Judith Butler as a Public Intellectual

I’m a bit late to the party on this article in New York about Judith Butler, which was making the rounds last week. But it’s got me thinking, again, about public intellectuals and their style of writing, a topic I addressed earlier this year in The Chronicle Review.

Now, I should confess at the outset that I’m a rank amateur when it comes to queer theory and gender studies. I read, and know, about it from a distance: from friends like Paisley Currah, from my students, and from colleagues in real life and on social media. So forgive me—and happily correct me—if what I am about to say is wrong.

The premise of the New York profile is that Butler was/is the theoretician of our contemporary politics (and culture) of sex and gender, even as that politics and culture have surpassed her in certain ways.

Taking into account that there were many writers and theoreticians who have contributed to our contemporary sensibilities and mores around sex and gender; acknowledging that none of these theories would have become remotely actual were it not for the millions of people, activists and non-activists alike, who worked to make the world more hospitable to the claims of the non-gender-conforming—the article still presumes that much in our world today would be inconceivable were it not for Butler’s original intervention in Gender Trouble. That’s the premise of the article I take to be true.

I don’t mean that to sound as if I don’t believe it to be true, though I recognize that it presumes a problematic narrative of the “Hero Theorist” who makes the world what it is. I just mean that for my purposes, it’s a necessary premise for what I really want to argue.

What struck me in reading the New York piece is that for much of the 1990s, Gender Trouble led a second, or shadow, life in the republic of letters. Where it was received, often nastily, less as a document in our ongoing arguments about sex and gender and more as an instance of Bad Writing. The article references that controversy over Butler’s writing style—a style that could be characterized as strenuous, I think it’s fair to say—but it doesn’t quite capture how heated and vicious the controversy often was.

In a famous essay, Martha Nussbaum flayed Butler for her writing style. And thousand of others did, too. Not just in lengthy articles, but in everyday conversation. (I’m sure I did, too; Butler’s style was not my own.)

The assumption of so many of those attacks—it ran through Nussbaum’s like a red thread—was that Butler’s style of writing was a betrayal of not just the philosophical vocation but of the public intellectual vocation: the vocation to speak to the issues of the day in a style that was as demotic as it was democratic. Nothing was thought to be so emblematic of Butler’s political un-seriousness—of her failure to speak to the polis—as the hermetic style of her prose. It was a prose for the initiated and the elect, not for everyday men and women.

Yet here we are today: an entire polity and culture awash, saturated, in Judith Butler’s ideas. From the President to pop culture, “It’s Judith Butler’s World,” as the piece’s URL title puts it. Butler has gone on to write eminently readable opeds (in defense of difficult writing, no less) in the New York Times, make brave interventions in the debate over Israel/Palestine, and pen learned essays on Kafka and Jewish identity in tony venues like the London Review of Books. Yet, a quarter-century later, it is Gender Trouble—that difficult, knotty, complicated book, with a prose style that violates all the rules of Good Public Writing—that has generated the largest public or publics of all: the queer polity we all live in today.

All of which is to say, it’s not the style that makes the writing (and the intellectual) public. It’s not the audience. It’s the aspiration to create an audience—and, with any luck (and it is luck, as Bonnie Honig and Lida Maxwell have reminded me), the actuality of having done so.

Judith Butler has done so.

As I wrote back in January:

Though the public intellectual is a political actor, a performer on stage, what differentiates her from the celebrity or publicity hound is that she is writing for an audience that does not yet exist. Unlike the ordinary journalist or enterprising scholar, she is writing for a reader she hopes to bring into being. She never speaks to the reader as he is; she speaks to the reader as he might be. Her common reader is an uncommon reader.

The reason for this has less do with the elitism of the intellectual — mine is no brief for an avant garde or philosopher king — than with the existence, really, the nonexistence, of the public. Publics, as John Dewey argued, never simply exist; they are always created. Created out of groups of people who are made and mangled by the actions of other people. Capital acts upon labor, subjugating men and women at work, making them miserable at home. Those workers are not yet a public. But when someone says — someone writes — “Workers of the world, unite!,” they become a public that is willing and able to act upon its shared situation. It is in the writing of such words, the naming of such names — “Workers of the world” or “We, the People,” even “The Problem That Has No Name” — that a public is summoned into being. In the act of writing for a public, intellectuals create the public for which they write.

