Judith Butler interview

Whenever I come across Judith Butler, I'm reminded of Feynman's experience reading sociology:
research-training-centre.sps.ed.ac.uk/feynman-on-sociology/

There was this sociologist who had written a paper for us all to read ahead of time. I started to read the damn thing, and my eyes were coming out: I couldn’t make head nor tail of it! I figured it was because I hadn’t read any of the books on the list. I had this uneasy feeling of “I’m not adequate,” until finally I said to myself “I’m gonna stop, and read one sentence slowly so I can figure out what the hell it means.”

So I stopped-at random-and read the next sentence very carefully. I can’t remember it precisely, but it was very close to this: “The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels.” I went back and forth over it, and translated. You know what it means? “People read.”

Then I went over the next sentence, and realised that I could translate that one also. Then it became a kind of empty business: “Sometimes people read; sometimes people listen to the radio,” and so on, but written in such a fancy way that I couldn’t understand it at first, and when I finally deciphered it, there was nothing to it.

If you are writing about something complex and difficult, it is in your interest to make it as understandable as possible.

If you are writing about something simple in a complex and convoluted way, you are being deliberately obscure.

If, once your reader has deconstructed your prose, it says trivial stuff that's one thing. If it turns out to have no meaning at all, you are intellectually dishonest at best.

You forgot d) she is hiding the fact she is talking nonsense.

or maybe that's the lingo in her field and that's why a colleague has no problems reading it.

(which historically doesn’t have a Puritan Anglophone obsession with “plain speaking”)

I wouldn't call the focus on plain speaking "puritan". The idea that you shouldn't have any fun doing what you do is what's Puritan. But learning is not a hair shirt. I think the continental tradition in this is elitist - if anyone can understand what you are saying, then it's not very profound. The Anglophone tradition is that the concepts are tough enough in themselves. Don't make it more difficult by using unnecessarily impenetrable language.

And the real danger of obscurantism is that you end up just talking about the language, and not the meanings it represents.

If they had taken some of the bits from her more populist work, then fair enough. I don’t like her work myself, but not all of it is rubbish or meaningless. Some of it is tendentious; some of it isn’t. But it doesn’t get us anywhere to repeat the usual stuff about how all academic thought should be readable by the layperson or it hasn’t any merit. As I mentioned, different disciplines and different countries have different expectations of academic style anyway. And you write for your audience.

Andrew Doyle said he met her in some university thing, and that she was relitively warm, funny and spoke normally.
So it seems the word salad nonsense is an actual ploy she is using, but to what end.
Its a mystery, for sure...

For me, the key thing about Butler is that when you read her really impenetrable sentences your first reaction is to think: "I don't understand this, I'm obviously not clever enough."

But when she is forced to speak in plain English, the stuff she comes out with is really banal and, dare I say it, stupid. You can find a thousand idiotic trans activists on Twitter who barely have a fistful of GCSEs between them coming out with stuff like "Terfs are fash". What Butler says in that redacted paragraph is just a slightly fancier way of saying "Terfs are fash". There's no thinking there, no attempt to engage with ideas, no willingness to consider the evidence.

(I once saw her give a lecture - in the 90s - in which most people had clearly come to hear her talk about her work on performance, but instead she treated us all to one of the most tedious and overburdened arguments I’ve ever sat through - on Foucault’s debts to Hegel - which she was clearly doing just to annoy the people who wanted to hear about speech and perfomativity. So I’m very willing to believe that she’s someone who likes to provoke.)

The style thing though is partly because there is a very different style in Continental thought (which historically doesn’t have a Puritan Anglophone obsession with “plain speaking”), so what is a normal style for a lot of Continental specialist philosophy looks obscurantist when translated into English academia which doesn’t value the long sentences and clauses that French and German thought does. (If you’re used to reading and writing about Hegel, you don’t see long overburdened sentences as a problem 😂)

So it’s partly that; but undeniably partly a kind of academic performance which covers over ideas that aren’t that new or surprising once parsed down.

