Exactly - if you can't figure it out, that means she "must be smarter than you." Kinda of a twist on the logical fallacy "appeal to authority" - only it's a false "I defer to authority" which really isn't an authority at all. Seems that it is another logical consequence to the failed government school model "sit down and shut up while I tell you your opinion" that makes so many die-hard CNN and MSNBC bots.
Still a logical fallacy. Brava to them for coming up with a sort-of new one.
Yep. It’s been a principal tool of the postmodernists for decades. Deliberately create an impenetrable thicket of needlessly obscure terms, then claim anyone who thinks it’s rubbish is just too dumb to understand it. “Artists” have used the same hustle for even longer than academics.
It makes a certain kind of sense when you realize that the entire postmodern exercise in art, philosophy, academics in general, and now politics, is to destroy morals, norms, all of Western civilization, and every institution, custom, tradition or truth associated with them. It’s all about contempt for those not anointed with the deep moral clarity of the perpetrators.
I gave the diagramming a try...just removing the basic prepositional phrases left this piece of nonsensical garbage:
"The move is understood to structure social relations to a view in which power relations are subject brought the question and marked a shift that takes structural totalities to one in which the insights inaugurate a renewed conception as bound up"
It can't be diagrammed, as there is no independent clause anywhere in that mess.
You definitely win the prize! I’d have to consult an old textbook to even try tackling that sentence or whatever it is. It’s not meant to communicate so much as to intimidate.
You're giving Harris too much credit for putting a noun and verb together that make sense. Literacy and speech are not strong suits in the Biden Administration.
I feel like James Lindsay is her only equal in terms of dense prose.... but I often like what he has to say, just wish I was smarter to stick with his articles all the way through. Maybe I need a Lindsay interpreter.
I like that approach. "Eliminate all free radicals" as James Bond once said.
One thing I notice on the internet is how much of it is narrative or conversational - written the way the author talks, rather than in clear, concise exposition. I'm just as guilty. But when I see it in someone who is paid to write for a living writing this way, I cringe for the future.
I read Lindsay as logical, but often needing to be unpacked. The sentences make sense, but you may have to pause and look up terms or other background info. Butler just doesn’t make sense because she is deliberately vague and deliberately uses words that she herself has made up and/or uses words in different ways than anyone else does. In this way, she is in control of the narrative—forever—because the narrative is whatever she wants it to be on any given day. She’s made herself the irreplaceable guru of a cult.
"Power was seen as static in institutions based on things like wealth. Now it's seen as dynamic due to patterns in the way its expressed thanks to work by (not cited). Which showed faults with the static Althuserrian theory."
Original:
"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power."
Funnily enough the entire thing becomes easier to understand with a bit of proper punctuation and semantic closure. I dare you to tell me that in spite of its ludicrous jargon, the bottom isn't vastly more legible.
"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation were arrived at through the study of their rearticulation.
Rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory; that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects - to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power."
Chris, Chris, Chris... don't be coming at her with all these facts. Don't you know her feelings don't care about your facts...? It's the narrative, man, that matters. She has her own truth - no need to consider ACTUAL truth for "what is truth?" Sigh...
Post modernism is fundamentally a denial of truth. I challenge any of these pseudo intellectuals to walk in front of a moving train or take a punch from Mike Tyson and tell me truth is completely subjective.
Appreciate your efforts to clarify the nonsense of Judith Butler. As a psychoanalyst, I recently lost a very unhappy young woman patient who identified as "non binary and queer". As gently as I could, I was uncovering the depths of her unhappiness, but her defense was taking exception when I used "disrespectful language" and referred to her as a sister .... she is going to look for a "therapist who identifies as queer and non-binary." She feels this person will be in a better place to understand her.
It is heartbreaking what gender nonsense is doing to young people IMO.
