![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
So we've been reading Three Guineas in my Gender & War class, and if you haven't read it, you certainly should. It's short; it's Virginia discussing many of the same elements of power, money, and gender that emerge first in Room of One's Own (1926, I believe), only in a darker, less optimistic sort of way and with particular emphasis on war and fascism (since now it's 1938). The following is therefore a handful of un- or semi-connected thoughts that occurred to me during class -- you know how discussions are, they move so fast and so far afield that something terribly interesting can become irrelevant five minutes later, as you've all gone on to greener pastures by then -- on patriotism, Aristotle, Ireland, strippers, and human sacrifice. (I should put all those things in my lj interests. That would attract an interesting clientele.)
Also, I'm gearing up to write a long essay for a book that the Pagan Student Association here at UGA is preparing to publish; they asked me to do "something earthy," given that I'm one of the few active PSA members whose perspective is strongly goddess-religion oriented rather than Western Mystical Tradition oriented, and I guess they read that as "earthy" (although I'm about as much an ecofeminist as someone who can't be assed to recycle her Diet Pepsi cans can be). Anyway, I said, what the hell, I might write something about Celtic sovereignty goddesses, how would that be? And they said, great, we're writing that down! By which I suppose they meant, consider yourself committed, wench. So I'll be putting that together over the next few weeks, and you may see bits of it, completed and/or discarded, appear in this journal somewhere. Like some of this, for example.
I always enjoy that game you play with etymology, where z comes from y which comes from x which comes from w, so therefore z is w, dammit! I say this with a certain amount of snarkiness, but I mean it both ironically and un-ironically: z isn't w, it's z, because if it were w we would call it w. The reason we abandon one form of language, be it a dead one a la Latin or PIE, or a sort of vestigial one like Old High German or Old French, for the language we currently speak is that culture is embodied and embedded in language. Language changes because it isn't anything more than a symbol-set for our thoughts, and our *thoughts* change, requiring different symbols (this flows backwards, too: our thoughts change because our language has changed -- don't chicken & egg this to death; it's a process, it's all going on at the same time). However, like most change, this kind of change is wrapped around a kind of core of continuity and conservatism, so etymology actually is interesting. Z isn't w, but there's a connective thread, and I actually with all due seriousness enjoy plucking at those threads.
So Virginia makes a certain amount of Big Deal out of the etymology of "patriotism," which probably you don't have to be a Latin scholar to deconstruct. It's related to "pater," meaning father -- the source of some of our favorite words like "patrimony" and "patriarchy," and in some languages the word for nation or homeland itself (French "patrie"). And that is interesting, and it is relevant: the idea of owing one's loyalty to some kind of abstract expression of "nation" or "homeland" or "our people" comes down to us from a vv old concept of the kin-grouping, the extended family which takes its identity and its coherence from a specific kind of top-down leadership. We're all in this together because we trace our very existence in common from our mighty ancestors who go back to the dawn of civilized time, down to the current keeper/preserver/embodiment of that authority, This One Guy, who is genetically and/or ritually our dad (interestingly, Indo-European languages often contain quite distinct words for "dad, my father" and for "This One Guy, Our Father" -- for familial vs. institutional fatherhood -- which means that the job of fathering has been considered both public and private for a very long time in a way that has no female equivalent: your mom is always *your mom,* that woman who actually did give birth to you -- I often toss around what that might mean). Therefore, in some very significant sense, we can see the state of "being a patriot" as intimately linked to this idea of "being led by one's faith in and loyalty to a top-down system of leadership expressed through the will and personal power of an individual or, at most, a tiny minority of Leaders." Obviously we've all seen this in play: those Americans who are most wedded to the sense of themselves as "American patriots" are the most invested in the idea that, as that political philosopher Britney Spears tells us, we ought to follow the president because he's the president and that's the whole point of him and of us. Those little black W stickers always fascinate me -- you know, the ones that say "W: The President," because they express without coming out and expressing it this whole worldview where that's, well, a relevant statement in some kind of really intense way. I mean, I think he's the president, too; clearly on one level it's a factual statement, and who could argue with it? But equally clearly, it's also this secondary statement of meaning, and we're meant to mentally fill in with some kind of "therefore." W is the president, therefore...we'll do whatever he says? therefore...he must be the right man for the job? therefore...those of us who voted for him are winners by association, and y'all are losers, so suck it? I hate to speak for other people, so I won't take a guess. But I'm just saying, patriotism as a concept does seem to bear more than a passing resemblance to the idea that the leader(s) of one's nation have some kind of symbolic meaning or importance that outstrips the simple fact of their occupancy of their office(s).
