Just Being Difficult?: Tciited

CulturaL Memory I in the Present
Just Being Difficult?

ACADEMIC WRJTTNG IN THE PUBLIC ARENA
tciited ~Y
JONATHAN
CULLER
rmd
KEVIN
LAMB
Cultural Memory
tn
the
Present
Mieke Bal and Hent de Vries, Editors

uust Being Difficult?
Academic Writing in the Public Arena
Edited by JONATHAN CULLER

and KEVIN LAMB
Stanford University Press

Stanford, California
2003
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
www.sup.org
© 2003 by the Board ofTrustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
All rights reserved. ·
Portions of Margaret Ferguson's essay appear in slighdy different form in
Dido's Daughters: Lit.er~cy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modem England and France
by MargaretW. Ferguson.© 2003 by The University of Chicago. All rights re-
served.
A longer version of Michael Warner's essay appears in his book, Publics and
Counterpublics. © 2002 by Zone Books. Reprinted by permission.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Just being difficult? ; academic writing in the public arena I edited by
Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb.
p. - em. (Cultural memory in the present)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN o-8047-4709-1 (alk. paper).-ISBN o-8047-4710-5 (pbk. : a1k paper)
I. Academic writing 2. Scholarly publishing. 3. Learning and scholar-
ship. 4· English language-Style." 5. English language-Rhetoric. 6.
College teachers-Language. I. Culler, Jonathan D. II. Lamb, Kevin,
I975- Ill. Series.
PN146.J87 2003
8o8'.o2---dc2I 20o20I4744
Original printing 2003
Last figure below indicates year of this printing:

I2 II IO 09 o8 07 o6 05 04 03
Printed in the United States o_f America on acid-free, archival-quality

paper.
Designed and typeset at Stanford University Press in I0.51I2 Bembo

Contents
Introduction: Dressing Up, Dressing Down 1
JONATHAN CULLER AND KEVIN LAMB
Part 1. In Search of a Common Language; or, Language Debates

and the History of Philosophy
1. Difficult Style and "Illustrious" Vernaculars: A Historical
Perspective 15
MARGARET FERGUSON
2. Hume's Learned and Conversable Worlds 29

ROBIN VALENZA AND JOHN BENDER
J. Bad Writing and Good Philosophy 43

JONATHAN CULLER
4· The Metaphysics of Clarity and the Freedom of Meaning 58

JOHN MCCUMBER
Part 2. Institutions, Publics, Intellectual Labor

s. Feminism's Broken English 75
ROBYN WIEGMAN
6. The Resistance ofTheory; or, The Worth of Agony 95

REY CHOW
7. Styles oflntellectual Publics 106
MICHAEL WARNER
Part J. Modernist Poetics and Critical Badness
8. On Difficulty, the Avant-Garde, and Critical Moribundity 129
PETER BROOKS
9. Difficulty in Modern Poetry and Aesthetics 139
ROBERT KAUFMAN
10. Bad Writing 157
BARBARA JOHNSON
Part 4· Address to the Other: Ethics and Acknowledgment

II. The Morality of Form; or, What's "Bad" about "Bad Writing"? 171
DAVID PALUMBO-LIU
12. The Politics ofthf; Production ofKnowledge:An Interview with

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak 181
STUART J. l\1lfRRAY
13. Values of Difficulty 199
JUDITH BUTLER
Contributors 217
Index 221
JONATHAN CULLER AND KEVIN LAMB
Introduction: Dressing Up, Dressing Down
THIS COLLECTION emerges from recent debates about bad or obscure

writing in the humanities, although many of the essays show that the issue
is scarcely new. What is at stake when the work of prominent thinkers is at-
tacked as "just bad writing" or as needlessly obscure? And why should what
might seem a local academic matter have graced the pages of the New York
Times, the New Republic, the Wall Street journal, and the London Review of
Books, as well as university publications such as Lingua Franca and South At-
lantic Quarterly? The current controversy was stimulated in particular by the
journal Philosophy and Literature, which for several years garnered publicity
by announcing recipients of a bad writing award, recipients who-doubtless
no surprise--turned out to be highly influential scholars and, more specifi-
cally, ones engaged in what has come to be known as "theory," with its odd
cachet of both political radicalism and intellectual abstraction. In something
like an academic version of Entertainment Jilkekly's "worst dresses" of the Os-
cars, the editors of Philosophy and Literature sought out instances of the "ugli-
est, most stylistically awful" 1 prose, and, as with such awards at the Oscars,
the targets' acknowledged star status certainly appears to be a prerequisite
for disparagement. But if this concern with writing were all merely a matter
of style, what could be the cause for such commotion? And if it were not
only a matter of style, what else could the charge of bad writing possibly
signify?
This volume sets out to inquire into the underlying stakes of these de-
bates. The essays gathered here are less about proving innocence than con-
testing the terms of the allegations, exposing to interrogation the history,
conventions, and assumptions underlying the designation "bad writing" and
its almost inarguable efficacy. For the most striking feature of the accusation
of bad writing is that it seems not to require explanation or demonstration,
2 JONATHAN CULLER AND KEVIN LAMB
as if all one has to do is quote a sentence and people will instandy recognize
how awful it is. Although obscurity is a charge one can contest by trying to
show that, taken in context, for an appropriately informed reader the sen-
tence is actually quite intelligible, badness seems to brook no argument. The
editor of Philosophy and Literature, indeed, felt no need to explain what made
a particular winning specimen the worst writing he had found, and when he
did speak about criteria of badness, he cited ugliness and opacity. The allega-
tion of bad writing works, then, through an appeal to transparency that assigns
badness to opacity. But if the most credible gloss for bad in bad writing is sim-
ply "unclear," doesn't the word itself-as an unclear substitution for the word
unclear--enact the same failure of clarity it decries? And insofar as, in this
model of transparency, clarity is what provokes immediate recognition, bad
writing might be above all merely unfamiliar.
As one might expect, the allegations of bad writing under scrutiny cen-
ter on the twin demons of difficulty and obscurity, but like the bad writing
itself, these constitute a special class of difficulty and obscurity. Literary and
philosophical texts have. often been characterized by elevated language, ab-
struseness, unconvention~ syntax, idiosyncratic style, even (horrors!) un-
grammatical usage. But when the object under consideration inhabits the lit-
erary canon, difficulty is treated as richness and intricacy, the very qualities
that make literature an object of exegetical energy and classroom study. Even
in philosophy, grappling with Kant or Hegel is considered fruitful because
they are important objects of knowledge whose stylistic complexity corre-
lates with the task of precision demanded in the elucidation of complicated
ideas. The obscure way of writing endemic to much philosophy is presum-
ably one of the reasons' the academy undertakes to teach philosophy at all
and often in the format of explicatory lectures. But why, then, should certain
other types of difficulty be scorned? Since scientists and even social scientists
are not vilified in the public press for bad writing, the answer must lie in the
status of the humanities, which is conceived not as a realm where specialized
or recondite reflection is needed but as a set of disciplines devoted to trans-
mitting a cultural heritage. To be more precise, specialized research may be
needed to work out problems in the history of culture, but insofar as it is sig-
nificant, this research should be "written up," as we say, in terms that are
broadly accessible.
We will return to the questions this assumption raises about the tasks of
the humanities. But what of difficulty? Critics of bad writing claim that the
problem is not difficulty per se; rather, the writing of current literary and
cultural theory is needlessly obscure. Doubdess the reason for charging writ-
ing with badness rather' than opacity comes from the conviction that obscu-
rity is unnecessary. Its badness, even wickedness-for moral indignation
quickly bubbles to the surface here--comes from its refusal to communicate,
Introduction 3
from its adoption ofjargon, abstraction, and complicated syntax that make it
inaccessible.
The claim not to understand might seem an innocent posture that peo-
ple would seldom adopt willingly, but in fact it is one of considerable power,
in which authorities often entrench themselves. Eve Sedgwick has described
the "epistemological privilege of unknowing," whereby "obtuseness arms
the powerful against their enemies," as when a bilingual diplomat must ne-
gotiate in the language of his monolingual counterpart from another coun-
try. 2 Something of that structure underlies charges of excess difficulty. The
claim not to understand carries a presumption that the writer ought to com-
municate in terms familiar to the reader, who thus comes to have an inter-
est in not understanding, since that is what strengthens his or her position.
The person who does not understand or declines to understand, the inter-
locutor who has or pretends to have the less broadly knowledgeable under-
standing, gets to determine the terms of the encounter. This is particularly
salient in laws on rape, where, Sedgwick writes-with some overstatement,
one hopes-"it matters not at all what the raped woman perceives or wants,
so long as the man raping her can claim not to have noticed" or under-
stood-a matter in which our culture provides masculine sexuality with a
certain amount of training. 3
Does something comparable happen in other cultural spheres? When dif-
ficulty is seen as elitist, inimical to the ideal of democracy, a disinclination to
try to understand anything complicated can readily cloak itself in self-right-
eousness. When American students are treated as customers who should be
satisfied, their resistance to difficulty can become a source of power. Above
all, our educational system, treating difficulty as something to be postponed
until it doesn't seem difficult, declines to value the struggle with complexity
except when that struggle succeeds in dissipating it. 4 In this context it is
striking but scarcely surprising how securely the power of the enemies of
theory is anchored not in their command of knowledge, their superior un-
derstanding of the texts they would impugn, but precisely in their ignorance,
their claim not to understand.
But the critics of theoretical writing swifdy proffer a different, and to some
extent contradictory, charge: it is not that theorists incompetendy conceal a
simple meaning in obscure formulations. On the contrary, they know ex-
acdy what they are doing and deliberately write obscurely in order to sound
profound when in fact they have nothing to say. According to such reason-
ing obscurantism is purely suggestive display. It produces the expectation that
deciphering is in order, only to elude the reader's effort with hollow mysti-
fication.
This charge has the merit of recognizing the performative dimension of
writing, that it does not simply transmit a thought or a content but performs
an action, takes up a stance. Of course, this fact about writing is itself part of
the problem: instead of self-effacingly conveying information, difficult writ-
ing puts itself forward, seeks to act on the reader, providing an experience as
it structures experience.And one of the performative effects of writing is in-
deed the establishment of authority, although it is scarcely clear that writing
obscurely succeeds in conferring authority, as critics of academic writing
seem to believe. There is a great deal of obscure writing out there, and few
of those who write obscurely become invested with authority. Far more of-
ten readers are put off, and the writing languishes. Obscure writing may
connote profundity of thought, but it rarely achieves the end of promoting
its author as a profound thinker.
However, critics are·not concerned with the mass of obscure writers, who
produce difficult prose to no end, but with the famous ones, those thought,
precisely, to have something important to say. The problem with these
prominent writers, critics charge, is that their prose not only obfuscates any
meaning but, more insidiously, produces an aura of authority. Theoretical jar-
gon, pervasive allusions, syptactic complexity, in short, difficult style, com-
mands the respect of the u~witting reader, they claim, because the rhetorical
flourish that bars the transmission of meaning also stands in for meaning's
presence. Obscurity in style, therefore, becomes a pretext for ferreting out
the impersonators and' exposing bad writers' complexity as the masquerade
it is.
Accused of donning the vestments of authority without purveying the
substance worthy of difficulty, these writers find themselves in a telling
dilemma. If they assert, "Yes, I have content, and here it is in plain language,"
they grant that the difficulty was needless and can hope, at best, that their
critics will acknowledge that there is credible content. But explaining to the
critics of bad writing what a difficult sentence means invariably seems some-
what beside the point. They are not curious about the concealed or possibly
missing meaning but angry at the obscurantism, which seems both to thwart
comprehension and to signal the authors' more serious intellectual, moral,
and political failings.
As many of the essays in this compilation make clear, the accusation of
obscurantism (and even of intellectual vacuity) goes hand in hand with
charges of professional irresponsibility, neglect of political realities, even col-
laboration with evil. Given the still vague definition of what qualifies as bad
writing in this context, it may be unremarkable that these attacks can and do
come from vasdy different quarters of the political map, from the left and the
right. The lack of immediate coiilil).unicability-and therefore the lack of
immediate content or politics of the sort to which lucid prose would sup-
posedly guarantee access-is taken to reflect writers' willful resistance to
Introduction 5
conunitments in the world, their refusal of, in Robyn Wiegman's terms, "the
political real" or, in David Palumbo-Liu's terms, "sociability." But since crit-
ics can scarcely claim that transparency and simplicity correlate with politi-
cal responsibility or that one should read only what is immediately clear and
familiar, that one should never read anything the least bit difficult, they have,
instead, recourse to a distinction between good and bad difficulty by differ-
entiating interior from exterior, what is inherendy difficult from what is
only superficially so-a position that allows that truly substantive complex-
ity may make unusual linguistic demands of the reader but still inveighs
against purely stylistic obscurity.
Critics' attempts, however, to separate real difficulty from merely apparent
difficulty-the latter being equated with bad writing-is perhaps unwit-
tingly and transferentially a displacement of the problem of which the bad
writers in question are often so acutely aware: the problem of a criticism that
aspires to find language about language yet is always already working
through and with the tools about which it seeks to perform its explanatory
magic. For Paul de Man this problem was the site both of theory and of its
resistance. He writes, "Nothing can overcome the resistance to theory since
theory is itself this resistance." 5 Nowhere are these paradoxes more in evi-
dence than in the debate that has emerged around the badness of particular
academic writing.
Inasmuch as theory takes language as an object of critical inquiry, it is for-
ever working both within and against linguistic constraints, seeking the dis-
tance implied by interrogation yet snared in the intimacy oflanguage as the
ultimate dwelling place of descriptive possibility. This effort has placed de-
termining importance not only on language but on its subset of metalan-
guage, on language about language. Bad writing is precisely a metalinguistic
designation, a form of writing about writing. Yet, as we've suggested already,
the manifest sense of what one means by bad writing is only assured by fa-
miliarity with its absence; the meaning that the label "bad writing" makes
present consists in isolating writing's failure to produce meaning. Of course,
the enabling ground on which all metalanguage functions is its reference to
something else called language. The referent is, thus, always eluding its de-
scription, perpetually absent at the moment it is, in fact, speaking on its be-
half. According to de Man it is even in appealing to our most intuitive no-
tions of language that we are perhaps most adrift in the problem of theory,
for "we seem to assume all too readily that, when we refer to something
called 'language,' we know what it is we are talking about, although there is
probably no word to be found in language that is as overdetermined, self-
evasive, disfigured and disfiguring as 'language.' " 6
That theory aims to account for language necessarily implies that theory
must examine the metalinguistic tools at its disposal. And if theory has
seemed to be self-critical, even self-parodying, it must be, in part, because

theory resists itself.To the extent that theory is enmeshed in language's refusal
of literal self-description, charges against academic writing may highlight the
central task of theory: to engage, expose, describe, and even resist this defin-
ing resistance of and to language. The very difficulty toward which the des-
ignation "bad writing'' gestures-that writing is bad when it is opaque or ex-
trusive, when it is seen as primarily or merely writing, without the precious
nucleus we designate content-appears mistakenly as theory's outside; but it
is, on the contrary, internal to the objects it describes, characteristic rather
than independent of the theory it purports merely to characterize. For if lan-
guage were to be transparent in relation to itself, it would be inescapably
opaque, presenting itself as the object by simultaneously claiming only to re-
fer to language and only to be language. The label "bad writing" is, hence, a
fine specimen not only of de Man's resistance to theory but also of the
quandary of theory as resistance, caught up in its impossibility as its condi-
tion of possibility. Indeed, at bottom, the failure of critical metalanguage is .
what drives all theory.
The recent example ofJu.dith Butler's selection as Philosophy and Literature's

bad writer of the year is· especially revealing with respect to the task of the-
ory and its relation to the prevailing distinction in these debates between
real or essential complexity and purely accessory or stylistic difficulty.
Strangely enough, parody has seemed at issue in the recent controversy. One
of the contest's rules states, "Entries must be non-ironic, from serious, pub-
lished academic journals or books. Deliberate parody cannot be allowed in a
field where unintended _self-parody is so widespread." 7 In explaining the
journal's goal to readers of the Wall Street Journal, editor Denis Dutton goes
on to define "theory" (his quotes) as "mostly inept philosophy applied to lit-
erature and culture." To show how "jargon has become the emperor's cloth-
ing of choice" for literary theory, Dutton cites a passage from a recent arti-
cle by Paul Fry, which he characterizes as follows: "The writing is intended
to look as though Mr. Fry is a physicist struggling to make clear the Copen-
hagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. Of course, he's just an English
professor showing off."8 Turning his attention to the year's prizewinner, Dut-
ton contrasts Judith Butler and previous prizewinners-so-called kitsch the-
orists-with Kant, Aristotle, and Wittgenstein, where the former, it is
claimed, only "mimic the effects of rigor and profundity without actually
doing serious intellectual work." 9 In a separate and very different attack on
Butler, Martha Nussbaum accuses "The Professor of Parody" (her title for
Butler) of encouraging dangerous flirtation with gender travesty as a substi-
tute for the real politics of advocating legal equality for women and gays and
lesbians. Like Dutton, who describes theory as "intellectual kitsch" and as
Introduction 7
"analogous to bad art," Nussbaum seems interested in ripping off the frock
of gender subversion and exposing it as a bad charade of real political en-
gagement.
This charge of impersonation is particularly interesting for the way in
which it takes on the questions of earnest performance, mimesis, and parody
thematized by Butler's work, questions at the heart of her claims about the
constitution of identity and of the social realm. Butler's point-that reality
itself has been delimited by the concretizing effects oflanguage and that drag
performance is perhaps one way of seeing anew the materiality of everyday
self-presentation as already imitative, linguistic, repetitive-ironically be-
comes the very ground of attack, as though Butler were merely a carbon
copy, flitting around decked out in all the trappings of intellectual abstraction
and political radicalism but with neither the substance of theoretical com-
plexity nor the bite of genuine activism. One of Butler's enduring insights,
however, is that the example of drag performance, of acting "as though a
woman," uncovers in all gender identity a form of impersonation or per-
formance predicated on the certitude of belief guaranteed over again by lan-
guage and by its invisibility. If Butler herself was merely impersonating the real
labor of intellectuals, acting as though an intellectual, she was, by the logic of
her own account, simultaneously exposing the natural performance of such
labor as already imitative, as relying on the transparency of meaning that
could only be guaranteed by powerfully obscure linguistic conventions, con-
ventions requiring language's invisibility and designating as parodic-and
bad-thought that appears garishly overdressed in language.
Pretending "as though" or "as if"-a function treated at greater length
and in more detail in Barbara Johnson's contribution to this volume-tradi-
tionally sustains our encounters with fiction, not criticism. But as Dutton's
analogy to kitsch suggests, bad critical writing has seemed to be like bad art,
in part, because it has ceased to be properly critical, because the difference
from the object of criticism has diminished to the point where theoretical
writing, maintaining vaunted pretensions to be "real philosophy," appears at
times to mimic the allusive, metaphorical, convoluted structure of its literary
objects, becoming itself literary. Many of the essays in this collection also
point to this perceptible overlap between the literary and the critical, em-
phasizing the continuity between modernist writers' attempts in the early
twentieth century to enable the representation of new realities and contem-
porary theorists' efforts in the latter half of that century to make newly
strange familiar ones. Even what alerts critics of bad writing to its presence
is ostensibly a structure of fictional self-presentation, a structure in which au-
thority is claimed under false pretences; for resemblance to abstraction is
taken as the real thing in its absence, as though fooling readers into buying
the novelistic surrogate by way of a persuasive likeness to reality. But what if
the task of criticism is the unmasking of various fictional self-presentations

as the stuff of reality? What would it mean to present the substance of real-
ity as certain types of linguistic masquerade yet to avoid masquerade? The
seeming literariness of theory may then be its own self-difference as an un-
dertaking of theory at all, which is to say that its moment of writing-and
hence of coming into being-is also its moment of fictionality. As Barbara
Johnson has argued elsewhere, "The difference between literature and criti-
cism consists perhaps only in the fact that criticism is more likely to be blind
to the way in which its own critical difference from itself makes it, in the fi-
nal analysis, literary."lo
When deconstruction discovered in the writing of philosophy the dis-
avowal of writing--writing as the supplement to conversation in its absence,
of an address to the other in the other's absence--it made explicit that for
philosophy badness and writing have perhaps always belonged together and
that the potential failure of acknowledgment seemed peculiarly the condi-
tion of writing at all. It should seem unsurprising, thus, that deconstruction
and the work of many continental philosophers who influenced a linguistic
turn in modern thought found their most hospitable home in the United
States not in departments'"of philosophy but of literature, where writing con-
stitutes the object of study and where the reliability oflanguage and its rela-
tion to reality may be brought into question. In the philosophical tradition
beginning with Plato, in which writing is an encumbrance to be rarefied to
a vitreous surface, Derrida and others encountered an unmistakable figural-
ity that turned against the description oflanguage even at the moment of its
supposed clarity. In specifying its office, language was supposed to guarantee
the idea's presence yet was instead relying on rhetorical tropes-the
metaphor, for example, of glass-even in its act of discrediting rhetoric. The
ineluctability of the rhetorical, the figural, in other words, the literary, be-
came central to much of the task of investigating language and meaning
making that characterized semiotics, deconstruction, and, later, simply the-
ory. That critical writing should seem not only the explication but also the
uncanny double of its literary object reflects perhaps theory's central
dilemma in finding literality shot through with its own figural otherness as
always other than the literal, as itself a figure of the literal. If theory's task
were to challenge commonsense notions about language and make apparent
the role of language in relaying, producing, and structuring everyday phe-
nomena understood as reality, how would it stretch, even deform, language
to render discernible the contours oflanguage itself?
This question brings us back to the role of writing in the humanities. In-
sofar as charges of bad writing take clarity and transparency as the norm,
they appear to treat the humanistic disciplines as means of transmission of a
cultural heritage. If they are, rather, the testing of the elements of that her-
Introduction 9
itage in a critical writing of it, or even the unwriting of what culture has
taught us to take for granted, then critical prose must call attention to itself
as an act that cannot be seen through. Roland Barthes suggests that the
writer's task is not "to express the inexpressible" but "to unexpress the ex-
pressible," to unwrite what is already inscribed in the discourses that subtend
our world. 11
Perhaps, then, the more serious criticism levied against certain theoretical
writing is that it reflects merely a consolidation of local vernaculars, that in
the process of challenging common sense it has failed to question its own
intellectual "common sense" and that of fellow left-leaning scholars in the
humanities. The weak version of this claim rehearses the common assump-
tion in this debate about disciplinary distinctions, the assumption that comes
through loud and clear, for instance, when Denis Dutton accuses Paul Fry of
acting "as though" he were a physicist when he is ''just an English professor
showing off." However, a more interesting argument-and certainly the
strong version of this claim-would be that, far from being too difficult or
merely difficult for difficulty's sake, so-called bad writers aren't difficult
enough; their idiom is too setded, not sufficiendy creative, perhaps not even
adequately neologistic. Rather than discouraging difficulty, this latter claim
seems a call to difficulty not unlike the call to theory, desperately seeking a
metalanguage able to allow the most defdy self-critical operations necessary
to explain language within language itself. If we are to move beyond the
current debate around bad writing in the humanities, it seems fitting to start
at exacdy this point of conjunction, where badness in writing means only, in
the end, not treating writing with the difficulty it deserves.
The essays in Part I, "In Search of a Common Language," start from pre-
cisely this question of common ground by taking issue with assumptions
about transparency, persuasion, and intuition in the writing of philosophical
ideas. Collectively, they represent insightful attempts to unearth and to think
beyond the historical primacy of clarity as the arbiter for intersubjective
contact. The first two essays of the section trace the status of language from
the early Greek philosophers' repudiation of the Sophists through the advent
of the modern academic disciplines in eighteenth-century England. Mar-
garet Ferguson's essay on "illustrious vernaculars" in Dante's De Vulgari Elo-
quentia examines, in particular, the troubling position that foreigners and in-
scrutability occupy in the coemergence of ideologies of national unity and
common language, ideologies that, often deployed in the service of imperi-
alist expansion, tend to connect moral virtue with one form of argumenta-
tion, a form of argumentation that has at its heart the hierarchical exclusion
of various others. With siinilar historical rigor and detail Robin Valenza and
John Bender look closely at two texts from Hume taken as the translation
between "learned" and ... conversable" worlds, arguing that the term transla-
tion is itself inadequate to describe the movement between specialized, dis-
ciplinary knowledge and its more broadly accessible representation. By plac-
ing language debates in the context of the nascent disciplinary division
between "natural philosophy" and "moral philosophy," they demonstrate that
the movement in Hume's worlds betrays not only a difference in the repre-
sentation of knowledge but a transformation in the very ways of knowing.
Jonathan Culler's and John McCumber's essays move the question of
common language and communication into the modern philosophical con-
text, where the authors propose the potential of difficulty to enable new
ways of engaging subjectivity and meaning. Closely reading the hard prose
of Stanley Cavell, Culler shows the promise of a style that convincingly de-
scribes the knots, dilemmas, desires, and identities of the writer. By breaking
up the process of reading and interfering with the accustomed modes of un-
derstanding a text, "stylish" philosophical writing, Culler argues, may go past
mere assessment and give persuasion a chance to happen. Locating the ori-
gin of philosophy's insistence on clarity in Aristotle and in the law of preser-
vation of form, McCumber highlights the historical domination of matter
by form. He concludes that when "matter"-that is, the body repressed and
denied-speaks, its speech may ultimately need to reject both the Aris-
totelian mode of clarity (occupying the extant vocabularies of experience)
and the Hegelian mo?e (treating obscurity as a necessary prelude to clarity)
and rather to undertake a more experimental relation to obscurity, one that
neither relegates obscurity to failed communication nor ties it to the ulti-
mate goal of its own transcending.
Part 2, "Institutions, :Publics, Intellectual Labor," centers on the politics
embedded in theoretical discourses in the academy and elsewhere. Robyn
Wiegman opens the discussion by showing how disciplinary divisions have,
in themselves, abetted and reproduced the conventional estrangement be-
tween a "political real" and a "theoretical imaginary," cementing the opposi-
tion of activism versus abstraction. Her essay argues that feminism needs to
reclaim a "theoretical humanities" as a vital site for considering afresh some
of the many articulations between poststructuralism and left politics. Echo-
ing many of the concerns raised by Wiegman, Rey Chow moves the discus-
sion from the domestic politics of debates over bad writing to the flow of in-
tellectual capital abroad, investigating, with surprising results, how
globalization has affected the value attached to difficulty and the potential of
obscurity to circulate in new, unanticipated ways. In the final essay of the
section Michael Warner provides a nuanced account of the pressures, para-
doxes, dilemmas, and unP,.redictability of writing that aspires to transform the
world. Scrutinizing the different functions complexity in writing style plays
in intellectual affiliation and change, Warner teases out the implications of
Introduction I I
publishing circuits, political participation, and the anteriority of"world mak-

ing" theory to its audience proper.
That the contemporary theory in question is itself a continuation of cer-
tain types of literary experimentation forms the organizing center of the es-
says in the next part. As the title "Modernist Poetics and Critical Badness"
suggests, the authors of these essays find in modernism the roots of a simul-
taneously literary and critical enterprise in which stylistic complexity and
the renegotiation of the subjective go together and in which the transgress-
ing of linguistic conventions-in the lyric, the novel, the essay, even the
boundary between the poetic and the prosaic, on the one hand, or art and
interpretation, on the other-diverts from general circulation works deeply
interested in the masses and in everyday experience and common sense.
Whereas Peter Brooks, by taking a historical view onto the emergence of
criticism and its alignment with the literary avant-garde, affirms hope for a
renewal of exegesis and its role in an aesthetic education, Robert Kaufi:nan
provides a detailed example of such an inquiry into the complexity of
modernism in the example of contemporary poetry and Theodor Adorno's
aesthetic theory. Barbara Johnson's piece closes the section with the impos-
sibility of closure, acting appropriately instead "as if" concluded. Her far-
reaching use of notions of"badness" from Baudelaire and Mallarme shows
the existing currents of contemporary debates to be still deeply embedded
in prevailing notions of language that have the denial of self-obscurity as
their precondition and, therefore, project difficulties in comprehension to
moral failings of authors.
The final part of the collection, "Address to the Other," deals at greater
length with precisely this question of ethics raised by obscure academic
prose; The authors in this section engage with readers' refusal of acknowl-
edgment to the seemingly opaque and inscrutable, or the less than immedi-
ately intuitive and transparent. David Palumbo-Liu's essay shows this refusal
to be rooted in conditions of sociability whereby notions of bad writing, bad
people, and nonnormativity work together to constrain what qualifies as le-
gitimate intercourse, even as they function within the circuit of politics as
usual, in which different groups vie for predominance. The interview with
Gayatri Spivak places the question of difficulty in the terrain ofleft academic
politics and knowledge production and dissemination. By looking at the
"law of curvature," the different temporality now attached to books, and the
role of teaching, Spivak argues for wedging apart the question of the valid-
ity of knowledge from the relative level of difficulty attached to its expres-
sion. In the final essay Judith Butler revisits the frequently cited example of
Adorno by way of a significant detour through Henry James's Washington
Square. Through Adorno's correspondence with friend and colleague Walter
Benjamin, Butler argues that Adorno signifies not only difficulty but also
difficulty's limits, the terrifying points at which difficulty is reconstituted

into orthodoxy and withdraws recognition to those who transgress its en-
trenched parameters. Proposing that the world may be understood anew in
unfamiliar and unconventional writing, Buder also advocates reexamining
the ethics of reading difficulty and ofjudgment in the face of incomprehen-
sion. By attaching ethical value to encounters with the "inadequacy of ex-
planation," Buder challenges us to honor that which cannot be fully under-
stood or mastered in the other.
Notes
I. The contest was conducted through the list serve, PHIL-LIT, for the journal
Philosophy and Literature. The rules were posted on the Internet and have since been
quoted in a number of places, in virtually identical form. The quotation here appears
on the following Web page: Denis Dutton, "Bad Writing Contest: Results for Round
Three," posted at www.miami.edu/phi/misc/badwrit3.htm.
2. Eve Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press, 1990), 4-7.
3· Ibid., 5·
4· For discussion see Helen Regueiro Elam, "The Difficulty of Reading," in The
Idea of Difficulty in Literature, ed.Alan Purves (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991), 73-79.
5. Paul de Man, "The Resistance to Theory," in The Resistance to Theorj (Min-
neapolis: University' of Minnesota Press, 1986), 19 (de Man's emphasis).
6. Ibid., 13.
7. Denis Dutton, "Bookmarks: The Somewhat Exaggerated Death of Primitive
Art," Philosophy and Literature 23 (1999): 252.
8. Denis Dutton, "bmguage Crimes," Wall Street journal, Feb. 5, 1999,Wn (our
emphasis). •
9· Ibid.
10. Barbara Johnson, "The Critical Difference: BartheS/BalZac," in The Critical
Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading (Baltimore, Md.:Johns Hop-
kins University Press, 1980), 12.
II. Roland Barthes, Critical Essays (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press,
1972), X.
PART I
In Search of a Common Language; or, Language Debates

and the History of Philosophy
MARGARET FERGUSON 1
Difficult Style and "Illustrious" Vernaculars
A Historical Perspective
Ever since Socrates distinguished philosophy from what the sophists and the
rhetoricians were doing, it has been a discourse of equals who trade arguments
and counter-arguments without any obscurantist sleight of hand. In that way,
he claimed, philosophy showed respect for the soul, while the others' manipu-
lative methods showed only disrespect.
-Martha Nussbaum, "The Professor of Parody"
The Sophists were disliked for different reasons both by philosophers like
Socrates and Plato and by leading citizens. The odium which they incurred in
the eyes of the establishment was not only due to the subjects they professed;
their own status [as "foreigners" to Athens] was against them.
-W. K. C. Guthrie, The Sophists
PHILOSOPHERS, Martha Nussbaum suggests, demonstrate their moral

goodness by using good language. Good language is clear language; it avoids
any "obscurantist sleight of hand" and conducts its arguments without any
trace of those "manipulative methods" that Plato's Socrates associated with
the Sophists. That group of language users and teachers, whose name allies
them with sophia, wisdom, have nonetheless come, in Western history, to be
vilified as false claimants to philosophy's goods. Those who possess some cul-
tural literacy of the kind defined by E. D. Hirsch know that a sophistical ar-
gument is a specious one; and those who read and allowed themselves to be
persuaded by Nussbaum's denunciation ofJudith Buder's writing style (and
ideas) in a 1999 issue of the New Republic know that those associated with
Sophists, even at the turn of the millennium in a country far from Greece,
are rhetoricians who seek to manipulate their readers' minds rather than re-
specting their souls. When they assessed Nussbaum's highly manipulative
rhetorical gesture of associating Judith Buder with the Sophists, however, did
the readers of the New Republic know that the Sophists were foreigners,
"provincials" (in the eyes ofAthenians) who lacked legal standing in Athens
16 MARGARET FERGUSON
and whose habit, as Plato describes it, was to wander "from city to city . . .
having no setded home of their own" (Timaeus, 19e)?1
The Sophists' status as foreigners is less likely to figure in a Hirschean
conception of modern American cultural literacy, I suspect, than is their rep-
utation as amoral, or even immoral, rhetoricians. In truth (but beware such a
phrase: it may be attempting to manipulate you), the question of what con-
stitutes foreignness in language use and among language users is intricately
bound up with debates (past and present) about what constitutes "good"
writing (or speaking) in English. By English I mean, in the context of this es-
say and this volume, that standardized form of the language that some soci-
olinguists call a "high prestige dialect" and see emerging, as a concept and a
set of prescribed practices, over the course of many centuries starting in the
early Renaissance era. 2 What counts as "bad" English has often been defined
as a function of what the Athenians called barbarism or, more precisely, sole-
cism. This term, which I vividly remember first seeing in the margin of one
of my graduate school ~ssays. where it accompanied a circled phrase the pro-
fessorial reader regarded as extremely infelicitous and as a mark of my gross
ignorance, denotes, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, "speaking in-
correcdy," a "violation· of the rules of grammar or syntax." Ancient writers
used the word to refer to "the corruption of the Attic dialect among the
Athenian colonists at Soloi in Cilicia." Solecisins are thus usages judged to be
improper or (later) Hnonstandard" by those who know the rules of the pres-
tige dialect, which is often, historically, the dialect spoken at the court
and/ or in the dominant city of a region or (later) of a nation-state.
By looking at a few moments in the history of the concept of a standard
language or, as Dante called it, an "illustrious" vernacular, I hope in this es-
say to questioit a tendency I see not only in Martha Nussbaum's approach to
the problem of Buder's "difficult" style but also in that of many well-edu-
cated persons who have written more generally, and in various fora, against
the "obscure" language, often call~d "jargon," of recent literary and cultural
theory. The tendency against which I'm writing here--and which I've cer-
tainly exhibited myself, at moments of irritation when I've felt that life is just
too short to wade through one more convoluted sentence by (for instance)
Luce Irigaray, or Jacques Derrida, or Theodor Adorno, or Cicero, or Mil-
ton-is to project one's irritation with stylistic difficulty as a negative moral
judgment on the author of the text in question. It may of course be the case
that the author is or was a liar or a criminal; but the difficulty of his or her
style is, I contend, much less likely to reflect a given author's moral qualities
than to refract a complex set of interactions between the features of a text
(its grammar, its lexicon, its habits of allusion, but also, perhaps, the size of its
print and the quality of its paper), on the one hand, and, on the other, vari-
ously educated and socially positioned readers whose tolerance for certain
Difficult Style and "Illustrious" Vernaculars 17
kinds of unfamiliarity may vary not only according to their education and
social class but also according to their health and mood on a given day. My
general aim, then, is to disaggregate the problem of stylistic difficulty, to sep-
arate some of its components so that it becomes less easy to recognize and
judge than it seems to be in Nussbaum's construction of the phenomenon.
I'm particularly interested here in opening a historical perspective onto the
reasons why different readers may have different degrees of tolerance for as-
pects of a text's language that seem alien, foreign, unknown, or, at the least,
hard to know without some considerable expenditure of time and energy.
Consider Nussbaum's statement that during a long plane trip she found
Buder's prose "fatiguing" (4o).Turning from Buder's writing to a student dis-
sertation about "Hume's views of personal identity," however, Nussbaum
found her spirits "reviving." "Doesn't she write clearly, I thought with pleas-
ure, and a tiny bit of pride." It's not the expression of a preference in reading
matter to which I object, nor is it Nussbaum's rhetorical gesture of recount-
ing a personal experience to illustrate her argument: the Sophists, as well as
Aristode, recommended that rhetoricians enhance their authority by
demonstrating aspects of their "ethos" or "good character." I do object, how-
ever, to Nussbaum's implied judgment that both Hume and the student
writing "clear" prose about Hume's theories of personal identity are morally
superior to Buder because their writing styles (presumably quite different)
are less fatiguing (to Nussbaum) than Buder's is: "what a fine, what a gra-
cious spirit" is Hume's; "how kindly he respects the reader's intelligence,
even at the cost of exposing his own uncertainty," Nussbaum exclaims (40).
Buder, however, is not "kindly" toward the reader; her style is "ponderous
and obscure ... dense with allusions to other theorists, drawn from a wide
range of different theoretical traditions," half of them (in the list Nussbaum
gives) from non-Anglophone countries. Hume is praised for exposing his
"uncertainties" to us, but Buder is chided for using too many questions and
for failing to tell us "whether she approves of the view described." Hume's
way of expressing uncertainty seems to be good because it is somehow in a
Platonic tradition of" equals trading arguments," whereas Buder's way of
(perhaps) expressing uncertainty seems to be bad because it is alleged to be
in a sophistical tradition of manipulating the reader. I suspect that matters are
more complex than this, and Hume might well have agreed, on the evidence
of an essay Nussbaum doesn't mention, an essay first published in 1742 and
entided "Of Simplicity and Refinement in Writing."
This essay is, to my mind, by no means easy to follow. In it Hume dis-
cusses the difficulty of finding a mean or balance between the two shifty
concepts denoted by his tide terms and yoked there, rather debatably, it turns
out, by and. "Simplicity," as Hume explains this abstraction, is allied with "na-
ture" and is a stylistic ideal that few readers will appreciate if it is not ac-
companied by "refinement," which includes "elegant" language and "un-

common" observations. 3 The title terms, as the essay gradually unfolds their
multiple meanings, seem to exist in more of an antithetical relation ("sim-
plicity or refinement"?) than a complementary one. Hume's aim, however, is
to discover what constitutes a ''just mixture of simplicity and refinement in
writing" (193). The answer to this question leads Hume to a discussion of a
"proper medium" of style that "lies not in a point, but admits of a consider-
able latitude"-a latitude explained by a wide variety of examples signaled
simply by capitalized proper names of figures from different eras and writing
in different languages and traditions. Occupying Hume's "proper medium"
of style are Pope, Parnell, Lucretius, Corneille, Congreve, Sophocles, Terence,
Virgil, and Racine; the latter two are singled out as being "nearest the cen-
ter," that is, "the farthest removed from both the extremities" of"refinement
and simplicity" (193-94). Only a reader of considerable education and with
considerable power to infer stylistic qualities from Hume's very elliptical il-
lustrations will grasp wh.at this concept of a "proper medium" of style entails;
indeed, Hume's argument comes to be more about the nature and education
of readers than about "si~plicity and refinement," understood as qualities in-
trinsic to a style of writing. Simplicity, allied with a concept of"the natural"
and-obliquely, I suggest, with Puritan theories about the virtue of"plain
speaking"-is a more relative notion than most readers, even the "persons of
taste" to whom Hume's essay seems to be addressed (191), may have thought;
for, as Hume begins to explain in his second paragraph, sentiments that are
"merely natural" "affect not the mind with any pleasure." Hume illustrates
this point by referring ~o the mental and verbal productions of four lower-
class groups or. types: "The pleasantries of a waterman, the observations of a
peasant, the ribaldry of a porter or hackney coachmen, all of these are natu-
ral, and disagreeable" (191). Whether as producers of"hackneyed" discourse
or as objects to be imitated in the discourse of"persons of taste," such lower-
class persons will not properly illustrate the ideal of natural simplicity that
Hume is complexly defining. "Nothing can please persons of taste, but na-
ture drawn with all her graces and ornaments, la belle nature" (192). Hume's
statement here, with its untranslated French phrase ("the beautiful nature"),
implicitly defines "persons of taste" as those who know more than one lan-
guage-and also as those who reject Puritan injunctions against verbal "or-
nament."The proper mixture of" simplicity and refinement," the essay seems
to say, is as much a function of the reader as of the writer.
I am by no means offering a full interpretation of Hume's short but
highly dialectical essay; I am, however, hoping that my citations of and re-
flections on Hume witl show that his prose style displays some of the very
qualities Nussbaum so dislikes in Butler's prose ("casual allusion," for in-
stance, where the disagreements among the figures invoked are not fully ex-
plained). In the significant although shifting weight Hume gives to the no-
tion of"uncommon opinions;' moreover, he joins Butler, Theodor Adorno,
Walter Benjamin, and Fredric Jameson (among others) in pointing to the in-
tellectual value of not being too kind to your real or imagined readers.
"Only what they do not need first to understand, they consider understand-
able; only the word coined by commerce, and really alienated, touches them
as familiar," Adorno wrote in the Minima Moralia, in a sentence that has been
quoted more than once in recent debates about "badness" in academic writ-
ing. 4 Brecht's stress on the value of the "alienation effect" in drama ( Veifremd-
ungsiffekt); the Russian formalists' interest in strategies of"defamiliarization"
(ostranenie), including techniques of "barbarizing" or "deforming" stylistic
norms; Adorno's scorn for the "ideologies" of"lucidity, objectivity, and con-
cise precision," as he called them in his 1956 essay "Punctuation Marks"; 5
Benjamin's concept of"writing against the grain"-these are well-known
modernist versions, I suggest, of Hume's search for a style capable of ex-
pressing "uncommon opinions." The modernist versions, however, have
seemingly relinquished Hume's hope (hedged by irony) that "uncommon"
opinions and "refinement" of language could somehow be "mixed" with
something that a "person of taste" would recognize as stylistic "simplicity."
The quest for a style that would convey "uncommon opinions," whether
through Humean "simplicity" or through modernist gestures of aggressive
violation of" common" notions of decorum in prose or poetry, is also a quest
for a certain kind of reader, one educated, as I now want to suggest, in what
has been, for many centuries in the West, an altogether "uncommon" lan-
guage. That language cannot be simply described as "one" language, nor can
it accurately be described as one's own vernacular tongue. Although ideas of
moral goodness (and social superiority) have historically accompanied this
language (these languages), such ideas are perhaps, at this historical juncture,
more in need of analysis than of endorsement. To illustrate this point, let me
turn to the tradition of writing about language that separates one "good" or
"noble" language from many languages considered "bad" or "vulgar"; moral
judgments are intricately tied to social ones in this tradition, which helped
to shape many later formulations about the relation between good writing
and moral (or social) superiority of a few over the many or, in the modern
American inversion of this idea, of the many over the few. Historically, the
literate elite happened to be mostly men; and the kind of language use they
defined as good was allied to an ideal of Latin as a universal, imperial, and
written, as well as spoken, language superior to local dialects. These latter
were, for most of the medieval period, spoken but not written languages.
One name for them, in some territories claimed by the French monarchy,
was patois. Before the fifteenth century this word denoted "incomprehensi-
ble speech"; between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries, however,
it came, according to Pierre Bourdieu, to signify "a corrupted and coarse

speech, such as that of the common or 'vulgar' people." 6 Predating and help-
ing us to understand that symptomatic change in the way in which the so-
ciological fact of linguistic diversity was perceived by members of a literate
elite is Roger Bacon's treatise on Greek Grammar. Written in the late thir-
teenth century, Bacon's text reflects on the distinction between the "one"
(Latin derived from Greek) and the "many" (vernacular dialects). He defines
the former as a "substance" to be discerned in the usage of those who know
Latin; the vernaculars, in contrast to the philosophically and theologically
charged notion of substanda, are implicitly defined as like the Aristotelian
"attributes" ofAbsolute Being. Bacon thus neatly occludes the fact that some
vernaculars (languages he classifies as "Teutonic,'' for instance) were not de-
scended from Latin and hence are not properly described by the substanda
metaphor, which makes subordinate languages ontologically dependent on
Latin. Linguistic "substance" thus, with elegant circularity, becomes a quasi-
divine and all-encompassing phenomenon revealed only in the usage of the
"literate,'' defined as clerks and others who know Latin; variability is ejected,
.
by definition, from the idea of Latin:
In lingua enim latina que ·vna est, sunt multa idiomata. Substancia enim ipsius lingue
consistit in hijs in quibus communicant clerici et literati omnes. Idiomata vero sunt
multa secundum multitudinem nacionum vtencium hac lingua. Quia aliter in mul-
tis pronunciant et scribunt ytalici, et aliter hyspani, et aliter gallici, et aliter teutonici
et aliter anglici et ceteri.
[For in that Latin language which is one, there are many idioms. But their substance
consists in that language ~n which clerks and literate persons communicate. Idioms
are many according to the number of nations using that language. Therefore it is
pronounced and written differently by Italians, and differently by Hispanics, aRd dif-
ferently by Gauls, and by us, and by English people etcetera.f
Late medieval clerkly arguments like Bacon's for Latin as "one" versus the
vernacular tongues as "many" frequently define Latin as the lineal heir to the
two other ancient languages most closely associated with divine being and
learning, Greek and Hebrew. This view of Latin implicitly privileges a for-
eign language learned in school by a small and mostly male portion of the
population over native or "mother" tongues of various kinds. Building on
this line of speculation, some medieval theorists oflanguage insisted that the
"conventional" mode of signification that Aristotle had regarded as charac-
teristic of language in general is truly typical only of vernacular languages;
Latin words, in contrast, signify in an "almost ontological" way, as the mod-
ern critic Serge Lusigr;an puts it in his book Parler Vulgairement (42-43). The
notion of a divine ground (and drigin) of Latin signification contributes not
a little, Lusignan speculates, to the exalted idea of grammar we find in many
late-medieval treatises; and the synonymy of grammar and Latin contributes

in turn to an idea we fmd in works from Giles de Rome's De regimine prin-
dpum (c. 1285) through Dante's De Vu~ari Eloquentia (c. 1306) to Joachim Du
Bellay's Deffense et illustration de la langue .franfoyse (1549) and Richard Mul-
caster's Positions (1581). This is the idea that the "paternal" language of Latin
is more "complete and perfect" than any vulgar tongue, a better instrument
for expressing "the nature of things, the customs of men, the course of the
stars and all of that which [men] wish to discuss." 8
Theories of the vernacular influenced by this idea (ideology) of Latin had
many results for educational practices in the West; one of the most significant
of these results, for my argument here, was that standard or "national" lan-
guages came to be "difficult" languages for most people, languages that re-
quire schooling to learn and that are full of words derived from the "for-
eign" tongue revered by those who shaped our ideologies of the vernacular.
Latin, and Latin-trained clerks, literally helped to create almost all the ver-
naculars ofWestern Europe; English, however, was critically shaped-"in-
vaded," one might say-not only by Latin but also by Norman French. In-
deed, as George Puttenham observed in an early statement prescribing a
"courdy" standard for proper English, the "language" of England is a hybrid
produced by history and still a locus of contention in 1589, when Puttenham
wrote his Arte of English Poetrie:
When I say language, I meane the speach wherein the poet or maker writeth be it
Greek or Larine, or as our case is the vulgar English, and when it is peculiar unto a
contrey it is called the mother speach of that people: the Greekes terme it Idioma: so
is ours at this day the Norman English. Before the Conquest of the Normans, it [the
mother tongue] was the Anglesaxon, and before that the British, which as some will,
is at this day, the Walsh, or as others affirme, the Cornish: I for my part thinke nei-
ther of them both, as they be now spoken and p[r]onounced ... [Y]e shall therefore
take the usuall speach of the Court, and that of London and the shires lying about
London within lx. myles, and not much above. 9
To illustrate my argument that what counts as our English vernacular
standard has not only been infiltrated, for a very long time, by elements of
the foreign, but has also presented significant lexical and grammatical diffi-
culties for "native" speakers of the language or languages of a given political
territory, I want to look briefly at Dante's famous treatise about an "illustri-
ous" vernacular tongue. As we debate the question of what constitutes a
good style in modern academic writing--specifically, that by humanists,
who are expected to conform to standards of clarity and ')argon-free" usage
by which scientific writing is seldom judged-Dante merits a place at the
table. For he was the first European (to my knowledge) who thought to put
an "illustrious" vernacular in the place previously occupied by Latin in dis-
cussions of"superordinate" languages versus the many or vulgar tongues.
Ironically, Dante makes his argument for a Latinate and granunaticized ver-
nacular-a "superior" vulgar tongue, as it were-in Latin rather than in Ital-
ian; this dramatizes the fact that the Italian language for which Dante is ar-
guing does not yet, in his view, exist. It is thus "standard" only in a highly
utopian sense.
The De Vu(gari Eloquentia, unfinished in Dante's lifetime, circulated in
manuscript and was debated by theorists of the Italian language such as
Bembo and Trissino. The treatise was first printed in Paris, in its Latin origi-
nal, in 1577. Its central notion of an "eloquent" vernacular contributed to the
construction of that set of theories about language, with corresponding
practices, that we associate with the Renaissance humanists and with print
capitalism. I want to view these theories as indebted to a masculinized
scribal culture that worked across Europe for many centuries and that pro-
duced ideas of linguistic unity profoundly important for modern ideologies
of national unity and national languages. Dante's treatise was written by a
political visionary actively attempting to promote a "unified" Italy that
would not in truth ilrrive, even as an official fiction, until the nineteenth
century, when, perhaps not coincidentally, the idea of an Italian Renaissance
would also take on Il}any of the features it continues to have in modern
Western societies and school curricula. In r86r ,just a year after Burckhardt's
Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy was published, one historian estimates
that "not more than 2 to 3% of the Italian population would have under-
stood Italian." 10 Dante explicitly promotes his vision of an "eloquent ver-
nacular" as the appropriate linguistic vehicle for an Italian nation modeled
(in Dante's vision) on the ancient Roman Empire. His "eloquent vernacu-
lar" belongs to no single region of Italy, not even Tuscany; rather, it unites
what is best from e;ch "native" dialect and thus produces a higher, more
powerful, e~tity.As he explains, "[B]y the vulgar tongue I mean that which
we learn without any rule, in imitating our nurse. From this we have an-
other, secondary language, which the Romans called grammar (vulgarem lo-
cutionem asserimus, quam sine omni regula nutricem imitantes accipimus.
Est et inde alia locutio secundaria nobis, quam Romani grammaticam vo-
caverunt)."11
Dante describes this regionally hybrid language as "cardinal, courtly, and
curial" and explains the middle adjective (aulicus) in clearly political terms:
The reason we call it courtly is as follows: if we Italians had a court it would be an
imperial one; and if a court is a common home of all the realm, and an august ruler
of all parts of the realm, it would be fitting that whatever is of such a character as to
be common to all parts without being peculiar to any should frequent this court and
dwell there: nor is there any other abode worthy of so great an inmate (Quia vero
aulicum nominamus, illud causa est, quod, si aulam nos Ytali haberemus, palatinum
foret. Nam si aula totius regni comunis est domus et omnium regni partium guber-
natrix augusta, quicquid tale est ut omnibus sit comune nee proprium ulli, conve-
niens est ut in ea conversetur et habitet; nee aliquod aliud habitaculum tanto dignum
est habitante). (r.18.2, Marigo ed., 150-52)
Dante's theory of the illustrious vernacular anticipates a tendency to con-
fl.ate the ideas of nation and empire in many later discussions of a national lan-
guage in countries with expansionist aspirations. Such discussions often
highlight the violence done to the "provinces"-eventually including colo-
nial territories-and to languages and language speakers defined as provin-
cial or colonial-in the process of nation building that has traditionally been
seen as heralding the end of feudalism in many Western European coun-
tries.12 It therefore behooves us to look closely, if briefly, at the way in which
Dante articulates a theory of the "illustrious vernacular" through a highly
elaborate set of discriminations between "good" and "bad" types oflanguage.
These discriminations are expressed, not accidentally, in terms that imply
distinctions between language users of different genders and social statuses.
The illustrious language, a "paternal" language made for "noble" men, in-
volves an explicit devaluation, region by region, of the various mother
tongues of Italy, the "native" languages that Dante examines and finds inad-
equate to his purposes. His illustrated prescriptions for an illustrious lan-
guage, the product of his fantastic clerkly learning and imagination, are fla-
grantly, even deliriously, ideological. Dante's treatise offers, indeed, a useful
perspective on a field in which grammar and biology are, as it were, at the
extremes of a social spectrum, each exerting pressures on what the other is
thought to be "by nature."
Dante articulates his vision of the "illustrious,"" eloquent,"" cardinal;'" cu-
rial;' and "courtly" vernacular, after showing that it belongs to no single re-
gion ofltaly, through the central metaphor of the sieve (cribrum); 13 the "sift-
ing" Dante prescribes and performs entails distinguishing not only among
genres, forms, and words but also among persons. The illustrious language, as
he explains, "just like our behavior in other matters and our dress, demands
men of like quality to its own," men "who excel in genius and knowledge"
("Exigit ergo istud sibi consiiniles viros, quaemadmodum alii nostri mores et
habitus .... excellentes ingenio et scientia querit") (2. 1.5-6, Marigo ed.,
164-65). The illustrious language is not only "suited" for a certain kind of
man but has a fatherly authority given it by its preponderance of"manly
words" (virilia). These are contrasted to "childish" words (like the names chil-
dren use, in their native dialects, for their mothers and fathers)1 4 and to "fem-
inine" words (2.7.4). It is important to note that by "feininine" words Dante
does not simply mean words grammatically feininine in gender. In the cate-
gory of"muliebra" he places words he considers excessively "soft"-in terms
of both semantics and sound, it seems: dolciada et placevole are his examples
(2.7.4, Marigo ed., 228). Within the preferred category of virilia he also
makes discriminations that have strong social resonances, with reference not
only to hierarchies ~f gender but also to those of class. Dividing "manly"
words into the categories of"silvestria" and "urbana,'' he fantastically subdi-
vides each of these categories into "good" and "bad" kinds of diction. Good
"urban" words are "combed out" (pexa) and "shaggy" (irsuta), whereas bad
"urban" words are''glossy" (lubrica) and "rumpled" (reburra). Examples of
these last two (bad) categories are, respectively, the words femina and corpo
(2.7.4, Marigo ed., 228}. The illustrations are not innocent, and they have at
least two resonant ironies for our inquiry. One is that the feminine was of-
ten equated with the corporeal in hierarchies of value such as Neoplaton-
ism, which placed the masculine and the spiritual above the feminine and
the corporeal. The second irony is that manuals for vernacular language in-
struction, in contrast to Latin and Greek grammars, were frequently ad-
dressed to women! and even ventriloquized women's voices, as they per-
formed their pedagogical function of teaching "elementary" things,
including names for the parts of the body. 15 In a multilingual treatise written
during the reign ofEngland's HenryV, for instance, which uncannily antici-
pates the French-language-teaching scenes in Shakespeare's play about that
king, the author explains that he has entitled his work Femina because "as
women teach infants tlte maternal speech, so this book will seek to teach
young peoples in the speech and rhetoric of Gaul" (Liber iste vacatur fern-
ina quia sicut femina docet infantem loqui maternam, sic docet iste liber iu-
venes rethorice loq~i Gallicum prout infra patebit). 16
Through its descriptions of types of diction "unsuitable" for the illustri-
ous vernacular, Dante's treatise offers an exemplary formulation of a theory
that appropriates for the "illustrated" and masculinized vernacular the qual-
ities that clerks like Roger Bacon attributed to Latin. The notion ofgrammar
would seem to. be the mediating concept in this process; once one's vernac-
ular has a grammar, it is more like Latin than it is like the spoken idioma used
by those who are illiterati in a historically new sense: ignorant of their" own"
language (as a phenomenon with a granunar) rather than simply ignorant of
Latin, which is the dominant medieVal meaning of illiteratus. In imb~ing not
only his prescriptions but his examples with hierarchical social meanings,
Dante may be seen, then, as an illustrious father of a key intellectual enter-
prise of the Renaissance, the enterprise undertaken by humanist writers of
constructing their vernaculars as tongues suitable for ambitious men and ca-
pable of competing against other "national/imperial" languages, as well as
against the great ancient tongues of Latin and Greek. Such vernaculars-
along with Latin and occasionally Greek-were taught in the "grammar
schools" of Renaissance England and in the humanist "colleges" of France,
the secondary schools tha.t prepared some boys for the all-male institution of
the university. Although many of us think of early modern grammar schools
as teaching chiefly the Latin language, in truth, as Spenser's teacher Richard

Mulcaster knew, such schools also taught English to many boys from the
middling and upper classes whose writings would later fill pages and pages
of the Norton Anthology of English Literature. The English they learned at
grammar school through the method of" dual translation" was not, however,
as I've been attempting to suggest, much like the languages that most people
living in English territories learned at their mothers' or nurses' knees. This is
a point often forgotten today, when (an idea of) "the vernacular" is com-
monly counterposed to and seen as somehow more democratic than Latin.
An ideal of muscular clarity-in French or English or Latin writing--was
also upheld in and through the Renaissance grammar school curriculum.
This ideal coexisted with a great variety of highly convoluted and difficult
vernacular language practices in the early modern period-practices often
defined, as Patricia Parker has shown, as "effeminate" or "Asiatic." 17 "Clarity"
associated with masculinity remains a central educational value in the tradi-
tion I have attempted, rather sweepingly, to sketch here. This is the tradition
of an "illustrious vernacular" that is at once a set of valued and prescribed
stylistic practices and a set of theories about language and its social value.
Historically linked to an ideal of Latinity and, I've been suggesting, to a vi-
sion of the Latin language as a supraregional phenomenon that must be
learned through the social institution of the school, the illustrious vernacu-
lar, in theory and in practice, is also historically linked to ideas of empire.
If you entertain this hypothesis, you will see why the stylistic ideal of clar-
ity is misunderstood, or at the least very partially understood, if it's associated
chiefly with moral qualities such as "kindness" to the reader. Which reader?
Born where? How educated? Considering the matter historically, we can
discern some links between the generally educated reader Martha Nuss-
baum and others hypostatize--the presumably nongendered citizen of the
modern democracy whose interests are allegedly not served by writing that
is too difficult, too laden with terms from foreign languages and specialized
discourses, not to mention with names of thinkers whose theoretical "differ-
ences" from each other aren't fully explained-on the one hand, and, on the
other, the imperial subject adduced by Antonio Elio de Nebrija in a treatise
written in 1492, the year of Columbus's fateful landfall on the island of San
Salvador, which the natives called (something like) "Guanahani." In the pref-
ace to his Gramatica de Ia lengua castellana Nebrija recounts what has become
a well-known anecdote in the history of Spanish culture, an anecdote in
which a writer describes, to a royal patron, the usefulness or political end of
a vernacular grammar book:
Now, Your Majesty, let me come to the last advantage that you shall gain from my
grammar. For the purpose, recall the time when I presented you with a draft of this
book earlier this ye~ in Salamanca. At this time, you asked me what end such a
grammar could possibly serve. Upon this, the Bishop ofAvila interrupted to answer
in my stead. What he said was this: "Soon Your Majesty will have placed her yoke
upon many barbarians who speak outlandish tongues. By this, your victory, these
people shall stand in a new need: the need for the laws the victor owes to the van-
quished, and the need for the language we shall bring with us." My grammar shall
serve to impart theni the Castilian tongue, as we have used grammar to teach Latin
to our young. 18
It may seem far-fetched to compare the oudaws and barbarians envi-

sioned by Nebrija as persons capable ofbeing brought into the pale of the
Spanish empire by means of the newly grammaticized language of Castilian
with the generally educated reader of the New Republic addressed, in an ap-
parendy kindly way, by Martha Nussbaum. There is, however, a political and
historical tie that binds these groups, as pedagogical subjects,just as there is
a political and historical tie that binds the Platonic philosopher, the late-me-
dieval and early modern fashioner of illustrious vernaculars, and the
Sophists-the foreigners or oudaws in Athens who compete with Socrates
and Plato for pedagogical authority and cultural capital. The ties are many-
stranded; I've done no more here than argue for their existence and begin to
oudine some of their features. I hope, however, to have driven a bit of a
wedge between the n:otion of a "clear" style, on the one hand, and, on the
other, any Platonic corner on the market for moral virtue.
Notes
I. Quoted in WK. C. Guthrie, The Sophists (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge Uni-

versity Press, 1971), 40. ,
2. For valual2le discussions of the notion of prestige dialects and the problems in-
herent in the concept of" standard" languages, see Tony Crowley, Standard English and
the Politics of Language (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), chap. 3; and Juliet
Fleming, "Dictionary English and the Female Tongue," in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality,
Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Richard Burt and John Michael
Archer (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), 290-326, esp. 313-14 n. 3·
3. David Hume, "Of Simplicity and Refinement in Writing;' in Essays: Moral, Po-
litical, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 1985), 192.
4· See Judith Butler, London Review of Books, letter-response to T. Eagleton, cited
in James Miller, "Is Bad Writing Necessary?" Lingua Franca (Dec.!Jan. 2000): 34· See
also Theodor Adorno's comments on language that is "baldly functional," "merely
communicative," in TheJargon ofAuthentidty, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will
(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), s8; and Fredric Jameson on the
idea that "thinking dialectically means nothing more or less than the writing of di-
alectical sentences" ("T.WAdorno," in Marxism and Form [1971; reprint, Princeton,
NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1974}, esp. 53).
5. Cited in Miller, "Bad Writing," 35·

