Personally, it has become quite clear that the Crit Theory/SJW cesspit memes were more true than I ever could have imagined. On my first day in my PhD program, we learned that the literal concept of individuality and the "Self" was racist, and a form of oppression invented by white men in the Enlightenment. Thankfully, we have PoCo and Foucault and the whole gang to placate us.
For those of you who are not Critical Theorists, and also have experience in the academic world, I'm wondering to what extent you were able to find success in doing something else. I spoke with a professor recently on the notion of doing analysis outside the school of, say, postcolonialism or neo-marxism, etc. I was told that I'd eventually find my own, unique way of doing things, a wonderful pastiche of things that would essentially be some derivative of Critical Theory—and, in my mind, thereby be essentially (to trigger the theorists out there) as though I had no voice to begin with.
I'm very concerned with ideological germination and lineage, and don't see any ways forward with Critical Theory that don't fall under the homogenous heap of "critique the critique without asserting any sort of foundation or basis for it, and thereby leave room for future critique on the merit of the presence/absence binary". Is it really so verboten to attempt to do one's own thing, or at least something with a different germination point than Hume/Kant/Hegel? This isn't even dragging personal ethics into the equation via the systemically oppressive use of Critical Theory to subjugate individuals and their identities in the very act of positing them as resisting larger systems of oppression.
tl;dr Have any of you worked on some pet ideologies/philosophies? What success have you found in utilizing them within academia? The culture seems to be antithetical to anything which goes against the current grand anti-narrative, that is seems as though Crit Theory is to academics as water is to fish in the ocean.
yeah shit that shouldnt be shouldnt like a mentally ill schizophrenic with autism and psychosis working for australian military named william murden klotz aka adolf hitler living in kingaroy dc in an underground military bunker illegally harrassing private legal lawful citizens for years on end and nothing being done about it to stop it has more then well proven to me the worthlessness of your human life
Jacob Gray
Use Cretin Theory to critique itself. Or go with the flow and try to extract good philosophical thinking points out of it and make your own meme theory, a synthesis if you will.
Have you heard of the Friesian school? You might be interested in it if you're looking for an alternative both to exhausted mainstream philosophers and CriTheory.
You're like the creationist who goes study biology and then tries to push for "creation "science"" and ""intelligent" design" to the point of repeating his year. Or maybe like those junior physicists who annoy their seniors with pet theories about time and parallel universes. You're 20 years too early to go against the consensus in an academic environment. It doesn't even matter if the consensus is correct, if you're too autistic to recognize you have no clout or credibility you're only going to earn ridicule.
Kayden Nelson
>Thankfully, we have PoCo and Foucault and the whole gang to placate us
I do hope you mean that PoMo actually gave us the tools to fight Critital Theory. Their little academic in-fighting has given card-blance to older types of identity to rise again.
Juan Wright
Who knows, maybe OP is the next great philosopher of the 20th century. Maybe he'll be the change.
James Gomez
and to add, philosophy and academia isn't as rigid as formal science, so I don't think it's a fair comparison.
Nicholas Nelson
Yes, maybe in 20 years, after he has earned his PhD, outlived his predecessors, outranked his successors and read like a thousand books in his discipline.
Look, if OP thinks he's the next Kant he can just start working on his theory, publish it and see what happens. Though if he had brilliant ideas to put on paper he wouldn't be here asking if he can take on Foucault. Maybe he can, I don't care. But if he thinks he can somehow change the academic consensus at his university while he's a fucking student, he's delusional.
Anthony Taylor
>On my first day in my PhD program, we learned that the literal concept of individuality and the "Self" was racist, and a form of oppression invented by white men in the Enlightenment. Yeah this is what you understood. What they told you was that the "self" and "individuality" are historically contingent concepts and were developed during the age of colonialism and enlightenment which is not even a question anymore at least it's not for historians working in that field. Not sure what this has to do with critical theory though. >I spoke with a professor recently on the notion of doing analysis outside the school of, say, postcolonialism or neo-marxism, etc. I was told that I'd eventually find my own, unique way of doing things, a wonderful pastiche of things that would essentially be some derivative of Critical Theory—and, in my mind, thereby be essentially (to trigger the theorists out there) as though I had no voice to begin with. What field are you even in? If you test Foucault, Recktwitz etc. empirically you often find them to be not 100% accurate.
I am still not sure you are not trolling.
