Loads of Learned Lumber

The Crooked Timber folks have been getting into the swing of the whole literary criticism thing. Good. I want more lit blogging. I've decided it makes me happy.

The Palm D'Orc to Kieran Healy's Austen/Tolkien mashup. And his post on the Peck article is extremely interesting and thoughtful as well. (I don't have a subscription either. Anyone? Anyone?)

Here is a little gallery I whipped up from the files real quick in honor of Chris's post.

Maria's chick lit thoughts? Well, I just prefer books about flaying myself. I mean: I myself prefer them to be about flaying. I just find all the awkward personal situations that arise in chick lit to be too painful. And it doesn't relate to my life.

Henry's fun post: already praised it. He started the ball rolling.

And life would be fewer thrilling without dsquared's comments in my comment box.

And now a little something related to this post by Henry a month back. I actually went and read the book: Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena, edited by Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb. (Culler is a grand old man of Theory, and Lamb is a grad student, so that's why you haven't heard of him.)

Here it is. But I think the number two title when you do an Amazon search would actually suit the book better. (When I called up this page a month ago I was offered a discount bundle of the two; which was brilliant.)

The first thing to be said is that the book is not as bad as you fear it will be. Henry talks about the pain and unprofit of reading Homi Bhabha. Nothing on that order of worthlessness here, even though such past offenders as Barbara Johnson and Gayatri Spivak are in attendance. Which is actually quite a good sign. Everyone obviously too ashamed to try it. Mockery having a salutary effect.

The second thing to be said is that it's remarkable how dull and listless and, frankly, pointless, almost all of these pieces are. The charges that need to be rebutted are obvious, at least in general outline, and each author in turn earnestly pretends that the critics of 'bad writing' are saying that writing should never be difficult, or challenging, that common sense should never ever be challenged, so forth. Which obviously no one says, or would say. It's sort of like watching a press conference where the press flack is really working hard to misunderstand more and more direct questions. (Ari Fleischer knew a lot of the tricks these authors know about how to be 'difficult'.)

Along these lines, quite a number of people - including Culler - complain about how the original "Philosophy and Literature" Bad Writing Contest was conducted in bad faith, sentences ripped out of context, so forth. When, obviously, the original contest was sort of a prank. A joke. A wheeze. It was called the Bad Writing Contest, even though the object was obviously to make fun of bad capital-T Theory, because - seems clear to me - Bad Theory Contest didn't sound as funny. So now these authors have to waste our time pointing out how wrong (wrong!) it is just to focus on style, not substance. (How can you say the writing is bad without considering the thoughts!)

It is possible to say a prank or joke is bad, or in bad taste, or proves nothing. Pretending it was all serious and then moaning about deficient methodology? Is there anyone so dumb that they could be gulled by this absurd stance?

Here is a paragraph in which Culller, in attempting to describe these terrible people picking on him and his friends, manages a pretty decent description of himself and his friends:

The claim not to understand might seem an innocent posture that people would seldom adopt willingly, but in fact it is one of considerable power, in which authorities often entrench themselves. Eve Sedgwich has described the "epistemological privilege of unknowing," whereby "obtuseness arms the powerful against their enemies."

The existence of this volume goes a long way towards proving the humoristic appropriateness of the original Bad Writing Contest. If these jerks are going to pretend not even to understand why some people are a bit cheesed off about how badly Homi Bhabha and Judith Butler write, just turn that trick on it's head. Don't even offer the courtesy of a fair debate, if that courtesy will only be abused by willful refusal to respond seriously to serious points. Thank you for being such a pain.

However, when your sole remaining methodological tool of critical inquiry is armed obtuseness, filling the pages gets to be sort of a chore. Farcical and (I hope) not fully earnest but (definitely) essay-length explanations about how, sometimes, academics have to think about difficult things and, like, challenge received notions.

I'll give you a sample. [UPDATE: I've since semi-repented of the harshness of what follows.]It's from John McCumber's paper, entitled "The Metaphysics of Clarity and the Freedom of Meaning". The man starts out very badly with this paragraph, which seems to me indicative of the general level of non-rigor that characterizes the project:

Clarity, as a norm for speech and writing, presents a paradox: although the burden of achieving it falls on the speaker, the achievement itself apparently falls on the hearer. I can labor mightily to produce a clear essay, argument or sentence. But I have not actually produced it until you agree that I have - if only tacitly, but continuing the conversation. If, by contrast, you tell me that I have not made myself clear, there is no arguing with you about that; all I can do is try again to express what I have to say, in different terms, so that you can understand it. My words are not clear until you have understood what I have meant by them.

The patent inadequacy of this opening is inauspicious. If you say you don't understand what I have written - and you have just drunk seven beers - I can perfectly well respond that actually it is quite clear, and when you sober up you will see that for yourself. The basic problem here, to jump ahead a bit, is that it never occurs to our author in the course of this essay even to consider the following line of analysis. Text X can be clear to Y and not to Z. We all know that's possible. Therefore clarity has to be, to some extent, a relational property. Also, it does not occur to our author that something does not actually have to be read to be clear. It is clear if it has a certain complex dispositional relational property, maybe. Text X is clear (with respect to Y) if Y would be able to blahdy, blahdy, blah. Pursue the analysis if you feel like it. The thing is: here we have a person earnestly proposing to analyse the concept of clarity. He is obviously incapable of anticipating the most elementary complications, counter-examples, so forth. Why is he proposing to horn in on the analysis business? He obviously has less than no interest.

