Hypatia vol. 29, no. 1 (Winter 2014) © by Hypatia, Inc.

Musing: Spectral Phenomenologies:Dwelling Poetically in ProfessionalPhilosophy

ELENA FLORES RU�IZ

Todos quieren o�ır la historia m�ıaque en mi lengua viva est�a muerta.Busco alguna que la recuerde,hoja por hoja, hebra por hebra.Le presto mi aliento, le doy mi marchapor si al o�ırla me la despierta.

[They all want to hear my own storywhich on my living tongue is dead.I search for someone who remembers it,page for page, thread for thread.I’ll lend them my breath, give them my beatto see if hearing it wakes it in me.]

—Gabriela Mistral, Locas Mujeres/Madwomen

SPECTRAL DWELLING

We demand so much from language, from the net it casts over our contexts of signifi-cation. For some of us, the demand is minimal: Primum non nocere—we expect theresources of expression at our disposal not to reproduce harms, that they not kneadand ferment new wounds in our descriptions of lived-experience… that there appearhere and there a scattered rhyme. For others, whose experience of worldhood is morefirmly footed in the sheltering comfort and interpretive stability of historically privi-leged “home perspectives,” the demand is often ultimate presence: that our resourcesof expression work to produce ready correspondence. To such signification, wordsaccrue, unproblematically, as a blank page remedied by ink. Yet for those of us whoroutinely feel the weight of inarticulacy flood our voices as we navigate the complexterrain of contemporary philosophical practice, the challenge of articulating our expe-riences as women of color or diverse practitioners often runs up against the pressing

need to decolonize the professional vocabularies of mainstream discourse. We turn uptheir history as one would plow spring soil, exposing the biotic universe of nutrientcycling and compaction that made layers of loose topsoil somehow pass for one singu-lar foundation, one universal earth-home. So that when we’re told, often with the coolsurety of scientific objectivity: “this is what philosophy is,” we can smile, point to theground and say: “NO, no-no, there is more.” This ground is always grizzly. This foun-dation has always been forged of loose and sanding stone.

But this is not the official story that gets told. As Andrea Nye and so many othershave noted, “in English-speaking academic philosophy, where certain presuppositionsas to the proper aim and methods of philosophy are sometimes held as dogma,” resist-ing the “resolutely monolingual” practices of professional philosophy is a dauntingtask (Nye 2000, 102). There are many reasons for this, least of which is the obduratecommitment on the part of some philosophical communities to erect an impermeableborder between philosophy as the performance of expert knowledge and the moregeneral act of philosophizing. The latter can be seen, following Angela Davis, as adisposition to “think critically about our social environment”—to not assume “thatthe appearances in our lives constitute ultimate realities”—but in a way that neednot be expressed through “a specific mode of thought, but rather as a quotidian wayof living in the world” (Davis 2000, 137).

On this account, not only do the institutionalized norms and disciplinary practicesof academic philosophy regularly collide with the intersectionally complex being-in-the-world of women of color, they do so in a way that produces experiences of nor-malized alienation, or spectral dwelling. This spectrality is twofold: first, through its“resolute monolingualism,” professional philosophy inhibits the articulation of arobust theoretical spectrum, a varied and fulsome array of philosophical modalitiespertinent to the lives of diverse peoples, and second, it engenders a specter of liminalexperiences that makes it difficult to vocalize a sense of dislocation or transience inthe profession. Given that professional philosophical practice is a lived experiencebut operates as if it were not, it becomes easy to lose confidence in the trustworthi-ness of our lived experience as important wellsprings for philosophizing (as criticalanalyses responsive to the cultural, racial, ethnic, gendered, and linguistic situatednesswe dwell in). We thus need recuperative narratives and tactics of embodiment thatpromote what Kristie Dotson has termed “a culture of praxis,” which attempts to fos-ter “a disciplinary culture that can increase livable options within professional philos-ophy” for diverse practitioners (Dotson 2012, 16).

