Latest Salvos

Lindsay Waters strikes again, four years ago (there's also a nice article on Perec).   I say, if you cannot beat 'em, join 'em.   The shame-faced and guilty decades-long Theory-pusher makes amends at last.   And why not?

(Update:  It's been brought to my attention that these two posts may be riding a little hard on Lindsay Waters, so for something a bit less snarky-popular and more philosophical perhaps, why not read this review by Steven Shaviro, from May of 2004.)

Why not begin by admitting everything up front?   It seems rather obvious they will be satisfied with nothing less.   At least maybe move the discussion along, for the love of God!   But wait, clever reader, surely he is not, this Waters fellow, a real anti-Theory-ite!   Surely we will not fall for that Eagletonian polemic bait once again.   This having one's cake and eating it will not stand!   (Instead, we shall take this pop article very seriously and debate it on our blogs.)   This pseudo-anti-Theory, veiled anti-Theory-ite ribbing will not stand!   It is too easy by half (though apparently effective enough).   Moreover, it is a bad model for public intellectuals.  It concedes too much in the interest of a compromise already lost. 
Let us debate:

After setting the hook, Waters proceeds to say some--indeed--rather interesting things:

There is deep uncertainty now inside universities about goals for the university as pertains to the humanities. Whatever goals we might have as humanists need to be articulated as clearly and as forcefully as we can make them now. We can stop crowing about the supposed virtue of ambivalence as a style of radical will. We need to reach a public and help constitute that public that stands apart from the state yet is profoundly interested in its every move. We have been too decadent as all the changes that have transpired over the last twenty-five years have taken place. Maybe we didn't want to get our hands burned. Maybe we didn't want to get our hands dirty. But getting caught up in the blame game now would be just another way of continuing with our bad old ways. A vast army of right-wing thinkers is eager to encourage those who are not conservatives to engage in bloodletting. They'll enjoy our making fools and worse of ourselves. "See, just what we predicted." Avoid that like the plague.

However, we do need to reexamine some of the ideas we have been developing over the last several decades. I will give several examples:

1. The death of the subject. This has been a key idea of the postmodernists who pick it up from Michel Foucault. Some leftwing postmodernists do not seem to realize that Foucault renounced this idea long before he died. He did an about-face and began to develop a whole set of ideas that go under the name of the "care of the self." Anyone who still promotes the death of the subject now is allying him or herself with the conservative ideology of Reaganism and Thatcherism. Thomas Hobbes laid out the philosophy of Reaganism centuries ago, and it boils down to this: You do not need to have an ego as long as the sovereign ruler convinces you he does and will let you share in his in a spell-binding spectacle of power. Reaganism is the postmodernism of the Right, celebrating the death of the subject and entertaining the citizenry with a series of small-scale wars that you can sleep out because they are all under control. All you need to worry about is finding the remote.

2. The incommensurability of peoples. This, too, has been one of the key ideas of some postmodernists, who have argued that only those inside a community can dare say a word of criticism about the practices within another community. The Ilingot of the Philippines are headhunters, and that is OK because if you could get inside their culture you would be able to see how killing others and making trophies of their skulls allowed them to let off steam in ways that are productive inside their culture. We should be similarly sympathetic when we hear about the tribal code of honor that calls for Pashtun men to kill any relative who sullies the family name. Cultures are incommensurable absolutely.8

3. The society of the spectacle. Following up on the work of Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem, many postmodernists have sought to understand how symbols work to enforce unity within a population, but cultural studies is an incomplete project and the most the general run of cultural studies analysis has done is to provide further tools to enable practices the professors of cultural studies pretend to subvert. The businessmen are usually way ahead of the profs, as Thomas Frank argues in The Conquest of Cool and Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello lay out in detail in their Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme (Gallimard, 1999).

Some of us have thought we were tearing down the Bastille; maybe we have been helping forge manacles.

I suggest one general principle for future work: Each and every field is too important to be left as the exclusive preserve of the people in it. Gain your professional skills the hard way, but seek ways to fly your teachers never taught you. Find your place of maturity and, if I can coin a word, amateurity. Against the triumph of professionalism that now terrifies young job seekers in literature to go to interviews dressed as if for a position at a Wall Street firm, we need now a rampant amateurism. We have all had the experience of seeing the word "interdisciplinary" bandied about in college catalogs and university statements of purpose: I ask you wherever you see that word to push and see if you are not touching the mush of soft rot. Of course, the best researchers are flagrant scofflaws about disciplinary boundaries, but most of the rest of us scoff them at our peril.

[...]

