Ironies
There’s an irony in all this – or maybe it’s two or three ironies. Steven Poole said yesterday in a comment on his post at Unspeak:
In exciting news, the cudgels of anti-anti-anti-intellectualism or whatever have been taken up by Ophelia Benson, scourge of what she is pleased to call “fashionable nonsense”, who takes me, mystifyingly, to be saying It is forbidden to criticize Zizek. Oh well. I suppose she was not sufficiently delighted with my review of her recent book.
Mystifyingly? But what else can ‘the opinion journalist Johann Hari does not suffer from such uncertainty, and has taken it upon himself to denounce Slavoj Zizek in an article for the New Statesman’ mean? If it doesn’t mean that, what is the point of such tendentious language? (From someone who has written a book about, I take it, tendentious language! There’s one of the ironies.) But that’s not the main irony; the main irony is related to the last sentence. Disregard the resort (as with Johann Hari) to an unwarranted and of course ill-mannered speculation about motivation, in order to consider the substance. In fact I quite liked his review of Why Truth Matters, and I was ‘sufficiently delighted’ with it. (And I didn’t need a fanciful motivation for commenting on his substance-free invective-heavy post on Hari’s article; I simply thought it was bad, and bad in an interesting and noteworthy way; that’s motivation enough.) It wasn’t entirely accurate though. It wasn’t so inaccurate that I decided to wait almost a year and then comment on a blog post of his by way of revenge, but it did contain an inaccuracy. It’s this:
Sadly, the authors also follow a modern tradition of lumping Jacques Derrida in with a bunch of his inferiors and slapping him around too, without showing persuasively that they have actually read much of the man’s work.
The inaccurate part is that we didn’t slap Derrida around, we slapped around some of his fans, which is a different thing. And where the irony comes in is that what we slapped his fans around for is for doing exactly what Poole did in this post: treating criticism of the hero as in some way illegitimate, and doing it not by offering evidence that the hero is better than the critic thinks, but by dragging in irrelevancies. In fact one irony here is that he ought to be right: that ought to be why I wrote the comment on his post yesterday, because it does tie up neatly with the mistake he made in his review of WTM: he was wrong about what we said, and he had made the same kind of mistake we were criticizing, himself. Very very neat. But in fact that’s not why. I remembered he’d written a review, and that it was favourable in parts, but I didn’t remember the details. If anything I felt more benevolent than not, because the review was more good than not. But that’s not the point: the point is that he apparently missed the point of what we said about Derrida’s fans, and that that makes sense because he argues the same way himself. Interesting.
If you’re curious about which fans of Derrida we slapped around, you can revisit this – it’s Judith Butler’s letter to the New York Times protesting against ‘Jonathan Kandell’s vitriolic and disparaging obituary’ of him. I’ve commented on it before here, but it was years ago – before we wrote WTM. Oh look – she cites ‘reactionary anti-intellectualism’ too. There’s even more irony than I thought. Well there you go: criticism of Derrida and Zizek is impermissible and ‘reactionary anti-intellectualism.’ Why? Well, according to Butler at any rate, it has to do with fame. Derrida is too damn famous to be criticized by some mere reporter (cf. Poole’s scornful repetition of ‘the opinion journalist Johann Hari’).
If Derrida’s contributions to philosophy, literary criticism, the theory of painting, communications, ethics, and politics made him into the most internationally renowned European intellectual during these times, it is because of the precision of his thought, the way his thinking always took a brilliant and unanticipated turn, and because of the constant effort to reflect on moral and political responsibility.
Uh huh. And if his contributions didn’t make him into the most internationally renowned European intellectual during these times, what is that because of? Who knows. But the inconsequentiality of the argument and the air of high dudgeon in the whole letter are, shall we say, not unfamiliar. That’s the irony.
I’m not interested in defending or attacking Poole, so I hope you’ll excuse the slightly off-topic nature of this, but the Derrida obit really was reactionary anti-intellectualism. I mean, it was entitled “Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74,” and pretty much gets worse from there. Nowhere in that piece does Kandell come close to accurately portraying Derrida’s thought. When Kandell begins to describe what Derrida actually wrote about, we get this paragraph:
“Mr. Derrida was known as the father of deconstruction, the method of inquiry that asserted that all writing was full of confusion and contradiction, and that the author’s intent could not overcome the inherent contradictions of language itself, robbing texts – whether literature, history or philosophy – of truthfulness, absolute meaning and permanence.”
Now, this is an incredibly simple-minded and tendentious portrayal of Derrida’s work. Kandell presents a half-digested account of an argumentative move Derrida sometimes makes (i.e., Derrida shows that the stated aim of a work is at times contradicted by the rhetoric with which that aim is argued) and then tries to puff up this fairly insubstantial understanding of Derrida’s work with a lot scare words (“robbing texts…of truthfulness, absolute meaning and permanence”).