So very sad. This world is falling into complete chaos and confusion. Maleness and femaleness is a Truth. It used to be part of our Social Contract that we all clearly saw this Truth and lived by it. The confusion in the world today has ripped away Truth and reality and the younger generations are growing up in a world that has no Truth, stability or civility. They are lost and adrift. We HAVE to bring Truth back into our society to save it.
There are indeed a few brain dead democrats who are unaware of the pedopathic vermin filling the democrat party of today.
Transhausen by proxy is just another example of the toxic democrat witches so prevalent in todays society, who will sacrifice their own children (and especially yours) on the altar of Woke perversion.
Mutilating the healthy organs of mentally ill children is just another example of the rabid rodents that are ruining the world.
I whipped up a meme last year, using a pic of an actual transmission.
It said, This is the only kind of trans, that is gender neutral.
It even has a neutral!
Mocking the leftist vermin is about the best way we can stop these rabid rodents.
I prefer to live in a world where we don't need to exterminate all the rabid folks.
Free speech, ridicule, and lovely mockery, are the best tools in a free society.
Let us hope the democrat vermin do not turn us into another slave society.
That would require another war, and I remember what happened the last time a bunch of repubs stopped a bunch of rabid democrats from their slave trade.
I know suing is so overdone these days but I bet that publisher is liable for these intentional and sloppy errors. A fake intellectual like Butler would be metaphorically slain by exposing her lazy “scholarship.”
Thank you for addressing the use of “Latinate neologism” in Butler’s writings. It’s a standard weapon in the DEI field as well. A while ago I attended a seminar about software used to predict recidivism for criminal sentencing purposes. As an attorney, I’d hoped to gain some useful insights but it turned out to be a DEI-focused event. The entire presentation was a mess of garbled verbiage so dense I couldn’t figure out what ideas they meant to convey. It’s an intentional strategy to undermine your confidence in your own intellectual abilities so that you don’t question or challenge their ideas. Calling them out on it is long overdue.
Perhaps a strategy to create more work for DEI consultants ;) Seems to be everywhere in the CLE (Continuing Legal Education) world - at least in Canada...
Obfuscatory prose is the name of the game, and the more you succeed at creating convoluted text, the more you're likely to be revered by peers and professors alike. I used to take pride in being able to unpack concepts from her brand of writing, but now see it for what it is: intentionally incomprehensible language used to shield her from criticism. If you take issue with the fundamental concepts, you're a fascist; if you don't understand the fundamental concepts, you just don't "get it," probably due to your "cis" and otherwise "privileged" subjectivities.
Now Butler is tacking on they/them pronouns, which highlights the problems inherent to the current gender construction debate. With her own prose, she has annihilated her own subjectivity as a woman (meaning, biological human female) and included herself in a category of non-binary people to justify her place in the woke political discussion she's helped to create. It's not surprising that facts get overlooked when the goal of this kind of writing, and the politics it's spurred, is meant to simultaneously confuse and excite people, which speaks to its place, not as academic literature, but as contemporary propaganda.
And, sadly, self-serving amoral media are always happy to promote garbage like Butler's if there's a chance it will attract ignorant eyeballs and advertiser $.
Thank you :) I did! I found value in critically thinking through gender norms and how we value or devalue people who deviate from the typical masculinity / femininity constructs we create. But even in 2019, when I did grad work in English (which included several gender studies & LGBTQ lit courses), we didn't deny the existence of biological sex. I'm happy to have finished with academia before this paradigm took over.
How did someone as emotionally and intellectually screwed up (plus generally non-entity) as Judith Butler ever get to be deemed a 'high-powered academic'; a 'scholar'; a 'philosopher' for Christ's sake? Had she presented herself at any academic institution worthy of the name all those years ago she would have been told politely that the academic life was not for her - and then a good psychotherapist suggested to her where she might get some help with her personal 'gender' hang ups.
Transhausen by proxy is just another example of the toxic democrat witches so prevalent in todays society, who will sacrifice their own children (and especially yours) on the altar of Woke perversion.
