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Althusser is for me a useful way into thinking about academic autonomy and
autocriticism for several reasons. First, he deconstructs a number of oppositions on
which academic legitimation tends to turn: between tabloid journalism and
criticism; between the public intellectual and the celebrity intellectual; between
fame or publicity and celebrity; between an earlier genuine public sphere and more
recent corporatized simulation of it; between strong European theory and weak
American domestications of it; between mere anecdotal dismissal of theory and
serious engagement with it. Althusser'sautobiography revealsautocriticism not to be
the opposite of tabloid distortions but to be tabloid; that is, Althusser'sself-criticism
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is congruentwith Johnson'sintroductoryanecdotequotedabove.Althusserscandalizes his readernot only with his explanationof his murderof his wife-it was his
mother'sfault-but with his accountof his workas a philosopher,which he does his
best to discredit.(He says he readonly the firstvolume of Capital for example.)
Ratherthan divide theoryoff from scandal,I suggestone could extenda line back
fromAlthusser'sautobiographyto the discoursesof Lacan,Foucault,and Batailleto
arguethat theoryand scandalhave alwaysconverged.
Moreover,Althusserrevealsthat academiclegitimation,even when modeledon the
Hollywoodcelebrityor superstar,extendsonly so far.In proclaiminghe is "thegreat
Althusser,"Althussershowshimselfto be not so much a celebrityintellectual-now
notoriousbecausehe's an insaneweirdo-but that the celebrityintellectualis also
alwaysfrom a certainperspectivethe opposite,a "nerd"intellectual,largelya legend
in his own mind. Althusserexposeshis nerdinessby expectingthat he will receive
immediate, excited recognition from the people he addresses,as if they would
Insteadthey
approachhim to ask "Gee,Mr.Althusser,can I haveyour autograph?"
implicitly respondby saying, "Yeah,like we care."The celebrityintellectualis at
some point alwaysa failure:unlikeHollywoodcelebrities,the celebrityintellectual's
fame is quite limited.
PERFORMING
that Althusser'scelebrification complicates not only this move but its very premises.
The practice of marking one's subjectivity is troubled by the academic context in
which it emerges. Personalcriticism turns out to be cool. Too cool, in fact. As Nancy
Miller points out in Getting Personal:Feminist Occasionsand Other Autobiographic
Acts, the separation of the personal and the positional cannot be maintained in
practice: "One of the resistances already mounted against personal criticism is the
specter of recuperation:what if what now seems new and provocative turned out to
be another academic fashion? [Personalcriticism] runs the risk of producing a new
effect of exclusion. At its worst, the autobiographical act in criticism can seem to
belong to a scene of rhizomatic, networked, privileged selves who get to call each
other (and themselves) by their first names in print: an institutionalized authorized
personalism."' Judging by two recent critical titles, "Guy, De Man, and me" by Alice
Kaplan in French Lessonsand "Michel, Bataille et moi," by Rosalind Krauss in
October,and by one journalistic title "The I's Have I": Duke's 'Moi' Critics Expose
Themselves" in Lingua Franca (I don't think that here the double entendre on
"expose" is intended, but you never know), things aren't getting any better. Nor
could they. For the positional turns out to be the most prominent part of the
personal, as in the moment the critic tells us the body of the text itself (fill in the
blank the name of critic perceived to be important) "invited me to give this paper at"
(fill in the blank of the name of the conference/occasion perceived to be prestigious).
Similarly, Althusser's case deconstructs recent critiques of the personalization,
celebritization, and tabloidization of the public sphere. In typical accounts, the
emergence of the celebrity intellectual or academic superstarin the 1980s would be
said to have converged with the complete personalization and tabloidization of the
public sphere in the 1990s, signaling, so the argument would go, the displacement
of genuine public engagement by mere entertainment and media spectacles.
According to one critic, the academic field's autonomy depends on its separation
from the public sphere of popular culture: academic value is established differently
in different spheres, some of which do not value the academy or value it differently
from the way it values itself. Yet this sociological critique of the celebrity intellectual
founders in the way the emergence of the public intellectual had depended on
scandal and celebrity.As Christophe Charles has shown in Naissancedes Intellectuals,
1800-1900, the emergence of the intellectual is coeval with the emergence of
tabloid journalism. Moreover, this critique ignores the degree to which cultural
criticism has been complicit with the celebritization of the public sphere, advancing
ratherthan halting what I would term the tabloidization of cultural criticism. Much
recent work has focused on celebrities and popular culture, and cultural critics
regularly go public by using the titles of popular films or songs in the titles of their
essays. Cultural criticism, like tabloids, puts sex at the center of its discourses.
Whereas for neoconservatives, this attention to sex is an index of critical degeneration, it is for cultural critics evidence of its progressive politics.
