Co-creation, The Psychic Life of Power, by Butler

I cannot read this book before class. I dip into it, trying to understand, and read what others have to say. It doesn't help. The professor tells us to read anyway, and trust that we will absorb more than we know. If we don't like it, look to ourselves for why. "We read to expand the kinds of questions we ask." Reese We don't need answers.
Essentialism- "The only thing that makes something what it is. The primary quality of a thing." Najendra
We reveiw the class from last week. I understand deeper. Our network of conversations includes a self network- "the board of directors" or the voices in my head. What we hear from others doesn't influence us (psychology term); it constitutes us.
Sometimes we attach meaning to a person- "she's the grumpy one." This is false- that is her in relation to me- in other circumstances she is different. This is why we can't understand why are friends are married to the men they chose, sometimes. We don't know the man they know. (just as well, really. That would be rather awkward.)Try changing your circumstances. Practise constituting someone before you interact with him/her. (This could help at work.) Use grace, or willingness to consider- This is the Bishop in Les Mis- constituting Jean as a friend, not a thief, and giving him a new identity.
There is no essential self- we are created in the moment, through language. "You are a new creation in Christ." There is pure religion in this idea. If we aren't locking someone into a preconceived performance, we are allowing the possibility of a brilliant performance, just as Christ offers us. Salvation becomes a performative speech act of speaking our new self into being, possessing the self that the Christ conversation has identified us as. This may, of course, need frequent repetition.
This is one reason why gossip is so destructive- the conversation networks constitute the individual in a negative way- what would be the power of positive gossip?

Co-creation- Without the tension of the opposite, you cannot know that you exist. Thus, master cannot exist without slave, man without woman, etc. Because of this tension, you can change others by changing yourself. Foucalt- Power doesn't lie with the speaker but with the listner. Force is outside pressure; "power is the ability to produce results through language." MLK, Ghandi, etc. Force doesn't work, it leads to more force. When we are subjected to force, the best response is not to change the other, but ourself. (hmm. Sounds like martial arts!)

How do you say Art is right? The network of conversations that create this rightness?
Najendra- "A discipline creates what it studies. The body is created with biology's creation." (What does this mean?) The act of speaking "I" puts the speaker into the game, enmeshing her into the web.

Butler was instrumental in seperating the ideas of gender and sex. I, who have no idea, try to explain queer theory by riffing on something the prof. said- it "queers" or inverts something. Is that what queer theory is then? It turns an idea upside down to look at it?