Moving right along. In paragraph two our author seems suddenly on the verge of a reasonable point: "truth appears to be a cognitive norm, whereas clarity seems to be aesthetic." Yet clarity seems to be a cognitive demand, yet aesthetics is not cognitive. A fairly familiar philosophical point, in one form or another. But worth pondering. Unfortunately, McCumber declines back to the low standard set by paragraph one: "As a judgment of taste imputes beauty to its object [if it is found beautiful anyway], so I can impute clarity to my words; but this means nothing more than that I expect that others will agree that they are clear." This is supposed to be Kant; maybe it is; I'm sure it's bad. I can think that something is clear and that no one else will find it so, because I am sure a genius. Also, McCumber is in the process of staggering into the arms of another mistake with which he struggles vainly for pages to come: he assumes any undefinable notion has to be unclear. But that is a strange thing to assume. I can't define 'red' (probably). Does that make the word unclear? Not to people who know what red is. As you might guess, a couple of these perfectly obvious problems right at the start are later on pulled out of the hat (sort of unclearly) as discoveries on towards the end. Yawn.

And then a second 'paradox': clarity is unclear, because to demand clarity is an unclear demand. (How much? What sort? So forth.) Stretching a point to call this a paradox, but I'm feeling generous.

Obviously all this is a bit off-point, since the charge of Bad Writing is not in fact a change of Unclear Writing. As Denis Dutton frequently mentions on these occasions: he studies Kant. It cannot be the case that he does not tolerate Unclear Writing.

But OK. Maybe the guy will have something to say about his chosen topic. And now this:

This pair of paradoxes combines into a rather simple dilemma. If, on the one hand, the nature of clarity were clear, then we would know whether we had attained it when we speak, and the first paradox of clarity would not arise. But if the nature of clarity is unclear, we have a sort of practical version of Russell's paradox: a norm that cannot apply to itself. A given sentence or argument or essay might be clear, but the judgment that it is could not.

This is shaky Russell scholarship. I bite my tongue.

Many contemporary American philosophers, bobbing along in the wake of logical positivism, have "solved" this dilemma by denying outright its first horn. they would call a statement "clear" not if it accurately conveyed the thoughts of the speaker to someone else but if it allowed for a single and complete distribution of truth values. If we can say, for every object in the universe, whether a given sentence is true of it or not, then that sentence is clear, and we do not need any hearers to tell us so.

There are many major problems here. Can you find them all? I'll start you out.

1. It is false that significant enough numbers of American philosophers to be worth mentioning are helplessly unable to think outside the tiny logical positivist box in which their puny minds are helplessly trapped. (Like flies in a flybottle! Look at them! And yet there is a way out! But they'll never find it! The fools! Everyone said I was mad! Urk.)

2. Truth-functional definitions of clarity? That is obviously not going to work because, obviously, statement X might be clear to Y and not to Z.

For the rest, I simply haven't the patience. It's so obviously ignorant and ham-handed. (Brian Weatherson? I haven't linked to you yet this post. Care to count all the major problems with this short paragraph? It's a thankless task, I know.)

Blahdy, blahdy, blah. Some senseless, doomed nattering about this senseless paragraph. And stuff about Kant that smells fishy, but I'm not sure. Then this, to round it off.

The first horn of the above dilemma has now been legislated away [by these stupid, oh-so-stupid philosophers] - like drug use, and with approximately equal effect: the behavior still continues. In this case people still feel obligated to reformulate their statements when others do not understand it.

So there you have it, kids: philosophers have convinced themselves that there is no need to reformulate statements so as to make themselves understood when others misunderstand them. 'Truth-functions all in order, ma'am. Please move along. Nothing to see here.' Can you guess what McCumber thinks 'Bad Writers' have been earnestly trying to do, that has led all these philosophers to accuse them so unjustly? Well, he doesn't quite come out and say they have all just been oh-so innocently trying to explain themselves as best they can. And the mean philosophers with their infernal logical devices don't recognize that as legitimate. (Waah.) But he comes close to saying that.

This is just so ... made up. I mean: who is he talking about? What's the point of getting it this wrong?

If you just want people to think badly of philosophers, and you think you can get away with making up any old thing, why not say we are those dog-faced people who walk upside-down on our six hands? That would surely damage our reputations. (Just trying to be helpful.)

There's sort of an interesting - but by no means good - piece by Peter Brooks. There's a funny paragraph, for example, in which he demonstrates the following humorous critical technique. Start by asking a question. Then sort of start treating that question as though it has already received the highly counter-intuitive answer you are obviously angling for. Under no circumstances consider other possible answers, or defend your answer. Or let on that you are aware that you are just assuming your answer without argument. Even though it's quite obvious you are. Just put on a dumb face if someone asks. Do an Ari Fleischer, in effect.

I want to evacuate the question of "bad writing" and leave it for what it is, bad writing, to get on to the more interesting question of difficult writing. [Yep. He actually thinks it's interesting to ask whether writing difficult things is a good idea. No he doesn't. He can't. So why is he pretending?] The issue may be stated in this form: must critical writing put certain notions of common sense into question, unsettling the grammatical frame of understanding and reference by which we usually proceed? [Obviously, no. It strictly needn't. But go ahead, assume the 'yes' answer if it makes you happy.] And if so, what is the relationship of this critical unmooring of common sense to the responsibility that we, as scholars, have to communicate effectively to a wider audience and to those who are not necessarily schooled in the same idiom? standards of decorum, clarity, even grammatical and syntactical conventions, in order to convey, or rather to do, something new and unsettling. How can you speak the old idiom if you are trying to make a revolution? Yet, if the revolution is to be effective - reach a wider public - how can you sacrifice the common language?

This question has plagued the avant-garde since its inception.

What if they held a revolution and no one ... noticed? Would it actually be a revolution? There is something in that querying thought that indicates an unclarity or problem with what this gentleman thinks he is up to.

Here's a nice paragraph:

To be sure, our recent culture wars were partly about a nostalgia - on the part of extra-academic cultural commentators - for a polite, gentlemanly exegesis of great literary works, expressed in a language that didn't need much more technicality than sestet and metaphor. Whereas the public is perfectly willing to conced that the language of the sciences - and perhaps even the social sciences - may evolve in response to the imperatives of research, produce new conceptual difficulties and even neologisms, the humanities ought to remain the realm of the true, the tested, indeed of the eternally true. Like "human nature" itself the subject matter and language of literary study and philosophy should not change. Since we humanists still write about Sophocles and Shakespeare, why need we invent new difficulties in the talk about them? Let the humanities remain the place of cultural truisms.

When it comes to armed obtuseness, Brooks is really locking and loading all twelve barrels with this one. The idea that the battle is between earnest theorists and people who think we should all actually be frozen in amber for our own Sophoclean good? I think more sophisticated versions of humanism might possibly be confabulated. And the patently irrelevant attempt to align capital-T Theory and science? Back in the 1970's, people sort of still pretended that structuralism and semiotics and scientific Marixism and Lacanian psychoanalysis were sciences. But no one even claims that anymore. So what possible point could there be in pretending that the difficulty of theory jargon is warranted on some analogy with the technical difficulty of any number of scientific fields? Suppose I write a bad poem, and you point out this awkward fact. And I fire back: 'well, you know a lot of physics is just equations and stuff. I'll bet you can't understand those!' Does this seem like a cutting response? I mean, beyond my own throat?

Well, never mind. But this gives you a pretty good indication of the profound non-usefulness of the contributors' collective profound non-engagement with the pretty bleedingly obvious issues, such as they are. Fantastic waste of time. And here I am writing about it.

Still here?

You're weird. My kind of weird.

But there are actually some things in this essay that are sort of interesting. Brooks even makes a few good points, quite by accident I think. Certainly what he has to say sheds rather unflattering light on the bad state of academic literary studies.

The situation of criticism was impressed on me recently when I wrote one of those (agonizing) letters of comparative evaluation of candidates for a professorship at a major university. All the candidates had published original, important and readable books. Not one of these books has been reviewed in any media one would recognize as "public" - and I don't simply mean The New York Times Book Review but such other serious media as New York Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books, Los Angeles Times Book Review, and the nearly moribund quarterlies such as Partisan Review [now dead, but presumably not as of Brooks' writing]. I suppose the commonsense explanation is that there are too many books being published because academic careers demand it. But it's by no means clear there has been a recent increase in publication rates in literary criticism - it has become more difficult than ever to get oneself published. What I think we really see is a failure of discrimination. It's as if the public journals had accepted the view of the cultural right and decided that all academic literary criticism is unreadable and trivial and therefore needn't be bothered with. this was, after all, the position championed by Lynne Cheney when she headed the official organization ofor our kinds of study, the National Endowment for the the Humanities.

Now I would like to point out only one pinheaded thing about this paragraph. Brooks advocates - as per that bit I quoted some distance above - revolutionary criticism that, not to put too fine a point on it, presupposes that the reader is an deluded idiot. That is, it presumes that the reader needs to have his paradigms and so forth fundamentally rescrambled right down to the grammatical level. Now I do not wish to say this is wrong. But to advocate revolution on those lines, and then to wonder why everyone doesn't give you a big hug? This just goes to show, basically, that Brooks is not thinking about what he is saying. His paradigm is scrambled at the most basic level. You think your job in life is to show everyone else that they are trapped in the Matrix of late capitalist Enlightenment instrumental reason gone to sleep and bred monsters. Whatever. Fine. But if you then evince surprise that you have a low readership? That shows you didn't think the first thing after all. You just said it. Because all your friends say it, and it seems sort of, y'know, cool. And that's not very punk rock.

I told all my friends to piss off and now I have no friends. I am not a plausible sympathy case.

On we go.

But if we have resigned ourselves to the situation of seeing good work go unreviewed (I don't want to be construed as saying that we should so resign ourselves - we need new journals that do serious public book reviewing), it may well be from a certain weariness with literary criticism itself; which i think derives from a crisis in belief about its usefulness. Most of us who continue to write and publish literary criticism don't particularly enjoy reading it any more - not most of it, anyway. We continue to do so (if we do) out of a sense of duty, because we continue to think it important to learn what's new in the discourse. But most of the fun is gone, since the stakes appear to be diminished, and there isn't much sense of real dialogue about our understandings of texts and issues that matter - that matter in a way on which there is some consensus. Literary criticism gained its broadest audience at a time when literature was taking the place of religion, as a kind of secular scripture - see Wallace Stevens for an extreme statement of the case: "After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is the essence that takes its place as life's redemption." It may prove to have been a historically delimited field.

I simply note the tension between the author's thesis that the New York Times ought to be reviewing this stuff and the confession that he himself is bored stiff; only reads it out of agonized duty to keep up with 'the discourse'. A bit further on:

We have placed a premium on "original published scholarship" that leads to a certain critical hyperventilation, the promotion into books of what should not be books, and the claim to significance where one would prefer a modest elucidation.

