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By Trevor |
(click to embiggen)
I'm reading the unbearable Gender Trouble for class this week, and also Martha Nussbaum's wonderful and devastating critique of that work from 2000 (find it here, for free!). Among many of Nussbaum's criticism's is the claim that -- because it lacks a normative theory of justice -- Butler's analysis becomes quite flimsy and void of political potential. Here's a choice quote:
There is a void, then, at the heart of Butler's notion of politics. This void can look liberating, because the reader fills it implicitly with a normative theory of human equality or dignity. But let there be no mistake: for Butler, as for Foucault, subversion is subversion, and it can in principle go in any direction. Indeed, Butler's naively empty politics is especially dangerous for the very causes she holds dear. For every friend of Butler, eager to engage in subversive performances that proclaim the repressiveness of heterosexual gender norms, there are dozens who would like to engage in subversive performances that flout the norms of tax compliance, of non-discrimination, of decent treatment of one's fellow students. To such people we should say, you cannot simply resist as you please, for there are norms of fairness, decency, and dignity that entail that this is bad behavior. But then we have to articulate those norms--and this Butler refuses to do.
She later continues:
Well, parodic performance is not so bad when you are a powerful tenured academic in a liberal university. But here is where Butler's focus on the symbolic, her proud neglect of the material side of life, becomes a fatal blindness. For women who are hungry, illiterate, disenfranchised, beaten, raped, it is not sexy or liberating to reenact, however parodically, the conditions of hunger, illiteracy, disenfranchisement, beating, and rape. Such women prefer food, schools, votes, and the integrity of their bodies. I see no reason to believe that they long sadomasochistically for a return to the bad state. If some individuals cannot live without the sexiness of domination, that seems sad, but it is not really our business. But when a major theorist tells women in desperate conditions that life offers them only bondage, she purveys a cruel lie, and a lie that flatters evil by giving it much more power than it actually has.
Click here to read the rest!
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Ohoho Trevor, the nineties called, they want their flame-bait back. :P
This is just the standard MrxFem/Philo critique of anything post-structuralist: "I wanna talk about material differences and you're not talking about material differences so you don't have a theory of justice and therefore you're wrong!"
Not to mention the Ivory Tower smear is a little bit rich coming from Nussbaum.
Hah! You're such a biatch, D. Okay, okay. But you have to admit: the critique rings true, no?
But you're right about one thing: I'm sure Martha is presently rolling around on her kitchen floor, covered in cashmere and pants made out of 24k gold, while petting her purebred Persian cat.
Well I was reading the PDF after I commented - okay, I admit, I was shooting from the lip as usual - and feeling myself crushing on Nussbaum's clarity and determination of prose and purpose, everything seeming so reasonable, UNTIL I came across the paragraph you quoted, and then it became clear she's just another academic-intellectual assassin.
Butler is theory, meaning you need to be willing to accept a number of other theoretical antecedents as hypothetical premises, and judge the whole according to how well its constituent ideas hang together. Her epistemology doesn't include grounding and she's simply not interested in that whole symbolic/real distinction that obsesses people doing Philosophy in the Platonic tradition. So there's some major bad faith in refusing to accept her premises and then taking her literally on your own terms.
This next bit worries me, because if I worked in the same institution as Nussbaum, it would probably constitute sexual harrassment, but since you've already gone there, I'll follow ;) -- Nussbaum gets to write with such clarity because she wields so much power; Butler has to wrap herself up in so much 'obscurantist' performativity because she's speaking in a tradition according MUCH less respect and power within the academy. Nussbaum clutches her pearls and is careful not to spill tears on her cashmere for the poor brown people oppressed by the very system that benefits her. That's all I'm going to say on that point - it's enough to suggest maybe the performativity of gender and power are legitimate subjects for critical discussion.
Trevor and Daniel-- great discussion and debate here.
Martha Nussbaum was one of my senior thesis advisors for my Classics program at Brown, and she had a great impact on my life (an impact that continues). IMHO, she was one of the few philosophers who was willing to bridge the worlds of classical philosophy with those of theorists such as Butler. In fact, my Nussbaum education left me much more open to explore the worlds of literary theory as important tools alongside of N's Aristotelian world. Nussbaum always highlighted (in almost all of her writings) the importance of literature (and theory) to understanding the good life (Aristotle's eudaimonia).
One of the first critical reviews I ever read was N's circa 1984 critique of Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind. There too (as with Butler) she held the author responsible for poor writing and sloppy ideas, and for their impact. I'm not saying that Butler is always obscurantist, but when she frequently is, I would disagree with Daniel that she "has to be" so. It's a calculated choice to exert her own power, IMHO, and I think it is a bit of a parlor game to debate whether Butler or Nussbaum has more power in the academy. Each exerts significant power in somewhat different realms.
Though I also get your point Daniel about N's benefitting from a system that is implicated in the oppression of poor people and people of color, I would say that N has invested serious effort (alongside her past partner Amartya Sen) to insure that her philosophic and economic ideas have an impact on women, poor people, and other marginalized classes worldwide. She has been seriously committed (IMHO) to the challenging work of making academic ideas carry their weight in the world of economic practice.
She has often also been an advocate for issues before they have become popularly supported and trendy. For example, she sponsored and helped organize the first queer studies conferences at Brown in 1987, and also was a witness in opposition to Colorado's anti-gay Amendment 2 (1992) .
In a world where academics seldom risk their asses to get involved with politics, Nussbaum has done so. So I want to acknowledge her for that.
This is not at all to dismiss the questions you raise Daniel- I only wanted to remove Martha Nussbaum from a parody that was emerging. Though as with all parodies there is some truth perhaps, I wanted to say that the truth of her work is a bit more complex than what's been mentioned here so far.
love, C
Chris, thanks for your thoughtful comments! I agree with that it's outrageous to claim that Butler's style is some kind of necessary evil. It's akin to Butler's explanation that one does not get to choose their own style of writing, that it is indoctrinated through their training and blah blah blah. Please. Talk about making people out to be victims of their structural environments! As a writer, I know that I have a choice when it comes to my words, and I can certainly choose to write sentences that I know will only be easily understood to those inside the Ivory Tower. But I do my best to avoid adopting that kind of style, because I'm deeply invested in having what I write be accessible to those without a jargon-filled training inside the academy. Butler has obviously never been invested in that project, and I think that's why many people who cannot understand her writing deeply resent her work: they feel excluded, marginalized, and condescended to.
And also, thank you Chris for sharing your thoughts on Nussbaum. I'm less familiar with her work than you are, and it's always fabulous to hear such praise and warm thoughts.