First off, a special bonus for my readers today. I’ve cracked it!
In 1997, Judith Butler wrote perhaps the most incomprehensible paragraph ever committed to paper. Even the very smart code-breakers at NSA and GCHQ have been unable to discern any meaning from it.
It’s a now infamous passage :
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)
It’s taken me a while, and without any Rosetta Stone to help in the deciphering of the postmodern hieroglyphics, but I now believe I have figured out the essence of the message Butler was trying to convey
Look at meeeeeee! I’m just soooooo fucking smart!
I am being slightly unfair because as an academic in a past life I do know how much we love our jargon. Often it’s really useful for “those in the know” and means that discussions can be made massively more concise. Saying that we’re working in a Hilbert space, for example, immediately conjures up a whole set of properties. It would be very tiresome to have to list those properties every time we wanted to talk about objects in such spaces.
But sometimes it’s hard to find any excuse at all. Take the 2016 paper on a feminist theory of glaciation. I haven’t read the whole paper, but do I really need to? The abstract is quite enough.
What the world really needed back then was a feminist theory of glaciation so that human-ice interactions could be made more just and equitable.
These folk really do seem to be a polar bear short of climate change.
But I think Butler’s place on the postmodern pedestal of engarblement is about to come to an end with a recent publication (7th July 2023).
Rae Rosenberg’s piece “On Surviving a cis Discipline” (also published in a Sage journal) is a great example of the self-absorption and, frankly, the narcissistic nuttiness of the “scholarship” of today. You can read the entire piece for yourself at the link given, but here’s just a few choice snippets from the paper.
A cis discipline is structured by a nexus of cisnormativity and discursive erasures of trans people. A cis discipline reproduces a range of daily systemic violences that target trans and gender diverse people. A cis discipline unquestionably operates in the conflation of gender and sex without nuance, and replicates dualistic frameworks of gender and sex in the production of knowledge. A cis discipline allows for the proliferation of outdated terminology, writing that is ignorant, and silencing of trans scholarship and scholars. A cis discipline propels cis people as knowledge holders of trans people’s experiences without explanations or critical reflections on positionality.
In the very next sentence the author criticizes cis disciplines in the following way :
A cis discipline enables the combined use of buzzwords . . .
At this point I had to stop to wipe off the coffee I’d just sprayed on my screen. These people really do seem to be self-absorbed but, sadly, not at all self-aware.
Apparently, the “trans genocide” is alive and kicking in cis geography too
As a cis discipline, the topic of being trans in geography raises the same question of being trans in our contemporary world: survival. To be discursively and ontologically erased, to be expelled from the category of human, is to be poised for extermination, for survival to be rendered impossible or at minimum extremely difficult to achieve
She/he/it (no idea) then goes on to explain what “survival” means :
Survival in this sense does not merely refer to the biological fact of being alive from one day to the next, but rather as the biographical, material, technological, affective, bio-chemical, and spiritual substances that enable us to exist within and beyond the necropolitical grip over trans lives
Are you sensing a pattern here already?
We can see the dread and moronic hand of postmodernism all over this piece. We have the postmodern drivel directly when the author talks about “forms of knowledge production”
Stryker’s work evidences the potential that the biographical carries for trans survival beyond the individual and into forms of knowledge production that can center trans experiences, subjectivities, and knowledges. . . . What might be instigated by inserting our biographical survival as a means of writing ourselves into geography, as a discipline that writes trans people out? To vocalize what it means to be made monstrous, purged from the category of human, through the wreckage of cisnormative knowledge production? What unmaking of the cis discipline of geography can occur through the biographical insistence of trans geographers?
Basically, it would seem, geography is simply not “trans” enough.
Trans geographical work is frequently subsumed within queer geographical work, sidelined by geographies of sexualities, and tossed away by the broader geographic discipline from what it actually is – inquiry about the politics of space and the inextricable links to representation, subjectivity, power, relationality, sovereignty, and materiality. Over time I see myself less and less in this cis discipline.
And that’s really what it’s all about isn’t it. The author “sees” themselves less and less in, erm, geography.
What a weird requirement. I see myself in the Schrödinger equation, said no physicist, ever. Why do these people need to put themselves in the centre of everything?
This never-ending and ultimately futile search for “validation” is really very sad.
The buzzword bingo bollocks continues apace
We sit in the tensions of striving for possibilities of visibility, representation, and placement – which have begun to happen, however limited – through a discipline that has also been agentic, and continues to participate, in colonial, white supremacist, ableist, and cisnormative projects. Thus, while geography carries potentials to offer us a form of place, it is cautious, untrustworthy, and incomplete. For us to be fully in place, geography as a discipline needs to be radically undone.
I presume the author was writing this late at night, after several bottles of Prosecco, and a bad day at the office
The project of a trans radical geographical imagination requires appreciating how gender stalks not-quite-human subjects differently, through various networks of power, as we exist and move through space. A trans radical geographical imagination must attend to the gradations of daily abrasions that slowly break our skin, and empathetically tether to the tears in our ability to spiritually endure this world. These tasks of survival, imagination, being, and world building – including when oriented around the goal of unmaking cis disciplines – require an unremitting interrogation and dismantling of the whiteness and ableism of trans survival.
We’re definitely giving Butler a run for her money here. What is this complete, unadulterated, load of nonsensical twaddle actually supposed to mean?
I’m buggered if I know1.
The last paragraph “explains” it all
Such an approach adopts the meaning of a trans radical geographical imagination through a “radically relational and processual ontology” of trans lives, embracing the non-linearity and messiness of futurity and subjectivity. The two-fold projects of cultivating a trans radical geographical imagination and unmaking geography as a cis discipline require collaborative solidarity work that seeks to undo the cisnormativities embedded in geography. Such work can only succeed with a persistent repudiation of white privilege and meaningful actions with wider calls for racial, housing, disability, gender, reproductive, anti-colonial, economic, migration, anti-carceral, health, and social justice.
The scattergun approach always works best - throw as many of those buzzwords in there as you can and maybe people will forgive you for not making any sense at all.
If this kind of absolute crap is what’s infecting scholarship these days - then we’re in serious, serious, trouble.
UK slang phrase which carries slightly more weight than simply saying “I don’t know”
Trans people are narcissistic losers who think their mental illness makes them the centre of the universe. The fact is that nobody gives a shit about them or their weirdness. If only they'd STFU.
Gee whiz. You really aren’t going to like my latest preprint, “Integrating and Translating Universalist Narratives into a Framework of Ethnocide by Kinesics and Proxemics in the Global Trans Diaspora: Working Toward a ‘Monstrous Hegemony’”.