“An unremarkable Foucault imitator, Butler is not particularly insightful, but her use of Latinate neologisms and dense prose give her work the appearance of profundity.” Haha. Not sure what this means, but it’s funny. Let me now go to the dictionary.
Foucault was one of the early postmodern philosophers with whom American academics fell in love. His assertions that all “truth claims” only existed in contexts (social, economic, cultural, political, etc) and amounted to nothing but power claims were eagerly snapped up by lazy, self indulgent academics. Of course all of his own assertions were exempt and offered as objective truths. Which at bottom was nothing but relativism (“there are no objective truths,” itself always asserted as an objective truth,) which is what all postmodernist/poststructuralist thought reduces to. I get to defeat all your assertions by claiming they’re contextual (patriarchal, heteronormative, capitalist, cis, white privileged, whatever,) while claiming that my own assertions are true across all contexts. This is observed comically, for example, in white liberals lecturing others on white privilege. Of course, it’s where absurdisms like “my truth” come from.
Mix relativism with good old Marxist haves/have nots, oppressor/oppressed boilerplate, and you’ve pretty much got all of postmodernism in a nutshell.
An excellent summary of post-modernism. It is really nothing more than repackaged Marxism. It still has the same fundamental characteristics such as oppressor vs. oppressed at its core.
Foucault’s moral relativism, by the way, included a penchant for having sex with male children in multiple visits to North Africa, and knowingly spreading HIV in San Francisco bath houses. No wonder the elite Left adores him.
When you figure it out, please post it. When I see "Foucault" I think of Foucault's Pendulum. There is a cool one at the Smithsonian in DC. When I was a kid I watched it for an hour because they said it proved that the earth was rotating, and that was fascinating to me.
This article is a fabulous smackdown of that phony fraud who is so fake that redundancy is necessary to communicate the full extent of her phony fraud.
So interesting! I have been saying for years that scholars who propose anything “socially constructed” enter into a quagmire in which they attempt to make abstractions real with further abstractions. It leads to false claims, circular reasoning, a tautology of citing others who say the same things, and plagiarism. And of course pure lies as you have exposed.
Ideologues like Butler do not see the descent into incoherence as a failure, but as a means of dissolving any rational obstacles to enforcing their assertions of pure will, while still retaining the outer appearance of academic respectability. They are the intellectual equivalent of Edgar the Bug-Man from the Men In Black movie. I wonder if Butler has a marked preference for sugar-water?
Chris, honestly where do these charlatans come from? We have seen many such species at the private schools here Can’t figure it out— for people like Burler is the motivation a desire for money or trendy academic accolades? Is it based on childhood abuse, mental illness, pure desire for communist overthrow? I’d love to be a fly on the paper of her neuropsych- eval! Lol! It’s breathtaking to see the warping.
Reading her extremely long run on sentence made my head hurt. Too early in the morning for that.
And to be perfectly honest? I didn’t understand at all what that sentence even meant. Lol.
That’s the whole point. Make it needlessly complex.
It is anti-rational and if you are paying for your kid to go to universities this is the horse shit they are getting, just don't do it.
Butler didn’t understand it, but, for her audience it matters not. And besides, I cannot diagram that word salad, so…
Exactly - if you can't figure it out, that means she "must be smarter than you." Kinda of a twist on the logical fallacy "appeal to authority" - only it's a false "I defer to authority" which really isn't an authority at all. Seems that it is another logical consequence to the failed government school model "sit down and shut up while I tell you your opinion" that makes so many die-hard CNN and MSNBC bots.
Still a logical fallacy. Brava to them for coming up with a sort-of new one.
Yep. It’s been a principal tool of the postmodernists for decades. Deliberately create an impenetrable thicket of needlessly obscure terms, then claim anyone who thinks it’s rubbish is just too dumb to understand it. “Artists” have used the same hustle for even longer than academics.
It makes a certain kind of sense when you realize that the entire postmodern exercise in art, philosophy, academics in general, and now politics, is to destroy morals, norms, all of Western civilization, and every institution, custom, tradition or truth associated with them. It’s all about contempt for those not anointed with the deep moral clarity of the perpetrators.
