What is a vignette? Vigne is vine (in French) and vignette is thus “little vine,” which is certainly an evocative image. But what does a little vine do for ethnographers?

The dictionary is useful here, helping us connect dots of history. Merriam-Webster distinguishes three modern senses of the term:

1. “A picture (such as an engraving or photograph) that shades off gradually into the surrounding paper; the pictorial part of a postage stamp design as distinguished from the frame and lettering.“
2. “a short descriptive literary sketch; a brief incident or scene.”
3. “a running ornament (as of vine leaves, tendrils, and grapes) put on or just before a title page or at the beginning or end of a chapter; also : a small decorative design or picture so placed.”

Of course what ethnographers have in mind is always sense (2), “a short descriptive literary sketch.” But my view is that the way we actually use and refer to vignettes ends up reproducing some real epistemological problems. And these problems emerge, it seems, from the very etymology of the term, or at least they resonate awfully harmoniously with its semantic history. Everything happens as if we were haunted by these other illustrative senses of this term: the “running ornament of vine leaves” that beautifies a text, the “pictorial part” of a stamp that is distinguished from its frame.

We are not positivists, right? We do not subscribe to an impermeable distinction between theory and data, do we? And we would like to overcome the historically gendered, historically colonial hierarchies that grounded this distinction, would we not? Yet the notion of a vignette tends to reproduce them.

In ethnographic practice, the vignette is a text within a text, a marked text that implicitly sets the ethnographic “data” (the non-positivist term is “experience”) apart from the ensuing “theory” or “analysis.” In vignettes — and too often only in vignettes — we feel allowed to be vivid. Allowed to be writers and storytellers, not merely analysts or theorists. Allowed to feel enmeshed in a scene, allowed to bring our readers along to vicariously experience places they have not been, allowed to allude to our human relations with our ethnographic subjects, allowed to present the world as unstructured and historical.

But it never gets to stay that way. Because the vignette is put to work within a larger text. Here are some examples of how ethnographers use the word vignette in their writing (taken randomly from PDFs on my computer):

• “Another brief vignette will help clarify this point.”
• “All three vignettes point to the fact that…”
• “The weighty tokens of durability noted in the opening vignette…”
• “The essay then provides three ethnographic vignettes from the author’s work in Indonesia…”

The vignette commonly has a double function. It “backs up” someone’s claims, providing “evidence” that is construed as having a sort of weight or force by virtue of its mere existence in the text. In this sense, vignettes provide “proof” or “warrant” — like admissible evidence in a court case. On the other hand, vignettes are full of meanings that are then mined or extracted in the text that follows. It is common to pause after a vignette and say something like, “So just what does this mean?” “What does this tell us?” And then to say something complex that is likely not very obvious to anyone but the author… Like a myth or sacred book, the vignette is prone to invoke a hermeneutic project, crying out for interpretation.

There is a normative discipline around how we use vignettes. Many anthropologists believe that vignettes must exist in a certain proportion: not too much, not too little. I’ve been told more than once, by editors or reviewers, that “this paper needs an opening vignette.” But too many vignettes — that’s a problem too. One time I saw someone give a talk at my graduate program at the University of Chicago, a notoriously theory-focused place. The speaker mainly wanted to tell some stories, but he started out instead by saying: “I wrote a page of theory to introduce my talk, because I thought people wouldn’t be able to accept just stories on their own terms.”

The discipline around vignettes is very weird, though. You can get in trouble for not having enough vignettes, but once you’re in the middle of one, you are in a little zone of freedom. It is easy to write vignettes, in my experience, because they are much less heavily policed than “theoretical” writing. People will attack you for the way you cite other scholars. They rarely dispute the way you describe your field experience.

* * *

In the end, the fact that people like talking about “vignettes” is a sign of their ambivalence, of their inner slippage or incoherence. I think the vignette operates on the logic of what Derrida used to call a “supplement”: it seems optional, at first, but actually is supposed to add some essential piece without which the original thing, claim, point, theory, idea, etc, would somehow fall flat. It never gets to be central — when you’re telling stories, they’re usually not about you, you just become the medium for some sequence of events — but its seeming marginality is sort of a ruse.

