wading through judith butler - accessability & academia

working in any academic field necessitates a decision about what kind of academic you wish to become. will you be a teacher? a researcher? an attempted amalgam, generally resulting (hopefully) in a longstanding position at some little liberal arts place far removed from the reality of american political culture?

these choices essentially represent a spectrum - you choose to be 70% teacher and 30% researcher at middlebury college, or you choose to be 80% researcher, 15% teacher, and 5% really awkward dude at columbia. become and independent researcher and you've jumped off the deep end of the research pool, while community college teachers generally represent the teaching end of the spectrum, as all of their research time is taken up commuting.

i am reading reading ayn rand and judith butler simultaneously, and i prefer reading rand, though i agree much more with butler. what does it say about academia that this is an assessment that most everyone - from the lay reader to the grad student to the tenured philosophy professor - would be very likely to adopt?

butler has encountered numerous complaints about her unreadability, responding to complaints in her 1999 preface to gender trouble by equivocating and then accusing her readers of not being responsible or hardworking enough to wade through her impenetrable kantian wording. apparently, she

think[s] that style is a complicated terrain, and not one that we unilaterally choose or control with the purposes we consciously intend. . . . certainly, one can practice styles, but the styles that become available to you are not entirely a matter of choice. moreover, neither grammar nor style are politically neutral. learning the rules that govern intelligible speech is an inculcation into normalized language, where the price of not conforming is the loss of intelligibility itself. . . . it would be a mistake to think that received grammar is the best vehicle for expressing radical views, given the constraints upon thought, indeed, upon the thinkable itself. but formulations that twist grammar of that implicitly call into question the subject-verb requirements of propositional sense are clearly irritating for some. they produce more work for their readers, and sometimes their readers are offended by such demands.

so let me get this straight . . . impenetrability is subversive. and those who do not throw grammatical constancy and structure out the window are rejecting "radical" (and thus, substantive) solutions to the problems of inequity.

does feel just a tad elitist to you? does it? because it should. a definition of radicalism that relies so heavily on jargon-laden philosophical analysis that apes kant's looping analytic style is both absurd and self-aggrandizing.

butler goes on to query whether

those who are offended [are] making a legitimate request for "plain speaking" or does their complaint emerge from a consumer expectation of intellectual life? is there, perhaps, a value to be derived from such experiences of linguistic difficulty?

thanks for the condescending lecture, judy. apparently, my need for transparent writing is merely a product of my superficiality, a result of my immersion and susceptibility to capitalist culture, which has insidiously climbed into the ivory tower, a la poison ivy. break free of capitalist grammatical nuance! embrace complete incomprehensibility!

after rolling my eyes continuously while wading through this complete crap, i began to think about what good academic writing might look like. academics all too rarely think seriously about the mechanics of their profession. after all, intellectual work is (unfortunately?) frequently aimed at other intellectuals, and when intellectuals are not speaking directly to one another, they are formulating a way of "dumbing down" not simply their language, but their ideas as well. this method of writing produces butler's assumption about simplistic language as a sign of and a vehicle for simplistic arguments.

is this relationship inevitable? are grammatical difficulty and intellectual breadth directly correlated with one another?

i certainly hope not. because there is a larger question here, one that relates to the elitism that i feel is implicit in much of butler's writing and approach to words and ideas. how accessible should academic work be? certainly, there are a number of options here, but again, the question is generally framed in terms of a choice: research or teaching.

this is not simply a kick-off question to an academic career - it is a question within the research option. will you, as a highly trained (over-educated) scholar, write for a scholarly audience or a popular audience? what is the difference? how does the aim translate into the right grammatical and syntactic approach?

i never want to write a book that only academics can understand. what would be the point? on the other hand, i don't want to condescend to a "popular" audience that i perceive as an army of dolts. the reading public is not a bunch of dolts.

so who is the reading public? i throw out the term as if its meaning was self-explanatory, but the question is not one i can answer at this point. to conceive of the people who read (intelligently) as a homogeneous group is a faulty premise.

so i start with a compromise. right now, everything i write is something i might be able to assign in an undergraduate seminar class. this means days of revisions, generally. it is far more difficult to retain nuance without resorting to jargon and obtuse sentence structure. being vague requires two drafts. being clear and concise while retaining the complexity of a scholarly argument requires days of revisions, hours of agonizing over word choice and argument structure.

do i write this way because it is naturally the way i write? i'm unsure. perhaps my mind is just as good as a middle-rate undergraduate student. and perhaps judith butler writes the way she does because she has the mind of a philosophical giant - and she will only speak to those like her. at any rate, i promise to never - ever - assign judith butler in any undergrad courses i teach. ever.

impenetrability is not subversive. impenetrability is a waste of everyone's time, brilliant ideas or not.