14. februar 2004

Philosophy and Literature announces Winners of the Fourth Bad Writing Contest (1998) We are pleased to announce winners of the fourth Bad Writing Contest, sponsored by the scholarly journal Philosophy and Literature. The Bad Writing Contest celebrates the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles published in the last few years. Ordinary journalism, fiction, departmental memos, etc. are not eligible, nor are parodies: entries must be non-ironic, from serious, published academic journals or books. Deliberate parody cannot be allowed in a field where unintended self-parody is so widespread. Two of the most popular and influential literary scholars in the U.S. are among those who wrote winning entries in the latest contest. Judith Butler, a Guggenheim Fellowship-winning professor of rhetoric and comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley, admired as perhaps “one of the ten smartest people on the planet,” wrote the sentence that captured the contest’s first prize. Homi K. Bhabha, a leading voice in the fashionable academic field of postcolonial studies, produced the second-prize winner. “As usual,” commented Denis Dutton, editor of Philosophy and Literature, “this year’s winners were produced by well-known, highly-paid experts who have no doubt labored for years to write like this. That these scholars must know what they are doing is indicated by the fact that the winning entries were all published by distinguished presses and academic journals.” Professor Butler’s first-prize sentence appears in “Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time,” an article in the scholarly journal Diacritics (1997): 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. Dutton remarked that “it’s possibly the anxiety-inducing obscurity of such writing that has led Professor Warren Hedges of Southern Oregon University to praise Judith Butler as ‘probably one of the ten smartest people on the planet’.” This year’s second prize went to a sentence written by Homi K. Bhabha, a professor of English at the University of Chicago. It appears in The Location of Culture (Routledge, 1994): 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. This prize-winning entry was nominated by John D. Peters of the University of Iowa, who describes it as “quite splendid: enunciatory modality, indeed!” Ed Lilley, an art historian at the University of Bristol in the U.K., supplied a sentence by Steven Z. Levine from an anthology entitled Twelve Views of Manet’s “Bar” (Princeton University Press, 1996): As my story is an august tale of fathers and sons, real and imagined, the biography here will fitfully attend to the putative traces in Manet’s work of “les noms du père,” a Lacanian romance of the errant paternal phallus (“Les Non-dupes errent”), a revised Freudian novella of the inferential dynamic of paternity which annihilates (and hence enculturates) through the deferred introduction of the third term of insemination the phenomenologically irreducible dyad of the mother and child. Stewart Unwin of the National Library of Australia passed along this gem from the Australasian Journal of American Studies (December 1997). The author is Timothy W. Luke, and the article is entitled, “Museum Pieces: Politics and Knowledge at the American Museum of Natural History”: Natural history museums, like the American Museum, constitute one decisive means for power to de-privatize and re-publicize, if only ever so slightly, the realms of death by putting dead remains into public service as social tokens of collective life, rereading dead fossils as chronicles of life’s everlasting quest for survival, and canonizing now dead individuals as nomological emblems of still living collectives in Nature and History. An anatomo-politics of human and non-human bodies is sustained by accumulating and classifying such necroliths in the museum’s observational/expositional performances. The passage goes on to explain that museum fossils and artifacts are “strange superconductive conduits, carrying the vital élan of contemporary biopower.” It’s demonstrated with helpful quotations from Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality. Finally, a tour de force from a 1996 book published by the State University of New York Press. It was located by M.J. Devaney, an editor at the University of Nebraska Press. The author is D.G. Leahy, writing in Foundation: Matter the Body Itself. Total presence breaks on the univocal predication of the exterior absolute the absolute existent (of that of which it is not possible to univocally predicate an outside, while the equivocal predication of the outside of the absolute exterior is possible of that of which the reality so predicated is not the reality, viz., of the dark/of the self, the identity of which is not outside the absolute identity of the outside, which is to say that the equivocal predication of identity is possible of the self-identity which is not identity, while identity is univocally predicated of the limit to the darkness, of the limit of the reality of the self). This is the real exteriority of the absolute outside: the reality of the absolutely unconditioned absolute outside univocally predicated of the dark: the