If you can't explain it to a nine yr old it is nonsense.
You really should say their deep "amoral" clarity. But good comment, nonetheless.
Remember Maxwell Smart, Agent 86?
I gave the diagramming a try...just removing the basic prepositional phrases left this piece of nonsensical garbage:
"The move is understood to structure social relations to a view in which power relations are subject brought the question and marked a shift that takes structural totalities to one in which the insights inaugurate a renewed conception as bound up"
It can't be diagrammed, as there is no independent clause anywhere in that mess.
You definitely win the prize! I’d have to consult an old textbook to even try tackling that sentence or whatever it is. It’s not meant to communicate so much as to intimidate.
Hilarious, thank you!
Good job! But I still don’t know what it means.
VP Harris must be her ghost writer.
You're giving Harris too much credit for putting a noun and verb together that make sense. Literacy and speech are not strong suits in the Biden Administration.
It's all smoke and mirrors.
A lot of circling back to restate the lies in another way.
I feel like James Lindsay is her only equal in terms of dense prose.... but I often like what he has to say, just wish I was smarter to stick with his articles all the way through. Maybe I need a Lindsay interpreter.
Maybe they should write as my freshman HS teacher advocated in 1960. Short declarative sentences and get rid of half the adverbs and adjectives.
I like that approach. "Eliminate all free radicals" as James Bond once said.
One thing I notice on the internet is how much of it is narrative or conversational - written the way the author talks, rather than in clear, concise exposition. I'm just as guilty. But when I see it in someone who is paid to write for a living writing this way, I cringe for the future.
I read Lindsay as logical, but often needing to be unpacked. The sentences make sense, but you may have to pause and look up terms or other background info. Butler just doesn’t make sense because she is deliberately vague and deliberately uses words that she herself has made up and/or uses words in different ways than anyone else does. In this way, she is in control of the narrative—forever—because the narrative is whatever she wants it to be on any given day. She’s made herself the irreplaceable guru of a cult.
Try Henry James ... his work is of similar, ah, density.
Here is what it means.
"Power was seen as static in institutions based on things like wealth. Now it's seen as dynamic due to patterns in the way its expressed thanks to work by (not cited). Which showed faults with the static Althuserrian theory."
Original:
"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power."
Funnily enough the entire thing becomes easier to understand with a bit of proper punctuation and semantic closure. I dare you to tell me that in spite of its ludicrous jargon, the bottom isn't vastly more legible.
"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation were arrived at through the study of their rearticulation.
Rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory; that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects - to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power."
Word salad, much like VP Harris.
Chris, Chris, Chris... don't be coming at her with all these facts. Don't you know her feelings don't care about your facts...? It's the narrative, man, that matters. She has her own truth - no need to consider ACTUAL truth for "what is truth?" Sigh...
Ha!
Judith Bulter is not white. She's Jewish. I think you knew that, Christopher.
‘Jewish’ is not a colour.
Post modernism is fundamentally a denial of truth. I challenge any of these pseudo intellectuals to walk in front of a moving train or take a punch from Mike Tyson and tell me truth is completely subjective.
Appreciate your efforts to clarify the nonsense of Judith Butler. As a psychoanalyst, I recently lost a very unhappy young woman patient who identified as "non binary and queer". As gently as I could, I was uncovering the depths of her unhappiness, but her defense was taking exception when I used "disrespectful language" and referred to her as a sister .... she is going to look for a "therapist who identifies as queer and non-binary." She feels this person will be in a better place to understand her.
It is heartbreaking what gender nonsense is doing to young people IMO.
So very sad. This world is falling into complete chaos and confusion. Maleness and femaleness is a Truth. It used to be part of our Social Contract that we all clearly saw this Truth and lived by it. The confusion in the world today has ripped away Truth and reality and the younger generations are growing up in a world that has no Truth, stability or civility. They are lost and adrift. We HAVE to bring Truth back into our society to save it.
