Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not to be believed
Reasonable People #21 : trying to be reasonable about Judith Butler's rejection of "parochial standards of transparency"
Here’s Judith Butler arguing that it is unreasonable to demand that writing about radical ideas be clear, transparent or conform to received grammar. It may, in fact, be better if it is unnecessarily difficult to understand:
Moreover, neither grammar nor style are politically neutral. Learning the rules that govern intelligible speech is an inculcation into normalized language, where the price of not conforming is the loss of intelligibility itself. As Drucilla Cornell, in the tradition of Adorno, reminds me: there is nothing radical about common sense. It would be a mistake to think that received grammar is the best vehicle for expressing radical views, given the constraints that grammar imposes upon thought, indeed upon the thinkable itself. But formulations that twist grammar or that implicitly call into question the subject-verb requirements of propositional sense are clearly irritating for some. They produce more work for their readers, and sometimes their readers are offended by such demands. Are those who are offended making a legitimate request for “plain speaking” or does their complaint emerge from a consumer expectation of intellectual life? Is there, perhaps a value to be derived from such experiences of linguistic difficulty? … The demand for lucidity forgets the ruses that motor the ostensibly “clear” view. Avital Ronell recalls the moment in which Nixon looked into the eyes of the nation and said, “let me make one thing perfectly clear” and then proceeded to lie. What travels under the sign of “clarity” and what would be the price of failing to deploy a certain critical suspicion when the arrival of lucidity is announced? Who devises the protocols of “clarity” and whose interests do they serve? What is foreclosed by the insistence on parochial standards of transparency as requisite for all communication? What does “transparency” keep obscure?
- Preface (1999) to Gender Trouble (1990).
All writing about new and complex ideas is difficult. All technical writing can be hard to follow. But here Butler seems to be admitting that she wants that, that she makes her writing harder to understand on purpose.
I’m new to reading Judith Butler, but twitter was quick to show me that she invokes strong reactions. This piece by Martha Nussbaum, The Professor of Parody: The hip defeatism of Judith Butler, is a comprehensive j’accuse. Some suggested that deliberate obfuscation is a ploy to deflect criticism (“if they can’t understand you, they can’t refute you”), or otherwise bludgeon the audience into deference. Other replies were just plain rude. A common view was summed up in quotes like “If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.” (attributed to Einstein, but isn’t everything).
Even if a six year old level of comprehension is too tough a test, shouldn’t we at least strive for clarity? In The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century (2014), Steven Pinker provides a roadmap for what he calls ‘classic style’, stopping along the way to mock critical theory scholars as bad writers, in love with abstractions, abstruseness and metadiscourse (he explicitly includes Judith Butler).
Classic style, according to Pinker, assumes a world beyond the writing, which the writer is showing the reader directly. The messy work of figuring out what the writer means is “done behind the scenes”, with the ambition being prose that assumes equality between the writer and reader, that makes the reader feel like a genius. “Bad writing makes the reader feel like a dunce” (p.36).
I’ve recommended Pinker’s work on clear writing to students, including his book and this lecture which summarises it. If you had asked me last week what I thought about the desirability of clarity in writing, I would have been firmly in Pinker’s camp, not Butler’s.
However, an axiom of this newsletter is that it is interesting to try and understand what people meant, rather than just make fun of what you think they meant, so let’s consider some cases for the defence:
#1 It’s about power, stupid
Since Butler’s topic is gender, it isn’t hard to see that a conventional (“powerful”) view of gender is embedded in standards of language: the gender binary of he-she. If you want to reject the idea, you’ll also need new words or new ways of using old words.
In the limit, a demand for clarity could be a demand to use conventional concepts. If you reject the conventional conceptual distinctions, then demands to be clearer are demands to yield your position.
Remember the lawyer who asks in court “Yes or no! Have you stopped beating your wife?”
Or the controversialist who demands proof that vaccines don’t cause autism.
It’s the wrong question, a distraction from the real issues, so no sensible answer can be produced which doesn’t reject the premise.
If your premise is about the very nature of language, how can you argue without remaking language, at least in some ways?
#2 It’s a journey
Another defence might be that writing isn’t a “window on the world” (the idiom of Pinker’s classic style). Communication is not the transmission from writer to reader of a substance (“information”) that has independent existence. In reading the reader has an experience, which takes them from one state to another. This process might be achieved by clarity and directness, but it might also be achieved indirectly.
I thought of the idea of defamiliarisation, or “making strange”, where in order to see something in a new way we first need to create a distance from our normal experience of it, from our expectations:
Aleksandr Rodchenko At the Telephone 1928
There’s a kind of parody zen story I once read:
One afternoon a student said "Roshi, I don't really understand what's going on. I mean, we sit in zazen and we gassho to each other and everything, and Felicia got enlightened when the bottom fell out of he water-bucket, and Todd got enlightened when you popped him one with your staff, and people work on koans and get enlightened, but I've been doing this for two years now, and the koans don't make any sense, and I don't feel enlightened at all! Can you just tell me what's going on?"
"Well you see," Roshi replied, "for most people, and especially for most educated people like you and I, what we perceive and experience is heavily mediated, through language and concepts that are deeply ingrained in our ways of thinking and feeling. Our objective here is to induce in ourselves and in each other a psychological state that involves the unmediated experience of the world, because we believe that that state has certain desirable properties. It's impossible in general to reach that state through any particular form or method, since forms and methods are themselves examples of the mediators that we are trying to avoid. So we employ a variety of ad hoc means, some linguistic like koans and some non-linguistic like zazen, in hopes that for any given student one or more of our methods will, in whatever way, engender the condition of non-mediated experience that is our goal. And since even thinking in terms of mediators and goals tends to reinforce our undesirable dependency on concepts, we actively discourage exactly this kind of analytical discourse."