Where do the problems lie? I suggest they lie in us. The middle-aged profs are the Old Guard we heard about when we were young. What caught us off guard was that we thought the old, obstructive group would be aged from 55 to 65, but it turns out they are aged from 45 to 55. A hundred years ago the academy went through the same changes happening now in which a generation that thought of itself as revolutionary became upholders of the status quo. The Gilded Age had its Genteel academics, and so does our Gilded Age. Anthony Grafton gets the sad situation just right, alas, as he addresses you and me: "Well, my masters, we have now progressed so far in our enlightenment that we have gone back to the future. It's 1898 again. We--the proud public intellectuals, the brave subverters of ‘late capitalism'--maintain the genteel culture of our fin de siecle." But, warns Grafton, the kids of the 1890s did not buy the Genteel at their own self-estimate, and neither are the kids of the 1990s and the Zeroes. They don't "want to take part in our endless debates about who may say what about whom, our rehearsals of meta-theory."9

The idea of multiple publics blurs--or, worse, dodges--the issue of what we ought to be doing in the academy, the issue being to my mind how we ought to try to think about the public as a unifiable but not now unified field. Ambivalence and equivocation rule the clouded minds of the "transnational corporation" intellectuals of the present.10 But I have a preliminary problem. We have been talking in the academic world for the last fifteen years about "public intellectuals" and "intellectuals," but I frankly doubt whether there are very many public intellectuals. About ten years ago several mainstream journals were squawking out the news that they had just discovered that the U.S. now had some black public intellectuals. The truth of the matter is that they'd really have been something to write home about if they could prove the existence of some white public intellectuals. What it means to be a public intellectual was established in the U.S. in modern times by W. E. B. DuBois. There have been few white public intellectuals since his time and a goodly number of black ones, so the qualifier "black" is not necessary when you use the phrase "public intellectual."

Are you an intellectual? You may be an academic, but are you an intellectual? I think a lot of academics assume that being an academic and an egg-head automatically entitles one to the name intellectual. To try to think through this problem with you, I have devised a few simple questions for you to ask yourself in the privacy of your own study to help you think about whether you are an intellectual. I did not craft the list in any systematic way, as you will see, but I think these are worthy questions:

1. Have you ever been outside the U.S. to a non-European country to the extent of really getting your feet on the ground? The elite in the U.S., the academics and the rich, tend to spread their wings only in Europe, and the paths over there for the American elite are all pretty well marked.

2. Do you read outside the box? Do you read outside your field in some areas where you spend enough time to really understand how the natives think so that when you appropriate a cool quote you understand why the people in that field might understand that it signifies something very different to people outside the field? Another way of putting it, when you seek to add some local color from another field to your writing is your way of doing so smash and grab or do you develop a certain expertise in the other field?

3. Have you ever helped build an alternative form of communication by setting up a website, starting a journal?

4. Have you written essays or books that could lead you to be accused of being a dilettante? Unless you have taken the risk of saying things that might be perceived as impertinent you probably really are not an intellectual. (As I said, these questions were not devised in a systematic way; they contradict one another.)

5. Do you consider science and technology to be the opposite of whatever it is you pursue most fervently? Because, if you do, you might be an intellectual elsewhere, but you cannot be one in the United States. In the U.S. the pursuit of science and technology go hand in hand with all the arts and all intellectual pursuits.

6. Do you think you are, for better or for worse, implicated in the same set of structures of feeling that your fellow citizens--of whatever unity of governance you vote in--are caught up in? And do you wrestle with those structures like Jacob wrestling with his angel? If you do not, you are probably not a public intellectual.

Those who seek to be active intellectuals in the academic worlds have their work cut out for them now: We have to raise the stakes and "change the language," as Carrie Brownstein of the rock group Sleater-Kinney says. We must use our tools, the words and the media, and respect our machinery. When the members of the group Sleater-Kinney first saw some of the riot grrl bands play in Olympia, Washington, in 1991, they were immediately energized. Why? Because in the effort of the group Bikini Kill they saw for the first time "feminism translated into an emotional language." We have now over the last twenty-five years a vast body of professional feminist discourse, but very little of it--alas, like almost all professional literary theory--ever gets translated into emotional language. A humanism that is worth its salt would speak in a way that is persuasive to humankind.

I take it all back; perhaps this is a useful step.  Only let's not forget the question of humanism in the process, eh?  These claims are limited, tactical and vague.  They neither pertain to, nor serve as adequate grounds on which to indict "Theory" very much.  They do keep the anti-Theory-ites busy, however, and this may be useful in its own way.  The trick, only and of course, is not to let on that when they latch on to this popular meta-debate as grounds on which to stage another battle, they aren't going to be taken very seriously by those who know enough to see through the maneuver.  Or rather, no more seriously than philosophers take the above by Lindsay Waters.  It's popular, not scholarly.  It's Bernard Lewis, not Karen Armstrong.  Eagleton, not Derrida.  The distinction is after all still rather important, no? 

Comments

[Jodi]

Ultimately, Waters is advocating a retreat not an advance. He appeals to the notion of the public as if that notion could work today. Why not something else: a commons, a collective, movement of people opposed to Reagan, Thatcher, and postmodern advertising? Such a retreat is apparent in that he implies a kind of cultural superiority. Why not give voice to a collective opposed to, say, female genital mutilation and murdering one's relatives. His account of the discussion of the subject similarly implies a retreat into a 17th century account of an autonomous, reasoning subject. Why not accept the way that current thought recognizes processes of subject formation, subjectivization, or subject position? Why not consider the possibility of creating conditions that can call new subjects into being? The problem of the subject is clear in his misreading of Hobbes: the sovereign is correlative to the egoistic subject.

[rob]

I very much enjoyed this; but if I might be permitted to be "limited, tactical and vague":

Or rather, no more seriously than philosophers take the above by Lindsay Waters. It's popular, not scholarly. It's Bernard Lewis, not Karen Armstrong. Eagleton, not Derrida. The distinction is after all still rather important, no?

I think it is an important distinction, but... Lindsay Waters is, in the great academic division of labour -- which, in this article, he reinforces by the very gesture with which he attempts to traverse -- a literary critic. I.e. as much as he has an expert area it's Paul de Man; when he writes in journals it's Boundary2. Since Eagleton is also a critic, are you not implicitly identifying the opposition "popular"/"scholarly" with "critic"/"philosopher"? Do I detect a prejudical kernel at the heart of "theory"'s triumph: philosophers feeling slightly slighted by the invasion of the critics -- to use Waters' own terms, the suspicion that critics "smash and grab" rather than "develop a certain expertise"?

Honest questions from a smasher-and-grabber.

[Matt]

That's a probing question Rob; thanks.

The contribution to philosophy on the part of philosopher-critics, from Mallarmé to Blanchot to Benjamin, is certainly not be underestimated or taken for granted. Literature--as the impossible--will always be the province of philosophy. But I do think there is a distinction to be made between staging an interventions in 'the public sphere' (or what is left of this concept, as Jodi aptly wonders) and a kind of thinking that aspires to specific higher standards, and I think the distinction hinges on the foreclosure upon self-questioning (and openness to the other qua other) inherent to polemic. As Foucault once pithily remarked, when coming across the strong whiff of polemic in something he was reading, he would often simply put the book down.

As to whether Waters is performing the role of a critic or instead that of a popular spokesman, issuing a manifesto here, I'm not sure. Would his intended audience be different were he writing instead about Benjamin? Is he speaking here as a public intellectual or as an "expert" on deMan, or maybe a little of both? Do these intentions really matter all that much? Perhaps more than anything the above distinction is important to ap-ply in context, if it is to hold any, you know..

I would suspect the general charge of elitism, or hostility to democratization is too broad to stick to "philosophy" in any useful or meaningful way, especially if one is talking about "Theory" or its alleged "triumph" or death, or whatever.

Admittedly, the above is itself something of a polemic. There may indeed be a world of difference in quality between Lindsay Waters and Bernard Lewis, even if, in this instance, Waters is seducing and perhaps making concessions to a wider audience than that which would otherwise be likely to ante up their ears (just as, you know, anyone assuming the mantle of public intellectual inevitably posits or imposes a certain 'public').

Of course in another tradition, such positing might better be read as an extending of this very question: of what constitutes a public or being-in-common.

[josef k.]

I would tend to agree with Jodi. But a couple of things catch my eye.

First, in the very notion of a public intellectual, do we not retreat so far back as to effectively wind-up behind Marx. After all: "We ought to try to think about the public as a unifiable but not now unified field" - does this dictum not position itself explicitly against the notion of the class struggle, the idea that the society is constitutely divided.

Or is this formulation to a certain degree a strategic feint? I am thinking here of the miraculous moblizing fictions of Badiou. Interestingly, Waters seems to have his own spin on this, clearest in his discussion of feminism and riot grrl, where he seems to suggest that, to be truly effective, such fictions demand to be written in emotional language.

Secondly, I would say that it is interesting that Waters suggests that the figure of the black public intellectual has served as the most prominent form of the figure of the public intellectual in general. I am hesitant about conflating race and class here, but thinking about the recent social history of the United States, I wonder if it would be fair to say that this formulation implies for the model of a public intellectual the taking of an engaged and militant position. I am thinking of course, in the case of black public intellectuals, of the civil rights movement.

From this, I wonder if it does not make sense to turn Walters around. Perhaps, instead of thinking of the public as a unifiable but not now unifed field, we should think about the State, as a presently monolithic but potentially fragmentable totality.

To be sure, maybe the role of the "public intellectual", is precisely to insist, by some means, that real divisions are still existent in the fictionally and ideologically unified "public"?

[McCathy's ghost]

I like to visit this blog periodically, but this evening was doing so for the first time since installing a new internet security program that includes something called "parental contol." The following is the message I received when trying to reach Long Sunday...

"This webpage has been denied by Parental Control. The webpage you are trying to access contains restricted material (Adult) and is therefore blocked by Parental Control. To access this webpage, click the icon on your system tray and select the 'Parental Control'. This reveals two options:

* Choose 'Show website list...', select the blocked webpage and allow it.
* Choose 'Suspend Webpage Filter' to turn off the filter for this session.

Note: Both actions require the Parental Control password."

What could have triggered this intervention, I wonder? Could it have been the word "terrorism"?

[anonymous]

I doubt it. Probably the dirty poshlost' photos. Though maybe YH is under investigation by the parent-in-chief, who knows. Don't mention he's not American.

[John S. Ransom]

Waters' accusations against -- what? the academy? postmodernism? -- are not very thoughtful. For instance:

[begin Waters]Subjectivity is what James Brown calls "soul power." With the elimination of the subject the experience the subject might undergo goes under erasure. That is to say, it becomes extinct. There is something profoundly ecological about these developments, because as subject and experience melt away, so does "culture." [end Waters]

And we get the same old nonsense about incomprehensible books without the common, intellectual decency of an example.

