Judith Butler showing how hegemonic power structures are intrinsic totalities in the theoretical conception of... oh, I give up. (Target Presse Agentur Gmbh/Getty Images)
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Judith Butler, the doyenne of what is known as “theory”, is back in the discourse thanks to a Guardian interview, in which they (for it is they not she, inevitably) described, with unusual directness, people who acknowledge there are two sexes (i.e. 100% of humanity) as “fascists”. They is famous for writing thoughts on gender and culture which have all the light, straightforward readability of the users’ manual for a nuclear reactor. They’s prose makes Dominic Cummings’s blog look like AA Milne. And they is one of those soi-disant feminists who, rather surprisingly, claims to believe that women don’t actually exist.
They’s most renowned sentence, which won the 1998 Bad Writing competition in the journal Philosophy & Literature, runs as follows:
“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.”
It is a glorious racket, and you can’t help admiring it. I like to picture Judith as a snake-oil purveyor on a travelling show in the days of the pioneering Wild West, sat in the wagon after the sell, in a box-coat and a tall hat, lighting a cigar with a ten-dollar bill and having a good chuckle with the missus at the dumb rubes in the crowd. “Honey pie, those bozos sucked it up!” There’s something very funny about seeing bourgeois idiots being taken for schmucks and grandly fleeced. “Good for you gal!” you want to shout.
If this were only a few bottles of liniment sold to a few stooges it would have a roguish charm. But with the explosion of higher education and of social media, these laughable ideas are increasingly seeping out into wider society.
Judith is the undisputed master of the form, but such specious claptrap is a game anyone can play.
Let’s have a go. You take a social phenomenon or a piece of art (high or low, that doesn’t matter) and subject it to theory. To pluck a random, recent example let’s take current hit BBC drama Vigil. We might say that in its depiction of a female detective investigating a murder mystery on a submarine that it posits interiority citationally as a partial détournement of the ideological power structures of the late-capitalist ideations of guilt and innocence.
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SubscribeBang on. The whole thing is a power grab.
I’m not sure it really is. A power grab implies purpose, focus and a cold-eyed view of the reality, which doesn’t sound at all like theory to me. It seems much more like a product of a hugely successful civilization which has left far too many people with far too much time on their hands.
Perhaps it is more a status grab (which also solidifies power). Just as fashion delivered more and more extravagant codpieces for competing courtiers, or whiter and whiter skin for the female aristocracy.
I think your highlighting ‘status’ is apropos.
Some time ago I was involved in a pushback against a pseudo therapy called Therapeutic Touch(TT). Its practitioners were by and large nurses in the US and its ‘theorists were largely female ‘academics’. I was asked to write a book chapter on the nursing ‘theorist’ who was used as the 1st sage to ground the ideas of this modality. Her name was Marthas Rogers.
I had to read copious amounts of her seemingly impenetrable writings around her notion of ‘energy fields’ etc.- a fiction put forward as what is being manipulated by the TT practitioners and ‘researchers’. Needles to say, after coming to understand what Rogers was writing about – couched in scientific jargon unmoored from its actual meaning – it took me at least month to recover from the exhaustion of trying to lay out a comprehensible account of her propositions.
The writings of Butler and the PoMo Jacques Derrida IMO have a similar appearance, exposed by physicist Alan Sokal (The Sokal Hoax) and recently by the Grievance Studies Hoax of Lindsay, Boghossian and Pluckrose. Producing papers written in impenetrable prose as a proxy for technical profundity.
I think it is facile mimicry – attempting to copy the highly technical prose of hard science papers written for academics in those disciplines. The conflation of that style of writing is associated with their recognised high status authority as a result of describing the world and producing demonstrable, powerful results from those descriptions.
In my view, unless propositions can be tested through appropriate, rigorous demonstration and/or statistical analysis and hence verified, those propositions remain fictions.
I think you are right. They also refer to previous sources as if they are making reference to established knowledge – which clearly they are not. Again in imitation of science. The result is houses built on sand.
‘They also refer to previous sources as if they are making reference to established knowledge – which clearly they are not.’ It is an academic circle-jerk.
Of course it´s a status grab; and there´s lots of money to be made too!