light univocally predicated of the darkness: the shining of the light univocally predicated of the limit of the darkness: actuality univocally predicated of the other of self-identity: existence univocally predicated of the absolutely unconditioned other of the self. The precision of the shining of the light breaking the dark is the other-identity of the light. The precision of the absolutely minimum transcendence of the dark is the light itself/the absolutely unconditioned exteriority of existence for the first time/the absolutely facial identity of existence/the proportion of the new creation sans depth/the light itself ex nihilo: the dark itself univocally identified, i.e., not self-identity identity itself equivocally, not the dark itself equivocally, in “self-alienation,” not “self-identity, itself in self-alienation” “released” in and by “otherness,” and “actual other,” “itself,” not the abysmal inversion of the light, the reality of the darkness equivocally, absolute identity equivocally predicated of the self/selfhood equivocally predicated of the dark (the reality of this darkness the other-self-covering of identity which is the identification person-self). Dr. Devaney calls this book “absolutely, unequivocally incomprehensible.” While she has supplied further extended quotations to prove her point, this seems to be enough. ************************************************ Prof. Denis Dutton Editor, Philosophy and Literature University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand Previous contests: 1997, Third Bad Writing Contest 1996, Second Bad Writing Contest Feel free to forward the above text to email lists or to post it, without alteration, on other web sites. www.denisdutton.com 9:43:22 AM    comment []

Bad Writing by D. G. Myers Originally published in the Weekly Standard 4 (May 10, 1999): 36-39. Bad academic writing is nothing new. Back in 1912, the critic Brander Matthews damned the scholarship of his day for its "endless quotations and endless citations and endless references," its "entangled" facts, 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." But though it still commits these faults more often than not, bad academic writing nowadays has become something worse than an aesthetic offense. Matthews Judith Butler may have been right to complain about his contemporaries’ neglect of style. Academic writing in our own time, however, exhibits a disregard, not merely for style, but for truth. Once upon a time, no matter how badly they wrote, scholars imagined that they were contributing to knowledge. But no longer. Much of the scholarship now published in the humanities—primarily in English and comparative literature, but increasingly in history, musicology, art history, and religious studies—has no other purpose than to confirm the scholar’s own status and authority. It is not a contribution to knowledge, but to political power. Consider, for example, Judith Butler. 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. And this year’s winning entry comes from Judith Butler, a full professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of five books including her widely quoted Gender Trouble (1990). Best known for this book’s idea that gender is a performance rather than the expression of a prior reality, Butler is on practically everybody’s short list of the most influential "theorists" now writing. She is routinely placed in the company of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. 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. When Philosophy and Literature announced Butler’s victory last December 22, the story was carried in over forty newspapers and magazines. The New York Times, US News and World Report, 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. And then, in the February issue of the New Republic, Martha Nussbaum demolished Butler’s pretensions as a thinker, calling her Martha Nussbaum work sophistry rather than philosophy, a parody of original thought. Although trained as a philosopher at Yale, Butler is read and respectfully cited "more by people in literature than by philosophers," leading to the question whether she "belongs to the philosophical tradition at all." In its chic and willful obscurity, Butler’s writing is an example of "hip quietism," Nussbaum concluded, which "collaborates with evil." The combination of popular press mockery and Nussbaum’s reproach was too much, and Butler took to the op-ed pages of the New York Times on March 20 to defend herself. 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." 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" (her words) in order to "question common sense"—the truths which are so self-evident that no one thinks to question them—and so to "provoke new ways of looking at a familiar world." If the only choice is between academic obscurity and the pseudo-clarity of "common sense," who wouldn’t choose the former? But who said that's the only choice? In the limited range of options she offers us, Butler reveals much about the real politics behind bad academic writing. 