Bad writing

Yes, I can tell you what that ‘system’ is, at least in the thinking of Thomas McLaughlin who wrote that defense of deliberate obscurity, by giving you the antecedent sentence, or rather two.

“Theory isn’t difficult out of spite. It is difficult because it has proceeded on the premise that language itself ought to be the focus of attention; that ordinary language is an embodiment of an extremely powerful and usually unquestioned system of values and beliefs; and that using ordinary language catches you up in that system.” And then comes the bit that I quoted.

Of course, he’s right about language. I for one spend a lot of my time and energy and attention noticing and interrogating the way language shapes our thinking. Why, only a couple of days ago, I did a Comment at B&W about the word “feisty” in connection with a Guardian article about the MMR controversy. A reporter went to interview Andrew Wakefield some months ago, and then fantasised about a movie featuring Wakefield and a “feisty single mother” taking on the bad old medical establishment. I did a fine old rant about that, and plan to do more rants on the same subject. But why, why, why, in order to consider issues like that, do we have to do it in artificially deliberately opaque (and pompous and above all mystification-mongering) language? We don’t – but theory-heads go on insisting that we do.

I got an email only yesterday from someone I know quite well, who is in fact a literary theorist himself, telling me why he disagrees with my article, including the fact that he doesn’t find the quotation from McLaughlin as “problematic” as I do. Now, I find that hard to understand – because this is a smart guy, and reasonable on some subjects. How could that quotation strike anyone as anything other than an embarrassing self-conviction of absurdity? It’s beyond me.

Actual, this has already been done. Some sects of Buddhism chant mantras which are effectively strings of nonsense syllables. There are explanations of the symbolic meanings of various phonemes and syllables in a meta-discourse, but the primary discourse meant to be nonsense.

For the record, I think that the Buddhist practice is far superior to the Lacanian one. The goal is to achieve detachment from conventional obsessions and phobias via a sort of hypnotic state.

More at my URL.

Thanks, Ophelia; but (through no fault of yours, of course) that still leaves me with the question “which ‘system of values and beliefs’ exactly?” It’s true that ready-at-hand cliches (such as “feisty”) often prejudice thinking. But is there really anything “systematic” about the biases produced by such cliches? That is — in McLaughlin’s view — are all the commonplaces of common language acting in the service of (say) capitalism and patriarchy?

I agree with you that if ordinary language were, in fact, systematically distorted to serve the interests of (capitalism, patriarchy…) it still wouldn’t follow that theoryspeak is the proper corrective to it. But I wonder whether they have identified a genuine “systematic” problem at all, or whether this is just a kind of question-begging syllogism along the lines of ‘the language we use reflects the system under which we live; we live in a capitalist patriarchy, therefore our language is irredeemably corrupted by c-p assumtions.’

“How can we think of gender as something divorced from the sexed physiology of the human body?”

Gender: “a : SEX b : the behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits typically associated with one sex”

The answer is, you can’t, because that’s what gender MEANS.

I suppose that puts me on Alice’s side of the argument:

“`But “glory” doesn’t mean “a nice knock-down argument,”‘ Alice objected.

“`When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean–neither more nor less.’

“`The question is,’ said Alice, `whether you CAN make words mean so many different things.’

“`The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master– that’s all.'”

As is the often the case, there is a valid point somewhere, which, like the butterfly in china, set off this storm. One way to think of it is something like this: When you first are told that the small brown bird is a “sparrow,” you are able to see it in a new way. Naming the bird reveals it to you. But after a while, and after many, many sparrows, it becomes “just a sparrow.” The name obscures the bird through its familiarity.

So does our language obscure ideas through an overly familiar vocabulary.

Nevertheless, intentionally obscure language is not the answer. The answer is to use ordinary language to express what it is that our familiarity has obscured. (“Yes, it is just a sparrow, but look at what it is doing – notice the little patch at the throat which is only on the males during springtime….”)

Of course, if you don’t have anything to say, if you have nothing to reveal, obscuring the absence of thought through impenetrable prose is an advantage. No one can quite be sure you are saying nothing.

Michael, is there any particular Butler essay you’d recommend as an example of how this method pays dividends to her (more careful) readers?

Dave, you’re right about the way I use the word (let’s defamiliarize it, shall we?) ‘theory’ in the piece – I did that, I think, because that’s what literary ‘theorists’ themselves do: talk about ‘theory’ when what they mean is ‘literary theory and specifically a particular kind of literary theory though which particular kind varies with the speaker and audience but that’s why it’s useful to call it just “theory” because that way one can elide differences like that whenever it’s convenient to do so.’ Richard Dawkins has a fit of rage somewhere about this hijacking of the extremely valuable (and general) word ‘theory’ by one particular discipline, as if they’d invented the damn thing.

“Isn’t this exactly the opposite of what one wants in academic writing? When I read a journal article in my field, for example, I don’t expect to have to go through as much work to get to the conclusion as the original researcher did. The whole point is for the researchers to make the disordered and difficult work of their research seem transparent, logical, and intuitive.”

That certainly is what I think. I think the way to defamiliarize language is to talk about it directly, not ‘perform’ the opacity by being as opaque as one can possibly be.

Jeffrey,

I’m not an expert on Butler’s work, but my personal favorite is probably the Introduction and first chapter of Bodies that Matter (1993).

It is very difficult, and might require a certain amount of theoretical grounding from its reader, but I think with patience, folks might find it interesting.

OK Ophelia — not everything’s intentionally obscure. But where do you draw the line? How do you know the difference?

