Skip to main content

LANGUAGE, POLITICS, AND ACADEMIC FEUDS

 

  1. Judith Butler’s op-ed in The New York Times from before I was born (lol, not to date myself) is missing a response to what I believe is valid and constructive criticism. Butler’s piece is in part a response to being crowned in a bad writing competition by a conservative journal which Martha Nussbaum likely made them aware of in her scathing critique. I know this because I wrote a poem (a sonnet) about it last year which I would be happy to share in class if there is any interest. Nussbaum, a philosopher and professor at UChicago, wrote a hit piece on Butler called “The Professor of Parody” published in The New Republic on February 22, 1999 and was shortly thereafter rebutted (indirectly) by Butler’s article published on March 20, 1999. In this article, Nussbaum argues, from a feminist perspective, that Butler and other academics have detached themselves from material politics and have adopted a defeatist politic to societal woes. These word-obsessed academics, she argues, have been incapable of addressing actual material change in the realms of legislative politics. I recommend reading it, but I also think that Nussbaum fails to diagnose that there are ruptures happening from their followers/students. And I want to see if my diagnosis is correct—I believe that this feud is symptomatic of larger distinct approaches to praxis in academe, I see the two figures in different philosophical camps. Whereas Nussbaum believes that reform happens primarily and should happen in legal institutions, Butler has a different stance, one in which reform happens in the cultural imagination of the left. While Nussbaum has been a part of the culture that influences legislation and judicial ruling (she teaches in the law school); Butler, and other gender theorists, have shifted the discourse about gender in mainstream culture in profound ways—everyone is obsessed with gender, especially conservatives (Butler teaches in the Comparative Literature and Critical Theory departments at UC Berkeley). I am interested in discussing how being in these different “disciplines” or academic departments shapes the way they engage with the political outside of the academy and how cultural studies engages with the works of these thinkers (Giroux et Al). 

 

  1. Here’s a fun question: Who do you think some contemporary “conservative organic intellectuals” are? Who are some radical organic intellectuals? 

 

—Brayan

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

2/2 Discussion Questions

Althusser makes a point that ISAs operate as "unified" under the ruling ideology. To what extent are certain ISAs unified if they are "the site of class struggle" playing out, holding the potential for "ruptures" (to use Hall's phrase) with dominant ideologies? Here, I am thinking about the University of Iowa's COVID policies and how its rules are practiced and applied in many different ways throughout campus, as administrative burdens and scale make it difficult to oversee large numbers of employees. More generally, as junior scholars, grad students, and/or individuals doing cultural studies work, does it make more sense for us to do deep and nuanced readings of theorists such as Marx and Althusser in our work, or to cite others who have expanded these traditions over the years?
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

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