// essays //
Spring 2006
Friends Don't Let Friends Say "Althusserian Exegasis"
Jen Spyra
Back in high school I actually read the dictionary for fun. I studied word books like some kids study baseball statistics. I forced my family to play vocabulary-building exercises on road trips. When we would workshop our papers anonymously in English class, I understood the mass eye-rolling of my classmates as jealousy; my genius made them green with envy. Words were my talent—or so I thought. Here is my sophomoric musing on Jefferson: "The conflagration of wooden republicanism impelled Jefferson, himself a dogmatically determined demagogue of sorts, to mobilize his intellectual allies and compartmentalize his revolutionary agenda."
I continue to be thankful for the day my English teacher, Mr. Murphy, took me to task for my convoluted blithering. ("Jen," he said, "you're out of control.") Sophomore year, I was too enamoured with big words and complicated sentences to realize that they were crutches for bad writers. By the time I got to Barnard, I had woken up and realized how silly my papers had been, how pompous I had sounded in classes. Yet at the very moment Murphy's wisdom had sunken in, I suddenly found myself surrounded by what I had learned to give up: unclear, pretentious writing. In the great majority of my humanities classes, we were inevitably assigned some tenured scholar, probably a recipient of the Guggenheim fellowship, writing in inaccessible prose. Why are the standards for academic writing higher for high school sophomores than lauded theorists?
One could make the argument that academics are just playing the academic game—current scholars didn't create this trend, they're just copying and adding the latest jargon. A second argument is that academic writing is comparable to scientific language. Just as one must learn a new language to talk about physics or chemistry, one must expect the same of social sciences and theory. A third, and perhaps most common argument is that the subjects of academic essays are often complicated and challenging; so complicated, in fact, that expressing the ideas in clear language is simply impossible. A complicated idea may just require a complicated rendering.
I don't buy any of these claims. In academe, there's something especially insidious about hard-to-understand writing. First of all, it's rarely broken down. In classes, students and teachers seem to repeat the buzzwords of a given text without actually explaining them. More importantly, unlike my high school English papers, academic texts are important. They have the real potential to influence the way we think as we develop our worldviews. Since these texts are supposed to be presenting breakthrough ideas with real world implications, they should be held to the highest standards of accessibility. Often, today's most important texts–those that tackle the difficult issues of gender, race, and power–are the ones only accessible to a handful of PhDs in a given field. If the theorists genuinely want their ideas to take hold and create a more socially just world, they should not write in a way that alienates non-PhD readers.
Repeat offender Judith Butler argues in defense of difficult writing. Butler, a famous gender theorist, Guggenheim fellowship winner and, ironically, a professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley, took first prize in the 1998 Bad Writing contest inPhilosophy and Literature. The aim of the journal's annual contest is to "locate the ugliest, most stylistically awful passage found in a scholarly book or article." Butler overwhelmed her competitors in one lamentable line:
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in a relatively homologous way to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
In response to this distinction, Butler published a defense of her writing in The New York Times. In "A Bad Writer Bites Back" she explains why "difficult"–a tired euphemism for inscrutable–language is so frequently used to express some of the "most trenchant social criticisms." Butler contends that the role of scholars is to question common sense, to "interrogate its tacit presumptions and provoke new ways of looking at a familiar world." Citing slavery and the suppression of women's suffrage, she argues that "many quite nefarious ideologies pass for common sense." Uncommon language helps to question such common sense and thus, allows us to create a more socially just world. Using language as a tool for social reform is a praiseworthy ideal. Yet Butler's own writing serves as a barrier to meaning, disallowing the possibility for positive change. Considering her seemingly relentless determination to avoid writing comprehensibly, it's safe to assume that social reform–at least through new ways of writing and speaking about the world–isn't actually one of her priorities.
Butler is not alone. The late Jacques Derrida, the French father of Deconstructionism, has come in many circles to be synonymous with impossibly incomprehsible. Here is Derrida in his essay "From Spectres of Marx":
But also at stake, indissociably, is the differential deployment of tekkne, of techno-science or tele-technology. It obliges us more than ever to think the virtualisation of space and time, the possibility of virtual events whose movement and speed prohibit us more than ever (more and otherwise than ever, for this is not absolutely and thoroughly new) from opposing presence to its representation, "real time" to "deferred time," effectivity to its simulacrum, the living to the non-living, in short, the living to the living-dead of its ghosts. It obliges us to think, from there, another space for democracy. For democracy-to-come and thus for justice. We have suggested that the event we are prowling around here hesitates between the singular "who" of the ghost and the general "what" of the simulacrum.
