>on and damn, what Etienne said! right on sistah! My experience with
>giving workers (manual laborers and low-level service workers) hard
>stuff? They like it.
Yup. It seems to be professionals and middle classers that raise the biggest stink about difficult writing. Etienne's excellent point about patronization is relevant here. So, in the opposite way, is Carl's wailing about Dylan's obscurity.
>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.
You could argue that writing for LRB is a loftier, more "intellectual" pursuit than her books, so that she writes clearer for a professional-intellectual audience that demands unambiguity than she does in her books, which presumably are available at most decent bookstores and accessible to any Joe or Sally who picks them up.
Let me reformulate this: Joanna said that Marx wrote the Manifesto for one audience and Capital for another; though she didn't say so, I take her to mean that the former was for workers while the latter was for academics and intellectuals. But she's got it backwards. A manifesto is necessarily an outward expression, a broadcast and a warning, and so was directed at capitalists (which, come to think of it, might explain some of its ridiculous flattery of the bourgeoisie). Capital on the other hand is full not only of theory but of reporting, history, and polemics; it's clearly a weapon for the working class. But some people see difficulty (and the first chapter is brutal) and assume it can only be targeted toward an audience with privileged knowledge.
>I also came to pomo, first, then philosophy. Consequently, I
>realized that all I was missing was being steeped in a discipline.
And after reading Hegel, Butler's writing is as clear and flowing as Dr. Seuss's.
Eric