6. See Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson, trans.
Gino Raymond and Matthew Aronson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1991), 47, citing Furetiere's Dictionary of 1690. Renee Balibar notes that the
terms dialectes, patois, and idiomes were confusingly interchanged in nineteenth-cen-
tury French usage and are still not well distinguished today. See her Le Franfais Na-
tional: Politique et Pratique de Ia Langue National Sous Ia Revolution Franfois (Paris: Ha-
chette, 1974), 32.
7. The Greek Grammar of Roger Bacon, Distinccio I, capitulum 1; cited in J.D.
Burnley, "Sources of Standardisation in Later Middle English;' in Standardizing Eng-
lish: Essays in the History of Language Change in Honor ofjohn Hurt Fisher, ed.Joseph B.
Trahern Jr. (Knoxville: University ofTennessee Press, 1989), 32. The Baconian for-
mulation invites comparison with Raymond Williams's discussion ofhow a "virtu-
ally metaphysical notion of the language" comes to subtend distinctions between
"standard" English and "dialects" ofEnglish. By this projection "of a concept of Eng-
lish as existing metaphysically, in other than its actual variations, there comes to be a
singular English and then dialects of English" (Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Ji&cabu-
lary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 106 (Williams's
italics]).
8. Giles de Rome, De regimine principum (1285), 2.2.7; cited in Latin and French in
Serge Lusignan, Parler Vulgairement: Les Intellectuels et Ia Langue Franfaise aux Xlle et
XIVe Siecles, 2d ed. (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Urin, 1987), 43 (my translation).
9. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poetrie (Kent, Ohio: Kent State Univer-
sity Press, 1970), 156-57.
10. Tullio De Mauro, Storia Linguistica dell'Italia Unita; cited in Jonathan Stein-
berg, "The Historian and the Questione della Lingua," in The Social History of Lan-
guage, ed. Peter Burke and Roy Porter (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University
Press, 1987), 198.
n. All citations of the De Vulgari Eloquentia refer to the third (bilingual) edition
by Aristide Marigo and Pier Giorgio Ricci in volume 6 of the Opere di Dante, gen-
eral editors Vittore Branca, Francesco Maggini, and Bruno Nardi (Firenze: Le Mon-
nier, 1968).The quoted passage is from book 1.1.2-3, 6-8. Citations will henceforth
be given in parentheses with book, chapter, and passage number followed by the
page numbers of Marigo's edition. My translations are based on those of Robert
Haller, Literary Criticism of Dante Alighieri (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1973),
and on those of Marianne Shapiro, De Vulgari Eloquentia: Dante~ Book of Exile (Lin-
coln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970).
12. See C. T. Davis, "Dante and the Empire;' in The Cambridge Companion to
Dante, ed. RachelJacoff (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 67-
79; see also his Dante and the Idea of Rome (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957).
13. Dante also uses the metaphor of the sieve in Paradiso, canto 26.1.
14. Interestingly, Dante gives the name of the mother first in his examples of
puerilia: "nee puerilia propter sui simplicitatem, ut mamma et babbo, mate et pate"
(2.7.4, Marigo ed., 228). For a provocative discussion of the rather contradictory per-
spectives on baby talk in the De Vulgari and in Dante's epic-which latter appears to
offer a more favorable !rStimate of baby talk than the treatise does--see Robert Hol-
lander, "Babytalk in Dante's Commedia," in On the Rise of the Vernacular Literatures in
the Middle Ages, ed. R. G. Collins and John Wortly (Winnipeg, Canada: University of
Manitoba Press, 1975), 73-84.
15. For a fuller discussion of this point see Margaret Ferguson, Dido's Daughters:
Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, forthcoming), chap. 3.
16. Quoted in Kathleen Lambley, The Teaching and Cultivation of the French Lan-
guage in England (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1920), 28.
17. See Patricia Parker, "A Virile Style," in Premodern Sexualities, ed. Louise Fran-
denberg and Carla Freccero (New York: Routledge, 1995), 199-222.
18. Cited in and translated by Walter Mignolo, Tite Darker Side of the Renaissa11ce:
Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1995), J8.
ROBIN VALENZA AND JOHN BENDER 2
Hume's Learned and Conversable Worlds
They that content themselves with general ideas may rest in general terms; but
those whose studies or employments force ... closer inspection must have
names for particular parts, and words by which they may express various
modes of combination, such as none but themselves have occasion to consider.
-Samuel Johnson, Idler, no. 70 (1759)
SAMUEL JOHNSON denied the possibility that the language of common

life could be sufficient to provide all the "terms of art," the expert termi-
nologies, necessary for specialized studies and employments. In the Idler es-
says and the preface to his Dictionary (1755) he describes this lexical divide as
a consequence of the pursuit of advanced knowledge, accepting with regret
the professional isolation that inevitably results.AlthoughJohnson confronts
the issues concerning specialized language that we address in this essay, the
degree to which general languages could speak to expert needs seems more
settled for him than for other writers, whether before or after.
British philosopher, historian, and essayist David Hume characterized the
conflict between specialized and public languages as a split between the
"learned" and the "conversable" worlds. Learned, for Hume, signified the id-
iom of university-trained specialists, conversable the conversational vernacular
of a broadly educated public. In his 1742 Essays, Moral and Political, Hume
imagined himself as an ambassador moving between these worlds. Such an
emissary was needed, Hume noted, because philosophy in particular had suf-
fered much by its disengagement from common life, losing any claims to
"liberty and facility of thought and expression" and becoming "chimerical
in her conclusions as she was unintelligible in her stile and manner of deliv-
ery."1 Hume's advocacy of a more conversational style in philosophical writ-
ing came in the wake of the popular failure of both his own, highly learned
Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40) and John Locke's earlier efforts to make
philosophy better suited for "well-bred company" and "polite conversa-
tion."2 Locke's push to conjoin the expert pursuit of knowledge with ra-
tional communication in society, here reiterated by Hume, resembles con-
30 ROBIN VALENZA AND JOHN BENDER
cerns raised in our own time about the accessibility of academic writing.
And, as Hume shows, although questions about the intelligibility of a dis-
course are, on one hand, about linguistic choice, they are, on the other, about
the values we attach to technical humanistic studies. Then as now, they are
loaded questions.
Our subject here is neither the role of the modern university in the her-
itage of these debates nor the debates' genesis in the eighteenth century.
Rather, we examine how the ideal of conversational language endorsed by
Locke and his successors was differendy deployed in scientific and humanis-
tic contexts in the eighteenth century. In so doing we speak genealogically
across time to the methodological divides facing today's academic writers.
We treat the case of David Hume because his career, although unusual in its
trajectory, crystallizes our concerns: in response to the mistakes he perceived
in earlier metaphysical systeins, he began life as a professional philosopher
looking for a scientific method, one that would allow him to achieve a rev-
olution in morality and epistemology analogous to the one Newton
achieved in physics. However, in publishing the Treatise he ran up against the
fundamental difference between disciplines that do their work on and in
natural languages and those that work on physical objects or through math-
ematical representations.•
The precondition of describing the findings of physical science in ordi-
nary languages is that such formulations inevitably will be incomplete: the
essence of the work. is given up in the transition from mathematical to lin-
guistic representation. The vernacular description of the work is acknowl-
edged as a series of metaphors that can be shaped to conform to the level of
understanding of the projected audience without affecting the original re-
sults. Thinking in language comes after the mathematical or experimental
fact and is, or i~ presumed to be, radically autonomous from science itself.
By contrast, in the humanities and social sciences findings and their rep-
resentations to an audience are bound up together in one and the same lan-
guage. This entanglement between the work itself and its linguistic presenta-
tion gives rise to the assumption that because one can understand a
vernacular language, one should be able to understand all things written in
it. But the problem with this assumption is that it discounts tl?-e histories, tra-
ditions, and methods that develop in expert discourses and their constituent
terminologies. Although specialized vocabularies are intertwined with the
language of common life (if indeed such a common-life language exists as
such), they are not identical to it. The oft-voiced prejudice against disciplin-
ary jargons likewise adumbrates a host of suspicions. Such wariness is
founded on a hazy but nonetheless powerful anxiety that texts written in
expert idioins are hiding j.mportant knowledge from the vernacular culture
for diabolical or at least potentially exploitative purposes. The widespread
Hume's Learned and Conversable Worlds 3I
distrust of legal language is the paradigmatic example, but other disciplines

have likewise long contended against similar misgivings.
The sciences and humanities thus have long displayed asymmetrical rela-
tionships to natural languages. This asymmetry confounds modern readers
no less than it confounded Hume when he assumed in his early work that
the audience for philosophical prose was coextensive with the generally ed-
ucated reading public. When his early effort at a scientific philosophy in the
Treatise was met with general incomprehension and was largely ignored, he
moved toward a more sociable, collegial style, adopting the language of cof-
feehouse periodicals for metaphysical ends. He simultaneously discarded the
technical, epistemological pursuits that could not be represented in nonex-
pert languages.
LAnguage and Spedalization

We frame our own investigation with a polemical question: Why does
the claim that science can only be incompletely represented by ordinary lan-
guage descriptions make the work done by scientists seem all the more im-
portant because all the more incomprehensible to the lay reader?3 And why
does the pressure work in the opposite direction in the humanistic disci-
plines: the more specialized humanistic language becomes, the readier the
reading public is to discount or suspect its value? Ordinary, or conversa-
tional, language figures centrally here because the eighteenth century wit-
nessed the movement of specialized, disciplinary knowledge into the public
sphere through demonstrations and expositions couched in language readily
available to an ever-broadening, nontechnical readership. But why was there
a felt need for such knowledge to move into the public sphere, the world of
everyday language? If we begin with the case of science, we can find answers
in recent scholarship. The new, experimental scientists (Newton, Boyle) dif-
ferentiated themselves from their rationalist counterparts (Descartes, Leibniz)
by conducting their work on and with nonlinguistic materials-prisms, air
pumps, telescopes-and through the highly specialized language of mathe-
matics. They fostered a new epistemology based in experimental objects and
mathematical symbols. This innovation required justification. Scientists made
the empiricist epistemology credible by staging their work in public demon-
strations and describing it in publications written in ordinary language. Pop-
ular exhibitions of scientific instruments served to show how natural and
mechanical objects could be made to speak. 4
Laboratory work made its way into common parlance through lecture
tours and written exegeses that glossed mathematical reasoning in everyday
terms. Popularizations of works such as Newton's Principia (1687) made their
basic claims, if not always their methods, accessible to the lay reader. 5 The
fiction guiding these scientists was that their laboratory experiments and
mathematical expressions made the facts of nature available to them and that
their public demonstrations-when they differed from what was done in the
lab or the study-were only secondary representations meant to convince an
untrained audience. They were not the thing itself.
In a 1761 lecture chemist Joseph Priestley compared this relationship be-
tween fact and representation to the difference between history and fiction.
"All true history has a capital advantage [over] every work of fiction," he
wrote, because "works of fiction resemble those machines which we con-
trive to illustrate the principles of philosophy, such as globes and orreries, the
use of which extend no further than the views of human ingenuity; whereas
real history resembles the experiments by the air pump, condensing engine
and electrical machine, which exhibit the operations of nature, and the God
of nature himself." 6 Priestley's facts of nature--made available through ex-
perimental mechanical devices-were constructed in the belief that "facts
were theory-free and value-free." 7 The eighteenth-century scientist's insis-
tence on the separation of the scientific fact from the capriciousness and im-
precision of language was crucial. Experimental scientists became publicly
credible because they emphasized the limits of the authority oflanguage and
the dominance of specialized modes of knowing. Paradoxically, they leaned
heavily on visual and linguistic rhetoric to make this distinction clear. Over
time the perceived remoteness of science from the world of rhetoric gave it
independence and p,ower.
The burgeoning realm of vernacular print culture both expanded audi-
ences and confronted the emerging disciplines with unforeseen demands. If
the public sphere was where rational, factual knowledge could be tested and
deemed credible, it would seem to be the ideal place to try the claims of any
new epistemology. There was thus a parallel impetus for new methods in hu-
manistic studies to make the same move into the public sphere. David Hume
thought along these lines, calling his 1739/40 Treatise of Human Nature an
"attempt to introduce the experimental Method of Reasoning Into Moral
Subjects." 8 In it Hume railed against the narrow, Aristotelian logic of his
metaphysical predecessors who would cavil endlessly over concepts such as
"the self;' inventing entities without seeking empirical evidence for their ex-
istence. Rather than beginning with general principles, he founde.d his work
on observation, the evidence of his senses, taken individually and collectively.
He called his method inductive, directing attention to his procedural dis-
tinctions from the deductive techniques of earlier moral philosophers.
Hume thus embarked on a project with the same set of assumptions that
Newton or Priestley did: that experiment could make fact-the real thing--
available to him through, sensory observation. His chosen method obliged
him to proceed as if his analysis would produce objective certainty. But fol-
Hume's Learned and Conversable Worlds 33
lowing his process through to its logical extreme, he undermined his own
operating assumptions. His prima facie privileging of our sensorium-our
best source of empirical information-was itself deconstructed. He demon-
strated that we have no way to prove that our sense organs give us facts
about the world. Inquiring into the basis of our notion of what is real, he in-
stead discovered he could not show that what our senses give us are facts;
they only offer grounds for strongly held beliefs. He showed that we work
from our beliefs in our representations of nature without any assurance that
this is nature itself. In so doing he revealed that the inductive method, when
applied to consciousness, increases our sense of the contingency of our
knowledge and thus delimits the claims of the method itself. Hume did not
entirely discredit our ways of knowing; rather he pointed to their suscepti-
bilities and qualifications and to the inability of any observation-based pro-
cedure to stabilize its object of knowledge.
But Hume presented his struggle with the nature of knowledge through
a method difficult enough to keep most readers from grasping what he had
done. To Hume's consternation the reading public failed to follow-or to
want to follow-him through his own involved reasoning. This outcome
should not have surprised him as much as it did, considering the complex-
ity of his analysis and the idiosyncratic precision with which he used ordi-
nary vocabulary. Almost from the beginning he attributed his readers' diffi-
culties to their misunderstanding his use oflanguage. When the third volume
of the Treatise was published in 1740, he annexed this remark: "I have not yet
been so fortunate as to discover any very considerable mistakes in the rea-
sonings deliver'd in the preceding volumes .... But I have found by experi-
ence, that some of my expressions have not been so well chosen, as to guard against
all mistakes in the readers." 9 Hume follows in the footsteps of Locke, who had
similarly found that his writing was subject to misunderstandings and mis-
communications and had likewise blamed insufficiently attentive readers for
the communication gap.
In an effort to untangle his work for the inexpert reader, Hume took it
upon himself to imitate the scientists by becoming his own expositor-
adopting a second, more public language, writing in 1748 the more accessi-
ble and considerably shorter Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and in
1751 the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. Even taken together, these
two works leave out many of the most specialized aspects of the Treatise.
Over the course of his career Hume moved toward increasingly approach-
able, essayistic forms and left off writing more technical works altogether.
Here is where the correspondence we have been tracing between moral
philosophers and natural philosophers, between humanists and scientists,
ends. In moving from philosophical discourse to more readily available lan-
guage, Hume eventually abandoned wholesale the most difficult, most tech-
nical aspects of his philosophical writing. The technical language went out
the window, and he ~ever took it up again. With it he also cast away the set
of ideas not responsive to treatment in the language of the essay, the genre of
the public sphere.
But even after the successes of Hume's later writings his Treatise did not,
at least in the public sphere, follow the trajectory of Newton's Principia by
becoming more valued because more inaccessible. The difference seems to
lie in some combination of their respective disciplinary practices and the
rhetoric used to present their work. Shordy before he died, Hume penned
an advertisement that would be prefaced to his posthumous collected works:
Most of the principles, and reasonings, contained in this volume, were published in
... A Treatise of Human Nature . ... But not finding it successful, he was sensible of
his error in going to the press too early, and he cast the whole anew in the following
pieces, where some negligences in his former reasoning and more in the expression, are,
he hopes, corrected.... Henceforth, the Author desires, that the following Pieces
may alone be regarded as containing his philosophical sentiments and principles. 10
Hume locates the difference between the two kinds of writing not in their
reasoning, although he says he did rectify a few errors there; rather, he finds
it "in the[ir] expression."That is, he represents the two works as differing pri-
•
marily in their linguistic style. He proceeds as if the difference happened
only in the manner and not in the matter. Here Hume's concerns intersect
with our own: Hume performs the same critical maneuver on his writings
that more recent critics are quick to perform on academic writing when
they confer bad writing awards and the like. They insist that difficult writing
is a marker of muddled or lazy thinking. They share the splenetic and delu-
sional perspective of the dying Hume, who held the wishful sentiment that
all reasoning, however stienuous, could be embodied in ordinary language. 11
Critiques (incluliing Hume's self-critique) that consider difficult writing to
be by definition bad writing mask deeper structural divergences that such
thinking refuses to acknowledge.
Although untrained readers may not have grasped much ofHume's essay,
what they did comprehend were reviewers who suggested they should not
read Hume's work at all because it was so pockmarked by the unpleasantness
of skepticism, disguised by difficult language. One of the few published re-
views of Hume's Treatise takes him to task for the trouble to whi<;h he puts
his readers:
I should have taken no notice of what he has wrote, if I had not thought his book,
in several parts, so very abstruse and perplex'd, that, I am convinced, no Man can
comprehend what he means; and as one of the greatest Wits of this Age has jusdy
observed, this may impose upon weak Readers, and make them imagine, there is a
Great Deal of deep Learning' in it, beca\ise they do not understand it. 12
This review's unnamed author exhibits a keen awareness of the power the
recondite text may hold over its readership, suggesting itself as holding se-
crets unavailable to the casual reader. However, he dismisses such an inter-
pretation ofHume's Treatise as a red herring. The Treatise's rhetorical com-
plexity is not caused by the immense learnedness of its author-as the weak
reader might assume--but rather by its author's linguistic inexactness and
faulty reasoning. But as another critic has observed, this anonymous reader
was himself not a very careful one, refusing or failing to evaluate Hume's sys-
tem on its own terms and, instead, holding it accountable to the very ratio-
nalist doctrines Hume sought to undercut. 13
This critical reader of Hume would have agreed in part with the more
perceptive reviewer of the Bibliotheque raisonnee: "Perhaps it will be found
that in wishing to investigate the inmost nature of things, [Hume] sometimes
uses a language a litde unintelligible to his readers. . . . Metaphysics has its
stumbling blocks as well as the other sciences. When it passes certain limits,
it obscures the objects that it searches out. Under pretence of yielding only
to evidence, it finds difficulties in everything." 14 Hume himself worried over
this: if clarity of understanding is the goal, certain philosophical or rhetori-
cal procedures ought not to be employed under any circumstances because
they inevitably muddy the water, impeding the view of the very objects they
wish to expose. Much of the Treatise is devoted to leading its readers into
philosophical dead ends, to showing the limits both of received epistemolo-
gies that argue for nonempirical sources of knowledge and of experimental
methods that rely on experience alone to explain human understanding.
Such a procedure is by its very nature difficult to follow. What later academic
philosophers have found most compelling about Hume's method lies in
these very mazes. It is in the nature of his intellectual maneuverings to leave
more questions than answers. However, an appreciation of such a method
runs counter to the prejudices of a wider reading public, who tended (and
still tend) to believe that what is possible at all in language is possible in
commonsensical formulations.
The belief in the power of common language to address philosophical
questions was and is still bolstered by a host of eighteenth-century writings
on the topic. Authors from John Locke to Hugh Blair have averred that
when language is held stricdy accountable to the ideas underlying it, both
language and ideas will be transparent to their readers. That is to say, critical
investigations into subjects not easily made tractable to straightforward (or
straightforwardly worded) solutions ran counter to the stated aims of en-
lightenment. For at least this brief moment in history popular pressure and
philosophical epistemology coincided-in theory. Rhetorical clarity was the
hallmark of the way empiricist philosophers thought of themselves. When
clarity was not possible, inquiry was inadvisable.
But alongside this .belief ran another, perhaps articulated best by philoso-
pher George Berkeley (I68S-I753), about the difficulty that the nonscien-
tific disciplines faced in sharing the vocabulary of everyday life:
Herein Mathematiques have the advantage over Metaphysiques & Morality[.] Their
Definitions being of words not yet known to [th]e Learner are not Disputed, but
words in Metaphysiques & Morality being mosdy known to all[,] the definition of
them may chance to be controverted. The short, jejune way in Mathematiques will
not do in Metaphysiques & Ethiques, for y[e]t about Mathematical propositions
men have no prejudices, no anticipated opinions to be encounter'd, they not having
yet thought on such matters. [T]is not so in the other 2 mention'd sciences, a Man
must not onely demonstrate the truth, he must also vindicate it against Scruples &
establish'd opinions w[hi]ch contradict it. In short the dry Strigose rigid way will
not suffice. 15
That is, mathematicians do not have to contend with their audience's pre-
conceptions about their terms because such terms are expressly set apart
from and defined in contradistinction to everyday language. In contrast,
metaphysicians must defend their language from the claims of common
sense. Practitioners of ~onmathematical, technical disciplines must contend
with the commonplace qotion-in Berkeley's time and our own-that lan-
guage is language is language. The operative belief here is that common
speech embodies common sense and that anything worth saying can and
should be said in broadly accessible terms. This is the heart of the critique of
Hume's Treatise by Thomas Reid, the eighteenth-century commonsense
philosopher: knowledge is not knowledge if it cannot be comprehended in
commonsensical terms. 16 Twentieth-century ordinary-language philosophers
have leveled a similar critique at technical disciplines more generally: tech-
nical work must have been ultimately-at its origin-based on ordinary un-
derstandings of the worldY This search for intuitive origins or even a con-
sistent language of common sense entails problems very much like the ones
Berkeley spells out, namely that expert languages often operate differendy
from commonplace usages, even if they had at one time overlapped. 18 In-
deed, one of post-Lockean philosophy's-as well as post-Newtonian sci-
ence's-tasks has long been to point out the assumptions and presumptions
lying behind common sense and its unilateral advocates.
Hume confers great value on common sense and habit because they al-
low us to get on with the business of everyday life. He does not, however, see
common sense as the solution to epistemological problems. Hume's achieve-
ment in the Treatise is to illustrate that our faith in the alignment between
fact and its representations is itself a problem, riddled with difficulties im-
plicit in the act of representing. Hume's Treatise opens up the fundamental
mistake in the insistence· on the rhetorical transparency of common sense
embodied in ordinary language.
We can thus recognize that reducing the difference between Hume's two
kinds of writing to "stylistics" is itself a rhetorical move on Hume's part.
Much of his readers' trouble in understanding the Treatise did not stem from
Hume's language as such (as many critics have demonstrated, his sentences
are generally very lucid) but rather from the philosophical method bound up
in the language. Hume responds to this level of difficulty by banishing many
of the parts of the Treatise he had explicitly marked as abstruse to his first En-
quiry's appendix and eliminating others altogether. He also provides his read-
ers with suggestions on which sections of his Enquiries they ought to skip if
looking for light entertainment. In writing the Enquiries he both implicitly
and explicitly denies the possibility of translating the Treatise. Hume hovers
between admitting philosophical abstraction cannot be explained without
resorting to a highly learned approach necessarily difficult to read and an as-
sertion that he will manage it anyway, by dismissing much of what he had to
say altogether. 19
Lost in Translation
Reading Hume thus raises for us a question: Is it possible for nothing
to be lost in such a "translation"? Literary scholar Gerald Graff has argued,
"Good academic writing ... tends to be 'bilingual,' making its point in the
complicated language of academese and then restating it in the vernacular
(which, interestingly, alters the meaning)." 20 This is a version ofHume's point
about the transfer of knowledge between learned and conversable worlds.
But, although Graff ostensibly maintains that specialized writings have a cer-
tain, if limited, right to exist, his remarks belie a basic suspicion of the value
of specialized, "difficult" language. The neologistic denomination academese
tends to mock the language in which many academics write. The funda-
mental problem, though, is the metaphor of translation that Graff applies to
the process of moving from disciplinary language to everyday language.
Translation is misleading because it suggests that the operative fiction here is
that as little as possible is lost in the move. This is not to disregard recent
work in translation theory but rather to suggest that the process of transmu-
tation may be described better by "representation" than "translation." Graff's
own parenthetical remark "(which, interestingly, alters the meaning)" is are-
covery effort, an acknowledgment that translation may be inadequate to de-
scribe what is accomplished and what is forfeited in moving between two
methodologies.
In fact, the alteration of meaning lies at the heart of the move from ex-
pert to general language. As Graff suggests, simplification has its value. As ad-
mirers of Hume have observed, few people might have ever read the Treatise
if the better-reviewed Enquiries had not called attention to it. In his own
time Hume gained widespread approval for his efforts to focus on the as-
pects of philosophy more compliant to vernacular treatment. His Enquiry
Concerning the Principles of Morals was the best received of his philosophical
works; not coincidentally he also called it his favorite. The January 1752
Monthly Review recommended this Enquiry for its congeniality to the taste
and abilities of the general reader:
The reputation this ingenious author has acquir'd as a fine and elegant writer, ren-
ders it unnecessary for us to say any thing in his praise. We shall only observe in gen-
eral, that clearness and precision of ideas on abstracted and metaphysical subjects, and
at the same time propriety, elegance, and spirit, are seldom found united in any writ-
ings in a more eminent degree than in those of Mr. Hume. The work now before us
will, as far as we are able to judge, considerably raise his reputation; and, being free
from that sceptical turn which appears in his other pieces, will be more agreeable to
the generality of Readers. His subject is important and interesting, and the manner
of treating it easy and natural[.]21
On the one hand, Hume's sacrifice of complexity as he moved from the

Treatise to the Enquiries was rewarded by reviewers who found grounds for
praise in both the easy flow of Hume's language and the absence of philo-
sophical difficulty. On the other, critics have remarked almost since Hume's
own time that in order to fit the Treatise's ideas into the more conversational
Enquiries, he left out much of what has most interested professional philoso-
phers in his own time and ours. Far from being stylistic residue, certain
methods of inquiry were abandoned because they were not direcdy
amenable to linear expository presentation.
We can easily see how the impulse not to differentiate between philo-
sophical and customary uses of words arises-both technical tenninologies
and general u_sage are embodied in one and the same words. An ordinary-
language philosopher of the twentieth century Inight well agree that Hume
was on the right track in abandoning problems that did not exist in ordinary
language. Hume says as much himself. However, such abandonment still begs
the question: Is it possible to talk about the range of difficulties we find in
ordinary-language constructions of the world without a technical language?
Hume's explicit answer to this question Inight have been a qualified "yes,"
but the course of his career after the Treatise suggests that the answer is "no."
That is, Hume's later writings indicate that when he turned to popular
forms, he gave up pursuits deemed impossible for a general reading audience
to understand.
Hume's rhetorical strategy differed fundamentally from the techniques of
self-presentation used in science, where the scientific experiment itself was
put forward as essentially different in nature, not simply in style, from the or-
dinary language later u~ed to represent it. Science was able to fmd an episte-
mology that lay outside ordinary linguistic norms while also receiving pub-
lie approval for the existence of such ways of knowing. We do not want to
suggest that scientists can avoid vernacular language in their writing; scien-
tists today must as a matter of course describe their research for nonspecial-
ists when applying for grants in ways similar to those that the early experi-
mentalists did to gain approval for their labors. 22 Instead, we want to point
out that the separation between the work scientists do and the ways they
represent it has, from an early point, been clearly demarcated as an act of rep-
resentation. Vernacular formulations are considered fundamentally different
from the work itself because the experiments and calculations were neither
conducted in nor reliant on the same language used in everyday life. Such
thinking persists in our own time. Indeed, in 1988 Stephen Hawking could
write that "if we do discover a [unified] theory [of physics], it should in time
be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists.
Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to
take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the uni-
verse exist." 23 According to Hawking, public conversation about such fmd-
ings can and will happen only after the scientific facts are determined and
then only in broadly metaphoric terms.
What remains for those of us whose work and the language used to rep-
resent it are indistinguishable?24 The case ofDavid Hume lets us see that at-
tempts to insist that specialized knowledge can be translated into "everyday
language" with minimal loss are incorrectly formulated. If we accept the
modern point of view that facts, formulae, and statistics are themselves rep-
resentations, the gap between those representations and ordinary language is
the same rift that opens up when one makes a representation of a represen-
tation. There is an axiomatic difference between the fiction of translation
(what Graff urges) and an acknowledgment of the process of representation
(the lesson we take away from David Hume).
Historians have shown that the rhetoric surrounding early empirical sci-
ence established in the popular consciousness the idea that experimental
practice has a claim on a reality not subject to the accidents and ambigui-
ties of conversational languages. We have tried to suggest a backward look
at how and why practitioners of what would become the humanistic disci-
plines sought-unlike the scientists-to avoid marking themselves off into
a separate realm of specialized knowledge apart from the public sphere. In
the case of Hume we hypothesize that he succumbed to his own reasoning,
which called into question all claims to any separate, factual spheres of
knowledge that were not contingent on habit and common sense. In the
Treatise he sought truth and found only belief; in his later writings he
stopped looking for shared truth and worked instead from commonly held
beliefS. Hume's radical linguistic shift seems thus to have resulted from some
combination of his own skepticism about the claims to factuality of any
epistemology, includmg his own, and of the social and marketplace pressures
influencing the reception of his writing. Print culture and Hume's own
love affair with it disallowed this insulating divide between specialist and
ordinary uses of language because it elided multiple audiences into a single
one.
In retreating from the Treatise's technicality Hume suggested he was mak-
ing a decision about a way of life as much as about a philosophical method.
Indeed, in the Treatise Hume dramatizes the difficulties of pursuing such a
methodology. He portrays the problem as a split between a life in society and
a life of the Inind, a divide between conversational and philosophical ways of
regarding the world. In philosophical mode he finds himself" affrighted and
confounded with that forelorn solitude" to which his thoughts subject him,
imagining himself"some strange uncouth monster, who not being able to
Iningle and unite in society, has been expell'd [from] all human commerce,
and left utterly abandon'd and disconsolate" (264). Hume runs himself ever
deeper into his solitary, abandoned realm until his senses call him back into
a convivial, social world of"blind subinission": "I dine, I play a game of
back-gammon, I con~erse, and am merry with my friends; and when after
three or four hour's a111usement, I wou'd return to these speculations, they
appear so cold, and strain'd, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to
enter into them any farther" (269). The choice is sentimentalized, allego-
rized, made into a decision between fear and despair, on the one hand, and
sweetness and light, on the other. With such a value-laden choice, who could
wonder at Hume's eventual adoption of the latter? Hume preferred ulti-
mately to follow in the capacious train of Joseph Addison, the eighteenth-
century master of essayistic language, in exerting himself to bring philosophy
"out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and as-
semblies, at tea-tables, and in coffee-houses." 25 This decision pushed Hume's
philosophy away from an emerging intellectual disciplinarity, away from the
difficulties of questions that required special exertion, broad and deep read-
ing, and perhaps some suffering. Whatever may be gained herein, it also en-
tails a substantial loss.
Notes
I. David Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene E Miller (Indi-
anapolis, Ind.: Liberty Classics, 1985), 534-35.
2. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 10. Indeed, Locke's student Anthony Ashley
Cooper, the third earl ofShaftesbury, took up this cry, trying to develop a truly con-
versational philosophy. .
3. For consistency's sake througl:iout the essay we use the term science in the cus-
tomary modern sense to refer to natural and/ or physical sciences. This definition
dates from the nineteenth century; these fields of study would in the eighteenth cen-
tury have been called "natural philosophy."
4· Larry Stewart pursues the distinction between "deeds" and "words" in seven-
teenth-century science in great and illuminating detail in TI1e Rise of Public Science:
Rhetoric, Technology, and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660-1750 (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1992).
5. As Stewart has shown, Newton's mechanical principles were illustrated by way
of"mathematical analog[ies]" in traveling science shows, in which, for example,
(naked) strong men were used to demonstrate how simple machines that took ad-
vantage of Newton's discoveries offered mechanical advantages, enabling more
weight to be lifted, moved, balanced, and so on. (Stewart, Rise of Public Science, 125-
26).
6. Quoted by Simon Shaffer in "Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle in the
Eighteenth Century," History of Science 21 (1983): 1. Shaffer cites Joseph Priestley,
"Lectures on History and General Policy," in The Theological and Miscellaneous JMlrks
ofjoseph Priestley, ed.J. T. Rutt (London: Hackney, 1817-31), 24:27-28.
7· Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1998), xviii.
8. David Hume,A Treatise of Human Nature, 2d ed., ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1978), xi.
9. Ibid., 623 (our italics).
IO. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Tom L.
Beauchamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 83 (our italics).
II. We cannot take credit for this slur; it comes from Thomas Hugh Grose,
Hume's nineteenth-century editor, on whose work most modern editions ofHume
are based. M.A. Box calls attention to Grose's remark that Hume's late-life retraction
of the Treatise was the "posthumous utterance of a splenetic invalid" (M.A. Box, The
Suasive Art of David Hume [Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 63).
12. "Hume's Account of Necessity," Common Sense: or, the Englishman's Journal
(July 5, 1740): 1-2; reprinted in James Fieser's Early Responses to Hume's Metaphysical
and Epistemological Writings (Bristol, U.K.:Thoemmes Press, 2000), 89.
13. Ernest Campbell Mossner, "The First Answer to Hume's Treatise: An Unno-
ticed Letter of I74o;'journal of the History of Ideas 12, no. 2 (1951): 293. The opposi-
tion to learned works on the grounds that they were obscure is a reversal of the Her-
metic tradition in place before the seventeenth century, in which knowledge worth
having was thought to be knowledge worth concealing. See Edgar Wind, Pagan Mys-
teries in the Renaissance (New Haven, Conn.:Yale University Press, 1958).
14. Bibliotheque raisonnee des ouvrages des savans de /'Europe 24 (April-May-June
1740): 328. Translated in Ernest C. Mossner's "Continental Reception of Hume's
Treatise, 1739-1741 ,"Mind 56 (1947): 36; and in Box, Suasive Art of David Hume, 74·
15. George Berkeley, Philosophical Commentaries, ed. A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop, vol.
I of TI1e Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne (London: Thomas Newlson and
Sons Ltd., 1948), 22.
16. See Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common
Sense (Edinburgh, I764), esp. sees. I.S-1.8, 2.6.

17. See, e.g.,J. L.Austin's remarks on the ordinary language conceptions that un-
derlie scientistic models of the world in his Philosophical Papers, 2d ed., ed.J. 0. Urm-
son and G.]. Warnock (London: Oxford University Press, I970), ISS.
IS. Even the vernacular language of scientific disciplines looks very different from
parlance outside the discipline: a mathematician's statement "that's intuitively obvi-
ous;' or "that's trivial;' means that an observation does not have to be proven explic-
itly in mathematical terms. Such an utterance would decidedly not indicate that a
nonmathematician would find the observation obvious; rather, it indicates that oth-
ers inside the discipline would know how to find the solution without having it
worked out for them.
I9. See esp. the introduction to his first Enquiry, the first paragraph of which de-
nies the possibility that moral philosophy could be easy to understand at all times
and the second paragraph of which professes that he may have done it anyway.
20. Gerald Graff, "Scholars and Sound Bites: The Myth of Academic Difficulty;'
PMLA us, no. s (2001): I044·
21. "An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals;' Monthly Review Oanuary I7S2):
I; reprinted in James Fieser's Early Responses to Hume's Moral, Literary, and Political
Writings (Bristol, U.K.:Thoemmes Press, I999), II-I2.
22. There is, in fact, crlrrently a closet industry of traveling rhetoric teachers (lat-
ter-day Sophists?), mainly university professors trained in humanistic disciplines, who
teach scientists to communicate their work to outside readers.
23. Stephen W. Hawking, A Brief History ofTime, 10th anniv. ed. (New York: Ban-
tam, I996), I9I. This 'book was a runaway bestseller.A former postdoctoral student of
Hawking's has pointed out that he has "sold more books on physics than Madonna
has on sex" (vii).
24. To take advantage of what a separate language can offer analysis, in recent
years analytic philosophers and linguists alike have increasingly moved toward math-
ematical representations of their work. For example, in using symbolic logic, practi-
tioners of these disciplines are working toward notational forins that deliberately
move away from natural language formulations. Aristotelian logic, grammatical
analysis, and mathematics all come together under this shared symbolic system.
2S. This quotation comes from Spectator, no. 10, first published March I2, I711.
JONATHAN CULLER 3
Bad Writing and Good Philosophy
1 BEGAN WORK on this topic for a conference at the University of

London on style in philosophy. The organizers suggested that I address the
question of what it is for a piece of philosophy to be badly written-no
doubt thinking that as a reader of French philosophers, I would have special
expertise on this question or at least a lot of relevant experience.
In fact, I was happy to take up this question because I have been intrigued
of late by claims made in the world of Anglophone philosophy about bad
writing. The journal Philosophy and Literature, edited by an Australian
philosopher, Denis Dutton, had for several years announced a Bad Writing
Award, and since this award had recently been conferred on a sentence by
Judith Butler that appeared in Diacritics during my stint as editor, I had a per-
sonal interest in the concept of bad writing in philosophy and the criteria of
selection. What counts as bad writing for this journal? What were the pa-
rameters of their Bad Writing Contest?
This contest was conducted for four years, and the prize was always
awarded to someone well known, never to analytical philosophers but always
to someone involved with Marxist, feminist, or postcolonial theory: Fredric
Jameson, Roy Bhaskar, Homi Bhabha, Judith Butler. The contest attempts
"to locate the ugliest, most stylistically awful passage found in a scholarly
book or article published in the last few years." In an article in the Wall Street
Journal Denis Dutton explains: "The rules were simple: Entries should be a
sentence or two from an actual published scholarly book or journal article.
No translations into English allowed, and the entries had to be nonironic." 1
I was surprised to learn that the editor asked only to see a sentence or two.
When the New York Times phoned me for my reaction to Butler's receiving
the award, I said that it seemed to me a matter of bad faith to take a single
sentence out of context and charge it with obfuscation; I hadn't realized that
44 JONATHAN CULLER
this was actually the basis of the contest. 2 What if, for example, the sentence
uses jargon that has just been explained?
I confess that it had never occurred to me that one ought to be able to
understand every sentence of a work of philosophy in isolation, that every
sentence should be clear in and of itself, that ugliness and impenetrability
can be assessed independently of what comes before. I wondered whether
only theorists of a continental persuasion produced sentences that failed
this test, and I thought I would take a look, in a negative version of sortes
vergilianae.
The first book I took down from the shelf was one with a good reputa-
tion, which I had always meant to read-Robert Nozick's Philosophical Ex-
planations. Although Nozick sometimes writes highly technical philosophy,
he has achieved a broad audience, and this book takes on large questions of
interest to many people (its chapters are "The Identity of the Self," "Why Is
There Something Rather Than Nothing," "Knowledge and Skepticism,"
"Free Will," "Foundations of Ethics," and "Philosophy and the Meaning of
Life"). But the first page to which I turned, in the opening chapter, on the
identity of the self, contained this sentence:
We have said that W is .a 'whole relative to parts p 1 , • • • , Pn when the closest contin-
uer of W need not be the sum of the closest continuers of the parts P;• when (a) it
is possible that the closest continuer of W exists yet does not contain as a part some
existing closest con~inuer of one of the p;'s; or (b) it is possible that the closest con-
tinuer of W exists and contains some part q that is not a closest continuer of any of
the P; (nor a sum or other odd carving up of these); or (c) it is possible that at some
later time no continuer of W is close enough to be it, even though each of the P;
then has a continuer close enough to be it-the parts exist at the later time but the
whole does not. 3 •
This is certainly ugly, awkward, and hard to follow (a potential prizewinner,

I should have thought!), but of course one can follow it if one is interested in
the project of trying, with elaborate invented examples, to work out what
logically would have to be the case for some y to count as a continuation of
x and all the conceivable configurations that might complicate such ascrip-
tions of identity. Having found enough sentences like this to assure myself
that analytic philosophy is not necessarily more graceful, witty, and compre-
hensible than other sorts and that looking for sentences that by themselves
are ugly and opaque is not a very good way of evaluating philosophy, I hap-
pened to glance at the opening page ofNozick's book, to see if he said any-
thing about the kind of writing he was doing, and here is what I found. The
book begins:
I, too, seek an unreadable book: urgent thoughts to grapple with in agitation and ex-
citement, revelations to be transformed by or to transform, a book incapable of be-
Bad Writing and Good Philosophy 45
ing read straight through, a book even to bring reading to a stop. I have not found
that book, or attempted it. Still, I wrote and thought in awareness of it, in the hope
that this book would bask in its light. 4
Prose that basks in the light of the hope of unreadability. That this might be
the goal of an eminent analytic philosopher warns us not to take ease of as-
similation and transparency as the hallmarks of good writing in philosophy
or difficulty as the necessary sign ofbad writing.
With this idea in mind let me turn to the winner of the 1999 Bad Writ-
ing Prize-a sentence from a brief essay by Judith Butler called "Further
Reflections on Conversations ofOurTime."This essay introduced a conver-
sation between Butler and Ernesto Laclau, whose book New Reflections on the
Revolutions cif Our Time provides the basis for Butler's title. Here is the sen-
tence.
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure
social relations in relatively homogeneous 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 possibilities of structure inaugurate a
renewed conception of hegemony bound up with the contingent sites and strategies
of the rearticulation of power. 5
This is not an easy sentence, certainly. Here is what Denis Dutton says about
it in commenting on the award: "Kitsch theorists mimic the effects of rigor
and profundity without actually doing serious intellectual work. Their jar-
gon-laden prose always suggests but never delivers genuine insight." 6 Then
comes Butler's sentence. Dutton continues: "To ask what this means is to
miss the point. This sentence beats readers into submission and instructs
them that they are in the presence of a great and deep mind. Actual com-
munication has nothing to do with it."
I think this is complete rubbish, actually. I wonder who it is who has failed
to do serious intellectual work-such as read Butler's three-page article. Her
sentence summarizes, in the third paragraph of the article, why she has taken
an interest in Laclau and Mouffe's writing. She first became interested when
she realized "that I had found a set of Marxist thinkers for whom discourse
was not merely a representation of pre-existing social and historical realities,
but was also constitutive of the field of the social and of history." 7 Then she
saw that
central to their notion of articulation, appropriated from Gramsci, was the notion of
rearticulation. As a temporally dynamic and relatively unpredictable play of forces,
hegemony had been cast by Laclau and Mouffe as an alternative to the static forms
of structuralism that tend to construe contemporary social forms as timeless totali-
46 JONATHAN CULLER
ties. I read in Laclau and Mouffe the political transcription ofDerrida's "Structure,
Sign and Play": a structure gains its status as a structure, its structurality, only through
repeated reinstatements. The dependency of that structure on its reinstatement
means that the very possibility of structure depends on a reiteration that is in no
sense determined fully in advance, that for structure and social structure as a result to
become possible, there must first be a contingent repetition as its basis.
This is important, as she explains later, because if what is dominant in a
society depends for its dominance on constant repetition and rearticulation,
there may be sites and strategies for altering that repetition and effecting
change. In these opening paragraphs Buder identifies sources of concepts
and introduces key terms such as hegemony and rearticulation, noting that for
Laclau and Mouffe hegemony is something dynamic, depending on repeti-
tion and rearticulation, which keep it going. Then comes the prizewinning
sentence summing· up why she found their work important.
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure
social relations in relatively homogeneous ways, to a view of hegemony in which
power relations are subjl;ct to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation, brought the
question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a
form of Althusserian thegry that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to
one in which the insights into the contingent possibilities of structure inaugurate a
renewed conception of hegemony bound up with the contingent sites and strategies
of the rearticulation of power.
Hegemony is a term that seems to provoke strong reactions, and when it
appears twice in a sentence, as it does in Buder's, that may seem the height
of obfuscation; but this sentence has been well prepared, and it is not hard to
explain, although, of ~ourse, it would help to have some specific examples
involving coQtingent sites and strategies of power. But we are still on page 1.
Buder goes on, on page 2, to establish a link between Laclau's work and her
own writing on a particular aspect of hegemony: the dominant conceptions
of gender in society. "Gender is not an inner core or static essence but a re-
iterated enactment of norms, ones which produce, retroactively, the appear-
ance of gender as an abiding interior depth." 8 She stresses two points that
mirror what Laclau and Mouffe are doing in their theorization of hege-
monic politics:
(1) that the term that claims to represent a prior reality produces retroactively that
priority as an effect of its own operation and (2) that every determined structure
gains its determination by a repetition and hence, a contingency that puts at risk the
determined character of that structure. For feminism, that means that gender does
not represent an interior depth but produces that interiority and depth performa-
tively as the effect of its own operation. And it means that "patriarchy" or "systems"
of masculine domination are not systemic totalities bound to keep women in posi-
tions of oppression but, rather, hegemonic forms of power that expose their own
frailty in the very operation of their iterability. The strategic task for feminism is to
exploit these occasions of frailty as they emerge. (14)
This is difficult writing, certainly, although not excessively so once one
understands a few key terms and has in mind some particular illustrations of
the processes at stake. My undergraduate students quickly become able to
handle it. In fact, despite the high level of abstraction, it is quite pedagogic
writing. Key points are rephrased and repeated so that if you don't catch on
the first time around, you have another chance when they come by again.
Buder has a distinctive style, determined in part by the counterintuitive
processes she is describing: there is not a set of given entities that produce
certain effects; rather, what we take to be the entities are the performative ef-
fects of repetition. Since English leads us to assume that the nouns we use
have preexisting referents, sentences wishing to argue that these entities are
themselves produced through repetition turn back on themselves in ways
that may make them hard to read. Thus: "gender does not represent an inte-
rior depth but produces that interiority and depth performatively as the ef-
fect of its own operation."
Denis Dutton maintains, "When Kant or Aristode or Wittgenstein are
most obscure, it is because they are honesdy grappling with the most com-
plex and difficult problems that the human mind can encounter. How dif-
ferent from the desperate incantations of the Bad Writing Contest Winners,
who hope to persuade their readers not by argument but by obscurity that
they too are the great minds of the age." 9 I do not find helpful the distinc-
tion between honest grappling and the desperate production of obscurity,
but Buder is certainly grappling with difficult problems.
Dutton's comment indicates, though, the ease with which-depending
on whether or not one sympathizes with the philosophical mode-one can
praise difficult writing as a heroic struggle with the antinomies of thought
or else condemn it as pretentious vacuousness. There is bad writing every-
where, but public complaints about bad writing in philosophy generally
seem complaints about a philosophical mode: a mode of thought one finds
uncongenial, concerns of which one doesn't see the pertinence, so that the
writing seems poindess and pretentious in its flaunting of specialized lan-
guage (as I found the Nozick passages).
In the hope of avoiding the issue of sympathy with or antipathy to a
philosophical mode, I want to approach the problem of philosophical style
and bad writing not through texts outside the analytic tradition but through
a very interesting and enigmatic figure, Stanley Cavell. A student of J. L.
Austin and admirer ofWittgenstein, Cavell is known for his distinctive writ-
ing. What is happening philosophically in Cavell's stylish writing?
The reviews suggest that if we wanted a famous philosopher who could
48 JONATHAN CULLER
be charged with bad writing, Cavell would be an obvious choice. The Times
Literary Supplement's review of his most famous book, The Claim of Reason,
by Anthony Kenny (entitled "Clouds of Not Knowing"), speaks of Cavell's
"selt:.indulgent" style, especially his penchant for gratuitous qualifications
and parenthetical interruptions, and concludes that despite "Cavell's philo-
sophical and literary gifts, his book is a misshapen, undisciplined amalgam of
ill-sorted parts." 10 Mark Glouberman, in the Review of Metaphysics, calls his
style "inexcusable"; 11 Dan Ducker, in International Philosophical Quarterly,
writes that "the pattern of withholding judgment, of putting off closure,
builds certain frustrations in the reader. There are moments in Cavell's book
where one wants to scream, 'Good God, come to the point!"' 12 Even ad-
mirers have harsh words for his style. At the beginning of Stanley Cavell: Phi-
losophy's Recounting of the Ordinary Stephen Mulhall notes "a feature of his
writing which has become increasingly prominent over time, a feature one
might call its 'lack of momentum'-a sense that there is no necessity to con-
tinue beyond the end of any given sentence." 13 Richard Fleming, in another
book-length study, speaks of"the inertia of the many voices expressed in
[Cavell's writing] and its constant self-reflections and pondering about self-
knowledge."14 Fleming.continues, "It is certainly true that Cavell's way of
writing has kept him outside of mainstream philosophy-if only because it
has kept him from being read." 15
Bad writing? Without more ado, here is the opening sentence of Cavell's
most famous book: The Claim of Reason:
If not at the beginning ofWittgenstein's later philosophy, since what starts philoso-
phy is no more to be known at the outset than how to make an end of it; and if not
at the opening of Philosaphical Investigations, since its opening is not to be confused
with the startiRg of the philosophy it expresses, and since the terms in which that
opening might be understood can hardly be given along with the opening itself; and
if we acknowledge from the commencement, anyway leave open at the opening, that
the way this work is written is internal to what it teaches, which means that we can-
not understand the matter (call it the method) before we understand its work; and if
we do not look to our history, since placing this book historically can hardly happen
earlier than placing it philosophically; nor look to Wittgenstein's past, since then we
are likely to suppose that the Investigations is written in criticism of the Tractatus,
which is not so much wrong as empty, both because to know what constitutes its
criticism would be to know what constitutes its philosophy, and because it is more
to the present point to see how the Investigations is written in criticism of itself; then
where and how are we to approach this text? 16
And the first paragraph concludes: "How shall we let this book teach us, this
or anything?"
Is it necessary to say that this is deliberate? I imagine that an editor at Ox-
ford University Press might even have red-penciled this sentence and been
told to let it stand. It would certainly have been easy to make it easier for the
reader. For example: "How should we approach Wittgenstein's Philosophical
Investigations?We could start on page 1, but the terms for understanding the
beginning of the text aren't given with the text itself; nor is the beginning of
the text the beginning of the philosophy. Moreover, the beginning of the
philosophy is not something we can know at the outset." And so on. The dif-
ficulty here is the difficulty of beginning philosophy, where there is in prin-
ciple nothing that can be taken for granted. This is the difficulty Hegel con-
fronts in the preface to the Phenomenology (where there are points similar to
Cavell's about the ways in which particular contextual approaches mislead).
Hegel's confrontation produces a text thought to be hard to read, though
not harder, I think, than this sentence of Cavell's, which seeks not to ex-
pound the difficulties but to confuse the reader. The two "if not at ... "
clauses presuppose objections, and the "since ... " clauses may be taken to
embody those objections, but since we don't, until after two hundred words
have past, get the question "where and how to approach?" to which the sup-
posed answers are being rejected, the reader couldn't understand the sen-
tence until the very end; and by then, the structure of the sentence has been
obscured by the shift halfway through from the negative, "if not at ... since"
structure (which would have been comprehensible), to the positive "if we
acknowledge at the opening, anyway leave open ... that," which doesn't talk
about a place to start or not start and thus leaves readers more at sea. If good
writing is that which considers the reader and gives him or her what is
needed to follow, this is bad writing, especially since no virtues of elegance
or aphoristic elan compensate for the befuddlement generated.
Richard Fleming, who wrote an entire book about Cavell's book, claims
that the first sentence shows "the care and high respect that he has for the
reader. He writes to someone who has been and continues to be engaged at
a sophisticated level by Wittgenstein's struggle with the state of philoso-
phy."17 I think that is wrong. The sentence isn't any clearer to a sophisticated
Wittgenstinean. The explanation lies in a different direction-one indicated
by the epigraph to The Claim of Reason, from Emerson: "Truly speaking, it is
not instruction but provocation that I can receive from another soul." The
opening sentence provokes-and thus can, arguably, serve its function of
alerting us to the fact that philosophy as Cavell conceives it is not something
systematic or even expoundable. The sentence can work this way even if it
also makes reviewers write that his style is inexcusable: it makes readers ex-
perience what it might be for nothing to be given and thus, in a minor way,
to live the impossibility of deciding what comes first and how to go about
thinking. "A philosophical question has the form: 'I don't know my way
about,'" writes Wittgenstein. 18 I imagine this aphorism lurks somewhere in
the murk from which Cavell's monstrous sentence arises.
50 JONATHAN CULLER
Cavell continues, "I will say first, by way of introducing myself and saying
why I insist, as I will throughout the following pages, upon the Investigations
as a philosophical text, that I have wished to understand philosophy not as a
set of problems but as a set of texts" (J). Not "I understand philosophy," but
"I have wished to understand." This is the sort of thing that prompts one to
call his writing precious or self-indulgent. But that is an interesting charge:
"self-indulgent."What does that mean? How is the selfbeing indulged? By
contrast with the epistemic standpoint of"I understand ... " or the imper-
sonality of"Philosophy is better understood as a collection of texts," "I have
wished to understand" evokes a self with desires and a history. But Cavell's
writing is rarely autobiographical, and here, when he might easily take the
opportunity to introduce the self, with some substantial remarks about its
past and its experiences, we get instead the slim reference to a wished-for
understanding of philosophy. 19 He does not seek to explain his views by
evoking a past history. "I have wished to understand" marks the fact that an
understanding, perhaps especially in philosophy, is not something that can be
treated as unproblematically given but consists of inclinations, temptations,
possibilities that have been attempted, ways of proceeding. To understand
philosophy as a set of texts would be--what?-to try to write in ways that
treated philosophy as different practices of writing (not easy to do).
But Cavell makes life hard for those who would justify his style: after this
sentence he immediately asks whether this remark about texts is itself to be
understood as a text, produces a two-page excursus on the different sorts or
lengths of texts, and then continues: "But I was supposed to be saying more,
having said something first, by way of introducing myself, and concerning
how we should approa-ch Wittgenstein's text. Accordingly, I will say, second,
that there is nn approach to it, anyway I have none" (6).
This is writing that, first and foremost, calls attention to itself as writing.
These sentences do that, with a coyness one can certainly find irritating--as
in the gratuitous "second" here. Is this not coyness more than self-scrutiny,
or, at best, parody of the idea of steps or method? 20 Why would philosophy
call attention to itself as writing? Philosophy is writing not only because that
is the form in which we generally encounter it but, most important, because
the fundamental philosophical question, for Cavell, is how we understand
each other and ourselves. Philosophy and philosophical writing need to
seek, and to question in seeking, that understanding. Thus, philosophy can-
not be a matter of attempted proofS and well-wrought arguments but of
working to find common ground through words that others will feel carry
weight, that capture what has remained elusive.
If you give up something like formal argument as a route to conviction in philoso-
phy, and you give up the idea that either scientific persuasion or poetic persuasion is
the way to philosophical conviction, then the question of what achieves philosoph-
ical conviction must at all times be on your mind. The obvious answer to me is that
it must lie in the writing itself. But in what about the writing? It isn't that there's a
rhetorical form, any more than there is an emotional form, in which I expect con-
viction to happen. But the sense that nothing other than this prose just here, as it's
passing before our eyes, can carry conviction, is one of the thoughts that drives the
shape of what I do. 21
Cavell does not answer the question of what in writing might carry con-
viction. Obviously, there is no recipe for it. But what is involved here? How
is what Cavell does-write philosophy--shaped by the need to write so as
to give conviction a chance to happen? And since Wittgenstein's is the philo-
sophical writing with which he is most concerned, how is Wittgenstein's
writing shaped by this end?
The Claim of Reason is a book focused on the Philosophical Investigations,
which Cavell thinks has been approached wrongly, as if, for instance, it con-
tained a philosophy oflanguage to be teased out. "Wittgenstein has no phi-
losophy oflanguage at all," he writes. Wittgenstein is interested in matters of
language because "they are topics in which the soul interests and manifests
itself, so the soul's investigation of itself, in person or in others, will have to
investigate these topics and those interests as and where they ordinarily man-
ifest themselves" (15). Cavell spends a lot of time on the question of the na-
ture of criteria, where his two philosophical mentors and models,]. L.Austin
and Wittgenstein, are at odds. The appeal to what we say and the search for
criteria "are claims to community. And the claim to community is always a
search for the basis on which it can or has been established" (2o).Appeals to
criteria expose the fragile agreements on which our relations with others are
based. In the exploration ofhow such appeals are conducted and of their en-
tanglement with the stream of life, Cavell's Wittgenstein is not seeking to re-
fute skepticism but to explore the problem of the other, of other minds,
which philosophy has been too inclined to treat as a special problem,
whereas in fact it is central to most aspects of life, including doing philoso-
phy, which is writing that must find ways to engage the other.
When he began to study the Investigations, Cavell writes, he was struck by
the play of skeptical voices and answering voices. "I knew reasonably soon
thereafter and reasonably well that my fascination with the Investigations had
to do with my response to it as a feat of writing. It was some years before I
understood it as what I came to think of as the discovery for philosophy of
the problem of the other; and further years before these issues looked to me
like functions of one another" (xiii). Here again we have that spare form of
self-indulgence, a style shaped by the reference to the temporality of a self
but where the content is not other than philosophical-that is, Cavell is not
trying to ground, justify, or explain a philosophical position by reference to
52 JONATHAN CULLER
.
some other sort oflife experience. This might better be seen as confession-
impersonal confession: recounting your thoughts in a way that invites read-
ers to consider the possibility of trying out the relation that is narrated. This
is different from writing "I intend to show that the text as a feat of writing
is a version of the problem of the other." Is the implication that there is no
other way to show this than to invite the reader to repeat the passage from
one to the other?
Wittgenstein and Cavell write stylish philosophy but in very different
ways. Wittgenstein is accused of being maddeningly enigmatic or unforth-
coming but not, I think, of writing badly. He is spare, aphoristic, enigmatic,
paratactic. Cavell is orotund, expansive, digressive, fussy, hypotactic. But since
Cavell regards the Investigations as, more than any other text, "paradigmatic of
philosophy for me" (xv) and has sought to discover "ways of writing I could
regard as philosophical and could recognize as sometimes extensions-hence
sometimes denials-ofWittgenstein's" (xv), one might ask whether there are
things that Cavell's and Wittgenstein's ways of writing share. What does
Cavell point us to in Wittgenstein's writing?
Neither claims to advance philosophical theses, for instance. I quoted ear-
lier a passage suggestin_g•that Cavell had no pretension to formal argument
or poetic persuasion. He says, even more strikingly, about Wittgenstein's
writing,
There is exhortation ("Do not say: 'there must be something common' ... but look
and see ... ") not to belief but to self-scrutiny. And that is why there is virtually
nothing in the Investigations which we should ordinarily call reasoning; Wittgenstein
asserts nothing which could be proved, for what he asserts is either obvious-
whether true or false--or else concerned with what conviction, whether by proof
or evidence or-authority, would consist in. Otherwise there are questions, jokes,
parables, and propositions so striking that they stun mere belief. (Are we asked to be-
lieve that "if a lion could talk we could not understand him"?) Belief is not enough.
Either the suggestion penetrates past assessment and becomes part of the sensibility
from which assessment proceeds, or it is philosophically useless. 22
This strikes me as a very significant and acute passage. It is also, of course,
a very strong contention: that what does not penetrate past assessment is
philosophically useless. That sets high standards for philosophical utility. The
goal of penetrating past assessment to become part of the sensibility from
which assessment proceeds is a daunting one, a real challenge for philosoph-
ical style. But it is clear also that skillful writing is what it calls for: writing
that appeals to the other not to persuade but to find an echo and ultimately
to receive acknowledgment.
Wittgenstein's writing works out methods for attaining self-knowledge
that aspires also to be knowledg~ of others: posing questions where readers
must try out their responses to an imagined situation, seeing what might be
said and meant. He makes very heavy use of questions, for example (as does
Judith Butler, I might mention); and he goes to much trouble, Cavell writes,
"to give them a rhetorical air," as in "What gives the impression that we
want to deny anything?" which certainly seems to suggest that he is not
denying anything. 23 "He wants to leave that way of taking them open to us,
to make it hard to see that they needn't be taken rhetorically, that instead the
question is one he is genuinely asking, asking himself, and asking us to ask
ourselves. The implication of this literary procedure here is that it is difficult
to see that such a question genuinely needs asking, difficult to ask it gen-
uinely" (IOJ).This claim-about the function of making something difficult
so that the reader may need aggressively to make an effort to ask a question
seriously-may provide clues to some of Cavell's own writing decisions.
Cavell sees the Investigations as engaging in the mode of the confession:
not because it offers personal information but because in confessing what
you would or would not say, what you are tempted to say or resist saying,
"you do not explain or justify, but describe how it is with you. And confes-
sion, unlike dogma, is not to be believed but tested, and accepted or re-
jected."24 The Investigations is convincing because its questions and supposi-
tions play out a desire, a willingness to resist the temptations of habitual
misunderstandings. Wittgenstein's talk of what "we say" or wouldn't say ad-
duces his linguistics intuitions, his sense of our ways of talking and thinking.
"And the fact is," Cavell writes, "so much of what he shows to be true of his
consciousness is true of ours (of mine). This is perhaps the fact of his writing
to be most impressed by; it may be the fact that he is most impressed by-
that it can be done at all" (20). Elsewhere Cavell notes that "skepticism about
our knowledge of others is frequently accompanied by complacency about
our knowledge of ourselves" but that those who historically have been ca-
pable of the deepest personal confession (such as Augustine, Rousseau,
Thoreau, Kierkegaard, and Freud) have been those "most convinced that
they were speaking from the most hidden knowledge of others" (109). In
such cases, of course, the universal bearing of the confession is inextricable
from the skill of writers. To write convincingly about the self is to write
about others as well.
In Cavell and Wittgenstein the attempt to make suggestions that may
have a chance to penetrate past assessment also generates language that at-
tempts to get attention, to stop you, even to make itself memorable, as are
Wittgenstein's famous aphorisms:"Why can't a dog tell a lie? Is it because he
is too honest?" But Cavell does not attempt aphorism. He is concerned to
spell out, inviting participation and recognition, once he has secured atten-
tion; his mode is capacious, exfoliating, running to parentheses and qualifi-
cation. The larger part of The Claim of Reason engages in very laborious ex-
amination ofWittgenstinian problems, with Cavell imagining questions and
54 JONATHAN CULLER
questioners, offering discriminations about precisely what concerns him

