[lbo-talk] Thoughts on Butler

Voyou voyou1 at gmail.com
Sun Jun 8 13:33:30 PDT 2008


On Sun, 2008-06-08 at 11:33 -0700, cgrimes at rawbw.COM wrote:
> 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

I'm not sure this is true. It may depend what you mean by "specialist language"; some of Butler's work (especially _Gender Trouble_) is hard to read on a grammatical level, with long sentences, lots of subordinate clauses, and so on. This kind of "specialist language" probably does just make ideas harder to understand (although, I think it is a largely unavoidable consequence of writing about difficult ideas - apparently, research in college composition courses has found that grammatical skill isn't constant, but gets worse when people write about a new subject. If someone is struggling to think in a new way, as I think Butler was in _Gender Trouble_, they're likely to lose their facility with grammar and style).

However, much of Butler's specialist language isn't of this sort, but is specialist in the sense that it continuously refers to other figures and arguments. This kind of specialist language might make difficult ideas _easier_ to understand, assuming, of course, that the reader is familiar with the context being referred to. I don't think there's anything anti-democratic about this; in a sense, there's nothing more democratic than the footnote, which opens up this world of references to the reader (of course, this democracy of the footnote requires material support - libraries, and time to read in them - but so does all democracy).


> 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.

However, the politics of Chomsky's language goes further than this, at least if I understand him correctly. Chomsky's position isn't that specialist language needs to be accompanied by a support system that makes this specialist language to everyone, but rather that there is nothing that cannot be stated in "plain language." This strikes me as an oddly elitist anti-elitism; Chomsky has decided, on the part of the common man, that the common man needn't worry about all that fancy Judith Butler stuff. An unexpectedly egalitarian moment in Lenin provides the right response here:

"It is necessary that the workers do not confine themselves to the artificially restricted limits of “literature for workers” but that they learn to an increasing degree to master general literature. It would be even truer to say “are not confined”, instead of “do not confine themselves”, because the workers themselves wish to read and do read all that is written for the intelligentsia, and only a few (bad) intellectuals believe that it is enough “for workers” to be told a few things about factory conditions and to have repeated to them over and over again what has long been known."

http://marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/ii.htm#v05fl61h-373-GUESS



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