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Judith Butler and a Petition I

JudithButler2013.jpg


Apparently members of the Modern Language Association have initiated a petition to remove Judith Butler as that organization's Vice President and President elect.

 In order to understand this petition, one has to have some answer to each of the following questions:

 1) Who is Judith Butler and how important is she?
2) What is the MLA and how important is it?
3) What are the grounds/merits of this complaint?

 I will address the first two of those questions today and the final one tomorrow.

 Judith Butler is a philosophy professor at UCal Berkeley. She is the author of Gender Troubles (1990) and Bodies that Matter (1993). Her writing style is notoriously difficult.  Here is one sentence often quoted as an example of the impenetrability of it: "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 question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities 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." 

 No, it doesn't get much clearer "in context." 

 Nonetheless, Butler is of considerable weight in academia today. Weighty enough that Martha Nussbaum has invoked her as a case study of much that is wrong with US intellectual life, especially the "mystification" and "hierarchy" that Nussbaum sees as the key to Butler's body of written work.

 What is the MLA? 

 It has been around since the 1880s, originally as a discussion and study group. With the passage of time comes venerability, almost by definition. And for the MLA, the passage of four thirds of a century has brought with it surprising prominence. The MLA has become the publisher of a widely-followed style manual, and the host of an annual convention that is the largest scholarly gathering in the humanities. 

 So a petition to dislodge Professor Butler from her position of prominence with the MLA is kind of a big deal. 

 More tomorrow. 
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