I find that if I come at it with my own standard expectations of reading approach, it is hard work to get through it. If instead I adjust my style of reading to fit the texts, working with rather than against them, it's much easier going, if not actually pleasurable.
[offtopic]Would you mind posting a bit more about that in this thread on reading?[/o]
To go back to the original thread summary, "The language of theory - is it over-complicated," one way to answer this is to ask how complicated something has to be to meet a specific goal, and who gets to decide, while another way is to ask whether any goal that involves more than X amount of complication is legitimate. But even if you ask the second question, you still have to ask who gets to decide whether any given goal is legitimate, so it seems to me that all these questions ultimately come down to power -- a power to decide what is legitimate, and what is enough -- and who gets to wield it.
I personally am all for people who are going to do something a little different with power wield it, such as women writing in styles in which are often seen as 'men's territory' (like Butler, Kristeva, Weil, Cixious -- all of them are challenging to read, in different ways).
if I was to post a post on a given Barbelith thread, which post simply said, 'Iran', without explaining what it meant, would I be within my rights to refuse to 'priviledge' any curious respondents by explaining it to them?.
Obviously not, because Barbelith is not yours, so you do not get to wield the power to decide individually. The group decides, and that decision is articulated in different ways (but that's another topic).
[offtopic] You know how I remember the spelling of 'privilege' (this may work for you): it's privi/lege, with lege like legislation, so it's like 'private law' -- privilege is having the ability to make your own set of rules. This could be completely wrong etymologically, but it helps me get the 'lege' bit right.[/o]
at that point it seems to me that theory has become an aesthetic object unto itself, and that's not a use of theory that I personally place much value in.
This may be off-topic, but do you reject aestheticism altogether, or only when theorists make use of it?
My other problem with the Butler is that she's using words ambiguously. For hegemony, I'm pretty sure she doesn't mean the dictionary definition and she means the Marxist definition, but I get the sense that she's using a lot of words in undefined, specialized ways.
I don't have the rest of the text around that excerpt so you may know something I don't know, but what in that bit of writing makes you think she's using hegemony in some specialized way? I mean, there is a certain amount liberty that people take with words -- when Wilfred Owen, writing to his mother about his war experiences and leaving out a lot of the gruesome details, letting his questions trail off, describes himself as a "master of elision," he is obviously not referring to himself as a master of the omission of vowel sounds, as one confused classmate of mine recently insisted, but it's not as though he's using 'elision' to mean something totally unrelated, like 'fuel economy'. I don't think Butler is doing here what other people sometimes do, which is either coin new words, or use existing words for their own purposes, to mean something there isn't a word for. I could certainly be wrong about this; I am not intimately familiar with her work and may be missing important nuances. |
