Postmodern Theory and the radical left?

For the sake of devil's advocacy, isn't this the same as 'don't read Marx because gulags'?

I'd echo what others have said about generalising about 'post-modernism' or 'post-structuralism', which are probably looser terms than Marxism (which covers Stalin to Pannekoek and more). As far as I can tell, the 'structuralism' to which post-structuralism refers is mainly Lévi-Strauss, who apparently thought that binary oppositions were a human universal, and suggested they were therefore fixed in human nature (as underlying structures in the mind). So post-structuralism would be all those who critiqued the binary, naturalised categories of structuralism. That's probably all the eclectic bunch of Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Butler etc would agree on. And it would take them 10,000 words to say 'I agree'.

Yeah a lot of this stuff is difficult. But then, have you tried reading Spinoza or Wittgenstein? Philosophy is hard. Ok, there's the Sokal/Bricmont argument that it's not just difficult, but meaningless. That's almost certainly true of some of it (e.g. the bullshit maths). But then, every movement has its fakers and blaggers. Which would leave the Chomsky argument - if it's not all bullshit, why can't anyone explain it in plain English, since even quantum mechanics can be communicated to a lay audience? Well, sometimes I think it can, so Chomsky's being a bit disengenous. I mean let's take Butler on gender.

Early feminism took the category of sex as a natural given, but argued for women's equality with men (e.g. Mary Wollstonecroft). From the 50s to the 70s, the sex-gender distinction became prominent, with 'sex' refering to the natural, biological and (relatively) unchanging, and 'gender' refering to the socially constructed roles for men and women. Simone de Beauvoir is probably one of the more influential examples, and this is now pretty much the WHO's stance too. Subsequently, feminists started to question the naturalness of 'sex'.

Butler is one of these. Her argument, afaics, basically echoes Marx (though without acknowledging it). Marx points out that it is living in a capitalist society which gives rise to the Robinson Crusoe myth of the political economists. i.e. the particulars of capitalist social relations are projected back onto timeless nature. Living in a capitalist society, going about our business as workers, consumers, political economists etc creates the idea that the laws of this specific society are timeless laws of nature. The idea of what is natural is a product of our activity. Butler does something similar with sex: rather than the gender binary being a product of nature, our understanding of nature is a product of a society with gender binary. So testosterone and estrogen are labelled 'sex hormones' rather than multipurpose growth hormones present in all humans, 'sex' actually refers to a cluster of spectrum variables (chromosomes, gonads, hormones, internal reproductive structures, external genitalia) not a single binary etc.

Any idealism here would be on the part of medical interventions to 'correct' messy natural variations to their 'true' binary form (e.g. castrating babies whose genitals are 'too small', not like a real man, because a woman's just a castrated man etc). Of course, you could make this argument, as I just did, without a lengthy engagement with Freud, Lacan, Foucault, Kristeva, Wittig etc. And you could do it in much plainer language without losing much, and indeed, cutting down on the scope for idealists to misinterpret 'performativity' as voluntarism. But I don't think it's meaningless - just unneccesarily obscure. Though Butler's a literature professor, so kinda goes with the territory. I think Chomsky's test is probably a good one - I just think some post-structuralism passes the test. Foucault probably would, so would Wendy Brown. I dunno about Lacan, Derrida (I've barely read anything on/by them).

I think part of the problem is the 'cultural turn' in theory (towards 'discourse', 'texts' etc) was seen as a rejection of materialism, but the 'Marxist' materialism it was rejecting was often a crude, reductive economism that couldn't theorise culture, gender, sexuality etc except as the superstructure to property relations. I mean in the 70s, homosexuality was often labelled a bourgeois deviation, members of radical communist groups physically attacked women's marches etc. Actually-existing Marxism was really shit on this stuff, which is why post-structuralism's influential imho. I don't really want to defend it as i'm not a big fan myself, and I share a lot of the common criticisms. But it's not just made-up nonsense.

Is it worth doing all the reading around the topic it takes to get your head around, say, Butler? Depends how much you want to engage with it I guess. You could probably get a similar analysis in clearer form via Christine Delphy and Anne Fausto-Sterling. And the problem with reading this stuff is once you start to get your head around the language, it starts slipping into your language too, so you become one of the incomprehensible in-crowd.

