CAN THE SUBALTERN SPEAK?

no the subaltern may not speak.

pardon?

Beyond her critique of Deleuze and Foucault’s relationship to ideology and ideological production, Spivak finds their sense of “representation” to be problematic. In Deleuze’s pronouncement “a theory is like a box of tools. Nothing to do with the signifier,” Spivak identifies an anxiousness about the relationship between “intellectual labor” and “manual labor,” and an attempt to collapse the two. Spivak thinks his earlier statement, “there is no more representation; there’s nothing but action” makes an “important point... the opposition between... theory and... practice is too quick and easy.” But even if this is a significant and possibly fruitful argument, Spivak tells us, Deleuze’s statement is “problematic,” specifically in his use of the word “representation.” In saying “there is no more representation,” Deleuze has allowed two senses of the word to become conflated. To articulate the two different senses, Spivak uses the German words Darstellung and Veretrung. Darstellung, “representation as ‘speaking-for,’” is the sort of representation present in the House of Representatives—it exists “within state-formation and the law.” Veretrung, on the other hand, is “representation as ‘re-presentation,’” and is the representation of “subject-formation” in art and philosophy. If there is no “representation,” the intellectual doesn’t “speak for the oppressed group,” and the subject is not a “representative consciousness” and therefore not undivided.

i need to get out of college

dishonorable discharge, soldier.

I'm definitely reminded why the hell I left.

i dont even know what that last sentence means.

(THE ANSWER IS "NO" BY THE WAY)

throw the word "subversive" in there somewhere and yr set

i actually like this essay!! i just dont want to write about it

i actually like this essay!! i just dont want to write about it

you've described my relationship to school perfectly.

& my relationship to writing

i don't get the last two sentences.

get bent & max: OTM. i have two more classes to go, and just today i found two really fucking cool subjects i can do - one of which is virtually HIDDEN in the course catalogue, and you'd never find it if someone didn't tell you about it (someone told me about it). now i don't have to do the buddhism class anymore.

luckily youre on strike remy!!

this particular essay never connected with me for some reason

Veretrung, on the other hand, is “representation as ‘re-presentation,’” and is the representation of “subject-formation” in art and philosophy.
^^^
this sentence just means that "veretrung" is what we might think of as "representation" in art; i.e., the (re-)presentation of another material thing

If there is no “representation,” the intellectual doesn’t “speak for the oppressed group,” and the subject is not a “representative consciousness” and therefore not undivided.
^^^
i dont know what this sentence means and i deleted it from my essay

this particular essay is correct but terribly written.

get an editor, Spivack!

prob b/c i got stuck on subaltern and how early 90s it seemed to me and could only think of it being a mix of pixies and nirvana or something
i'm ok now

"Can Mudhoney speak?"

i find this 'representation' to be 'problematic'

yeah horseshoe is right... shes so concerned with forestalling possible criticisms of the article that she buries all of her points and obfuscates what are mostly fairly cogent theses

You people are giving me flashbacks.

Ultimate 1993 grad school seminar experience -- trying to follow the softly-spoken professor's analysis of Nadine Gordimer while the Melvins are rampaging through a free noontime set not far away.

haha
you should just talk abt lollapalooza for 2000 words
xpost

the first time i heard the word obfuscate was in an episode of the x-files
scully said it, at the end

Although Spivak clearly finds the work of Soundgarden and Babes in Toyland important and useful in certain ways, she finds it deeply problematic in others. “The two systematically ignore,” she writes, “the question of ideology and their own implication in intellectual and economic history.”

deny inveigle obfuscate!

i thought it was "obfusticate" until like two months ago

obfusticate=to make unclear by way of musty odor

confusticate

i think it remains the biggest word i've even heard on tv
xpostss

i know where this spivak essay is in my files and i am not going to get it; i just can't

we could talk about seeing and knowing instead
the speaking eye, the penetrating gaze

it's all connected to this anyway

i like this essay a lot b/c she defends derrida as a political thinker and identifies a lot of things that i really admire about "deconstructive" or at least derridean discourse

BUT I HOPE YOU ALL ARE VOTING

i am voting by not voting

"Can rrrobyn speak?"

i am working on an nu-power alphabet

spivak is so unreadable. i am fairly convinced that so much of US humanities theory coming from foucault/derrida/deleuze/cixous/kristeva has lost a LOT in translation of those writers

just find everything "problematic" and bonus points for making "problematic" a noun while you're at it. the age of theory is over.

