Ink and Privilege
Some time ago, I wrote:
The more sceptical among us 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.
With that in mind, a reader, Todd Lemmon, has steered my attention to this post by Rick Hills on obscurantism and being “anti-intellectual”:
I am most certainly an anti-intellectual… Being anti-intellectual is not the same as being anti-intellect. My beef is with a particular social class – the “intelligentsia” – and not with the practice of using one’s intellect to reflect on experience. In my experience, intellectuals (as a class) are ideologically intolerant, easily offended by ordinary humour, and pretentious in their prejudices, which they disguise as universal truths. Moreover, I find a direct relationship between the academic obscurity of self-consciously “intellectual” writer’s prose and the willingness of that writer to justify the unjustifiable.
It takes the convoluted abstractions of a Carl Schmitt or a Heidegger to offer apologetics for Hitler; a Sartre, to temporize about Stalin; a Foucault, to defend Khomeini. In this respect, I stand with George Orwell who spent the 1930s and 1940s denouncing the obscurity of intellectuals’ prose as a cloak for tyranny (and, incidentally, who was also accused of being an anti-intellectual). Intellectuals spray polysyllables like squid ink, to evade the democratic decencies of conversation. I’d like not to be one of their number.
I am aware of, but never have been persuaded by, various efforts to justify the deliberate obscurity of intellectuals. Pierre Bourdieu, for instance, offered a defence of academic obscurity in the introduction to his book, Distinction. Alas, it was too obscure for me to understand. Instead, I tended to think that the rest of Bourdieu’s book provided a better account of the social function of academic obscurity: Obscurity is what Bourdieu dubs “cultural capital”. It is akin to knowing to wear white shoes only before Labour Day or which jazz CDs to play at a Upper West Side academic party – a sort of union card that one can flash for admission to a privileged class.
Judith Butler offered a defence of her obscurity in the New York Times, in which she argued that obscure prose was necessary to get outside of the oppression built into ordinary language. But she gave no examples of instances in which her prose served such a function, and I remain sceptical. Her standard argument that gender bias is built into language can, I think, be communicated effectively without the name-dropping and byzantine insider jokes that are (again, my view or prejudice) the hallmarks of Butler’s style. I tend to think that simple questions simply asked a la Socrates can unveil much more incoherence and oppression in ordinary social conventions that any numbers of references to “hegemonic discourses” and the rest.
For more on Judith Butler, see here and the comments following this.
Related: Derrida imparts his wisdom. And, of course, the extraordinary Professor Caroline Guertin.
There is a good paper here on why would be gurus need to be obscure:
http://www.dan.sperber.com/guru.htm
‘Life is too short to struggle with an author when the payoff in understanding (for instance) “performativity” seems to be no more than the banal idea that people do stuff to exhibit their gender identity that is, in this sense, “socially constructed.” ‘
Yes indeed. Life is too short.
Turning to dear Prof Butler, though, I note that her New York Times piece is, for the most part, admirably clear (and even makes a passing attempt at humour). It’s curious, though, that when she writes with such clarity she somehow manages to come across as even more supercilious than when she writes her for-clever-people-only prose. And, when we read statements such as
‘Language that takes up this challenge [i.e. that finds ways of challenging common sense] can help point the way to a more socially just world’
We can see clearly that we’re being presented with vacuous generalisations and dreary conformist opinions posing as genuine intellectual discourse.
Sometimes when the wrappings fall, there’s nothing underneath at all…
Bob-B,
Thanks for that. It does capture the kind of status pantomime I had in mind. I’ve often been struck by how cultish and status-conscious so much material of this kind is, with endless namedropping and fawning citations of pseudo-axioms or modish non sequitur.
Horace,
As I think I mentioned before, when Derrida died, Butler wrote a pompous and sycophantic piece about him for the LRB, the tone of which was somewhat at odds with her supposedly egalitarian credentials and alleged critical wizardry. She then got sniffy with the New York Times for publishing an insufficiently reverent obituary of the old fraud. Her defence of Derrida was essentially an argument from celebrity. A celebrity acquired largely because of endless, fawning reference by other equally disreputable people.