But it manages to trivialize the flux of empirical reality at the same time, insisting on the primary of theory by denigrating storytelling. It’s a flat genre of empiricism that lets life happen while keeping it in a cage. It makes phenomenology, experience, and history into decoration. The little vines that decorate the long streams of colorless, authoritative prose.

The “vignette” — this is really what bugs me about it so much — is a story that feels guilty about being a story. No vignette ever graduated from its embryonic state of narrative insufficiency. It is little by nature, born little, destined to remain little. But storytelling need not be marked as little. That every story is finite and non-total is a sign that history is unfinished, not grounds for epistemic guilt.

In its littleness, the vignette is a genre all too well suited for our era. We have short attention spans, we produce too much (and what we write is not well read if it is ever read), and our discipline itself is full of crisis. There is a crisis of gendered violence, as MeToo insists; there is a crisis of coloniality, as #HauTalk insists; there is a crisis of labor, as groups like PrecAnthro observe. And these crises also suggest that we might ask if the notion of vignette does not also have some unexplored gender connotations.

If “theory” is marked masculine (as Lutz famously argued in The Gender of Theory), and if our more “serious” or “academic” writing is the part where we want to be recognized as serious scholars with authority, then the vignette seems to enter that textual economy as the site where our feminine part can come out. The things that vignettes do are historically marked feminine: they decorate; they care about moods; they talk about relationships and process incidents; they provide pleasure and comfort to tired readers; and sooner or later (ugh), they get interrupted by male voices…

I begin to wonder if the notion of the vignette does not work in contemporary ethnography to denigrate the feminine.

I think we could do without it.

Of course our writing does need stories. It needs moods. It needs to process incidents. It needs to provide pleasure and transmit experience.

But it does not need to have a category that sets these functions apart from the rest of our texts and makes them into marked moments, set out against the unmarked, uncomfortable, authoritative, and potentially masculinist prose of theory and analysis.

I ended up concluding that the Bad Writing Contest was a scene where low-status-academics got to symbolically denounce higher-status academics, so in that sense the whole affair was basically about status dominance; but I had put the project behind me, until I was reminded of the topic by Corey Robin’s recent comments about Judith Butler as a public intellectual. I’d like to focus briefly on his main claim: that Butler’s seemingly inaccessible writing style did not prevent her work from being culturally generative and iconic. As he puts it:

It is Gender Trouble—that difficult, knotty, complicated book, with a prose style that violates all the rules of Good Public Writing—that has generated the largest public or publics of all: the queer polity we all live in today.

To be clear, Robin’s view is that Butler’s success as public intellectual was neither because nor in spite of her prose style, but rather that success was altogether orthogonal to prose style. He proposes that “it’s not the style that makes the writing (and the intellectual) public. It’s not the audience. It’s the aspiration to create an audience.”

I can’t avoid thinking that Robin is too hasty here to dismiss “style” as a force in the social world. Here I would stay close to the usual readings of the “linguistic turn” and the work of Mikhail Bakhtin or Roland Barthes, and insist that style is not external to the production of social relations in writing. Rather, it is intrinsic to their being.

One could make Robin’s argument more persuasive, accordingly, by not drawing such strict distinctions between style, empirical audiences, and aspiration-to-create-publics. If style mediates social relations in texts, then one’s “aspiration to create an audience” must necessarily occur in and through style. And an aspirational audience, moreover, cannot spring from nowhere; it is at best a symbolic tranformation of existing social realities.

We can speculate about all the different ways that this occurs, or we can actually do ethnographic research on readers of critical theory, as I did in my 2008 paper on literary theory classrooms. I didn’t do research on Butler’s readers specifically, but I can imagine that for some readers, the prose of Gender Trouble can be transfixing precisely because of its difficulty, or can be a rite of passage because of its difficulty, or an important moment of socialization; or perhaps it can come to constitute an incomprehensible locus classicus. One time I actually heard a queer studies ethnographer declare that he had had to read Gender Trouble to be in the field, but that it was commonly understood to be impossible to make heads or tails of.

