Bad Writing, Part 1

 

[As readers of Rick On Theater will know, writing is a focus of mine.  I’ve taught it and blogged on it frequently.  While I was still teaching the subject, I collected articles from many sources on the subject of writing and teaching writing, so, when I read about the 1998 Bad Writing Contest, I sought out some of the coverage of the “award.”  Two recent posts on Rick On Theater related to writing are “Peter Elbow and Freewriting,” 12 March 2025, and “Two Passings: Peter Elbow and Athol Fugard,” 17 March 2025.] 

“BOOKMARKS: THE SOMEWHAT EXAGGERATED
DEATH OF PRIMITIVE ART”
by Denis Dutton 

[This announcement was published in the Philosophy and Literature issue of April 1999 (vol. 23, no.1): 251-55.  (This is an excerpt.  It’s part of a regular omnibus column by the journal’s then-editor, Denis Dutton [1944-2010], an American philosopher of art who was a professor of philosophy at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, at the time.)

[On 22 December 1998, Dutton announced the winners of the fourth (and final) Bad Writing Contest which he’d initiated at Philosophy and Literature in 1995.  Each year since then, the academic journal, which explores the connections between literature and philosophy, ran the contest to celebrate “the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles.”  The only condition for eligibility was that entries be non-ironic.  

[“Deliberate parody cannot be allowed in a field where unintended self-parody is so widespread,” the rules explained.  Anyone could send in a sample to compete for the “prizes.”  Third prize in 1998 went to Steven Z. Levine, a Harvard Ph.D. who’s now the Leslie Clark Professor in the Humanities Emeritus at Bryn Mawr College in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, where he taught since 1975.

[The second prize winner was Homi K. Bhabha, an Indian scholar and critical theorist who taught English at the University of Chicago in 1998.  Today, he’s the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University, with a D.Phil. in English Literature from Christ Church, Oxford University.

[But it is the winner of the first prize with whom we’re concerned in this series of posts.  They’re Judith Butler (b. 1956), a feminist philosopher and gender studies scholar.  They were a Guggenheim Fellowship-winning professor of rhetoric and comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley when the contest ran.  (Butler is non-binary and since 2020 prefers to use singular ‘they/them’ pronouns.)

[Butler is currently Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley.  They have a 1984 Ph.D. from Yale University.

[The sentence for which Butler was awarded first prize in the Bad Writing Contest was published in their essay “Further Reflections on Conversations of Our Time,” which appeared in the journal Diacritics 27.1 (Spring 1997): 13-15.  (The passage is on p. 13.  The only online version of this essay that I found is on Project Muse, a database from Johns Hopkins University Press [https://muse.jhu.edu/], which is only accessible by fee or subscription; it is, however, available from many libraries, such as New York Public Library and most university libraries, if you check your local system’s databases.  By the way, Philosophy and Literature is also on Project Muse.)

[The announcement of the award ignited a level of critical scrutiny that attracted a lot of public, journalistic, and academic interest, as Dutton notes below.  (I’ll be reposting some of that coverage.)  It eventually led to a lengthy critique of Butler’s work in the New Republic by professor of law and philosophy at the University of Chicago Martha Nussbaum, which focused on their writing, spurring more interest.  (Nussbaum’s article will be Part 2 of this series.]

The latest Philosophy and Literature Bad Writing Contest has received extraordinary media attention. Reporters and editors kept picking the contest up from each other, and by the time this column went to press, coverage which began in the Guardian had been carried on by the Associated Press, and then in feature articles and columns in the Chicago Tribune, Lingua Franca, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Toronto Globe and Mail, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, US News and World Report, the Irish Times, various Australian dailies, and National Public Radio. Much of the commotion was generated by the New York Times article on the contest and bad academic writing in general (February 27, 1999 [Dinitia Smith, “When Ideas Get Lost in Bad Writing; Attacks on Scholars Include a Barbed Contest With ‘Prizes’”; coming in a later part of this series). This included news that the deplorable state of scholarly prose has recently become a source of concern to none other than Edward Said [1935-2003], the new head of the MLA [Modern Language Association, widely considered the principal professional association for scholars of language and literature in the U.S.; it aims to “strengthen the study and teaching of language and literature”]. “At some point,” he told the Times, “critics and writers become parodies of themselves.” Indeed, this explains why the rules of our contest have, as we have restated them every year, insisted that “entries must be non-ironic, from serious, published academic journals or books. Deliberate parody cannot be allowed in a field where unintended self-parody is so widespread.” How heartening that Professor Said now shares our worries, although we note that his solidarity comes none too soon.

Two of the most popular and influential literary scholars in the U.S. are among those who crafted winning entries in the latest contest. Judith Butler, a Guggenheim Fellowship-winning professor of rhetoric and comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley, wrote the sentence that captured the contest’s first prize. Homi K. Bhabha [b. 1949], a leading voice in postcolonial studies, produced the second-prize winner.

