{"id":171,"date":"2016-12-29T22:44:41","date_gmt":"2016-12-29T22:44:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.matthiasbrinkmann.de\/wordpress\/?p=171"},"modified":"2016-12-29T23:33:28","modified_gmt":"2016-12-29T23:33:28","slug":"judith-butler-on-difficult-writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.matthiasbrinkmann.de\/wordpress\/2016\/12\/judith-butler-on-difficult-writing\/","title":{"rendered":"Judith Butler on Difficult Writing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Judith Butler is often held to be an icon of bad academic writing<\/a>, and Martha Nussbaum\u2019s withering critique of Butler<\/a> is one of the most biting philosophical pieces I remember reading; where you come out on the Butler\u2014Nussbaum row might well be a shibboleth for where you stand more widely regarding matters of style in philosophy. But I\u2019ve only recently\u00a0become aware that Butler hasn\u2019t been silent on her own writing style, but has actually written in its defence<\/a>. The most interesting part of Butler\u2019s response is that she fully accepts that her writing is \u201cdifficult\u201d, though of course she rejects that it is \u201cbad\u201d. Butler\u2019s crucial defence is neatly contained in the following passage:<\/p>\n

Herbert Marcuse once described the way philosophers who champion common sense scold those who propagate a more radical perspective: \u201cThe intellectual is called on the carpet. \u2026 Don\u2019t you conceal something? You talk a language which is suspect. You don\u2019t talk like the rest of us, like the man in the street, but rather like a foreigner who does not belong here. We have to cut you down to size, expose your tricks, purge you.\u201d<\/p>\n

The accused then responds that \u201cif what he says could be said in terms of ordinary language he would probably have done so in the first place.\u201d Understanding what the critical intellectual has to say, Marcuse goes on, \u201cpresupposes the collapse and invalidation of precisely that universe of discourse and behavior into which you want to translate it.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Several ideas combine into one in this passage. First, demands for \u201cclarity\u201d should be seen as attempts to chastise radicals who deviate from the conventionally expected. Second, because radical writers mean to challenge and subvert the mainstream, form has to follow content: difficult writing is meant to shock placid readers out of their expectations. And third, perhaps it\u2019s not even possible to formulate radical thought in \u201cordinary language\u201d, as that language presupposes the \u201cuniverse of discourse\u201d the radical wishes to undermine.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I have little patience for the third argument\u2014it seems to me that it rests on a severe misunderstanding regarding the nature of language. Language can<\/em> shape thought, but that influence doesn\u2019t reach so far that radical thought couldn\u2019t be formulated in it clearly. The first claim\u2014that demands for clarity are used as political weapons against radical authors\u2014might well be true, but is also somewhat beside the point. Criticisms of philosophical style can just be attempts to dismiss thought which challenges the philosophical or political mainstream, but they don\u2019t have to be.<\/p>\n

So Butler\u2019s best point is that difficult writing has a shock function, that difficult writing is in some way meant to shock readers out of lazy, habitual assumptions regarding some subject matter, perhaps to provide them with a serious hint that they\u2019re subject to some kind of \u201cfalse consciousness\u201d which stops them from being receptive to truly alternative thought.<\/p>\n

In another interesting letter, in which she defends Spivak\u2019s writing<\/a> against Terry Eagleton\u2019s similar critique, Butler puts this point as follows:<\/p>\n

The wide-ranging audience for Spivak\u2019s work proves that spoon-feeding is less appreciated than forms of activist thinking and writing that challenge us to think the world more radically. Indeed, the difficulty of her work is fresh air when read against the truisms which, now fully commodified as \u2018radical theory\u2019, pass as critical thinking. Adorno surely had it right when he wrote \u2013 in\u00a0Minima Moralia<\/em>\u00a0(1951) \u2013 about those who recirculate received opinion: \u2018only what they do not need first to understand, they consider understandable; only the word coined by commerce, and really alienated, touches them as familiar.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(How lucid Butler\u2019s defence of difficult writing is!) So basic writing is in some ways meant to be subversive: form as well as content are meant to shock the reader out of their complacency.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not really buying it. First, if radical writing is meant to shock us out of our complacency, then it is curious how tame and conventional much of \u201cpostmodern\u201d writing still is. Sure, these writers use lots of obscure Latinate phrases, a generous dosis of neologisms, and write in long, noun-heavy sentences. But if you intended to shock someone out of complacency, you would expect much more fireworks: philosophy done as verse, say, or in aphorisms, or through different art forms altogether. We would expect radical theory to invent new words, forms, grammars, dialects, styles of address, and perhaps entire languages altogether\u2014all in all, we would expect it to leave much of the conventional niceties of the university publishing houses aside.<\/p>\n

