[lbo-talk] "Theory's Empire," an anti-"Theory" anthology

Ben Jackson nonplus.plus at gmail.com
Wed Jun 4 05:19:20 PDT 2008


On Wed, Jun 4, 2008 at 6:10 AM, Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Did Irigaray actually call Newton's Principia a "rape
> manual"? That's got to be taken out of context.

How about the Katherine Hayles quote about Irigaray?

"The privileging of solid over fluid mechanics, and indeed the inability of science to deal with turbulent flow at all, she attributes to the association of fluidity with femininity. Whereas men have sex organs that protrude and become rigid, women have openings that leak menstrual blood and vaginal fluids... From this perspective it is no wonder that science has not been able to arrive at a successful model for turbulence. The problem of turbulent flow cannot be solved because the conceptions of fluids (and of women) have been formulated so as necessarily to leave unarticulated remainders."

I won't assume that this one paragraph is representative of all of Theorydom, the way Dawkins does. But seriously, what kind of intellectual tradition produces something like this?

There is some truth to Dawkins' argument that what's unusual about a quote like this is that it's written plainly enough you can actually see how it operates. And when you do it's like something out of a Monty Python sketch. Sometimes using language in idiosyncratic ways is necessary to get at a genuinely new idea. But I'm suspicious of modes of theorizing that get sillier the more simply they're expressed.



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