>kelly, babe, you got a point here. I used to read the stuff to be able
>quote it at seminars to embarass the ta's and impress my prospective dates
>- it sounded profoundly academic because nobody could understand jack shit
>what it was about. i actually made an effort to decipher the deep meaning,
>including going to english translations that were realy realy helpful, but
>the verborrhage of these giants of esoterism was overwhelming. Howver,
>after i read c writght mills i realized that if something cannot be said in
>plain english it is probably not worth saying at all (albeit i'm not sure
>if that holds for the german as well), and stopped feeling bad about my
>lack of depth perception. moreover, after women became unimpressed by
>deep-thoughts dropping, i lost interest in the stuff altogether.
well, wojtek, my muffin, thing is my students find c. wright mills difficult sometimes. in part it's the language of the fifties. but it's also the ideas --sociology,and the idea that our biography is shaped by social forces [society/history] is completely alien to them and hard to understand. c wright mills isn't that transparent either. my point: critiques of supposed theoretical difficulty are facile critiques. people who say "yuck" to habermas or butler or derrida or foucault etc generally haven't bothered to read them and, if they have, they are "yucking" out of their own ignorance and laziness, failing to bother to try to get a grasp on a theoretical tradtion within and through which the author's ideas would make sense.
[in other words, bill lear had a problem with butler's use of "subject" made no sense to him as to why "subject" was preferable to self or individual. well, "subject" has a specific meaning within the context of a specific theoretical tradition. it does make no sense if you don't know what it means. and please don't tell me that this is ridiculous. you know as well as i do that a discipline is about language. we, in soc, use "institution" -- it has a specific meaning [though a range of meanings and a contested range, at that, depending on whether you're working out of a functionalist or critical theoretical or feminist soc tradition].
so, i'm not too keen on critiques of authors because they are, ostensibly, difficult to understand. i do not find the ideas in butler hard to understand because i understand the philosophical tradition she is working from. ditto habermas. butler's writing *IS* tortured. as for habermas, well i don't know how to judge a translation from german to english. how much of this is about what gets mucked up in translation, eh?
and, in general, and i know you're joking in many ways, but i want to be serious here for a moment. i don't find these condemnations of supposed intellectual fluff all that easy to make. i don't think that claiming that you or i or anyone else takes up these ideas and studies these intellectual traditions because they merely want to engage in empty impression mgmt all that funny. there are some, i suppose, who do this. i'm not one of them.
in the first place, college wasn't a given for me, nor was it handed me on a silver platter--despite excellent marks and test scores i was simply too poor to go to college. i eventually went, but before that i was so motivated to want to know about the world of ideas i used to spend time in the local library reading whatever i thought was important to read, reaching back in my memory recalling what h.s. teachers had suggested as important literarary works or recalling favorite authors of my history teacher and whathaveyou. it wasn't , for me, just about getting an education so i could get a job and making lots of money. no. it was about something else entirely, hard to put my finger on --and maybe it is ideology--but this story is told by lots of formerly working class intellectuals: they yearned for the life of the mind, for something besides the everyday world they lived in, for a community of others who liked to think about and talk about the world around them in ways that they didn't often find among their working class friends and workmates.
so, when i used to hear feminists in women's studies classes whine because dorothy smith was a difficult writer who worked out of the phenomenological trad in philosophy--which they thought was masculinist, patriarchal, sexist, blahblahblah--i was particularly incensed. for what they found oppressive--ideas--was not at all for me. learning to master and understand a social theorist was, in fact, liberating for me in ways that i cannot explain here.
so, no, i don't think what habermas has to say is unimportant. surely it's problematic. but the fact is, woj, he is working out of and through a rather important and fundamental tradition in sociological scholarship and i don't think he should be dismissed as 'difficult'. his ideas aren't difficult at all. nor are butler's or derrida's for that matter. those writers are only difficult insofar as they are writing in ways that presuppose a certain specialized training from their readers. i would agree, tho, that butler is a tortured and inefficient writer. i would also say that she annoys me because she fails to do justice to and credit the traditions she works out of. she, for ex, as many sociologists point out--says stuff about performance that goffman said long before her [as did simmel and mead]. and, tho she briefly cites turner, she really does a serious disservice to this tradition of scholarship because she refuses to engage it in any meaningful way. i consider that a real failing in a scholar-- a serious breach of scholarly ethics.
i've never read an author simply because i thought it would impress. in the first place, i went to a weird school --british open university in style. i didn't have colleagues--save for my tutors/mentors--to compare myself to or impress. i'd simply meet with a tutor, talk about what i'd want to learn. they'd send me off with a reading list. i read widely, come back with a more organized sense of "the field" and we'd make up a contract about what i would read and do to demonstrate what i'd learned. if i had questions in our meeting, they'd send me off in search of more things to read such that i'd read many, many books. the point was to come back and be their teacher--because, often enough, they didn't necessarily have an expertise in what i was studying. and so there were no academic rituals of deference and demeanor, no obvious hierarchy of the teacher and blank slate. the point, tho, was that i travelled fromt thinker to thinker, completely unaware, really, of any notion of who was sexy or more impressive or whathaveyou. studying habermas was a natural outgrowth of having stumbled over a ref to marcuse while reading about marxism. wanting to know more, as was my habit, i went back to the 'beginning' and started reading the frankfurt boys. habermas seemed the next logical step after i'd done my work on hork, adorno, fromm, marcuse....
and finally, fact is wojtek, reading habermas was something i did entirely on my own. grad school did not expose me to very many ppl who took his work seriously. oh, my mentor and ceremonial head of my diss committee had read him and knew his work pretty well, having published widely as a critical theorist. but no one offered courses specializing in hab or even in critical theory --even though i'd gone to the dept under the illusion that it was one of the only dept in the country that specialized in theory.
between the time i'd been recruited and applied and been accepted, the theory people had been dethroned by the feminists and sociology=research only/theory is unimportant crowd. [abstracted empiricists on c wright mills terms] . the point: no one dared teach too much theory. it was considered genuflecting at the altar of dead white guys who had nothing to say to contemporary social life. what hoohah!. the whole thing makes me ill, so i can't write about it at the moment. suffice it to say that i wanted to read habernmas and i did so entirely on my own and n the face of peers and teachers who weren't impressed in the least. so gimme a break
and c. wright mills by the way was used often enough in his day to impress the co-eds