Surely it is partly a power grab, if equity is one of the consequences of wokeness, that will mean weak people will be given powerful positions just because of their identity. Therefore there will be less competition for people who think the ‘correct’ way to deal with.
Completely agree re “too many people with far too much time on their hands.”
As they say, embrace the power of “both/and.” Chaos emerging from those who are driven by nihilism, internal misery, and anger is the engine of change. Yet, there are definitely those who initiate and direct this chaos for purposes of acquiring power.
There are only so many avenues to power in an existing society. Newly-emerging power opportunities lie at the edge of destruction; therefore that which exists must be continually attacked, burned, and plowed under.
Well said!
Best article here in a long time, 5 stars *****.
I hear a number of the academics rolled over by the Post-Modernist freight train saying University is over, beyond saving, is merely a destructive force and best avoided. It is utterly ‘Captured’. I try to explain Post Modernism and Neo-Marxism and Critical Theory here and get no up votes. The people just do not care that all that enlightenment and intellectualism and moral decency from the last 2000 years of Western thinking is being utterly destroyed and despised, and that will destroy the West and thus the World – they just do not care.
“The only way to deal with it is to defund the academic institutions and courses that expound it. It must go. ”
The only force I have seen which attempts to fight this social Pathology is Trump, his banning of CRT and such – but Biden wrote 100 Executive Orders before his first month was out, and reversed every one – thus we know Biden is completely Captured….. the only analogy to this attack on all which is decent is David Ike’s Lizards. The success of this Neo/Post/Critical pathological philosophy of hate is so crazy, yet successful, nothing rational can be equated to it.
Of course people care that Western civilization is under attack. Look at the extensive comments section under any Unherd article describing cancellation or another statue being removed or more woke policies in the workplace.
I continue my probably vain quest to have Unherd publish more articles describing how to fight this ideological attack on the West instead of just describing it. In a reply to one of my comments someone said that describing and defining the problem is the start point for fighting back. I agree but I feel the problem has now been thoroughly described. We need strategies for fighting back and not many people are proposing them.
It’s not just a problem here on Unherd. There’s a ton of articles, podcasts, and youtube interviews discussing ‘progressive’ attacks on the west but they don’t suggest what we can do about it. I wonder if all these commentators secretly accept that the west is finished and all they can do is bear witness to its decline?
Hopefully the Royal support for BLM is a lie, or at least a half-truth. But seeing as Her Majesty has to be Queen for all of the UK, blacks and BLMers included, and is anyway barred from participating in political debate, I shall think no less of the Firm for making a generic claim like this to protect the flank and keep everybody on board. Renegade ex-members are another matter.
The claim was made by a black equerry. Whether it’s true is another matter.
I am for ‘All lives matter’ myself, and strongly opposed to BLM, kneeling etc. I’d boo the national football team for kneeling if I ever went to their matches. But since you cannot expect the Royal Family to take sides in a culture war, I am happy enough for *them* to hedge their bets, if they can do it without betraying the ‘white lives matter equally’ side.
The Queen would have been told about the terrible death of George Floyd and that BLM were a group that protested it. Who wouldn’t support that?? who would say Black Lives Don’t Matter? I doubt she is fully aware of the more insidious political aims of BLM or about the corruption and moral bankruptcy of its leaders and the woke corporations falling over themselves to not have a finger pointed at them, or the slavish devotion shown by our cultural elites. If she is, it could be a (smart) cynical ploy as the Royal Family is an easy target for claims of white supremacy.
One would hope that she was fully aware – or listening to advisers who are. But then the Queen has to do a certain number of things that Elisabeth might have disagreed with.
“Who are they and why are they able to get away with it? Why has the so-called long march through the institutions met with so little resistance – and who is doing the marching?”
Niall Ferguson puts it very well…..
“Liberals defer to progressives, and progressives defer to outright totalitarians”.
This is the problem. Liberals need to be less gullible and to “see all sides”. Sadly, this cancer has metastasised outside the Academy now, thanks to our enabling media, cultural and HR gatekeepers all coming from within it.
You are asking the relevant questions. In my view there are many situations and individuals outside of unlawful conduct that cannot be held to account for various reasons. Holding to account and expecting a significant change as a conclusion does not necessarily follow.