Second, as Mark Bauerlein remarks<\/a>,<\/p>\n

Just because a bit of theory prose violates grammatical rules and stylistic tastes doesn\u2019t mean that a norm has been toppled. A norm may or may not fall; that depends on what actually happens with specific attempts.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In other words, it\u2019s an empirical question whether the challenge presented by difficult writing undermines conventional expectations. You cannot simply claim that subversive intent also has subversive effect. An alternative hypothesis for the radical might be that the best way to undermine the mainstream might be from within: to emulate the austere style of (what we may tentatively, if\u00a0somewhat misleadingly) call \u201canalytical philosophy\u201d, and then turn it subtly against it.<\/p>\n

What we ultimately need to consider, then, is a counterfactual. If radical writers like Butler had written in a different, less \u201cdifficult\u201d style, what would their political impact would have been? Would they achieve their political aims better or worse? The suspicion here is\u2014and that is one of Nussbaum\u2019s main points I tend to share\u2014that the obscurantist style of someone like Butler severely limits the appeal of her ideas and its political reach. If you wanted to be mean, you might claim that this is left-wing academia crippling itself through hopeless obscurantism. Butler, on the other hand, seems to suggest that Spivak\u2014whose writing is also difficult way, to put it mildly\u2014has been so influential partially because<\/em> she hasn\u2019t \u201cspoon-fed\u201d her message to her audience, but made her writing deliberately complex.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s some truth to Butler\u2019s claim. Difficult writers like Spivak and Butler\u00a0have<\/em> been enormously successful, perhaps much more so than more accessible writers. But I suspect that such writers have been successful despite, not because of, their difficult style\u2014and at any rate, they have only been successful amongst a very narrow sliver of fellow academics. Even where obscurity plays into the success of a writer, the relationship between obscurity and success isn\u2019t probably quite as benign as the \u201cshocking out of complacency\u201d narrative suggests. (Nussbaum<\/a> highlights some of these reasons effectively.) That difficult writing is valued is more likely to have to do with various sociological forces and reputation mechanisms inside academia.<\/p>\n

So it\u2019s not clear what we should think of the truth of the counterfactual. I suspect it depends on lots of background assumptions that defenders and opponents of Butler\u2019s style are unlikely to share. Still, there\u2019s an interesting upshot from Butler\u2019s discussion: there can be reasons to be deliberately difficult\u2014that is, more difficult than the topic would require\u2014in one\u2019s own writing. In this respect, I\u2019m happy to have some of my more na\u00efve beliefs about the tasks of a philosophical text challenged. The broader dilemma is that the two aims in writing\u2014outlining one\u2019s argument clearly, and one\u2019s text having the right psychological and political impact\u2014can come apart in the means they require. That\u2019s an interesting thought, even if I\u2019m not convinced that the dilemma is normally present.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Judith Butler is often held to be an icon of bad academic writing, and Martha Nussbaum\u2019s withering critique of Butler is one of the most biting philosophical pieces I remember reading; where you come out on the Butler\u2014Nussbaum row might well be a shibboleth for where you stand more widely regarding matters of style in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.matthiasbrinkmann.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.matthiasbrinkmann.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.matthiasbrinkmann.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.matthiasbrinkmann.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.matthiasbrinkmann.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=171"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.matthiasbrinkmann.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":174,"href":"http:\/\/www.matthiasbrinkmann.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171\/revisions\/174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.matthiasbrinkmann.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.matthiasbrinkmann.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.matthiasbrinkmann.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}