Obviously I've not spent much (any) time with Butler, but the critiques of her positions - beyond her delivery - shows a writer who is either ignorant of some basics of reality or simply dishonest (with herself most importantly). Critical differences in historical social roles between men and women are of biological convenience and/or necessity, not mere social happenstance. If she is obtuse, we might possibly blame her privilege as a rich(relatively, in both contemporary and historical standards), educated, liberal-academic following the Cultural Revolution, Jewish-American woman. Nietzsche said something along the lines of a philosophy saying more about the philosopher than anything else. I think there is a significant amount of merit to this.
Absolutely agree with the Nietzsche quote. But again, if we allow that here, then we also have to say that Kant's philosophy didn't produce a model for human consciousness/subjectivity, but a model for white, European, male subjectivity. That doesn't mean there's nothing valuable there.
...admittance of which is something that as far as I am aware of is completely absent in those critiques.
It isn't though.
This is what made postwar theory, in my personal opinion, more perceptive than the affirmationist philosophies that preceded it. It exhibited an awareness that its own grounds come under assault. Derrida insinuated this in 1966 when he gave his talk, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences." Foucault has acknowledged it in
The Order of Things, published that same year. More recently, Cary Wolfe summed it up perfectly in his book on postmodern theory:
Wolfe said:
On one side, then, we find critics of diverse political stripe who lament that the breakdown of the realist philosophical world worldview means a loss of reference and meaning that undermines the ethical and political promises of Enlightenment modernity. Defenders of the realist tradition hold, to put it schematically, that interpretive validity depends on the representational adequation — the faithful mirroring, as Richard Rorty has argued— of the objective meaning of the text, the event, or the social phenomenon. From this perspective, if objectivity or something very much like it is not possible, then we are automatically driven back upon relativism and even nihilism. On the other side, we find proponents of postmodernism such as Lyotard, Rorty, and Foucault who celebrate this very loss of representational authority as a liberation of the social and cultural field from what Jacques Derrida has famously called “logocentrism,” a liberation that returns interpretive activity to the materiality, historicity, and social embeddedness of its processes and practices of production. To which critics of postmodernism respond in turn that these theorists cannot claim that such a breakdown of realism has taken place without engaging in a self-refuting paradox; as one recent study puts it, “How does one rule out categorical theories in principle without getting categorical? How does one universalize about theory’s inability to universalize?”
Wolfe suggests that Derrida is intensely aware of this paradox. Derrida has always said that deconstruction isn't a philosophy, and that his methods of practice aren't categories or concepts. They resist such manifestation because as soon as they become concepts they deconstruct themselves.
So it isn't that theory is unaware, as you argue. It's that such theory is very aware that it has no ground, and thereby no stable premise from which to argue. Obviously these theorists have to fall back on something, especially when engaging in spoken dialogue with their peers, which is why their critics often rush to attack them based on the contradictory nature of individual statements or quotes. That's insufficient, however, because the argument has to do with the very nature of contradiction and paradox.
Contemporary academia in the humanities is still steeped in this tradition, but that's because it's still so recent. It's actively working its way out of it, like any committed discipline does, and it's making headway.
It's apparent Marx was smart. I wouldn't call him brilliant: he merely traced out the logic of the labor theory of value, and even forgot the value of the labor of ownership and management. The danger in Marx's work was this (incorrect) depiction of the mechanisms of prosperity as nothing but thievery and depredation (obviously some of this goes on, but it isn't a systemic issue). In short: total oppression. While you and I might be able to read these almost dryly delivered polemics against capitalism with a more critical eye, the notion is ripe for the sort of actions/rhetoric taken by basically every communist regime in history. This is a far cry from the manipulation, for example, of Nietzsche's texts to support Nazism. The former requires only some basic inductive steps from the underlying premises of the author (and those not entirely his own) and the other requires an extremely limited selection pulled out of context from the entire corpus.
Well, we've had this argument before.
Your perspective on Marx is primarily economic, which is also how he's commonly dismissed by economists in general. I'm referring to what he saw operating within what I'll call (following Jameson) the political unconscious of market relations. These aren't economic principles - they're social ones, ideological ones. The perceptions are insightful and accurate, in my opinion. Their translation back into a new system of social relations (i.e. communism) might not be.