Virginia brings all this up, although of course she's more interested in Hitler and Mussolini, and less interested in bumper stickers, but that's the gist of it. Her solution is: well, z is effectively w, and to reject w, x,y, and z have to go on the chopping block, too. As she opposes that kind of top-down form of control -- the concept of the Powerful Father around whom we will all gather, the Pater -- everything else is going too: patriarchy goes, which is the devolution of Pater wherein we reenact the governmental model endlessly, every individual man holding the office of Pater over his own little feifdom of women, children, and noncitizens. Patrie and patriotism also go, hence the rather famous quote about being without any nation because she is a woman. A woman opposed to a cosmology where the Pater is at the center of human life and civilization (and superhuman life as well, once you extend upward as well as downward to a celestial mega-Pater) must, on the fruit-of-the-poisonous-tree theory, refuse to claim a homeland.
This is kind of exciting and inspirational, I think, when you first read it. I mean, who doesn't like the idea of being the champion of all of humanity, as opposed to those Not In My Backyard provincialists over there who selfishly ignore the big picture? Virginia's "society of outsiders" has a lot of poetic appeal -- Joss Whedon is particularly adept at deploying our love of having expatriate or outsider status to claim as our own, bless his heart.
My problem with it is Aristotle. Well, not Aristotle himself so much as that system of Aristotelian logic. You know the one, the cave one? There's a Real World, and it is intangible/mental/spiritual/conceptual. There is the Perceived World, and it is an expression of the first, but devolved or secondary in some way -- a shadow on the wall. It isn't quite...right. I mean, it's okay, it's certainly necessary, and the wise man should study and understand it, but when push comes to shove, your experiences in the Perceived World can confuse and deceive you, unlike your experiences with the Real World, which are wholly true and wholly good. Oh, also, the Real World? It's everywhere all the time -- meaning it's nowhere none of the time, too, in the sense of not occupying a *place* or a *time* unto itself. Ergo, things that do have specific boundaries within space and time are not...quite...right. Shadows on the wall.
This includes you.
Do you see where I'm going with this? To idealize a state of being where we are unboundaried, uncontained by the specificity of a self, where we have no location but not-there and no heritage but the rejection of our (unenlightened, savage, barbarous, pagan) past -- where we are unmoored and without a homeland and a history -- what the hell are we romanticizing, here? Nonbeing? To say we're global citizens, or perpetual outsiders, is a negative definition by its very nature: we are sloughing off things and replacing them with ideas -- The World, The Margins, Otherness. There isn't a World in any very useful sense; it's bigger than I can conceptualize, and I'm betting it's bigger than you can, too, which means in our heads it basically doesn't exist, particularly when you start factoring in the time dimensions, too. There's certainly nobody who is an Other, unless you first accept that someone else is a Someone against whom we can or should legitimately define ourselves. Otherness itself is a time-contingent and culture-contingent experience, and it comes out of accepting at least the reality of, if not the legitimacy of, someone else's self-definition as non-Other. So if you're going to go to the trouble of being as fantastically, beautifully radical as Virginia Woolf is, why buy into the idea that Otherness/outsiderness is necessary or desirable? To me, that seems like the ultimate concession to the Pater: that he is correct in assuming his primacy and his right to extend a portion of that primacy to those he feels resemble him most closely, while pressing everyone else out into various degrees of orbit on the boundaries.
