RE: Re: rejecting a school
Title: RE: [PEN-L:28537] Re: rejecting a school [how's the font?] I wrote: >>BTW, how is "post-structuralism" defined? I'm "post-structuralist" since I learned from the Althusserian structuralists ... but moved on. But I don't think that's what the term means... << Christian writes:> It all depends on who's doing the defining, of course. However, you might think of structuralism as relying on the claim that _everything_ can be clearly mapped into social, ideological, semantic, cultural system(s). Such systems are knowable (even if not easily so). In the "bad" (some would say Althusserian--I wouldn't say this) version, human agency is a thing like other things--a calendar, a watch, daytime--and so can't be counted on to change the system's rules.< >The basic gesture of post-structuralist critique is to point out that the "structure" of structure has a certain degree of play in it. (As Derrida says, it's like the play of a machine part, which won't work if it's either too tight or too loose. It's not infinite play, as some say JD has said.) And so the whole problem of agency (not just human--animal, unconscious, institutional, ritual, cultural) is reintroduced, but with a difference. Put another way, the post-structuralist gambit is to demonstrate that any structure or "thing" that is presumed to be well-defined, autonomous, "real" (as opposed to fake or false), etc., relies on something extrinsic to it for its sense, effect, etc.< More than post-structuralism, this sounds like "loose structuralism," which is an improvement over "bad structuralism" (in which the social structure determines human thought and activity). Or as economists might say, it's structuralism with a stochastic (random error) term added. But I think it would be better to embrace a dynamic vision: societal structures (institutions) "make" people and their actions, by limiting and shaping their preferences, expectations, ideologies, etc., while it was people who (in the past) created these structures in the first place. But any of these structures -- including capitalism --is simultaneously being rebuilt and being destroyed: an institution represents a constant struggle between the people whose actions have the effect of preserving and/or expanding it (e.g., class-conscious capitalists, opportunistic workers) and those whose actions have the effect of undermining the institution (e.g., opportunistic capitalists, class-conscious workers). In this view, institutions always change over time, not only due to exogenous shocks but due to endogenous tensions. >>Can someone name the main achievement of one author who has been dubbed "post-structuralist"? It is much better to talk about one specific thing than to go on and on about abstractions such as "post-structuralism." << > Achievement? Well, I think that the popularization of the value of "marginality" has something to do with post-structuralism. And, though I don't give litcritters credit for it, our awareness of the way that gender, ability, race, sexual orientation, etc. have been meaningfully, materially excluded from consideration of "rights" discourse has something to do with poststructuralism. Or were you thinking achievement like book titles?< Almost always, book titles are achievements only in the academic hierarchy. But it seems to me that Herbert Marcuse thought that marginality was really important back in the 1960s (and he was from the Frankfurter tradition). Call me a materialist, but I wouldn't give credit to _any_ intellectual tradition for bringing issues of "gender, ability, race, sexual orientation, etc." to the fore. Rather, I'd give credit to the women's movement, the "independent living" movement, the civil rights movement, and the gay-rights movement for doing so. Academics get hung up with their theories and their conventional wisdoms, but when there's a bunch of people out there shouting about gay rights (or whatever), academe listens. Many will condemn, act defensive, etc., but some will try to modify the theories and wisdom to incorporate the role of such movements. An even smaller group actually contributes to the (partial) success of the movement. JD (but not Jacques Derrida)
Re: Re: rejecting a school
I'm skeptical of this achievement. Certainly the blind spot of liberal equality is exposed by post-prefixers' focus on marginality, but how much, really, been added to the earlier Marxist, feminist, anti-imperialist etc. appreciations of social inequality/complexity (the better versions; I'm not thinking of the Stalinist types)? My sense is that, politically, post-prefixism has been one step forward and two steps back. The emphasis on difference tends to result in abstention over what is common. What is a good example of post-prefixism yielding politically richer mixtures of difference and commonality than we knew of before? Bill Burgess > >Can someone name the main achievement of one author who has been dubbed >"post-structuralist"? It is much better to talk about one specific thing than >to go on and on about abstractions such as "post-structuralism." > >Achievement? Well, I think that the popularization of the value of >"marginality" has something to do with post-structuralism. And, though I don't >give litcritters credit for it, our awareness of the way that gender, ability, >race, sexual orientation, etc. have been meaningfully, materially excluded >from consideration of "rights" discourse has something to do with >poststructuralism. Or were you thinking achievement like book titles? > >Christian
RE: Re: rejecting a school