After that paragraph, Kandell goes on to lift boilerplate from the Lynn Cheneny newsletter (“Advocates of feminism, gay rights…”dead white male” icons, etc.) before spinning off into total inanity (Woody Allen once made a movie with the word “deconstruction” in the title).
Anyway, insofar as the obit recycles vapid right-wing talking points about the danger of feminists in the academy as well as seemingly neglects to crack the spine of any of Derrida’s books, I’d say that “reactionary anti-intellectualism” is an accurate description of Kandell’s piece.
With all that said, I don’t think Butler’s criticism of the obit is unreasonable. I don’t read the sentence you quoted as claiming that “Derrida was famous, so lay off journalists,” and in fact I’m a little befuddled as to how you ended up with that reading. Rather, I think Butler is saying something like, “Look, the reason so many people all over the world were interested in Derrida is because his thought was interesting in these respects…” Given that Kandell’s obit paints Derrida in such a negative light, why can’t Butler fire back by listing some positives?
I’m just finding it hard to read Butler’s letter as “treating criticism of the hero as in some way illegitimate, and doing it not by offering evidence that the hero is better than the critic thinks, but by dragging in irrelevancies.” On the first count, Butler explicitly says that not all criticisms of Derrida’s are illegitimate—just Kandell’s. She writes in a sentence directly before the one you quoted: “There are reasonable disagreements to have with Derrida’s work, but there were none to be found in Kandell’s obituary.” Again, given the problems with Kandell’s piece, that seems to be a fine claim to make. As far as offering up irrelevancies instead of evidence for the worth of the “hero”: well, even if we discount Derrida’s international fame as irrelevant (as we probably should—but, again, I don’t think that’s the only or most important claim being made here), Butler mentions Derrida’s contributions to a variety of disciplines, and describes what she likes about his thought.
Yeah, Kandell’s obit was kind of a hatchet-job. But I don’t think it was a hatchet-job born of reactionary anti-intellectualism; rather, it reflects a significant majority of prevailing scholarly opinion on Derrida’s work. Derrida claimed to be a philosopher, but almost every philosopher I know shares Kandell’s opinion of Derrida’s contributions to philosophy. Derrida may yet be very popular in the lit crit and/or communications theory world (although as far as I can tell from outside, his influence is fading even there), but in the other listed fields – philosophy, ethics, politics – Derrida’s name is synonymous with the worst sort of empty intellectual faddism. Derrida’s cited contributions to and direct influence on recent and contemporary discussions of major philosophical issues in epistemology, political philosophy, metaphysics, ethics, ethical theory, metaethics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, history of philosophy, and so on and so forth can be summed up in three words: None at all.
Perhaps this judgment represents a certain bias, the perspective of British-American academic philosophers rather than academics/intellectuals more broadly. So? Derrida claimed to be a philosopher and was granted a Ph.D. in philosophy, and the NYT is written in the U.S. in English – so reflecting the prevailing opinion of Derrida amongst English-speaking philosophers makes a certain sort of sense.
Why such a negative view of such a widely talked-about (if not widely cited within philosophy) figure? Judith Butler makes one claim in the cited defense of Derrida/critique of the NYT obit that highlights the core issue, I think. To describe Derrida’s thought as “precise” requires extraordinary telepathic ability: If one gains one’s impression of Derrida’s thought from what he actually wrote, one cannot possibly conclude that his thought is precise. His writing is vague, encoded in impenetrable self-referential jargon, buried in needlessly confusing verbiage, and often self-contradictory. Precise? Not even close.
You upbraid the Kandell obit and support Butler’s criticisms of it for failing to “accurately portray Derrida’s thought.” But that failing, I’m afraid, was Derrida’s first. You can’t write unclear, often metaphorical, highly rhetorical, and linguistically impenetrable prose riddled with internal contradictions then complain when you’re misrepresented or misunderstood. (That sentence applies to Judith Butler as much or more than Derrida himself, natch.)
To be fair, I’m not aware of Derrida himself ever making such complaints: He seemed perfectly satisfied with his large and very mixed reputation, and didn’t seem to care at all that so many people thought he was completely full of shit. But Derrida’s admirers more than made up for his own disinterest in defending his reputation, and they continue to do so. If any of them were any better at articulating their ideas and arguments, maybe I’d find their defenses of Derrida more convincing. But sadly, they seem to be even less clear writers than their intellectual hero – Butler herself being a prime case in point.