The project of increasing livable options can be significantly aided by highlightingthe ways in which those very options are obfuscated as “livable” in professional phi-losophy to begin with. That is, by specifying how through a host of intricately wovenregulatory practices and mystification rituals (which legitimate the implicitly operativestatus of a norm by mystifying its sociocultural origin and its tacit repetition), aca-demic philosophy self-polices its own borders. Once these practices are established asthe norm and reified through the use of regulative mechanisms like conferenceprograms, grant awards, curricular perspectives and syllabi construction, tenureand promotion criteria, the replication of power structures in Research I universities,

Elena Flores Ru�ız 197

and so on, it makes possible the conditions under which diverse practitioners in thefield experience the systematic microaggressions that alone can be methodically dis-missed as isolated incidents, but which taken together create the spectral experienceof alienation, professional estrangement, and on some days, normalized madness char-acteristic of inhabiting spaces ripe with ambient abuse.

And so, in response to this predicament, I would like to tell a story of how arichly layered social practice like philosophy has been tilled by certain tools to yielda monolithic image that reproduces certain harms, that sees plurality as the accommo-dation of what is already there without acknowledging differences from without. Thestory is not a “what”; it’s a how. One that tries to plow the soil upon which thealleged methodological purity of philosophical discourse rests, if only to say: “No, no-no, this alleged foundation will not be used against us. Ya basta, enuf.”

SOMNAMBULATORY POLICING

There’s an existential exhaustion that comes from realizing that one’s energies havebeen spent saying what has already been said time and again, the irretrievable timespent laboring over one’s arguments in (often unread) articles, carefully qualifyingevery claim with logical precision only to be interrogated (perhaps verbally or inpassing) for an instance where a group term was used unqualified, as if one’s profes-sional credentials were not enough to assure mastery of basic logical fallacies and theproblem of universal claims. “Yes,” I have heard an exasperated presenter finally replyin a Q&A, “by women of color I mean ALL women of color. Every last one of them.All existing or possibly existing, past present and future,” adding, with a tone of pro-found fatigue, that in fact she spoke for all and on behalf of all of them and couldrelay a message if the questioner so wished. This is how diverse practitioners oftenleave the field, from total psychic exhaustion. So it is with a brief existential sighthat I now repeat what has been incessantly repeated at countless professional confer-ences and in disciplinary publications throughout recent years: Professional philoso-phy will go the way of the dinosaurs if it cannot pluralize its borders; already thefields of sociology, cultural studies, and comparative literature are faring far better atattracting philosophically inclined practitioners of color (cf. Yancy 2008; Dotson2011; Schutte 2011).

Time and again, this is the echo and refrain: Philosophy as a professional disci-pline in the Anglo-American academy is at a crossroads, a tense intersection wherewhat is at stake seems to have less to do with battles over which road it will take—whether the perspective that emerges will mirror those of a particular methodologicalcamp—than with the tacit biases of a professional culture that legitimates particularways of partaking in the crossing, ways that often delegitimize the creative efforts andinsights of diverse practitioners in the field (cf. Salamon 2009; Ru�ız-Aho 2011).Otherwise put, as a diverse practitioner, one cannot simply “cross” philosophical bor-ders with a critical analysis of lived experience. No. One’s border-crossing card ismade of argumentative justifications, the lingua franca of epistemic borders. So that

198 Hypatia

what is often forgotten is that professional philosophy does not just police its ownborders (out of a high-grade legitimation fever); it does so behind its own back. Forexample, it makes possible the disjunctive experience of hearing a white feminist phi-losopher express seemingly deep-felt concerns over the overwhelming whiteness ofphilosophy while simultaneously defending the need for philosophy to cement tenaci-ously aggressive rational argumentation as a stylistic hallmark of legitimate philosoph-ical production—one incontrovertibly traced back to a pure, unmiscegenated imageof its origins in ancient Greece. These two goals are uncritically held together, simul-taneously, as if one goal did not severely compromise the other.