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. A variation on Ezra Pound’s modernist credo Make It New, it has been offered by every pretender to artistic and philosophical originality this century. The desire to "question common sense" is merely the self-congratulation of someone whose "sense" is different, but no less "common." Although Butler wishes to disrupt "the workings of capitalism," the effect of her writing is exactly the opposite. Its effect is to safeguard the power and privilege of academic capitalists—among whom she is one of the great robber barons. The ninety-word sample that won Philosophy and Literature’s Bad Writing Contest suggests as much. It is something more than the "ugly" and "stylistically awful sentence" demanded by the contest's rules. What Butler’s writing actually expresses is simultaneously a contempt for her readers and an absolute dependence on their good opinion. The problem is not so much her lack of concern for clarity; it’s her lack of concern for clarification. If Butler Homi K. Bhabha took seriously her academic responsibility—her duty to teach—she would take pains to make herself clear. Her concern, though, is not to clarify a difficult subject but to justify her position in the front ranks. Hers is not writing to be read and understood; it is a display of verbal majesty, which is to inspire awe and respect. Its one purpose is to confirm Butler's authority as a leader of the academic left. At first blush, it seems remarkable that such writing finds any admirers. Warren Hedges, an English professor at Southern Oregon University, once declared that Butler is "one of the ten smartest people on the planet." But Hedges’s admiration breaks down when forced to confront academic writing simply as writing. The second-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. Asked by the Chicago Tribune to parse and explain this sentence, Hedges admitted, "[It] doesn’t make a lot of sense to me." Two years ago, Newsweek named Bhabha as one of its "One Hundred Creative Individuals Most Worth Watching." How is it possible that a writer bears watching, but his writing does not? 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. Academic writing wasn’t supposed to be this way. Even at its most stylistically absurd, it was supposed to seek truth. 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. An instructive example of this assault on truth in the name of party occurred last year [1998] at a Yale symposium on psychoanalysis. Frederick Crews, 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. Such reasoning, Crews said, is "a scandal for anyone who subscribes to community standards of rational and empirical inquiry." 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. During the discussion following his paper, however, Crews was willfully misunderstood by Judith Butler. Pouncing on the phrase "community standards," Butler 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." There’s a certain truth to the distinction Butler is making. It is 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 goals. And Crews’s understanding of rational inquiry is in fact a substantive one, implying a mode of association—the university—that exists to promote a common undertaking. But the lie in Butler’s response is the notion that she is somehow advocating merely formal associations among university scholars. 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 hint was placed deftly and inconspicuously, but there it was: "community standards" meant homophobia. In Butler’s university community, just as in Crews’s, everyone pursues the same good. But in her community, the standard is not a common devotion to ordinary rational principles, but a devotion to party. We could call this party is the "liberationist party." What is required for membership is voluble solidarity with the party’s claim to liberate us from "social oppression." To have any kind of career in the university today is to be compelled to sit in the "audible rooting section," booing the likes of Crews and cheering the likes of Butler. 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. Let us have no nonsense about independent criticism, and intellectual delicacy, and the few and the many; . . . if one of us speaks well, applaud him; if one of us speaks ill, applaud him too; we are all in the same movement, we are all liberals, we are all in pursuit of truth. You can catch some of the flavor of this party feeling in the attacks made on Philosophy and Literature’s Bad Writing Contest. In her Times op-ed, Butler observed that the contest winners, beginning with the Marxist critic Fredric Matthew Arnold Jameson in 1994 (he won again two years later), were "restricted to scholars on the left." 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." A professor from Germany went even farther, associating the contest with Volkisch anti-intellectual populism. The implication is obvious: To criticize the bad writing of "scholars on the left" is Fascist. But you can sense the strength of Butler’s party even more strongly among those who support the Bad Writing Contest. In the last two years, at least five young scholars have submitted entries, asking that their names not be released if they should win. In an unsigned June 1997 letter, one entrant confessed that he was "loathe 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. In the current crisis of hiring freezes and intense pressure for tenure, the need to publish is perhaps greater than any time before. 