here and what does not, reflecting on the meaning of the various terms we
might or might not offer in connection with such dialogues. This is prose
that flows on continuously, with passages that go on and on-at the oppo-
site remove, it might seem, from the paratactic paragraphs of the Investiga-
tions.Yet, in the end, in one way the effect is surprisingly similar. Just as you
can't read Wittgenstein straight through but must stop and become involved
in the little dramas of questioning and self-questioning his fragments stage,
so with Cavell, I find, you can't read straight through to find out what he is
saying but have to break the text into short chunks (four or five pages at a
time is my limit) and allow yourself to get engaged in puzzling over these
matters. You must forget or at least set aside the fact that there are over five
hundred pages to this book and read as if it were a series of short scenarios .
.Cavell does not, to my knowledge, talk about what might count as bad
style in philosophy, but he is critical of philosophy's habit of proceeding by
charging other philosophers with mistakes, nonsense, blindness, contradic-
tion, circularity, what have you. N ozick, for instance, reports in Philosophical
Explanation that he "usually reads works of philosophy with all defenses up,
with a view to finding out where the author has gone wrong." 25 This leads
to the situation Cavell regrets, where any graduate student can rehearse
"how Descartes was mistaken about dreams, or Locke about truth or Berke-
ley about God or Kant about things in themselves or moral worth, or Hegel
about logic, and So forth." 26 But what if philosophers, following Austin's
analysis of what is involved in doing something by accident or by mistake
(his analysis and not his own conduct in charging other philosophers with
mistakes), were to "grant to other philosophers the ordinary rights oflan-
guage and vision that'Austin grants all other men: to ask them, in his spirit,
why they should say what they say where and when they say it, and to give
the full story before claiming satisfaction." 27 Then just as ordinary-language
philosophy ties understanding to the elucidation of underlying consistencies
or acknowledgment of commonality, so philosophy might become less of an
esoteric battle and more of an enterprise of understanding. Cavell recom-
mends, at least, that philosophy treat criticisms it feels "phenomenologically,
as temptations or feelings; in a word, as data, not as answers." 28 In sum, the
goal should be not to find mistakes in other philosophers but to understand
from within, in the hope of reaching if not understanding and agreement,
recognition and acknowledgment.
In something of this spirit, in a fine essay, "Aesthetic Problems of Modern
Philosophy,'' Cavell takes up an issue in philosophy where it is hard to imag-
ine reconciliation. Kant distinguishes the judgment that something is pleas-
ant (canary wine is pleasant-which means "pleasant to me") from the judg-
ment that an aesthetic object is beautiful (it would be "laughable," he says, to
justify oneselfby saying it is "beautiful to me"). The later judgment demands

or claims or imputes general validity. There is thus supposed to be a differ-
ence of kind in the judgments involved. "One hardly knows:' writes Cavell,
"whether to call this a metaphysical or a logical difference. Kant called it a
transcendental difference; Wittgenstein would call it a grammatical differ-
ence. But how can psychological differences like finding something laugh-
able or foolish (which perhaps not every person would) be thought to betray
such potent, or anyway different, differences?" 29 Cavell continues:
Here we hit upon what is to my mind the most sensitive index of misunderstanding
and bitterness between the positivist and the post-positivist components of analyti-
cal philosophy: the positivist grits his teeth when he hears an analysis given out as the
logical one which is so painfully remote from formality, so obviously a question of
how you happen to feel at the moment, so "psychological"; the philosopher who
proceeds from everyday language stares back helplessly, asking, "Don't you feel the
difference? Listen, you must see it?" Surely, both know what the other knows, and
each thinks the other is perverse, or irrelevant, or worse. (90)
Cavell sets out to describe why philosophers like him want to call such dif-
ferences logical, in responding to the element of necessity felt in them, to-
gether with a sense of the ways such judgments are supported and convic-
tion produced-by recurrent patterns of support. And he goes on to argue
that Kant's aesthetic judgments, with their "universal" character that does not
depend on empirical evidence about assent, are similar to philosophers'
claims about "what we say." If you disagree, you don't try to collect data but
try to determine why, and if you can't explain the disagreement, you try to
find an explanation for that, with different examples.
"The philosopher appealing to everyday language," he writes, "turns to
the reader not to convince him without proof but to get him to prove
something, test something, against himself. He is saying: look and find out
whether you can see what I see, wish to say what I wish to say. . . . All the
philosopher, this kind of philosopher, can do is express, as fully as he can, his
world and attract our undivided attention to our own." 30
The reader may well be put off or preoccupied with other things, but lan-
guage that gets one's attention may also, unpredictably, give conviction a
chance to happen. Or rather-since Cavell says that unless suggestion pene-
trates past assessment, it is philosophically useless-we might speak of the
reader"getting the hang ofit": 31 corning to participate in a way of thinking
that feels right, as something he or she can now do.
It is to give this unpredictable possibility a chance that Cavell writes this
stylish, mannered prose designed to capture attention. If it aspires to provo-
cation rather than instruction, it nevertheless instructs, if you take it in small
enough chunks that its longueurs become occasions for reflection-leading
56 JONATHAN CULLER
you to see something for yourself-rather than irritation. It can be remark-

able philosophy, even though its parts, such as the opening sentence of The
Claim of Reason, could win any bad writing contest.
Notes
1. Denis Dutton, "Language Crimes," Wall Street journal, Feb. 5, I999,WII. See
also Denis Dutton, "Bad Writing Contest: Results for Round Three," posted at
www.miami. edu/phi/misc/badwrit3 .htm.
2. I understand that the contest has now been abandoned, perhaps because Dut-
ton realized that this was not a good basis for judgment.
3. Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, I98I), 101.
4· Ibid., 1.
5. Judith Butler, "Further Reflections on Conversations of Our Time," Diacritics
27, no. I (spring I997): I3.
6. Dutton, "Language Crimes," II.
7. Butler, "Further Reflections," I3.
8. Ibid., I4. .
9· Dutton, "Language Crimes," II.
10. Anthony Kenny, :'Clouds of Not Knowing," review of The Claim of Reason,
by Stanley Cavell, Times Literary Supplement, April IS, I98o, 449.
II. M. Glouberman, review of The Claim of Reason, by Stanley Cavell, Review of
Metaphysics 32 Oune l979): 9I3.
I2. Dan Ducker, review of The Claim of Reason, by Stanley Cavell, International
Philosophical Quarterly 2I (March I98I): 109-II.
I3. Stephen Mulhall, Stanley Cavell: Philosophy's Recounting of the Ordinary (Ox-
ford: Clarendon Press, I9.94), xii.
I4. Richard Fleming, The State of Philosophy: An Invitation to a Reading in Three
Parts of Stanley· Cavell's "The Claim of Reason" (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University
Press, I993), 10.
I5. Ibid., II. One should note that The Claim of Reason is in its seventh printing,
but possibly many purchasers quickly ~top reading.
I6. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason (New York: Oxford University Press,
I979), 3· Further references to this work will be given by page numbers in the text.
I7. Fleming, State of Philosophy, 22.
IS. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, no. I23, 3d ed., trans. G. E.
Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, I968), 49·
I9. Elsewhere Cavell does, I admit, seem to spend more time than other philoso-
phers telling you about the genealogy of his writings-how what you are reading re-
lates to his past writings-and this can certainly seem a form of self-indulgence de-
signed to focus attention on the career and corpus of this self, but I think that what
we are dealing with in this passage is different.
20. Cavell says, "If I could set every word down and question the very setting of
that word down as I set it down, I would do that to the point of self-excruciation."
James Conant, "Interview with Stanley Cavell," in The Senses of Stanley Cavell, ed.
Richard Fleming and Michael Payne (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press,
1989), 59. His critics would say this self-excruciation is excruciating to readers.
21. Conant, "Interview," 59.
22. Stanley Cavell, "The Availability ofWittgenstein's Later Philosophy," in Must
JiVe Mean What JiVe Say? A Book of Essays, by Stanley Cavell (Cambridge, U.K.: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1976), 71.
23. Wittgenstein, Investigatiotls, no. 305, p. 102.
24. Cavell, Must JiVe Mean What JiVe Say? 71.
25. Nozick, Philosophical Explanation, 6.
26. Cavell, "Austin at Criticism," in Must JiVe Mean What JiVe Say? III.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., IIO.
29. Cavell, "Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy," in Must VIle Mean What
JiVe Say? 90.
30. Ibid., 96.
31. See "Austin at Criticism," 103.
JOHN MCCUMBER 4
The Metaphysics of Clarity and the
Freedom of Meaning
Paradoxes of Clarity
Clarity, as a norin for speech and writing, presents a paradox: although
the burden of achieving it falls on the speaker, the achievement itself appar-
ently falls to the hearef. I can labor mightily to produce a clear essay, argu-
ment, or sentence. But I have not actually produced it until you agree that I
have--if only tacitly, by continuing the conversation. If, by contrast, you tell
me that I have not made myself clear, there is no arguing with you about
that; all I can do is try again to express what I have to say, in different terms,
so that you can understand it. My words are not clear until you have under-
stood what I meant by them.
Other discursive norms are not like this. No one is privileged to judge,
for example, whether a given utterance achieves truth. If I tell you some-
thing and you tell me that it is false, I can argue with you about that. I can
defend my statement, give evidence and reasons for it, and so on-exactly as
you can do against it. I am not obliged,just by your reaction, to retract my
statement. And it may even be that I am right: that my sentence is in fact
true and you were simply wrong to call it false. In any case we are on an
equal footing.
To put this into one of the conceptual frameworks that we in the West
have inherited, that ofKant:Truth appears to be a cognitive norm, whereas
clarity seems to be aesthetic. As a judgment of taste imputes beauty to its ob-
ject, so I can impute clarity to my words; but this means nothing more than
that I expect that others will agree that they are clear. I cannot demonstrate
their clarity any more than I can (for Kant) demonstrate that something is
beautiful. ,
But subjecting the paradox of clarity to a Kantian conceptual framework
The Metaphysics of Clarity and the Freedom of Meaning 59
gives rise to another, more daunting, paradox: if clarity is like beauty, then it
cannot be defined. We know it when we see or hear it but cannot say in
what it consists. For anyone who knew what the nature of clarity was would
not need a hearer to tell her if she had been clear on a given occasion: she
could simply see for herself whether her utterance matched the criteria for
clarity, as codified in its definition. This is a hard place in which to leave clar-
ity, for it makes of it a self-violating norm: what are we to make of a notion
of clarity that itself cannot be defined and so is inherendy obscure?
A False Solution: Clarity as Unambiguousness

This pair of paradoxes combines into a rather simple dilemma. If, on
the one hand, the nature of clarity were clear, then we would know whether
we had attained it when we speak, and the first paradox of clarity would not
arise. But if the nature of clarity is unclear, we have a sort of practical version
ofRussell's paradox: a norm that cannot apply to itself. A given sentence or
argument or essay might be clear, but the judgment that it is could not.
Many contemporary American philosophers, bobbing along in the wake
oflogical positivism, have "solved" this dilemma by denying outright its first
horn. They would call a statement "clear" not if it accurately conveyed the
thoughts of the speaker to someone else but if it allowed for a single and
complete distribution of truth values. If we can say, for every object in the
universe, whether a given sentence is true of it or not, then that sentence is
clear, and we do not need any hearers to tell us so.
This move, it bears noting, subordinates clarity to truth: a sentence is true
(according to a famous philosophical tradition) if it corresponds to reality,
false if it does not. It is clear if it permits us to assign one or the other of
these two values to it: if it is unambiguous. By reducing clarity to the possi-
bility of truth, this view makes of it what Kant would call a "cognitive" mat-
ter, amenable to demonstration. I do not need a hearer to tell me whether
my utterance is clear, for I can perfecdy well decide for myself whether it al-
lows an unambiguous distribution of truth values. If it does, and you as
hearer do not think so, you are wrong. The first horn of the above dilemma
has now been legislated away-like drug use, and with approximately equal
effect: the behavior still continues. In this case people still feel obligated to
reformulate their statements when others do not understand them.
The Metaphysics of Clarity

I have now broached two concepts of clarity: clarity as the accurate
conveyance of the thoughts of a speaker to a hearer, and clarity as the un-
60 JOHN MCCUMBER
ambiguous distributability of truth values. Both of these have to do with var-

ious sorts of matching or (more mysteriously) correspondence. On the first
concept the thoughts in the hearer's head should match or correspond to
those in the speaker's. On the second my words should be capable of con·e-
sponding, or not corresponding, to reality.
The traditional way to understand correspondence is as a form of simi-
larity. This is what Aristotle does when he defines sentential truth as the con-
nectedness of subject and predicate. Truth and falsity, for Aristotle, depend
"on the side of the objects, in their being combined or separated, so that he
who thinks the separated to be separated and the combined to be combined
has the truth, while he whose thought is in a state contrary to that of the ob-
jects is in error." 1 When the separations and connections in my mind match
those presented by the objects I perceive, I have attained "truth."
What leads Aristotle to this view is not its epistemological merits alone
(whatever they are) but a problem arising from the fact that he views sensa-
tion as the passage of a sensible form or quality of an object from the object
to the soul of the perc;eiver of it. 2 The problem arises because the sensible
form that passes from an object to a soul, like any form, cannot change-and
so cannot be changed by that passage. Hence, as Aristotle puts it in De Inter-
pretatione, the things in·my soul must be "likenesses" of the things outside my
soul (u6a7-8).
The problem with this is evident: not all sensory qualities are unchanged
by their passage froin an object into a soul. The cloud I see on the horizon
may look smaller than a dime. Sitting across from Coriscus in a gloomy
room, I may not perceive his complexion exactly right. The things in my
soul are not, usually, exact likenesses of the things outside it but more or less
distorted approximations. How, then, can anything in my mind ever corre-
spond to anything outside it? How can anything be true?
Aristotle's answer is that this whole issue does not affect truth, since the
likeness involved in truth does not directly concern concrete sensory quali-
ties at all but is strictly a matter of connection and separation. Although the
size of the cloud in my field of vision does not match its real magnitude, I
can still truthfully perceive the connection between that cloud and its color or
between it and another cloud. If Coriscus's complexion has been distorted
by the intervening air or even by my eyes, that is no matter because my
properly cognitive business is not to perceive his complexion at all but to
connect whatever color I do see with his other perceived properties and to
separate it from other properties that he does not have. Connection and sep-
aration, Aristotle's gloss for what more recent philosophers call "correspon-
dence," are thus special cases of sensory form. They are determinate qualities
that (unlike color and size) can pass absolutely unchanged from the object
known to the knowing soul. Aristotle thus defines truth as correspondence,
in part at least, because he is committed to the idea that in cognition form

must be transmitted from object to soul without change.
This commitment-! will call it the law of the preservation of form-is
more than merely epistemological: it applies to all form as such, which passes
unchanged from being to being and only looks different, in different beings,
because of the unfortunate accretion of matter. Thus, in Aristotelian genet-
ics the human form passes unchanged from the father to his child, who not
only will be conspecific with him but should, as Aristotle rather strenuously
insists, actually resemble him:"Any one who does not resemble his parents is
already, in a sense, a monster; for in such creatures nature has in some way
transgressed the genus." 3 Similarly, although hot water does not feel like hot
air, the nature of heat is not changed by being communicated from the fire
to the pot above it.
The law of the preservation of form structures not only Aristotle's defini-
tion of truth but his view of clarity as well. As Aristotle argues at length in
book 3 of De Anima, knowledge is a quality or form of a mind. A piece of
knowledge cannot, then, be changed by being passed from teacher to pupil.
Linguistic communication, such as teaching, is in fact for Aristotle one form
of motion, which means that the quality (knowledge) imparted to the
learner must already be present in the teacher. 4
When this is extended to the exchange of information that occurs in all
speaking/writing and hearing/reading, we get a demand that the knowledge
that comes about in someone's soul as a result of hearing the words of some-
one else should always be formally identical with the knowledge in the
speaker's soul; and this is the first of the two concepts of clarity broached
above. An utterance is clear if its words, as the material vehicles of its mean-
ing, convey that meaning without change from the mind of the speaker to
that of the hearer. All utterances should be clear because knowledge is a de-
terminate quality, or form, in a soul. Form must be transmitted without
change from one mind to another because it is the nature of form not to
change, and that in turn is a metaphysical thesis.
The logical positivists, like all moderns, were more Aristotelian than they
cared to be: they threw Aristotelian form out of nature but retained it as the
universal structuring principle of the human world. 5 The second, "positivist"
concept of clarity broached in this paper is, predictably, also rooted in what
I call the law of preservation of form-and so in metaphysics. On that view
clarity means that the sentence is like a clean, flat mirror: it is ready to con-
vey the properties of things well enough for us to be able to tell what is an
image of, or true of, what. The "image" of reality that it presents, in other
words, should be undistorted.
This concept of clarity thus also goes back to Aristotle's view that lan-
guage is a matter of resemblances or matchings, that is, of efforts to observe
62 JOHN MCCUMBER
the law of the preser-Vation of form. His own categories, basic or derivative,
are validated, he thinks, as such: they are valid because they (somehow) re-
semble objects outside the mind. The more they do this-the more they
provide headings that group together only things that actually are alike-the
"clearer" they will be. 6 The main change from Aristotle to the moderns is
the replacement of connection and separation by the much more mysteri-
ous, and hence more easily fetishized, relation of" correspondence."
Thus, the category of"slave by nature;' which Aristotle discusses in Poli-
tics 1. 5 and which does so much work in legitimating vicious structures of
the ancient economy, is valid (in Aristotle's view) because there really is a
group of people who have passive but not active reason: they can recognize
the right thing to do when someone else tells them but cannot come up
with it for themselves. A similar passivity characterizes the seemingly differ-
ent category of"sl.ave by law," which includes people taken captive in a just
war (and their descendants). There really were people in Aristotle's world
who had been enslaved on such grounds, and they reached that pass because
they chose to surrender rather than to fight on to their deaths-that is, be-
cause they really lacked courage. There will always be wars and people defi-
cient in the courage to .fight them to the death, so "slave by law" is an eter-
nal kind-very like a natural kind.
Solving the Paradox: Clarity as a Transitional

Property of Discourse
It is important to see that the idea that all discourse should be clear is
new with Aristotle. This is not always recognized. Martha Nussbaum, for ex-
ample, has written that "ever since Socrates ... [philosophy] has been a dis-
course of equals who trade arguments and counter-arguments without any
obscurantist sleight-of-hand.''7 Although Nussbaum was originally trained as
a Greek scholar, it is hard to detect in this observation any knowledge at all
of Greek philosophy or its development. True, the Presocratic philosopher
Parmenides is no Hume; and Heracleitus was famously nicknamed ho
skoteinos, the obscure one. But things did not exactly get clearer with
Socrates: has Nussbaum never heard of Socratic irony? The honest, even
yeoman-like argumentation to which she reduces philosophy is, in Plato's
dialogues, only the occasional basis of a much more complex series of moves
and strategies, as is noted by the author of the "Seventh Letter" (that is, by
Plato himself or an associate). It is as if Nussbaum watched a basketball game,
saw only dribbling, and denied that the numbers on the scoreboard were ris-
ing.
True to his metaphysics of for'in,Aristotle himself claims that "language to
be good must be clear." But he makes the claim in his Rhetoric, not in a trea-
tise on philosophical method such as the Analytics (where clarity is required
only of definitions). 8 And even Aristode seems to have honored clarity very
much in the breach. Anyone who has struggled through even a page of the
central books of his Metaphysics knows that he dispenses with clarity when it
comes to really basic thinking. As Herman Bonitz put it, "Is enim ut est dili-
gentissimus in cognoscendis rebus singularibus ... ut est acutus et ingenio-
sus in redigendas his singularis rebus ad summas, quas distinxit, omnium en-
tium categorias; ita quum de iaciendis altissimis doctrinae fundamentis et de
confirmandis interque se conciliandis principiis agitur, plurimum relinquit
dubitationis." 9
This discussion of ancient philosophy, although perhaps interesting, has
not been a mere diversion. Seeing how clarity, both as the accurate con-
veyance of the thoughts of a speaker to a hearer and as the unambiguous dis-
tributability of truth values, is rooted in the law of the preservation of form
enables us to solve rather than deny the paradox with which I began. For
clarity is not, it seems, a property of my thoughts, or my words, for if it were,
then you would not be its privileged judge. Nor does it reside merely in
your understanding of my thoughts or words, because then if my words were
unclear, you would have failed and I would not be required to reformulate
my views. Clarity is, in sum, a property of the transition between my mind
and yours: if my meaning has not changed when it reaches you, the words
that conveyed it were clear.
Clarity in speech thus requires both a speaker and a hearer. (It may be
worth reflecting on the social conditions that allow something that in its ba-
sic nature is cooperative to appear paradoxical. Those conditions may even
overlap with those that make it seem plausible for logical positivists to legis-
late the paradox away altogether.)
What if Matter Speaks?

The instatement of clarity as a necessary condition for good thinking,
speaking, and writing is thus grounded in metaphysics-in the law of the
preservation of form. Certainly the facts of discourse, as we know them, do
not justify it. For there misunderstanding-my meaning not entering some-
one else's head precisely as I intended it-is more the rule than the excep-
tion. Indeed, we would often prefer to have our words creatively applied
rather than merely accurately repeated, even if such creativity always involves
some degree of what Aristode would call misunderstanding. Nor need we
turn to ancient philosophers to see that unclarity is not only pervasive in
learned discourse but even desirable. David Hull has argued both points in
the case of contemporary science: "When new ideas are introduced they are
64 JOHN MCCUMBER
.
rarely expressed with sufficient clarity. Scientists do not know what they in-
tended to say until they find out what other scientists think they have said .
. . . But distortion is more than routine in science. It is a traditional mode of
argumentation, and a mode that is not entirely counterproductive. It forces
scientists to commit themselves." 10 Whether forcing scientists to commit
themselves is the only productive role for "distortion" will be discussed
shortly. For the moment it seems that the law of preservation of form can-
not be grounded in empirical givens. Unclear discourse has had important
roles to play in thought, from Greek metaphysics to postmodern science.
Nor is it grounded, today, in metaphysics; for Aristotle's metaphysics of un-
changing form has long been discredited. Why, then, is clarity still regarded
by some people as an indispensable condition for good speech and writing?
Why is the law o( preservation of form still in force for discourse today?
From what can it derive its legislative force?
Could it be that the word unchanging is the key? That the demand for
clarity is nothing more than a demand for unchanging meaning (which in turn
implies an unchanging domain of realities to which our words should re-
main "likenesses")?That this whole effort at universal clarity is nothing more
than (yet another) expression of what Heidegger called the "metaphysical"
effort to see anything and everything as "something which constantly stands
at one's own disposal"? 11
Aristotle himself seems to have thought so, for in the passages I have
cited-as well as in his Poetics-he associates clarity with familiarity and or-
dinariness: a discourse will be clear if it uses standard words in their standard
meanings or else works them up carefully by a process that moderns would
call "induction" and that remains faithful to the particulars from which it be-
gins.12 If so, then the privilege of clarity in Western discourse is simply a de-
mand that discourse avoid innovation.
So underst ..:>od, this demand not only has metaphysical roots but grows
from sociopolitical soil. The crystalline clarity of Aristotelian form, after all,
is not the whole of his ontology. If it were, there would be no places for
form to leave behind and transit to. Also ingredient in the Aristotelian world
is matter. The metaphysics of form in terms of which the norm of clarity is
historically grounded is one that maintains, and therefore abets, what can
only be called the "domination" of matter by form. 13 In cognition this dom-
ination proceeds to the point of effacement: matter is unknowable, and all
we can know of a thing are the various forms that we can receive in our
souls. (Much of the unclarity of Aristotle's Metaphysics results from the fact
that he is trying there to talk of the relation of form to matter and so-
somehow-of matter itself.)
Two things, then, are forbidden by this metaphysics of form and clarity.
One is newness: all form is eternal and preexists; the meanings of words, like
the forms in the world of which they are likenesses, are eternal. All we can
hope to do by way of improving our language is to capture them more ad-
equately in our words (for example by defining human as "rational animal"
rather than, say, as "animal with earlobes"). The other thing forbidden, and
much more stringently, is the possibility that matter itself could ever speak,
ever generate meanings. For meaning is form, and matter is-not.
What might we be entitled to expect, then, if matter were somehow to
speak-to cease in any traditional sense to be "matter" at all, spontaneously
to exceed this most basic ofWestern dichotomies? Certainly not the con-
ceptually precise discourse of a preestablished set of forms or meanings.
More like sighs and groans, at first-the emissions of a body in pain or ec-
stasy. Then, perhaps, an unrelenting and frustrated struggle to give pattern to
the groans, to gain articulation for what is provoking them. Such a struggle
may take any number of paths.
And it is taking them, because the speech of matter is the most important
global event of the last half century. That period has seen large numbers of
beings formerly relegated to the status of mere matter-people who had
been thought to be mere bodies, mindless or almost so--stand up and start
to talk: gay men, lesbians, people of color, women, groups formerly colo-
nized in a variety of ways. This development is as important to thinking peo-
ple in the twenty-first century as the triumph of science was to those in the
first half of the twentieth and for the same reason: on the one hand, it has the
capacity generally to enrich every human being (and not only spiritually).
On the other, it has the potential utterly to destroy the world in which we
think we live.
As a mere observer of this stupendous upheaval (although a sympathetic
one), I can offer here only a few observations about where it may go with
respect to the ancient norm of clarity, so suspect in its foundations and so
tenacious in its grip.
Aristotle, Hegel, and Anonymous

Any attempt to articulate a life experience that has previously been
relegated to the unheard opacity of mere matter can, it would seem, end in
one of three ways: in an Aristotelian or Hegelian manner or in one that has
no name.
The Aristotelian ending would be one in which the speaking matter,
searching for an adequate vocabulary in which to articulate its pains and
joys, would find one already familiar and--so to speak-well formed, which
needs only to be taken over and used as it stands. The original unclarity was
a mere contingent confusion, for the speaking matter could just as well have
known from the start that the requisite words existed.
66 JOHN MCCUMBER
It is unlikely that ;uch faith in the readily available conceptual frame-

works is justified. First, it is a fact that the West by now contains a variety of
what Richard Rorty calls "basic vocabularies." 14 These are sets of systemati-
cally interconnected, very basic, words or concepts to which people appeal
for their understanding of themselves and others and in which they formu-
late their basic goals and plans of action. One generic name for these basic
conceptual systems is "philosophy," and we could mention Platonism, Aris-
totelianism, Thomism, Kantianism, Hegelianism, and Marxism as a few ex-
amples of final vocabularies now available in the West. These vocabularies
have now diverged from each other to such an extent, thinks Rorty, that
communication among them is impossible.
This very plurality suggests that none of the available basic vocabularies
by itself has been aciequate to articulate everyone's experience up to now.
Why, then, should it be assumed that any of them will be adequate to the
newly speaking bodies of the third millennium? Moreover, most of the avail-
able final vocabularies have in fact been around for at least a couple of cen-
turies, so if any of them were adequate for articulating the experiences of
women and minorities, it would have done that job long ago.
None has, and this extraordinary fact suggests something else. To what do
the available final vocabularies owe their common inability to articulate the
experience of women and minorities? Is there some fault they all share, a
core common to all that explains why all of them have, without exception,
installed and legitimated the oppression of women and minorities?
In that case Rorty's claim of radical divergence among the final vocabu-
laries available in the West today would be overblown. The various concep-
tual frameworks that we find around us today would, on a deeper level, be
truly at one. Their arguments, however vicious, would be about secondary
matters: about means, not ends. Their mutual incomprehension, however
genuine, would be superficial: a matter of fashion, not essence. If such is the
case, there is even less reason to think that the newly speaking bodies of the
third millennium will ever come to rest comfortably and intelligibly within
any of the currendy prevailing final vocabularies.
And it is the case. What I earlier called the "domination" of matter by
form is a leitmotif shared by all the philosophies I mentioned above and
many others besides. It was first codified by Aristode in a famous appeal to
nature: "In all things which are composed out of several other things, and
which come to be some single common thing, whether continuous or dis-
crete, in all of them there turns out to be a distinction between that which
rules, and that which is ruled; and this holds for all ensouled things by virtue
of the whole of nature." 15 In other words, the domination of matter by form
is universal and natural; in every association there must be a ruler (form) and
a ruled (matter). The only question left is that of who will be which.
Aristotle's own account of the domination of form by matter was the first
such account in Western philosophy, but as I have argued elsewhere it was
not the most extreme or oppressive. 16 Modern versions of such domination,
freed by empirical science from the constraints of nature, have been even
more absolute. For all his jibes at Aristotle's natural philosophy, for example,
Thomas Hobbes's subtitle for Leviathan is The Matter, Forme, & Power of a
Common- Wealth Ecclesiastical and Civill. Hobbes means the ftrst two words in
their traditional, that is Aristotelian, senses; but his deployment of them is a
tyranny far beyond anything Aristotle ever envisioned.
Any attempt of matter to speak thus flies in the face of one of the most
basic and dominant themes in Western thought: the domination of matter by
form. Matter which speaks, then, can hardly expect to be familiar-or clear.
Aristotle's appeal to nature is basically an appeal to unchanging natural
kinds, the general form of which is a form actively controlling some patch
of matter. His view of natural kinds, however, does not survive the opening
pages of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, and its demise, in turn, allows a
Hegelian vision of the speaking of matter that is very different from the
Aristotelian one. In "Sense-Certainty," the Phenomenology's opening section,
experience is presented as a random flux so that a creative effort of the mind
is required to gain any purchase on it at all. And as the rest of the book
shows, our creative efforts always go astray eventually (that is what makes
them our efforts), so no category can be eternally valid: all are in principle
open to revision. (This is why, instead of transcending time at the end of the
Phenomenology, consciousness's ftnal, suicidal move is to embrace it)Y
Since no category will be valid for all time, Hegel would be quite com-
fortable with my suggestion above that the categories basic to Western
thought have reached their limits. Yet every time such a limit is reached in
the Phenomenology, consciousness attempts to revise its categories in order to
express what it has newly discovered. Applying this to the speech of matter
suggests that such speech will eventually come to some sort of clarity but
only in the terms of a new conceptual framework invented by the newly
speaking bodies themselves-not one (or several) that are already available.
This framework may be entirely new, or (more congenially to Hegel) it may
be one that has been remodeled from previously available ones-but even in
the latter case the remodeling may be so extensive as to obliterate any sense
of derivation.
In such a case the new conceptual framework may be intelligible only to
those who have shared the inarticulate joy and anguish from which it came.
Like musical notation or quantum physics-indeed, like any conceptual
framework at all-it will not make sense to those who engage it without the
requisite prior experience.Yet for all that, it will be clear, at least in that it en-
ables those who have had those experiences to think and work together. So
68 JOHN MCCUMBER
this Hegelian outco~e would not completely abjure clarity. As with Hull's
scientists it would recognize unclarity not as a mere contingent confusion
but as a necessary prelude to clarity.
But there is a third possibility, one that (I suggested) has no name. It in-
volves abjuring, rather than seeking, clarity altogether. In such a case, many
think, common action will also be abjured, leaving us with what so many on
the cultural right see as postmodern: a group of people who perversely
choose to express themselves in ineffectual whines.
But there are different ways to "abjure" something. The previous para-
graph trades on an absolute sense in which we "abjure" something by re-
jecting it altogether. But when something has had absolute status, that is, has
been canonized as the indispensable goal or necessary precondition of some
practice, we can "abjure" it simply by beginning to look on it not as ab-
solutely valid but as merely one among a number of alternatives, thus situat-
ing it in a wider spectrum of goals and practices. This would leave room for
discourse that is not only not clear from the start (as Aristotelian views hold
discourse should be) but that is also not trying to make itself clear (as dis-
course should on Hegelian views).
Utterances in such discourse would not be merely ambiguous, because
ambiguity can be resolved through the available conceptual repertoires. They
would have to be so genuinely strange as to mean not more than one thing
but fewer than on~: utterances whose component elements, for example, can-
not be put together in the accustomed ways. An example, recendy given fame
by Judith Buder, is Adorno's "Man is the ideology of dehumanization." 18
I have elsewhere developed an extended theory of such discourse 19 and
will content myself here with merely pointing out that such a statement may
well provoke. a proliferation of meanings, when the hearer responds to the
unclear statement by extrapolating a new meaning for it-a meaning of her
own. In that case we have (at least) two meanings: the speaker's original one
and the one the hearer comes up with (which may, of course, overlap with
the other to some degree).
Thus, Adorno's "Man is the ideology of dehumanization" is transformed
when Buder expounds it to mean "the way the word 'man' was used by
some of his contemporaries was dehumanizing." 2° For that is not the only
possibility. Adorno may have had not merely his contemporaries in mind but
the entire philosophy of the Enlightenment, with its constant talk of"man"
when it should say "argumentatively trained intellect." He may even have
targeted, a la Heidegger, all modern philosophy. And by man Adorno might
also have meant more than a word: he could have been talking about "man"
as a socially function~} illusion, such as that of An1erican invincibility prior
to the Vietnam War.
My aim here is not to point out deficiencies in Buder's admirably lucid
gloss, which elegantly makes her point that Adorno's seemingly unintelligi-
ble words can receive a perfectly clear interpretation. But part of the way
those words work is to be susceptible of more than one possible meaning; al-
ternatives cannot be ruled out.
Thus, the original meaning Adorno intended when he wrote his sentence
and the meaning that Butler gives it overlap but are different. Different again
is the meaning that I give it here, as a case of what I elsewhere call "abnor-
mal poetic interaction." In each case the sentence transits into a new con-
ceptual environment, where (as in Derridean iteration) 21 it does new work,
and provokes new thoughts in the minds of its hearers. In the process its
meaning is transformed-or, better, trans-formed-at every stage.
When things like this happen, we-the speech community-are pro-
vided with new meanings and categories, such as Butler's category of" [lin-
guistic] challenge to common sense." Our dependence on the previously
available repertoire of meanings and categories is lessened, and our verbal ca-
pacities are increased. This process, then, deserves to be called emancipatory.
And it is an emancipation we often wish for and sometimes seek; for who
does not hope that her words will be taken up by hearers and used in pro-
ductive ways of which she has not dreamed?
If to engage in such discourse is to abjure clarity, it is also to commend
oneself to a complementary set of values-playfulness, improvisation, and
freedom itself. 22 It is to forswear the Aristotelian law of the preservation of
form in favor of what his wiser teacher, Plato, called the "leaping spark" of
philosophical insight: an unpredictable, and so joyful, passage from soul to
soul. 23 And it is to forswear the vain project of immortalizing one's thoughts;
for even if one's words survive, their meanings will not.
When basic issues are settled and newness is not on, the habitual suffices
and our speech can observe the law of the preservation of form in its lin-
guistic sense: we can expect and demand clarity from those who address us.
But history-even, as we saw, the history of science-teaches that those
conditions do not always obtain. Simple common sense-of all things-
shows us that they certainly do not obtain right now. Many people today
find that the current conceptualities do not do justice to their experience,
and new ones are needed. Breaking free from the old words-always, as
Rorty teaches, a delight24-is now a necessity for those people, in ways that,
if they are allowed to stand as what they are, will enrich everyone.
So we see, finally, the terrible price paid by those who, siding with form
against matter, would make clarity an indispensable condition of serious
thought. Trapped in a misguided effort to obtain immortality for their own
current world, they would force us all to remain in ancient and oppressive
habits of thought. They set themselves against time itself-and against the
creativity and joy that are our privilege, as the mortal creatures that we are.
70 JOHN MCCUMBER
Notes
I. Aristode, Metaphysics 9·9.1051b2f; also De Interpretatione 1.16au.
2. Aristode, De Anima 2.7.418a33seq and, more generally, De Anima 3.2.425b225-
426ar, 416a6-n; also cf.Aristode, On Dreams 459a27-60a32. On the origins of this
view in Aristode's account of form in matter see also Edwin Hartman, Substance,
Body, and Soul (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977), 175-80.
3. Aristotle, De Generatione Animalium 4· 3. 767b7f.
4. See Aristode, Physics 3.3.202a31-32, 202b6-8, 8.5.257a1-3, 257b3-4; also
Metaphysics 2.9.I065b19.
5. On this general characteristic of modernity see my Metaphysics and Oppression
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2ooo), ws-8.
6. See Aristode, Posterior Analytics 2.13 .97b33 -39.
7· Martha Nussbaum, "The Professor of Parody;' New Republic, Feb. 22, 1999, p.
38; available at http:/ /www.tnr.com/archive/0299/022299/nussbaumo22299·html.
8. Aristode, Rhetoric J.2.1404b1-5; Posterior Analytics 2.13.97b30-37·
9. Roughly:"However diligent [Aristotle] is with regard to the knowledge of in-
dividual things, and however acute and ingenious he is in bringing these individuals
to the highest categories of all beings, which he distinguishes; yet, when it is a mat-
ter of laying the foundations of the highest doctrines and of confirming them and
reconciling them with'one another, he leaves a great many doubts" (Hermann
Bonitz, Aristotelis Metaphysica, 2 vols. [Bonn, 1848) 2:29; quoted in Irwin, Aristotle's
First Principles [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 640 n. 4). Nussbaum says the same
thing about Butler:"one is bewildered to find her arguments buttressed by appeal to
so many contradictory concepts and doctrines, usually without any account of how
the apparent contradictions will be resolved" (Nussbaum, "Professor of Parody," 41).
This is high praise from so famous an admirer ofAristode as Nussbaum. Perhaps it is
unintentional.
IO. David Hull, Science as a Process (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988),
288-89. •
II. Martin Heidegger, "Uber Nietzsches Wort: Gott 1st Tod," in Holzwege, by
Martin Heidegger, 4th ed. (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1963), 221.
12. Aristode, Poetics 22.148a18-2o.
13. See Judith Buder, Bodies That Matter (New York: Roudedge, 1993), 27-55; and
the first two chapters of my Metaphysics and Oppression.
14. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge
University Press, 1989), 9·
15. Aristode, Politics 1.4.1254a28-32.
16. See my Metaphysics and Oppression, 105-93.
17. G. EW. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans.A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1979), 563.
18. Judith Butler, "A 'Bad Writer' Bites Back," New York Times, March 20, 2000,
op-ed.
19. John McCumber, Poetic Interaction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1989). -
20. Buder, "A 'Bad Writer' Bites Back."
21. Jacques Derrida, "Signature Event Context;' Glyph 1 (1977): 172-97.

22. It is thus no wonder that Martha Nussbaum attacks Butler for "unclarity," as
well as for lacking immediate political relevance (of the single kind Nussbaum de-
sires), and that she does so in an angrily dictatorial tone: the absolute installation of
clarity brings absolute hatred for creativity and freedom. See Nussbaum, "Professor
of Parody."
23. Plato, Seventh Letter 341d1. I am assuming here that Plato was the author of
the letter; but even if he was not, it clearly expresses an ancient and respectable view
of philosophy.
24. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity.
Institutions, Publics, Intellectual lAbor
ROBYN WIEGMAN 5
Feminism's Broken English
You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost some-
thing.
-George Bernard Shaw
THE ARGUMENT of this paper is ostensibly simple: that, in the name of

politics, academic feminists need to defend a theoretical humanities. Read-
ers aware of contemporary debates in academic feminism will know that
such an argument runs counter to a great deal of feminist sentiment about
the relationship between theory and politics. Indeed, in many quarters today
the political has been distincdy opposed to the theoretical, in part (say some)
because poststructuralist discussion eliminated the imperative to explicate
women's oppression. At several recent conferences on the future of women's
studies, for example, scholars from a variety of disciplines called for a return
to the field's origins in social movement as a strategic response to what is
characterized as the antimaterialist elitism of theoretical forays into discursive
subjectivity. This call to remember where we come from is somewhat strik-
ing in the midst of the will to forget not only poststructuralism's interest in
language as a material force but feminism's own disidentification with polit-
ical slogans as the critical content of an analysis of power.
But let me not linger on remembering what has been for many academic
feminists necessary to forget. Forgetting is, after all, part of the work of pol-
itics; when done well, it can aid the process oflearning because learning, like
politics, is not linear or accumulative but erratic, even-indeed impor-
tandy-unpredictable. To forget enables us to learn again, which is not the
same thing as discovering what we already know; learning again is not nec-
essarily learning something over.
What might we learn again, then, if we considered what poststructuralism
meant to an academic feminism pushed to exhaustion to make the words of
social movement critically useful: patriarchy, oppression, resistance, revolu-
tion, experience? This is the question that I want to pursue to create a dif-
ferent history of the present from the one that currendy writes academic
76 ROBYN WIEGMAN
feminism's interest it{ poststructuralism as the end of its public political com-
mitment. Most generally, I seek to rewrite the conceptualization of knowl-
edge and politics that figures the work of feminism in the academy as polit-
ical only in relation to a social formation defined as wholly outside of it by
exploring how the theory/practice divide is intrinsic to the organization of
the disciplines and not, as the current discussion suggests, the effect of a the-
oretical humanities unable to apprehend a world of real material political
struggle. My argument is that, within the broad frame of the human sci-
ences, the relation between scholars and the material real is never simply a
matter of political commitment but is part of the order of disciplinarity it-
self. My point, however, is not to defend the humanities as any more neces-
sary to feminism than other disciplinary domains but to demonstrate how
academic feminism's conceptualization of the university, its culture of pro-
fessionalization and expertise, and its disciplinary organization are not exte-
rior to but foundational for academic feminism's understanding of its own
politics today.
By focusing on how current academic feminists write the academic against
feminist in order to define their political commitment, my contribution to
this collection on the 'Problem of theoretical language and the growing de-
mand for uninhibited communicability makes three interrelated moves.
First, I consider what it is that poststructuralist theory currently stands ac-
cused of doing to. feminism by surveying recent arguments by prominent ac-
ademic feminists, with special attention to the work of Lynne Segal, whose
1999 Why Feminism? Gender, Psychology, Politics offers one of the most com-
pelling and complex renderings of critical analysis and political life along the
theory/practice divide. Then, I examine the unacknowledged ways in which
disciplinary- authority is exerted in her argument, with the effect of dis-
avowing the university's disciplinary management of the "real" through the
methodological and conceptual divides between the humanities and social
sciences. Finally, I return to the question of the political need for a theoret-
ical humanities as a necessary part of academic feminism's own critical in-
terrogation into the social organization of knowledge and its power effects.
Much of my argument is aimed at defining how the demand for communi-
cability in contemporary academic feminism-cast against theoretical lan-
guage in the name of reviving the utopian affect of twentieth century social
movement-is contingent on a will to forget both what poststructuralism
might have meant for feminist analysis and what disciplinary organization
currently (de)means.
In calling this essay "Feminism's Broken English" I hope to indicate at the
outset something o( the way language, discipline, and nation-as they fi.mc-
tion as references for "English"-are collectively central to the current con-
versation about communicability, theory, and the deployment of the politi-
Feminism's Broken English 77
cal in the U.S. university. Although none of these references can be fully
pried apart from the others, their relationship is not static, and it is toward
current transformations in the ways that language, disciplinary domain, and
national culture are linked to the structure and state-based function of the
humanities that my discussion will eventually turn. In particular, I will situ-
ate the emergence of poststructuralist theory in the context of the disestab-
lishment of the cold war apparatus of the university, which conferred on the
humanities in general and English in particular the strategic function of pro-
ducing citizens within a homogeneous understanding of national culture.
Although the current "crisis of the humanities," as it is routinely called, of-
ten equates the rise of theory in the humanities with the loss of the human-
ities' status, I am more interested in understanding, as a kind of positive pol-
itics, the ways in which the nation-state has ceased to manage humanistic
inquiry in its name. To bring the question of theoretical language into the
orbit of the political articulated here is to offer a different and hopefully use-
ful way to understand "academic feminism" today.
Theory as Failure, or the End of Common LAnguage
I own two copies of Adrienne Rich's 1978 collection of poetry A

Dream of a Common LAnguage. One is paperback, its cover so tattered now the
tide is reduced to the first four letters: A Dre it says, before the heavy beige
paper gives way to a stained and messy edge. For several years after its pub-
lication I carried this copy in my backpack. More important than a wallet or
a set of keys, it provided a necessary sustenance for my then recent entry into
feminism. The other copy I own is hardback; I bought it in the mid-1990s
secondhand-"Kent R.Johnson" is stamped in the top right-hand corner of
the inside page. I remember being starded that he had abandoned it, even as
I knew that my nostalgic impulse to buy the book came from my earlier re-
jection of it. By the 1990s Rich's poetry had become too idealist for me; her
dream of a common language was too committed to literary humanism's vo-
cabulary of beauty, pain, and love. Where once her poetic refusal to "make a
career of pain" had resonance for me in the alternative sites of community
building~tudy groups, coffeehouses, shelter projects, reproductive rights
collectives-the repetition of familiar failures (the loss of trust, the misman-
agement of funds, the abandonment of some women for others) under-
mined my attachment to collective aspirations for utopian completion. Still,
I like to say, thinking back on Rich and the sensibility of utter outrage and
care that her poetic language evoked, that I am a seventies feminist. I don't get
to say that sentence very often, in part because I have become something
that phrase is not supposed to mean: a feminist academic or more precisely
and, for many people, more negatively, an academic feminist.
78 ROBYN WIEGMAN
In characterizations of feminism's recent history some feminists define

the space between being a "seventies feminist" and being an "academic fem-
inist" as a political fall, with "academic feminist" serving as a code phrase for
poststructuralist theory and theory serving as the categorical designation of
the loss of a public political intent. Susan Gubar, for instance, finds the spe-
cialized "jargon" of critical theory a "debilitating rhetoric," echoing in a dif-
ferent way Tania Modleski's warning at the outset of the 1990s that post-
structuralism might rob feminism of "women,'' the very centerpiece of
feminist politics. 1 Other critical laments focus on academic feminism's insti-
tutional success. Ellen Messer-Davidow's recent Disdplining Feminism: From
Soda IActivism to Academic Discourse offers a long meditation on what she casts
as the political costs of academic institutionalization, in which the batde for
legitimization in universities, constituted within the hegemonies of post-
structuralist theory, prevented feminists from adequately countering the
right's well-funded demolition of all forms of progressive social movement
by pushing "debates to a more abstract level ... [sending us] into the
metadiscursive stratosphere."2 As Naomi Schor wrote before her, "[A]cade-
mic feminism became a victim of its own success ... weaken[ing] what
many of ... my geneption ... had treasured about feminism: a sense of
commonality, of participating even as a footnote in perhaps the most suc-
cessful peaceful revolutionary movement of our era." 3
Lynne Segal's Why Feminism? takes up these and other criticisms of the
contemporary formation of academic feminism. But unlike Schor, who
reads the success of feminism in the university in relation to the loss of the
literary as a specific feminist focus, Segal, a social scientist, finds the disci-
plinary proclivities of the humanities part of the reason for feminism's pub-
lic decline. "[A] ferllinism which begins with ... textual practice,'' she
writes, "is oii.e which is incommensurate with, as well as distanced from, the
perspectives and practices ofWomen's Liberation." 4 Segal, to be sure, does
not dismiss either cultural studies or discursive analysis; indeed, she is quite
forceful in her insistence that feminist analysis requires a range of interdisci-
plinary inquiries, especially those that cut across the epistemological divides
among the disciplines. She thus calls for both the discursive and the material,
the cultural and the economic, and the psychic and the social structural. But
her analysis retains the distinction of these divisions even as it calls for their
analytic integration. As she writes in the first chapter:
[P]ost-structuralism ... has provided feminists with fresh conceptual tools for prob-
lematizing identities and social differences .... But in a world of intensifying in-
equality, any concern with either gender injustice or the fate of women overall must
also engage us in social struggle for economic redistribution, alongside (and in-
evitably enmeshed with) issues of identity involving cultural recognition and re-
spect.... [We need] theorizations sufficiently complex to embrace the intricacies
of personal life, while refusing to give up on struggles for social justice and equality.
(33. 34)
To make this point, Segal devotes the second chapter to queer theory's de-
constructive challenge to heteronormative binaries of gender. Although she
extrapolates in detail the "tensions between those who stress the psychic life
of difference, and those who study the social dynamics of the gender order,"
the chapter ends on a striking contrast between academic discourse and a
politically charged "real" world of struggle (43). She writes: ''Just when queer
theory and transgression gained academic modishness ... the most signifi-
cant, most modest, most easily bestowed choices which might have been
made available to young women entering adult sexual arrangements were
being systematically withdrawn .... Now is not the time for us to be for-
getting gender" (73, 76).
Segal's emphasis on time is an important one; the title of her chapter
"Gender to Queer, and Back Again" reiterates a now pervasive idea in aca-
demic feminism that the future is contingent on a return, in the aftermath of
poststructuralist theory, to feminism's political origins in social movement
and, with it, to the analysis of and struggle against structures of domination.
Segal cites this political origin as "a socialist imaginary, combined with fem-
inism, which has always stressed the sufferings caused by the material ex-
ploitation, deprivation and social marginalization of women and other op-
pressed groups around the world" (34). The return to a socialist feminist
imaginary can counter, she posits, the temporal stasis of contemporary fem-
inism, which, through poststructuralism, has grown "distrustful, when not
dismissive, of traditional forms of collective action and reformist political
agendas" and which thus "faces an uphill task ... [in] bring[ing] women to-
gether in any widely shared transformative feminist project" (35). For Segal
"some wider political project" is what separates academic feminism today
from its originary impulses in the 1960s and 1970s. Hence the return to an
earlier political vision is in a sense a return to the future, to the utopian mak-
ing of another world. In this nexus between past and future the poststruc-
turalist present of academic feminism is placed outside of, if not implicitly
against, feminism's revolutionary place in historical time.
Elsewhere I have used the term apocalyptic to categorize such accounts of
academic feminism since it is the theoretical present that functions consis-
tently as a form of interruption, dissolution even, of feminism's political fu-
ture. 5 With my own feminist attachments to theory and politics borne in the
increasingly abjected site of the academy, I have generally thought it impor-
tant to mount a defense against the apocalyptic formulation not simply of
poststructuralist theory but of academic feminism, which is far more diverse
and institutionally interventionist in its various sites-the classroom as well
80 ROBYN WIEGMAN
as research, governan~e as well as public performance--than the apocalyptic

narrative tends to allow. I have thought it important to challenge the as-
sumption that feminism as a political movement and feminism as an aca-
demic project could be, even should be, coherently related, in language, strat-
egy, and/ or goal. I have even found the apocalyptic formulation that posits
poststructuralism as a displacement of the pressing concerns of material re-
ality a troubling form of discipline, as it places all feminist thought within a
specifically defined understanding of social change, political progress, and
collective aspiration. Most crucially perhaps, such a narrative functions, albeit
unconsciously, to produce an "authentic" feminist subjectivity in which the
acquisition of feminist consciousness in the academy and especially through
theoretical discourses is a degraded and apolitical formation. Far from open-
ing feminism's po).itical future to old and new debates, subjectivities, and
utopianisrns, this kind of generational discipline flattens distinctions in order
to make equivalences across analytic, institutional, historical, and subjective
domains that I would argue actually require more creative vocabularies,
more rigorous historical contextualizations, and more finely nuanced for-
mulations.
This is not to say tltat I disagree with those scholars urging us to attend
to social justice goals or to seek new ways, especially in the context of glob-
alization, of understanding structures of domination. My concern arises in-
stead from the pervasive assumption in the apocalyptic narrative, even those
as nuanced and critically important as Segal's, that theory belongs to the
academy and social struggle is both its anterior and now excluded outside.
Indeed, the critique of poststructuralism in the name of social struggle can
only be neatly made by refusing to acknowledge the university's own man-
agement of social movement and political change as objects of study now
legible, because they are themselves institutionalized, in the disciplinary di-
vide between the humanities and social sciences. It is my contention that ac-
ademic discourse as a set of knowledge divisiqns authorizes the very critique
that has come to define discourse and social struggle as fundamentally op-
posed-with discourse as the theoretical term and political the privileged lan-
guage of a material real. 6 From this perspective the desire to "return" to the
political imaginary of 1970s feminism is less a turn outside the academy than
a failure to account for the ways in which the history and politics of social
struggle have their own disciplinary homes.
Disdplinary Affect
I am saying that the use of the language of political struggle to escape

the seeming enclosures of acad'emic institutionalization for feminism is itself
a disciplinary move, and not just of the generational kind. It is also, impor-
Feminism's Broken English 8I
tantly, a form of institutional disciplinarity, part of the war of method and

critical apparatus that inhabits academic feminism, itself the conglomerate
term for the collective activities of feminist scholars trained in a variety of
disciplines. To the extent that these disciplinary identities are competitive el-
ements of the defining terms of feminist knowledge, it is not possible to as-
sume that contemporary feminism's relation to the contents of the cate-
gories of discourse, culture, social struggle, materiality, or the political are
disciplinarily innocent. My own use ofAdrienne Rich clearly demonstrates
how academic training in literary languages was instrumental to my earliest
relation to feminism-much as my rejection of it was part of my later doc-
toral training that emphasized rethinking the modernist foundations of U.S.
feminism's romance with humanism. To a great extent it is the institutional
incorporation of these (and other) differing, indeed contradictory, modalities
of feminist subject formation that constitutes much of the struggle today
within academic feminism over its terms, political affect, historical vision,
and future orientation.
Nowhere is this struggle more intense and pointed than in the critical
understanding of the political possibilities and limitations of the various
identity-based studies that now focus on gender, race, and sexuality as their
proper objects of study. Take, for instance, women's studies. At their most
cynical, scholars will claim that women's studies plays the role of wife to the
disciplines, offering unpaid labor in the management of the specific needs of
female students (psychological counseling and mentoring) and producing a
variety of studies for the nation-state that explore the strategies of women's
political organization and resistance. At their most optimistic, scholars will
argue that such knowledge projects make possible a reformulation of the
histories of gender, sexuality, and race that inform the modern organization
of the disciplines, producing new historical subjects and providing the means
for reconnecting the institutionalized alienation of the social (economics,
politics, the state) from the cultural (representation).?The cynical view reads
the incorporation of identity-based studies into the university as purely ap-
propriative; the optimistic view emphasizes the agency of the subjects of
knowledge, finding in the articulation of subordinate social status an episte-
mological critique (understood by many as a standpoint method) that casts
as an intervention identity as a domain of study.
I take a position somewhere between these two readings by understand-
ing the history of identity studies as a dynamic activity. Although the utopian
narrative of identity's academic becoming celebrates the social movements
that brought women's studies, ethnic studies, and gay and lesbian studies into
being and made possible their reshaping of disciplinary definitions of proper
methods and objects of study, it is also the case that the disciplines have au-
thorized specific understandings of the meaning, force, and history of both
82 ROBYN WIEGMAN
identity and social movement. In this authorization social movements and

activist projects, along with racial and gender identity, are not simply studied
but constituted by disciplinary formations, and that constitution is as much
within as against the relations of realness and abstraction, empiricism and in-
terpretation, and experience and representation that have come to charac-
terize the common sense of specific disciplinary domains. This is not to say
that the disciplines of the human sciences are static formations always know-
able as on one side or other of such methodological and critical divides. In
literary study, for instance, the focus on identity served to undermine the
formalist poetics of New Criticism to such an extent that today critics must
defend the project of studying the aesthetics of texts by minoritized writers
against the disciplinary demand to read their narrative productions as socio-
logical expressions of minoritized experience. The struggle over textual
forms and social meaning, over the status of the literary object vis-a-vis
identitarian aspirations for both political and historical subjectivity, forges an
intervention to be sure, but it does so at the cost of establishing as a disci-
plinary proclivity iden,tity's proper place as a solo referent for injured expe-
nence.
The emergence of c;;ertain forms of poststructuralist theory in literary
studies might be understood as a critical challenge to such discipline. This is
especially the case with queer theory, which has harnessed deconstructive
techniques to rethink the normative function of the hetero/homosexual op-
position so necessary to sexuality's identitarian sedimentation. At the same
time, queer theory's use ofFoucault to analyze forms of power and its inter-
est in the psychoanalytical significance of language and subjectivity have
contributed to a general undermining of the sovereignty of the canonical
humanist subject, "he'" who could see the world whole and represent it
grandly in various forms oflanguage-based expression. Such decentering of
the privileged agency of the humanist subject has generated attention in
queer theory's humanistic inquiry on (among other things) performative
identities, public cultures, intimacy, premodern sexualities, "the psychic life
of power," and the language of desire. 8 The theoretical valence of these in-
quiries has challenged the extension of racial and gendered identity models
to sexuality and thereby revised the notion that although there are different
identity forms, they all operate similarly as categories of social difference. 9
For literary study this has meant rethinking the assumption that the political
import of difference can be registered by more inclusive canonical construc-
tions, as it has raised to the level of critical visibility the impossibility of con-
stituting sexual identity as the definitive term for an alternative literary tra-
dition. Indeed, the political effect of queer theory on literary study as a
discipline has rendered the traditional canon inherently queer. 10
The point here, however, is not to champion queer theory but to demon-
strate through it how the question of the politics of poststructuralism cannot

be measured apart from the disciplinary domains in which poststructuralist
theory has been put to use. When Lynne Segal castigates queer theory for its
political failure in Why Feminism? she explicitly notes its interest in "the di-
verse tools of discourse theory, deconstruction and psychoanalysis," but she
does not explore the ways in which such tools operated within the protocols
of either literary study or humanistic inquiry in general. Instead, queer the-
ory is applauded for its "brilliant outpouring of texts" at the expense of its
tragic political effect, "the final trashing of gender" (55, 56). Such a conclu-
sion is based on viewing queer theory's interest in subversion-identitarian,
textual, public, and psychic-as "stylish," a form of"cutting edge fashion"
that indulged the postmodern fantasy that queers could "at last radically free
themselves from the constraints of gender" (57, 58):
No longer simply the object of medical and social surveillance and management ...
the body became the site of resistance for those who felt newly empowered to en-
gage in self formation and self-fashioning.... Transgression can be part of a wider
culture of oppositional consciousness .... But that broader struggle has become less
and less visible in recent lesbian and gay texts, which, in the context of the wither-
ing away ofleft alliances and principles, are more concerned with post-modern lit-
erary theory. (6o, 65, 67)
Segal's chapter ends by contrasting the seeming self-fashioning of the queer
theoretical subject with the real world of sexual constraint, where issues of
pregnancy and reproductive choice, sex education, sexual violence, and sex
segregation in the workplace all stand as evidence against the "flexible" ob-
sessions of a textual queer theory.
Segal's argument reconstitutes against her own stated wishes familiar dis-
ciplinary divisions between discourse and materiality, knowing and doing,
subjectivity and social structure, and hermeneutics and experience. Although
she emphasizes, as I have noted, that feminist analysis requires all forms of
knowledge for its long-standing dream of interdisciplinarity, she nonetheless
defines humanistic practices as subordinate to the struggle for social justice
and social justice as the only viable destination of feminist knowledge pro-
duction: "the grassroots movements for social justice which women are lead-
ing today require a variety of types of scholarly servicing, some of which are
increasingly absent from the most esteemed forms of feminist theorizing, as
it has moved from its earlier stronghold in sociology and the social sciences
into English and the humanities" (222). Indeed, in her terms the very
strength of feminist studies in the humanities is the sign of the left's political
weakening: "the move in academic fashions from sociology and the social
sciences to English and the humanities was itself, at least in part, a sign of the
decline ofleft politics after the close of the 1970s" (222-23).With disciplin-
84 ROBYN WIEGMAN
ary divisions between·humanities and social science functioning to narrate

the loss of feminism's public political commitment, the very content of"so-
cial transformation" emerges in alignment with those objects of study most
accessible as such in social science disciplines: welfare, reproductive rights,
sexual divisions oflabor, and gendered violence. 11 Significandy, it is through
their centrality as the definition of a politically engaged academic feminism
that Segal's socialist feminist political imaginary can be revived, one that will
focus its attention "on actually existing social relations" (222).
What I find most striking in Segal's interpretation of academic feminism
today is the way she constructs social scientific inquiry as coterminous with
a leftist politics at the same time that the humanities are posited as a knowl-
edge domain wholly internal to the university. 12 Indeed, by the end of her
study-text-based inquiry comes to bear the entire burden of feminism's in-
corporation into the academy, as it is the primary evidence for "the academ-
ization of feminist politics" (222). For instance, she writes that although fem-
inist studies "began as a genuinely interdisdplinary field . . . the current
pressures of the academy are such that it is almost impossible to maintain
genuinely cross-disciplinary interests and knowledge, so harnessed are we to
ever narrower channel~ of disciplinary career and publication.... Indica-
tively, the conference At the Millennium: Interrogating Gender ... reflected the
predominance of English and cultural studies in the vanguard of academic
feminism. Indeed, I was the sole speaker from the social sciences" (221). With
original interdisciplinarity aligned more with the social sciences than the
humanities, Segal casts the humanities as "academic feminism," thereby ex-
tracting the social sciences from the depoliticizing order of the disciplines. In
this way her own disciplinary identity is preserved as outside "narrow chan-
nels of discipJinary career and publication" and hence consistent with and
not deformative of feminist politics. This disciplinary hierarchy that under-
writes the academic/feminist divide operates in contradiction to Segal's own
repeated assurance that feminists need cultural as well as material analysis,
that symbolic orders matter as much as economic ones. "I am not endorsing
those academics now making a name for theinselves through an anti-theo-
retical populism. Least of all am I trying to jettison cultural analysis for what
is often falsely posed against it as 'materialist"' (223).Yet her analysis consis-
tendy arrives, often after great critical nuance and generosity, at a determi-
nation of where "reality" must be politically and definitively located: not in
the critical armature of a humanities-resistance theory but in the rock-solid
evidence of material lives: "The more flexible and volatile our identities,
lives, and bodies are conceived to be in academic discourses deconstructing
genders and sexualities, the more predictable social constraints and pressures
... manifest theinselves in the lives of many women" (229-30).
For many feminists this is as it should be because lived experience and the
continuing assault on women worldwide is the necessary target of femi-

