Judith Butler has spoken

[lionheart]

Damn.

www.newstatesman.com/international/2020/09/judith-butler-culture-wars-jk-rowling-and-living-anti-intellectual-times

'If we look closely at the example that you characterise as “mainstream” we can see that a domain of fantasy is at work, one which reflects more about the feminist who has such a fear than any actually existing situation in trans life. The feminist who holds such a view presumes that the penis does define the person, and that anyone with a penis would identify as a woman for the purposes of entering such changing rooms and posing a threat to the women inside. It assumes that the penis is the threat, or that any person who has a penis who identifies as a woman is engaging in a base, deceitful, and harmful form of disguise. This is a rich fantasy, and one that comes from powerful fears, but it does not describe a social reality. Trans women are often discriminated against in men’s bathrooms, and their modes of self-identification are ways of describing a lived reality, one that cannot be captured or regulated by the fantasies brought to bear upon them. The fact that such fantasies pass as public argument is itself cause for worry.'

I went to university at a time when post-modernism was entering the academy, so much of the European tradition was new to students and teachers.

I found many of the ideas genuinely exciting; because they untethered texts from the grind of historicity and exegesis. Post-modernism was a critical tool which allowed the reading of texts in a variety of ways; to explore their meaning in culture or to examine what the production of a text might mean in a particular context. It also offered an opportunity to do meta-criticism - why did a hundred years worth of scholars try so hard to prove The Wife’s Lament was not written by a woman?

If you want a really fascinating and enjoyable example of this, Stephen Knight’s book about Robin Hood.

Post-modernism offered tools for looking at popular culture as a way of understanding society without having to make artistic judgements. Why is Neighbours so popular? What does that popularity signal about the cultures it performs in?

The concepts of “re-reading” or “reading against”, which are trite now; were then really interesting ways of re-engaging with important cultural objects (like Shakespeare), just when you thought nothing new could be said about them. It meant that you could ask questions about the role of women or “queer” characters, disengaged from any consideration of what Shakespeare might have meant.

Some of the writers were opaque and I struggled with them, but often the work of reading hard paid of with real insights. You didn’t have to agree with all of it to find some of it useful. Close reading was important, in fact the foundation of the work.

At the time post-modernism was not meant to create reality, but offer a way of understanding it. If you want to understand office politics, consider it as a text for understanding and see what revelations appear.

The writers of post-modernism still went out to lunch and mowed lawns and made babies. And went to work and grappled with complex ideas and how to write about them.

It would be a particularly post-modern project to examine the current mode of post-modernism in the world and explore what cultural anxieties might be exposed by the likes of Judith Butler.

‘At the time post-modernism was not meant to create reality, but offer a way of understanding it. If you want to understand office politics, consider it as a text for understanding and see what revelations appear. grin‘

This is the kind of thing I really object to. Office politics are not a text. They have real material consequences for workers, most strikingly now when we are in a global pandemic.

Life is not a text to be read. It is real.

This is the kind of thing I really object to. Office politics are not a text. They have real material consequences for workers, most strikingly now when we are in a global pandemic.

What tools do you use to understand reality? Theoretical approaches using class and power analysis? Considerations of structural inequity? Close analysis of what politicians, media and organisations say?

A great deal of push back against the TRA agenda has focused on analysis of the attempt to deconstruct the meaning of words. Feminist reading of this attempt has been very clear - and it resulted in real world activism.

Textual analysis is a way of looking at things differently in order to decode significance. There is no prohibition from taking that understanding and suggesting that a workplace might be altered to be fairer. Or that a society is reacting to fear of the future by strictly policing gender norms in bizarre ways.

It’s a thinking tool, not a magic wand to transcend reality.

DancelikeEmmaGoldman

Excellent posts and completely agree. And it allowed certain dominant forms of thought to be exposed for still backing up and continuing oppressive power relations. So class theory in which the political subject to be empowered was actual the male worker or the work the French feminists did on the tethering of being female to motherhood which was itself rooted in the Juddo-Christian figure of Mary (all giving and selfless) and how that played out culturally not just in religion.