Daria otm. I've tried to read Spivak too, but had to give it up. Though she's not as bad as Kristeva I guess. I really hate that French school of writers' way of making their texts into intellectual jigsaw puzzles. If you want to be subversive, don't you think it'd help if more than one person out of thousand would actually get what you're trying to say?

if the subaltern speaks in the public sphere does he/she make a sound??

You've been pwned by your sarcastic teacher: you have to go to his classes and he makes you write about the lower classes.

ohh man I remember reading this essay, wow it was bruuuuuuutal. I read it in a feminist philosophy class, and I think I enjoyed reading it at the time (the course as a whole was pretty interesting).

But now I think she could've probably sliced away at 80% of the convulated prose and gotten her point across a lot more clearly. I spent a fuckin' long time trying to get what the hell she was talking about, and I think I pretty much skimmed through that whole bit in the last third of the article when she talks about the British abolition of sati. Spivak is seriously a horrible, horrible writer.

Have you read her introduction to "Of Grammatology"? Even more poorly written and abstruse then this essay, and it's a toss-up whether it's more poorly written than "Of Grammatology." Errhhh I don't think I could ever arse myself to sit down and read this stuff again.

*convoluted, sorry.

and doesn't she say at the end that the Subaltern cannot speak?

is there a particular reason for going to those german terms? they ring a bell for some reason but i've forgotten it? is it mere caprice?

see, i could have changed my username to 'the subaltern' to be clever, under the old rules.

lol max u a fave man

is this some bullshit like, language is structured by the ruling class therefore to speak in language as we're given it is always to speak the language of power, and therefore for the subaltern to speak would involve using fucking joycean baby-talk bollocks?

Yes, Spivak is a Derridean. The English translation of Grammatology is by her. The main value of this essay is its catchy title.

One of my favorite Eagelton book reviews takes on Spivak, and is actually pretty fair about it. Might be helpful. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n10/eagl01_.html

also.. re: "Of grammatology".. Derrida likes to play on several meanings of words and is thought provoking and all, but.. in the US academy this whole school of deconstructionist thought has been constructed with Derrida as a key figure, and in France that's not the case.. I haven't read this stuff in a couple years and yet i recall after a while starting to think all these french theorists, the tel quel people especially, are not the way they're regarded in the US. you get the sense they love what they're reading and writing about, and love playing with language, and are deeply engaged with political issues at the time, and what's become of them in the US academy is a bunch of plodding impenetrable nonsense that.. seems not worth bothering to slog through because it has no relevance to the real world

as far as non.. majority people speaking and writing and using language in a new way, i love love love what deleuze has to say about that..

it also reminds me one of my friends in critical theory seminar used to go around singing aphex twin "beetles".. replacing it with "spivak"..

i don't fit in to his theory world, foucault and althusser, lacan and husserl..

as far as non.. majority people speaking and writing and using language in a new way, i love love love what deleuze has to say about that..

-- daria-g, Friday, November 2, 2007 4:16 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

what did he say? in a word?

i don't fit in to his theory world, foucault and althusser, lacan and husserl..

hahaha

http://www.kunci.or.id/images/ilustrasi/ilustrasi_spivak.jpg

LEAVE SUBALTERN ALONE!

I really hate that French school of writers' way of making their texts into intellectual jigsaw puzzles. If you want to be subversive, don't you think it'd help if more than one person out of thousand would actually get what you're trying to say?

I really hate physicists' way of making their papers into intellectual jigsaw puzzles. If you want to write about high-level science, don't you think it would help if more than one person out of a thousand would actually get what you're trying to say?

