on 12/16/00 6:53 AM, Doug Stokes at dstokes14@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> Im not familiar with the thread, or indeed Nussbaum. Maybe what he / she is
> getting at is Post structuralisms (PS) failure to ground itself in any
> politico-ethical framework.
I think it falls more in the line of pomo-bashing. :)
I don't think Nussbaum really understands any of her objections or what
she's objecting to - it's really more like Cheney's objections to Foucault.
Really more like the whole Feminist conflict... Let's find a way to make the
ideal feminist and all of the others will be destroyed!
Did you know that Butler was chased away from the U. Chicago gender
conference by threats from Nussbaum that Nussbaum would accost Butler if she
showed up?
> Furthermore, it has taken left academia into a
> discursive navel gazing whereby the symbolic becomes the foundational. The
> retreat from any economic or materialist analysis (which PS caricatures as
> 'economic reductionism') and its attendent effects on concioussness is made
> all the more ironic as capitalism further penetrates our inner lives.
I think that may fit more the type of Nussbaum etc who disregard
"post-modern projects" because they aren't "attached to anything." It seems
like such obsession with acting has undermined the possibility (in some
ways) to re-evaluate the ways we think and act.
> Intellectuals abdicate responsibility for any sustained engagement.
Which ones do this?
Foucault comes to mind here:
We are just private individuals here, with no other grounds for speaking ...
than a certain shared difficulty in enduring what is taking place. ... Who
appointed us, then? No one. And that is precisely what constitutes our
right. ... 1. There exists an international citizenship ... that obliges one
to speak out against every abuse of power, whoever its author, whoever its
victims. After all, we are all members of the community of the governed, and
thereby obliged to show mutual solidarity. 2. ... It is a duty ... to always
bring the testimony of people's suffering to the eyes and ears of
governments, sufferings for which ... they are ... responsible. The
suffering ... must never be a silent residue of policy. It grounds an
absolute right to stand up and speak to those who hold power. 3. ...
Individuals can get indignant and talk; governments will reflect and act.
... One can and must refuse the theatrical role of pure and simple
indignation ... The will of individuals must make a place for itself in a
reality of which governments have attempted to reserve a monopoly for
themselves, that monopology which we need to wrest from them little by
little and day by day.
Or how about Derrida?:
One my still find inspiration ... to denounce endlessly the de facto
take-over of international authorities by powerful Nation-States, by
concentrations of techno-scientific capital, symbolic capital, and financial
capital ... A "new international" is being sought ... it already denounces
the limits of a discourse ... that will remain inadequate ... As long as teh
law of the market, the "foreign debt," the inequality of techno-scientific,
military, and economic development maintain an effective inequality as
monstrous as that which prevails today, to a greater extent than ever in the
history of humanity. For it must be cried out ... never have violence,
inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many
human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity. ... Let us never
neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites
of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before,
in absolute figures, never have so many men, woman, and children been
subjugated, starved, or exterminated on the earth.
> Instead
> they cripple themselves with talk of 'specific intellectuals', meanwhile the
> globalised juggernaut of late capitalism continues to universalise
> oppression.
>
I think you are seriously misreading what it means to talk about the
specific intellectual. I think that the above quotes begin to demonstrate
something in those terms, but that it should be read more as a manner in
which we approach normative judgements (and political action) rather than a
mode of (in)action.
The point is not that we are specific so we cannot act, but that we are
specific so our actions can only be actions that speak from our specific
position.
> I seriously doubt that Nassbaum was wishing to be 'morally led' by wishing
> to know what butler grounds her 'perfomativity' in.
I think it's quite the opposite. Take a look at her article in the New
Republic. She establishes a universal standard for what a Good Feminism must
include and goes through the reasons that Butler fails to meet it.
I think that Nussbaum's real failure lies in her inability to comprehend
that Butler (in Gender Trouble) was not making normative judgements. Even if
Butler's theories have negative implications that doesn't answer Butler's
articulation that identity is performative - it's descriptive not normative.
> By the way, does Butler
> provide any empirical evidence for her claims except a vague mention of
> transexualism as indicative of teh performative nature of subjectivity?
>
Yes. Take a look in Gender trouble, she provides quite a few examples of
transsexualism and such, also of drag. A lot of it based on Foucault's work
w/Heraclitus.
> cheers,
>
> Doug Stokes.
>
>> Hi~
>>
>> Nussbaum complains the Butler doesn't provide a criteria by which to
>> differentiate between Good and Bad. This seems to be an appeal to Butler to
>> act as what Foucault calls the universal intellectual, rather than to open
>> up spaces for specific intellectuals.
I think it's more of a need to see individuals as rational autonomous beings
who act independent of anything else. Nussbaum can't come to grips with the
fact that things may be determined by more than simply the individual
(perhaps even many individuals intersecting).
Nussbaum wants to find normative judgements so that she can attack the way
that "Butler wants the world to be." The problem is that Butler is
descriptive of the world, identifying the manner in which identity (gender)
is constructed through performance. Even if that construction of gender is
wrong, Nussbaum's distaste for it doesn't negate the accuracy of its
description of the world.
> Could the desire to be morally "led"
>> by philosophers be attributed to Deleuze's concept of inner fascism?
>>
Nussbaum is not only the neurotic, but the neurotic who refuses to recognize
her neurosis, and after all, "perhaps the only incurable is the neurotic."
