Bad language

No one has any questions about what Nietzsche meant, eh?

I’m going to challenge Henry on Jameson (no argument for Honi for the time being) here and say that he can’t in fact adequately reduce any of his arguments in the manner he claims. I’m not certain this is a good thing, necessarily, but it is different than mere excessive jargon. Jameson writes in a self-consciously “dialectical” style, which involves a continual modification of the claims of his argument. Thus it’s not easily summarizable and not reducible–the negation of that reduction providing not the text or the data of that imaginative level: but instead presupposes a reconstruction of the negation to the horizon of the concept–a concept further elided by “prior knowledge”–of “authorial intent,” which requires the reader to sublimate his reinvested energy before the expressive determinacies and exigencies of form, properly figured and allegorized in the absent whole of what is, in the final analysis, only the negation of the negation.

Nietzsche certainly isn’t clear. Not because of convolution or obfuscation, but because what he writes seems to be a commentary on his thoughts rather than an expression of them. In order to get somewhere near what he meant to mean you need to get inside his head. It’s more like a theatrical performance, except that you can’t hear the tone of voice. Nietzsche’s meaning depends vastly on the tone of voice: sincere vs. ironic vs. ironically sincere vs. … hence a vast range of (mis)interpretations.

I found James Davidson’s work on Greek manners intermittently readable: while he makes his arguments clearly, filleting Foucault with sushi chef-like precision, he uses the same example (a political speech) again and again in the second half of the book to illustrate marginally different aspects of society, which leads to a sense of deja vu, bogging down and scraping the barrel.

I agree that Nietzsche is not clear — indeed that reeks of understatement — but I think it would be difficult to argue that he is not a great writer. I think the key thing that is lacking from the jargonistic academic essays under discussion is not (or not only) clarity but voice — they do not in my limited experience with them read as if they were written by an individual human author.

I’ll jump on the bandwagon, and also assert that 1) Nietzsche is a great writer, and much studied (indeed, when I was an undergrad, he was probably more read than Hegel, and possibly even more than Kant, by philosophy majors, and certainly more read than Hegel or Kant by non-philosophers); 2)That he’s also both maddeningly obscure at times (though his obscurity is more a matter of aphoristic or vividly dramatic, metaphorical prose, than of convolution and jargon), and the source of much controversy (just compare the readings of Nietzsche by, say, Walter Kaufmann, Maudemarie Clark, and any Straussian or Straussian-influenced writer, for starters); 3)Marx’s writing, while sometimes wonderfully clear and also dramatic, can also be terribly rebarbitive; he, also, is much studied — less in the US, where people tend to focus more on his epigones these days, than here in England, and there has hardly been a lack of controversy over his meaning; 4) A more important point, which I’m surprised people haven’t mentioned. All of the thinkers we’ve been discussing, as well as Adorno and Benjamin and Heidegger, were GERMAN speakers. They mostly wrote in German; and all were educated in a German literary and philosophical tradition. Their style, and their way of thinking, were therefore rather different from that of most anglophone thinkers. The German language tends towards greater convolution than English (or, if you prefer, allows for greater complexity. It also allows for greater abstraction; whether this means getting closer or further from the truth of things is an open question). English, on the other hand, allows for greater clarity (and this is why many German students read Kant and Hegel in English translation!)
Now, I admire all of these thinkers tremendously, and I think that we should take the trouble to try to figure out what they mean; and I think that the difficulty of their style really is tied to their way of thinking, and thus their insights.
But I think that it’s a very bad idea for theorists writing in English to pretend that they’re writing in German (or to pretend that they’re French speakers who are pretending to write in German, a la Derrida in his worst moments. Incidentally, while I’m on the subject, I think that one should also make a distinction between Foucault, who’s quite a good writer, and some of his American disciples who take on his jargon without his clarity). It seems to me that those who try to write English as if it were German produce a literary monstrosity, without achieving any great insights — though I may well be missing something.
Finally, I think one can be allowed a good deal of obscurity if one is, in fact, on the intellectual level of Kant or Hegel, or even Adorno. Still, to the extent that I have comprehended anything that Derrida, Butler, Jameson, and Bhabba, have written, I think that it’s ludicrous to claim that they are (this is not to say that they aren’t very intelligent and insightful, or have ideas which, if they could just communicate them better, would be illuminating; but I think it’s hard to dispute that their thought is just less rich and profound, and so doesn’t compel or repay one to take the same trouble in deciphering, as that of the greater thinkers we’ve been discussing)