Have you read her introduction to "Of Grammatology"? Even more poorly written and abstruse then this essay, and it's a toss-up whether it's more poorly written than "Of Grammatology." Errhhh I don't think I could ever arse myself to sit down and read this stuff again.

spivak's not a terrific writer, but is quite smart. of grammatology (and derrida's work in general) is (in my opinion obviously) terrifically well-written, certainly in french. spivak's translation of OG is (unfortunately) quite bad. i wont blame its "abstruseness" on her, but of all theorists to pick up as "bad writers," derrida isnt a great example.

you get the sense they love what they're reading and writing about, and love playing with language, and are deeply engaged with political issues at the time, and what's become of them in the US academy is a bunch of plodding impenetrable nonsense that.. seems not worth bothering to slog through because it has no relevance to the real world

certainly the key to derrida is that hes sort of "prankster," but not in the sense that he doesnt care. he cares deeply about language and philosophy and enjoys having a great deal of fun with it--really his major antecedent is someone like james joyce; and i can see hating derrida if you hate something like finnegan's wake. how he's taken up in america is a whole different issue, and obviously people who take it or themselves "too seriously" come across as "plodding" and "impenetrable." as for having "no relevance to the real world," well, so long as youre using language, what derrida says has a great deal of relevance to you.

is this some bullshit like, language is structured by the ruling class therefore to speak in language as we're given it is always to speak the language of power, and therefore for the subaltern to speak would involve using fucking joycean baby-talk bollocks?

this isnt what she says and i dont know what "joycean baby-talk bollocks" is but your total unwillingness to even consider continental thought as interesting or worthwhile is pretty fucking tiresome nrq

Be careful, whenever you accuse of theorist of using obtuse language you risk summoning the vengeful spirit of Judy Butler.

Surely, neither the LRB nor Eagleton believes that theorists should confine themselves to writing introductory primers such as those that he has chosen to provide. The wide-ranging audience for Spivak's work proves that spoon-feeding is less appreciated than forms of activist thinking and writing that challenge us to think the world more radically. Indeed, the difficulty of her work is fresh air when read against the truisms which, now fully commodified as 'radical theory', pass as critical thinking.

judy butler otm

sort of

lol "activist thinking"

way to arrogate "continental thought" to this particular project.

cmon bro ive been to enough of these threads on ilx, you always show up to piss on it.

"joycean baby-talk bollocks" is the kristeva thing, i guess, the notion that joyce or mallarme or whoever (duras?) are the REALLY radical writers because they challenge the institution language, the most repressive institution of all...

it's odd coming from soi-disant marxists (not so much derrida himself who was scrupulously 'a'political) when the guy who built the thing wrote in pretty straightforward, indeed 'bourgeois', language.

xpost

i am the morbius of these threads.

judy butler, i'm not too thrilled with her. she came to speak at my school when i was a grad student and.. it was all about psychology but she didn't have the expertise, I was irritated, and she made snide cracks about republicans which pissed me off - not because I am one, i'm pretty damn liberal, but because isn't that precisely the kind of marginalizing attitude she ought to be against - there may well have been conservative/republican students in the audience who didn't appreciate her comments but were in the position where speaking up against her and most everyone else in the room was just.. not done.

re: deleuze
what did he say? in a word?
oh dear, i'm not near well read enough on him to say it well, but check up on a "minor literature," - I'm ripping this off: "Instead of exploring preexisting categories or literary genres, they propose a concept of "minor literature"—the use of a major language that subverts it from within. Writing as a Jew in Prague, they contend, Kafka made German "take flight on a line of escape" and joyfully became a stranger within it."
http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/D/deleuze_kafka.html

yeah im not such a kristeva fan, but derrida is pretty well-known as a "joycean" in certain ways--but my impression is that for derrida joyce's strength is his playfulness and the way he works w/in language rather than any sort of "challenge." i doubt derrida would really call language "repressive" (altho hed certainly call it "violent") but if he did it would certainly be necessarily so. and i dont know about saying that joyce wrote in "straightforward" language! i mean obviously finnegan's wake would be an "exception" and about half of "ulysses" but even portrait and the dead contain some fairly "out-there" stuff.

what the fuck do i care though. my essay is done.