This is why the debate over jargon versus plain language is, in this context, misplaced. The underlying assumption of that debate is that the public is simply there, waiting to be addressed. The academic philosopher with his notorious inaccessibility — say, Adorno — obviously has no wish to address the public; the essayist with his demotic presence and proficiency — say, Hazlitt — obviously does. Yet both Adorno and Hazlitt spoke to audiences that did not exist but which they hoped would come into being. Adorno, explicitly: “Messages in a Bottle” was the title of 10 fragments he meant to include in Minima Moralia. In Hazlitt’s case, as Stefan Collini has argued, the

“familiar style,” which was to serve as something of a model for later generations of critics who aspired to recreate a “lost” intimacy with an educated readership, was consciously adopted as a voice that was not appropriate to the new age; it was an attempt to refashion a mode of address to the reader that was already felt to be archaic.

Whatever the style, the public intellectual is always speaking to an audience that is not there.

Of all our contemporary academics with claims to the title of public intellectual, Judith Butler is the first among equals.

17 Comments

  1. Roquentin June 30, 2016 at 9:44 am | #

    As a former English major I ran into plenty of this and regretfully bought into it at times. There’s an entire school of thought which grew up around the idea that everything produced should read like a magazine or newspaper. This became an ideology of sorts, which instantly dismissed anything not written in this easy and commercially accessible style. Writers today are trained to produce commercially successful work, first and foremost. At times it got so bad it was the sole criteria through which writing was evaluated. I think that has subsided a bit if for no other reason than the publishing industry has gone down in flames in recent years.

    It was compounded by the attitude that went something like “if it’s hard for me to understand, it must be bullshit.” This was wildly popular in no small part because it plays very well to the vanity of the lazy. No longer did you have to worry that you weren’t well read or educated enough to understand an argument, if it was confusing it was bullshit. Net result: nothing changes, neither your opinions, ideas, or actions. Of course, with enough time, careful attention, and effort most of the material this criticism was directed at would become relatively clear. But that’s the entire point, it required work. It was much easier to just write it off as a crock and go back to reading the New Yorker.

    The latter argument held particular appeal for the STEMlords who always have treated the humanities with open contempt. Now entire disciplines could be written off as garbage. The whole Sokal affair was an example of this. Even Chomsky got in on the action at times, which is nothing if not sad. It’s always made it harder for me to respect him.

  2. Michael Cleaves June 30, 2016 at 11:33 am | #

    You’re definitely on point about the creation of a public. And the argument about “bad writing” goes back well over a hundred years – the Transcendentalists were routinely excoriated for having an opaque writing style during the 1830s and 1840s, and now look where Emerson and Thoreau are in the literary pantheon. And maybe it’s just me, having spent a good deal of time wading through French postwar thought, but I never found Butler’s style all that difficult. The passage Denis Dutton cited as his “first prize sentence” when he gave her his first bad writing award is completely intelligible and as wordy as it needs to be given the complexity of the thought. It just doesn’t read like something a magazine writer would write.

    That said, I always found Butler’s defense of her style a little fishy. She argued in rebuttal, channeling Adorno, that the point of complex writing was partly to shock people out of the complacency that prevents them from coming to terms with heterodox thinking. To my mind this unnecessarily bifurcates the function of language into the roles of provocateur and interpreter – it’s both Dada and philosophical, to the detriment of both. So I guess it’s a good thing that I don’t think her writing is the type she seems to be defending.

  3. LFC June 30, 2016 at 12:11 pm | #

    I was completely unaware of the New York article that, according to Corey R., was “making the rounds” last week. (Not being on FB or Twitter, I guess I’m not on “the rounds.”) I read down to where the author of the piece claims that the word “problematic” is an instance of ‘Theoryspeak’, which is wrong; maybe the author was reaching for problematize.

    I’m wondering, and this pertains more to the OP’s argument, how many people have actually read Gender Trouble. Can a public intellectual create an audience even if relatively few people have read her work? Is it enough if the main ideas somehow filter into ‘the mainstream’, which is what the New York piece seems to be arguing?

    • LFC June 30, 2016 at 12:33 pm | #

      p.s. “filter into” is too weak; “change the reigning assumptions,” or something like that, would be more accurate, I guess.

      • Graham Clark June 30, 2016 at 6:06 pm | #

        “Get copied a lot” is perhaps to the point.

        • LFC June 30, 2016 at 8:00 pm | #

          @Graham Clark
          I think this is my fault for not being clear.

          Corey’s argument is that public intellectuals do not address an existing public; they bring a public or an audience into being; they create their public. So the difficulty of language doesn’t matter too much because a public, an audience, has to be summoned into being anyway. And prob. b.c I don’t remember v. well the speech I heard CR deliver on this (which was the basis for his Chronicle article), I’m somewhat puzzled about how the process, as he sees it, actually works. But I suspect his answer to the orig. question is: yes, you can bring a public into being even if the book in question is not all that widely read. (In fact I don’t how widely read ‘Gender Trouble’ was/is).