> Can someone name the main achievement of one author who has been > dubbed "post-structuralist"? the lads at http://www.adequacy.org had a go at claiming that Luce Irigaray anticipated Stephen Wolfram's "New Kind of Science": (I have added a couple of question marks to words which do not get through my firewall) We don't pretend here at adequacy to understand the French feminist philosopher and critical theorist Luce Irigaray in any great depth. Since male life expectancy is only 74.5 years in the USA, and what with maintaining this website, keeping up with the newspapers and trying to read some of the classics of Western literature, we frankly doubt that we're ever going to have the spare time to get into her work. Maybe perdida, with the extra five years' life expectancy her gender brings, will give it a crack some time. Because of our ignorance about what Irigaray actually wrote, we're reduced to getting our information third hand, via people like Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. They wrote a book called " Intellectual Impostures " in order to tell us, at mind-numbing length, that Irigaray and other French critical theorists were Very Bad People and Not Worth Reading. Indeed, so many people are of this opinion, and so many of them are folks (like Richard Dawkins and William Safire) who have turned out to be utter a??eholes on every other subject, that I at least among the Adequacy staff had come to the conclusion that if literally the entire inflated-self-esteem-hard-science-equals-hard-d?ck-know-it-all community hated Irigaray enough to write a whole big book about how stupid she was, there was almost certainly something to be said for her. What I didn't expect was that one of the greatest mathematical geniuses of the last twenty years would prove this view to be crashingly and resoundingly right. For those of you with better things to do with your time than keep up with the Science vs Sociology wars, the rap sheet against Irigaray boils down to one specific charge; that she did recklessly or with malice aforethought suggest that there might be some connection between 1) the way in which classical mechanics concentrates for the most part on the motions of medium-sized rigid objects, and 2) the fact that most scientists in history have been men, and therefore for the most part obsessed with the motions of a particular kind of object, an object which is often decidedly less rigid and decidedly more medium-sized than its owner would like, but which could charitably be assumed to tend asymptotically toward the Newtonian ideal. Specifically, the great sin which got Irigaray into the Black Book of Postmodernism was to suggest that mathematics was not as value-independent and Platonic a field of inquiry as one might think. In an attractively adventurous quote, she speculated that things would have been different (specifically, our view of which classes of applied maths problem are easy and which difficult) if women had been in charge of the whole enterprise "The Newtonian break has ushered scientific enterprise into a world where sense perception is worth little, a world which can lead to the annihilation of the very stakes of physics' object: the matter (whatever the predicates) of the universe and of the bodies that constitute it. In this very science, moreover [ d'ailleurs ], cleavages exist: quantum theory/field theory, mechanics of solids/dynamics of fluids, for example. " Or as American writer Katherine Hayles puts it... " The privileging of solid over fluid mechanics, and indeed the inability of science to deal with turbulent flow at all, she attributes to the association of fluidity with femininity. Whereas men have s?x organs that protrude and become rigid, women have openings that leak menstrual blood and vaginal fluids... From this perspective it is no wonder that science has not been able to arrive at a successful model for turbulence. The problem of turbulent flow cannot be solved because the conceptions of fluids (and of women) have been formulated so as necessarily to leave unarticulated remainders. Hard questions So, to sum it up, male maths is obsessed with h?rd-ons, while women's maths, if it existed, would be able to solve problems of turbulent flow because women are more interested in it. Not, one might have thought, all that outrageous a piece of speculation about the sociology of mathematicians. But apparently this small mention of our old pal the pen?s was enough to bring out a long parade of male academics absolutely eager to spell out exactly where Luce Irigaray had gone wrong. So we have... Irigaray, in sum, does not understand the nature of the physical and mathematical problems posed in fluid mechanics, " -- Sokal & Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense " You do not have to be a physicist to smell out the daffy absurdity of this kind of argument (the tone of it has become all too familiar), but it helps to have Sokal
Re: RE: Re: rejecting a school
I don't understand the physics, but wasn't Newtonian physics transcended long before post-structuralism (by Einstein, a socialist, for one)? I'm not convinced by Irigarary that the _particular_ obstacle to better physics was masculinity, but in any case, I don't see how the _general_ point about the social construction of science and the rejection of pretensions to objectivity is a (new) achievement. Engels discussed flows in _Dialectics of Nature_, and Marx's _Capital_ is all about bourgeois objectivity. Bill > > Can someone name the main achievement of one author who has been > > dubbed "post-structuralist"? > >the lads at http://www.adequacy.org had a go at claiming that Luce Irigaray >anticipated Stephen Wolfram's "New Kind of Science": (I have added a couple >of question marks to words which do not get through my firewall)
Re: Re: rejecting a school
> >>I'm not >>convinced by Irigarary that the _particular_ obstacle to better physics was >>masculinity, but in any case, I don't see how the _general_ point about the >>social construction of science and the rejection of pretensions to >>objectivity is a (new) achievement. > >Well, maybe the development of an old insight in a new way is worth doing. >I don't say that Irigiray has done it. I rather doubt it. Yes, it is certainly worthwhile when someone recovers (and especially improves on) an old or forgotten insight. That's all most worthwhile efforts ever amount to. It _is_ worth thinking about the link Irigarary is reported to draw between masculinity and Newtonian physics. But I'm asking, it is fair that the credits for this kind of challenge to positivism be placed in their (new?) column in the balance sheet of intellectual accomplishment? It is sometimes not even acknowledged that credits have already been earned in other columns. Bill
