Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jonathan Culler is Senior Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. Kevin Lamb is a graduate student in the English Department at Cornell University.

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Just Being Difficult?

Stanford University Press

Contents

Introduction: Dressing Up, Dressing Down JONATHAN CULLER AND KEVIN LAMB............................................................1Part 1. In Search of a Common Language; or, Language Debates and the History of Philosophy1. Difficult Style and "Illustrious" Vernaculars: A Historical Perspective MARGARET FERGUSON.......................................152. Hume's Learned and Conversable Worlds ROBIN VALENZA AND JOHN BENDER.............................................................293. Bad Writing and Good Philosophy JONATHAN CULLER.................................................................................434. The Metaphysics of Clarity and the Freedom of Meaning JOHN MCCUMBER.............................................................58Part 2. Institutions, Publics, Intellectual Labor5. Feminism's Broken English ROBYN WIEGMAN.........................................................................................756. The Resistance of Theory; or, The Worth of Agony REY CHOW.......................................................................957. Styles of Intellectual Publics MICHAEL WARNER...................................................................................106Part 3. Modernist Poetics and Critical Badness8. On Difficulty, the Avant-Garde, and Critical Moribundity PETER BROOKS...........................................................1299. Difficulty in Modern Poetry and Aesthetics ROBERT KAUFMAN.......................................................................13910. Bad Writing BARBARA JOHNSON....................................................................................................157Part 4. Address to the Other: Ethics and Acknowledgment11. The Morality of Form; or, What's "Bad" about "Bad Writing"? DAVID PALUMBO-LIU..................................................17112. The Politics of the Production of Knowledge: An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak STUART J. MURRAY.....................18113. Values of Difficulty JUDITH BUTLER.............................................................................................199Contributors........................................................................................................................217Index...............................................................................................................................221

Chapter One

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' manipulative 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 cultural literacy of the kind defined by E.D. Hirsch know that a sophistical argument is a specious one; and those who read and allowed themselves to be persuaded by Nussbaum's denunciation of Judith Butler'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 respecting their souls. When they assessed Nussbaum's highly manipulative rhetorical gesture of associating Judith Butler with the Sophists, however, did the readers of the New Republic know that the Sophists were foreigners, "provincials" (in the eyes of Athenians) who lacked legal standing in Athens and whose habit, as Plato describes it, was to wander "from city to city ... having no settled home of their own" (Timaeus, 19e)?

The Sophists' status as foreigners is less likely to figure in a Hirschean conception of modern American cultural literacy, I suspect, than is their reputation as amoral, or even immoral, rhetoricians. In truth (but beware such a phrase: it may be attempting to manipulate you), the question of what constitutes 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 essay and this volume, that standardized form of the language that some sociolinguists 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. What counts as "bad" English has often been defined as a function of what the Athenians called barbarism or, more precisely, solecism. This term, which I vividly remember first seeing in the margin of one of my graduate school essays, where it accompanied a circled phrase the professorial reader regarded as extremely infelicitous and as a mark of my gross ignorance, denotes, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, "speaking incorrectly," 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." Solecisms are thus usages judged to be improper or (later) "nonstandard" by those who know the rules of the prestige 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 essay to question a tendency I see not only in Martha Nussbaum's approach to the problem of Butler's "difficult" style but also in that of many well-educated persons who have written more generally, and in various fora, against the "obscure" language, often called "jargon," of recent literary and cultural theory. The tendency against which I'm writing here-and which I've certainly 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 Milton-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...