          • LFC June 30, 2016 at 8:02 pm | #

            correction: don’t know how widely read…

  4. John Maher June 30, 2016 at 12:36 pm | #

    I did not read the New York Magazine article, nor do I get political theory from there. In full disclosure I was familiar with NY Magazine staff a long time ago end edited some copy that was published in that rag.

    1. It is sad that most people know Butler for the Martha Nussbaum contretemps. Butler is easily the most humane philosophe of her generation and lights up any room of hardened cynics. Her prose, in truth, used to be jargon-laden, but has been accessible for many years.

    2.Mon cher Roquentin, what has gone a bit unitoced about l ‘affaire Sokal is that what Sokal wrote was not impossible under quantum theory and therefore a double joke, the truth stated as a lie, in the manner of Catherine in East of Eden. It was a huge assumption check for all the indulged sophists in classrooms and salons worldwide. The term “STEMlords” is great! LFC has a great comment as well which illustrates the endless battle over emergence in language.

    3. Butler’s work concerning depersonalization within the political is possibly more universal than Gender Trouble, which should be re read with a wider definitional understanding of queer theory as anything opposed to a binary structure. In fact, her recent work relates to Burke and Locke somewhat in terms of this exclusion or making ‘sacrificeable’ in Derridean terminology. She is so much more than 5th wave feminist or whatever pigeonhole society wishes to use to constrain her.

    4. Adorno cared about the public but had little to say to them, it is true. His work, and that of Serres, should be considered in terms of the avant garde as the agential means of change. He wrote about reprogramming the message from the intellectuals to the masses in light of the material failures of Marxism. This is an entirely separate and broader discussion.

    4. I love Corey’s courtesy to Butler as the sign off. That said, I respect her scholarship immensely but disagree as to preeminancy among public intellectuals, which should be a non hierarchical assembly. Though I despise his writings, Cass Sunstein possibly fits this bill more. I would argue for Tim Morton at Rice because he is actually redefining the term ‘public intellectual’ in a manner accessible for the new media age.

    I did not read the New York Magazine article, nor do I get political theory from there. In full disclosure I was familiar with NY Magazine staff a long time ago end edited some copy that was published in that rag.

    1. It is sad that most people know Butler for the Martha Nussbaum contretemps. Butler is easily the most humane philosophe of her generation and lights up any room of hardened cynics. Her prose, in truth, used to be jargon-laden, but has been accessible for many years.

    2.Mon cher Roquentin, what has gone a bit unitoced about l ‘affaire Sokal is that what Sokal wrote was not impossible under quantum theory and therefore a double joke, the truth stated as a lie, in the manner of Catherine in East of Eden. It was a huge assumption check for all the indulged sophists in classrooms and salons worldwide.

    3. Butler’s work concerning depersonalization within the political is possibly more universal than Gender Trouble, which should be re read with a wider definitional understanding of queer theory as anything opposed to a binary structure. In fact, her recent work relates to Burke and Locke somewhat in terms of this exclusion or making ‘sacrificeable’ in Derridean terminology. She is so much more than 5th wave feminist or whatever pigeonhole society wishes to use to constrain her.

    4. Adorno cared about the public but had little to say to them, it is true. His work, and that of Serres, should be considered in terms of the avant garde as the agential means of change. He wrote about reprogramming the message from the intellectuals to the masses in light of the material failures of Marxism. This is an entirely separate and broader discussion.

    4. I love Corey’s courtesy to Butler as the sign off. That said, I respect her scholarship immensely but disagree as to preeminancy among public intellectuals, which should be a non hierarchical assembly. Though I despise his writings, Cass Sunstein possibly fits this bill more. I would argue for Tim Morton at Rice because he is actually redefining the term ‘public intellectual’ in a manner accessible for the new media age.

  5. Graham Clark June 30, 2016 at 5:54 pm | #

    Yup, un-intelligibility doesn’t necessarily preclude influence. Which suggests rather unsettlingly that craftsmanship, style, and even just plain intelligence – never mind accuracy or progressive politics – are for mediocrities and geniuses can take them all or leave them.

    • Graham Clark June 30, 2016 at 6:04 pm | #

      On the other hand, if a genius can’t or won’t communicate clearly, that does maybe suggest something important about the genius.

    • Roquentin July 1, 2016 at 10:10 am | #

      I have to disagree. It’s not possible to convey all ideas, theories, and concepts simply. It’s not a deficiency in the use of language, what is being conveyed specifically calls for a more difficult vocabulary and syntax. All sorts of disciplines, scientific or otherwise, are esoteric and quasi-incomprehensible to the layman. Why are philosophy and critical theory the only things we demand be instantly and simply understandable?

