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.'

But they shouldn't be used by the untrained - you need to know how to be modern before you try to get postmodern

YES, YES, YES!!!!

That reminds me of my undergraduate introduction to postmodernism. The question of whether it would be used to deny the holocaust, met with the response that the people being taught were not the kind of people to deny the holocaust.

But it was put in the groundwater. And now we have a flourishing of fake news, conspiracy theories about shadowy powerful influences and people obsessed with literal violence which is anything but.

Because many people have given up on the basic skills of assessing reality; they just see everything as about power, control and discourse.

Well food is biological. A good analysis would understand how social and cultural beliefs and practices impacted on the environment and body, and how environmental and health factors impacted on society and culture.

It is a really complex and interesting dynamic - but the crux is the interaction between the two.

We can see that with the debate about veganism and the supply of quinoa, for example. Its cultural meaning and status in the West has an environmental impact and impact on people who grow it as a staple, which in turn alters its cultural significance in the West.

There are plenty of people who understand biology and society who can analyse that. Butler isn’t among them.

Well food is biological. A good analysis would understand how social and cultural beliefs and practices impacted on the environment and body, and how environmental and health factors impacted on society and culture

An analysis would not really need to do this in order to be 'good'. An analysis could do this, but it should not have to.

‘An analysis would not really need to do this in order to be 'good'. An analysis could do this, but it should not have to.‘

If an analysis doesn’t do this it isn’t engaging with reality, so is meaningless to the people it is speaking about.

Oh OK. I rather think that you are arguing the point here and/or have no real knowledge of what academic work involves so I'm disengaging from this and getting back to my 8,000 word (the usual, standard length) journal article at this point, safe in the knowledge that it is perfectly OK that I don't engage with each and every aspect of my topic and that I'm not going to mention biology once :)

I have three degrees and my research area is social and environmental interaction, particularly the history of food.

The only reason I will out myself in this way is because I think what has happened to people’s understanding of the world due to postmodernism is disastrous.

If I was interested improving health and safety in the workplace, I’d do a survey and examine accident reports, because they’d be appropriate tools.

But if I was interested in what health and safety might represent in society, discourse analysis might be an interesting tool to understand that. OH&S has both a material reality, (keeping workers safe), but it might also have a theoretical component which tells us something about an increasingly risk-averse society and how that influences workplace policy.

It’s not all or nothing, you use the interrogative tools which are appropriate. And I suppose those which suit the way your mind works.

OK. So you'd know that you don't cover each and every aspect of your topic then.

I agree that the effects of postmodernism have been disastrous, but I am also not a fan of monocausal approaches to understanding phenomena. There have been other elements at play too.

A dynamic approach is the opposite of mono causal.

Dance, well hopefully people would look at both together. You would look at what the risk really was and that would inform your understanding of how risk averse someone is being in relation to the actual risk. You could then look at whether the cultural attitudes of risk aversions ended up increasing material risks. For example attitudes to antibacterial products and antibiotic resistance.

How your mind works is going to in part be a consequence of the kind of education and ideas you’ve been exposed to, and all forms of knowledge require applying theory.

Some pp mentioned the 'extreme relativism' of pomo, one way and another. Call a spade a spade: the extremity of relativism in question is one that denies truth in claiming it to be relative.

This leads to a quick and dirty refutation of pomo. As follows:

If it is true there is no truth, then it is false there is no truth; so it is false there is no truth.
Pomo entails there is no truth.
So if pomo is true, it is false. So it is false.

There may be more to say. But quick and dirty is sometimes good.

This can only work once we have established that pomo makes sense, of course. But that is another matter.

[Must relativism of truth deny truth? Hilary Putnam (in Reason Truth and History it will be) famously quoted Alan Garfinkel's response to relativist-inclined youth: 'I know where you're coming from; it's just that relativism isn't true for me.']

Again, wrt to Butler, pps referenced Martha Nussbaum's piece taking her down. Nussbaum pretty much did for any credibility Butler might have claimed as a feminist theorist, pomo relativism or no pomo relativism.

'I know where you're coming from; it's just that relativism isn't true for me.'

Perfect!

I find it hard to grasp how relativism became so authoritarian.

Yes, WeeBisom, that’s a good point. JB does have strong ‘cool girl’ energy - rape, abuse and harassment are things that only happen to pathetic femme-presenting women, not cool androgynous types like her. That also ties in with the mindset in the trans community that how you present is all that matters. A trans man is exempt from female biological oppression because of how he chooses to ‘present’. It’s a nice idea but sadly not true.

Apologies if this has already been posted (I'd check but, you know, 14 pages) - Unherd article entitled 'The intellectual shabbiness of Judith Butler':

unherd.com/2020/09/the-intellectual-shabbiness-of-judith-butler/?tl_inbound=1&tl_groups[0]=18743&tl_period_type=3

Judith Butler only gets to call herself a 'feminist' because she's female. Oh the irony.

