Final Exam (Take-home)
Student Essay
I Do Have Something to Tell You
In his essay “Is There Something You Need to Tell Me?” William S. Wilkerson adopts Satya P. Mohanty’s theory to explain “coming out”[1] of a homosexual and argues against essentialist and postmodernist views of experience and identity.
Before introducing Wilkerson’s argument, first of all, we need to have a general idea of Mohanty’s theory. In his essay “The Epistemic Status of Cultural Identity”, Mohanty argues that experience is not self-evidently meaningful but “socially and ‘theoretically’ constructed”, and knowledge gained from experience is ideological; however, “there are better or worse social and political theories, and we can seek less distorted and more objective knowledge of social phenomena by creating the conditions for the production of better knowledge” (Mohanty). That is to say, by adopting a less distorted ideology, on
Wilkerson agrees with Mohanty and further emphasizes that “experiences do not have meanings apart from mediation, but they are not without latent meanings that can be interpreted, and, moreover, the accuracy of these interpretations can be measured by continued verification” (254). In other words, experiences are not self-evidently meaningful as essentialists believe, but mediated and with latent meanings.[2] On
Here, Wilkerson, like Mohanty, denies the foundationalist view of identity that it is stable and is based on shared, self-evidently meaningful experiences. Instead, he agrees with postmodernism at the point that experiences are culturally constituted, but he does not agree with the postmodernist view in claiming that such mediated experiences cannot be a source of knowledge nor identity. According to Wilkerson, by denying foundationalist theory, postmodernism goes to another extreme: both of the two theories “assume as a starting point a false dichotomy between an absolute and self-evidently meaningful experience and an experience that is produced, contingent, and typically ideological” (274). In other words, they view experiences on
However, when taking such a route, postmodernism fails to find a way to distinguish ideology from truth, since all experience is ideological production. Moreover, postmodernist theory also fails to provide the origin of knowledge, since knowledge, as it claims, does not come from experience. These two arguments are also the bases of Wilkerson’s evaluation of two essays by postmodernists Diana Fuss and Joan Scott.
Judging from Wilkerson’s introduction of Fuss’s points,[3] he is right in saying Fuss has loopholes in her discussion.[4] However, when critisizing Scott, we think on the on
he makes entries in a notebook, at the front about material things, at the back about sexual desire…Although on
Scott’s point is to claim that the social and the personal are both discursive and ideological, even the meaning of experience is discursive, too. Therefore she is not contradictory to her former statement.
Wilkerson tries so hard to claim that Fuss and Scott and all other postmodernists are trapped in their own theory, in order to introduce a realist theory that both avoids the pitfalls of foundationalist epistemologies and evades postmodernist aporias, because realist theory views “experience as mediated from the start,” and the mediated experience is a source of knowledge. In addition, the realist theory regards “mediated knowledge as the on
When discussing coming out, Wilkerson points out that it is impossible to explain coming out with Cartesian or Freudian theory, since in both theories, it is impossible not to be aware of on
As for Freudianism, sexuality as “the internal stimulus is said to be instinctual” and cannot be run away from since “a stimulus of internal origin defines need” (Mullahy 3-4); therefore on
forever pressing toward expr
That is to say, sexuality is forever trying to find a way to influence on
Works Cited
Mohanty,Satya P. “The Epistemic Status of Cultural Identity: On Beloved and the
Postcolonial Condition.” 11 June 2009 <http://clogic.eserver.org/3-1&2/ mohanty.html>.
Mullahy, Patrick. Oedipus: Myth and Complex. New York: Hermitage Press, 1948.
Scott, Joan W. “The Evidence of Experience.” Critical Inquiry, 17.4 (1991): 773-797.
Wilkerson, William S. “Is There Something You Need to Tell Me?: Coming out and
the Ambiguity of Experience.” Ed. Paula M. L. Moya and Michael R. Hames-Garcia. Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism. Berkeley: U of California P, 2000. 251-78.
Wilson, Margaret Dauler. Descartes. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982.
[1] According to Wilkerson, “coming out” is “neither the recognition of on
[2] Here, by “latent meanings,” Wilkerson does not mean that the meaning of experience is simply self-evident like what the experiential foundationalist believes but something can be figured out on
[3] Fuss, according to Wilkerson, claims that experience itself is ideological, but this does not mean that experience cannot provide evidence; instead, it can still be used to understand “processes of identity formation and distortion,” but not as a reliable evidence of understanding identity (Wilkerson 271).
[4] Actually, Wilkerson is using postmodernist logic to argue against postmodernist thoery. According to him, firstly, if Fuss means, which we think she does, that all experience is an ideological production, she owes us an explanation of how we get such knowledge, because our knowledge of the world “must come from some source.” If the knowledge comes from experience, and experience is ideological, knowledge then is ideological. Thus we can come to a conclusion that everything is ideological, but when everything is ideological, we will not be able to distinguish ideology as ideology. To make his argument invulnerable, Wilkerson further assumes that there may be a possibility that Fuss means that on
[5] Scott focuses on analyzing the discursive characteristic of experience and identity. She also claims that the meaning of experience is not fixed. However, “treating the emergence of a new identity as a discursive event is not to introduce a new form of linguistic determinism, nor to deprive subjects of agency.” She points out that “subjects do have agency,” but this “agency is created through situations and statuses”, meaning the agency is ideological, too (Scott 792-93). She does not discuss the relationship between experience and knowledge which Wilkerson questions. Wilkerson is not evaluating what Scott is claiming, instead, he is questioning how Scott has got such knowledge which is discursive practices that produce experience and identity. So the later evaluation is basically his argument against his own hypothetic possible answer to his question. He points out that Scott’s knowledge of discursive practices must come from some source. If it is from experience, it will go back to the point that experience is the starting point of knowledge, which is certainly unacceptable to postmodernism; if it comes from some nonexperiential source, either innate (which is refused by postmodernism) or learned (meaning knowledge comes from a third party apart from experience and innate capacity), according to Wilkerson, it comes from “an inference to the best explanation of the source of my knowledge” (273). But such a hypothesis makes it impossible to test the reliability of the understanding of such a source. Wilkerson’s explanation is that if knowledge comes from an inference of the best understanding of the source of my experience, I could not verify the credibility of my understanding, because I could not use my experience to test it since experience is mediated. Apparently, such an explanation falls into an either-or fallacy: either my understanding can be tested by experience, or it cannot be tested at all; it is inexplicable.
[6] Wilkerson stresses that on the on
[7] Here, we should pay attention to a crucial difference between Wilkerson’s “coming out” and Cartesian and Freudian understanding of on
评论