Professor Butler’s first-prize sentence appears in “Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time,” an article published in Diacritics 27 (1997): 13-15. It’s on the first page of the article, and is not, as someone told the Chronicle of Higher Education, part of an abstract:

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. [Since the point here is obscurity and impenetrability, I won’t clarify any of the quotations. You’re on your own!]

This year’s second-prize sentence was written by Homi K. Bhabha, who teaches English at the University of Chicago. It appears in The Location of Culture (Routledge, 1994):

If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to “normalize” formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality. 

This passage was entered by John D. Peters of the University of Iowa, who describes it as “quite splendid: enunciatory modality, indeed!”

Ed Lilley, an art historian at the University of Bristol [England], supplied a sentence by Steven Z. Levine from an anthology entitled Twelve Views of Manet’s “Bar” (Princeton University Press, 1996):

As my story is an August tale of fathers and sons, real and imagined, the biography here will fitfully attend to the putative traces in Manet’s work of “les noms du père,” a Lacanian romance of the errant paternal phallus (“Les Non-dupes errent”), a revised Freudian novella of the inferential dynamic of paternity which annihilates (and hence enculturates) through the deferred introduction of the third term of insemination the phenomenologically irreducible dyad of the mother and child.

Stewart Unwin of the National Library of Australia passed along a gem from the Australasian Journal of American Studies (December 1997). The author is Timothy W. Luke [b. 1951; professor of political science in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg], and the article is entitled, “Museum Pieces: Politics and Knowledge at the American Museum of Natural History”:

Natural history museums, like the American Museum, constitute one decisive means for power to de-privatize and re-publicize, if only ever so slightly, the realms of death by putting dead remains into public service as social tokens of collective life, rereading dead fossils as chronicles of life’s everlasting quest for survival, and canonizing now dead individuals as nomological emblems of still living collectives in Nature and History. An anatomo-politics of human and non-human bodies is sustained by accumulating and classifying such necroliths in the museum’s observational/expositional performances.

The passage goes on to explain that museum fossils and artifacts are “strange superconductive conduits, carrying the vital elan of contemporary biopower.” It’s demonstrated with helpful quotations from Michel Foucault’s [1926-84; French historian of ideas and philosopher] History of Sexuality [London: Allen Lane (4 vols.), 1978-2021].

Finally, a tour de force from a 1996 book published by the State University of New York Press. It was located by M. J. Devaney, a member of the editorial board of this journal who also edits books at the University of Nebraska Press. The author is D. G. Leahy [1937-2014; philosopher and philosophical theologian; professor of classics at New York University], writing in Foundation: Matter the Body Itself [State University of New York, Albany, 1996].

Total presence breaks on the univocal predication of the exterior absolute the absolute existent (of that of which it is not possible to univocally predicate an outside, while the equivocal predication of the outside of the absolute exterior is possible of that of which the reality so predicated is not the reality, viz., of the dark/of the self, the identity of which is not outside the absolute identity of the outside, which is to say that the equivocal predication of identity is possible of the self-identity which is not identity, while identity is univocally predicated of the limit to the darkness, of the limit of the reality of the self). This is the real exteriority of the absolute outside: the reality of the absolutely unconditioned absolute outside univocally predicated of the dark: the light univocally predicated of the darkness: the shining of the light univocally predicated of the limit of the darkness: actuality univocally predicated of the other of self-identity: existence univocally predicated of the absolutely unconditioned other of the self. The precision of the shining of the light breaking the dark is the other-identity of the light. The precision of the absolutely minimum transcendence of the dark is the light itself/the absolutely unconditioned exteriority of existence for the first time/the absolutely facial identity of existence/the proportion of the new creation sans depth/the light itself ex nihilo: the dark itself univocally identified, i.e., not self-identity itself equivocally, not the dark itself equivocally, in “self-alienation,” not “self-identity, itself in self-alienation” “released” in and by “otherness,” and “actual other,” “itself,” not the abysmal inversion of the light, the reality of the darkness equivocally, absolute identity equivocally predicated of the self/selfhood equivocally predicated of the dark (the reality of this darkness the other-self-covering of identity which is the identification person-self).

Dr. Devaney calls this book “absolutely, unequivocally incomprehensible.” While she has offered to supply further extended quotations to prove her point, we have begged her to forbear.