This is a good righteous response to Butler legalfeminist.org.uk/2020/09/26/troubling-with-butler/

@9toenails

Some pp mentioned the 'extreme relativism' of pomo, one way and another. Call a spade a spade: the extremity of relativism in question is one that denies truth in claiming it to be relative.

This leads to a quick and dirty refutation of pomo. As follows:

If it is true there is no truth, then it is false there is no truth; so it is false there is no truth.
Pomo entails there is no truth.
So if pomo is true, it is false. So it is false.

There may be more to say. But quick and dirty is sometimes good.

This can only work once we have established that pomo makes sense, of course. But that is another matter.

[Must relativism of truth deny truth? Hilary Putnam (in Reason Truth and History it will be) famously quoted Alan Garfinkel's response to relativist-inclined youth: 'I know where you're coming from; it's just that relativism isn't true for me.']

Again, wrt to Butler, pps referenced Martha Nussbaum's piece taking her down. Nussbaum pretty much did for any credibility Butler might have claimed as a feminist theorist, pomo relativism or no pomo relativism.

This is basically the same refutation as strong empiricism.

Anyway - I'm not convinced by postmodernism even as a way to look at literary texts. I think it can result in some pretty shit analysis and when it comes up with something worthwhile, it's mostly luck, or intuition that has nothing to do with the method.

Anyway - I'm not convinced by postmodernism even as a way to look at literary texts. I think it can result in some pretty shit analysis and when it comes up with something worthwhile, it's mostly luck, or intuition that has nothing to do with the method.

Quite. Postmodernism/deconstruction is a thing you can do akin to "putting something in a blender".

I'm sure putting something in a blender is a useful technique in some circumstances, but whatever the results are will tell you far more about the input than the blender, and will have very little to do with your blending technique.

Anyone who decides to devote their career to blenderology and start writing long-winded wordy texts about blenders and how to use them, writing admiring reviews of others' blender output and decides their academic career is going to basically be knocking on every department's door and trying to shove their stuff in their blender needs to be restrainded for everyone's safety.

There are some definite overlaps between this discussion and this article on Jessica Klug. Klug was the academic most recently called out for identity deceit--a woman with a white, middle-class Jewish background but who 'passed' as something else.

The perils of identity politics and postmodern babble combine here:

quillette.com/2020/09/25/deception-and-complicity-the-strange-case-of-jessica-krug/

stripesgalore

Going back to your point about whether pomo would be used to deny the holocaust, some current left wing figures seem to be, if not denying it, at least take away its exceptionalism.

Different circumstances, but AOC has referred to 'concentration camps' on the US / American border which is ridiculous (don't remember Jews trying to cross the river Rhine into Germany, distinct lack of piles of bodies in US border establishments).

Roger Hallam (who seems to be an eminence grise of XR) has made comments about the holocaust being 'just another fuckery in human history'.

www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/20/extinction-rebellion-founders-holocaust-remarks-spark-fury

I don't know if it's pomo or just the left wing trying to take away the exceptionalism of what they see as a right wing issue (due to Israel being seen as an apartheid state etc) but it's interesting to see how different threads can come together.

Goosefoot:
This is basically the same refutation as strong empiricism.

Hmm. Could you help me out a bit with this, Goosefoot? Where is the empiricist premise?

[Not a disagreement; I just would like to understand.]

@9toenails

Goosefoot: This is basically the same refutation as strong empiricism.

Hmm. Could you help me out a bit with this, Goosefoot? Where is the empiricist premise?

[Not a disagreement; I just would like to understand.]

Essentially the original premise is along the lines of, the only things can be empirically observed are real/meaningful/true. This is of course impossible to verify empirically, so the statement contradicts it's own criteria.

Positivism of that kind started to go by the wayside by about the 50s due in part to problems like this, but it's remained pretty mainstream in popular culture to some extent.

Thanks Goosefoot:
' Essentially the original premise is along the lines of, the only things can be empirically observed are real/meaningful/true. This is of course impossible to verify empirically, so the statement contradicts it's own criteria.'

-- But ' If it is true there is no truth, then it is false there is no truth' seems to depend only on a little logic (and possibly the bipolarity of 'truth' if that is non-logical). I still do not see any epistemological claim there, much less a specific commitment to empiricism of any stripe. (I could know the truth of that conditional even if all my knowledge were innate, no?)

The argument, in short, seems (to me at least) to be independent of epistemological commitment.

But, again, perhaps I miss something. Or, perhaps, the 'original premise' is not the one I quote. (Perhaps it is tacit, even? Are you saying the argument is enthymematic?)

I am sorry, this is possibly slipping off topic rather. I would like to understand, though.

I've said this on another thread, but part of the bonkers-ness of this for me is that half the time TRAs are spouting Butler-ish pomo nonsense, and the other half they're claiming that science "proves" that it's possible for a male brain to exist in a female body, or vice versa.

Well, it can't be both, sunny Jim. If you believe that transgender identity is a matter of science, then everything Butler says is null and void. And vice versa.