The way I see it, I'm from here, too. This is my space and my lifespan, my body and my mind, my location within the great order of things. Where the hell am I going to go? I could declare myself an outsider, but I would still be occupying my space. I'd be exactly in the center of *that,* no matter what. You can't, in some very real and tangible way, get to the Outside. You can't find it. The center is, as I believe a number of folk proverbs and riddles and whatnot tell us, wherever you're standing. It seems to me like if there's a Big Lie going on, that's it exactly. The lie is that there's such a thing as a "marginal" person, and that we can lose a few (dozen, thousand, billion) of those, and everything's cool as long as the Pater and his inner cadre survive, because they're the people of significance. Well, no. Sorry, no. There are no marginal person because there's no margin; there are no Others because there's no One. That we've been led to believe there are such things is not only not true, it's clearly not true, just like there's clearly no such thing as "left." Whose left? "Center" and "margin," "inside" and "outside" are obviously terms of relative position (just thought you might be ready for a fic break, there). Therefore the understanding of any one person or set or entity or whatever who exists permanently and from all positions at the center of everything is nonsensical. The only thing at the center of everything is, well, Centerness. Which is why Centerness is so very, very sacred and fascinating, and also moveable and strange and weird, like everything sacred and fascinating. Every town and kingdom and family and whatever can have its own world tree/omphalos/sacred flame/whatever expresses Centerness in that cultural vocabulary, because Centerness exists everywhere all at once. What counts is that this is *our* Centerness. To take away a rival group's symbol of that is to symbolically and energetically uncreate them -- to reject your own experience of Centerness is to uncreate yourself, and I'm not super keen to do that. (There's an interesting fan tangent to go on here, re: Joss once again, wherein the Buffyverse plays with the concepts of a Pater-centered universe, where an heroic figure, Buffy or Angel, occupys the central spot, and Firefly subverts that somewhat by creating that revolving engine in the belly of Serenity as the Center, which all the characters measure themselves as close-to or far-from, departing-from or invited-toward -- this is why the desecration of Serenity in the movie is a hugely fucking symbolic gesture meant to incite fear and discomfort, while we can destroy, say, the Sunnydale High library or the Hyperion Hotel and feel kind of nostalgic about it, but not much more.)
In short and stripped of a lot of my weird, quasi-mystical language, there's a lot of feminist scholarship post-Virginia Woolf about the dangers of generalizing categories like "the world" or "human nature" or "woman," and the importance of speaking in very intimate, specific terms about the lived reality of actual people, whose speech and identity has inherent meaning not dependent on its relationship to the conceptual ideal. The shadows on the wall are not only not unreal, but more real than anything else, because Aristotle was completely wrong and a dink besides.
So! I've dispatched the Pater (hopefully y'all won't miss him much), but I'm continuing to insist that we are at and from some (specific) *where.* Virginia's got a point: our language is not well-constructed to express our relationship to where-we-are-at/from without calling up that which we can't put down (you suck!) This is the source of my fascination with the idea of *sovereignty.*
The game goes a little like this: sovereignty comes from the Anglo-French sovereynete which comes from the Old French souverainete which comes, long story short, from the Latin superanus (slashers, I'm going to ask you to show great restraint, here, please, as you all know that puns are the lowest form of humor), meaning "principal, most important, superior, sublime," (super=over). In other words, that which is sovereign or holds sovereignty is the "But Most Importantly" in any given list of things. Sure, somebody's going to come along and be all post-modernist with me and argue that it's equally corrupt to argue that there is a "most" or a "best" or a "superior" in general, and that I should think more collectively, in terms of systems and connections and processes. And that's not wrong, really. I don't have any terribly good argument with that, except...doesn't it seem like a good deal to have a Prime Good? Otherwise, aren't you endlessly mired (like liberals unfortunately find themselves so often) in yes, but yes, but and all these excellent things and thoughts and people and experiences, with no way to sort them into any order at all? Of course, one could say, life is messy, suck it up! Embrace chaos! But...can you live like that? Can we, with out little pattern-detecting, pattern-inventing brains, live at that speed, or do our heads just explode at some point? Clearly I'm pushing you toward "no" and "the latter." It seems to me like if you don't at some point find a way to come down to brass tacks and say, "This, above everything else" and "Here's the thing that really matters" and "But most importantly," you will forever be mapless, and we as a species don't function well without maps. Here's where my radical imagination fails, I suppose. The map is not the territory, but I'm not so sure we're ready to say it's therefore expendable.
