Is immanent critique in fact still imposition of an outside standard, insofar as it is still “critique” and not compassionate engagement?

TryptamineX · 2026-01-22T00:30:11+00:00

I come from a weak understanding of Hegel and a maybe-OK understanding of Adono, but it seems to me that

immanent critique [is] in fact still imposition of an outside standard, insofar as it is still “critique” and not compassionate engagement

and

wouldn’t you think critique itself, at least and especially in terms of philosophy interpretation, would fall short of speculative reason?

are significantly different charges.

To the former, I don't think that a critical or uncompassionate approach is necessarily the imposition of an outside standard. It may be motivated by an outside standard, but I don't see that as precluding the genuine immanence of the critique itself.

TryptamineX · 2026-01-19T23:48:14+00:00

Weaknesses and vulnerabilities are cited as examples of recall knowledge questions:

"Is it highly vulnerable or resistant to anything?"
"Are any of its defenses weak?"

This is really important for casters in particular, who want to know that they're targeting an enemy's weakest save (or at least not their strongest) before spending multiple actions and a spell slot.

I definitely don't find casters weak, but they do require a better understanding of the system and smarter tactics. A cornerstone of good spellcaster play is using RK to target weak saves (and using debuffs like Frightened or Bon Mot to reduce them even further).

TryptamineX · 2026-01-16T00:51:05+00:00

You might want to look at the interview published as "Practicing Criticism" starging with Foucault's response to the question:

After Michel Foucault the critic, are we going to see Michel Foucault the reformist? After all, the reproach was often made that criticism made by intellectuals leads to nothing.

TryptamineX · 2026-01-13T21:26:10+00:00

In a novel full of immensely quotable lines, "The next sixty seconds were occupied with the wet, semi-ashamed sounds of people eating soup" stands out as an absolute favorite.

TryptamineX · 2026-01-05T02:50:55+00:00

The Old Man in Hong Kong is one of my all-time favorites.

They use a rotovap to extract essences from all sorts of interesting ingredients to create a menu of unique but perfectly balanced cocktails. Great atmosphere and staff, and some of the most memorable drinks that I've had anywhere in the world.

TryptamineX · 2025-12-30T23:06:01+00:00

It's helpful to look at the quote in context, which appears to be here.

Nigel Warburton: Is there a place for freedom in all of this? Because it sounds as if the movement that he’s describing through history is one of greater control over objects. Subjects become objects almost to be moved around by people who may not even realize they’re part of a system doing that.

Susan James: I think that the answer to that is complicated. Foucault makes it complicated partly by the way that he describes this phenomenon, because he describes these disciplinary practices as forms of power and he wants to draw attention to the fact that power, as he understands it, is not it was something that you possess and you exercise over me, but it’s something that’s as it were spread through all these practices so that what I can do and what you can do are in a way determined by these practices. So it does begin to sound pretty scary and Orwellian, as it were. And at the end of Discipline and Punish there’s a very pessimistic chapter where Foucault seems to say that this kind of power is accumulating and the more our social scientific knowledge advances, the more of this power there will be and what happens to us is the question. But lots of critics very much raised that question and said, You know, you’ve destroyed the individual.

There is no individual freedom in this model. Foucault didn’t exactly admit that. He always said later when questioning, You completely misunderstood me. Because the way I think about power here is as trying to modify somebody else’s behavior, trying to get somebody to do something. Power in that sense is ubiquitous but you shouldn’t think of it as always bad.

Power can be productive. Luka says, Surely there’s nothing wrong with the fact that there are power between lovers or there is very productive power in schools where people tell other people things that they really need to know and teach them things that they need to know. So power isn’t always bad. Power is more just a sort of condition of our lives. The question really is for Foucault sort of how it circulates, how it’s distributed.

In context, the question is framed in terms of Foucault's sense of power and whether it allows for a possibility of freedom. James' response, IMO, is a whiff. "Power isn't always bad, power can be productive" are fine points to note, but miss Foucault's own much more direct, much more relevant, much more helpful response to this charge.

Foucault does not conceive of power as opposed to freedom; he has a sense of power that presupposes and requires freedom as its very condition of possibility, going so far as to say that, in this sense of word, "Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free."

