Martha and Judith and My Book

[kelly_chambliss]

Today, in what was partly book research and partly avoidance behavior, I reread scholar Martha Nussbaum's famous (in academic circles, at least) denunciation of feminist theorist Judith Butler (New Republic, 1999). Butler first gained fame in the 1990s for her book Gender Trouble, which contained her theory of gender-as-performance. Building on a long tradition of social-construction ideas, Butler argued that, far from being an inherent, stable, core identity, gender is a constantly-evolving process, something that we define and redefine every time we behave in gendered ways. Nussbaum, a feminist herself, doesn't disagree with this premise (in fact, she says it's the one interesting contribution Butler has made). Rather, she objects to what she sees as the morally-passive implications of Butler's language-based feminism, which, in Nussbaum's deliberately-dramatic terms, is not only wrong-headed, but actually "collaborates with evil."

Nussbaum's article can be attacked and defended on many grounds, but the issue I've been thinking about today is that of academic writing style. I'm struggling to write an academic book that I hope with be both informative and readable. I would also like it to be intellectually respectable. But if you read only certain modern critics, you might think that intellectual validity can come about only if you write so that almost no one can understand you.

Judith Butler, like many postmodern theorists, is almost as famous for her impenetrable prose style as for her ideas. You might think that the issue of academic style is pretty straightforward: writers want to be understood, right? So obviously they should write as clearly and precisely as they can, right? And if they don't. . .if instead, like Butler, they win "bad writing" contests with obscure sentences like the one immediately below, they should take a composition course, right? Where's the controversy here?

 (Butler's prize-winning bad sentence: "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.")

Well, in fact, the whole issue of style is highly politically charged. Even though it's pretty hard to defend writing like that I've just quoted, the solution isn't as simple as just saying, "Write clearly." The long tradition of American anti-intellectualism can lead us to equate clarity with simplicity and to distrust anything that isn't obvious "common sense." This insistence on the simple can lead us to dismiss automatically any ideas expressed in language that is complex, difficult, or challenging. Yet some ideas require such expression. Plus, the words we choose do influence the way we think. Language is never neutral.

Butler defended herself against Nussbaum and the whole issue of obscure writing by arguing, as other writers have often done, that her style is essential to her enterprise. Unless we are forced to grapple with new, even frustrating and obscure, means of expression, we will never challenge our current ways of thinking; we will never be able to see how our current "clear" language is actually just as obscure in its own way, in that it encourages us to ignore the implications of our beliefs, not to look critically at the assumptions that underlie what we are so "clearly" saying. She notes the politics of the kind of "bad writing" contests that people like herself and Frederic Jameson seem always to be winning -- the "winners" are almost always thinkers from the left.

In many ways, her view is dead on. There's a lot of truth to the notion that difficult ideas can't always be expressed in simple terms. Objecting to complex, difficult language often IS a smokescreen for anti-intellectualism at best and political reactionism at worst. Those who criticize the work of leftist scholars often are conservative reactionaries who object to any challenge of the status quo. Also, what some critics dismiss as "jargon" is often a useful, necessary shorthand for specialists in the field. Not everything has to be or can be written at the level of the beginner.

On the other hand, highly-abstract, dense jargon of the Butler/Jameson mode is not always so much about revealing new truths as it is about asserting the writer's academic superiority. It can be a form of intimidation, a way of making readers think that if the mere expression of the ideas is so confounding, the ideas themselves must be the last word in intellectual sophistication. And I'm skeptical of claims that such writing ultimately does any service to liberal/radical ends. As one on-line commenter noted, "there is something paradoxical and, in my view, problematic about theorizing about the empowerment of the masses in a manner that is comprehensible only to fellow academics and cultural elites."

The whole debate reminds me of a hilarious moment with one of my students, when I accused him of not having read his assignment. "I did read it; I did," he insisted. "But it was so well-written I couldn't understand it."

In the end, like so many things, the best view probably lies somewhere in the middle. Difficult language is not by definition a bad thing. Not every important or worthy idea can be expressed in simple terms. And we often do need to use language as a way of jolting us out of our entrenched ways of thinking.

But. . .when you cross the line, as Butler and Jameson and others undoubtedly do, from necessary complexity to a style that is incomprehensible even for many academic readers, then to whom are you speaking? If the tree of an actual idea falls in your jargony forest, who will hear it?

(Of course, Butler might answer:  "lots of people. Look at me; 'turgid' is the best you can say about my prose, yet in some circles, I'm one of the most influential thinkers of the last twenty years.")

Comments

Nicely said.

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks for an insightful post and the Nussbaum link. I just finished a Ph.D. in a humanities discipline and struggle with these issues all of the time.

Re: Nicely said.

[kellychambliss.livejournal.com]

You're welcome!