The problem with e.g. Butler is inconsistency and vagueness. Look at how she uses the term "sex" in Gender Trouble. IIRC one reviewer counted several different meanings used interchangably.

Anyway, I don't think the comparison of Butler to Marx is sound. Marx never said "Use-values don't have objective existence, they are produced by discourses". He did say it's a historical deed to discover the usefulness of a thing, but no way would he deny the objective reality of the material object and its properties that ultimately make possible the usefulness and its very discovery. Butler, on the other hand, can be viewed (unfortunately, it's hard to tell exactly, given how quickly she shifts from one meaning of a term to the other) as saying there is no sex, in the sense of a material, biological object, and that it's just a product of discourse and institutions etc., just like gender. What you end up with is a lot of trouble, but not the kind Butler wished for, I think.

And it's like that with pretty much the rest of philosophical postmodernism I've read (and I had to read some to get a degree in philosophy). When you abolish any standards of rationality, evidence etc., anything is possible. I mean, given enough time and typewriters, monkeys would eventually produce Hamlet, but...

True that. Still, Aren't you concerned that the authors criticized use extremely convoluted mathematical language in a completely nonsensical way? (What could possibly be the purpose of that?)

This is ridiculous. Marx made some arithmetic mistakes in (the drafts of) Capital. He left an unpublished manuscript about the differential calculus that is probably worthless (that's what I've read). This doesn't at all compare to saying that, e.g. general relativity is an argument for epistemic relativism, as po-mos do. You could at least have brought up Isaac Newton's mysticism.

And Joseph, like you say, exactly the same argument could be made without all the lengthy bullshit. In fact it had been made before Butler – by second-wave feminism of the sex/gender distinction. What Butler added was the confusion and idealism.

Well she certainly added confusion. I don't see the idealism unless you equate discourse with idealism, which it isn't. Sure, you can't touch it, but you can't touch value either. That doesn't mean either exist outside of the material world. Where does Butler say that reality doesn't exist and every arbitrary narrative's as valid as any other?* Like I say, I don't really want to defend 'pomo' or whatever (I've used Butler as the example as I've read it most recently), but I don't think a materialism which purges discourse/culture is tenable.

* Serious question - a lot of people say this but I don't remember reading it. It's possible I just ignored it/missed it.

Yeah I don't see that in Butler either. In fact Butler replies to a lot these criticism here. And she is very clear that she is a materialist.

Also, on the sex/gender distinction. You are saying Butler says two things. Both that she merely repeats the 2nd wave sex/gender distinction

and that she turns sex into a non-material, non-biological object just like gender

When actually her point is that there the sex/gender distinction does work. That a gendered body is a sex and that a sex is merely a gendered body. So the nature of sex needs to be understood as a social fact, not as a biological one. (Or to respond directly to you jura, sex is a material non-biological phenomenon according to Butler.)

Personally, I think she is right here, but only just. Sex and gender rest on a social activity, which is sexual reproduction, and which does involve biological distinctions. This isn't to say that there is a one to one relation between role in sexual reproduction and gender/sex. But still, I think it is definitely the case that in post-structuralist gender theory the question of babies is really neglected.

Question seems to be, mind, why they fund their heads so empty that they'd accept even that drivel to fill it, and like Ocelt and Georgestapleton, that's a matter of the collapse of post-war struggles, not something you can lay at the head of any particular black turtlekneck'd Frenchman.

(edit: also, shit, "empty heads" was so very much not the best way to phrase that. sounds condescending as fuck. what i was trying to get at was the theoretical poverty of the post-68 left, rather than any personal qualities of the people who get into this stuff.)

I'll look up the quotes. She said something like sex is the effect of discourse, where it was pretty clear that she was denying the objective biological existence of sex outside of discourse. In other words, making the famous leap from epistemological subjectivity to ontological subjectictivity, something like the triple Lutz of postmodern "philosophy". Of course, it's hard to argue with her because on different pages in the same book (and of course in different texts over the years) she says things that can be construed in opposing ways. So you can have it both ways, depending, I guess, on whom you're talking to right now and what claim you want to defend. And that's the main reason why I can't stand any of this.

