Getting off the Subject: Iconoclasm, Queer Sexuality, and the Celebrity Intellectual

Author(s): Richard Burt

Source: Performing Arts Journal, Vol. 17, No. 2/3, The Arts and the University (May - Sep.,
1995), pp. 137-150
Published by: Performing Arts Journal, Inc.
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GETTING OFF THE SUBJECT

Iconoclasm, Queer Sexuality,and the
Celebrity Intellectual
Richard Burt

REVENGE OF THE NERD INTEl.I.lFCTUALS

fter he was released from a mental hospital in 1983 (having been put there
for murdering his wife), the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser would
sometimes go for walks. As Douglas Johnson relates in his introduction to
Althusser's posthumously published autobiography, The Future Lasts a Long Time:
"In his despair he would walk the streets of northern Paris, a shabby, ageing figure,
and would startle passers-byas he shouted 'Je suis le grand Althusser.' He was always
in and out of hospitals. It was in one of them ... that he died of a heart attack on
October 22nd, 1990. He was 72." Althusser'sautobiography is the most recent in a
series of major intellectual cause celebres, following quickly as it does upon
posthumously written biographies of Michel Foucault and Paul de Man. Their
publication (and in Althusser'scase, translation into English) has coincided with the
controversy over political correctness, a series of pedagogical sex scandals, the
emergence of the celebrity intellectual, and the dominance of personal and
autobiographical cultural criticism. This convergence raises questions about literary
theorists' libidinal investments in theory, about the ways in which theory plays out
in relation not only to the production of yet more theorized critical practices inside
the university but to fantasies about the performance of what might be considered
"undertheorized"intellectual practices outside it as well. At issue, I want to suggest,
is how academic autonomy is exercised and regulated, and how personal, subjective,
autobiographical criticism and pedagogy can be, the degree to which critical selfreflection requires embodying the critic and teacher, and if so, how.
A

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

137

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.

I open this discussionwith the exampleof Althusseras a celebrityintellectualin

order to complicatecurrentcritiquesof the institutionof criticism,one of which
turnson the institutionalizationin criticismof a specificallywhite malesubjectivity
as universaland unmarked,and anotherwhich turns on the presentstatus of the
public sphere.Throughan alwaysalreadymimetic,embodied,and in certaincases
subversive"performativity,"
emergentor still and dominated groups mark their
make
visible
their exclusion, and to force, if necessary,their
to
subjectivities
inclusion in institutions which have systematicallyexcluded them. In terms of
criticalpractice,this has meantrelatingone'sprofessionalpositionto one'spersonal
life in waysthat tend to involvea significantdegreeof explicitnessaboutone'sbody,
and has hence riskedthe dangersof personalembarrassment,
exposure,and shame:
to
the
talks
about
bathroom;
JaneGallopmakesexualpuns in
JaneTompkins
going
the titlesof heressays(on the "studentbody,""agood lay,"andso on); EveSedgwick
writesan essayabout her fantasiesand poetryaboutspankingand anal sex; Nancy
K. Millerwritesa chapterentitled"MyFather'sPenis,"David Millerwritesabouthis
crushon RolandBarthesandhis backpains,to cite a few well-knownexamples.The
ethicaland politicaljustificationfor this explicitnessrestson a distinctionbetween
donatingone'sbody to criticism(regardedas braveand politicallyprogressive)and
appropriatingbodies other than one's own, or worse leaving one's own body
unmarkedand remainingvoyeuristicallyhidden out of view while directingone's
others(regardedas cowardlyand
normalizing(and usuallymale) gazeat "aberrant"
politicallyreactionary).
From the perspectiveof autobiographicalculturalcriticism,Althussermight be a
useful example of marked male subjectivity-a case study of Kaja Silverman's
reconstructedmasochistic,abject,castratedmasculinity.I want to suggest,however,
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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 *