      Also, there’s this book Adorno wrote on Hegel, Three Studies, and one of the three specifically focuses on the lack of clarity in Hegel and provides ample justification for why it was necessary.

      • Graham Clark July 2, 2016 at 2:58 am | #

        “Why are philosophy and critical theory the only things we demand be instantly and simply understandable?”

        They aren’t. For example, some people demand the same of art. One thing all three of those disciplines have in common is that they aren’t science.

        • “One thing all three of those disciplines have in common is that they aren’t science.”

          And THAT is the very reason that some demand “accessibility” of the sub-disciplines of the Humanities. “Accessibility” would certainly make them more easy to police prior to the public’s consumption of them, in or out of the classroom. Has not anyone remembered that this has been where the “campus culture wars” started — in the Humanities Department?

          As for the hard sciences one could note that it is hard to police the content or style of, say, differential equations, for political ends. Indeed, their difficulty is seen by the public as the barrier domain between “us” and The True Masters Knowledge. The cultural baggage imposed on their “difficulty” is that of an honorarium; the Humanities’, not so much. Where is the hard science’s Martha Nussbaum to wax outraged at that? Even when the culture industry (Adorno reference!!) makes fun of “science geeks”, those who laugh at them also clearly admire them, sometimes with transparent envy.

          Even an ex-dishwasher could figure that out.

  6. Thomas L. Dumm July 3, 2016 at 7:40 pm | #

    I’m late to this discussion, but not really. It is part of something ongoing, forever sometimes I think.

    I’ve written books that (in my egoistic assessment) have probed fairly deeply within the language and concepts used by post-structuralist thinkers such as Foucault (especially) and (paradoxically) Derrida, and others that have been indebted to ordinary language philosophers, especially Stanley Cavell (who shared more with those thinkers than used to be acknowledged). But always, we seek our own voice to describe and argue about the reality we are trying to understand and influence. I deeply admire Judith Butler for the substance of her work and for her ethical courage. Aside from performativity, the red thread of precarious life is illuminating her more recent thinking and writing in ways that are vitally important for how we are to think about humanity at this really dangerous point in time.

    I have always been puzzled by the critique of thinkers for being “too difficult or obscurant.” If they are wrong, simply call them out. If they are bullshitting, show how. (Christ, how would Emerson be received, or Wittgenstein under such rules.) I have been disappointed with Martha Nussbaum ever since her attack on Butler, which went far beyond accusations about lack of clarity to accusations about ethics, as though Nussbaum had the monopoly on right and wrong. It felt like the smallest of academic politics to me. I’ve always found Butler to be an open and curious and generous colleague, and have been disappointed, though not surprised, by the polemics that have arisen concerning her.

  7. Pat July 4, 2016 at 3:01 pm | #

    I dislike the habit—not unique to Corey Robin!—of using “public intellectual” without a definition. Not because it’s easy to say what the term means but because it is hard, or rather, as far as I can tell, impossible.

    But anyway I’m pretty sure Paul Krugman is the biggest one in the world, or at least the Anglophonic world.

  8. Donald Pruden, Jr., a/k/a The Enemy Combatant July 13, 2016 at 12:14 pm | #

    I have enough sense to know when and when not to toss in my two cents on “philosophy”. I have read my share but I don’t hang with the big kids on THAT block. I am an amateur and I pretend at nothing else.

    That said, I also know that I am late to this discussion because I have been READING the relevant debates in question regarding Professor Butler. I made the boneheaded mistake of tossing out the New York mag that had the article on her in it before Corey’s post above — totally forgetting the article was in there!! Dammit. Thank goodness for the online version.

    That also said, there is a spirited discussion motivated by a provocation thrown down by “Coach Taylor” at the website called “Feminist Philosophers”, whose subtitle is “News feminist philosophers can use”. “Coach Taylor” has a meme there that takes issue Nussbaum’s critique of Butler.

    It is to that site’s comments’ section that I direct the reader. One of this site’s own comments’ section commenters, “s. wallerstein”, provides some pointed replies to “anonymous” who defends Nussbaum. I’d say “s. wallertein” does quite a serviceable job there.

    Let the reader decide: https://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/2012/02/13/coach-taylor-defends-feminist-philosopher/

  9. SC January 27, 2017 at 9:07 pm | #

    Just a footnote to this but . . . as someone who was involved with editing a small slice of Butler’s work, I can testify that instead of making fun of her critics and being defensive about her writing and thinking style, she has worked hard to, well, write and think better. She does not tolerate fools gladly but unlike some she takes her critics, even her unfair critics, seriously. Her most endearing trait is that she’s always the smartest student in her classroom.

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