For years, critics on both ends of
the political spectrum have faulted some of the most highly touted
postmodern theorists for their ponderous, even impenetrable, style.
Recently, even Terry Eagleton, an erstwhile booster of so-called
critical theory, has charged that such writing dilutes the political
goals of the academic Left in favor of stylistic preening.
But must such theorists write in the onerous manner they choose?
Case in point: “Edward Alexander accuses Edward Said of ‘misrepresentation.’” This sentence, which forms the beginning of a
letter to the editor of Commentary, is both simple and unremarkable.
Except in one respect: its author is Gayatri Spivak, professor of
English and comparative literature at Columbia University and a doyenne
of postcolonial theory.
This is the same Gayatri Spivak whom critic Russell Jacoby labeled “the
master of broken sentences, brackets, parentheses, equivocations.”
Indeed, Jacoby asserted, “Spivak, like most post-colonial theorists,
cannot write a sentence.” Clearly, Jacoby never read Spivak’s missive
in Commentary.
To be sure, however, Jacoby was on to something. Anyone who has even a
cursory familiarity with Spivak’s prose knows how torturously opaque it
can be. Among the schools of postmodern academics who churn out cloudy
essays replete with jargon, Spivak is a big fish. A typical sentence,
culled from her tome A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward A History of the Vanishing Present reads:
“If the mercantile-territorial/feudal-capitalist transitions provide a
first historical origin for my sentence—‘white men are saving brown
women from brown men’—that origin is evidently lost in the more general
history of humankind at work, its origin placed by Marx in the material
change or ‘metabolism’ between the human being and Nature, the story of
capitalist expansion, the slow freeing of labor power as commodity, the
narrative of the modes of production, the transition from feudalism via
mercantilism to capitalism.” This, naturally, is very far removed from
“Edward Alexander accuses Edward Said of ‘misrepresentation.’”
It is so far removed, in fact, that the question beckons: Why can
Spivak express herself so lucidly in the pages of Commentary, but offer
her reader linguistic legerdemain in other contexts? In short, why can
Spivak only occasionally write a sentence?
Before attempting a conclusion to this query, we can safely rule out
the possibility that the editorial staff at Commentary performed a
Herculean labor, altering an original Spivak sentence that read
something like “The hegemonic discursive strategy and phallogocentric
troplogical elocutions attributed to one Edward Alexander position
Edward Said as the signified ‘misrepresentation’ — a strategy typical of
the reactionary aesthetic/political vocabulary of late capitalism.”
After all, Spivak and Commentary hardly see eye-to-eye on political
matters, and Edward Alexander probably would have enjoyed censuring
Spivak for her opacity.
So, why did Spivak suddenly find herself capable of presenting a clear
argument? A defender of such poststructuralist obfuscation might argue,
as feminist theorist Judith Butler did some years ago in a New York
Times op-ed, that cloudy style, by questioning language’s hold on
reality, “can help point the way to a more socially just world.” What
the uninitiated take as foolish hermetic word-games, then, are really
clarion calls for social justice.
This apologia for clunky prose should be expected by those acquainted
with the tenets of postmodern theory. There is, as the academics say,
no transcendental signifier, and thus speech cannot represent reality,
but is ultimately concerned with power.
Immediately, though, another question beckons: Why did Judith Butler,
an opaque author par excellence, express this sentiment so clearly in
the pages of the Times? Butler’s op-ed, in fact, was penned in defense
of her own obscure writing, for which she was the ignominious “winner”
of Philosophy and Literature’s
“Bad Writing Contest” of 1999. Given the Times as a soapbox—surely a
more effective forum for reaching the masses than all those trendy
academic periodicals—one might expect Butler not only to justify her
opacity, but also provide an example of it. Yet Butler, in defense of
bad writing, chose sentences such as “Many quite nefarious ideologies
pass for common sense.” How mundane! Where’s the Judith Butler who took
the cake with such rhetorical humdingers as “The move from a
structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure
social relations in relatively homologous ways, to a view of hegemony
in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and
rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of
structure…” etc., etc.?
And this question brings us back to Gayatri Spivak. Her letter to the
editor was a rebuke to Edward Alexander, who had authored an attack on
Edward Said in the August 1989 number of Commentary. Alexander’s rough
treatment of Said—he referred to him as a “professor of terror”—was
itself a defense of Alexander’s colleague Robert Griffin, whom Said
mercilessly excoriated in the pages of Critical Inquiry. Spivak, then,
was stepping up to support Said, and likely chose to do so in the most
effective way possible—that is to say, in lucid prose. Likewise Judith
Butler, when compelled to defend her disastrously cloudy style in The
Gray Lady, did so pellucidly.
It seems as though Giyatri Spivak’s and Judith Butler’s bursts of
limpidity are revealing in a way not intended by their authors. Sure,
language might be an imperfect tool for discussing what surrounds us,
but, when words really matter, clarity is king. How very simple.
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