Da rube -----------------
Dear Rube,
You know, I was reading Butler off and on and following this teachers is workers thread. So, yesterday, I asked the guys at work in the warehouse, "So, how come teachers and school are full of shit?"
They looked at me and laughed. Like what, you don't know?
So, I pursued it a little. Enough to recall what school looks like from the outside. How absolutely hopeless it looks from a warehouse. What does a school look like, if you go there and sign up for a night class? It is a fucking nightmare of bullshit. Once you get to class you are faced, usually with some asshole who gives you very little or next to nothing. If you ask questions, you are usually dismissed as an idiot, or told that it is your job to find out the answer. You stumble along and guess at what you can't figure out and feel relieved if you get a C. Nothing else happens. You go nowhere.
Obviously I used to work in a lot of places doing just about anything.
In any event, I was trying to figure out what ever gave Butler the idea she was writing about reality? Where does this obscure nonsense come from? So, I when out to look for Hegel's Phenomenology of the Mind, which has the section on Bondsmen and Lords. But I got side tracked because bookstores around here are great. I came home with a translation of Proclus', commendatary on Euclid's Elements, Gutherie's History of Greek Philosophy, and the McKeon's Aristotle. So, how could they be out of Hegel? I'll have to get it new or put up with a really ratty paper bound copy.
In any case, so I was reading the thread on teaching and trying to locate it in some Marxist lexicon and thought you know that's were Butler's been. She's been in academia. She is writing about all the obscure power games that go on there, just like Foucault. I mean nobody who has been on the business end of a wheelbarrow would write shit like that about power or the body.
So, I painted a picture of the academy from the outside. Glad you enjoyed it.
Chuck