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.). I’m often appalled at my own writing, but since jargon, rather than substance, gains a publication, I succumb to verbiage. The problem, finally, is not that academic writing is "ugly" and "stylistically awful." It’s rather that bad academic writing conceals the political reality of the contemporary university. No longer defined by the common attachment to ordinary rational principles, they have become institutions of one-party rule. To canvass for this party is to promote your career; to dissent from it is to put your career at risk. Young scholars must conform in their writing—and pay a protection fee to the party bosses in the form of quoting them. And "to succumb to verbiage" is really to succumb to "the terror under which many graduate students and junior faculty live." In such a climate, the party leaders are effectively insulated from criticism. Philosophy and Literature’s Bad Writing Contest does, in fact, what Butler and cohorts always claim (and fail) to do: criticize entrenched power in the name of community. It is one means—however minor and satirical—of discharging the old-fashioned academic obligation to correct error and reprove negligence; that is, to criticize bad writing. 9:33:54 AM    comment []

Lingua Franca Volume 9, No. 9 - December/January 2000     IS BAD WRITING NECESSARY?     George Orwell, Theodor Adorno, and the Politics of Literature   BY JAMES MILLER Det er prøvelsens tider for venstresiden i USA, noe som kan være en av grunnene til at det har brutt ut en bitter feide mellom erklærte venstre-radikale akademikere og intellektuelle over et så ærverdig tema som "Politics and the English Language", --  for å låne fra et kjent essay av George Orwell som han skrev i 1946. Må en skrive klart og utvetydig, spurte Orwell, eller er de ekte radikaler og revolusjonære tvunget til  å skrive radikalt og revolusjonært -- eller til og med uklart, som gjennom et sotet glass? Det er spørsmålet.   På den ene siden står akademiske størrelser som retorikeren Judith Butler fra University of California i Berkeley og engelsk-professoren Jonathan Arac fra University of Pittsburg, som henter inspirasjon fra størrelser innen kritisk teori som Michel Foucault og Theodor Adorno. Disse radikale professorene nærer en mistro til kravet om "språklig gjennomsiktlighet", og  hevder at Foucault og Adornos arbeider er blitt misforstått av venstresidens journalister, og påstår at det lammer evnen til "se  verden gjennom mer radikalte tanker".   På den andre siden finnes en rekke forskjellige journalister og intellektuelle fra det offentlige liv som historikeren Russell Jacoby fra UCLA, den feministiske forfatteren Katha Pollitt og fysikeren Alan Sokal fra NYU. Disse aksepterer ikke forvirrende sjargong og kan ikke se hvordan en prosatekst som med vitende og vilje er skrevet på en vanskelig tilgjengelig måte på noen måte kan bidra til å endre verden. De sistnevnte pleier ofte å utnevne George Orwell til sin skytshelgen, selve bildet av mannen som taler sannheten rett i maktens ansikt - og som taler den i klartekst.   Det er en ting venstresidens klartekst-talerne har i fellesskap og det er relativt større tilgang til et større publikum. Dette skyldes delvis at de vet hvordan de skal skrive med "språklig gjennomsiktlighet". Men som Pollitt noe sørgmodig peker på har talsmennene for klar tale uten tvil hatt fordel av den anti-intellektualisme som har pågått i amerikanske massemedia i lang tid. De som har kontrollen med massemedia er hissige på å forenkle og meget forsiktige med lange argumentasjonsrekker, og er generelt utålmodige i forhold abstraksjoner og kompleksitet såvel som kvalifikasjoner og nyanser som kan medføre at et flertallet av leserne vil ramle av lasset. De vil ha kjennsgjerninger fremlagt, forklaringer og drøftinger formidlet så smertefritt som mulig. Et resultat av dette er at venstresidens forfattere som er i stand til å behandle komplekse emner i korthet, klarhet og med entusiasme utøver en innflytelse på akademias totale kultur som er ut over alle proporsjoner med sin anseelse, --  hvis de i det hele tatt har noen.   Denne situasjonen vekker ikke bare misunnelse hos enkelte av venstresidens akademikere, de fyrer også opp under deres mistanke om at klar tale er politisk falsk .-- og forsterker snarere enn å utfordre radikalt, den kulturelle status quo. Og akkurat dette ble poengtert i fjor av de akademiske organisatorer av en konferanse ved University of California i Santa Cruz. De prøvde da å sette den nedlatende merkelappen "venstre-konservatisme" på noen av de mest leste av sine kritikere.   Dersom Orwell er et strålende eksempel på klarhets-gruppen så kan det muligens hevdes att den tyske filosofen Theodor Adorno er kommet til å representere uklarhets-gruppen. Vi skal se litt på den siste episoden i denne borgerkrigen av en Kulturkampf som oppsto i vår etter at redaktørene av tidsskriftet Philosophy and Literature skjenket sin årlige Bad Writing-pris til Judith Butler.     8:47:24 AM    comment []

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