That's damn true. Give the man a point. Give the man two points.

We all know why this is so. Indeed, I find myself telling younger colleagues that only books "count" any more; articles just don't make the weight ... I doubt if anyone under the age of seventy turns to Partisan Review for its literary and cultural commentary, and if the library catalogue didn't assure me of the continued existence of Kenyon Review and Hudson Review, I would not be aware of it. Commentary and the New Criterion disqualified themselves as interepreters of culture by becoming public executioners during the culture wars. And nothing has come to take the place of these journals of mediation. (Witness the rise to prominence of Lingua Franca, a kind of academicv People magazine; and even it is now defunct.) But there is perhaps no point in lamenting the decadence of the serious cultural journals since journals of any sort mainly go unread at at present

At this point I pause to link to Armavirumque, in hopes that the poor dears will see and be cheered with being credited with fell executions committed. I notice that Roger Kimball himself is now blogging. That means I shall be reading more often. I like Roger Kimball very much, even though his politics are most definitely not my own. I've been thoroughly disappointed by Armavirumque, so this is a good sign. Derivative warblogging and some potshots at easy targets. I challenge them to win my discriminating custom with their future offerings. But I always read The New Criterion. This is really the proof of Brooks' doom. I am a lefty pop-culture hound, and one of the only academic 'cultural studies' journals I habitually read is every issue of a righty high-culture outlet. Why? Because I am rational and interested in philosophy. And, although The New Criterion has been known to fall far short of that standard, there are no lefty academic-grade culture studies publications that currently ever attain to it, to my knowledge. (Tell me I'm wrong.) If The New Criterion were consistently as bad as Peter Brooks' essay, for example, I would stop reading it. And Brooks' wishes he ever wrote anything as good as Lingua Franca on a bad quarter.

But I digress.

The decline of the quarterlies of course can be explained as part of a general decline of the literate print media in an age of the "frenzy of the visible," to use Jean-Louis Comolli's phrase. Nonetheless, it participates as well in a loss of faith in the value of exchanged understandings about the meanings and conditions of meaning of literature. I don't think it is simply nostalgia to claim there was once a culture in which serious writers and serious readers were able to meet on the grounds of what to think about Kafka or Wallace Stevens. Now, each new book of literary and cultural criticism must be an individual performance, strenuous, original, self-inventing - and inventive, too, of an audience it hopes to shape and indeed create through its rhetoric. Some of these performances succeed remarkably - as in the works of Judith Butler. Many others simply produce a kind of hypertrophy of rhetoric and alleged significance.

Have I then argued myself into a corner where literary criticism must finally expire and be seen in historical perspective as the acolyte of modernism, rising and falling with the long passage from romanticism through to postmodernism? I think this is a distinct possibility, although not one to which I am currently willing to resign myself. I consider that the writing of literary and cultural critique is still worth the agony. This may be simply the result of years of professional deformation. But there still are grounds to believe that criticism matters. To paraphrase the French poet Paul Claudel, the world is before us like a text to be deciphered. ONe need not share Claudel's religious commitment to believe that the semiotics of literature and culture are crucial to understanding not only discrete messages and how they affect us but also our very compostion as fiction-making animals.

There's a sort of amiable inaccuracy to that ending that I find endearing. A discrete message would be, say, 'Honey, I forgot to buy milk. Make sure to pick some up.' Now whether or not one shares Claudel's religious commitment, one need not be a semiotician to go buy the damn milk, and understand what it was that made one go buy the damn milk. Not that this picky detail matters, but the likes of Brooks' are obviously worse than useless for purposes of analysing anything so twiddly and particular as us fiction-making animals.

He should find something to do with his life that's simple and obvious. For example, earnestly maintaining the importance of Theory, as currently practiced in the academy, in Ari Fleischer-like tones.

But I am cruel.

The thing that strikes me about this - quite apart from the wholly unwarranted and gratuitous removal of Judith Butler (of all loathsome writers) from Ground Zero - is the whiny, wound-licking, self-pitying pointlessness of it all.

How to put this? Literary criticism is not like alchemy after the chemists figured out lead into gold is not a going economic proposition. Literary criticism is not like astrology in an age of astronomy. Literary criticism is people interested in books writing things - possibly books - for other people interested in books. Brooks' wholly unwarranted determination that all literary criticism must be implausibly revolutionary; his sullen, accusatory finger-pointing at these newspapers that, for reasons best known to themselves, do not wish to drive their readers away by reviewing over-produced academic pseudo-philosophical, pseudo-critical pabulum. Can he not just give it a rest and say something interesting? Mightn't it be the case that saying something interesting is what readers really want? Literary critics who moan because the revolution hasn't come seem silly to me. It's like saying: I really liked Shakespeare until I found my writing about Shakespeare wouldn't cure cancer. And now I find reading Shakespeare to be agony. But I think the New York Times ought to review more books by professors about Shakespeare.

This attitude makes no sense to me on so many levels.

And about those moribund little magazines and journals of opinion? Crooked Timber and the Volokh Conspiracy publish a full issue worth of learned material from the pens of professors every week. I'll bet both have more circulation than most of the famous old organs in their heydays. (And I am personally very sorry to see Partisan Review go. That was where Lionel Trilling wrote. End of an era.) It's not like our recent excursions into literary criticism in these parts are ground-breaking, of course. But it's obvious lots of people will show up to hear university professors (mostly) write thoughtful thoughts they are thinking about stuff they are interested in. If we wrote even more impressive stuff, more people would come more often. That's my guess. And I think people will even read long stuff, too. (Anyone out there?)