The Bad Writing Contest was devised to create some needed debate on the topic of academic prose style. It was in that spirit that when we heard Professor Steve Fuller [b. 1959; social philosopher in the field of science and technology studies; now Chair in Social Epistemology at the University of Warwick, England] had criticized the contest on the Internet, we invited him to write the article we are pleased to publish in this issue [“Whose Bad Writing?”; coming up in a later part of the series]. Other responses have been more angry. Joan Scott [b. 1941; American historian of France with contributions in gender history], described by the Times [in Dinitia Smith, referenced above; coming up] as a professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, said that a scholar who uses difficult language “is not pretending to be a journalist,” and that our attack on academic writing is “a kind of anti-intellectualism that is everywhere in the culture, a demand for things they already agree with.” This strikes us as merely desperate. On the other hand, a more interesting counterattack came from Judith Butler, who defended so-called bad writing in the Times (March 20 [see below]) on the ground that humanist scholars “are obliged to question common sense, interrogate its tacit presumption and provoke new ways of looking at a familiar world.” She is exactly right, and the common sense in some academic fields that equates obscurity with profundity, jargon and phony technicality with sophistication, is what the Bad Writing Contest sets out to interrogate. It is not just the ordinary world outside the academy that needs to be shaken out of its complacent presumptions. We believe the academic world itself sometimes needs a good kick in the pants. We were gratified that Professor Butler was given the opportunity to respond to the contest in a major public forum. Nor is it proof that she is wrong that every one of the many letters her essay provoked disapproved of her argument. At least the issues are being openly disputed, which is about as much as we can ask for.

In an intriguing new development, the editors of Lingua Franca [magazine about intellectual and literary life in academia; 1990-2001] have announced a new contest [“Contest,” Lingua Franca 9.3 (Apr. 1999)]; we think of it as Son of Bad Writing Contest. They note that our award winners “have tended to come from the postmodern wing of the academy, where scholars like Bhabha and Butler have displayed an affinity for contorted syntax, a love of neologisms [a word or phrase which has recently been coined; an existing word or phrase which has gained a new meaning], and a weakness for the notion that to deconstruct linguistic categories is to reconstruct society.” But bad writing has a long history in universities, and they prove the point by quoting a sublimely awful sentence written decades ago by Talcott Parsons [1902-79; sociologist]. They therefore invite their readers to submit favorite examples of bad writing “in a non-postmodern idiom.” We look forward to the results. Prizes include a collection of George Orwell’s [1903-50; English novelist, poet, essayist, journalist, and critic] essays.

Denis Dutton

University of Canterbury, New Zealand

[Unfortunately, Lingua Franca, which received the National Magazine Award for General Excellence in 1993, ceased publication in October 2001, during the recession in March through November, after a financial backer withdrew support.  University Business L.L.C., the company behind the magazine, declared bankruptcy in April 2002.]

*  *  *  *
“A ‘Bad Writer’ Bites Back”
by Judith Butler 

[Judith Butler responded to the attention, including Nussbaum’s critique, on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times of 20 March 1999 (sec. A [news]).

In the last few years, a small, culturally conservative academic journal has gained public attention by showcasing difficult sentences written by intellectuals in the academy. The journal, Philosophy and Literature, has offered itself as the arbiter of good prose and accused some of us of bad writing by awarding us “prizes.” (I’m still waiting for my check!)

The targets, however, have been restricted to scholars on the left whose work focuses on topics like sexuality, race, nationalism and the workings of capitalism – a point the news media ignored. Still, the whole exercise hints at a serious question about the relation of language and politics: why are some of the most trenchant social criticisms often expressed through difficult and demanding language?

No doubt, scholars in the humanities should be able to clarify how their work informs and illuminates everyday life. Equally, however, such scholars are obliged to question common sense, interrogate its tacit presumptions and provoke new ways of looking at a familiar world.

Many quite nefarious ideologies pass for common sense. For decades of American history, it was “common sense” in some quarters for white people to own slaves and for women not to vote. Common sense, moreover, is not always “common” – the idea that lesbians and gay men should be protected against discrimination and violence strikes some people as common-sensical, but for others it threatens the foundations of ordinary life.

If common sense sometimes preserves the social status quo, and that status quo sometimes treats unjust social hierarchies as natural, it makes good sense on such occasions to find ways of challenging common sense. Language that takes up this challenge can help point the way to a more socially just world. The contemporary tradition of critical theory in the academy, derived in part from the Frankfurt School of German anti-fascist philosophers and social critics, has shown how language plays an important role in shaping and altering our common or “natural” understanding of social and political realities.

[Frankfurt School, group of researchers associated with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, who applied Marxism to a radical interdisciplinary social theory. The Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung) was founded by Carl Grünberg in 1923 as an adjunct of the University of Frankfurt (today known as Goethe University Frankfurt); it was the first Marxist-oriented research centre affiliated with a major German university. Max Horkheimer took over as director in 1930 and recruited many talented theorists, including T. W. Adorno [1903-69; German philosopher, musicologist, and social theorist], Erich Fromm [1900-80; German-American social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist], Herbert Marcuse [1898-1979; German-American philosopher, social critic, and political theorist], and Walter Benjamin [1892-1940; German-Jewish philosopher, cultural critic, media theorist, and essayist].