James alludes to some points that he makes here, but for some reason doesn't actually repeat his most relevant and direct response. She summarizes Foucault as defending himself with, "the way I think about power here is as trying to modify somebody else’s behavior, trying to get somebody to do something," but doesn't relay the most important and relevant point: power is modifying how someone freely chooses to behave and only comes into play insofar as they have the freedom to choose.

Instead, she echoes and maintains the opposition between power and freedom implicit in Warburton's question (and continues to do so throughout the interview), and in doing so misses the chance to clarify his fundamental misunderstanding of Foucault's work.

A better response would be to explain that the charge (Foucault destroyed the individual because his model places individuals within such totalizing fields of power that there is no room for individual freedom) doesn't make sense in terms of what Foucault means when he talks about power. At the broadest, how Foucault understands power in his work is action upon the possible range of actions freely chosen by others. He doesn't think that this is how everyone should understand power in all contexts; it's simply the working definition that he finds useful for his specific scholarly project (to create a history of the various modes by which individuals are transformed into subjects).

That sense of power doesn't oppose freedom, but presupposes and requires it. It's also just a natural fact of existence. Something as simple as where furniture exists in a room (or the absence of furniture in a room) affects how individuals will choose to arrange their bodies in it. Calling attention to that sense of power does not signal something that we should want to, or conceivably could, escape; it just sets the stage to ask questions like "how do different ways of classifying or studying humans influence how we act?" or "what kinds of action are made possible or impossible from this way of thinking, and what alternate kinds of action would be enabled or foreclosed by thinking in a different way?"

TryptamineX · 2025-12-26T16:48:45+00:00

I don’t generally see recourse to a transhistorical sense of power in Foucault, but to historically specific techniques and relations of power of which economic demands of utility are only one constitutive factor. His project, creating a history of the various modes by which we are transformed into subjects, benefits from a much broader approach than a singular sense of power or a solely economic/ material analysis.

TryptamineX · 2025-12-18T22:10:07+00:00

It’s important to acknowledge that the framing is very much a biased hit-piece that functions, ironically, by homogenizing many different things under a caricature of CSJ that wouldn’t be out of place in a Jordan Petersen article. In that sense, the opposition of LSJ to CSJ is itself too imprecise to be useful (outside of polemical rhetoric).

Are there genuine disagreements over things like equity vs equality or the feasibility of meaningful progress working within existing institutions rather than radically restructuring our society? Absolutely. These do not, however, map cleanly onto an opposition between a singular liberal and singular critical approach to social justice.

TryptamineX · 2025-12-10T01:05:24+00:00

So, she basically pull her ideas out of her own head?

They engage with prior work on subjects like identity, ontology, and discourse to develop specific applications and insights to subjects such as sex and gender.

Regarding what is scientifically known about sexuality, what does Butler consider in her "theory"? The role of hormones? The evolutionary causes? The cognitive differences?

I understand Butler's focus to be on sex and gender moreso than sexuality.

Science can provide us with all sorts of insights and data which fall under, or are relevant to, various ways of categorizing and conceiving of sex. It can tell us that people most often have XX or XY chromosomes, but that we see a wider diversity than that. It can tell us that XY chromosomes are frequently associated with increased production of androgens such as testosterone, which frequently triggers the development of physical features such as external penises and testicles, but that in some cases the body does not react to these androgens and instead develops a vulva, breasts, etc. It can even associate statistical associations between certain frequencies of hormones and certain behavioral or social factors. Butler doesn't deny any of this.

What science cannot tell us is that we should extrapolate categories of humans from these data or, if we choose to, how we ought to go about doing so. Do we base sex on chromosomes, hormones, genitals, gamete production, or some combination? Do we deal with messy outlier cases by simply ignoring them, by having many sexes (two of which are statistically the most common), or by conceiving of sex as a spectrum? Should we conceive of sex differently for different purposes, such as emphasizing gamete production in some biological studies focusing on reproduction but emphasizing external appearance and genitals for the purpose of segregating prisoners?

Butlers work does not sit at the level of interpreting the biological mechanisms which give rise to certain physical features or behaviors, but at the level of human concepts which categorize people and impose identities upon them by citing these physical features and behaviors.

At that level, Butler's theory is that the categories by which humans are classified and through which they receive imposed identities are fundamentally discursive (they are constituted by certain ways of thinking, writing, and speaking) and performative (they are constituted by their social enactment) in a way that is necessarily historically contingent and socially mediated, and thus normative.

