Very Big Language
Further to yesterday’s post on Judith Butler and her opaque prose, I thought I’d add a few thoughts. One commenter, Dr Dawg, has argued that Butler is making a point, albeit badly:
I think this misses an important point. The issue, I think, hinges on whether you regard the opacity of Butler’s statement, and of many others I’ve highlighted, as a result of ineptitude or something more deliberate. Is it a mistake, a technical necessity, or a stylistic affectation and convenient camouflage? It seems to me that mere clumsiness doesn’t explain the prevalence and uniformity of those “mistakes” among leftwing PoMo academics. It seems much more likely that this habitual and remarkably uniform obscurantism is a determined effort – specifically, an attempt to hide the slightness of certain ideas and their various assumptions and contradictions.
The issue, as I see it, is one of bad faith. Hiding a small and tendentious idea, or no idea at all, inside Very Big Language is not a promising indicator of good character, honesty or wisdom. As I’ve argued elsewhere, one might suspect that the unintelligible nature of much postmodern ‘analysis’ is a convenient contrivance, if only because it’s difficult to determine exactly how wrong an unintelligible analysis is. In this respect, one might see the PoMo phenomenon as not so much a loose collection of often disreputable ideas, but more as a rhetorical tactic employed by narcissists, ideologues and academic shysters.
There are also endemic biases that are related to things like the individual structural variations in each of our limbic systems, pre-frontal cortexes, &c, which commonly translate into things like predispositions for optimism or for pessimism, and, more generally, things like MMPI personality types. Human thought does not occur without physical instances of humans.
That instances of those with particular endemic biases accrete should not be surprising. Thus over the last thousands of years we have come to realize that the final test of any truth-conjecturing hypothesis is not its accretion of the like-minded, it is its effecacity across all-minded.
Actual merit, after all is said and done, does indeed, in the long run, trump claimed merit. It’s just that it’s a very slow process, and there is never a shortage of people trying to sabotage the effort in the name of illegitimate personal advancement.
“Butler has a more fluid view of power relations, which I think derives from Foucault.”
Ah, Foucault. Now we KNOW that Butler is pushing BS. 🙂
By a funny coincidence I was just reading the following passage last night:
“What, I asked, do you propose to put in the place of this ‘bourgeoisie’ whom you so despise, and to whom you owe the freedom and prosperity that enable you to play on your toy barracades? What vision of France and its culture compels you? And are you prepared to die for your beliefs, or merely to put others at risk in order to display them?…She replied with a book: Foucault’s Les mots et les choses, the bible of the soixante-huitards, the text which seemed to justify every form of transgression, by showing that obedience is merely defeat. It is an artful book, composed with a satanic mendacity, selectively appropriating facts in order to show that culture and knowledge are nothing but the ‘discourses’ of power. The book is not a work of philosophy but an exercise in rhetoric. Its goal is subversion, not truth, and it is careful to argue–by the old nominalist sleight of hand that was surely invented by the Father of Lies–that ‘truth’ requires inverted commas, that it changes from epoch to epoch, and is tied to the form of consciousness, the ‘episteme,’ imposed by the class which profits from its propagation. The revolutionary spirit, which searches the world for things to hate, has found in Foucault a new literary formula. Look everywhere for power, he tells his readers, and you will find it. Where there is power there is oppression. And where there is oppression there is the right to destroy. In the street below my window was the translation of that message into deeds.”
–Roger Scruton, writing about the 1968 Paris riots, in the February 2003 issue of the New Criterion