In my view what is required is serious government intervention at this point. It requires a rigorous highlighting of the what constitutes the ideology and its core propositions, where the ideological activism is occurring in the institutions and whether the results of its activism are unlawful or if not.
Liberals basic aim is to protect their affluent life of comfort and ease and everything can and will sacrificed to that purpose: especially the labouring classes.
T Hopp and Michael Stanwick are right. Who are all these alleged malefactors? They do seem curiously hard to discover. One therefore wonders if the ‘woke’ thing and its concomitants are not largely inventions based on the twitterings of a few opportunists, or deranged individuals, broadcast by the commercial media as clickbait and taken up by the gullible.
It would properly be the universities’ job to expose such nonsense, but they have been so demoralised by Thatcher’s removal of tenure, lack of money, the cynical antics of ‘management’, and endless criticism from those who should be their strongest defenders, that they are now mostly spineless. This distresses those of us who can recall real universities.
Michael Stanwick suggests ‘a serious government intervention’. Alas, we live under Captain Boris and his crew of fools. Nothing to be hoped for there. How about an ad-hoc committee of cross-bench peers in the Lords? There is a good deal of experience and even a smidgeon of integrity among their number. If the alleged growth of intellectual vandalism is found to be genuine, then legislation might have to follow. If not, perhaps we can just develop a sense of proportion. We have nothing to fear, but fear itself.
” . ..what we can do about it”.
Two books inspire me on this, Fahrenheit 451 and The Bible.
Preserve and promote knowledge as much as I can, share it with others wherever possible. Praise and help youngsters who approach it with enthusiasm, they are out there. Keep arguing.
The B for obvious reasons, the wisdom and perspective it contains and faith.
“Plead thou my cause, O Lord, with them that strive with me: and fight thou against them that fight against me. . . .Let them be confounded, and put to shame, that seek after my soul: let them be turned back, and brought to confusion, that imagine mischief for me. Let them be as dust before the wind and the angel of the Lord scattering them. Let their way be dark and slippery: and let the angel of the Lord persecute them. For they have privily laid their net to destroy me without a cause: yea, even without a cause have they made a pit for my soul. Let a sudden destruction come upon him unawares, and his net, that he hath laid privily, catch himself: that he may fall into his own mischief.”
From Psalm 35
A movement to preferentially hire people who didn’t get a university degree in the arts and humanities — by discriminating against those who got such degrees — would work wonders. If such a degree made you greatly less employable than not having one, people would stop flocking to university to get them, and universities would stop seeing themselves as needing to cater to the students and their parents, as if they were in the business of selling knowledge to customers.
And the History departments (and other humanities) could go back to teaching history to people who so cared about history that they didn’t care if the degree was at best a waste of time. (As well as to the people who were rich and clueless — who didn’t particularly like history but couldn’t figure out anything they liked better to do, either.)
Spot on. That’s where the fightback should start – at university level which is the source of all this xxxxxx.
Proactive hiring of non-graduates has to be a key element. Some of this has been touched on here before, but in “my day” in newspapers/media you positively would not be hired as a trainee by the vast majority of papers if you had a degree. (Oddly, the Mirror was an exception to this). It was clearly recognised then (and I exaggerate only slightly) that your mind was beyond help if you had been put through the graduation mincer. We now have the very opposite of this hiring policy and the results speak for themselves.
‘The West is finished’ is stretching the hyperbole a bit? There are movements afoot in the US – mostly political movements associated with conservative leaning pundits, who are advocating a ‘parallel polis’. I think this is necessarily the way forward. But that is the US.
“‘The West is finished’ is stretching the hyperbole a bit?”
I hope so but I’m not sure.
“There are movements afoot in the US – mostly political movements associated with conservative leaning pundits, who are advocating a ‘parallel polis’. I think this is necessarily the way forward.”
I had to google ‘parallel polis’ so I learned something new. I’m not aware of these movements but I’ve seen the suggestion that we have to create a new ideology independent of what’s coming out of our educational institutions. That seems like a long, hard slog to me but maybe that’s the reality.
Another idea toi be filed under the ‘what can we do about it’ — we need to change the regulations for charities. The people who are out there doing good works for the suffering are a different class of people than those who are running sports clubs are different than those who are promoting activism and those who are lobbying groups and think-tanks. Letting big corporations dodge taxes by calling ‘paying for their lackeys to influence public opinion and governments in a way that small citizens can never afford’ a charitable donation must stop.
