A Provocation

I would like us to take a position. Not necessarily a position all of us can agree on, nor a position bound by a grand or totalizing theory of everything, but one that is operative, generative and capable of reconstituting the time it takes to devise and implement such a position and turn it into a bunny.

Or if not a bunny then something unexpected. Yet something recurrent, or at least a position that returns to us in ways that remind us of what it was and who we were when we first took it. What motivated it, what it felt like as a thought, or simply just a feeling.

Not a position to wield, like one might hold up a sword and wave it around, but one to nurture, like what one does with a tamagotchi.

This summer I was in a situation where I thought the only way I might learn something, the only way I might be of use to anyone, was to take a position associated with what Luce Irigaray talks about in her discussion of gender relations, a position that awkwardly translates (from the French) as self-limitation.

For me, this was the only position to take, particularly when the common position taken by those faced with me and what I commonly signify is resistance.

So yes, I would like us – each of us -- to take a position. And not just an intellectual position but one that operates outside the realm of thinking, as one might find oneself in situations where what is usually received in the vertical position is sensually different when experienced – or let’s say assumed -- on the horizontal plane. Which, incidentally, is another position associated with Irigaray: horizontality.