Author: Ophelia Benson

Oh dear, oh dear, I really shouldn’t. But I’m going to. Pester another fish in another barrel. Because it’s quite interesting how lame their arguments are, how beside the point or redundant or both. Either they accuse me of not talking about that which I never said I was talking about, or they say something I already said.

I have to say I found the ‘Bad Writing’ article extremely dissapointing. Like, unfortunately, too much criticism of theory it was utterly, utterly trivial. I mean, was this what the ‘theory wars’ were all about, that some people dislike Judith Butler’s use of subordinate clauses?

But ‘Bad Writing’ isn’t criticism of theory, it is what it says it is: a criticism of Bad Writing. Bad Writing in ‘theory’, yes, but still, the subject is bad writing, not theory. And subordinate clauses are not the problem.

Some theory is hard to read (though no harder to read than some analytic philosophy, – Gender Trouble is not appreciably harder to read than Word and Object, although the two books are difficult in different ways).

Yes. That’s my point – that ‘difficult in different ways’ bit. That covers a lot of territory, doesn’t it! I haven’t read Gender Trouble, but the theory I have read is difficult in a pointless, empty, arbitrary way, and that’s what I complain of. Writing that is difficult because the subject is inherently difficult is another matter, but that’s not the kind of writing I was talking about.

If postmodernists are wrong, critique their arguments…The best critiques of postmodernism do just that; witness the gulf separating the ‘Bad writing’ article on this site from the excellent article by Martha Naussbaum which it linked to, which engaged with the actual substance of Judith Butler’s views, rather than raising a fuss about her style.

We do critique the arguments of postmodernists, of course, in other articles. And of course the article by Nussbaum is excellent, that’s why I linked to it. But it’s certainly not accurate to say or imply that Nussbaum doesn’t ‘raise a fuss’ about Butler’s style. She does just that, here for instance:

It is difficult to come to grips with Butler’s ideas, because it is difficult to figure out what they are. Butler is a very smart person…Her written style, however, is ponderous and obscure…Thus one is led to the conclusion that the allusiveness of the writing cannot be explained in the usual way, by positing an audience of specialists eager to debate the details of an esoteric academic position. The writing is simply too thin to satisfy any such audience. It is also obvious that Butler’s work is not directed at a non-academic audience eager to grapple with actual injustices. Such an audience would simply be baffled by the thick soup of Butler’s prose, by its air of in-group knowingness, by its extremely high ratio of names to explanations.

That first sentence says it all, really. But then the other sentences go on to say quite a lot too. How can we help concluding that theory-lovers admire Butler not despite the ponderous obscure style but because of it? Especially since we have yet to encounter any who can say coherently what it is they admire about her?

Is sniggering at examples of ‘bad writing’, apparently as a substitute for providing genuine argument, really the best the self-desribed defenders of the Elightenment can come up with?

Of course it’s not. It’s the subject of one of many, many articles on this site. I disagree with the writer that Bad Writing is trivial or completely non-substantive, however, especially bad writing of the kind in question. I think it promotes bad thinking, obscures bad thinking, drives people out of the humanities, and gives the humanities a bad name, just for four things. I do think it matters. That doesn’t mean I think that’s the only thing wrong with Postmodernism, but then I never said I did. I begin to wonder if another problem with bad writing is that people who like it become incapable of reading carefully. Judging by the defenders on this site at least one would have to suspect that it does.

A few days ago we received an email from a new and enthusiastic fan of B&W, telling us we would be even more wonderful than we already are if we linked to Keith Burgess-Jackson at TechCentralStation. Err, thought I. I don’t much like TCS, though I have seen an occasional interesting article there, and I think finally linked to one. I did a N&C about this at some point – about the quandary of seeing an interesting and/or relevant article at a site which is so free markety-rightwing that I really hate to link to it even if I quite like a particular piece. It is a quandary. On the one hand if the article is good then the article is good. On the other hand, their agenda is not my agenda, and do I want to help them push theirs – no, not much. But then it’s our mission to try to disentangle truth claims from ideology. So I sighed and went to TCS to have a look at Burgess-Jackson.

