A matter touched on several times during the course of my (and your) academic journey is the style of writing in various journals and books. With one camp contesting the dense nature of some writing we have had to read, arguing it is unnecessary, and does much to dilute the authors point. Others claim it is the very nature of this writing having an elite vernacular that allows expression of certain theoretical points not suited for prose. In my summer readings I came across David Foster Wallace. I am not alone in thinking him one of the true literary geniuses of our time. In relation to this debate this is an excerpt from Consider the Lobster (I know it is long, stay with it)–
The issue is Academic English, a verbal cancer that has metastasized now to afflict both scholarly writing –
If such a sublime cyborg would insinuate the future as post-Fordist subject, his palpably masochistic locations as ecstatic agent of the sublime superstate need to be decoded as the “now all-but-unreadable DNA” of the fast industrializing Detroit, just as his Robocop-like strategy of carceral negotiation and street control remains the tirelessly American one of inflicting regeneration through violence upon the racially heteroglassic wilds and others of the inner city
-and prose as mainstream as the Vilage Voice’s
At first encounter, the poems’ distanced cerebral surfaces can be daunting, evading physical location or straightforward emotional arc. But this seeming remoteness quickly reveals a very real passion, centered in the speaker’s struggle to define his evolving self-construction.
Maybe it’s a combination of my SNOOTitude and the fact that I end up having to read a lot of it for my job, but I’m afraid I regard Academic English not as dialectical variation but as a grotesque debasement of SWE, and loathe it even more than the stilted incoherencies of Presidential English (“This is the best and only way to uncover, destroy, and prevent Iraq from reengineering weapons of mass destruction”) or the mangled pieties of BusinessSpeak (“Our Mission: to proactively search and provide the optimum networking skills and resources to service the needs of your growing business”); and in support of this total contempt and intolerance I cite no less an authority than Mr. G. Orwell, who 50 years ago had AE pegged as a “mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence” in which “it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning”
It probably isn’t the whole explanation, but with the voguish hypocrisy of PCE, the obscurity and pretension of Academic English can be attributed in part to a disruption in the delicate rhetorical balance between language as a vector of meaning and language as a vector of the writer’s own resume. In other words, it’s when a scholar’s vanity/insecurity leads him to write primarily to communicate and reinforce his own stature as an Intellectual that his English is deformed by pleonism and pretentious diction (whose function is to signal the writer’s erudition) and by opaque abstraction (whose function is to keep anybody from pinning the writer down to a definite assertion that can maybe be refuted or shown to be silly). The latter characteristic, a level obscurity that often makes it just about impossible to figure out what an AE sentence is really saying, so closely resembles political and corporate doublespeak (“revenue enhancement,” “downsizing,” “proactive resource-allocation restructuring”) that it’s tempting to think that AE’s real purpose is concealment and its real motivation fear.
The insecurities that drive PCE, AE and vocab-tape ads are far from groundless though. These are tense linguistic times. Blame it on Heisenbergaian uncertainty or postmodern relativism or Image Over Substance or the ubiquity of advertising and PR or the rise of Identity Politics or whatever you will – we live in an era of terrible preoccupation with pretention and interpretation, one in which the relations between who someone is and what he believe and how he “expresses himself” have been thrown into big-time flux. In rhetorical terms, certain long-held distinctions between the Ethical Appeal (=an argument’s plausibility or soundness, from logos), and Pathetic Appeal (=an argument’s emotional impact, from pathos) have now pretty much collapsed – or rather the different sorts of Appeals now affect and are affected by one another in ways that make it nearly impossible to advance argument on “reason” alone.
Okay any thoughts? Arguments?
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Well Sam, you have done a fine job of chipping away at the thrones of Bhabha, Spivak, and other craftsmen of large, top-heavy beasts with no substance but a lot of baritone. I very much agree with you, and perhaps more so on the point of obscuring (opaque abstraction) the lack of a real argument than with portraying a good sense of diction. For we know, after all, that Mr. Homi Bhabha himself has been awarded the sought-after prize for the most meaningless passage of 1998:
ReplyDelete"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."
Talk about complete bullshit.
Whoops, sorry. That was a quote by Judith Butler. Here is the Bhabha quote:
ReplyDelete"If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to “normalize” formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality."