Denis Dutton
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Denis Dutton is an academic philosopher at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. He founded and edits the website Arts & Letters Daily.
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[edit] Career
Dutton is a native of Los Angeles, California, where his family owns an eponymous chain of bookstores. He did his Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Barbara and taught at the University of Michigan-Dearborn before emigrating to New Zealand in 1984. He is the founding editor of the journal Philosophy and Literature.
[edit] Controversy
In 1995, Dutton, as editor of Philosophy and Literature, created a "Bad Writing Contest" to expose what he deemed to be the wilfully obscurantist prose styles of many literary and cultural theorists. The contest highlighted the tortured prose of figures such as Homi K. Bhabha and Fredric Jameson. In 1998, the Bad Writing Contest awarded first place to University of California, Berkeley Professor Judith Butler, for a piece which appeared in the journal Diacritics. The winning sentence read:
"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."
Dutton noted in a Wall Street Journal article, "To ask what this means is to miss the point. This sentence beats readers into submission and instructs them that they are in the presence of a great and deep mind. Actual communication has nothing to do with it."
This award led to a brief furor among humanities academics. After winning the award, Butler countered Dutton's accusation of academic pedantry and obscurantism in the pages of the New York Times and the affair briefly became a cause célèbre in the world of academic theorists (see also Alan Sokal). The Bad Writing Contest ceased in 1998, but Butler's sentence is still often cited by critics of postmodernism as an outstanding example of meaningless academese.
Dutton has also worked in radio through much of his career and served for seven years (1995 - 2002) a Director of Radio New Zealand.
