Giving an Account of Judith Butler
I’m reading Douglas Murray’s new book, The Madness of Crowds, at the moment. It’s essentially a softly spoken diatribe against the left and identity politics that owes a lot of its argumentation to Jordan Peterson. This should be no surprise given Murray was the moderator of Peterson’s stadium conversation with Sam Harris.
I was struck with a particular passage in the book, where Murray excoriates “purveyors of the ideologies of social justice and intersectionality” for being unreadable.
The example he gives is this quote:
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, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power
Butler, Judith. Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time, Diacritics (1997)
Two things struck me about this. One was how often I see this example used, and the other was how I really didn’t think it was anywhere near as bad as everyone makes out. Between 1995 and 1998, the Philosophy and Literature journal ran a bad writing contest to celebrate “the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles”. In 1998 Judith Butler won with this entry, which appears to be where everyone got it from.
The popularisation of this sentence has led to ample discussion from some dire critics. To be clear, the sentence sucks. It clearly sucks. Anyone reading it knows it sucks. But it’s not just treated as a bad sentence, it’s now the archetypal example of impenetrable, obscurantist writing in social science papers. Nick Cohen, Steven Pinker, Christina Sommers, and now Douglas Murray have all trotted out this example to illustrate the meaninglessness of this type of academic work.
Steven Pinker, in his 2014 book The Sense of Style, writes:
A reader of this intimidating passage can marvel at Butler’s ability to juggle abstract propositions about still more abstract propositions, with no real-world referent in sight. We have a move from an account of an understanding to a view with a rearticulation of a question, which reminds me of the Hollywood party in Annie Hall where a movie producer is overheard saying, “Right now it’s only a notion, but I think I can get money to make it into a concept, and later turn it into an idea.” What the reader cannot do is understand it — to see with her own eyes what Butler is seeing. Insofar as the passage has a meaning at all, it seems to be that some scholars have come to realize that power can change over time.
Douglas Murray, for his part, says:
Prose this bad can only occur when the author is trying to hide something. A theoretical physicist like Sheldon Lee Glashow cannot afford to write in the unreadable prose of the social sciences. He needs to communicate exceptionally complex truths in as simple and clear a language as possible.
What’s so strange is they don’t just think it’s bad writing, they think it doesn’t have any meaning and even go as far to question the motivations for writing it. There’s a lot to criticise about the sentence, but the idea it’s devoid of meaning is simply not true. Like most things, it makes a lot more sense in context. So let’s look into that context, and why it was written the way it was.
The quote is from an article called “Further Reflections on Conversations of Our Time” published in a scholarly journal called Diacritics. The article is exactly 1300 words long, a little over two pages. As the name implies, it’s not actually a paper. It’s Butler going over her thoughts surrounding an email exchange she had with Ernesto Laclau about a book he co-wrote. The article directly follows another article containing that email exchange. Given the entire thing is only two pages long, if you want to read the thing and you have access to JSTOR, it can be found here.
So the article is talking about a book called Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, which seems to be all about how Marxist thought is too caught up with class identity at the expense of other things. One fan of the book is Slavoj Žižek, who cites it as a direct influence to his book The Sublime Object of Ideology. Butler even namechecks Žižek in this very article.
The book had a bit of an impact on Butler, and the infamous paragraph is her highlighting what she thinks is a really important insight it gives. But to get what that insight is, we have to go backwards in the article to where she lays out the groundwork:
I realized that central to the notion of articulation, appropriated from Gramsci, was the notion of rearticulation. As a temporally dynamic and relatively unpredictable play of forces, hegemony had been cast by both Lacla and Mouffe as an alternative to forms of static structuralism that tend to construe contemporary social forms as timeless totalities. I read in Laclau and Mouffe the political transcription of Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play”: a structure gains its status as a structure, its structurality, only through its repeated reinstatement. The dependency of that structure on its reinstatement means that the very possibility of structure depends on a reiteration that is in no sense determined fully in advance, that for structure, an structure as a result, to become possible, there must first be a contingent repetition basis. Moreover, for some social formation to appear as structured is for it to have over in some way the contingency of its own installation.
Clearly this is a lot of mouthful too, so let’s go through exactly what this means, and then double back to the original sentence which will then make a lot more sense.
So there’s an idea called “articulation” in sociology, which can trace its roots back to the Marxist scholar Antonio Gramsci. Articulation is basically where social classes adopt bits of culture for their own ends. For example, if someone tells you they’re going to the opera or a classical music recital, then you’re probably going to assume something about what social class they’re in. Now, you could argue well sure but that’s because opera costs a fortune so obviously it’s a more middle/upper class thing. But what about loving Shakespeare? That’s seen as high art, despite the fact he wrote his plays for the common muck. The point here is certain facets of culture get adopted by certain classes, even when there’s nothing inherent to that class about that thing. Just think about the difference in stereotypes between a football fan and a cricket fan.
