Butler vs. Nussbaum

WHEN POSTSTRUCTURALIST FEMINISTS BEGIN TO ATTACK EACH OTHER, THE END OF THE PC DYNASTY IS NEAR.

[Salon, 1999]

Dear Professor Paglia:

Denis Dutton, the teacher at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand who founded the annual "Bad Writing Contest" a few years ago, recently announced the winner of this year's contest as Professor Judith Butler of the University of California at Berkeley. Her "winning" sentence comes from an article she wrote for the journal "Diacritics":

"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 questions of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural tonalities 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."

Now, I don't think I'm a stupid person, and I think I have a pretty good grasp of the English language, but I haven't a clue as to what Professor Butler is trying to say. And she's a professor, yet! Apparently someone, like, read her work and thought she should be paid big bucks to do more. I don't get it. There are crazy people ranting on the streets who make more sense (Berkeley could save a wad of cash by hiring a dozen of them to take Butler's place). But I recall that in one of your books you said she was a student of yours once. Did you teach her to write like this?

Joseph Molden
Santa Cruz, Calif.

Dear Mr. Molden,

"A hard rain's a-gonna fall!" prophesied Bob Dylan in 1963. The academic sun that once brought high rank and riches to PC queens like Judith Butler has begun to fade in the gathering storm.

May the Muses bless New Zealand's Professor Dutton for his witty championing of basic standards of logic and style! Unfortunately, Butler is only one of a flock of poststructuralist seagulls whose empty squawks have been hailed as divine wisdom by gullible professors and imposed on hapless students in required reading lists[...]

[...]Please do not blame me for Butler's lousy writing! She was never officially enrolled in my classes in the mid-1970s at Bennington College -- although her circle of close friends were repeat students of mine. I was then in my most militant lesbian-feminist mode (which led to me getting fired after a fist fight at a college dance half a decade later). My influence was everywhere on that small, seethingly insular campus. For example, I helped organize a feminist film festival, for which I chose the films and wrote the program notes. I gave illustrated public lectures on sexual personae and "performance" (a Swinging '60s London and Warhol New York principle that stupid people think Butler or Foucault invented). In an essay for the alumni journal, I celebrated Bennington's transvestite production of Jean Genet's "The Maids," starring a charismatic theater major, Mitchell Lichtenstein, as the maid Clare.

The sad truth is that Judith Butler -- at that time wry and smart but timorous, mundane and as nervously anxious as early Woody Allen (I used to call her "the little brown mole") -- fled Bennington at the height of David Bowie's flamboyant, gender-bending period (Bowie was our god) to enroll as a transfer student at Yale University, where she eventually got her B.A. Yale was then the first landing point, via Johns Hopkins, of French poststructualism,

a ponderously labyrinthine style of false abstraction that killed the American-born Warholite pop revolution dead in its tracks, when acolytes like myself were trying to use it to revolutionize academic discourse[...]

Who Needs Philosophy?: A profile of Martha Nussbaum

The New York Times Magazine, November 21, 1999

Back when she was the star of her high-school drama club, the philosopher
Martha Nussbaum wasn't interested in playing Emily in "Our Town." Her favorite
role was Robespierre – in a five-act, French-language production she wrote
herself. Decades later, she still speaks fondly of the meandering walks she
would take around the affluent Philadelphia suburb of Bryn Mawr, dreaming of the
sacrifices the Frenchman made to advance his ideals. "I was fascinated by his
dilemma of wanting liberty for everyone, but having to figure out what to do
with individuals who won't go along with your plan," she recalled recently. "I
still think about it all the time." Nussbaum also remembered the fun she had
playing Joan of Arc, entranced as she was by the question of "how far to
sacrifice friendship and personal loyalty to an abstract cause." Although
Nussbaum eventually traded the stage for the academy, she still takes these
early inspirations to heart. Synthesizing the passion of the revolutionary with
the zeal of the self-sacrificing saint, she has become, at 52, the most
prominent female philosopher in America.