All right, sovereignty implies/evokes the idea that there is an over-and-above, what the philosophers call the Prime Good, what used to be called Truth. It is not in itself derived from a social function or a personage, like the Pater business; it's derived from, well, relative position again. This is over -- over what? Over me. It shelters me, expands over me, I locate myself beneath it and implicitly within its (under its) protection. It's my Superthing. The word in Irish is flaith, and if you're a reader of mythology and whatnot, that's where you've likely heard it: those Irish Sovereignty Goddesses. Flaith is the word being translated there, and it's a great word. We have a cousin-word to it in English, and that word is "valiant." Ready? FROM the Anglo-French valliant (stalwart, brave), from the Old French verb valoir (to be worthy, to be strong), from the Latin valere (to be strong, to be worth something, to have power or ability, to be well), from the proto-Indo-European base *wal- (to be strong). *Wal- gets us the Old English wealdan (to rule), Old High German walt and wald (powerful -- look for this one in lots of German-derived personal names, including my own last name, btw), Old Norse valdr (ruler), Lithuanian valdyti (to have power), Old Celtic *walos- (ruler), Welsh gallu (to be able), and of course the Old Irish flaith (dominion, sovereignty).
So here's this word, applied in a number of ancient and modern contexts within Irish to a variety of goddesses whose purpose was to bestow the right to hold kingship/dominion/sovereignty -- that is, goddesses whose major significance was political -- that is, having to do with the distribution of power. Sometimes she's named "Flaith" as a proper name, while other times she's just identified as the keeper or bestower of flaith. The range of words we can use here are not only power and rulership, but also well-being, strength, value (same root, did I mention that one?), valor, worth. It's basically "okayness" on the grandest possible scale. It means someone or something who is significant and capable and fit for leadership -- and in a democracy, that's -- hey! Everybody! The set of all people who are grown up and in good standing and of sound mind -- all of us. By very definition, you can only have so many Paters: someone has to be everybody else. The idea behind sovereignty/flaith may have been traditionally understood as belonging foremost and more so to specific kings/leaders/rulers/Paters, but at its root we're just talking about being strong and brave and okay, being whole and worthy. There's no earthly reason we couldn't strive to make everybody those things. There's no reason anybody has to be, no pun intended, un-*wal (it really is just a pun: well comes from *wel, which is totally not the same word. Trust me.)
Was this remotely related to Virginia Woolf anymore? Remotely, maybe. I'm still talking about power, and who has it and who should be expected to submit to it -- and about this idea of being inside vs. outside, of having vs. not-having. Three Guineas is a lot about that stuff? Yeah, that was the connection. Only Virginia Woolf is saying, "Since the inside/outside system is corrupt, let's be radically resistant and stay outside where they tell us we're not supposed to be" and I'm saying "Since the inside/outside system is corrupt, let's be radically resistant and say that those words don't mean what they tell us they mean."
Also, I never got to the stippers or human sacrifice. Well, the stripper discussion was less interesting than you might think, and maybe human sacrifice deserves its own entry at some point. Yeah, that's it.
Also, I'm gearing up to write a long essay for a book that the Pagan Student Association here at UGA is preparing to publish; they asked me to do "something earthy," given that I'm one of the few active PSA members whose perspective is strongly goddess-religion oriented rather than Western Mystical Tradition oriented, and I guess they read that as "earthy" (although I'm about as much an ecofeminist as someone who can't be assed to recycle her Diet Pepsi cans can be). Anyway, I said, what the hell, I might write something about Celtic sovereignty goddesses, how would that be? And they said, great, we're writing that down! By which I suppose they meant, consider yourself committed, wench. So I'll be putting that together over the next few weeks, and you may see bits of it, completed and/or discarded, appear in this journal somewhere. Like some of this, for example.
