On Wed, January 27, 1999 at 12:24:55 (-0800) Dennis R Redmond writes:
>On Wed, 27 Jan 1999, William S. Lear wrote:
>
>> Ok, she extends corsets to silicon implants, big deal (I don't mean
>> to be bilious). Why does this need to be said with 8 syllable words?
>
>Because corsets are NOT identical to silicon implants: the quantitative
>extension of technology and production rebounds into qualitative changes.
>Corsets were directly linked to the Victorian marriage-market in a way
>which isn't true for people today; everything is endlessly mediated, by
>convoluted processes of cultural formation (people watch TV stars and are
>influenced by this in gradual and subtle ways). Late capitalism is not
>early capitalism.
Of course they are not identical, but to say that there are "qualitative" differences between the social oppression that women today face and that faced in the 19th century is simply vacuous. Imagine living at a time when slavery and blatant institutional racism existed --- how would this complicate gender relations? The progress women have made since then has also been real and important. Women in the 19th century were under much harsher "control" by men (and religion). Read Edmund Morgan's *The Puritan Family* to find the incredibly complex social structure that existed in seventeenth-century New England. To say that "everything is endlessly mediated" and "late capitalism is not early capitalism" sounds a lot to me like the sorts of arguments that Edward Herman makes about the "new" capitalist global economy, arguments that were effectively rebutted by Doug Henwood.
>> I find her "theoretical exposition" sharp only in that it looks
>> formidable. I find it pretty much empty of anything new, though. I'm
>> still waiting for answers to two questions: 1) What is new here?; 2)
>> What is new here that must be expressed in the way she expresses it?
>
>There is something quite new about Butler: she's theorizing the lesbian
>movement of the Nineties, in much the same way that Foucault theorized the
>gay lib movement of the Seventies. And she's also saying some interesting
>stuff about the preconditions of contemporary micropolitical movements --
>why it's hard to motivate people to join unions, work in their community,
>resist the ravages of capital, etc.
She's "theorizing" the lesbian movement? How does she test her "theories"? And how does this make her *ideas*, in contrast to her subject, novel? Sure, she's used new (big and obscure) words, but when you unravel what is there, there's nothing really new that has not been said before in a much simpler way. She's covering up banal truisms and leaps of Hegelian fantasy with pretentious verbiage.
>But of course, none of this can be computed on little Excel charts, so
>it's not important to real, loin-girdling disciplines which Crunch Numbers
>and Calculate Graphs of Objective Reality (and since we all know, without
>being told, what Objective Reality is, we don't need to discuss the
>thing, now do we). Next slide, please...
I don't care about Excel charts, just English that can be understood without post-doc study in literary, Freudian, or rhetorical theory.
Bill