In suggesting that academic legitimation is always a function of celebritization, I
mean to say that present debates over whether subjectivity is marked or unmarked
and over the proper relation between the intellectual and the public sphere are nonBURT / GettingOff the Subject *
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PERFORMING
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not a simulation of real Hollywood celebrity outside it; rather, "real"celebrity itself
is always a simulation. Butler, Castle, and Paglia reproduce in parodic form what
they seek to expel (for very different reasons, to be sure) from the legitimate
institution of criticism. A broader account of the institution will give us a deeper
understanding of the proliferation of critical antagonisms between dominant and
emergent modes of criticism inside and outside the academy. In focusing on Butler,
Castle, and Paglia I will argue that the present proliferation of forms of queer studies
(it is far from being a single unified practice) will inevitably produce antagonistic
contestation over what counts as properly (progressive)queer criticism.
Before proceeding to my analysis of Butler, Castle, and Paglia, I would like to clarify
my use of the term iconoclasm. I introduce it in addition to scandal and tabloid
because it enables me to address a problem not only with a central premise of
current autobiographical criticism but of the way film studies have become the
dominant paradigm for cultural criticism, namely, that autocriticism proceeds by
reflexively turning one's gaze on oneself, marking oneself The demand for reflexive
critique, to declare one's position or identity, follows from the assumption that one
see oneself clearly without blind spots. The concept of iconoclasm will help clarify
a blindness within the institution of criticism to its investment in the sacred:
celebritization involves a re-circulation and displacement of the sacred rather than
its total destruction. Perhaps the single greatest distinction determining illegitimate
and legitimate criticism is that between critique as ressentimentor in bad faith, and
critiques made in good faith. Critics of avowedly competing and antagonistic critical
and political agendas are equally invested in polarizing iconoclastic and idolatrous,
heretical and heresiarchalversions of the profession. They typically regard criticism
as a secular vocation, a worldly, cosmopolitan practice. By contrast, I will suggest
that criticism can never be fully secularized.Iconoclasm is not something that can be
dispensed with by critics, as if one could say, "Well, let's look at where the sacred has
gone and at what's invested in it." For to avowedly secular critics, the sacred always
appears in unrecognized forms and practices:only another'sidolatry is visible. One's
own idolatry is misrecognized as admiration, wonder, in short, as appreciative
criticism.
BITCH TROUBLE
Judith Butler, the fanzine Judy!accuratelyinforms us, does not like to be called Judy:
She "will tear to shreds anyone who calls her Judy in an academic context." Though
the fanzine doesn't give the details, my argument requires that I do. Here they are.
At a recent feminist conference on psychoanalysis and race held at the University of
California, Santa Cruz, Butler and Hortense Spillers were the keynote speakers at
the conference's opening night. After Butler and Spillers gave their papers, the
commentator, Carla Freccero,prefaced her remarksby saying that it was an honor to
comment on the work of two critics who have influenced her work and her life so
greatly and whom she had come to regardas her teachers. Freccero mentioned that
she had taken an NEH Seminar from Spillers and went on to say that "anyone who
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has spent an evening in Judys living room knows how much she learns from her."
When it was Butler's turn to respond to Freccero's comment, Butler began by
making two corrections: first, the woman who introduced made an error in rank.
Butler was a Professor of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, not an
Associate Professor as the woman had said. Second, by way of an unmistakable,
public rebuke, she corrected Freccero, who blushed upon hearing it, for calling her
"Judy":"It's Judy in the living room, but it's Judith in public." It comes as no
surprise that Butler, or "ProfessorButler," as Freccero proceeded to call her (in an
admirably bitchy manner), does not like the fanzine Judy!either.After Lingua Franca
did a story on the zine last Fall, Butler wrote the following letter of complaint to the
editor:
By citing uncritically from the fanzine and protecting Andrea LawlorMariano from publicity, Lingua Franca has effectively entered the
homophobic reverie of the fanzine itself. If there is still some question over
whether "Butler is secretly pleased by the adulation," let me clarify that I
find this "adulation"to be slanderous and demeaning. If the fanzine signals
the eclipse of serious intellectual engagement with theoretical works by a
thoroughly hallucinatory speculation on the theorist's sexual practice,
Lingua Franca reengages that anti-intellectual aggression whereby scholars
are reduced to occasions for salacious conjecture (pace Jim Miller on
Foucault) rather than as writers of texts to be read and seriously debated.
Whether this kind of trash emerges from within or outside the gay
community, it remains an insult. I am poignantly reminded of why it was I
never subscribed to Lingua Franca,for it proves to have no more value than
Heterodoxyor the National Enquirer.(Lingua Franca, November/December
1993, 3)
Butler partly elucidates her aversion to "Judy" in an interview in Artforum
(December 1992) and more fully in the preface to Bodies That Matter: On the
Discursive Limits of "Sex."
Theorizing from the ruins of logos invites the following question: What
about the materiality of the body? Actually, in the recent past, the question
was repeatedly formulated to me in this way: What about the materiality of
the body, Judy?I took it that the addition of "Judy"was an effort to dislodge
me from the more formal "Judith"and to recall me to a bodily life that
could not be theorized away. There was a certain exasperation in the
delivery of that final diminutive, a certain patronizing quality which
(re)constituted me as an unruly child, one who needed to be brought to
task, restored to that bodily being which is, after all, considered to be most
real, most pressing, most undeniable. Perhapsthis was an effort to recall me
to an apparently evacuated femininity, the one that was constituted at that
moment in the mid-50s when the figure of Judy Garland inadvertently
produced a string of "Judys"whose later appropriations and derailings
could not have been predicted. Or perhaps someone forgot to teach me "the
BURT / GettingOff the Subject *
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"reproduction"advisedly. Now that Butler and her partner Wendy Brown have had
a baby, one can only wonder whether Butler will correct her child, if necessary, as in:
"It's'Mommy' at home, but it's 'Mother' at daycare."