And the student was enlightened.
- Broken Koans and other Zen debris, via @perceptophore
One take on the joke here is that all the zen stuff with buckets, fingers, sticks etc and endless zazen can be done away with. The point can be expressed clearly and directly: “well why didn’t you just say so!”
But here the joke reveals that futility of clear expression. Telling someone to abandon prior concepts and experience reality in an unmediated way doesn’t actually help them to do that. Worse, it may actually hinder the effect.
If we write to shake up people’s sense of the world, to induce a strangeness so that things can be experienced anew, maybe there is no short cut, maybe you have to write obliquely, to take people along the path to where you’re going.
#3 The curses of knowledge
Even without jargon, clear prose can make no sense:
If the balloons popped, the sound wouldn't be able to carry since everything would be too far away from the correct floor. A closed window would also prevent the sound from carrying, since most buildings tend to be well insulated. Since the whole operation depends on a steady flow of electricity, a break in the middle of the wire would also cause problems. Of course, the fellow could shout, but the human voices are not loud enough to carry that far. An additional problem is that a string could break on the instrument. Then there could be no accompaniment to the message. It is clear that the best situation would involve less distance. Then there would be fewer potential problems. With face to face contact, the least number of things could go wrong
The missing ingredient is knowledge. If you don’t have the background - if you don’t share the common ground - then you can’t fit even the clear english words into a schema to make sense of them. This classic example is from Bransford & Johnson (1972), they asked participants to listen to recordings of this text, and then asked them to rate how easy they found it to comprehend. They also tested recall, which is a good proxy measure of comprehension (as well as being a useful thing to be able to do in its own right). Participants who listened to the text without being given any context scored terribly on both measures; participants who were shown for just 30 seconds a cartoon which gave context to the text easily understood it when they heard it, and demonstrated far superior recall.
Crucially, the cartoon had to be shown to the participants before they heard the description. If they saw it afterwards it didn’t help at all. The schema for comprehension had to be in place as the words came in.
Here’s cartoon which provided the context you need to make sense of the prose:
If I was repeating this experiment I’d do it with tiktok videos:
First you pinch 1 and 3, then you bring 1 to 3 and lift. Wave forward then back on itself. The result is much quicker and you get any image nicely at the front
Can you tell what it is?
- “How to fold a t-shirt in 3 seconds”
This is why taking quotes out of context (like I did with Butler) can be so unfair. Good writing respects the knowledge of the audience, but the flip side is that if you can’t understand something it is very hard to know if the problem is with the text or with what you know (or think you know).
The topic of gender, like psychology, is something that everyone thinks they understand. Sometimes I think this can cause people to be particularly affronted when the disagree with an author, or don’t understand what they are saying. A little humility in front of a text we don’t understand creates a pause for greater comprehension to slip in.
#4 It’s about power, stupid (redux)
These have been some reasons we could marshall in Butler’s defence, but I think this is the core reason she is alluding to. If speaking in a particular way - clearly, rationally, transparently - is a standard, then some people will abuse this to obstruct, silence or disrail people who don’t meet their conception of that standard. Butler is saying that who has power can define the standards for language use, and use this to dismiss people who use non-standard language.
But this is also the reason I ultimately can’t be on board with Butler. These reasons are defenses against a demand that we write in a particular way. They all allow exceptions to the absolute demand that clarity and transparency be honoured above all else. Other considerations apply, we can write for other purposes. At root, thought, we write to connect with other people, to bring them into a common ground of understanding.
Writers of critical theory draw on the claims to be investigating profound truths about the nature of knowledge, power, language and human existence; they purport to be invested in issues of justice, of giving succour to those excluded and dominanted by conventional power structures. I can allow Butler that there is “value to be derived from such experiences of linguistic difficulty?”, but if the sacrifice is that your audience can’t understand you, and is left feeling stupid or excluded, that cost is too great.
“It’s too early to say”
Butler’s work has been influential, and not despite the way she writes. It’s hard to imagine a counterfactual universe where she wanted to say the same things, but wrote them clearly and directly and had the same influence. Something about her difficult, perhaps deliberately difficult, prose has supported her influence.
Has the influence of Butler’s writing been for the good or bad overall? Probably, like the Chinese president’s apocryphul comment about the effects of the French Revolution, it’s too early to say.
But, as writing advice, I know this: Difficulty and confusion come for free when you write. Understanding between people is hard enough without adding obstacles on purpose. This is as true when you want to overturn established understandings, as it is when you don’t. Committing youself to clarity, and to the commons, is just as challenging a path, and just as noble, as an effort after poetic effect.
Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. Routledge. [70k+ citations on google scholar!]
Bransford, J. D., & Johnson, M. K. (1972). Contextual prerequisites for understanding: Some investigations of comprehension and recall. Journal of verbal learning and verbal behavior, 11(6), 717-726.
Pinker, S. (2014). The sense of style: The thinking person's guide to writing in the 21st century. Penguin Books.
Sperber, D. (2010). The guru effect. Review of philosophy and psychology, 1(4), 583-592.