I was reading Douglas Murray’s new book “The Madness of Crowds“, there was a specific Judith Butler (3rd wave feminist philosopher) paragraph in there that perfectly illustrates why intesectionalism and critical theory can’t be taken seriously by people who are actually critical thinkers.
Murray used the paragraph to show the obstructive style ordinarily employed by people who have a lot to say about nothing. They hide behind big words and complicated syntax in order to hide the fact that their argument can’t stand up to actual scrutiny.
Anyway, have a read at the referenced paragraph. It is just pure garbage.
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 temporarity into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural tonalities 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.
If you are confused after reading that, you are not alone. Philosophers are known for their complicated prose but this is outrageous.
The paragraph looks like one of a middle-schooler attempting to get to an essay word count minimum for a school assignment, and at the same time using the Microsoft Word thesaurus feature to substitute simple words for its most complicated counterpart.
If you have a good point and your argument can stand up to scrutiny, your writing would be as simple as possible in order to get your point across…because it is a good point after all right? But the more complicated and nonsensical your writing is, the more confused people get. And if they are confused, then they can’t debate you. And if they can somehow find some understanding in your drivel, then you can always use the “that’s not what I meant…you don’t understand my argument” escape hatch. This is what what obstructionists do.
If you somehow want to read more of this drivel, you can find it in Diacritics, vol. 27, no. 1, Spring 1997, titled “Further reflections on conversations of our time.”
And if you haven’t picked up Murray’s book “The Madness of Crowd” yet, I highly recommend it. It perfectly summarizes the vapidity of today’s regressive left.
