A 'Bad Writer' Bites Back
By JUDITH BUTLER
BERKELEY, Calif. -- In the last few years, a small, culturally conservative academic journal has gained public attention by showcasing difficult sentences written by intellectuals in the academy. The journal, Philosophy and Literature, has offered itself as the arbiter of good prose and accused some of us of bad writing by awarding us "prizes." (I'm still waiting for my check!)
The targets, however, have been restricted to scholars on the left whose work focuses on topics like sexuality, race, nationalism and the workings of capitalism -- a point the news media ignored. Still, the whole exercise hints at a serious question about the relation of language and politics: why are some of the most trenchant social criticisms often expressed through difficult and demanding language?
No doubt, scholars in the humanities should be able to clarify how their work informs and illuminates everyday life. Equally, however, such scholars are obliged to question common sense, interrogate its tacit presumptions and provoke new ways of looking at a familiar world.
Many quite nefarious ideologies pass for common sense. For decades of American history, it was "common sense" in some quarters for white people to own slaves and for women not to vote. Common sense, moreover, is not always "common" -- the idea that lesbians and gay men should be protected against discrimination and violence strikes some people as common-sensical, but for others it threatens the foundations of ordinary life.
If common sense sometimes preserves the social status quo, and that status quo sometimes treats unjust social hierarchies as natural, it makes good sense on such occasions to find ways of challenging common sense. Language that takes up this challenge can help point the way to a more socially just world. The contemporary tradition of critical theory in the academy, derived in part from the Frankfurt School of German anti-fascist philosophers and social critics, has shown how language plays an important role in shaping and altering our common or "natural" understanding of social and political realities.
The philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, who maintained that nothing radical could come of common sense, wrote sentences that made his readers pause and reflect on the power of language to shape the world. A sentence of his such as "Man is the ideology of dehumanization" is hardly transparent in its meaning. Adorno maintained that the way the word "man" was used by some of his contemporaries was dehumanizing.
Taken out of context, the sentence may seem vainly paradoxical. But it becomes clear when we recognize that in Adorno's time the word "man" was used by humanists to regard the individual in isolation from his or her social context. For Adorno, to be deprived of one's social context was precisely to suffer dehumanization. Thus, "man" is the ideology of dehumanization.
Herbert Marcuse once described the way philosophers who champion common sense scold those who propagate a more radical perspective: "The intellectual is called on the carpet. . . . Don't you conceal something? You talk a language which is suspect. You don't talk like the rest of us, like the man in the street, but rather like a foreigner who does not belong here. We have to cut you down to size, expose your tricks, purge you."
The accused then responds that "if what he says could be said in terms of ordinary language he would probably have done so in the first place." Understanding what the critical intellectual has to say, Marcuse goes on, "presupposes the collapse and invalidation of precisely that universe of discourse and behavior into which you want to translate it."
Of course, translations are sometimes crucial, especially when scholars teach. A student for whom a word such as "hegemony" appears strange might find that it denotes a dominance so entrenched that we take it for granted, and even appear to consent to it -- a power that's strengthened by its invisibility.
One may have doubts that "hegemony" is needed to describe how power haunts the common-sense world, or one may believe that students have nothing to learn from European social theory in the present academy. But then we are no longer debating the question of good and bad writing, or of whether "hegemony" is an unlovely word. Rather, we have an intellectual disagreement about what kind of world we want to live in, and what intellectual resources we must preserve as we make our way toward the politically new.
Judith Butler is a professor of rhetoric and comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley.
https://web.archive.org/web/20111008194554/https:/pantherfile.uwm.edu/wash/www/butler.htm
My Comment
It probably started with Theodor W. Adorno, this confusion of 'common sense' with 'common ideology'. And although the confusion does not diminish the validity of common sense philosophy, also called 'Scottish common sense realism', it does give the impression at least that the child (common sense) can be thrown away with the bathwater (common ideology). So I would maintain that a critical theory dismantling a common ideology can be expressed in ordinary, common sense language. It's just more difficult than expressing it in a newfangled intellectual language that may appear nonsensical. With nonsense being the opposite of common sense, there is a real danger that critical theory expressed in apparently nonsensical language is not well understood and becomes a nonsensical ideology no less harmful or wrong than any other common ideology. The idea that "power haunts the common-sense world" and that abolishing common sense therefore opens a "way to a more socially just world" seems to me a clear expression of a nonsensical ideology that has the power to destroy critical theory as an emancipatory endeavor.
