To be more specific, there are two forms of science critique that I think should be avoided. (1) It is, in my view, a mistake to name "modernity," "instrumental reason," "Western metaphysics," etc. as chief villains for making science an instrument of oppression, as, for instance, ecofeminists (e.g., Vandana Shiva, Maria Mies, etc.), postmodernists (e.g., Lyotard, Foucault, Butler, etc.), Green localists, deep ecologists, New Age primitivists, etc. are wont to do. (2) One does not want to dismiss science per se, (as opposed to oppressive forms of science in theory and practice), merely as a "regime of truth" invested with a will to power (e.g., Foucault). Science (in the broad sense of the word, an accumulation of knowledge, including feminist & historical materialist knowledge) is necessary, and we ought to seek to free it from an ensemble of oppressive social relations in which it is made to play a role of facilitating exploitation. For this purpose, postmodern philosophical premises just won't do. (What the philosophical premises in question are, I have extensively discussed and criticized on this list, so if you are interested, my posts are in the LBO archive).
>--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).
This inability to disentangle sex & pleasure from procreation; sex from gender; sex & gender from sexuality; etc. displayed by some LBO posters has less to do with whether one accepts or rejects postmodern philosophical premises than whether one is committed to feminism & Marxism. My December half Carrol disagrees with Judith Butler (as I do), but he can disentangle them from one another just fine, because he's a committed feminist. The guys who object to the idea of historical constitution of sex, of disentangling the nexus of sex, gender, & sexuality, etc., on the other hand, act as if they just had their girlfriends walk out on them. Tragic indeed.
Speaking of disentangling, one of the problems of Judith Butler's philosophy is that in her quest for calling the gendering of sex into question, nay, crisis (which is a correct motive), she ends up writing _as if_ nothing corporeal existed before the coming into being of gendered sexes (though we all -- including Butler -- know that's not the case: the extra-discursive is prior to and limits the discursive, many species came into being & disappeared before ancestors of humans even evolved into the more or less present forms of bodies):
***** Judith Butler, _Bodies that Matter_, p. 34
This "subjection," or _assujettissement_, is not only a subordination but a securing and maintaining, a putting into place of a subject, a subjectivation. The "soul brings [the prisoner] to existence"; and not fully unlike Aristotle, the soul described by Foucault as an instrument of power, forms and frames the body, stamps it, and in stamping it, brings it into being. Here "being" belongs in quotation marks, for ontological weight is not presumed, but always conferred. For Foucault, this conferral can take place only within and by an operation of power. This operation produces the subjects that it subjects; that is, it subjects them in and through the compulsory power relations effective as their formative principle. But power is that which forms, maintains, sustains, and regulates bodies at once, so that, strictly speaking, power is not a subject who acts on bodies as its distinct objects. The grammar which compels us to speak that way enforces a metaphysics of external relations, whereby power acts on bodies but is not understood to form them. This is a view of power as an external relation that Foucault himself calls into question.
Power operates for Foucault in the _constitution_ of the very materiality of the subject, in the principle which simultaneously forms and regulates the "subject" of subjectivation. *****
The above is, first of all, misleading for the reason I described above. Moreover, it is not only unnecessary to follow the Foucauldian premises to pursue Butler's political project; the Foucauldian premises in fact make it difficult to clearly disentangle sex, gender, & sexuality from one another. *If power really acted in the way Foucault/Butler says it does, sex would be always already gendered,* and therefore there is little hope for a radically new ensemble of social relations that free us from the oppressively gendered sexes. Fortunately, Foucault and Butler are incorrect here, and we may adopt Engels's optimism for the future of emancipated sex (in the double sense of the word).
>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.
Yes, "yesterday's foundationalism" is indeed a problem, but history has been & will be made by people whose epistemology ain't correct, for we make history not as we please, not under the circumstances of our own making. Except perhaps under exceptional circumstances (e.g. a quantity of leisure time to pursue philosophy _as well as_ an unshakable commitment to a political project of all-around social emancipation existing together for the same individual, as in the case of Marx, and even he wasn't quite up to per by our feminist standards), our social relations and ideology are such that the majority of historical agents who must accomplish the task of revolution do not acquire even a concept of epistemology, let alone a correct epistemology. The abolition of gender is after all a political project, and if it does get accomplished, people will acquire a new, more emancipated way of inhabiting & conceptualizing bodies _in the course of, or after_ the project of gender abolition, _not_ before it. Practice is prior to ideas, logically and temporarily.
Yoshie