Derrida's ambiguity and pretention is legendary–some critics have called him a "charlatan"–but it is his defense of a vocabulary smokescreen that merits special attention. Derrida is quoted as musing, "No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist that he or she does not understand, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather someone who tampers with your own language." His argument is typical: philosophy necessitates a special vocabulary just as much as math does. But his self-defense is superficial. He never justifies his implicit presumption that critical theory is necessarily as abstract as physics and math. Is talking about language really as trying as talking about, calculus in everyday language? I am skeptical that criticizing literature somehow requires a new language. Derrida leaves his implicit conclusion unsupported and his readers scratching their heads.
Gayatri Spivak, Columbia professor and famed post-colonial theorist, is infamously hard to read. A sentence from her acclaimed essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" gives us a taste of what is often her regrettable style. She writes, "Foucault articulates another corollary of the disavowal of the role of ideology in reproducing the social relations of production: an unquestioned valorization of the oppressed as subject. The object being, as Deleuze admiringly remarks, "to establish conditions where the prisoners themselves would be able to speak." This sentence is a good example of what's bad. What's worse is this little gem found tucked away, only paragraphs from the mentioned line: "This parasubjective matrix, cross-hatched with heterogeneity, ushers in the unnamed Subject, at least for those intellectual workers influenced by the new hegemony of desire." To be fair, sometimes she pairs such phrases with other more understandable sentences that make her work more accessible than, Butler's or Derrida's.
In our gender-obsessed and often homophobic culture, contributions by academics like Butler could be highly relevant and have the potential precipitate positive social change. Yet Butler discards her non-inititated audience by miring her ideas in her word choice. Butler's most incisive criticism has come from Martha Nussbaum, fellow feminist scholar and Ernst Freund Distinguished Service professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago. In "The Professor of Parody," a 1996 article from The New Republic, Nussbaum criticizes what she sees as a movement in the academy towards elitism and pointless pretention. "Feminist thinkers of the new symbolic type would appear to believe that the way to do feminist politics is to use words in a subversive way, in academic publications of lofty obscurity and disdainful abstractness." Nussbaum calls out Butler's bad writing simply and truthfully, "It is difficult to come to grips with Butler's ideas, because it is difficult to figure out what they are. Her written style...is ponderous and obscure. It is dense with allusions to other theorists, drawn from a wide range of different theoretical traditions." Nussbaum's point goes beyond a superficial attack on Butler's style, and thus, the inability to understand her ideas. Her critique cuts at the heart of he problem with theorists who claim to create a better, more just world through their complicated language. Nussbaum writes, "Hungry women are not fed by this, battered women are not sheltered by it, raped women do not find justice in it, gays and lesbians do not achieve legal protections through it." Butler's elitism is not only pretentious—it's unhelpful towards the very people it claims to advocate for.
Alongside queer and post-colonial studies, deconstructionism rates high in both sexyness and inscrutability. Derrida's theory of deconstruction, though not aimed at dismantling a specific social ill, inherently contains the potential that any philosophical movement has to change the landscape of our intellectual and social context, and indeed, Derrida's famed de-analysis has been applied to virtually all of the humanities. But even lauded intellectuals like Noam Chomsky confess that they have no idea what Derrida is saying. In a discussion about postmodernism and its contribution to activism, Chomsky eloquently called pomo theorists' bluff and said plainly:
Most of it seems to me gibberish. But if this is just another sign of my incapacity to recognize profundities, the course to follow is clear: just restate the results to me in plain words that I can understand, and show why they are different from, or better than, what others had been doing long before and and have continued to do since without three-syllable words, incoherent sentences, inflated rhetoric that (to me, at least) is largely meaningless.
Derrida himself has, on various occasions, resisted or denied giving a definition of deconstruction because he said that it was impossible. If defining a theory is beyond even the theoritician who conceived of it, who can possibly be expected to understand it?