So that’s what articulation is. Following this, Butler is saying really these types of displays are a bit like roles, and they need repetition aka re-articulation in order to keep existing. This is best understood in contrast. Let’s take the Shakespeare thing. One could imagine thinking Shakespeare has always been considered high art for the middle classes aka a “timeless totality”. There’s just something inherently erudite about the whole thing, and erudition demands a public school education complete with wine tasting and Latin lessons.
But that idea is clearly untrue, given the status we afford a Shakespeare play can (and did) change over time. Really how it works is: every time a performance is put on, who is in the audience dictates how that event is perceived. If a bunch of stereotypical Guardian readers rock up, then that’s re-articulating it as a middle class pursuit. But if enough plebs take a punt, then suddenly the perception starts to change.
Shakespeare only got the original reputation for being for everyone, because that’s who turned up. And he only lost it when who turned up changed. This newer association may seem set in stone, but really it’s only maintained by the repetition of those types of people being the ones who turn up. This is what “a structure gains its status as a structure, its structurality, only through its repeated reinstatement” is getting at. It’s saying these cultural associations need reiterating to keep existing, and Shakespeare being for the middle class was never an inevitability from the moment he wrote his first play, even though it may seem that way from where we’re standing (or more likely sitting, up in the dress circle).
I used the perception of the works of Shakespeare as an example, but this idea applies widely. I could just have easily picked the example of how a certain salute changed meaning entirely in the 1940s, and further still if you were to perform it in a long line with a bunch of you buddies, how the message you’re sending about your identity has also changed dramatically. It’s not just for little stuff either, this idea of re-articulation applies all the way up to grand concepts such as Capitalism itself.
With that background context in mind, let’s look at the sentence immediately preceding the infamous word salad:
The theoretical rearticulation of structure as hegemony marked the work of Laclau and Mouffe as consequentially poststructuralist and offered perhaps the most important link between politics and poststructuralism in recent years (along with the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak).
So this idea, that elements of the social order only work through re-articulation, ties into our understanding of politics in an important way. Namely, it changes how we should view capitalism as an entity.
Finally we get to the neverending sentence. Let’s tackle this beast piece by piece. Remember, all this sentence is doing is comparing two competing accounts of power and the social order under capitalism.
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways
Structuralism sees power and social interaction as being a direct reflection of money, which operates in a uniform top-down way
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,
Post-structuralists think power is more formed over time by repetition by people which in turn reinforces ideas and creates norms, and hence shifts the focus far more on how things change over time
and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power
The old structuralist analysis (exemplified by Louis Althusser) sees things as very static and fixed and treats capitalism as a timeless (almost mechanical) concept. The newer post-structural analysis shifts to a view where things are far more up bottom-up, and power only exists by people dutifully reinforcing the social order through repetition
So to bring it all together, and convey the whole thought in plain English:
Our understanding of power is changing. The old thinking was focused on Capital, and how it directly shapes society e.g. the more money you have the more power you have. The problem with that is it takes Capital to be too theoretical, an abstract machine that doles out power. But that conception fails to explain all the different ways power can change over time. Later thinking sees the social order as being intimately tied to norms, which are defined and ingrained over time through repetition. The focus is much more on how these norms form, and the ways in which they’re continually reinforced and reinstated.
That certainly reads a lot clearer, but in context does lose something along the way. Butler expects you to know what “structuralism” is, who Althusser is, and how structuralists understand capitalism. She also expects you to understand what “hegemony” means in Marxist thought, given she’s talking about an insight present in a book entirely about that. There’s also an implicit assumption you’re aware of “articulation”, given she assumes it while defining “rearticulation” earlier on in the article.
This is obviously expecting a lot from the reader, in the sense that’s several difficult concepts you’re just expected to know going in. But she’s also not writing for a general audience. This journal is aimed at academics with interests in social studies and political theory, and left wing political theory at that. And whereas I think we can definitely say it’s a bad sentence, it does not follow that makes it meaningless.
In fact, later in the article she goes on to make quite a salient point that whereas certain theorists despair at how all-encompassing Capitalism is and how inevitable it seems (e.g. Mark Fisher), that actually the thing about social orders is they only exist for as long as people keep repeating/reproducing elements of them. Which means, over time the way people do that can slowly but fundamentally change the social order itself.
If Žižek was making this point, he’d probably compare it to the classic 1998 NBC miniseries Merlin and how Queen Mab’s power is dependent on attention and acknowledgement from the court.