139

debates.It doesn'tmatterwhetheryou begin with universalMan as the subjector

with subjectivitiesmarkedby race,class,gender,or sexualorientation,with fameor
celebrity,with a public intellectualor a celebrityintellectual.The consequencesfor
criticalpractice,for the institutionof criticismare the same: one will necessarily
produce hierarchiesand exclusionswhich attempt to regulatethe circulationof
academicvalueand fame in the profession.
This does not mean that questions about subjectivityor the public sphere are
irrelevantto contemporarycriticalpractices;it meansratherthat the institutionof
criticismmust be reconceptualizedin more expansiveterms than that initiatedor
undertakenby Michel Foucault,EdwardSaid, PierreBourdieu,StanleyFish,Terry
Eagleton, Samuel Weber, Peter Hohendahl,JonathanCuller, Gerald Graff, and
BruceRobbins.By reconceivingthe institutionin iconoclasticterms,I want to show
that the legitimationof criticalautonomyand dialoguewill alwaysbe a function of
criticalcelebritization.What follows is a hybridof criticaland fanzinediscourses,
writtenin a genreone might term critizine.Critizineis bastardcriticism,paradoxicallyfragmentand coherent,participatingboth in writtenformsand oralpresentations (the talk show, the interview,and so on). Joiningculturalcriticismwith the
fanzineenablesone to readcentraltheoreticaltextsin relationto criticaldatathat is
largelyoff the record,so to speak,dataregardedas so transparentor insignificantto
meritsustainedcriticalattentionmuchlessanthologizationor reprinting.The "raw"
data for my analysisof the institutionof criticismincludesgossip,introductionsto
books by other authors,introductionsto specialissuesof academicjournals,book
jacket blurbs, book reviewsin academicjournalsand in mainstreamjournalism,
interviews(printed
lettersof recommendation,
footnotes,prefaces,acknowledgments,
and televised), memorial issues of journals dedicated to recently dead critics,
eulogies, letters to the editor, and "tabloid"journals like Lingua Franca and
Though these texts arewidely regardedas marginalcritically(they do
Heterodoxy.
not even appearin sociologicalanti-institutionalcritiques)they are nevertheless
central.All arecrucialto the profession's
academyawards:acquiring
administratively
a job, gettingtenureandpromotion,mobility,sizeof teachingload, fellowships,and
so on.

I don'tmean to replacedismissingmarginalcriticismor attentionto it (on grounds

that it is rude,partial,distorting,irresponsible,mean-spirited)with embracingit as
the "censored"(becauseall too scandalous)truthof the profession,as if the sacred
and the blasphemouswere easily and consistentlyopposed. So that the gestureof
dismissalwould itself be regardedas rude ratherthan polite, one that aggressively
saved the idol from would-be iconoclasts.The problemwith both high-minded
dismissaland high-mindeduncensoringor exposeis thatthey assumethereis a clear
line betweencriticismwhich is insidethe professionand criticismwhich is properly
(or improperly)outsideit. By contrast,I maintainthat the institutionof criticism's
legitimacycan neverbe fully securedno matterhow much autonomyit is granted.
The line betweenwhat is properlyinside the institutionand improperlyoutside it
must be continuallyre-drawnand re-negotiatedbecause"illegitimate"criticismis
always a simulacrumor parody, a bad imitation not of the real thing but of
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institutionalized imitation: seen from an official perspective, "good" critics or

disciples reproduce the institution by not imitating it exactly, while "bad" critics
slavishly imitate master critics. Bad criticism is not completely exterior to good,
then, but is a miming of institutionalized mimesis, both a literalization and a
symbolic parody that haunts it. Establishing a distinction between good and bad
practices therefore requires that the parodic continually be exorcised and expulsed.
Because certain mimetic practices are always being expelled as "bad,"the institutionalization of criticism is also always at the same time the de-institutionalization of
criticism. What needs to be examined, in my view, is the way celebrity circulates in
the profession subjecting the critic to a dynamic oscillation between a number of
idolatrous and iconoclastic positions ranging from the triumphant and sadistic "We
rule and they suck," as MTV's Beavis and Butthead would put it, to the masochistic,
abject "We suck and they rule" to the resentful, aggressivelysadomasochistic abject
"I may suck, but they reallysuck!"
Reversing the direction of usual institutional critiques, criticine asks "Why can the
institution never be fully normalizing?" rather than "What is the antidote to
normalization?"This is to subordinate the question of the subject's marking to its
construction in terms of the proper context. I want to ask "What is the proper
subject, in both senses of 'agent' and 'topic' of criticism?"By this question I mean
not only "How is criticism differentiated from its improper other?" But "Can
criticism ever be proper?"If the proper subject is unmarked, hence invisible, is it
even a subject? Or does one become a subject only by being marked, say by madness,
crime, or death (as in the cases of de Man, Foucault, and Althusser)? Put in its most
paradoxical form the question is, "What are the (im)proprieties of establishing a(n)
(im)proper account of the subject in criticism?"
To address these questions, I will focus on three "out" lesbian critics, Judith Butler,
Terry Castle, and Camille Paglia, all of whom have confronted the celebrity
intellectual phenomenon head on from opposing epistemological and institutional,
if not political perspectives. My examples are, I hope it is clear, not meant to be
regarded as exhaustive, but others would be variations of the same problematic. To
anticipate a criticism I will take up later, it would make no difference to my
argument were I to discuss the turn to autobiographical criticism as performed by
straight male critics like Stephen Greenblatt and Frank Lentricchia (or the critical
legal scholar Duncan Kennedy or to consider the anti-autobiographical, anticelebrity intellectual Pierre Bourgieu). Butler, Castle, and Paglia engage the
celebritization of the academic and the public sphere in a variety of ways, from being
the object of an academic fanzine with limited circulation (Butler) to thematizing
celebrity as an autobiographical occasion (Castle) to being an actual media celebrity
(Paglia). Rather than discriminate between these critics in terms of whether they are
real public intellectuals or merely pop or celebrity intellectuals, or position them in
relation to a political and media binary of Left and Right, radical (academic) and
neoconservative (media), or use them to differentiate the circulation of academic
celebrity inside the academy and outside it in the public sphere, I will show that the
practices of these critics deconstruct those very oppositions. Celebrity in academy is
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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
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facts of life?" Was I lost to my own imaginary musings as that vital