It is perhaps clear why Butler dislikes both being called Judy and the fanzine Judy!.
For the fanzine is a form of imitation and gender insubordination that mimes and
critically exposes Butler's reliance on "the phallic regulatory norms of institutionalized criticism":Judy!is a "speculativeexcess"that exposes the way Butler legitimates
her performance of performativity through her own body, or more precisely,
through the promise of access to it. Butler's body matters, it's "the body you want,"
because it will make your body matter. Butler is the critic who will take you inside
academia and out, "beyondthe confines of the ivory tower" as the introduction to
the Artforum interview puts it, if you purchase and mime Butler's books in the
appropriateway, if you submit, that is, to the authority of her lesbian phallus. This
is precisely the serious point made comically in Judy!. On a page with the words
lesbian phallus written in large Gothic script across it, we read this appreciation of
Butler: "Judy is the number one dominator, and the only thing you or I can do is
submit gladly. Take it with pride. Think of it like this: Kaja Silverman might be the
Phallus masquerading as lack, and Teresade Lauretis might be lack masquerading as
the Phallus, but Judy is the Phallus masquerading as the Phallus."Judy!isn't simply
a frivolous parody of Butler's "serious"work, but seriously reveals the excessive,
unwittingly self-parodying elements of that work. It puts "seriousness"in quotation
marks, deconstructing the opposition between serious original and subversive
parody.
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146
147
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parody cuts both ways, then, both as a critique of Paglia and as a critique of what she
parodies.
EXILEIN DYKEVILLE
In suggesting that celebrity constitutes the sacred of cultural criticism, I have tried to
show that the institution of criticism is necessarily paradoxical, that when it
functions it also does not function. Legitimate criticism cannot rightly be separated
from the fanzine and/or tabloid coverage as inside and outside, with tabloid as that
which is censored by legitimate criticism, as that which gives an uncensored account
of criticism, or censored criticism, blocking access, distorting it, denigrating it and
so on. In miming mimesis, tabloid discourses not only run the gamut from
adulation to derision but make it difficult to tell the distinction between the two at
all points. Both the reflexivitysought by avowedly feminist/queer cultural critics and
the pagan decadence celebrated by Paglia are less radical critiques of normalization
than they are vehicles of normalization, ways of dismissing competing critiques of
the institution by anecdotally equating a rival critic's biography with his or her
institutional position and then using that anecdote to discredit the critic or critique
(who is thereby pathologized, said to be speaking out of envy, resentment, and so on,
and who is thereby made into a parody of a "real" critic). Reflexive critique
inevitably becomes dysfunctional: a critic's institutional motivation to conduct a
critique of the institution of criticism overrides the marks of gender, sexual
orientation, and race of a given critic; precisely because that motivation will
invariably be pathologized, a given critic's subjective markings are insignificant and
irrelevant.
This means that establishing a legitimate, proper subject of criticism, telling the
difference, will necessarily take the form of iconoclastic cruelty. Maintaining the
distinction by identifying with the disciple and the master, as Althusser tried to do
("Reflect back to me how I want to see myself or I'll murder you") or by denying the
possibility of doing so, as, say, Paul de Man did ("No one can reflect me back to me
because I am inimitable"). Much of what could reasonably be called the cruelty of
professional critics, cruelty which extends well beyond questions about sex between
professors and students to include practices like not speaking seriously to another
critic or not addressing him at all, the master not giving the blessing to the disciples
or theory diva wannabes, demanding acknowledgment from others of one's criticism
(and other examples of"ugliness" could easily be multiplied) may be explained as an
always failed drive away from the perceived bad effects of the institutionalization of
criticism, namely, simple mimetic reproduction based on blind faith (the
commodification of criticism as mere serialization), explained, that is, as an
inevitable moment in the de-institutionalization of criticism because criticism is
always commodified. The "outside" of criticism is both an expelled abject and a
seductive lure. This is to say that celebritization cannot be recuperated as either a
sensationalistic scandalous diversion away from criticism nor its real subject (scandal
is the truth of criticism), as insignificant or as deeply significant. To do criticism is
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to get off the subject in both euphoric and dysphoric sense, and given the current
economic downward mobility of academia, will be an increasingly turbulent activity.
NOTES
1. Nancy Miller, GettingPersonal(N.Y.:Routledge,1991), 25.
2. JudithButler,BodiesThatMatter(N.Y.:Routledge,1993), 9.
3.Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian (N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 1993), 201.
4. Ibid., 236-37.
5. Ibid., 273.
6. Ibid., 237.
7. Ibid., 238.
8. CamillePaglia,Sex,Art,andAmericanCulture(N.Y.:Random/Vintage,1992), xi; 254;
255; 263.
9. Ibid., 250.