4.0

The discursive formations exemplified by the classic eye-ear case such as dichotomous categorizations, frozen hierarchies, and cyclic reversals lose legitimacy if mind and body are considered as mutually interactive.  Recursivity, especially in its cybernetic manifestations, provides an analogy for that interaction.  It also provides a discursive mechanism that can generate rhetorical moves that do not pit hearing against sight or slight other sensory modalites.

4.0

4.1

Recursivity marks the relation of mind and body:  to know, to be a body that knows, to be a body that knows its knowing.  From successive recursivity, dialectic, the possibility of reasoning, the potential for asking questions, emerges.  The leap from recursivity to dialectic is managed by three premises.  First, the body is a medium.  It is material, tool and repository of repertoire (habit).  Second, sensory modalities are open to transcoding.  Such transcoding is related to powers of abstraction.  Third, nondyadic models of embodied consciousness and text handling best explain conceptual play and discursive practice.  The key in this cursory and condensed precis is, of course, sensory transcoding.  It permits one to model the thinking body by analogy with textual interaction and account for the semiotic intersection of different ways of knowing.

4.1

4.2

Using the analogy between the relation of reading subjects to texts and the relation of thinking bodies to themselves one can profitably reread Ricoeur's notion of appropriation and Ingarden's, of concretization.  With the analogy between a thinking body's relation to itself and a text's relation to a reading subject, the theorizing of text handling becomes less embroiled in sensory bias.  Likewise the excavation of sensory bias in some versions of feminist epistemology aids the exploration of embodied consciousness.  The exercise aims to discover discursive repressions and limitations that impinge on the imagining of thinking, feeling subjects.

4.2

4.3

The names that follow are rarely uttered in the same breath.  Less rarely, they are found in the same library.  Dorothy Smith's cartography of the modes of consciousness is cousin to the phenomenological literary aesthetics of Roman Ingarden.  Susan Bordo and Jane Flax share a common intellectual heritage with the hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur.  He and they draw on psychoanalysis.  He, for his notion of appropriation;  they, in conceptualizing repression of maternal bond and the role of detachment in intellectual activity.  All the thinkers gathered here are golden fodder for critique but they are not entirely made of pale yellow straw.  All slight in some fashion either the body or the mind.  To do one or the other is to neglect the social aspects of technology, perception and reproduction.  Indeed theoretical consideration of this nexus depends upon privileging neither mind nor body.  Furthermore, placing body and mind on par amounts to accepting both mental and bodily experience as social and rational.

4.3

4.4

The genesis of ways of knowing is entangled with intellectual and erotic ways of being.  In some languages, the intellectual and the erotic share the verb "to know".  Often the struggle to disentangle sexuality from biological reproduction has been characterized by the adversaries of feminist positions as the imposition of reason on nature.  This argument also plays a role in the conceptualization of the relation of technology to perception.  This is the case for McLuhan.  Ironically, the same argument, reason dominating nature, inflects certain feminist epistemologies.  In some cases, social reproduction veers deterministic when sexuality is not sufficiently distinguished from biological reproduction.  Such discourse has difficulty articulating homosocial let alone homosexual phenomena.  Investigations are limited to cross- gender interaction.

4.4

4.5

However mere attention to same-sex interactions without a radical requestioning of the centrality of dyads would be no guarantee against the recurrence of dispositional explanations and the spectre of determinism.  Such dichotomizing feminist work seeks "to explain why objectivity as detachment and noninvolvement is the epistemological stance to which men are predisposed" (Arnault 204 n. 7).  The work rests on the construction of a pathologized target.  This is possible because a dichotomous category of participation (involvement and non-involvement) is positioned within a polarized relation of gender and valence: men and women; bad and good.  Truth-values aside, accounts based on the construction of predispositions remain unreflexive.

4.5

4.6

This pattern is not representative of all feminist epistemologies.  Stanley and Wise interrogate the relation between theory and experience within the production of feminist knowledge.  Their epistemology comes out of dialogues within British feminism.  They develop their work partially in response to their own experience of Marxist-feminist currents within British academic feminism.  Perhaps since they do not target an entity called Cartesianism, they avoid adopting dualist formulations.  For them positivism and scientificism are not the sole preserve of men.  They stress differences between women as much as those between men and women.  They refuse to pathologize even the oppressor class.

A feminist developmental theory that can explain neither feminism nor difference between groups of women (and men) except as the product of malfunctioning should be anathema to feminists [...] (Stanley and Wise 1993, 7)

Consequently their epistemology can not bolster moral superiority or nostalgic longing for an integrated body and mind.  In their thinking, theory is an activity.  It is of the domain of practice.  Mind-body relations are constructed out of social interaction.  This primacy of the social ensures that in their discourse mere reversal is never lodged as a fulcrum, never left unquestioned.

4.6

4.7

The ethnomethodological and interactionist-inspired work of Stanley and Wise does not find a place in the typology of feminist epistemologies offered by Lynne Arnault.  All the various thinkers she groups together are said to be concerned with masculine predisposition to "objectivity as detachment and noninvolvement".  Within this common design, Arnault explains that "some feminists make recourse to feminist revisions of "object- relations" theory.  [...] Less psychoanalytically oriented feminists account for the gender specificity of the Cartesian ideal in terms of a post-Marxist theory of labour and its effects upon mental life" (Arnault 204).  Of her examples, Susan Bordo and Jane Flax are users of object relations, Dorothy Smith, a user of labour theories.  These thinkers will draw closer examination.

4.7

4.8

Compared to the work of Stanley and Wise, the feminist theory represented in Arnault's typology suffers.  Stanley and Wise are very sensitive to the power of the telling of stories.  Despite psychoanalysis being a discipline devoted to the interpretation of narratives, Bordo and Flax do not display in the deployment of their tales such self-reflexivity.

4.8