Professional philosophy sleepwalks; its somnambulatory practices stroll silently,policing checkpoints without the burden of consciousness of its actions and practices.It need only be “know philosophy when seen”—without the justifications (andself-reflexive insight) necessary to be consistent with its own internal standards ofconsistency. It is this way, through somnambulatory practices, that it can reproducemarginalization by claiming neutrality, by placing the work of exclusion behind itsown back. Hence it makes it possible for legitimated practitioners in prestige fieldslike metaphysics, epistemology, and logic to ask, without qualms: “how is what you’redoing philosophy?” with regard to every perspective that is not produced through thelanguage internal to the assumptions of its own worldview. Professional philosophysleepwalks.

On this account, inclusion in philosophy, then, gains footing only within some setof somnambulatory practices that exist beyond prescription and assumption. Inclu-sion, and it is not clear that this is the “word,” cannot simply be given; marginalizedperspectives cannot be folded into the batter of the discipline through time, or worse,“brought into the center” of (what is largely unacknowledged as) a discursively con-structed reality. The discourse is not spoken; rather, it speaks us through the everydayenactment of professional rituals and specialized jargon that simultaneously legitimateboth the practice of exclusion and the critique thereof. That is to say, to have a legit-imated philosophical voice one must speak with the “aid” of tools from these verysomnambulatory practices that, at once, both constrain and enable border-crossing.What remains unquestioned is the politics of nation-building and the historicaloppressions it enlisted to erect its professional borderlands and operative sense of“home.”

So it is not surprising that, in light of this, creative contributions in the field arefrequently recognized as such only when they are articulated through the normativeargumentative paradigms and methodological perspectives that helped create thetotalizing conditions out of which the need for creative contributions arose in the firstplace. For instance, when Brazilian logicians are able to accommodate inconsistencyand contradictory premises in classical logic (without reducing the inferring relationto triviality) in the development of paraconsistent logic—it is received as a genuineand creative contribution, incontrovertible philosophy. But when the epistemicefforts of Black and Latina feminists, along with those of diverse philosophical practi-tioners, attempt to accommodate inconsistency, contradiction, and paraconsisentforms of reasoning in phenomenological accounts of lived experience, whether by

Elena Flores Ru�ız 199

developing rich strategies of epistemic pluralism or personal identity, the burden fallson those practitioners to underwrite their projects with a warrant of methodologicaland conceptual fidelity as to how, exactly, their projects count as philosophy beforebeing considered “creative contributions.” That is to say, they must cross by way ofthe somnambulatory policing within professional philosophy. When Gloria Anzald�uamoves toward the articulation of epistemic frameworks aimed at “developing a toler-ance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity” through conceptually rich strate-gies of “mental nepantlism, an Aztec word for torn between ways,” the academicreception is nowhere on par with that of paraconsistent logic (Anzald�ua 1987, 10).Her work is placed beyond the exclusion/inclusion debate in philosophy because it isnot excluded per se, but rather is never seen as a candidate for entry in the first place(when situated against the backdrop of a normalized, home perspective). So legiti-mate philosophical investigation can concern inconsistency and contradiction whenspoken in the right language (in conformity with operative somnambulatory prac-tices); but when the incongruence is found in lived experience, when it is our abilitiesto live a livable life that shape the direction of philosophical inquiry, the terrain getstricky.

Mariana Ortega calls this exclusionary practice in philosophy “the fear of livedexperience,” explaining that:

the fear of lived experience—especially the lived experience of whatAnzald�ua calls los atravesados, those at the margins, at the borders,the unwanted, the rejected, the ones that do no fit the accepted ordominant norms—[is] the fear within some philosophical camps ofdealing with flesh and bone beings that are all around us, that havelived experiences that may disrupt clean, tight, supposedly objectivetheories. (Ortega 2013, 15)

The problem is that all too often it is clean, tight, objective theories undergirded bythe justificatory discourses of scientific neutrality that are held up as the grammaticalbaseline of philosophical discourse. This is a problem that has no name, a mystifica-tion ritual that passes for the learned discourse of legitimated, specialized jargon inphilosophy. Without recognizing the pervasiveness of these practices, we remain espe-cially vulnerable to the ways in which somnambulatory policing works its way intoour daily environments to produce a sense of alienation and psychic estrangementthat can lead to calling it quits—albeit not for lack of talent, passion, or skill.