In any event, Robin goes on to draw some conclusions about the generativity of public intellectual work:

In the act of writing for a public, intellectuals create the public for which they write.

This is why the debate over jargon versus plain language is, in this context, misplaced. The underlying assumption of that debate is that the public is simply there, waiting to be addressed.

But again, style mediates potential readerships as well as actually existing ones. I agree that “jargon vs plain language” is an unhelpful way to frame the issue, but it remains the case that style is massively consequential in  facilitating relationships with readers. Let’s be sympathetic, though, and reformulate Robin’s view as saying that through its very style, public intellectual work can generate new publics and reorganize existing audiences. And I would certainly agree with him that Gender Trouble – in and through its style – has helped generate a “queer polity.” Let’s grant Robin’s claim that public intellectual work at its best is generative: that it can bring into being new publics, as Butler’s work has.

But we need a second big qualification here. Robin’s focus on an “aspiration to create an audience” presumes that we can distinguish between authors with this aspiration and authors that lack it. Ironically, though, it’s not true that this cultural generativity (or even a radically reimagined audience) was in any way Butler’s aspiration when she wrote the book. She explains herself that Gender Trouble was addressed to Anglophone feminist theorists of the 80s, a perfectly comprehensible public that was at that point already becoming institutionalized in the academy (I think) and did not need to be a particular object of authorial aspiration. Indeed, she tells us that she was quite surprised by the unexpected larger success of her book, in fact. Here’s what she wrote in the 1999 preface to the book:

Ten years ago I completed the manuscript of Gender Trouble and sent it to Routledge for publication. I did not know that the text would have as wide an audience as it has had, nor did I know that it would constitute a provocative “intervention” in feminist theory or be cited as one of the founding texts of queer theory. The life of the text has exceeded my intentions, and that is surely in part the result of the changing context of its reception. As I wrote it, I understood myself to be in an embattled and oppositional relation to certain forms of feminism, even as I understood the text to be part of feminism itself.

It’s fair to say that Robin’s appeal to “aspiration” as the criterion of public intellection is a sneaky way of bringing back authorial intentionality into our analysis. But Butler notes herself that her intentions were fairly circumscribed (to the feminist theoretical field at the time) and in no way decisive. Let us then, contra Robin, not appeal to authorial aspiration as the key ingredient in generative public-intellectual work.

It seems better to me to note, instead, that every author writes for an idealized readership that never corresponds exactly to an actual audience (if any), and that any text is susceptible to becoming culturally generative, whether or not the author aspired to that generativity. Contrast Gender Trouble‘s unexpected success with Hardt and Negri’s intentionally anthemic, though similarly difficult book Empire. Empire was a minor hit on the academic left, but it didn’t found any new polity, even though it sure seemed like it aspired to.

In sum, if we cut out Robin’s dismissal of “style” and his appeals to authorial aspiration, we’re still left with a perfectly plausible thesis: that “public intellectuals” can be distinguished from what one of my French interlocutors called “tutors of the status quo” because their work (and its characteristic style) ends up generating new discourses and thought-worlds, and new polities and publics around them. You can’t decide to be a public intellectual, on that view, because what counts is really one’s interaction with social context, even as this may take the form of rupture. Generativity vs repetition is a spectrum, moreover, but it’s not impossible to judge case by case, and Robin is obviously right that Butler’s work has been massively generative.

I wanted to conclude, nevertheless, with a rudimentary dialectical qualification to Robin’s thesis. In short: intellectual work can be generative even as it is alienating. Too often we assume that inaccessible writing is an either/or — either it’s good and generative (and the detractors are misguided), or it’s bad (and intentionally incomprehensible and its defenders are elitists). All my research in university classrooms confirms that it is almost always both: some readers are inspired, others are excluded; some have their mind blown (gender is iterative!) and others (often those with less academic capital, which sometimes correlates with race and class lines) are totally frustrated. I wish our analyses of intellectual work could all begin with the premise that academic writing is an instrument of social fracture and not only of cultural production.

