Tahir: While I agree with your main thrust,I think you are missing two important points here. Firstly in the case of the authors you mention they were genuinely breaking new ground. A more apt comparison with the Butler discourse that we've been looking at would no doubt be some of the inferior discourse of the followers of those philosophers. The language of Butler that I saw is not the language of a groundbreaker, it is the language of a born follower. It is formulaic and dead, and has been that way since the eighties at least. But that doesn't matter; it's function is not to mean anything, it is rather an emblematic function. You wear it like a badge of membership, to show that you are one of the elect, those who are 'difficult'. The second point is related: Can some of this stuff in fact be translated into ordinary language? Are there in fact intelligible propositions to be extracted? Hegel wrote in a difficult style because he was making language do something different, and his strategy was to write speculatively. But the pomo writers write dogmatically without a trace of irony or speculative potential, as witless as can be. What is the content at the end of the day? I'll tell you, it is the authority of one. Everyone else's language is problematic, non-referential except ours. Nothing is true, except the statement that nothing is true and that statement is ours. Hence our discourse must reign, until it disappears up its own arsehole, as it will.
But more than anything else, in the quote above given by Dennis, Butler assumes what she should argue. There is an assumption that her subject (her discipline?) needs extra-ordinary language and something beyond our everyday grammar. That is an argument in-itself. I don't think it is true.
Tahir: Well, yes, but I must add again that this 'something beyond' is a complete fraud. It is unintelligible just like the alternative politics that is supposed to flow from it. It doesn't exist. Now I'd like to point out something else: if there is one humanities discipline that the postmodern tendency has been unable to break into, it has been linguistics; outside of some French schools, that is (and those have always been more semiotics than linguistics).This is hugely significant. Postmodernism has never engaged with serious linguistics beyond its own cavalier appropriation of Saussure. So when pomos actually try to engage in discussion of language it usually degenerates into vague gibberish about signifiers etc., which has not exactly won the respect of linguists. If there is one vantage point from which postmodernism is seen to reveal its stupidty most obviously, that is linguistics.
And then:
From: Dennis Claxton <ddclaxton at earthlink.net> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] More Postmodernism (Butler)
Like slurs thrown at "pomo" writing that never specify texts or authors, claims that the skies are filled with jet-setting pomos never name names. I'd like to see a list of these pomos living high on the hog. And not one borrowed from David Horowitz.
Tahir: I have no intention, while I'm still here, of obeying such an obviously tendentious rule. If it is true as we hear ad nauseum that there is 'no such thing' as posmodernism, outside of a shared taste for extremely ugly and pretentious writing, then why do people jump so readily to the defence of this thing that doesn't exist? But really one doesn't have to cite some offlist text or other, when we have such excellent specimens being posted to the list.
Amidst all the concern with whether Butler is right or wrong, ones and zeros, what gets missed is how many young students become engaged with learning and politics because of contributions like hers. People who arrive on campus with their own gender troubles are very likely to find Butler more engaging than Marx. We should be glad that they are even coming in the tent, not taking on a kind-of forgive them for they know not what they do posturing.
Tahir: You're welcome to your tent while the pole still stands. Personally I prefer not to dwell in a tent. I want to know what this politics is and how deeply it has changed anything. Your assumption is simply invalid that these people would not have engaged with politics without a particular tendency being so influential. If anything campuses are much more pliant in the pomo era than they were in the 60s or 70s. Is that totally unrelated to the kinds of discourse that prevails? I think not. I guess according to you these students must just be satisfied with whatever crumbs fall from the table. BTW there is also a tendency to virtually equate feminism and critical gender studies with the pomo tendency that now dominates them, of which we have seen such a good example here. That's rubbish. Those students that need feminism would have found feminism -- the idea that Marx should have played that particular role is silly. Both feminism and marxism and also marxist feminism will survive this.
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