There are indeed a few brain dead democrats who are unaware of the pedopathic vermin filling the democrat party of today.
Transhausen by proxy is just another example of the toxic democrat witches so prevalent in todays society, who will sacrifice their own children (and especially yours) on the altar of Woke perversion.
Mutilating the healthy organs of mentally ill children is just another example of the rabid rodents that are ruining the world.
Transhausen by proxy is real.
I whipped up a meme last year, using a pic of an actual transmission.
It said, This is the only kind of trans, that is gender neutral.
It even has a neutral!
Mocking the leftist vermin is about the best way we can stop these rabid rodents.
I prefer to live in a world where we don't need to exterminate all the rabid folks.
Free speech, ridicule, and lovely mockery, are the best tools in a free society.
Let us hope the democrat vermin do not turn us into another slave society.
That would require another war, and I remember what happened the last time a bunch of repubs stopped a bunch of rabid democrats from their slave trade.
Wasn't pretty then, it would be much uglier now.
"transhausen by proxy" = accurate 👏👏👏
I know suing is so overdone these days but I bet that publisher is liable for these intentional and sloppy errors. A fake intellectual like Butler would be metaphorically slain by exposing her lazy “scholarship.”
It's awful. Just basic factual errors.
Unfortunately, probably not. Claudine Gay is still teaching at Harvard.
And well.
That’s exactly what I was thinking when reading this article — seems liable to me — then again, I’m not a lawyer.
Thank you for addressing the use of “Latinate neologism” in Butler’s writings. It’s a standard weapon in the DEI field as well. A while ago I attended a seminar about software used to predict recidivism for criminal sentencing purposes. As an attorney, I’d hoped to gain some useful insights but it turned out to be a DEI-focused event. The entire presentation was a mess of garbled verbiage so dense I couldn’t figure out what ideas they meant to convey. It’s an intentional strategy to undermine your confidence in your own intellectual abilities so that you don’t question or challenge their ideas. Calling them out on it is long overdue.
Isn't the use of a Latinate neologism a manifestation of white privilege? (sarc)
Perhaps a strategy to create more work for DEI consultants ;) Seems to be everywhere in the CLE (Continuing Legal Education) world - at least in Canada...
Obfuscatory prose is the name of the game, and the more you succeed at creating convoluted text, the more you're likely to be revered by peers and professors alike. I used to take pride in being able to unpack concepts from her brand of writing, but now see it for what it is: intentionally incomprehensible language used to shield her from criticism. If you take issue with the fundamental concepts, you're a fascist; if you don't understand the fundamental concepts, you just don't "get it," probably due to your "cis" and otherwise "privileged" subjectivities.
Now Butler is tacking on they/them pronouns, which highlights the problems inherent to the current gender construction debate. With her own prose, she has annihilated her own subjectivity as a woman (meaning, biological human female) and included herself in a category of non-binary people to justify her place in the woke political discussion she's helped to create. It's not surprising that facts get overlooked when the goal of this kind of writing, and the politics it's spurred, is meant to simultaneously confuse and excite people, which speaks to its place, not as academic literature, but as contemporary propaganda.
And, sadly, self-serving amoral media are always happy to promote garbage like Butler's if there's a chance it will attract ignorant eyeballs and advertiser $.
Nicely written.
You write as though you once swim in the ocean of this ideology, but have recently stepped out and onto shore, solid ground.
Very well written …
Thank you :) I did! I found value in critically thinking through gender norms and how we value or devalue people who deviate from the typical masculinity / femininity constructs we create. But even in 2019, when I did grad work in English (which included several gender studies & LGBTQ lit courses), we didn't deny the existence of biological sex. I'm happy to have finished with academia before this paradigm took over.
Consider that those masculinity / femininity constructs are not created by us, but in utero.
Brilliantly said!🏆 Thank you!
Great response to her attacks. She is worthy of being defrocked just on the basis of that 94 word sentence alone.