nism's political intention. My point is not to dismiss the sense of urgency
that drives Segal's desire to reconvene a kind of utopian political vision: that
mobilizing affect that enables people to feel connected to the possibility of
social change, not in a distant future but in the emergency of our ongoing
present. Rather, I am interested in the way that an authentic feminist politics
that is anterior to the academy has its own disciplinary dimensions. For fem-
inist scholars there is no political "before" that can be revived intact, ever un-
burdened by the consequences of feminism's academic institutionalization,
for there is today no discourse of the political produced within the academy
that is not defined by, even if in contradiction to, the order of the disciplines.
When Segal uses humanities scholarship as evidence that the political has
been weakened in feminist studies (as opposed to the field's "interdisciplin-
ary" origins in "sociology and social science"), she has not escaped the dis-
ciplinary enclosures of the academy; she has inadvertently confirmed them.
This is especially the case because the imperative for the "scholarly servic-
ing," in Segal's words, of"grassroots movements for social justice" brings
with it a series of methodological priorities: privileging the live subject, cat-
egories of agency and resistance, and social transformation based on inter-
ventions in the state. 13 Thus, far from engendering an escape from the en-
closures of the university by defining a public in whose name academic
feminism can speak, such servicing establishes a disdplinary structure for aca-
demic feminist knowledge production, providing both its rationale and its
epistemological guarantee.
It is this use of the political as a form of disciplinarity for academic fem-
inism that most concerns me. When taken up as the goal of doctoral train-
ing in women's studies, for instance, the emphasis on producing activist re-
searchers increases the professionalized relationship between academic
feminism and social change now ascribed to humanistic inquiry. When the
question of the international becomes the political horizon of these critical
activities, women's studies can be understood to play a management role, of-
fering accreditation by the university for the academy's own generation of a
professional class to negotiate a global human rights agenda that simultane-
ously extends and supplants the welfare structures of First World nation-
states.14 Under the conditions of these kinds of changes in capital and cor-
poratism, discourses produced by feminism in the academy about the
political must interrogate the institutional forms that already inhabit it,
thereby resisting the consolidation of how the political might be thought in
order to address its deployment within and across social domains. This will
by necessity bring the university into question as an important mediating
site for the struggle over the language, structure, and symbolic life of the po-
litical today.
86 ROBYN WIEGMAN
Does this mean, then, that I share no sympathy with Why Feminism?'s de-
sire to critique the effects of institutionalization on feminist politics? Mter
all, academic feminism has witnessed success in the midst of what we might
otherwise understand as the "meantime"-the time not of revolutionary be-
ginnings or historical completions but of the endless demeaning of the
grammar and affect of social transformation. In the meantime is the time of
U.S. feminism's public political decline: in the end of welfare, in the tighten-
ing of antiabortion laws, in the legal affirmation of white males as an injured
class. The question for me is not, however, what have academic feminists
been doing to allow things to go so terribly wrong. "JIVe" are not, "academic
feminism" is not, the solo referent for feminism as a political discourse and world-
buildingforce, nor is social transformation as a historical process synonymous with so-
cial justice goals. Indeed, it seems to me necessary to recognize, so as to make
politically useful, the differences within and between various modalities of
social transformation, not to pit them against one another but to articulate
the temporal processes, affects, and languages of institutionalization, grass-
roots organization, m<:>vement politics, and other transformative social forms.
Such an agenda does not canonize a particular definition of the political as
the disciplinary guaran~ee for academic feminism's productivity. Nor does it
equate the political effectivity of feminism with its critical interventions into
the academy's organization of fields. Rather, it tries to engage the utopianism
of various deployments of the political and to reimagine what the ongoing
project of feminism's academic institutionalization might politically yield.
A Theoretical Humanities
.
To foC)lS on academic feminism as it negotiates (or fails to) the
methodological divides that currendy write a theoretical humanities against
the urgency of the political present may seem in the end unfair to feminism.
After all, it is not the only leftist politics that finds itself at the beginning of
the twenty-first century struggling not only to account for its loss of a gen-
erative public presence but to do so from within the institutional space of
the university. My own sense is that academic feminism is both a case in
point and an exception to the general rule. It partakes in the broader dis-
course about the loss of the left, absorbs that discourse into its own self-as-
sessment, and comes to disavow the project of institutionalization that seems
to leave it out of revolutionary time and ensconced instead in the temporal-
ities of the bureaucratic in which the utopian affect of social change overdy
vies with the contradictions and complicities of professional culture. At the
same time (and this is the exception), academic feminism is perhaps the most
successful institution:ilizing project of its generation, with more full-time
faculty positions and new doctoral degree programs emerging each year in
the field it inaugurated, women's studies. The autonomy that this field now
seeks and its subsumption of feminism as both its referent and epistemolog-
ical guarantee generate an extensive and troubling disciplinary imperative on
the nomination academic feminism. 15 Hence the situation I have been both di-
agnosing and critiquing is one in which the discourse of political loss that
functions as a compensatory narrative about the effects of institutionalization
becomes the means to institutionalize an activist origin story as the disci-
plinary foundation of feminism as an academic field. In this canonization of
an originary political imaginary as the content and definition of feminist
knowledge production, activism is finally, fully, instrumentalized to the do-
main of academic professional culture; and the contestations about the
meaning, time, practices, assumptions, and future of feminism as a political
force are rendered already known as the organizing principle of the field. 16 I
am motivated by questions that turn in different directions. In the context of
the relationship between the public and politics we might ask, What are the
costs for social movement and for critical considerations of politics and so-
cial change in founding the autonomy of an academic field on the political
origin story of any particular national scene of struggle? Can the difficulties
encountered by a First World U.S. feminism be adequately addressed by gen-
erating a tradition of knowledge production that takes the Anglo-American
context as its political beginning?
In this context the present functions as the scene of abjection, and the
utopian gestures that have been possible during the meantime are made to
stand as evidence, if not agency, of the demeaning of the past. Here, as we
have seen, queer theory, for instance, is read as a flexible obsession that in-
habits in a mirroring form the force of postindustrial capital production-a
critical move that links notions of subjectivity with relations of production
through "flexible" as a prevailing metaphor. But if the language of theory has
this kind of power, to quite literally stand in for, as the equivalent to, mate-
rial forms, then how can queer theory's deliberations over the materiality of
language be so roundly disdained as a self-fashioning avoidance of the every-
day real? It would of course be much more useful, as well as more critically
difficult, to think about queer theory as itself a form of utopian striving
whose success cannot be measured in the terms of the present as the hori-
zon of either politics or the real. Segal's determination that queer theorists
are in the end delusional in their attempt to "at last radically free themselves
from the constraints of gender" (58) closes the book altogether on theoreti-
cal language as a means of occupying the difficulties of the "meantime."
Most crucially, it raises as a requirement of both political commitment and
utopian articulation the finalization of thought in a set of confirmed prac-
tices that define the future as continuous with a retrospectively coherent no-
tion of the political past.
88 ROBYN WIEGMAN
a
My argument for theoretical humanities in the name of feminist poli-
tics arises here: first, as an interruption into this demand for the applicability
of feminist thought and, second, as an insistence that a deeper consideration
of the knowledge practices of the university be forged. This is not to dismiss
the necessity of the kinds of practices that Segal and others call for as part of
"concrete" political struggle, but it is to suggest that academic feminism
needs that which its anxiety about institutionalization has come to foreclose:
ideas without definitive evidence, critical thought without immediate actu-
alization. That the humanities today are one of the only domains in the uni-
versity that operate without suturing knowledge production to an instru-
mentalizing function (of whatever kind) makes them not the antithesis to
feminism's political aspirations but a critical site for occupying a different
(and currendy unruly) set of disciplinary demands. Why this is the case has
nothing to do with any intrinsic or essential aspect of humanistic inquiry
and everything to do with transformations in the status of culture, language,
and literacy currendy underway in higher education as an institution central
to the formation of the nation-state. For some observers, in fact, it is pre-
cisely the disestablishment of a generalizable notion of a homogeneous na-
tional culture and the transition from ideals of national to transnational citi-
zenship forms that underwrite what has been called, in a variety of venues,
the "crisis of the humanities." In this context it is the dissolution of the cold
war university aqd its reliance on the specificity of national culture as the
pedagogical means for inculcating citizen subjects that politicizes the loss of
the humanities as a privileged mode of inquiry in general and literature as a
valued object of study in particular. The turn to theory, especially in depart-
ments of English, might thus be understood as a form of opportunistic oc-
cupation o£. the vacated sites of disciplinary control.
This is not to say that poststructuralist theory has escaped producing its
own disciplinarity, nor can it be applauded for resisting hierarchical reinvest-
ments in the authority of the signature that the critique of literary canonic-
ity raised. But issues of identity and the psychic economy, if you will, oflan-
guage as the representational apparatus for human subjectivity have enabled
feminist scholars to elaborate on the political in domains that had not been
pressured to consider it as such. The very "fact" that the state, as the legisla-
tive body governing higher education, expresses its deep ambivalence about
the status and purpose of the work of the humanities today indicates, if per-
versely, the political possibilities opened up by its lack of an incorporating vi-
sion.17 In the name of feminist politics we need to engage such possibilities,
not to save the humanities as such from their massive defunding but to wres-
de with their (tenu_ous) failure to be instrumentalized to the U.S. nation-
state, itself undergoing realigrtments in the context of geopolitical transfor-
mations. This wresding will by necessity require the critical armature of
postcolonial and subaltern studies, not in their utilization as the liberal inclu-
sion of minoritized bodies from the peripheries ofWestern modernity but as
critical frameworks for challenging both the historical organization of hu-
manistic inquiry into the discrete provinces ofEuro-American nation-states
and the reconfigurations currently underway. 18 Academic feminism must do
more than reference this critique; it must inhabit it in the way it articulates a
critical history of its own, resisting the desire to make First World struggles
for democratic completion the originary political moment in its academic
sojourn. To think of"broken English" in this context, as my title proffers,
means articulating academic feminism's relation to national discourses of the
"political" as they have been organized both across and within disciplines
and as they have come to define, if only implicitly, the critical horizons and
epistemological foundations of new interdisciplinary identity sites. 19
It also means considering the ways in which the relationship between
language and governmentality is critically at stake in recent demands on the
humanities for public communicability. As Rey Chow discusses in her con-
tribution to this collection, many critiques that pit poststructuralist theory
against politics tend to render language instrumental to modernity's own
historic march toward technocratic utopian goals. 20 The humanities have
borne the brunt of demands for linguistic accessibility, as liberalism's ideal of
collective personhood (no matter how contradictory in its application)
shapes the category of the human itself. Thus, as Chow demonstrates, com-
municability for the humanities is indistinguishable from the belief in the
expressibility ofhuman subjectivity, which in turn serves as the internal logic
of modern governmentality as an ideology of social perfectibility. From this
perspective, to refuse the demand for communicability is to challenge, at
least provisionally, the linkages that have rendered the human foundational
as both agent and vehicle for the perfectibility of the liberal democratic state.
This is of course the destination of so much debate about poststructuralism:
the moment at which we must assess the possibilities (or not) of human
agency and the utopianism (or not} of democratic governmentality. To the
extent that poststructuralist theory, especially as articulated by feminist schol-
ars, has consistently tried to interrupt permanently this point of arrival, it
might be read as a form of political intervention in the equation linking hu-
manism, expressibility, and perfectibility. That such a refusal is experienced
socially as well as intellectually as a loss is not a surprise, as it places into
doubt that which we do not know how not to want. But the operation of this
want as something more than the truth of the political is necessary, not to
poststructuralism per se but to feminism's own political articulation of its
historical ties to discourses of both the human and liberal governmentality
in Western modernity. 21
In advancing a distinction between the temporalities, if not temperament,
90 ROBYN WIEGMAN
.
of feminism's social movement and its academic enterprise, I have been in-
sisting on the importance for feminist politics of a theoretical humanities. I
have done this for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the neces-
sity of challenging the equation that casts feminist politics solely on the side
of the subjective, everyday, or concrete once again. That my argument is not
original I surely grant: it retraces some of the plotlines and political anxieties
that haunted the feminist movement as it struggled to negotiate institutional
interventions on epistemological as well as distributive levels. To the extent
that the epistemological has been taken up most centrally by the humani-
ties-and turned against itself, we might say, by poststructuralism's critical in-
terest in the unconscious as a form of social language and mediation-fem-
inism has indeed been disciplined. 22 But my point has been this: any call for
a return to the ec.onomic and material as a function of a pointed agenda of
social change, cast as a reclamation of movement sensibility, indeed as a res-
urrection of public commitment, cannot rescue feminism from institution-
alization's disciplinary effects: it can only confirm them, this time from a dif-
ferent position vis-a-vis disciplinary divides. In academic feminist debates
about theory and communicability, then, a disciplinary engine is, I venture
to say, always at work ih the production of what is cast as a simple, even com-
monsense, opposition between the theoretical inside and an exterior public
and hence seemingly politically committed sphere. This is not an argument
against academic.feminism's contemporary desire to think about its obliga-
tion to either social movements (past or present) or to a public social sphere
in which "feminism" as such has been politically demeaned. Certainly, much
more attention needs to be paid to the ways in which academic feminism's
institutional position, indeed its power, can be organized in relation to strug-
gles that cut across various domains. But it may not be strategic, finally, to
cast academic feminism as the ultimate agent or arbitrator of the deployment
of the political, as if its own disciplinary function is to define what the po-
litical will come to mean.
If my argument is an attempt to rescue the possibilities of a theoretical
humanities, it is not, then, to give it priority in a political configuration that
would render academic knowledge production continuous with the tempo-
ralities and affect of social movement. Indeed, I have argued the contrary,
foregrounding discontinuity in order to pay critical attention to the speci-
ficity of institutional politics in which language, disciplinarity, and nation
have been definitively linked. It is in this context that I have wanted to learn
again what poststructuralism might have meant for academic feminism and
hence what it might mean in today's academy for feminism to support, in
the name of politics, a knowledge domain not contingent on the immedi-
ate, the live, the empirically n!al. This is one way of registering my own fear
that the demand for communicability, cast against theoretical language, will
Feminism's Broken English 9I
come to stand as compensation for academic feminism's sense of a lost con-

nection to social movement and that, in that compensation, we will lose a
way of thinking about the political that we absolutely need.
Notes
1. Susan Gubar, ""What Ails Feminist Criticism;' Critical Inquiry 24 (summer
1998): 878-9o2;Tania Modleski, Feminism Without rn,men (New York: Routledge,
1991). See also my response to Gubar, "What Ails Feminist Criticism: A Second
Opinion," Critical Inquiry 25 (winter 1999): 362-79.
2. Ellen Messer-Davidow, Disciplining Feminism: From Soda/ Activism to Academic
Discourse (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 213.
3. Naomi Schor, Bad Objects: Essays Popular and Unpopular (Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 1995), xiv.
4· Lynne Segal, 'Why Feminism? Gender, Psychology, Politics (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1999), 14.
5. See my "Feminism's Apocalyptic Futures," New Literary History 31, no. 4 (au-
tumn 2000): 805-25.
6. This is not to say that the structure of the disciplines I am noting here is static.
Mary Poovey's A History of the Modern Fact (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1998) is an important intervention in current discussions that seem to take the do-
main of fact "factually," which is to say as a domain that is stable and not a rhetori-
cal and argumentative technology through which its own claims to ontology are
made. In this context it becomes crucial to recognize, as Bill Maurer pointed out to
me, that recent feminist moves to recoup a materialist claim as a political/moral dis-
course ofjustice often rely on the "factual" and not the argumentative--the empir-
ical demonstration of women's exploitation and oppression serves to ground politics.
From within this framework that equates the economic with the factual, poststruc-
turalist insistence that knowledge claims, including the numerical, are argumentative
are recast as elitist disregard for justice.
7· See, e.g., Lisa Lowe, "The International Within the National: American Stud-
ies and Asian American Critique," Cultural Critique 40 (fall 1998): 29-47.
8. On performative identities see Judith Buder, Bodies That Matter (New York:
Routledge, 1993); on public cultures see Michael Warner, T11e Trouble with Normal:
Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York: Free Press, 1999); and Jose Munoz,
Disident!fications (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); on intimacy see
Lauren Berlant, The Queen ofAmerica Goes to Washingto11 City (Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 1997); and Kath Weston, Families~ Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); on premodern sexualities see David
Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (New
York: Routledge, 1990); and Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval (Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 1999); and on the psychic life of power and desire see Judith
Butler, The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997); and
Philip Brian Harper, Private Affairs: Critical Ventures in the Culture of Social Relations
(New York: New York University Press, 1999).
92 ROBYN WIEGMAN
g. See my "Queering the Academy" for a more lengthy discussion of the difficul-
ties of articulating sexuality as a term of equivalence with race or gender ("The Gay
90s: Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Formations in Queer Studies," ed. Thomas
Foster, Carol Siegel, and Ellen E. Berry, Genders 26 [1997): 3-22).
10. See, e.g., Eve KosofSky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male
Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
II. This is not to say that these issues, as objects of study, were not constituted in
social science through a great deal of disciplinary struggle by feminist scholars. In-
deed, feminist social scientists continue today to fight for the legitimacy of certain
kinds of practices as objects of study and to revise methodological protocols that
would render the agents of such practices more than mere informants (as partici-
pants). My point here is not to critique the social sciences per se but to demonstrate
how the various issues that Segal defines as central to a social feminist imaginary-
and to a feminism· committed to something more than academic professionaliza-
tion-have greater disciplinary legibility in some places than in others.
12. Segal also fails to identify the ways in which Marxist paradigms lost their crit-
ical currency within social science fields throughout the 1980s, giving way to eco-
nomic analysis drawn 'to formal modeling. The location of the loss of the political,
then, in the humanities displaces a critical account for the ways in which the real has
been tethered to a formalist economics in that domain defined, nostalgically, as the
foundation of"genuirie interdisciplinarity."
13. See Jane Newman's "The Present in Our Past: Presentism in the Genealogy of
Feminism" for a discussion of the ways a constricted notion of the political gener-
ates an eternal present as the temporal framework for feminist knowledge produc-
tion. Her concern, specifically, is how such presentism operates in women's studies
curricula in ordering a narrow relation to the study of the past (WOmen~ Studies on
Its Own, ed. Robyn Wiegman [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002]). For a
discussion of the constriction of the political on poetics see Elaine Marks, "The Po-
etical and tlte Political: The 'Feminist' Inquiry in French Studies," in Feminisms in the
Academy, ed. Domna C. Stanton and Abigail J. Stewart (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1995), 274-87.
14. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan have written at length outlining the im-
portance of critiquing global human rights discourses as they are taken up within
feminism. See "Introduction: Transnational Feminist Practices and Questions of Post-
modernity," in Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 1-33;"Warrior Marks: Global
Womanism's Neo-Colonial Discourse in a Multicultural Context," Camera Obscura
39 (September 1996): 5-33; and "Transnational Feminist Cultural Studies: Beyond
the Marxism/Poststructuralism/Feminism Divides," in Between WOmen and Nation:
Transnational Feminisms and the State, ed. Caren Kaplan, Norma Alarcon, and Minoo
Moallem (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 349-63.
15. Women's studies scholars might object to my use of the term discipline here,
arguing instead that t,he field has always defined itself as an interdisciplinary domain.
But my point rests on understanding the national move toward autonomous doc-
toral degrees in women's studies as a reproductive mechanism that cannot not accede
to the protocols of disciplinarity. I do not believe that women's studies should avoid
doctoral programs because of this; rather, it needs to grapple with what it means to
establish a disciplinary structure for what it repeatedly takes as a prototypically polit-
ical, as opposed to academic, project. See Wendy Brown's "The Impossibility of
Women's Studies" (differences 9, no. 3 [winter 1997]: 79-101) for an incisive analysis
of the tension between the academic and the political in the curricular agendas of
the field.
16. One can surely object to this interpretation for a number of reasons, not the
least of which might be my use of instrumentalize as a negative formulation of the re-
lation between academic feminism and the political. After all, why would academic
feminism not want to make its knowledge applicable to a social movement outside
the academy? Why would it object to the implication that it instrumentalizes not for
capital or the state but for progressive social change?
17. Sheila Slaughter has done a great deal of work that tracks the transformation
ofhigher education at the end of the twentieth century. See especially Sheila Slaugh-
ter and Larry Leslie, Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial Uni-
versity (Baltimore, Md.:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
18. I am thinking here of the way that European studies is emerging on some
campuses not as an alternative to the nation-based departmental sites of French, Ital-
ian, and German studies but as their expansion, even as the whole ofAsia continues
to be taught in area studies configurations where, quite often, Korea, China, and
Japan are organized collectively in a single Asian studies department.
19. It is important here as well to consider the ways interdisciplinary identity
sites, as they produce and often affirm discourses of identity formed by "commu-
nity," function to mediate the crisis that a theoretical humanities evokes around is-
sues of social subjectivity and governmentality. Where the question of politics has
been formulated on the side of visibility and the articulation of suppressed histories
(and insistently produced as the counter to the theoretical dismantling of the onto-
logical subject), there is something increasingly too cozy between identity studies'
reliance on community as its lingua franca of countergovernmentality and the mar-
ket's reliance on identity and community as the replacement strategy of the citizen-
function of higher education. From this perspective the nationalist discourses of in-
clusion and democratic completion that resonate as originary discourses in women's
studies and other identity-based sites are temporally dislocated from the political ef-
fects of institutionalization in the present. This does not mean that identity studies
are simply conservative actors, as too many commentators of the left now assume;
but it does point to the kinds of issues that most constructively constitute the inter-
nal critique and political complexity of understanding the present-and I would say
future-of interdisciplinary identity studies today.
20. The contemporary order of the disciplines speaks to this general ideological
and instrumental function, although the ways in which knowledge domains are in-
strumentalized varies. In law, for instance, the unintelligibility of its discourse to a
general readership is itself a condition of the culture of professionalization and ex-
pertise, but that illegibility in no way hampers law's instrumentalized relation to the
state. Rather, law is instrumentalized for the state precisely in relation to its lack of
94 ROBYN WIEGMAN
generalizable intelligibility. Disciplinary modes of instrumentalization are thus in-

consistent across domains, which is one way of saying that it is important to under-
stand how communicability as an ideal is never simply the same thing.
21. In this vein academic feminism needs a theoretical humanities in order tore-
assess its own critique of abstraction as Western modernity's methodological inscrip-
tion of masculinism, which has had the effect of aligning both women and feminism
with the experience, the subjective, and the partial seemingly once again. Debates
about sentimentalism in the nineteenth century have retraced the perpetual dilemma
we encounter here where the necessity of citing women's resistance, if not liberation,
often returns us to a celebration of the very forms of their social abjection. If ab-
stractions, like both objectivism and universalism, have been understood as modes of
masculine power, why must academic feminism authorize, in the name of politics,
the gendered binary that gives these to "them" again? This question is really rhetor-
ical in the sense that there is no escape from the conundrum in which feminism, ac-
ademic or otherwise, finds itself where its emergence is always a form of belated and
hence contradictory originality.
22. Some commentary is necessary here to challenge the way in which debates
about the fractured identity of academic feminism tend to align disciplinarity fully with
the university's knowledge production, leaving the public formation of feminism as
both outside and resistant to disciplinary forms. But certainly a great deal of the
process of feminism's" public political demeaning has been wrought through the
forms of discipline that adhere to the public sphere. I am thinking especially of com-
modification. Although I have limited my discussion to knowledge-based organiza-
tions of disciplinabty, it is important to an overall consideration of the history of
contemporary U.S. feminism to consider how political affect has been publicly dis-
ciplined and hence how the sphere of the public, so often heralded as the realm of
political commitment, has come to be managed by disciplinary forms. For critical in-
sight into this issue see Berlant's Queen ofAmerica.
REY CHOW 6
The Resistance of Theory; or,
The Worth of Agony
The Compartmentalization of Knowledges

In the controversy over contemporary critical writing it has become
somewhat commonplace to attack poststructuralist theory for being an elit-
ist, privileged phenomenon that is oblivious to reality. 1 Indeed, it is often
surprising that the impassioned debates that took place with the emergence
of poststructuralism back in the late 1960s and 1970s-debates that prob-
lematize long-cherished and naturalized notions oflanguage, subject, text,
and meaning-continue to reinstate themselves today, at times in the pages
of the most prestigious academic journals. Although the contents of critics'
complaints have become more elaborate, so that the evils of poststructural-
ism are now compounded by those of postcolonialism, especially the voices
of women of color, 2 the issue that has remained contentious is that of the
role of language.
In the theory-attacking ritual language is typically regarded as a device
for communication. The implicit assumption is that such a device needs to
remain clear and transparent even when the subject matter it is communi-
cating is extraordinarily difficult. Language exists, in other words, only in or-
der to be a conduit, whose function is to transmit information about the
world, its events, and its problems but never to convey anything about lan-
guage itself. 3 This is by no means a new assumption, and debates about the
difference between what is considered common sense (and clear language)
and abstract thought (and obfuscated language) have been a regular feature
of modernity. Once we locate this controversy in the context of modernity,
however, it will have to be quickly added that these demands for language to
be clear and transparent are, in fact, selectively placed on certain kinds of
knowledge production and not on others. In higher education it is typically
disciplines in the humanities, in particular those that deal with things that
96 REY CHOW
everyone supposedly understands~uch as storytelling, novel reading, writ-

ing, and so forth-that are designated the areas on which such linguistic de-
mands are to be made. Disciplines built on opaque, impenetrable languages
that are admittedly incomprehensible to the layperson, but that are based in
science and technology (such as medicine, computer technology, engineer-
ing, and biochemical research), or in law, seem not to have this continual
stigma attached to their obviously specialized linguistic usages. In the case of
these other disciplines the inaccessibility of their languages is regarded as a
sign of their practitioners' professionalism rather than as a sign of their ob-
scurantism: if a scientist, doctor, or lawyer writes in a manner that everyone
can understand, this logic goes, well and good-but that would be a bonus,
one that he or she is not expected to provide.
This polarization of assumptions-between the humanities, on the one
hand, and the sciences and trade professions, on the other-about how lan-
guage ought to be used is part of the larger historical picture in which we
must place the smaller, although no less critical, controversy in the late twen-
tieth and early twenty-first centuries over so-called theory and theoretically
informed critical writing. If language has been reduced to instrumentalism
(as it undoubtedly has been by those critics who complain of theory's "cor-
ruption" oflanguage), such instrumentalism itself is already a product of the
modernist progress that transforms the production and dissemination of hu-
manistic knowle4ge by default into a kind of "communication." In this
process, against an increasingly specialized world, it is nonetheless expected
that humanistic knowledge should continue to be universally available and
relevant in the sense that everyone should be entitled to it (whereas the sci-
ences and the trade .professions are allowed to have much more stringent
membership qualifications). This unequal compartmentalization ofknowl-
edges means that the use of language also becomes hierarchically divided: if
one happens to be pursuing the humanities-writing about novels, let's
say-one does not, however profound one's knowledge might be, have the
right to speak in the manner a rocket scientist does. Humanists should not
have a technical language because the humanities are not about anything
technical; they are about general human things. Indeed, the language at a hu-
manist's command must remain the same language that is shared by every-
body human. If one is not a scientist, a doctor, a lawyer, or a high-tech guru,
one must speak and write in such a way as to remain comprehensible to the
masses.
Once the historicity of the demand for "clear" language is fore grounded
this way, it becomes possible to understand the moral self-righteousness that
often accompanies t:J:le hostile criticisms of poststructuralist theory. In a man-
ner that inadvertendy aligns them with those instrumentalist forces that have
led steadily to the demise and degrading of humanistic knowledge as such,
The Resistance ofTheory; or, The Worth of Agony 97
the critics of theoretically inflected writing tend to stereotype theory not

merely as bad writing but also as a kind of morally degenerate dismissal of
the real world out there. Their reprimand of those who write theoretically is
issued on behalf of the disenfranchised masses, who, according to these crit-
ics, derive no benefit from such elitist uses of language. In their acceptance,
tolerance, and practice of the equivalent of (what in the sciences and trade
professions would simply be) a complicated because specialized language,
theoretical writers are thus portrayed by antitheory moralists more or less as
enemies of the people, whose sufferings they appear not to be attempting to
resolve. In sum, poststructuralist theory, like much abstract thought, is for
such moralists something to resist-in the name of an altruism called com-
mon sense. 4 (In the age before poststructuralism philosophy was typically
branded as perpetuating a user-unfriendly and impractical language.) The
irony lies, of course, in the fact that these self-appointed guardians of the
people are often themselves securely situated in privileged institutions, in ca-
reer positions that are no less remote from the wretched of the earth than
those of the theorists they attack.
The Resistance of Theory and the Point ofAgony

In the midst of the oft-repeated commonplaces about high theory's
elitism, especially the rather misleading polarization between common sense
and abstract thought, the radical intentions that lie at theory's foundations
tend to be more or less forgotten. Whether or not we suppose that such in-
tentions are or can ever be realized, any responsible evaluation of the impact
of theory in the late twentieth century and beyond would, I believe, need to
take them into consideration.
Insofar as it began by fundamentally challenging the generality of the
Western logos, poststructuralist theory, in particular, emerged on the episte-
mological horizon as the writing of a special kind of alterity, an irreducible
metaphoricity that insists on having its own autonomous status from within
Western thinking itself. As Paul de Man writes:
Literary theory can be said to come into being when the approach to literary texts
is no longer based on non-linguistic, that is to say historical and aesthetic, consider-
ations ... when the object of discussion is no longer the meaning or the value but
the modalities of production and of reception of meaning and of value prior to their
establishment-the implication being that this establishment is problematic enough
to require an autonomous discipline of critical investigation to consider its possibil-
ity and its status. (7)
When poststructuralist theory calls attention to the materiality of lan-
guage, then, it is to point out that language embodies a concrete kind ofla-
98 REY CHOW
bor. To this extent, poststructuralism shares important affinities with Marx-

ism: the oppressed who is called on to rebel from within Western society, to
problematize the stability of the cognitive field (that ranges from logic and
grammar to rhetoric), and thus to reclaim the products of her labor, is none
other than language itself. In the hands of poststructuralist theorists, language
tenses its muscles and breaks the chains of its hitherto subordination to
thought, throwing into question all old illusions of symbolic plenitude and
epistemological self-sufficiency and refusing the customary erasure of lan-
guage-as-language. What is restored by this theoretical revolution, accord-
ingly, is what might be called an originary difference intrinsic to the Western
logos. Hence the status of language is-to complete the comparison with
Marxism-not unlike that of a guest worker, an exploited "alien" who has
been indispensable in helping to hold together the host society with her hard
work but whose eXistence continues to be disavowed. "The resistance to the-
ory," writes de Man, "is a resistance to the use oflanguage about language. It
is therefore a resistance to language itself or to the possibility that language
contains factors or functions that cannot be reduced to intuition" (I2-IJ). 5
In order to honor their commitment to linguistic materialism, those who
pursue poststructuralist theory in their critical writings find themselves per-
manently at war with those who expect, and insist on, transparency of lan-
guage as a mere tool of communication. To counter this kind of"common
sense," poststruct~ralists charge that it is precisely such an expectation that
perpetuates the denial of the materiality (the work) of language. In order
that such materiality no longer be denied, it is essential for them to adhere
to certain principles:
I. The work of language is never finished and cannot be separated from the
slow but Certain movement of time (and, by implication, difference).
2. Any assumption oflanguage's transparency must be systematically demysti-
.fied as an unexamined ideological manner of thinking.
3. Any attempt to deny the work oflanguage and to co-opt us into believing
in the likes of"nature,""essence,""identity,""origins," and so forth, must be
vigilantly deconstructed.
4· Any resistance to (poststructuralist) theory as such is symptomatic of a cer-
tain blindness to one's own theoretical assumptions ("The attack [on theory]
reflects the anxiety of the aggressors rather than the guilt of the accused" [de
Man m]).
In retrospect, it is important to acknowledge the specific nature of the

force carried by poststructuralist critical thinking. This force is most de-
tectable at the points at which such thinking exerts its greatest energies, and
it tends to be preponderantly negative-albeit self-confident-in its charge:
a profound distrust of literal, naturalized meanings; a persistent refusal or de-
The Resistance ofTheory; or, The Worth of Agony 99
ferral of reference; a determined unmasking of any use of language that

seems devoid of semiotic self-consciousness; a ready dismissal or debunking
of those who challenge any of the above as themselves being the prey to
their own mystifications. 6
This powerful force, it should be added, is also a force of resistance.
In poststructuralist theory's heroic-if Sisyphian-efforts to obstruct the
path of a sweeping global instrumentalism that has led to the demotion of
language, we see the compelling legacy of a romanticist high modernism
with its avant-garde political-aesthetic programmatic intentions. (Consider,
in this regard, the importance of the English and German, as well as French,
romantics for de Man, and the works of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levi-Strauss,
Artaud, and others for the early Jacques Derrida.) Linguistic opacity, obscu-
rity, impenetrability-these qualities that are characteristic of high modernist
works of art and literature, with their aversion to realist and mimetic repre-
sentation-are also descriptive of much deconstructive critical writing. In
the case of poststructuralist theory, such qualities serve less as markers of an
alternative poetics and aesthetics than as signs of a dissident politics based, as
were many other social movements of the 196os in the Western world, on
consciousness raising. At the same time, precisely because it can indeed be
seen in this regard as the late twentieth century's version of high modernism,
the practice of poststructuralist theory is likewise shot through with high
modernism's self-contradictions. Like high modernism, we might say, post-
structuralist theory wants to be of the masses yet ends up speaking and writ-
ing in such ways that few of the masses will ever understand. The radical
events of reading and writing that began as acts of subversions of an unbear-
able regime (Western logocentrism and its many "ideological aberrations," to
use a phrase from de Man)/ that strove toward a liberating, democratic or-
der that would truly reflect the actual ways in which language (the prole-
tariat) works, fail precisely on the very issue (language) on which poststruc-
turalism has waged its most intimate battles, turning poststructuralist writing,
in a manner quite opposite to its philosophical premises, into the enemy of
the people.
Insofar as it is invested in this permanent contradiction, this unresolvable
agony engendered by the rift between its egalitarian aspirations and their
"elitist" execution, poststructuralist theory may perhaps be described, ulti-
mately, as being driven by a kind of Christian promise. To those who have
faith, it seems to declare, "Never mind the tortuous path you have to go
through now. Believe (in the work oflanguage), put your belief in practice,
and you will be saved (someday, or in an afterlife). Pleasure derived from all
worldly things in the present (read: linguistic accessibility) is a delusion you
must learn to forgo. Agony, and agony only, is the way to truth-and to sal-
vation."
100 REY CHOW
The J/Hlrk of Myth

Although we must acknowledge poststructuralist critical thinking for
its major interventions, therefore, it is perhaps equally necessary to recognize
its own (no less ideological) predicament. This predicament may be effec-
tively grasped through a revisit to Roland Barthes's memorable little book of
the 1950s, Mythologies. 8 My readers are likely already well acquainted with
Barthes's then-novel introduction of the science of semiology in the reading
of mass culture-and mediatized-materials. For our purposes, it is thus
more important to focus on the interesting reflections on the problematic of
language in modernity that underlie Barthes's thesis.
In the theoretical part of his book Barthes offers a systematic analysis of
what he terms myth-which in today's language might be called the inter-
facing of multiple domains of signification, whereby meanings, instead of
properly stabilizing in one domain, have the capability to shift and slide
among different ones, thus offering endless opportunities for duplicity, am-
biguity, and ideological manipulation. For our present argument, however, it
is not so much the semiotic analysis Barthes provides as two conflicting mo-
ments in his definitio_n. .of myth that are highly suggestive of the complexi-
ties informing the issues at hand.
The first moment is to be found in the lingering romanticism Barthes at-
taches to nature and the countryside, which are, in a manner of speaking, an-
titheses of the urban, artificial objects that he analyzes with considerable en-
thusiasm in the first part of the book. We encounter this moment in the
section called "Myth on the Left." Here, despite having demonstrated the all-
pervasive and inescapable workings of myth, Barthes nonetheless goes on to
assert that tlrere is a kind of language that is not mythical-the language of
"man as a producer," who seeks to transform reality rather than preserve it as
an image (146).Who is it who usually speaks this political, unmythicallan-
guage? Barthes's example is revealing: "Ifl am a woodcutter and I am led to
name the tree which I am felling, 'whatever the form of my sentence, I 'speak
the tree', I do not speak about it ... between the tree and myself, there is
nothing but my labour, that is to say, an action" (145). Barthes calls this "the
real language of the woodcutter," a real language he also attributes to "the
oppressed" (148-49).
This assertion of a language that can remain free of myth because of its
own material deprivation and barrenness is intriguing because it is, in con-
tradistinction to Barthes's own semiological readings, a remnant of a struc-
ture of feeling that is still invested in a stable, as-yet-uncorrupted origin of
meaning. As is characteristic of such structures of feelings, this notion tends
to attach itself to certain kinds' of figures, such as peasants, proletarians, chil-
dren, the poor, the oppressed, the subaltern, and so forth. It is hence no ac-
The Resistance ofTheory; or, The Worth of Agony I oI
cident that Barthes refers to the rustic figure of the woodcutter and his tree.
His own analytical insights notwithstanding, it is remarkable that Barthes
reads in the woodcutter and the oppressed an unmediated relation to lan-
guage--theirs is, he writes, "a transitive type of speech" (148)-a relation
that in turn becomes recoded by Barthes as political resistance (to processes
ofbourgeois mythification) and as truth.
The second moment I would like to highlight is found in the section en-
tided "Myth as Stolen Language," in which Barthes clarifies in no uncertain
terms myth's capacity to absorb and recontain everything, including acts of
resistance against it. "When the meaning is too full for myth to be able to in-
vade it," he writes, "myth goes around it, and carries it away bodily" (IJ2).
Of special significance here are, once again, the examples Barthes provides-
in this case the languages of modern mathematics and avant-garde poetry:
In itself, [mathematical language] cannot be distorted, it has taken all possible pre-
cautions against interpretation: no parasitical signification can worm itself into it. And
this is why, precisely, myth takes it away en bloc; it takes a certain mathematical for-
mula (E = mcZ), and makes of this unalterable meaning the pure signifier of mathe-
maticity....
. . . Contemporary poetry ... tries to transform the sign back into meaning: its
ideal, ultimately, would be to reach not the meaning of words, but the meaning of
things themselves. This is why it clouds the language, increases as much as it can the
abstractness of the concept and the arbitrariness of the sign and stretches to the limit
the link between signifier and signified.... Poetry occupies a position which is the
reverse of that of myth: myth is a semiological system which has the pretension of
transcending itself into a factual system; poetry is a semiological system which has
the pretension of contracting into an essential system.
But here again, as in the case of mathematical language, the very resistance offered
by poetry makes it an ideal prey for myth: the apparent lack of order of signs, which
is the poetic facet of an essential order, is captured by myth, and transformed into an
empty signifier, which will serve to signify poetry.... [B]y fiercely refusing myth,
poetry surrenders to it bound hand and foot. (132-34, emphases in the original)
These examples suggest that the process of myth as described by Barthes
can be viewed as a process inherent to the experience and politics of lan-
guage in modernity, wherein we can no longer safely assume that language
will always function in the unproblematically transparent manner that some
of us continue to presume it should. This heightened historical awareness of
language as a source of trouble--on account of its faithlessness and its readi-
ness for co-optation-is what led in part to acts of resistance such as those
mounted by modern mathematics and modern poetry. In both cases, resist-
ance is issued in the form of a deliberate obscurity, exclusiveness, and impene-
trability so as to guard the contents in advance from the ruthless onslaught of
myth and restrict access to them only to initiates. Yet, as Barthes points out,
I02 REY CHOW
such resistance, howe'ver sophisticatedly vigilant and anticipatory it might be,

can hardly deter myth, for myth has a way of capturing even-and espe-
cially-that which resists it the hardest: "Myth can reach everything, corrupt
everything, and even the very act of refusing oneself to it. So that the more
the language-object resists at first, the greater its final prostitution; whoever
here resists completely yields completely" (132-33).
Barthes's thesis on myth is illuminating for a critique of the fraught rela-
tions among language, myth/ideology, and the efforts to resist myth/ideol-
ogy that remain at the heart of debates concerning theory and critical writ-
ing today. Let me put it in a nutshell: if the position occupied by the
antitheory moralists is comparable to that ofBarthes in his moment of slip-
page back into a longing for an unmediated truth that can be "spoken"
without language? then the position occupied by poststructuralist critical
writing is, we may argue, not unlike that of the specialized languages of
modern poetry and E = mc2.Although it may be easy to dismiss the first po-
sition as theoretically naive and untenable, what Barthes has demonstrated,
far more disturbingly, is that the second, theoretically astute, position, too, is
in the end a fully assailable and co-optable one.
The Forces of Globalization

Poststructuralist theory's revolution, in other words, is caught in a cer-
tain dilemma that may be described as follows: on the one hand, it attempts
to speak truthfully in resistance to various types of"ideological aberrations"
(including in particular the one that reduces language to a transparent com-
munication tool); on the other hand, it is compelled to recognize at every
turn the invincibility and ubiquity of the forces of mythic manipulation.
Much like high modernism, this failed revolution must also be considered
in the larger context of the demands placed by modernity on languages and
cultures worldwide. If an aesthetically self-conscious, incomprehensible kind
of language can be seen in the West as a historical rebellion against the in-
creasing trend toward instrumentalism since the Enlightenment, then else-
where in the world, in cultures that have had to cast off the burden of the
ethnic tradition in order to modernize, the problem oflanguage is, rather, al-
ways defined in terms of how it can become more clear, more accessible, and
more useable--in short, how it can become more of a viable instrument to
assist the developing nation in its progress toward the future. It was in the lat-
ter kind of cultural furor about cleansing the native/ ethnic language of its
past-especially of its obsolete, opaque literary qualities-that a country
such as modern China, for instance, found itself in the early twentieth cen-
tury. 9 Globally, hence, it is as though modernity had, in the early twentieth
century, compartmentalized the world into two apparendy disjointed but in
The Resistance ofTheory; or, The Worth ofAgony I o3
fact mutually implicated halves: in the industrialized West, an avant-garde

linguistic drama, staged first through high modernism and then through
poststructuralist theory, driven by a fervendy puritanist resistance against
progressive instrumentalism; in the developing Rest, a characteristically des-
perate effort to bring the native culture up to date by reinforcing (rather
than resisting) such progressive instrumentalism so as to survive the trauma
that is none other than the compulsory contact with Westerners. On the one
side, the fate of aesthetic/critical language was to become ever more special-
ized, unreadable, and thus superfluous (so that it cannot be easily appropri-
ated); on the other side, the practical task faced by politicians, bureaucrats, in-
tellectuals, and culture workers alike was rather that of creating a language
that can be properly functional, communicative, and useful-a tool, precisely,
for purposes of national and cultural self-strengthening.
At the beginning of the new century, in ways that could not have been
foreseen, the forces of globalization have brought these two seemingly in-
compatible sides of modernity face-to-face. For instance, as Asian countries
such as China, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, and Korea become economically
prosperous, with sufficient financial resources to be spared for "cultural ex-
changes," even the most arcane and linguistically formidable Western theory
has found unprecedented channels for burgeoning. As many Western theo-
rists have, under the rubric of globalization, become advocates of the need
to spread their theory to various corners of the world, their missionary en-
thusiasm is being increasingly reciprocated in different places by local culture
brokers who welcome it as an opportunity for conducting various types of
transactions with established venues in Western countries, in particular the
generously funded ones in North America.
Like modern poetry and E = mc2 , then, theoretical critical language has,
contrary to its own expectations, begun to assume a new mythical life--as a
trendy global commodity whose market appeal lies precisely in its near in-
accessibility. As the operational logic of myth would have it, the more im-
penetrable the critical prose, the stronger the suggestion that there is some
superior value therein; and the more audiences feel the frustration and in-
timidation of not "getting it," the more they desire and pursue "it." Witness
the innumerable mentions and applications of theory at international con-
ferences across the Pacific as well as across the Adantic, and from the North-
ern to the Southern Hemisphere. Is theory still the event of political dissi-
dence that it was in its origins? Has it not become, instead, a thriving
entrepreneurship, whose powers for expansion and circulation often have lit-
de to do with the resistance against myth that once inspired its refusal to be
intelligible?
In the new global trajectories of intellectual exchange, the agony that has
earned theory the shameful name of elitism, the agony that accompanies
104 REY CHOW
.
theory's self-conscious mobilization oflanguage to unmask ideological aber-
rations, has taken on a new kind of worth. The revolutionary defiance of in-
strumentalist linguistic lucidity has transformed, in practice over time, into a
potentially gainful means of generating cultural as well as financial capital. As
in the case of the uncomprehending masses' mythic invocation of E = mc2
for "modern mathematicity;' many who know nothing about the historical
specifics of theory tend exactly to drop such names as Benjamin, Bhabha,
Butler, Derrida, Foucault, Jameson, Kristeva, Lacan, Said, Spivak, and Zizek
like so many instant formulae, as a way to signify one thing and one thing
only-that they've got this thing called theory, that their enunciation is fash-
ionably possessed of theory-ness. If, at an earlier moment, the resistance of
theory could be analogized to the energy that fuses the traditional Christian
promise of otherworldly salvation, such resistance can probably be histori-
cized and recharted, at the turn of the new millennium, as part of the un-
stoppable momentum of a prosperous multinational capitalism, that "ideo-
logical aberration" that will likely continue to diversify, reproduce, and
reinvent itself in the ·decades to come.
Notes
I. The tide of this essay was conceived in response to the tide originally proposed
for this volume, Worth the Agony? As my discussion will show, I believe that the no-
tions of worth and agony are indeed significant in this context because they serve to
highlight the fraught historical implications of the continuing uses of, as well as de-
bates on, critical and theoretical language in the North American academy.
2. See, e.g., the COII).plaints, voiced as recendy as the late 1990s, in Susan Gubar,
"What Ails ~eminist Criticism?" Critical Inquiry 24, no. 4 (summer 1998): 878-902.
3. For a well-known example of such ongoing debates see, e.g., George Orwell's
"Politics and the English Language," in his A Collection of Essays (Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubleday, 1954), 166-77. Orwell attributed the "debasement" of the English lan-
guage in modern times to the conformity and corruption imposed by politics.
4· See a succinct analysis of such resistance in Paul de Man, The Resistance to The-
ory, foreword by Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986),
3-20; hereafter page references are included in parentheses in the text.
5· For another well-known, thought-provoking account, in early poststructural-
ism, of the status of language in modern literature, one that is predicated on lan-
guage's self-referential agency, see Roland Barthes, "To Write:An Intransitive Verb?"
in The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Critidsm and the Sdences of Man, ed.
Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore, Md.:Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1970), 134-56.
6. This passage from de Man offers a characteristic summation of these points:
"What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of
reference with phenomenalism. It follows that, more than any other mode of in-
quiry, including economics, the linguistics of literariness is a powerful and indispen-
The Resistance ofTheory; or, The Worth of Agony I05
sable tool in the unmasking of ideological aberrations, as well as a determining fac-

tor in accounting for their occurrence. Those who reproach literary theory for be-
ing oblivious to social and historical (that is to say ideological) reality are merely stat-
ing their fear at having their own ideological mystifications exposed by the tool they
are trying to discredit" (The Resistance to Theory, u).
7· See note 6 above.
8. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, selected and translated from the French by An-
nette Lavers (Frogmore, St. Albans, Herts.: Paladin, 1973). Hereafter page references
are included in parentheses in the text.
9· I have offered extended discussions elsewhere of the historical specificities per-
taining to modern Chinese language and literature and will not repeat these argu-
ments here. Interested readers are asked to see Rey Chow, l-li&man and Chinese Moder-
nity: The Politics #Reading Between l#st and East (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1991), chaps. 2 and 3; and "Media, Matter, Migrants," in Writing Di-
aspora: Tactics #Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies, by Rey Chow (Bloom-
ington :Indiana University Press, 1993).
MICHAEL WARNER 7
Styles of Intellectual Publics
IN THE OPENING SCENE of Orwell's 1984 the horror of totalitarianism

is driven home to th,e reader by-of all things-the experience of writer's
block. The main character, Winston Smith, has just sat down under the glare
of the all-seeing telesqeen, intending to begin a diary. He falters. A tremor
goes "through his bowels." He feels helpless. "For whom, it suddenly oc-
curred to him to wonder, was he writing this diary?" 1
Winston's choice of genre, the diary, is perversely apt to illustrate the
problem of audience. Perversely, because the addressee of a diary is that
unique individual about whom most is known and whose sympathetic re-
sponse can be taken for granted: oneself. How could anyone, even in the
most ruthlessly totalitarian regime, lack an audience for a diary? But even
in a diary one never' writes simply to oneself in the present. At the very
least one addresses one's retrospective reading at some point in the future.
One therefore addresses oneself as a partial stranger, one who will have for-
gotten, or will have been caught up in a different phase of life and will
have become, by consequence, different. And thus oneself comes to stand
for posterity, and for a posterity partly brought into being by this act of
writing.
It might be that a diary is addressed to others entirely, to an unborn pos-
terity, and this in fact is how Winston mentally answers his question: "For the
future, for the unborn." But this, too, he finds unsatisfying:
For the first time the magnitude of what he had undertaken came home to him.
How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible. Either
the future would resemble the present in which case it would not listen to him, or it
would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.
For some time he sat gazing stupidly at the paper. The telescreen had changed
over to strident military music. It was curious that he seemed not merely to have lost
Styles oflntellectual Publics 107
the power of expressing himself, but even to have forgotten what it was that he had
originally intended to say. 2
Writing in this scene com~s to seem impossible because the diary can have
no concretely imagined public, present or future. The totalitarian state, with
its godlike control of media, has eliminated the civil-society context without
which neither public nor private life can have modern meaning. The diarist's
blockage illustrates the lack of both. Winston has no privacy because he is
visible to the watching telescreen, and when he puts his notebook away in a
drawer, he knows it is useless to hide it. But he is also deprived of publicness.
That means not only an audience to write for in the present but, more
tellingly, the sense of a future that might be capable of comprehension, but
different. "Either the future would resemble the present in which case it
would not listen to him, or it would be different from it, and his predica-
ment would be meaningless."What he requires is a near future, linked to him
by a chain of continuous transformation. Even a diary, the most private of all
forms, requires this hope as its condition of possibility. Finally, at the end of
the scene, Winston arrives at a resolution:
He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as
he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by
making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.
He went back to the table, dipped his pen, and wrote:
To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one
another and do not live alone. (26-27)
The public sphere here becomes purely imaginary or, we might say, inter-
nalized as humanity. In order to write even a diary, Winston must imagine
the ability to address partial strangers-men who are different and do not
live alone. When he turns this ability into an internal freedom and is able to
dispense with the need to be heard, he begins to speak direcdy to humanity
in an effect that could apdy be called lyrical, since Winston appears to ad-
dress humanity only in the absence of any actual context of address.
Isn't the imaginary character of such a general address necessarily its
weakness? The diary has no place to go, except into the hands of the police.
Its address can only be internal projection. It has no readers, no scene of cir-
culation. It stands for the pure wish that such a scene exist, that it might be
oriented-as in fact it cannot be-to a horizon of difference. Its rhetorical
addressee is only a placeholder for others and merely marks the idea of a san-
ity that could be confirmed through the exchange of perspectives. Orwell
seems to be trying to imagine a way to get around the chicken-and-egg cir-
cularity of publics, which only exist by virtue of the rhetoric that addresses
them.
This image of writing as a ghost of freedom is a striking image, tapping
108 MICHAEL WARNER
into a frustration th~t I think is widely felt, and not just under authoritarian
regimes. Orwell presents 1984 as a dystopia of totalitarianism. But is that
what this scene is about? The extreme conditions of the novel would be hard
to realize outside the most frozen Gulag. Orwell's 1984 is therefore easier to
read as the negative image against which liberal society defines itself than as
a plausible critique of existing alternatives. That telescreen in Winston's room
is not just Stalin technologically extended. It is also an anticipatory image of
mass culture, about which Orwell also worried. Orwell's dystopia stirs read-
ers because the frustration it asks them to imagine is common enough not
just behind the old Iron Curtain but here in the land of freedom, under
civil-society conditions, whenever the available genres and publics of possi-
ble address do not readily lend themselves to a world-making project. Any-
one who wants to transform the conditions of publicness, or through pub-
licness to transform the possible orientations to life, is in a position
resembling that of Orwell's diarist.
For whom does one write or speak? Where is one's public? These ques-
tions can never be answered in advance since language addressed to a public
must circulate among strangers; neither can they be disinissed, although the
answers necessarily remain mostly implicit. One does not stand nakedly to
address humanity. Every entry assumes an already recognizable form, a dis-
cussion already underway, a discourse already in circulation, a medium, a
genre, a style, and, for what counts as politics in modernity, a public to be ad-
dressed. People often say, when they are dissatisfied with extant publics, that
they write only for themselves; this can only be at best a lazy, shorthand ex-
pression, even for diarists. Every sentence is populated with the voices of
others, living and dead, and is carried to whatever destination it has not by
the force ef intention or address but by the channels laid down in discourse.
These requirements often have a politics of their own, and it may well be
that their liinitations are not to be easily overcome by strong will, broad
Inind, earnest heart, or ironic reflection. To speak in a certain way is to be
typed as a speaker. To publish iri a certain venue is to orient oneself to its cir-
culation, as a fate.
It Inight very well be that extant forms and venues will accommodate
many political aims. But what if they do not? What if one hopes to trans-
form the possible contexts of speech? Since such a hope is likely, of its very
nature, to be less than fully articulate, I suspect it is more common than any-
one imagines. One cannot conjure a public into being by force of will. The
desire to have a different public, a more accommodating addressee, therefore
confronts one with the circularity inherent in all publics: public language ad-
dresses a public as.a social entity, but that entity exists only by virtue of be-
ing addressed. It seems inevitable that the world to which one belongs, the
scene of one's activity, will be deterinined at least in part by the way one ad-
dresses it. In modernity, therefore, an extraordinary burden of world-making

comes to be borne above all by style.
Recent interest in the idea of the public intellectual suggests, I think., just
such a blocked wish, a· desire to transform the available contexts of speech
and, indeed, of publicness. So does the ongoing preoccupation, voiced by
journalists and academics, with the style ofleft academic theory. When peo-
ple complain, as many do, that intellectuals are not writing clearly enough,
their yardstick of good style generally turns out to be not just grammatical
or aesthetic but political. After all, they do not want elegance ofjust any va-
riety. They do not wish that academics should write beautifully in the mode
of, say, Ronald Firbank or Nietzsche. The incomparable prose style of
Michel Foucault-densely suggestive, both technical and poetic-far from
being their ideal of rigorous style, is more likely to serve as an example of
writing that is too difficult to be efficacious. They want language that will
bring a certain public into being, and they have an idea of what style will
work. The question of style, at any rate, entails a worry about the nature and
duties of the intellectual.
The connection is made explicit by many critics of left academics in the
humanities, including Katha Pollitt, Martha Nussbaum, Russell Jacoby, and
James Miller. Opaque writing is said by these writers to indicate contempt
for those whom one might persuade and thus to result in a hollow substitute
for political engagement, no matter how radical the claims of the writing.
Katha Pollitt, for one, has argued that when intellectuals write for them-
selves, the result is "a pseudo-politics, in which everything is claimed in the
name of revolution and democracy and equality and anti-authoritarianism,
and nothing is risked, nothing, except maybe a bit of harmless cross-dress-
ing, is even expected to happen outside the classroom."3 Pollitt's principal
target here is Judith Buder; hence the reference to cross-dressing-although
anyone who takes cross-dressing as a metaphor for harmless and risk-free
entertainment has never done much drag in public. For the record, I think
there is a significant element of truth in Pollitt's argument, and I'll come
back to it; for the moment I am concerned to show how the issue is dis-
torted when it is taken to be one of clarity.
The possibility I would like to raise here is that those who write opaque
left theory might very well feel that they are in a position analogous to Or-
well's diarist-writing to a public that does not yet exist-and finding that
their language can circulate only in channels hostile to it, they write in a
manner designed to be a placeholder for a future public. At stake here is the
question of how, by what rhetoric, one might bring a public into being
when extant modes of address and intelligibility seem themselves to be a
problem.
A small irony of the recent polemics is that Orwell himselfhas often been
IIO MICHAEL WARNER
cited as the example· of writing that is, as all writing should be in the view
of some critics, oriented to the largest possible audience. In a recent essay in
Lingua Franca James Miller approvingly echoes Pollitt's attack and points out
that it has become common among critics who share this view to cite Or-
well as a model. Orwell, as they understand him, represents the idea that the
writer is obliged to write with the greatest possible transparency, coming as
close as possible to an address to all persons. Style, in this argument, is seen as
determining the size of the audience, which in turn is seen as determining
the potential political result. Orwell illustrates not only the principle of a
clear style but the entire chain of reasoning that leads from style to political
engagement. "That he was staggeringly successful in reaching the largest
possible public, in a way that very few twentieth-century writers have been,"
Miller writes, is indicated by the "simple fact" that he "has sold, between An-
imal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, more than 40 million books in sixty lan-
guages which is, according to John Rodden, 'more than any pair of books by
a serious or popular postwar author.' " 4 (You can almost hear the Berlin Wall
being brought down, like the walls of Jericho, by the chirping of the cash
registers at Barnes and Noble.)
Does Orwell really.stand for the idea that accessible style leads to mass
markets and therefore to effective politics? He himself emphasizes, in "Poli-
tics and the English Language," that his ideal of clarity in thought "is not
concerned with fake simplicity and the attempt to make written English
colloquial." I hav~ my doubts about his definition of precision: "What is
above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other
way about." 5 It is possible to describe the phenomenon that gives force to
this idea without the jntentionalist semantics to which Orwell here falls prey.
Yet he is ma.king a point about the difficulty of precision and not, as is gen-
erally implied in current polemic, about the need for a populist idiom in
search of a numerically extensive audience.
The image of forty million copies of Orwell lighting up the UPC scan-
ners of the free world certainly contrasts oddly with Orwell's own image of
Winston's diary, hidden in a drawer, with a speck of dust carefully placed on
top so that it will be possible to tell when the police have read it. "It was not
by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human
heritage.'' Somehow Orwell has come to stand for the opposite of this sen-
timent that carrying on the human heritage requires that one be heard by as
many people as possible.
We might also read the diary scene, and its intense melancholy, as an un-
recognized allegory of the displacement of the writer by the technologies of
the mass. There is something unmistakably nostalgic in Winston's fetishiza-
tion of the cream laid paper, the nib of the pen, writing by hand-a fetishism
echoed in that placement of the piece of dust on the cover and by the rna-
Styles of Intellectual Publics I I I
teriality of every piece of writing described for the remainder of the novel.
This is not the image of writing that Orwell's current advocates have in
mind; its desperate fetishism suggests that Orwell himself worries about the
estrangement of mass publics, which appear in the novel in drag as totalitar-
lamsm.
In response to the polemic against the style ofleft academic theory,Judith
Buder has frequently invoked Adorno's Minima Moralia-a much more ex-
plicit commentary on the estrangement of mass publics. Her appeal to
Adorno is the basis for the conceit of Miller's Lingua Franca essay, which dis-
cusses the debate over clarity in left academic theory by comparing Orwell
and Adorno, contemporaries who, in Miller's view, represent antithetical un-
derstandings of the politics of style. Adorno, however, fares no better in this
exchange of polemics than does Orwell.
Buder cites Adorno to the effect that common sense is an unreliable stan-
dard for intellectual writing. The apparent clarity of common sense is cor-
rupt with ideology and can only be countered by defamiliarization in
thought and language. The task of the intellectual is to disclose all the forms
of distortion, error, and domination that have been embedded in the current
version of common sense. As she points out, views that now strike us as
grotesque have often been graced with such immediate comprehension that
they hardly needed to be stated at all. The rightness of slavery and the sub-
ordination of women are only the most politically salient among many other
gruesome examples. Common sense is often enough unjust. Language that
takes us outside the usual frame of reference, teaching us to see or think in
new ways, can be a necessary means to a more just world. And to the degree
that our commonsense perceptions contain distortion, just so far will the ef-
fort of reimagining seem difficult, even (to many) unclear.
This is a forceful argument, although one might object that the need for
unfamiliar thought is not the same as the need for unfamiliar language.
There is a long tradition of argument for both. Dissent from the pressure of
unexamined common sense is a cardinal principle of the Enlightenment. For
most Enlightenment intellectuals the idea was to create a new, more reflec-
tive--and therefore more just-common sense. And at least since romanti-
cism there has also been a long history of skepticism about the possibility of
pure and universal clarity, given the arduousness of the vision called for, or
about the idea that reflection alone will produce insight.
Indeed, Butler did not need to appeal to so suspiciously foreign an au-
thority as the Frankfurt School on this point; a very similar argument lies at
the core of American transcendentalism. Henry Thoreau, who is taken in
some quarters to be nearly a byword for epigrammatic clarity, had nothing
but scorn for common sense and the journalistic demand that one write for
it. "It is a ridiculous demand which England and America make, that you
112 MICHAEL WARNER
shall speak so that tli'ey can understand you," he writes at the end of Walden.
"Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as
common sense?The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they
express by snoring."6 Thoreau had his own reasons for distrusting common
sense and its clarity. The commonsensical legitimacy of slavery was one. He
also thought that true perceptions must be poetic, transformative, even trans-
gressive; any true thought must wake one out of common sense. This he
took to be a demand on style as well as thought. Thinkers who aspire to ex-
pand the realm of the thinkable can hardly be expected to avoid experi-
ments of usage. His call for defamiliarizing language contains both a classic
Enlightenment wish (since "men asleep" need to be awakened from the
sleep of common sense) and a more romantic conviction that the result
could never look like simple clear reasoning, which would address the ra-
tional faculties only. Hence the need for literary language.
Adorno distrusts common canons of clarity for reasons that encompass
Thoreau's but go further on the strength of a different kind of argument. "A
writer will find that the more precisely, conscientiously, appropriately he ex-
presses himself," writes Adorno, "the more obscure the literary result is
thought, whereas a loose and irresponsible formulation is at once rewarded
with certain understanding." Adorno did not think this was necessarily or al-
ways true; it is true under the conditions of mass culture and an idealization
of common senst: that is based in commodity culture. "Shoddiness that drifts
with the flow of familiar speech is taken as a sign of relevance and contact:
people know what they want because they know what other people want." 7
In other words, they embrace the idiom that, in its social currency, prmnises
them the widest possible belonging. Commodity culture intensifies this de-
sire and dist.orts it. The producers of mass culture, for obvious reasons of self-
interest, take care to make their commodities intelligible to as wide a market
as they can. This is one side of the picture but not what concerns Adorno
most. He does not just criticize mass culture as cynical manipulation. He sees
the way the expansiveness of mass circulation affects and distorts a desire for
social membership on the part of readers; and he thinks this is the root of the
problem of style. The wide circulation of language in mass culture is per-
ceived and treasured as a quality of style by those who Inisrecognize it as
clarity and sense.
Adorno is describing the manifestation, in matters of style, of one of the
most pervasive and troubling effects in mass society: the phenomenon of
normalization. Ideas of the good-and, in this case, the beautiful as well-
are distorted, in ways that escape nearly everyone's attention, because they
have been silently adjusted to conform to an image of the mass.A good style
is a normal style. What counts· as normal depends on distribution; the range
of variation defines the norm. This is a distinctively modern way of defining
Styles of Intellectual Publics II 3
value, based in a wide range of quantifying techniques (statistics, demo-