I always enjoy that game you play with etymology, where z comes from y which comes from x which comes from w, so therefore z is w, dammit! I say this with a certain amount of snarkiness, but I mean it both ironically and un-ironically: z isn't w, it's z, because if it were w we would call it w. The reason we abandon one form of language, be it a dead one a la Latin or PIE, or a sort of vestigial one like Old High German or Old French, for the language we currently speak is that culture is embodied and embedded in language. Language changes because it isn't anything more than a symbol-set for our thoughts, and our *thoughts* change, requiring different symbols (this flows backwards, too: our thoughts change because our language has changed -- don't chicken & egg this to death; it's a process, it's all going on at the same time). However, like most change, this kind of change is wrapped around a kind of core of continuity and conservatism, so etymology actually is interesting. Z isn't w, but there's a connective thread, and I actually with all due seriousness enjoy plucking at those threads.
So Virginia makes a certain amount of Big Deal out of the etymology of "patriotism," which probably you don't have to be a Latin scholar to deconstruct. It's related to "pater," meaning father -- the source of some of our favorite words like "patrimony" and "patriarchy," and in some languages the word for nation or homeland itself (French "patrie"). And that is interesting, and it is relevant: the idea of owing one's loyalty to some kind of abstract expression of "nation" or "homeland" or "our people" comes down to us from a vv old concept of the kin-grouping, the extended family which takes its identity and its coherence from a specific kind of top-down leadership. We're all in this together because we trace our very existence in common from our mighty ancestors who go back to the dawn of civilized time, down to the current keeper/preserver/embodiment of that authority, This One Guy, who is genetically and/or ritually our dad (interestingly, Indo-European languages often contain quite distinct words for "dad, my father" and for "This One Guy, Our Father" -- for familial vs. institutional fatherhood -- which means that the job of fathering has been considered both public and private for a very long time in a way that has no female equivalent: your mom is always *your mom,* that woman who actually did give birth to you -- I often toss around what that might mean). Therefore, in some very significant sense, we can see the state of "being a patriot" as intimately linked to this idea of "being led by one's faith in and loyalty to a top-down system of leadership expressed through the will and personal power of an individual or, at most, a tiny minority of Leaders." Obviously we've all seen this in play: those Americans who are most wedded to the sense of themselves as "American patriots" are the most invested in the idea that, as that political philosopher Britney Spears tells us, we ought to follow the president because he's the president and that's the whole point of him and of us. Those little black W stickers always fascinate me -- you know, the ones that say "W: The President," because they express without coming out and expressing it this whole worldview where that's, well, a relevant statement in some kind of really intense way. I mean, I think he's the president, too; clearly on one level it's a factual statement, and who could argue with it? But equally clearly, it's also this secondary statement of meaning, and we're meant to mentally fill in with some kind of "therefore." W is the president, therefore...we'll do whatever he says? therefore...he must be the right man for the job? therefore...those of us who voted for him are winners by association, and y'all are losers, so suck it? I hate to speak for other people, so I won't take a guess. But I'm just saying, patriotism as a concept does seem to bear more than a passing resemblance to the idea that the leader(s) of one's nation have some kind of symbolic meaning or importance that outstrips the simple fact of their occupancy of their office(s).
Virginia brings all this up, although of course she's more interested in Hitler and Mussolini, and less interested in bumper stickers, but that's the gist of it. Her solution is: well, z is effectively w, and to reject w, x,y, and z have to go on the chopping block, too. As she opposes that kind of top-down form of control -- the concept of the Powerful Father around whom we will all gather, the Pater -- everything else is going too: patriarchy goes, which is the devolution of Pater wherein we reenact the governmental model endlessly, every individual man holding the office of Pater over his own little feifdom of women, children, and noncitizens. Patrie and patriotism also go, hence the rather famous quote about being without any nation because she is a woman. A woman opposed to a cosmology where the Pater is at the center of human life and civilization (and superhuman life as well, once you extend upward as well as downward to a celestial mega-Pater) must, on the fruit-of-the-poisonous-tree theory, refuse to claim a homeland.
