SOME MONTHS AGO, I expressed to a local educator the thoughtless wish that schools would return to diagraming sentences. I am, I realize, out of touch with the way things are done nowadays, and am innocent in particular of educationist theory. What is taught in the schools of education is deeper water than my small brain is designed to navigate. I hug the shore, alert for wind shifts that might carry me dangerously far from port.
Still, I would not have thought teaching students the sturdy backbone of an English sentence -- the noun, the verb, the predicate -- an unreasonable expectation. And it's fun besides.
"Oh, we don't do that anymore," I was told in that tone of peremptory smugness that education folks seem obligated to cultivate. Catching a mild surprise in my reaction, she informed me that "the research" had shown sentence diagraming to be old-hat.
Well, OK, I thought, not wishing to butt my head against this particular brick wall.
We do things differently in a poststructuralist age, and the schools of education are not alone in the thrall of technology.
To write like a poststructuralist, you have to know a lot of hard words and have a head full of theory. And no one spins a sentence in poststructuralist criticism the way Judith Butler does.
A Judith Butler sentence is a timber truck loaded with redwood. It is not for nothing that Butler, who teaches philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, is the reigning Bad Writer of the Year. The journal Philosophy and Literature annually awards this Oscar for obscurity, and in December it was Judy's turn to cry. Take a deep breath and enjoy her winning 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."
Isn't that wonderful? It snakes like a river, rearticulating here, converging there, rolling downstream, clause piling upon clause. It's got everything you could want in a good academic sentence -- with the polish of a master.
You've got your "hegemony" -- twice -- and I counted several variations of "structure," studding the sentence from one end to the other. "Convergence" shows up only once, but you've got "rearticulation" and "contingent" twice each. And notice that she works in "homologous." Neat.
On top of so much else, she finds space to give a winking nod to French philosopher Louis Althusser, dead all these years but alive and kicking in the academy.
Not everyone is smitten by Butler's prose. In the New Republic recently, Martha Nussbaum, a philosopher of note, gave up all hope of diagraming Butler's prose and suggested it was a charade.
"It is difficult to come to grips with Butler's ideas," Nussbaum wrote, "because it is difficult to figure out what they are."
This is unfair. Thinkers such as Butler force us to think harder. They deal with complexity at a level of abstraction higher than any physicist. It should not be surprising that they write in a technical language beyond the capacity of uneducated laymen. Opacity is proof of profundity.
If Nussbaum, who teaches at the University of Chicago Law School, can't make sense of what Butler and her ilk are trying to say, others vouch they can. In the English departments, Butler is read with reverence. Her prose is difficult, the young adepts tell me, because it deals with exceedingly technical ideas -- structural totalities as theoretical objects, etc.
Literature? This is theory, and it's thorny stuff.
When the bad-writing award was bestowed on Butler, the editor of Philosophy and Literature cited a certain Warren Hedges, who teaches English at Southern Oregon University. Hedges has called Butler "probably one of the 10 smartest people on the planet." You get the idea that the journal's editor thinks Hedges is unquestionably one of the 10 stupidest.
But who wouldn't be impressed by a two-ton sentence? You wouldn't want to diagram it, and you certainly couldn't sing it. Either would ruin it. You only behold its profundity, whatever its meaning.
Michael Skube wrote this article for the Cox News Service.
Pub Date: 03/21/99