I think the Joyce comparison is useful. The language of Spivak, Butler, et al makes more sense to me as kind of avant-garde writing, not really "activist" per se. An attempt to expand the boundaries of language (and therefore freedom, equality, whatev) in a very modernist way. Academia is one of the only places where people can get away with pushing on the boundaries of language these days; maybe in another time these people would be writing novels.

no no -- i mean marx wrote in straightforward language.

joyce didn't, sure, but i'm pretty sure the tel quel thing was linking high-modernist experimentation with marxism.

all of these were battle-texts in the context of late-60s, early-70s paris, and it seems to me you have to read them through that lens.

letting the subaltern speak was not an entirely theoretical exercise in the context of a french maoism that wondered if you could in fact open up the repressive structures of ideology (blah) to the proles.

eg by opening up -- amirite -- the vincennes college of the uni of paris, which i think deleuze was involved in, which did not require formal qualifications for entry.

the very well-heeled tel quel lot were wondering if this was a practical route to revolution, and came down to the idea that you needed to detourn/subvert (apols to mark s) language to do this.

or something.

xposts

shakah, max!

yes i agree wholeheartedly that a lot of "this," and "can the subaltern speak?" in particular, needs be contextualized as a part of an ongoing series of ideological battles within the academic left

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/42/Gesture_raised_fist_with_thumb_and_pinky_lifted.jpg

i.e. spivak's biggest axe to grind it seems is the way foucault/deleuze and derrida get taken up by american academics ("foucault is material and political and derrida is textual and esoteric")

Spivak is ALL axe, dudes. Trust me on this.

CAN THE SUBALTERN USE TWITTER

of grammatology (and derrida's work in general) is (in my opinion obviously) terrifically well-written, certainly in french. spivak's translation of OG is (unfortunately) quite bad. i wont blame its "abstruseness" on her, but of all theorists to pick up as "bad writers," derrida isnt a great example.

i guess my main point is that philosophical writing is very very different from other types of writing. i studied a fair amount of continental stuff, as well as a little bit of analytic phil (mostly in ethics) in college, and without making substantive philosophical comments about either approach, i have to say that the emphasis on argumentative clarity and precision in analytic/anglo-american philosophy is something to admire. as i struggled reading philosophy and writing my own arguments in college, i came to believe that the mark of a really good philosophical writer (not necessarily a good philosophical thinker) is the ability to make your arguments as clear and transparent as possible (this is different from dumbing down), and i never really felt that that was something derrida really did. there weren't too many signposts, not too many outright statements of his premises, assumptions, or intended conclusions, not really any delineations of his general arguments. there was a lot of flair, a lot of playfulness, but i never really felt that that stuff is essential to good philosophical writing.

i don't know french so i've never read derrida in french.

I really hate physicists' way of making their papers into intellectual jigsaw puzzles. If you want to write about high-level science, don't you think it would help if more than one person out of a thousand would actually get what you're trying to say?

i think it's a bit different here. i agree with the implied point that high-level philosophy shouldn't be dumbed down for general consumption just as high-level physics shouldn't be. but in the case of derrida/spivak/kristeva et al., the complaints about obfuscation are often coming from trained philosophers. sure, rawls, just as derrida, wouldn't be fairly intelligible to someone without philosophical training. but i've never heard people with a little phil. training claim they can't see what the hell rawls is talking about.

now re: the comparisons with joyce, well, i haven't read joyce so i can't comment. but i take it this is about appreciating derrida's literary style rather than his argumentative style? i can't comment on the literary style, but to describe derrida's argumentative writing as "terrifically well-written" seems to be a stretch when a whole lot of philosophy students can't tell what the hell he is talking about and a whole lot of trained philosophers call him a charlatan. as far as creating clear, transparent arguments, derrida doesn't strike me as a very good philosophical writer (this is not to say he's not a good philosopher or other type of writer, i won't comment on either of those).

i agree with the implied point that high-level philosophy shouldn't be dumbed down for general consumption just as high-level physics shouldn't be

mark OTM, ie you people who are complaining about academic writing being poorly written are IDIOTS

ya mark all i can really say is that if youre looking for clarity of thought or transparency of argument in derrida youre barking up the wrong tree!!

also i am 100% in agreement that writing shouldnt be dumbed down, but that doesnt mean i cant delineate btw a well-written and poorly-written essay even at these "high levels," i.e., derrida and foucault are terrific writers and spivak isn't particularly!!

