Judith Butler Superstar
Okay, what’s the deal with Judith Butler. Why does everyone who writes about her call her a celebrity or a superstar. A superstar?? Someone who teaches gender studies at Berkeley? A superstar?
Berkeley’s Judith Butler, a superstar of gender and literary studies, drew a packed house with her analysis of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s bad grammar and slippery use of the term “sovereignty.”
I’m not making it up, that’s from the Boston Globe, from a story on the MLA convention. Not a very affectionate or over-impressed story, either – and yet Scott Jaschik calls Butler a superstar. Well if she got married in Las Vegas and then had the marriage annulled the next day, would we hear about it? Would it take up time on the BBC World Service’s half-hour news report? If she were arrested for child molestation, would we hear about that, would the World Service consider that important enough to spend a minute or two on? I have to say, I kind of doubt it.
Well to be sure, Jaschik does call her a superstar of gender and literary studies – not just a superstar tout court. But then further questions arise. Do reporters write about superstars of nursing, superstars of postal work, superstars of meat packing? Do they write about superstars of history or Classics? I don’t think so. So what is it about Judith Butler that somehow hypnotizes people into calling her a superstar? Or is it something about her field that does that – and if so, what? And what does it mean – what does all this vocabulary of stardom and trendiness and hipness and fashion portend? Why is it catching? Why don’t people just laugh when academics are called superstars?
Even in Israel, even that far away and with other things to attend to, they are susceptible. Witness Ha’aretz.
Butler is an unusual figure in academia. On the one hand, she is a celebrity who has a community of followers and who exudes charisma. Groups of followers sometimes line up for her lectures, as though she were a rock star; and her major influence on feminism at the start of the 21st century is widely noted. On the other hand, many persons outside of feminist academia have never heard of her; nor have they come across her ideas, or been influenced by them.
Celebrity? Followers? Charisma? Rock star? Well at least Ha’aretz realizes some of the truth – ‘many persons outside of feminist academia have never heard of her.’ Yes, you could say that. Quite a few, I daresay. In fact I would venture to guess that the non-hearing of Judith Butler outside feminist academia is pretty nearly universal.
Rock star, celebrity, superstar. How do these rumours get started, I always wonder.
I think it’s wishful thinking by other writers, intellectuals, journalists etc. that they too may be someday be viewed as a “star.” The breathless hero-woship part — “such genius” — is disturbing.
Hmmyes, but then why doesn’t one see the same thing said of historians, for example? Which as far as I know one doesn’t – not with the monotonous regularity one sees it of Butler and other Critical Theory types. The breathless hero-worship part is indeed disturbing. There is something seriously odd about all this, about the gullibility and celebrity worship and hipsterism. I would love to be able to figure it out, but all I can do is keep offering examples.
I think they {the critical theory types) have hired some people to praise them breathlessly so that we will buy their books. Which is a mistake I haven’t made in a good while. Or maybe it’s a case of a bunch of people mutually praising each other so that all their books will get bought by us. Not to mention tenure, etc. All right, I can’t prove it but any time anything gets praised just a little too loudly my crap alert goes off bigtime.
A million times zero is still zero.
Niall Ferguson is an example of a historian that is referred to as a star, a media star and a superstar. There are others.
The usage is common for that group of profs that are well known (if not always loved) in their fields as well as having a public or media following. Pinker comes to mind.
I see it as the intellectuals’ way of slavering in front of the all-powerful & wise demagogue, the “man-on-horseback.”
And you do indeed see it in other fields: Gehry, Koolhaas and Hadid — for example — among architecture ‘buffs’.
The general trick is to say things in a manner which is simultaneously somewhat plausible but esentially obscure.
While Ferguson may indeed be a star, he is also understandable i.e. there is a ‘there, there’ to dispute. With the others, the only intelligent response is often ‘Huh?’
The problem with all this is that when one goes to criticze these people’s ideas, the common retort — and it was said to me once about Koolhaas — and always said condescendingly — is ‘Well yes, he is a difficult thinker.’
Yes, I did think of Ferguson later. But then he has a considerable media presence – he’s done a tv show, he’s interviewed on NPR and such. I don’t think that’s true of Butler.
And I still think there’s some difference of tone. Do philosophers, for example, talk about other philosophers as ‘superstars’? On the record? One does see this kind of hyperbole about Jameson, Bhabha, Butler, Greenblatt – one can see it on the page or screen, it’s not just a matter of conference chat. I’m not aware of that kind of thing oozing out of philosophers. I could just be unaware of it, of course.
I wrote something about this phenomenon a couple of years ago:
http://www.mclemee.com/id44.html
You certainly did. That’s a terrific article.
And someone in there says the same thing (although he sees it as a good thing, not a piece of absurdity) – that it’s in literary theory that the stars shine. Not just all departments impartially, but in all-encompassing, omniscient, stunningly brilliant literary theory.
I need more room, I’ll have to do a proper comment.
I returned to academe as an English literature major after a 17-year hiatus and was also perplexed by this development. It seems to me that the superstar system is just one aspect of generally inflated sense of angst and self-importance in literary studies. There’s a trend, for example, among postcolonialist critics to make vast claims about their favorite books’ power to “disrupt” colonial economies or “subvert” imperial regimes (there’s a post on my blog about this kind of over-reaching at
http://naivehumanist.blogspot.com/2004_01_01_naivehumanist_archive.html#107548005399995274)
I’m inclined to blame Terry Eagleton and his book _Literary Theory_. Throughout it he repeatedly criticizes pre-Theory approaches to literature because “there was never any serious consideration of trying to change such a society [as early 20C Britain’s]” (29). These old critical approaches were “recipes[s] for political inertia” (43). And so on.
On nearly every page–sometimes for the entire page–Eagleton agitates for a vision of literary criticism as a form of activism with the potential to radically transform society. Even though he makes fun of his critical forebears for their political pretensions, he’s galled not by their ambitions for political change via literary criticism, but by their failure to fulfill those ambitions.
I understand Eagleton’s book has been The Textbook in lit studies these last two decades. Maybe if I’d read it when I was a mush-brained 20-year-old I would have been filled with anxious zeal to make my generation the one to realize Eagleton’s vision.
Maybe all these hyperventilating “fans” of literary “superstars” are looking for an Eagletonian messiah.
Then again, Eagleton’s probably just another symptom of this whole inexplicable…grandiosity thing…