Robin misses this, because he wrongly dismisses the mediating force of style, replacing it with a speculative aspiration-to-create-new-publics. Along the way, he manages to create a wrongly one-sided image of Butler’s work, as if it were purely positive in its aspirational generativity, and in no way structured by academic forms of exclusion (since “actual audiences” and “jargon” aren’t the real issues for Robin).

Don’t get me wrong — I admire Butler as a critical theorist, and the cultural circulation of her work is radically distinct from her person, fanzines aside. But we have to be attuned to the institutional reality of critical theory in the university, and Butler’s work, to me, is a also a reminder that even our great successes cast shadows and create wounds in the social body.

If one description of scholarly activity is “producing knowledge,” then logically, wouldn’t we expect that there would be such a thing as “overproducing knowledge”? Can there be an overproduction crisis of scholarship?

It’s been said before. For instance, here’s Tim Burke from Swarthmore writing in 2005:

The drive to scholarly overproduction which now reaches even the least selective institutions and touches every corner and niche of academia is a key underlying source of the degradation of the entire scholarly enterprise. It produces repetition. It encourages obscurantism. It generates knowledge that has no declared purpose or passion behind it, not even the purpose of anti-purpose, of knowledge undertaken for knowledge’s sake. It fills the academic day with a tremendous excess of peer review and distractions. It makes it increasingly hard to know anything, because to increase one’s knowledge requires every more demanding heuristics for ignoring the tremendous outflow of material from the academy. It forces overspecialization as a strategy for controlling the domains to which one is responsible as a scholar and teacher.

You can’t blame anyone in particular for this. Everyone is doing the simple thing, the required thing, when they publish the same chapter from an upcoming manuscript in six different journals, when they go out on the conference circuit, when they churn out iterations of the same project in five different manuscripts over ten years. None of that takes conscious effort: it’s just being swept along by an irresistible tide. It’s the result of a rigged market: it’s as if some gigantic institutional machinery has placed an order for scholarship by the truckload regardless of whether it’s wanted or needed. It’s like the world’s worst Five-Year Plan ever: a mountain of gaskets without any machines to place them in.

But this isn’t exactly the kind of overproduction that I’m talking about. This is what I would call herd or mass overproduction, a sort of overproduction that “ordinary academics” produce as a matter of survival in a scholarly system that incentivizes publication quantity. “Ordinary academics” — the ones who have jobs or want jobs of the kind where publishing is required, that is — which isn’t all academic jobs, by a long shot.

Herd overproduction, on Burke’s view, is a generic state of being, a thing “everyone” is doing. But what I’m thinking about is a different kind of overproduction: let’s call it elite or star overproduction. That is, the kind of overproduction that academostars often practice. To be clear, not all recognized academostars overproduce in quite the way I mean, and conversely, some singularly prolific academics are not necessarily at the very top of the scholarly prestige hierarchy — but there is a strong correlation between hyper-prolific writing and star status, in my experience.

Star overproduction does something different than just produce a mass of mass expertise. If herd overproduction produces relatively generic, interchangeable, unremarkable research commodities, then star overproduction reinforces big-name scholarly brands; it’s more like releasing a new iPhone every year than building a minor variation on a cheap digital watch. Star overproduction captures an outsized share of academics’ collective attention, more as a matter of general brand loyalty (“I like to keep up on Zizek”) than because it is necessarily the highest quality academic product. As a corollary to this — and this particularly irks me — certain hyper-prolific academics really let the quality of their work slip as they begin to hyper-overproduce. It’s as if they just have too many obligations, too much exposure, like a decent band that just doesn’t have a dozen good albums in it. Fact-checking sometimes gets iffy; the same arguments get repeated.

All this makes me wonder: after a certain point in a hyper-productive career, might it be more ethical to pass the floor to other, more marginalized academics?

