is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.

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what it might mean to be married to a man.

Picking up from were we left off last time... sure, I could end up Married to a Man someday (where "married to a man" is a metaphor for a larger set of constraining norms). Or I could persist in a "friend-based family structure," finding my way through (and by means of) a maze of life-sustaining connections that remain invisible to the naked eye of anyone who experiences normative pressure as a fact about how the world is rather than one possibility among other possibilities of how to live.

It's not that norms are the bad guy. We can't live without them. They help us predict the future with some certainty, and streamline our interactions with others. They express shared ideas about value and convention. And they constrain us--for better and for worse, like I said, sometimes even dictating what we are able to "see" when we look at the world. But norms also only operate when they are repeated. (For an interesting take on this, see Judith Butler's Frames of War.) Here is where resistance enters. In getting themselves repeated norms are rendered fragile, in that repetition is always different. Repetition is always different! When you act according to a norm you might also modify what you are doing, remaking the norm... Making it respond to your life and needs rather than bending your life and needs to suit the norm. No formal action is required to change a norm. Only lots of people acting in such a way that what the norm requires and allows is modified over time.

What if what it meant to be a "man" changed so much that being "married to a man" became a more capacious expression? (How much grief might the world be saved if the normative definition of "man" changed?!) Or: What if choosing to spend a life with anyone or any combination of others, no matter what the formal relation, was treated as a commitment worth honoring?

Along those lines, here's something I wrote four years ago�about how the experience of normative pressure changes over time�that still makes sense to me now.... though it seems I am also in the process of refining/improving my ideas about the operation of norms.

From April 22, 2006:

When you're a rebellious teenager and you say that you are not normal, it's an act of defiance, a way of showing how different you are from all the other snowflakes around. But when you're not normal because you're a 40-year-old unmarried woman with a Ph.D. and a friend-based family structure, it just means that you're not normal.

The difference between the two is, I think, in how one inhabits one's life. The non-normality of youth is exhausting in its need to inhabit its non-normality. One has to dress for it, speak for it, think about it, think through it, be it, ha, make it an ontology. But 40-year-old woman non-normality has already taken care of all that for you. You are who you are, you live your life, hopefully fairly happily, and your attention is drawn to your own non-normality by the outside world, not your inner world. You get reminded that you are not-normal when your friends have to pay double what your non-existent in-laws would have to pay at the campus guest rooms, or when you realize that you won't be included in some social activities in QB because you're unmarried and no one knows what to do with you. You might feel bad about that occasionally, but if you do, it's mostly in a way that regrets how the world gets divided into couples in a certain way. By which I mean not that I do not like couples or that I do not see how lovely it is at times to be in one. It's that the world gets divided into couples in a certain way. Let's call that way: normal.

Normal couples become for each other a self-contained unit. They don't need to socialize outside the unit, or, if they do, their social experiences are oriented around couplehood, with other couples, or doing things couples do. Such couples think it is strange if a single interloper wants to establish a friendship ritual like "TV Night" or "Restaurant Night" or anything else that might tie their social life to something outside the unit. It's not even that I think these self-contained couples have made the wrong choices. It's just that the choices they do make (many times without thinking of them as choices, of course) are precisely what make me not-normal. It's what makes it difficult to be a a 40-year-old unmarried woman with a Ph.D. and a friend-based family structure, separated from that structure. Those normal couples can't see my life at all. If they ever took the time to try to represent it to themselves, they would have no idea what to picture.

Believe me, I've tried to institute some friendship rituals here, and I tried in Amherst as well, and, well, so far it hasn't worked. None of this is to say that I didn't have lots of fun getting to know a few new people in Amherst, or here in QuakerBubble during this first year here. And, to be fair, in Amherst much of my 'failure' had nothing to do with couple-structure, but had to do with illness and grief and other forms of understandable self-absorption. It just saddens me at times that aging people, in or outside of couples, so rarely allow new friendships to lift them even the slightest bit out of their understandable self-absorption.

Levinas writes about transcendence, and that makes everyone think he is talking about religion. But when Levinas uses the word transcendence, he means transcendence of concern for self-only, being lifted out of self-absorption. The fact of other people pulls you out of yourself, and makes you respond to them, which is a form of responsibility for them. We are always responding to others because we are covered with sense organs and are vulnerable to the presence of others and also to our thoughts about them. Sometimes that responsibility can be burdensome, but other times it is precisely what makes life worth living. There is nothing more depressingly self-oppressive than the way in which each one of us so easily can remain self-absorbed even in a world where it is impossible not to be affected by other people. We are oppressive to ourselves when we don't let the needs of others 'oppress' us. Part of Levinas' point is that only a form of thought (or non-thought) that has a really bad definition of freedom would think of owing things to others as 'oppression' rather than 'the human condition.' And yet I'm willing to bet that most of us, when we form questions to ourselves about why we have duties, say something like "how did I ever come to owe anything to anyone?!" By being born, OK? We are asking the wrong questions. We have been taught the wrong things.

Sure, it's nice when we live within fairly stable political communities which allow us to choose what we owe, the commitments by which we would like to be 'oppressed' or, more fittingly, held or moved. But every stable political community is full of the kinds of injustice that result from that very stability, let's say, the tears the civil servant can't see, the unfairness performed by 'formal equality,' etc. Here being not-normal is just the tiniest example of a pain that can't be seen because it is not represented. That is why the 'stable political community' can't be left to weigh only on its own account, because that will always produce injustice. And so you are responsible. But you should be thankful for that. Because only in that way are you freed from the burdensome self-absorption of concern for self-only. Only in that way can you actually be part of a world.

Being freed from self-absorption is why we all want to be in love and in couples anyway, right? To love someone is to care about more than yourself. But the structure of two, while lovely, is inherently unethical, in that it doesn't care a whit for the world. That is part of its grace, that it is protection from the larger world. But that is also its danger. It stands for oblivion of the human condition, that we have to live together, and that we have the power to make other people's lives happier, or less desperate, or more desperate, with our choices.

It's not that this account of how the world works asks you to be a saint giving everything to others. Instead it points out that it is part of the structure of human happiness to be pulled out of concern for self-only. We aren't only about self-preservation. The things we (probably) most admire about the world could not have been built by people first and foremost concerned with self-preservation. But: admitting that we can't be concerned only with ourselves and have a world we desire is the same as admitting that we might owe things we wish we didn't owe. Maybe you think this point doesn't matter because I'm not normal.

Ha.

If you're wondering what it all means, this is as close to a prescription as I can get (and I have my reasons for avoiding giving prescriptions, as if making new norms were the only point here): Instead of asking "how did I ever come to owe anything to anyone?", ask yourself what you have to do with justice, or with forming a world larger than your own life. And know that the answer cannot be "nothing." All your choices end up mattering. Sure it is exhausting and barely possible always to try to think about everything. But if you tend to avoid thinking about such things, at least, on occasion, ask yourself what kinds of norms are made possible by that lack of thought.

Of course, norms are powerful, but they are not all-powerful. They make lots of lives invisible, but those invisible lives are still lives, lived to the full. Let us not forget that, either. I guess maybe it would be good if we reminded ourselves, every now and then, that what we can see has as much to do with norms as it does with what appears in our frame of vision. There's a lot we don't see even when we are looking directly at something, especially when that something is another person.

11:20 a.m. - July 04, 2010

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