So let's insert one for him and see how it plays out. Mark Bauerlein wrote an article commenting on Judith Butler winning a prize for – hah hah! – incredibly obscure writing. His article is located here:

http://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/philosophy_and_literature/sample.html

I thought Butler was attacked unfairly, and so I wrote the guy. Here's our exchange, with me going first:

-----Original Message-----
From: DICKINSON COLLEGE BOLOGNA
Sent: martedì 21 dicembre 2004 19.06
From: John Ransom
To: 'Mark Bauerlein PhD'
Subject: RE: judith butler

I'm sorry, I really don't get what is supposed to be so incomprehensible about Judith Butler's sentence. Here's what she says:

"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
END BUTLER QUOTATION

Well, what's supposed to be so horrible about that? Look, isn't the real basis of misunderstanding found in a lack of familiarity with structuralist thought? And isn't such familiarity a not unreasonable requirement for reading Butler? She's saying that structuralism started off being excessively static. Anyone familiar with structuralist founders like Comte and Spencer knows that there is this strong ahistoric tendency in that school of thought which treats the efficiency of the structure as some kind of self-sufficient purpose. Nor is it at all strange that she refers to Althusser here; on the contrary, it's quite apt. And then she says that there's this move that goes beyond structure as an all-embracing totality unaffected by time to one that takes into account temporality, which in turn makes for contingency, which in turn makes structures that much less absolute.

What the heck is supposed to be so incomprehensible about that? I would say the jargon level is quite moderate. I really just don't get it. And this won first prize for bad academic writing? The people who came up with it should get a prize for bad reading. -- John Ransom

Mr. Bauerlein was kind enough to reply. He wrote:

Dear Mr. Ransom,

The sentence isn't incomprehensible if one has the implicit references. But the
sentence is clotted, inflated, and abstract to a fault. It is only in the other sentence that I quoted from Butler that we see basic grammatical errors occur. If you're going to condemn P & L for its choice, though, you're going to have to condemn the entire public arena as well, for Butler didn't have a single defender outside the theory clique.

Mark Bauerlein

To which I responded:

Dear Mr. Bauerlein,

Thank you very much for the kindness of your reply. But I still think it's remarkable that Butler's sentence is chosen as the *worst* instance of impossible-to-understand jargon. And if I'm right that P & L is mistaken in its choice of Butler's sentence, then people from the public arena should have the commitment to intellectual charity to say so. And so then the question is: Am I right or wrong about Butler's sentence? Is the judgment as "worst possible sentence of academic writing ever encountered" a just one? Is it fair, if we add -- as we must -- the impicit references?

And there's another thing. Isn't there an incredibly long history of exactly the same types of responses to theoretical work? And I mean *exactly the same* types of responses. I mean, let's leave aside Hegel for a minute – remember what people thought of Kant! They couldn't believe it! Neither could I when I first approached it, and lots of people, in and out of the theory clique at the time, had the same reaction.

Of course the same was true with Plato: the dialogues are littered with people who really don't understand what Socrates is saying. They're not just playing dumb. (If interested, I'll send citations.) There's a very long history of just this kind of relationship.

Do you remember Schopenhauer's comments on Hegel?

BEGIN SCHOPENHAUER ON HEGEL
If I were to say that the so-called philosophy of this fellow Hegel is a colossal piece of mystification which will yet provide posterity with an inexhaustible theme for laughter at our times, that it is a pseudo-philosophy paralyzing all mental powers, stifling all real thinking, and, by the most outrageous misuse of language, putting in its place the hollowest, most senseless, thoughtless, and, as is confirmed by its success, most stupefying verbiage, I should be quite right.

Further, if I were to say that this summus philosophus [...] scribbled nonsense quite unlike any mortal before him, so that whoever could read his most eulogized work, the so-called Phenomenology of the Mind, without feeling as if he were in a madhouse, would qualify as an inmate for Bedlam, I should be no less right.
END SCHOPENHAUER ON HEGEL

But I'm sorry, Schopenhauer was wrong about Hegel, not that there aren't things to disagree with Hegel about.

Thanks again for your response.

-- John Ransom

As you can see from this exchange, there's just not the slightest particle of intellectual honesty and decency among these critics of postmodernism. They are so sure they are right, that they never feel the need to offer even a single instance of obscure writing. And when a piece of obscure writing is offered, and it is pointed out that the writing in question is by no means anywhere near being as obscure as it is gigglingly made out to be, they just shrug their shoulders, secure in the knowledge that "everyone" knows that Theory is obscure.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

John,

First, unless you have someone's permission to publish private correspondence, it's not considered kosher to do so.

Second, in his book Literary Criticism: An Autopsy, Mark spends fifteen pages demonstrating why a single sentence by Homi Bhabha is both inelegant and philosophically incoherent. In fact, he devotes an entry to a number of concepts and demonstrates why they're philosophically unsound. Now, you can take issue with his arguments, but first you have to be polite enough to acknowledge that they're there.

[Fred Astaire]

Yup, with a swagger of the fingers, so the "theory clique" is exiled from the "public arena."

As Shakespeare once said:

We are such stuff
as dreams are made on...

[John S. Ransom]

Scott Eric Kaufmann writes:

Second, in his book Literary Criticism: An Autopsy, Mark spends fifteen pages demonstrating why a single sentence by Homi Bhabha is both inelegant and philosophically incoherent. In fact, he devotes an entry to a number of concepts and demonstrates why they're philosophically unsound. Now, you can take issue with his arguments, but first you have to be polite enough to acknowledge that they're there.

