[PEN-L:2498] Re: Re: Re: 1998 Bad Writing Contest

[Dennis R Redmond <dredmond@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 22 Jan 1999, William S. Lear wrote:

> where it might be dense.  Michael Perelman wrote an entire book on
> Marx and I can't think of prose more lucid and intelligent.  Where are
> these people for Butler?  Will they only come along 150 years later?
> Is there no one capable today of expressing what she says in plain
> English?

Universal communicability is not, as Adorno put it, a criterion of
truth; multinational capitalism is without question the most complicated,
thorniest, damnably confusing society the human race has ever experienced.
We don't expect the natural scientists to be instantly understandeable, do
we? So why should social scientists and intellectuals be any different? Or
is it just that we've all been conditioned by the system to denigrate any
attempt at thinking for ourselves -- men in white suits building bombs,
that's fine, but how dare heretics stop and think about the
military-industrial complex, etc. It may seem like jargon, but it's
really specialization: Butler is talking about some extremely complicated
ideas involving identity, the capitalist subject, the consumer culture,
gender ideologies etc.

-- Dennis