This is kind of exciting and inspirational, I think, when you first read it. I mean, who doesn't like the idea of being the champion of all of humanity, as opposed to those Not In My Backyard provincialists over there who selfishly ignore the big picture? Virginia's "society of outsiders" has a lot of poetic appeal -- Joss Whedon is particularly adept at deploying our love of having expatriate or outsider status to claim as our own, bless his heart.
My problem with it is Aristotle. Well, not Aristotle himself so much as that system of Aristotelian logic. You know the one, the cave one? There's a Real World, and it is intangible/mental/spiritual/conceptual. There is the Perceived World, and it is an expression of the first, but devolved or secondary in some way -- a shadow on the wall. It isn't quite...right. I mean, it's okay, it's certainly necessary, and the wise man should study and understand it, but when push comes to shove, your experiences in the Perceived World can confuse and deceive you, unlike your experiences with the Real World, which are wholly true and wholly good. Oh, also, the Real World? It's everywhere all the time -- meaning it's nowhere none of the time, too, in the sense of not occupying a *place* or a *time* unto itself. Ergo, things that do have specific boundaries within space and time are not...quite...right. Shadows on the wall.
This includes you.
Do you see where I'm going with this? To idealize a state of being where we are unboundaried, uncontained by the specificity of a self, where we have no location but not-there and no heritage but the rejection of our (unenlightened, savage, barbarous, pagan) past -- where we are unmoored and without a homeland and a history -- what the hell are we romanticizing, here? Nonbeing? To say we're global citizens, or perpetual outsiders, is a negative definition by its very nature: we are sloughing off things and replacing them with ideas -- The World, The Margins, Otherness. There isn't a World in any very useful sense; it's bigger than I can conceptualize, and I'm betting it's bigger than you can, too, which means in our heads it basically doesn't exist, particularly when you start factoring in the time dimensions, too. There's certainly nobody who is an Other, unless you first accept that someone else is a Someone against whom we can or should legitimately define ourselves. Otherness itself is a time-contingent and culture-contingent experience, and it comes out of accepting at least the reality of, if not the legitimacy of, someone else's self-definition as non-Other. So if you're going to go to the trouble of being as fantastically, beautifully radical as Virginia Woolf is, why buy into the idea that Otherness/outsiderness is necessary or desirable? To me, that seems like the ultimate concession to the Pater: that he is correct in assuming his primacy and his right to extend a portion of that primacy to those he feels resemble him most closely, while pressing everyone else out into various degrees of orbit on the boundaries.
The way I see it, I'm from here, too. This is my space and my lifespan, my body and my mind, my location within the great order of things. Where the hell am I going to go? I could declare myself an outsider, but I would still be occupying my space. I'd be exactly in the center of *that,* no matter what. You can't, in some very real and tangible way, get to the Outside. You can't find it. The center is, as I believe a number of folk proverbs and riddles and whatnot tell us, wherever you're standing. It seems to me like if there's a Big Lie going on, that's it exactly. The lie is that there's such a thing as a "marginal" person, and that we can lose a few (dozen, thousand, billion) of those, and everything's cool as long as the Pater and his inner cadre survive, because they're the people of significance. Well, no. Sorry, no. There are no marginal person because there's no margin; there are no Others because there's no One. That we've been led to believe there are such things is not only not true, it's clearly not true, just like there's clearly no such thing as "left." Whose left? "Center" and "margin," "inside" and "outside" are obviously terms of relative position (just thought you might be ready for a fic break, there). Therefore the understanding of any one person or set or entity or whatever who exists permanently and from all positions at the center of everything is nonsensical. The only thing at the center of everything is, well, Centerness. Which is why Centerness is so very, very sacred and fascinating, and also moveable and strange and weird, like everything sacred and fascinating. Every town and kingdom and family and whatever can have its own world tree/omphalos/sacred flame/whatever expresses Centerness in that cultural vocabulary, because Centerness exists everywhere all at once. What counts is that this is *our* Centerness. To take away a rival group's symbol of that is to symbolically and energetically uncreate them -- to reject your own experience of Centerness is to uncreate yourself, and I'm not super keen to do that. (There's an interesting fan tangent to go on here, re: Joss once again, wherein the Buffyverse plays with the concepts of a Pater-centered universe, where an heroic figure, Buffy or Angel, occupys the central spot, and Firefly subverts that somewhat by creating that revolving engine in the belly of Serenity as the Center, which all the characters measure themselves as close-to or far-from, departing-from or invited-toward -- this is why the desecration of Serenity in the movie is a hugely fucking symbolic gesture meant to incite fear and discomfort, while we can destroy, say, the Sunnydale High library or the Hyperion Hotel and feel kind of nostalgic about it, but not much more.)