One other thing I wanted to add. One of the effects (and one that I've experienced myself) of postmodern "theory" is that it makes even an averagely intelligent reader (like myself) feel incompetent and even outright stupid. I've read and re-read Deleuze and Guattari's What is Philosophy? as a sophomore in Philosophy and felt like quitting and switching to Tourism, even though I could understand (or at least partially understand) Russell's Problems of Philosophy and most of the other stuff we had to read. I've seen people (in the academia and in activist circles) use this neat feature of pomo "theory" to their advantage to diss other people's views, justify their own position, and shut down discussion. In this sense it's really the complete opposite of what "theory" (as in "scientific theory") is supposed to be like and what the "Left" (or at least its best parts; Pannekoek FTW) has historically stood for in regard to science and "theory". In a very vulgar way that I apologize for in anticipation of the uproar, one could describe it as fundamentally anti-working class.

I haven't read Butler so i aint gonna comment apart from where that quote from ethos seemed to resonate with my readings of Zizek. What one seems to find in common between say the way Marx sets out his arguments on chapter one in Capital and Russell in 'Problems of Philosophy' is they start with simple observations and built out simple basic principles to be tested and built upon till a general picture is brought. Im reading Kants 'Critique of Pure Reason' at the moment and it seems to be going about things in the same kinda way.

With Zizek, by contrast, its like various philosophers being flung together in one page(sometimes one paragraph) without explaining how they relate to each other. in about three pages i remember going from Kant to Heidegger to Gnostic Christianity and then a bit of Kripkes 'Naming and Necessity'. Can marx be accused of that kinda tomfoolery?

Even Wittgensteins stuff is hard to read in its seeming style of aphorisms rather than straight out deductive arguments but its not the same as namedropping hunners of disparate scholars from differening disciplines together..

This is incorrect. The structuralism they all refer to, including Levi-Strasuss, is Ferdinand de Saussure's semiotics. This is why quite a lot of structuralists and the post variety is often about epistemology, possibilities of meaning, signs etc.

And I do see the big problem with their theories per se. Some of them are quite helpful if you are an academic, but the political actions based on these theories are often crap from what I've seen (and often based on serious misreadings).

Baudrilliard's 'the gulf war did not take place' is probably the best example of this. Make outrageous assertion, backtrack to something banal ('i wouldn't call it a 'war' and anyway we only experienced it through TV'). I'll take your word for it with Butler. I don't remember reading her that way, but I'd read Fausto-Sterling (a biologist, by training) just before, and Butler references her, so I read it in that vein (epistemological relativism, ontological realism).

This does seem to be the function of the unexplained name-dropping and bullshit maths, yeah. Not limited to post-structuralism mind, i've had people talk about Tiqqun this way to me. A lot of 'theory' seems to be more about establishing the superiority/intellect of the writer than anything else.

Edit: @Khawaga, ta for the correction.

Joseph is correct about Levi-Strauss, his entire project was to work out the universal human mind, the structure of the mind, by way of finding binary oppositions, of universal structures in kinship, analysing stories from around the world looking for universal themes, inspired from Freuds dream analysis but in the collective 'dreaming' of myths. He drew indeed from Saussure but also freud and those russian formalist characters who I forget their names.

It would be tempting to say that only really Levi-Strauss could be labelled in any real way a Structuralist.

I actually though he was onto something.

imho at least part of post-structurlaism is the rejection of this universal mind and the positing of structures within discourse, which as JK points out in NOT an idealist approach in the likes of Foucault and Butler at least.

This is the same question that Sokal and Bricmont pose themselves... and come up with the conclusion that the only reason they can think of is a deliberate attempt to mystify the reader. Therefore, that must be the real motive.

Except the validity of the route to that conclusion - "we can imagine no other explanation" - is somewhat in contradiction with their starting point of "we don't understand this stuff and have made no attempt to understand it, as that's out of scope". In other words, it is entirely possible that any attempt to actually engage with the works in question as a whole will allow the reader to imagine other reasons.