"Gendered language can be harmful when it does not match the gender of the person it is applied to."
The whole idea of combating supposedly harmful gendered language by regulating and changing the common sense language is a prime example of what such a nonsensical ideology can lead to. Because the ideology ignores that there is only one speech rule that is acceptable, and it is not even a rule but a simple fact. The fact that I am responsible for what I say, while you are responsible for what you hear or understand. From which it follows that your misunderstanding of what I say can never give you the right to tell me what I should say or how I should say it.
An 'ought' does not follow from an 'is'? "If it were not for the fact that we ought to be reasonable, it would not be unreasonable to deny that something ought to be believed because it is a fact." - Frank van Dun
Speech rules for pronouns? Let me start by pointing out that your gender is just one of your properties out of many and therefore not the same as your identity. Which means that by using a pronoun that does not match your chosen gender I'm only doing injustice to one of your properties but not to you as a person. You may not like it, and you are indeed free to ask me to use the pronoun you deem appropriate. But I am also free to not grant you that wish for reasons that are my own, such as my instinctive refusal to use language that does not feel natural to me. You may in turn conclude that I am not being nice to you, and you may even be right, but that still doesn't give you the right to order me what language to use. You are certainly free then to decide that you don't want to have anything further to do with me, and there is nothing I can do about that. Except maybe to cave in and start using your preferred pronoun, which I may very well do if my relationship with you matters enough to me. It's called 'to each his own' or the natural order of human conviviality. I'm free to exercise my right in whatever way I wish as long as I respect your and other people's right to do the same.
J.K. Rowling defending women's and girl's rights
Women's and girl's rights are of course no different from everybody else's rights and are to be protected against all those who want to violate them irrespective of their motives - you don't need a scientific study on anyone's patterns of criminality to justify upholding the law!
Trans-women are men who identify as trans-women; they can ask you to accept and love them as trans-women, but you are equally free not to grant them their wish. When they ask you to consider and treat them as biological women, their demand is obviously nonsensical, as they cannot prove the fact they ask you to treat as fact.
Restroom business: Isn't the obvious solution to that nonexistent problem to create a third category of restrooms 'for all those who want to enter'? Or if the men have no objection, to change men's restrooms into that third category?
Same for sports competitions: a third category 'for all those who want to compete'. Or if the men have no objection, to open the men's competition to all those who want to compete with the men?
Who's Afraid of Gender? Judith Butler's public lecture at University of Cambridge 2023
Claim 1: "Fascist passions are intensified and accelerated by attacks on women, LGBTQIA+ people, migrants, black and brown people, and the poor."
Claim 2: "These attacks appeal to the fear of destruction with which many people now live, not only workers who fear the loss of their jobs and the stability of their lives, but people forced into migration by the ongoing climate catastrophe."
Claim 3: "These attacks, whether they take the form of physical attacks, murder, or legal disenfranchisement, also redirect the fear of destruction. If gender or migration are identified by the right as the cause of the destruction of society, then they themselves become eligible targets of destruction. If a nation can get rid of them or hold them in states of indefinite subordination or detention, then apparently the fear of destruction can come to an end. Or at least that is one of the false promises of fascism, or perhaps not a promise at all, but rather a fantasy collective in nature and lethal in its effects."
"My argument today is that the anti-gender ideology movement should be considered a neo-fascist phenomenon. (...) Anti-gender is one of the vectors through which fascist passions are stoked and circulated, and those are passions that support increasingly authoritarian regimes that justify their wars and their acts of destruction by appearing as if they are putting an end to what threatens society with destruction."
I find it very difficult to argue with that kind of 'suggestive thinking', i.e. thinking that suggests more than it spells out, while only mentioning as an aside very contestable ideas as if they were indisputable axioms or self evident truths, and that in general tends to make a great mess of things, as when it puts on the same plane gender and migration. Aren't we allowed to question anymore that the Earth is being destroyed by powers that seek to maximize profits and to expand state control? Or that people are forced into migration by an ongoing climate catastrophe? I mean, where do you start to untangle this mess? If that is what critical theory has become, then how is it to be distinguished from a nonsensical and inimical ideology that is effectively undermining our capacity to argue rationally about the human condition and the state of society?
Then there is the inescapable logic of polarization: You start by scaring yourself with a depiction as black as you can imagine of your opponent's malevolence, only to see your worst fears validated by your opponent's reaction to what was in effect your own deliberate but unintended provocation!
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