way. One example of such hegemonic attitude at work is the myth of an objective science, which played its role through the eugenic programme that framed the Holocaust. The ‘objectivity’ and the causal links implied by genetic determination is made legible (and legitimised) through this hegemonic epistemology; the subsequent ‘application’ is further made ethically comprehensible through the priority of the ‘master race’.
Maybe I've lost you in there somewhere. It is my impression, between being a philosopher and a woman, that feeling lost is not the worst place to be, and the communication outside of academia’s fancy language deserves more of our intelligence and sensitivity. After all, the 'conceptual clarity' that we have been trained for is gradually emerging to be a parody of itself at best. The only clarity for us is that we are human, and the only dominance is the immediacy upon which cruelty can be set up and inflicted on.
Therefore, to philosophers with whatever subscription: sign the petition to Stand With Alison, protest the university's narrative that the woman is dispensable, that gender studies need not be led by experts. If there are indeed compelling reasons for the management's decision, then they need to prioritise their narrative on gender over those reasons (e.g. continue Dr Kerr's contract until they find more women staff and another expert on gender studies).
Footnotes
[1] For those concerned about Nietzsche's notorious 'misogyny', I am of the view (and assumes it here) that his writings on woman expresses the sentiment rather than the belief in the oppression of women. In other words, parody. You can read more about this stance here.
[2] If you haven’t heard of what Descartes did yet, and still want to, here it is: ‘Nevertheless I have long had fixed in my mind the belief that an all powerful God existed by whom I have been created such as I am. But how do I know that he has not brought it to pass that there is no earth, no heaven, no extended body, no magnitude, no place, and that nevertheless (I possess the perceptions of all these things and that) they seem to me to exist just exactly as I now see them?’ In other words, everything we take to be real and external could really just be God’s little trick on our perceptions. From his Meditations on First Philosophy.
[3] Butler is suspicious of the distinction between 'gender' and 'sex'. The former is postulated as culturally constructed, as opposed to what is anatomically given through 'sex'. Butler argues that the concept of a 'natural' and given sex is itself preconditioned by the already culturally constructed discourse on dichotomous gender.
[4] By 'ethical', we are of course referring to Levinas' sense where meaning is the intersubjective dimension of the human :)
[5] My example is only partially indicative of the concept described here, but it is difficult and indeed mistaken to isolate a single event that demonstrates the point here about structure. Subjects in history behave politically only against a background of sedimented cultural practices, and the outburst of particular violence incidents are never quite 'incidents' understood in that isolated sense.