I realise there is a certain ‘who gets to bell the cat’ problem here, but since you asked …
Orban has said successfully resisted it, most of the east has. And surprisingly France. The Mediterranean areas are largely free as well.
The English speaking world is riddled with po mo.
Anyway the rock has been lifted. A few years ago references to this kind of stuff were rare, now common place.
Although I hate the new trend of dividing everything by race, Critical Theory serves no-one but rich white liberals who get to divide groups against each other. It epitomizes the very cultural imperialism it pretends to oppose.
It does not even serve Rich White Liberals, it is merely a pathological hatred of Western society and its Philosophy and culture, morality and history. It is only good for those who are so consumed with loathing of all which has given them everything, that they wish to destroy it. The historical equivalent is the Mongol Hordes who would Capture a civilization, and then kill and burn it all for no reason, but for a lust to destroy. That is Post-Modernism.
It’s society eating itself at the prompting of academia. Ask a Cambodian about this.
Hear! Hear!
Excellent point. Our very own year zero. Heaven help us.
Everything that exists deserves to be utterly destroyed. By alchemy, a new and perfect world will emerge—but only after every molecule and thought has been destroyed in its previous form.
Defund The Guardian
I tend to agree with Orwell, that good writing is clear and concise. That said, learning the jargon, learning to write ‘university ugly’ is all about power and exclusion – for mediocre minds. The really bright still express themselves with clarity.
There is also a touch of middle-class anxiety in this pseud style. Toffs and working class types speak clearly; the anxiously virtue-uncertain middle classes don’t. It’s like the great Tracey Ullman sketch on an airline: upper classes will be served roast beef, potatoes and Yorkshire pudding….the middle class will have salmon en croute, with a rasperry jus and an apricot glaze….
And the working classes will be served… roast beef, potatoes and Yorkshire pudding.
In short, if you know who you are, if you are certain of your culture and your values, you don’t write or speak like these pompous idiots.
Thanks for the Tracey Ullman. Very funny. And good to see someone keeping contempt for the middle classes alive
“So now we have queer theory, gender theory, critical race theory, out in the open. And this stuff is dangerous when it metastasises.
Because it’s not merely an irritant. It weakens and debilitates us. It amplifies neurosis and further damages already damaged people — the shouty unicorn-avatar children of Twitter have been driven out of their tiny minds by it, to their and our detriment. It has had a terrible, deadening effect on the arts, reducing a lot of drama to nothing much more than grievance and resentment.”
So much truth here. Not much else to say!
i know that it is tempting to think this, but it takes us away from the more important issue. That she is simply wrong! Wrong, and contrary to the popular view, completely out of date.
her basic idea about gender is rooted in French existentialism, as an early paper of hers makes clear. Put simply, it’s “existence precedes essence” for gender.
this is very fashionable but very dated nonsense.
Brilliant! A Dalrymple like dissection of deconstructionist drivel.
Excellent article, sharp analysis, witty, entertaining, thank you.
The great Clive James saw this coming, at least as it relates to the study of literature. He also apparently saw it going, which, alas, did not come to pass: …”there was simply no time to read literary theory: a fact it tacitly admitted by making itself unreadable. But while it ruled the universities, a generation of teachers impervious to literature passed on their impudence to a generation of students who would have been better left idle.”
Hilarious but dangerous. If Trump taught us anything, it’s that people who have a stage, can put forward increasingly bizarre and wrong ideas and people will follow and believe. Those of us with a non-woke disposition need to speak up and reclaim common sense and reality or we’re lost!
Trump taught me about fake news – which is pretty substantial.
BINGO!
Yes, privatise the universities
Make Humanities Great Again.
The less oxygen that is given to fools such as Judith the better.
However, it is hardly surprising that the Bill Gates sponsored Guardian runs stories like this as it is Bill’s and the entire elite’s agenda to sow such discord in the lower 98% that consensus can never be found, thus allowing the move to corporate oligarchy to press ahead unopposed.
The response to Covid has clearly proven that big tech rules the world and that governments of developed countries are just its mouth piece and its jailers.
