Date: Sun, 28 Nov 1999 12:17:29 -0500 (EST) From: "Raphael C. Allen" <rcda at duke.edu>
Sure, Yoshie,
Sokal's certainly not against all social studies of science, nor against all critiques of science. And I agree with you that plenty folks have felt empowered by an ill-designed hoax to discredit, inappropriately, some smart critics. Yet, methinks both you and Proyect advance the distortion by referring to the science studies folks in that Science Wars volume as pomos. That's common here, and that's minor, to me. You might have meant it as a neutral shorthand, but the term seems little more than a pinata anymore, which is why i suggest using more specific terms.
--But my two main points stand (now in reverse order): (1)that discussions of science studies often devolve in the very same way as LBO's gender/zex discussion's devolving. In both realms, folks mistake the common-sense status of something (eg gravity there, dimorphism and selfishness here) for an analysis of how it became tacit knowledge. Seems weird to conflate the common-sense status of sexual dimorphism in our day and age, with the open question of whether there really are only two sexes (zzzz...) or the more social question of how dimorphism became the norm. (2) Even if we were all persuaded that zexual dimorphism was as natural as gravity, still gender does not equal zexuality does not equal zex-id (as in m/f/hermaphrodite or 1/2/3/4/5, etc).
What's cool, though, is that we began this thread by talking around Butler's comments on Left Conservatism (hence LC) before wandering over to sex/gender, yet our impasses demonstrate her original point. Sure, we've been discussing sex/gender while the LC debate was, on the surface, about class-vs-culture. And sure, Butler's been misread here (Carroll?) as being invested in the naming of high-profile names, but in actuality she was more concerned to indict all of us who get stuck on last year's foundationalism without flexibility enough to remember how we got to it. The problem, for her and for me, is that the more that a point of debate gets settled, the more that that answer gets counterposed to culture, even when culture figures into the settled answer.* Her remarks (short-12 paragraphs) and the entire transcript of the LC conference can be found in 2 issues of the e-journal Theory & Event, online at
http://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/theory_&_event/v002/2.2butler.html
*This is why she objected to the LC conference poster-which named names-and tis why she agreed with the conf-organizer, Chris Connery, that LC is a tendency and not an identity. That's, for me, the link between Doug's Judy-quotes re sex and Judy's own remarks on foundationalism in the LC debate.
still trying to figure out when to get medieval and when to get biblical,
raphael