I cannot fathom why, if I'm writing a book intended for an audience already familiar with the ideas, I should write another book geared to first year students who know nothing about althusser's concept of "interpellation"?
yes, yes: the whole argument about how it keeps people out, creating an insider's circle of people already in the know. well, presicely: that's why these are called _disciplines_. They are boundaried. Not everyone can enter and expect to understand without doing the work first.
so what? she never claimed to be writing ideas for Jane Bierwit-Fruitinit
shag
(has anyone beside me taken a look at a six pack of miller with lime and shuddered with the icks! ?)
At 04:10 PM 6/4/2008, Seth Ackerman wrote:
>By the noted philistine and simpleton Martha Nussbaum....
>
>http://tinyurl.com/539n9j
>
>
>[...]
>
>It is difficult to come to grips with Butler's ideas, because it is
>difficult to figure out what they
>are. Butler is a very smart person. In public discussions, she proves
>that she can speak clearly
>and has a quick grasp of what is said to her. Her written style,
>however, is ponderous and
>obscure. It is dense with allusions to other theorists, drawn from a
>wide range of different
>theoretical traditions. In addition to Foucault, and to a more recent
>focus on Freud, Butler's
>work relies heavily on the thought of Louis Althusser, the French
>lesbian theorist Monique
>Wittig, the American anthropologist Gayle Rubin, Jacques Lacan, J.L.
>Austin, and the
>American philosopher of language Saul Kripke. These figures do not all
>agree with one
>another, to say the least; so an initial problem in reading Butler is
>that one is bewildered to
>find her arguments buttressed by appeal to so many contradictory
>concepts and doctrines,
>usually without any account of how the apparent contradictions will be
>resolved.
>A further problem lies in Butler's casual mode of allusion. The ideas of
>these
>thinkers are never described in enough detail to include the uninitiated
>(if you are not familiar
>with the Althusserian concept of "interpellation," you are lost for
>chapters) or to explain to the
>Page 3
>initiated how, precisely, the difficult ideas are being understood. Of
>course, much academic
>writing is allusive in some way: it presupposes prior knowledge of
>certain doctrines and
>positions. But in both the continental and the Anglo-American
>philosophical traditions,
>academic writers for a specialist audience standardly acknowledge that
>the figures they
>mention are complicated, and the object of many different
>interpretations. They therefore
>typically assume the responsibility of advancing a definite
>interpretation among the contested
>ones, and of showing by argument why they have interpreted the figure as
>they have, and why
>their own interpretation is better than others.
>We find none of this in Butler. Divergent interpretations are simply not
>considered--even where, as in the cases of Foucault and Freud, she is
>advancing highly
>contestable interpretations that would not be accepted by many scholars.
>Thus one is led to
>the conclusion that the allusiveness of the writing cannot be explained
>in the usual way, by
>positing an audience of specialists eager to debate the details of an
>esoteric academic position.
>The writing is simply too thin to satisfy any such audience. It is also
>obvious that Butler's
>work is not directed at a non-academic audience eager to grapple with
>actual injustices. Such
>an audience would simply be baffled by the thick soup of Butler's prose,
>by its air of in-group
>knowingness, by its extremely high ratio of names to explanations.
>To whom, then, is Butler speaking? It would seem that she is addressing
>a group
>of young feminist theorists in the academy who are neither students of
>philosophy, caring
>about what Althusser and Freud and Kripke really said, nor outsiders,
>needing to be informed
>about the nature of their projects and persuaded of their worth. This
>implied audience is
>imagined as remarkably docile. Subservient to the oracular voice of
>Butler's text, and dazzled
>by its patina of high-concept abstractness, the imagined reader poses
>few questions, requests
>no arguments and no clear definitions of terms.
>Still more strangely, the implied reader is expected not to care greatly
>about
>Butler's own final view on many matters. For a large proportion of the
>sentences in any book
>by Butler--especially sentences near the end of chapters--are questions.
>Sometimes the answer
>that the question expects is evident. But often things are much more
>indeterminate. Among
>the non-interrogative sentences, many begin with "Consider..." or "One
>could suggest..."--in
>such a way that Butler never quite tells the reader whether she approves
>of the view described.
>Mystification as well as hierarchy are the tools of her practice, a
>mystification that eludes
>criticism because it makes few definite claims.
>Take two representative examples:
>What does it mean for the agency of a subject to presuppose its own
>subordination? Is the act of presupposing the same as the act of
>reinstating, or
>is there a discontinuity between the power presupposed and the power
>reinstated? Consider that in the very act by which the subject
>reproduces the
>conditions of its own subordination, the subject exemplifies a
>temporally based
>vulnerability that belongs to those conditions, specifically, to the
>exigencies of
>their renewal.
