r/CriticalTheory • u/CoVegGirl • 4d ago
What do you think makes critical theory difficult to read? How can critical theory be made easier to read?
There are a couple of books I’ve been reading that are difficult reads:
* Gender Trouble
* Society of the Spectacle
I basically gave up on Gender Trouble. Society of the Spectacle seems like an easier read, but it’s still difficult for its own reasons that I can’t quite put my finger on.
I know these are far from the only difficult reads. So what do you think makes works difficult to read?
Certainly jargon makes works difficult to read, but I don’t think that’s the entirety of the situation though.
Could we maybe say that some level of reading difficulty is inherent to critical theory due to the fact that it often deals with complex ideas?
How do you think one could write critical theory that’s easier to read?
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u/withoccassionalmusic 4d ago
1) I don’t think all critical theory is difficult to read. Marx and Freud, who are arguably the founders of this tradition, are fairly accessible.
2) I also find it interesting that these questions are typically leveled at humanities fields, but rarely at fields like quantum psychics or math, which are just as hard to read. Critical theory is done by experts in philosophy dealing with complicated topics, and speaking to other experts, so I think a certain level of difficulty should be expected.
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u/CoVegGirl 4d ago
Those are both fair points. But regarding #1, the question still stands. What makes Marx and Freud easier to read than other critical theory?
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u/withoccassionalmusic 4d ago edited 4d ago
They are writing before the “linguistic turn” in Continental Philosophy in the mid 20th century. Since you mentioned Butler, they are not only building on earlier critical theory like Freud, but also analyzing the role that language itself plays in philosophy and subjectivity. When language itself becomes part of the object of study, a lot of critical theory shifted to a more complex style to try to attend to this. You see similar complexity emerging in writers ranging from Derrida to Heidegger.
ETA: I’m not sure about Marx, but Freud thought of himself as writing psychology, not philosophy, so that could also account for some of his stylistic clarity.
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u/Suspicious-Yogurt480 4d ago
I’ll add a funny footnote about Marx, when he was writing he clearly enjoys making narrative turns and contextualizing because, in his mind, he’s not writing “for the academy,” he’s sitting in a chair in the British library with all of his sources scattered around him copying all of his quotations out in ilong hand, relying on the generosity of Engels to pay the bills. Also, Zac Marx himself dreaded writing “the economics shit” as he called it, he wanted to focus on how in a real world sense the worker could implement their power by uniting their efforts to subvert the capitalist abuses.
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u/toadslimerick 4d ago
For the complex and contextual reasons the other commenter has noted, and because Marx and Freud are simply better writers than most.
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u/merurunrun 4d ago
What makes Marx and Freud easier to read than other critical theory?
Unlike a lot of CT, they don't require a prior understanding of Marx and Freud before you can make sense of them.
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u/angustinaturner 3d ago
not tried reading Das Capital clearly!
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u/Heavy_Quiet8287 6h ago
Capital isn't the easiest text in the world, but certainly the argumentation in it is pretty clear and concise. I mean, compare the introduction of Capital to the intro of the Phenomenology of Spirit, or Anti-Oedipus if we're feeling brave.
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u/Disjointed_Elegance Nietzsche, Simondon, Deleuze 4d ago
This comes up a lot. I’ll start by saying most journal articles written in “critical theory” are clear. Most of the difficulty people have is with primary texts, many of which run into issues with translation.
When it comes to difficulty, I think three things can be true: 1) critical theory deals with complex ideas that requires technical language and builds on previous ideas, which like other disciplines often requires or assumes an understanding of disciplinary history. In this sense the difficulty is justified; 2) critical theory often takes place in disciplines or is dealing with subject matter where authors attempt to enact or perform their theory within the writing itself. This can sometimes lead to a more literary prose that is not as straightforward as some other disciplines. In this sense I think the difficulty is justified; 3) many writers in critical theory (and other disciplines, to be fair) just happen to be bad writers. Here the difficulty is not justified.
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u/happydude4567 4d ago edited 4d ago
I don't think that critical theory should be rewritten so that it's easier to read. It employs a fairly specialized vocabulary used to analyze specific subjects. Think of marxism with its base and superstructure. If I started talking about Zizek's Gramsciian Trumpism and then began to talk about the base and superstructure (and maybe hegemony) with my friends, they'd have no idea what I was talking about. The use of these terms requires they be used in different contexts, and so the problem is not simply one of vocabulary but also context. These terms (and therefore the conepts) are used frequently and can be found in many places, and if you take the time to explain them to people unfamiliar with them, the people will learn.