But the issue is in the extreme relativism of some of the tradition. And also when it stops understanding it’s own constructions. So there’s no concrete category of woman where we can be sure of any commonality of lived experience but there is a concrete category of trans women? The better post structuralists like Kristeva, Irigaray and Mouffe accept we come to common, if fragile and temporary, categories of meaning and subjectivity and for Mouffe, political agency.

God, there are some smart women here!

Take note, Judy

Like lots of others on here I read Cristeva, Irigaray and the others at university. I couldn’t relate to it all all, because they linked womanhood to women’s bodies. I really wasn’t wanting to engage with the femaleness of my body at all at that age, because tbh all that femaleness meant to me then was trouble, unwanted sexualised attention or what I said or wrote being dismissed because I was young and patriarchally-fuckable.
And back then, if asked, I would have said anyone else who wanted ‘femaleness’ (or what I was being repeatedly shown that ‘being a woman’ meant) was welcome to have it, and I would have grimly wished them good luck with that..

Postmodernism put its toe in the door when I was nearing the end of my undergraduate degree. I found some of it useful, some not. In all honesty, I thought Foucault the most useful, although as said in a previous post, I think his own subjectivity guided his writing and he wasn't at all self-reflexive about this.

What really, fucking got on my tits though was that the postmodernists made so many claims about the 'newness' of their work that simply were not quite true. Those of us adopting modern Marxist and feminist analyses and even some social history thinking (the Annals school) had been doing what the pomos claimed was new since the 60s. Look at the early work of the Birminham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies for example, or consider some of the work of historians who read history from the bottom.

And some of the new postmodern stuff was not just overly relativistic, it denied a social reality and made it harder for those of us saying that social structures are real to make our case against right-wing detractors. It still does. I could say everything I want to say about social construction (of sex/gender, age-based categories, the family, other social forms and so on) without having to dip into postmodernism at all.

I didn't study Eng. Lit to be fair, my study was mainly in the more social and political disciplines (with a fair whack of Women's Studies), but I honestly feel that earlier theory has been cuckooed.

All these people tweeting that they understand Butler and how clear and comprehensive her writing...

... yet they struggle to understand JK Rowling and what she has clearly and comprehensively written.

My grounding in being able communicate clearly came through theology. Obviously, talking about unprovable metaphysics and highly abstract concepts like the Christian Trinity or Atonement Theory requires being able to use both technical language, and grasp complicated abstract ideas.

Now, most religious activity is about the emotional connection, the feelings, so it is not especially necessary to be able to explain it. But if you want to move beyond highly personal individual experiences, you have to be able to distill these complicated concepts into clear language.

I saw postmodernism influence a lot of the Christian writers around me, and it was really obvious their purpose was not to explain or clarify, it was to deliberately obfuscate and confuse, because they wanted to shift religious experience back to an individual, and indeed, otherworldly, mystical experience.

Which is all very well in religion. But Butler et al are academics, not priests. Or, are they?

‘What tools do you use to understand reality? Theoretical approaches using class and power analysis? Considerations of structural inequity? Close analysis of what politicians, media and organisations say?‘

My starting point in any understanding of reality is that people are materially real and live in a materially real world. I start from understanding what people’s biological needs are and what impact they have on the physical world around them and what impact it has on them.

Postmodernism doesn’t do this. We’re just talking heads in postmodernism. It’s all a power game. Postmodernists don’t look at a health and safety policy and tell you whether or not there is a real risk to a pregnant woman, because they don’t engage with the materially real. They simply tell you who holds power in the interpretation, which is meaningless if you don’t know whether or not the contents of the document are a realistic reflection of the real world.

If a worker is ordered at work to do something which is physically dangerous, you could apply postmodernism to the meaning and power of the order, but not to the physical danger, because you don’t have any mechanism for understanding physical danger.

And most of oppression is material- it is someone not offering the right medical care in childbirth, someone choking their romantic partner, a labouring child forced to harvest cotton grown with dangerous chemicals, someone being beaten, being paid so little they can’t heat their home, the impacts of a nuclear bomb.

If someone doesn’t have the intellectual skills to deeply understand both the material real and the socially constructed, they are making half an argument. Post modernists know this, which is why they constantly try to dismiss the importance of reality.