im using a lot of exclamation points!!!

find you can delineate between foucault and spivack all you want but you probably need some credentials to make that statement sound convincing anywhere other than 1) undergraduate education 2) a coffeeshop or 3) the internet

oh for christ's sake @ vahid. there is plenty of high-level stuff that is well-written, but a lot more that is poorly written. clarifying is not dumbing down; conversely, difficult writing is not necessarily working at a higher level of argument.

anyway mark i think the pop-derrida response to that is "why are you privileging clarity?" the point just being that if derrida is "confusing" its not because its poorly-written its because the shit he's writing about is terrifically confusing and hes not particularly interested in "untangling it" (or maybe he thinks that "untangling it" is wrongheaded and ultimately impossible)

lol vahid im on your side

also if we need credentials to talk about this stuff we may all want to shut up except for horseshoe and rrrobyn

anyway mark i think the pop-derrida response to that is "why are you privileging clarity?" the point just being that if derrida is "confusing" its not because its poorly-written its because the shit he's writing about is terrifically confusing and hes not particularly interested in "untangling it" (or maybe he thinks that "untangling it" is wrongheaded and ultimately impossible)

-- max, Friday, November 2, 2007 6:24 PM (55 seconds ago) Bookmark Link

if we want the subaltern to speak, do we also want him/her to read?

less fatuously, derrida is being terrifically fatuous if this is what he's saying.

also if we need credentials to talk about this stuff we may all want to shut up except for horseshoe and rrrobyn

-- max, Friday, November 2, 2007 6:26 PM (30 seconds ago) Bookmark Link

haha again, can the subaltern has credentials?

Y'all want me to grab research materials, there's all the original paperwork upstairs.

see this sort of shit really gets my goat, because it touches on my pet project, which has to do w/ deep problems in the educational system

i think you really DO need credentials to talk about this stuff.

to me it's a sad comment on the state of education nowadays that joe-on-a-message-board doesn't understand shit about metabolism, photosynthesis, global warming, etc etc but has deeply held beliefs about quantum mechanics and chaos theory

this thread is the humanities version of same

xp uhhh i dont know how to respond to that? i mean i dont know that derrida is interested in making his stuff accessible to the "subaltern" or to anyone really, as you pointed out upthread he sort of scrupulously avoided politics until spectres of marx. moreover i dont know that derrida is actually as confusing as hes made out to be--if he is it's because he wants to be very careful about what hes saying and as such tends to qualify his statements all over the place (and moreover because hes quite well-read and without some grounding in heidegger + levinas + plato it can be v. mystifying). now if you want to criticize it on the grounds that all writing should be accessible to all people, go for it but i think thats unfair. derrida didnt write the subaltern essay.

im just making an ass of myself at this point anyway. i dont even have an undergrad degree yet.

the pop-derrida response to that is "why are you privileging clarity?" the point just being that if derrida is "confusing" its not because its poorly-written its because the shit he's writing about is terrifically confusing and hes not particularly interested in "untangling it" (or maybe he thinks that "untangling it" is wrongheaded and ultimately impossible)

haha i understand. but in my mind, then one has to come up with a decent argument as to why clarity ought not be privileged, or why it's wrongheaded to do so.

i guess i'd be much more interested in someone trying earnestly in untangling whatever they find worthy of inquiry, whether or not they are successful, than someone who barfs up 100,000 convoluted words on something admittedly complex and says "i can't make it clearer b/c the issues aren't even clear, and to attempt to do so will miss the point." this is philosophy -- everything's terrifically confusing, but there are plenty of philosophers who make good, earnest, careful attempts at unpacking this confusing stuff. that's more interesting to me.

this kind of goes along with analytic view that philosophy is science's partner. the problems are huge, complex monsters, but small, careful, precise steps are the keys to untangling it all.

as far as barking up the wrong tree with jacques-- you're probably right.

analytic vs continental, hello?

mark theres a really great essay about this question by derrida called "spurs, or the question of style," which is about nietzsche but sort of also about stylistic clarity. it might be my favorite thing hes ever written, actually.

