In Stock’s excellent Material Girls chapter 2 there’s a brief description of the weird academic cult, mostly outside of academic Philosophy, of the philosopher Judith Butler.
Butler’s rise to popularity partly explains why, as I mentioned before, many serious philosophers abandoned the topics of feminism, sex, and related matters. In recent decades many such academics are not really serious, that is, not really serious about the search for truth. For them, bullshit (speaking for effect without concern for truth or falsity) is more than enough.
But bullshit is beyond boring to the serious philosopher.
Stock helpfully reminds us of an important critique of Butler’s work by philosopher Martha Nussbaum. Nussbaum frankly calls Butler’s bluff, and explains the function of her famously terrible writing style:
In this way obscurity creates an aura of importance. It also serves another related purpose. It bullies the reader into granting that, since one cannot figure out what is going on, there must be something significant going on, some complexity of thought, where in reality there are often familiar or even shopworn notions, addressed too simply and too casually to add any new dimension of understanding. When the bullied readers of Butler’s books muster the daring to think thus, they will see that the ideas in these books are thin. When Butler’s notions are stated clearly and succinctly, one sees that, without a lot more distinctions and arguments, they don’t go far, and they are not especially new. Thus obscurity fills the void left by an absence of a real complexity of thought and argument.
Stock comments too on the wildly implausible and sophomoric, unserious nature of Butler’s philosophy.
Butler’s conclusion is embedded in a much wider philosophical worldview from which it cannot really be unmoored . . . that there is nothing intelligible in the world before it is referred to in language. Linguistic categorisation doesn’t refer to prior reality, but is rather ‘productive’ or ‘constitutive’ of it. Because languages differ in their concepts, so too do ‘constructions’ of reality vary socioculturally and historically. Language doesn’t reflect what was already there. There are no pre-existing human kinds or types whose natures are to be discovered via philosophical or scientific analysis. Biology is itself just a ‘medico-legal alliance emerging in 19th century Europe [that] has spawned categorial fictions’ – i.e., the two sexes – ‘that could not be anticipated in advance’. Concepts such as the self or human nature or the ‘natural’ human body are also fictions, shifting in their details from society to society. There’s nothing ‘underneath’ or ‘before’ language that would secure linguistic reference to something ‘outside’ of it.
To academic philosophers like me, keen to connect philosophy with working science in fruitful ways and to make appropriately nuanced distinctions between what is discovered by humans in the world as opposed to what is put there by them, Butler’s worldview looks adolescently, simplistically monotonic. In short: she thinks it’s all put there. Yet long experience tells me that, to some students and lecturers – mostly, it has to be said, in fields other than academic philosophy itself – Butler’s worldview is hugely seductive. For those of a certain mindset, Butler is the Harry Potter of philosophy, transforming boring old truisms about the material world into something alchemical, shifting and sexily impermanent. This effect is heightened by the famous opacity of Butler’s prose style, which can make people think they must be accessing really deep truths, and by the fact Butler rarely spells out the consequences of her view, coyly offering with one sentence what she then seems to take away with another. On a single page, she can imply both that there are no human bodies prior to various contingent sociocultural constructions of them, and that, somehow, there is such a thing as ‘materiality’ after all.
Material Girls, pp. 62-63
The common person may have a hard time distinguishing rubbish science from well-done science. Even more so, she may find it hard to tell rubbish Philosophy from competently done Philosophy. The solution is the same in both cases: education which familiarizes her with good, laudable examples of each sort of investigation.
