Date: Sat, 20 Feb 1999 17:13:09 +0000 From: William Winstead <stimmung-AT-earthlink.net> Subject: Re: Fw: Butler & Nussbaum & Bad Writing Joanna, Thanks for the quotes from Butler and Nussbaum. Nussbaum does indeed, as you say, simplify Butler and miss her point. If you compare the two quotes, what is demonstrated is not that Butler's writing is "too thin to be satisfying," as Nussbaum asserts, but her own inability to READ the very words which Butler has written. Butler writes: "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." Butler is criticizing Althusserian theory. She is commenting on the "shift" away from it, towards a discourse on power What does Nussbaum say? "Marxist accounts, focusing on capital as the central force structuring social relations, depicted the operations of that force as everywhere uniform. By contrast, Althusserian accounts, focusing on power, see the operations of that force as variegated and as shifting over time." Has Nussbaum got Butler right? In no way. The distortions: 1.) Althusser is not a Marxist! So a shift from Marxism to "Althusserian accounts" is possible! Hardly Butler's claim. 2.) Why? Because the shift Butler describes is from Althusserian Marxist with its focus on structure to power and its relationship to time (repetition, etc.). This flies in the face of the most basis rules of reading, of scholarship. Nussbaum is a violent reader, a reader who does not read, but projects, obliterating the text before her. We might ask what frightens her so much? Why the pre-judging that allows for the projecting? By the way Joanna, could you give me the addresses of the other lists where this is being discussed? Thanks, Bill
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