I’m certain the object of Henry’s critique exists (although I don’t think Jameson is an appropriate target, or at least not the Postmodernism essay, which I always found quite clear). Let me also agree with the consensus that Neitzsche is A) a great writer, B) a very difficult (and often willfully unclear) writer, and C) those two truths are intimately intertwined.

As much as I’m not unsympathetic to Henry’s post, there is something about it that drives me crazy. It’s not that I necessarily think he’s wrong about Bhabha, but that he doesn’t see fit to really even say anything about why. I know the practice of blog writing doesn’t always lend itself to fully formed position papers, but I’d like to be at least pointed to what’s so wrong with Bhabha’s ideas. The practice of announcing by fiat that an emperor has no clothes commits the same sin as the bad writing you deride–your substantive point is mystified rather than clarified. The angry literary blogger you link to does the same thing with Critical Inquiry, and it’s just silly. Tell me what’s wrong! I can handle it!

Another point–you’re post implies, although you stop well short of actually asserting (for good reason) that good writing and good ideas go together, as do bad writing and a lack of ideas. This dichotomization of the writing scene makes your point a rather simple one, but I don’t think it covers all that we might encounter. There are plenty of examples of academic writing composed of unnecessarily difficult prose that reveals, after too much slogging and struggling, some pretty good insights. (for what it’s worth, I’d put Spivak in that category). There are good theorists with bad writing habits in which the clarity and exposition of the ideas is only minimally hampered by the bad writing (here I have Rawls in mind). In short, the writing/ideas quality connection isn’t as clear as it’s made out to be here.

I’d also say to the previous poster on the subject of the task of writing–yes, communication is the primary task of most writing, but it is certainly not the only one. Some excellent writing is geared toward evoking emotional responses, disorienting the reader, and perhaps even enraging the reader. It’s in the process of reflection on why that response took place that the impact of the writing becomes clear. When this is the agenda, crisp, as-clear-and-simple-as-possible writing in which claims are straightforwardly asserted doesn’t really serve the writer well.

I am generally sympathetic to the whole lit theory/cult studs project, but this business of defending Jameson, Bhabha, et al. on the basis of their agenda has got to go. Style is a result, not an intention. That I intended to write a meditative sonnet in the style of Donne is neither here nor there if the result is a five-line offering which includes two rhymes for “Nantucket.”

To wit: “Jameson writes in a self-consciously ‘dialectical’ style, which involves a continual modification of the claims of his argument.” Well, no, he doesn’t, not if I can’t understand what the sentences mean. For him to achieve this stylistic effect would require that I first understand his initial claims, and then that I understand that he is modifying them. If readers do not perceive the intended stylistic effect, then it is nonsense to say that the prose is written in that style.

I would add that it seems to happen with some frequency that writer X writes impenetrable work of prose Y and then goes around explaining on the down low to some favored friends and colleagues how to read Y so that it makes sense. That is not participating in academic scholarship, but an attempt at forming one’s own personal cult. This little scheme can be traced back to James Joyce’s pulling Stuart Gilbert aside in 1930 and explaining how to filter Ulysses to make it potable. I thought that was wicked cool as an undergraduate; now I just find it pompous and boring.

I would suggest to alkali fats that he read the remainder of my comment, which I think goes a long way towards explaining Jameson’s method.

Someone once asked Alfred North Whitehead why he didn’t write more clearly, and he answered, with perfectly British aplomb, that, if he thought more clearly, he would write more clearly. The only real justification for difficult writing, prescinding from aesthetic matters, is the difficulty of the thinking it labors to express. But if it is a matter of lining up the ducks of one’s pre-established ideological position, to signify one’s belonging to the “elect”, then it is a fraud.

How about applying an efficiency test, an hermeneutical version of Occam’s razor: If the hermeneutical effort required to understand an explication is greater than that required to understand what is to be explicated…