“Blurred Boundaries? No! Get Your Stuff in Order.”

I was part of THE PURGE: FIRST SACRIFICE today. Our assignment? Rant about something in our field. Don’t punch down. Hard for me because I think I was the most senior presenter?

“Spicy provocations.” Here’s mine:|

People still love to “blur boundaries.” The cliché insists itself often in academic prose because it’s so alliteratively tidy, and because it’s the pose of someone too wily to be stuffed into one of your Institutional Boxes, man. My purge rant: just stop it. Don’t write this anymore. Don’t let anyone else write it anymore. When you’re reviewing a manuscript, and you find it, tell them to knock it off.

Now, I can imagine reasons to want to leave it in. I don’t need to tell you – except that if I don’t, you’ll think I’m a dummy – that some people think that nations, gender, race, all this, are real things, with absolute insides and outsides. So we gotta mess ‘em up by telling them their boundaries are blurred, that their special categories don’t work like that at all. They’re blurry. They’re contingent! Things are just messy. Relax, you ontotheological weirdos, relax! Join us out here, where things are so blurry and so chill.

But is a blurry category all that special? Everything’s blurry if you work hard enough at smudging it. In “Eating Well,” but just as well just about anywhere else, Derrida observed “Not to be able to stabilize itself absolutely would mean to be able only to be stabilizing itself.” I guess? Sure: it’s a poststructuralist truism – since categories endlessly need other, oppositional categories to operate, every concept’s always a bit wobbly, and every concept gets wobblier the more you try to rely on it. So there’s nothing special about the categories academics habitually blur. That’s just categorization!

Furthermore. All categories are essentially heuristics, just tools to help us get by for a bit. And no one can do without some categorization. You’ll all remember the psychoanalytic or even Kantian truism that we have no direct access to things in themselves. There’s always some screen intervening between us and the supposed place where things are as they really are, where they are either in their absolute perfection of being (Kant) or in their slobbery confection of pullulating nothingness (psychoanalysis).

What’s a category except a way to get by? They’re pragmatic things. If anything’s going to make sense, we have to have them. Some work better than others; none work perfectly; some are cruel, some anodyne, and some merely a matter of aesthetics. Give em a shove, they’ll blur a bit, or maybe a lot; but a heuristic just has to work—it doesn’t have to work perfectly.

People still want to discover that “boundaries are blurred” though. They want to do this because they want to be on the side of FREEDOM, of not having to color in the lines. They want to be the wild one, who doesn’t play by the rules, who wears different-colored socks, who sorts their books by smell, who eats their sandwich inside out. Good for them.

This is going back 16 years now, but maybe you’ll remember Sarah Palin, former celebrity politician. Her name’s on five whole books, the first called Going Rogue. She’s certainly blurry! She’s a woman, but she likes to shoot! She was a governor, but she hates government! She has human children, but she named them after objects, like Track and Bristol.

Ben Lerner, I’ve heard, and read, used to love breaking language. The avant garde was a Trojan Horse in conventional language, so he thought. And then he read and listened to Sarah Palin, and he knew that “the fascist reaction and I / was mimetic of what I thought I opposed / with my typing.” Palin’s a language-breaker too. Someone’s liberated by her broken language, but what use is that blurriness to those us who want to be spared her asshole cruelties?

Fantasies of blurry boundaries, of the rhetorical “weave,” are just as much over there as they are over here, among us. So many people want to think of themselves as free or want to believe that someone else is living their freedom for them. Some of those people are awful. So many people think blurry is better, think “nuance” is the way to go, think it’s too constraining to identify things, as if apophasis is the way out. As for me, I don’t think blurriness is the royal road to good things. And neither should you.

I’m here to rant: as blurry as you think your boundaries are, you’ve gotta have other, crisp ones if you’re going to think at all! Stop pretending you’re on the side of blurriness as such!

Thank you!