PROFESSIONAL GASLIGHTING

When I worked as a secretary I had a supervisor who, upon learning that my medica-tion regimen produced brief spells of automatic behavior and forgetfulness, wouldmake small modifications to my physical work environment; in my absences shewould move my stapler into a desk drawer, pull place tabs off of important pages inreference manuals or place my paperclips atop a file cabinet, and routinely proceeded

200 Hypatia

to innocently ask me for a paperclip, stapler, or data from the relevant pages in themanuals. In the months that this lasted I was convinced I was losing my mind. Did Iput the scissors in the mini-fridge? Was my level of incompetence so high that mas-tering basic tasks eluded my capacities? Am I even employable? So I immediately rec-ognized the feeling that Linda Mart�ın Alcoff speaks of when she says: “As a Latinain the academic world of North American philosophy, I regularly feel that, indeed, Ihave lost, or am in the process of losing, my marbles” (Alcoff 2012, 23). For you see,I have been here before.

In the 1944 film Gaslight, Ingrid Bergman portrays a woman who unwittingly mar-ries her aunt’s murderer, a sociopathic music teacher whose goal is to have his newbride declared insane and confined to psychiatric care for the purposes of acquiringher deceased aunt’s famed jewel collection. He proceeds to manufacture small, every-day situations geared toward producing negative self-identifications that make his wifequestion the reliability of her memory, perceptions, and judgment. He gifts her witha brooch, steals it, and asks her if she lost it. He misarranges household items such aspaintings; he then questions her domestic abilities and derides her through the use ofnormative discourses of moral benevolence and duty. Rather than as a clear case ofmental abuse, these apparently mundane microaggressions in her ambient world showup to her as lapses in her own abilities and as a process of ever-increasing internalizedself-doubts. It is only when she receives supportive confirmation that the house gas-lights are indeed dimming on their own (and that she is not going insane by imagin-ing the flickering phenomenon) that she recuperates a sense of confidence andtrustworthiness in her lived experience.

After hearing the increasingly lengthening scrolling narratives of women of colorin the profession of philosophy who dwell, whether briefly or constantly, in this senseof puncturing self-doubt, it finally hit me: Amigas, sisters, we’re being gaslighted, pre-dominantly by the somnambulatory policing in the form of normative practices andtacit methodological assumptions in mainstream philosophy. This is a kind of profes-sionalized, ambient abuse; it has no “mastermind” per se and it is done as a means ofconstructing the professional landscape of philosophy. Although in this case there isno grand architect, there is, however, the moving of justifications and the changingof standards all the while asking, “how is this project philosophy, again?” This is whysomnambulatory policing is a particularly hard form of gaslighting to counter, becausethere is no one admitting to being a mastermind, no culprit to hunt down, only sen-sibilities that emerge but are never (or are barely) acknowledged.

Moreover, we are sometimes gaslighted by our own practices, which can bear theimprint of panoptical self-surveillance when we attack ourselves and one another,not to critically engage our ideas, but to play the game of professional prestige.Indeed, many of our writings, in the spirit of offering an important corrective toEurocentric theories and practices in philosophy, are beginning to resemble long dec-larations as to how “we didn’t lose the brooch” or “move the painting.” We write forour own survival so that we can say that we have not gone mad. And it’s exhausting,not because these works are products of false consciousness, but because our creativecapacities and philosophical interests often reach far beyond offering correctives to

Elena Flores Ru�ız 201

the canon. But this is the tragedy of grappling with somnambulatory policing: Onemust frequently redirect one’s energies in order to self-validate and possibly aid increating more hospitable working and learning environments for those who have yetto earn credentials in a field that has professionalized ambient abuse.