It's not like blogs will cure cancer either.

I don't want to fall into that dorky trap. But the thing Brooks really doesn't seem to see is that his problem is that he keeps thinking, 'how can I force them to read my stuff, the deluded bastards?' It's the worst sort of top-down, command, pushing string mentality, seems to me. There is no respect whatsoever for the intelligence and - above all - autonomy of the sought-for readership. There's no: if we wrote worthwhile stuff, they would come. If they don't like us, maybe it's because we presupposed they were wrong ,and they found that treatment annoying.

He ends the article by proposing that all the collaborators lobby together - "perhaps a consortium of university presses along with foundations" - to publish a "new periodical dedicated to serious critical reviews of serious critical writing." But are you going to write less dull stuff? If not, will you pay people to read it? If not, why would they? (Answer: because they are morbid, like me. But that's my problem. And yours, apparently.)

UPDATE: I should not be such a complete bastard as not commend Brooks' for his spot-on point about how everyone in literary studies is professionally obliged to engage in absurd, self-promotional hyperventilation. Good point. But he doesn't see that his windy insistence on the necessarily revolutionary, transformative quality of literary criticism is hyperventilatory and arrogant and annoying. If you think you know how to start a revolution, fine. Start one. If you really haven't a clue, then settle for saying something interesting about some literature. Don't just weep about how no one is willing to read journals about how you are going to start the revolution you have no clue how to start.

Comments

[Chun the Unavoidable]

I intend to offer a lengthy reply to this stimulating bit of writing, but, as always, I think your main problem is that you're focusing on a very narrow and unrepresentative sample of what literary scholars actually produce and making unwarranted generalizations about the whole from it.

[Chun the Unavoidable]

How could one like Roger Kimball? Have you ever read Tenured Radicals? Besides David Horotwitz's Radical Son, this is easily the worst book ever written.

[Chun the Unavoidable]

Also, when I wrote above that "Tenured Radicals was the worst book ever written," I mean, of course, that I find it to be so.

There are problems in the study of literature that require a technical vocabulary. Is this vocabulary often used in an arbitrary manner? Is it occasionally used only for its own sake? Sure. Of course it is. What kind of damn-fool question is that? But your mistake is that you don't realize, probably because you don't read enough representative work in the field, that the overwhelming majority of literary criticism published is straightforward philological and historical explanation and interpretation.

In other words, the stuff that gets all the attention isn't the real stuff.

[yuppity]

"Whoever knows he is deep, strives for clarity; whoever would like to appear deep to the crowd, strives for obscurity.  For the crowd considers anything deep if only it cannot see to the bottom:  the crowd is so timid and afraid of going into the water."
-Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

[jholbo]

Thanks for the comments, Chun. I quite expected to hear from you about Roger Kimball in particular. Well, maybe we'll argue about it at length some time. I do agree that Tenured Radicals is not a satisfactory book. I do like quite a number of pieces Kimball has written for NC, however.

More or less at random, here's a nice essay on Kierkegaard:

http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/20/sept01/kierk.htm

In general, I regard Kimball as an often engaging, often vexing intellectual opponent and an occasional philosophical ally against various forms of egregious stupidity. And I think his stern, brisk yet florid style - with the inevitable, multiple epigraphs - is rather winning.

As to your point about technicality. The thing to be said is this: no one is complaining about legitimate technicality. And no one is complaining about the sober semi-technical work lots of scholars are no doubt doing. Probably I should emphasize more that I don't think everyone in English departments are evil idiots. I really don't think that, although no doubt sometimes it sounds that way, and then I deserve to be called up short and made to explain myself.

The thing people - like myself - object to is the likes of, say, Judith Butler defending her Bad Writing on the grounds that it is necessarily technical. It simply isn't. This of course takes some showing. No one need take my authoritative word on it. But I think it's true. Butler's writings are sweeping in metaphysical scope, impressionistic and gestural in their formulations, highly dogmatic in nature. She does not argue. She makes claims. She uses terms like 'performative', which she borrows from Austin. And it is a technical term. But she does not use it in Austin's technical sense. She uses it as a stage prop. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. it depends on whether the theatrical performance is artistically successful. But the play cannot be defended on the grounds that Butler is doing something technical. It simply isn't true.

You are right that I read the bad stuff, and that sort of poisons the well of my good will. But something does need to be done about the fact that there is apparently an inverse relation between status and quality. The high status stuff is bad philosophy and the low status stuff is probably mostly solid and sturdy and respectable scholarship. I've asked you this question before, I know. To what degree is this the way things are: sort of stood on their head, that is?

[Chirag Kasbekar]

I'm still VERY annoyed that I couldn't understand a WORD of what Spivak wrote in "Can the subaltern speak?"

Literally not a word. Left me stunned.

Have she and her friends invented a new mathematics? Do they really think they have?

[Timothy Burke]

Chun, I've mulled this over before, and I honestly would like to know: how do you make satisfying claims about what is typical or normal or representative in a particular discipline or type of scholarly work? It seems to me that John has very accurately skewered not just the essays in this collection but also a type of reason or argument which is much more widespread, particularly the kinds of claims about the purpose of criticism that Brooks makes and the incoherencies of the way Brooks links that to a mapping of the actually existing public sphere.

