Why I am an anti-intellectual

I am sorry to have offended Professor Heller with  what I took to be a lighthearted gibe at Judith Butler.  Although my assessment of her stuff is basically the same as Martha Nussbaum's, I am happy to attribute my mystification at her language to my own intellectual limits -- especially if this admission will excuse me from re-reading the baroque prose of Bodies That Matter (1993).   Life is too short to struggle with an author when the payoff in understanding (for instance) "performativity" seems to be no more than the banal idea that people do stuff to exhibit their gender identity that is, in this sense, "socially constructed."  I'd rather take another go at Kant's transcendental deduction.  But, again, it could be -- probably is -- a sign of my own limitations or even, as Patrick O'Donnell notes, "sour grapes":  I just might lack Professor Heller's depth or patience or humility.

I must, however, highlight one of Professor Heller's statements that I thoroughly endorse: I am most certainly an anti-intellectual.  (I am not a "know-nothing" and hereby declare all-out war on the abuse of this phrase, which expression refers to the American Party of the 1850s or, more generally, nativism, and otherwise is just incoherent blather.  What does it mean to be a "know nothing" in any other sense?  That one admits to, or is proud of, knowing nothing?  That one knows nothing in fact?    Surely, "ignoramus" works better for the latter, and "bigot," for the former).

But to continue:  My confession of being an anti-intellectual requires a bit of explanation.  Being anti-intellectual is not the same as being anti-intellect.  My beef is with a particular social class -- the "intelligentsia" -- and not with the practice of using one's intellect to reflect on experience.  In my experience, intellectuals (as a class) are ideologically intolerant, easily offended by ordinary humor, and pretentious in their prejudices, which they disguise as universal truths.  (Whether any of these adjectives applies to Professor Heller's response to my little poke, I leave it for others to judge).

Moreover, I find a direct relationship between the academic obscurity of self-consciously "intellectual" writer's prose and the willingness of that writer to justify the unjustifiable.

It takes the convoluted abstractions of a Carl Schmitt or a Heidegger to offer apologetics for Hitler; a Sartre, to temporize about Stalin; a Foucault, to defend Khomeini. In this respect, I stand with George Orwell who spent the 1930s and 1940s denouncing the obscurity of intellectuals' prose as a cloak for tyranny (and, incidentally, who was also accused of being an anti-intellectual). Intellectuals spray polysyllables like squid ink, to evade the democratic decencies of conversation. I'd like not to be one of their number.

I am aware of, but never have been persuaded by, various efforts to justify the deliberate obscurity of intellectuals. Pierre Bourdieu, for instance, offered a defense of academic obscurity in the introduction to his book, Distinction. Alas, it was too obscure for me to understand. Instead, I tended to think that the rest of Bourdieu's book provided a better account of the social function of academic obscurity: Obscurity is what Bourdieu dubs "cultural capital." It is akin to knowing to wear white shoes only before Labor Day or which jazz CDs to play at a Upper West Side academic party -- a sort of union card that one can flash for admission to a privileged class.

Judith Butler offered a  defense of her obscurity in the New York Times, in which she argued that obscure prose was necessary to get outside of the oppression built into ordinary language. But she gave no examples of instances in which her prose served such a function, and I remain skeptical. Her standard argument that gender bias is built into language can, I think, be communicated effectively without the name-dropping and byzantine insider jokes that are (again, my view or prejudice) the hallmarks of Butler's style. I tend to think that simple questions simply asked a la Socrates can unveil much more incoherence and oppression in ordinary social conventions that any numbers of references to “hegemonic discourses” and the rest.

This is not to say that obscurity is always unnecessary: Sometimes tough ideas call for tough prose. (Again, think of Kant's transcendental deduction, which cannot easily be translated into plain language, because it asks difficult questions about the most basic grounds of experience and language. Of course, it does not help that Kant was German: The Teutonic style famously lacks the light touch). To my mind, Butler's prose mimics this necessary obscurity like a Viceroy mimics a Monarch butterfly -- to avoid being devoured by predators who are scared off by the appearance of tough ideas that are hard to swallow.

So, yes, I confess to disliking intellectuals and the practice of intellectualism, which, I believe, impedes everyone’s intellect with pretense and ostentation. But I could be wrong about Butler, and I'd be happy to be proven so. After all, I do not pretend to be an intellectual.