Jane Clare Jones has an extensive thread about the deletions and various of Butler's assertions about GC feminists' alleged lack of engagement with the authors or issues she discusses.

twitter.com/janeclarejones/status/1435570447790362624?s=20

And she isn’t a social scientist nor is that a passage from work in the social sciences - she’s a Continental philosopher with a background in Hegelian thought, but she’s inveigled her way into other disciplines through slight and flimsy books on gender which are much less substantial than her early work on Hegel.

Butler is using it here to mean “relatively proportional or correspondent ways”. In her better work she is actually consistently interested in how Greek etymology might structure later philosophical forms, so this isn’t unusual for her.

When I rephrased it above I necessarily simplified aspect of it. So it’s a dense passage, but in the same way that we don’t expect formal logic or quantum chromodynamics to be relatively understandable by a non-specialist, it is just a piece of specialist Continental philosophy, and actually pretty clear (and not saying anything new or surprising) to someone who works in that field.

However, elsewhere in her work one can find all sorts of passages of obscurantist tendentious nonsense. It would be better to be arguing over those 😂

Technically you can libel someone without naming them, if it is possible to figure out who you were talking about.

I don’t think it was JB calling feminists fascists that was the issue, I think it was cut to avoid attracting more attention to the WiSpa story that the Guardian’s writer lied about.

(Exhibit A: Jolyon Maugham, who decided to tweet "brain swoon" in response to that interview).

there's an option d), which is that she uses that style to disguise the paucity and unoriginality of her thinking.

There's also option e), which is that she knows there's an audience who will relish the opportunity to show their superiority by claiming the ability to understand an impenetrable work.

It's kind of like a wildcard citation - if you cite Butler, who can say that the citation doesn't hold up? No-one can be certain what it actually means...

‘- it’s just not written for a lay audience but a technical audience.’

What is the technical meaning of homologous in the social sciences then?

I understand exactly what it means in biology, but I don’t understand what specific technical meaning it can have in terms of society, power or capital, or why a biological term is being used here.

I think it was CS Lewis who said that if you can't explain a complicated idea well enough so that a child could grasp it, you don't understand it yourself.

If you can't explain it well enough that another reasonably competent adult can understand it, you've really not got it.

ditalini - I think there's an option d), which is that she uses that style to disguise the paucity and unoriginality of her thinking.

I agree ditalini but I'm a social scientist and I have never, ever written that way - nor have many colleagues. It isn't all of us.

The reason that passage was a worthy winner is the reason you found it so easy to summarise for us - I'm guessing it took you, what, 10 seconds?

A very common form of bad writing is writing that obscures its meaning for reasons of style. JB perhaps chooses that style because:

a) She thinks it looks clever
b) She's too lazy or thoughtless to consider other audiences other than her peers
c) She's not a skillful enough writer to change her style despite wide criticism of her technique

There has been a lot of discussion and change in editorial practice to make scientific writing generally more accessible without losing precision. It's had mixed success, but the world of the social sciences seem absolutely impervious to clarity.

Is this a watershed moment for The Guardian, perhaps? Have they finally realised how barking their misogynistic conspiracy theories look when faced with the actual facts?

Not to derail the thread but @IvyTwines2, I am an academic in the social sciences and at my current institution I would have to agree with @YetAnotherSpartacus that there is diversity in terms of gender, ethnicity, nationality, and even class, and that does mean that amongst the faculty there really is a range of 'real world' experiences. Although many of us do have privilege, undoubtedly, the idea that we are all living off the spoils of a privileged background would be far from the truth. I think the sort of culture you are describing is much less common now although there might be pockets where it does still exist.

Anyway, for the most part, I do not know my colleagues take on trans issues and I am too scared to ask, but I do know that many (probably most) laugh and groan whenever Butler's name is mentioned.

Perhaps they thought that taking something with meaning and making it that obscure was a worse example of writing than pure meaningless drivel.

Yeah - I understood that passage too but I also think that it is really, really poorly written. It needs a couple more full stops for a start!