> I absolutely don't get how you draw this conclusion from the material you quoted, which is all about our embeddedness in history, society, politics, discourse. What is solipsistic or "present=ist" about it?
If my "seeing and judging" is determined by an inescapable "epistemological frame," then what I see and judge isn't reality as it is in itself which, on this assumption about my "seeing and judging," is unknowable.
So any knowledge claim that goes beyond my own existence now, e.g a knowledge claim about my own existence five minutes ago, is inconsistent with this assumption. My "seeing and judging" of this is necessarily determined by this "epistemological frame" and hence can't be knowledge of the reality of my existence five minutes ago.
As I pointed out, Butler treats her own "seeing and judging" that in all "seeing and judging" of "the Other" there is not only "an epistemological frame within which the face appears, but an operation of power as well" as "seeing and judging" of the reality of "seeing and judging" of "the Other" as they are in themselves, rather than as "seeing and judging" determined by ""an epistemological frame within which the face appears, but an operation of power as well."
> When we ask, by virtue of what exteriority is recognition conferred?, we find that it cannot be the particular endowment of the Other who is able to know and to recognize me, since that Other will also have to rely upon a certain criterion to establish what will and will not be recognizable, a frame for seeing and judging. In this sense, if the Other confers recognition - and we have yet to know precisely in what that consists – it does this not primarily by virtue of special internal capacities. There is already not only an epistemological frame within which the face appears, but an operation of power as well, since only by virtue of certain kinds of anthropocentric dispositions and cultural frames will a given face seem to be a human face to any one of us.
The same problem is found in the passage I quoted from Fish.
Ted