In addition to producing a steady stream of books and articles from her
perches at Harvard, Brown and now at the University of Chicago, she has
cultivated a distinctive, even glamorous, public presence. Nussbaum has
discussed Greek tragedy with Bill Moyers on PBS, presented Plato on the
Discovery Channel and been photographed by Annie Leibovitz for her new book,
"Women." More important, as a regular contributor to The New York Review of
Books and The New Republic, Nussbaum's essays have become required reading for
those with a taste for intellectual combat. Prized for her writing's acerbic
bite, she first attracted notice in 1987 with a devastating attack on Allan
Bloom's conservative diatribe "The Closing of the American Mind." Writing in The
New York Review of Books, she denounced his proposal that universities dedicate
themselves solely to educating the elite and savaged what she saw as Bloom's
distorted reading of Greek philosophy. "How good a philosopher, then, is Allan
Bloom?" she concluded. "We are given no reason to think him one at all."

Earlier this year, Nussbaum took aim at Judith Butler, the radical feminist
philosopher who has attained cultlike status (through dense monographs like
"Gender Trouble") for arguing, among other things, that society is built on
artificial gender norms that can best be undermined with "subversive" symbolic
behavior, like cross-dressing. Appearing in The New Republic, Nussbaum's
8,600-word essay, "The Professor of Parody," castigated Butler for proffering a
"self-involved" feminism that encouraged women to disengage from real-world
problems – like inferior wages or sexual harassment – and retreat to
theory. "For Butler," she wrote, "the act of subversion is so riveting, so sexy,
that it is a bad dream to think that the world will actually get better." By
abdicating the fight against injustice in favor of "hip defeatism," Butler,
Nussbaum concluded darkly, "collaborates with evil."

The review received a visceral response within the academy and beyond.
Butler's defenders branded it an ad feminam attack on an innovative thinker
whose reputation was surpassing Nussbaum's own. "It was a crassly opportunistic
act," said Joan Scott, a historian at the Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton. Others welcomed Nussbaum's blow against the hermetic politics of
postmodernism. "The piece was a skillful and long-overdue shredding," said Katha
Pollitt, the feminist writer.

Although it would be hard to find two more ideologically dissimilar thinkers
than Bloom and Butler, according to Nussbaum's withering judgment they were
guilty of a common crime: both were mandarin philosophers who refused to use
their theories to help wage the battle for freedom, justice and equality. While
Bloom was at least openly skeptical about philosophy's connection to democracy
(he disparaged those who dared to seek practical advice from his beloved Greek
texts), Butler drew Nussbaum's ire because she claimed to be using philosophy to
address political issues even as she manipulated poststructuralist theory to
sidestep them. "I thought of the Butler and Bloom reviews as acts of public
service," she said. "But a lot of my impatience with their work grew out of my
repudiation of my own aristocratic upbringing. I don't like anything that sets
itself up as an in-group or an elite, whether it is the Bloomsbury group or
Derrida."

The debate over whether philosophy should play a mandarin or public role has
been a contentious one throughout American intellectual history. In the hands
of thinkers like Sidney Hook and John Dewey, philosophy turned its attention
"from the problems of philosophers toward the problems of men," as Dewey wrote
in "Reconstruction in Philosophy" (1920). After the Second World War, the
mainstream of American philosophy became reclusively "analytic," orienting
itself around the study of logic, mathematics and the philosophy of science,
while maintaining only a tenuous connection to the world at large. With John
Rawls's "A Theory of Justice" (1971), academic philosophy initiated a wary
rapprochement with its more socially engaged past, using the analytic idiom to
address age-old questions of justice. Nussbaum's work has played an important
part in this revival, as she has extended Rawls's liberal insights to examine
questions of gender, race and international development. She insists that
philosophy be rigorous and, above all, useful.

Whereas Ludwig Wittgenstein once
compared philosophers to garbage men sweeping the mind clean of wrongheaded
concepts, Nussbaum believes they should be "lawyers for humanity" – a phrase
she borrows from Seneca, her favorite Stoic thinker. Part wonk, part sage,
Nussbaum is determined to make philosophy relevant to the modern world.

Q&A with Lydia Davis

I haven't met a so-called experimental writer who likes the term.

By Kate Bolick | April 29, 2007

You may not have heard of her, but Lydia Davis is the sort of fiction writer that other serious practitioners -- Jonathan Franzen and Zadie Smith, for instance -- admire and champion. Her famously short stories (some are only a paragraph long, or even a sentence) defy classification, which makes them blessedly refreshing to read but maddeningly difficult to describe. To call them an epigrammatic hybrid of poetry and philosophy risks making them sound pretentious and difficult, when in fact they're accessible and forthright. Likewise, to say they're contemplative and methodical leaches her wry, understated humor right out. The best way to make sense of Davis's work is simply to read it.