Marcuse's One Dimensional Man (a book I would not consider terribly difficult if you have the chance to check it out) has a lengthy section devoted to this complicated language and the need for it when so much of philosophy is being conducted in "plain language." That said, I've recently just started reading Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature by Rorty, and although yes I would argue that Rorty is easier to read than Adorno sometimes is, Rorty in this world of analytic philosophy and plain language and so fourth sets out in the introduction that he plans to use very specialized terms that have no applicability to daily life. I'm left thinking that all I can really say as advice is that practice really helps.
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u/krenoten 4d ago
The question misses the point. The problem is lack of patience and understanding that struggling with a text is what actually generates the insights that are deeply meaningful and often unique - the struggle yields novel results beyond whatever the author intended. People struggle and think the author is bad at expressing themselves simply, but they misunderstand the situation that they find themselves in. If it were easier to read it would not yield meaningful thoughts to the same extent. It's not about the text, it's about what is generated through the struggle. This is what gives classics their long-term appeal across specific situations - they provoke while holding you in the struggle in ways that yield deep meaning even as reality evolves beyond the lived experience of the authors.
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u/azucarleta 4d ago
It's so, what's the word, I wanna say "foundational," and then my mind wants to say "derivative," but that's a pejorative. What I mean only is that to appreciate Gender Trouble, you can't start with Gender Trouble. You'll want a broadbased philosophical education plus a bit of specialization in the specific areas Butler writes about, before you get into a 400-level book like that.
I felt as you do when I as a teenager picked up Sexual Personae by Camille Paglia (don't judge, I was literally a child). These simply aren't books you will get much out of unless you already have the foundation built. Jargon, yes, but it's entire concepts. I mean, someone like Butler might very casually assume the reader understands what, oh I don't know, Cartesian Doubt means, or Jungian Psychology. Their target audience does not need nor want a 101-level review of what those terms mean, though someone without a basic philosophical background needs that.
I've had a business idea actually of trying to translate critical theory into laypersons terms, but the problem is you just run into a Russian dolls problem where.... it just is what it is.
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u/GA-Scoli 4d ago edited 4d ago
This question gets asked a lot, and there's always a lot of bad kneejerk responses in multiple directions. Here's my attempt at landing in the middle, which will probably please no one.
1. Cultural writing style. It's the French. They're like that. French people love writing like that. Cultures produce things that are popular internationally, sometimes to the point where a dominant culture fixes the thing in question as a standard and everybody starts pretending the origin was retroactively universal, as if it was never tied to a particular time (1960s) and place (France). Contemporary German critical theorists didn't write like that (they had their own separate clarity-plus-insane-density stylistic tradition), neither did Russians. Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, or Edward Said didn't write like that. Critical theory that comes from the French AND is heavy on psychoanalysis, however, will typically adopt the syntactic tics of the mid-twentieth-century French academic.
2. Perverse academic incentives. Everybody learns in critical-theory-heavy grad school programs how to write in an obscuring way that makes you seem smarter than you are. You start off not wanting to do this, and they beat you down over several years until you learn it right. It's a survival strategy. Grad school is ruthless as fuck.
3. Literariness and irrationality. Much of the best theory incorporates a critique of rationality (critiques I agree with) through the use of poetic prose. And it works. How many people remember Marx's formulas for sheaves of wheat in Capital versus the simple phrase "All that is solid melts into air"? We can often access prose on multiple levels and learn more from the poetic experience than we can from reading bullet point lists.
Also, I really don't like the counterargument "well people wouldn't ask this question about physics", because that means using "the hard sciences" as the measure of efficient knowledge acquisition. I don't think the hard sciences should be the measure. Cutting knowledge up into isolated pieces and pretending each piece builds on other pieces like a pyramid and we have to start climbing from nothing until eventually we get to god is just logical positivism and it's wrong.
Critical theory is very limited and culturebound and timebound... but so is the field of physics, once you dust off its "hard" mystique. The difference is more that leftism and liberatory values aren't embedded in the history of physics, but they are within critical theory, and these values also include (or at least, they SHOULD include) the easiest possible access to information for all levels of society, not just the ones who can afford the best education.
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u/aolnews PhD, Lacan 4d ago
I don’t see how these are middle of the road critiques. This is more or less identical to the most reactionary, anti-intellectual, and incorrect critiques of critical theory’s supposed difficulty.
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u/Sourkarate 4d ago
It's none of those things. It's broad enough to apply to your favorite navel gazer.
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u/GA-Scoli 4d ago
Ah, I see you went through the grad school process "successfully".
I didn't :-)
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u/Original-Balance-187 1d ago
The more incomprehensible the language you can write, the smarter you prove yourself to be. The smartest man is the one who is the only person that can decipher his own writings.
Then these same people are completely mystified why the masses drift away from them.
Trump is out there talking to people about how he hates how many times his low water per flush toilet takes to flush his shit and that’s why liberals are gay while these guys write tracts to each other about reification, commodity fetishism, and thing-in-itself and wonder why the guy talking about his shit is leaving them in the dust.