Well, I don’t recall ever reading anything in the Times about philosophers or philosophy that came within a country mile of being accurate or insightful. Although their science reporting is not very bad, the people they pick to write on philosophy, for some peculiar reason, never seem to have the slightest understanding of what they are writing about. I really can’t understand why people continue to think that the Times has any credibility in this area at all. The general assumption seems to be that the Times management would never hire anyone who wasn’t a brilliant intellect, though that idea has been disproven countless times.
Mind you, I can’t say anything sensible about Derrida since I’ve never been able to read more than a sentence or two of his stuff before concluding that it is totally impenetrable. And I don’t have time to spend trying to penetrate the impenetrable. But just for that reason, I never claim to be able to make informed comments about him, or any of the other “postmodernists.” It’s all terra incognita to me, and will probably always be so.
Roger, no excusing necessary, your comment isn’t off topic at all. And I take your point, but…I still think Butler considers ‘internationally renowned’ to be some kind of knock-down argument, and I think that’s the real anti-intellectualism.
JonJ: On the NYT’s history of failure with regard to philosophy, I have to agree. Then again, their journalistic standards more generally have been in free-fall for so long (Judith Miller, anyone?) it’s hard to pick out one thing they suck at especially: It’s rather easier to pick out the few things they do well – such as the Science section, I agree. I have nothing but respect for the Times Science editor, staff writers Cornelia Dean & Natalie Angier, and regular freelance contributor Carl Zimmer.
But the fact remains that Kandell’s opinion was not just something out of left field – or rather, given the “reactionary anti-intellectual” accusation, right field. Kandell’s understanding and dismissal of Derrida’s thought, although perhaps worded rather callously for an obit, is very widely held amongst Anglophone philosophers. And I maintain that it is a peculiar reversal (at best) to blame some general blindness or prejudice amongst those philosophers for their opinions of Derrida rather than Derrida’s own universally acknowledged obscurity.
That last point is what I find most peculiar about this repeated debate. Defenders of Derrida and other famous figures falling under the general “post-modern” label – Foucault, Lacan, etc. – rarely if ever deny that their various icons’ writings are very obscure or convoluted. Yet they they valorize this obscurity at every opportunity, insisting that its difficulty is a mark of genius. They insist that “deeper reading” and “more engagement” somehow yields important, even revolutionary insights into the human condition – without ever being able to explain what those insights are or why they are so important. Either the complete inability to express these very important insights in anything even approaching a moderately clear fashion is virulently contagious, or the lack of clarity serves some other purpose – such as concealing a total lack of these oft-claimed but never explained “very important insights.”
I have ventured into your aptly labeled terra incognita and wrestled with some of these impenetrable writers: Judith Butler most of all, but also some Derrida and Foucault and Lacan. I’ve found that all the careful reading and thoughtful engagement in the world with these thinkers reveals no more than fairly banal insights which, while they can be very important, are never quite as sweeping and revolutionary as advertised – and they can always be stated much more clearly and briefly than the authors in question do.
Oops, I think you’re a post ahead of me on some of these points now, G. I’d like to respond to a few of your points, and hopefully expand a little on the admittedly rushed last part of my response, later.
Roger,
“However, I would want to stress once more that I don’t think it’s a very fair reading of the passage.”
Okay, I’ll bite: why?
Why is it not fair to read the passage as implying that Butler thinks it matters that Derrida was “celebrated”? That’s a very odd adjective to use, surely; odd, and irrelevant. Since when is celebrity a criterion of intellectual merit? I think it’s such an odd word to use, with its whiff of the fan magazine, that it bears interpretation, and my reading is that it’s a kind of bullying: he’s celebrated, therefore you must be respectful.
I certainly don’t think your contributions are the slightest bit trollish, Roger. In fact, your point about balance is well-taken. Kandell gestures at Derrida’s popularity and place amongst some intellectuals, but doesn’t really present any of the reasons why many people do take him seriously – and is too sketchy on why other people don’t.
On the other hand, I can’t entirely hold Kandell’s feet to the fire on that, because I generally find the reasons people offer for why they take these figures seriously pretty obscure: There always seems to be a lot more valorization (But he/she’s so important/ deep/ insightful/ influential/ widely-read/ etc.) than substantial reasons for that valorization. Nevertheless, his obit would seem more plausible and less trollish if he’d at least made the attempt to show why people cared about Derrida – and he didn’t.
And perhaps I should give a few of those [insert po-mo star here] For Dummies books a read. As I’ve said, I’ve read some of the originals and found the insights… less than brilliantly insightful, to say the least. And certainly not worth all the padding. But maybe it would be worth looking at the distillations of people who claim to have found more substance behind the nonsense to see if they can convince me. Can’t be a dedicated fallibilist if you’re not willing to be proven wrong! ;-)
Anyway, I’ll add it to my projects list. Before reading the collected works of Merleau-Ponty (there’s a figure who is often difficult, but I think offers a real payoff) but definitely after my dissertation!
