Bad Writing

...A professor from Germany went even farther, associating the contest with Volkisch anti-intellectual populism...

...And then, in the February issue of the New Republic, Martha Nussbaum demolished Butler’s pretensions as a thinker, calling her work sophistry rather than philosophy, a parody of original thought...

...if one of us speaks ill, applaud him too...

...The third-prize winner in this year’s Bad Writing Contest was from a recent book by the post-colonial scholar Homi K. Bhabha: If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to “normalize” formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality...

...Best known for her idea that gender is a performance rather than the expression of a prior reality, Butler is on practically everyone’s short list of the most influential “theorists” now writing...

...In summarizing her attack upon him, Crews put it neatly: What was very interesting . . . about my statement of ordinary rational principles— and the point was not lost on Butler’s audible rooting section in our conference hall—was my self-alignment with social oppression...

...The notion that difficult and demanding styles of writing are politically revolutionary—and that “plain” writing is hidebound and reactionary—is not just dubious, but tiresomely familiar...

...Once upon a time, no matter how badly they wrote, scholars imagined that they were contributing to knowledge...

...Myers is associate professor of English and religious studies at Texas A&M University and a member of the editorial advisory board of Philosophy and Literature...

...it is a display of verbal majesty, which is to inspire awe and respect...

...Matthews may have been right to complain about his contemporaries’ neglect of style...

...When Philosophy and Literature announced Butler’s victory in December, the story was carried in over forty newspapers and magazines...

...A variation on Ezra Pound’s modernist credo “Make It New,” it has been asserted by every pretender to artistic and philosophical originality this century...

...She is routinely named in the company of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida...

...But though it still commits these faults more often than not, bad academic writing nowadays has become something worse than an aesthetic offense...

...But the lie in Butler’s response is the notion that she somehow advocates merely formal associations among university scholars...

...Her concern, though, is not to clarify a difficult subject, but to justify her position in the front ranks...

...The ninety-word sample that won Philosophy and Literature’s Bad Writing Contest suggests as much...

...Asked by the Chicago Tribune to parse and explain this sentence, Hedges admitted, “It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me...

...And this year’s winning entry comes from Butler, a full professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of five books including the widely quoted Gender Trouble (1990...

...Academic writing wasn’t supposed to be this way...

...Two years ago, Newsweek named Bhabha as one of its “One Hundred Creative Individuals Most Worth Watching...

...By “community standards,” Crews was invoking not an organic, social community, but rather the very principle of the university: an association of persons who are related to one another by virtue of their common pursuit of truth...

...Young scholars must toe the party line in their writing— and pay a protection fee to the party bosses in the form of quoting them...

...During the discussion following his paper, however, Crews was willfully misunderstood by Butler...

...if one of us speaks well, applaud him...

...In such a climate, the party leaders are insulated from all criticism...

...It is something more than the “ugly” and “stylistically awful sentence” demanded by the contest’s rules...

...No longer defined by the common attachment to ordinary rational principles, our universities have become institutions of oneparty rule...

...Although Butler wishes to disrupt “the workings of capitalism,” the effect of her writing is exactly the opposite...

...It’s the distinction between a formal community like a city, in which everyone obeys the same laws, and a substantive community like a baseball team, in which everyone pursues the same good...

...If Butler took seriously her academic responsibility—her duty to teach—she would take pains to make herself clear...

...Consider, for example, Judith Butler...

...How is it possible that a writer bears watching, but his writing does not...

...And Crews’s understanding of scholarship is indeed a substantive one, implying a mode of association— the university—that exists to promote a common undertaking...

...The implication is obvious: To criticize the bad writing of “scholars on the left” is Fascist...

...This combination of popular press mockery and Nussbaum’s reproof was too much, and Butler took to the op-ed pages of the New York Times on March 20 to defend herself...

...News and World Report, D.G...

...Warren Hedges, an English professor at Southern Oregon College, testifies that Butler is “one of the ten smartest people on the planet...

...The likely explanation is this: When such writing is separated from its purpose of confirming academic authority, it just doesn’t make a lot of sense...

...Even at its most stylistically awkward, it was supposed to seek truth...

...It is a contribution not to knowledge, but to political power...

...An instructive example of this assault on truth in the name of party occurred last year at a Yale symposium on psychoanalysis...

...If the choice is between the difficulty of the most advanced thought and the pseudo-clarity of popular prejudice, who wouldn’t choose the former...

...This page intentionally left blank - advertisement the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Economist, the Chicago Tribune, the Times Literary Supplement, the Toronto Globe and Mail, and the Wall Street Journal all reported the contest, and National Public Radio broadcast a segment on it...

...But Hedges’s admiration breaks down when forced to confront academic writing simply as writing...

...Although she agreed that even leftist scholars “should be able to clarify how their work informs and illuminates everyday life,” Butler insisted that academic writing needed to be “difficult and demanding” in order to “question common sense”—the truths so self-evident that no one thinks to question them— and thus “provoke new ways of looking at a familiar world...

...In the last two years, at least five young scholars have submitted entries, asking that their names not be released if they should win...

...Writing earlier in the on-line magazine Salon, Christopher Hitchens had made much the same point, suggesting that the contest betrayed a “certain easy populist hatred for the ‘politically correct’ Left, and a certain Anglo-Saxon and anti-intellectual contempt for the French...

