P.S. The is something ironic that the names Habermas and Chomsky are invoked. I personally finding reading either's prose to be an excruciating task and death occasionally seems like a reasonable out when reading Habermas in particular. Not that it says much about their value as intellectuals one way or another. (In all fairness, Chomsky gives a damn good interview. He becomes a lot more interesting (to me) with an interlocutor.
> 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
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
>