im getting depressed already thinking about how i will look back on this thread three years from now and be mad at myself for being so dumb.

i think most ppl come to this via eng lit rather than philosophy, so the credentials thing is pretty tricky.

especially since eng lit grads tend not to have a very firm grasp on history, so the 'colonialism' in post-colonialism is a kind of phantom object derived not from any historical study but from the general ambit of 'Theory' -- which is suboptimal.

also this stuff is all in the marxist tradition but the version of marxism you pick up from this stuff is all about really minor aspects of highly developed versions of marx -- 'subject-formation' -- which gives it a further ahistorical skew.

if you're going to ask for credentials, they should probably not be self-confirming ones from within latter-day eng lit and its offshoot, cult studs.

xpost

"without some grounding in heidegger + levinas + plato it can be v. mystifying"

exactly.

im getting depressed already thinking about how i will look back on this three years weeks from now and be mad at myself for being so dumb.

^ that's every paper i wrote in college. i have like 2 papers that i still look back with some satisfaction

there is plenty of high-level stuff that is well-written, but a lot more that is poorly written. clarifying is not dumbing down; conversely, difficult writing is not necessarily working at a higher level of argument.

yes

i know where this spivak essay is in my files and i am not going to get it; i just can't

-- rrrobyn, Friday, November 2, 2007 4:48 AM (13 hours ago) Bookmark Link

Can I just point out how very much I love it when people mention their files?

there are plenty of philosophers who make good, earnest, careful attempts at unpacking this confusing stuff

and if "unpacking" is what they're after then their projects are very different from derrida's

derrida is not writing in order to decode the world for you, in a key that lets you unlock the secrets of previously-locked mysteries; his language is not a hand that whisks a veil away and allows you to see what was once hidden in complexity

^^ he talked like that in interviews

hahaha

continental style, that's how we do

derrida is not writing in order to decode the world for you, in a key that lets you unlock the secrets of previously-locked mysteries; his language is not a hand that whisks a veil away and allows you to see what was once hidden in complexity

i don't know any philosopher or scientist that would ever describe their work in this way.

well it seems like what you want

yeah the reason i brought up "credentials" is that you guys are awful quick to locate the difficulty in poor argumentation. have you considered your own lack of grounding, lack of shared goals, disequilibrium of new ideas, etc etc

i mean the fact that you keep comparing derrida to scientists + philosophers (who you clump together) would seem to indicate some problems on the way

mark otm -- who characterizes writing in that way except derrida? the world is not "a code", wtf.

i take back everything i said on this thread

tracer hand, what i mean is that i kind of see philosophers as working in similar ways as scientists do -- there are many individual researchers who make small, individual contributions to the solution of a set of widely recognized problems, that there is a sense of collective effort in the field -- each researcher makes tiny, precise, and careful contributions, not big sweeping solutions to "secrets of previously-locked mysteries"

not big sweeping solutions to "secrets of previously-locked mysteries"

^^ scientists do this, though

as do ordinary people on a pretty regular basis

talk to anyone who studies string theory, for example

Hey! Little Girl
Comb your hair, fix your makeup
Soon he will open the door
Don't think because there's a ring on your finger
You needn't try anymore

For wives should always be lovers too
Run to his arms the moment he comes home to you
I'm warning you...

Day after day
There are girls at the office
And men will always be men
Don't send him off with your hair still in curlers
You may not see him again

For wives should always be lovers too
Run to his arms the moment he comes home to you
He's almost here...

Hey! Little girl
Better wear something pretty
Something you'd wear to go to the city and
Dim all the lights, pour the wine, start the music
Time to get ready for love
Time to get ready
Time to get ready for love

i mean the fact that you keep comparing derrida to scientists + philosophers (who you clump together) would seem to indicate some problems on the way

the problem with derrida is that mainstream academic philosophers aren't sure what to do with him at all, if they even read him. derrida is far more popular with english/lit crit professors than philosophers.

btw, the view that science & philosophy are intensely related is fairly widespread among mainstream analytic philosophers.

http://wps.prenhall.com/wps/media/objects/479/490765/cover.gif

not big sweeping solutions to "secrets of previously-locked mysteries"

