The only effective defense against thorough and coherent poly causal social science is to tell the author that it would have been more rigorous of them to stretch the plausible causality of a single variable.
1) a collection of famous authors’ dissertations.
2) An audio book of Jack Donaghy reading Distinction.
If you read Judith Butler too quickly you might end up becoming a slam poet.
Post reblogged from Second Balcony
Explanundum: ex-religious people tend to be real cocky people.
Explanation: ranking your own judgement over that of all the smartest people that you know worked out, so you stick with it.
This also works pretty well as an explanation of Camron’s personality.
Source: secondbalcony
If you’re an academic you’re asking yourself what can the wikileaks documents on Afghanistan do for me? This reaction is a natural effect of the petite bourgeoisie positionality of academics. This is your position. According to Althusser your predominant social reflexes are opportunism and selfishness. You may be aware that the information from the wikileaks is of civic value and may save Afghan lives. You feel alienated from these addititions to the public good. Another possible symptom of your position is that you want to criticize those who embrace the wikileaks docs for being guilty of “empiricism” or “positivism.” The ultra petite bourgeoisie reaction is to quote Poulantzas’ caution on the “illusion of the evident.” The proper solution is to hastily identify wikileaks as an “archive” and ask why must we go to the archive to find the “real” war or How is archival knowledge privileged over other knowledges?
the organizational structure of the standard Judith Butler or Saba Mahmood critique
basically runs as follws: we have these highly circumscribed ways of talking about important issues that privelege very limited types of agency while making other claims, grievances, agencies unintelligible. Usually these things work as binaries and those who work really hard to put forward third pole that is more sensible and detached are usually unseccessful. At least in the short term. More effort goes into asserting the rigidity of these binaries and their apparent naturalization than into elaborating the third pole which although probably correct is just as simple as the positions under critique. This is also the structure of most South Park episodes.
Post reblogged from Second Balcony with 2 notes
I’m against a blanket boycott against Israel but I support reactive sanctions. In case you wanted an Israeli vantage point. Anyway, back to my regular scheduled programming of semiotics and preciousness.
I support sanctions against Israel (general and strategic) but I oppose voluntarism and have some pretenses of analytic lucidity. The problem with the BDS movement is that the analogy between Israel and apartheid South Africa although it more-or-less captures the similarity in treatment of the Palestinians and non-white South Africans— political strategies should not derive solely from moral analogies but from informed analysis of concrete political situations which includes one’s own political praxis. In other words, what the movement needs is rational criticism. In the South African context international sanctions helped to hasten the demise of apartheid because they converged with the interests of South Africa’s capitalist class which was dissatisfied by 1) the costs of maintaining two separate governments based on racial classification 2) a system of racial privilege that created economic inefficiencies by artificially raising the cost of hiring white labor while suppressing the total quantity of skilled labor and 3) threatened their access to foreign capital which was necessary for the country’s capital intensive diamond industry (this is the most direct link with the anti-apartheid movement but it is unlikely to be replicated by the Palestinian BDS movement).
I’m not going to go in too hard on economic history and political science but Israel has managed some of the crucial political-economic contradictions inherent in a colonial project by terminating its reliance on Palestinian labor, through its relationship with the US (which has been crucial in helping Israel navigate its recessions—an important fact that is often overlooked in favor of discussing the US-Israel military relationship), by subsidizing high-tech industry heavily and through creating robust and collaborative economic relationships with the EU.
Finally, there’s a cultural logic to our politics that favors BDS explicitly because its non-violent. This is yet another conflation of moral and rational analysis. There isn’t much in the particular conjuncture or the general situation which I think makes BDS likely to be especially effective. It’s humble effects should discourage moralizing endorsements of BDS tactics. In addition to being tied to the ability to reproduce moral criticism or bring attention to the suffering of the Palestinians solidarity should be informed by a close reading of the power-dynamics and relation of forces in Palestine/Israel. This is necessary in order to avoid confusion, exhaustion and irrelevance. At the very least, BDS should open itself up to critique from new angles and field some uncomfortable questions about its own praxis as well as Hamas, the Hezbollah and the anti-Wall movement.
Source: secondbalcony
Spivak’s frequently quoted human rights=Social Darwinism aphorism is cool and all, but, it’s pretty hard to find a movement to be proud of from the nineteenth century to the present that doesn’t rely on a philosophical logical that couldn’t be plausibly anologized to Social Darwinsim. Look, Social Darwinism (i.e Eugenics) is disgusting but Spivak’s argument encompasses a larger number of ethical and self-strengthening movements than her text is willing to identiy. This is one of those extremely frustrating “I get what you’re saying, but…” moments where an argument that you basically agree with Loses because it relies on a highly marketable guilt by association move. What to do? Endorse Social Darwinsim (of course not) or follow the logic of the argument to its logical point and shit on nearly all “progressive” movements that you can recall? Well, Fuck that. Would anyone really accuse Al-Haq or the people of Bil’in of being Social Darwinist?
Look, there is a real problem here. Information politics are bereft with problems. Ethico-political criticism is easily co-opted and manipulated by those with power or the state or whatever you want to call them/it. But, tactics and strategy should follow a thorough conjunctural analysis, not precede it. These paradigms. Lord Have Mercy.
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