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.
............
I think this is somewhat unfair to Butler and maybe Derrida too.
As everyone here knows (or should), you write for your audience: technical language for professionals and non-technical language for everyone else.
If memory serves, Butler *has* written articles and essays for a general audience which explain at least some of her ideas in a simpler form, tailored for nonspecialists. Interviews she's given are also pretty straightforward. I recall reading a review of these works which bizarrely criticized Butler for her directness by asking 'why didn't she write like this before?'-- placing her in a damned if you do and if you don't situation.
...
An example.
I'm against digital rights management (DRM) technology and have written and talked a lot about it.
When writing for my peers, I don't avoid using words and descriptions which might turn off the general reader. Of course, when explaining to my cousin why the Windows Media, phone-home authentication based DRM'ed online movie viewing scheme he paid money for suddenly stopped working, I'm not going to toss terms such as 'application programming interface' and block diagrams detailing MSFT's protected media path methods in his face.
But I'll get the message across.
I imagine that if someone rounded up all my technical papers -- perhaps as part of a book on techie elitism -- they could make a good case that .d. was writing 'undemocratically' about an important technology millions need to understand. If you looked at the whole however, it'd be clear that one set of works was written for 'insiders' while another was for interested 'outsiders' who want to get savvy.
As far as I can tell, criticisms of Butler skewer the complexity of her specialist work while ignoring her non-specialist pieces and excerpting, for academic nerd comedy routine purposes, the most difficult passages without context or history. Crying over the lack of style and elegance is also a popular pastime.
What I've yet to read is a criticism which truly takes Butler seriously, wrestling with the text -- yes, 'interrogating' the text -- asking basic questions such as what problems is she describing? What solutions (if any) does she offer? It always seems to come down to variations on: 'I don't get it' 'Let's talk about some other thinker who's better. How 'bout Heidegger?' 'I haven't read any of her books but I read a paragraph and...' 'Why can't she write more like that guy who writes so well?'
Over and over again.
.d.