conversation was taking place?And if I persisted in this notion that bodies
were in some way constructed,perhaps I really thought that words alone had
the power to craft bodies from their own linguistic substance? Couldn't
someone simply take me aside?2
For Butler, being called back to "Judy"is linked not only to anti-intellectualism, but
to an anti-theoretical mode of political activism she deplores. Yet Butler's own
critical practices and her own criticism call into question her distinctions between
aggressivelyanti-intellectual trash like Judy!or Lingua Francaand serious intellectual
engagement with theoretical works (like hers), between "Judy" and "Judith,"
between theory and anti-theoretical activism. Consider the interview in Artforum.
The interview contains lots of nice color photos including some transgressiveTom
of Finland-like porn "art."And Butler's cultural capital is indexed by the fact that
hers was the first in a new interview series and that she got an eight page, continuous
spread, unlike other recent interviewees as Larry Rickels or John Waters, who only
got one or two photos and had most of the interview shoved to the back of the
magazine. How different is the Artforuminterview from the fanzine Judy!?
Now one might want to dismiss everything I've said thus far as essentially frivolous,
inconsequential, insignificant, and rather cruel, not to say bitchy criticism. Butler's
remarks at conferences, her forays into the realm of journalism, are either
insignificant, some might argue, or a politically necessary defense of the significance
of that work, which can hardly be reduced to remarksin the preface and a footnote,
and which in any case deserves a respectful, responsible critical attention rather than
the parodic account I may seem to be giving of it. To do what I'm doing here, some
might argue, is less to reveal anything about Butler than it is to reveal my own deeply
gendered envy, even male (lesbian?) phallus envy, iconoclastic ressentiment,perhaps
even misogyny, all of which is either at worst morally irresponsible and politically
reactionary or at best a critique that will only provide more ammunition to Rightwing critics who want to discredit Left (hence feminist and queer) academic
criticism. Am I not engaging in typically male heterosexist fetishism, getting a sense
of my bodily and psychic integrity by directing my normalizing gaze at aberrant
lesbian criticism?Wouldn't it be better to deal directly with my own embattled sense
of my masculinity, consider why it is that I am interested in lesbian criticism in the
first place?
Rather than a divide between Butler's serious and insignificant criticism, there is a
continuum between them, one that extends as far back as the footnote in Gender
Troublediscussing Monique Wittig's denial she has a vagina to Butler's blurb on the
back of Luce Irigaray'smost recently translatedbook, The EthicsofSexual Difference.
Butler's interest in deciding who can call her "Judy"or "Judith"and where is an
extension, so to speak, of her rigid lesbian phallus. Re-deploying the Lacanian "name
of the father," Butler can name herself by putting her names between quotes. Her
performance of her theory of performativity seems less like a subversive parody or
the institution of criticism than its straightforward reproduction. And I use
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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.

HOT SHOTS, PART DEUX

In the last chapter of her book, The Apparitional Lesbian, entitled "In Praise of
Brigitte Fassbaender (a Musical Emulation)," Terry Castle tries to exploit the very
kind of idolatry that Butler so dislikes, to see in the fame a positive resource of
lesbian admiration. Castle wants to illuminate the "more subjective" aspects of the
phenomenon and so outs herself as a fan. She focuses on Brigitte Fassbaender not
only because she is a diva but because Fassbaenderis herself a diva worshipper. She
reveals "herselfon stage, without shame or self-censoring, as afan of other women."
For Castle, diva worship moves along a continuum from fantasy to actual physical
contact and emotional intimacy with the diva: "For female fans, the implication is
obvious: to enthuse over the voice is, if only subliminally, to fancy plumping down
in bed with its owner."3The diva promises, then, an embodied rather than a spectral
lesbianism.
Castle concludes her chapter by mounting a defense of the fan: "One of the
enduring negative stereotypes in tabloid journalism since the late nineteenth century
has been that of the 'derangedfan'-the person so demented by his love for someone
famous he commits an outrage either against himself or the person he reveres. Heroworship, we are admonished, leads to mania-to violence or its threat. But it may