It might be too late to save academia. I dropped out of a Philosophy Masters at Exeter after reading Judith Butler. Myself aged 61 and a retired GP were consistently failing our assignments. I felt sorry for our lecturers teaching this stuff but the students seemed to lap it up.
Yes I am a gp and did a medical anthropology masters with a gender paper so had to read Judith. Felt much like a mind bending intellectual game. I just about grasped the theory and chucked an A out on my essay whilst fully clear that this would not be of use back in the day job. One of the most satisfying parts of that course was pointing out real life health dilemmas to those who had such critical theory type approaches that they’d disconnected from the every day…and we’re stumped by these scenarios as presented by me. No theorising a solution then!!!
It’s always ‘late capitalism’, isn’t it? Or ‘late-stage capitalism’. As if the end is somehow just around the corner, and some kind of sunlit utopia lies within our grasp, if only we were sensible enough to see it.
Interesting article. I have not read her work but Banning Butler (or almost anyone) and defunding faculties is not the way to do it: this would surely be a reverse Gramsci and be seized on as such? Reform and change are to be welcomed: both are messy and yet the marks of a vibrant and resilient society. Whether she is right or wrong counter arguments have to be made in an open, investigative and reasonable manner – hard though it may be to see gladiators thrashing with nets and swords or being munched by lions before baying crowds. Rome wasn’t rebuilt in a day – and shutting down debate in yet another direction may not help. Even if it silences those who would silence you.
I can so relate. I did my degree in media and film in the early 90s, doing a dissertation on the Monstrous Feminine (The Alien Queen, Psycho, Carrie etc) and Marxist-feminist theory was the bedrock for EVERYTHING. I used the word patriarchy 50 times a day and became quite the little militant. I eventually grew out of the worst of it but only because ‘normal’ society was still there to bring me back. I fear today’s young brainwashed little activists have no such reality check. They go straight into jobs at the BBC.
This definitely struck a chord with me. I abandoned my goal of an academic career in Eng. Lit. back in 1985 after realising that although I was quite good at churning out “specious claptrap,” the essays that I wrote meant absolutely nothing to me. Critical Theory had already taken root even then (this was in LA) and our reading list for a course on Tudor poetry “naturally” included a work by Pierre Bourdieu, which was both impenetrable and unutterably boring. I decided to quit after attending a seminar that was supposed to be about a poem by Auden but that opened with the immortal words: “Well we won’t waste time reading the poem.”
Great piece.
and note:
just how useful some of that analysis borne of Marxism still is – if applied with your brain switched on.
…a ruling class ‘progressive’ pose that belongs more to the eleventh century than the twenty-first.
Why the eleventh century? What was the ruling class’s progressive pose at that period? Or is it used just because it’s a nice round thousand years earlier? It’s like the use of ‘mediaeval’ as an all-purpose insult, generally employed by people who know zip about the Middle Ages. The rest of the article was fine, but that throw-away reference is irritating.
I mean, what did the Normans ever do for us?
And they is one of those soi-disant feminists who, rather surprisingly, claims to believe that women don’t actually exist.
If that were true then she would not exist.
Wow, what a relief that would be to us all.
Judith Butler is the polar opposite of Richard Feynmann, who explained genuinely complex ideas in the physical sciences in ways that ordinary people could gain some appreciation of.
Perhaps I’m just too angry, but I’d love these loathsome and cowardly con artists to try it on, somehow, IN China or Saudi. See how their torrent of sh**te fairs against determined power. Of course they are not so stupid that they are unaware of the need to pick on soft targets.
Regarding the winner of the 1998 Bad Writing prize: did “they” really write that, or was it produced automatically by some prototype of the Post-Modernism Generator at https://www.elsewhere.org/journal/pomo/ ?
Very much to the point
spot on – and a few more observations:
it is based on an inherited view of man as a special creation – in spite of the religious underpinnings of this having been stripped away. It is pre Darwinian in its understanding of mankind
its inherent dualism becomes evident in the trans issue – the souls gender is independent of the body’s sex
It is grounded in aspects of French culture that will be mysterious to most people in the Anglo sphere but have been spotted by Chomsky and others. Where man is concerned the French are pre Darwinian, dualist and make a far greater distinction between humans and animals than we do. It’s just part of the cultural background. It’s a key part of the reason that animal rights, let alone vegetarianism, have come so late to France.