graphics, markets) for imagining the social world. The conformity that re-
sults is different from, say, conformity to divine law or natural hierarchy. It
appears to allow for difference to be generated from the bottom up, so to
speak. It does not appear to have any transcendent authority; what is good is
inferred from what people happen to do or like.Yet this imagination of value
has an authority, and a coerciveness, of its own. 8
The false aesthetic of transparency, defining clarity as that which commu-
nicates widely, has a powerful social effect of normalization. One result is
that it will naturally privilege the majority over less-familiar views. Equally
important to Adorno is that it will distort the judgment of the majority it-
self, precisely qua majority. The tastes and ideas that become those of the ma-
jority do so because people need to believe that their tastes and ideas will be
widely shared. The result is a kind of invisible power for dominant norms,
even though the people who make these normalizing judgments of taste do
so not in order to exercise power (they are not, in other words, simply
wielding the tyranny of the majority) but simply to fit in. Adorno implies,
with pathos, that people rely on expressions that are precertified for them as
common currency out of a kind of defensiveness; they are alienated from the
labor of judgment. "Only what they do not need first to understand, they
consider understandable; only the word coined by commerce, and really
alienated, touches them as familiar." 9
Now it does not follow that writing, in order to be valid, must be in-
comprehensible. Butler, in her op-ed piece in the New Y<lrk Times, comes
close to this implication because she stresses the need for defamiliarization. 10
And Miller embraces it outright: "Q.E.D.: The most radical critic of alien-
ation will be the most exquisitely aloof thinker, incomprehensible and un-
popular by design, as if enraptured by his unswerving address to an ideal au-
dience of one: a God who may not even exist." 11 The picture of an Adorno
addressing "an ideal audience of one: a God who may not even exist" bears
a strong resemblance to the predicament of Orwell's diarist. Yet here Miller
shows himselfhasty to score points against Adorno. This position is incoher-
ent except as caricature. You cannot be incomprehensible by design, espe-
cially if your audience is yourself.You also cannot be cynically strategic and
yet "enraptured" by an unswerving address.
Adorno does not prescribe incomprehensibility nor unpopularity. He
prescribes careful, rigorous, precise expression, whether the result is a popu-
lar idiom or not-as, for that matter, Orwell does in "Politics and the Eng-
lish Language." In order to present willful incomprehensibility as anyone's
considered program, Miller has to present that person as nearly insane. He
describes Adorno as "the most exquisitely aloof thinker;' as "indistinguish-
able from a Prussian autocrat," as expressing "nothing but contempt" (4I),
114 MICHAEL WARNER
and as a mandarin, a foreign and inscrutable nerd. Miller does not scruple to
produce a personal pathology as the not-so-hidden meaning of Adorno's
thought:" Minima Moralia," he writes, in an attempt to sound sympathetic, is
"the effort of a sensitive introvert" (36).
One of the most amusing moments in Adorno's writing, by the way, is an
episode in his autobiographical essay about the years he spent in a research
project on the medium of radio in Newark, New Jersey, just after he fled
Nazi Germany. One day he was met by a young American researcher who
asked him, in what Adorno calls "a completely charming way,""Dr.Adorno,
are you an introvert or an extrovert?" He does not tell us his response. Per-
haps he was too dumbfounded to make one. When he told this story later,
however, it was to illustrate the spread of reified thinking. 12
Miller, no doubt unaware of this ironic echo, needs to render Adorno an
irrational introvert in order to arrive at the question announced by the title
of his essay: "Is Bad Writing Necessary?" The question is a false one, an ex-
ample of polemic rather than real deliberation. To answer the question in the
affirmative--bad writing is necessary-entails a contradiction in terms. Any
way of writing that could be said to fit necessity cannot be called simply
bad. Having posed the issue this way, Miller is able to ensnare the victim in
a paradox: "Does this mean that Adorno's and Butler's most challenging
ideas, precisely because of their relative popularity among a not-insignificant
number ofleft-leaning intellectuals, have lost their antithetical use value and,
by the infernall~gic of exchange, been alienated and perhaps even dialecti-
cally transformed-turned into something hackneyed and predictable? If
one accepts Adorno's position in Minima Moralia, there is no escaping the
conclusion" (43).
Actually, this conclusion is very easy to escape. Adorno does not infer
alienation directly from the number of comprehending readers. He equates
alienation with an imitative style of mass comprehension that defensively re-
sists the unpredictability of thought. Numbers of readers are not the issue.
The manner of reading is-although Adorno believes that the problem with
the currently dominant manner of reading is that its imagination of value is
controlled by people's tacit calculations about the numbers of readers with
whom they will be in alignment. So no matter how many people read and
comprehend his writing, that in itself tells us nothing about its social mean-
ing. Only when the extensiveness of the reading audience is taken into nor-
mative consideration in advance by that very reading audience do we have
the phenomenon he describes.
I have taken a detour through this episode in Anglo-American polemics
partly because it shows how primitive our thinking about publics is. The as-
sumption seems to he that a clear style results in a popular audience and that
political engagement requires having the most extensive audience possible.
Styles oflntellectual Publics II 5
This view is assumed rather than reasoned, which is why anyone who dis-
sents from it can only be heard as proposing inanities: that bad writing is
necessary, that incomprehensibility should be cultivated, that speech in order
to be politically radical must have no audience. In Miller's summary both
Orwell and Adorno are made to share the assumption that clarity of style
produces large numbers of readers: Miller's Orwell thinks this is a good
thing; Miller's Adorno thinks it is a bad thing.
We begin to normalize intellectual work whenever we suppose a direct
equation between value and numbers-imagining that a clear style results in
a popular audience and therefore in effective political engagement. So
deeply cherished is this way of thinking that to challenge it is to court deri-
sion, especially in journalistic contexts. Adorno tried to identify a connec-
tion between the mass circulation of discourse and the mode of reading ori-
ented to that circulation. 13 He is heard, instead, as arguing against readability
in principle.
Given such confusion, it is perhaps better to return to very basic ques-
tions. What kind of clarity is necessary in writing? Clarity for whom?
For some, the answer to these questions is too obvious to need stating.
Writing that is unclear to nonspecialists is just "bad writing." This general
moral position is implied by Miller's title, as it is by the Bad Writing Award
cooked up by the journal Philosophy and Literature. This idea of clarity as a
self-evident morality is the self-understanding of a certain middlebrow pub-
lic and its paid flatterers in places like the New York Times. People who share
this view will be generally reluctant to concede that different kinds of writ-
ing suit different purposes, that what is clear in one reading community will
be unclear in another, that clarity depends on shared conventions and com-
mon references, that one person's jargon is another's clarity, that perceptions
of jargon or unclarity change over time. (My students have trouble reading
eighteenth-century prose that was a model of clarity in its time, but they
take as self-evidently clear such terms as objective and subjectiv~terms de-
nounced as hideous neologistic jargon when Coleridge used them.) People
who think the charge of bad writing is self-evident or universally obvious
therefore tend to be naive at best and quite often can be shown to be hypo-
critical. As Judith Butler rightly notes, for example, the charge is almost al-
ways reserved for thinkers in the humanities who share certain unpalatable
views. Even conservative academics in the humanities who write opaquely
are seldom attacked; the hostility of journalists seems reserved not only for
certain disciplines but for left thinkers within those disciplines.
Should writing intended for academics in the humanities aspire to acces-
sibility for everyone when we don't expect the same from writing in
physics? Isn't such an expectation tantamount to a demand that there should
be no such thing as intellectuals in the humanities, that the whole history of
II6 MICHAEL WARNER
the humanistic disciplines should make no difference, and that someone

starting from scratch to enter into a discussion-of, say, the theory of sexu-
ality--should be at no disadvantage compared to someone who had read
widely in previous discussions of the question? Any institutional context for
discussion inevitably limits accessibility. That is not necessarily a bad thing,
unless you are a knee-jerk populist. It allows people to develop a line of
thinking cumulatively, without starting at each moment from the zero point
of maximum accessibility. Some sloppiness no doubt results; institutions al-
low people to speak in code and forget questions that might be posed from
the outside.Yet when the charge ofbad writing comes from journalists, it is
hard to avoid the feeling that some hostility to the very idea of scholarly hu-
manistic disciplines is involved.
It is also possible to challenge academic writing for a second set of rea-
sons, precisely because of the ideals that separate the disciplines from jour-
nalism. Instead of assuming a self-evident standard of clarity and a moral ob-
ligation to follow it, one could argue that the imperative to write clearly is
not the same as the need to write accessibly, that the project of an academic
discipline requires a rigor of definition, argument, and debate. What would
count as clarity, in this view, might remain highly specialized and inaccessi-
ble to lay audiences or journalists. Indeed, to the extent that clarity might re-
quire conceptual precision of very unfamiliar kinds, it might compete with
accessibility. People adhering to this ideal might feel that clarity is endan-
gered not by the isolation or specialization of the academy but, on the con-
trary, by the failure of humanists to take their own disciplines seriously-ei-
ther because of the humbug of genteel humanistic piety or because of the
fascination with journalistic authority that besets such professions as history
or because specialized environments like the cultural studies circuit have led
academics to think that rigorous argument counts less than a gestural poli-
tics of righteousness. To appeal for clarity in this sense would not be an ar-
gument about public intellectuals, nor would it apply to left academics more
than to anyone else.
A third line of thinking is that a special standard of clarity should be ap-
plied to just those academics who claim political consequences for their
work-which would include almost everyone working in cultural criticism
these days. On this view there might be no need for accessibility in academic
disciplines in general, and "bad writing" awards could be dismissed as grand-
standing. Yet when academics claim to be furthering justice through their
work, this argument goes, they take on obligations that go beyond their own
profession. (This is the way the argument has been advanced by Martha
Nussbaum and Katha Politt, a,mong others.) Even on these terms it does not
immediately follow that accessibility is the issue. Nussbaum's critique ofJudith
Buder's prose style, for example, does not assume that Buder's work should
be written for nonspecialists; her more serious charge is that Buder's work is
not written for canons of argument among specialists, either in philosophy
or in law, and that only the star system of cultural studies accounts for its
form of address. 14 Some of the stylistic tics Nussbaum targets, like the ten-
dency to introduce premises in conditional "if ... then" clauses and then to
treat those premises as·givens, have to do with logical argumentation hut not
necessarily with exposition for nonspecialists such as the presumed readers
of New Republic, where Nussbaum was writing.
So a further assumption seems to be required to produce the charge that
inaccessible writing is irresponsible. One must hold not only that clarity is a
special burden on writers with political aspirations but that the kind of clar-
ity they need is the kind found in journalistic or political publics. This de-
mand seems to me wholly unjustified for reasons that I hope to make clear.
In all the attacks on the style of left academic theory, I have not seen a co-
gent defense of this extra requirement. It tends to be taken for granted, es-
pecially by journalists. There is a reason for the silence; those who believe
most ardendy in the power of journalistic publics tend to believe that those
publics are like the air-everywhere, invisible, and permeable to light. It
hardly occurs to them to wonder whether a public might be a cultural form
predisposed to some ends over others.
Notice, too, that the charge ofbad writing carries a corollary assumption:
that if only left academics would write accessibly for journalistic publics,
they would be more politically effective. This does not obviously follow, and
experience suggests that it is a mistake. Accessible prose alone gets you noth-
ing if the ideas are unpalatable for other reasons or if the public is structured
in such a way as to be substantively prejudicial. There are many arguments
that will never fmd their way to the pages of the New York Times no matter
how clearly expressed. Just as it is a mistake to equate good writing with ac-
cessibility, so also is it a mistake to equate an easy style with effectiveness.
We are drawn into these assumptions so insidiously that they can distort
the defense of difficult writing as well. It is all very well to argue that some
kinds of difficult writing might be good, even politically necessary. But is
difficulty a virtue in itself or an effective strategy for defarniliarizing com-
mon sense? To defend academic writing on such grounds is to assume that
defarniliarization works all by itself. One falls into the same mistake as those
who believe in transparency, saying nothing about context, audience, ways of
reading, or mediation by form. How does writing defamiliarize common
sense? If it does so only when read by the protocols of academic discourse--
where, for example, it is axiomatic that complexity is to be valued over sim-
plicity-then the arguments of Pollitt and others have some force: the polit-
ical benefits that flow from this strategy of resistance do so only within the
restricted zone of academic circulation. Defamiliarization for whom?
II8 MICHAEL WARNER
Might it not be the case that what might have been defamiliarizing has
become, for many in the academy, all too familiar? Many people outside the
academy are defensive about using their judgment in the face of difficulty;
might it not also be true that many inside it are defensive about giving up
the display of difficulty in the surface of writing? There would be nothing
surprising in this. Style performs membership. Academics belong to a func-
tionally segregated social sphere, and in the humanities in the United States
that sphere is increasingly marginal, often jeopardized. People use style to
distinguish themselves from the mass and its normalized version of clarity.
Often, those who do so-especially graduate students, whose role is not in-
stitutionally secured-are also trying to mark their own somewhat tenuous
membership in a fragile but desperately needed subculture. A value on diffi-
culty contributes to the poesis of that social world, just as an ideologized
clarity contributes. to the poesis of journalistic publics. These social dimen-
sions of style are probably more important to the making of any public than
either clarity or defamiliarization considered in the abstract.
At stake in the dispute about style, then, are different contexts for writing,
different ways of imagining a public. The issues are obscured, rather than
clarified, whenever W(} assume that a public intellectual is one who writes
for large numbers, that an untroubling and familiar idiom is essential to po-
litical engagement, that meaningful political work is necessarily performed
within what cum;ntly counts as politics, that it should bring about changes
within the calendar of news, or that political position-taking is the only way
of being creatively related to a public. What disappears, in this view of the
politics of prose, is the public of writing itself. Publics spring neither from
clarity, which pretends they are transparent, nor from defamiliarization per
se, which makes opacity private. Publics require a manner of address, a ma-
terial context of circulation, affective dispositions of reading or witnessing,
and a social imaginary that confers significance on performance or literate
practice.
So we are back where we began: how could one bring a different public
into being, transforming the conditions of speech?
The question is blunted by the very ideology that drives much of the talk
about public intellectuals in the first place: the dominant ideology of the
public sphere, dating at least from the early eighteenth century, according to
which the public sphere is simply people making public use of their reason.
Citizens, in this commonsense view (shared equally by high theory after
Habermas and by the folk theory of democracy), form opinions in dialogue
with each other, and that is where public opinion comes from. Any address
to a public tends to be understood as imitating face-to-face argumentative
dialogue, or rather ~ idealized version of such dialogue. Public opinion is
thought to arise out of a continuum of contexts ranging from common
Styles oflntellectual Publics I 19
conversation to PTA meetings to parliamentary forensics, op-ed pieces, polls,

or critical essays; and at each step the rules of discourse are the same. One
proceeds by airing different views in the interest of understanding, making
assumptions explicit, and then reaching some decision. The public sphere is
critical discussion writ large. A vibrant scene of public-spirited discussion is
the motor of democratic culture.
I have argued that publics do not in fact work that way. 15 But if you be-
lieve that they do, that there is a continuum from rational dialogue upward
to the realm of public opinion, then it might seem obvious that intellectuals
are uniquely positioned to address publics publicly. Critical argument is the
intellectuals' metier. If public discourse is to be reasonable, who should be
better fitted to lead it than intellectuals? If they fail to do so, the thinking
goes, then the failure must lie at their own door.
For many people "public intellectual" has come to mean a quasi-journal-
istic pundit with a mass following. Older conceptions-such as that of the
intellectual as the conscience of the age, adhering to conviction or historical
memory whether anyone listens or not, keeping alive an alternative that may
be reanimated in some distant future-have faded into the background. 16
Contemporary culture regards any thought of a distant future as archaic.
Given the contracted span of futurity in the headline temporality of politics,
which increasingly dominates all thought, we think in horizontal terms:
public intellectuals are those who seek socially expansive audiences.
Under the sway of such thinking one could easily ignore the difference
between intellectuals as a class and citizens as a general category. Both use
critical reason and articulate considered arguments. Intellectuals are simply
those who are equipped to do this in the greatest degree. John Guillory aptly
writes that the idea of an engaged intellectual can be seen as "nostalgia for
the very public sphere that functioned historically in the absence of a socially
identified group of'intellectuals.'" 17 The wish for public intellectuals leads
people to speak as though there were a moral imperative to clarity, and a
moral imperative to political position-taking as well. To the extent that these
are moral requirements, they can hardly be expected to result in such a spe-
cialized status as the public intellectual. If one were really to argue that
everyone should write clearly and that everyone should take political posi-
tions publicly, one would be arguing in effect against the idea of a public in-
tellectual as a special role.
More to the point, this ideology misrecognizes the fundamental innova-
tion of the public as a cultural form. The public sphere never required a
widespread culture of rational discussion at all but rather a notion of a pub-
lic-which is, after all, a fiction. Only this essentially imaginary function-
which presupposes a temporally indexed circulation among strangers-al-
lows that scene of circulation to be captured as a social entity and addressed
120 MICHAEL WARNER
impersonally. 18 Success in this game is not a matter of having better argu-

ments or more complex positions. It is a matter of uptake, citation, and
recharacterization. It takes place not in closely argued essays but in an infor-
mal, intertextual, and multigeneric field. There is no reason why intellectu-
als should be specially positioned for public address in this sense, except
where they are packaged as experts. And expert knowledge is in an impor-
tant way nonpublic: its authority is external to the discussion. It can be chal-
lenged only by other experts, not within the discourse of the public itself.
The sociologist Nina Eliasoph has recently published a disturbing study
of contexts of discussion that should challenge any idea of the public sphere
as a continuum of critical opinion making. Eliasoph examined a wide range
of public discussions in local community groups and found that public-
minded discussion is systematically inhibited in almost every context. As
conversations get closer to public topics, where opinions would have a gen-
eral relevance and others' views would have to be taken into account, peo-
ple tend to shut up, deflecting currents of conversation. Even active volun-
teers in civic groups. construct their volunteering so as to avoid risky
discussion. They choose topics that allow them to avoid dissent. They frame
their motives as prepoliti:cal.Journalists and officials actively conspire to limit
public discussion, diverting it into testimony that can be viewed as private
passion rather than opinion or argument. They solicit people to regard their
public spirit as goo~ feeling, compassion, volunteerism, or anything else that
can be divorced from the conflict of views. Journalists report on citizens'
feelings or interests rather than on their arguments, keeping for themselves
the role of the uncontested mediators of publicness. They proftle those who
speak as moms, acting on behalf of their children, rather than as citizens with
general views. Officials who respond to citizen involvement tend to invoke
expertise or to steer discussion into bureaucratic speech protocols in which
their own authority can be performed. 19
Interestingly, Eliasoph herself does not question the assumption that the
continuum of public-minded critical discussion is what the public sphere has
been or should be about. Her book is driven by a sense of outrage that ac-
tual conversations fail to accord with the ideal. But the ideal of critical dis-
cussion was itself never sufficient to bring the public sphere into being. The
endlessly repeated discovery that public politics does not in fact conform to
the idealized self-understanding that makes it work-a discovery made by
the romantics, by Marx, by Lippman, by Adorno, by Habermas, by Foucault,
and de novo by Eliasoph-can never generate enough moral passion to
force politics into conformity. The image of discussion writ large is necessary
to the public sphere ~ a self-understanding but not as an empirical reality.
That same image, I suspect, fuels the fantasy of the public intellectual as a
necessary function for political change, where the intellectual is seen as one
especially adept at framing issues for critical discussions and where change
results when discussion encompasses the most extensive possible public in its
deliberative agency. This conception of the intellectual's relation to politics
relies on a language ideology in which ideas and expressions are infinitely
fungible, translatable, repeatable, summarizable, and restatable. To the extent
that this is what public language is supposed to be about, attention must be
deflected away from the poetics of style, as well as from the pragmatic work
of texts in fashioning interactive relations. Publics are co~ured into being by
characterizing as a social entity (that is, as a public) the world in which dis-
course circulates; but in the language ideology that enables the public sphere
this poetic or creative function of public address disappears from view.
Rather than help to constitute scenes of circulation through style, intellec-
tuals are supposed to launch transparently framed ideas into the circulation
of an indefinite public. Of course, if intellectuals thought of themselves as in-
volved in world-making projects, it is not clear that intellection would be
more effective than, say, corporeally expressive performances. It is not clear
that intellectuals would have a naturally leading role in the process at all.
Hence it is perhaps not surprising that the professional class of intellectuals
should seem reluctant to abandon the conception of public discourse whose
inadequacy they continue to discover.
The wish for popularly read intellectuals responds in part to the extreme
segregation ofjournalistic and intellectual publics in the United States. They
are segregated not just by attitude and style but by the material conditions of
circulation. Publics do not exist simply along a continuum from narrow to
wide, specialist to general, elite to popular. They differ in the social condi-
tions that make them possible and to which they are oriented. The United
States is an extreme case. The American strain of anti-intellectualism has
made intellectuals feel like exiles for the past two centuries; small wonder
that many should dream of vindicating themselves through fame, the only
currency of respect that really spends in America. The intense capitalization
of mass culture here means that the media that matter are those whose scale
and scarcity of access are most forbidding. Meanwhile, the saturation of uni-
versities by commercial and state interests makes academic work in some
ways less than public, insofar as intellectuals there come to be either func-
tionally incorporated into the management culture of expertise or, alterna-
tively, marginalized. And for the past thirty years or so trade and academic
publishing have been institutionalized as distinct fields of production to a
much greater degree than in any other country, and the decentralization of
the American university system prevents it from providing the coherent plat-
form of authority that is to be found in more frankly elite systems such as
that of France.
University presses and journals are mulish compromises, half professional
122 MICHAEL WARNER
and half public. Their products are widely available to any stranger who can
buy or borrow copies, and in that sense they address publics. But they also
take care to maintain a close fit between their circulatory ambit and the pri-
vate realm of the professions. They select authors from professions; they vet
manuscripts (less and less, it is true) with expert readers within fields; they
promote works within professional organizations and academic markets.
(This is true even of presses like Routledge that have no formal ties to uni-
versities.)
The world of strangers to whom this discourse circulates is a world in
which strangers are either directly certified in advance by institutions and
networks or indirectly limited by the distributional practices of the pub-
lisher. Readers share reference points, career trajectories, and subclass inter-
ests. They share protocols of discourse, including things like a preference for
complexity. ("Actually, I believe it's more complicated than that" is, within
the academic world, an unanswerable shibboleth; it articulates a professional
mode for producing more discourse and for giving it an archivally cumula-
tive character. The same gesture falls hopelessly flat in journalistic settings,
where the extensive uptake of audience attention is at a premium.) Writers
in this world are inevitably involved in a different language game from jour-
nalists.
The private circulation of academic discourse could be all to the good in
the routine functioning of a discipline. But when disciplines decline or go
into crisis, or when members for their own reasons seek to use the academic
platform to address a different public, the existing routes of circulation prove
unsatisfactory. Circulation is then controlled by conflicting laws. Journalists,
wh0 as a class have an interest in mass circulation and the forms of author-
ity based oh it, are only too happy to point out the conflict.
These conditions structure the available publics for thought and writing
in the United States. They are not to be overcome by a mere change of atti-
tude, any more than Orwell's diarist could have been expected to generate,
out of style alone, a time when thought is free, when men are different from one an-
other and do not live alone. Academic left theory, mostly from within the jeop-
ardized disciplines of the humanities, has been attempting to reconstitute it-
self as a public, often with the explicit intention of ceasing to be organized
by disciplines. Often enough it seems willing to postulate its own world
through idiomatic and topical allusions to mass culture. The result frustrates
nearly everyone. Between the academy and the mass, between the disciplines
and journalism, the conditions for public circulation do not for the most
part now exist.
There are of coarse many ways in which the effort to bring a public into
being, to do world-making ~ork in the public sphere, can go wrong. When
Katha Pollitt complains that academic intellectuals postulate their own radi-
calness in a way that entails no risk and reduces to pseudopolitics, the strong
version of her point is that the public of academic work is being misrecog-
nized. Like most academic expertise it circulates only in a well-defined path
mediated almost entirely by the university system; but it no longer under-
stands itself this way. It seeks to overcome the separation of academic, trade,
and political publics by means of its topical content rather than through its
public circulation. Of course, this perfectly valid point can also be turned
around. As Adorno points out, the journalistic public itself can fail to be a
scene of risk or world making. When journalists denounce academics for
speaking in a way that is not already familiar, they too are trying to avoid the
risk of truly public circulation.
There are many academics, especially in cultural studies, who distrust the
claim ofjournalists and mass media to represent the only relevant public and
who seek public relevance in a different way. Rather than seeking fame or
publicity in journalistic publics, they seek to regard all intellectuals as public
intellectuals. They aspire to see their own work as politics, either in the gen-
eral sense of contested culture or even in the narrower sense of having a
bearing on common action and state policy. Recognizing that academic dis-
ciplines, for better or worse, create a functional gap between themselves and
political publics, they wish to eschew their disciplines (many of which are in
an exhausted state anyway) as the context for their writing and thinking. Yet
they do so not by leaving the disciplines entirely, writing for publics and
lifeworlds outside the academy, but by adapting work and career within an
academic context as much as possible to a political self-understanding.
This experiment has its own dangers. Among them is a loss entailed by
imitating the temporality of politics without recognizing the difference of
temporality available in these two contexts for circulating discourse. Politi-
cizing thought tends to mean adjusting it to the urgencies of the headline.
Some kinds of thought, essential to politics but not captured within its
terms, might require a different space of circulation. The academic disciplines
have their own orientation to time, which they elaborate by means of a
whole apparatus of futurity. They treat knowledge as cumulative; they re-
quire new members to master the field's history and contribute to its
archives; they treat research as corrigible inquiry; they are structured by roles
of apprenticeship and expertise and by a professionalism that is socially self-
reproducing. Cultural studies, which arose partly from a distrust of this struc-
ture of expertise, has sometimes attempted a methodical elimination of each
element in this apparatus of futurity. Yet so long as such work continues to
circulate only within a metadisciplinary academic framework, its aspirations
to political time remain blocked. This contradiction gives force to the ob-
jections of journalists.
Any public includes strangers, present or future. The quality of risk that
124 MICHAEL WARNER
Pollitt finds missing• in left academic theory is just this orientation to

strangers and the submission of discourse to estranging paths of circulation.
But that risk can happen over longer as well as shorter durations; it's just that
the shorter ones are easier to recognize as politics. Orwell's diarist longs for
this risk among strangers when he writes to a time when people "are differ-
ent .from one another and do not live alone." The future scholars of a traditional
discipline are also, in this limited sense, semipublic; even quite traditional
scholarship is oriented to corrigibility over time by strangers. Neither ad-
dress to the journalistic public nor the immediate politicization of academic
publics, in other words, is the only way to take the necessary risk of public-
ness. World-making projects require not just intentions, nor the moralized
postures that are called "having politics," but rather a set of forms that can ar-
ticulate the temporality and social space of their circulation. Certainly a pub-
lic· practice oriented to redefining public practice is a paradoxical task, not
finally dissimilar to the problem of Orwell's diarist. It is a way of imagining
a speech for which there is yet no scene and a scene for which there is yet
no speech.
Notes
1. George Orwell, 1984 (New York: Signet, 1981), 10.

2. Ibid.
3· Quoted by James Miller, "Is Bad Writing Necessary?" Lingua Franca, Dec.!Jan.
2000,44·
4· Miller, "Is Bad Writing Necessary?" 38.
5· George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," in A Collection of Essays,
by George Orwell (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1981), 169.
6. Henry'Fhoreau, Walden (New York: Library ofAmerica, 1985), 580-81.
7· Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. EN.
Jephcott (London:Verso, 1978), 101.
8. I have described this understanding of normalization at somewhat greater
length in The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York:
Free Press, 1999), 52-61. Some will object that I am taking liberties by attributing
this understanding to Adorno, when it derives more directly from Canguilhem and
Foucault. But I think much of Adorno's thought, especially in his California years,
follows these lines, although he does not use the term.
9. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 101.
10. Judith Butler, "A 'Bad Writer' Bites Back," New York Times, March 20, 1999.
Butler's op-ed piece responds to an earlier article by Dinitia Smith: "When Ideas Get
Lost in Bad Writing;' New York Times, Feb. 27, 1999.
n. Miller, "Is Bad Writing Necessary?" 37.
12. Theodor Adorno, "Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America;'
trans. Donald Fleming, in The InteHectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930-1960, ed.
Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1969), 338-70.
13. The issues enumerated in this sentence pervade Adorno's writing, but a few
key texts can serve as examples in addition to Minima Moralia. See, e.g., The Stars
Down to Earth and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture (New York: Routledge,
1994); Introduction to the Sociology of Music (New York: Continuum, 1989); and
"Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda," in The Essential Frankfurt
School Reader, ed.Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum, 1987),
n8-37·
14. Martha Nussbaum, "The Professor of Parody;' New Republic, Feb. 22, 1999,
37-45·
15. See the title essay in my Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books,
2002).
16. Some of these different conceptions are reviewed in Edward Said, Representa-
tions of the Intellectual (New York: Pantheon, 1994); and in Bruce Robbins, ed., Intel-
lectuals: Aesthetics, Politics, Academics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1990).
17. John Guillory, "Literary Critics as Intellectuals: Class Analysis and the Crisis of
the Humanities;' in Rethinking Class: Literary Studies and Soda! Formations, ed. Wai
Chee Dimock and Michael T. Gilmore (New York: Columbia University Press,
1994), 107-49, II7.
18. This definition of a public is elaborated in my Publics and Counterpublics, cited
above.
19. Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life
(Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
PART 3
Modernist Poetics and Critical Badness

PETER BROOKS 8
On Difficulty, the Avant-Garde, and
Critical Moribundity
ANY REFLECTION on the languages and the possible audiences of crit-

icism demands an agile dialectical performance. I want neither to subscribe
to dominant current practices in academic writing nor to endorse the gen-
erally mindless critique of them. I find it difficult to come to rest in any one
position. I hope, then, that what follows will be read as a resdess interroga-
tion of the problem rather than a prescriptive conclusion.
One can pick up at random almost any extra-academic cultural journal
and find the uncontested assumption that literary and cultural commentary
produced by the academy is tendentious, politicized, jargon filled, and gen-
erally rebarbative in that it places between the reader and the beauty of the
literary or artistic work an ugly and self-regarding prose. Not long ago, for
instance, the New York Times Book Review had a piece by one Ron Rosen-
baum that used a recent meeting of the Shakespeare Association ofAmerica
to proclaim a reformation of criticism by way of the end of theory. 1 "The-
ory" in the piece is unproblematically equated with bad writing, and the
sample of the latter cited by Rosenbaum-from an essay by Linda Charnes
on Hamlet-indisputably deserves the label:
Mass culture is being increasingly "quilted;' to use Lacan's term, by the points de capi-
ton of what I would call the "apparitional historical." It is therefore no accident that
Hamlet is the play to which contemporary culture most frequently returns. Hamlet-
the-prince has come to stand for the dilemma of historicity itself.... But the sub-
ject of affective time is incommensurable with the order, and the nature, of events.
This was one ofLacan's greatest insights, and one of his advances over Freud: his as-
sertion that the true subject of the "impossible real" isn't constituted by her narrative
reconstruction of her "story" but rather by the failure of that story to "include" its qf-
Jective event-horizon-its epistemological starting- and end-point. As Joan Copjec
has recently written about the Lacanian gaze ... 2
IJO PETER BROOKS
With apologies to Linda Charnes for prolonging her ordeal as victim of the
day-many others could be found for the sacrificial role--one is tempted to
make a distinguo: this is bad writing not because it is theory but because it is
lazy, in-group, sloppy prose that uses allusion to deities and demi-deities of
the moment and half-digested theoretical terminology-ripped from con-
text and yoked in half-analyzed ways (see those points de capiton conjoined to
quilting, for instance)-to make the simulacrum of an argument rather than
the real thing.
There is far too much of this kind of writing produced by academics but
not because it is "doing theory." On the contrary, it is prose that can't shoot
straight enough to be theoretical. And post-theory and antitheory don't nec-
essarily fare any better. Rosenbaum's diagnosis is of course hopelessly out of
date; more reliable ·commentators will tell you we entered "post-theory" at
least a decade ago, with the turn to new historicism and postcoloniality, and
the same kind of prose is with us.
I want to evacuate the question of"bad writing" and leave it for what it
is, bad writing, to get' on to the more interesting question of difficult writ-
ing. The issue may be stated in this form: must critical writing put certain
notions of common setise into question, unsettling the grammatical frame of
understanding and reference by which we usually proceed? And if so, what
is the relationship of this critical unmooring of common sense to the re-
sponsibility that we, as scholars, have to communicate effectively to a wider
audience and to those who are not necessarily schooled in the same idiom?
These queries suggest that certain ideas and arguments may need to violate
standards of decorum, clarity, even grammatical and syntactical conventions,
in order to convey, or rather to do, something new and unsettling. How can
you speak die old idioms if you are trying to make a revolution? Yet, if the
revolution is to be effective--reach a wider public-how can you sacrifice
the common language?
This question has plagued the avant-garde since its inception. It is part of
what Guillaume Apollinaire called the "long quarrel ... of Order and Ad-
venture."3 Misunderstandings between the artistic and political avant-gardes
have often turned on the issue of language and communicability. Political
avant-gardes historically tended to want to promote the language of ordi-
nary men, to make the linguistic sign transparent. The clear moral and polit-
ical messages of melodrama, delivered in an emphatic rhetoric, suited the
French revolutionaries, and it is no accident that after the Bolshevik Revo-
lution Maxim Gorky attempted to revive melodrama as a genre: he knew it
was an effective vehicle for mass communication. The artistic avant-garde,
however, from Mallarme onV~[ard, chose a hermetic language that required
apprenticeship, a novitiate, if one wanted to enter the chapel.
One could argue about which form of avant-gardism has more perma-
On Difficulty, the Avant-Garde, and Critical Moribundity 13 I
nently affected our cultural lives, but it is wrong simply to equate them and
to assume the compatibility of their goals. And the assumption one some-
times finds among academics-that practices deconstructive of meanings-as-
usual in the world work to subvert the established political and moral order
of things-needs critique as well. Subversion for whom, if communication
with the nonadepts is lost? And to the extent that the language of the priest-
hood eventually enters a more public kind of speech, circulates among the
laity-witness the term deconstruction, which has by now become a journal-
istic commonplace, applied to everything from architecture to clothing-it
is inevitably in a parodistic version of its original contextual meaning and
force.
As someone educated when the avant-garde of high modernism still held
sway, I was initiated into the belief that difficulty was a positive value in art
and that the explication of that difficulty was a worthwhile enterprise. It was
worthwhile first of all because unpacking, making perspicuous, and trying to
understand the difficulties of a Mallarme sonnet or Eliot's Four Quartets took
one to what those poems were "about." They were, among other things,
about the difficulty of expression in a language that needed to be made new
to be faithful to the new, to the unsaid and unthought. "For last year's words
belong to last year's language I And next year's words await another voice." 4
And then it was worthwhile because the explication of difficulty allowed
one to exchange the understandings gained with others-they became the
basis of a sharing of precious knowledge gained, incipiently the foundation
of a community of understanding. (I remember that this sometimes took the
form of one of the early Mike Nichols-Elaine May dialogues: "Yes, you've
read ... Zarathustra?" "Yes, yes. It was as if the heavens had opened.") So that
exegesis was valued-in the classroom, in critical writing-not only because
it appeared the royal road to understanding-of things we sensed were im-
portant to understand-but because it educated us as finer sensibilities, and
indeed created that "us," as partakers in a knowledge worth having.
Northrop Frye could argue in 1957, in his "Polemical Introduction" to
Anatomy cif Criticism: "Everyone who has seriously studied literature knows
that the mental process involved is as coherent and progressive as the study
of science." 5 And in this belief there is more of a continuity between New
Criticism and the French structuralist theories that came to contest its hege-
mony in American universities than is often perceived. If the notion of a
"science litteraire" violated the genteel exegetical traditions of New Criti-
cism, it nonetheless promoted what was essentially another kind of formal-
ism. Both formalisms believed that the patient discernment of literary form
and structure were steps on the way to understanding. IfNew Criticism be-
lieved the object of understanding was the poem itself, and structuralism
preferred the genre or the overarching notion--such as "narrativity"-they
132 PETER BROOKS
were united in the faith that knowledge of literature, what it meant and how
it meant-the conditions for the creation of meaning-was knowledge
worth having and worth constructing a curriculum on.
To be sure, our recent culture wars were partly about a nostalgia-on the
part of extra-academic cultural commentators, joined by the cultural right
within the academy-for a polite, gentlemanly exegesis of great literary
works, expressed in a language that didn't need much more technicity than
sestet and metaphor. Whereas the public is perfectly willing to concede that
the languages of the sciences-and perhaps even the social sciences-may
evolve in response to the imperatives of research, produce new conceptual
difficulties and even neologisins, the humanities ought to remain the realm
of the true, the tested, indeed of the eternally true. Like "human nature" it-
self the subject matter and language of literary study and philosophy should
not change. Since we humanists still write about Sophocles and Shakespeare,
why need we invent new difficulties in the talk about them? Let the hu-
manities remain the place of cultural truisins.
Nonetheless, even' if we protest the terins given to the debate by the cul-
tural right, I think we are forced to recognize a true crisis in the notion of
difficulty. For one thi~g. it has lost its moorings in the notion of the avant-
garde as a socioculturally valid group and practice and object of attention. It
is not that there won't always be art that is misunderstood, that is in advance
of public understanding and acceptance-although the recuperative powers
of the media and of popular culture have become astonishing, and it now
takes precious little time for the challenging art object to be recycled in MTV
form. It is that the sociocultural form (should I now say formation?) of the
avant-garde now lacks plausibility. The dynamic of the postmodern is such
that the exJ>ressive media of literature and art no longer have the ability to
shock and perplex, at least not in forins that drive those who would under-
stand them-as once was the case-to patient exegesis and explication.
The modernist avant-garde produced criticism as a necessary completion
of its artistic practices (Eliot's footnotes to The Wasteland might offer the par-
odic instance of this, and Nabokov's Pale Fire its metainstance). Put in his-
torical perspective, the emergence of literary criticism as an autonomous
field of practice and then an academic discipline more or less tracks the evo-
lution of avant-gardes from romanticism onward. It responds to the rise of
what Charles Taylor calls "the Romantic ideal of self-completion through
art." 6 This is foreshortened history, of course, in that there has been criticism
from Aristotle on, especially in the form of poetics, which has perhaps been
especially congenial at moments of neoclassical revival, where conventions,
rules of genre, the grammar f{om which individual utterances are forged be-
come most evident. The need for exegetical criticism, originally associated
with sacred texts demanding interpretation within the moving horizons of
On Difficulty, the Avant-Garde, and Critical Moribundity I 33
history, becomes most clearly marked with the rise of the difficult art of the
modern, say from Baudelaire through Woolf. Creative writers themselves be-
come critics, and they spawn exegetes. The relation of exegesis to text is es-
sentially collaborative--by no means always harmonious but nonetheless a
recognized commonality of enterprise in the reception and sharing of un-
derstandings.
The coming to America of continental "theory" in the 1970s created a
new avant-garde of sorts-a genuine one, I think-and a new exegetical en-
terprise. Yet its fate was different because there was never a public consensus
that the work in question constituted art objects whose public exegesis was
important. (Witness the almost total neglect by the New York Review of Books,
founded in the early 1960s, of the work ofLacan, Derrida, Barthes, Foucault,
etc.) The need for exegetical criticism, it seems, was linked to poetry and
novels. Expository prose of a challenging order could be left to take care of
itself. If not immediately comprehensible, to hell with it. Meanwhile, there
apparently ceased to be anything identifiable as avant-gardism in poetry and
fictional prose (the French "New Novel" of the 1960s is the last example that
comes to mind), although the avant-garde impulse continued to manifest it-
self in the visual arts, especially arts of performance. Art Forum for a while
achieved a kind of mediatory critical function that literary journals had lost.
It is at least conceivable, then, that the present crisis of criticism derives
from a lack of need for criticism in the public perception. Literary journal-
ism of the daily and weekly sort can take care of instructing us what to read
and to see and to listen to. There is no longer an imperative to look in the
mirror ofhigh art and discuss the reflections one finds there. In this sense the
present crisis of critical languages, of how to write criticism, is authentically
a crisis of criticism itself. One sits down to write criticism without any sure
sense of the audience it might be addressed to, and thus language, tone, and
even subject matter become desperately difficult to define. Over my many
years as a writer of criticism I have found it increasingly difficult to know
what I am writing it for. Who will publish it? Where will it be published?
Who, if anyone, will read it? I can no longer harbor a conviction that any-
one cares.
The situation of criticism was impressed on me recently when I wrote
one of those (agonizing) letters of comparative evaluation of candidates for
a professorship at a major university. All the candidates had published origi-
nal, important, and readable books. Not one of these books has been re-
viewed in any media one would recognize as "public"-and I don't simply
mean the New York Times Book Review but such other serious media as New
York Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books, Los
Angeles Times Book Review, and the nearly moribund quarterlies such as Par-
tisan Review. I suppose the commonsense explanation is that there are too
IJ4 PETER BROOKS
many books being published because academic careers demand it. But it's by
no means clear there has been a recent increase in publication rates in liter-
ary criticism-it has become more difficult than ever to get oneself pub-
lished. What I think we really see is a failure of discrimination. It's as if the
public journals had accepted the view of the cultural right and decided that
all academic literary criticism is unreadable and trivial and therefore needn't
be bothered with. This was, after all, the position championed by Lynne Ch-
eney when she headed the official organization for our kinds of study, the
National Endowment for the Humanities.
But if we have resigned ourselves to the situation of seeing good work go
unreviewed (I don't want to be construed as saying that we should so resign
ourselves-we need new journals that do serious public book reviewing), it
may very well be from a certain weariness with literary criticism itself,
which I think derives from a crisis in belief about its usefulness. Most of us
who continue to write and publish literary criticism don't particularly enjoy
reading it any more--not most of it, anyway. We continue to do so (if we do)
out of a sense of duty, because we continue to think it important to learn
what's new in the discourse. But most of the fun is gone, since the stakes ap-
pear to be diminished:, and there isn't much sense of real dialogue about our
understandings of texts and issues that matter-that matter in a way on
which there is some consensus. Literary criticism gained its broadest audi-
ence at a time when literature was taking the place of religion, as a kind of
secular scripture--see Wallace Stevens for an extreme statement of the case:
"Mter one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is the essence that takes its
place as life's redemption." 7 It may prove to have been a historically delim-
ited field.
The partisans of cultural studies may claim that they understood this
some time ago and therefore have even in some academic settings replaced
departments of comparative literature (for instance) with departments of
cultural studies. Yes, but: if literary criticism is a dying art, in too much of
cultural studies there is no art at all-no hypotheses at least as good as those
of the New Critics, or Frye, or the structuralists to account for the condi-
tions of the production of meaning in the field under study. Although rec-
ognizing that we all now do cultural studies in one form or another, and ap-
plauding the breadth this has given to our inquiries, I also recognize the
truth of Geoffrey Hartman's recent strictures:
Literature is becoming less the object of literary study than of an informal sociology
or politology. I say "informal" because so few who approach literature this way have
actually worked in sociology or political science. They use socioeconomic cate-
gories-particularly' class, gend,er, race and property relations-to inspect works of
art as "products" of a certain form of social life, which Marx (who is being read)
considered temporary or transitional. The motivation of most of these analyses is so-
cial justice, and the field established by them is what we call cultural studies. Yet
where do we find, together with that social awareness, the inventiveness, playfulness,
and art-centeredness of a Kenneth Burke?8
It is perhaps unfair, or at least premature, at this point to demand of cultural
studies a full-fledged theory of practice. But in the meantime the problem is
that so much of it combines a smug assumption that it is on the side of the
moral and political angels with a disparate set of critical tools and concepts
that never seek justification. Too often it employs a writing style that, for all
its gestures toward global inclusion, proves its moral earnestness by in-group
allusions. In short, it assumes virtue rather than establishing it.
The solution to all these woes recommended by Rosenbaum-and many
before him-is a return to what he calls "aesthetic considerations," by which
he really means a "return to questions of value: How good is this passage or
play, how do we judge it better or worse than something else in Shakespeare
or in the work of other dramatists?" 9 I think it strange that "value" should be
evoked in this manner, as if a kind of literary stockbroking could save us-
Frye warned us in that same "Polemical Introduction" about the shiftiness of
such valuations in the absence of any overall sense of the structure and func-
tions of literature and criticism. This is "aesthetics" only in a narrow and rel-
atively trivial understanding, although one that, alas, is common.
Hartman also wants to revive aesthetics, but he has in mind something
more serious, since he evokes Friedrich Schiller's concept of" aesthetic edu-
cation," which he glosses as meaning "that art is taken to be a serious empir-
ical object of study and a field encouraged to reflect on itself, on its role in
human relations .... There is no other way to strengthen aesthetic educa-
tion than to expose students to art itself and those who have written pas-
sionately and critically about it." 10 Schiller in fact saw the need for aesthetic
education in nearly anthropological terms, as a development of the Spieltrieb,
that play function that is the essence of human freedom. The aesthetic edu-
cation of humankind is on this model both an end in itself and a precondi-
tion of culture as an active, transformative medium in which people mutu-
ally civilize one another and proclaim their sphere of freedom from the state.
"There is no other way of making sensuous man rational except by first
making him aesthetic," writes Schiller, arguing for the power of fictions to
restore people to their humanity. 11
I think the notion of" aesthetic education" is useful also because it takes
us back to pedagogy. Much of the exegetical work of the New Critics, for
instance, came in shortish essays that were very much like classroom exer-
cises, and I. A. Richards's "practical criticism," indeed, began as a classroom
experiment. That is, to the extent that such criticism was written, and pub-
lished, it very much limned a certain pedagogical practice. It didn't seek to
136 PETER BROOKS
.
be an earthshaking new interpretation bound in hard covers. We have placed
a premium on "original published scholarship" that leads to a certain critical
hyperventilation, the promotion into books of what should not be books,
and the claim to significance where one would prefer a modest elucidation.
We all know why this is so. Indeed, I find myself telling younger col-
leagues that only books "count" any more; articles just don't make the
weight. The example of my late colleague Paul de Man, who was appointed
to a professorship at Yale on the basis of one slim volume of collected essays
(Blindness and Insight), seems to me irreproducible today. The decline in pres-
tige of the exegetical article points to another problem: the etiolation of
those journals that used to bridge the gap between the academy and a "gen-
eral public;' mainly the famous quarterlies. I doubt if anyone under the age
of seventy turns to Partisan Review for its literary and cultural commentary,
and if the library catalogue didn't assure me of the continued existence of
Kenyon Review and Hudson Review, I would not be aware of it. Commentary
and the New Criterion disqualified themselves as interpreters of culture by
becoming public executioners during the culture wars. And nothing has
come to take the place of these journals of mediation. (Witness the rise to
prominence of Lingua Franca, a kind of academic People magazine; and even
it is now defunct.) But there is perhaps no point in lamenting the decadence
of the serious cultural journals since journals of any sort mainly go unread at
present.
The decline of the quarterlies of course can be explained as part of a gen-
eral decline of the literate print media in an age of the "frenzy of the visible;'
to use Jean-Louis Comolli's phrase. 12 Nonetheless, it participates as well in a
loss of faith in the value of exchanged understandings about the meanings
and conditions of meaning of literature. I don't think it is simply nostalgia to
claim there was once a culture in which serious writers and serious readers
were able to meet on the grounds of what to think about Kafka or Wallace
Stevens. Now, each new book of literary and cultural criticism must be an
individual performance, strenuous, original, self-inventing-and inventive,
too, of an audience it hopes to shape and indeed create through its rhetoric.
Some of these performances succeed remarkably-as in the work ofJudith
Buder. Many others simply produce a kind of hypertrophy of rhetoric and
alleged significance.
Have I then argued myself into a corner where literary criticism must fi-
nally expire and be seen in historical perspective as the acolyte of mod-
ernism, rising and falling with the long passage from romanticism through to
postmodernism? I think this is a distinct possibility, although not one to
which I am currendy willing to resign myself. I consider that the writing of
literary and cultural critique' is still worth the agony. This may be simply the
result of years of professional deformation. But there still are grounds to be-
lieve that criticism matters. To paraphrase the French poet Paul Claude}, the
world is before us like a text to be deciphered. One need not share Claudel's
religious commitment to believe that the semiotics of literature and culture
are crucial to understanding not only discrete messages and how they affect
us but also our very composition as fiction-making animals.
Criticism may need to think more of its pedagogical nature and recreate
a closer relation to classroom praxis. I know this sounds like a recipe for su-
perior boredom. But I think most of us-meaning academics--spend a
good deal of time making ourselves clear in response to student questions
both intelligent and dumb, and intelligibility in response to questions, both
real and imagined, is a good test of critical writing. Mikhail Bakhtin com-
ments ofDostoevsky's characters that their"every thought ... senses itself to
be from the very beginning a rejoinder in an unfinalized dialogue." 13 If the
agony of writing criticism makes it most often seem a deeply monologic en-
terprise, one can nonetheless keep the dialogic ideal in mind. A dialogic
model might conduce to a certain modesty of critical tone. We have come
to embrace the notion of the critic as creator, but there is plenty of evidence
that the public prefers to see us in the more humble role of reader's surro-
gate, stand-in, go-between-which is after all the traditional and honorable
role ofHermes.We might well recall Diderot's Paradoxe sur le comedien, which
argued that the actor performs most effectively when he eschews identifica-
tion with his role in favor of conceiving the performance from the point of
view of the audience.
But if literary criticism is in fact a terminal case, what is to be gained from
recommendations about its tone and manner? Roland Barthes wrote that
"those who neglect to reread condemn themselves to reading always the
same story." 14 This of course evokes a kind of mandarin practice, of the
leisurely rereading and patient exegesis oftexts.Yet I don't see that we have
much more to offer. Nor do I think that patient rereading is a negligible en-
terprise, especially when the notion of text has been expanded to include all
cultural discourses, manifestations, artifacts, performances. Here, in my view,
the move into cultural studies has been wholly positive. Where it has lost its
way is in its all too frequent abandonment of the patient practice of reading
in its urge to make heady megaconceptual claims and to construe itself as
the teaching of virtue. All of culture offers itself to us for critical decipher-
ment. But the decipherment must be real, not simply a simulacrum in the
service of in-group spiritual uplift.
And of course as academics we have a responsibility to work toward the
reform of those university practices that have encouraged critical hypertro-
phy: the demand for ever more publication for hiring and tenuring, the
weighing of publications by the kilo, the devaluation of the critical essay, the
hyping of the modest contribution to knowledge. If the tenets ofhigh mod-
138 PETER BROOKS
ernism and the avant-garde no longer command allegiance, it may be time

to reexamine the kind of value they assigned to individualism and original-
ity. Reconceiving research and critical writing as a collaborative enterprise
could move us toward greater dialogism.And,just for starters, I propose that
the contributors to this volume persuade some combination of benefac-
tors-perhaps a consortium of university presses along with foundations-
to found a new periodical dedicated to serious critical reviews of serious
critical writing. I don't see how we can move forward without that.
Notes
I. Ron Rosenbaum, "The Play's the Thing, Again," New York Times Book Review,
Aug. 6, 2000, I2-Ij.
2. Linda Charnes, "We Were Never Early Modern," cited in ibid., I2.
3. Guillaume Apollinaire, "La Jolie Rousse," in Calligrammes (Paris: Gallimard,
I92S).
4· T. S. Eliot, "Four' Quartets," in Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950 (New York:
Harcourt Brace, I950).
S· Northrop Frye,Anatomy of Critidsm (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University
Press, I9S7), IO-n.
6. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
I989). 409. .
7. Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous (NewYork:Vintage Books, I990), ISs.
8. Geoffrey Hartman, Aesthetidde; or, Has Literary Study Grown Old? Emory Hu-
manities Lectures (Emory University, I999), II.
9· Rosenbaum, "Play's the Thing, Again;' I3.
10. Hartman, Aestfietidde, 4- s.
I I. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. and ed. Elizabeth
M.Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon, I967), 161.
I2. Jean-Louis Comolli, "Machines of the Visible;' in The Cinematic Apparatus, ed.
Theresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath (New York: St. Martin's, 1980), I22-23.
I3. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems in Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 32.
14. Roland Barthes, SIZ (Paris: Editions du Seuil, I970), 22-23.
ROBERT KAUFMAN 9
Difficulty in Modern Poetry and Aesthetics
THAT THE NOTORIOUS difficulty of modernist poetry could provide a

critical purchase on recent debates over "difficult" academic prose might
seem dubious. Or worse, the suggested relationship to poetry might prove
congenial to those who overhastily assert that much of contemporary theo-
retical discourse in the humanities, pretending to describe sociohistorical re-
ality, actually commits egregious crimes of genre with every line it writes:
texts that would otherwise be recognized as impressively bad prose poems
instead pass for something called theory (or theoretically informed analysis).
That is, when liberal and left commentators have criticized the fashion for
what is seen as needless obscurity or difficulty, the charge of inappropriate
or adolescent literariness is often implicidy or explicitly in play. (I'll leave
aside the somewhat different lines of critique found in conservative and
right attacks on today's academic discourse.) And at least among liberal and
left critics such charges are generally not made from a Socratic-Platonic hos-
tility to the idea that mimesis (artistic representation) might have a right to
participate in, or might have a real contribution to make toward, knowledge
claims. Rather, what is expressed is an essentially Enlightenment and pro-
gressive notion that useful presentations of social, political, historical, and
cultural reality should be offered in as clear and communicable a manner as
possible--so that the greatest possible number of people can share in such
knowledge (and so that they can, should they so decide, attempt to use that
knowledge to change the world).
Poetry may be inspirational, but it's usually not been thought to provide
objective, empirically verifiable facts that can be shared or transparendy
communicated. And ever since romanticism, the communicability even of
poetry's inspiration has been questioned, precisely on the grounds of
whether self-consciously difficult modern art can convey anything of con-
140 ROBERT KAUFMAN
sequence to a broad•(and hence potentially world-changing) audience. That

was already the crux of a century-long left debate before anyone had ever
heard the names Althusser, Lacan, Derrida, Irigaray, Foucault, Kristeva, Ben-
jamin,Adorno, or Zizek. It might thus prove useful, in revisiting that debate
and examining its relevance to discussions of contemporary academic prose,
to consider a telling literary instance that arises in a decidedly unacademic
setting. Although the issue scarcely appears in the film's reception history,
Martin Ritt's Norma Rae (1979) meditates on, and in subtle ways highlights,
the meanings of poetry's difficulty, and it does so while trying to communi-
cate broadly about socioeconomic, political, and cultural struggles. You may
recall that Norma Rae is a fictionalized account of the effort by the Amalga-
mated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU) to organize the then-
largest textile manufacturer in the South, the J. P. Stevens Company. (Years
after the film's release, the ACTWU merged with the International Ladies Gar-
mentWorkers Union to form UNITE, the Union ofNeedletrade and Indus-
trial Textile Employees.) The film's fictional protagonist, Norma Rae Web-
ster, is a composite. of several women workers who had participated in
attempts to organize J. P. Stevens, most notably, Crystal Lee Sutton. 1
One night, after slJe's thrown in her lot with the union and is working
round the clock for -its cause, Norma Rae browses through union organizer
Reuben Warshawsky's volume of Dylan Thomas's poetry. She asks if Dylan
Thomas is "hard to read" and-finding that Thomas does seem difficult to
understand-asks, "Why should I bother?" Reuben casually but pointedly
responds, "Maybe he has something to say to you." Their repartee furthers
not only the ftlm's leitmotif of the social import of advanced levels of liter-
acy, of opportunities for education that for the working class have tended to
go hand in hand with the conquest of some measure of industrial democ-
racy and ec'anomic justice; the conversation also reiterates the ftlm's earlier,
insistent focus on the difficulty of understanding words (and, in turn, the dif-
ficulty of finding words that will communicate ideas that unquestionably
need to be communicated): standing outside the plant and passing out union
literature early in the action, Reuben had heard a then-uncommitted
Norma Rae call out to him, after she had glanced at his proffered leaflet,
"Hey, there's too many big words; if I don't understand it, they [her fellow
workers] ain't gonna understand it."The next time Reuben had given the
still-undecided Norma Rae a leaflet, he'd furthered the same banter and
theme: "I took your advice; I think I got it down to two syllables." "One's
better," she had parried. Yet finally it will be the two syllables of one word,
which she's defiantly written on pasteboard and held high for all inside the
plant to see--UNION-that causes the workers to stop their machines and
that gets Norma Rae accosted, fired, arrested, booked, and jailed. Terminated
and therefore technically no longer an employee eligible to vote for the
Difficulty in Modern Poetry and Aesthetics 141
union, Norma Rae concludes the film standing outside the factory gates
with Reuben, overhearing the jubilant shouts that tell of the union's election
victory by vocalizing-by chanting-that two-syllable word, union. The film.
then ends with Reuben's promising, at their parting, to send Norma Rae the
volume of Dylan Thomas; she tells him not to bother-because she's already
gone out and bought her own copy.
Now, Dylan Thomas is hardly an exemplar of modernist esotericism. On
the contrary, precisely the combination of his perceived accessibility, his able
reconjurations of traditional notions of bardic oracularism and lyric mel-
lifluousness, his progressive sociopolitical stances, and, of course, his roman-
tic hard-drinking image led to Thomas's popularity in activist trade union,
left, and Marxian circles in the United Kingdom and, to a lesser extent, in
the United States. 2 That's why it's so intriguing that Ritt and the film's
screenwriters (Harriet Frank Jr. and Irving Ravetch), well aware of this tra-
dition ofleft Thomas-reception, nonetheless make Thomas into a sign of dif-
.ficulty.As Norma Rae retells a classic left-Enlightenment scenario (in this case
via an encounter with Thomas's poetry), hard-won literary education or aes-
thetically articulated insight parallels, or somehow even contributes to, hard-
won social struggle. But, significandy, the filin.'s conclusion doesn't erase or
resolve the question of why either contest (aesthetic or social) has been
hard-won, which is to say that it doesn't erase the question of difficulty. For
what ultimately persists is the difficulty-indeed, the seeming impossibil-
ity-of the neat integration of realms or levels of experience, thought, and
action.
Having given almost everything to the organizing struggle, having been
the key activist in that struggle, Norma Rae finally finds herself standing lit-
erally outside the struggle's central physical and material location. As the film.
closes, she's outside the factory grounds, banished not by a defection from
class struggle to literary delectation but by the company's retaliatory action
for her having voiced, written, and inspirationally communicated the union's
message; as she speaks warmly of her volume ofDylan Thomas, she now-
in a charged inversion of the old J. S. Mill formulation-can only "overhear"
the triumphant public celebration of her fellow workers inside the plant. It
would be exacdy wrong to see this as what is today typically (and, far too of-
ten, facilely) stigmatized as "bourgeois, self-cultivated transcendence,"
wherein a literary or aesthetic "ideology" of autonomous separation suppos-
edly trumps committed engagement with material, sociopolitical reality. Be-
cause in the most rigorous, tighdy constructed manner the ftlm has ensured
from the start that the literary and the sociopolitical constandy articulate,
without ever determining, each other. Neither causes the other; neither de-
mands an escape from, or triumph over, the other. Instead, the film. manages
to do what critical aesthetic semblance--critical mimesis, critical artistic rep-
142 ROBERT KAUFMAN
resentation-does when it's really working: it makes the audience feel, as an

