``That's pretty great. How can anyone resist its charms?'' Doug
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Evidently quite a few people on the list can resist Butler's charm.
And, you can mount an argument that in fact Butler in some of her writing contradicts herself in the conjunction of theory and practice. In other words you apply some of Chompsky and Habermas's ideas to Butler. The key assumption is that when Butler mentions political contest, I take that to mean she wants to open up ideas to a more democratic forum.
Let's take the above as an example. I think someone like Chompsky who writes very plainly and clearly does so with the explicit purpose of making his ideas and opinions understood by the largest audience he can reach. He wants to open ideas to agreement, argument or contest to the largest group of people he can. Chompsky's linguistic competence is following Habermas' proscription for making theory and practice, democratic.
In the above sense Chompsky is practicing what he preaches (and/or what Habermas preaches). The basic sermon for both (I think) is that most of us are masters of our language at its most commonly used level. This idea is a basis for a concept of democracy. In other words, Chompsky's political ideal is put inot practiced by his clear speaking and writing.
On the other hand, the use of highly technical language limits the potential audience, and therefore contracts the public forum for discussions.
Methods of writing like those practiced by Butler and Derrida for example, create a specialist language and therefore their audience is limited. In the quote above then, Butler's practice of writing contracts her audience and contradicts her claim that she has opened some idea to political question. Opened for who? Only the initiates and those unable to resist her charms constitute her public and her public forum for discussion.
Evidently, Chompsky is among the resisting class. Here is Chompsky pleading dumbfoundedness:
``I have spent a lot of my life working on questions such as these [critiques of science], using the only methods I know of; those condemned here as "science", "rationality", "logic" and so on. I therefore read the papers with some hope that they would help me "transcend" these limitations, or perhaps suggest an entirely different course. I'm afraid I was disappointed. Admittedly, that may be my own limitation. Quite regularly, "my eyes glaze over" when I read polysyllabic discourse on the themes of poststructuralism and postmodernism; what I understand is largely truism or error, but that is only a fraction of the total word count. True, there are lots of other things I don't understand: the articles in the current issues of math and physics journals, for example. But there is a difference. In the latter case, I know how to get to understand them, and have done so, in cases of particular interest to me; and I also know that people in these fields can explain the contents to me at my level, so that I can gain what (partial) understanding I may want. In contrast, no one seems to be able to explain to me why the latest post-this-and-that is (for the most part) other than truism, error, or gibberish, and I do not know how to proceed.[29]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky#Opinion_on_cultural_criticism_of_scien ce
I am actually an agnostic on the question of whether or not various writings of Butler or Derrida are intelligible. They are most of the time, but they require a lot specialist work and are tough going.
On the other hand, I prefer Habermas's or Chompsky's point that to open an idea or problem up for the purpose of politically democratic discussion, it is important to present it in ordinary or commonly used language.
Now the idea maybe very difficult to understand. If that is the problem, then it is only made more difficult to understand when it is presented in specialist language. So, the tactical presentation has to be staged in such a way as to introduce the idea in its simplest form first. After that is done, then the idea can be further refine with more technical terms as these are introduced and explained. This what teachers do all the time. Teaching isn't very democratic in practice but its goal can be democratic.
CG