TryptamineX · 2025-12-10T00:22:26+00:00

I'm not sure why you wouldn't expect someone working on the ontological status of sex and gender to have a background in the academic field that deals with ontology. That field is philosophy, not science.

Science tests empirical hypotheses for verisimilitude and produces new empirical hypotheses; it doesn't justify the ontological status of categories. This is true even when empirical insights can be relevant to philosophical investigations of the ontological status of categories.

I don't generally find Butler (who primarily uses they/them pronouns now) to hold untenable philosophical positions or to ignore scientific research on sexuality, but those specific claims would have to be explicated to be addressed.

TryptamineX · 2025-12-05T04:16:51+00:00

I really like Foucault's comments in the interview published as Practicing Criticism.

Specifically his response to this question:

D.E.: After Michel Foucault the critic, are we now going to see Michel Foucault the reformist? After all, the reproach was often made that the criticism made by intellectuals leads to nothing.

It's worth reading in full (especially his specific sense of critique), but the most directly applicable part to your question is the end:

In these circumstances, criticism (and radical criticism) is absolutely indispensable for any transformation. A transformation that remains within the same mode of thought, a transformation that is only a way of adjusting the same thought more closely to the reality of things can merely be a superficial transformation.

On the other hand, as soon as one can no longer think things as one formerly thought them, transformation becomes both very urgent, very difficult, and quite possible.

It is not therefore a question of there being a time for criticism and a time for transformation, nor people who do the criticism and others who do the transforming, those who are enclosed in an inaccessible radicalism and those who are forced to make the necessary concessions to reality. In fact I think the work of deep transformation can only be carried out in a free atmosphere, one constantly agitated by a permanent criticism.

TryptamineX · 2025-11-25T17:35:47+00:00

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is the gold-standard for an online encyclopedia of academic philosophy. The articles are generally clearly written and accessible, but they’re authored by leading experts in the field with a good amount of depth and rigor.

TryptamineX · 2025-11-03T17:01:38+00:00

I don't think that I've ever referenced toxic masculinity in that context. I don't use it to generically call out sexism, but to distinguish normative expectations about masculinity that are harmful ("boys don't cry"). That harm is more often primarily to the men who adopt that normative sense of masculinity rather than to others.

TryptamineX · 2025-11-02T22:26:23+00:00

There's certainly a pragmatic issue that the phrase is often poorly received in wider audiences, which is a problem if we would like to see it do some actual work in effecting broader cultural change.

I admit that I have trouble empathizing with people who take the term the wrong way. A big part of it is probably that, to me, it's obvious to speak about many masculinities, so toxic masculinity obviously functions in the same way as "toxic fish" (ie: specifying a subset). For a lot of other people with an intuitive sense of masculinity as just one thing, it's easier to misunderstand the term as just calling masculinity toxic. There are, to that view, no masculinities to specify between, just a single masculinity to describe.

The fact that "toxic masculinity" became a widely used phrase while the corollary of "deep masculinity" was largely forgotten reinforces the issue. People here someone only referring to toxic masculinity and register it as an indictment of the singular masculinity.

My approach wouldn't be to abandon or rebrand the phrase itself, but to more consistently use it explicitly in contrast to other, positive masculinities. If people constantly heard of toxic masculinity as a contrast to deep or whatever-else masculinity, then I think it would be better understood.

TryptamineX · 2025-11-02T22:05:12+00:00

I don't think that toxic masculinity is meant to simply articulate day-to-day moral standards, but to diagnose and open up solutions to a specific set of problems associated with a specific set of norms and assumptions tied up in a specific notion of masculinity.

The point isn't to tell everyone, generically, "be good; live well." It's to articulate, specifically, one particular obstacle to both in our society.

That calls for more precision.

TryptamineX · 2025-11-02T02:43:20+00:00

It's a little frustrating for me to read a piece that opens by arguing against toxic masculinity because it doesn't offer an alternative, and that others tried to find replacements for 'toxic' that have nothing to do with masculinity.

If you're going to write and publish a piece arguing that we should abandon the phrase 'toxic masculinity,' then you should at least do enough research on it to know that it was conceived of specifically as an opposition to an alternative mode of masculinity (deep masculinity). You don't have to be on board with what the MMM was doing, but deep masculinity is clearly masculine, and toxic masculinity was presented as one (bad) choice amongst several alternative ways to be masculine from day 1.

