Judith Butler interview

[MotherofPearl]

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/sep/07/judith-butler-interview-gender?CMP=ShareiOSAppOther

Apologies if this has already been posted. I found this troubling to read. Am I misreading this or is Butler saying that GC feminism is fascist?

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

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.

@Theoldprospector

‘- 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.

It’s not originally a biological term - it’s a long-standing word and philosophical term (long predating modern biology!) from the Greek for “agreement” (literally: same ratio), via the medieval Latin homologus meaning “having the same relative position, relation, or proportion; corresponding”.

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 😂

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.

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

@RoyalCorgi

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

Yes - I’d certainly agree on that one.

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.

@ditalini

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.

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

(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.)

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.

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...

@ditalini

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.

It isn’t social sciences though, and there isn’t really any reason why specialist work in Continental philosophy should be readable by any other audience than her peers - that’s the point of it. If you wrote an academic monograph or PhD to be readable by a lay reader rather than the audience it’s aimed at, you’d not get it published as an academic monograph or passed as a PhD, in the same way that you don’t get a paper published in the BMJ if you make it readable by a schoolchild. They just are different audiences, and that’s okay. No academic publishers sell monographs on Continental philosophy to the general reader.

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.

(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.

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.

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.

I write simply because I write papers in stops and starts. There’s nothing worse than spending a day writing to finally have another day free six weeks later and coming back to what you wrote and not understanding a word of it.

Nothing new about setting out to be a stupid person's idea of a clever person, a poor man's idea of a rich man, or a failure's idea of a sucess.

Reminds me of Enoch Powell with his random Cicero and circumlocutions to cover up the inherent dishonesty and nonsense he was spouting, about West Indians who couldn't speak English except the word 'Racialist!' with and exclamation mark!

@JustSpeculation

(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.

There is, though, an explicit tradition of Anglophone writing which draws a very specific (and named) influence from Puritan and Protestant theological writing and English materialism and sees this as a deliberate continuity of an English (and later also American) rhetorical inheritance. It’s a very longstanding tradition and certainly not invented by me 😂 You’ll find specific reference to this in analytic philosophy to this day, for example (and analytic philosophy makes a very big deal of how “common sense” it is compared to the Continental tradition).

In English thought, the “the concepts are tough in themselves and the Continental tradition is elitist” claim has been made constantly since the seventeenth century, and was a particular refrain of nineteenth century English philosophers explicitly keen to distinguish themselves from a suspiciously mystifying, Catholic European style. It’s by no means a new argument, but it still is about valuing a particular national or cultural style in philosophy as much as it is about audience (by laying claim to a certain worldview about what “concepts” are and what philosophical discourse is).

Ironically, analytic philosophy has managed to create an in-language all of its own so abstruse that no ordinary reader can possibly read it (formal logic); yet still likes to berate the Continental tradition for elitism and obscurantism 😂

@RoyalCorgi

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 think this is definitely key. Strip away the terminology, much of which is either misapplied or there to make her sound knowledgeable (as with the 'apostolic' reference I mentioned), and her arguments are basic, poor and easily refuted.

Um, I'd just like to ask anyone claiming that the Puritans were plain-speaking to read some Jeremiah Burroughs or Richard Baxter. (I jest, they're not that bad. Slightly better than Butler)

Ironically, analytic philosophy has managed to create an in-language all of its own so abstruse that no ordinary reader can possibly read it (formal logic); yet still likes to berate the Continental tradition for elitism and obscurantism

But there's a clear point to that - specific specialised notations can make things a lot clearer and more concise, albeit at the cost of an entry barrier to learn that notation.

You could certainly do logic or mathematics in English without any special notation, but the notation ultimately simplifies it, and is more expressive than English. It allows you to run, rather than walk.

There are downsides, but there are very clear upsides.

What's the benefit of the Continental tradition, or Butlerism? You're increasing verbiage, but to what end?

I am not tried to be argumentative here, just trying to understand.

“having the same relative position, relation, or proportion; corresponding”.

That is just the ordinary definition of homologous from the dictionary.

How is it a technical meaning in philosophy that only those with knowledge of philosophy would understand?