Short of a comprehensive survey of every work of scholarly literary criticism published in the last two years, how do we make these kinds of judgements? Personally, I can only say that the criticisms that John offers seem to me to apply not merely (with devastating accuracy) to the defenses of "bad writing" in this book but to a very widespread array of arguments and work that I read or know of. But I don't know how to go beyond saying, "Seems right to me", save to begin the laborious work of cataloguing thousands of scholarly publications.

I think to some extent that this is the very best, smartest point John makes in this essay, amid many smart observations: that the essays in this volume either reflect that the authors literally do not understand the more sophisticated kinds of arguments against "bad writing" (or "bad theory") or that they refuse to understand them, and offer a bad faith portrayal of all such arguments as being right-wing demands for simple-minded thinking. There's a frustrating lack of charity here, an inability to say, "Ok, so perhaps you have a point or two", when the first thing that happens when I get together with many of my critical theorist and literary critical friends and colleagues is that we all confess we don't understand 90% of Bhabha or Deleuze or Butler et al. Now the difference after that point is that I go on to say that some of these folks are saying much less than they seem to be (Bhabha or Spivak); some of them are saying things that could be said better and are using obscurity as a bludgeon or substitute for argument (Butler) and some are saying virtually nothing and don't even know that they are (a substantial number of third-tier critical theory/lit crit writers). My friends are sure that there's gold in them thar hills, and that their own lack of comprehension is only a promissary sign of the intellectual labor that will be required to extract it.

I feel that saying, "Well, John, this really isn't typical stuff", comes close to being the same kind of see-no-evillism that some of this anthology indulges in. It seems to me that the ground floor of this discusssion has to be, "Bad writing and bad theory are both real phenomena, and reasonably widespread in the humanities". Once we get there, I'm perfectly happy with going on to say, "But the very best work, work which is generative of its own sustainable intellectual traditions, is not like this at all, and it is this work that we should take to be more meaningfully representative of literary criticism today".

[Chun the Unavoidable]

I haven't read the anthology in question, and I don't know if Timothy has either. Having said that, I think that you can easily make a normative judgement about work in the field by reading in it, as I do.

I don't mean to claim that I read even a significant percentage of all the literary criticism written in one year, but I do read enough to know that these "debates" that scholars in other disciplines and middlebrow cultural observers (by which I mean people like Kimball, not our host) get so worked up over simply do not apply to the selection of material I read for my research and general interest. Scholars either don't care or are not affected by what are perceived to be these "megatrends" in theoretical work.

I won't make tiresome Kuhnian analogies about "normal science" and such, and there is undoubtably a distressing level of idolatry in literary studies. Timothy's critical theorist friends might be professors at Swarthmore or people he knew at Johns Hopkins. Their "'higher' status" means that they have more invested in being closer to the top of this perceived status hierarchy, which is why they might need to believe in the intellectual seriousness of a Bhabha or Butler more than the majority of practicing literary critics (I don't really have an opinion about the intellectual content or the style of either of these killer "B"s, personally, so don't take that as an endorsement of Duttonesque neocon claritism--it's merely an instance).

Maybe there's no "bad writing," only "bad reading." To try to answer John's original question, it's not that the "'high' status" stuff is worse than normal criticism, it's just that it has to be controversial (and probably opaque) in order to achieve that status. Of course if you can't necessarily pin down someone's argument, you can at least be persuaded that it's because you don't understand it. In most cases, this is obvious bullshit. But it is true, sometimes at least, that work can be beyond the understanding of all but a very few people, only to be appreciated much later.

I don't claim that this is particularly insightful, but it also seems to be a fairly obvious explanation of the "bad theory" phenomena.

[msg]

When my hermeneutic chain-saw drops a rhetorical Sequoia through the roof of a building in which a roomful of tenured linguists are gathered, do the reverberations count as an essay, or is it still just 10% of course grade? Does it matter if they all have their fingers in their ears and are looking away on purpose? How about iPOD's? Walkmen? Cel phones?
If later on I show it on film to people deaf from birth it would seem obvious no sound is involved, and yet...
Is a book at the bottom of the sea still a book? Even if no one knows it's there? Is that a tangent?

[Jean]

Can I just say that, at least in the English-speaking academic traditions I know of, it is only in the US that arcane "high theory" is accorded quite such authority in the first place. In Australia, for example, pragmatic intellectual traditions are generally considered at least as useful or important (or is that just wishful thinking?) And I should note the existence of Deleuzian cults in particular pockets as well.

[Ophelia Benson]

Yeah - there's something wrong with Americans in this respect! There's some terrible deep well of credulity and naivete and willingness to be overimpressed, here, that...I just don't get.

For instance, I read a bit of the introduction to 'Just Being Difficult?' a couple of hours ago, and noticed that they (Culler and the other guy) talk about the comparatively well-known 'theorists' as 'stars.' Not just in passing, but making a point of it - making a meal of the fact that the Bad Writing Contest gave the prize to 'stars' like Butler and Bhabha and that that's no accident. Stars?! Come on! Butler and Bhabha are not stars to anyone except other theorists. But they do think of each other as stars. They talk as if Derrida were Kant and Butler were at least Fichte. It's very odd. Credulity seems so kind of...untheoretical.

[W. Kiernan]

...obscurity as a bludgeon or substitute for argument (Butler)...