I respond:
It's not true that I haven't been polite enough to the author. The claim I was responding to was that Judith Butler deserved the criticism that was delivered by those who condemned her sentence as the worst piece of academic writing on tap. I wrote to him concerning whether or not it was tenable to criticize Butler this way, and I demonstrated with great clarity -- in my opinion -- that it was not. There was nothing at all unclear about Butler's sentence. I am not required to know about what the guy says about Homi Bhabha in order to comment about what he says about Judith Butler.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

John,

I refer not to your specific point about Butler's sentence and the Bad Writing Contest but to the generalization you draw from it:

As you can see from this exchange, there's just not the slightest particle of intellectual honesty and decency among these critics of postmodernism.

Also, the position you reject isn't Mark's. It's yours. You conflate incomprehensibility and terrible prose then accuse Mark of intellectual dishonesty for saying a passage he could understand was poorly written...when in fact all Mark said is that it was poorly written.

To wit: Just because it's not incomprehensible doesn't mean it's not "clotted, inflated, and abstract to a fault." It is. The fact that you "demonstrate with great clarity" that the sentence isn't incomprehensible indicates to me that you value, well, "great clarity." And while it may be comprehensible, Butler's sentence isn't an exemplar of clarity. That's all Mark said, so far as I can see. (However, in the book I linked to, he does demonstrate that behind that lack of clarity about some common critical terms is a fundamental philosophical incoherence. But as you note, that's outside the purview of the current discussion.)

[anonymous]

Oh look, here's your hero Bauerlein dignifying Horowitz "deconstructing" Chomsky.

{Gasp} Could the players in these debates be at all political?

[John S. Ransom]

Scott Eric Kaufman writes:

And while it may be comprehensible, Butler's sentence isn't an exemplar of clarity.
[end excerpt from Scott Eric Kaufman]

Butler's sentence is fucking too an exemplar of clarity. This is *granted* by Bauerlein, who grants that "[Butler's] sentence *isn't incomprehensible* if one has the implicit references." (emphasis added)

Well if it "isn't incomprehensible" and especially if it makes all the sense in the world if one includes -- as is quite reasonable here -- the 'implicit references' then it is a calumny to claim that Judith Butler has written an especially incomprehensible sentence. A calumny. An unreasonable, intellectually incurious, downright anti-intellectual calumny. One that *reasonable people* should rush to denounce and disassociate themselves from.

Look, believe it or not, colleagues in the 'theory' fold deserve intellectual charity just as much as anyone else. What does 'intellectual charity' require? This was explained to me the first time I complained to a professor of mine about the strangeness I felt when confronting -- do you want to guess? I'll tell you! Rawls! My professor was kind and patient, because his or her main goal was that I should take Rawls seriously, which doesn't mean agree with everything or anything. This professor said: "If there's some way to construe the argument of the person you read or listen to that does not conclude the author or person is stupid or some other intellectual fault, then *intellectual charity* dictates that one is to read (or hear) that person in as favorable a light as possible." One is not to positively *try* to make one's interlocutor into an idiot. But isn't that just what happened to Butler? People *tried* to make her out to be an idiot -- but I'm sorry, Judith Butler has written incredibly valuable and insightful material on gender and other topics, and those who seek to *ridicule* her should be ashamed. Deeply, intellectually, ashamed.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

I can feel the love in this room. Anon:

Oh look, here's your hero Bauerlein dignifying Horowitz "deconstructing" Chomsky.

I have an idea: why don't we skip the conversation and resort to childish taunts immediately. Or you can read what I wrote, see that I pointed to a disconnect between the claim Mark made and the one John attributed to him and then discuss it. Or we could turn this into a playground. And yes, with Bauerlein, a staunch libertarian, I would expect what he writes about The Anti-Chomsky Reader to be sympathetic. What's your point? That you don't like libertarians, or that Chomsky's work hasn't become increasingly sloppy in recent years? Because we could have that conversation, too. (Without sharing Bauerlein's libertarian philosophy, I'd be inclined to make the same argument about Chomsky. He's not the mind he once was...which, to use your logic, would mean that I agree with David Horowitz. Even though I don't. But hey! Maybe you could score a rhetorical point anyway.)

John: I'm not defending Mark, nor am I defending the Bad Writing contest. I'm simply pointing out that there are two distinct criteria being conflated here: comprehensibility and prose style. To say that someone's a "bad writer" is simply to say that they're a "bad writer." It doesn't speak to the quality of the thought but the clarity of its presentation. I've noted when theorists whose work I respect sometimes aren't the best writers. Am I saying that I don't think Amanda Anderson's work valuable or insightful? Or am I simply saying that her prose leaves something to be desired? See the distinction? In case not:

Well if it "isn't incomprehensible" and especially if it makes all the sense in the world if one includes -- as is quite reasonable here -- the 'implicit references' then it is a calumny to claim that Judith Butler has written an especially incomprehensible sentence.

Mark never claimed the sentence was incomprehensible. He said it was "clotted, inflated, and abstract to a fault," ipso facto your claim that he's being intellectually dishonest fails to stick. He isn't. He's saying that on the one hand, that's a terrible sentence, but on the other, it's comprehensible. Hell, you could probably understand this sentence I wrote earlier:

"However, in the book I linked to, he does demonstrate that behind that lack of clarity about some common critical terms is a fundamental philosophical incoherence."

