A L S O_ T O D A Y

Professor in drag
By Jacqueline Swartz
Philosopher Michael Gilbert discusses the delights and enlightenment that come with wearing a dress

T A B L E_ T A L K

You were expecting "Animal House" and got Pasta Bar Night. Discuss the myths and realities of college life in the Education area of Table Talk

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Check out books by Camille Paglia at barnesandnoble.com
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Conservative foundations are pouring money into traditionally liberal campuses in the hopes of converting a new generation of right-wing radicals, but will their millions bear fruit?
(02/19/99)

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(02/17/99)

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(02/12/99)

The reluctant accuser
By Alexandra Robbins
When faced with quasi-assault from a friend, a young student finds neither college counselors nor handbooks have an answer
(02/10/99)

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Butler vs. Nussbaum

WHEN POSTSTRUCTURALIST FEMINISTS BEGIN TO ATTACK EACH OTHER, THE END OF THE PC DYNASTY IS NEAR.

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Dear Professor Paglia:

Denis Dutton, the teacher at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand who founded the annual "Bad Writing Contest" a few years ago, recently announced the winner of this year's contest as Professor Judith Butler of the University of California at Berkeley. Her "winning" sentence comes from an article she wrote for the journal "Diacritics":

"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 questions of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural tonalities 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."

Now, I don't think I'm a stupid person, and I think I have a pretty good grasp of the English language, but I haven't a clue as to what Professor Butler is trying to say. And she's a professor, yet! Apparently someone, like, read her work and thought she should be paid big bucks to do more. I don't get it. There are crazy people ranting on the streets who make more sense (Berkeley could save a wad of cash by hiring a dozen of them to take Butler's place). But I recall that in one of your books you said she was a student of yours once. Did you teach her to write like this?

Joseph Molden
Santa Cruz, Calif.

Dear Mr. Molden,

"A hard rain's a-gonna fall!" prophesied Bob Dylan in 1963. The academic sun that once brought high rank and riches to PC queens like Judith Butler has begun to fade in the gathering storm.

May the Muses bless New Zealand's Professor Dutton for his witty championing of basic standards of logic and style! Unfortunately, Butler is only one of a flock of poststructuralist seagulls whose empty squawks have been hailed as divine wisdom by gullible professors and imposed on hapless students in required reading lists.

That the chill winds of change are abroad is obvious in the New Republic's Feb. 22 cover line, "America's Emptiest Feminist," the teaser for Martha Nussbaum's trashing of Butler within. When one PC diva turns on another, you can bet the academic establishment is coming apart at the seams. Let the cat fights begin!

Yes, dear readers, the University of Chicago's Madame Nussbaum (once a classicist but now oddly a professor of law, among her other ever-accruing titles), whose revolting overpraise in her Times Literary Supplement review of two shoddy, theory-contorted books by gay classicists partly inspired my 1991 Arion manifesto, "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders," is now doing a Paglia on Butler -- motivated, it appears, by Nussbaum's irritation at Butler being mistaken for a major philosopher by philosophically naive literature teachers.

Nussbaum's exposé is long overdue. Of course, if she had real courage or disinterested motivation, she would have written it seven or eight years ago -- just as she would have publicly allied with me in the campaign for academic reform instead of doing the opposite (as when she denounced the editor of Arion, Herbert Golder, for publishing my essay). Nussbaum isn't squeamish about borrowing my ideas without acknowledgment, however, as in her proposal in her most recent book to put world religions at the center of 21st century multicultural education. (Cooking dinner one night, I laughed out loud when David Gergen, interviewing Nussbaum on PBS's "Newshour With Jim Lehrer," gushily singled out that idea in her book, as she smiled winsomely and flashed some more leg.)

Though I agree with her about Butler's philosophical mediocrity, Nussbaum's endless, numbingly verbose New Republic piece stumbles on the gender theory question. Yes, Butler is ludicrously lionized for commonplaces that are decades old, but Nussbaum, herself a creature of PC coteries, wildly overestimates the work on gender of her former Brown University colleague, Anne Fausto-Sterling, and other feminazis. Nussbaum's preparation or instinct for sex analysis is dubious at best. But whatever her failings (she's worked to the bone her graduate-school mentor's expertise in Aristotle, and she made a much-derided poor showing in parsing Greek at a Colorado gay rights trial), Nussbaum is a genuine scholar who operates on a vastly higher intellectual level than Butler, a Foucault fanatic whose limited assumptions and muddled writing I have been attacking for years -- even when I lectured in 1993 at her own former institution, Johns Hopkins University.

Please do not blame me for Butler's lousy writing! She was never officially enrolled in my classes in the mid-1970s at Bennington College -- although her circle of close friends were repeat students of mine. I was then in my most militant lesbian-feminist mode (which led to me getting fired after a fist fight at a college dance half a decade later). My influence was everywhere on that small, seethingly insular campus. For example, I helped organize a feminist film festival, for which I chose the films and wrote the program notes. I gave illustrated public lectures on sexual personae and "performance" (a Swinging '60s London and Warhol New York principle that stupid people think Butler or Foucault invented). In an essay for the alumni journal, I celebrated Bennington's transvestite production of Jean Genet's "The Maids," starring a charismatic theater major, Mitchell Lichtenstein, as the maid Clare.

The sad truth is that Judith Butler -- at that time wry and smart but timorous, mundane and as nervously anxious as early Woody Allen (I used to call her "the little brown mole") -- fled Bennington at the height of David Bowie's flamboyant, gender-bending period (Bowie was our god) to enroll as a transfer student at Yale University, where she eventually got her B.A. Yale was then the first landing point, via Johns Hopkins, of French poststructualism, a ponderously labyrinthine style of false abstraction that killed the American-born Warholite pop revolution dead in its tracks, when acolytes like myself were trying to use it to revolutionize academic discourse.

Judith Butler is no radical: She is one of the smoothest careerists and veteran conference hoppers in the entire American academic system. She shrewdly adapted herself to the prevailing chic orthodoxy at Yale and became a major player in the ruthless academic marketplace, with its platinum perks and golden parachutes. The well-publicized jockeying and bidding wars that have gone on for Butler's services -- among Hopkins, Berkeley, Stanford, Harvard, New York University, et al. -- have driven her salary into the stratosphere, while the aboriginal Warholites remain ostracized. You're quite right to focus on the blatant inequities here: The star system, which accelerated in the 1980s, has warped the academic budget and helped keep graduate-student teaching assistants and adjunct instructors at slave wages.

I have repeatedly suggested in my lectures and elsewhere that Butler, on the basis of her published writings, has evidently not undertaken the kind of broad research into science, art, literature, popular culture, history, political science and economics that would give texture and credibility to her theorizing about gender and society. But at this point I can't get too exercised that foolish teachers are wasting their students' precious college time with Butler's turgid, derivative work, since it should be obvious to everyone that she has played no part whatever in the great public debates of the 1990s that have transformed feminism. Judith Butler is very small potatoes -- for which American universities have paid a very high price.

Postscript: In an op-ed piece for the Feb. 22 Wall Street Journal, I condemned the intrusion of gay propaganda about famous artists (and poor Eleanor Roosevelt!) into a Newton, Mass., middle school, as reported in the Feb. 11 Boston Globe.
SALON | Feb. 24, 1999

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