Her quote as posted by you is all we need to read. Says it all.
“She often seems impressed with herself as she turns English words into Germanic-length monsters.” Hahaha
How did someone as emotionally and intellectually screwed up (plus generally non-entity) as Judith Butler ever get to be deemed a 'high-powered academic'; a 'scholar'; a 'philosopher' for Christ's sake? Had she presented herself at any academic institution worthy of the name all those years ago she would have been told politely that the academic life was not for her - and then a good psychotherapist suggested to her where she might get some help with her personal 'gender' hang ups.
Transhausen by proxy is just another example of the toxic democrat witches so prevalent in todays society, who will sacrifice their own children (and especially yours) on the altar of Woke perversion.
This quote comes to mind…”When victimhood is your empowerment, recovery is the enemy.” — Tammy Bruce
In Butler’s case, I would also add “self loathing” to “victimhood”.
“An unremarkable Foucault imitator, Butler is not particularly insightful, but her use of Latinate neologisms and dense prose give her work the appearance of profundity.” Haha. Not sure what this means, but it’s funny. Let me now go to the dictionary.
Foucault was one of the early postmodern philosophers with whom American academics fell in love. His assertions that all “truth claims” only existed in contexts (social, economic, cultural, political, etc) and amounted to nothing but power claims were eagerly snapped up by lazy, self indulgent academics. Of course all of his own assertions were exempt and offered as objective truths. Which at bottom was nothing but relativism (“there are no objective truths,” itself always asserted as an objective truth,) which is what all postmodernist/poststructuralist thought reduces to. I get to defeat all your assertions by claiming they’re contextual (patriarchal, heteronormative, capitalist, cis, white privileged, whatever,) while claiming that my own assertions are true across all contexts. This is observed comically, for example, in white liberals lecturing others on white privilege. Of course, it’s where absurdisms like “my truth” come from.
Mix relativism with good old Marxist haves/have nots, oppressor/oppressed boilerplate, and you’ve pretty much got all of postmodernism in a nutshell.
An excellent summary of post-modernism. It is really nothing more than repackaged Marxism. It still has the same fundamental characteristics such as oppressor vs. oppressed at its core.
Foucault’s moral relativism, by the way, included a penchant for having sex with male children in multiple visits to North Africa, and knowingly spreading HIV in San Francisco bath houses. No wonder the elite Left adores him.
When you figure it out, please post it. When I see "Foucault" I think of Foucault's Pendulum. There is a cool one at the Smithsonian in DC. When I was a kid I watched it for an hour because they said it proved that the earth was rotating, and that was fascinating to me.
Context kind of says this isn't the same.
It was the “Latinate neologisms” that got me. I should read Christopher’s book to learn about Foucault.
This article is a fabulous smackdown of that phony fraud who is so fake that redundancy is necessary to communicate the full extent of her phony fraud.
BOOM.
So interesting! I have been saying for years that scholars who propose anything “socially constructed” enter into a quagmire in which they attempt to make abstractions real with further abstractions. It leads to false claims, circular reasoning, a tautology of citing others who say the same things, and plagiarism. And of course pure lies as you have exposed.
Ideologues like Butler do not see the descent into incoherence as a failure, but as a means of dissolving any rational obstacles to enforcing their assertions of pure will, while still retaining the outer appearance of academic respectability. They are the intellectual equivalent of Edgar the Bug-Man from the Men In Black movie. I wonder if Butler has a marked preference for sugar-water?
You are right. They make it impossible to reason with them.
She must have studied sentence structure as an art form with our VP Harris
lol they are both educated beyond their intelligence
Chris, honestly where do these charlatans come from? We have seen many such species at the private schools here Can’t figure it out— for people like Burler is the motivation a desire for money or trendy academic accolades? Is it based on childhood abuse, mental illness, pure desire for communist overthrow? I’d love to be a fly on the paper of her neuropsych- eval! Lol! It’s breathtaking to see the warping.