The State of Collegiate Education:

I think it is utterly ridiculous and irresponsible that the rating of a college is based on numbers, crunched by bureaucrats, which represent student GPAs and assessments, in that, for such proclivities to be statistically productive, responsibility for this procurement is sequestered to Instructors' didactics, which is consequentially diluted to meet the status quo rather than the actual engagement in critical reading analysis, writing, and thinking.


TBC...

Selfhood and Facticity:

After reading Part A. and most of Part B. of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, I decided to give  my brain a "mild" break by "getting my feet slightly wet" by moving my attention to the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre - at the moment, working my way slowly by reading Sartre for Beginners, and the Translator's Preface and Introduction to his magnum opus, Being and Nothingness.

I’m experiencing my own sort of “nausea” in that am dealing with my own facticity in that during my undergraduate years, I considered myself an Existentialist. Since then, I have transitioned from that school of thought to Post-Structuralism (although maintaining, and becoming more solidified in my Nietzschean tendencies).

Existentialism and Post-Structuralism, at least in certain aspects of its various forms, share several theoretical currents such as, non-essentialism, and a sense that identities are created, fluid, and that the social dimension plays a large and important role in this development. However, where Existentialism is vastly different is in unrelentingly maintaining the notion that one’s life and identity is one’s own to create. To say that another way, each individual is completely and utterly free, from linguistic, socio-political, and ontological conditions, which might determine or cause his/her constitution/interpellation as a subject.

Thus, my cumbersome question of the evening is: Can/do human beings [freely] choose from among the various events and influences of their past, without the facticity of the past being determinant, in their own (re)formulation of selfhood in relation to the world of the present and the future? Both in a “common” sort of understanding, as well as Post-Structuralist thinking, this is impossible, and apparently Sartre doesn’t make it much easier by implying that our “condemnation of freedom” is so deep that the linguistic dimension is subordinate to it as well. This is especially perplexing for Post-Structuralist thought since, as it is a reaction to – yet in many ways simply revisionary of – Structuralism which in-turn was founded on the methodology of the Structural Linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure. In short, thinkers labeled Post-Structuralist argue that the social (i.e. the linguistic) exists prior to persons. Thus, persons are, not unlike the Existentialist notion, “thrown,” or more simply, are born into a socio-linguistic world which, only afterward, constitutes them as subjects.

A deeper problem exists it seems, in that from Sartre’s perspective, the (re)creation of our “selves” requires not only an ontological self which is somehow in suspension of the socio-linguistic dimension, but also in the fact that the, any, process of subjective creation requires a system of signification which is extrinsic of the self. In other words, to cast/recast my self according to my own creative potentialities is to transpose the so-conceived “free self” immediately into a field of operation constructed by (to use Foucauldian-Butlerian terminology) discursive apparatuses.

Yet, at the same time, Sartre’s notion continues to hold sway over my ponderings. I cannot help but ask myself how he could be wrong in suggesting that what we gesture to as deterministic facticity, is actually a mere element of our pasts with which we “choose” (another troubling Sartrean category) to identify as the being of our selves. This is in concordance with the question of how we possibly ever can or do evolve, change, and grow, as human subjects in our own lifetimes. How can we alter ourselves through reflection, sublation, sublimation, etc.? Or, am I merely seeing disparities between these two great philosophical systems which aren’t really there? 

On Nussbaum’s Misreading of Judith Butler

To add to the critique of Nussbaum’s essay “The Professor of Parody,” (which can be found here: http://www.akad.se/Nussbaum.pdf) it must be pointed out that based on a textual analysis alone; from the opening of her essay, Nussbaum is set out to do an injustice to any reading of Judith Butler which lends itself to understanding. Describing Feminist Theory as “not just fancy words on paper,” but as “connected to proposals for social change,” and the imperative of “engagement in concrete projects,” Nussbaum begins to construct the “straw man” that she will present herself as dismantling under the presumption that Judith Butler’s work constitutes mere “mystified symbolism” rather than a “concrete political project.” However, in what seems to be pure “Analytic fashion” (not that I wish to perpetuate the trivial nature of the so-called Continental/Analytic divide in philosophy) she absolutely fails to understand either the methods or the “words on paper” scribed by Butler.

Nussbaum attempts to convince her readers that the site of academia is not the space of “practical politics.” And additionally (and probably more importantly in regard to the case of Butler who is usually counted as a Post-Structuralist philosopher – more on this below) that the “addressing of these urgent issues” somehow doesn’t consist of discursive and performative practices which Butler sites as the spaces of subversion and agency.

