Skip to main content

26 January 2022 Reflection.

I'm stuck on certain aspects of the Butler piece, and not necessarily because of Butler's own opinions; I'm particularly drawn to their citation of Adorno's position that "nothing radical could come of common sense." I like the idea, especially the fact that anything that could truly constitute "common sense" could be interpreted as maintenance of the status quo. However, I immediately think of philosophical and political movements based on the unity of the working classes. Toward the end of World War II, then-US Vice-President Henry Agard Wallace gave a particularly compelling speech in which he declared that, in order for society to progress and reach its potential and for all humanity to achieve a lasting peace, the era after WWII needed to be the "Century of the Common Man," in which peaceful intellectual and economic competition would enable the free people of the world to create a better society. Wallace insisted that WWII was, in fact, a "people's revolution." I've always maintained that the vast majority of philosophical, literary, and political concepts can be explained in such a way that a sixth-grader can understand them; while I think the Philosophy and Literature approach of lampooning anyone to the left of Reagan as a highfalutin' elitist is both silly and reductive, I do think there is an element of gatekeeping to much of academia that I often end up accused of being "anti-intellectual" for pointing out.
While I found all of the readings informative and interesting, that particular aspect of the Butler piece stood out to me.
I suppose I should ask some questions:
1) Is it truly necessary for "the most trenchant social criticisms" to "often [be] expressed through difficult and demanding language?"
2) What is the primary benefit to viewing Hall's statements on feminism within the context of the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies through the anecdotal lens of someone who was there and participating? What, if any, would be the drawbacks?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

On Journals and Prose

My two questions from this week have emerged from the Judith Butler piece, A 'Bad Writer' Bites Back , both centered around the journal, Philosophy and Literature —which Butler describes as the self-proclaimed “arbiter of good prose.”  I agree with Butler’s staunch defense of questioning common sense and provoking “new ways of looking at a familiar world”, and was reminded of David Harvey’s quote in the introduction to his Companion to Marx’s Capital : “Real learning always entails a struggle to understand the unknown.”   Butler describes Philosophy and Literature as a “culturally conservative academic journal” which naturally led me down a longer-than-anticipated visit to the journal's website . I was greeted with a video presented by the Philosophy and Literature’s editor Garry L. Hagberg, who rails against the “jargon infested” work that litters the journal’s field, locating Philosophy and Literature in clear opposition to such bothersome clutter.  However, Hagberg...
Post a Comment
Read more

Week 6 Discussion Qs

 Hall brings up the concept of interpellation as applied to social formations. (p 335) How is interpellation related to articulation? How are the two different, if at all? Must the two be discussed together? I have more difficulty conceptualizing interpellation than I do articulation. If we are to take up Hall's warning not to study racism as a set of "historically specific racisms" (336) nor as something with a "universal structure" (337). What balance can we strike today between these two approaches in our current historical moment? Eduardo Bonilla-Silva has written that certain forms of modern racism have been impacted by the prevalent ideology of "colorblindness." Are we still in this moment or are new specificities arising?
Post a Comment
Read more

Corrine's Op Ed

       Although the Grammy’s “rebranded” their “urban” music award in 2020 after being taken to task by Tyler, the Creator for using the term to cover all black artists, regardless of their chosen genre, its lingering presence can still be felt in the new “Progressive R&B” award that has taken its place. Where Tyler, the Creator and other artists argued for more diverse genres that allow for broader categorizations for “people who look like [him],” the Grammy’s simply tucked one category into the other, reflecting how “urban” and R&B are both intrinsically linked and coded to the Grammy’s board as “black music.” This neat folding away of urban back into R&B seems to be unhelpful at best and reductive at worst, and has serious repercussions for us all, artist or otherwise: the pigeonholing of black art/ ists into essentialized categories allows for only a few forms of blackness to be legitimated through the Grammy system, but it also reflects the rigid bo...
Post a Comment
Read more