^^ scientists do this, though

the big-sweeping solutions in science are what we hear about in the news. there are like 100,000,000 tiny experiments going on right now trying to examine 100,000,000 tiny problems.

ok mark, but philosophers aren't each working on some small chunk of one agreed-upon thing, after which they can put down their pens and say "it is done", and especially not ppl like derrida -- i think this is what v4h1d referred to as the difference between analytical and continental styles of philosophizin'

the big-sweeping solutions in science are what we hear about in the news. there are like 100,000,000 tiny experiments going on right now trying to examine 100,000,000 tiny problems

false!

maybe you are confusing science and engineering?

what is false about that?

seems to hold true for medicine at least

more true in some fields than others. i'd say it's more true for biology and astronomy than physics and chemistry, for example.

well, here's an example. there's 1000s of high-energy particle physicists looking for data confirming the different predicted symmetries of particle emissions. myself, for example, in the late 90s. OK i guess that's 1000s of small experiments. but each experiment does NOT add incrementally to our understanding of quarks. one "new" result though (an asymmetry where we expected a symmetry) would have indicated a whole new pair of fundamental particles and greatly shook up the field all at once

(Not that I really want to join in, but it's probably worth noting that Derrida is surely the analog of "what we hear about in the news," and that there are 100,000,000 ten-page approaches to minor questions of philosophy published in minor academic journals ever year)

^^ also true

yes

I voted yes

i think this is what v4h1d referred to as the difference between analytical and continental styles of philosophizin'

you're right. i stated way upthread that i didn't want to get into any substantive statements about either approach, but that i simply thought that the argumentative approach in analytic phil is something that i came to admire when i was doing my philosophy degree. i didn't find that derrida's writing style was at all expressive of what i admired about good philosophy writing, that's really about it.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

lolololololol

hahaha

lol! xp

who said dualism was dead

(i love that i stay off ilx almost all day to edit thesis and when i come back on this thred is at the top of new answers and i am all loopy on poststructuralism lolz)

Loopy on Poststructuralism will either have to be the name of your blog or your first album.

but i already promised that once i submit this thing i will never say/write poststructuralism again

loopy on p*sts***tur**is*
loopy on the concept of freedom in the v narrow and timely definition of one robynf, dec '07

loooooooooooooooool

This was a good thread!

haha

CAN THE SUBALTERN USE TWITTER

― El Tomboto, Friday, November 2, 2007 2:15 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this was never properly answered

wkiw spivak

I would actually be k'ing-iw spivak next week, along with kaja silverman and a bunch of canadian public intellectuals (they're coming to this meeting for a humanities institute I did a fellowship with) but no, I had to go and move to a different continent...

i took several classes with kaja's ex! the mean-spirited gossip at the time was that he hadn't written a thing since they'd split up (i.e. all the ideas were hers)

Thanks are in order to this thread, which has inspired me to gratuitously throw this phrase into Phd application statements.

DOES THE SUBALTERN WANT A CUP OF TEA?

DOES THE SUBALTERN TAKE SUGAR surely

CAN THE SUBALTERN GET ME DOCTORAL FUNDING?

this particular essay is correct but terribly written.

― horseshoe, Friday, 2 November 2007 04:37 (4 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

get an editor, Spivack!

― horseshoe, Friday, 2 November 2007 04:37 (4 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha i love how she writes. i have long running feud w my friend ellen about her critique of deleuze in this essay. this is the part im fuzziest on but im p sure ellen is wrong.

CAN THE SUBALTERN KICK IT?

this is an entirely different question.

i feel bad i misspelled her name, but her writing still annoys me. it's been years since i read this, though.

does the subaltern have to lie to kick it?

the subaltern is always already kicking it

can the subaltern freak?

i don't know anything about this stuff, but i just listened to the in our time about the "analytic-continental split" and enjoyed it!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b016x2jp

Beatrice Han-Pile, who seemed to be there to rep for continental, was in particular extremely clear to me (clearer than the analytical guy!)

the subaltern can speak.

http://jacobinmag.com/2013/04/how-does-the-subaltern-speak/

this was pretty interesting