More generally, if there is a market for scholarship, could it be a better-regulated one? Scholars like Marc Bousquet (The Rhetoric of “Job Market” and the Reality of the Academic Labor System) have rightly criticized the notion of a “market” as an adequate description of academic labor allocation, but market-style social dynamics do crop up in a lot of academic life, in my experience, and the critique of market ideology need not preclude regulatory projects of one sort or another. For instance, might we have a collective interest in preventing oligopolies of knowledge? In preventing overly large accumulations of academic capital? Could we help the marginalized publish more by placing limits on publishing success?

Or to be a bit hyperbolic, but also more concrete: Could there be, hypothetically, a lifetime quota on publication, a career-length word limit? Suppose, for instance, that such a limit were set at a very high level that most of us would never approach — but if you did get to the limit, your time would be up?

Intellectual: … Difficulty is illegitimately manufactured whenever an absence of empirical breadth is mistaken for the presence of conceptual depth. Say you restrict yourself to speaking in the name of Marx and Freud, and then address things that cast doubt on what they said, such as the absence of a proletarian revolution or the presence of post-Oedipal identity formation. Not surprisingly, you end up saying some rather complicated and paradoxical things. But you have succeeded only in engaging in some roundabout speech that could have been avoided, had you availed yourself of a less sectarian vocabulary. But the continental philosophical game is mostly about deep reading and roundabout speech. By the time you have gone to the trouble of learning the relevant codes, you will have become an ‘insider’, capable of wielding a sort of esoteric power by virtue of that fact alone. This is a trick that the US continental philosopher and queer theorist Judith Butler learned from Plato.

Philosopher: All I know about Butler is that a few years ago she won the ‘Bad Writing’ contest awarded each year by the editors of the journal Philosophy and Literature. So she must not have been that successful.

I: Au contraire. In fact, the editors played right into Butler’s hands, though neither she nor they appreciated it at the time. An accusation of ‘Bad Writing’ boils down to the charge that the author doesn’t know what she’s talking about. In fact, of course, it implies only that the accuser doesn’t know what the author is talking about — and hopes that others share this problem.

P: But why worry about Butler’s literary malfeasance in the first place?

I: Exactly the point! That she is accused at all is already a major concession to her power. (This is why intellectuals like to make accusations: we want to force the accused to reveal the power they’re trying to hide.) So all that Butler had to do after her opponents’ opening blunder was to use the least force possible in displaying her power, preferably by conveying magnanimity. In short: don’t insult the accuser. Butler managed this is no less than The New York Times. She portrayed difficult writing as a kind of self-sacrifice that few have either the will or the opportunity to perform. The reader was left believing that Butler and her fellow travelers write as great explorers sailing to uncharted regions under the flag of Humanity.

P: Once again, I detect a note of sarcasm in your analysis. So what’s the point?

I: The point is that accusations of ‘Bad Writing’ merely refinrce the sort of difficult writing championed by Butler and others influenced by continental philosophy. The real problem isn’t that Butler doesn’t know what she’s talking about. The problem is that what she’s talking about isn’t best served by what she knows. She has clearly raised some important issues relating to gender identity, especially once the biological basis of sexuality is called into question. These issues are bound to loom large in law and politics in the coming years, especially as developments in medical research and biotechnology allow for various cross-gendered possibilities that go well beyond cross-dressing: suppose people could easily undergo a sex change or be equipped to performa role traditionally restricted to one sex – such as carrying a pregnancy to term? However, you can’t get very far addressing these questions if you’re armed with little more than a pastiche of recent French post-structuralist thought.

I put in bold the parts that I find most interesting. I particularly like the analysis of “bad writing” as a kind of performative speech act – one which is based on shared incomprehension on the part of its utterer as well as their audience, one which, in a sense, projects ignorance and incomprehension into the writer when in point of fact it exists primarily in the reader. This is an important compromise position between two overly dichotomous positions on “bad academic writing” — one of which reduces charges of “bad writing” to a misleading rhetoric that hides other political projects (of advocating a more culturally conservative role for the humanities, for example); the other of which would view bad writing as simply “bad” according to purely linguistic and stylistic criteria (themselves probably unanalyzed). One is too dismissive of the fact that some people actually can’t make head or tail of a given text; another takes for granted that all texts should be equivalently readable. Fuller, in contrast to these positions, interprets “bad writing” accusations as products of a judgment about the writing itself, but one that is the product of a particular community of readers with local norms of intelligibility.