In Butlerian fashion, I dare to ask a chain of rhetorical questions: In what way, other than discourse, does one enter into “practical politics” and address these issues? How is any activist to discuss and engage in political dialogue directed toward social change without the use of words? Nussbaum continues her audaciously misconstrued attack on Butler by saying,

Feminist thinkers of the new symbolic type would appear to believe that the way to do feminist politics is to use words in a subversive way, in academic publications of lofty obscurity and disdainful abstractness. These symbolic gestures, it is believed, are themselves a form of political resistance; and so one need not engage with messy things such as legislatures and movements in order to act daringly. The new feminism, moreover, instructs its members that there is little room for large-scale social change, and maybe no room at all. We are all, more or less, prisoners of the structures of power that have defined our identity as women; we can never change those structures in a large-scale way, and we can never escape from them. All that we can hope to do is to find spaces within the structures of power in which to parody them, to poke fun at them, to transgress them in speech. And so symbolic verbal politics, in addition to being offered as a type of real politics, is held to be the only politics that is really possible.

Begging the pardon of Nussbaum, and anyone else who might find my criticism blatantly repugnant, but Nussbaum’s argument might well be described as idiocy; it is certainly incredulous and a representation of intellectual laziness! Are we to believe that instead of using words to be subversive, we should instead use action? What is the archetype of political “action” other than violent revolution which history has shown us so much of? Is that what Nussbaum, intellectual and professional extraordinaire of Utilitarian Liberal Democratic model wishes women to engage in? By her own words, “practical politics” involves engagement with “messy things such as legislatures and movements.” But what does it mean to “engage with legislatures?” Legislature is any assembled body which functions to create and/or amend laws. Laws, whether written or oral, are ultimately textual. To say that another way, laws are words! Thus, legislation is nothing more than, to use Butler’s terminology borrowed from J.L. Austin, systems of “speech acts” or “performative utterances.” Additionally, to “act daringly” not only rings of a type of “speech act,” but is unquestionably a performative gesture, or what Butler calls performativity. Since for Butler identities are not necessarily “social constructs” as such (although this is a difficult category to pull performativity out of), but are performative acts regulated by discursive practices, where Butler’s theoretical work proves more cogent than Nussbaum would like is in the fact that feminists who go about “doing” politics in the sense informed by the so-named “Enlightenment Project” philosophies are actually engaging in the very subversion of political hegemony which Nussbaum here is attempting to invalidate.

“Feminist activists” are inevitably “doing practical politics” through performativity as described by Butler. What Nussbaum fails to devote enough attention to is the theoretical basis from which Butler works. In that, Butler is a Post-Structuralist, she recognizes that for social, ethical, and political life the constitution (or interpellation in Althusserian terms) of human subjects is the primary concern. In her perpetuation of the philosophy of Michel Foucault, Butler is working from the theoretical framework that understands the arbitrary nature of all discursive categories of identity, on top of a socially non-divisive conception of power dynamics. One of the other problems Nussbaum has with Butler’s Gender Trouble rests on the question of her reading audience. Yet, it is very clear from the text of the book, that it is directed at the main body of the Feminism(s) of the period from the 1960s-90s comprised of women of academia (typically those who were additionally from elite socio-economic backgrounds, and whose feminism often precluded women of racial/ethnic minorities). Butler troubles the category of “woman” as an essentialist notion taken for granted by the majority, in short arguing that this, and all other identity categories, are products of cultural discourses in which everyone is enmeshed as subjects. Also, such categories are performative; just as one who identifies as a “student” must do specific acts which constitute that person as a student (e.g. one doesn’t go to a textiles factory, clock in and operate machinery for wages who is called a “student”) women, more often than not, engage in specific acts which constitute the person as a “woman.”

Although Nussbaum recognizes in Butler’s work the philosophical problem of, as Nietzsche put it, “the doer before the deed,” (i.e. in the range of work from Hegel, Nietzsche, Foucault, as with Butler that such a “doer” is precluded) she seems to stop short of full recognition (viz. Butler distinguishes “recognizability” as separate and prior to “recognition” in Frames of War) in that she fails to understand Butler’s site of socio-political agency is not vested in the faculties of any individual. Rather agency emerges solely at the site of the group, or, as all political understandings realize, in the social. Butler’s notion of the “politics of parody” (although criticized by more than solely Nussbaum) uses the example of a drag show as a performative which, in opening a space of rupture to the subjectivity of the spectators, holds the potential for the site of agency. It is not the dancer or singer in drag who manifests agency – this emerges only in those who watch, and in their observations, experience a reconfiguration of their own discursive and performative subjectivities. Consider this as an aid to understanding this admittedly difficult concept: racism has existed for a very long time, and continues to exist in many parts of the world, including the West. Western culture certainly has its own troubled history of both a system of slavery which, although not initially racially motivated, became reconstructed by way of cultural discourses as the providential manifestation of socio-economic dynamics of relations of racial superiority and inferiority. In the United States, it was only after the Civil War, only after Reconstruction, only after “Jim Crow,” only after Civil Rights, that African Americans gained social recognition as mutually human beings. Such a social force did not occur because of individual activists, (e.g. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., etc.) not to say that they are not important figures – it was (and remains) however, the larger, overall social networks and dynamics of discourse and power which shifted to give rise to this massive socio-political change.