In short and stripped of a lot of my weird, quasi-mystical language, there's a lot of feminist scholarship post-Virginia Woolf about the dangers of generalizing categories like "the world" or "human nature" or "woman," and the importance of speaking in very intimate, specific terms about the lived reality of actual people, whose speech and identity has inherent meaning not dependent on its relationship to the conceptual ideal. The shadows on the wall are not only not unreal, but more real than anything else, because Aristotle was completely wrong and a dink besides.
So! I've dispatched the Pater (hopefully y'all won't miss him much), but I'm continuing to insist that we are at and from some (specific) *where.* Virginia's got a point: our language is not well-constructed to express our relationship to where-we-are-at/from without calling up that which we can't put down (you suck!) This is the source of my fascination with the idea of *sovereignty.*
The game goes a little like this: sovereignty comes from the Anglo-French sovereynete which comes from the Old French souverainete which comes, long story short, from the Latin superanus (slashers, I'm going to ask you to show great restraint, here, please, as you all know that puns are the lowest form of humor), meaning "principal, most important, superior, sublime," (super=over). In other words, that which is sovereign or holds sovereignty is the "But Most Importantly" in any given list of things. Sure, somebody's going to come along and be all post-modernist with me and argue that it's equally corrupt to argue that there is a "most" or a "best" or a "superior" in general, and that I should think more collectively, in terms of systems and connections and processes. And that's not wrong, really. I don't have any terribly good argument with that, except...doesn't it seem like a good deal to have a Prime Good? Otherwise, aren't you endlessly mired (like liberals unfortunately find themselves so often) in yes, but yes, but and all these excellent things and thoughts and people and experiences, with no way to sort them into any order at all? Of course, one could say, life is messy, suck it up! Embrace chaos! But...can you live like that? Can we, with out little pattern-detecting, pattern-inventing brains, live at that speed, or do our heads just explode at some point? Clearly I'm pushing you toward "no" and "the latter." It seems to me like if you don't at some point find a way to come down to brass tacks and say, "This, above everything else" and "Here's the thing that really matters" and "But most importantly," you will forever be mapless, and we as a species don't function well without maps. Here's where my radical imagination fails, I suppose. The map is not the territory, but I'm not so sure we're ready to say it's therefore expendable.
All right, sovereignty implies/evokes the idea that there is an over-and-above, what the philosophers call the Prime Good, what used to be called Truth. It is not in itself derived from a social function or a personage, like the Pater business; it's derived from, well, relative position again. This is over -- over what? Over me. It shelters me, expands over me, I locate myself beneath it and implicitly within its (under its) protection. It's my Superthing. The word in Irish is flaith, and if you're a reader of mythology and whatnot, that's where you've likely heard it: those Irish Sovereignty Goddesses. Flaith is the word being translated there, and it's a great word. We have a cousin-word to it in English, and that word is "valiant." Ready? FROM the Anglo-French valliant (stalwart, brave), from the Old French verb valoir (to be worthy, to be strong), from the Latin valere (to be strong, to be worth something, to have power or ability, to be well), from the proto-Indo-European base *wal- (to be strong). *Wal- gets us the Old English wealdan (to rule), Old High German walt and wald (powerful -- look for this one in lots of German-derived personal names, including my own last name, btw), Old Norse valdr (ruler), Lithuanian valdyti (to have power), Old Celtic *walos- (ruler), Welsh gallu (to be able), and of course the Old Irish flaith (dominion, sovereignty).