France is beginning to open up intellectually thanks to new thinkers – ironic that we have taken on thinking that they are now, slowly, moving away from.
The difference you are grappling with may be the enduring deep attachment to Enlightenment universalism. It is linked to the very big difference today that ‘woke’ ideology has not infiltrated the media in France as it is has in Britain. Indeed, there is a robust resistance to it as I have mentioned before.
In part perhaps.
It has been observed by French thinkers that identity politics has roots in German romanticism. But we still can’t get away from the fact that wokeism has deep roots in French thinking. Nor should we accept French thought as a whole simply because it shows some resistance to wokeism. Part of that opposition is, in any case, a residual anti Americanism.
Amusingly French philosophers like Luc ferry (while fully aware of the French origins) see deconstruction as an American cult.
True. And yet France since 1989 has again become so divided over other issues to the (exaggerated) point of old hands warning of civil war. Next election may break the trend with new ideas and people? Moutet and others on Unherd seem gloomy on prospects. So why?
Which is a tad unfair, given that the source of so much wokeist theory arises from the writings of French ‘intellectuals’.
They serve the stuff up, but they don’t seem to want to eat it. Le patron mange ici? No, he doesn’t, it would appear.
In their defence they didn’t eat quite so much of it for quite so long, and when they got indigestion they stopped. Meanwhile America is in the toilets throwing up.
Butler’s theories are blatant nonsense. But it is not as simple as “defund the institutions” or “cancel the courses”, because academic freedom is an intrinsic part of free societies, and rightly so.
True, but nobody, i.e. society, should be obliged to pay for it either. Let the courses run but students can pay the full cost of teaching. That, in turn, pays the wages of the academics, minus running costs, admin, etc.
I understand your argument but in most Western countries there is a long history of public subsidies to universities. If you believe that no university should receive any public funding anyway then that simplifies things, but if some of them should do then any rule that makes that conditional on their teaching things that you or I agree with will, correctly, be seen as an attack on academic freedom because it strongly incentivises those institutions to teach particular things or not teach particular things.
At the same time, if a university or a course is woefully substandard or is teaching things that are manifestly without academic merit then most people would say they shouldn’t be subsidised. So some sort of regulation probably does make sense but getting the rules right and ensuring it’s objective and fair is certainly important.
It certainly is essential to avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater, yes, and therefore we do have to proceed with a certain amount of caution so as to avoid doing so.
There must be no prohibition on criticising or even denouncing Western or any other culture. Both “anti-Western” and “pro-Western” views must be allowed.
However, where you are right is that sometimes the attack on academic freedom does come effectively from within academe, and that has to be looked at as well.
We don’t teach astrology in university. Plenty of human ideologies aren’t considered fit for 3rd level. And the other side cancels what they can.
I’m not sure astrology can be considered an ideology, it has no ideals as such.
Yes, well then plenty of human ideas or beliefs are not taught at 3rd level.
Likewise to the Soviets, who similarly gutted their universities of opposed views. One lesson from history includes the trap of becoming your enemy. Stand up Czeslaw Milosz.
Commentators have asked how do we combat nonsense. Usage by society determines what a particular word means so if usage changes meaning changes with it. That in itself does not matter. What does matter is that everyone knows what current usage is so we need a glossary of terms that everyone can refer to so words mean the same to everyone. Academics should be required to agree the definitions in a glossary. It does not stifle opinions because there is no limit to the possible words and therefore possible meanings. It should though flush out the absurd. For example if you remove biologcal differences from the word male and female you need a rigourous definition for the terms male and female that excludes those biological differences. The definitions can not be subjective, “what I see as red” means nothing when I use the term red, they have to be objective, “that ball is red”. I defy anyone to come up with a coherent objective definition for male and female that excludes objective biological differences.
Well said!
This article just explains why Gender Theory is rubbish.
This one explains why it helps perverts endanger children: https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/09/09/how-the-guardian-became-the-pravda-of-the-trans-movement/
You say that “it is ‘they’, not ‘she’, inevitably”, but in fact Butler doesn’t seem to care much which we use.
