The following lecture notes are from my Queering Theory Class on October 6. If I recall, it was an especially nice day, so we had class outside, in the courtyard of Northrup Auditorium.
Readings:
- Butler, Judith. A Bad Writer Writes Back
- Butler, Judith. Value of Difficulty
- Interview with Judith Butler. Changing the Subject
Here are my notes from that class.
The winner of the Bad Writing Contest for 1998 (with Homi Bhabha coming in second!):
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.
Judith Butler
common sense
common language
language/grammar produces and constrains our sense of the world
popular culture/popular ideas
jargon
accessibility?
difficulty/politics of discomfort
translation
critical (being/thinking critically)
“new”/”different”
Sullivan: “Queer” as the endlessly mutating token of non-assimilation by reflect a certain bourgeois aspiration to always be au courant” What are the dangers of promoting the unconventional/difficult/always new? (see “Values of Difficulty” 202)
Judith Butler in different registers?
I believe it is important that intellectuals with a sense of social responsibility be able to shift registers and to work at various levels, to communicate what they’re communicating in various ways (“Changing the Subject”)
Judith Butler
register one: an op-ed for the New York Times
No doubt, scholars in the humanities should be able to clarify how their work informs and illuminates everyday life. Equally, however, such scholars are obliged to question common sense, interrogate its tacit presumptions and provoke new ways of looking at a familiar world.
Judith Butler
register two: an interview with jac
It may well be that we want to construct a fiction called “the public sphere,” or a fiction called “common sense,” or a fiction called “accessible meaning” that would allow us to think and feel for a moment as if we all inhabit the same linguistic world. What does it mean to dream of a common sense? What does it mean to want that today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, when there’s enormous conflict at the level of language? When Serbian and Croatian are now claiming they are separate languages? When speaking even in a Berkeley classroom means speaking across inflection, across dialect, across genres of academic writing to students for whom English is very often a second language? Every classroom I’ve ever been in is a hermeneutic problem. It’s not as if there’s a “common” language. I suppose if I were to speak in the language of the television commercial, I might get a kind of uniform recognition–at least for a brief moment–but I’m not going to be able to presuppose a common language in my classroom.
Judith Butler
register three: a book chapter
