This was meant in reply to Kelley's bit about feeling she's not allowed to be 'subaltern' - Oz has lots of such lefties, I reckon. Anyway, I wouldn't know what Spivak looked like - but I did once read something of hers on 'southern feminism' which seemed sensible enough, readable enough, and implicitly anti-Harrods-frocked-victim enough for me to grant the benefit of a doubt commensurate with my ignorance of her stuff.
>it might
>just be that my eyes glaze over and my brain goes on strike -- a kind of
>resistance that has little to do with how easy to learn or not such an
>idiom is. and that, me thinks, is what happens across the board and gets
>confused as inherent 'impenetrability'.
Well, the likes of Krugman and Stiglitz in America and Gittins and (when he wants to) Walsh in Australia manage to say their mainstream economics pieces so I, sans any economics background at all, can confidently disagree. Their unspoken assumptions (although K and S seem to be dropping one or two of those just now) are pretty apparent on the 'what-would-have-to-pertain-for-this-to-be-meaningful test', I reckon
>i don't think finding something 'impenetrable' says i'm stupid or that the
>writer can't write properly. we have to grant that communication is often
>impossible for reasons which are in no way sinister or a judgement on those
>communicating or wanting to.
Awright, good collar, guvnor. But, I do tend, for my daily bread, to read within these provinces and then translate my impressions into lecturese. I'm not too clever on this cultural studies stuff, but I reckon even Oz-culturalists Milner, Morris and Wark (who can all produce gooey porridges of sentences when they want to) do better than Butler, and on the same paddock with the same ball. Them I generally understand.
>or translation into an idiom i understand? that's not a question of
>simplicity but of the conceptual hooks that i might already have versus
>those being used.
Don't reckon I need idiom translation. I spent years learning English, and now no bugger I read seems to be writing in it!
>ummm.. this would be why the language is so tortured, right? (do spivak
>or butler insist that nothing _happens_ outside language, or do they argue
>that nothing is conceptualised other than _through_ language? -- thought
>you'd slip that by, huh?)
Fair go! I put 'happen' in quote marks! That's idiomatically correct innit? And appropriately ambiguous, too. Extra marks to me, I reckon!
>but to the specific issue and an anecdotal:
>when i write, the thing which always seems to bother me is what do i spend
>time explaining and in particular arguing for and what don't i have to?
>and the difference between the two is deciding what the reader will (or
>not) regard as self-evident. sometimes, not all the time i grant you, but
>sometimes, it's quite important to challenge the self-evidence of what
>might appear to be the most self-evident of things, to get the reader to
>work hard in order to make the organisation of that established
>self-evidence a matter of overt construction rather than assumption.
It's been a while, but the Butler I remember was on about the uncomfortable ambivalence of 'the subject' (Foucault talked about that), the constructivist's complicity of language in fixing sexual identities (er, Foucault mentioned that), the queer-theoretical cut between genitals and gender (a gay flatmate of mine tried to warm me up with an argument presciently like this in the seventies - I always told him he shoulda been at uni), the structuralist idea that meaning comes from other meanings rather than an unproblematically accessible extralinguistic truth (Foucault repeated this notion as well), and the logically concomitant notion that 'the phallus' is something socially-allocated-through-something-central-but-not-defined-called-power rather than something that is bodily present or absent. I'm a little more vulgarly (I'd prefer 'dialectically') physicalist than this stuff - without evincing the courage to choose what's decisive - but it's long been self-evident that some consider this sorta approach as self-evident - or at least consider that dichotomising biological determinism is not self-evident.
>pretentiousness is something all theorists do.
I kinda hope not. Why do you reckon this?
>but on butler, it could also be
>that there are debates being referenced in there that you or i haven't been
>privy to or are as concerned with or find irrelevant or (here's the
>punch-line) regard as self-evidently concluded.
If (a), I'm still not privy; if (b) then she'd have been better off making her PLOP project one of translating Foucault into lecturese so our like wouldn't have to do it.
>can we read butler without having some knowledge of the debates in
>queer politics and queer theory?
How can we know whether we've sufficient queer theory at our disposal to answer this question? Certainly my impatience with PLOP might be a function of insufficiency in this regard. What I currently suspect, however, is that the vestiges one gleans from a little Foucault and a few colour supplements is enough to make a call on it. When ARE we allowed to make a call on the important matter of choosing texts for undergraduate courses (an ever more important tasks as undergraduates read ever less)?
>ps. what does 'wallah' mean? i can't find it in my copy of the macquarie
>aust-speak handbook. it makes me think of pith helmets and gin and tonics,
>but beyond that...
I took a 'wallah' to be someone assigned with whatever task precedes that word - eg. 'desk wallah' or 'lab wallah'. And, yeah, I'm sure it comes from Kipling's India.
Cheers, Rob.