Fortunately there was no quandary, I didn’t like his stuff at all. There may be some that’s good but what I saw was just snide and commonplace. So I answered our fan to that effect, and forgot about it. Until two days later, when I read this item at Crooked Timber. TCS is apparently not as forthright about its agenda and the funding behind it as it might be. There’s been a lot of discussion about whether that matters or not, whether readers can just judge the articles on their merits or not, whether we can all spot an agenda and be on our guard against it or not. Personally I don’t think it’s all that easy – I don’t think we can notice everything, and I’m pretty sure we can’t fact-check everything. At any rate, I’m glad I didn’t like Burgess-Jackson and didn’t bother to link to him. But the quandary will come up again, and again and again.

It just never goes out of style, does it, berating people for liking things that not everyone likes. We just cannot get enough of that kind of thing. Witness Stephen King at the National Book Awards on Wednesday, as reported by the Guardian.

King called on the publishing industry to pay more attention to writers such as himself, accusing the literati of a “blind spot” when it came to popular fiction. “What do you think,” he asked, “you get social academic brownie points for deliberately staying out of touch with your own culture?” He accused many in publishing of making it “a point of pride” never to have read anything by mega-selling authors such as John Grisham, Tom Clancy and Mary Higgins Clark…

Pay more attention is it. More attention than what? What does he want? Jillions of dollars aren’t enough, he wants yet more attention? Well of course that could be just the Guardian’s paraphrase, so I shouldn’t pick on the word. (Only it’s so hard not to think of Willy Loman and ‘Attention must be paid!’) But what does he mean ‘blind spot’? He gets published, does he not? What does he want? Awards? People who don’t want to read him to read him? That’s a rather strange demand, isn’t it? And also a rather greedy one? Not content with being widely read, he wants to be universally read? Does that follow with all popular entertainment? Once a movie passes a certain point in sales, it becomes mandatory for the entire population to see it? Or does the rule only apply to intellectuals – maybe that’s it. Or should I say to nerds. That must be it – sometime while I wasn’t looking, a law was passed that all nerds have to read every book that sells more than 2 million copies and attend every movie that surpasses the box office take of E.T.

Yes but seriously. King’s not a bad guy. But he really shouldn’t say this kind of thing – he shouldn’t feed the anti-intellectual beast. It’s far too fat already. The matter is quite simple: some people don’t want to read Grisham, Clancy and Clark for a very compelling reason: they’re terrible writers. They may or may not be good story-tellers, but they are dismal writers. I’ve sampled all three, so I can say that with confidence. People who don’t like that kind of thing aren’t pretending not to like it in order to ‘get social academic brownie points’ – we really don’t like it. I’m terribly sorry but there are many many aspects of ‘my own culture’ that I do indeed want to stay out of touch with. Not to get brownies points, not as a point of pride; just because they make me feel sick or stupid or both, and because life is short and time is limited and I have better things to do. That is not a crime, it’s not even an attack on democracy, and people like King really shouldn’t talk as if it is.

And speaking of bogus populism, Matthew Yglesias has a pretty funny one at The American Prospect, from David Frost’s interview with Bush.

THE PRESIDENT: I’m looking forward to — it’s a huge honor to be invited by Her Majesty to stay in Buckingham Palace. It’s hard to imagine me even considering staying in Buckingham Palace when I was living in Midland, Texas. It’s just one of those things. And Buckingham Palace has got a tremendous mystique to it, and so Laura and I are really looking forward to coming.