>> I'm gone for a week. I hope to return to an overflowing inbox :)
>>
>> Cheers
>>
>> ~Nate
---
Asher Haig ahaig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Dartmouth 2004
> Im not familiar with the thread, or indeed Nussbaum. Maybe what he / she is
> getting at is Post structuralisms (PS) failure to ground itself in any
> politico-ethical framework.
I think it falls more in the line of pomo-bashing. :)
I don't think Nussbaum really understands any of her objections or what
she's objecting to - it's really more like Cheney's objections to Foucault.
Really more like the whole Feminist conflict... Let's find a way to make the
ideal feminist and all of the others will be destroyed!
Did you know that Butler was chased away from the U. Chicago gender
conference by threats from Nussbaum that Nussbaum would accost Butler if she
showed up?
> Furthermore, it has taken left academia into a
> discursive navel gazing whereby the symbolic becomes the foundational. The
> retreat from any economic or materialist analysis (which PS caricatures as
> 'economic reductionism') and its attendent effects on concioussness is made
> all the more ironic as capitalism further penetrates our inner lives.
I think that may fit more the type of Nussbaum etc who disregard
"post-modern projects" because they aren't "attached to anything." It seems
like such obsession with acting has undermined the possibility (in some
ways) to re-evaluate the ways we think and act.
> Intellectuals abdicate responsibility for any sustained engagement.
Which ones do this?
Foucault comes to mind here:
We are just private individuals here, with no other grounds for speaking ...
than a certain shared difficulty in enduring what is taking place. ... Who
appointed us, then? No one. And that is precisely what constitutes our
right. ... 1. There exists an international citizenship ... that obliges one
to speak out against every abuse of power, whoever its author, whoever its
victims. After all, we are all members of the community of the governed, and
thereby obliged to show mutual solidarity. 2. ... It is a duty ... to always
bring the testimony of people's suffering to the eyes and ears of
governments, sufferings for which ... they are ... responsible. The
suffering ... must never be a silent residue of policy. It grounds an
absolute right to stand up and speak to those who hold power. 3. ...
Individuals can get indignant and talk; governments will reflect and act.
... One can and must refuse the theatrical role of pure and simple
indignation ... The will of individuals must make a place for itself in a
reality of which governments have attempted to reserve a monopoly for
themselves, that monopology which we need to wrest from them little by
little and day by day.
Or how about Derrida?:
One my still find inspiration ... to denounce endlessly the de facto
take-over of international authorities by powerful Nation-States, by
concentrations of techno-scientific capital, symbolic capital, and financial
capital ... A "new international" is being sought ... it already denounces
the limits of a discourse ... that will remain inadequate ... As long as teh
law of the market, the "foreign debt," the inequality of techno-scientific,
military, and economic development maintain an effective inequality as
monstrous as that which prevails today, to a greater extent than ever in the
history of humanity. For it must be cried out ... never have violence,
inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many
human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity. ... Let us never
neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites
of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before,
in absolute figures, never have so many men, woman, and children been
subjugated, starved, or exterminated on the earth.
> Instead
> they cripple themselves with talk of 'specific intellectuals', meanwhile the
> globalised juggernaut of late capitalism continues to universalise
> oppression.
>
I think you are seriously misreading what it means to talk about the
specific intellectual. I think that the above quotes begin to demonstrate
something in those terms, but that it should be read more as a manner in
which we approach normative judgements (and political action) rather than a
mode of (in)action.
The point is not that we are specific so we cannot act, but that we are
specific so our actions can only be actions that speak from our specific
position.
> I seriously doubt that Nassbaum was wishing to be 'morally led' by wishing
> to know what butler grounds her 'perfomativity' in.
I think it's quite the opposite. Take a look at her article in the New
Republic. She establishes a universal standard for what a Good Feminism must
include and goes through the reasons that Butler fails to meet it.
I think that Nussbaum's real failure lies in her inability to comprehend
that Butler (in Gender Trouble) was not making normative judgements. Even if
Butler's theories have negative implications that doesn't answer Butler's
articulation that identity is performative - it's descriptive not normative.
> By the way, does Butler
> provide any empirical evidence for her claims except a vague mention of
> transexualism as indicative of teh performative nature of subjectivity?
>
Yes. Take a look in Gender trouble, she provides quite a few examples of
transsexualism and such, also of drag. A lot of it based on Foucault's work
w/Heraclitus.
> cheers,
>
> Doug Stokes.
>
>> Hi~
>>
>> Nussbaum complains the Butler doesn't provide a criteria by which to
>> differentiate between Good and Bad. This seems to be an appeal to Butler to
>> act as what Foucault calls the universal intellectual, rather than to open
>> up spaces for specific intellectuals.
I think it's more of a need to see individuals as rational autonomous beings
who act independent of anything else. Nussbaum can't come to grips with the
fact that things may be determined by more than simply the individual
(perhaps even many individuals intersecting).
Nussbaum wants to find normative judgements so that she can attack the way
that "Butler wants the world to be." The problem is that Butler is
descriptive of the world, identifying the manner in which identity (gender)
is constructed through performance. Even if that construction of gender is
wrong, Nussbaum's distaste for it doesn't negate the accuracy of its
description of the world.
> Could the desire to be morally "led"
>> by philosophers be attributed to Deleuze's concept of inner fascism?
>>
Nussbaum is not only the neurotic, but the neurotic who refuses to recognize
her neurosis, and after all, "perhaps the only incurable is the neurotic."
>> I'm gone for a week. I hope to return to an overflowing inbox :)
>>
>> Cheers
>>
>> ~Nate
---
Asher Haig ahaig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Dartmouth 2004