by Robin James
In her 2008 article “re-thinking intersectionality,” Jennifer Nash argues that feminist theory’s enthusiastic adoption of intersectionality has been continually undercut by its misuse. Though intersectionality is designed to account for “the simultaneity of race and gender as social processes” (2), Nash argues that “intersectional projects often replicate precisely the approaches that they critique” (6), such as treating black women as “a monolithic entity” (8) or failing to account for the fact that individuals can be both privileged and oppressed at the same time and in the same situation (as is the case with white cis women).
According to Nash, the only times scholars of intersectionality have successfully avoided replicating these problems is when they think with “non-objective and often non-linear theoretical formations” (7) such as poetry. As Nash explains,
While the use of poetry as a mechanism for disrupting logocentrism is a convention of feminist theory…the deployment of poetry as the primary vehicle for evoking the experiences of marginalized subjects suggests a shortcoming in the methodological orientation of intersectional theory. In particular, it suggests that the project has yet to produce a mechanism for systematically articulating, aggregating, or examining the ‘multiple levels of consciousness that form the basis of their study of subjectivity’ (8).
If the problem lies in theory/philosophy’s “methodological orientation,” the solution isn’t just to supplement the standard toolkit of texts, figures, and methods with one or two new ones (e.g., by adding ‘diverse’ philosophers to syllabi), but to understand that these tools have been pointing us in the wrong direction to begin with. The methods we use in philosophy–propositional speech and writing, categorical distinctions, etc.–will tend to reproduce the problems intersectionality was designed to fix because they are working in the wrong register and from the wrong vantage. Nash thinks that poetry points us in a better direction.
What does poetry bring to our attention that philosophy typically doesn’t? It brings our attention to poetics, i.e., aesthetics and the conditions and practices of producing them. It’s not that philosophy doesn’t have a poetics. Like whiteness, which invizibilizes itself as the lack of racial identity or status, philosophy naturalizes or invizibilizes its own poetics as the objective qualities of thought itself, unbiased or unaltered by anything as parochial as poetics. (I mean, think about those cliched, old-fashioned analytic complaints that continental philosophers deigned to have a style or appear ‘literary’ in their writing. And on the other side of the divide, I’ve had reviewers at a continental philosophy journal police my tone as “unscholarly” and too invested in contemporary culture.) Philosophy’s standard poetics point us away from analyzing or thinking about…poetics. This is why people like Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Guattari can appear revolutionary in their claims that philosophical analysis should be attentive to rhythm. (See for example The Gay Science section 268 or A Thousand Plateaus chapter 11.) Even the most conventionally philosophical prose has a rhythm, but the tools we learn in graduate school generally don’t lead us to consider that rhythm as philosophically significant.
Philosophy’s conventional inattention to poetics is a problem for feminist philosophy. And, if you take intersectionality seriously and understand that oppressions are mutually interlocking and mutually articulating systems, this intentional inattention to poetics is also a problem for any philosophical practice committed to social justice. To the extent that philosophy adopts the various poetics traditionally used in the major traditions studied in the Western academy (analytic, continental, pragmatist, etc.), it will be both unable to adequately address intersectionality and complicit in reproducing the problems Crenshaw invented intersectionality to redress–both in our work and in our workplaces. Just as the inclusion of “intersectionality” in feminist theory’s conventional methodological orientations gives lip-service to the idea of it while doubling-down on the things it was designed to critique, the inclusion of underrepresented people and topics in philosophy’s otherwise unchanged methodological orientation(s) isn’t enough. If we take intersectionality’s mandate seriously, our intellectual practices have to stop sounding and feeling “philosophical” (please note the scare quotes).
Attention to how we literally and metaphorically sound is a key feature of the black womanist/feminist philosophical traditions Devonya Havis analyzes in her article titled “Now, How You Sound?” Drawn from “Black Vernacular ancestral discourse” (Havis 288), “now, how you sound” is “a broader question designed to make [one] think beyond the particular action and to consider the larger ethical implications of [one’s] position” (Havis 240). According to Havis, this question demands a kind of philosophical reflection that differs from mainstream philosophical methods in two ways. First, instead of treating ethics as primarily a matter of individual behavior, “it served as a reminder of how [one’s] positions and actions were not only personal but also relational, anchoring [them] within a community” (Havis 240). Here, “sound” is a metaphor for the repercussions (think carefully about how this word works in this context) of one’s actions within a community. Second, and more importantly for my point here, it “employs ancestral discourses, narratives, literature, folk wisdom, music, and other cultural repositories as a basis for knowledge-creation and preservation” (241)–in other words, it appeals to poetics such as “expressions, oral comments, gestures, and attitudes” (238). The question asks us to consider both the repercussions of our actions in our material and social contexts, and how the poetics of our speech and gestures register with others.
Because philosophy’s traditional methodological orientations mute or mask such repercussions and poetics, Havis argues that “if we continually ask ourselves ‘how we sound’ when doing academic philosophy, perhaps we will be able to hear in this alternative philosophical praxis” (240) both philosophy’s own limits and parts of the spectrum of intellectual practices those limits exclude. Even for people in groups whose overrepresentation in philosophy has attuned the discipline’s poetics to their “listening ears,” close and careful attention to the poetics of philosophical practices can give them the critical distance necessary to practice philosophy in ways that sound and feel differently–that is, in ways that don’t reproduce the problems intersectionality was designed to help fix. Havis is explicit about this; arguing that “this Western academic formula for what counts as legitimate philosophy falls apart in the messiness of real-world conditions where many claim simultaneous membership in multiple and often contradictory communities” (238), she, like Nash, claims that the only way to do justice to the spirit of intersectionality is to revise the poetics with which we practice theory or philosophy.