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also be possible-indeed worthwhile-to try to rehabilitate such emotion."4There's

just one problem. Some diva-worshippers are deranged fans. As Castle concedes,
"Even in the sedate world of opera, there has always been a lunatic fringe."5
To deal with the problem of the deranged fan, Castle implicitly distinguishes
between good and bad fans: "Not that I mean to redeem fans like Mary Garden's
suicidal admirer Helen Newby: as long as we live in a culture in which certain
individuals are marketed as celebrities and surrounded with an aura of confounding
wealth, prestige, and power, there will always be those maddened-sometimes
horrifyingly-by their adoration. Yet for every diva-worshipper like Newby, one
could find, I am convinced, hundreds of thousands of others 'quickened'... by their
infatuation: enriched and nourished, made more happy and alive, made more
conscious of who they are."6The problem with Castle's distinctions between good
and bad fans, between the humane opera house and the inhumane world of
celebrities, tabloid journalism, and mass culture, is that they reproduce the very
phenomenon Castle tried to get around, namely, the spectral lesbian. The lesbian
returns as a voice, not a body: "In the same way that in a perfect world no shame
would ever attach itself to the desire of woman for woman, no shame attaches-or
should attach itself-to the admiration inspired by a passionate female voice. If I
have, however crudely, inspired a desire to hear, or hear again, the singing of Brigitte
Fassbaender, I am glad: in the presence of such brave and tender artistry, there is
nothing to fear and much-oh, so much-to love."7
Castle can "have"the diva shamelessly and uncensored, but only because the diva
exists in spectral form: Castle "loves" the diva's voice rather than having sex or
fantasies about having sex with her. The eroticism of listening and the fantasy of
being "taken up" by the diva discussed at the essay's opening drop out at its end
without being explicitly renounced. Perhaps more sadly, Castle turns herself into a
spectral lesbian: Castle is a medium for real opera divas ratherthan a diva in her own
right, a theory diva for lesbian critics who might be her fans. Though Castle uses
terms of psychopathology in a mock clinical way-she speaks of her "habit,"
"obsession," fixation," "voyeurism,"and so on-her desire to save herself and others
as legitimate fans paradoxically ends up making her defense of fans seem, well, a
little deranged. Castle's celebration of fans is less an alternative to Butler's
denigration of them than it is the inversion of it. For both Butler and Castle want to
regulate the difference between good and bad fans.

BUTCH TROUBLE:LIKEA CFT.EBRITY

As a final example of the celebritization of criticism, I turn to Camille Paglia in order
to demonstrate that there is no way to resolve the problems presented by Butler and
Castle, to arriveat a truly democratic, inclusive practice of queer criticism. However
inclusive, there will always be some (queer) sexual personae non grata. By any
measure, Paglia has achieved celebrity as an intellectual, appearing on television talk
shows, MTV, in newspapers and magazines, and in a segment of the German lesbian

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filmmaker Monica Treut's movie Female Misbehavior. Paglia documents media

