Potent Quotables

By privileging the institutionally strategic over the intellectually sound, and by effectively conceding that these operate on separate planes, these arguments affirm the status of women’s studies as something distinct from the rest of the university’s intellectual mission for research and teaching. In effect, by admitting its thoroughly politicized rationale, these defenses replicate the low value that hostile outsiders often accuse women’s studies of attaching to the caliber of arguments and to intellectual life as a whole; suspicions about the non or anti-intellectual dimensions of women’s studies are thus confirmed.

Wendy Brown, The Impossibility of Women’s Studies

Potent Quotables

[S]imply rejecting a whole class of methods is not just a logical error — it is a political one as well. Anyone who cares about society, about social and environmental justice, about peace, and who is committed to democracy, cannot give up on the idea of science. Humans are intentional and social actors. If we do not accept some standard for valid knowledge, we cannot agree on how to proceed. If those critical of existing social arrangements reject any basis for valid knowledge, they cannot make politically effective claims about where and how change needs to occur. If critical researchers say that science is nothing but ideology, why should we bother to listen to any social scientist, incuding them?

Joey Sprague

Potent Quotables

I started off with language: How does language relate to reality? People can say, “You’ve said something true or false, or relevant, or irrelevant, or intelligent or stupid”–and that’s a remarkable fact. In the style of philosophy, we ought to be astounded by what any sane person takes for granted, namely that by flapping this hole in my face and making noises I can give a lecture, or advance a thesis, or convince people, or all the other things you can do with language.

- John Searle, Reason interview

Potent Quotables

In honour of the launch of the new blog, I’ve decided to introduce a new feature called Potent Quotables, which will be a quote or a short passage from something I’ve read that I found interesting at the time (if I still find it interesting, that’s a bonus). There won’t be any commentary or context provided, unless there’s something I really want to say about it, in which case it will cease to be a potent quotable. Here goes.

In the best of current debates [about transsexualism], the standard mode is one of relentless totalization. The most egregious example in this paper, Raymond’s stunning “All transsexuals rape women’s bodies” (what if she had said, e.g., “all blacks rape women’s bodies”), is no less totalizing than Kates’s “transsexuals…take on an exaggerated and stereotypical female role,” or Bolin’s “transsexuals try to forget their male history.” There are no subjects in these discourses, only homogenized, totalized objects–fractally replicating earlier histories of minority discourses in the large. So when I speak the forgotten word, it will perhaps wake memories of other debates. The word is some.

Sandy Stone, The Empire Strikes Back