New Partisan

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.