These people aren't writing for the average person with a full tie job anyway. and, as far as I know, never said they were. When Butler wrote for the typical reader of the London Review of Books, she was clear as a bell. But, she was trying to work in and through her discipline.
As for writing about the academy, oh sure they have. What the hell was Derrida writing about 1/4 of the time? There's a whole slew of them in sociology and anthropology, unpacking the ways in which the disciplines have been used to control populations, the ways social scientists feed on the system, etc. etc. Richard Harvey Brown is one example. Judith Stacey, another. There are many more. Stacey is eminently readable.
http://blog.pulpculture.org/brown/
They were mostly showing how current practices, dominant disc discoures excluded their views. But, here's the thing, they never claim that their's is likely to do anything other than exclude as well. (And even if they do, to criticize the as wrong b.c of that is simply ad hom argument. it's not even worth going there. Hypocrits? That's not a reason to dismiss any theory.)
Similarly, the grounds that it's been done before or said b-e-tt-er? That's a gentic fallacy. It's not a reason for saying they're wrong. You just don't like the way they write. That is ALL anyone can say about it if your only crit is that someone said it before.
I've read this kind of criticism for years and heard from fellow students. Since I had to learn on my own, with no one dumping it into my brain, every time I came upon a new disciplinary language, it was hard and made no sense at all. So, what do you do? I sure didn't whine that Habermas was hard. I looked in the footnotes and endnotes and clues to whatever I could find to start reading in the tradition. Once I did that, it all made sense. It was hard work. So? it's graduate school. It's supposed to be.
I also came to pomo, first, then philosophy. Consequently, I realized that all I was missing was being steeped in a discipline. They're disciplines for a reasons. Sure, they're oppressive. What isn't? They also exclude. They must.
And before Litcritters were the laughingstock, it was sociologists. There have been sociologists writing about how to be more accessible since the 1940s. Talk about a jargon-laden discourse that people have complained about for years as one which makes the simplest things difficult because they use terms that don't seem transparent to people. Psychology is another one.
I once presented a paper on Habermas, my goal was to ground his theory in empirical research. Very few people do that, staying within the confines of theory whoring. Introducing me, the guy who presided over the meeting said, People go to Germany to listen to Germans talk about Habermas's work with the hopes that hearing it in German, they'll finally understand it. Thanks to Bitch, you don't have to make the trip.
I suppose that's flattering, but I've always suspected that the so-called difficulty with any of these authors lies in the difficulty of translation.
I'd also like to know if people in France or Germany claim to have the same difficulties. If not, then I'm just a wee bit suspcious about this so-called problem.
Carrol keeps going on about how it's all been said before. That's called a genetic fallacy. But more, it hasn't been said before. Which marxist thinker explores norms and deviance and tries to understand how social structure is both bound and unbound in the very social practices that produce it? Which social thinkers have really tried to explore that?
Finally, something was said about how people who do theory/criticism aren't like artists. I don't get that. Having written various forms of "theory" and "criticism" I can safely say that my drive to do it is addictive and as compelling to me as any other form of creativity. I daresay it's the same for anyone else. It's a very creative process for anyone. Butler writes fine. She's writing in and through a tradition.
I used to get so fed up with gradstud colleagues who'd whine. But, you know, they never fucking read the material for class anyway, even if it was freakin' easy. They just didn't like it because they didn't know something and, products of this schooling system, instead of having been taught how to tackle it anyway, they postured with indifference and disgust, going on about a feminist ought, really, to write for women. Like being a feminist is all about writing for the people.
Give me a fucking break. Some femnists do that. Others work in the academy. Others write blogs. Thank god I didn't have to read easy to understand authors ever tawdry mintue. I'd have gone batty. I like picking up an pomo author because they often play with words and they make you think of words in different ways. It's a form of play.
For the grammarians in room 101, it violates the rules.
I say: GOOD
As I always used to say, If you don't understand it, it's because you aren't steeped in it. That's my experience. I'm pretty much an auto-didact, though. Every time I picked up a book in a new field, it was a new language and was tough slogging. Answer? Read the bib and anything else for clues to learn more. There was no one to distill it for me and nine times out of ten no one to even discuss it with. All it took on my part was a little ambition and desire to understand it. Learn the language they're speaking in, voila! It's not so hard.
I've heard this crap from people about how Habermas is soooooooooooooo hard. Or Dorothy Smith. Or foucault. And claims about how they do it on purpose. You know what? It's not hard and every single person on this list is bright and intelligent. The only thing that keeps you from understanding it is time --time to read widely and read the same things she's read. Karl Marx made not a lick of sense to me when I first read him. Hegel too. Etc. Etc. .
But, it wasn't written for you to have it served up, pre-digested. And these pople don't have editors like they should either. The relationship between editors and writers is fraught with so many tensions it's unbelievalble. As the academic press houses are put under pressures, there are fewer and fewer people to do the hard work of editing.
I'm sure everyone's going to be incenses. Whatever. I'm not going to deny that I'm disappointed in thoroughly bright people who are perfectly capable of understanding it and yet expect something from authors who never said that's what they are giving you to being with.
They're radicals? When have they ever ever said that?
"You know how it is -- come for the animal porn, stay for the cultural analysis."
Bitch | Lab http://blog.pulpculture.org