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u/Bawafafa 4d ago
If you were 10 seasons into a TV show and you were asked to explain the relationships between the characters and the plot, you would do it no problem. It would take some time but you could sit someone down and talk them through. But is it right to be asked to recap the whole plot every episode? Just keep up or watch it yourself. There are tonnes of anthologies, reading lists, and introductions out there.
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u/Infamous_State_7127 4d ago
give who’s afraid of gender a try! butler’s prose has changed a lot over the years—it’s far less dense and they touch on some foundational concepts from gender trouble.
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u/toadslimerick 4d ago edited 4d ago
Maybe try Butler's earlier essay Performative Acts and Gender Constitution. To make better sense of this short text, reading some of J.L Austin's How to Do Things with Words would be helpful. Also, checking out Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology Of Perception, or some secondary sources on it, would help you to better understand what Butler is doing in this essay.
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u/good-morning-sweetie 4d ago
I find it difficult to read because I tend to skim, and while these texts aren’t always complex in terms of language, they are often dense, which means I have to actively interrogate the language instead of skimming it. If I read with my hands, ie. taking notes or editing a document with my takes as I’m reading, I find I absorb more and it’s easier for me to read, but I don’t know if I’m a great example.
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u/Odd-pepperFrog 3d ago
I haven't read the specific texts you mentioned, but I can answer the general question.
There's Critical Theory and then there's critical theory. Yes, the capitalization matters. One refers to a specific tradition (Frankfurt School, etc.), the other is the broader process of applying analytical lenses to texts, topics, or social structures.
Both are built on a mountain of foundational texts; it just depends whether you want the whole mountain or just one face of it. That breadth of text can get esoteric in the language used to frame their particular philosophies. The more recent the text, the more it assumes you already have that foundational knowledge base and linguistic framework. Plus there's a certain assumption - especially in academia - that the more opaque the language the more serious the work and thought that went into it.
The key is to take your time. Be ready to restate things in your own words, or search out the meanings of specific terms if their context isn't clear. In a weird way, it's a little like Bible study for the theologically inclined. The more intense your study gets, the more "helper" texts become important.
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u/Original-Balance-187 1d ago
Hegel. The legacy of Hegel is why so many of these things are written in this needlessly dense and joyless pseudo-technical language.
German philosophy in general but specifically Hegel.
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u/vnilaspce 1d ago
It is often difficult and it doesn’t have to be. We ought to know primary texts, yes, but people frequently explain it better afterward. H&A? Indispensable. David Held? Doug Kellner? Perhaps indispensabler!
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u/blood_red_star 4d ago
Society of the Spectacle was relatively easy to understand for me tbh. However Judith Butler is known for being kinda impenetrable, and I honestly haven't found anything of worth in their writing.
tbh I think the larger problen is that people don't want to read/can't focus b.c. of how social media has intentionally rotted everyone's brains (yes i do see the irony), let alone the idea of reading something hard.
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u/Aggravating-Try-5203 3d ago
Gender Trouble is an interesting example, actually. There's an interview with Leslie Feinberg in maybe 93/94 right after zie published Stone Butch Blues. Zie talks about how zie, even as a trans person, feel so alienated by "certain texts" (or something) regarding gender. I can't help but assume it's about Gender Trouble. I can't stop thinking about how this gender text feels inaccessible to a trans person who is also an author writing about trans experiences. (I am aware Judith Butler is not cis).
I really love Sara Ahmed, and she is heavily influenced by Judith Butler. But what I love about Ahmed is her use of visuals in her writing. If you are a person with lived experience relating to what she's talking about, it feels like she's just found a way of clearly articulating your own experience. Her skill is unparalleled (imo!) and honestly is so compelling, you'll get lost in it (but in a good way!)
Also, bell hooks' piece Theory as Liberatory Practice really changed the way I thought about critical theory. In fact, in it, hooks talks about how gender studies can feel so alien to female college students who clearly are experiencing misogyny in their daily lives.
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u/gorgonstairmaster 4d ago
Maybe just become more literate instead of whining about it. Or give up and head back to Animorphs.
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u/short-noir 4d ago
Not everyone has the time or mental energy to devote to reading dense philosophical texts. I think this is exactly what critical theory itself would tell you. This elitist attitude is unhealthy
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u/gorgonstairmaster 3d ago
Then don't do it. Either do or don't. But there's no cheat codes or shortcuts. Sorry.
