In ‘researching’ my MA dissertation I came across this little gem, a Good Housekeeping advert from would you believe it 1988, obviously riding on the back of much anti-feminist sentiment. This poster is used by a scholar in an essay to make some very serious points about so-called ‘post-feminism’, but though I see point they’re making, I just can’t help seeing this kind of thing as rather funny. There’s an event better picture from Women’s Day (that I can’t be bothered to scan in), of Barbara Bush posing immaculately in Pearls on a White House sofa, superimposed with speech marks it reads: “Women’s Lib made me feel inadequate and useless”.
I feel like this dissertation, now more then anything else, is impeding me from getting on with the rest of my life. What doesn’t help matters is that I’ve been reading some fairly subversive literature recently slamming post-modern academia, and feminists in particular. Nick Cohen posits that, as well as certain historical factors, it is the academic left’s insistence on ‘theorizing’ identity politics, it’s zombie like fixation on ‘otherness’ and ‘the tyranny of the signifier’, that accounts for its current impotency and lack of moral compass. It’s an argument I find rather appealing having just come through the ‘cultural studies’ experience myself. A typical reading list at a university in the thrall of the ‘post’ies will contain a couple of essays by Enlightenment thinkers early on, and then the rest will be reams and reams of post-modern ‘theory’ characterised for the most part by unnecessary complex language and obscurantism. The general feeling is that the harder to read or understand something is, then the more worthy and important it must be. Maybe this sounds a bit anti-intellectual or plebeian even. But I honestly think George Orwell would be turning in his grave at some of this crap.
In 1996 Dennis Dutton, the editor of Philosophy and literature, opened an annual Bad Writing Contest. The winner in 1999, as Cohen highlights in his book What’s Left: How Liberals Lost their Way, was the radical marxist feminist theorist Judith Butler. There are several of her texts on my reading list, all of potential use in my dissertation – so help me god. Here is the winning entry in all its glory:
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 rearctiulation 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.
What, except on a very abstract level, does this have to do with reality? And what right do the writers of such stuff have to claim they are coming from the left? Is it any wonder that I’m beginning to take the view that the ‘University experience’ for many of my generation is a complete sham and a swindle?