coverage of her Sex, Art, and American Culturewith three appendices, "A Media
History," "Cartoon Personae,"and "Profiles,Interviews, Debates, and Exotica." Her
recent essay collection, Vampsand Tramps,does the same thing, only more so.
Paglia'sabject, masochistic repetitiveness-she continually declares that her career is
a disaster8-her identification with celebrities like Madonna, her self-identification
as a "bitch,"9and her ressentimentmight lead some critics to dismiss her as a pop
intellectual, as if Pagliawere merely a parody of the intellectual. Paglia, that is, might
be viewed as being more like the Hedda Hopper of the profession, an envious gossip
queen who is hypocritically fascinated by what she pretends to despise. One could
add that Paglia epitomizes the present debasement of the public sphere to the
tabloid sphere, a debasement which has allowed neoconservatives to use her in
mounting an attack on higher education and on emergent forms of criticism,
particularly feminist and queer.
I suggest, however, that Paglia implicitly puts the distinction between real and pop
intellectual into question. To be sure, Paglia is a caricature and a parody. The
cartoons of herself she includes in her two essay collections literalize the point. She
is like a celebrity. Yet Paglia'sparodic status has a critical force. For one thing, she
unintentionally revealsthat the simulated or parodic intellectual cannot legitimately
be opposed to the real celebrity intellectual because the real celebrity intellectual is
always already a knock off, always alreadylike a celebrity.That is, Paglia reveals, a la
Madonna, the way that criticism is always a form of voguing, striking a pose. (The
same point would hold if one wanted to oppose the celebrity intellectual, as a
parody, to the public intellectual, as real.) Moreover, Paglia's parodic elements
implicitly constitute a critique of the sacred cows of cultural studies. Paglia is always
talking about herself whenever she is supposedly talking about someone else (ackie
O or the Rolling Stones) and her criticisms of others are typically self-referential.
Consider, as an example, the conclusion of Rosalind Krauss'stextual commentary on
Cindy Sherman:
Just as I would like to think of Sherman in a dialogue with [Douglas]
Crimp in the production of UntitledFilm Still #36, I imagine her reflecting
on [Hal] Foster'sargument in the course of producing Untitled, #263. This
is certainly not because I picture her sitting around reading works of
criticism. It is rather because she fully inhabits a discursive space vectored
by, among other things, her friends. So that many voices circulate within
this space, the supports of many arguments and theories, among those of
Hal Foster. (Cindy Sherman 1975-1993. Text by Rosalind Krauss with an
Essay by Norman Bryson[New York: Rizzoli, 1993], 212)
Here Krauss'sclaim for the way many theories and many voices have had an impact
on Sherman is comically (some might say repellently) contradicted by the exceedingly small number of critics Kraussmentions, by the narrowness of their circle-all
these critics have published in the journal Krauss edits, October-and by the way
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her fantasy about Sherman'srelation to criticism is made in purely personal terms

(Sherman pays attention not to books but to her friends, of whom Kraussobviously
counts herself as one).
Moreover, Paglia's criticism indirectly shows the contradictory ways in which
cultural studies wants to undo some boundaries while keeping others in tact. A
critique of Paglia as a pop intellectual assumes a boundary between academy and
journalism which is itself the source of fetishistic fascination. It is precisely this
division which Paglia's parodic elements call into question. As Foucault, Paglia's
most loathed theorist, says in an interview entitled "The Masked Philosopher":
Books, the university, professional journals-they are also media. One
ought to guard against calling every channel of information to which one
cannot have or doesn't want access the media. The problem is to know how
to set differences in play; and to know if it is necessary to establish a
reservedzone, a "culturalpark"for the fragile species of scholar menaced by
great ranges of information, which remaining space would be a vast space
for the shoddy products. Such a division doesn't appear to me to correspond
to reality. And worse: it's not at all desirable. (Foucault Live, ed. Sylvere
Lotringer, Semiotexte, 1990)
A dismissive reading of Paglia as a pop intellectual would be blind to the way that
popularization is always going on within the profession, as JeffreyWallen has shown,
and to the way that Paglia is a public intellectual, a crossover phenomenon. My
point isn't that her tabloid account of the profession and of gay and lesbian studies
is correct but that the celebritization of the public sphere calls into question the
distinction between the public and the pop intellectual, between the emergent and
the dominant.
Consider Paglia in comparison to her self-constituted rival, Marjorie Garber, for
example, whose book VestedInterests:Cross-Dressingand Cultural Anxiety Paglia
trashed in a review in the Boston Globe(and she spoke at MIT to increase the sense
of rivalry). Both critics write about celebrities like Madonna and Michael Jackson;
indeed, both claim to be able to read anything. Garber,like so many other cultural
critics, opposes an encyclopedic approach to culture to the narrowness of a great
books tradition. But Paglia'soverweening inclusiveness might suggest that Garber's
(and by extension, cultural criticism's)inclusiveness is driven by a predatorydesire to
incorporate everything as an object of study as well as a form of study into cultural
studies.
Paglia's receivability extends well beyond mainstream journalism and can't be
explained by the way her politics fit a neoconservative attack on the profession since
they don't fit; there are points of overlap with neoconservatives, but there are points
of overlap with Left cultural critics as well. Both Paglia and the self-identified Left
attack Reaganism and the 1980s in the name of the 1960s. Moreover, both are progay and sex positive. If Paglia is the cultural critic's Doppelganger,status as demonic

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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.

RICHARD BURT teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

This article is a portion of his new work examining trends in cultural
studies.

PERFORMING ARTS JOURNAL, NO. 50/51 (1995) PE 137-150: ? 1995

The Johns Hopkins University Press
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