Personally, out of the people named in the book, I can only really speak for the D&G combo. In the D&G case, the use of mathematical and scientific referents are simply one aspect of their "schizoanalytic" style which mimics, in a certain sense, the hyper-connecting speech of the schizophrenic, referencing things from as many different disciplines as available to them and proliferating connections between them all (a sort of giant conceptual cross join, to use a sql analogy) and then filtering through perceived patterns and contrived conceptions. It's kind of more like conceptual data mining rather than the more traditional apriori method of hypothesising a proposition/relation and then testing it against available data.

But anyway, that's a digression into my reading of the D&G, which is sorta besides the point. The point in response to Sokal & Bricmont's failure of imagination as to motive, is part and parcel of their failure to engage with the post-structuralists they are ostensibly critiquing, which ultimately is a result of the fact that their main target is elsewhere - i.e. the Strong Programme of the sociology of scientific knowledge, as part of the Science Wars.

Their use of selected quotes from selected post-structuralist texts is thus entirely instrumental and secondary to their real purpose. And in that sense your later assertion that "saying that, e.g. general relativity is an argument for epistemic relativism, as po-mos do", is, as JK has already pointed out, based on that general anti-relativist position in the Science Wars, rather than the fact that you can point to authors like Butler, Foucault or D&G actually saying that. Because, AFAIK, they simply have not (open to being proved wrong with a relevant quote here)

What have you got from Lucan?

This is actually called abduction and is a regular form of reasoning. In the absence of a better explanation, you conclude that p. You could refute that p if you gave a more plausible explanation why the criticized authors write what was demonstrated to be nonsense.

I asked you to do that. You said:

This is a description of what they do. My question is, how can you come to reasonable conclusions from premises which are nonsensical (as demonstrated by Sokal and Bricmont). I.e., what cognitively relevant reason there was for D&G to write nonsense. (If there is no cognitively relevant reason, and I think there really is none, that's fine. I wouldn't ask Tristan Tzara or Hugo Ball to provide cognitively relevant reasons for what they'd done, but then, they didn't call it theory.)

He is correct in his summary of L-S that there is an 'innate structuring capacity' in the human mind and that it is expressed in myths that always comes from binaries. But L-S got this from de Saussure, so all structuralists go back to Saussure (or Barthes) even if it's via L-S. And yeah Bakhtin and Voloshinoiv was also an influence, as was Marx for Deleuze and Guattari, and for Foucault.

So much to read, so little time....

OK, here's a quote from the German translation of "Bodies that Matter", quoted by the Austrian feminist philosopher Herta Nagl-Docekal. Butler asks the question (my translation back into English): "Through which regulative norms is the biological sex itself materialized?".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7e_9rpBR6Bc

Sure, but I can't help feeling that you can't get a full picture of what the "structuralism" that post-structuralism refers back to, without including Althusser. It was Althusser who took Levi-Strauss as a jumping off point for a programme to reconstruct an intellectually credible Stalinism. Althusser's attack on Satre for the latter's alleged "humanism" leaves its mark on post-structuralist thought in that even while breaking from PCF Marxism and the structuralist project, a certain "anti-humanism" (or post-humanism, take your pick) is a common thematic. To this day people like Negri et al, that self-indentify as pomos will take (usually petty) potshots at Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou in passing in their texts.

I can't say I've read Reading Capital or For Marx or any of the main Althusserian texts, to be honest. But I certainly wouldn't rule them off the reading list simply because I have a lot of time for E.P. Thompson on one hand, and Foucault and D&G on the other.

Sure, and this is the dendritic (tree-like) mode of exposition. Start with the one, the one divides and becomes two, and so on. But the dendritic form is not the only one, there is also the rhizomatic form (in geek: network) where there is no single point of origin, each node has a mutiplicity of connections, rather than the simple binary "either-or", and every node can potentially connect to any of the others. Each has their strengths and weaknesses, neither is objectively superior to the other (contrary to the prejudices of those that say that on the tree is the royal road to truth), and in fact each has a tendency to mutate into the other at points. Conversely, certain anarchists have prejudices against tree-like structures because the form evokes the image of hierarchy. Yet what is federalism if not a tree-like structure, but with bottom-up flows of decision-making power, rather than top-down ones? All of which is just a summary of chapter 1 "The Rhizome" from ATP.