Writing as Butler, Derrida, and Spivak do is only a problem if we believe that this sort of knowledge is meant for everyone. If this tacit premise is not generally upheld, and it is affirmed that certain theories are only meant for a small group of elites, than such pretention is not a dire issue. Caroline Damon, an English major at Connecticut College, implied something along these lines. When I asked her whether she noticed a special academic jargon she said, "Sure. And I understand what the draw is, and I do think that some things are sophisticated enough that they need to use different language." When asked whether or not she felt that special language was a barrier between the public and new ideas she offered, "I don't think that academe is really meant for the mass public. It's not a necessity [for it] to be accessible." When I suggested she might come off as elitist, she shrugged, "Yes, I know. It's okay."
The contention that certain theories resist fathomable expression is, well, baloney. Butler contends that theorists need a vocabulary smokescreen, comparing them to a persecuted philosopher: "If what he says could be said in terms of ordinary language, he would probably have done so in the first place." Unlike math and science, post-colonial studies and queer theory do not necessitate vocabulary smokescreens, but theorists erect them nonetheless. Understood most generously, one could argue that changing language questions the social norms out of which the old language was created. Changing language, in this light, could be seen as productive and good. By its very nature it challenges the status quo. But rather than liberating new ideas, this languages creates a new "oppressor," or hegemony (to use a Butler favorite) of the elites in the ivory tower.
Forgetting about the lay reader, even in universities, students who rush to read names like Derrida and Spivak often are left feeling discouraged. Ella Gluckman, a McGill sophomore majoring in Anthropology and Latin Studies, said, "Sometimes it makes me feel like I don't deserve to live." Though humorous, Gluckman's response has resonance. A similar opinion was voiced by Kevin Connell, Columbia College junior and joint Political Science and Human Rights major: "If the impression [in a class] is that I should understand, I'll probably just feel stupid and not ask." Kevin followed up by adding that these baffling texts "make me feel a little angry and a make me feel a little stupid, too." The confusion generated by an inaccessible text does little more than undermine the readers' confidence and interest. Authors should write like they're on a date of sorts with their readers. At best, they should tantalize. At the very least, they shouldn't leave their readers feeling inadequate.
It's highly regrettable that the most frequent recipients of the bad writing awards are scholars from the left whose work focuses on topics like sexuality, race, nationalism, and capitalism. In a world where social ills persist, these scholars could make key contributions–if only we could understand what they were saying. Perhaps the updated release of Strunk and White's slim classic The Elements of Style offers a nudge in the right direction. I direct our grand theorists to chapter five, section sixteen: "Be obscure clearly! Be wild of tongue in a way we can understand!"
I continue to be thankful for the day my English teacher, Mr. Murphy, took me to task for my convoluted blithering. ("Jen," he said, "you're out of control.") Sophomore year, I was too enamoured with big words and complicated sentences to realize that they were crutches for bad writers. By the time I got to Barnard, I had woken up and realized how silly my papers had been, how pompous I had sounded in classes. Yet at the very moment Murphy's wisdom had sunken in, I suddenly found myself surrounded by what I had learned to give up: unclear, pretentious writing. In the great majority of my humanities classes, we were inevitably assigned some tenured scholar, probably a recipient of the Guggenheim fellowship, writing in inaccessible prose. Why are the standards for academic writing higher for high school sophomores than lauded theorists?
One could make the argument that academics are just playing the academic game—current scholars didn't create this trend, they're just copying and adding the latest jargon. A second argument is that academic writing is comparable to scientific language. Just as one must learn a new language to talk about physics or chemistry, one must expect the same of social sciences and theory. A third, and perhaps most common argument is that the subjects of academic essays are often complicated and challenging; so complicated, in fact, that expressing the ideas in clear language is simply impossible. A complicated idea may just require a complicated rendering.
I don't buy any of these claims. In academe, there's something especially insidious about hard-to-understand writing. First of all, it's rarely broken down. In classes, students and teachers seem to repeat the buzzwords of a given text without actually explaining them. More importantly, unlike my high school English papers, academic texts are important. They have the real potential to influence the way we think as we develop our worldviews. Since these texts are supposed to be presenting breakthrough ideas with real world implications, they should be held to the highest standards of accessibility. Often, today's most important texts–those that tackle the difficult issues of gender, race, and power–are the ones only accessible to a handful of PhDs in a given field. If the theorists genuinely want their ideas to take hold and create a more socially just world, they should not write in a way that alienates non-PhD readers.
Repeat offender Judith Butler argues in defense of difficult writing. Butler, a famous gender theorist, Guggenheim fellowship winner and, ironically, a professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley, took first prize in the 1998 Bad Writing contest inPhilosophy and Literature. The aim of the journal's annual contest is to "locate the ugliest, most stylistically awful passage found in a scholarly book or article." Butler overwhelmed her competitors in one lamentable line:
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in a relatively homologous way to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
In response to this distinction, Butler published a defense of her writing in The New York Times. In "A Bad Writer Bites Back" she explains why "difficult"–a tired euphemism for inscrutable–language is so frequently used to express some of the "most trenchant social criticisms." Butler contends that the role of scholars is to question common sense, to "interrogate its tacit presumptions and provoke new ways of looking at a familiar world." Citing slavery and the suppression of women's suffrage, she argues that "many quite nefarious ideologies pass for common sense." Uncommon language helps to question such common sense and thus, allows us to create a more socially just world. Using language as a tool for social reform is a praiseworthy ideal. Yet Butler's own writing serves as a barrier to meaning, disallowing the possibility for positive change. Considering her seemingly relentless determination to avoid writing comprehensibly, it's safe to assume that social reform–at least through new ways of writing and speaking about the world–isn't actually one of her priorities.
Butler is not alone. The late Jacques Derrida, the French father of Deconstructionism, has come in many circles to be synonymous with impossibly incomprehsible. Here is Derrida in his essay "From Spectres of Marx":
But also at stake, indissociably, is the differential deployment of tekkne, of techno-science or tele-technology. It obliges us more than ever to think the virtualisation of space and time, the possibility of virtual events whose movement and speed prohibit us more than ever (more and otherwise than ever, for this is not absolutely and thoroughly new) from opposing presence to its representation, "real time" to "deferred time," effectivity to its simulacrum, the living to the non-living, in short, the living to the living-dead of its ghosts. It obliges us to think, from there, another space for democracy. For democracy-to-come and thus for justice. We have suggested that the event we are prowling around here hesitates between the singular "who" of the ghost and the general "what" of the simulacrum.
Derrida's ambiguity and pretention is legendary–some critics have called him a "charlatan"–but it is his defense of a vocabulary smokescreen that merits special attention. Derrida is quoted as musing, "No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist that he or she does not understand, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather someone who tampers with your own language." His argument is typical: philosophy necessitates a special vocabulary just as much as math does. But his self-defense is superficial. He never justifies his implicit presumption that critical theory is necessarily as abstract as physics and math. Is talking about language really as trying as talking about, calculus in everyday language? I am skeptical that criticizing literature somehow requires a new language. Derrida leaves his implicit conclusion unsupported and his readers scratching their heads.
Gayatri Spivak, Columbia professor and famed post-colonial theorist, is infamously hard to read. A sentence from her acclaimed essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" gives us a taste of what is often her regrettable style. She writes, "Foucault articulates another corollary of the disavowal of the role of ideology in reproducing the social relations of production: an unquestioned valorization of the oppressed as subject. The object being, as Deleuze admiringly remarks, "to establish conditions where the prisoners themselves would be able to speak." This sentence is a good example of what's bad. What's worse is this little gem found tucked away, only paragraphs from the mentioned line: "This parasubjective matrix, cross-hatched with heterogeneity, ushers in the unnamed Subject, at least for those intellectual workers influenced by the new hegemony of desire." To be fair, sometimes she pairs such phrases with other more understandable sentences that make her work more accessible than, Butler's or Derrida's.
In our gender-obsessed and often homophobic culture, contributions by academics like Butler could be highly relevant and have the potential precipitate positive social change. Yet Butler discards her non-inititated audience by miring her ideas in her word choice. Butler's most incisive criticism has come from Martha Nussbaum, fellow feminist scholar and Ernst Freund Distinguished Service professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago. In "The Professor of Parody," a 1996 article from The New Republic, Nussbaum criticizes what she sees as a movement in the academy towards elitism and pointless pretention. "Feminist thinkers of the new symbolic type would appear to believe that the way to do feminist politics is to use words in a subversive way, in academic publications of lofty obscurity and disdainful abstractness." Nussbaum calls out Butler's bad writing simply and truthfully, "It is difficult to come to grips with Butler's ideas, because it is difficult to figure out what they are. Her written style...is ponderous and obscure. It is dense with allusions to other theorists, drawn from a wide range of different theoretical traditions." Nussbaum's point goes beyond a superficial attack on Butler's style, and thus, the inability to understand her ideas. Her critique cuts at the heart of he problem with theorists who claim to create a better, more just world through their complicated language. Nussbaum writes, "Hungry women are not fed by this, battered women are not sheltered by it, raped women do not find justice in it, gays and lesbians do not achieve legal protections through it." Butler's elitism is not only pretentious—it's unhelpful towards the very people it claims to advocate for.