The fact Butler is so interested in this idea should be no surprise given her work on gender. What this book seems to be arguing is power is based on structures which are established by repetition and reiteration until they become the social norm. Much like what Butler argues about gender. It’s both backing her up, and offering a way to change those structures. If you can just get enough people, at the right time, to change their actions then slowly what Gender is will shift over time to something completely different.
Whether or not you agree is another story, but it’s definitely a real point. And yet you wouldn’t think it given the amount of criticism it’s received. The editors of Philosophy and Literature describe it as “anxiety-inducing obscurity”, which is a little odd considering it’s comparing the stance of one of the most famous Marxist scholars with that of the authors of a book she’s explicitly talking about.
Steven Pinker, to his credit, does accurately summarise it (albeit in an overly broad sense). I feel if he’d bothered to read the full article he’d probably have gotten the bit about re-articulation that he so smugly references. If this were Annie Hall I’d be listening to Pinker’s summary in person, before pulling Judith Butler in from off screen to explain how he’s fundamenally missed the point of her work. Boy, if only life were like this.
I think part of the confusion is just down to the fact people are taking it as Butler saying something original, as opposed to what she’s actually doing which is summarising someone else and how it relates to a particular idea.
The use of “hegemony” twice seems inexplicable if you don’t know she’s talking about a book entirely about that concept. “Social relations” sounds weird if you don’t know it’s a technical term foundational to Marx’s conception of Capital, similarly “power relations” sounds weird if you don’t know she’s making deliberately referencing to Foucault’s work (who she mentions by name in the very next sentence). Rearticulation being repeated is baffling if you don’t know it’s a term she just defined and is highlighting its importance as an idea in the context of this book.
That said, I’m not trying to give a full defence of the sentence. It’s still badly written, and some of those words are just unnecessary. Homologous, temporality, and contingent could all be changed for simpler words with nothing of value being lost. But a lot of it is simply reusing existing terminology, all of which has a clearly defined meaning.
Truth be told, I didn’t initially intend to have to write an exhaustive breakdown of this sentence. I had hoped to find someone else who’d bothered to translate it into plain English, given how old it is. But it turns out most the commentators thought it genuinely meant nothing.
The worst attempt I’ve seen is by Martha C. Nussbaum, an American philosopher and legal scholar. She attempts to rewrite the sentence to demonstrate how the same idea could be better put in an infamous article for The New Republic:
Marxist accounts, focusing on capital as the central force structuring social relations, depicted the operations of that force as everywhere uniform. By contrast, Althusserian accounts, focusing on power, see the operations of that force as variegated and as shifting over time.
The problem is this rewrite is wrong in a couple of ways. First, Butler very much isn’t comparing a Marxist account with an Althusserian account. Even if you knew nothing about Marxism, you’d be able to tell by the fact she says “from a form of Althusserian theory” followed by “to one in which”. The way Nussbaum has written it is akin to saying the depiction of magic has moved from a traditional account with wands and wizarding schools to a JK Rowling style account which focuses on The Witches Council and talking cats.
Secondly, her sentence doesn’t do the job it’s supposed to. It’s meant to be an example of what Butler could have written if she didn’t prefer “a verbosity that causes the reader to expend so much effort in deciphering her prose that little energy is left for assessing the truth of the claims”, as Nussbaum so concisely puts it. Given that, there’s obviously an inherent contradiction in trying to show how much simpler you can write a sentence while including the word “variegated” in said rewrite. What exactly is that word bringing to the table that the word “varied” can’t? It’s almost like we shouldn’t be looking to a Harvard classicist for our plain English needs either.
Martha Nussbaum and Douglas Murray both share the criticism that Butler is somehow trying to prevent people from deciding whether or not she’s full of it. I’m just not quite sure how’s she managing to do that by summarising a book she’s included the name of, in a piece directly following a published email exchange she had with one of the authors. Clearly Butler is terrified of someone challenging her on her wild claim that she can accurately summarise the content of a readily accessible text.
I didn’t think when I started reading The Madness of Crowds that it would lead to me writing an extended piece defending Judith Butler’s work during the late 90s, but here we are.
The irony is I’m not even a particular fan of Butler’s work. But if you’re going to use her as your silver bullet example of everything wrong with academia, the left, and women who dare to string sentences together; then at the very least you should double-check you’re not fundamentally misrepresenting her based on an unflattering quote, taken out of context, in a glorified book review she once wrote.
The greater irony is the very criticism of this infamous sentence proves her point about re-articulation. You can quite literally trace the genealogy of all these critics performatively making the same points about the same quote until it becomes established truth; despite the fact not one of them has bothered to read the article it’s from. And that, my friends, is how power works.