Davis's new story collection, "Varieties of Disturbance," out next month from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is her eighth work of fiction, and the first to be published since she won the prestigious MacArthur Award in 2003. Along with being a writer, Davis is an accomplished translator -- she's translated six books from French into English, including "Swann's Way," the first volume of Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past." Thanks to the "genius grant," she has been able, for the first time in 30 years, to devote herself exclusively to her fiction.

Happily, the 57 stories collected are as intriguing and inimitable as ever. Each takes a thought and steadfastly pursues it to the very end -- whether that takes 12 words or 40 pages, and whether the subject at hand is loneliness or a complicated professional relationship. Some of the stories excavate the intricacies and limitations of language and perception; others, such as a critical analysis of 27 schoolchildren's get-well letters, make new a familiar experience. The sensation of reading them calls to mind what the novelist Claire Messud once wrote about Proust: His "gift to his readers is the discovery not of experiences that we did not know, but of experiences we did not know we knew."

I called Davis last week in the former grammar school near Albany, N.Y., that she and her husband, the abstract painter Alan Cote, now call home.

IDEAS: You're often called a minimalist; do you consider yourself one?

DAVIS: I don't particularly like that label. It sounds so stingy and grudging. And writing brief stories isn't all I do. I resist labels anyway.

IDEAS: So I suppose the same goes for the "experimental" label?

DAVIS: I haven't met a so-called experimental writer who likes the term. It must be people who aren't experimental writers who call people experimental. It's just the wrong word. "Experiment" carries the suggestion that it may not work. I prefer the idea of being adventurous, exploring forms. You wouldn't call Beckett an experimental writer, would you? You look at the whole span of his career -- he started with poems and short stories and novels, and then he got into these strange texts. Kafka is the same with his parables and paradoxes. You wouldn't say, "Oh he's an experimental writer," you would just say, "That's Kafka writing in that way because that's what interested him."

IDEAS: How about "avant-garde"? What does that term mean to you?

DAVIS: I guess I prefer that term to the others. But "avant-garde" -- being out in front -- implies that other writers will follow, and I don't think that's the case. The German writer Peter Altenberg, much admired by Kafka and Thomas Mann, was writing eccentric little stories back around the turn of the last century. Kafka was probably influenced by him -- maybe to write his parables and paradoxes -- but this did not lead to a general movement in the direction of short, pithy stories.

IDEAS: Has winning the MacArthur, and being freed from having to work as a translator, changed your writing process?

DAVIS: The writing has felt a little more naked. I mean, at first it was a great relief. "Swann's Way" was an enormous job, and a very absorbing one, so it was a relief not to feel obligated to do anything for a while. But then I just simply missed translating. It had been part of the structure of my life for so long, and there was something very steadying about it.

More generally, it makes me all that much more alert to shades of meaning, and it allows me to write in another style that's not my own, which is a great pleasure. One thing I believe about translating is that the translator should not impose a style on the translated work. I try to disappear into the text when I'm translating, and speak with the voice that I hear when I read the original, and speak with that voice in English.

IDEAS: It can feel sometimes like your stories arrive in your mind already intact. How do your ideas come to you?

DAVIS: Most of them begin somehow in a notebook, because I keep various notebooks and I try to write down anything that interests me either in terms of language or situations. Most of the time they just remain notes, because time is pressed, and you can't develop all your ideas. But some of those go immediately into a story, and I try to write the story then and there if I can, so I don't lose it. Once it's mostly written I can safely go back to it later and improve it.

Sometimes I have a formal idea, but that's a little unusual. For instance, I did the very, very short ones while I was translating Proust. I wondered how short I could get and still write a piece that felt to me like a fully living, complete piece. But that was in reaction to the great length of the Proust, and the fact that I had so little time to write, and I really couldn't think of writing anything very large while I was doing that translation.

IDEAS: How about the longer stories?

DAVIS: "Helen and Vi" is almost 40 pages, but was intended to be only two or three pages. It's simply that once I got going there was nothing I wanted to leave out. I try to let the form grow out of the demands of the material. If the material only needs a sentence it only gets a sentence; if it needs a paragraph it gets a paragraph, and so on.

IDEAS: It's very methodical.

DAVIS: I like the idea that the brain can do so many things at the same time. That even in an emotional relation your brain can still be noticing how things are said, and be hanging onto them. You may be in tears, but at the same time still enjoy the certainties of language. So you can try to write it down later.