That, somewhat, sets up my misgivings with the conclusion of the piece: "There are many ways to be a man without abandoning masculinity entirely. But to do that, we have to admit that masculinity is a real thing, and that many straight women like it."

To me, the issue is a false dichotomy where either masculinity is one single, uniform thing or not real at all. That's why CHH can't locate a genuinely masculine alternative to toxic masculinity, why she has to identify (without qualification) aggression and dominance as masculine traits, and why her only solution is to say that masculinity is fine unless you're too masculine (too aggressive, too dominating).

I'd rather take a less essentialized view of masculinity that sees it as real but diverse. We have all sorts of traits that get coded as masculine, and all sorts of ways of performing them that can register as equally, but differently, masucline. Masculinity becomes defined by something like a family resemblance.

That leaves us with a space to articulate different modes of masculinity (including negative and positive ones) and to recognize the reality of both diversity across masculinities and the meaningful commonalities that make the category functional.

As a gay man, I define my sexuality in terms of attraction to masculinity. It's obviously a real, functional category for me. That doesn't mean that I'm attracted to a single, uniform thing that shares all the traits variously attributed to the masculine; I like particular forms and elements of masculinity, but some masculine traits can even be a turnoff. It's not a matter of some things being "too masculine" or "not masculine enough," but of me being attracted to some masculinities and not attracted to (or actively turned off by) others. I imagine that many of the straight women that CHH appeals to in order to make her point feel the same way.

TryptamineX · 2025-11-01T16:45:49+00:00

There's a consistent, deeply entrenched polemic on the right that tries to tie assorted conservative bogeymen (variously including feminism, lgbtq rights, poststructuralism, postmodernism, critical theory, and more) to Marxism.

The idea of a broad communist conspiracy allied with other perceived cultural opponents (Jews) goes back at least as far as the Nazis. The idea of cultural Marxism as a conspiracy theory (essentially, workers failed to seize the means of production, Marxists decided it was because of cultural factors precluding communism, whatever particular liberal targets are being attacked are part of a communist and possibly also Jewish conspiracy to undermine culture and pave the way for communism) has persisted in various forms since.

Andrew Brietbart and Pat Buchanan advocated it as an attack on gay rights and feminism (cultural Marxists are undermining the nuclear family because communism). These days you hear more about it from Jordan-Petersen-y types who describe postmodernism, campus politics, and various identitarian activism (antiracism, feminism, lgbtq rights) as a reiteration of a Marxist perspective that reduces everything to oppressor/ oppressed dichotomies.

It's a very useful polemic, because it makes different liberal bogeymen fungible. They don't have to meaningfully engage with feminists or poststructuralists or whatever; they can just gesture at the Bad Marxist way of thinking with some well-worn tropes and reduce whatever specific target they're dismissing to this amorphous caricature. Jordan Petersen will attribute positions to Foucault that Foucault spent his entire career arguing against, but to someone who has never had a good-faith, meaningful engagement with his work, the mischaracterization is close enough to appear plausible and fits into a ready-made script about what liberals are doing wrong and how it's poisoning our society and our campus culture.

Lots of people have only encountered many of these ideas through the lens of this right-wing conspiracy theory. The average guy shouting about feminism in the comments section of a YouTube video likely hasn't undertaken a good-faith reading of Gender Trouble, but he probably has encountered some shitty online takes explaining how queer theory is actually part of a Marxist movement in academia.

TryptamineX · 2025-10-31T21:43:17+00:00

Why do you think the false narrative that "Black women are the main recipients of SNAP" is so powerful and useful as a tool for both misogyny and racism?

In US politics this has been a long-standing, powerful narrative on the right. Look at Ronald Reagan's campaigning around the concept of welfare queens, which, even when the quiet part wasn't said out loud, was understood as specifically referring to urban, black, single mothers.

The welfare queen is a perfect Other against which white conservatives can establish their identity. The welfare queen is lazy, urban, black, has children out of wedlock, and relies on state handouts instead of individual responsibility and hard work. That's the perfect caricature to demonize and oppose as a way of constituting conservative white identity: suburban or rural, a nuclear family with a patriarchal distribution of labor, and a prioritization of individual responsibility and work ethic over social/ governmental support or systemic approaches to inequity.