But it's poorly constructed, barely even up to the low low low standards of a blog comment. All those nested clauses and stacked prepositional phrases. But it is understandable. Same thing with the Butler sentence. Do you think you could diagram it? Or that she couldn't cut down on the number of prepositional phrases and subordinate clauses? Is her point so dependent on the infelicities of her prose that she'd be unable to communicate it any other way? Of course not. I've read lucid explications of Butler's thought before. It can be done. That she not only refuses to do so but insists on doing otherwise is the point of contention.

Do I agree with people like Katha Pollitt who would shame her into doing so? Certainly not. But if Butler's honestly interested in her ideas having an effect on public discourse, then she should think about writing in a manner that the intelligent public doesn't recoil from. Put it another way:

John Dewey struggled his entire life to communicate his ideas with as much clarity as could muster so they'd receive as wide a hearing as possible. Did he ever succeed in doing so? No. But did he ever stamp his foot and decide his difficult style a virtue? Never. Why not? Because he wanted to change society and realized that he wouldn't be able to do so if he didn't attempt to communicate with it. Butler, on the other hand, trumpets the political importance of her work while proudly writing in a way guaranteed to prevent her from accomplishing her states aims. I see that as a problem. But this is all old hat, no? The typical leftist complaint about the other leftist whose sincerity is suspect because his or her actions never quite correspond to his or her words.

Look, believe it or not, colleagues in the 'theory' fold deserve intellectual charity just as much as anyone else. What does 'intellectual charity' require?

I haven't stated otherwise. Why you would assume I have, I don't know.

[Matt]

Sorry to interrupt this, but...

John,

I agree that Waters begins with an all-too-common criticism wrt cultural studies/postmodernism/turtles/salamandersanddoves.

Strangely enough, he seems to balance these apparently defeatist remarks (the tired and obvious refrain about late capitalism co-opting and appropriating Theory) with an appeal to a more global intellectualism, one that thinks outside the box (and recognizes itself as working on an "incomplete project"). I don't think these remarks are entirely without value, however popularly couched.

The observation he makes, in the section emboldened above, insofar as it may be extracted from any too-hasty prescription, is to some degree, of course, an accurate one.

Others may have described the context with more care. To pick a more or less random example, from the first issue of n+1 magazine, in the section sub-headed, "PoMo NeoCons:"

"Writing about cartoons in a high style is meant to convince us that Disney belongs to an indigenous American "great tradition." What it belongs to is "cult-studs." Apgar's piece takes the techniques of Marxism-influenced cultural analysis--now available at a discount at most universities--but changes the expected pessimistic conclusions about alienation, loss of individuality, and the perpetuation of noxious ideology into a patriotic rhapsody. Disney's Mouse "continues to captivate the masses"--the masses?--"and provoke the creative mind--in part because [he] personifies the drive, optimism, and relentless quest for happiness that are the core traits of America."

If the Standard wants to do for Mickey Mouse what Marxism did for tractors, who are we to deny them their fun? But when they try out Foucault, their articles get nasty....

Like plenty of the fare at The Standard, these writers demonstrate a facility with the language, methods and moves of disciplines thought to have been the exclusive preserve of the academic left. This may reflect the developing consciousness of a right-wing poststructuralism and postmodernism. Or it may just be the shaping of intelligent editors who have learned from the enemies they affect to despise. Whether from complacency or ignorance, too many of us with left-wing prejudices believed that "advanced methods" were enough to change the world. The Standard proves that learning to think strategically about symbolic forms doesn't necessitate any substantive politics.

Although, inevitably, most of The Standard's editors hail from the same Ivy League milieu as the rest of the Washington intelligentsia, they love to decry the secret elitism of their opponents..."

-n+1, "The Intellectual Scene," issue one

It seems to me that if Waters' remarks have value, it is in the context of this (unfortunately, still only budding) awareness of complicity, or rather--more accurately: co-option. That he structures his appeal for the baby with the bathwater crowd is perhaps unfortunate.

[John S. Ransom]

Scott Eric Kaufman writes:

To say that someone's a "bad writer" is simply to say that they're a "bad writer." It doesn't speak to the quality of the thought but the clarity of its presentation.
[end excerpt]

Well, I think a lot more is being asserted than that. The bad writing is supposed to be indicative of a much deeper fault, and this is made the basis for dismissing lots of people with -- it seems to me -- contempt. Making fun of postmodern writing is the slightly more 'intellectual' counterpart to complaining loudly about 'political correctness.' To me, this makes it almost impossible to get the conversation going, as it just seems like there is so much intellectual bad faith at the outset. And that's what critics of postmodernism want, it seems: not to have a conversation, because their first move is ridicule. Their second move is more "serious": postmodern relativism and nihilism undermine the basis of all things Good. (How we get from "incomprehensible" to "undermining Western civilization in the face of the Islamo-fascist threat" is unclear, but there it is.) And then when I remember that this is exactly the treatment so many founders and trailblazers of philosophy have received going back Socrates, I wonder further whether 'postmodernism' or just plain ol' everyday 'philosophy' is the object.

