Anyway, the author doesn’t have any conclusions, I just thought it was interesting, another collection of “letters to OWS”. http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/11/open-letter-to-occupy-movement.html

Doug’s animosity is pretty simple. He doesn’t like the business about prefiguring the society you’d like to live in now. And the reason he doesn’t like it is that it might require what I referred to in a post – “conscious social reproduction.” Instead of simply reproduce, for instance, gendered social relations, you make an attempt to challenge them by turning to new social norms.

The way they run a progressive stack at GA is an example. Instead, of just taking names and stacking people to speak as they indicate a desire to speak, they progressively stack it by making sure that voices that have been historically underrepresented are heard. When Angela Davis spoke, for instance, they progressively stacked so that women of color were the first ones to ask questions. When someone asked to speak, the woman running stack said (paraphrase from memory), “So and so always has something to say, has had ample opportunities to speak, is there anyone else who would like to ask a question?”

Basically, in this case, it wasn’t about race or gender at this point, it was simply about a person who feels really confidant about speaking, always has a question, yadda being asked to step aside so others who are more shy and less confident can feel comfortable speaking.

As someone who is ‘that guy’ and can yak up a storm, I’m acutely aware that lots of people aren’t so comfortable but have genius things to say. I’m a one percenter who should be taxed more in that regard! :)

I think that is the thing that offends some people the most. If this approach to social movement making gets off the ground and becomes a dominant way of doing things, some folks are deeply threatened by that.

But more than that, what OWS is is an example of people fully capable of having an analysis that Doug has argued against on the grounds that such an analysis of anti-racism anti-sexism and the like simply isn’t radical. It produces a politics that is no politics at all. It produces people who are unwittingly supporting neo-liberalism. etc. etc. And yet people with that sort of politics, people who would call themselves anti-racist, anti-sexist, etc. are actually putting a class analysis (as mild as it is) at the center of the politics.

They’d predicted that the mere support for anti-racist politics couldn’t produce even the glimmer of a radical analysis.

But it did.

guess i’ll have to post that at the blog. ha ha

We are a multicultural newspaper interesting in reproducing this interview. Please let us know if there is any copyright.
Thanks
The Prisma team

I forgot to mention that Plotnitsky used to teach Irigarary, whom he sometimes jokingly referred to as “one of the crazies,” to remind us how Sokal, in his pretentious ignorance, referred to her and, presumably, still does.

You can learn all you need to about Sokal’s mind-boggling incompetence in these matters by reading his bizarre complaints about Irigaray’s utterly uncontroversial comments about boundaries of vague predicates. (E.g., a ‘D’ morphed into an ‘O’ and back. Where is the boundary of ‘D’? Is there one?) Sokal tells us that these concerns are addressed in differential topology. In differential topology!! I’m not kidding.

And the readers say, “Yes, wise one. Yes.” It’s as if the inmates
are running the asylum. Hooray for scholarship.

1) What possible interpretation of Irigaray’s quote isn’t ridiculous?

Ask Arkady Potnitsky what Irigaray means.

Some of Arkady’s credentials: All but Ph.D. in mathematics with Gromov (one of the world’s greatest mathematicians) in the USSR, graduate studies in physics in the USSR, Ph.D. in English literature in England, doctoral thesis on the history of the romance novel, currently professor of literature at Purdue, kindly helped to save Sokal even greater embarrassment by explaining that the humanists he mocked for talking nonsense about chaos theory were not talking about chaos theory. They were talking about chaos in the original sense of the term (e.g., as in Milton).

Also, see how Nagel’s gibberish about special relativity theory is handled in the section “Hatchet jobs” of “Reading and relativism.”

2) You can’t just fall back on the old “it was a just a metaphore/joke/ironic remark” every time someone points out the falsity of such claims.

I agree. However, I see no false claim here on the part of Irigaray. It’s rather that Sokal outrageously misrepresents what she says to make it seem so. (E.g., by his apparently willful misunderstanding of Irigaray’s use of the term “privileged.”)