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California State University, Dominguez Hills
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Soka University Japan - Transcend Art and Peace
Created: October 24, 2003
Latest Update: October 24, 2003
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Culture and Identity:
"I am I because my little dog knows me."

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, October 2003.
"Fair use" encouraged.

This lecture is based on a new text I receivd on Thursday: The Theory Toolbox by Jeffrey Nealon and Susan Searls Giroux, 2003. Rowman and Littlefield. ISBN: 0-7425-1994-5. (pbk.)

I'll be going back to this text, and we'll use it next year, but I'd like to put up some quick summaries and comments as I can manage while we're working on the Fall 2003 Exhibition. We still need to deepen and expand our sense of theory, even though we have other projects under way.

In Chapter 5, at p. 51, I really liked this definition:

"Along the way we've been insisting that meaning is brought about by a reading process that is conext bound and culturally produced; there is no preexisting metaphysical or transcendatal meaning that's somehow found under or above the text. Authors, readers, and subjects always 'happen' in a cultural context. As Gertrude Stein so cleverly puts it in her poem 'Identity: 'I am I because my little dog knows me.' "

"I am I because my little dog knows me." How different from so much of the theoretical drivel we get off into on middle range theory and so. I think I like the metatheories better because they have to soar beyond the mere empirical. There's something in me that responds to Gertrude Stein's simple acknowledgement that the interrelationship between her and her little dog is a part of who she is, and who the little dog is, too, that we are interdependent, living creatures, one with the other, and that through the process of that interdependence we are aesthetically creating who we are.

Yes! Gertrude Stein. And I am I because that little gray blur who occasionally deposits a giant rat at my feet is usually soft and timid and gentle and lets me snuggle him, and bask in the silkiness of his ears. I am I because of that soft gray snuggle, and he is King Tut because of the rat at his feet and the snuggle that says I love him.