In this writer’s meager opinion, Nussbaum ultimately fails to understand the significance of the problem of the subject – that “there is NO doer behind the deed.” Instead, she solidifies her position as a typical Enlightenment thinker who, whether admittedly or not, postulates a transcendental subject that exists prior to the social. The very language Nussbaum uses to attempt her refutation of Butler’s work is implicit of her failure to understand Post-Structuralist analysis of language, discursive systems of signification, and power dynamics. Examples of this can be read in her uses of words such as “performances” and her later points on “bondage.” Again, in maintaining a philosophical presupposition of a transcendental subject, Nussbaum fails to comprehend how this Enlightenment notion, which informed all Modern (viz. prior to “Post-Modern”) Western political theories, is so deleterious to Butler’s theories. – Only a pre-social subject can “perform” or be “bound,” however a subject which is constituted as a slave for example, is always-already “bound.” If/when emancipation was implemented, this “former slave” subject would have to be reconstituted as a “freeman.” Readers who understand Butler will fully recognize that this very example is demonstrative of the types of “normalizing” discursive and performative identificatory apparatuses which her work troubles.

And in terms of her “libertarian student” who asks a series of “why this can’t be used for _____” questions, I’d suggest that 1) both Nussbaum and her student(s) aren’t trying hard enough to understand Butler’s theoretical work, let alone trying hard enough to put her theory into practice. 2) Nussbaum and her student(s) will continue to misunderstand both Butler and all systems of government if they continue to not recognize the fact that all such systems are symbolic in nature and “socially constructed.” – The best way, it would seem, to establish a more ethical society is to deconstruct its construction in order to reconstruct the new construction.

In her own whimsical attempt at parody or irony, Nussbaum gives her readers the following:

Suppose we grant Butler her most interesting claims up to this point: that the social structure of gender is ubiquitous, but we can resist it by subversive and parodic acts. Two significant questions remain. What should be resisted, and on what basis? What would the acts of resistance be like, and what would we expect them to accomplish?

Nussbaum insists on p. 11 of her essay that Butler ignores the “material side of life.” But, what exactly is this “material side of life?” Does Nussbaum fail to realize that to say that there is a “material side of life” is to textualize phenomena? Where Nussbaum posits the naiveté suggesting that, “For women who are hungry, illiterate, disenfranchised, beaten, raped, it is not sexy or liberating to reenact, however parodically, the conditions of hunger, illiteracy, disenfranchisement, beating, and rape.” She unabatedly fails! She fails to understand the subtleties of Post-Structuralists linguistic analysis. She fails to understand that there exist particular discourses that enable women to starve, stay illiterate, disenfranchised, beaten, and raped – yes, discourses, languages, texts, words, systems of signification which enable these and all other tragedies. Perhaps, based on a surface understanding of Butler’s thought, parodying these issues doesn’t seem to do much. But is the way in which Nussbaum reads Butler’s notion of parody to be found in her text(s)? And why would it serve best for Butler not to present what Nussbaum calls “empirical” argumentative proof? Is it because, under the influence of Foucault’s notion of power, not as Enlightenment philosophies would have it, which is to say the force and control of one individual or small sector of the social held sway over everyone else, but as mutable and fluid dynamic network existing as, and stemming from, all persons, that Butler recognizes the wisdom of not systematizing yet another political scheme (which Nussbaum reads as a “void”) which would only serve to reconstitute power?

My ultimate point here is not to argue that Butler’s notion of parody is decisively the best alternative for political agency. Rather, I simply wish to confer my critique of Nussbaum’s failure to apprehend, comprehend, and recognize Butler’s argumentative structure. In short, if one fails to understand any text, one should not write a critique of it, especially if one is of such high academic and professional esteem as Nussbaum.

A final point, which I hope serves my purposes well here, is that just as any inexhaustible volumes could be composed on any one singular political issue, I think it serves us all well to treat Butler’s Gender Trouble as just that – one book, addressing one issue, intended as critique of Second-Wave Feminism, and even more directly as a Post-Structuralist critique of the essentialist presuppositions of that sector of Feminist Theory. 

Genealogy of Conservatism

Conservatism is the immediate result of the unrecognizability of difference. Any social circumstances which simultaneously presupposes and perpetuates  the "ideology," or "discourse," of similitude or sameness, inevitably posits an "exemplar" of sameness as universal. This universality of sameness then, serves to barricade the accessibility to, and acceptability of, difference. Thus, conservatism also, both, fortifies itself against its own genealogy, as well as the accessibility to the ontological reality of pluralities. This is why conservatism insists alterity be rectified and sublimated into the ideological modality of similitude. And with this structure emerging particularly under the presumption of universality, all provocations and convictions toward the rectification of difference is transfered into coercive fascimilation.