Samuel Jenkins
Bullshit. If your philosophy fails on the level Predicate logic people will fuck you up good.
Nathaniel Edwards
Looks like some bitter libertarians/anti-socialists stuck too deep into politics to actually think about philosophy except in terms of scoring points off their ideological opponents.
Elijah Torres
yeah I got that vibe too, didn't read it actually but looking over some of the pages that actually deal with philosophy it seems like a decent position to explore.
Jeremiah Morris
>that fucking website That's some edgy bullshit right there.
Easton Murphy
>In Netscape, the font controls were on the same menus as the color controls, and almost any size of type could be selected. In Firefox, font size is under "Content" in the "Options..." section of the "Tools" menu. In Internet Explorer, a relative "text size" can be selected from the "View" menu.
Leo Bell
You can follow Ben Shapiro's advice, write like a commie when you're in college, your grades are important. Then do what thou wilt when you're out.
Justin Sanchez
>following the advice of a shifty eyed nerd-kike
James Ramirez
>hurr durr communist aliens are controlling universities and media
Nathaniel Myers
> consensus is the truth
Zachary Green
In the majority of theories of science the academic consensus is what is closest to the truth since we by now (Fleck, Kuhn) know that scientific facts are at least partially influenced by sociological factors. There hardly is a debate over this.
Jayden Hill
>I didn't read the posts I'm replying to
Chase Sanchez
why do americans need to shart on everything with their buzzwords?
Liam Turner
Their political culture is completely degenerated.
Logan Howard
>he doesn't know that thinkers like Spivak BTFOd critical theory and Foucault years ago top lel
Colton Parker
>All Jews are Commies Retard
Jose Powell
They have no critical thinking skills at all, their whole culture is dumbed down and the people are like empty vessels being rammed full of horseshit which they then regurgitate like the OP.
They simply cant think for themselves.
Christian Phillips
>tfw I studied International Relations >tfw Critical Theory is considered second tier at best compared to Realism and Liberalism, and feminism is a joke
It may not have gotten me anything but debt so far, but at least i didnt have to deal with all that bullshit
Angel Adams
Critical theory needs to be declared damnatio memoriae.
What are the alternatives? I had to use it in college and used it to argue that modern society has lost its virtues and that celebrities like the Kardashians are culturally bankrupt.
I can't help but look at the conflict between the optimates and the populares in Rome as a class conflict. I don't like communism, but it looks like a class conflict to me. An alternative angle would be that it was a conflict over noble rights, the centralisation of the state, and the development of pseudo-feudalism.
Mason Cruz
Humanities are cancer in readable, lecturable form. Enjoy your cancer phd. It will serge for nothing other than teaching cancer to other human beings.
Mason Powell
Well in the sense that in any discipline you have to conform to the standard of basic logical reasoning. Philosophers aren't out their articulating there theories in the form of predicate logic though. In fact a lot of them don't even know much about predicate logic these days. I was a math major for my first two year of undergrad and just switched to philosophy and I had a professor that didn't know what a maximal element was when I brought it up in class (and that's like pretty basic shit that you'd learn in a lot of introductory math courses, especially any that deal with logic or set theory). They also thought I meant set theory when I brought up ategory theory.
Jacob Mitchell
Critical Theory is German. Nice try though.
Ethan Butler
It's Kritische Theorie in German which is no buzzword at all in Germany. In fact even leftists I know think pure Kritische Theorie is outdated as fuck and that it (especially Adorno) is part of bourgeois ideology. It's "Critical" Theory" that has become an empty buzzword around here and I guess stormfront and /pol/. Just like OP many people here think anything even slightly influenced by Marx, Foucault, Bourdieu or the Frankfurt School is CT (as if any theory could ignore those people...). It's a fight against a straw boogeyman really. >Philosophers aren't out their articulating there theories in the form of predicate logic though Many of them are tho. Your personal experience doesn't disprove that. In Germany (Berlin) "Formal Logic" is mandatory when studying philosophy. It's also the reason 50% of students drop out. I get what you are saying though and I don't really disagree since I am a historian easily annoyed by philosophical bullshit without any roots in (empirical) reality.
Lucas Rodriguez
>What they told you was that the "self" and "individuality" are historically contingent concepts and were developed during the age of colonialism and enlightenment which is not even a question anymore at least it's not for historians working in that field. Not sure what this has to do with critical theory though. those two words are still the subjects of the intellectuals today, because the liberals and libertarians have noticed that they fucked it up when they tried to exclude the religion form their '''''''''''''''secular'''''''''''' doctrine.