Perhaps that tells us something.
From Rick Hills’ comments after his post:
“The very plainness of the advocate of tyranny helps insure that the argument’s speciousness is plain. Obscurity camouflages outrageous argument in arcana: It serves as an anesthetic of the intellectuals’ sense of common decency. Here’s another assertion… The Trahison des Clercs of the 1930s was facilitated by a Franco-German tradition of social theory that cloaked brutality with academic fancy dress. Prominent French, Italian, and German intellectuals — e.g., Claudel, Schmitt, Heidegger, Luigi Pirandello, etc — were, I suggest, far more likely to endorse Fascist and Nazi principles than English ones precisely because the English style was clearer, less arcane, less enamoured of a need to draw sharp boundaries between intellectual language and ordinary language.”
It seems to me the problem isn’t just whether Butler (for instance) is gratuitously opaque or worth taking seriously; the problem is that the academic environment Butler inhabits tolerates, even rewards, incompetents – such as Wahneema Lubiano at Duke, or Caroline Guertin, whose “work” is wilfully incomprehensible and largely meaningless. Butler’s defence of obscurantism, feeble as it is, gives license and camouflage to ideologues, fantasists and peddlers of tat.
The problem with obscurantism and technocratic posing is that errors and dishonesty are much harder to detect. Indeed, the more impenetrable the language, the more easily a certain type of person is seduced and willing to defer. And if one can’t fathom the meaning in a given piece of prose it’s easy to assume that the fault is entirely one’s own. But this may not be the case. Elsewhere, I’ve explained how pseudo-educators like Guertin revel in being opaque, as opacity tends to make the most loaded and trivial of ideas seem more coherent and impressive than they actually are. For some there’s an incentive to be obscure and unintelligible, as it lends a status and sense of importance that hasn’t actually been earned. And by the time the reader has disentangled the clotted prose, he may simply be too fatigued to ponder the weakness of what’s actually being expressed, or to argue back. This is a fairly common tactic. It’s the postmodern way.
There will always be rogues and chancers whose “work” is trivial, tendentious or dishonest. What matters is that the academic environment is able to flush out such people and expose them as inadequate. But my impression is that large parts of the humanities – especially those entranced by “poststructuralist gender studies” and other politicised “Theory” – no longer do that, or even try to. (The Sokal hoax and the various editors’ petulant reactions come to mind. Such was their determination to expose “gender-laden and racist assumptions,” all that mattered was a conclusion that fitted their own prejudice, not whether the conclusion was remotely justified or made any kind of sense. No-one was fired, no-one resigned, and the gibberish still flows as if nothing had happened.) And if a person can earn a doctorate with a dissertation that’s in large part gibberish, as Guertin did – and do so apparently unchallenged – then the environment they inhabit needs a major overhaul. If a person can survive, even flourish, by randomly misusing esoteric terminology, as Guertin does repeatedly, that can’t be good for anyone’s probity, including students. Years of sleight-of-hand and taking liberties with meaning – or turning a blind eye to it – can blunt the critical senses and one’s grip on reality.
If you can’t explain it on the back of a napkin to a barmaid, you really don’t know what your talking about…
David,
You might be interested in this.
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/print/35218
AC1,
Thanks for that. I may track down a copy. In a way it’s dreary that the Social Text saga still has currency, or that the damn thing is still published and its editors still employed. As I said above, their reactions to Sokal’s hoax demonstrated an imperviousness to humiliation. And I suspect that’s partly a consequence of the kind of cultish pseudo-thinking in which they indulge.
Butler once described “theory” as “a critical interrogation of beliefs we already carry with us.” Which is a bit rich, really, since so much “theory” (and so much of Butler’s own output) seems utterly disinclined to “interrogate” its *own* political assumptions, or even to state them clearly so that others might take a shot. When these soi-disant “theorists” are so preoccupied with “oppositional voices” and alleged “hegemonies” (always of a particular and rather doubtful kind), there’s little apparent interest in the “hegemony” of “theory” and its own ideological assumptions.