That's what I too thought at first, or else that she's simply incapable of expressing herself clearly, like Hegel was. But from the one book of Judith Butler's I've 3/4 read so far (The Psychedelic Life o' Power, hey it's only been what, three, four years? I'm slow) I get the impression that Butler writes like that on purpose. It's a style. She's describing subjection to us and to do so more effectively she deploys that all-rusty-sharp-edges style of hers to put the reader in a subjected-upon mood, so he'll not only understand it but feel it. Kind of like if you were sitting at a jazz show and the saxophonist came down off stage and whacked you upside the head with his horn. Man, that'd convey an emotion. The tip-off was, I happened to see a short article by her about a current affairs topic which was, to my surprise, written in such simple, unadorned English that I could read it from a to z in one pass and get the whole thing.

Boy I pity anybody who has to try to digest her stuff on schedule, like say, by the end of a semester!

[Ophelia Benson]

Oh yeah - I think everybody agrees she does it on purpose. But that's the problem...

In fact that's one of the defenses of the bad-or-difficult writing crowd. As in this quotation from the introduction by Thomas McLaughlin, to the anthology Critical Terms for Literary Study:

"Any discourse that was out to uncover and question that system had to find a language, a style, that broke from the constraints of common sense and ordinary language. Theory set out to produce texts that could not be processed successfully by the commonsensical assumptions that ordinary language puts into play. There are texts of theory that resist meaning so powerfully - say those of Lacan or Kristeva - that the very process of failing to comprehend the text is part of what it has to offer."

It's hard not to laugh at that.

I did a comment on the whole thing at Butterflies and Wheels last month, here.

[Cosma]

Chun, I'm quite prepared to believe that the work in literary studies which gets most of the attention from outsiders is neither the best nor the most representative. (God knows I work in a field with similar issues.) Can you point out some specific books or articles which you do find representative and not subject to these afflictions, just so the rest of us can see for ourselves?

I can't tell, though, whether you're saying that the work which gets attention on the outside also has high status within your discipline. I think so, but I can't see any way to reconcile that with your apparent equanimity about the state of the discipline.

[Chun the Unavoidable]

I'm saying that the work which generates a lot of controversy has proportionally less status and influence than is commonly assumed.

Some representative work (all Muse-able):

Daileader, Celia R. "Back door Sex: Renaissance Gynosodomy, Aretino, and the Exotic." ELH. 69.2 (2002): 303-334.

Atkins, Carl D. "The Application of Bibliographical Principles to the Editing of Punctuation in Shakespeare's Sonnets." Studies in Philology. 100.4 (Fall 2003): 493-513.

McGann, Jerome. "Herbert Horne's Diversi Colores (1891): Incarnating the Religion of Beauty." New Literary History. 34.3 (2003): 535-552

Diemart, Brian. "The Waterworks: E. L. Doctorow's Gnostic Detective Story." Texas Studies in Language and Literature. 45.4 (2003): 352-374.

[msg]

http://www.bard.edu/hrp/events/spring2002/butler_interview.htm
"...early on in September and October, people didn't want to hear about why the people who orchestrated and executed the attacks on September 11th - they didn't want to hear explanations of why they did it. Because if you can give a reason for why they did it, that makes them rational, that makes them animated by a reason. And if you have an investment in making them out to be just pure evil, or constituently violent, or extra-human or not human, then they are not motivated by reason, they are motivated by something that's other than reason. So, in that case, no reasons can be given.

But I think that it's not only wrong to cast people in that way, even when they do heinously violent acts, but it is an opportunity to think critically about the origins of violence in our time - Where it's coming from, why it's directed where it is, what its themes are. So, in the piece that you referred to, I worry that people who try to think about explanations are very often accused of providing a rationale or justification for that action. But I think it's important to distinguish between those two. We can condemn those violent actions, but also be compelled by our international place and obligations to figure out the reasons for them."
—
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n16/butl02_.html
"In holding out for a distinction to be made between Israel and Jews, I am calling for a space for dissent for Jews, and non-Jews, who have criticisms of Israel to articulate; but I am also opposing anti-semitic reductions of Jewishness to Israeli interests. The 'Jew' is no more defined by Israel than by anti-semitism. The 'Jew' exceeds both determinations, and is to be found, substantively, as a historically and culturally changing identity that takes no single form and has no single telos. Once the distinction is made, discussion of both Zionism and anti-semitism can begin, since it will be as important to understand the legacy of Zionism and to debate its future as to oppose anti-semitism wherever we find it."
—
That Judith Butler I tell ya, opaque as broken glass years in the sand. Laughable. I mean really.
And you know what else? I hate it when people write stuff that's over my head. Hate it hate it hate it. On the other hand, sometimes I wonder if maybe it's me, maybe I just don't get it. You know?

[Timothy Burke]

I think Chun's argument both makes a lot of sense and yet cannot also be left at that.

Chun's basic point is legitimately common throughout the academy, namely, that an insider or practicioner sense of a discipline or subdiscipline is always more nuanced, attentive and rich than an outsider perspective, particularly one that has come to trash and demean work. I've had the surreal experience ever since I was in graduate school of having older academics on the left perceive Basil Davidson's work as canonically typical of African history. In a way, it is, in that it captures the central premises of the "nationalist sympathizer" moment in Africanist historiography very well--but Davidson was never perceived, even at his most preeminent moments, as a scholar's scholar, as the person who shaped research and writing for disciplinary practicioners. And to be confronted at this late date with the perception that he *remains* a central shaper of the canon is from the perspective of anyone trained from the 1980s onward, just odd.

