The University of Washington Press has published the book 'Underflows, Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice', which is a 'trans focus on grief for fish'. It also details 'why rivers matter for trans life'. A review of the book has even been hosted by London School of Economics pic.twitter.com/uKDvSLHlBj
I think somewhere along the line, some editor (or committee thereof) was afraid to: a) admit that they did not understand what they were reading, or b) unwilling to believe it was all mad bullshit.
Just more proof that trans think everything is about them. No matter the topic, it’s about them. The war in Ukraine? They need to be centered. Women in poor countries being raped and murdered? Center trans. Domestic violence against women? Center trans. Schools failing children of color? Center trans.
White males used to be the center of everything. Now they are supposed to think about others, so they come up with a way to center themselves all over again without losing their progressive cred.
At least the right wing is open about their contempt for everyone else and their belief that white males are the glory of creation.
“Imaginaries” is a treasured bit of jargon in the broad misty field of Cultural Studies aka Critical Theory aka [your preferred label here]. It’s a tool to make banalities sound technical and fascinating and difficult.
Apparently, this usage of imaginary goes back to Jacques Lacan. His Register Theory divides mental phenomena into three categories: the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. The Imaginary constitutes the representation of things, whether conceptual or material, in a psychological “image”. This “imagining” contrasts with the Symbolic’s naming and formalizing. Where the Imaginary represents things via images (meaning perceptual qualia, really), the Symbolic represents and points to things via words, rituals, practices, etc. And the Real? Well, the Real basically amounts to an apophatic “not those other two”, because clear ideas are for losers, or something. Quoting the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy:
The imaginary and symbolic are modes of representation that make the world and the self intelligible. The symbolic is Lacan’s term for the way in which reality becomes intelligible and takes on meaning and significance, through words; the imaginary refers to the mode of intelligibility offered by images. The concordant and conflicting mediation of the world by images and words coordinates, or makes sense of, reality and instigates both subjectivity and social relations.
In essence, any time you conceive of something phenomenologically, you’re operating within the Imaginary. Any time you conceive of something literally or semantically, you’re operating within the Symbolic. This doesn’t really explain how usage made the plurals “imaginaries” and “symbolics” possible, though. From what I gather, that evolved as Lacan’s Registers got picked up by French Feminism, particularly Luce Irigaray.
Looking at how the Psychoanalytic Feminism entry describes Luce Irigaray’s view (because I’ve never read Irigaray) also happens to give us insight into how the ideas came into Critical Theory and its progeny.
Irigaray’s own project … requires intervening in the symbolic and imaginary realms, creating a new language that would not be severed from the body and ending the division of labor between love and law.
…
Irigaray does not think she can say what a woman is or what femininity is.
…
Irigaray’s undertaking thus involves not merely an assertion of difference against equality, nor certainly a simple reversal; such stances take place on the basis of an already existing symbolic order and imaginary relation and are themselves what need to be interrogated. To find a language for feminine sexuality and feminine subjectivity, we must go “back through the dominant discourse” (Irigaray 1985b, 119) with its metaphysical assumptions of substance or essence, and its concept of identity which adheres to the regime of sexual indifference.
Whew. That’s quite a bit to unpack, wrapped in a whole lot of Freudian gibberish. Right from the first, however, you’ll probably be getting whiffs of Queer Theory’s fetish for remaking the world through transforming language. To intervene in the symbolic and imaginary realms just is to queer a concept, while the replacement of that language is the next step in the ongoing Hegelian Dialectic. Once replaced, the new symbolic and imaginary need to be interrogated, and to make it clear that this next step in the Dialectic is not operating on the same social (either ideal or material) conditions, we allow the words to become plural. We have a symbolic and an imaginary at each stage, and thus we have symbolics and imaginaries. We can further subdivide the Registers at each stage according to the domain of Critique interrogation, giving us multiple symbolics and imaginaries at all levels.
It’s easy to overlook, but there’s a key to the Critical Theory connection in the first sentence I quoted: “the division of labor”. You’ll recall that one of Marx’s claims is that man is estranged from man, both from others and himself, by the division of labor. Irigaray’s theorizes that language contributes to—perhaps even precedes, but I’m unsure about that—the estrangement of woman from woman, woman from man, and man from man in nearly the same way as Marx theorizes the division of labor.
(I say nearly because there’s a distinction that Continental philosophers like to make between “materialist” and “idealist” analyses. No, of course these words aren’t used in their normal senses here, and I don’t know why you’d expect them to be. “Idealism” isn’t even used in its typical sense as a philosophical term of art. Anyone with anything like a STEM background would hear, “Marx is important because he offered a material analysis,” and think it refers to scientific materialism, but that’s not what it means. Here, all “idealist” really means is that ideas are presumed to have a greater effect on social phenomena than material conditions, and “materialist” means that material conditions are presumed to have a greater effect than ideas. Seriously.)