:-)
G
I’m enjoying the ironies here.
http://unspeak.net/inaccurate/
Steven, whatever Alannis Morisette may have told you, irony is not your strong point. Irony is expressing something by using words that usually mean the opposite. You are trying, and failing, to identify hypocrisy on OB’s part. While displaying it on your own part.
Oh, wait, you mean that what appears to be you ineffectually trying to criticize OB is actually you effectively succeeding in praising them? OK, I can buy that.
But it still doesn’t work as a distraction. You are the Vicky Pollard of academic fahion.
Roger,
Oops! Quite right – I meant ‘renowned.’ I translated; something I’m always complaining about other people doing. Bad, bad, very bad.
“The logic of her sentence, in my reading, works like this. If Derrida is internationally renowned, it is because of intellectual merits X, Y, and Z.”
Yes, but that’s actually another objection I have to that sentence – the logic of it doesn’t in fact work at all; there is no logic. If D is renowned, how does she know that’s why? And is she saying D is in fact renowned, or is she posing a genuine conditional? Is she trying to give the impression D is renowned without actually saying so? In short, the sentence is more rhetoric than logic.
Anyway, you haven’t come across as trollish in the least.
This is a different Roger – although hat’s off to Roger Mexico.
I didn’t think much of Judith Butler’s defense of Derrida at the time – she could have mounted a much more aggressive one – and I was almost pleased that he was still considered enough of a rebel to tick off the Times. However, one does like to point out the double standard for philosophers operating both at the Times and elsewhere in the Anglosphere. When someone like Quine or Davidson dies, you don’t read in the obituary that their ‘fraulent behavioralist views of language acquisition were decisively shown up in the fifties by mainstream linguists’ – although, in fact, Chomsky, whose work is mainstream in linguistics, did show up Davidson and Quine, and did pretty much accuse them of having no knowledge of linguistics at length in the early sixties. I don’t know that that means they were wrong, though – although, of course, if it was some continental philosopher, we’d hear that the majority of informed experts from the fields they referred to had decisively shown up their intellectual impostures.
So, I think Butler is pointing to a fair point. To be celebrated in a NYT obituary is already to be famous in some way. So the task of the writer is to explain what that way is. If the writer clearly doesn’t understand the dead man or woman’s work, or displays such a bias against the dearly beloved that it is impossible to find out why, for instance, Derrida was celebrated – then you have a problematic obituary. But I doubt the Times cared. In some ways, the rough handling is a compliment – nobody is going to roughly handle 99 percent of the dead Anglo analytic philosophers because nobody cares, outside of the very narrow fields they have carefully tended, that much about their work. Is anybody going to get upset at some future point because Jaegwon Kim’s modified reductionism is insulted in the NYT in his future obit? Let’s face it, the future obit, if there is one, will simply be about colleges taught at.
And, of course, Kendall’s “I’ll throw some words at deconstruction and see if it works” approach is, perhaps unconsciously, in line with the NYT stylebook, which seems to allow arts reporters to use deconstruction to mean “analyse”, “criticize”, or simply take apart. It was good for laughs that a paper that is so sloppy about its appropriation of Derrida’s term then turns around and accuses Derrida of sloppiness. I laughed, at least.
The larger point, though, and Poole’s point, I think, is that intellectual journalists and academics in England and America exude this entitled feeling of disdain when they write about the sloppy, the romantic, the fraudulent Frenchies, as though they have, at their back, all of science and philosophy. Usually they don’t. Usually they don’t even have, say, analytic philosophy of science, just some sound bytes from Popper. So it gets a person’s back up.
A good recent example of this phenomenon is the Andrew Scull review of Foucault’s History of Madness in the TLS, which went around the blogs with a noticeably triumphant tone, as though here was a real showing up of Foucault’s faulty scholarship. Foucault just didn’t do his homework. He was decisively shown up to be a fraud. Etc. In actuality, I think it showed Scull’s propensity to give numbers that are, to say the least, doubtful or probably wrong – for instance, his number for the peak number of patients at Bethlem Hospital – and to make judgments on original sources for which he gives no reason for us to believe him – as for instance his instance that the paying of a fixed sum to see patients at Bethlem was apocryphal, in spite of many contemporary sources that confirm Foucault’s account. In other words, Foucault, who sometimes put in some dodgy stuff in his book, never put in so much concentrated dodgy stuff as Scull puts in his four pages, and yet the shimmer of expertise, the bowing to the real facts, the aura of positivism, will no doubt be used for years to show how wrong Foucault was. That kind of thing is a real intellectual imposture, and I suspect Steven Poole thinks you are all too inclined to sympathize with that, OB. But I think that you are too fair to sympathize with mere sidetaking, though you do have a side.