Date: Thu, 14 Sep 95 18:15 BST
From: WIDDER-AT-VAX.LSE.AC.UK
Subject: Re: Susan Says Here It Is, There It Isn't


I think some background is probably in order.

Susan spent one year in a grad program in a fairly intense philosophy 
program somewhere in university-land, USA.  For a variety of reasons, she
dropped it and ended up a mid-level admistrator in a hotel.  It seems that
Susan an academia just didn't quite mix.  It was, she knew, a very masculine
world, and she tried to take it head on by being more masculine than even the
men.  Since masculinity in some sense had something to do with locker-room
exchanges on girls most recently fucked and the methods of fucking -- or so
Susan assumed that was what masculinity was -- she tried to take a similar
strong attitude.  She figured she'd force herself onto the male-dominated
academic world by outdoing them.  They thought they were big boys who could
intimidate girls with talk of sex.  Well she'd shove it right back at them.
They wouldn't be expecting that.  

She had a strong personality and a fast wit, and it seemed to be effective for 
a while.  But the other grad students and the profs eventually became 
unimpressed.  It seemed that all Susan could do was try to be more daring than 
them.  While they appreciated her energy, they couldn't help but feel that 
something was missing.  This usually came out in questions like, "Susan, can 
you please explain yourself," which Susan often didn't care to do -- at least 
not in a non-polemical way.  They also found her explanations too fast and 
seemingly not well though out.  But since, initially at least, they didn't
quite know the material from which she was getting this stuff, they just assumed
she had a good grasp on it.  Later, they decided that it was best to let Susan
get this hostile attitude out of her system.  They thought they were very 
patient in this regard, but Susan never seemed to change.  Eventually they 
decided that Susan's energy was great, but her thinking left something to be 
desired.  Everybody left with a bad taste in their mouths.  Susan felt she was 
forced out by the 'boys network'; the men thought they had been giving her all 
the chances in the world, but Susan wouldn't even try to cooperate.  At some 
point you have to learn to live with the people you're studying with, they 
believed, and Susan just wouldn't even try.

This was probably inevitable.  If someone had been watching from the outside,
they probably could have seen this coming a long time ago.  There was something
rather strange about Susan's ways even in undergrad.  She took a general 
humanities and social sciences degree, which she did with great enthusiasm, as
she did everything.  But she also found something a bit too 'soft' about these
studies.  She was drawn in some way to the 'hard sciences', though she perhaps
didn't understand them all that well.  She often made appeals to things like 
'reality' against those in philosophy, humanities, English lit, and everything
else who liked to talk about metaphors, insides/outsides, etc.  She had a 
number of friends who majored in various science fields.  She often liked to 
tell them about how she was debunking these 'soft sciences' with the 
contemporary scientific theories they were studying.  They found this all a bit
odd.  They had learned from the very beginning that these were just theories --
in their own lingo, they were 'models' -- but Susan took them almost as gospel.
They thus found her to be a strange ally.  They were intrigued by what Susan had
brought to the discussion.  She had a lot to say about people like Deleuze
and Guattari, and some 'dick-munch' named Heidegger and another named Derrida.
To her science major friends, these were just names.  Susan, though, had a lot
to say about them.  They couldn't help but feel, though, that what she was
saying was a bit too fast.  From what they gathered, she like Deleuze and
Guattari quite a lot.  She saw them as bringing new epistemologies to the 
table which jived with their scientific studies which they nonetheless thought
of as models.  They didn't know D&G themselves, of course.

They couldn't help but think that Susan had swallowed a couple of their books 
whole (similar to those IR majors they knew who swallowed entire Tom Clancy 
novels).

All her friends had warned her about applying speed-reading techniques to
the books she read.  She didn't listen.

Tim did a general liberal arts degree in a small college.  He loved it.  It
was a great experience for him, though he never considered taking it beyond
an undergraduate degree.  He found his way to the hotel just because the
job market sucked.  He considered himself in some sense a 'philosopher' -- not
because he was deeply read in the subject but because he was a 'friend of
wisdom'.  He thus didn't have the sort of loyalties that Susan had towards
certain thinkers and the hostilities she had to others.  He figured, though,
that he also wasn't well read enough in any of them to know.  What he 
considered to be Susan's dogmatism was a bit disturbing to him.  Why would any
one be so virulent?  He figured that being in the 'real world' now, he would
never have the time to carefully read these things, and so would never know.

Susan knew she could play with Tim any way she wanted.  She had read more 
philosophy than he had (with the help of that speed reading course and the
year in the graduate program), and she knew Tim wasn't familiar enough with 
terms like the 'univocity of Being' to offer much resistence.  Tim was also 
just a nice guy.  The combination of her reading background and her tenacity 
made it easy for her to have fun with Tim -- the way she had fun with those 
grad students until they themselves started reading some of the things she had 
claimed to have already read and found themselves unimpressed with the things 
she was saying about them (those same grad students, for example, were very
amused when they started to figure out what the univocity of being was all
about, and how it was drawn from Aristotle through Aquinas and scholasticism,
and which had many Heideggerian overtones.  They basically found that what 
Susan had been saying about univocity didn't even jive with what Deleuze seemed
to mean in DIFF/REP.  But that's another story).

And so that's the way things went.  Tim could never quite keep up with
Susan's responses.  And the talk about S&M just threw him -- the girls he
knew would never talk like that.  But even Tim got tired of it, as did the
hotel manager, who often found Susan talking too much and working too little.

This being the 90's, Susan was eventually fired.  Her bosses said her language
at the workplace was highly inappropriate.  They told her that a few years
ago if a man was saying those things to a woman he would be charged with
sexual harassment.  Now, a few years later, even women could be charged with
harassing male co-workers.  So they let Susan go.  She told them they all had
bones up their asses and were moralist fuck-heads.  They cut her severence pay 
in half for that.

Susan eventually drifted along.  She went through various jobs, having similar
problems wherever she went.  Eventually a strange transformation occured.  She
became a born-again Christian.  Perhaps it wasn't too strange, as she shared
their dogmatism, so it was simply a matter of changing the attitudes she held.
It was like the way Jane Roe came out as a pro-lifer.

Strangely enough, Susan found that as an arch-moralist she could shock people
just as much as in her previous mode as a staunch a-moralist.  But maybe that's
not so strange -- who wouldn't be shocked at the archaic non-sense that comes
from those types anyway?  As it turned out, it wasn't so much the message that
was shocking as the mode of delivery.  And the mode of delivery was the same in
both camps.  But the mode also had the same limitations in both camps too.


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