THE POLITICS OF DANCING II: So the Willis book also spurred me to think about the postmodern love of contradiction–holding contradictory beliefs or impulses, and not attempting to reconcile them. And this naturally led me to the Cat Power song “Say.” And thus I bring you the second installment of The Politics of Dancing, an occasional feature on this blog in which I relate pop lyrics to the workings of my own tangled cerebellum. (Click here for my exegesis of the Cramps’ “Eyeball in My Martini.”)

Lyrics: Learn to say the same thing

What defeats people is a double confession

One time they will confess one thing

And the next they will confess something else

Talk to them they will say

Learn to say the same thing

Let us hold fast to saying the same thing…

I used to be really, really into this whole “Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself/I am large, I contain multitudes” shtik. It’s a big part of “Third Wave” feminism–many 3W anthologies seem filled entirely with women ruminating on the various contradictions within their lives and their feminism, and then ultimately deciding it’s not important–I hate the “beauty industry” but I can wear lipstick if I wanna!, masochism as feminist statement, I’m a Christian but I think God is a She, etc. It was part of my antipathy to purity.

But the problem is that trying to incorporate contradictions into one’s worldview and everyday life fractures one’s identity. Some bits of your life are lived one way, other bits another, and it gets harder and harder to hang on to a unified sense of “who you are,” or even a sense that there’s a “you” at all. I don’t have time or energy to get into it here, but if you want a really long look at this problem, it crops up again and again throughout my senior essay (“Nietzsche’s Rejection of Eros”): Fragmentation of identity, disappearance of identity, means the loss of the ability to make promises, and without promise-making love and loyalty similarly fragment and then vanish. I think this is one reason I have never seen a convincing portrayal or description of postmodern love–postmodernity is about alienation from self, and alienation from self means that promising and giving oneself can’t happen.