First of all, I don't accept that S&B "demonstrated to be nonsense" the passages they quoted and found unintelligible. They just demonstrated that they're nonesense to them (and me, as it happens). But hey, that's noise in the signal - you can't always make out what the hell the writers had in mind when they wrote a particular passage - see for e.g. Hegel.

Your "not one drop" theory of what useful philosophy should be, seems to me to be strangely 19th century or Comtean. i.e. the image that the aim of philosophy or conceptualisation, is to build a giant, integrated and monolithic structure - a "philosophial system" - like a house or a temple, starting at the root (trees again) with sound foundations and then placing brick on brick, checking that each is secure from the pull of syllogistic gravity. From such a perspective, evidence of any single fallacy, or undecideable proposition, brings down the whole edifice of the "Temple of Truth". Surely it can't be news to anyone who's done a philosophy degree that such an approach is untenable?

Leaving aside the pursuit of philosophy for its own sake, from the perspective of the revolutionary, engagement with philosophy is more like a game of conceptual scrapheap challenge. Your team has to scour the junk yard or broken-down or discarding rusting and rotting philosophical machines and engines, break them for parts to weld into a new war machine fit for the purpose of taking on your particular class struggle and recomposition challenges. From that perspective what matters about the individual hunks of rusting philosophical engines are: what is the noise to signal ratio of the text (i.e. what bits are still working/useable), and can we use the working bits to good effect in the particular war-machine we are trying to build?

From that perspective, I'd say that the noise to signal ration of Foucault, Deleuze & Guattari, etc are actually pretty high (imo), and they certainly provide tools I use all the time, just like Marx, Kropotkin or Thompson.

And now a quote to enrage the "temple builders".

Just to push a bit more on Butler, this seems the most explicit bit in 'Bodies that matter':

That seems to explicitly acknowledge there's a reality out there, but our concepts/knowledge/meaning of it are inherently contested. That said, it's again, needlessly obscure. Following that quote, there's a passage headed 'are bodies purely discursive?'. It would be really fucking simple to say 'no, of course not'. But instead there's a dense passage on the irreducibility of language to matter and matter to language which then seques into a discussion of Kristeva and Lacan without giving a clear answer (but with enough caveats to defend against charges that she says the body is made of words). So yeah, it's hard to conclude this ambiguity isn't deliberate:

'O hai I heard you guys found Gender Trouble confusing, so here's some more confusion, I hope it's productive for you!' I guess the question is whether sophistry, or even provocation/trolling, is a valid pedagogical technique, i.e. is it ok to sow confusion in order to force people to work things out for themselves? Which I guess is related to the 'rhizome'/'tool box' approach to philosophy. It's surely one thing to say 'there's some stuff we can salvage from this scrap yard' and another entirely to set out to produce a pile of scrap.

But that just brings us back to the catch-22: this stuff has been influential, so do you spend time getting your head around it in order to understand what say, queer theorists, are on about, or do you ignore it and tell them to speak plain English (thus validating the post-structuralist claim that rational white-straight-masculinist discourse is founded on the exclusion of subaltern subjectivities etc). The way out of that would seem to be a decent materialist approach to questions like race, sex/gender, sexuality etc. Which, funnily enough, Butler of all people sketches in that piece George linked above:

Interesting....Thanks... I've just downloaded chapter 1 from ATP there, so ill give taht a read tonight - hoping that it will provide some kinda relief from the formal logic stuff im trying to learn (badly) at the moment.

As it happens, one of the things thats driving me to learn logic and maths and stuff (which im still at GCSE level at) is to try and see if there is anything worthwhile in Badious Being and Event as I've noticed a fair few lefties ive spoken to talk about Badiou in positive terms with a tone of being in awe of his mathematical demonstrations, and when i read one of his books aimed at the general reader (Ethics)it was all predicated upon the much more difficult mathematical set theory based stuff in Being and Event.

