blinkandwheeze posted:

it's ridiculous to assume that as irigaray is a feminist...

afaik irigaray doesnt think of herself as a feminist. or at least her 'psych et po' group (which included cixous, kristeva) explicitly rejected feminism

www.jstor.org/stable/3178697

But in France, Psych et po's struggle against feminism was apparently becoming ever more frantic, in what Picq views as "diatribes" that "lost all relation to reality."

Ringart, writing of her own experience, tells us that "Antoinette . . . charged the word with everything that was wrong in the world. . . . 'Feminism' . . . was everything that held us back and, in the guise of women's struggles, would just renew the masculine order and dominant ideology."

Picq quotes from Psych et po: "Socialism and feminism . . . are the two most powerful pillars of Patriarchy in decline, the final stage . . . of Phallogocentrism. . . . Feminism is radical only as root of Patriarchy."

this stuff is from the 80s so maybe she changed her mind completely, i dont know.

that article is esp. interesting because it goes on about the shady funding of obscurantist theory in France over explicitly socialist / old-left publishing

c_man posted:

i did actually do a bit of background reading on that the last time it was mentioned here, so my understanding was that when she says something, like an equation, is "sexed" that means that whatever it is is interpreted relative to concepts that are understood to have some kind of association to different sexes. in the quote she describes it's sexed nature as "privileging that which goes faster". i was trying to note that a common modern understanding of special relativity places very little emphasis on the notion of "speed", interpreting everything as having the same "speed" but apportioning that "speed" differently in space and time. like i said, i'm not an expert so maybe that doesn't make a difference as far as the sexed character but i thought that it was a relevant example of the way in which the perspective of a practitioner can give a different perspective than the usual one propagated through popsci media.

going back to this post, i think the problem with that is that you're understanding this dynamic just within the internal frame of the equation, it might be true that the quantitative weighting of speed as not of particular importance in relative terms and is subject to the determination of other constituent sets (bear with me here i don't really know anything about science or math) but if you look at it from an external perspective the result is still an equation that holds the speed of light as a fundamental component

c_man posted:

idk maybe the reason relativity is so associated with this idea of a Maximum Speed became fixed in the popular imagination as opposed to the idea of apportioning momentum into space and time directions was because it had this very quantitative character and Dudes like to hear about things that go The Fastest. in that case maybe you'd actually want to say "well actually it makes more sense to think about it this way" to further the point

which is i mean to a degree what irigaray says, we need forms of articulation that do not privilege masculine coded models

blinkandwheeze posted:

c_man posted:

i did actually do a bit of background reading on that the last time it was mentioned here, so my understanding was that when she says something, like an equation, is "sexed" that means that whatever it is is interpreted relative to concepts that are understood to have some kind of association to different sexes. in the quote she describes it's sexed nature as "privileging that which goes faster". i was trying to note that a common modern understanding of special relativity places very little emphasis on the notion of "speed", interpreting everything as having the same "speed" but apportioning that "speed" differently in space and time. like i said, i'm not an expert so maybe that doesn't make a difference as far as the sexed character but i thought that it was a relevant example of the way in which the perspective of a practitioner can give a different perspective than the usual one propagated through popsci media.

going back to this post, i think the problem with that is that you're understanding this dynamic just within the internal frame of the equation, it might be true that the quantitative weighting of speed as not of particular importance in relative terms and is subject to the determination of other constituent sets (bear with me here i don't really know anything about science or math) but if you look at it from an external perspective the result is still an equation that holds the speed of light as a fundamental component

c_man posted:

idk maybe the reason relativity is so associated with this idea of a Maximum Speed became fixed in the popular imagination as opposed to the idea of apportioning momentum into space and time directions was because it had this very quantitative character and Dudes like to hear about things that go The Fastest. in that case maybe you'd actually want to say "well actually it makes more sense to think about it this way" to further the point

which is i mean to a degree what irigaray says, we need forms of articulation that do not privilege masculine coded models

well, i mean, you can certainly make claim that certain fields of research may be privileged with funding and prestige because of their masculine vs feminine associations, and i think you could certainly find fields where that is the case. i don't think that's particularly controversial, but you would still need to ask some questions. a lot of funding is tied to military and government programs which are of course going to privilege "masculine" areas of research such as lazers or whatever. is that because of conceptions of field are sexed, or because there's empire has concrete need for those field?