[Matt]

(An uncomfortable silence around the water cooler doth descend. It's true that nuanced philosophical defenses of postmodernism are rare these days, and that the (largely political) reasons for this are not entirely just. (Even while fashions in literary study become more sweepingly distant--indeed, infatuated with an easy distance--and in a recognizable sense perhaps, glibly postmodernist all the time, ushered in under the same predictable feel-good and hippie-ish equivocations and avoidance of 'persistent critique' that so characterized the bad postmodernism.) To some degree this climate is a result--to further a speculation quoted earlier--of a general ongoing awakening and awareness of, dare we say it, a fundamentally postmodern condition. On the other hand, there are serious critiques--philosophical critiques, such as those of Gillian Rose--that continue to go, quite lamentably, unresponded to.

At this point you know I'd offer something collegial like: "Careful John, you're liable to have a doorstop hurled at your head," but then I suspect the air is simply poisoned such, and your remark perceived to be insulting enough, that it will merely be ignored as utterly beneath contempt (or already answered). To be sure, there was recently a call-to-arms anthology published, and a reluctant blog-war waged, in which one side repeatedly proclaimed such things as "the critique of Theory is itself philosophical" and anyone who questioned the rigor and applicability of this mantra, much less hinted at a history of anti-intellectualism, was promptly tarred and feathered. Or maybe just egged. Are you looking for some egg, Mr. Ransom?)

[Craig]

Maybe all concerned should agree to have a all pre-trial motions heard here and then agree have the trial set for the next MLA?

[John S. Ransom]

I don't understand the stuff about the doorstop or the egg. I also can't find the insult above, but I apologize for writing in a way that was perceived to be insulting. (The person who is really and directly insulted is, of course, Judith Butler.)

But anyway, Matt, I agree with you that there is definitely something interesting in the appeal "to a more global intellectualism" as you put it. But let's take one moment from the bit you quote:

"Whether from complacency or ignorance, too many of us with left-wing prejudices believed that 'advanced methods' were enough to change the world. The Standard proves that learning to think strategically about symbolic forms doesn't necessitate any substantive politics."

Well, first of all I deny that anyone is ignorant or complacent, and why those are the only two possibilities I don't know. But second, why not actually assess the contributions to the political scene made by those who have chamnpioned advanced methods and have thought about symbolic forms? The author assumes that nothing positive political came out of left intellectual movements over the past forty years. But that not only doesn't seem fair, it also doesn't seem thoughtful, which is worse. Instead of writing down on paper a thoughtless prejudice -- "theory types in the academy have never done anything but masturbate loudly for forty years now, what with their advanced methods and symbolic forms" -- why not be serious, and ask: "What contribution to the political scene has been made by left-wing intellectuals using theoretical models that swirl loosely around the term 'postmodernism' over the past forty years?"

Is the answer really "no discernible contribution whatsoever?" I think we would all immediately be on our guard about such a conclusion, because something serious doesn't seem right. Namely, if all these postmodernist, deconstructionist, gender-studying academics were really so inconsequential in the public sphere, why are they attacked over and over and over again? Why are they taken so seriously, if only to be "purged"?

In fact, these attacks point to the political efficacy of the academic left, even if they do not yet clarify what it consists in. Let's put it this way, people like David Horowitz aren't out there for nothing. And he's only a foot soldier in this dirty little war.

[John S. Ransom]

Scott Eric Kaufmann writes:

John Dewey struggled his entire life to communicate his ideas with as much clarity as could muster so they'd receive as wide a hearing as possible. Did he ever succeed in doing so? No. But did he ever stamp his foot and decide his difficult style a virtue? Never. Why not? Because he wanted to change society and realized that he wouldn't be able to do so if he didn't attempt to communicate with it. Butler, on the other hand, trumpets the political importance of her work while proudly writing in a way guaranteed to prevent her from accomplishing her states aims. I see that as a problem. But this is all old hat, no? [end excerpt from Kaufmann]

I like John Dewey too. But I think you are unfair to Butler. I don't think it's true that she writes proudly in a way guaranteed to prevent her from accomplishing her stated aims. One piece of evidence for this contention of mine is that, to a large extent, Butler has accomplished her aims. She's had a big effect on people. Lots of people have read Gender Trouble. Important people, too: people who graduate from college and go on to become leaders and opinion-makers, which is the way in which the effects of someone like Butler should be measured. But to test her supposed incomprehensibility, I did a little test. I went to amazon.com, and looked up the book. They have an option at amazon.com where you can click 'surprise me' and you are taken to a random page in a book. That's what I did and here's what Butler wrote on the random, computer-selected page:

[begin Butler excerpt]
The various explanatory models offered here suggest the very different ways in which the category of sex is understood depending on how the field of power is articulated. Is it possible to maintain the complexity of these fields of power and think through their productive capacities together? On the one hand, Irigaray's theory of sexual difference suggests that women can never be understood on the model of a "subject" within the conventional representational systems of Western culture precisely because they constitute the fetish of representation and, hence, the unrepresentable as such. Women can never "be," according to this ontology of substances, precisely because they are the relation of difference, the excluded, by which that domain marks itself off. Women are also a "difference" that cannot be understood as the simple negation or "Other" of the always-already-masculine subject. As discussed earlier, they are neither the subject nor its Other, but a difference from the economy of binary opposition, itself a ruse for a monologic elaboration of the masculine.
Central to each of these views, however, is the notion that sex appears within hegemonic language as a *substance*, as, metaphysically speaking, a self-identical being. This appearance is achieved through a performative twist of language and/or discourse that conceals the fact that "being" a sex or gender is fundamentally impossible. For Irigaray, grammar can never be a true index of gender relations precisely because it supports the substantial model of gender as a binary relation between two positive and representable terms.[endnote] In Irigaray's view, the substantive grammar of gender, which assumes men and women as well as their attributes of masculine and feminine, is an example of a binary that effectively masks the univocal and hegemonic discourse of the masculine, phallogocentrism, silencing the feminine as a site of subversive multiplicity. [end Butler excerpt, from p. 25 of *Gender Trouble*]

Does anyone really have such a problem with that? I've assigned sections of this text to students in a seminar on subjectivity. It's a natural choice.

