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Remember, when I wrote a couple of recent posts on Butler, mentioning Habermas and Chompsky, I was making their arguments, not mine. I was trying to propose them as points of view from a different basis than Butler or me.
If Carpenter could set my naive realist world as an undergrad spinning down the toilet, sure there is no reason at all why Butler might do the same for others.
I think there is still a difference though. As I understand it Butler is attempting to deconstruct or dissolve the presumptive hegemonic ideas, social norms, and psychological assumptions that center around sex, gender and power orders of our society. She is mounting a social and political critique using various ideas of her own and others drawn from philosophy, sociology, psychology, literature, and her own experiences.
>From my point of view, Butler is taking on a subset of a much larger
and more comprehensive world. What world? The one presented in the
Cassirer posts.
The question I wonder about is, will she be able to infold one world into the other. She may or may not be interested.
As an aside. When I discovered the world of sex, gender, various modes of being sexual and the power orders of the society that pertain to them, I was in puberty. I had to sort this stuff out and I watched and explored all these ideas, performances, acts, social expressions, etc. I decided that was, what growing up was about. So these thoughts, acts, and reflections on them were the origins of my first intellectual life, and the first self-consciousness and intentionally enacted revolts.
In my childish way, I said to myself, I don't care what anybody else says is right or wrong here, I am going my way about this stuff. As the consequences of this thought began to become felt, I had my first consciously disjunctive moments. Shocks, astonishments. What? I saw my world of 1950s sexuality made up of absurdities, pretense, make-believe, lies, and bullshit rules. Since sex was mostly all I ever thought about, I began to `philosophize' about it too.
Much later, I heard Richard Prior deliver a great comedy routine on that world recreated as the Great Pussy Draught of Fifties, ``yes, it was a terrible thing. dudes were just passing out in the heat, dying like flies...''
I think I can be pretty sure Judith Butler had similar and related experiences. In this sense, then I think Butler is re-inscribing her originary experiences and thoughts and discovering and attempting to extend the ontological and epistemological consequences. Of course this is also the task of the arts. Other non-literary writers like Freud, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari were doing the same thing. I only mention them because I've read something from them. I also think this is a domain that Jerry Monaco was calling ontic. Heidegger is another.
Now returning to the other theme here. By the time I got to Carpenter's class, I was already in revolt against the bourgeois social, sexual, political order. But like Neo, I just never expected what came next.
Now I want to go back to this, ``The question I wonder about is, will she be able to infold one world into another?'' On the theory that mathematics manages to provide conceptual models for many sorts of thoughts, I'll say Butler might. The possible class of transformations to think about are called conformal mappings. These essentially turn things inside out through Moebius transformations.
I think Cassirer, Levi-Strauss, and Piaget provide the overview of how this is done. The sources of mythic thinking originate from the emotive-feeling affect of the mind, so that sexuality is intimately and automatically infolded within this originary source and virtually all its productions. This is why I think Butler, Foucault, Freud, et al and their works are pointing in the same direction. They are all drinking at the same fountain, as are the arts, and many other worlds of myth, ritual, custom, and practices.
So then that idea gets around to Charles B and his question about a biological basis for heterosexuality. I think the most serious answer I could come up with is, I don't know, and I don't think anybody does. I suspect there are biological basis for what we have labeled sexuality or libido. But the reason I suspect that, is because I believe there is an emotive-feeling affect built into the body that connects a whole array of physiological systems (that blur our distinctions between mind and body), most of which we don't know much about from an empirical science point of view. On the other hand, we certainly know a lot about that constellation from our experiences and development, our embedding and engagement with the humanly constructed worlds we inhabit.
CG