From learning philosophy from a uni thats very fixed to the analytic side of the divide, its kinda been depressing that one will not get a chance to encounter continental philosophers even if it is just to refute them. What i've liked so far from reading Being and Event that Badiou seems to be trying to get a dialogue happening between the inheritors of the Vienna Circle tradition and the Continental crowd.

But one thing he says in his introduction in response to the Sokal criticisms is along the lines that hes justified in using mathematics in his philosophy as this has always been the way of things and he uses Leibinez as an example. The problem with that particular example is that Leibinez has left us some genuine mathematical and logical tools as a legacy such as the 'principle of identity' and differential calculus. Same goes for analytic philosophers such as Russells Paradox, Logicism as foundation for mathematics, development of predicate logic, Quine's development of Set Theory etc. I don't think the same can be said for Badiou or D&G.

Despite that, i am going to try and keep an open mind on Badiou, and will settle my opinion once i have the logical and mathematical tools to see if there is something of use in his philosophy.

I would add that the attempts I've seen to synthesise anarchism and post-structuralism are atrocious individualist shite, typically based on two straw men - anarchists rely on a benevolent human nature (bollocks, if you think people are bastards or socially constructed from a blank slate you could still coherently oppose capitalism/hierarchical power) and an aversion to power (bollocks, the most widespread forms of anarchism, e.g. anarcho-syndicalism, were precisely about building collective workers power in a productive/combative as opposed to repressive mode). Like I say, I think a better approach would be to theorise mode of production as including gender, normative sexuality, race etc (e.g. Kenan Malik argues that "the idea of race developed as a way of explaining the persistence of social divisions in a society that had proclaimed a belief in equality", originally coterminous with class and only later becoming attached to skin colour). I guess some of the communisation stuff is barking up this tree, but often no more intelligible than post-structuralism.

Yeah, I think you are totaly correct to answer this question. And I think I'd agree, I find it extremely frustrating.

It's like with art. The now standard trope in art seems to be "This works raises questions about.." or "makes us question..." I think I'd like there to be a shift back to "this work presents us with an assertion of...."

In Lacan, he kind of justifies his method her with his concept of "the subject supposed to know". But, while still I think it's a pretty ridiculous mode of representation. Especially seeing as from my experience of pomos (grad students etc.) - they are not Foucaults or Lacans. They are largely people who are lazier than me, do very little research and generally don't know the subject that they are 'challenging'. So this approach of deliberately not being evasive, while intended to indicate their position as a vacuous 'master', hides the fact that they just plain vacuous.

Well my answer to this would be answer in whatever register you find comfortable in and you think is appropriate. And as to theory you don't understand. I think its totally fair to say "I looked at that and it seems to be a load of crap".

But I think people saying "I haven't tried to understand this and I don't understand this, so its not understandable and its shit", isn't really fair.

Honest question: Do you really think the two paragraphs that you posted are more comprehensible that the 'incomprehensible' ones earlier in your post? Because I think this is more because we find obscure marxist language comprehensible and stuff like Derrida and Kristeva much harder to read. Whereas other people presumably find things the other way round.

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Also just to echo ocelot's point earlier, all these criticisms of incomprehensibility apply with equal, if not greater, force to Hegel than they do to almost and pomo stuff.

I was trying to pick out the clearest quotes rather than the incomprehensible ones (the fact these can be mistaken speaks volumes!). But the point about familiarity with specialist Marxist jargon but not, say, psychoanalytic jargon, is fair enough. Tbh, I think Marxist jargon should be purged to a minimum too, though I certainly use it as shorthand on libcom lots of the time.

There is the counter-argument, I think from Adorno (or Frankfurt School anyway), that cryptic prose and counter-intuitive/paradoxical assertions (e.g. 'enlightenment is totalitarian') force the reader to reassess received wisdom and question assumptions. But I don't think it follows that clear prose can't invite a reconsideration of assumptions, or that paradoxes and riddles are the best/only way to do so.

Adorno is just as bad BTW!

Sorry, but whats "pomo"? cheers

I concur! just acknowledging his pro-obscure prose argument.