[M]

John,
You are right of course.

The article is certainly somewhat tongue-in-cheek, in referencing a popular (if not dominant) trope. In truth I think its author(s) may agree with you.

Not to belabor this, but the potential for insult might be found, I suspect, in your implying that the more "intellectual" critique of Theory/posmodernism/hamandeggs was, while not as bad as Horowitz, at least implicitly still anti-intellectual.

[McKenzie Wark]

I don't see much engagement here with Lindsay's main agenda, which i take to be:

1. the right wing anti-public sphere completely changed the relationship between thought and power. That's the main thing that ought to galvanize our attention.

2. one of the strengths of conservative intellectual practice is its ability to understand and deploy affect. Hence affect ought to be something important to work on.

3. most of ther doxa of the leftish theory crowd is just not very interesting. Either (a) not interesting any more, or perhaps (b) never was. Anybody wanting to do new and interesting work would probably not sift through the tea leaves of 20 years of theory journals.

4. That doxa let go of some important stuff anyway, which is worth recovering.

I think (1) through (3) are interesting and challeging ideas. I'm not entirely sure about the value of (4) or whether it is all that closely connected to the rest of the argument. Indeed Lindsay's insistence on it might weaken the broader appeal of his points (1) through (3).

Is it possible to coordinate thought as action? Is it possible to create new publics? The success of the right wiing anti-public sphere proves that it is. One might not want to build anything like it, but the very idea that one can build new publics is a challenge worth taking up, i think.

(full disclosure: Lindsay published my book A Hacker Manifesto, so i'm not necessarily a disinterested party).

[Jodi]

John,

I think your arguments here are absolutely correct. On Butler, in recent years she's been undertaking ever more of what we might call public intellectual work, particularly on the matter of criticism of Israel and not letting charges of anti-semitism rule out the possibility of such critique in advance. In my view, this is important work.

What's at stake in the pretense that her writing is somehow too hard for mere mortals? To me, that pretense is the worst sort of flattening out of political discussion, as if to speak and argue were to grunt and gesticulate (what we might call the presidential mode of presentation).

Here is an example from my experience: mainstream critics (the nation, new york review of books, nyt book review) of my book on alien abduction emphasized the postmodern jargon, dismissing me as a cult stud and all that; yet, in no one writing in the UFO and conspiracy press mentioned the jargon or language at all; and a mainer than mainstream review--Library Journal--said the book was approachable by high school students! So, what do we make of the protectors of the idiots? It's like the nation and new york review of books want to establish and police certain terrains in the name of difficulty and clarity.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

John writes:

But I think you are unfair to Butler. I don't think it's true that she writes proudly in a way guaranteed to prevent her from accomplishing her stated aims.

I didn't mean to be unfair to her so much as repeat arguments she's made, both in the NY Times and in the volume Bauerlein reviewed. My point, briefly, is that her defense of the difficulty of her prose seems to me at odds with her statements about the necessity of public intellectuals. I could demonstrate exactly why I find that excerpt mystifying, but it'd sound familiar to the complaints I have about abstractions (which she reproduces) in key moments in Foucault's corpus. (And before anyone thinks I'm being unfair to Foucault here, or simply dismissing him, since he's the theorist whose work has most influenced my own methodology. I only say this because things tend to get a little binary around here sometimes; I don't want anyone to think that any unhagiographic-type statement "from someone in my camp" equates an attack, since in this case it's the small difference of engaged thought.)

Anyhow: No, I understand what Butler's written, but it's not clear, the syntax isn't clean, it's riddled with abstractions (and piles them one on top another), &c. Imbricated as we are in the discourse, it's difficult for us to see that...but we've been trained to read such prose, which should undermine the idea that she's trying to engage the public. A public intellectual, in other words, shouldn't require three or four years of post-graduate study to understand. Again, that's not to attack her work, only the conflict between her stated aims and actual prose.

Jodi,

I haven't read your book, but from what I have read of your work on Zizek, I wouldn't say it reaches the heights of abstraction Butler's does. It didn't set off the unnecessary and unqualified abstraction alarms Butler does (even in the passage above).

[John S. Ransom]

I want to try another idea. Popular myth: left-wing academics have failed to create any kind of efficacious public. McKenzie Wark above points out that the right wing has been able to create effective publics, and urges that this is something we all ought to be interested in. The implication, I think, is that the left doesn't do that much in this area. But I think that's an urban legend! (Or maybe a rural or suburban legend. Since when do legends originate in population centers of various kinds?) Namely, left intellectuals helped create and foster political correctness. And political correctness has had a profoundly beneficial influence on all sorts of publics, and has created a few of its own. I know its politically correct to be politically incorrect, but I think if we really sat down and added up the pluses and minuses of what's popularly labelled political correctness, we'd find the pluses making a very good case for themselves.