Aw shucks, isn’t that sweet, li’l ole small-town backwoods barefoot boy makes good. Kinda like Abe Lincoln, ain’t it. Why doesn’t he embarrass himself with that stuff…

I have something I want to comment about, but I keep musing on a different subject, instead. On what a disgusting world it’s turning into, and what an unimaginably disgusting world it would be if the bombers got their way. We thought things were bad before! What with the US propping up repressive blood-thirsty regimes all over the planet as long as they were hostile to the Soviet Union (as Bush acknowledged in London today), and what with the two super-powers piling up ever more and more nukes. But that all looks like a nice cozy tea-party compared to what’s shaping up now, doesn’t it. There is just nothing quite like the combination of nuclear weapons and people who would like to run the whole world according to Sharia. It’s enough to make you want to go out and stock up on little cyanide capsules.

John Gray refers to the nasty mess in passing in a review of Bernard-Henri Lévy’s book about the killing of Daniel Pearl. Just in passing – because everyone knows about it, and what can we do anyway.

Lévy is hardly the first to suggest links between Pakistani intelligence and radical Islam: there is evidence the ISI played a pivotal role in establishing the Taliban in Afghanistan. Pakistan could become the world’s first nuclear-equipped failed state. It presents a greater danger than North Korea, and incomparably more than Saddam’s Iraq.

Yes. Such an exciting prospect – that coup in Pakistan that seems to be just waiting to happen, and then there we are, Muslim fundamentalists with nukes. Oh goody.

Well, while I still can, I think I’ll just enunciate a little rhapsody to the good fortune of being a woman here in this place now at this time instead of at another time or place. To what women who live in the secular West get to have that women who live in Muslim theocracies don’t get to have. Like independence, and ownership of our own selves as opposed to being owned by a man, and autonomy, and the ability to leave the house whenever we want to without having to ask permission or put on a large stifling tent. The ability to leave the house at all. The ability to work, the ability to say no to an offer of marriage – the ability to live our own lives however we damn well please. Period. What a new thing that is for women, how lucky we are to have it, how few women around the globe have it even now, and how…unspeakable it would be to lose it. As it was for the urban women of Afghanistan, for example.

I’m a maniac about independence, myself. It’s perhaps almost my first value; it’s at any rate right at the top of the list. I prefer autonomy to safety, security, to almost anything. Always have. Maybe it’s something to do with growing up in the country – I used to spend all the time I could outdoors wandering the fields and woods, delighting in the fact that no one, not even my mother, knew exactly where I was. So the idea of being under permanent lifelong house-arrest the way women are in Muslim theocracies makes my skin crawl more than almost anything I can think of. And I doubt I’m the only one. For what that’s worth, which is pretty much nothing. That’s the point of all this bombing. ‘We don’t care what you want, we’re going to tell you what you can have.’

Oh, hell. I despair sometimes, I really do. As who doesn’t. Who in hell doesn’t. What a world, what a world, as the Wicked Witch said. Istanbul, of all places. Well of course. It’s secular. It’s near Europe, and has dealings with the nasty place, and allows women to drive cars and think of themselves as human beings. So let’s just bomb the bejesus out of it.

And kill the British Consul-General, and a lot of people in the street near the bank. A fitting follow-up to killing those pesky Jews at the synagogue the other day. And more tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow – all in the name of a world more like Taliban-world. The worst possible nightmare for people like us, for people who read this kind of thing. A world run by violence-loving, blood-soaked, Koran-thumping, backward-looking, women-hating men. Now there’s a cause to march for. Ah, hell.

Isn’t it nice, the way we’re always so anxious not to let each other get above ourselves? The way we’re so terrifically concerned to make sure no one gets any big ideas? The way we’re so very very careful to make sure that everyone understands that our first duty is always to be normal, to be regular, to be like everyone else – so that if we must do something as eccentric and peculiar and self-indulgent as developing some intellectual curiosity and thirst for knowledge and inclination to think about things – well, all right, maybe we can be forgiven for that, as long as we can show that we’re not nerds about it, and that we realize how boring all that stuff is really.