The other things that I find stimulating here are: (1) the idea that the complexity of some academic discourses is unnecessary and arguably even spurious, because it is a product of overly constrictive premises; (2) the idea that one examine important intellectual problems without knowing that one’s methods or prior knowledge are poorly suited to the task. I guess this is a particularly provocative accusation when it comes to Butler because she’s become so canonical, and I don’t really see what Fuller is suggesting she ought to have done instead (and calling her work a post-structuralist “pastiche” is excessive), but I rather like the idea that one’s scholarly habitus can turn into a (valorized, misrecognized) intellectual disability. That seems to me very plausible.

In many academic circles today anyone who tries to write in a widely intelligible manner is liable to be condemned as a ‘mere literary man’ or, worse still, ‘a mere journalist.’ Perhaps you have already learned that these phrases, as commonly use, only indicate the spurious inference: superficial because readable. The academic man in America is trying to carry on a serious intellectual life in a social context that often seems quite set against it. His prestige must make up for many of the dominant values he has sacrificed by choosing an academic career. His claims for prestige readily become tied to his self-image as a ‘scientist.’… It is this situation, I think, that is often at the bottom of the elaborate vocabulary and involved manner of speaking and writing. It is less difficult to learn this manner than not. It has become a convention–those who do not use it are subject to moral disapproval.

…Desire for status is one reason why academic men slip so readily into unintelligibility. And that, in turn, is one reason why they do not have the status they desire. A truly vicious circle–but one out of which any scholar can easily break.

…To overcome the academic prose you have first to overcome the academic pose.

….Most ‘socspeak’ [that is, sociology speak] is unrelated to any complexity of subject matter or thought. It is used–I think almost entirely–to establish academic claims for one’s self; to write in this way is to say to the reader (often I am sure without knowing it): ‘I know something that is so difficult that you can understand it only if you first learn my difficult language. In the meantime, you are merely a journalist, a layman, or some other sort of undeveloped type.’

…..The line between profundity and verbiage is often delicate, even perilous.

There are, of course, other explanations besides status for academic writing being unintelligible to the uninitiated. For instance, jargon could be one response to outside political pressure — one can imagine academic radicals like Hardt and Negri burying their politics in the grave of their prose. As people like David Graeber have argued, academics are permitted to espouse the most radical politics they can imagine, just so long as their audience is massively restricted by the social barriers embodied in their writing style. And as Mills also indicates, academic style is often something less than a means of attaining status; it can function simply as a condition of disciplinary belonging or group membership.

Alas, I don’t have time to give a good analysis of the politics of academic style, one more contextually specific than this one. But I like the idea that style is the vehicle for academics’ self-undermining desires, for a “vicious circle” of unrealized status or political involvement. Academic writing is an object of attachment and not just a communication medium. “Pose” not only “prose,” as Mills puts it. And a “pose” based on the logical fallacy that Mills points out: that readability is superficiality. My experience is that Graeber’s plain-spoken academic language is admired for that very reason (like in his book on value), and total incomprehensibility is generally scorned, but there is also prejudice, I think, against academics who are always too plain-spoken and seem not to “get” the subtlety of more baroque arguments. This points to a further contradiction in academic writing, which Mills knew but didn’t exactly say: academic writing becomes the vehicle for contradictory social dynamics; that is, our desire to communicate and our desire to produce community (or distinction) are often at odds with each other when we evaluate academic writing.

Finally, I note for further thought Mills’ hypothesis that, by becoming an academic, one is not just sacrificing income, but also the dominant values of the society that one is in a way rejecting, by opting out of (what’s ludicrously called) the “real world.”