In any case, the result is that we are subjected to the same jargon, as well as the same conception of humanity and History, that we get from the neo-Marxists. It’s all about constructing a language that allows for filling out the Conflict Theory Madlib in as persuasive and, perhaps more importantly, politically expedient way. Irigaray takes Marx’s class analysis from the domain of economics and transposes it into the domain of sex, and Conflict Theory is like a test for a virus that always returns a positive result. It’s the witch hunter who somehow always finds that the accused is a witch.
I think somewhere along the line, some editor (or committee thereof) was afraid to: a) admit that they did not understand what they were reading, or b) unwilling to believe it was all mad bullshit.
Just more proof that trans think everything is about them. No matter the topic, it’s about them. The war in Ukraine? They need to be centered. Women in poor countries being raped and murdered? Center trans. Domestic violence against women? Center trans. Schools failing children of color? Center trans.
White males used to be the center of everything. Now they are supposed to think about others, so they come up with a way to center themselves all over again without losing their progressive cred.
At least the right wing is open about their contempt for everyone else and their belief that white males are the glory of creation.
Did you notice truck slut is playing with his dong in the photo?
Yes…it’s kind of hard to miss.
WTF is all that?
Transgenderism and/or biological sex of human beings has ???? to do with ecology or drying-up rivers? What?
And I forgot to say:
WTF are “imaginaries”?
This book is all sound and fury, signifying nothing.
“Imaginaries” is a treasured bit of jargon in the broad misty field of Cultural Studies aka Critical Theory aka [your preferred label here]. It’s a tool to make banalities sound technical and fascinating and difficult.
It basically refers to conceptual spaces. The imaginary of pop music would be all the ways that people conceptualize pop music.
At least, that’s how I’ve seen the stupid mangling of language used.
After a bit of research, I was right.
Partially.
Apparently, this usage of imaginary goes back to Jacques Lacan. His Register Theory divides mental phenomena into three categories: the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. The Imaginary constitutes the representation of things, whether conceptual or material, in a psychological “image”. This “imagining” contrasts with the Symbolic’s naming and formalizing. Where the Imaginary represents things via images (meaning perceptual qualia, really), the Symbolic represents and points to things via words, rituals, practices, etc. And the Real? Well, the Real basically amounts to an apophatic “not those other two”, because clear ideas are for losers, or something. Quoting the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy:
In essence, any time you conceive of something phenomenologically, you’re operating within the Imaginary. Any time you conceive of something literally or semantically, you’re operating within the Symbolic. This doesn’t really explain how usage made the plurals “imaginaries” and “symbolics” possible, though. From what I gather, that evolved as Lacan’s Registers got picked up by French Feminism, particularly Luce Irigaray.
Looking at how the Psychoanalytic Feminism entry describes Luce Irigaray’s view (because I’ve never read Irigaray) also happens to give us insight into how the ideas came into Critical Theory and its progeny.
Whew. That’s quite a bit to unpack, wrapped in a whole lot of Freudian gibberish. Right from the first, however, you’ll probably be getting whiffs of Queer Theory’s fetish for remaking the world through transforming language. To intervene in the symbolic and imaginary realms just is to queer a concept, while the replacement of that language is the next step in the ongoing Hegelian Dialectic. Once replaced, the new symbolic and imaginary need to be interrogated, and to make it clear that this next step in the Dialectic is not operating on the same social (either ideal or material) conditions, we allow the words to become plural. We have a symbolic and an imaginary at each stage, and thus we have symbolics and imaginaries. We can further subdivide the Registers at each stage according to the domain of
Critiqueinterrogation, giving us multiple symbolics and imaginaries at all levels.It’s easy to overlook, but there’s a key to the Critical Theory connection in the first sentence I quoted: “the division of labor”. You’ll recall that one of Marx’s claims is that man is estranged from man, both from others and himself, by the division of labor. Irigaray’s theorizes that language contributes to—perhaps even precedes, but I’m unsure about that—the estrangement of woman from woman, woman from man, and man from man in nearly the same way as Marx theorizes the division of labor.
(I say nearly because there’s a distinction that Continental philosophers like to make between “materialist” and “idealist” analyses. No, of course these words aren’t used in their normal senses here, and I don’t know why you’d expect them to be. “Idealism” isn’t even used in its typical sense as a philosophical term of art. Anyone with anything like a STEM background would hear, “Marx is important because he offered a material analysis,” and think it refers to scientific materialism, but that’s not what it means. Here, all “idealist” really means is that ideas are presumed to have a greater effect on social phenomena than material conditions, and “materialist” means that material conditions are presumed to have a greater effect than ideas. Seriously.)
In any case, the result is that we are subjected to the same jargon, as well as the same conception of humanity and History, that we get from the neo-Marxists. It’s all about constructing a language that allows for filling out the Conflict Theory Madlib in as persuasive and, perhaps more importantly, politically expedient way. Irigaray takes Marx’s class analysis from the domain of economics and transposes it into the domain of sex, and Conflict Theory is like a test for a virus that always returns a positive result. It’s the witch hunter who somehow always finds that the accused is a witch.