Lucas Carter
>j classical logic is just a formal system to formalize some inferences taken seriously by a few people. Only stem kids take this formalization seriously.
Hunter Ortiz
>only stem kids take formalisation seriously >he says this like it's a flaw.
David Gray
I think you're too concerned with being accepted by other critical theorists, OP. Just develop your own ideas while keeping engaged with the critical culture. As in, let yourself learn from other people, but make sure you question them from your perspective. The only difficulty here is in knowing how to communicate your thoughts so as to promote the use of critical skills.
The naysayers, nonbelievers, and critics have an audience too, even within critics themselves.
Can confirm. Before I was alt-right I was actually a Marxist for some time.
Classical Marxists despise Critical Theory. Critical theorists are seen as mere college professors content on securing a teaching position for themselves in the bosom of the system while "critiquing" the same system without commitment to any revolutionary politics. They are your average shitlib with a college degree. The same could be said for feminism, etc.
Pollacks seem to think that Classical Marxists and Critical Theorists are in league, the one doing the the economic struggle, the other, in charge of the cultural subversion, but there's no evidence that that's the case. In reality, to use Marxist jargon, academics are petty bourgeois with petty bourgeois consciousness, despite the anti-capitalist rethoric. The two don't mix well.
In closing I'd like to add that one of the things that got me intrigued by the alt-right was listening to an interview of Jonathan Bowden by Richard Spencer where they discussed the "reactionary potentialities" of the Critical Theory. I had never heard about this kind of synthesis of left and right-wing ideologies before; the mere thought of appropriating a left-wing ideology for reactionary purposes seemed to me -- subversive, and I thought, finally something new. But then the alt-right runs the same risk as the CT. Being content on (over) analyzing books and films, without doing anything in the real world.
Aaron Sullivan
nice post, nice quints
Liam Edwards
Nice
Ayden Harris
Based Get.
Jayden Moore
Scientific Consensus is when truth (or at least the most likely to be truth) becomes the consensus.
What user is referring to is when the consensus is claimed to be truth BECAUSE it has been conceded.
Anthony Allen
>Yeah this is what you understood No, it is quite literally what happened. A man in my class, towards the end, asked if he would be allowed to participate in class discussion on the basis that he, as a straight white male, would be unable to fully quash his role as a cog in the machine of systemic oppression. What it has to do with Critical Theory is that we were doing a PoCo analysis of Enlightenment ideals.
While I may have personal quibbles with some philosophers themselves, my greatest problem is with practitioners who have caused/are causing atrocities in the modern day without recourse due to a tribalistic definition of the good hidden behind Critical obfuscation: a decent example is the ubiquity of feminism as a hegemonic discourse within the conversation on identity, despite having purposefully and maliciously fought for the removal of trans health care in the US which resulted in tens of thousands of preventable deaths over a 3 decade period—a genocide of which no one cares.
Not to be consequentialist, but I don't understand how this is acceptable. It feels, to me at least, that one should judge an ideology at least partially on its physical teleology, rather than on ideal ones. Especially the ones which explicitly state that to not actively/politically subvert systems of oppression is to be in concert with them. Something is wrong with the ideological undercurrent, and the germination point should be found and one can work from there. If you want to call on human nature, then already we are moving back far past contemporary thinkers, which is my point. A critique in the Critical mode, even of contemporary Critique, does not seem to be viable as a mode of change. The whole "master's tools" thing is nonsense to me.
Jayden Flores
your "greatest problems" is with things that are non-issues, fabricated by your time spent on /pol/. try reading a book.
Blake Reyes
>your "greatest problems" is with things that are non-issues >Tens of thousands of people who died as a direct result of an ideology are a non-issue >An ideology subjugating a class of people to their specific narrative, negating the ability for sovereign identity, is a non-issue Also, really, /pol/ is fabricating the silent genocide of trans people? I didn't realize they were such great champions of the oppressed.
Try responding with an argument. An ideology whose physical teleology is one of literal genocide and identity-subjugation is a non-issue? Even fucking Spivak talks about the Orientalism innate within Said's critique of Orientalism. Do tell me how these are non-issues, when an ideology supposedly for rebellion against oppressive systems and ideological mores simply reifies them within their anti-narrative.