Alongside queer and post-colonial studies, deconstructionism rates high in both sexyness and inscrutability. Derrida's theory of deconstruction, though not aimed at dismantling a specific social ill, inherently contains the potential that any philosophical movement has to change the landscape of our intellectual and social context, and indeed, Derrida's famed de-analysis has been applied to virtually all of the humanities. But even lauded intellectuals like Noam Chomsky confess that they have no idea what Derrida is saying. In a discussion about postmodernism and its contribution to activism, Chomsky eloquently called pomo theorists' bluff and said plainly:
Most of it seems to me gibberish. But if this is just another sign of my incapacity to recognize profundities, the course to follow is clear: just restate the results to me in plain words that I can understand, and show why they are different from, or better than, what others had been doing long before and and have continued to do since without three-syllable words, incoherent sentences, inflated rhetoric that (to me, at least) is largely meaningless.
Derrida himself has, on various occasions, resisted or denied giving a definition of deconstruction because he said that it was impossible. If defining a theory is beyond even the theoritician who conceived of it, who can possibly be expected to understand it?
Writing as Butler, Derrida, and Spivak do is only a problem if we believe that this sort of knowledge is meant for everyone. If this tacit premise is not generally upheld, and it is affirmed that certain theories are only meant for a small group of elites, than such pretention is not a dire issue. Caroline Damon, an English major at Connecticut College, implied something along these lines. When I asked her whether she noticed a special academic jargon she said, "Sure. And I understand what the draw is, and I do think that some things are sophisticated enough that they need to use different language." When asked whether or not she felt that special language was a barrier between the public and new ideas she offered, "I don't think that academe is really meant for the mass public. It's not a necessity [for it] to be accessible." When I suggested she might come off as elitist, she shrugged, "Yes, I know. It's okay."
The contention that certain theories resist fathomable expression is, well, baloney. Butler contends that theorists need a vocabulary smokescreen, comparing them to a persecuted philosopher: "If what he says could be said in terms of ordinary language, he would probably have done so in the first place." Unlike math and science, post-colonial studies and queer theory do not necessitate vocabulary smokescreens, but theorists erect them nonetheless. Understood most generously, one could argue that changing language questions the social norms out of which the old language was created. Changing language, in this light, could be seen as productive and good. By its very nature it challenges the status quo. But rather than liberating new ideas, this languages creates a new "oppressor," or hegemony (to use a Butler favorite) of the elites in the ivory tower.
Forgetting about the lay reader, even in universities, students who rush to read names like Derrida and Spivak often are left feeling discouraged. Ella Gluckman, a McGill sophomore majoring in Anthropology and Latin Studies, said, "Sometimes it makes me feel like I don't deserve to live." Though humorous, Gluckman's response has resonance. A similar opinion was voiced by Kevin Connell, Columbia College junior and joint Political Science and Human Rights major: "If the impression [in a class] is that I should understand, I'll probably just feel stupid and not ask." Kevin followed up by adding that these baffling texts "make me feel a little angry and a make me feel a little stupid, too." The confusion generated by an inaccessible text does little more than undermine the readers' confidence and interest. Authors should write like they're on a date of sorts with their readers. At best, they should tantalize. At the very least, they shouldn't leave their readers feeling inadequate.
It's highly regrettable that the most frequent recipients of the bad writing awards are scholars from the left whose work focuses on topics like sexuality, race, nationalism, and capitalism. In a world where social ills persist, these scholars could make key contributions–if only we could understand what they were saying. Perhaps the updated release of Strunk and White's slim classic The Elements of Style offers a nudge in the right direction. I direct our grand theorists to chapter five, section sixteen: "Be obscure clearly! Be wild of tongue in a way we can understand!"
// JEN SPYRA is a Barnard College junior. She is majoring in English and minoring in History.