I was musing on this subject earlier this morning, because I was thinking about the significance of the fact that in an hour of listening to the radio yesterday I managed to hear two examples of Major Media assumptions that most things other than popular culture are boring – and then when I got on the computer, the first thing I saw was example three. There’s something strange about this…

The two yesterday. The first was in a bit of dialogue from the new movie ‘Shattered Glass’ on Fresh Air. It sounds like quite an interesting movie – centering on events at the New Republic, of all things. Not a big newspaper, not a tabloid, not a shiny popular magazine, but the New Republic! Not your normal Hollywood fare. And as Terri Gross pointed out, no car chases, no guns, no romance; just pure journalism. So that’s good! That’s excellent. It’s very encouraging that once every ten years or so the adults among us are allowed to see a movie that’s not all explosions and flames and collisions of one kind or another. Very, very good. But even there…The movie is about Stephen Glass, a reporter who made up his stories, and the bit of dialogue is from an editorial meeting at which he pitches a story about the boxer Evander Holyfield and biting. Then Charles Lane has to pitch his story, and he begins by saying, sheepishly, ‘That’s a hard act to follow.’ Long pause. ‘That’s a very hard act to follow.’ Sheepish laugher. ‘My story is about Haiti…’

Hm. So a boxer who bites is fascinating, and Haiti is boring. Hmmm. Really? Is that really true? And is it true even in the editorial offices of TNR? No, as a matter of fact, it’s not, because it turns out that particular scene didn’t happen, it’s a screenplay fabrication, and Tanner didn’t think the Haiti story was boring at all. Not surprisingly. But then how dreary that the movie has to pretend that it is.

And the other item in the hour was from ‘On the Media,’ an NPR show I hardly ever listen to because it’s so relentlessly cute and would-be funny – but I did hear a few minutes, which included a listener writing to rebuke one of the show’s hosts for calling C-Span ‘a yawn’. Well, granted, some of what’s on C-Span is not what you’d call lively, but it a lot of it is important all the same. And much of it is highly interesting, and even if it isn’t, is it helpful for influential voices such as those on National Public Radio to tell us that it isn’t? Remarks like that aren’t just a description, they’re also a prediction, a self-fulfilling prophecy, a meme – in short, an instruction. ‘This stuff is boring and if you don’t think so you’re boring too.’ ‘This stuff is boring because it’s about the gummint and tedious crap like that, not about good old cop shows which are so much more interesting.’

And today, browsing for news, I promptly find an article in the New York Times about John McWhorter.

Mr. McWhorter, an intense, confident and — perhaps not surprisingly — loquacious man, is not a curmudgeon or a fuddy-duddy. Nor, for that matter, a nerd, despite a résumé that bristles with intellectual precociousness. Self-taught in 12 languages — including Russian, Swedish, Swahili, Arabic and Hebrew, which he initially took up as a Philadelphia preschooler when he was 4 — he is a respected expert in Creole languages. (In his spare time, he is compiling the first written grammar of Saramaccan, a Creole language spoken by descendants of former slaves in Suriname.) A college graduate at 19 and a tenured professor at 33, he has published seven previous books…But none of these exploits, he is at pains to show, should be taken to mean that he is not hip. His conversation is peppered with knowing allusions to pop culture — Britney Spears, Tori Amos, television sitcoms, rap and Broadway.

Well, who said they should be taken to mean he is not hip? Why would we think he’s a nerd, and why does intellectual precocity (not precociousness) imply nerd-dom? And why should we care anyway? Why do we need people not to be nerds or unhip? And what do those words mean anyway? Do they really mean people who don’t know how to talk or walk across a room, or do they just mean people with intellectual interests? Why is it not possible in a mainstream mass market publication to mention people with some kind of knowledge (other than that taught in law school or business school at least) without apologizing? And what does all this constant nagging repetition of the idea that intellect is suspect or risible or both do to us? Does it train us to believe that we’d better not develop any ourselves lest we wind up in some sort of zoo, in the Nerd cage, having peanuts and battered volumes of Heidegger thrown at us?

Oh never mind, I’m bored, I think I’ll go shoot some pool.