As a woman, I take great offense at this. More liberal condesension.
Critics have a duty to break up common sense beliefs, and disrupting the norm of clarity effectively does so. As Butler put it in her Times op-ed, "scholars are obliged to question common sense, interrogate its tacit presumptions and provoke new ways of looking at the world."
Actually, I think critics have a duty to make their ideas comprehensible to all. I have sometimes felt at a loss at conventions with the decontructivist poststructuralist jargon all around me. Do these writers even understand each other?
When I teach a course in art criticism, we have a great time derailing some of this theory. It seems the simpler the art work, especially minimal sculpture, the more complex the argument for it.
And postmodern jargon is the worst. The visual artworks have little merit and are wrapped in postmodern theory to compensate for that. So if we go around scratching our heads in confusion, does that make the art more worthwhile?
If you propose to explode certain attitudes and beliefs, and to do so by disrupting their proper idiom, then you must compose a language compelling, powerful, memorable, witty, striking, or poignant enough to supplant it. Your language must be an attractive substitute, or else nobody will echo it.
Needless to say, the theorists haven't achieved that and never will. A [End Page 189] genuine displacement comes about through an original and stunning expression containing arresting thoughts and feelings, not through the collective idiom of an academic clique smoothly imitated by a throng of aspiring theorists. The writings of Pound, Mallarmé, Faulkner, and H.D. each form a unique signature and inspire theorists to daring interrogations.. Amen. Faulkner and Pound, those are my idols.
Doesn't this sloppy writing just show the dead-end thinking of liberals?
I caught that too. What does it mean? That women and minorities must be spoken to using incomprehensible jargon or that you are too dumb to understand your condition and must be led like children by your betters? The latter, I suspect.
Actually, I think critics have a duty to make their ideas comprehensible to all. I have sometimes felt at a loss at conventions with the decontructivist poststructuralist jargon all around me. Do these writers even understand each other?
I can't speak about conventions but at faculty parties I often observe grad students being harangued by their profs. The poor students nod sagely but have a glazed expression that tells me they aren't hearing (or understanding) a thing that's being said to them.
When I teach a course in art criticism, we have a great time derailing some of this theory. It seems the simpler the art work, especially minimal sculpture, the more complex the argument for it.
Another one of my pet peeves has been the attack on beauty in art by much of the academy. Art criticism is another field contaminated by revolutionary fervor and jargon. That being said, I'm looking forward to going to the reopened MOMA.
Doesn't this sloppy writing just show the dead-end thinking of liberals?
Sure does.