BEYOND GASLIGHTING: SELF-VALIDATING

It has often been said that an important strategy for successfully charting the troubledwaters of professional philosophy is the cultivation not only of supportive networksbut also practices of self-validation. Doing so is quite difficult, however, without adiagnostic vocabulary that helps name the harms borne and for which the very needfor self-validation comes. How does one search for a cure for something that is notyet acknowledged as an illness, that one experiences only in terms of unspecified,symptomatic doubts routinely attributed only to a heretofore unknown cause?

There is a significant psychic toll whenever there is a clash between a lived expe-rience and our contexts of signification, which include, but are not limited to, theability of our social vocabularies and lexical imaginaries to robustly accommodatedescriptions of those experiences (and the kinds of somnambulatory practices servingas a backdrop for certain kinds of intelligibility). They are all too often reduced tointimations, haunting suspicions, or inarticulable inklings we must shelve in thememory banks of the liminally embodied dramatis personae we sometimes develop tocope: the dual (or hybrid) selves that allow us to give felt-yet-inarticulable weight tothe spectral phenomenologies we dwell in, that only poets and artists have reconciledthrough inhabiting a linguistic universe that is always already at home with what isparatactic, irreducibly diverse, and epistemically torn.

But this embodied duality can also prove damaging when it is the result of clashesand conflicts in professional practice, when it is the consequence or negative residueof an experience rather than a creative enactment or therapeutic response. For exam-ple, in the classroom we often find ourselves performing great feats of pedagogicalbilingualism without any acknowledgment of those skills or efforts, reproducing thestory of philosophy (often with remarkable skill and fidelity) while simultaneouslyweaving a new one of our own making that can better speak to our struggles. Weunpack Leibniz’s Monadology and spell out Heidegger’s account of Dasein when calledto, all while creating innovative lesson plans that interweave tremendously diversetexts (even technological resources) from multiple intellectual traditions. And we dothis, like a boss.

When met with resistance from administrative structures or poor (even hostile)student receptivity, however, this embodied duality can yield a negative self-interpre-tation by fostering a fragmentary identity that is forced to “split” different parts ofoneself to accommodate the multiple narrative commitments one inhabits as adiverse practitioner. As a case in point, when I taught an upper-level critical aesthet-ics course abridged in title as “Art and Revolution,” the high enrollment plummetedwhen the full description “in Latin America” was added to the course schedule. On

202 Hypatia

this note, part of the frustration with diversifying the teaching of philosophy today isthat the sources often exist; the texts are there. But the worldviews and narrative tac-tics generally utilized in noncanonical readings are often seen as literary deviationsfrom the mainstream story of philosophy (and the ways of telling that story) thatbegan in ancient Greece. So the texts may be there, but the looking-glass that main-stream Anglophone philosophy trains students to see through does not sufficientlyallow these texts to be seen insofar as they fall outside the discursive domain of dom-inant, western European methodological perspectives; they are not told that that storywas used to cover over other stories, of the use of “Reason” in colonial expansionover “uncivilized” territories. Even the way the canon should be pluralized is tacitlypoliced by somnambulatory practices to replicate the legitimated “home” perspectiveof its own history—one where the “other” of literal “reason” is already defined as thenonliteral “fiction” of Western discourse. The literature of the existential tradition, totake one example, can be deemed acceptable or even lauded as bringing in “interdis-ciplinary perspectives”; The Brothers Karamazov can be folded into an introduction tophilosophy syllabus with relatively little difficulty. But try integrating the image-richand often fabulist writings from Subcomandante Marcos into a course, especially onthe tenure clock. This, despite the fact that Subcomandante Marcos, unlike Dostoev-sky, actually holds a graduate degree in philosophy and taught at a large metropolitanuniversity. The experience of having to split our commitments in this way can bedebilitating.