There are three social consequences of that, all of which were inevitable. Firstly, a turning away from the working class and subsistence workers because they are materially deprived, which can’t be understand by postmodernism. Secondly a denial of sex as a category, because that would place women’s oppression within treatment of their bodies. Thirdly endless identity politics over utterly trivial language violations because postmodernism places a laser focus on someone calling you a rapist or a deviant but can’t offer the most basic explanation of why injecting someone with hormones so that they end up in premature menopause might cause them life long suffering.

Stripes - that is so well put. That was what made me weep (literally) when reading the pomo feminists for the first time. Where was the critique of structural constraints, of material factors like poverty and of injustice and so-on?

I'm wondering, though, if this is about appropriate tools and if your tools might be appropriate for some situations and the pomos for others, or if the two can complement each other?

Just thinking this one through...

‘I'm wondering, though, if this is about appropriate tools and if your tools might be appropriate for some situations and the pomos for others, or if the two can complement each other?’

I use both sets of tools together. Unless someone is engaging in a very formal lab procedure, coding or similar, both sets of tools are used because the material and social work together.

But anyone who can only use social theory to understand the world isn’t understanding the world.

Bearing in mind that social theory is a very broad church inclusive of a range of approaches, some of which do very much take account of material and structural elements...

That piece of impenetrable writing (that won the award) reproduced here by myself and others..

Was anyone able to translate?

I had a go a couple of pages back...

I probably could translate it, but honestly, I'm that bit closer to my death already and I am trying to value every minute...

Yes, there are many really useful kinds of social theory that can be used in conjunction with biological knowledge and understanding.

But they are not postmodern.

Yes, there are many really useful kinds of social theory that can be used in conjunction with biological knowledge and understanding

Not all social theory needs to be used in conjunction with biological knowledge - it very much depends on what the theory is analysing.

I do tend to agree with your position on postmodernism, although I am not quite so 'black-and-white'.

I probably could translate it, but honestly, I'm that bit closer to my death already and I am trying to value every minute...

Oh go on - give it a go!

Yes, someone studying English literature will rarely need to refer to an understanding of biology.

But anyone who is going to start making claims about human beings in society has to be coming from a position of being able to understand biology and assess claims about it, because we are biological. There’s no getting away from it.

Even the original topic here that Butler is supposed to be talking about - the risk men pose to women - that is a combination of biological and social factors.

Stripes that was a really useful post. I often find myself saying ''but what about safeguarding'' or 'but risk assessment' and you made me realise that I expect safeguarding and risk assessment to be as important to the other person as they are to me. I'm going to try to change the way I engage with other people.

But anyone who is going to start making claims about human beings in society has to be coming from a position of being able to understand biology and assess claims about it, because we are biological. There’s no getting away from it

Not all social theory in the social sciences is centrally concerned with biology, or, if it is it is isn't necessarily concerned with sex/gender. Social theorists do analyse other topics!

‘Not all social theory in the social sciences is centrally concerned with biology, or, if it is it is isn't necessarily concerned with sex/gender. Social theorists do analyse other topics!‘

Maybe it would help if you gave some examples.

Most people aren’t academics so routinely combine the skills they have developed in understanding social elements, biological elements, mathematical elements without separating them all out.

When it comes to claims about the reality of biological sex, what is Butler’s background in biology that would allow her to be authority on the subject?

Compare her to, say, Cordelia Fine, who can talk about sex and gender with a deep understanding of both based on expertise.

I'm wondering, though, if this is about appropriate tools and if your tools might be appropriate for some situations and the pomos for others, or if the two can complement each other?

I like Téa Smith's videos where she's been trying to get into the academic background to the nonsense, and she talks about postmodernism and deconstruction like this. They're tools, which have a valid use, and are safe to apply in a controlled environment. (But they shouldn't be used by the untrained - you need to know how to be modern before you try to get postmodern).

Switching metaphors, what we're seeing now is much like a controlled burn that has jumped the gap and started a wildfire. Fanned by people who don't grasp what they're doing.

Helen Joyce has also described it as a "universal acid", which I like. I'm sure that would be very useful in a lab, but you wouldn't want to start stocking in supermarkets.

Maybe we are talking cross purposes. Social theorists might also examine the history of cultural relationships with food (so for example, how we embraced curry or Chinese cuisines). They examine our relationship with and participation in social movements. These are just two examples.