Feminist Theory & "Women's Issues" Discussion Thread: All Gender Identities Are Encouraged To Participate

@WCC, You didn't even *know* Butler until 15 minutes ago, yet you claim to know her style, place it into a "school of philosophy" no less, because of an extract online somewhere...

Ah well, the joke's on me I suppose, talking to a person who says she's drunk and angry. On the internet. A lol forum. I'm out.

But complicated things are complicated. I much prefer to open up those complicated things to further questioning, to put pressure on them and to discover how they work by investigating it for myself, than to be given an answer and go 'yes, that sounds about right, and it's by a scientist so they must know'.

Also, Chomsky's linguistics are pretty much entirely discredited, right? I have time for the dude, but... well.

yeah but tbh it's all very circular, especially with a lot of different topics itt.

em: yes.

to discover how they work by investigating it for myself, than to be given an answer and go 'yes, that sounds about right, and it's by a scientist so they must know'.

And by none of this do I mean anything close to 'well, it's just our differing opinions, maaaan'.

LBI. Let me spell this out for you. I know who Butler is. I have seen her referenced in many places, intersecting with the things I read about in gender, sociolinguistics etc. I checked out a couple of articles that were online, and found them impenetrable.

When Plax tells me "lay off the Butler" this is an absurd proposition, because Butler is not the foundation of my ideas about gender. I have read enough about Butler to find her impenetrable. I have seen her mentioned enough to know approximately which school of thought she belongs to. I have not read enough of her to have her theories be so much at the base of my ideas about gender that I need to lay off them. Can you understand that, or do you need me to draw you a map?

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

what's hard about that

i never said "lay off the butler" just so we're clear. i said that you were repeatedly using a trope that was strongly associated with her work. i was saying her work has formed identifications with a lot of people who are not women and that it has been taken up and used and identified with and become a canon text for groups that judith butler does not belong to. i never literally said "lay off the butler" or anything similar.

anyone who thinks butler is hard should give spivak a go. or laruelle.

lol iatee

isn't butler's impenetrability, like, a widely discussed thing? iirc she's pretty much admitted to it.

(i found her writing style completely obfuscatory when i tried her at university, but then i also find deleuze incomprehensible too)

deleuze and guattari is tough but deleuze solo is pretty clear.

WCC, you said I've never read Judith Butler. Which is what I went by. Plus, Plaxico never said "lay off the Butler"?

It's just a shame that you tell other people off for not having read certain books or gathered information that you have - like Con, who seems genuinely interested in a lot of things mentioned here. Yet you dismiss Butler, a hugely prolific writer on this matter, without having read a single thing by her.

No need to "draw me a map", save those pencils for your artwork.

even anti oedipus is pretty straightforward.

there is a certain performative difficulty in butlers work, the complexity of the text as a set of entanglements in order to mirror the complex social configurations she is writing about. yes.

difficult and deliberately difficult aren't the same as trying to be obscure or confusing.

there is a jargon to a lot of this stuff that becomes "familiar" with time but i think it's okay that difficult ideas are difficult. i couldn't pick up a quantum physics text and just breeze thru it until i understood the universe either.

i'm sorry if this is too much fanboyism

what's hard about that

took me longer to comprehend than to read, but igi, and i don't even know who Althuss is. hegemonic structures are not fixed things, they exist over time, in the way they are repeated and reasserted. style is a bit lol bullshit academic obfuscation, but i figure that goes with the subject.

OK, your actual post has disappeared behind the cut, Plax, but that was the general gist I got "this idea comes from Butler, Butler said it only in one place and moved beyond it" when it's an idea that has been debated back and forth in other places and I've been talking about those other places so much - it would make more sense if you'd said "lay off the Dale Spender" or "lay off the Cordelia Fine" so I didn't really understand why you were getting Butler from what I was saying.

Le Bateau Ivre, go boil your head.

and for one person deleuze and guattari = difficult another person loves the playfulness and texture of the work

Le Bateau Ivre, go boil your head.

― White Chocolate Cheesecake, donderdag 16 februari 2012 1:31 (3 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

...

Stay classy.

oh i guess it was deleuze & guattari that i read (or tried to read, don't think i got to the end, certainly didn't understand enough of it to take anything from it)

there is a certain performative difficulty in butlers work, the complexity of the text as a set of entanglements in order to mirror the complex social configurations she is writing about. yes.

This I have no time for. Maybe it comes from reading too much about maths and physics, and wanting things to be elegant, that the mark of a brilliant mathematician is someone who takes a big mess of complicated stuff and renders it down to an elegant beautiful equation.

Taking complicated stuff and making it more complicated, to prove that the subject is complicated? That's obfuscation as far as I'm concerned.

i couldn't pick up a quantum physics text and just breeze thru it until i understood the universe either

pretty sure you wouldn't understand the universe afterwards either fwiw

continually mystified/bummed that these threads seem to inevitably devolve into CWW hostility tbh

pretty sure you wouldn't understand the universe afterwards either fwiw

that's the joek!

chomsky is a chill bro and all but yes, structural linguistics, a bit passe.

never found butler anything but dense yet clear tbh, never sure where these ideas of her being such a terrible writer come from.

most philosophy texts are not good at telling you what the secret true state and meaning of the world is tho, this is true

ha, hadn't seen this martha nussbaum quote before

Nussbaum's "The Professor Parody" essay also raised the issue of Butler's style, calling it "ponderous and obscure" and "dense with allusions to other theorists, drawn from a wide range of different theoretical traditions...It bullies the reader into granting that, since one cannot figure out what is going on, there must be something significant going on, some complexity of thought, where in reality there are often familiar or even shopworn notions, addressed too simply and too casually to add any new dimension of understanding."[54]

she kind of goes in on butler and does not stop in this essay http://www.akad.se/Nussbaum.pdf

i couldn't pick up a quantum physics text and just breeze thru it until i understood the universe either.