...What is required for membership is voluble solidarity with the party’s claim to liberate us from “social oppression...

...it’s her lack of concern for clarification...

...In her Times op-ed, Butler observed that the contest winners, beginning with the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson in 1994 (he won again two years later), were “restricted to scholars on the left...

...In Butler’s university, just as in Crews’s, everyone pursues the same good...

...Its effect is to safeguard the power and privilege of academic capitalists— among whom she is one of the great robber barons...

...We might call it the “liberationist party...

...Back in 1912, the critic Brander Matthews damned the scholarship of his day for its “endless quotations and endless citations and endless references,” its shameless taste for “interminable controversy over minor questions,” its careless assumption that every reader had an “acquaintance with the preceding stages of the discussion...

...In its chic and willful obscurity, Butler’s writing is a “hip quietism,” Nussbaum concluded, which “collaborates with evil...

...What Butler’s writing actually expresses is simultaneously a contempt for her readers and an absolute dependence on their good opinion...

...And “to succumb to verbiage,” is really to succumb to “the terror” under which many students and junior faculty live...

...Pouncing on the phrase “community standards,” she declared that it entails—as Crews summarized her position—“a tendency to fall in line with social ‘normativity’ in general, especially as it applies to the imposing of heterosexist values and rules on people who should be left in peace to pursue their own goals and pleasures...

...to dissent from it is to put your career at risk...

...You can catch some of the flavor of this party feeling in the attacks made on Philosophy and Literature’s Bad Writing Contest...

...Philosophy and Literature’s Bad Writing Contest does in fact what Butler and her allies claim (and fail) to do: It exposes the workings of entrenched power...

...In the limited range of options she offers us, Butler reveals much about the real politics behind bad academic writing...

...The problem, finally, is not that academic writing is “ugly” and “stylistically awful...

...Academic writing in our own time, however, displays a disregard, not merely for style, but for truth...

...Yet to publish in most journals means flinging the jargon, toeing the party line (which is somewhere to the left of gibberish), and quoting the usual suspects (Benjamin, Foucault, Derrida, Said, Jameson, Butler, etc...

...In the current crisis of hiring freezes and intense pressure for tenure, the need to publish is perhaps greater than any time before...

...In an unsigned June 1997 letter, one entrant confessed that he was “loath to upset senior scholars in my field,” since alienating them could do “significant damage” to his career: I share this information not merely to expose the folly of current writing— there’s enough bad writing going around that adding one more sentence won’t really change much—but to let you know the terror under which many graduate students and junior faculty live...

...But you can feel the strength of Butler’s party even more strongly among those who support the Bad Writing Contest...

...The New York Times, U.S...

...that is, to criticize bad work...

...It is one means—however minor and satirical— of discharging the old-fashioned academic obligation to correct error and reprove negligence...

...It’s rather that bad academic writing conceals the political reality of the contemporary university...

...Such reasoning, Crews said, is “a scandal for anyone who subscribes to community standards of rational and empirical inquiry...

...Let us have no nonsense about independent criticism, and intellectual delicacy, and the few and the many...

...we are all in the same movement, we are all liberals, we are all in pursuit of truth...

...But no longer...

...Instead, what we have in academic writing nowadays is the circulation of authority—the replacement of the ideals of scholarship and academic community with the principle of a political party...

...To have any kind of career in the university today, young scholars must sit in this party’s “audible rooting section,” booing the likes of Crews and cheering the likes of Butler...

...I’m often appalled at my own writing, but since jargon, rather than substance, gains a publication, I succumb to verbiage where a simple sentence would do...

...To canvass for this party is to promote your career...

...At first blush, it seems remarkable that such writing finds any admirers...

...Here is her award-winning sentence: The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power...

...Over a century ago Matthew Arnold mocked this sort of call to party unity: Let us organize and combine a party to pursue truth and new thought, let us call it the liberal party, and let us all stick to each other, and back each other up...

...Scorning Philosophy and Literature as “a small, culturally conservative academic journal,” she aligned herself with “scholars on the left” who focus on “sexuality, race, nationalism, and the workings of capitalism...

...Though trained as a philosopher at Yale, Butler is read and cited “more by people in literature than by philosophers,” which raises the question of whether she “belongs to the philosophical tradition at all...

...There’s a certain truth to the distinction Butler was making...

...The problem is not so much her lack of concern for clarity...

...The hint was placed deftly and inconspicuously, but there it was: “community standards” meant homophobia...

...Its one purpose is to confirm Butler’s authority as a leader of the academic left...

...But who said that’s the only choice...

...The desire to “question common sense” is merely the self-identification of someone whose “sense” is different, but no less “common...

...But in her community, the standard is not a common devotion to ordinary rational principles, but a devotion to the victory of a particular party...

...Hers is not writing to be read and understood...

...Much of the scholarship in the humanities—primarily in English and comparative literature, but increasingly in history, musicology, art history, and theology—has no other purpose than to confirm the scholar’s own status and authority...

...Every year since 1994, the journal Philosophy and Literature has held a Bad Writing Contest, asking its readers to submit “the ugliest, most stylistically awful” sentences they’ve found...

...Frederick Crews, Butler’s colleague at Berkeley, read a paper in which he criticized the circularity of Freudian theory, which confirms itself by means of evidence manufactured by the very premises it seeks to confirm...