Skip to main content

A Bad Reader Bites Back

 1. "Why are some of the most trenchant criticisms often expressed through difficult and demanding language?" This is the question I expected Butler to answer in the op-ed "A 'Bad Writer' Bites Back." If there was an answer, I missed it or misunderstood it. Butler suggests that complex, radical critiques of "common sense" cannot be made in ordinary language using the legacy of the Frankfurt School to show how [intellectual] language can challenge our social realities. My questions are: What about the "common sense" or power that haunts the "intellectual" world? How does this theoretical & intellectual work reinscribe the politics of domination or the "game of hegemony"("Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies" 267)? 

2. In "The Meaning of New Times," Hall notes how the individual subject is no longer a stable or whole "self," but an amalgamation of different selves produced by the different social worlds they inhabit. Furthermore, towards the end of the piece, he calls for the return of ethnicity, which he defines as: "the astonishing return to the political agenda of all those points of attachment which give the individual some sense of ‘place’ and position in the world, whether these be in relation to particular communities, localities, territories, languages, religions or cultures” (236). What are the pros and cons of addressing ourselves as part of a network or collective identity? Is identity a "bureaucratic nothing" (thinking of Xandra Ibarra's critique here)? 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Articulation_by_Abby Escatel

 In "Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance," Stuart Hall is concerned with complicating Marxist theory's tendency to overgeneralize and universalize its claims that are specifically located within a European history of labor. Questions concerning slavery, coloniality, unfree/forced labor come to the fore and force Marxist theorists to grapple with the need to be specific in their contextualization and historicization of particular moments, ruptures and conjunctures. My questions are as follows:  1. How do we move forward with Marxism while taking into account the component of "unfreedom" when conceptualizing class, labor, and labor power? How does the "proletariat" fail to account for the lived realities of racialized bodies?  2. It seems as though Hall is also saying that race is not all encompassing and also shouldn't be overgeneralized/universalized. In short, labor and race are both always already at work. As a scholar who ce...
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

Pedagogy vs. the indulgence of regressive politics (a. darryl moton)

I deeply hate to focus on merely one aspect of the incredibly rich texts we read for this week, but I stopped clearly on this paragraph from the Giroux: These are hard times for educators and advocates of democratic schooling. Beseiged by the growing forces of vocationalism and the neoconservative cultural warriors, prospective and existing classroom teachers are caught in an ideological crossfire regarding the civic and political responsibilities they assume as engaged critics and cultural theorists. Asked to define themselves either through the language of the marketplace or through a discourse of liberal objectivity and neutrality that abstracts the political from the realm of the cultural and sopcial, educators are increasingly being pressured to become either servants of corporate power or disengaged specialists wedded to the imperatives of a resurgent and debasing academic professionalism.(343) Having taught in high schools in the early-to-mid-2000s, I witnessed firsthand both...
Post a Comment
Read more