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2:57am August 13, 2014

amorpha-system:

solipsistful:

spoiler:

we have read very little Foucault first-hand

most of our knowledge about him and his theories comes from lectures and stuff. probably still not the most accessible language still, but better than Foucault’s awkwardly translated and purposefully dense writing

so that’s kinda another reason to hate academia and how it functions. all that complicated language and such isn’t just a barrier to keep out people who don’t have the skills to read them — they’re a barrier that often becomes lowered once you have the privilege to be in a university environment in the first place, where you have the opportunity to be explained these things without the writing. i hear professors again and again talk about how they hate postmodern writing and how difficult it is to read

“So then… stop????”

grumble grumble. what am i getting myself into.

- Ace

Yeeeaaaahhh, if even *professors* have a difficult time getting through it, that’s… not a good thing, and makes me wonder why that style of writing exists to begin with.  I know youneedacat has talked about hir experiences with people who insist that using terms like postmodern, critical theory, etc, is “just using these words to silence people who talk about their own experiences,” when hir experience- and ours as well— involved learning terms like critical theory from people who were *deeply into it,* sometimes to a perseverative extent. (This is part of why I think there’s definitely value in recognizing different types of autistic cognition, people just need to get past the idea that they have to do with whether you can talk or not— some of the people we’ve known who were most intensely perseverative about certain kinds of academic theory and ideology were autistic.  And that’s a cognitive style which doesn’t mesh with ours well at all, and is in some cases the total opposite of it.) 

…that being the case, I also wish to gods people would stop assuming that nonbinary gender identities are always based in some kind of academic ideology rather than an intuitive sense that what you’re seen/addressed as isn’t right for you. *thud.* All the “U TRANSTRENDER, U MUST HAVE READ FOUCAULT AND THINK UR IDENTITY IS SO TRENDY” stuff also often seems to be tied in with “well, being binary trans is okay BECAUSE SCIENCE” ideologies.

And when we’ve tried to pick apart writing that our brain has a really hard time getting through, like the infamous (in-system, anyway) “Rhetorical Gendering of Autism” paper, what we do get out of it, when it’s stripped down to the most basic concepts, is… things that are pretty obvious to us, drawn out into long-winded impenetrable language.

(…I’ve also read some postmodern writing on plurality, both dissociative and non-dissociative.  Couldn’t make heads or tails of it. :p)

-S.