So here's this word, applied in a number of ancient and modern contexts within Irish to a variety of goddesses whose purpose was to bestow the right to hold kingship/dominion/sovereignty -- that is, goddesses whose major significance was political -- that is, having to do with the distribution of power. Sometimes she's named "Flaith" as a proper name, while other times she's just identified as the keeper or bestower of flaith. The range of words we can use here are not only power and rulership, but also well-being, strength, value (same root, did I mention that one?), valor, worth. It's basically "okayness" on the grandest possible scale. It means someone or something who is significant and capable and fit for leadership -- and in a democracy, that's -- hey! Everybody! The set of all people who are grown up and in good standing and of sound mind -- all of us. By very definition, you can only have so many Paters: someone has to be everybody else. The idea behind sovereignty/flaith may have been traditionally understood as belonging foremost and more so to specific kings/leaders/rulers/Paters, but at its root we're just talking about being strong and brave and okay, being whole and worthy. There's no earthly reason we couldn't strive to make everybody those things. There's no reason anybody has to be, no pun intended, un-*wal (it really is just a pun: well comes from *wel, which is totally not the same word. Trust me.)
Was this remotely related to Virginia Woolf anymore? Remotely, maybe. I'm still talking about power, and who has it and who should be expected to submit to it -- and about this idea of being inside vs. outside, of having vs. not-having. Three Guineas is a lot about that stuff? Yeah, that was the connection. Only Virginia Woolf is saying, "Since the inside/outside system is corrupt, let's be radically resistant and stay outside where they tell us we're not supposed to be" and I'm saying "Since the inside/outside system is corrupt, let's be radically resistant and say that those words don't mean what they tell us they mean."
Also, I never got to the stippers or human sacrifice. Well, the stripper discussion was less interesting than you might think, and maybe human sacrifice deserves its own entry at some point. Yeah, that's it.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-10-25 03:44 am (UTC)From:This rocks. A whole lot.
One thing, about this:
your mom is always *your mom,* that woman who actually did give birth to you -- I often toss around what that might mean).
It's 'mother Russia' in the former USSR. In many cultures 'aunt' and 'older sister' and 'grandmother' are terms of respect used beyond blood bonds. A special needs teacher I know earned the title 'aunty' from one of the Turkish families whose kid she taught, for example. I seem to recall that there are more specific examples from anthropology of mom as title rather than specific instance of birth, though I can't remember where/when.
But I'm just saying, patriotism as a concept does seem to bear more than a passing resemblance to the idea that the leader(s) of one's nation have some kind of symbolic meaning or importance that outstrips the simple fact of their occupancy of their office(s).
Interestingly we have a monarchy, and while that kind of patriotism occurs here and there too, it isn't universal. Any admiration I have for the people who make up our royal family is that they do a really demanding job, that they didn't get to choose to do, so well.
I wouldn't say I'm a monarchist on an idealistic basis (genealogy does seem an outdated way of distributing work), but I'm definitely a monarchist on a practical basis: because our royals are (mostly) non-political, and because it's pure chance which persons happen to be them, you can feel nationalistic (i.e. tied to the place/cultury/history of this place) and still wholeheartedly disagree with x or y political point of view or party or individual politician. Separating the locus of patriotic sentiment (and everybody will feel something like that 'yes, this is so cool! this is us!' about something or other at some point, be it effective disaster relief or a sport's match) from the politics of the day is something I value a lot. And I wonder what shape partriotism will take in Dutch society when the monarchy is abolished.Which I fully expect to happen in the next fifty or a hundred years. I wonder if that focus/banner function will default to politicians, which is how it seems to have worked in other countries, or if we will be able to retain that very practical attitude to government as an administrative solution, rather than a liege lord.
Anyway, what I was saying was: not necessarily. With a very practical attitude and healthy distrust of authority-for-the-sake-of-authority it isn't *always* built in.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-28 01:59 pm (UTC)From:(Hi, I'm stalking your jounal a little; you might notice this. *waves*)
(no subject)
From: