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Yeeup, yeeup, yeeup Righteous Rant Drive by Derrida
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For what it’s worth, I don’t like Bitch Lab, I don’t read her, I don’t think she’s very bright, and I think the main thing she piggybacked on recently was a comment thread to a post she didn’t author. Nice appropriation, that.
So: Don’t like Bitch Lab? Join the club, and don’t read her. Read the women she rips off instead. They’re better.
So: Don’t like Bitch Lab? Join the club, and don’t read her. Read the women she rips off instead. They’re better.
01-12-2006
Just go ahead and bitch
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[...] Over at K’s blog, she writes: Bitch | Lab » Blog Archive » Bitch responds: Is Cultural Feminism Pomo Feminism? But, anyway, I’d say that, no, cultural feminism is rather different from postmodern thought. And I will warn you: While I wouldn’t say I’m a postmodernist, I certainly didn’t spend my time studying it and in fact mostly wrote criticisms of it, I do have a big problem when I read dismissive crits of their work. [...]
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Okay, you have refreshed my memory somewhat. I shall not drink four bottles of beer before pontificating in such a fashion next time — there are always opportunities for variations on pontifications with different fashions for them, so nothing will ever come out the same way.
I think you are wrong, however, about no relationship between cultural feminism and postmodernism……….s. Sure, they may not be connected historically,as a political movement. I see them as metaphysically connected though. I maintain that poststructuralism, at least, is a paradigm which needs to posit the metaphysical dualisms of structuralism as a primary act, even if the desired goal is to go on to undermine such posited opposites. And cultural feminism, as you have described it, is based on a dualistic paradigm of masculinity and femininity. So, poststructuralism and cultural feminism are dualistic relatives. Poststructuralism just does a nice neat side-step and posits itself as “antifoundationalist”. That’s fine. But it does get bogged down in self-referentiality, nod nod , wink, wink: “You think I am a feminine woman and I am forced to play this role because of the way I have been socially positioned [reference to structuralism], but [poststructuralist dainty manoeuvre] you should see that I also have at hand my minor counterveiling individualist tendency — for example, I am very naughty!”
The fetishising of inaction: “Gender roles [structuralism] have put my into bondage but [post-structuralism] I rather like it too! And haven’t I messed with your social suppositions now, in making you realise this?”
heh. Reading this without enough coffee in me, all I could think of is that you’d described poststructuralists as Woody Woodpeckers, always mocking everything.
I’m curious, though, which thinkers are you speaking of? Kristeva? Derrida? Butler? Foucault? Others?
Or were you talking about Slut Feminism?
Oh, and I meant to say also, that I’d be really grateful for an extended exegesis on this. I find it interesting but I’m not sure which thinkers are exemplary and I’m wanting to re-read or re-think them in light of your comments. Which, now that I think about it, your comments are a pithy way of summarizing Alcoff’s criticisms of post-structuralism.
No, you didn’t mention Linda before, but you did recently mention Larry Alcoff in a post about SEIU - and he’s her husband.
Yepper. She’s actually how I met Larry to begin with. I was so smitten with her, as an undergrad, I ended up writing her for a copy of the paper. Later, I invited Larry to participate in a series of town forums about the economic tragedies faced by a community: plant closings, etc. When the nursing home workers strike went down, got involved with that.
Tres cool blog name by the way. Off to investigate more. You’re evil for distracting me from the task of keeping my nose to the grindstone. :)
Well, I’ma dumbass, I ASSumed. Your site isn’t a blog! I will put it up at the pulp pages, though!
[...] Over at K’s blog, she writes: Bitch | Lab » Blog Archive » Bitch responds: Is Cultural Feminism Pomo Feminism? But, anyway, I’d say that, no, cultural feminism is rather different from postmodern thought. And I will warn you: While I wouldn’t say I’m a postmodernist, I certainly didn’t spend my time studying it and in fact mostly wrote criticisms of it, I do have a big problem when I read dismissive crits of their work. [...]
I’m curious, though, which thinkers are you speaking of? Kristeva? Derrida? Butler? Foucault? Others?
Oh, and I meant to say also, that I’d be really grateful for an extended exegesis on this.
Haha! That’s funny — an extended exegesis.
I don’t think that will be forthcoming — and it’s not so much because such an exegesis would require me to get out a bunch of books and actually put some effort into writing one (which may not be an unworthy exercise all in all), but because more precisely what I intend to criticise when I speak of “post-structuralism” is less the proclamations of the po-mo authors themselves, which may, at times, be groundbreaking or simply amusing. What I want to refer to, rather, is the cultural postures which they engender in their hangers on.
I suppose that if I want to do what I say I do, I should run some tests, start a social psychology paper, and get me some statistics to corroborate everything — however, once I again, I doubt that this is going to happen.
So, I must revert to anecdote and observation.
The problem with pomo theory, as it appears to me, is not the theory itself, but the authoritarian nature of the human being which it implies. Why is Foucault even considered radical? He is a kind of postNietzschean, who took Nietzche’s methodology of social archaelogy along a few different trajectories. He seemed to imply for a lot of people (though I suspect this was not his intention) that as individuals, we are victims of an overarching institutional determinism, over which we can have (or, at least SEEM TO HAVE) no control. He might wish to be a radical — and to some degree he can be read in this way. Generally, he is read as someone who sets a backdrop of extreme social determinism to his foreground antics of personal, but only slightly transgressive, naughtiness.
Such slight misbehaviour as Foucault engaged in, in order to cryptically assert his resistance to a sense of a totalitarian order, only appears outrageous or even interesting to someone whose personality is already riddled through with an authoritarian quality and flavour. One first has to BELIEVE in “daddy” in order to find pleasure and self-satisfaction in going against the presumed moral order set in place by “daddy”. Can it be true that the way to find one’s individuality is by rebelling like a naughty child? Perhaps yes — perhaps even archetypically so. But rebelling is a recipe for a suppressed child who wants more for itself. Rebelling in such a way is not political in itself. Just the first step to freeing oneself.
The hardest part of being a political radical is having the wherewithal to become efficacious once the rebellion has been completed, and one is now psychologically free.
I have not found ANYTHING to date, within postmodernism, which goes anywhere beyond this rebellious child syndrome.
“He seemed to imply for a lot of people (though I suspect this was not his intention) that as individuals, we are victims of an overarching institutional determinism, over which we can have (or, at least SEEM TO HAVE) no control.”
Hmmm. Well, that’s exactly the opposite of how I understood Foucault and what I taught in my classes where his theories came up. In fact, what is intriguing to me about Foucault’s work is that he offers a theory that does, in fact, allow us a way out — at least point the way to get started. Contrary to other conceptualizations of power, MacKinnon for instance, where you either have power or you don’t. Power, for Foucault, is generative (productive). Most illuminating was his criticism of Freudo-marxists which prompted me to engage in a lengthy analysis of the Frankfurt School for my thesis, showing how their old school marxist understanding of society — the relationship between society/self (structure/subject, whatever) — was what ultimately left us entrapped in the present.
You can see this in MacKinnon in a quote I left in the comments, responding to Ed under Bitch Gets Rude. For MacKinnon, who’s working off old school Marxism, you either have power or you don’t and nothing short of radical social change and agitation every minute will suffice.
Otherwise, I guess I don’t see the same thing in the adherents of pomo — and I can’t really think of anyone right now.
Indeed, everything you say can actually be applied to _my_ blog. Wee you to suggest that it was the result of Pomo, I would laugh and say, “you don’t know me very well. :)”
NO you are not as cagey as most postmoderns –the one’s I’ve actually met. Postmoderns tend to disappear under a seeming cloud of unknowability, after the first engagement with them. They appear to love a certain high religious feel to everything, which justifies their non-engagement. indeed, they act as if “well you either understand our mystical formula or you are not a sophisticate.” Because you continue to try and engage with what I say, you do not have this core tendency to mystify the truth as something “felt” but not articulable– indeed, if anyone here is liable to that charge under the circumstances, I would say it is more likely to be me than yourself, since you have written screeds to justify your position, whereas I have been content to merely FEEL self-justified, whilst resting in the lazy holiday mode. So, rest easy. I don’t see you in this way.
As a postscript, I will say that having read Nietzsche for a number of years, and really with a great deal of persistance to reach the level of understanding I now think I have …. also having combined his insights with those of Marx, finally, to make a coherent whole, I do found Foucault to be something of a mere footnote to these other thinkers.
I would also suggest that the way undergraduates read and understand him is very different from the way that a trained academic would read him. Perhaps what I have noted represents a certain schism between two tendencies in reading.
All the same, I am often disappointed with self-named postmodernists. I don’t find their views very conducive to enhancing my own sense of personal wellbeing, not even to the point of giving me the feeling that I am really, truly communicating with a human being. More often I get the sense that I am trying to relate to someone who has suffered so much at the hands of power that they have well and truly disappeared up their own asses… into a state of pseudo-individuality.
And if I had a real life problem — a real dilemma that pertained to the concrete, real word — who would I go running to? I have asked myself this question a lot — since some of my dilemmas have been, let’s say, critical.
There are few, of an ideological bent, whom I could trust — but certainly I would run to ANYONE whose viewpoints entailed the concept of “empirical”. i’d also run to many feminists. But run to a postmodernist to help me solve my problems..?
I’d sooner run to the family priest, or simply cuddle my dog.
After all, most solipsists have enough problems of their own to deal with.
Bitch, are you familiar with Chomsky’s criticisms of post-modernism? Have you read this: http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/chomsky-on-postmodernism.html
He also debated Foucault: http://www.chomsky.info/debates/1971xxxx.htm
I read his debate with Foucault years ago as an undergrad. Doing some research, I stumbled over it, sat there among the stacks and read through it.
My impression at the time was that he was uninformed about Foucault’s work but, as I said, it was years ago. So, I’d be happy to listen to a summary. I work about 80 hrs a week, so I have little time for extracurricular pursuits.
Do you think it would inform a discussion of the difference between cultural feminism and pomo feminism? E.g, does chomsky speak to whether or not women have essential natures or whether or not women’s position in society as a class vis a vis men as a class gives them a unique standpoint through which we can radically transform society? (I too simplistic gloss on the wide variety of thought within cultural feminism, to be sure.)