Amia Srinivasan: preference

Transcript context

…Let me ask you a longer question. This is about your work. I’m going to start by reading two quotations from you. The first is, and I quote, “One thing history might show us is that it is the prophets, and not the mere pragmatists, who are the most powerful world makers.” Here’s the other quote: “One might hope to take a similar attitude about philosophy in general. Its job, we might think, is not to get the world right, but rather to get ourselves right.” Those two passages from your work really struck me. Let me continue. If I think about everything you’ve done — your interest in the genealogical fallacy; what seems to be a broader interest in the biographical origins of ideas, as evidenced by your love for Dan Chiasson’s poetry book; or your interest in our own mental states not being transparently known to us; your new book called The Right to Sex — what’s your best account of the bigger picture of how all that fits together? Is it you as prophet and world maker, and these are different parts of the bigger picture? Just tell me. Let it make sense for me because I see there’s something there, and you haven’t spelled it out yet. You get the question? Yes, I’m neither a prophet nor a world maker. I was really hoping you were going to tell me, because that’s where it felt like this was leading up, was like a grand theory of how these things are united. I share with you the feeling that there is something that unites these different parts of my work, and not just the trivial fact that they’re all produced by me. I don’t think I have a great account of what that is. I think — and this speaks in part to one of my preoccupations which you identified, which is the nontransparency of ourselves to ourselves, the extent to which we cannot know ourselves. In some cases, I think that can lead to what I’ve called a tragic worldview, but it also implies the necessity of social relations for forms of self-understanding. That’s why I was hoping you were going to give me the answer to how this all links up. But maybe I can point to a couple of themes that I think speak across the more epistemological parts of my work and more feminist parts, and you can tell me if any of this rings any bells. I have this preoccupation — this is what my dissertation was on — with the limits of self-knowledge. Which is not to say that we never know ourselves, but that this kind of, what’s called Cartesian picture — although it’s unfairly attributed to Descartes — Cartesian picture on which our minds are this kind of theater that’s totally knowable, which operates as a kind of compensation for the potential unknowability of the external world . . . I think that’s a bad picture of the mind, not for the reasons Freud says. I think those reasons are right, but those weren’t the reasons I gave. I gave a more technical argument in epistemology. Once one has that picture, for a reason I won’t totally go into here, it implies that agents can do as best they can, by their own lights, and still get things very wrong, whatever the normative system is. No matter how much you try to index normative truths to how things seem from the internal perspective, it’s still going to be the case that our normative performance is hostage to these external forces. It gives you this kind of tragic worldview, where how we do in the world depends radically on where we find ourselves in the world, how we’re positioned with relation to the world. I think that same spirit of tragedy is built into my feminist outlook. You called me a utopian. I think, in some sense, that’s right, but I also have a view on which there’s really no progress without regress. For example, take decriminalization of sex work. I told you I’m adamantly in favor of it, but I think there’s an interesting question about whether decriminalizing sex work would have the hoped-for utopian effect of transforming the basic relations, the wage relation, the relation women have to work, would allow sex workers to refuse sex work. er decriminalizing sex work would have the hoped-for utopian effect of transforming the basic relations, the wage relation, the relation women have to work, would allow sex workers to refuse sex work. Whether decriminalization has this kind of transformative ability, or whether all it would do would be to make sex workers better off as workers, but reinscribe sex work into a capitalist order — that might be tragically true, but we should nonetheless do it. Or take the mass entry of women into the workforce, and the way in which that, on one hand, has obvious benefits for women, and on the other hand, contributes to the demise of the family wage and entraps lots of women in forms of work that are alienating and atomizing. In particular, and this is something that Black feminists warned against when middle-class white feminists were arguing for mass entry into the workforce, Black feminists were arguing for their right to stay at home and to actually be the beneficiaries of a family wage, which they had never been. I suppose there’s that kind of tragic worldview that maybe crosses over from epistemology into feminism. There’s also the interest in genealogy as a method, and world-making as a method, which I have a kind of epistemological interest in. But then, I’m also drawn to the history of feminist thought because I think of lots of the theorists in the feminist tradition as being those kinds of prophets and world makers, trying to do something where they were engaged in forms of conceptual innovation, which were supposed to actually restructure materiality in some sense. I think when, for example, prostitutes started calling sex work “work,” calling it “sex work,” they weren’t simply trying to give a new name to something. They were trying to do something, reorient our relationship to this practice, and have lots of downstream material facts in how we relate to that practice. The history of feminism is full of these attempts at prophecy and world-making. That’s another thing.…

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