Who cares.
She cares enough to make an arbitrary selection.
Manperson killed God.Manperson became God.Manperson killsmanperson.The end.
Insert new species to continue.
What wonderful use of English, subtle as a sledgehammer, to make the point about writing clarity:
So now we have queer theory, gender theory, critical race theory, out in the open. And this stuff is dangerous when it metastasises.
Gunning Fog Factor = 15
Compared to the impenetrably pretentious 94 word sentence quoted Gunning Fog Factor = 49
W. S. Gilbert had the measure of these people when he wrote the lyrics for Patience or Bunthorne’s bride.
.
Bravo!
“Theory” is post-Enlightenment they way I see it. It clearly builds on a critique of Enlightenment. Those who insist on seeing no fault in Enlightenment will continue to suffer for it as long as they avoid accepting legitimate criticism of Enlightenment which today finds its voice in the form of Theory.
Theory, really, is a symptom of something that’s gone wrong, not the cause of it.
Dislike of Judith Butler here is reminiscent to me of the visceral hatred of Trump in the “Left”: “if only he didn’t exist.” Trump is another phenomenon that is a symptom than a cause.
Genius. Top piece
Brilliant dissection of the dulling circularity of pomo prose, and its (particularly) arch proselytisers . As part of my PhD training as an employment and labour markets researcher i had to take courses in this piffle. I played arch empiricist arguing it had no falsifiability except its own falseness. That it was verbose cant with zero intellectual foundation. My humourless lecturer said “economists like you need to be re-educated in power” That why we do this.”. I then told her i was a Marxist and understood full well what power was. She still failed me and i had to submit to re-education. This was in the 90s so not new!
Many, many years ago I represented a ” travelling salesman” as they were then called. No intention to denigrate his calling. When he described his job to me I said ,’oh you are a travelling salesman.’ No, no, he insisted I am a “sales executive”, he was most put out! When he appeared before the Judge and described his job the Judge said, ‘ah a travelling salesman !!’ There was no protest Changing the words did not change the reality! Perhaps a bit too simplistic !
Butler needs to turn in ‘their’ woman card and ‘their’ lesbian card as well, of course the former presumes the latter, does it not Alice? What utter nonsense. Does any part of the academy have any integrity these days?
And btw, they Butler, LGB people don’t ‘identify’ as homosexual or bisexual they are homosexual or bisexual. And they know what sex is –it’s in the name.
This article correctly pinpoints the start of this movement in the mId 20th century. It has been promulgated by the universities and absorbed by the naive students.
Now nearly 50% of young people, these innocents believe they are being taught facts. They then move into job roles with similarly taught people. The trained belief system is reinforced in every personal interaction so now it is ‘right’ and ‘they’ are ‘wrong’. It is ‘our truth’.
Those older and wiser have been retired early or sidelined because they are disagreeable.
This article correctly pinpoints the start of this movement in the mId 20th century. It has been promulgated by the universities and absorbed by the naive students.
Now nearly 50% of young people, these innocents believe they are being taught facts. They then move into job roles with similarly taught people. The trained belief system is reinforced in every personal interaction so now it is ‘right’ and ‘they’ are ‘wrong’. It is ‘our truth’.
Those older and wiser have been retired early or sidelined because they are disagreeable.
Actually, Lacan was the one to say “woman does not exist”. He meant to say that our symbolic language imposes two non complementary logical positions: the masculine position: all are subject to symbolic castration – those who aren’t are exceptions and the feminine position: all are castrated with no exceptions (or there’s more to one than castration). In that sense woman is both man and something more. But those are structural positions (of deriving signification out of arbitrary symbols) and have nothing to do with biological gender, genitals, etc. The author is not very astute in his understanding of structuralism and post-structuralism.
Unfortunately, Lacan was an idiot who wrote nonsense.
It takes one to know one
Doesn’t look like it.
false
Thanks for dealing with the touat.
Everything you said there was full of evidentially spurious nonsense. But the then Lacan was working on a synthesis of Freudianism and Marxism, the work of two total spoofers.
spurious … spoofers .. have you been Pfizered recently? Lacan never worked on a synthesis of Freudianism and Marxism
Have you read the chapter on Lacan in Impostures Intellectuelles?