apparent intellectual-emotional insight (parallel, here, to Norma Rae's own
insight), that the aesthetic and the social necessarily comprehend, translate,
or, on some ultimate level of the characters' own experience, voice one an-
other. In that sense aesthetic experience undertakes the difficult task of mak-
ing or fortifying subjects' felt capacity for transformative relationships with,
and to, conceptual knowledge (and to the empirical world to which con-
ceptual knowledge corresponds).
As usual, the issues are more than academic. I first saw Norma Rae at the
time of its initial release, at a moment of embarking on what I'd assumed
would be a permanendy posditerary trajectory, one that, as it turned out, did
occupy the better part of a decade spent in law school and as a fledgling la-
bor lawyer. The fervent debates over Norma Rae (its basic authenticity; its de-
cisions about addressing "ultimate" matters of sociopolitical causation; its
chosen modalities for representing workers' at-the-machine, in-the-meet-
ing-hall, and at-home experience, not to mention issues of race, gender, and
regionalism; its overall approach to the cinematic means and relations of
artistic production) tliat I'd avidly followed in film, art, and political journals
in some ways paralleled, and in some ways split off entirely from, the aston-
ishing reception the filin enjoyed (immediately and for an impressively long
time thereafter) across wide sectors of labor and in the labor movement it-
self. One could point to various American films that, at least as courageously
and perhaps even more militandy, narrate labor's story (Salt of the Earth and
Harlan County, USA, come immediately to mind, although their genre and
historical differences from Norma Rae--their respectively semidocumentary
and documentary character, along with the McCarthyite context informing
Salt of the Earth's production and distribution batdes-distinguish them from
Norma Rae). 'But quite simply, virtually no other American post-McCarthy
labor film seems so effectively to have reached its intended potential audi-
ences: namely, people currendy experiencing, or likely to experience, organ-
izing drives in their own workplaces.
The rapidity with which Norma Rae became a touchstone, and then the
ways it sustained that status, not only within the labor movement but also for
unorganized workers, was litde short of remarkable. An extraordinary num-
ber of those who have worked in the labor movement, or in government
agencies or independent organizations involved with labor, or in occupa-
tional safety and health and related areas, have testified to this phenomenon.
Within a year of the filin's release the number of workers who began ex-
plicidy referring to or riffmg off the filin's story and dialogue (during union
campaigns, all the way to the sort of National-Labor-Relations-Board elec-
tion portrayed in Norma Rae's penultimate scene) was unprecedented-as,
again, coundess participating workers, as well as union, management, and La-
bor Board representatives, have noted. (I vividly recall experiencing this per-
sonally and recall hearing scores oflabor-movement and Labor Board col-
leagues from around the country report-in a process that spanned years-
about having witnessed near-identical instances of Norma Rae invocation,
allusion, and applied interpretation, quite frequently on or near the shop
floor.) Perhaps more remarkable is the fact that by all accounts this phe-
nomenon continues today, twenty-three years after the film's release. And al-
though Crystal Lee Sutton had vigorous disagreements with the film's por-
trayal of the character that was based in large part on her, it is also the case
that Norma Rae's long afterlife has created successive waves of interest in Sut-
ton's biography and activism; in response Sutton has continued as a notable
presence in labor struggles around the country. She was, for example, one of
the keynote speakers at a June 2001 march-and-rally in Columbia, South
Carolina, that was called to defend the Charleston Five. (The Charleston
Five are activist members of a largely African American local union in the
International Longshoremen's Association, against whom an extremely con-
servative South Carolina state attorney general brought Riot Act charges af-
ter a Charleston judge had refused to enjoin or otherwise curtail their pick-
eting activities in a 1999labor dispute.) Meanwhile, in a striking number of
cases the Norma Rae references made by workers (and by union representa-
tives) have involved the question of the character Norma Rae's reading, of
the way that her burgeoning literary interest functions as a dynamic sign, so
to speak, of her participation in the fight to secure some measure of a si-
multaneously collective and personal autonomy.
One could say that the powerfully felt significance of Norma Rae's po-
etry reading is a palpable, yet difficult or complicated, thing for working
people to explain; but the truth is that it's an inherently difficult thing for
anyone to explain. It bears emphasizing that it's not the matter of seeking to
attain factual knowledge in relation to sociopolitical struggles that's so com-
plicated; however hard certain facts may be to come by, and however com-
plicated are the particular facts themselves, the necessity of getting them, and
the problems caused when they're unavailable, are pretty obvious. What's
more difficult to express is why people's own aesthetic experience can seem
so dramatically to be at stake in social, political, and historical matters. In-
deed, this difficulty of stating (let alone in a descriptive and accessible vo-
cabulary and form) just how and why such things can feel like they are so
inextricably related is one of the oldest conundrums of literary and aesthetic
theory. The enigma is so persistent-and has been so central to politically in-
tended art and criticism-that one begins to understand the paradox of the
orthodox Marxian critic Ernst Fischer's inaugurating his most important lit-
erary-aesthetic work by quoting, with surprising and disarming approval, the
emphatically uncommitted artist Jean Cocteau: "Poetry is indispensable--if
144 ROBERT KAUFMAN
I only knew what for." 3 Well before asking the question of whether difficult
writing might best present the difficulty of this difficult subject matter, one
might observe that there has often enough been a rough consensus about
the difficulty of the subject matter: the difficulty, that is, of understanding and
articulating the aesthetic's status-as individuals and collectivities experience
it-vis-a-vis the sociopolitical and the historical.
Precisely such difficulty has been theorized (from the romantic era of
Kant's third Critique to the modernist period ofBenjamin,Adorno, and the
Frankfurt School-and beyond) as the central problem of modern art and
aesthetic theory. Generally speaking, in these theorizations of what Kant had
initially understood as a "reflective aesthetic judgment" paradoxically syn-
onymous with estrangement and defamiliarization, the aesthetic has been
grasped as the felt-as-necessary (but notoriously difficult to account for)
"bridge" between nature and freedom, cognition and morality, theoretical
and practical reason, fact and value. In short, the aesthetic wants to bridge
objective-conceptual knowledge (or the objective world to which concep-
tual knowledge is meant to correspond) and the subjective human capacity
for a critical agency that would be more than arbitrary in relation to objec-
tive knowledge of existing reality. The key notion is that aesthetic thought-
experience, although feeling itself to be cast in or aiming for conceptual
("objective" or objectively oriented) thought, is not yet substantively-
objectively conceptual. In proceeding via the feeling that it is objective (that
it is keyed to judgments that could be universally shared), aesthetic thought-
experience maintains the form-but only the form-of conceptual thought;
this formality in relation to substantive conceptuality makes the aesthetic ef-
fectively quasi-conceptual. The inherently experimental exercise of that "for-
mal" experience can produce, to paraphrase Kant, a wealth of thought-
emotion that cannot be reduced to any determinate, presently existing
substantive concept and that thus can allow for the emergence or reconfig-
uration of the materials for a subsequent, postaesthetic construction of new
concepts and the sociopolitical dispensations that would correspond to
them. 4
Why do Benjamin's and Adorno's famously "difficult" Marxian restate-
ments of such ideas so often make poetry-lyric poetry in particular-a
special case within this theory or view of how art and aesthetic experience
attempt the difficult task of bridging and the task of stretching (or stretching
past) the bounds of extant concepts (of gesturing toward the construction of
new concepts that would be more than instrumental but also more than ar-
bitrary)? (Here I can only assert something that will receive full elaboration
elsewhere: contrary ·to so mu,ch of contemporary Marxian and Marxian-
inflected theory's "antiaestheticist" hostility to aesthetic experience and aes-
thetic judgment, Marx himself intentionally marshals the aporetic but by no
Difficulty in Modern Poetry and Aesthetics I 45
means paralyzing structure ofKantian reflective aesthetic judgment precisely

for the "theory of praxis" announced in his Theses on Feuerbach.) For the tra-
ditions of poetics in which Benjamin and Adorno participate, modern lyric
ambition stands as a, or even the, high-risk enterprise, the "go-for-broke
game" ["va-banque-Spiel"], ofliterary art: the lyric poem must work coher-
ently in and with the medium-language--that human beings use to artic-
ulate objective concepts, even while the lyric explores the most subjective,
nonconceptual, and ephemeral phenomena. This theoretical or philosophi-
cal difficulty, concerning how simultaneously to think objectivity and sub-
jectivity, also arises practically as lyric's great problem of form-construction:
How-with language alone as medium-to build a solid, convincing artistic
structure out of something as evanescent as subjective song and how, in the
bargain, to delineate or objectivate the impressively fluid contents of capital-
ist modernity? How, spontaneously yet rigorously, to make thought sing and
to make song think? For the Frankfurt School critics, lyric dramatizes with
special intensity aesthetic quasi-conceptuality's more general attempt to
stretch conceptual thought proper; this special intensity arises from lyric's
constitutive need musically to stretch conceptual thought's very medium,
language--to stretch it quasi-conceptually all the way toward affect and
song, but without relinquishing any of the rigor of conceptual intellection. 5
Benjamin and Adorno go on to argue that high capitalist modernity and
its unprecedented acceleration of the abstracting processes of commodifica-
tion (the "reification" not only of objects, products, and people but of
thought and language themselves), along with the concomitant "loss of aura"
(the collapse into immediacy of a previously charged, critically enabling, au-
ratic-aesthetic distance), require that Kantian aesthetic difficulty-the diffi-
culty of grasping and negotiating the transition between types of knowledge
and realms of experience--be supplemented. What, in a later, faster, and
technologically more complex modernity, is Kantian difficulty to be supple-
mented with? Apparently, with a lot more difficulty: more difficulty within
art, and within the judgment, interpretation, and criticism that art calls forth;
and all this for the purpose of accurately conveying the problems bedeviling
the attempt critically to cognize an increasingly opaque modernity. And as
far as Benjamin and Adorno are concerned, a crucial chapter in this modern
aesthetic-social history involves Charles Baudelaire's lyric poetry, where
lyric's presumed condition of possibility-the availability of an auratic, re-
flective experience that in its turn makes possible a noninstrumental, poten-
tially emancipatory capacity for constructing new conceptual-objective
knowledge--seems to have disappeared. Hence the Frankfurt focus on
Baudelaire: Baudelaire, who for his subject "ch[ooses] the modern itself";
who abjures or scorns an already-known socioliterary language, so that his
"lyric poetry is a slap in the face not only to the juste milieu but also to all
146 ROBERT KAUFMAN
bourgeois social sentilnent:' yet whose "tragic, arrogant mask" of advanced

technique is nonetheless-indeed, is in consequence--"truer to the masses"
than conventional" 'poor people's poetry"' (and this because Baudelaire's ex-
perimentalism proves capable ofbringing into aesthetic experience the new
historical reality unavailable to a conventional poetics, a conventional poet-
ics effectively if unwittingly determined by reigning concepts of what social
conditions are or have been). 6 The much-vaunted Frankfurt preference for
modernist artworks of great complexity is the preference for a Baudelairean
art still intent on risking experimental enactments of aura together with
mimetic reflections on modernity's most advanced technical-productive de-
velopments. This is a preference for an art that, while refusing to give up
aura's ghost (which is to say, while continuing its attempts to differentiate it-
self from reification and the reified communicative discourse that have
tended to vitiate aura), also views productive and technological modernity as
having become part of art's very materials.7
To say this much is to say that the Frankfurt School's reputation for diffi-
culty (a reputation that is not the only source but is certainly a crucial source
and touchstone in today's debates about academic prose) is best understood
in relation to the FranldUrters' emphasis on the aesthetic. And although this
clearly involves taking up and foregrounding self-consciously difficult art-
works of the Baudelairean line--and of a properly aesthetic critical prose
aiming stylistically .to dramatize the defamiliarizing experience of the art-
works at issue--it is not only artworks theiDSelves that constitute the aes-
thetic sphere. Benjamin's and Adorno's attempts to contribute to Marxian-
derived projects that seek historically, sociologically, economically, and
politically to grasp capitalist modernity are always to some extent broached
through an aesthetic insight that is prior to, or broader than, their experience
of individual artworks or of artistic tradition more broadly. This ur-aesthetic
inflection inforiDS their criticism not merely because Benjamin and Adorno
are from virtually their earliest years profoundly and preternaturally aesthetic
thinkers and writers, nor does it occur because of some belief they hold in
the sheer superiority of aesthetic modes of thought and presentation.
Rather, the crucial point is that Frankfurt analyses of sociohistorical phe-
nomena tend to concern themselves with human subjects' abilities critically
to take in and respond not only to the local but especially to the larger sys-
temic situations that confront them. This capacity for reflective and poten-
tially activating response is conceived as the possibility of an act of under-
standing that would proceed in a more than merely instrumental, and in a
more than merely arbitrary, manner; that would proceed, in other words, in
a manner directed to'Yard meeting at least the minimal requirements for
critical agency. In the quite Kantian tradition that those in and around the
Frankfurt School generally share, the precise designation for such thought-
experience (where subjectivity itself tries critically to understand its animat-

ing, quasi-conceptual relationship to concepts and objective entities like cap-
italist society) is aesthetic. An aesthetically generated or informed approach is
by no means the only valid path one could or should take when examining
and writing about social phenomena. But for the Frankfurt School the aes-
thetic is by definition the key modality for the investigation and enabling of
subjective, critical human capacities to process intellectually and emotionally
(and to work transformatively with) the overarching objective structural real-
ities of modern society.
A number of conclusions would seem to follow. First, Frankfurt School
commitments to difficulty do not imply that economics, history, sociology,
political science, and the theories attendant on them (and on adjacent disci-
plines) should be characterized willy-nilly by difficult and/ or aesthetically
inflected writing. For the Frankfurt School the aesthetic's difficult modali-
ties can challenge one-sided positivist analyses in which a crucial subjective
element may have essentially been ignored or banished; Frankfurt studies in
fact often dedicated themselves to correcting such positivist one-sidedness.
But this means that there is no warrant for believing that difficult academic
or theoretical writing is inherendy required, advisable, or even justifiable,
much less inherendy progressive or revolutionary. In short, the justification
for difficult writing depends on the materials the writing seeks to present
and on judgments about one's intended audience for the presentation. (In
that light perhaps too litde attention has been paid in the United States to
the ways in which members of the Frankfurt School-even those most
identified with "Mandarinism"-although trying to remain faithful to the
complicated concepts and theories they were developing, nonetheless at-
tempted regularly to modulate their discursive registers and to pursue op-
portunities to address nonacademic audiences via the mass media, most no-
tably, radio and newsmagazines.) 8
Even where complex modern artworks are not the central concern, if
the materials under study nonetheless contain an important aesthetic ele-
ment-if the materials are in significant part composed of or oriented to-
ward human beings' attempts subjectively to imagine their way into the as-
similation and potential re-formation of concepts that correspond to
objectively existing social phenomena-then modalities of aesthetic diffi-
culty may well be called for. And if one traces the course of various Frank-
furt disputes-even or especially those between Benjamin and Adorno, over
technical-mechanical reproducibility and over the need simultaneously to
engage the questions of aura, economic structure, and the aesthetically stim-
ulated reconfiguration of materials for the construction of new concepts-
it turns out that all those difficult dances with aesthetic subjectivity, quasi-
conceptuality, and the not-yet-formed concept are meant to serve an
148 ROBERT KAUFMAN
expanded, noninstruniental notion of"objective" conceptuality and reason.

This is, in effect, the project quietly hinted at in Dialectic of Enlightenment
and more explicitly articulated in Negative Dialectics: an imagining of the
ways in which Enlightenment conceptuality or reason might examine and
critique itself and its own tendencies toward sheerly instrumentalist and
identitarian thought; an imagining of the ways in which conceptuality
might cease to repress those areas of experience and reality left behind after
they've been conceptualized; in sum, an imagining of how scientific (or sci-
entistic-objectivist) conceptuality might remain in dialogue with aesthetic
quasi-conceptuality, with the thought mode that stands formally for the
materials or areas of experience that conceptuality tends to leave behind af-
ter having intellectually "dominated" them. As I've shown at length else-
where, Adorno's and Benjamin's debate over the latter's essay "The Paris of
the Second Empire in Baudelaire"-their debate over competing versions
and approaches to lyric aura-is actually a debate over the possibility of
continuing to expand conceptuality beyond determinist parameters. Signif-
icantly, that debate leads Benjamin not only to write his brilliant "On Some
Motifs in Baudelaire" (with its animating and fruitful tension between the
disappearance oflyric aura and an artistic-critical re-posing of aura precisely
in aura's wake). It also-on his own account-directly leads Benjamin to
think and write a critique of linear, deterministic "progress" and its presum-
ably unbroken "continuum of concepts," a critique that will be known as
the "Theses on 'the Philosophy of History" [Ober den Begriff der
Geschichte] and that will become a key source-text for later Frankfurt ef-
forts to understand, critique, and transform Enlightenment conceptuality
and reason (from Dialectic of Enlightenment all the way to Negative Dialectics,
Aesthetic TheQry, and The Aesthetic Dimension). 9
As far as Benjamin, Adorno, and their cohorts are concerned, all these
ideas depend in part on a criticism that takes care to write some very pre-
cise, concrete, and crackling prose. The desideratum stems at least in part
from Benjamin's theorization (which he often repeats and which Adorno
constantly echoes) of the constellation and force field. Contemporary theoreti-
cal discourse rightly understands the theory and practice of the constellation
as an intellectual attempt nondeterministically to identify and dynamically
connect elements (historical, socioeconomic, cultural) that are not initially
given as relational but that, when animated-constellated-into conjunction
create or reveal a signifying force field. That force field for its part illuminates
the larger social reality whose elements have been brought together in affin-
ity and tension (rather than in a misleadingly integrative totalization) to
make the force field visible. After our previous discussion it may not be sur-
prising to recall that one of the Frankfurters' key models for understanding
how concept-expanding constellations of critical thought are made, and for
how force fields are created, is art: not least, the "go-for-broke" art of lyric
poetry, with its special relationship to conceptuality's basic medium, lan-
guage.And although Benjamin and Adorno emphasize the need for criticism
to learn aesthetic lessons from lyric's manner of constructing constellations,
they nonetheless inveigh against an aestheticist identification between criti-
cism and lyric; they caution against self-deluding modalities in which the
critic tries to write as if he or she were a poet working (even if dialectically-
critically) with aesthetic semblance (Schein). From a Frankfurt perspective
critical writing that invokes the concepts of the constellation and force field
asks to be judged by standards as rigorous as those that Benjamin and
Adorno apply to lyric poetry and other forms and genres of art.
In Benjamin's and Adorno's view artworks are to be judged by how well
they accomplish their difficult constellative task of formally enacting art's de-
terminate indeterminacy, art's exact but capacious-and sociopolitically en-
abling-ambiguity (a "precise ambiguity" that must be spontaneously en-
acted, or forged anew, with each work yet that also springs in some general
way from the fact that art pushes toward an expanded conceptuality while
itself remaining quasi-conceptual). Criticism likewise seeks, with a matching
recourse to experiment and precision, to construct constellations of critical
thought; but unlike art, criticism seeks to do this essentially without sem-
blance. Criticism conceptually articulates the contributions toward an expanded
conceptuality that art has generated mimetically, nondiscursively. Criticism
thus follows art in open-endedly and nondeterministically constructing con-
stellations that are in no way pregiven; but criticism's precisions finally seek
to enunciate conceptually what art has, in accord with its own character,
quite precisely constructed as quasi-conceptual. 10
At any rate criticism's profoundly aesthetic dimension, which sterns from
its affinities with artistic practice and aesthetic theory, becomes ever more
evident when one considers Benjamin's often-stated specification of what,
within criticism, constellative form requires, of how and why it creates a
force field (and this is a specification Adorno will time and again make his
own): in writing that seeks to present constellative critical thought each sen-
tence should point back-formally and substantively-to a constandy mov-
ing center from which that sentence has all along radiated. That's no small
task; in fact, it's pretty damn near impossible, as it perhaps would figure to be,
given that Benjamin develops this ideal of exact, imaginative, in-motion
form largely through his formidable engagements with the formidable artists
of the Baudelairean lyric countertradition. Benjamin's formulation also
stands as one of the great modernist, constructivist reimaginings of that fa-
miliar old lyric-aesthetic friend whom it thereby radically reinvents: organic
form. In Adorno's musical formulation such constructivist reimagining of
what is still really organic form appears, in advanced modernity, as the si-
150 ROBERT KAUFMAN
multaneously dissociative and structural principle of dissonant composi-

tion.11
This would be the moment to turn from the sketching of overviews and
principles toward treatment of concrete examples from Benjamin and
Adorno: toward a detailed engagement with their discussions of nineteenth-
and twentieth-century poetry and the other arts, and then toward coordina-
tion of such a treatment with fuller consideration of contemporary academic
prose's attempts to apply or enact Frankfurt notions of difficulty. Limitations
of space unfortunately make that impossible here; and they likewise prevent
me in this essay from satisfactorily taking up one of the most significant
challenges that Be~amin and Adorno set for themselves and others: that
criticism about aesthetic or aesthetically informed matters should immerse
itself in the problems of contemporary art, including the art of poetry. For
now. the most minimal gestures in that direction will have to suffice and to
serve as a provisional conclusion.
"Baudelaire envisaged readers to whom the reading oflyric poetry would
present difficulties." 12 Benjamin took his life within two years after writing
that well-known first sentence of"On Some MotifS in Baudelaire";Adorno,
for his part, spent a good portion of the next three decades trying to unpack
and trace the meanings of those difficulties for-and in-modern art. The
two short texts presented immediately below come from later moments of
the history Benjamin and Adorno had been investigating; these texts are sep-
arated by almost thirty years and are authored by two of the United States'
most important contemporary poets, both of whom, although they belong
to different generations, are known for their filiations with experimental tra-
ditions of modern lyric (and for their more-than-passing interest in what
Frankfurt School aesthetics has itself meant for post- 1945 poetry). If these
texts seem far fi:om mainstream or direct styles of lyric address, they never-
theless take up the very problem that Norma Rae discovers and voices in
her fraught initial encounter with the nontransparency of even a Dylan
Thomas lyric. First, a passage from Barbara Guest's book-length poem Sym-
biosis (2000), a work made in collaboration with the painter Laurie Reed:
The difficult! the difficult!
loosen the ropes that entangle it,

tear them down from the mast!
The schooner off its route,

Difficulty in Modern Poetry and Aesthetics I 5I
adios to the bird of prey,

flies in another direction, the nineteenth
century
wears a plaid cap. 13

Guest-now in her eighties-is one of the original members of the
"New York School" of poets; the New York School has, of course, been
made almost synonymous with the advent of postmodernism in American
poetry (although it is significant that Guest, often deemed the school's most
aesthetically fearless and formally uncompromising artist, is also thought of
as its most relentless modernist). Here, characteristically, she swings with such
grace of musical phrase and gentle backbeat that the gravity of her subject
seems to register only recursively. Playfully and exclamatorily turning difficult
from adjectival description into a substantive that is then itself made to sig-
nify a quality or state of being, Guest uses both sound values and the sus-
pended pause of the page's blank space to make "difficult!" virtually chime
with "entangle it." She sets the pleasing suggestions of sonic and visual affin-
ity in intriguing tension with the perhaps paradoxical command to loosen
the bonds that entangle "the difficult." (Unentangled, will Difficulty Un-
bound prove more--or less-difficult? Will it move farther from, or closer
to us?What of the fact that the ropes entangling it seem to be made of these
verse-lines themselves?) Meanwhile, the increasingly complicated-yet in-
creasingly mellifluous, sensually serpentine--commingling of pleasure and
problem seems to suggest a triangulation of the present moment (the con-
temporary perils and beckonings of song and thought) with two crucial ear-
lier moments of history (and of literary history): Homer singing about
Odysseus's self-torturing attempt to know the Sirens' song without being fa-
tally dashed against the rocks; and the death ships' mascot-albatrosses in the
flights of Coleridgean and Baudelairean song.
If Guest implicitly shades in the Homeric instance as the ancient or ar-
chaic foundation stone in this structure of music-and-dilemma (a structure
that yields, among other things, musical dilemma as both artistic and social
problem), her more charged historical gesture casts the Coleridgean and, es-
pecially, the Baudelairean instance not just as absurdly outdated ("the nine-
teenth I century I wears a plaid cap") but as positively archaic in their turn.
Indeed, for the nineteenth-century or Baudelairean flaneur figure, with all
its cool-culture cachet (not least in its repeated rediscovery and celebration
during the last three decades of poetics and criticism), to be pictured now in
a plaid cap is playfully but insistently to have the "fli[ght] in another direc-
tion" operate to make "the nineteenth I century" (whose very enjambment
conveys its being reduced to pieces of itself) more archaic than the Odyssey.
Or, perhaps more devastatingly, it is (in line with Benjamin's analysis of what
152 ROBERT KAUFMAN
had once made Baudelaire so modern) our moment that is archaic and the
Homeric that is modern, whereas the presumably modernist-archaic epoch
offlaneurisme (so imbricated, in Benjamin's thinking, with the emergence of
both modernism and Marxism) has become that trivial thing, the simply
quaint or comically outdated: "a plaid cap." The exacting construction of
syntactical indeterminacies drives home the poem's exploration of the am-
biguous cross-directionality of the phenomena at issue, quite pointedly on
the model of ships crossing in the night (is it that "schooner" or "the bird of
prey" that actually "flies in another direction" and gives us to understand the
plaid-cap nature of a nineteenth century that will apparently last just as long
as postmodern celebrations of it-celebrations, that is, of a certain aesthetic-
politicalflaneurisme?). In any case Guest's stripped-down but sinuous lyric,
reaccessing the oldest and most troubling riddles in both poetic and socio-
cultural history, works from a long-standing nexus of music, meditation, and
difficulty to ask again about what has changed and what is new-and about
how to ask that question itself. 14
And here is the poem "for," from Michael Palmer's 1974 volume The Cir-
cular Gates:
for ...
This is difficult but not impossible: coffee

childhood; in the woods there's a bird;
its song stops you and makes you blush
and so on; it's her
small and dead behind the roses
better left alone; we wander around the park
and out of our mouths come blood and smoke
and sounds; small children and giants
young mothers and big sisters
will be walking in circles next to the water15
Palmer-one of the most admired poets writing today in English and a
member of the Chancellors' Board of the Academy of American Poets-
began to come to prominence in the early 1970s as a new voice extending
aspects of the experimental lyric practice of the "San Francisco Renais-
sance" (most associated with Robert Duncan, to whom Palmer was extraor-
dinarily close until Duncan's 1988 death). The Circular Gates, with its epi-
graph from one of the volume's abiding presences, the great left, modernist
poet Cesar Vallejo ("Toda la canci6n I cuadrada en tres silencios [All the
song I quartered in three silences]"), was one of Palmer's first books.
"Coffee I childhood" is indeed "difficult but not impossible" to wrap
one's mind around; the two don't tend logically or sequentially to go to-
gether. Except that they do, retrospectively: in the aftermath of thought-pro-
voking, Madeleine-spiked cups of coffee that fuel the view back toward the
past. Such retrospection here moves somewhat eerily, if not surprisingly, into
nostalgia for lyric's own vulgar-modern roots; it moves, that is, to echoes of
Dante's "wood" and haunted-forest birdsong and common tongue. Yet po-
etry's historicallyricization ofbirdsong also appears here as the object of cri-
tique, a self-mockery at once gende and unsetding, as the straightforwardness
of Palmer's language not only undercuts any possible divineness in this com-
edy but also shifts quite explicidy to the language of parody and cliche:
"makes you blush I and so on"; and then, disturbingly, we pass from parody
to something noirish, violent, troublingly ambiguous (is the "her" of"her I
small and dead behind the roses" a girl, a woman, the bird, birdsong in
modernity, institutional-cliche birdsong?). In its direct and slighdy clipped
and then periodically more expansive rhythms and diction the poem moves
from enunciations of imagistic strangeness toward full-blooded surrealism:
toward "mouths" "out of" which emerge "blood and smoke" (and, only at
that point, out of which also emerge audible articulations-"sounds"); to-
ward a pairing of "children and giants" that turns what otherwise might
merely be a slightly asymmetrical coupling ("young mothers and big sis-
ters") into a jointure that helps unfold an arresting other-logic.
Progressing through vocabularies of estrangement and parody and disso-
nant critique, and with an irregular start-and-stop metrics that nonetheless
makes felt a coherent rhythmic expansion and contraction of thought,
Palmer's almost-deadpan delivery yields weavings and phrasings that stretch
from a classic surrealism to his own, remade-again language: of fable,
Grimms' fairy tale, philosophical meditation, singsong nursery rhyme, We-
bernesque condensation. With the final line's return to an expanded length
we catch up to find we've all along been treading a homeopathically artifi-
cial path, one that has, paradoxically, had us traveling backward-forward to-
ward breath-song's circulations around nature's life source: " ... small chil-
dren and giants I young mothers and big sisters I will be walking in circles
next to the water."
Much more is at work in these ten lines, and those additional elements
could be felt without specialized knowledge of poetic history. But such
knowledge would help one better describe the virtuosic formallayerings that
contribute decisively to the reader's sensing of a charged and ghosdy
echolalia. For Palmer has pillaged and translated the majority of these lines
from Rimbaud's Les flluminations, adding crucial components to them,
torquing them differendy, and-perhaps most ambitiously-imagining and
working out the sedimented form- and content-effects that will carry over
or be created when he replaces Rimbaud's already modernist prose-poem
passages into still-more-modern verse lines (in ways suggesting that, at how-
ever subterranean a level, the formal transposition or retranslation is itself
154 ROBERT KAUFMAN
crucial in order to convey not only estrangement but also song's self-
renewal, melody's altered, stagger-step yet weirdly elegant reemergence from
song's wake and its own self-critique). If experimental lyric's re-posing and
exercising of such formal aesthetic dynamics and capacities can indeed prove
"difficult but not impossible," it may also, through its work, help demon-
strate-or stimulate-a critical subjectivity that asks about how to know the
coordinates of a much-changed world and about how to refashion knowl-
edge-processes themselves. 16 With such necessary, and necessarily complex,
explorations, contemporary poetry rededicates itself to what an earlier stage
of modernism had likewise taken from a still earlier moment of art and crit-
icism (a still earlier moment called romanticism): a commitment to the chal-
lenge--at once aesthetic and sociopolitical-of what is difficult.
Notes
For their responses to earlier versions of this essay I am grateful to Bill Brown, Adam
Casdin, Norma Cole, Jonathan Culler, Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Saree Makdisi,Joce-
lyn Saidenberg, Arthur Strum, Robert von Hallberg, and Alex Woloch. I am also in-
debted to numerous former colleagues from a different, sometimes overlapping
world, including especially Robert Remar, initially of the National Labor Relations
Board and, later, counsel to the International Longshore and Warehouse Workers
Union, AFL-CIO; th~ late Maxine Auerbach, initially of the National Labor Relations
Board and then counsel to numerous San Francisco Bay Area unions; Michael
Eisenscher, former field organizer for the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine
Workers ofAmerica; Mary Ann Massenburg, District 65, United Automobile Work-
ers of America, AFL-CI!J; and David Borgen, Coummunication Workers of America,
AFL-CIO.
1. For a quick rehearsal of the film's background and the labor history it tells see
Carlton Jackson, Picking Up the Tab: The Life and Movies of Martin Ritt (Bowling
Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1994), 180-93.
2. For a useful, essentially orthodox Marxian recounting of this Thomas-and-the-
left history see Victor N. Paanam!n, "Dylan Thomas as Social Writer: Toward a
Caudwellian Reading;' Nature, Society, and Thought 3, no. 2 (1990): 167-78.
3. Jean Cocteau, quoted in Ernst Fischer, The Necessity of Art, trans. Anna Bostock
(1957; reprint, London: Penguin, 1963), 7·
4· For discussion see, e.g., Anthony J. Cascardi, Consequences of Enlightenment
(Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Frances Ferguson, Solitude and
the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (New York: Routledge,
1992); Howard Caygill, Art ofJudgment (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); Robert Kaufinan,
"Red Kant, or the Persistence of the Third Critique in Adorno and Jameson;' Critical
Inquiry 26, no. 4 (summer 2ooo): 682-724; and Robert Kaufinan, "Negatively Capa-
ble Dialectics: Keats, Vendler, Adorno, and the Theory of the Avant-Garde;' Critical
Inquiry 27, no. 2 (winter 2001): 354-84.
5· See Adorno's quite Benjaminian "On Lyric Poetry and Society;' in Theodor
Adorno, Notes to Literature, ed. RolfTiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, 2

vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991-92), 1:43, 44;"Rede iiber Lyrik
und Gesellschaft;' in Adorno, Noten zur Literatur, ed. RolfTiedemann, 4 vols. (Frank-
furt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1958-74), r:85, 87.
For more on the history and theory of Benjamin's and Adorno's approaches to
lyric see Robert Kaufinan, "Aura, Still," October 99 (winter 2002): 45-80; and Robert
Kaufinan, "Adorno's Social Lyric: Poetics, Aesthetics, Modernity," in The Cambridge
Companion to Adorno, ed.Tom Huhn (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press,
forthcoming).
6. Adorno, "On Lyric Poetry and Society," 44, 45-46; "Rede iiber Lyrik und
Gesellschaft," 87, 89-90. (Adorno here again seeks to telescope Benjamin's prodi-
gious although largely uncompleted writings on Baudelaire into a few pages.)
7. For sustained treatment of Frankfurt School analyses of the Baudelairean coun-
tertradition in modern lyric, and for Benjamin's, Brecht's, and Adorno's surprising
later indications that lyric aura might have a renewed, progressive role to play in con-
temporary poetry and theory (qfter lyric's apparent supervention by mechanical-
technical reproduction or reproducibility}, see Kaufman, "Aura, Still."
8. Although Herbert Marcuse--and the Benjamin of the mid-1930s-would be
obvious instances, the case is perhaps best made by considering the most ostensibly
Mandarin of the Frankfurt critics; in that light see, e.g., the May 5, 1969, interview
with Adorno that appeared in Der Spiegel under the title "Keine Angst vor dem
Elfenbeinturm;' trans. Gerhard Richter (the literary critic, not the painter) under the
title "Who's Afra~d of the Ivory Tower? A Conversation with Theodor W. Adorno,"
ed. and with an introduction by Richter, Monatashifte for Deutschsprachige Literatur
und Kultur 94, no. r (spring 2002): ro-23.
9· See, again, Kaufman, "Aura, Still," esp. 73-74 n. 46. For a valuable consideration
of how the triangulated crises of aura, experience, and conceptuality inform an al-
ways-implicit ethical theory in Adornian and Frankfurt thought see J. M. Bernstein,
Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press,
2001). See also Walter Benjamin, "The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire," in
Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans.
Harry Zohn (London: New Left Books, 1973), 9-106; and Walter Benjamin, "On
Some MotifS in Baudelaire;' in Walter Benjamin, Rluminations: Essays and Reflections,
ed. and introduced by Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken,
1969}, 155-200, 217-5r;Walter Benjamin, "Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baude-
laire" and "Ober einige Motive bei Baudelaire," in Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte
Schriften, prepared with the cooperation ofTheodor W. Adorno and Gershom Sc-
holem, ed. RolfTiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhauser, 7 vols. in 14 individ-
ual vols., plus 3 supplement vols., (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972-99), 1.2:431-654·
Most of these texts are likewise found in Walter Benjamin, Rluminationen:Ausgewiihlte
Schriften (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1961}; see also Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire:
Bin Lyriker im Zeitalter des Hochkapitalismus. Zwei Fragmente, ed. and with an afterword
by RolfTiedemann (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969}. See also Theodor Adorno and Wal-
ter Be~amin, Briqwechsel, 1928-1940, ed. Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1994},
138 ff., 364 ff., and 388 ff.; in English, The Complete Correspondence, 1928-1940, ed.
156 ROBERT KAUFMAN
Henri Lonitz, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
I999), 104 ff., 280 ff., and 298 ff. Finally, see Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Phi-
losophy of History," in flluminations, 253-64; "Ober den Begriff der Geschichte,"
Gesammelte Schriften 1:693-704.
IO. For a simultaneously comprehensive and succinct meditation on these ideas
about constellative form in critical writing-and for an identification of Benjamin
as the greatest theorist and practitioner of such writing--see Theodor Adorno, "The
Essay as Form," Notes to Literature I (I991): 3-23;"Der Essay als Form," Noten zur Lit-
eratur I (I998): 9-49.
II. For an extended discussion see Kaufman, "Aura, Still," esp. 74-79.
I2. Benjamin, "On Some MotifS in Baudelaire," I55; ["Baudelaire hat mit Lesern
gerchnet, die die Lektiire von lyrik vor Schwierigkeiten stellt"), "Uber einige Mo-
tive bei Baudelaire," Gesammelte Schriften 1.2:607.
I3. Barbara Guest and Laurie Reid, Symbiosis (Berkeley, Calif.: Kelsey St. Press,
2000), n.p. Guest's recent work also includes the Adorno-invoking Rocks on a Platter:
Notes on Literature (Hanover, N.H.:Wesleyan University Press, I999); and if So, Tell Me
(London: Reality Street Editions, I999); see also her Stripped Tales (Berkeley, Calif.:
Kelsey St. Press, I995);·and Quill, Solitary, APPARITION (Sausalito, Calif.: Post-
Apollo Press, I996).These and other volumes of Guest's poetry have been published
by smaller presses whose- books may sometimes prove difficult to find. I should
therefore add that most of Guest's work-and that of other poets often associated
with experimental traditions-is available through the (nonprofit) Small Press Dis-
tribution, the leading such distributor in the United States, at I34I Seventh Street,
Berkeley, CA 947IO, (510) 524-I668 or (Boo) 869-7553, fax (5IO) 524-0852, or-
ders@spdbooks.org, http:/ /www.spdbooks.org.
I4. For more specific treatment of Guest's relationship to the early and continu-
ing reception of Frankfurt School aesthetics in the United States see Robert Kauf-
man, "A Future for Modernism: Barbara Guest's Recent Poetry," American Poetry Re-
view 29, no. 4 "(July/Aug. 2000): n-I6.
I5. Michael Palmer, "for ... ;• in "The Brown Book" section ofPalmer, The Cir-
cular Gates (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, I974), I3.
I6. For some of Palmer's more recent work see At Passages (New York: New Di-
rections, I995); The Lion Bridge: Selected Poems 1972-1995 (New York: New Direc-
tions, I998); The Promises of Glass (New York: New Directions, 2000), and Codes Ap-
pearing: Poems 1979-1988 (New York: New Directions, 2001). For an example of
Palmer's thoughts on the dialogues between Frankfurt aesthetics and contemporary
poetry see his "Some Notes on Shelley, Poetics, and the Present," Sulfur, no. 33
(I993): 273-81, an essay that might best be read in relation to his Sun (San Francisco:
North Point Press, 1988) and At Passages. For a very helpful discussion of Palmer see
David Levi Strauss, "Aporia and Amnesia," review of Palmer's At Passages, in The Na-
tion, Dec. 23, I996, 26-29.
BARBARA JOHNSON 10
Bad Writing
Le Mal-une forme aigiie du Mal---dont elle (la litterature] est I' expression, a
pour nous,je crois, Ia valeur souveraine.
-Georges Bataille, La Litterature et le Mal
The canyons cooled. Indigo darkened,

Oozing out of the earth like ectoplasm,
A huge snake heaping out. "This is evil,"
You said. "This is real evil."
-Ted Hughes, "The Badlands"
IN 1963 ANNE SEXTON composed an elegy for Sylvia Plath called

"Sylvia's Death," in which she wrote, "and I know at the news of your
death, I a terrible taste for it, like salt." 1 This elegy is unusual in that it ex-
presses not loss but sexual jealousy. Sylvia's death has awakened an over-
whelming appetite and envy, a terrible taste.
Critics have often accused Anne Sexton of terrible taste, putting un-
seemly parts of the female body on display and lusting after death self-
indulgently, even to the point of feeling robbed personally when someone
else commits suicide. But lyric poetry has always been obsessed with death,
and I would argue that in seeing Sexton as all symptom and all body, read-
ers have missed her inventive exploration of more technical questions of
lyric voice. For when she calls Sylvia's death "an old belonging," something
one's mouth opens onto, she is talking about the way in which death's terri-
ble taste has filled poets' mouths for a long time, like salt.
The fact that the history of lyric poetry is so bound up with the nature
of elegy has created the impression that the lyric was invented to overcome
death, not desire it. Poetry, in this view, acts as a consolation, a monument, a
promise of immortality beyond the grave.Yet even the most traditional elegy
contains the guilty secret that desire is not all for life, that poetry offers
something other than life as object of desire. From Narcissus, in love with an
image, and Apollo or Petrarch, consoling themselves with a laurel branch, to
Keats's "half in love with easeful death," Milton's Lycidas, or Wordsworth's
158 BARBARA JOHNSON
"Lucy" poems, the mourned person provides an occasion for poetic per-
formance, not just loss. From there to Sexton's "Wanting to Die" the distance
is not as great as some would have it.
But the confl.ation of the desire for writing with the desire for death does
not perfecdy flow from the fact that both are desires for something other
than biological life. It is true that Narcissus dies from loving an image, but
the critical theory of the "Death of the Author" was not about literal death
but about interpretation and authorial intention. Indeed, it is precisely in the
case of an author who has committed suicide that readers who normally re-
strict their interest to features internal to a text develop a terrible taste for
biography as a tool for understanding poetry. Readers are unable to resist
asking the poems to tell us why the poet killed herself. The dead author re-
turns to life with a vengeance as the site of an intention to die.
There are two profound taboos threatened when the poet is a woman.
There is something monstrous by definition when a woman chooses death
over life because she has so often been the guardian of the life forces, associ-
ated with reproduction, comfort, other-directedness, and maternal care.
When a woman writes about bodies that matter and yet can be accused in
any way of being a "bad mother" or even of being something other than a
counterpart to a man, she is violating the very conditions of her visibility
and is much more likely to be seen as a "bad writer" than to participate in
the culturally valued badness that poetry's job is to hold up to the laws of the
marketplace-or of reproduction.
The cultural prestige of "Le Mal" probably reached its height with
Baudelaire's 1857 publication of Les Fleurs du Mal. "Le Mal" is notoriously
hard to translate into English. Is it "evil"? "badness"? "sickness" ["a
Theophile Gautier, je dedie ces fleurs maladives"]? "suffering"? "melan-
choly" [spleen]? "romanticism" [Mal du siecle]? But sardonic delight in
thumbing one's nose at bourgeois "virtue" was de rigueur for postrevolu-
tionary French poetry. Rimbaud's mother, for example, forbade her son to
read the unseemly writings of"M. Hugot [sic]," 2 and parents threatened to
withdraw their children from their English class when it was learned that the
Inild-mannered M. Mallarme had published poetry. 3 It is perhaps surprising
that the Second Empire courts took literally Baudelaire's poetic celebrations
of evil and prosecuted him for them. But it is even more surprising how sur-
prised he seemed by this. The rise of the bourgeoisie in France was particu-
larly gender divided: women stood for virtue, men for badness of every
sort--so much so that Baudelaire could exemplify his badness through les-
bianism but could disqualify women completely as readers of his book.
Something of Baudelaire's "b_adness" is lost, I think, when it is translated
by Mallarme into obscurity alone. Baudelaire explained in an unfinished
draft of a preface that "[f]amous poets had long divided up the most flowery
BadWriting 159
realms of poetry. I thought it would be pleasant, and enjoyable precisely to

the extent that the task was difficult, to extract beauty from le Mal." 4 This is a
defense of difficulty, too, but not in the same sense as Mallarme's "I say: a
flower! and ... musically arises ... that which is absent in all bouquets." 5
Contemporary defenses of difficult writing have gone in the direction of
Mallarme's obscurity rather than Baudelaire's evil. The "death of the author;'
in fact, is prefigured in Mallarme's famous statement, "The pure work im-
plies the speaking disappearance of the poet, who yields initiative to words." 6
But this is a death without a corpse, without decay, without worms, without
vers. Mallarme makes of death a principle of structure so far-reaching that it
took the whole twentieth century to understand it. Nevertheless, while
making death infiltrate every aspect of signification, Mallarme is also in some
way repressing it, and repressing the badness that no principle can eliminate.
That badness returns, paradoxically, not in the defenses but in the attacks
on "bad writing" that have often accompanied obscurity. A sense of such
contests at the end of the nineteenth century can be gleaned from Mal-
larme's testy defense in his essay "Mystery in Letters":
De pures prerogatives seraient, cette fois, a la merci des bas farceurs.
Tout ecrit, exterieurement a son tresor, doit, par egard envers ceux dont il em-
prunte, apres tout, pour un objet autre, le langage, presenter, avec les mots, un sens
meme indifierent: on gagne de detourner l'oisif, charme que rienne l'y concerne, a
premiere vue.
Salut, exact, de part et d'autre--
Si, tout de meme, n'inquietait je ne sais quel rniroitement, en dessous, peu se-
parable de la surface concedee a la retine--il attire le soup~on: les malins, entre le
public, reclamant de couper court, opinent, avec serieux, que,juste, la teneur est in-
intelligible.
Malheur ridiculement a qui tombe sous le coup, il est enveloppe dans une
plaisanterie immense et mediocre: ainsi toujours-pas tant, peut-etre, que ne sevit
avec ensemble et exces, maintenant, le fleau.
II doit y avoir quelque chose d'occulte au fond de tous,je crois decidement a
quelque chose d'abscons, signifiant ferme et cache, qui habite le commun: car, sitot
cette masse jetee vers quelque trace que c' est une realite, existant, par exemple, sur
une feuille de papier, dans tel ecrit-pas en soi-cela qui est obscur: elle s'agite,
ouragan jaloux d' attribuer les tenebres a quoi que ce soit, profusement, flagramment.
Sa credulite vis-a-vis de plusieurs qui Ia soulagent, en faisant affaire, bondit al'ex-
ces: et le suppot d'Ombre, d'eux designe, ne placera un mot, dorenavant, qu'avec un
secouement que ~· ait ete elle, I' enigme, elle ne tranche, par un coup d' eventail de ses
jupes:"Comprends pas!"-l'innocent annon~at-il se moucher. 7
I have permitted myself this extensive quotation because I think it
touches on most of the things that come up when one tries to defend ob-
scurity: the division between the crowd and the writer, the crowd's refusal to
think there could be obscurity inside everyone, the scapegoating of anyone
I60 BARBARA JOHNSON
who suggests otherwis·e and the paranoid vigilance about it, the accusation
that incomprehensible writing is the cause of incomprehension. But the real
mystery is why "I don't understand it" should condemn the author rather
than the reader or, at least, as Mallarme goes on to say, should not amount to
a suspension of judgment:
Je sais, de fait, qu'ils se poussent en scene et assument, aIa parade, eux, Ia posture hu-
miliante; puisque arguer d' obscurite--ou, nul ne saisira s'ils ne saisissent et ils ne sai-
sissent pas-implique un renoncement anterieur ajuger. 8
It has become commonplace to allow difficult or transgressive writing to au-

thors but not to critics. Poetic badness and critical obscurity seem very differ-
ent, but the condemnation of any writer for obscurity is itself colored with
moral indignation. "Don't understand!" becomes an accusation. When what
was initially conden'Ined enters into the canon, we can smile with superior-
ity at Rimbaud's mother or Baudelaire's and be amazed at their blindness to
poetic genius. Yet in the very act of inventing obscure poetry Mallarme in-
vented the "poeme cr~tique." In other words, it was when he realized that
the writer and the reader could no longer be disentangled that Mallarme be-
came Mallarme.
The taint of moral unseemliness does not last forever, but literature nev-
ertheless keeps enough of that initial frisson to give literary studies a some-
what bad conscience. As Peter Brooks put it: "We teachers of literature have
little hard information to impart, we're not even sure what we teach, and we
have something of a bad conscience about the whole business."9 Brooks's re-
marks come in the context of a defense of studying literature as a specific
object. It was written for a fascinating compilation of reports and responses
published in 1995 as Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, in
which it is suggested that literature be considered "one discursive practice
among many others." 1°Comparative literature, it seems, threatens to dissolve
into "cultural studies," seen as the triumph of, as Baudelaire would put it,
"bonnes actions" over "beau langage." In fact, none of these slippery slopes
are unavoidable, but the best way to make sure that literature doesn't dissolve
is precisely to keep that "bad conscience."
Comparative literature as a field seems to need to defend itself against the
Scylla of"theory" and the Charybdis of"translation." Although many writ-
ers recognize the necessary and irreversible changes each has contributed to
the field, they lament the day when comparative literature meant reading
several languages and literary traditions in the original. Yet their guilt about
"elitism" or "Eurocentrism" leads them to overlook some obvious defenses
that no one calls up. They mount, with increasing feebleness, what might be
called a "Protestant" defense of multiple languages: it is hard to learn a lan-
guage; therefore, students who learn more than one have to make more ef-
BadWriting 161
fort and be more talented. Here is how Harry Levin, author of the first re-
port in 1965, put it: "If we profess to cover more ground than our sister de-
partments we should honestly acknowledge that we must work harder, nor
should we incur their suspicion by offering short-cuts." 11 This is true only to
the extent that languages can only be learned in school. The decline oflan-
guage teaching therefore makes this way of learning languages even harder.
But instead of merely failing to teach languages, the public school system ac-
tually discourages the use of any language other than English. Education con-
sists, then, of unlearning languages, not learning them. Before becoming an
elite capable of mastering several languages, children must first pass into the
elite of people who speak only English. The number oflanguages spoken in
American homes is everything a dream of multiculturalism could ask for: it
is not an idea; it is a reality. If comparative literature could tap into that mul-
ticulturalism, however, it would tap into the true obscurities and insolubili-
ties of a world that cannot be studied as an object. Every comparatist would
already be a part of it.
The "good" object, multiculturalism, would present all the dilemmas of
the modern world that its idealization-the "It's a small world after all" re-
frain-represses. But the "bad" objects, theory and translation, are actually
two versions of the same unrepression. It is not just that theory involved a
mad impetus to translation but that the theory that transformed literary
studies utterly transformed the practice of translation. Translating Derrida or
Lacan became an art in itself, and respect for specific effects sometimes be-
came so great that more and more words were left in the original and
glossed. Thus, more and more French, Greek, or German words began to
have currency in theoretical discourse, which, in turn, increased the anger of
beginning readers frustrated at what felt like unnecessary impotence to the
point that they felt like slamming down the book, snarling something like,
"Take your Nachtri:iglichkeit and shove it!"
In 1959 it was still possible to write, as did a translator of Hegel's Encyclo-
pedia:
To translate the world's worst stylist literally, sentence by sentence, is possible--it has
been done--but it is perfectly pointless; the translation, then, is every bit as unintel-
ligible as the original. But the world's worst stylist is, alas, also one of the world's
greatest thinkers, certainly the most important for us in this twentieth century. In the
whole history of philosophy there is no other single work that can hold a candle to
his Logic; a work incomparable in its range, depth, clarity of thought, and beauty of
composition-but it must be decoded.
The attempt must be risked, therefore, to rescue its grandeur from its abstruse lin-
guistic chaos .... This is like detective work: what Hegel means, but hides under a
dead heap of abstractions, must be guessed at and ferreted out. I have dared to trans-
late--not the ponderous Hegelian jargon, which is as little German as it would be
162 BARBARA JOHNSON
English-but the though~ My "translation;' then, is a critical presentation or rendi-

tion; it is not a book about Hegel because it faithfully follows the order and se-
quence of his paragraphs.t2
Mter the theory revolution it is no longer possible so serenely to separate
style from thinking, idea from language, thought from jargon. The under-
standing that thought is not separable from its expression-and in that way
sometimes escapes the control of the author himself-is what deconstruc-
tion found within the structuralism that claimed a panoptic view of mean-
ing making. "As little German as it would be English" indicates that the
original is worth translating precisely because it is foreign to its own lan-
guage. When Mallarme contributed a series of his "poemes critiques" with-
out translation toW. H. Henley's journal the National Observer, a letter from
a reader protested that he was ready to accept the anomaly in order to brush
up on his French but that Mallarme was writing in a language that was "as
little French as it would have been English." 13 Poetry, for Mallarme, was that
which "de plusieurs vocables refait un mot total, neuf, etranger aIa langue." 14
For Walter Benjamin, too, translation was "only a somewhat provisional way
of coming to grips with the foreignness oflanguages." 15 Only through trans-
lation does the work's foreignness to its own language become apparent.
If deconstruction is what is often meant by "theory," whether for good or
ill, no one could insist more on going back to the original language than
Jacques Derrida. His. essay on Plato discovers in the word pharmakon an un-
decidability that all translators-and therefore all Platonisms-have assumed
was a decidability. The divide between poison and remedy happens in transla-
tion. It is not, however, that such inadequate translations could be avoided if
one stayed with the original. It is that an actual history, shaped by a decision
that the translators could not choose not to make, makes the original per-
ceptible as resisting it. As Derrida tells his Japanese translator, "The question
of deconstruction is also through and through the question of translation." 16
The worry about translation is, of course, always a worry about bad trans-
lation ("the inaccurate transmission· of an inessential content," as Benjamin
puts it)P But the suspicion is that what is essential about a literary work is
precisely what is always lost in translation, which is why so many poets have
been so intent on finding it. That is perhaps why both Baudelaire and Mal-
larme wanted to translate the quintessential bad poet ofAmerican literature,
Edgar Allan Poe. And this takes us back to the badness of literature.
Sometime ago, when I carne across a reference to one of my colleagues in
the Boston Globe as a professor of" comparable literature" (Oct. 20,2000, B4),
I realized that the field itself is oddly named. Why isn't it called "comparable
literature" in fact? Doesn't the classic version of the field assume that you can
take, say, romanticism, ~d compare its French, German, and English ver-
Bad Writing 163
sions, which are presumed to be comparable? What does "comparative liter-

ature" really mean? That what is studied is comparatively (but not absolutely)
literary? Perhaps-but could this have been the original intent? The field
that depends on comparison for its very definition somehow at the same
time opposes some sort of resistance to comparability. Just enough to echo
the irony in the story of Elena Levin explaining to someone why her hus-
band, Harry, author of the 1965 report, was busy working: "The Professors
are here to compare the literatures." It is as if the field defined by compari-
son unconsciously upholds the adage," Comparaison n'est pas raison," or agrees
with William Blake when, in his poem Jerusalem, he has his hero, Los, howl:
"I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Mans; I I will not Rea-
son & Compare: my business is to Create." 18
In order to explore this odd resistance to comparison, I turn to three
more texts that each embody some form of"bad writing": popular culture,
philosophy, and teaching manuals. My three texts are the 1995 film Clueless,
H. Vaihinger's book The Philosophy cif "As lf" (first published in German in
I9II), and Andrew Boyd's Life's Little Deconstruction Book (billed by the pub-
lisher as "Po-Mo to Go").
In the film Clueless19 the exclamation "As if!" is used by the protagonist,
fifteen-year-old Beverly Hills high school student Cher Horowitz, to proj-
ect the frame of reference of other persons into pure fantasy-theirs-and
to expel it from herself. For example, when an unprepossessing high school
boy approaches Cher in an interested manner, she says, "Ew! Get away from
me! As if!" In other words, "As if I would go out with you!" "In your
drea~ns!" "You wish!"When another boy, Elton, reveals that he is interested
in her, not in the new girl, Tai, with whom she has been trying to fix him up
(this is one of the few places where Jane Austen's Emma is recognizable as a
source), Cher exclaims "Me? As if! Don't you mean Tai?" In other words,
"As if I had been flirting with you for myself!" "As if I had been the object
rather than the subject!" Another example: when Cher reports that her
teacher has said that her arguments are unresearched, unstructured, and un-
convincing, she exclaiins, "As if!"-which I guess means, "Who is he to say
such a thing?"
The Beverly Hills high school dialect in the film thus makes use of the
expression as if in an interpersonal sense. It is always an exclamation and al-
ways casts desire or doubt away from the speaker and onto the addressee. I
don't have time to do a reading of the film as a rhetorical treatise, but as a
study of substitution, transformation (the makeover), and the narcissism of
small differences, it would lend itself very well to such treatment.
For Hans Vaihinger as if is an essential mental function enabling people to
use fictions "as if" they were true: religions, philosophies, even mathematical
constructs. As he writes in the preface to the English edition, "An idea
164 BARBARA JOHNSON
.
whose theoretical untruth or incorrectness, and therewith its falsity, is ad-
mitted, is not for that reason practically valueless and useless; for such an
idea, in spite of its theoretical nullity, may have great practical importance." 20
Kant's Ding an sich, for example, which can't be proven, is a necessary part of
his philosophical system, just as imaginary numbers operate as a necessary
part of a system of calculations, even though, in the end, they don't exist.
Life's Little Deconstruction Book is organized as a series of maxims. 21 There
are 365 of them-one for every day of the year (I'm not sure what the reader
is supposed to do during Leap Year). Maxim 33 reads: "Be as if." I guess that
must mean something like, "Ontology is performance" or "Whatever you
seem to have in your mind is your mind." Or, as Pascal might have put it,
"Act as if you believe, and belief will follow, or at least, you will have gained
everything that you :would have gained by believing."
Teaching theory I come up again and again unexpectedly against the
problem of belief. In literature I can suspend disbelief, but in theory I feel
as if my location with respect to other writers and thinkers is somehow the
stuff of the course. Because the writers I am teaching have designs on the
most fundamental assumptions I make while I read, I cannot teach them as
if they were a subject rhatter. At the same time, my own relation to the
writers has changed over time, and it has changed with respect to that of
my students. What is different about teaching theory for me now is the
sense of my own historicity. Yet if I look at the theory I teach exclusively
from the outside, I am not teaching theory but history. There would cer-
tainly be usefulness in teaching the history of theory, but it would not give
access to the "Aha!" that ignites an interest in theory in the first place. When
Frantz Fanon says about his reaction to Sartre's reading of Aime Cesaire's
poetics of Negritude, "I needed not to think I was just a minor term in a di-
alectic," he is saying, in effect, I needed to read as ifi believed in the Negri-
tude I now take a distance from, in order to get to the next stage in my
thinking. As if is something that cannot happen right if it happens in the
mode of as if.
I have found that the way in which students dismiss or take distance from
the texts we read in a theory course follows patterns that are quite different
from critiques.And that perhaps was true of my own dismissals of their pred-
ecessors. But my task is to make sure the students actually read whatever is on
the syllabus-which may now include some of those predecessors I am
reading for the first time. "Bracketing the referent" or "preferring langue to
parole" are important ways of seeing the limitations of Saussure, but they help
only in understanding what Saussure didn't do, not what he did do-not
what those limits enabled but only what they prevented. Understanding the
conceptual breakthrough involved in saying, "In language there are only dif-
ferences," depends on pausing there long enough (recall Cher's reaction to
Bad Writing 165
stop signs-"1 totally paused") to see what Saussure was critiquing himself.
Thought as a break is different from thought as a chain.
The same is true for elements of a theory-say, female sexuality in
Freud-from which one knows one has taken a critical distance, or elements
in a theory-say, ethnocentrism in Levi-Strauss-where one may be critical
of a framework of which one is nevertheless still a part. What has been called
"political correctness" is something I would prefer to call "double con-
sciousness"-the knowledge that one is viewed, not just viewing.W E. B Du
Bois defined double consciousness, famously, as "the sense of always looking
at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape
of a world." 22 The strength of those "others" produces double consciousness.
But how can white double consciousness or male double consciousness or
Eurocentric double consciousness be anything but reactive and defensive, if
the power of those "others" is itself what consciousness was defined against?
Double consciousness would feel a lot like paranoia. No wonder people
might attempt to eradicate it. But in this case, as they say, even paranoids have
real enemies. Or perhaps we should say, denying paranoia doesn't make those
"real others" go away. What does the necessity of double consciousness have
to do with the question of teaching as if one believed?
The dangers of representativeness and tokenism are precisely the dangers
oflosing the "foreignness" of texts to their own languages. But to fear such a
danger is to forget that what should happen in literature courses is reading.
Yes, the changes might reflect an unquestioned notion of individualism. And
yes, the students will not see that from which a syllabus is departing. But
surely the students have imbibed cultural assumptions that will be defamil-
iarized by some of the texts. Perhaps the use of tokens or of islands of
knowledge in a sea of ignorance can homogenize all differences into various
versions of the same. But even when something like colonialism attempted
to reproduce itself in, say, the Caribbean, it became something quite differ-
ent from what it started out to be. At the same time, how could a syllabus
mark radical change within a culture-and an educational system-that
changes much more slowly? If the remedy mirrors the system being ques-
tioned rather than the questioning, at least the cognitive dissonance that
these contradictory energies embody may correspond to a real conflict in
the world rather than the wishful thinking that would seek a more effective
critique.
Actually taking seriously the works being read has to become transfor-
mative eventually because what is secondary revision for one generation
may become primary process for the next. The very transferential process
that tends to absolutize the authority of a text (as if it had always been on the
syllabus) will deabsolutize the assumptions that are still operative in the
teachers who have put those books on the syllabus. On the one hand, if the
166 BARBARA JOHNSON
map isn't being changed in the primary process of thinking, changing it in a

secondary revision is not really thought. But on the other hand, acting as if
the map were changing might actually make it so, in the long run.
How does the structure of the as if£i.mction, then, to allow for a heuristic
transference and for a transformative double consciousness at once, even
though these two processes draw on the contradictory energies of belief, cri-
tique, and defense? Let me end with a quotation from Joan Copjec's book
Read My Desire, in which a structure she actually designates as "as if" is un-
derstood through, and clarifies, the Lacanian notion of suture:
Suture, in brief, supplies the logic of a paradoxical function whereby a supplemen-
tary element is added to the series of signifiers in order to mark the lack of a signifier
that could close the set. The endless slide of signifiers (hence deferral of sense) is
brought to a halt and allowed to function "as if" it were a closed set through the in-
clusion of an element that acknowledges the impossibility of closure. The very des-
ignation of the limit is constitutive of the group, the reality the signifiers come to
represent, though the group, or the reality, can no longer be thought to be entirely
representable. 23
What I want to claim here is that the role of academic literary criticism-
which is academic p,:-ecisely because it acknowledges the existence of multi-
ple languages-is always to risk a certain "badness" and to be this suture. It
is the field whose only definition is to be the acknowledgment of the im-
possibility of the field, to be the "as if" of literary closure. Criticism, in other
words, is what is added to the series of literary signifiers in order to mark the
lack of a signifier that could close the set. It marks not the future of literary
studies but the suture of literary studies. That is the best way we have of rely-
ing on the badness of strangers.
Notes
My first epigraph and much of the framework for this part of my essay are taken
from the brilliant article by Deborah Jenson, "Gender and the Aesthetic of 'le Mal':
Louise Ackermann's Poesies philosophiques, 1871," in Nineteenth-Century French
Studies 23 (1994-95): 175-93. ["Evil-an acute form ofEvil-ofwhich literature is
the expression, has I think supreme value for us."]
I. Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), 126.
2. Arthur Rimbaud, Oeuvres (Paris: Garnier, 1960), 357.
3. Gordon Millan, Mallarme: A Throw of the Dice (London: Seeker and Warburg,
1994). 144·
4· Charles Baudelaire, Oeuvres completes, ed. Claude Pichois, vol. I (Paris: Galli-
mard, 1975), 181.
5. Stephane Mallarme, Oeuvre~ completes (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 368.
6. Ibid., 366.
BadWriting 167
1· Ibid., 382-83.
[Pure prerogatives would be, this time, at the mercy oflow jokers.
Every piece of writing, outside of its treasure, must, toward those from whom
it borrows, after all, for a different object, language, present, with words, a sense
even indifferent: one gains by not attracting the idler, charmed that nothing there
concerns him, at first sight.
Each side gets exactly what it wants-
If, nevertheless, anxiety is stirred by I don't know what shadowy reflection
hardly separable from the surface available to the retina-it attracts suspicion: the
pundits among the public, averring that this has to be stopped, opine, with due
gravitas, that, truly, the tenor is unintelligible.
Ridiculously cursed is he who is caught up in this, enveloped by an immense
and mediocre joke: it was ever thus-but perhaps not with the intensity with
which the plague now extends its ravages.
There must be something occult deep inside everyone, decidedly I believe in
something opaque, a signifier sealed and hidden, that inhabits common man: for,
as soon as the masses throw themselves toward some trace that has its reality, for
example, on a piece of paper, it's in the writing-not in oneself-that there is
something obscure: they stir crazily like a hurricane, jealous to attribute darkness
to anything, profusely, flagrantly.
Their credulity, fostered by those who reassure it and market it, is suddenly
startled: and the agent of darkness, singled out by them, can't say a single word
thenceforth, without, a shrug indicating that it's just that enigma again, being cut
off, with a flourish of skirts: "Don't understand!"-the poor author innocently
announcing, perhaps, that he needed to blow his nose.]
8. Mallarme, Oeuvres completes, 383. [I know, in fact, that they crowd the stage and
expose themselves, actually, in a humiliating posture; since to argue that something is
obscure--or, no one will get it if they don't, and they don't-implies a prior sus-
pension ofjudgment.]
9. Peter Brooks, "Must We Apologize?" in Comparative literature in the Age of Mul-
ticulturalism, ed. Charles Bernheimer (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University
Press, I995), 105.
IO. The Bernheimer Report, I993; reprinted in Bernheimer, Comparative Litera-
ture, 42.
II. The Levin Report, I965; reprinted in Bernheimer, Comparative literature, 25.
I2. Hegel's Encyclopedia of Philosophy, trans. and annot. by Gustav Emil Mueller
(New York: Philosophical Library, I959}, I.
I3. One letter to the editor read as follows: "siR,-I will not, like your 'Constant
Subscriber' oflast week, protest against all foreign languages. I can read some of them
myself, and have relations who can read others. But I shall take it very kindly if the
next time M. Stephane Mallarme occupies your columns, you kindly append a
French translation of his article, or what in Decadish might be called 'une fran~aise
traduction.' I am, yours resignedly, ONE WHO USED TO THINK HE COULD READ FRENCH"
(National Observer,Apri19, I892, 540).
I4. Mallarme, "Crise devers," in Oeuvres completes, 368 (my emphasis).
168 BARBARA JOHNSON
15. Walter Benjam1n, Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael WJen-
nings, vol. I (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1996), 257.
16. "Letter to a Japanese Friend," in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed.
Peggy Kamuf(NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1991), 270.
17. Benjamin, Selected Writings, 253.
18. William Blake, The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman
(New York: Doubleday, 1965), 151.
19. Writ. and dir. by Amy Heckerling, prod. and dist. by Paramount Pictures, star-
ring Alicia Silverstone as Cher Horowitz.
20. Hans Vaihinger, The Philosophy of "As lf," trans. C. K. Cohen (London: Rout-
ledge and Kegan Paul, 1924), viii.
21. Andrew Boyd, Life's Little Deconstruction Book (New York: Norton, 1999).
22. WE. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin, 1989), s.
23. Joan Copjec, Read My Desire (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), 174-75.
PART 4
Address to the Other: Ethics and Acknowledgment