So yes, this happens a lot: our internal canons and hierarchies of value get lost when outsiders look casually askance at what we do.

However, once we're past flat denial that work which is controversial because of its obscurity, difficulty or "bad writing" exists, and instead arguing about what constitutes the legitimate, central or influential work of literary criticism and critical theory, we face a couple of problems.

First, obviously, has to do with actually existing systems of reward and incentive in academic life. There are literary critics for the literary critic, and they have power and influence within disciplinary practice. And then there are scholars who come to constitute critical practice for a larger audience, and their power and influence extends across a wider if not deeper terrain. Go check any citation index for Bhabha or Kristeva or Spivak or Butler and you're going to come back with a much larger number of citations spread across a vastly larger realm of disciplines than for Diemart or Atkins (or in my field, Hunt or Landau, to cite two scholars whose work I admire).

This is not mere paper status. "Stardom" of this kind translates into real privilege, constitutive authority and power within the academy. If we are to accept Chun's argument that this sort of work is not really terribly representative of the best of literary criticism nor even that influential, then there is something about the economic and institutional benefits this work incurs for its producers and their most devoted followers that raises a further set of questions that interest me, and I think ought to interest Chun. At the very least, there is a genealogy of influence to follow and untangle, but I think there are also deeper questions about how we judge what is "influential", and according to what metrics or goalposts.

Nor do I want to retreat into arguments that simply take what disciplines internally praise as the best or most legitimately representative of what academics do. Because there is another set of "widely influential" works that are also often taken as representative of what academics do and think that I'm quite proud to have the public sphere look on and find quite useful for my own practice, works that take the more Orwellian position in the "language wars" and commit to communicating clearly with a wider public (inside and outside the academy). And it is those works that I think many of the critics of "bad writing" are pointing to as proof that bad writing not only exists but is unnecessary.

[Ophelia Benson]

As always (well, all the times I've seen, anyway), Timothy Burke is spot-on.

This business of rewards and citations, of who is a 'star' and who is not, is as Burke says worth following and untangling. I have friends who are lit crits, or teachers of English, who tell me that they don't much like writing theoryspeak, but that's what is expected and indeed required, by publishers and even more to the point by interviewers and tenure committees. If you want to publish, if you want to get tenure, if you want a promotion, if you want to move to a more thrilling university with a better research library and a smaller teaching load - then you have to crank out the theoryspeak. So I'm told, anyway.

So, arguably, that's one reason all this mockery and teasing is a very good idea. John made the excellent point in his post that mockery does make a difference - and it can be seen as doing the prisoners of theory a favor, rather than as tormenting them. If obscurity-for-its-own-sake goes out of fashion, maybe that won't be such a tragedy for the practitioners. Maybe they secretly want us to apply pressure to the university presses and hiring committees - who knows?

"works that take the more Orwellian position in the "language wars" and commit to communicating clearly with a wider public (inside and outside the academy). And it is those works that I think many of the critics of "bad writing" are pointing to as proof that bad writing not only exists but is unnecessary."

You betcha.

[Ophelia Benson]

I have to add an absurdly apposite comment from a review by Anthony Daniels of a biography of Jung in (sorry) The New Criterion -

"There is nothing quite like esoteric windiness for creating a penumbra of profundity...and this no doubt explains how [Jung] became the Madame Blavatsky of psychotherapy."

An awful fate! Lesson: always be clear, lest you become the Madame Blavatsky of anything.

[W. Kiernan]

That first fragment of Judith Butler that "msg" quotes happens to be the very current-affairs article I read. Clear and simple, but then the subject is not a specialist one nor is the target audience made of specialists. Next I was going to copy, for contrast, a few random sentences out of Psychic Life of Power. But upon reflection that's unfair; the broad subject of Psychic Life is far more complicated than the narrow subject of a brief popular essay and it leans heavily on other scholarly works, themselves chock full of the most awful neologism imaginable. To score points off an author (or his school or politics or nation or religion), pluck a paragraph out of the middle of one of his big specialist books that will be especially opaque to non-specialists when ripped out of context. (With extra points if the author uses everyday words with special meanings specific to the field; e.g. Butler's usage of "body," by which she evidently doesn't mean the face I humbly hold aloft, the face that now greets you and smiles.) So no cherry-picked ("pit-picked"?) passages for you.

Still... still. You go read a even few pages in a row of Psychic Life of Power, and tell me there weren't a couple sentences where you had to stop and reread to make out something basic like which damn word in there is the verb. That might be excusable if she's whipping out a folio of study notes for her students to read along with her lectures. You'd think someone going to the trouble of publishing a book with a cover and an ISBN number and all would try to make it clear and persuasive, even more so for a work aimed at scholars than one written to amuse the general public.

[Ophelia Benson]

"You'd think someone going to the trouble of publishing a book with a cover and an ISBN number and all would try to make it clear and persuasive, even more so for a work aimed at scholars than one written to amuse the general public."

Well...I hate to keep beating this into the ground, but the reality is, no you wouldn't, not as long as reputations for stardom are in inverse proportion to the clarity of one's writing. In most fields, especially scientific ones, that is not the case, but in some sectors of the humanities, alas the day, it is.

[Styles]

Thanks for your discussion. I shared some thoughts on the subject a while back at http://www.yougotstyle.org/archives/cat_schoolstyle.html#000079. I was pleased to find yours here.

[alexander hamilton]

um, wtf? i mean, wtf?