anyways, if you tried (i'm too lazy to do so), i'm sure you could find fields that suffered from a sexed perception, so i don't necessarily disagree with that. the problem is that in her example she's calling the theory of relativity masculine and the fluid dynamics feminine. fluid dynamics is if anything, incredibly male dominated. there is and has been incredible drive towards understanding fluid dynamics for decades now. aerospace engineers, mechanical engineers, physicists, and mathematicians have all been working on it for a long time. aerospace and mechanical engineering are perhaps the most male dominated fields if anything. solving the navier stokes equations would instantly put a mathematician in the annals of history and net him probably 10 million dollars in prizes (clay math, shaw, fields, nobel, etc). the reason fluid dynamics haven't been "solved" yet is because they're a harder set of problems, ones that may be inherently unsolvable in some sense. whereas algebra, which is more "rigid" and "discrete", similar to the theory of relativity was arguably in the 20th century modernized by a woman (Noether). the assumption that a broader cultural notion of associating fluidity to women translates into a scientific discipline just isn't true.

i think that's what underlies the problem of associating sexed notions to very specific things like equations, it's a shifting target. biology was for a long time the purview of men (just like all fields), but it has slowly been dominated by women. has the field been revolutionized by women? yes, absolutely. however, i wouldn't say that their research has been categorically different in drive from men's research. i would say that the fields derided as feminine are simply the fields where women have broken into and are then retroactively categorized as such. patriarchy is (un)surprisingly flexible.

roseweird posted:

i have almost never heard anyone talk about irigaray except people with no interest/investment in her field bringing up her sexed equations thing, which i never bothered to learn to understand because learning about irigaray always seemed tertiary/quaternary/centenniary to reading de beauvoir, foucault, dworkin, hooks, butler, as someone who spent a pretty limited amount of time studying queer theory. however in my limited time i noticed that no one in queer and feminist theory had much to say about irigaray. maybe french academics care about her more, i don't know.

Along with Wittig and Kristeva she's one of the most-cited authors in Gender Trouble, the founding document of queer theory, so I would say she's fairly important. The word "foundational" comes to mind.

Lessons posted:

Anyway it's cool that people are apparently arguing about Dawkins (iirc) pulling embarrassing statements from Irigaray out of context to mock them like it's a reasonable representation of her as a philosopher, also Irigaray's psychology is more empirically sound than Dawkins's evopsych. Peace.

it was alan sokal, a theoretical physicist, marxist, and bitter old man. also i dont think dawkins actually does any research (im pretty sure his title is "professor of the public understanding of science"), since his degree is in zoology, an essentially obsolete field, and he studied animal behavior, not even anything directly related to genetics. dawkins is a simp. you're probably thinking of steven pinker, who has his degree in experimental psychology and language, also not anything to do with genetics or evolution. steven pinker is very qualified to do his scientifically unsound work, and has a well published, scientifically unsound research record. easy mistake.

Edited by c_man (Sept. 12, 2014 02:56:15)

daddyholes posted:

daniel dennett likes to talk about Stalinism.....of the mind

stalinism of the intellect

Lessons posted:

Microbiology is obviously important, especially in medicine as it relates to cancer, but probably the most prestigious field in contemporary biology is neuroscience (essentially a behavioral field) and biology as a whole is moving in the same direction. It's certainly true that Jane Goodalls aren't the future of biology but people who are completing her research with empirical methods are.

ok i see where you're coming from. most of the exposure to neuroscience that i have tends to be more of the "what in the fuck are neurons actually doing?????" variety than the "well we told some kids to make a pillow fort and then we did an fMRI" variety so i guess i don't have a good perspective. it does make sense that the latter would be more common. thanks!

AmericanNazbro posted:

This is a really good article w/r/t topic of the thread. I want to quote the entire thing, it's pro-read

https://medium.com/@NafeezAhmed/how-the-west-created-the-islamic-state-dbfa6f83bc1f

Divide and rule in Iraq

“It’s not that we don’t want the Salafis to throw bombs,” said one US government defense consultant in 2007. “It’s who they throw them at – Hezbollah, Moqtada al-Sadr, Iran, and at the Syrians, if they continue to work with Hezbollah and Iran.”

hey its better than that these guys do it all. they give American leaders popular domestic support to bomb world leaders and countries they wanted to bomb a year ago when they didnt have support, provide the same cover for pushing out American puppet leaders that they wanted to push out a month ago,they do it through remote foreign provocations guided by videos inadvertently leaked(??) from inside the organization(?!?!) and all while displacing everyone America's leaders hate from Assad to Al Qaeda. its crazy wild how coincidentally good they are for America, its absolutely loco go nuts paranoid schizophrenia, this coincidence tat happened