DAVID PALUMBO-LIU 11
The Morality of Form; or, What's "Bad"
About "Bad Writing"?
SEVERAL YEARS AGO Edward Said delivered a series oflectures at my

institution. He was introduced by the late Ian Watt. I remember Watt's intro-
duction well but even more Said's response. Watt told the audience that of all
the critics writing at the time he most appreciated Said because of the clar-
ity and lucidity of his writing, which Watt attributed to an English educa-
tion. I must not have been the only one in the audience who held their
breath in anticipation of what Said, having grown up under British occupa-
tion, could possibly say. What he did say was both gracious and to the point.
He thanked Watt for the introduction and then added, "But you know, Ian,
some of us learned English in different ways--some of us were caned if we
didn't speak English correctly."
I use this anecdote because it addresses not only the issue of writing and
the value attached to clarity (however ascertained) but also the intensely so-
cial aspect of the current discussion of academic writing. It is to that notion
of sociability that I will turn for my emphasis. As Ian Watt had been instru-
mental in establishing a regard for the humanities at Stanford, and was the
founder of its humanities center, there was something very significant about
his welcoming Said. What Watt chose to emphasize as a point of common-
ality, of sociability, was a discourse that allowed him to imagine Said as part
of a particular fraternity. Watt's pronouncement indicated that he and Said
were brothers, not only in the English language but also in a particular usage
of it within specific intellectual protocols. For Watt this bond transcended
the particularities of how they each came to write English. But for Said such
an affinity could not so easily erase historical specificity, a specificity that
challenged the notion of a seamless social bond produced by a common lan-
guage and a shared sensitivity about its proper use.
Debates over language ("national language,'' bilingual education, ebonies,
172 DAVID PALUMBO-LIU
and so forth) are nevet about language alone or even primarily. Rather, such
arguments point to the social functions oflinguistic communication and the
assumptions of sociality that are to be at once vouchsafed and reproduced by
communication. These issues have everything to do with the social posi-
tioning of the practitioners of language--the actual speakers and writers
themselves and the extralinguistic situations that englobe acts of communi-
cation, that is, the arenas in which words circulate and are recognized, re-
sponded to, or rebuffed. The most significant issue behind the flurry of ac-
tivity that has surrounded the controversy over "bad writing" is the issue of
sociability and the attendant matter of social responsibility.
The issue of responsibility is located in two related areas: first is the con-
cern that what is deemed "bad writing" is bad because its authors allegedly
set themselves up as progressive political thinkers, whereas in actuality they
write in such an obscure and difficult manner as to make access to such po-
litical thinking impossible for more than a handful of initiates. 1 Alongside
the issue of how "bad writing" might be, despite its assumptions and claims,
unpolitical, there is th~ issue of its application in a certain domain-that of
the academy, specifically, the classroom. The issue of bad writing is deeply
linked to a pedagogical program constructed around a particular vision of an
academic community. In both cases "bad writers" are chastised for their
moral dereliction.
To make this charge stick, however, requires the establishment of norms
and propriety. An intellectual community is construed that is populated by a
specific group of individuals whose norms and capacities guide the produc-
tion of discourse. If norms supposedly have been broken, contracts voided,
responsibilities dodge?, then we need to first assume the existence of a
"common pc:rson" whose level of intelligence or discernment would be
used to adjudicate the proper form of language, the degree to which lan-
guage should conform to its social contract. From a conglomerate of such
individuals one posits an ideal community in order to arrive at some sense
of what the most acceptable degree of transparency would be or how much
complexity, nuance, indirection could be tolerated in social discourse. 2
Here one discovers an affinity between the notion of"bad" writing and
what one might call "deviant" writing, that is, writing that departs from pre-
sumed norms and threatens by its example to lead others to reproduce not
only that sort of writing but a bad sort of behavior as well. Such language
and behavior challenge the norms, the grounds for sense making, truth as-
serting, and rational discussion in the community. From early rhetorical de-
bates between the Atticists and Asiaticists there has been a specific concern
over the manners in which "unplain" language might persuade (indeed, se-
duce) listeners better 'than "plain" language and convince them to do bad
things. Unplain language is assumed by its critics to be not only less than
The Morality of Form; or, What's "Bad" About "Bad Writing"? 173
transparent but also untrue by virtue of its opacity. 3 The assumption on the
part of those arguing against "bad writing" is that it irresponsibly and im-
morally beguiles its readers into taking on its own behavior and norms, into
becoming complicit with its own reproduction. Furthermore, these norms
are at a significant remove from anything that might be construed as not
only true but honesdy arrived at as well. Critics of"bad writing" remark on
a double loss-the loss of a social world in which "truth," to which they
held the keys, no longer takes the same linguistic form, no longer is config-
ured in the terms most familiar to them, and the loss of the power to enforce
those norms and by consequence to discipline those who dare to write de-
viandy.
Thus, "bad writing" presents more than simply a spiritual loss, a loss of
kindred community. The present attack on "bad writing" is a multifaceted
attack that goes beyond its disappointingly ad hominem facet to an assertion
regarding the types of scholarship central to today's academy and the ways in
which such scholarship and its conventions seem to have deprived its critics
not only of voice but of a place to be. It has taken away an entire topos, a sit-
uation of speech and sociality in which their kind of behavior is not only
sanctioned but required. If, in the fifth century B.c., Corax, the person to
whom the "invention" of rhetoric is attributed, elaborated rhetorical skills in
order to help people regain their property after the expulsion of the tyrants
and to maintain social order, here we find a batde over language that differ-
endy enlists a particular set of rhetorical devices centered on a particular no-
tion of" clarity" and its absolute value to secure intellectual property and
rights. 4 The similarity between these two otherwise quite different cases is
that in each a particular kind of language/writing is seen as proper to the
task of normalizing social relations and the power to claim property. In the
academy it is a matter of making sure that the correct modes of expression
and argumentation are in use, and in use to secure and convey a particularly
configured notion of not only truth but ways of knowing the truth.
For "good writing" now to become urgendy necessary requires three in-
terrelated elements: first, the instantiation of a normative community whose
reproduction is essential; second, a viable threat to that community and its
values; and third, a particular realization of this threat. Here, the threat is
manifested in a figure at once inside and outside of the community. This fig-
ure occupies this double status because although it has certain claims to
membership within the community, it is not a full or equal member. This
figure is, precisely, that of a student. "Good" academics are needed to deliver
knowledge properly to the bereft figure of the average student in need of
proper guidance. Without this particularly imagined, abject object of in-
struction, we would not need academic writers. To argue a disease and a pa-
tient is to legitimize the presence of the physician. To substantiate the exis-
tence of this abject figure, critics ofbad writing go to some lengths to con-
struct a scenario of powerlessness and fear, of subjection and contempt.
Most important, along with this contempt for readers/ students comes a
contempt for academic responsibility. D. G. Meyers, one of the editors of the
journal that awards the prize in "Bad Writing;' asserts that "bad writing" ex-
presses a "contempt. for readers" and "not so much a lack of concern for clar-
ity" as a "lack of concern for clarification." This distinction is important, for it
focuses our attention not on a value but on a pedagogical process. Bad writ-
ers should even "take pains" to make themselves clear. 5 According to this cri-
tique bad writers are bad because they refuse to honor the contractual obli-
gation all academic writers have with their readers and all teachers have with
their students. 6
The rhetoric of Meyers's sentence snowballs from an abrogation of"re-
sponsibility," a dereliction of"duty," and, indeed, the evasion of the "pain"
necessary for writers and teachers to fulfill their contract: this community is
invented not only by the pleasure oflearning but also by a constitutive pain.
The assumption is tqat writers and teachers are to absorb the pain of diffi-
culty in order to spare the reader and student. The proposition is that the
scene of reading and l~arning should have a precisely delimited ratio of dif-
ficulty (if it need be difficult at all). But such a notion of obligatory self-sac-
rifice is again premised on a particular notion of the character and identity
of the members of the community-the very individuals whose pain and
pleasure, capacity and willingness to understand and to clarify, is presumed to
be uniform and discernible. It is also premised on the proposition that learn-
ing should not hurt. Meaningfulness must thus be delivered in a particular
fashion that clearly gelineates a product to be consumed in ways that are
similar to ~e consumption of all such products, that is, in ways that do not
unwarrantedly challenge the consumer beyond a certain point.
Hence, Martha Nussbaum argues that academic writers "assume there-
sponsibility of advancing a definite interpretation."7 Using Judith Buder as
her example, Nussbaum states: ''[Buder's writing] bullies the reader into
granting that, since one cannot figure out what is going on, there must be
something significant going on."This argument is weak in two regards: first,
it again constructs a "straw-student;' a gullible, weak, and unintelligent indi-
vidual, to represent the victim of bad writing. Second, it assumes the absence
of any redeeming pedagogical value. But one could easily argue against the
assertion that "bad writing" is "bad" because it lacks determinacy. Rather
than deliver a predigested commodity for absorption by an innocent student
body, one could imagine that "bad writing" is a provocation to think outside
received categories and that "indeterminateness" is exacdy what prompts
critical inquiry and further speculation. Yet I doubt that the critics of bad
writing would argue with this point. Rather what would likely result again
The Morality of Form; or, What's "Bad" About "Bad Writing"? I 75
would be an argument about the proper degree of difficulty. And, again, that
is an abysmal argument, which calls for a stable and clear calibration of the
ratio between requisite clarity and acceptable difficulty.
But although one might respond to such criticism by arguing that a new
set of concerns and problems now calls for different discursive strategies, and
that new forms of linguistic expression have to at least be entertained (if not
accepted outright) in order to make possible the representation of new
problems, this is not really the point of the controversy. Although there is the
need to debate the issue of whether the production of new knowledge calls
for a commensurate change in the way we write, as I read and reread the
various position papers in this debate, what seems most irksome to critics of
"bad writing" is not its existence but rather its supposed predominance. My
own suspicion is that on this count those who worry about the dominance
of "bad writing" have litde to worry about, especially if the issue is the
"common person," whose intelligence has to be protected from the tortuous
meanderings of bad academic writers. The vast portion of news venues
around the world that covered "the story" sided with the critics of bad writ-
ing, and hardly any of its defenders were cited at all. The basis for this attack
on "bad writing" therefore seems faulty and its moral charge less than per-
suasive simply because it is not an absolute critique (bad writing is bad) but
rather relative and qualified (there is too much of it). The issue thus becomes
a purely political one. The criticism of bad writing has less to do with lofty
moral issues than with social practice and power. Students are to be cured of
their ignorance, but equally important for the critics of"bad writing" is the
reproduction of healthy bodies, not only to legitimate their own endeavors
but to add to their numbers. By casting themselves as the parents and
guardians of the next generation, the critics of bad writing attempt to
achieve the moral high ground and at once assure that the right kind of re-
production, of the right social world, will be continued.
The critics of"bad writing" are concerned that it persuades a particularly
constructed audience to become themselves bad writers. Says Deborah
Knight, one of the judges for the "Bad Writing" award: "The real risk is that
students will be exposed and start writing like this, thinking they ought to
[emphasis added] ." 8 What is needed, then, is the reinstantiation of the proper
community created by "common" language and behavior-what would be
more horrible than the production of another sort of community? The issue
ultimately is not the degree of difficulty and pain imposed on the
reader/student, or even the need for Truth, but another quantitative issue-
the number of practitioners of bad writing and their likely proliferation and
domination over those who envision another sort of community. That is, if
all this fuss were about a couple of isolated writers, why would it matter?
What indeed emerges from this diagnosis of a few instances is an entire so-
ciology of domineering types and personalities that are necessary to sub-

stantiate and give weight and durability to this phenomenon.
For example, we have Nussbaum's imputation of an "air of in-group
knowingness" in Butler's prose, and Robert E. Clark's "Letter to the Editor"
in the New York Times (March 27, 1999), which accuses bad writers of play-
ing "a self-perpetuating and insular game ... speaking only to and for their
colleagues." Meyers elaborates on this to name an entire renegade "commu-
nity" at odds with all the usual standards of academic communalism: "Acad-
emic writing wasn't supposed to be this way. Even at its most stylistically
awkward 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 polit-
ical party."
And it is here that we can disentangle the accusation of"bad writing" as
irresponsible socially and professionally from the much more relevant charge
of its being "bad" because it is partisan. But even partisanship in itself is not
necessarily bad. The tssue is not power (academics has of course always been
involved with power: its acquisition, loss, trade-offs, various sites, and inter-
relations) nor the me_~;hanisms that perpetuate it (for example, who cites
whom, who sits on which nominations or awards committees) but rather
that the wrong kind of people have it-bad people. Meyers writes, "Although
Butler wishes to disrupt 'the workings of capitalism,' the effect of her writ-
ing 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." As titillating as this sounds, this "discovery" of a conspiracy, this
Manichean schematization, is hardly new; in fact, it is as old as the academy
itself. ·
In The Sociological Imagination C. Wright Mills argues the need to under-
stand better the phenomenon of academic "cliques":
If we are to understand what is going on in any area of cultural and intellectual
work, we must understand its immediate social context .... The whole business of
"cliques" and "personalities" and "schools" is ... complicated ... ; their importance
in shaping the development of social sciences deserves more awareness on our part .
. . . The function of the academic clique is not only to regulate the competition, but
to set the terms of competition and to assign rewards for work done in accordance
with these terms at any given time. 9
Most germane for my discussion here is Mills's comment on the reproduc-

tion of cliques:
[I]f there is competition among several cliques in a field of study, the relative posi-
tions of the several competitors te,nd to determine clique strategies. Cliques that are
small and considered unimportant can in due course be expected by leading cliques
The Morality of Form; or, What's "Bad" About "Bad Writing"? I 77
to go out of business. Their members will be ignored or won over or rejected, and
in the end die off without having trained the next generation. It must always be kept
in mind that one important function of cliques is the shaping of the next academic
generation. 10
Meyers herself finally drops the whole issue of writing and discloses the
real agenda behind the granting of the "award":
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 contempo-
rary university. No longer defined by the common attachment to ordinary rational
principles, our universities have become institutions of one-party rule .... 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.
The very vagueness of the notion of"ordinary rational principles" and
the openness of such a notion to precisely partisan debate forces us to focus
instead on the issue of dominance. The issue is not bad writing itself, or even
the badness of the people who write badly, but rather the assumed monop-
oly of authority in place in academia and its effect on "young scholars,'' that
is, the production of new generations along the wrong axis of power. But,
again, if this is the real issue, it falls seriously short of being anything worth
spending much ink on. This is true for two reasons. First, there is, again, no
proof that this is actually the case. Apart from some anecdotal evidence, we
have no other data with which to support the assertion that "our"(!) uni-
versities have become "institutions of one-party rule." But even if this were
so, it would behoove Meyers to prove which party, exactly, is in power. The
second reason why this argument falls short is that, as mentioned previously,
universities have long been exposed for not being exempt from deeply per-
sonal battles over authority and the loyalty of students-such battles belie
any claim of" ordinary rational principles" holding sway over individual or
group egos. For instance, the judges of the Bad Writing Contest claim that it
"exposes the workings of entrenched power" and in so doing seeks to liber-
ate all those docile and intimidated students held under the gun by bad writ-
ers. Yet what would happen if"they" succeeded in doing so? They simply
would have rooted out the enemy and established themselves as the new
party. The debates over "bad writing" may thus be seen within a tradition of
internecine academic institutional battles over influence--here the critics of
bad writing have taken up the gauntlet supposedly laid down by bad writ-
ers. Whether the gauntlet was ever thrown is hardly the issue--it provided a
pretext on which to launch a more general attack against a largely invented
opposition.
When examined on its basic claims, the critique of "bad writing" dis-
closes a vacuous argument and tremendous bad faith. But, beyond that, there
are important issues "attached. Returning to my beginning anecdote: al-

though there is something quite poignant and real about the sense of value
placed on the intellectual community evoked by Ian Watt, one wonders
what has been relegated outside the margins. Is it a community vouchsafed
by its common pursuit of"the truth"? Not exactly, because critics of bad
writing appropriately make the qualification that the real issue is the method
that is to be deployed to not only pursue the truth but to deliver it. Is it in-
deed a community with common standards that might appear positively and
independently from an opposing party? So far, no positive evidence has been
proffered. We have no way to identify good writing and, in fact, no real way
to determine what, exactly, "bad writing" is, outside of appeals to a still un-
specified normative reader. The threat posed to this community by "bad
writing" is that truth and the proper pedagogical methods of conveying it
are under attack. This is a serious charge, but there is no evidence that this is
actually taking place outside the imagined topoi invented by Nussbaum and
others, at least not as pervasively and deeply as they assert.
Having now questioned the "clarity" and substance of such a schemati-
zation, can we entertain instead a much more nuanced, and perhaps more
real, picture? Can we iJilagine that "good writers" can be bad teachers or
that their wonderfullJ clear ideas are intellectually weak? Can we imagine
that "bad writers" may be good teachers, that their style of presentation is
not incomprehensible to a differently imagined "implied audience"? Can
we imagine that "bad writers" (or any writers, for that matter) write, teach,
and speak in different registers for different occasions and to suit different
purposes and audiences? And can one imagine students who are not simply
cowardly, docile, narrow-minded careerists? In this case we would have to
imagine a much mo;e complex and, again, real, world in which we live,
that is, a seri~s of topoi that break up the simplistic formula invented by
critics of bad writing and open the windows of their rather claustrophobic
scene.
In doing so, we might imagine a different sort of implied reader, one who
would be looking to a text for a serious challenge to pre-existing ways of
thinking, a challenge that might require different and indeed difficult modes
of articulation and reading. This reader might be part of an open-ended
community-in-the-making that arises not to reproduce a pre-existing com-
munity, but rather evolves around an unpredictable set of common interests
and concerns stimulated by the reading of the text. In such a case sociability
is not reduced to a program of academic reproduction and power grabbing
but widened to accommodate a broader spectrum of endeavors that are
more in keeping with a difficult, nonconclusive critical inquiry into the pos-
sibilities of knowledge. In such a case, would it not be possible to argue that
it is precisely "bad writing" that is ethical? For in refusing to bind itself im-
The Morality of Form; or, What's "Bad" About"BadWriting"? 179
mediately to "determinacy;• does it not allow the reader a real freedom of as-
sociation and the power to think differendy?
Notes
Many thanks to Jonathan Culler for his helpful suggestions regarding this essay.
I. Interestingly, in an article published in the May 25, 1918, issue of 11 Grido del
Popolo, Grarnsci cautions against assuming that political language has in all cases to
be "easy":
Let us admit that the article in 11 Grido was the ultimate in difficulty and prole-
tarian obscurity. Could we have written it otherwise? It was a reply to an article
in La Stampa, and the Stampa piece had used a precise philosophical language
which was neither a superfluity nor an affectation, since every current of thought
has its particular language and vocabulary. Our reply needed to stay on the same
ground as our opponent's thought, we needed to show that even with, indeed be-
cause of that current of thought ... the collaborationist line was wrong. In order
to be easy we would have had to falsify and impoverish a debate which hinged on
concepts of the utmost importance, on the most fundamental and precious sub-
stance of our spirit. Doing that is not being easy; it amounts to fraud, like the
wine merchant who passes off coloured water as Barolo or Lambrusco.A concept
which is difficult in itself cannot be made easy when it is expressed without be-
coming vulgarized. And pretending that this vulgarization is still the same con-
cept is to act like trivial demagogues, tricksters in logic and propaganda. (Cited in
Gramsd: Cultural Writings, ed. David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, trans.
William Boelhower [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991 ], 32)
2. For some useful essays on the subject of communities, speech, and deliberation
see Seyla Benhabib, ed., Democracy and D!fference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Polit-
ical (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), esp. the contributions of
Habermas, Mansbridge, Benhabib,Young, Mouffe, and Gutman.
3. One should not forget, however, that the most apparendy transparent discourse
may be precisely the most devious, as it exploits certain notions of common parlance
to obscure its actual content-which president of the United States was called "The
Great Communicator," after all?
In book 5 of the Confessions Augustine makes a similar point: "In your wonderful,
secret way, my God, you had already taught me that a statement is not necessarily
true because it is wrapped in fine language or false because it is awkwardly ex-
pressed .... You had already taught me this lesson and the converse truth, that an as-
sertion is not necessarily true because it is badly expressed or false because it is finely
spoken" (Saint Augustine, Confessions [London: Penguin, 1961 ], 97).
Consider also Judith Buder's statement: "No doubt, scholars in the humanities
should be able to clarify how their work informs and illuminates everyday life.
Equally, however, such scholars are obliged to question common sense, interrogate
its tacit presumptions and provoke new ways of looking at a familiar world. Many
quite nefarious ideologies pass for common sense" (New York Times, March 20, 1999,
op-ed).
4· This assertion is found in Aristotle, Rhetorica, trans. John Henry Freese, Loeb
Classical Library, vol. 193 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), xii-
xm.
5. D. G. Meyers, "Bad Writing: Judith Butler Did It," Weekly Standard, May 10,
1999 (Lexis-Nexis).All references to Meyers are to this article.
6. Interestingly, the reader's obligation to read carefully and consideredly is omit-
ted from these accounts.
7· Martha Nussbaum, "The Professor of Parody;' New Republic, Feb. 2, 1999 (Elec-
tronic Library).
8. Quoted in Tom Spears, "A Contest No One Wants to Win: 'Loopy' Academic
Prose Vies forTop Honors;' Ottawa Citizen, Feb. 9,1999 (Lexis-Nexis).
9. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1959), 107.
10. Ibid., 109.
STUART J. MURRAY 12
The Politics of the Production
of Knowledge
An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
STUART J. MURRAY: Let us begin with the general question of commu-

nicability and critical writing. 1
GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK: In a recent interview I was trying to talk
to the general American book buyer. 2 This is what I said about communica-
bility and critical writing, answering a question about my book, A Critique
of Postcolonial Reason: I think I have learned something from this big book,
and that it is perhaps not fair to the reader to go from one end of the spec-
trum to another.
There will be a question later about my work in Asia, so that is one end
of the spectrum, and Columbia University in New York is the other end of
the spectrum. But I also go very much from high theory to activist discourse
in my book.
If the general reader wants to approach the book, Chapter Three, which
is on history, might be the place to begin. The point is not to be turned off
too quickly. If it seems wordy at times, move right along. We skim when we
read long books, don't we? Even in Chapter One, which is a litde daunting
for people because it is about philosophy, if one moves on deciding not to
be turned off by the fact that I include German words because the transla-
tions are not always satisfactory, there is an argument which is not just for
philosophers, but for the general reader who hasn't decided that where his
or her understanding stops, elitism begins.
I would really like to challenge and invite the general reader to move
through this as if it were not a difficult book, even though I say that I do go
here perhaps too violendy from one end to the other. But I think the ex-
periment is worth making. I don't think a litde self-doubt is bad. That's how
182 STUART J. MURRAY
I myself read when I ·read a complicated text or even popularized science, or

when I read philosophy, even when I read Aristotle with my negligible Clas-
sical Greek. It's not easy and I feel daunted. I do feel self-doubt. It's like go-
ing to the gym for me. Have you seen the people who are really trying at
those machines-groaning, but pushing? No pain, no gain? We know that in
terms of the body. Why have we forgotten that in terms of the mind? A lit-
tle bit of pain is not bad. Of course, one will never really understand every-
thing of anything. It's a challenge and an invitation to the general reader not
to be turned off. The argument is not hard. It requires a little imaginative
charity, but I believe there is something when you've finished all those pages.
There is some degree of shared assumptions in a so-called public lan-
guage, but nonetheless, we all know that the exact thing is not getting com-
municated to each and every one. The general law of communication is that
it's never a straight line-it's always a curved one. Given this, what am I go-
ing to do? Am I going to engage an ever more general reader, lower my
sights, so that I can speak to this person? No, I'm going to be as precise as I
can be; I'm going to assume a reader who is going to take the trouble to find
out what it is I'm speaking about.
The critical must memphasize the counterintuitive. In the essay that I've
written for What~ ujt ofTheory? I try to show how Marx is actually push-
ing the counterintuitive-because that's what you teach, after all, that which
is not exactly alre<).dy understood by everyone. 3 When we're trying to make
it accessible, we are constantly running interference.
We are not obliged to question common sense, we are not obliged to ques-
tion grammar, we are not obliged to question language, but if we are obliged
to do so in order to make a point, we ought to have the freedom to do so
and to count on a reader who is interested enough to see why. There is a
perfect example in someone having ridiculed me for putting a hyphen in-
side the word geo-graphy. Of course, that person was absolutely unsympa-
thetic to the fact that by doing such a thing--such an "uncommonsensical"
thing, even though it is a common word-I was asking the reader (who
happened to be a man) to understand that I was talking about the fact that
when we look at a map, we are looking at stuff that has been-literally!-
written, written on, an imagined surface of the earth. My argument was
about the disappearance of the aboriginal. It was a pretty serious gesture,
putting that hyphen there, but this guy was so fixated on the fact that I had
done such an outlandish thing that he couldn't see that there was a reason
why.
So, to repeat, it is not necessary that we question grammar, or question
common sense, or question language, but if we do so, I think that the ques-
tion of writing, the question of the politics of writing, the politics of the
production of knowledge, must be kept separate from the question of di:ffi-
An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak I 83
culty. It's not the same question. I quite often find that people criticize me
for writing in this confused way and then take that as a dismissal of every-
thing I want to say. That's my objection. My objection is not that one has to
be difficult. My objection is that if one has to be difficult or if one is diffi-
cult-and has a style that is perhaps not always easy to handle for the
reader-that should be kept separate from the question of the validity of the
production of knowledge. It's not identical.
There is a further point I wish to make--and again I'm speaking person-
ally here--I have tried over the years to make my language clearer. I believe
my language is clearer now, but I assure you, it is not easier to understand. In
fact, it may be more difficult to understand, because the simple words seem
to be easy, and they're not. The question of difficulty is much more compli-
cated and much more layered and nuanced than one would imagine. I don't
think that it's necessary to meddle with "ordinary language," but if it is nec-
essary to do so, one must have the confidence in the readership to see what
the point of it is and that the question of the politics of the production of
knowledge should be kept separate from-only related to-the question of
the difficulty oflanguage.
SJM: So, by having such a confidence in your readership, and by refusing
to level-down your language--"lower your sights"-are you ensuring the
curvature of language, throwing your reader a "curve ball" now and then?
GCS: No, I'm just saying that the law of curvature is the general law of
communication. Whatever you say, to whomever, alone, or in crowds, it's
common sense that the words are not going to convey some unified mean-
ing from me to you the way in which we copy a ftle from one diskette to
another. There is no question that one is subject to that law; and in fact we
try and try to turn that law into a straight line; that is the effort. But one has
to remember that at the end of the day one is subject to that law of curva-
ture, which is an iron-clad law; we cannot break it up.
But that was not my main point. My main point was about the fact that
one must be allowed to be counterintuitive, that in critical writing or when
we're teaching anything, it is counterintuitive; otherwise we're just repeating
what the other person already knows. And I'm suggesting that the question
of the politics of the production ofknowledge must be kept separate from-
although it's related to, it's not identical with-the clarity of the speech or
prose. Finally, I'm saying that a seemingly clear prose is not, by that token,
easier to understand.
There's another problem that people have, and, generally, South Asians
have come forth with this one; and that's that I don't seem to be writing
about Kant writing about colonialism and that I seem to focus instead on
the place where Kant is not writing about that. Well, if they took a moment
.
to read-and the reader's role with difficult writing is transactional-they
would see that that is exacdy the point I am making. If one were to look at
expressed sentiments, and there are many noble sentiments about cos-
mopolitheia and perpetual peace and so on in Kant, there has been a lot of
criticism but also a lot of much deserved applause for such arguments; but in
fact for me what is more interesting is the rhetoric of the moment where, in
his central philosophical writings, he comes to a central philosophical mo-
ment, and therefore I focus there. This is the signature of a literary critic, not
an intellectual historian. In fact, a literary critic, by training, focuses on those
kinds of moments where a truth is betrayed.
And so by the same token I'm taken to task for not being an Indianist.
But I'm not interested in being an Indianist. I'm not even interested in be-
ing a kind of refurbished Orientalist who believes that the essence of knowl-
edge is knowledge about knowledge. That's not my problem. In fact, I am a
Europeanist who believes that the study of European materials is done best
when the wider picture is taken into account. So, indeed, if one goes into
the genealogy of this particular objection, one will see that it began the mo-
ment I was invited to theorize the work of the subaltern studies group.
At that time I desC<ribed the preoccupation with subaltern consciousness
as a strategic use of essentialism. I think, in hindsight, that it was not such a
strategic use of essentialism but simply an assumption that there was such a
consciousness. It was at that moment that this particular piece of criticism,
that I am not an Indianist, had its origin. To go back to that initial occasion,
one of the things that the leader of the collective asked me, in a rather in-
transigent way, was, could I make a revolution with what I was saying-as
Mahasweta Devi could make a revolution with what she was writing. That
was in 1986, I believe. I was at that time new to the Indian intellectual scene
because I had gone away and had not come back to teach in India until
1987.Today I think I have been enough involved in the subcontinental scene
to say that in the current context-in today's globalized world, without the
East-West divide-it is much mcire likely that the kind of educational in-
volvement with a part of the largest sector of the electorate that I have will
bring about a revolution of another model than any kind of nationalist strat-
egy.
In fact I had a conversation with Mahasweta Devi, maybe just a month
ago. Having secured a good deal of money from the United Nations devel-
opment fund (which of course, since 1989, is completely uncritical of the
transnationalist scene), she said to me: "I want to give to these tribals what
will last, like schools and roads." And I looked at her, and I said, look, I want
to give them something that will last also, which is to say, in the very long
run, changed minds, so that they will not need to be patronized by aid. And
I must say that she is such a sympathetic and intelligent woman, that when I
was working in the villages, there came a letter from her acknowledging
that, indeed, people do not understand what it is that I am doing with my
time and skill. So, to that particular criticism, originally from that disingen-
uous question-can you make a revolution with your work?-I would now
answer differendy. At that time I had given an honest answer-I am a liter-
ary critic; that is my trade-and that has been misunderstood in order to
produce a lot of contempt for what I do; but I believe, sixteen years later, I
can say that I now answer that question differendy.
That comes at a bit of an angle to the question of difficulty, but it cer-
tainly is relevant to the question of a wider audience. I am interested not in
oral history, but I am interested in providing the kind of education one gives
here to extremely opulent students-in terms of quality-I'm interested in
providing that sort of education for the vasdy disenfranchised. I've been
teaching for thirty-eight years. My effort in a corner of rural India is now
thirteen years old. I hope I remain alive to have one of the students from
these aboriginal schools, after a university education, tell me: Gayatri, your
writing is too difficult. I am waiting for that day; I am waiting to have such
criticism honesdy directed at me from one of them. That criticism-I'll wear
it like a crown! I cannot take it seriously when people talk to me about
"wider audiences," when this comes from the lazy or reactionary parts of the
academy or from the person who would like to use words like activist, etc.,
when all they mean is me, my group.
One's wider audience is a choice. If I wrote a book in Bengali about
Marx, that would be a wider audience choice. The wider audience choice is
not just simply to banalize or make less precise one's argument for lazier or
more reactionary academics. As I've said before, difficulty starts where one's
own understanding stops, where there's no attempt at wanting to exercise
one's own critical capacity.
SJM: I wonder about writing politics back into difficulty in some sense,
because if the "choice" to be lazy or reactionary is not a political choice per
se, does it not have political implications?
Gcs:Yes, but difficulty as such is not a goal, and by that very token the
avoidance of difficulty at all costs is nonsense-avoiding difficulty at all costs,
that is, to have it as a goal above all else, for an academic audience. That's
what I'm talking about; I'm being extremely simpleminded here. Now, there
is a question about the commitment to democracy. Don't forget that there
is, in democratic action, a coercive edge, whereas education is a noncoercive
theory in terms of desire. Obedience in the classroom is scary. In democratic
forms of government the fact that democracy has, to quote Lefort, an
"empty space" at the end is what distinguishes it from other systems.You
never know what the decision will be in democracy.
That undecidabilitY is what we want to close up at all costs; that's what all
the campaign rhetoric, all the polls, all the conventions, all the talks, all the
kissing your wife elaborately in public are trying to do-that is part of
democracy; that's not a failure of democracy. Like most rational abstractions,
democracy operates. by denying its nature, so the undecidable edge of
democracy is always won back to decision, always won back to voting re-
sults, etc., so that once again it can be opened up to an undecidability, after a
period. In the functioning of democracy there is for sure a good deal of co-
ercion-it's not physical or violent; then it wouldn't be called democracy.
But as one well knows, coercion is not confined to manipulating ballot
boxes and exercising recognizable and visible violence at polling stations. So
that's what this whole business of having campaigns is related to.
Now, in both teaching and this kind of democratic procedure, the point
is not to have the word democracy mean generally that everyone must under-
stand what you're saying. If that were so, then there would not be contend-
ing parties. Reasoning people would all reason at once, so everybody would
believe the same thing, wouldn't they, if we were to take that to its logical
consequence? That's not the point in democracy. Democratic minorities are
not just something we should forget; they're not just racial minorities or cul-
tural minorities-the .democratic minority is a body count. So, therefore,
when one looks at democracy in a thick way, rather than as just a nice buzz-
word, then it's simpJeminded to think that democracy does not have a coer-
cive moment worked into the structure of its functioning. Whereas, at best
education is an uncoercive theory in terms of desire, in the humanities, the
social sciences.
And then there is the book. One has to accept the fact that the book is an
archaic form now, and we want to keep it residual, rich in wonderful vocab-
ulary. Given the way modes of communication are operating now, the book
has to have a different contract with its reader, one that acknowledges that
reading, as I said, is transactional. A book is not the functioning of democ-
racy, nor is it the textuality of classroom teaching; the book is a different kind
of negotiable instrument. If one wants something that comes more easily,
then it is not to the book that one will turn, and so we must give the book
its due.
A book is an impacted thing. Either you have that contract with the
reader, or the reader has that contract with you-or it won't work. And the
humanities are trivialized; the idea of taking time to learn-which is differ-
ent even from knowing-is being trivialized into just information-com-
mand, until even that is no longer pertinent. So, therefore, let us at least, if we
are going to engage in .that archaic activity, let us insist it be what it can be--
that instrument that goes at a slower speed in a world where speed seems to
be of the essence. That's what a book is. It is archaic, must remain residual,
can become alternative and oppositional because it is a defective form-a

virtual enclave in which people can think. There is no such thing as speed
reading-that is why people don't like it.
There is the question of people "not schooled in the same idiom." Now
here again I will talk about the other end of the spectrum, those aboriginal
schools. I do that stuff-the teacher training--for my own education, be-
cause there what I have to do is to learn to learn from below, and it's diffi-
cult. For thirteen years I've been doing this, and I'm just beginning to break
the ice, so that the very poor, the very badly educated-and some of these
teachers are extremely badly educated-are beginning to have some faith in
my way of devising an education, which does not resemble anything like the
education available on a rural level. It's scandalous how different the educa-
tion is below the middle class. Nothing I say, nothing, can stand up against
the common sense of that dreadful system of rote learning and getting
through exams by memorizing answers to antiquated questions and so on,
unless I learn how to teach the counterintuitive.
How long do I stay there? Not long at all, because ifl supervise, once I
am gone, it will break. These people have been kept millennially unedu-
cated-this is not like going down to Brooklyn! I've been trying very hard
not to have them "obey" me. It has taken a very long time to have bits of
trust come from the other side. That's been my education, and it's hard to
do-hard to read the other's text to the extent that I will be able to think of
a way of changing minds uncoercively that would seem plausible to them.
Just today I was looking at "The Wall Street Journal" Report' on television,
which was about "the hottest new demographic in town": ten percent of
eight-to-ten year olds own bonds. To quote the television program: an
eleven-year-old sister and nine-year-old brother have learnt at school and
have inspired their father to become an investor. And they're using the thing
that Marx knew more than one hundred years ago: the bourgeois ruse--
your money keeps growing on your money. Merrill Lynch, Salomon Smith
Barney-they're sending people into preschools .... Morgan Stanley, Amer-
ican Express, kids' parents and money programs-instead of buying the car,
buy the car company! They're called "Generation Y."There are seventy mu-
tual funds especially designed for kids, and they have managed to spend $105
billion on their own. I'm just quoting the television program! This is given
very positively, right?! We have here how we enter into pliable minds, how
children become a part of globalizing financial networks, how exploiters are
being trained.
The same day I also saw on NBC: "The MTV generation is driving the
economy"; teenagers are the "heads of households" because most parents are
working. So we're going from preschoolers, through eight to ten, eleven, and
twelve--teaching them investment-into the MTV generation. This is the
real core of children's education. And then, the same morning, a bit later on
ABC-you see, all the networks, first CBS, then NBC, now ABC: Elizabeth Cady
Stanton's granddaughter comes on; she says her grandmother said that
women's votes are instruments for social change (we see the regulation doc-
umentary footage), and then she praises the female executive of Merrill
Lynch-we've just seen Merrill Lynch sending people into schools, right?-
saying Merrill Lynch is "working for her."
So, you see, this is a textile, this is a cultural fabric, this is children's edu-
cation. As far as I'm concerned, for your own education you want to do the
thing counter to this kind of effort. Remember, this is just one morning, I
was doing my own work, but as I was moving around, I turned on the 1V a
bit, and I got these three wonderful nuggets-it's not research.
This is the idiom being placed within children's minds; this is the cultural
fabric being woven; this is what says, "We won't read anything difficult."
When we are training children in this way, these things are against turning
globalization around constandy for better social redistribution. I believe that
you cannot turn capitali-sm around to anything that is not within capitalism,
in other words, corporate philanthropy, development-sustaining cost effi-
ciency, impatient human;-rights intervention with no time to respect local
assumptions. We need strong virtues that one must not call "precapitalist" be-
cause then you're some kind of a social Darwinist, and we all know that
that's a crock! We need other virtues defective for capitalism. But that does-
n't mean that that's what should cover the world because globalization can-
not, and in fact, should not, be stopped. In order for globalization to global-
ize all over the world, to be strategy driven, rather than each time crisis
driven {the crisis of the North upon the South), we need those other kinds
of virtues. '
Now, if you 'like, my effort is at this other end of the spectrum-with the
aboriginal children, because they're part of the larger system in countries of
the South, the rural poor. When you work here, at this end you can only
hope that one person's mind will change, one person who will perhaps be-
come interested in this unglamorous work that is interesting in other ways.
SJM: One at a time. Sort of a "strategic particularism,'' if you will?
GCS: Of course! Of course! Now, I should also say that problem-solving
activists reject what I'm talking about as well because they're impatient with
problems to be solved; they don't have the time to construct extremely frag-
ile collectivities that aren't just already there. By their supervision and their
constant insistence to present a real collectivity they must remain focused on
the moment o(freedom from oppression. They assume that once the problem
is solved and the time for the freedom to be responsible comes, that the op-
pressed somehow will do good. That just isn't true; the facts don't bear that
out. My kind of work suffers from the rejection not only from these won-
derfully investment-trained preschoolers but rejection also from the prob-
lem-solving activists who are just interested in going from problem to prob-
lem and solving them. They're absolutely crisis driven.
I think the hope is really for an open future so that one teaches in such a
way that there will be some kind of other-directed thinking when things
will have changed. But somehow, without any infrastructural support, and
therefore not particularly effective within a global context, that sort of hope
is all that one can have.
Now, as for the relationship between the academy and journalism. The
vast field ofjournalism should certainly not be ignored-entertainment, in-
fomercials, MTV, and what is the Internet? Is it virtual journalism mas-
querading as something like books? Is it some kind of simulacrum of that ar-
chaic mode? What is the nexus of telecommunication and finance capital,
where any kind of information picture moving is okay? Where does jour-
nalism end these days? Where does it begin? Should we accept little maga-
zines as also a defunct residual form? I am not talking about fanzines and
stuff, because there is within journalism now this move toward the other
medium that, even if it is between covers, does not resemble a book because
it does not have that transactionality. It's not a question of high and low. It's
a question of different kinds of production in language.
SJM: Could we call this "criticality"?
ccs: I don't know if you could call it criticality; but if you like, you could.
I think that the concept of criticality itself is more toward one end. They're
all using some form of verbality, but I don't know what journalism is any-
more. The newspaper, little magazines, journals-these are beginning to
shade off into the instant. And not only an instant, but an alternative instant.
And sometimes a kind of noninstantiable virtuality. So, if you bring me to
the question of journalism and critical writing, I will repeat: we are in a
residual mode, which I don't think of on an evolutionary scheme because
I'm not a social Darwinist. But nonetheless I welcome Raymond Williams's
model that we keep the residual, not just as alternative, but oppositional, by
insisting on the fact that the book is transactional; in order to survive as it is,
it has to negotiate a different kind of contract with the reader. Finally, that
hope is not a very strong one because of the trivialization of the humanities
and the quality of the social sciences-and at the same time the weaving of
the textile of the cultural fabric gets lower and lower as training turns into
this kind of virtualized investment.
SJM: Let's return to the question of your writing with a more specific
question. You mention in several places that you write with great difficulty,
both in English and iri your mother tongue, Bengali. You say: "I would like
to be able to write more sober prose."5 Can "sober" prose readily be distin-
guished from its "inebriated" counterpart? What would it mean to under-
stand your prose as "inebriated"?
Gcs: Sober prose---a lovely question. When I did that interview, I was re-
ally talking about the rhetoric of expressed desire and not of a goal. Ex-
pressed desire, half thinking, half projecting-that's the medium. It's not re-
ally an expressed thing. I believe I was using sober somewhat more
figuratively than you imagine--like clearly--and I think what I was con-
trasting it to was the fact that my passions show.
We need not just a weapon, but a recognizable weapon, an up-to-the-
mark, effective weapon. If the "subaltern"-which is a word for those who
do not have infrastructural support-resist on their own, it will be useless: it
will not be recognized by other women, even by other women in their own
families. Therefore, I have said-in a very enraged and passionate way: "The
subaltern cannot speak." This was picked up by a kind of narcissism in the
academy, where anybody who feels she has not had a good deal immediately
decides that she herself is a subaltern. And so we hear Spivak takes away the
voice of resistance. "The'" subaltern cannot speak" was something like saying
there is no justice in the world-you know, that sort of passionate rhetoric.
But I decided that rather than confront the kind of nonsense I was hearing,
it was better to take the rage out and rewrite it in simpler language. That is,
if you like, "sober" language, serious language.
And I think, you know, I cannot say that I regret that passion makes me
confusing sometimes. So that desire is just an expression of desire that is per-
haps not being fulfilled. It's like I wish I could be something that, clearly, I
don't quite want to be--that was the mode of my statement, because when
you cannot do something, you say, "Oh, I wish I could." And it's often the
frivolous and not just the passionate; but if you really want to get the weight
of that frivolous, maybe we should. talk about the archaeology of the frivo-
lous-but that would take us too far afield. . . .
SJM: I understand you are passionately involved in grassroots literacy proj-
ects in Asia. Would you talk a bit more about your activism in this sphere and
how it informs the language of your theoretical commitments? What act of
"translation" takes place for you, Gayatri Spivak, as you shuttle between Asia
and America, trying to effect a communication?
Gcs: I'm really not involved in "grassroots literacy projects." It would be
difficult for me to really run literacy projects. My real schools, these decade-
long schools, are in Western Wes~ Bengal. They are not "literacy projects"-
they are schools that I run. I feed the children, I pay the teachers, I have small
An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak 191
schoolrooms built, I hang out-going again and again, never staying too
long--to find ways of being responsible, so that I can tell them how to do
things, and teaching teachers to teach by learning from the children. You
know, it's that kind oflabor-intensive work; there is no project there--it's all
my moving around with my teachers in these one-room schools.
What act of translation takes place? I almost don't know what act of
translation takes place, but I do know that something happens. I don't try to
effect a communication between the two. Over the last few years there are
many ways in which my experience there is teaching me how to teach here.
After all, it is useful to be far from the triumphant culture with its sense of
manifest destiny. As I revise I am on a bus returning from a UNIFEM lunch-
eon, wonderful women, but talk about a sense of"manifest destiny"! The
idea of being in an indispensable country, you know, cultural rights every-
where--as if all of this took place so that one could be sitting in a classroom.
So, I try more and more to teach. I teach in my classroom that at the
speed of slow reading of difficult books there are no stock options. The idea
is to see that reading literature in its literariness is to practice accessing the
other as other so that the reader is adrift-determined by the text-in un-
predictable alterity. This is what I see here, and basically it is something that I
have learned from my experience there. In the beginning I thought of teach-
ing here as just instrumental, as earning my living so that I could work there.
But truly my work there has begun to show that a similar kind of work can
be done here as well. Is that a translation? I don't know. But I feel the two
ends of the question corning together more and more.
There is another thing. I teach Longinus to my undergraduate students in
the history of critical thought. At a certain point Longinus says one of the
ways one can produce sublime writing is by thinking one is addressing "the
illustrious dead." Now, I don't think they necessarily have to be the illustri-
ous dead. The men and women of these areas with whom I've been involved
for the last thirteen years, when I try to learn to learn from below, they are
my silent judges, they, like Longinus's illustrious dead, these persons so far re-
moved from the dominant idiom; they're always there. They have no power
over me, but they have all the power over me. It is in their ghostly presence
that I read, write, and teach. Nothing that I read, write, or teach wouldn't be
endorsed by the fact that they are. And that does indeed give a certain kind
of responsibility, which should not be confused with the obligation to be
clear for the lazy or reactionary.
SJM: Ifl may quote you here:"You have to hypercathect what you trans-
late. That is the politics of translation." 6 Would you mind elaborating on the
crossing of the libidinal, the political, and the ethical within translation?
How ought we to make sense of" culture as translation"?
Gcs: I think translation is something one cannot avoid. When I said hy-
percathexis, I was really thinking of"attending."What is interesting about
hypercathexis is what one would call not attention but attending. Cathect-
ing has a more libidinal application, and I meant something less given over
to the libido. How do you understand hypercathexis?
SJM: I was thinking of hypercathexis along the lines of what Freud dis-
cussed in his paper on psychoanalysis and the so-called war neuroses. There
he found that a neurosis might be prevented by a hypercathexis of the in-
jured body part-effectively binding the libidinal energy. If I recall, the hy-
percathexis was seen by Freud almost as a prophylactic against psychic
trauma.
GCS: Yes, so the hypercathexis is the enigma of survival, as it were. That's
very interesting and would relate to the idea of translation. What one "trans-
lates" is the untranslatability oflanguage, the untranslatability of idiom. One
is translating for content, so it's the language that's falling out; there is no lan-
guage there. I'm thinking of the lost limb: it is language that is the lost limb
there.
SJM:Well, what survives then?
GCs:What survives? Nothing survives. Just as the arm is not there, the lan-
guage is not there. And yet, it is the enigma of survival: we survive without
the arm.
SJM:You have said that the infant "invents his or her mother tongue. That
is how the infant begins, by creating a language which then the parent
learns, as it were. Through that it develops into a language with a history." 7
Would you ~laborate on this notion of"invention," and might there be im-
plications here for the project of cultural translation?
Gcs: Cultural translation, the idea that the infant invents his or her
mother tongue-these notions come to me from Melanie Klein. But I al-
ways insist when I talk about Melanie Klein that this is not the Melanie
Klein that you will find in Kleinian psychoanalysis or even in most readings
of her. Thankfully, I have read Melanie Klein with the kind of passion I was
describing to you, so what I offer is a kind of digest of Spivak using Klein
with this sort of focus. Did you read "Translation as Culture"?8 I'll quote
from there:
"Melanie Klein ... suggested that the work of translation is an incessant
shuttle, that is, a 'life.' The human infant grabs on to some one thing, and
then things. This grabbing (begreifen) of an outside, indistinguishable from an
inside, constitutes an inside, going back and forth and coding everything
into a sign-system by the thing(s) grasped. One can call this crude coding a
'translation."' The point is that we, "the reader ... translating the incessant
translating shutde into that which is read, must have the most intimate
knowledge of the ruse of representation and 'permissible narratives'-
Klein's words-which make up the substance of a culture, and must also be-
come responsible and accountable with the writing-translating presupposed
original."
Now this idea of the subject and the shutding described by Klein is
something that will have happened, not something that definitely happens. In
this understanding of translation in Melanie Klein, therefore, the word trans-
lation itself loses its literal sense. That is Melanie Klein's narrative. Although
she does talk about Oedipus, etc., because she was devoted to Freud, I think
this is secondary in Klein; it's part of the permissible narrative. In fact, if you
really look at Klein carefully, you'll see that the subject's an economy; it's a
constant shutding, and Oedipus is only a resource rather than an object-
choice narrative that one adopts. Klein doesn't go from Imaginary to Sym-
bolic, etc. She's very, very interesting from this point of view. I believe
Deleuze and Guattari misunderstood her, and Lacan did not acknowledge
her.
SJM: Perhaps I could ask another question in this vein. Psychoanalytic
theories posit an unconscious of various sorts that gets taken up critically as
a model of radical alterity. Here at the heart of the "I" resides something ir-
reducibly Other, and yet it is also, after a fashion, "mine." But how much of
this, to follow Lacan, is "structured like a language"? You have said, "When
you say it's structured like a language, when it's structured like metaphor and
metonymy, everything begins to go astray." 9 What is this going astray? Is it a
productive crisis? And, conversely, might there be a better model, outside the
vagaries of language, to theorize unconscious alterity?
GCS: Now, my idea of"radical alterity" is not psychoanalytic. I cannot
think of this resident other-which, indeed, psychologically I cannot access
but nonetheless is metapsychologically imbricated in whatever can be called
a "me," if not an "I"-I can't think of it as "radically" other. It is only psy-
chologically other; I cannot access it psychologically. My notion of radical
alterity is-if it can be a notion-that to be human is to be angled, that is to
say, leaning toward another. It's more philosophical than psychoanalytic. This
entails an assumption of a radical alterity, so therefore it is in fact not an
antonym of the self; an antonym of the self would not be a radical alterity-
it would be alterity but not "radical." A radical alterity is not, as it were. And
so for me the psychoanalytic theoretical fiction of the unconscious is not a
radical alterity insofar as it is the "it" of the "I."
I would like to point you to this essay, which you no doubt have read,
which is part ofLacan's twentieth seminar, called Encore (Again)-where he's

talking to Jakobson, "A Jakobson." He says, "[I]f one considers everything
that, given the definition of language, follows regarding the foundation of
the subject--so thoroughly renewed and subverted by Freud that it is on
that basis that everything he claimed to be unconscious can be grounded-
then one must, in order to leave Jakobson his own turf (domaine reservl), forge
another word. I will call it linguistricks (linguisterie)." 10 He is trying to say he
was not doing linguistics when he took that line from Jakobson: he was "lin-
guistricking." Now, this is the important part. Lacan continues: "The fact that
I say (Mon dire) that the unconscious is structured like a language is not part
and parcel of the field of linguistics." So, the fact that it was taken to mean,
literally, the transposition of the linguistic model of metonymy and
metaphor working on the chain of the production of signifiers-desire and
the symptom-that is what here, quiedy, in the 1970s Lacan is dissolving as
he is moving into his postsemiotic phase.
I'm but an aficionado of psychoanalysis. I have the same kind of feeling
about psychoanalysis as I have about any sort of ritualized behavior: it works
because it works. And so I would say that the effort to tap the production of
the subject in order to restore social agency-! think that is incredible, be-
cause one must work with this distinction between subject and agent, al-
though at the limit they are shifting. But nonetheless, I would not want to
theorize unconscious alterity because my idea of unconscious alterity is pre-
cisely that which resists theorizing. So it may be that language is the best
model. But that is a problem, rather than a solution. By doing this I'm sim-
ply repeating a lesson learned from Derrida early on, which he hasn't turned
his back on. In the ·very first thing of Derrida's-his introduction to
Husserl's "Ofigin of Geometry"-the point was that Husserl solved the
problem too quickly and too easily by falling on the model oflanguage. Of
course that's the model that will always solve the problem-but what's the
use? That solution is the very problem.
SJM:Would you comment on South Africa's "Truth and Reconciliation
Commission,'' presided over by Archbishop Desmond Tutu? The idea is, ba-
sically, that perpetrators of crimes under Apartheid publicly confess their
crimes-a ritual intended to bring peace and a sense of justice to post-
Apartheid South Africa, even if this does litde to change the material condi-
tions of its citizens. What faith do you have in such ventures; are you hope-
ful? Can past horrors be represented adequately in/by language, without
Nuremberg-style trials, and to what end?
ccs: First of all, I will say that in the idea of stating something ritually
we're not thinking about psychotherapy. We're thinking about the fact that
ritual works because it works. That's the power of ritual. In fact, what we're
looking at here is a tremendous exercise in the literalization of a kind of de-

hegemonized Christianity. De Man used to say that in order to be political,
you have to literalize the metaphor. To an extent that's what this is. And
therefore what is happening here is not an adequate representation of hor-
rors. In other words, it's not an adequate Darstellung of horrors in speech but
that other meaning of representation, that is to say, a metonym. Speech be-
comes an accepted agential, rather than subjective, metonym for the unrep-
resentable. And therefore it does not remain unrepresentable. The very un-
representability, the unrepresentability of a horror that approaches the
absolute, is represented by its metonymic substitution in speech. That's how
ritual works.
When penance is given-from within a generalized discourse-in ex-
change for confession in the more classic structure of confession, one would
have to think that all Catholics are fools or naive to imagine this is taken by
a subde Catholic mind as some kind of actual substitution. It is the act of
faith in the substitution that works because it works. Like an exchange, it's
not reasonable. That functioning of the value form-that's what it is in the
classic structure of confession-that functioning is as symbolic as all ex-
change.
SJM: You have recendy said: "Triumphant global finance capital/world
trade can only be resisted with irony." 11 Would you talk a litde about irony
and the possibility of a resistance in language?
ccs: De Man's definition is that irony is permanent parabasis, which is the
move in Attic comedy when the Chorus steps forth and there is a kind of
collective voice that interrupts the main action of the play. Even there, how-
ever, one voice wants to take over in the Chorus, etc. These counterglobal-
izing movements, if you globalize globalization rather than see it as just met-
ropolitan migration, these movements are constandy disrupting, not at
meetings but by small initiatives, one after the other, one after the other . . .
turning capital around and trying but not succeeding because of the absence
of infrastructural recognition and what I call relative restricted permeabili-
ties-so that stuff from the top (for example, the wro demonstrations in
Seatde [December 1999]) permeates down, but not much percolates up. This
is what I call the irony of global finance capital-permanent parabasis: con-
stant interruption of the operating of the main story (finance capital and
world trade) by a collective voice. That's what I meant; I did not mean ironic
language.
There are people who know about this: there is a Third World network;
there is an Asian Women's Human Rights Council; it's not like no one
knows. But in the sector that calls itself the international civil society, or the
general northern-bas~d radical sector that goes on demonstrations-the

people who go to the Beijing plus Five meetings at the UN headquarters in
New York-with them there isn't enough of an infrastructure that percolates
up. If you look at the big email circuits produced by the Beijing plus Five
meetings, etc., you will see that what is often being reported is people mak-
ing NGOs and asking for help. But we're not talking about how nicely they
work as NGOs, and so on! It is amazing if you actually read the reams of stuff
that's produced. But for the actual non-English-speaking, local-language-
speaking workers in the field, there is no infrastructure that will allow the
news of this resistance to reach up as such. It is taking place-the permanent
parabasis is taking place-but it remains inaccessible to northern-based,
somewhat impatient organizational do-gooders. The northern-based stuff or
the NGo-level southern stuff is not, strictly speaking, interruptions. Those
ruptures are critically continuous with the system.
SJM: Back in 1988 you said, "There is a practical political left in the
United States, but it has no connection with the academic left." 12 Very re-
cently, however, you have lamented the absence of a "'practical' left in the
United States," suggesting the left is now consigned entirely to "a dwindling
enclave in the academic and journalistic world." 13 Have your views changed
in the last decade? And is the academic left "impractical"? These academic
and often esoteric debates take place, as you say, "with a vigor matched only
by [their] lack of consequence outside the academy." 14 How do you recon-
cile the need to be critical of" ordinary language" politics and the need to be
accessible, to "go public as often as we can"? 15
GCS: I won't give you a direct answer because I've talked at length about
this in the first part of our conversation. But I would like to end with an an-
ecdote. I cotaught a course in fall 2000 with the head of the Political Science
Department-an enlightened, rational choice kind of colleague. I did this
because we don't often enough talk to such colleagues to recognize that our
account of the most radical in left thinking is incomplete. Here, for example,
I hold in my hand a book written by another colleague of mine-Professor
Elster-with whom I have had only one casual conversation in all these
years! The academic subdivision oflabor is so strong, and the dismissal of the
kind of work we do-which is the occasion for our conversation-is so
Olympian in the other part of the academy, that he would be completely
dismissive of my work.
I've just started to read his book Alchemies of the Mind, which has for a
subtitle: Rationality an4 the Emotions. Rationality and the emotions-very
promising, and indeed, I find his' earlier work, Ulysses and the Sirens, for ex-
ample, extremely suggestive. But look at this. He is talking about psychic
causality as "a recurring and intelligible causal pattern," a "mechanism."This

is so far from our understanding of a lot of the psychic as being metapsy-
chological! The difference between the psychic as apparatus (although he's
using the word mechanism, his understanding of mechanism is "an intelligi-
ble causal pattern") and the fact that there is a metapsychological that is not
accessible to psychology, that is not continuous with psychology and a kind
of taxonomy of phenomenal emotions and affects, etc.-that difference is so
commonsensical to us. Consider the question: "Who dreams?" or that to
dream is normal. I'm not even going into any kind of theoretical thicket
here. This immediately gives the lie to this notion of psychic causalities. So
in the interest of a coherent theoretical system, which presumably enriches
the rational choice idea of political theory by an account of the emotions,
one must impoverish the psychic field even by ignoring what I'm calling
common sense.
When the best in the discipline is like this, and the discipline is broken by
the question that brought us into this conversation-this distrust of a lan-
guage that sinks or swims in order to come to grips with something that
may not be an intelligible "mechanism"-then, I think, the binary opposi-
tion between the criticism of ordinary language and the need to go public,
claimed by our neck of the woods, becomes a bit risible.
I notice in rereading that I have bypassed the question of the left. Why
have we identified "the left" with simplemindedness? The teaching role of
the left intellectual is an economy of the uncanny, making the familiar unfa-
miliar enough so that critical practice can happen. But that is simply to pre-
pare the field. Is that enough? That leads to another conversation.
Notes
I. This interview took place at Columbia University, New York, August 20,2000.
2. "Moving at Both Ends of the Spectrum:A Conversation with Gayatri Chakra-
vorty Spivak," interview by Lopamudra Basu. The interview took place four months
prior to this one, and is posted at the Barnes and Noble Web site:
http:/ /www.bn.com/. It is accessible via the link "Interviews and Essays, Read More
From the Author" from Barnes and Noble's web page for Spivak's book, A Critique
of Postcolonial Reason.
3. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "From Haverstock Hill Flat to U.S. Classroom:
What's Left ofTheory?" in Whatj Left ofTheory? New Work on the Politics of Literary
Theory, ed.Judith Buder, John Guillory, and Kendall Thomas (New York: Roudedge,
2000), I-39·
4· CBS, August 20, 2ooo.
s. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dia-
logues, ed. Sarah Harasym (New York: Roudedge, 1990), 160.
6. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Lost Our Language--Underneath the Linguistic
Map," interview by Ramer Ganahl, in Imported: A Reading Seminar, Semiotext(e) 18,

volume 6, issue 3 (New York: Semiotext(e), 1998), 192.
7. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, interview by Geert Lovink, ed. Linda Wallace, Pax
Electronica,July 23, 1997.
8. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Translation as Culture:' in Parallax:A]ournal of
MetadiscourseTheory and Cultural Practices 14 aan.-March 2000): 13-34·
9. Spivak, Post-Colonial Critic, 150.
10. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar ofJacques Lacan, Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality,
The Limits of Lave and Knowledge, Encore 1972-1973, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans.
Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1998), 15. Originally published as Le Seminaire, Livre
XX, Encore, 1972-1973 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975), 20.
II. Spivak, "From Haverstock:' 33.
13. Spivak, "From Haverstock," I.
14. Ibid.
JUDITH BUTLER 13
Values of Difficulty
1 AM WONDERING how to write this essay. Will I be intelligible or not?