A technical meaning is like what the word proof might mean in maths or compound in law or base and superstructure in the social sciences. It is when a term has a specific meaning in that subject area that is different to the usual meaning or that is only used in that way in that field. Technical terms explain more precisely something in a particular field.

Using the everyday meaning of a relatively obscure word isn’t technical language.

It is a technical discourse though: what she’s talking about is an explicit way that structure is understood in Althusserian Marxism (whih is a form of structuralist Marxism - which is reasonably complex).

The term has a simple meaning in biology and mathematics, too, but when it’s used it’s still used in a technical sense.

The use of homologous in that passage is partly metaphorical, too. When you read it, you’re getting a sense of the way that the French structuralists imagine the structures inherent in capitalism to be three-dimensional and almost mathematically uniform, like a crystalline structure in which different spatial and structural junctures replicate each other geometrically, so that you can almost swap in different bits of the structure in and out and it retains a kind of spatial uniformity. Social relationships in this model are essentially relational, but the structure of that relationality is kind of uniform and fungible.

In contrast, she’s saying that once you add time into the structure, you can see that the relational junctures aren’t all alike and endlessly swappable, but that they are more like knotted concentrations of power that change and disperse over time, and don’t remain either static or like you can just swap them in and out and the structure remains the same. So you can’t just say, for example, the relation between structures of oppression is neat and endlessly swappable, and you can map on race-economy-class to sex-economy-law or labour-capital-material. When you input time into the model of the “crystal”, instead you see that there are different densities and networks of power in each relationship, that make them change over time.

That relationship between the spatial and mathematical, and the idea of similarity and equivalence, is being carried by the word “homologous” because she’s making reference to the specific thought-models of structuralist French Marxism. Without it some of the way a specialist might read that passage would be lost. I can boil the essence of it down into a simpler statement, but then it’s missing the explicit connection back to the pseudo-mathematicality of structuralism that the word is telling me about. As I read it, it’s drawing in the specific forms of mid-century theories that she’s talking about. That’s what I mean by a technical discourse - yes, I can rephrase this for a less technical audience, but then it loses something that’s there explicitly for a readership that’s familiar with the tradition she’s writing about.

And you notice that the more I try to explain what the word does, the less easy it is for me to make my prose easy to understand, because I’m trying to translate a very detailed technical concept from French Marxism into different language. And in doing so I’m having to use metaphors of crystals and words like “fungible” because that’s the only way I can quite get close to the meaning. (By the end I might as well just use “homologous”…)

That’s why all disciplines use technical language (though they don’t all do it in the same way). If you study most historical philosophy you have to do it with dictionary in hand for years and years. It’s no different to any discipline in that regard.

It’s by no means a new argument, but it still is about valuing a particular national or cultural style in philosophy as much as it is about audience (by laying claim to a certain worldview about what “concepts” are and what philosophical discourse is).

Yes it is, @irresistibleoverwhelm, but I think there there are pragmatic reasons to value it. It may be that the origin of the clarity preference lies in protestant, and puritan, thought - that's not my area of expertise. But that doesn't mean there is anything inherently puritan about wanting it. Or valuing it.

But thank you for a lovely answer.

@NecessaryScene

Ironically, analytic philosophy has managed to create an in-language all of its own so abstruse that no ordinary reader can possibly read it (formal logic); yet still likes to berate the Continental tradition for elitism and obscurantism

But there's a clear point to that - specific specialised notations can make things a lot clearer and more concise, albeit at the cost of an entry barrier to learn that notation.

You could certainly do logic or mathematics in English without any special notation, but the notation ultimately simplifies it, and is more expressive than English. It allows you to run, rather than walk.

There are downsides, but there are very clear upsides.

What's the benefit of the Continental tradition, or Butlerism? You're increasing verbiage, but to what end?

I think part of it is that when it's authentic, and not put on for show, quite a lot comes out of trying to explain concepts that we don't have words for, and quite a lot is in translation. Philosophy in German in particular has tended to try and create new language to describe ideas that are much more specific than what we use in everyday language. There might be everyday words that are close, but they really are trying to talk about something much narrower.

(The actual content that she’s writing about in that passage though - about the difference between structuralist Marxism and poststructuralist concepts of social relationships - is not by any means new or radical: it’s basically reheated Foucault.)