the inconceivable middlepage

tumblr controversies got you down?

i started wading through some of the back and forth posts recently, then stopped. it was quite liberating to simply ignore them. i remembered a few lines of edward soja’s thirdspace i especially like and had recently used. they seemed relevant… and there could be more and possibly better references, but i am quite lazy 

In describing such epistemological policing, Edward Soja states that it is spurred on by a “categorically simplified choice, occupy only a ‘radical’ channel or ‘liberally’ choose them all, especially when backed by the similar categorical binarism of ‘if you are not our friend you are our enemy,’ imposes a rigid logic which intensifies the need for an ‘epistemological police’ to guard boundaries and punish deviation, especially for those who seek a different set of choices” (1996:90n8). Soja goes on to say that “further intensifying this tendency to fragmentation (and expanding the role of the epistemological police) is an internal competition for primacy, driven by the same ‘urge to unity’ that pervades most modernist identity politics. Here we find the effort to exclude, to separate the pure from the impure, the deviation from the essence: a demarcation of categorical distinctions between inside and outside that actively represses difference and otherness” (1996:91n9).

i’m not trying to condemn anyone in particular, nor attempting to disenfranchise any groups, ideas, etc. i just like to keep this in mind whenever i evaluate anything as a tool of self-reflection. if anyone thinks this might apply to a recent post of theirs… it probably does. enjoy.