[This is a personal reflection aimed at Robert. My answers to Robert's reflections are below in as a response to his specifics.]
What sort of catches me out about your note is that of the books and writers you have mentioned I have read them all, except for Connolly's which I don't know, and never even heard of. (If possible tell me more about this book or point me to a review.) Haraway's book sits happily next to E.O. Wilson's "The Diversity of Life" on one side and Maitland Eddy & Donald Johanson's "Lucy" on the other. When I went searching for my copy of "Bodies that Matter" I found it shelved next to Lewontin's "Biology as Ideology." I am a complete-ist on S.J. Gould and I have read most of Lewontin's work. This accident of expression leads me to guess that there is some basic background that we share in these questions. So perhaps it is no accident that your replies seem to me the most searching, that you actually "get" where I am coming from and have no need to be dismissive, even if you can occasionally make and have fun. (But perhaps I (we?) should be skeptical of this "seeming" and that the accidental correspondence of our reading lives makes it more probable that we misunderstand each other?).
The problem is I don't think I ignore the work of Foucault. I have read practically everything published in English up until 1992 and I used to be a great admirer. My ontological critique goes back to when I knew his work well. I have come to look at Foucault as a kind of charlatan, whose historical reseearch is very shoddy, and thus some of my anger at "pomos" comes from a certain personal bitterness. I wish I had been more skeptical when I started reading him in the late 70s.
On the other hand I have only read four works of Butler so it may be so in her case, that I have missed some argument where she contradicts my conclusions. As far as I can understand from what I have read Butler simply assumes that there is a basic ontological separation between (human) biology and socicality and goes on from their without making the assumption explicit. E.O. Wilson, for example, seems to me to make the opposite assumption, that the social and the biological are collapsible, one to the other. (I am trying to stay away from the notion of "reductionism" which is implicated in the question of ontological status, but properly is a separate question of how a theory may or may not work best.) Wilson doesn't even seem to understand that there is an issue here or that one can take a "methodological" stance of agnosticism on these ontological issues. I am not sure that Butler would want to make these issues explicit. As a matter of provocation I am tempted to say that Judith Butler and E. O. Wilson are two sides of the same coin, but no matter how much I oppose Wilson politically, I admire him and understand what he writes, but rarely understand what I read in Butler's books. I must say, in truth, I feel mostly contempt for Butler's work. They seem to me to be broken promises. They promise new ways of thinking about sexuality and gender but don't deliver. I find more fulfillment in this regard in Percy Shelley, Emma Goldman, the Spartacist League's writings on sexuality, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
I am writing very personally in reply to you because it seems that what is not understood is why I am motivated to oppose Butler in the first place.
On 6/6/08, wrobert at uci.edu <wrobert at uci.edu> wrote:
>
> The real problem with this argument is that it ignores the work of Butler
> and Foucault. Butler draws on material that examines the cultural
> implications of biological discourse and the claim for Foucault becomes
> even more problematic given the extensive examination makes of medicine
> in his work in History and Madness and Birth of the Clinic. Foucault
> looks at the profound impact that the creation of these sciences have on
> the social.
I think this is confusing matters a bit. The question is not what sort of history of disciplines that Foucault wrote or how Butler analyzes the social construction of sexuality and the performance of the social. I am writing about more basic assumptions. The assumption that there are sociological, institutional, and historical origins to systems of thought, practices of science, and theoretical development is obvious to me. This particular assumption can fit into almost any post-Reformation "world-view". Also that these systems, practices and theories can feedback into the shaping of the institutions and social relations that they emerged from should also be obvious.
But one controversial notion you might not agree with is that there is a semi-independence of "theoretical understanding" that is very much like mathematical understanding. Once a certain kind of mathematical understanding gets started -- set theory, for example -- the working out of its ramifications becomes separate from its "uses" and gets worked out _as if_ it were a kind of complicated strategy game that the inventor does not control. Good, strong and deep theories (and also some bad theories) have this mathematical and game-like quality separate from the theory's uses that develops on its own.
But none of this touches on the more basic assumptions I am trying to point to. For instance I think if you look behind the ontology of the very notion of "discourse" in the way most post-moderns use it, you will find behind it an assumptions about the "irreducibility" of language, an assumption never spelled out (implicit in Saussure) because at base there is no reason for making it. (Also see postscript below for more on the troubling notion of "discourse.") The notions of language that underlie "discourse" (and meaning within language) are taken as-if they are a separate ontological ground or reality. This is simply a conclusion that is never concluded or even stated explicitly. (Quite frankly these notions of language are in practically every single paragraph I have read of Butler.)
So let me explain that I am not making the argument that either one of the two ontological assumptions I have sketched out are wrong, or even a wrong starting point. I am mostly saying that they shoudn't be assumptions at all.... they are in fact "conclusions" of a sort that we have no business warranting in our studies of either human sociality or primate biology. I think what is basically wrong are all of the implicit ontological assumptions that go into the notions "social construction of reality" and "biological constraints of social behavior." These notions are often stated as if they are antinomies but mostly they are simply ontological assumptions each of which contains its own opposite without reference to either sociality or biology.
Try to follow my thought here but I think that the ontological assumptions of each of these notions can be easily discovered not by counterposing them but by simply flipping them "internally". Thus:
1) The ontological opposite assumption of the notion (a1) "the social construction of reality" is made by flipping the notion to read (b1) "_the real_ construction of sociality."