From what my students tell me, poetry is often very difficult. And there, if anywhere, the obscurity has to be intentional. What do we make of this? Different projects? Sometimes, yes. In other ways, not at all.

Funny, the kids in the modern lit class told me the same thing about some of the books we did there. Even Henry James — sometimes the man doesn’t just come right out and say it. What’s the freaking deal with Strether anyway? What’s up with that?

What can we say about this? Is it possible that theory in a certain sense is philosophy gone literary? A hybrid form?

Ophelia – I understand that it’s all “subjective,” but my question for you and the other critics of “obscure” or “difficult” writing is to account for the value judgment in play here. If you admit that sometimes difficulty is OK, why not in the case of literary theorists, or these literary theorists, or what you will…

I guess my problem with the line of talk here is that I smell a lot of snark and not much substance. Including the Guardian piece. Check out these difficult writers dismissing in advance my critique on the grounds that I must be too simpleminded to understand what they’re talking about. Fine. But when we push our heads up above the swirling currents of tautology, what about “difficult” academic writing do you have a problem with, other than the fact that they respond to critics by defending difficulty.

“There are texts of theory that resist meaning so powerfully – say those of Lacan or Kristeva – that the very process of failing to comprehend the text is part of what it has to offer.”

If we change the sentence around to read that there are “poetic texts that resist meaning so powerfully – say those of Eliot or Wallace Stevens – that the very process of failing to comprehend the text is part of what it has to offer” – this seems pretty much OK, right?

Sure there’s a difference between poetry and philosophy. But many of these theorists work to blur the difference. In a certain way, you could call theory – the theory that here we are labeling “theory” – the application of modernist or postmodernist literary technique to the writing of philosophy.

And, of course, just as there were a thousand terrible modernists for every canonical one, there’s still tons of bad theory out there. I agree with that wholeheartedly.

There’s more to be said on both sides (in particular, some account of the post-1968 failure of the “revolution” in Paris, which is theory’s primal scene), and sorry to harp on this point, but I think it’s pretty important and would like to hear what the other side has to say…

If we could begin to talk about what difficulty is, and what it’s for, I think we could really get somewhere with this…

Well, the point of this kind of literary theory is necessarily to talk “about” language and meaning, and its role in constituting various realities, which is an inherently difficult thing to do.

Lacan is difficult for a couple of reasons. First, he assumes a lot of knowledge of the Freudian and “Western” canon. If you aren’t familiar with who the Wolfman is or what the Master/Slave dialectic is about, he isn’t going to explain it to you. But, in that respect, Lacan is like any other academic.

Lacan is also difficult because he uses ordinary words in specialized ways, ways that are quite different from, and to some degree, the opposite of their common-sense meanings. “Imaginary”, “Symbolic”, “Real”, etc. have special meanings.

Not only does Lacan appropriate ordinary words this way, he also appropriates Freudian theory and mathematical expressions in an idiosyncratic, specialized way.

The result is a system. Whether that system actually gives greater insight into human relationships and the exchange of meaning, is impossible to judge without making the effort of understanding how the various parts in the system interact. Once that investment has been made, there is a great incentive to tell other people it was worthwhile, so we can’t completely trust the Lacanians. Still, we also can’t trust the people who haven’t made the effort and assume that Lacan must be talking nonsense because they don’t understand what he is saying.

The same, of course, for Judith Butler, although it would seem to me that it is even more obvious in her case that there must be *something* to it all. Even if you reject the idea that gender is a performance, rather than a biological reality, it must be hard to deny that idea’s influence, and its originality when first put forward.

“Is there a necessary, inherent connection between talking or writing or thinking about a difficult subject, and using difficult language?”

No, the simplicity or difficulty of the writing should be determined by the writing context. A work produced for graduate students, for fellow theorists and thinkers in discipline obviously can sustain a different level of discourse than, say, a talking-head “deconstruction” of the lastest White House smut on CNN.

But that’s the point. I’m tired of reading this sort of denunciation of literary theorists as somehow complicit in the failures of the left or of intellectual progress. Sure, some physicists go for the mass market, but I’m sure there are boatloads of physics papers that I’d never be able to read — would never be able to make heads or tails of. But I don’t find them pissed on the next morning in The Guardian or The Nation.

It’s a little known fact that many of the most infamous of the “bad writers” do quite a bit of “clear” writing on the side. Butler wrote a quite legible piece on Guantanamo for The Nation (check the archive), for instance.

There’s lots to say about the role of academics as public intellectuals. Shouldn’t they be out on the barricades instead of perched on the ivory tower and that sort of thing. But bad faith, inertia, hypocrisy are spread pretty evenly across the landscape of the left. (Writers should put down their pens and do something, politicians are estranged from the grass roots, no one could ever do enough and so on).

But I’m sure this is not the point of your critique. Yes there are many — or maybe even all — who conform to an institutional vocabulary for the sake of self-betterment. But this is always the case with writing. I’m just not sure you can dismiss the entire body of literary theory because of this fact…

I’ve already said, I’m not dismissing the entire body of literary theory. That’s why the article is titled ‘Bad Writing’ and not ‘Literary Theory.’ I’m dismissing the bad stuff. Not the good stuff – the bad stuff.

And, sure, I know about the internal, disciplinary argument – this is work for specialists, not a general readership, etc. I’ve had this conversation quite often. But I find it unconvincing. I have a really hard time believing that (always stipulating: in the case of bad writing) the difficulty is not worked up, for its own sake – for the sake in fact precisely of seeming like an insider, a specialist, an expert, someone with a command of an insider’s patois.