>And:
>Such questions cannot be answered here, but they indicate a direction for
>thinking that is perhaps prior to the question of conscience, namely, the
>question that preoccupied Spinoza, Nietzsche, and most recently, Giorgio
>Agamben: How are we to understand the desire to be as a constitutive desire?
>Resituating conscience and interpellation within such an account, we might
>then add to this question another: How is such a desire exploited not
>only by a
>Page 4
>law in the singular, but by laws of various kinds such that we yield to
>subordination in order to maintain some sense of social "being"?
>Why does Butler prefer to write in this teasing, exasperating way? The
>style is certainly not
>unprecedented. Some precincts of the continental philosophical
>tradition, though surely not all
>of them, have an unfortunate tendency to regard the philosopher as a
>star who fascinates, and
>frequently by obscurity, rather than as an arguer among equals. When
>ideas are stated clearly,
>after all, they may be detached from their author: one can take them
>away and pursue them on
>one's own. When they remain mysterious (indeed, when they are not quite
>asserted), one
>remains dependent on the originating authority. The thinker is heeded
>only for his or her
>turgid charisma. One hangs in suspense, eager for the next move. When
>Butler does follow
>that "direction for thinking," what will she say? What does it mean,
>tell us please, for the
>agency of a subject to presuppose its own subordination? (No clear
>answer to this question, so
>far as I can see, is forthcoming.) One is given the impression of a mind
>so profoundly
>cogitative that it will not pronounce on anything lightly: so one waits,
>in awe of its depth, for
>it finally to do so.
>In this way obscurity creates an aura of importance. It also serves another
>related purpose. It bullies the reader into granting that, since one
>cannot figure out what is
>going on, there must be something significant going on, some complexity
>of thought, where in
>reality there are often familiar or even shopworn notions, addressed too
>simply and too
>casually to add any new dimension of understanding. When the bullied
>readers of Butler's
>books muster the daring to think thus, they will see that the ideas in
>these books are thin.
>When Butler's notions are stated clearly and succinctly, one sees that,
>without a lot more
>distinctions and arguments, they don't go far, and they are not
>especially new. Thus obscurity
>fills the void left by an absence of a real complexity of thought and
>argument.
>Last year Butler won the first prize in the annual Bad Writing Contest
>sponsored by the
>journal Philosophy and Literature, for the following 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.
>Now, Butler might have written: "Marxist accounts, focusing on capital
>as the central force
>structuring social relations, depicted the operations of that force as
>everywhere uniform. By
>contrast, Althusserian accounts, focusing on power, see the operations
>of that force as
>variegated and as shifting over time." Instead, she prefers a verbosity
>that causes the reader to
>expend so much effort in deciphering her prose that little energy is
>left for assessing the truth
>of the claims. Announcing the award, the journal's editor remarked that
>"it's possibly the
>anxiety-inducing obscurity of such writing that has led Professor Warren
>Hedges of Southern
>Oregon University to praise Judith Butler as `probably one of the ten
>smartest people on the
>planet.'" (Such bad writing, incidentally, is by no means ubiquitous in
>the "queer theory"
>group of theorists with which Butler is associated. David Halperin, for
>example, writes about
>the relationship between Foucault and Kant, and about Greek
>homosexuality, with
>philosophical clarity and historical precision.)
>Page 5
>Butler gains prestige in the literary world by being a philosopher; many
>admirers associate her manner of writing with philosophical profundity.
>But one should ask
>whether it belongs to the philosophical tradition at all, rather than to
>the closely related but
>adversarial traditions of sophistry and rhetoric. Ever since Socrates
>distinguished philosophy
>from what the sophists and the rhetoricians were doing, it has been a
>discourse of equals who
>trade arguments and counter-arguments without any obscurantist
>sleight-of-hand. In that way,
>he claimed, philosophy showed respect for the soul, while the others'
>manipulative methods
>showed only disrespect. One afternoon, fatigued by Butler on a long
>plane trip, I turned to a
>draft of a student's dissertation on Hume's views of personal identity.
>I quickly felt my spirits
>reviving. Doesn't she write clearly, I thought with pleasure, and a tiny
>bit of pride. And Hume,
>what a fine, what a gracious spirit: how kindly he respects the reader's
>intelligence, even at the
>cost of exposing his own uncertainty.
>
>[...]
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