Einherjar86
Active Member
It is slightly reductionist.
Butler isn't a Kantian. She isn't saying that the material world is off-limits to us; she's saying that any attempt to expand our knowledge into new territories is at the same time an imposition of knowledge on those territories. If the thing itself is a kind of base materiality, then this isn't off-limits or unreachable; in fact, it's experienced every day. Even values and myth-beliefs can be traced (theoretically) back to some material instance or act of communication, but this origin is lost to us. At this point, all attempts to recover that origin can only be exclusionary or, at worst, totalitarian.
Butler's own theory answers Hume by presenting knowledge as an accumulative process. She concedes that purely constructivist and essentialist views are untenable; the idea that knowledge is accumulative insists upon an awareness as to where the basely material warps into the ideological.
For example, the case of women consistently performing more poorly than men in tests designed for admission to the military. The rage currently is over whether or not these tests are sexist, or created with men in mind. The question then becomes are these tests created that way for biological reasons (i.e. soldiers need to perform grueling tasks and males are biologically more capable than females) or historical reasons (i.e. for a long time women could not be soldiers and there is still a stigma against women in the military, suggesting a bias in these tests toward men).
It may very well be the case that we can isolate enough evidence to suggest the former, i.e. the biological requirements for the test. Butler's point (which I am extrapolating) isn't that we shouldn't act on these results, but that in acting on them we shouldn't thereby assume that we have discovered some fundamental condition of the sexes. We have actively contributed to the construction of sex in our culture, and we have to be careful not to fall back on this evidence as some kind of absolute precedent or axiom in future conditions.
I have no idea what Butler's actual opinions about women in the military are, and she may flagrantly disagree with what I just said. But that is how I understand her theory.
Butler isn't a Kantian. She isn't saying that the material world is off-limits to us; she's saying that any attempt to expand our knowledge into new territories is at the same time an imposition of knowledge on those territories. If the thing itself is a kind of base materiality, then this isn't off-limits or unreachable; in fact, it's experienced every day. Even values and myth-beliefs can be traced (theoretically) back to some material instance or act of communication, but this origin is lost to us. At this point, all attempts to recover that origin can only be exclusionary or, at worst, totalitarian.
Butler's own theory answers Hume by presenting knowledge as an accumulative process. She concedes that purely constructivist and essentialist views are untenable; the idea that knowledge is accumulative insists upon an awareness as to where the basely material warps into the ideological.
For example, the case of women consistently performing more poorly than men in tests designed for admission to the military. The rage currently is over whether or not these tests are sexist, or created with men in mind. The question then becomes are these tests created that way for biological reasons (i.e. soldiers need to perform grueling tasks and males are biologically more capable than females) or historical reasons (i.e. for a long time women could not be soldiers and there is still a stigma against women in the military, suggesting a bias in these tests toward men).
It may very well be the case that we can isolate enough evidence to suggest the former, i.e. the biological requirements for the test. Butler's point (which I am extrapolating) isn't that we shouldn't act on these results, but that in acting on them we shouldn't thereby assume that we have discovered some fundamental condition of the sexes. We have actively contributed to the construction of sex in our culture, and we have to be careful not to fall back on this evidence as some kind of absolute precedent or axiom in future conditions.
I have no idea what Butler's actual opinions about women in the military are, and she may flagrantly disagree with what I just said. But that is how I understand her theory.
