A new challenger for Judith Butler’s mantle

For some reason, I found myself clicking around the more obscure parts of the blogosphere late one night when I stumbled upon Chun the Unavoidable, a self-described “committed egalitarian” who allows that even uninformed Americans “can vote, marry, and even procreate here in America, and I see no compelling reason to change this right away.” Chun had discovered Sissy Willis’ blog, an irrefutable example of “a genuine working-class Bush supporter.” Chun, who’s quite the leftist, was unclear about how to respond to what — to him — was an absurd political position for a good prole to adopt. Before I quote from Chun’s conflicted response to Sissy, let’s take a brief detour into the fascinating world of bad academic writing. The journal Philosophy and Literature sponsors an annual bad writing contest, which is usually won by an academic. For example, Judith Butler famously won the 1998 prize by penning this memorable sentence:

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.

Why this aside? Because this paragraph of Chun’s response to the tangible existence of Sissy Willis should be a nominee for the 2004 bad writing award:

As a committed leftist, egalitarian thinker, in what way should I dialectically work through my feelings of alienation and, let’s face it, complete and total superiority, when confronted with this unpleasant materiality? I can’t aufhebung; I can’t aufhebung it. Note that this transitive/intransitive dichotomy has an indissociable trace of didacticality–pedanticissimo, natch, which will always already sui generise this contact narrative, which is invested with the logic of my colonizing gaze (though countermanded by my decolonializing gangsta lean), and which is itself recircumscribed by my minatory subjectivity as an oppositional leftist, egalitarian thinker. In effect, we have an histoire de l’oeil without the fun stuff but with the massenpsychologie of the burn the earth to a clinker (Klinger?) crowd. “Let us roll,” indeed.

Somewhere, Judith Butler is feeling this vague sense on unease, wondering whether she still remains the densest prose stylist of them all. Be sure to read Sissy’s response to Chun. UPDATE: several commenters have suggested that Chun consciously obfuscates his prose in an effort to punk unsuspecting bloggers. That had actually occurred to me, but is pretty much irrelevant. I know few people who could consciously write a paragraph that dense, and I hang around with a lot of high-falutin’ academic types (readers are invited to try and compose something that dense). So, a hat tip to Chun for consciously or unconsciously possessing the ability to compose such dreck.