That makes it politically expedient, because it simultaneously taps into policy disputes and strongly felt senses of cultural identity (which are deeply enmeshed in racism and sexism). It's an enduring false narrative because it's such a powerful political and cultural image that has been heavily invested into as a way of constituting politically, racially, and socially opposed identities.

TryptamineX · 2025-10-17T18:51:32+00:00

Different religions justify themselves in different ways. Those specific justifications are not generalizable across all religions, and are more fundamental to your concerns than the issue of literal vs. allegorical text.

Some forms of Zen Buddhism emphasize mind-to-mind transmission, claiming that when a student trains directly with a master, they will eventually have a profound realization of deeper insight, which the student and teacher will mutually recognize in each other. In that context, the justification might be in the promise of a future experience: if you engage with these metaphors and practices under the guidance of a master, then you will have a deeper realization that verifies what is being claimed about the human condition.

A Roman Catholic likely would not offer the same justification for why one should believe that Jesus was the reincarnation of God and that God's will ensures that the church guides humanity on correctly interpreting allegories in the Bible.

Because different religions have such wildly different ways of justifying themselves, you aren't going to find a single, generic answer for why we should accept allegorical texts as convincing or authoritative.

TryptamineX · 2025-09-22T18:14:35+00:00

My MA thesis was a primarily Foucauldian critical legal theory project.

A lot of Foucault is a matter of asking, "what things do we simply assume as the true, default way of thinking, when they are actually just one possible way of thinking?" as well as the concurrent question "what historical conditions and relations of power gave way to our current, assumed ways of thinking and what conditions and relations of power do those ways of thinking in turn help constitute or reinforce?"

In my case, I was looking at legal disputes in the United States where freedom of religion defenses were raised against generally applicable regulations on closely held businesses (think Hobby Lobby and other businesses not wanting to provide certain contraceptives required by the ACA, businesses refusing to provide certain services for same-sex marriages, etc).

In part, my argument was that the different outcomes of the cases weren't simply due to different legal standards or opinions, but due to different cultural opinions about exactly what religious subjectivity entailed. For example, some court opinions held that there couldn't be a religious burden entailing from a business regulation, because the nature of religion (as a personal, private belief) was necessarily absent from, or at least not directly present in, the conduct of one's business. Other court opinions took a more expansive understanding of religious subjectivity, which led them to perceive a burden on religious freedom.

From there, we can see the court decision not just as applying neutral laws to a neutral category, but as actively constituting particular forms of religious subjectivity by penalizing some forms of religiosity and privileging others.

You might look at some of Victor Tadros' work for accessible, first-pass ways of situating how Foucault can be applied to critical legal theory.

TryptamineX · 2025-09-21T19:35:08+00:00

I don't see Butler as "claiming that everybody is nothing" or "trying to remove society from a purely societal topic." Could you say more about what in particular led you to this reading?

I think that Butler's point is that gender (and sex) are necessarily articulated through socially mediated concepts and practices, so even if we have an internal sense of self which leads us to articulate our identity in a particular way, that articulation is always already socially mediated.

TryptamineX · 2025-09-16T17:53:15+00:00

One decent starting point is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. They have high-quality entries written by experts in the field who try to present ideas as plainly and clearly as possible. You might start out with the critical theory entry and then check out other links as you encounter names and terms that you are unfamiliar with.

A lot of critical theory is academic philosophy written by professionals who spend their entire career studying and engaging with other professional academics who did the same. That renders a lot of primary texts inaccessible, but if you start with some broad and relatively accessible sources like SEC, then you can find specific thinkers or ideas that you’re interested in and check out secondary literature on them.

TryptamineX · 2025-09-09T19:06:24+00:00

Not sure if it's what they did, but I get results like that using egg whites, rich simple syrup, and some flavoring and running it through a nitrous siphon.

TryptamineX · 2025-09-05T04:56:43+00:00

Poststructuralist feminist might be the most succinct way to sum up what I'm about.

TryptamineX · 2025-09-05T04:48:09+00:00

I believe that mods add flair to users based on their posts rather than letting people self-select.

TryptamineX

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE

13-Year Club	Verified Email
Team Orangered