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Witnessing: Beyond Recognition

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I have done a little reading in Witnessing Beyond Recognition (2001) by Kelly Oliver lately. My own life is changing rapidly enough to defy recognition by those people who expect me to function as anyone who attempts to be disguised as a normal person. This book is an ideal old possession for people like me, who realize how little anyone has learned from all the lessons that are constantly being served to us by people who wish we had a more positive attitude. Since there was a bookmark near the end of the book, I read from there to the end, just to make sure I had read all the pages. The conclusion was that having a relationship ends when a person is reduced to serving a particular function as a kind of object. People with aims in life expect most people to conform to their particular ideals, and we all have trouble fulfilling the wave of hoops that pop up as regularly as dropping the kiddies off at the pool. I learned a new euphemism last night for an old obsession, and dropping kiddies off at the pool functions as well as religion for people who lead modern lives. Keeping busy with a regular routine is the coping mechanism of everybody who does not like us clowns who are just kidding.

Try imagining Stony Brook, where the author of this book is a SUNY professor of philosophy and women's studies, as an intellectual heartbeat away from what took place on September 11, 2001, and this book, which was prepared before the events of that day, gains a bit of weight if it is considered as a sincere attempt to understand such things, although it was written in a philosophical manner which is remote from the intrigue with which such events are planned and executed. Philosophers have often fallen back on their affinity for the familiar, and this tendency may also be found in this book, especially in the attention it gives to current feminist thought, in spite of the churlishness that is occasionally to be found regarding those things which are out of the ordinary in a thoroughly distasteful way, as intentionally destructive acts often appear to be. Though the book attempts to deal with psychologically troubling matters, there are thoroughly feminist moments, which are particularly heartwarming in regard to the innocence of financial planners, whose only connections to the World Trade Center towers were, at their best, in a manner which might previously have been regarded as impersonal and businesslike, and whose expectations implied that the accumulation of wealth through world trade was the sole context in which the activities that are entitled to the most significance in our world might be judged. The best example of such thinking in this book, which is copyright 2001 but reflects the thinking dominant prior to the events of September 11, 2001, is its consideration of the ideas of Patricia Williams on "the metaphor of investment instead of possession to convey social relations and their incumbent responsibility. Imagining a more optimistic future, she says: `What a world it would be if we could all wake up and see all of ourselves reflected in the world, not merely in a territorial sense but with a kind of nonexclusive entitlement that grants not so much possession as investment.'" (p. 155). If there is a bombing campaign, or investment in weapons of mass destruction, or a war against drugs, or two million people in prison in the United States of America, going on right now, all of which are probably being rationalized by just about everybody as steps that must be taken so that we can have such an ideal world, with an economy which would be truly great, but actually, the way that things like this have been going on for the last 10,000 years suggests that, if we keep following our own tendencies on this, outer space might even become the new frontier for weapons which could be this destructive, if anyone with our instincts is allowed to use it to try to defend ourselves. This book approaches reality on a lot of levels, but I may be the only person to read it who could find any support for my views in this book. You can read it for yourself, too.