from Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (2003)
Should writing intended for academics in the humanities be readable for everyone when we don't expect the same from writing in physics? Isn't such an expectation tantamount to a demand that there be no such thing as intellectuals in the humanities, that the whole history of the humanistic disciplines make no difference, and that someone starting from scratch into a discussion--of, say, the theory of sexuality--be at no disadvantage compared with someone who has read widely in previous discussions of the issue? When the charge of bad writing comes from journalists, it is hard to avoid the feeling that some hostility to the very idea of scholarly humanistic disciplines is involved.
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Warner is visiting us at Fremulon University next week, so many here are reading up on his interesting work on the public. I posted this to see what people thought. Comments, concerns?
I'm divided on the passage. On the one hand, he's right: why should the casual observer castigate academics for bad writing (and here he's talking about left theory, especially Judith Butler)--and its attendant claims of elitism and exclusivity--when that same reader can't make a dent in an article on molecules, quarks, and other what-have-yous? Does he get all pissy? Nah. This hypothetical reader's daughter, by the way, is the student who accepts her chemistry exam C with a shrug, but who feels personally attacked by a C in English.
On the other hand, given that language is our special province--well, for some--it seems we could do it, and our ideas, better justice by writing more clearly and artfully. And it seems to me that social and political ideas, unlike quantum physics, do have some overlap with a common public language.
However, the defense for the particular style of literary theory, as articulated by Adorno (and Adorno purists, just bear this, because I'm going to run roughshod in this summary), is you can't critique an ideological structure in its own language; the terms are already corrupted and commodified when you arrive. Whatever stands for common-sense at any given historical moment must be defamiliarized, etc.
But how many academics can really say this is what they are doing? Bad writing comes from fuzzy thinking; little encourages disjointed thought like rushing to use some big theory.
For instance, let me give you a tasty sample of my fucking day, which consisted of responding to two academic papers, one the sodomy that is absent in its presence--a "lacunae," if you will-- and the other about the "'infection' of the perfomative by perfofmance" another:
"Concomitantly, these citational contexts from which preformative authority derives likewise threaten in an alchemy of reciprocity in this play to collapse into the merely grammatical."
Yeah, how'd you like that? I spent 8 hours today writing a response to 9 pages of somesuch gibberwocky.
2 follow-up notes.
(1) I am not a pithy guy. I can't believe how long all my "comments" are. But what can I say, I am an anecdotalist.
(2) I am really proud that I used the bres' label "preferential punishment" in on this post. I don't know what it means, but I think it fits.
to me, the key issue is an economic one, and it's what i was in the back of my mind as i frantically tried to shift our discussion away from the book at hand. the books and articles we write don't have any obvious instrumentality-- unlike science and math, that cannot be "applied" to cures for alzheimer's or new ways to fabricate plywood. and unlike freakonomics, which i needlessly injected into today's discussion, there's no implicit promise that you'll make more money on your real estate transactions or know when your child's teacher is cheating on standardized test. readers in our field are ultimately looking for pleasure-- if not from the prose itself, than from the depth of understanding it offers. (as george costanza once said, "i enjoy understanding.") when we offer readers neither of those pleasures (a charge i wouldn't level at foucault or butler, though it is true of their flunkies), we make our audience even smaller.
Interesting points all round. Clarity, complexity, and pleasure do not seem to me to be mutually exclusive. In fact, that seems to be exactly what Warner's after here. I mean, what else would one call this:
"That he was staggeringly successful in reaching the largest possible public, in a way that very few twentieth-century writers have been," Miller writes, is indicated by the "simple" fact that he "has sold, between Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four more than 40 million books in sixty languages which is, according to John Rodden, 'more than any pair of books by a serious or popular postwar author.'" (You can almost hear the Berlin Wall being brought down, like the walls of Jericho, by the chirping of the cash registers at Barnes & Noble.)
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