Because professional philosophy overlooks the incarnate corporeality of what itmeans to inhabit our social roles as philosophers and, hence, as professional philoso-phers on a daily basis, we need recuperative narratives and ways of validating ourlived experiences of professional life—experiences that can testify to the very livabilityof our profession. This includes our hybrid teaching practices, which don’t justmaneuver through the standard model of philosophy but creatively enact methodolog-ical perspectives, skills, and strategies pertinent to our living, especially through prac-tices that validate diverse students’ experience of incongruence in the learningprocess. Such recuperative narratives can include seeing teaching as learning to phi-losophize but in the service of a more livable life that critically analyzes historical con-texts, circumstances, and barriers to social justice. It is value-laden in the minimalsense of a commitment to the ineliminability of context—to the idea that a purelyobjective, value-free, and neutral perspective covers over the intricately latticed net-work of historical forces that inform our epistemic practices and cultural productionof shared discourses, including philosophy.

As diverse professional practitioners, cultivating a hybridly multiplicitous (ratherthan dual or fragmented) sense of self can also help steady the mast of our confidencewhen beset by gusts of setbacks brought on by somnambulatory practices in philoso-phy. It can help us self-legitimate in light of professional alienation by vivifying theidea that the monolithic foundation of philosophy is always forged of loose andsanding stone. As a poetics of philosophical practice that rests on a creative value-inversion, it can help nurture a sense of trustworthiness in our experiences ofincongruence, transience, and dislocation that helps one articulate perspectives

Elena Flores Ru�ız 203

outside legitimated norms. It is, in other words, the self-sustaining practice of a pro-found suspicion, a constant corporeal refrain that insists no, we are not alone in our feltincongruence… that our narrative self-work is done at the crossroads of great com-plexity, but it need not be done alone.

And so, on days when it feels like it can’t be sustained, yet it must be sustained ifwe are to strangely align our love of what philosophical practice can bring—to claimit as our own—it is helpful to have a story to tell oneself, to keep hope. Say it: “thisis what philosophy is,” repeat: “no, there is more.” Beyond the no, what that “more”is can never be prescriptive; each must pave her own way home. But what philosophycannot be said to be, what is uncritically foreclosed in advance of its creation on thebasis of what the discipline’s historically privileged practitioners have already dis-closed as their own—that is, a story created in their own image—can no longer standas the only story professional philosophy can disclose. Ya basta, enuf.

REFERENCES

Alcoff, Linda Mart�ın. 2012. Alien and alienated. In Reframing the practice of philosophy:

Bodies of color, bodies of knowledge, ed. George Yancy. Albany: State University ofNew York Press.

Anzald�ua, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands/la frontera: The new mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt LuteBooks.

Davis, Angela. 2000. Interview by George Yancy. In Women of color and philosophy, ed.Naomi Zack. Malden, Mass. and Oxford: Blackwell.

Dotson, Kristie. 2011. Concrete flowers: Contemplating the profession of philosophy.Hypatia 26 (2): 403–09.

———. 2012. How is this paper philosophy? Comparative Philosophy 3 (1): 3–29.Mistral, Gabriela. La Contadora/The Storyteller. In Locas mujeres/madwomen. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press.Nye, Andrea. 2000. It’s not philosophy. In Decentering the center: Philosophy for a multicul-

tural, postcolonial, and feminist world, ed. Uma Narayan and Sandra Harding. Bloom-ington: Indiana University Press.

Ortega, Mariana. 2013. Interview by Cynthia Paccacerqua. Hispanic and Latino Issues inPhilosophy 12 (2): 14–16.

Ru�ız-Aho, Elena. 2011. Latin American philosophy at a crossroads. Human Studies 34 (3):309–31.

Salamon, Gayle. 2009. Justification and queer method, or leaving philosophy. Hypatia

24 (1): 225–30.Schutte, Ofelia. 2011. Attracting Latinos/as to philosophy: Today’s challenges. In Refra-

ming the practice of philosophy: Bodies of color, bodies of knowledge, ed. George Yancy.Albany: State University of New York Press.

Yancy, George. 2008. Situated black women’s voices in/on the profession of philosophy.Hypatia 23 (2): 155–89.

204 Hypatia