If philosophy’s tools and methods, and the poetics those tools and methods make possible, are unable to accurately address gender and patriarchy, then feminist philosophy is basically an oxymoron. What, then, do feminist scholars do? What tools and methods can we work with? As Ashon Crawley asks “What will knowledge be once it is released from its being enclosed by the logics of the very possibility of universality, abstraction, stilling. We are after a poetics, a practice, that unsettles, disorients, imagines otherwise possibility” (11). Enclosure (in the sense of transforming commons into private property), universality, and the like are poetic practices that have been central to philosophy’s traditional methodological orientation(s). We can find examples of the poetics Crawley calls for by following Havis’s suggestion and reorienting ourselves toward ones designed and use by people who are “members of multiple and often contradictory communities.” These poetics are better for thinking intersectionality and practicing the spirit of its call because that’s how they function in their vernacular contexts.
For example, in her book on mid-20th century African American women blues singers, Angela Davis weaves Frankfurt School aesthetic theory with black feminism to explain how artists like Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith could perform songs that “simultaneous[ly…] confirm and subvert racist and sexist representations of women in love” (164) by “work[ing] with and against the…ideological content” (Davis 163) of their lyrics and the conditions of their production. The main way they did this was with the poetics of their singing–the way they delivered the lyrics altered their otherwise banal and patriarchal meaning. Rihanna’s performance of her single “Love On The Brain” at the 2016 Global Citizen Festival is a clear example of this. Paying attention to her facial expressions, her gestures and bodily comportment, and the tone (not as in pitch but as in affect) of her delivery, it’s easy to tell that she’s calling bullshit on the song’s lyrics, which glorify domestic violence. For example, she frequently gives dead stares that say “you’ve got to be kidding me,” and at 1:06-7 she sings in a high-pitched “nayh-nayh” teasing manner. Here, Rihanna uses the poetics of her vocal performance to stage a feminist intervention into an otherwise disgustingly patriarchal script. It’s an example of what Sara Ahmed calls “rolling eyes = feminist pedagogy.” Here, facial choreography is the medium for theorizing. The poetics of that choreography articulate a specific claim about the context or situation one is in as one rolls one’s eyes. In Rihanna’s performance, her eyerolls communicate her philosophical and political orientation to the song’s lyrical content: she’s not affirming it, but critiquing it, pointing to its flaws.
In his 2005 book Phonographies, Alexander Weheliye emphasizes that this practice of working otherwise, which he calls “thinking sound/sound thinking,” is basically the opposite of the “theoretical frame/cultural case” (202) method that is so so so common in philosophical writing on pop culture. This method subordinates pop culture as particular to case to philosophy’s supposedly universal theoretical purview. Thinking sound/sound thinking uses the poetics of sound both as an “otherwise” practice that Crawley calls for and as a tool for critically engaging the poetics and other content of standard old philosophy.
As Denise Ferreria da Silva explains, this type of “poethical (material and decompositional) rather than critical (formal and analytical) reading of the work…considers artistic practice as a generative locus for engaging in radical reflection on modalities of racial (symbolic) and colonial (juridic) subjugation operating in full force in the global present.” According to da Silva, this method’s attention to the concrete compositional features of works (of art or theory or whatever) allows practitioners to perceive aspects of these works that aren’t determined by or beholden to the philosophical poetics that hold intersectional analyses back. This methodological reorientation shifts attention to the “components of the artwork…its ‘how’ and its ‘what’…signal a path for a kind of reflection that avoids the colonial and racial presuppositions inherent to concepts and formulations presupposed in existing strategies for critical commentary on art.” In other words, the poetics of artworks can offer us models for “otherwise” theoretical or philosophical poetics, poetics that don’t reproduce the white supremacist capitalist patriarchal presuppositions built into philosophy’s traditional methods and methodological orientations. More specifically, da Silva argues that reading and doing traditionally philosophical things through these otherwise artistic poetics, makes it “available for something that can be termed a recoding,” namely, a recoding into a theoretical practice that sounds and feels like something besides “philosophy.”
Working otherwise will require feminist philosophers — and philosophers concerned with social justice generally — to pay serious and sustained attention to poetics. To do this, we will have to change how we train students. One easy way to begin is by reading feminist work in disciplines whose primary focus is this: music theory, art history, film studies, dance, performance studies, science and technology studies, and many others (even coding and data science have poetics!). For example, feminist philosophers often read and cite Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In addition to focusing on Mulvey’s development of the concept of the male gaze, we could also pay attention to her claim that the poetics of narrative cinema are analogous to the poetics of classical liberal contractarianism (briefly: the fourth wall and formal equality before the law are analogous structures or frames). The poetics of narrative cinema are a cartographic key that helps us unlock the poetics of a specific yet deeply influential philosophical tradition. And while there is an abundance of philosophical literature that compellingly critiques this tradition for its gender, race, and class politics, its inattention to philosophical poetics make it susceptible to the same intersectionality-related errors Nash identifies.
There is a strong case made by numerous black feminist thinkers that feminist theory and feminist philosophy cannot be done well without some sort of attention to poetics. Such attention is necessary in both our work and our workplaces. We have to change how it sounds and feels to practice philosophy.
Robin James is Associate Professor of Philosophy at UNC Charlotte and co-editor of The Journal of Popular Music Studies. She is the author of three books, including Resilience & Melancholy and The Sonic Episteme.