2) The ontological opposite assumption of the notion (a2) "bioligical constraints of social behavior" can be made in the following way, we assume we are looking for (b2) "the social constraints of biological behavior."
Each of these flips makes the assumption that there is either something collapsible or uncollapsible between the two realms that they refer to and that the starting point of research is the unexamined "conclusion" of these assumptions. In all four cases we are assuming an ontological ground that can act as a pivot to move our studies along. Whether that ground is "_the real_" (b1) or "the social" (b2) is not my current question. My current question is what happens when these assumptions are made into conclusions (instead of choices) and _also_ go unexamined. I think mainly bad and unthoughful arguments and the assumption that people making different kind of arguments than you are making those arguments from hidden movtives.
There is simply no ground upon which any science or theory can be based - mental, social, real or material. All that we can do is make our philosophical and pre-theoretical conclusions (choices) explicit and clear. We can also make the futher warranted assumption that these pre-theoretical "choices" that imitate conclusions are in fact "uncertainties." We have to emphasize the uncertain-ness of these pre-theoretical ontological assumptions precisely because they imitate conclusions.
So here is the main "moral" of my critique, the ontological assumptions must be made explicit so that we can, as much as possible, see those assumptions as a range of uncertain choices that imitate conclusions. Further, the most helpful attitude toward these range of uncertain choices is moderate skepticism and agnosticism.
Actually, when Foucault was asked about a inherent
> homosexuality, he begged off the question on the basis that it was not in
> his competence to answer.
And good that he did, but again I don't think this at all implicates the underlying ontological questions. This response of Foucault's might have some implications to assumptions of knowledge but without drawing such assumptions out I don't have any reply to this.
> There are a number of post-Foucaultian thinkers
> have worked on this as well. You could turn to Haraway's early work in
> Primate Visions, Connolly's book in the theory out of bound's section,
> etc.
Loved "Primate Visiions" by the way. What is the name of Connolly's book?
I think that the problem is that there is a fantasy that there is
> somehow a 'biology' that somehow exists outside of social practices
> that is somehow outside of the political. You don't need Butler to
> point out the problem with that. You can turn to Gould or Lewontin
> if all the feminism is freaking you out.
Well I don't think this at all. Except for my caveat about the independent game that theory can become I think that Gould and Lewontin are interesting and often correct in their analysis.
>
> As a last note, I think that the question of 'intellectual modesty'
> is interesting. My initial inclination it to read as polemical
> gesture, ie my knowledge unlike the hubris of the theorists is
> modest, therefore more sound. But I feel that there is also an
> attempt to point to something else, which has to do with the ability
> of making universal claims. In this case, it is a mistake to think
> that the 'theory' of these discussions is making the same kind of
> claims as the 'theory of economics (who probably would not call their
> work theoretical in any case.)
At times it is a rhetorical gesture even when used by me. But if you read most of my questions and posts to this list I think you will find that I am mostly skeptical about thinking that we know what we know. All of us are lucky, no not just lucky, we are great thinkers, if we can be about 30% right. It is part of the reason why the word "theory" sticks in my throat in describing chess openings or literary analysis, because systems of thought that are "just theories" are the most certain kinds of way of thinking we have in a very, very uncertain world where knowledge is a very small ship in a rough sea of unknown connections. QM and biological evolution are "just theories" but they are about as certain as we can get even with all of the doubts I have about the finality of either.
Jerry
>
> I suspect that this will have to be revisited after Jerry explains
> where I got it wrong.... :)
>
> robert wood
A humbugging, carping _post-script_ on the notion of "discourse". I really don't think that something like the notion of "discourse" refers to anything significant or at least not in the way that it is used by Foucault and Butler. But what do I do? I use the word anyway because it is standard coin. But I try to scale it back. In most post-modern talk the notion "discourse" can be used for almost everything and anything. It reminds me of something that I discovered while thinking about Aristotles ideas of motion and change. In Aristotle, if he had the notions of "instinct" or "gravity" you could easily substitute "instinct" for "gravity" in every case. In pomo talk you can substitute the word "discourse" for "system", "ideology", "discipline", "discussion", and on and on. But deep down it seems to me that there are Saussure-derived assumptions to the notion of "discourse", assumptions that I don't think are true.... the endless circle of never settled meaning .
> > It is the same with the ontological difference between the biological and
> > the sociological. There is no way to determine what that difference is,
> > if
> > there is any difference at all, or if the question is simply meaningless.
> > Everything I have read of Butler's (or of Foucault for that matter) seems
> > to
> > assume that the biological and the sociological are ontologically
> separate
> > and not just separate areas of study. Yet they never argue for their
> > basic
> > ontological assumptions they simply assume them. Thus confusion is
> > compounded beyond just the confusion I have in reading their prose.
> >
> > Again my assumption is that we should admit our lack of knowledge in this
> > area. We don't know one way or another what fundamental differences are
> > between the biological and the sociological, if there are any differences
> > at
> > all, or if how to state these differences. I think that this is the same
> > case with "the mental" and "the physical" and thus you run into the same
> > heated arguments.
> >
> > I have noticed though that on this list, arguments for lack of knowledge
> > or
> > humility of knowledge often fall flat. Most intellectuals have a hard
> > time
> > maintaining this kind of negative capability, which is the value of those
> > very few intellectuals who are good poets.
> >
> > Jerry
> > ___________________________________
> > http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
> >
> >
>
>
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