[Most of the institute’s scholars were forced to leave Germany after Adolf Hitler’s accession to power (1933), and many found refuge in the United States. The Institute for Social Research thus became affiliated with Columbia University until 1949, when it returned to Frankfurt. (“Frankfurt School,” Encyclopædia Britannica Online).]

The philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, who maintained that nothing radical could come of common sense, wrote sentences that made his readers pause and reflect on the power of language to shape the world. A sentence of his such as “Man is the ideology of dehumanization” [from The Jargon of Authenticity (Northwestern University Press, 1973)] is hardly transparent in its meaning. Adorno maintained that the way the word “man” was used by some of his contemporaries was dehumanizing.

Taken out of context, the sentence may seem vainly paradoxical. But it becomes clear when we recognize that in Adorno’s time the word “man” was used by humanists to regard the individual in isolation from his or her social context. For Adorno, to be deprived of one’s social context was precisely to suffer dehumanization. Thus, “man” is the ideology of dehumanization.

Herbert Marcuse [1898-1979; German-American philosopher, social critic, and political theorist] once described the way philosophers who champion common sense scold those who propagate a more radical perspective: “The intellectual is called on the carpet. . . . Don’t you conceal something? You talk a language which is suspect. You don’t talk like the rest of us, like the man in the street, but rather like a foreigner who does not belong here. We have to cut you down to size, expose your tricks, purge you.”

The accused then responds that “if what he says could be said in terms of ordinary language he would probably have done so in the first place.” Understanding what the critical intellectual has to say, Marcuse goes on, “presupposes the collapse and invalidation of precisely that universe of discourse and behavior into which you want to translate it.”

Of course, translations are sometimes crucial, especially when scholars teach. A student for whom a word such as “hegemony” appears strange might find that it denotes a dominance so entrenched that we take it for granted, and even appear to consent to it – a power that’s strengthened by its invisibility.

One may have doubts that “hegemony” is needed to describe how power haunts the common-sense world, or one may believe that students have nothing to learn from European social theory in the present academy. But then we are no longer debating the question of good and bad writing, or of whether “hegemony” is an unlovely word. Rather, we have an intellectual disagreement about what kind of world we want to live in, and what intellectual resources we must preserve as we make our way toward the politically new.

[This discussion of good (academic) writing will continue with many commenters adding their opinions, and I don't want to short-circuit that debate--but I will pause here and make a couple of points at this juncture nonetheless.  These are in response, specifically, to Judith Butler’s self-defense above, but they are good advice in any case.

[In “William Zinsser on Writing: Harnessing the World We Live In,” 28 July 2015, I quoted the great writing teacher:

His fourth fundamental principle of good writing was what he called “humanity—underlying all the others.” Zinsser explained: “If you’re not coming across as who you are (writing is talking to someone else on paper), I think you almost might as well not write, at least if you’re writing for the general public”—as opposed to, say, academics who write for other academics.  In their cases, and by implication, anyone who writes solely for others in the same field as they are, “who am I to say that they couldn’t write in the murkiest possible way,” granted Zinsser, “but they shouldn’t inflict it on the rest of us, nor should they think it’s good writing.”  

[I then added some remarks from my own experience reading—or trying to read—some academic works for my own research:

When I was doing some extensive research on some writers, I tried to read an essay called “The Crisis of Narrative in the Postnarratological Era: Paul Goodman’s The Empire City as (Post)Modern Intervention,” which was so thickly written that even once I got past that title—a classic of academese, in my opinion—I got very little out of it that was comprehensible.  I also bought a book called Toward a Theater of the Oppressed: The Dramaturgy of John Arden—I believe it was a published dissertation—that was so impenetrable that I returned it to the publisher.

[The essay on Paul Goodman’s 1959 novel was by Donald Morton, published in New Literary History 24.2 (Spring 1993).  The John Arden book was by Javed Malick, published by University of Michigan Press (1995).

[What these writers, as well as the honorees of the Bad Writing Contests, were afflicted with I came to call the William F. Buckley Syndrome: the compulsion deliberately to choose a $50 word or an arcane reference when a $5 word or accessible allusion is available, just to show off.  

[In the case of the late Buckley (1925-2008), the politically conservative writer, public intellectual, political commentator and novelist, I always thought he did it to make the readers stop and look stuff up—just to show he could.  It meant he was smarter than we were . . . and I hated when he did it!

[“Bad Writing” continues with Part 2 (Martha Nussbaum’s critique) on Thursday, 22 May.  I hope you will all come back to Rick On Theater to see where this goes.]