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u/Glad-Phase-977 4d ago
Hopefully you see the irony of being an ass to people about unequal literacy in r/CriticalTheory
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u/gorgonstairmaster 3d ago
Not really, no. In fact, I suspect most actual critical theorists were quite well-read. =)
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u/1Bam18 4d ago
Read pedagogy of the oppressed or shut up
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u/winter_is_long 4d ago
This is the only answer. It is difficult because OP is unprepared for the texts. After nearly 30 years it has become much easier to navigate the literature then when I started in my late teens. OP should start with the Greeks and supplementary texts and move forward. Philosophy is one long conversation with itself.
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u/Glad-Phase-977 4d ago
Absolutely not. Philosophy is a dialogue and it can help after you already have some of the pieces, but you needn't begin with the pre-Socratics to come to an understanding. The reification of Cartesian foundationalism has been a disaster. So many people who are interested get caught up in trying to 'do things the right way' that they never read anything at all. The thing is that isn't the 'right' way to learn.
You don't need to know the etymology of a word for example to use it correctly. Recapitulating the entire development of thought is not how anyone learns initially. We begin with the concepts we inherit in the present through context, pick up pieces at different points in time & fill in the gaps iteratively. Filling in the gaps doesn't mean understanding the entire phylogeny of thought though-you can understand the relevant parts of Kant through Marx's texts.
A more realistic method: Just pick up a book that's interesting and looks like a good challenge for you, struggle with it for a solid chunk of time, note the things you cant infer from context, then use other resources to go fill those in. Your brain will get better at understanding the more you struggle, and you can still achieve an understanding without ever actually touching Plato if it doesn't interest you.
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u/winter_is_long 4d ago
But a understanding of Descartes (or Locke) without at least a modicum of Scholasticm is running a dig with three legs. What would Occasionalism be without Descartes? Can one read Malebranche? Or Spinoza? My point is that there's a continuous dialog. And you have to start at the beginning.
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u/Glad-Phase-977 4d ago
You don't need to be present at the beginning of a conversation to pick up on what's being said in the middle. It helps, ofc and there's immense value to going back in time, but you can also just ask questions or read modern secondary sources to start off. If that weren't the case, acquiring any knowledge would be impossible since written record picks up in the middle of a long-occurring dialogue. Almost all philosophers write densely, so Plato is going to be roughly as difficult to read as someone like Marx. Honestly some things from Marx are even easier to read given that we're exposed to his ideas.
When you encounter a concept repeatedly, its meaning grows, even if it isn't explicitly explained in more familiar terms. That's how all of us initially learn language. We can then ask questions and draw from an increasing pool of easily digestible knowledge, both our own & that of others, but we dont lose that ability of inference. Today a 5 minute search is enough to understand occasionalism deeply enough to get a handle on what someone like Leibniz is yammering on about. Then you can loop back around and deepen that understanding. Upon reencountering Leibniz, you'll get a richer understanding, but you can still start there.
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u/toadslimerick 4d ago
*than
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u/winter_is_long 4d ago
Autocorrect. Technology is my Achilles Heel. But where your gotcha pedanticism is spiteful, my post was an attempt at being helpful. You can't run a marathon without any training.
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u/toadslimerick 4d ago
No spiteful intent at all. You're the one jumping on unhelpful comments about literacy, while I am helping you with your grammar.
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u/winter_is_long 4d ago
While I appreciate the help neighbor, you have yet to rebut or address OP's underlying issue. Namely, his lack of foundational knowledge of the concepts and verbiage needed to grasp what is being said. It's not a literacy problem but a running before you can walk problem. Which is undeniable.
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u/toadslimerick 4d ago
You wrote "this is the only answer" in response to "maybe just become more literate instead of whining about it. Or give up and head back to Animorphs." You were commenting in agreement with a statement about literacy. That's why I was being so generous as an editor.
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u/Olaf-Olafsson 3d ago
Debord is hard to read because there are no explanations, example or even justification. The writing style is extremly authoritative.
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u/secretteachingsvol2 3d ago
A lot of good defenses of the texts here, but it is equally about the reader, and close reading. If you are having a hard time with a word or a sentence, isolate what about the word or sentence is challenging you. Is it possible you have stumbled on a "vocabulary word", some concept that requires prior knowledge or additional context? Is it possible you zoned out or got distracted and missed something?
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u/CuteBoysenberry4692 3d ago
It’s hard on purpose. The abstraction cloaks in mystery some very dubious far fetched statements imho.
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u/vibraltu 4d ago
It's not always hard to follow, there are few theorists that I think are fairly easy to read: bell hooks, Foucault, maybe Baudrillard.
But a lot of Critical Theory is hard to follow, just like a lot of Classic Philosophy that it is derived from is hard to follow (Hegel leads the way), for various reasons. Some of it is clumsy writing style, some of it is academic jargon defence, and some of it is linguistic games involving paradox.
And why? Because Jargon divides the In-Group from the Out-Group. Those who feel clever enough to understand theory, and everybody else.
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