I've read several books by Deleuze and Guattari, but haven't had any formal instruction on postmodernism. They're hilariously opaque, but also pretty interesting if you have the patience.
At one point in A Thousand Plateaus, the authors say that vaginas are just penises travelling faster than the speed of light. Does anyone think this is meant to be analyzed scientifically? To say that there's no scientific rigor in this statement misses the point; scientific rigor has almost no impact on how people live their lives.
For someone analyzing human beings, the truth of science is much less interesting than how scientific concepts can be misunderstood, and the authority of science misapplied. The co-opting of a precise scientific term can be frustrating to someone who has spent their entire life studying it, but that doesn't mean it's all hot air and empty words.
"At one point in A Thousand Plateaus, the authors say that vaginas are just penises travelling faster than the speed of light. Does anyone think this is meant to be analyzed scientifically?"
Does anyone think that's actually a coherent statement?
Sure, the proposition that "penises are vaginas travelling faster than the speed of light" is perfectly coherent. Vaginas and penises are perfectly well-defined, and the notion of a penis travelling faster than the speed of light is, while not considered possible by any existing physical models, is entirely logically sensible.
It remains to determine whether vaginas are, in fact, penises travelling faster than the speed of light. The short answer is no, since anything travelling faster than the speed of light would be travelling faster than the speed of light, and vaginas typically travel subluminally. Thus, we have proven this well-formed statement false.
I realize that we're all programmers here, and that we live and die by unambiguous semantics. But human languages are awash in ambiguity and borderline nonsense, and the only thing holding it all together are some shared concepts and idioms. The disjoint between the clarity of science and the ambiguity of human communication is really interesting, and by that token something can be both incoherent and rich with meaning (though obviously this isn't always the case).
At one point in A Thousand Plateaus, the authors say that vaginas are just penises travelling faster than the speed of light. Does anyone think this is meant to be analyzed scientifically? To say that there's no scientific rigor in this statement misses the point; scientific rigor has almost no impact on how people live their lives.
For someone analyzing human beings, the truth of science is much less interesting than how scientific concepts can be misunderstood, and the authority of science misapplied. The co-opting of a precise scientific term can be frustrating to someone who has spent their entire life studying it, but that doesn't mean it's all hot air and empty words.
Most feminist criticism is pretty silly, though.