#postructuralism

[meryton-etc]

im back babey

[ella-the-feministkilljoy]

Judith Butler

Poststructuralist philosopher

Believes that feminism needs to work with ‘woman’ as a site of permanent political contestation

Identity is about doing, rather than being

Identity emerges through actions

Repeated actions create the “truth effect” of a stable gender identity

“Acts and gestures, articulated and enacted desires, create the illusion of an interior and organized gender core, an illusion discursively maintained for the purposes of the regulation of sexuality within the obligatory frame of reproductive sexuality” 

Gender is a performance that we believe in

Gender is socially produced: not natural, but we repeat them so much that they become natural. This repetition is expressing an interior essence that’s an illusion

Normative manifestation of masculinity and femininity and how that maintains notions of heterosexuality and its place in our culture

[openinterpretation]

Desire and Representation

"[The Marquis de] Sade attains the end of Classical discourse and thought. He holds sway precisely upon their frontier. After him, violence, life and death, desire and sexuality will extend, below the level of representation, an immense expanse of shade which we are now attempting to recover, as far as we can, in our discourse, in our freedom, in our thought. But our thought is so brief, our freedom so enslaved,our discourse so repetitive, that we must face the fact that that expanse below is really a bottomless sea." 

- Michel Foucault, The Order of Things

[my-ear-trumpet]

Is someone you care about getting involved in post-structuralism? Act now before it's too late (HT Professor Patrick McGhee)

[melangle]

yo like religon as the proviso of existential comfort is largely recognized as superceeded by Art in secular society which is cool but like it doesn't really help because like you have paintings that you can look at and be like "isn't that pretty" or "deep bro" but 

like given that we know that idealism is a just wishfully thinking testicles and like that everything is subject to the limitations of expression being that all meaning is just the postioning of a signifier in a system of interrelating signifiers and that after this set of limitations you are given like an extra set of that things like reason and logic or whatever are themselves only systems of internal validation like you can only validate something within the system it exists within, like somelike like 2+2=4 is only validatable inside mathematics like the ground premises of maths are not externally validatable, like there is no "core" or "center" that provides "truth" truth is only internal reference to the set of rules that a system operates under. Then after those limitations you are given an extra set in that you are given the world through this chaotic inchoate of stimuli and that the phenomena you perceive the world to be constructed from is a fabrication of the processes that make the mess of sense data something you can use and you have to be pretty trusting to take that seirously. Then like that phenomena is something you have to mostly inferentially convert into products of discrete objects, and like then like trying to think about causality is totally fucked becuase like causality is another constructed thing like it's not something you can "intuit" it's an appended thing and then like holy fuck science is like a really slow process of replacing ideas with ones that fit better and like you get things that repeat thier things which can be usefull but it's just pimped up inference and like the key thing with inference is that it's all about the thing that best fits with the overstructure of understanding and then like then there is society which is full of shit like pretty much the ways that bags of flesh do things to make sure that the instruction manual for the bags of flesh (which is mostly random junk) gets mixed  around inside other fleshbags to create more fleshbags and all things are just ineffiecent blind expressions of this process.

Totally helpfull yeah, so glad for the flat things with drips on them bro.

[off-whitenoise]

It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing, and this is an impossibility that will remain, for this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, coded-which doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. But it will always surpass the discourse that regulates the phallocentric system; it does and will take place in areas other than those subordinated to philosophico-theoretical domination. It will be conceived of only by subjects who are breakers of automatisms, by peripheral figures that no authority can ever subjugate.

Cixous, Laugh of the Medusa