There are writers (whose exact names escape me because I'm drunk - Barrow, Penrose spring to mind) who do *exactly this*. They write about quantum physics in such a way to make it accessible. People like this, I have respect for as writers and thinkers.

tbh i hate the kind of academic that is afraid they are being tricked by texts they don't understand

continually mystified/bummed that these threads seem to inevitably devolve into CWW hostility tbh

Hey, I've got some yapping assholes buzzing round me telling me how ~hostile~ I am, before I've even got hostile, and then get all preachy when they manage to poke and prod me into anger - hey, you might get a bit fucking cranky after a while of that, too, you know.

Yes, but they don't actually give anybody any skills to handle quantum physics. And anyone who reads them will be reading ideas based on scientific testing but filtered through theory.

xxpost

there is a jargon to a lot of this stuff that becomes "familiar" with time but i think it's okay that difficult ideas are difficult. i couldn't pick up a quantum physics text and just breeze thru it until i understood the universe either.

― dayove cool (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, February 15, 2012 4:30 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

this is totally changing the subject, but i have absolutely zero tolerance for obfuscatory overwriting in an academic critical/theoretical context. that shit is the biggest, most transparent load of horseshit in the world. if any of the people posting in this thread are academic type people, i really, really hope you don't write like that.

I'm not an academic. I never pretended to be. I'm an autodidact in pretty much everything. I see how a lot of people use walls of academia to keep the riffraff like me out, and hey, I'm suspicious of it.

they don't use it to keep you out, they use it to justify their having a job

they don't really care about you

since i know you're not an academic i wasn't criticising you there either.

put it another way - what makes people so angry about text they don't "understand"?

ha, this topic has given us surprise WCC/contenderizer agreement

because you can spout untruths half-truths and platitudes in transparent orderly prose too

Academia is pretty much my family business and has been for generations, they kinda do care about me ha ha, at least I hope so.

what makes people so angry about text they don't "understand"?

it annoys me in the same way that most bad writing annoys me.

eh it is not something that concerns me much these days as i live in my own little world (cept when i tried to explain deleuze to someone doing a phd in philosophy of science the other night, drunkenly. didn't go v well), but it just strikes me as odd that we're still in a place where people think that the sole inviolable rule of serious academic/theoretical writing is to be clear precise and to the point. (um, i think i'm xposting terribly here, should learn to type more quickly.)

Well, obviously as an academic I'm not welcome in this thread any more. So I'll see myself out. Bye, guys.

it's down to the privileging of certain forms of logic and truth i think

I've been following this thread with interest, though my knowledge/experience here is slight and I don't have much to add to the debate. The analogy with science writing made me think of a question though: what are the equivalent of good "popular science" books wrt feminism? I don't have the training (or the time, tbh) to jump into Judith Butler and get much out of it but I would like to read a good accessible introduction to the issues she and her peers discuss.

put it another way - what makes people so angry about text they don't "understand"?

It doesn't make me angry. It does make me think that they're *hiding* something - like, maybe they don't understand their subject quite as well as they represent themselves if they can't come up with a usable metaphor for it.

Like, I don't understand a popular science book to enable me to walk into the Hadron Supercollider and switch on all the buttons, but understanding what they theories are about, and what they are for - they can accomplish that in a clear and straightforward way, even about something as confusing and brain-bending as the weirdness of quantum physics. But, like, Butler, she doesn't want to come up with a helpful metaphor to make you understand. She wraps everything in allusions to references with subclauses chock full of namedrops of disciplines she hopes you haven't heard of.

privileging good writing in the humanities should be the same thing as privileging 'good math' in science.

what makes people so angry about text they don't "understand"?

it annoys me in the same way that most bad writing annoys me.

― first period don't give a fuck, second period gon get cut (lex pretend), donderdag 16 februari 2012 1:42 (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

SO text you don't understand annoys you like bad writing? I think NV has a very good point here tbh. The annoyance really isn't with that with which you don't understand, rather with you yourself not understanding it. I get that so many times tbh

there is a certain performative difficulty in butlers work, the complexity of the text as a set of entanglements in order to mirror the complex social configurations she is writing about. yes.

― judith, Wednesday, February 15, 2012 4:30 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark

i love most of what you've said itt, judith, but i can't get on board w this. making complicated things seem complicated is dead easy. any hack can do it. hell, it's easy to do it even with simple things. making complicated things seem clear, however, is very, very hard.

there's a complex relationship between intellectual competition, narcissism and defensiveness that is just painfully obvious in a lot of "sophisticated" academic/critical/philosophical writing. no matter how much i sympathize with the forces that motivate it (it's their job to seem smart and someone else is always after the same grant money), i simply cannot abide it.

lol, WCC and i are on the same side now. go team philistine!

I'm still kinda scarred from 2 years of Crit Theory...Heidegger was pretty much where I threw in the towel, as far as impenetrability goes.

But I think it's a lot to do with patience, and being invested in the subject. I have mad respect for people who can parse Butler, for academics as well... I guess if anything the impenetrability makes me hate myself more than the subject. Like 'ugh, brain, WORK dammit'