And if I am intelligible, does that mean that I have succeeded? And if I am
not quite intelligible, or if I am unintelligible, then will that be a failure of
communication? Or will it be making a different point? This is a rhetorical
predicament I am in, writing here, and it is one not only I am in, but which
many of us are in as we try to explain why certain kinds of scholarship in the
humanities assume the voice that they sometimes do. In many venues, these
days, there is an obligation, a need, to make clear what we do. And this is not
always easy because what we do is not always easy. It is sometimes necessary
to take up the challenge of making clear what we do, of making clear what
we do without precisely denying what we do. That the presentation cannot
and will not always conform to modes of communication that are familiar
and consoling may seem to some as if the project of communication has
failed. But is it not part of a critical practice, a critical approach to language
and, indeed, to rhetoric, to ask what constitutes the norms of communica-
bility, and what challenges them, and how it is that a critical consideration of
the norm and its challenges forms part of the project of a comparative ap-
proach to literature? Indeed, the norms that govern communicability are not
singular, and if they were, there would be no place for translation, no need
to ask, how might I make this text communicable here and there? Or how
can it travel? And what are the limits to its traveling? Part of my point will
be that to pass through what is difficult and unfamiliar is an essential part of
critical thinking within the academy today, an academy whose dedication to
"comparative" work is not a field or subfield of its operation but a funda-
mental and irreversible condition of communication itself. I hope to make
clear along the way that this passage, which is not smooth, through the un-
familiar and the difficult is especially crucial for a version of the humanities
200 JUDITH BUTLER
that seeks to maintain'a connection to social theory and to the project of so-
cial and political transformation. Whereas some critics, such as Rorty, have
suggested that literature is deprived of its inspirational possibility once it be-
comes sullied by the work of social theory and social science, I would like to
suggest that it is virtually impossible to think the practice of criticism, much
less critique, without this important implication of literary theory in its re-
lation to social life. I will be making a counterpoint, however, as well, about
the specificity of literary language and the limits of its translatability into so-
cial theory.
A certain paradox has emerged within debates on the politics oflanguage.
The questions of how we speak and to whom we speak are traditionally
rhetorical problems. They become acute when we seek not only to speak
but to persuade, and to persuade others of our political views. Now, one
view on this problem, a view from the left, is that it is therefore crucial that
we speak in ways that most people can understand, that we reach them
where they live so that the "we" who speaks and the "them" to whom we
speak are not separate<:\, so that we are a member of the very community that
is our audience. That same position holds that it is important that we reach
the largest audience possible with our views and that politics relies funda-
mentally on a rhetoric with popular appeal. What this means for academics
on the left is not only that it will be important to speak in a way that does
not become lost to the internal workings of academic language but that it
will be important to take popular culture as an object and venue for aca-
demic work itself. I take it that this position is one that insists that any pro-
gressive use of politics must be popular, and it must be popular in several
senses: it must reach a_wide audience, it must address topics that concern
most people, a_nd it must speak in the language of the broader community.
This strikes me as a sound view. But I do want to outline a paradox, and
the other side of the paradox looks like this: Adorno and others working in
the context of critical theory made the argument that one of the most im-
portant ways to call into question the status quo is by engaging language in
nonconventional ways. He worried, and surely many others worried as well,
that language gives us a world, a sense of its meaning and its intelligibility,
and that many assumptions about how the world should be are built into
language use. I take it that he did not mean that whatever we say the world
is, is the way the world appears but rather that certain kinds of assumptions
about, for instance, the natural status of money, the inevitable existence of
class structure, of what the human is, of "who" constitutes the human, of
what the limits of community are, of"who" is included in prevailing notions
of community, what communicable speech might be, "who" is intelligible
and who is not are embedded in the everyday use oflanguage. Now, this use
may appear to be "common," but here again we have to ask: whose language
Values of Difficulty 20 I
assumes the status of" common" language, who polices the "common;' and
what uses oflanguage are thereby ruled out as uncommon or, indeed, unin-
telligible? Adorno thus claimed that a critical theory must use language in
ways that call into question its everyday assumptions, precisely because some
of the most problematic views about reality have become sedimented in
everyday parlance. His worry was that to speak in ways that are already ac-
cepted as intelligible is precisely to speak in ways that do not make people
think critically, ways that accept the status quo and do not make use of the
resource of language to rethink the world radically.
So this strikes me as an interesting and sound view, even though it appears
to be in conflict with the first view that I laid out above. Whereas the first
view claims that any left position must speak the language of the popular, the
second worries that the language of the popular is that of an uncritical con-
sumerism. Whereas the first might accuse the second of elitism, and with
some justification, and might also claim that forms of critical consumerism
exist, that popular culture, including popular language, is a scene for critical
subversion of the status quo, the second might accuse the first of selling out
thought or, indeed, of premising politics on a dogmatic anti-intellectualism.
Surely there are a number of viewpoints that fall between the two I have
just outlined. There are those, for instance, who might claim that critical the-
ory does not need to be popular or have an effect on what is popular, that its
value is intellectual and that it does not need to change the world or always
be referred to the project of changing the world. And there are others who
might claim that changing the world is the paramount thing and that it will
always be a pragmatic consideration which language to use in the process or
who might feel that language is one instrument among many for effecting
that transformation. It is also unclear that what Adorno means by" common
sense" is the same as what defenders of popular culture mean by the "popu-
lar." Surely, popular culture can function to challenge common sense; the
popular is not one, and it is often the venue for minority cultures to weigh
in against high culture, often the vehicle through which the new comes into
confrontation with what has been commonly accepted.
So what do I mean by critical? I will turn to Adorno to see what might be
made of this term, but here are a few remarks to keep in mind: Adorno was
an elitist, and his views on popular culture are for the most part radically
lamentable. He thought that film stupefied the senses and dulled the critical
mind, that jazz lacked the proper characteristics of culture: even the most
generous reader of his work would be hard-pressed not to call those reflec-
tions of his racist. So my point will not be to embrace Adorno but to let him
represent one extreme within a reflection that I hope to conduct, a reflec-
tion that seeks to embrace a paradox without precisely resolving it.
So, with such caveats in mind, let me cite a passage from Adorno, one that
202 JUDITH BUTLER
illustrates his deep distrust of communicability, a distrust that would be

nearly impossible to hear replicated within our current cultural climate.
Adorno put his view most acutely in his Minima Moralia, 1 a text he wrote
while in exile in New York and published in 1951 in Germany:
A writer will find that the more precisely, conscientiously, appropriately he expresses
himself, the more obscure the literary result is thought, whereas a loose and irre-
sponsible formulation is at once rewarded with certain understanding. It avails noth-
ing ascetically to avoid all technical expressions, all allusions to spheres of culture that
no longer exist. Rigour and purity in assembling words, however simple the result,
create a vacuum. Shoddiness that drifts with the flow of familiar speech is taken as a
sign of relevance and contact: people know what they want because they know what
other people want. Regard for the object, rather than for communication, is suspect
in any expression: anything specific, not taken from pre-existent patterns, appears in-
considerate, a symptom of eccentricity, almost of confusion. The logic of the day,
which makes so much of its clarity, has naively adopted this perverted notion of
everyday speech. Vague expression permits the hearer to imagine whatever suits him
and what he already thinks in any case. Rigorous formulation demands unequivocal
comprehension, conceptual effort, to which people are deliberately discouraged, and
imposes on them in advance of any content a suspension of all received opinions,
and thus an isolation, that they violently resist. Only what they do not need first to
understand, they consider understandable, only the word coined by commerce, and
really alienated, touches them as familiar. Few things contribute so much to the de-
moralization of intellectuals. Those who would escape it must recognize the advo-
cates of communicability as traitors to what they communicate. (101)
Adorno, of course, belonged to that earlier formulation of critical theory
that believed that social criticism ought not to be separated from aesthetics
and that, in particular, a·critical perspective must actively trouble the received
conventions of language, risking a certain "isolation" from common-held
standards of linguistic satisfaction. Of course, this has always been the conceit
of high literary modernism, namely, that the world can only be given anew
when redescribed by heightened and unconventional language that reworks
the settled meanings of words into those that are explicitly unconventional.
Within literary modernism the point of undoing conventional forms of
communication was to produce the new, and the new had a value, since it
seemed to signify cultural progress and the possibility of renewing a sense of
experience out from under the shackles of technology. Part of what critical
theory did in its pre-Habermasian phase was to transpose this insight oflit-
erary modernism into social theory. Thus, the question oflanguage became
central to the rethinking of social reality. Language not only communicates
to us about a ready-made world but gives us a world, and gives it to us or,
indeed, withholds it from us by virtue of the terms it uses. Then the critical
question emerges: what world is' given to us through language, and how
Values of Difficulty 203
might the alteration of our language give us a different sense of world? Is

one way that social reality, capital, class difference, relations of subordination
and exclusion come to seem natural and familiar precisely through the lan-
guage that impounds these notions in a subtle and daily way into our sense
of reality? And if this sense of reality is built up, solidified, rendered im-
mutable, imprisoned through repeated kinds oflanguage use, then where do
we intervene on that repetitive use to transform the world into a site of pos-
sible action and of possible transformation?
It may seem that I am asking for a certain kind of emancipation through
language, but I do not mean to be so happy. Adorno makes clear in the above
that the risk of difficult thinking is a certain isolation and estrangement, so
it is not a bounteously collective moment in which critical thinking
emerges. Indeed, it can come from the depths of isolation. One might object
and say that Adorno moves too quickly to identify the familiarity of the
common with consumerist notions of satisfaction and that the reason writ-
ing must risk obscurity and isolation is therefore to establish a perspective
that is not immediately co-opted by consumer culture. Although Adorno
may have all sorts of misbegotten ideas about consumer culture, he does have
an idea of what makes a perspective critical. The demand that language de-
liver what is already understandable appears to be a demand to be left alone
with what one already knows. But Adorno gives this notion of self-satisfied
ignorance a twist when he writes, "Only what they do not need first to un-
derstand, they consider understandable."The "they" here do not need to un-
derstand, and that very need not to understand conditions their judgment
about what is understandable. The paradox that emerges is that what is not
understood becomes what is best understood, and for Adorno this is no un-
derstanding at all; it is, in fact, a defense against understanding, one per-
formed and maintained in the name of understanding itself.
Of course, one political response to such a view is to claim that to reach
people and to have effects one must write in an accessible and popular way.
And perhaps it is that Adorno fails to understand the critical or subversive
potential within consumer culture itself. But is he also making another point
about criticality that might be separated from his claim about consumer cul-
ture? Is he telling us that the moment in which understanding is challenged
and risked is the one in which a critical perspective emerges? Is this not the
moment, the occasion, when I come to recognize that it is my ignorance,
and my tenacious hold on ignorance, that dictates what I will come to call
communicable knowledge? What does it say about me when I insist that the
only knowledge I will validate is one that appears in a form that is familiar
to me, that answers my need for familiarity, that does not make me pass
through what is isolating, estranging, difficult, and demanding?
Adorno is not referring to certain kinds of truths that are hard to take but
204 JUDITH BUTLER
rather to the way in ~hich those truths are presented, a presentation that is
essential to the truth that is articulated. If communication does not take
place through familiar conventions that house and protect my ignorance,
then does it take place at all? If I call "communicability" that moment in
which I already know the convention by which communication takes place,
what risk of difference do I foreclose, and what form of cultural parochial-
ism do I protect?
To say that the communication of truth depends on its presentation is to
say that such communication is rhetorical. This means that the presentation
of truth that is made may well produce meanings that call into question the
truth that is communicated or add something more, something different, to
what is explicidy intended. The language in which one offers one's views
does not always carry the meanings that one intends, and our words often
return to us as hauntings from another order. For words are not first spoken
and then received, they are received and spoken, received and imparted at
once in the act of speaking. That I am born into a language does not mean
that it speaks me as if.I am its ventriloquization, but it does speak as I speak,
and my voice is never fully or exclusively my own. Indeed, I speak and lis-
ten, and then later ask, '~Who was speaking there?" And the answer may not
be conclusively given·. That the speech act is not governed by the intention
by which it is animated does not mean that there is no intention, only that
the intention does.not govern. That the intention does not govern does not
mean that it does not sometimes orchestrate and effect its intention, only
that if it does, it is lucky. Similarly, this does not mean that we cannot fully
intend to get across a certain point, but we should probably be aware that
even the same words.resonate differendy, depending on the semantic di-
mensions of their circulation, and that our intentions will become derailed
to some extent in the course of the trajectory of our words. I think that this
situation is not simply reducible to a formal character oflanguage, to a rela-
tion between intention and force, or to fields of intention and fields of re-
ception but takes its own specific form within the context of a multicultural
linguistic condition. The use of a term or a locution in one context may or
may not travel appropriately into the next.
This happens surely with contemporary human rights discourse, where
rights are attached to kinds of persons or practices that make no sense in one
cultural venue and are, as it were, the foundation of sense in another. And it
happens when we consider the term universality, which, by definition, should
include all people, and it is regularly misunderstood by those it describes, or
refused by those it includes, or used in syntactical ways that are incompati-
ble with other such US!!s.And speaking locally, for the moment, this problem
of translation, and its limits, takes'place in gay politics as well, a lesson learned
from AIDS activism in the 1980s, when activists sought to enter Spanish-
Values of Difficulty 205
speaking conununities, for instance, to do AIDS outreach by asking who was

"homosexual" only to find that very few people would answer to the term.
When they returned to ask who practiced anal sex with other men, many
more people came forth, and a lesson was thereby learned by Anglo activists.
To engage in activism is not to start with the concept of a shared language
but to be prepared to find that conununication can sometimes take place
only when the terms that initiate a discussion undergo an expropriation that
bears no resemblance to the original, where the term abandons the animat-
ing conditions of its own efficacy in order to live elsewhere as another term
or as a term subjected to a radically unanticipated use.
Such examples make at least two points about political rhetoric that I
would like to underscore today. The first is that we may think that effective
activism requires that we use language that is direct, straightforward, and
conunonsensical. Indeed, we may even think that a popular democratic
movement must use the language of the people, and we may even conjec-
ture that we know what that language is and how best to use it. But if one
of the tasks of activism is to cross cultural barriers in a nonimperialist fash-
ion, that is, to learn how to speak across various languages in ways that do
not assimilate this variety of languages to a dominant notion of speech, then
it seems to me that we must do without a notion of conunon language. And
although some may think that doing away with conunon sense and a com-
mon language is the sure road toward divisiveness, it seems to me that ac-
cepting the heterogeneity of language is a necessary point of departure for
any left politics that does not seek to reestablish the terms of cultural domi-
nance through recourse to what is publicly accepted as the doxa of the
conunon.
The second point is that there is no effective politics without accepting
translation as the conunon predicament. To claim that translation is a com-
mon predicament is not to claim that there is a conunon language among us
but only that speech will require translation to be received, that activism that
seeks to extend information in particular (and we can think of many in-
stances in which that is the paramount goal of activism) will founder if it
does not take up the task of translation. What I mean here is that even the
core terms, the ones we cannot do without, such as universality and justice
and equality, the ones we believe are essential to politics, do not have a sim-
ple or already established meaning. And although we often think that we
must secure the meaning of such terms before we can proceed, that other-
wise we will have no anchor and no ground, we will find that as soon as
these terms enter into a political field, they are contested and that no re-
course to an ideal or precultural semantics will settle the question of what
they mean or, indeed, within institutions, how they will mean. The question,
for instance, of how universality means, and how universality might mean, is an
206 JUDITH BUTLER
.
example of one key question that must remain open for politics to maintain
its status as a critical enterprise, for it to resist the lure of foundational cer-
tainties that reduce it to the doldrums of dogmatism. And it may be that
there are different ways, within different languages, within different political
syntaxes, of understanding universality, but it also might be that that term has
no translation in certain contexts and that a certain failure of translation is
presented there for us to undergo. For when we assume that translation is
possible, we assume that every language, every political syntax has a place for
what we call universality, but that place may not be a place: it may be an in-
flexion, it may be a sign for colonialism, it may be no sign at all. And then
we will be up against the limits of universality, for if it cannot translate
everywhere, then the only way it can translate is through ignoring what it
finds, through an imperialist move that claims to find itself in the Other, or
through a developmental perspective that assumes that the colonized has not
yet assumed the insights of the colonizer and that it is the white man's bur-
den to prod them along. And this challenge to translatability-its interrup- •
tion, its arrested moment-is the one that compels the violence of a certain
colonial expansionism, but it is also the possibility of meeting up with the
limits of our own epis_t<!mological horizon, a limit that challenges what we
know to be knowable, a limit that can always and only function as the radi-
cally unfamiliar within the domain of ordinary language, plain speaking,
common sense.
And although this is a philosophical point, and in some ways a political
point, I want to make it again briefly and to make it through a brief refer-
ence to Henry James, not because he is a political hero or because he repre-
sents brilliant class politics but because the kind of difficulty he presents for
us is one with a clear ethical implication. And then finally, briefly, I'd like to
return to it by asking what happens to Adorno when he reads Benjamin on
Baudelaire, why it is that Benjamin seems to Adorno too obscure, too diffi-
cult, too untheoretical. But first, what is the relation between linguistic opac-
ity in James and the question of an ethical relation? Consider what James has
to say about judgment, our ability to make it, and the necessary limits of our
capacity. We may think that without the capacity to judge we are surely at
sea in the realm of ethics, that judgment must anchor us, that judgment is
what we must secure.
At the end of Washington Square the main character, Catherine, refuses to
marry Morris Townsend, the man to whom she was earlier engaged and
who left her quite unceremoniously and without good explanation some
twenty years before. 2 Catherine's father never believes anyone would want
to marry her and believes in particular that Morris wanted to marry her
only for her wealth. But she very much wanted to marry dear Morris and
wanted as well to believe in the transparency of his words. She believed, as it
Values ofDifficulty 207
were, in the transparency of his authorship, that his words manifested his in-
tentions, and that the words and the intentions were nothing but good.
Catherine was not only believing but also obedient, and she refused to
marry Morris until and unless she could secure her father's approval. But that
approval never comes; it is ferociously withheld, and daughter and father be-
come locked in a battle of wills. In the meantime she keeps Morris waiting,
Morris, who turns out not to have a job, not to have a cent, very much in
need of her money, to be very much a cad, a smooth cad, one with a won-
derful and engaging way with language. Before the father dies, he asks that
Catherine promise that she will not marry Morris, even though it has been
twenty years, and no one has heard from him. She refuses to promise. More
suitors arrive in the interim, and she refuses them all. And then the father
does die, and Morris arrives, and he banters, and he appears to mean what he
says, and he asks about a future, and she shows him the door, which is her
act. And she takes up her embroidery and assumes her solitude for the time
that is left to her. Morris can't understand and asks, well, why didn't she get
married all this time, assuming she was waiting for him. And we ask, well, if
she wasn't going to marry old Morris, why didn't she make the promise to
her father? But she didn't, no, she didn't. And everyone thinks they know
her; everyone thinks they can predict her. The father dies thinking that she
was unwilling to make the promise because she intends to marry Morris.
Morris arrives thinking she has been rejecting suitors with the hope of mar-
rying him. But she won't. She won't make that promise, and she will not take
that vow. And these refusals, we might say, make her virtually incomprehen-
sible to everyone.
Morris stood stroking his beard, with a clouded eye. "Why have you never mar-
ried?" he asked abruptly. "You have had opportunities."
"I didn't wish to marry."
"Yes, you are rich, you are free; you had nothing to gain."
"I had nothing to gain," said Catherine.
Morris looked vaguely round him, and gave a deep sigh. (218)
She offers him some words in this instance, but he cannot seem to un-
derstand them, and he doesn't seem to know what questions to ask of these
words in order to gain elucidation. Indeed, she seems to understand that the
answer she has to give is one that he will not be able to understand as an an-
swer: "I meant to tell you," she adds, "by my aunt, in answer to your mes-
sage--if you had waited for an answer-that it was unnecessary for you to
come in that hope" (219). She offers him no hope for an answer, and in this
moment it is the reader, too, mindful that this is the last page, who is cau-
tioned against hope in this sense. When Morris then says good-bye, he adds,
"Excuse my indiscretion," suggesting that he has broken from accepted form
208 JUDITH BUTLER
.
or that her refusal is in some way an indication that he arrived with inap-
propriate expectations. Her response does not take the form of words but
rather an extended silence, as if whatever meaning this refusal has for her will
not and cannot appear in speech. The final act between them is one of
movements, not words: "He bowed, and she turned away-standing there,
averted, with her eyes on the ground, for some moments after she had heard
him close the door of the room" (219).As he leaves, he expresses his exas-
peration to Mrs. Penniman: "She doesn't care a button for me--with her
confounded litde dry manner." And then he comes up against the enigma of
her decision:"But why the deuce, then, would she never marry?" (219). Mrs.
Penniman, whose own desire, deflected and sustained through the triangu-
larity of their relations, fears the impending end. Catherine has taken herself
out of the circuit, and there is no future if this enigma stays intact, if no fresh
explanation can incite more plot. Morris then leaves them both, and the "in-
adequacy of the explanation" finally stills their conspiracy. "Catherine, mean-
while, in the parlour, picking up her morsel of fancy-work, had seated her-
self with it again-for life, as it were" (219).
And she does not give her reasons in language. Indeed, this is a moment
when language recedes-, when handiwork is taken up, when the idioms of
the novel cannot approach the final enigma that she is, when what we might
be tempted to call her autonomy has no language but takes place, as it were,
through marking the limits of all speaking that seeks to bind her, that offers
itself to her as a way of binding herself. She performs, we might say, the lim-
its of language and the "inadequacy of explanation" at this instance. The
work she takes up "for life, as it were," makes clear that this is a life consti-
tuted only metaphorieally: the "as it were" closes the story, but the figure ret-
rospectively extends back to the whole story, as if, all along, a figure of
speech that does not quite capture the referent has been the story's way of
proceeding, only stated explicidy at the end, as a defining and definitive
aside. The reader is also left, in a sense, exasperated, cursing, staring. As read-
ers we are effectively asked whether we will judge her, supply her with a
motivation, find the language by which to know and capture her, or
whether we will affirm what is enigmatic here, what cannot be easily or ever
said, what marks the limits of the sayable. And if we cannot join with Mor-
ris and the other chatterers to judge her, then perhaps we are asked to un-
derstand the limits of judgment and to cease judging, paradoxically, in the
name of ethics, to cease judging in a way that assumes we already know in
advance what there is to be known.
And this suspension of judgment brings us closer to a different concep-
tion of ethics, one that honors what cannot be fully known or captured
about the Other. Her action, her nonaction, cannot be easily translated, and
this means that she marks the limits of the familiar, the clear, and the com-
mon. To honor this moment in which the familiar must become strange or,
rather, where it admits the strangeness at its core, this may well be the mo-
ment when we come up against the limits of translation, when we undergo
what is previously unknown, when we learn something about the limits of
our ways of knowing; and in this way we experience as well the anxiety and
the promise of what is different, what is possible, what is waiting for us if we
do not foreclose it in advance.
So one might think that this brings me back to Adorno's point and that
in a way all I have been saying is a support for Adorno's claim about passing
through the unfamiliar. 3 Adorno at once helps to articulate this conception
of passing through difficulty as part of what is necessary for critical thinking,
but he also exemplifies the limits of the very capacity he recommends. When
Walter Benjamin sends Adorno in October of 1938 his Baudelaire manu-
script, per agreement, to be considered for publication in the journal edited
by the Institute for Social Research, Adorno takes some time in responding;
and when he does respond, he lets Benjamin know he is "disappointed"
(281). Benjamin is living in Paris at the time, in exile from Germany, under
a collaborationist government, with litde money. He has no other livelihood
than the meager payments he receives for his articles; Adorno and others are
responsible for keeping Benjamin on the payroll of the institute. Fearful of
the Germans entering France, Benjamin is voicing his desperation to
Adorno, and indeed writes to Adorno only one year before he is interned in
a camp in Nevers. So we might say, and with reason, that there is a certain
ethical urgency to Benjamin's situation at the time. He earlier corresponded
with Gerschom Scholem to see whether he might emigrate to Palestine, and
Scholem suggested to him that it might be difficult, since Benjamin might
need to embrace Zionism. 4 And now Benjamin is waiting to see whether
the Institute for Social Research will help him, and they do eventually help
him, but it is Max Horkheimer who makes sure that the visa is at Marseilles
in September of 1940, Horkheimer who could never really read Benjamin,
who wanted the journal to go in a different direction: more social theory,
more social science. So Benjamin sends his Baudelaire essay to Adorno, and
Adorno responds by vacating the position of the "I" and writing as the "we,"
the editorial board: he writes about "the attitude of all of us to your manu-
script" (28o):
motifS are assembled but they are not elaborated (durchgtfohrt). In your cover letter to
Max you presented this as your express intention, and I am aware of the ascetic dis-
cipline you have imposed on yourself by omitting everywhere the conclusive theo-
retical answers to the questions involved.... Panorama and "traces," the jl8neur and
the arcades, modernity and the ever-same, all this without theoretical interpretation-
can such "material" as this patiently await interpretation (geduldig auf Deutung warten
kann) without being consumed (verzehrt) in its own aura? (281)
210 JUDITH BUTLER
.
So Adorno's complaint seems to be that Benjamin fails to give an elabora-
tion and that an elaboration, a true elaboration, will be one that qualifies the
work as theoretical. Benjamin's writing is allusive, inconclusive, too ascetic,
withheld, guilty of ellipsis. It needs to give itself, and to give itself in the
form of a theory that renders explicit the meaning of the disparate elements
of analysis at hand. What would qualify for Adorno as such a theory? And is
this theory as it must be, or is this theory as Adorno wished it to be? We get
a better sense of what is required as we continue to read this fateful letter of
November 10, 1938. There he writes, for instance, that Benjamin's work be-
longs to a "realm where history and magic oscillate" (282); that the work is
"lacking in one thing: mediation" (282); that Benjamin relates "the prag-
matic contents of Baudelaire's work directly and immediately to adjacent
features in the social history, and wherever possible, the economic features,
of the time" (282). For Adorno, Benjamin fails to relate these aspects of the
text and its conditions of production in a way that can be conceptually elab-
orated; Benjamin offers metaphors for this relation and, Adorno writes: "I
am struck by a feeling ·of artificiality (Kunstlichkeit) whenever you substitute
metaphorical expressions for [obligatory expressions (verpjlichtenden Aus-
sage)]" (282, my correc;:tion). And then he makes clear, without doubt, that
for the connection to be authentic, and not artificial, for the relation to be
conceptual and elaborated, and not metaphorical and elliptical, it would have
to fulfill the requirements of a true materialism: "I regard it as methodolog-
ically inappropriate to give conspicuous individual features (sin'!fiillige Zuge)
from the realm of the superstructure a 'materialist' turn by relating them im-
mediately, and perhaps even causally, to certain corresponding features of the
substructure. The materialist determination of cultural traits is only possible
if it is mediated through the total social process (gesamtprozess)" (283).
So we see that what theory is or, rather, must be is precisely the kind of
practice that relates every particular cultural trait to the total social process. 5
But we also understand that Adorno is writing to Benjamin at a time of
need, rejecting his piece on Baudelaire, and calling into question his relation
to the institute, which supplies his wage at this time and which holds out his
last hope for gaining a visa out of collaborationist France. This somehow re-
mains in the background here, even as Adorno apologizes for Horkheimer's
failure to respond directly to the essay originally addressed to him, citing
"the enormous commitments connected with [Max's] move to Scarsdale"
(285).
The impression which your entire study conveys-and not only to me ... -is that
you have here done violence upon yourself.Your solidarity with the Institute, which
pleases no one more than myself, ha§ led you to pay the kind of tributes to Marxism
which are appropriate neither to Marxism nor to yoursel£ Not appropriate to Marx-
ism because the mediation through the entire social process is missing, and because
Values ofDifficulty 2!1
of a superstitious (aberglihlhlisch) tendency to attribute to mere material enumeration

a power of illumination (Macht der Erhellung) which really belongs to theoretical
construction alone rather than to purely pragmatic allusions. (284)
And then Adorno truly assumes the mantel for both Marxism and theory,
not to mention patron, father, and judge, when he writes:
I speak not only for myself, unqualified as I am, but also for Horkheimer and the
others when I say that we are all convinced that it would not only benefit "your"
production if you could elaborate your ideas without recourse to such considera-
tions ... , but that it would also prove most beneficial to the cause (am forderlichsten
ist) of dialectical materialism and the theoretical interests represented by the Institute,
if you surrendered to your own insights and conclusions without combining them
with other ingredients, which you obviously find so distasteful to swallow that I can-
not expect anything good to come of it. (284)
The letter concludes by explaining to Benjamin why the work cannot ap-
pear in the journal pages as is, and Adorno justifies this decision by claiming
that this is "for your own sake and for the sake of Baudelaire" (285).
So maybe it is for Benjamin's sake, or the sake of Baudelaire, but we don't
really find Adorno weeping over the cause of Baudelaire in this writing or
elsewhere. We do see him clearly laying out the stakes of a dialectical mate-
rialism, however, that takes the process of mediation to be central, that thinks
the truly theoretical operation is the one that relates the particular to the so-
cial totality through this mediation, fully conceptualized, according to norms
of conceptualization to which Adorno subscribes. Indeed, Benjamin's refusal
to supply the satisfying link between the particular cultural trait, the duty on
wine, the stroll of the flaneur, and the total social process seems to be cost-
ing him his livelihood at the moment. And perhaps it could be said as well
that the subsequent delays on the part of the institute in supplying that visa
in time might be due to the lapse in correspondence that followed this
rather stunning rejection of Benjamin's work by Adorno. For months follow
after this: Benjamin replies in December with an even and laconic response,
and Adorno waits until February 1 to reply, offers a lengthy engagement
with Benjamin's essay again, and mentions the impending threat of a Ger-
man invasion, but does not mention the visa. Benjamin writes back on Feb-
ruary 23, 1939, and Adorno waits until July to write again. By September
Benjamin is interned at Nevers.
If Scholem earlier asked Benjamin to sign on the dotted line to commit
himself to Zionism, and linked that to the plausibility of Benjamin emigrat-
ing to Palestine, now Adorno invokes not only dialectical materialism but
the collective voice of the institute, inducing Benjamin either to join his
view or to disavow Marxism altogether. And although Adorno does not de-
liver an ultimatum to Benjamin, he withholds work and payment and even
212 JUDITH BUTLER
.
delays their correspondence precisely at the moment in which Benjamin's
livelihood and life are imperiled. Significantly, Scholem had written Ben-
jamin earlier about the prospects ofBenjamin getting a visa to New York,
but in the context of that deliberation Scholem lets Benjamin know that he
thinks the writing is too obscure, too unintelligible, and that the possibility
of getting the necessary support from influential intellectuals in New York is
in some way made more difficult because of Benjamin's difficult prose. 6
You might think that Benjamin would cave in, would simply write what
they want, if it would make them all more satisfied, if it would induce them
to go to the consulate, get the visa papers in order, make sure he had a way
out. But that was not Benjamin's route, and, as you know, he ended up, visa
in hand, committing suicide at the Spanish border on the one day when the
border was closed in, early September of 1940.
In defending his work, Benjamin suggests that theory must risk a certain
incoherence, that it must fail to be fully explicit, that it must founder on re-
lations that might be figured, through metaphor, but not captured through
conceptual elaboration: "I, too," he rejoins to Adorno,
regard this as a theory in the strictest sense of the word (eine Theorie im stren.gsten
Sinne des Wortes) and my di;cussion of the Jla.neur cuhninates in this. This is the place,
and the only place in this part [of the text], where the theory comes into its own in
undistorted (unverstellt) fashion. It breaks like a single ray of light into an artificially
darkened chamber. But this ray, broken down (zerlegt) prismatically, suffices to give
an ideal of the nature of the light whose focus lies in the third part of the book. (290)
Although I cannot take the time here to trace the treatment of the flaneur,
it seems important, for our purposes, to see how Benjamin insists on the in-
vocation of metaphor when he makes the claim for "theory in the strictest
sense," theory· that "comes into its own in undistorted fashion." And the
metaphor at work, the metaphor of light, is precisely the central metaphor of
truth in Kabbalistic writings.? Suffice it to say that Scholem will be no more
pleased with Benjamin's appropriation of Kabbalah (see Scholem, Wt!lter
Benjamin and Gerschom Scholem, 106) than Adorno will be pleased with Ben-
jamin's appropriation of Marxism and that despite the clear relation of need
and friendship Ber:Yamin has for both Adorno and Scholem, he will refuse,
refuse until death, to satisfY either one of them. Benjamin does a certain vi-
olence to Kabbalah, a certain violence to Marxism, yet he insists on both. To
Adorno he writes, "If I refuse (wenn ich mich dort weigerte) ... to pass on to
other matters beyond the interest of dialectical materialism and the Institute,
there was more at stake than solidarity with the Institute or simple fidelity
(blosse Treue) to dialectical materialism, namely, a solidarity with the experi-
ences (Eifahrungen) we have all shared during the last fifteen years" (291).And
to the charge that he has done violence to himself, Benjamin continues:
[I)t is therefore a question of my own [most productive interests (eigenste produktive

Interessen)] as a writer. I will not deny that these may occasionally do violence to my
original interests. There is an antagonism here of which I would not wish to be re-
lieved (enthoben) [not even once (nicht einmaQ] in my dreams. And overcoming (Be-
wiiltigung) this antagonism constitutes the problem of my study, and that is a problem
of construction. I believe that speculation can only begin its inevitably audacious
flight with some prospect of success if, instead of donning the waxen wings of eso-
tericism, it seeks its source of strength in construction alone (statt die wiichsernen
Schwingen der Esoterik anzulegen ihre Krtiftquelle allein in der Konstruktion sucht). (291,
my translation)
Whereas Adorno understands the construction of social reality to be a
theoretical elaboration of the mediating structures that relate specific cultural
traits to the total social process, Benjamin understands that social reality is
riven precisely by the absence of such mediation, an absence that produces
an inevitable tension and antagonism, one he would not want to be without
and one that has a specific value for him. Esotericism, yes, precisely because
the uncanny way in which the pipe, the stroll, the wine tax, the windows re-
late to each other and to some social totality is not to be grasped, and that
ineffability must be figured, relendessly, through metaphors in which the re-
lation of substitution between terms does not cuhninate in a mediation be-
tween them, in which, rather, a disjunction and irretraversibility is restaged
again and again. When Benjamin writes in February of 1939 to Adorno, he
makes clear that conceptual elaboration, if there is to be one, if there is to be
one of the fl.aneur in particular, will have to assume a metaphorical form that
instates an antagonism that will find no resolution. Satisfaction will not be
achieved, not even in one's dreams. He makes clear his version of Marxism
when he claims: "the commodity economy arms [the] phantasmagoria of
sameness (des Gleichens) which simultaneously reveals itself, as an attribute of
intoxication, to [become believable as (beglaubigt)] the central image of illu-
sion" (310, my correction). In making his point clear to Adorno, he writes,
"the JMneur makes himself thoroughly at home in the world of [saleability
(Kaujlichkeit)]. In this, he even outdoes (uberbietet) the whore; he takes the ab-
stract concept of the whore for a stroll" (310). Here, quite literally, Benjamin
subjects the conceptual to a metaphorical mode of transport. But whereas
the translator adds "so to speak" at the end of this line, there is no
"sozusagen" or any similar marking of the figural status of this claim in the
German. There is no "as it were" that marks off the figural dimension from
something more objective, more grounded, more conceptual. For Be~amin,
as he argues against Adorno's equation of metaphor with artificiality (Kun-
stlichkeit), the figural is the means by which the conceptual is fulfilled, and
the figure of the strolling whore is a concept that fulfills itself only in an-
other figure (310). If the concept is fulfilled by such figures, the concept ap-
214 JUDITH BUTLER
pears to become articu'iated only through its disarticulation as a figure. In-

deed, if for James, Catherine takes up life "as it were," we are asked to un-
derstand the life she takes up as a figural one, a life that is as proper to fiction
as, say, the life of a fictional character must be. And we are asked at that mo-
ment to consider the slide between fiction and life, since there are lives that
are lived in the mode of" as it were;' resembling something we might call life
that carries no quotation marks around it. Benjamin's translator tries this
Jamesian move when he supplies the "so to speak" to Benjamin's claim that
Baudelaire "takes the abstract concept of the whore for a stroll." Benjamin is
insisting here that reality has been transfigured by the commodity, that new
forms of animation are possible as a consequence, and that the figure has be-
come literalized in this instant. James's explicit affirmation of the figural sta-
tus of Catherine's life fails to restore us to a sure distinction between figural
and literal. Since we might say that her life is only "as it were" a life because
it is a fiction, taking place within one, the uncanniness of the story resides
precisely in the positing of a life that can be lived in the mode of the "as it
were," one that fiction lets us see but that does not, for that reason, exempt
the possibility from life. IfBaudelaire is said to "take the abstract concept of
the whore for a stroll," then the concept is animated in and by its figural d,i-
mensions, and there is no way to separate the two without losing the ani-
mation that is, as it were, its very life.
Oh Benjamin, he .makes our heads hurt. Why does he torture us so? Must
we follow him here, or can we stop following him, tell him, simply, clearly,
that he is no longer a Marxist, no longer a Kabbalist, no longer knowable ac-
cording to the terms by which we have, conventionally, established knowa-
bility? Or is he telling tas something about what truth has become for us,
historically, that it has become a certain difficulty, and that if we are unwill-
ing to be disarmed and to become, suddenly, unknowing, we assume instead
a posture of dogmatism that may well sidetrack us from the evanescence, if
not the ineffability, of a life?
Notes
I. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N.
Jephcott (London:Verso, I978).
2. Henry James, Washington Square (New York: Penguin, I979).
3. SeeTheodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, 1928-
1940, ed. Henri Lonitz, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1999).The German text consulted and cited here is TheodorW.Adomo, IMII-
ter Benjamin, Briifwechsel, 1928-1940, ed. Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt: Surhkamp, I994).
4· See Scholem's letter to Benjamin, dated July 26, 1933, in which he remarks, "In
our experience, in the long run only those people are able to live here who, despite
Values of Difficulty 2I5
all the problems and depressions, feel completely at one with this land and the cause
ofJudaism" and then counsels Benjamin to "assess the degree of your commitment
to Judaism," in The Correspondence if Walter Benjamin and Gerschom Scholem, 1932-
1940, ed. Gershom Scholem, introduction by Anson Rabinbach (New York:
Schocken, 1989), 66.
5. Of course, Adorno makes clear elsewhere that this totality is not given at once
but only negatively and in parts that indicate the always vanishing whole.
6. See Scholem's letter to Benjamin, March 25, 1938, regarding how Benjamin is
regarded as a "mystic" in New York (Scholem, Walter Benjamin and Gerschom Scholem,
215).
7. Benjamin was reading Scholem on Kabbalistic writings (in manuscript form)
throughout the 1930s and doubdess had exposure to them before. Kabbalistic writ-
ing has centered on the Sifer ha-Zohar, a multiauthored text that centers on the the-
ory of divine emanation. This emanation both informs and transcends figures of
speech so that words contain and indicate a divine light that precedes them and
passes through them. The account of emanation has undergone several forms in the
course ofKabbalistic writings. The Safed Mystics, exiled in the early sixteenth cen-
tury from Spain, included Isaac Luria, who, in Palestine, offered a theology in which
"the first divine act was not emanation, but withdrawal." God, deemed Ein Sof,
withdrew from this space both to eliminate "harsh judgement" (15) and to subse-
quendy endow the space of withdrawal with the power of light. The light entered
this space only to shatter and to produce sparks that became contained as bits of ma-
terial existence. The Hasidic phrase "raise the sparks" refers to the act of finding the
holiness within material reality and, indeed, within letters of the alphabet. See Daniel
C. Matt, The Essential Kabbalah, The Heart ofJewish Mystidsm (New York: Harper-
Collins, 1994), 1-19.
Contributors
JOHN BENDER is Professor ofEnglish and Comparative Literature,Jean

G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, and Anthony
P. Meier Family Professor in Humanities at Stanford University. He is also
director of the Stanford Humanities Center, author of Imagining the Peniten-
tiary: Fiction and the Architecture cif Mind in Eighteenth-Century England, and
coeditor of The Ends cif Rhetoric: History, Theory, Practice; Chronotypes: The Con-
struction cifTime; and The Columbia History cif the British Novel.
PETER BROOKS is Sterling Professor of Comparative Literature and
French at Yale University. His most recent books include Troubling Confes-
sions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature; and a volume edited with Alex
Woloch, Whose Freud? The Place cif Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture.
JUDITH BUTLER is Maxine Elliot Professor of Rhetoric and Compar-
ative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley. She is the author
of numerous works in feminist theory and continental philosophy, including
Antigone~ Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death; and, with Ernesto Laclau
and Slavoj Zizek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues
on the Left.
REY CHOW is Andrew W Mellon Professor of the Humanities at
Brown University and the author of several books, including, most recently,
The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit cif Capitalism. Her publications in English
have been translated into a number of Asian and European languages, in-
cluding Chinese, Japanese, Korean, French, Spanish, and German.
JONATHAN CULLER is Class of 1916 Professor of English and Compar-
ative Literature and senior associate dean of the College ofArts and Sciences
at Cornell University. He has published widely in the field ofliterary theory
and criticism and continental philosophy. His books include The Pursuit cif
Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction; On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism
After Structuralism; and Literary Theory: A ~ry Short Introduction.
2I8 Contributors
MARGARET FERGUSON is Professor of English at the University of Cal-

ifornia at Davis. She has also taught at Yale, Columbia, and the University of
Colorado. The author ofTrials cif Desire: Renaissance Defenses cif Poetry, she has
also coedited numerous volumes, including Rewriting the Renaissance: Dis-
courses cif Sexual Difforence in Early Modern Europe; and Postmodernism and Fem-
inism. Her most recent book, Dido's Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in
Early Modern England and France, is forthcoming from the University of
Chicago Press.
BARBARA JOHNSON is Professor ofEnglish and Comparative Literature
and Frederic Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society at Har-
vard University. She has published widely in literary criticism and theory
and is the author ofl among other works, The Critical Difference: Essays in the
Contemporary Rhetoric cif Reading; and MotherTongues: Sexuality, Trials, Mother-
hood, Tranlation, forthcoming from Harvard University Press. She is also the
translator ofJacques Derrida's Dissemination and coeditor of The Norton An-
thology cifTheory and Ctiticism.
ROBERT KAUFMAN is Assistant Professor ofEnglish at Stanford Univer-
sity. He is currendy com'"pleting two related books, Negative Romanticism, Al-
most Modernity: Keats, Shelley, and Adornian Critical Aesthetics; and Experiments
in Construction: Frankfurt School Aesthetics and Contemporary Poetry. He is also
at work on a third project, HAMLET's Form cif the Modern. His articles have
appeared in various journals and edited collections, including Critical Inquiry,
October, American Poetry Review, The Cambridge Companion to Adorno, Modern
Language Quarterly, anq Studies in Romanticism.
KEVIN bAMB is a Ph.D. candidate in the English department at Cor-
nell University. A former high school mathematics teacher, he also spent
time working in Russia in the field of HIV I AIDS activism and queer poli-
tics prior to pursuing his interest in contemporary theory and modernist
literature.
JOHN MCCUMBER is Professor of Germanic Languages at the Univer-
sity of California at Los Angeles. He has taught at the New School for So-
cial Research and Northwestern University and is the author of Time in the
Ditch: American Philosophy and the McCarthy Era; Philosophy and Freedom: Der-
rida, Rorty, Habermas, Foucault; Metaphysics and Oppression: Heidegger's Challenge
to Uiestern Philosophy; and other books and articles.
STUART J. MURRAY is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department ofRhetoric
at the University of California at Berkeley. He is writing a dissertation on
spectral subjectivity and the sacred.
Contributors 219
DAVID PALUMBO-LIU is Professor of Comparative Literature and di-

rector of the program in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford Uni-
versity. His most recent work includes an essay on Jean-Luc Nancy, "The
Operative Heart," forthcoming in The New Centennial Review; and "Multi-
culturalism Now: Civilization, National Identity, and Difference Before and
Mter September nth," published in boundary 2.
GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK is Avalon foundation Professor in the
Humanities at Columbia University. Her numerous books include The Post-
Colonial Critic; Outside in the Teachirtg Machine; A Critique <if Postcolonial Rea-
son; and, most recendy, Red Thread; and Death <if a Discipline, both in press. She
has also translated Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology and Mahasweta Devi's
Imaginary Maps; Breast Stories; Old WOmen; and Chotti Munda and His Arrow.
ROBIN VALENZA is Assistant Professor of English at the University of
Chicago. She wrote a dissertation at Stanford on the emergence of the mod-
ern academic disciplines in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in
Britain.
MICHAEL WARNER is Professor of English at Rutgers University. He is
the editor of Fear <if a Queer Planet and coeditor, with Gerald Graff, of The
Origins <if Literary Studies in America. His most recent books are The Trouble
with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics <if Queer Lift; and Publics and Counter-
publics. His essays and journalism have appeared in The Village VOice, VLS, The
Nation, The Advocate, POZ, In These Times, and other magazines.
ROBYN WIEGMAN is the Margaret Taylor Smith Director ofWomen's
Studies and Associate Professor ofWomen's Studies and Literature at Duke
University. She has published AmericanAnatomies:Theorizing Race and Gender
and five edited collections: Who Can Speak? Authority and Critical Identity;
Feminism Beside Itself, AIDS and the National Body: Writings by Thomas Yingling;
WOmens Studies On Its Own; and The Futures <ifAmerican Studies. She is codi-
rector of the Dartmouth Institute on American Studies.
Index
Addison, joseph, 40 Burckhardt, Sigurd, 22

Adorno, Theodor, n-12, 19, 26n4, 68-69, Burke, Kenneth, 135
III-14, 124n8, 144-50, 200-203, 206, Buder, Judith, 6, II-I2, 15, 17-19,43, 45-
209-14 47,68-69, 109, III, IIJ, II6-J7, 136, 175,
aesthetic education, 135 176
aesthetic experience, 143- so Canguilhem, Georges, 124n8
aesthetic judgments, 54-55,58-59,144 Cavell, Stanley, ro, 47-56
alienation effect, 19 Charnes, Linda, 129-30
Apollinaire, Guillaume, 130 Cheney, Lynne, 134
argument, formal, so-sr, 52 Chow, Rey, ro, 89
Aristotle, ro, 20, 60-69 Christian aesceticism, 99
audience, 17, ro6-8 clarity: history of, 62; ideology of, 15, 6o-
Augustine, Saint, 179n3 69, 95-97, III-I?; metaphysics of, 58-69
Austin,). L., 47, sr, 54 Clark, Robert E., 176
avant-garde, 130-32, 138 Claude!, Paul, 137
Clueless, 163-64
Bacon, Roger, 20 Cocteau,Jean, 143-44
Bad Writing Award, I, 6, 12nr, 43, 45, 47, 53, common sense, 9, 36, 39, 97, II r- 12, 130
ns, 175-77, 179 Comolli,Jean-Louis, 136
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 137 comparative literature, r6o-63
Balibar, Renee, 27n6 confession, impersonal, 52
Barthes, Roland, 9, roo- 102, 137 "conversable" language, ideal of, 29-41
Baudelaire, Charles, 145-48, rso, rsr, 152, Copjec,Joan, r66
rs8-6o, 209-14 Corax, 173
Bender, John, 9- ro critical thinking, 199-206
Benjamin, Walter, 19, 144-50, 152, r62, 206, criticism, literary, 8, IJI-38, r66, 184
209-14 Culler,Jonathan, ro
Berkeley, George, 36 cultural studies, 123, 134-35, r6o
Berlant, Lauren, 94 curvature, law of, 182-83
Blake, William, 163
Bonitz, Herman, 62 Dante Alighieri, 9, r6, 21-25
Bourdieu, Pierre, 20 De Man, Paul, s-6, 97-98, 99. I04n6, IJ6,
Boyd, Andrew, 163, 164 195
Brecht, Bertolt, 19 deconstruction, 8, r62
Brooks, Peter, II, 150 defarniliarization, 9, 19, III-2, 117-18
Brown, Wendy, 93n15 Derrida,Jacques, 8, 46, 194
222 Index
Devi, Mahasweta, 184-85 Hull, David, 63

difficulty, 130-37, 139-54, r8r-83, 185-87, Hume, David, 9-10, I7-I9, 29-4I
199-206, 209-14
domination of matter by form, 64, 66-67 ignorance, power of, 3
double consciousness, 165 Italian vernacular, 22-25
DuBois, WE.B., r6s Jakobsen, Roman, I94
Ducker, Dan, 48
Duncan, Robert, 152, James, Henry, 206-9
Dutton, Denis, 137 Jameson, Fredric, 26
Johnson, Barbara, 7-8, n
Eliasoph, Nina, 120-21 Johnson, Samuel, 29
Elio de Nebrija,Antonio, 25-26
Eliot, T.S., 132 kabbalah, 2I2
Elster,Jon, 196-97 Kant, Immanuel, 54-55,58-59, I44, I83-
Emerson, Ralph W, 49 . 84
epistemology, sciences contrasted with hu- Kaplan, Caren, 92n14
manities, 8-9, 30-32, 34, 38-40 Kaufman, Robert, n
exegesis, 131, 135-36 Kenny, Anthony, 48
Knight, Deborah, I75
Fanon, Frantz, 164
feminism, 10,75-94 Lacan,Jacques, I6I, I66, I94
Ferguson, Margaret, 9 Laclau, Ernesto, 45-47
Fischer, Ernst, 143-44 language: as normative community, I72-73,
Fleming, Richard, 48, 49 175-78; materiality of, 98-99; politics of,
Foucault, Michel, 82, 109, 124n8 200-208; specialized versus genrral, 24,
Frankfurt School, III, 14), ISSn7 30-40,
Fry, Paul, 6, 9 Latin, ideal of, I9-2I, 24-25
Frye, Northrop, I3I, I35 Lefort, Claude, I8S
Levin, Harry, I6I-63
Gautier, Theophile, I 58 Locke, John, 29, 33
gender, performance of, 7, 46.:47, 82-84 Longinus, I9I
globalization, IO, 103, I88-89, 195-96 Lusignan, Serge, 20
Glouberman, Mark, 48 lyric poetry, I39-54, I57-62
Gorky, Maxim, I30
Graff, Gerald, 37 Mallarme, Stephane, I30, IS8-6o, I62
grammar school, 24-25 Marxism, 98, I44-45, 2IO-I4
Gramsci,Antonio, 45, I79 mass culture, Io8, no-n, I2I
Grewal, Inderpal, 92n14 McCumber,John, IO
Gubar, Susan, 78 Messer-Davidow, Ellen, 78
Guest, Barbara, IS0-54 Meyers, D. G., I74, 176-77
Guillory,John, II9 Miller,James, no, III, II3, II4, ns
Mills, C. Wright, I76-77
Habermas,Jiirgen, n8 modernism, 99, 102, I3I, I39-54, 202
Hartman, Geoffrey, I34-35 Modleski, Tania, 78
Hawking, Stephen, 39 moral superiority, 2-5, I6-I9, 96-97, I6o
Hegel, G.WF, 49, 67- 8, I6I-62 Mulhall, Stephen, 48
hegemony, 45-47 multiculturalism, I6I
hermetic language, I30 myth, I00-102
Hirsch, E.D., IS
Hobbes, Thomas, 67 Nabokov,Vladimir, I32
Horkheimer, Max, 209 New Criticism, 82, I3I, I35
Index 223
Newman, Jane, 92n13 Said, Edward, 171

Norma Rae, 140-43, 150 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 164-65
Nozick, Robert, 44-45, 54 Schiller, Friedrich, 135
Nussbaum, Martha, 6-7, 15-17,62, 70n9, Scholem, Gerschom, 209-14
II6-I7, 174, 176; misreading of Greek Schor, Naomi, 78
philosophy, 62-63 science, epistemology of, 30-35, 38-39,63-
64,96-97
Orwell, George, 106-II, II3, II5, 122, 124 Sedgwick, Eve, 3
Segal, Lynne, 76, 78-80, 83-88
pain, 182 self-indulgence, 50-51
Palmer, Michael, 152-54 Sexton,Anne, 157-58
Palumbo-Liu, David, 5, II simplicity, 17-19
Parker, Patricia, 25 Slaughter, Sheila, 93n17
Pascal, Blaise, 164 solecism, 16
penetrate past assessment, 52-53 Sophists, 9, 15-17
performative, 3-4,7 Spivak, Gayatri, II
philosophical utility, 52-53 Stevens, Wallace, 134
philosophy as writing, so- 51 style, masculine and feminine, 23-25
Plath, Sylvia, 157 subaltern studies, 184-85, 190
Poe, Edgar Allan, 162 Sutton, Crystal Leem 140-43
Pollitt, Katha, 109, II6, II7, 123, 124
Poovey, Mary, gm6 Taylor, Charles, 132
postcolonialism, 95 teaching, 2, II, 135-36, 164-66, 174-78,
post-structuralism: and myth, roo- 104; and 183, 186-89, 191
politics, 75-90,95-97, 19 theory, 5-6, 129-30, 133, 160-62, 181-82,
preservation of form, law of the, 60-62 200-202, 210-14; resistance to, s-6, 97-
Priestley, Joseph, 32 104
psychoanalysis, 82-83, 191-94 Thomas, Dylan, 140-42
public, creation of, 108, II4-I9, 121-24 Thoreau, Henry David, III-I2
public intellectual, 109, II8-24 translation, IO, 37-38, 160-62, 190-92, 205-
public sphere, 107, II8-2I 6, 208-g
publishing, 121-23 truth, relation to clarity of, 60-69
Puttenham, George, 21 Tutu, Desmond, 194
queer theory, 19, 79,82-83,87 undecidability, 186

questions, in writing, 17, 53 universality, 204-6
unknowing, epistemological privilege of, 3
radical alterity, 193 unreadable book, ideal of, 44-45
reader, kindness to, 17, 25
Reed, Laurie, 150 Vaihinger, Hans, 163-64
Reid, Thomas, 36 Valenza, Robin, 9-10
reviewing of books, 122-28 vernacular, 16, 19-26
Rich, Adrienne, 77,81
Richards, LA., 135 Warner, Michael, xo-n
Rimbaud,Arthur, 153, 158 Watt, Ian, 171, 178
Ritt, Martin, 140-43 Wiegman, Robyn, 5, IO
Rodden,John, IIO Williams, Raymond, 27n7, 189
Rorty, Richard, 66, 69, 200 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 47-49,51-54
Rosenbaum, Ron, 129-30, 135 women's studies, 61-62,86
Russell's paradox, 59
Cultural Memory in the Present
Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb, eds., just Being Difficult? Academic
Writing in the Public Arena
Jean-Luc Marion, The Crossing ofthe Vtsible
Eric Michaud, An Art for Eternity: The Cult ofArt in Nazi Germany
Anne Freadman, The Machinery ofTalk: Charles Peirce and the Sign
Hypothesis
Alain Badiou, Saint Paul· The Foundation of Universalism
Bernard Faure, Double Exposure: Cutting Across Buddhist and western
Discourses
Stanley Cavell, Emerson's Transcendental Etudes
Stuart McLean, The Event and Its Terrors: Ireland, Famine, Modernity
Beate Rossler, ed., Privacies
Gil Anidjar, The jew, the Arab: A History ofthe Enemy
Jean-Luc Nancy, A Finite Thinking, edited by Simon Sparks
Theodor W. Adorno, Can One Live after Auschwitz? A Philosophical
Reader, edited by RolfTiedemann
Patricia Pisters, The Matrix ofVisual Culture: WOrking with Deleuze in
Film Theory
Talal Asad, Formations ofthe Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity
Dorothea von Miicke, The Rise ofthe Fantastic Tale
Marc Redfield, The Politics ofAesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanti-
czsm
Emmanuel Levinas, On Escape
Dan Zahavi, Husser/'s Phenomenology
Rodolphe Gasche, The Idea ofForm: Rethinking Kant's Aesthetics
Michael Naas, Taking on the Tradition: jacques Derrida and the Legacies of
Deconstruction
Herlinde Pauer-Studer, ed., Constructions ofPractical Reason: Interviews
on Moral and Political Philosophy
Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given That: Toward a Phenomenology ofGiven-
ness
Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic ofEnlightenment
Ian Balfour, The Rhetotdc ofRomantic Prophecy
Martin Stokhof, World and Life as One: Ethics and Ontology in Wittgen-
stein's Early Thought
Gianni Vattimo, Nietzsche: An Introduction
Jacques Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, I97I-I998,
edited by Elizabeth Rottenberg
Brett Levins~n, The Ends ofLiterature: The Latin American "Boom" in the
Neolibera!Marke~lace
Timothy J. Reiss, Against Autonomy: Cultural Instruments, Mutualities,

and the Fictive Imagination
Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber, eds., Religion and Media
Niklas Luhmann, Theories ofDistinction: &-Describing the Descriptions of
Modernity, edited and introduced by William Rasch
Johannes Fabian, Anthropology with an Attitude: Critical Essays
Michel Henry, I Am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity
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Isabel Hoving, In Praise ofNew Travelers: Reading Caribbean Migrant
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Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, OfHospitality
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Kaja Silverman, World Spectators
Samuel Weber, Institution and Interpretation, expanded edition
JeffreyS. Librett, The Rhetoric of Cultural Dialogue: jews and Germans in
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David S. Ferris, Silent Urns: Romanticism, Hellenism, Modernity
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Peter Schwenger, Fantasm and Fiction: On Textual Envisioning
Didier Maleuvre, Museum Memories: History, Technology, Art
Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism ofthe Other; or, The Prosthesis ofOrigin
Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature
and Cultural P~litics in Yugoslavia
Niklas Luhmann, Love as Passion: The Codification ofIntimacy
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CulturaL Memory I in the Present

Just Being Difficult?

Mieke Bal and Hent de Vries, Editors

Edited by JONATHAN CULLER

Stanford University Press

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Original printing 2003

Last figure below indicates year of this printing:

Printed in the United States o_f America on acid-free, archival-quality

Designed and typeset at Stanford University Press in I0.51I2 Bembo

Introduction: Dressing Up, Dressing Down 1

JONATHAN CULLER AND KEVIN LAMB

Part 1. In Search of a Common Language; or, Language Debates

2. Hume's Learned and Conversable Worlds 29

J. Bad Writing and Good Philosophy 43

4· The Metaphysics of Clarity and the Freedom of Meaning 58

Part 2. Institutions, Publics, Intellectual Labor

6. The Resistance ofTheory; or, The Worth of Agony 95

7. Styles oflntellectual Publics 106

9. Difficulty in Modern Poetry and Aesthetics 139

10. Bad Writing 157

Part 4· Address to the Other: Ethics and Acknowledgment

12. The Politics ofthf; Production ofKnowledge:An Interview with

13. Values of Difficulty 199

Introduction: Dressing Up, Dressing Down

THIS COLLECTION emerges from recent debates about bad or obscure

seemed to be self-critical, even self-parodying, it must be, in part, because

The recent example ofJu.dith Butler's selection as Philosophy and Literature's

the task of criticism is the unmasking of various fictional self-presentations

publishing circuits, political participation, and the anteriority of"world mak-

difficulty's limits, the terrifying points at which difficulty is reconstituted

In Search of a Common Language; or, Language Debates

PHILOSOPHERS, Martha Nussbaum suggests, demonstrate their moral

companied by "refinement," which includes "elegant" language and "un-

it came, according to Pierre Bourdieu, to signify "a corrupted and coarse

late-medieval treatises; and the synonymy of grammar and Latin contributes

as teaching chiefly the Latin language, in truth, as Spenser's teacher Richard

It may seem far-fetched to compare the oudaws and barbarians envi-

I. Quoted in WK. C. Guthrie, The Sophists (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge Uni-

5. Cited in Miller, "Bad Writing," 35·

SAMUEL JOHNSON denied the possibility that the language of common

distrust of legal language is the paradigmatic example, but other disciplines

LAnguage and Spedalization

On the one hand, Hume's sacrifice of complexity as he moved from the

Sense (Edinburgh, I764), esp. sees. I.S-1.8, 2.6.

1 BEGAN WORK on this topic for a conference at the University of

This is certainly ugly, awkward, and hard to follow (a potential prizewinner,

questioners, offering discriminations about precisely what concerns him

justify oneselfby saying it is "beautiful to me"). The later judgment demands

you to see something for yourself-rather than irritation. It can be remark-

A False Solution: Clarity as Unambiguousness

The Metaphysics of Clarity

ambiguous distributability of truth values. Both of these have to do with var-

in part at least, because he is committed to the idea that in cognition form

Solving the Paradox: Clarity as a Transitional

What if Matter Speaks?

Aristotle, Hegel, and Anonymous

It is unlikely that ;uch faith in the readily available conceptual frame-

21. Jacques Derrida, "Signature Event Context;' Glyph 1 (1977): 172-97.