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Sirotnikov
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<--- Yes, It's a "kitty" in a boot.
Feb 2000
time: 07:29
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quote:
They should know better
Humanities scholars spend lots of time reading, so why can't they write?
Robert Fulford
National Post
Tuesday, July 15, 2003
The tortured prose common in academic writing often produces both unconscious comedy and literary scandal. It stumbles across my desk or my screen every day, but a particularly striking example showed up in Gail Singer's recent review of The Girl from God's Country, a University of Toronto Press book by Kay Armatage about a silent-era Canadian filmmaker, Nell Shipman.
Armatage, who teaches film, has made documentaries, organized festival programs and otherwise operated outside academe. Yet she writes an obscurantist style that seems directed only to other professors. Singer, a filmmaker who admires Shipman and would like to admire her biographer, directs our attention (in the June issue of the Literary Review of Canada) to what Armatage says about Shipman's attachment to the Canadian North:
"We can see a socio-sexual parallel between the geography of the wilderness and the topographies of narrative in this genre, which organizes a particular spatial itinerary and social anatomy."
Is there, anywhere, a reader brave or foolish enough to explain what that means? Probably not. And why is it there? How complicated can the story of Nell Shipman be? Armatage seems to be following the first rule of postmodernism: Make simple ideas complicated, and complicated ideas incomprehensible.
Sympathetically, Singer suggests that many scholars believe their peers will judge them harshly if they don't write that way. By implication, she raises what should be a pressing question in the universities: Is it now mandatory to write badly?
Well, in a sense it can't be. Good writers work in the universities, and university presses sometimes publish good books. Denis Dutton, editor of the online Arts & Letters Daily, says he knows many lucid and lively academic writers. But for every superb stylist, he believes, there are 100 who range from adequate to awful.
How could that be? Scholars in the humanities spend much of their time writing, and are forced constantly to read the work of superb writers. Yet they pour out streams of gnarled and barbarous sentences and don't even know they are doing it. Professors in English departments, after lives spent close to the best literature, usually produce the worst prose.
The perpetrators are by no means obscure hacks beavering away in the remote suburbs of academe. Dutton quotes Paul H. Fry, professor of English at Yale. He finds this in Fry's A Defense of Poetry: "It is the moment of non-construction, disclosing the absentation of actuality from the concept in part through its invitation to emphasize, in reading, the helplessness -- rather than the will to power -- of its fall into conceptuality."
Readers may imagine (as Dutton says) that they are too ignorant to understand "the absentation of actuality." Academic theorists take advantage of the innocent reader's natural humility. In this case, Dutton suggests: "The writing is intended to look as though Mr. Fry is a physicist struggling to make clear the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. Of course, he's just an English professor showing off."
Mass culture now attracts the most bizarre theorizing. When moviemakers changed James Bond's brand of vodka, Aaron Jaffe of the University of Louisville wrote that this "carries a metaphorical chain of deterritorialized signifiers, repackaged up and down a paradigmatic axis of associations."
We can classify much of this prose as pomo-babble (a word first used, I think, by John Leo in U.S. News & World Report). In pomo-babble, being incoherent isn't enough. The best pomo-babble requires a high level of jargon density. One word or two won't get you there. You need four key words in any major sentence. In pomo-babble it's appropriate to praise, for instance, a transgressive challenge to the valorization of hegemonic narrativity.
In recent years leftist academics have been enraptured by Empire, a 500-page anti-globalization book by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, published in 2000. Empire collects all possible criticisms of free trade and wraps them in prose like this: "In the logic of colonialist representations, the construction of a separate colonized other and the segregation of identity and alterity turns out paradoxically to be at once absolute and extremely intimate."
To commit a sentence like that is to subtract from the sum of human knowledge. But it is not really exceptional, and its authors are much admired for their fresh version of leftist "thinking."
This kind of academic writing has some vehement institutional enemies (the Times Literary Supplement is especially articulate) and a multitude of individuals it infuriates. In some ways, though, it's catching. Pomo-babble exhibits strong elements of paranoia, and so (sometimes) do its critics. That may be why they often depict bad prose as a plot by academics. Brian Martin, an Australian professor, invented the phrase "secret passwords at the gate of knowledge" and explained: "Jargon serves to police the boundaries of disciplines and specialities." It's like a toll collected from those crossing intellectual borders.
But conspiracy theory takes us only so far. We know that many outside academe, even some people who could never be accused of careerism, are devoted to precisely the same suffocating crit-speak.
No one knows quite how it arose, and no one knows what to do about it. Certainly there are now thousands of humanities professors (and their students) who believe polysyllabic gobbledygook is the best way to write, maybe the only way. You can't persuade them otherwise.
Crimes against language are not victimless, of course. Academic life has become a publish and perish world: Professors publish, literacy perishes. Students perish too. If they are unlucky (or not warned soon enough), they can find themselves oppressed by teachers who have no interest in demonstrating anything except their own command of an esoteric language and a few Parisian ideas.
What to do? The students fake it, usually. They pretend, for as long as necessary, to take it seriously. Northrop Frye used to say that if you don't care about being educated, a little animal cunning will get you a degree. My guess is that students confronted with pomo-babble go into animal-cunning mode, get an acceptable mark by hiding their opinions, and then find better teachers or escape to the outside world, somewhere beyond critical theory and cultural studies, somewhere that respects reality and art. All it requires is endurance, a light heart, and the ability to believe that this, too, shall pass.
robert.fulford@utoronto.ca; www.robertfulford.com
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Cruddy
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Most academics are gibbering loons hiding from the real world.
Hardly news.
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mrmitchell
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It's a great way to cover up the fact that you're an idiot.
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Buck Birdseed
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Khoon Ki Pyasi Dayan (1988)
Nov 2000
time: 05:29
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The thing is, several of the terms used can, in the the correct context, be exceedingly meaningful. In the bit quoted from Empire, which lies closest to my own field of knowledge, every term used is usefully distinct- "identity" etc. are part of the sociologist vocabulary and entire books have been written on each single term. Sure, it's easy enough to explain each concept in a few words, but when you're writing for professionals there's absolutely no need. I suspect each of these sentences are part of a wider text explaining each part carefully too, so I wouldn't judge them before I've read the entire relevant paragraph.
That doesn't defend the sloppy construction of the sentences, nor the general pseudy pretension some of them radiate, but I personally believe that complex language does have a point and a place in writing.
(Also, although I'm uncertain of the quality of these examples, sometimes truly groundbreaking texts can be enveloped in utterly incomprehensible babble. Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, by many considered the most important work of 20th-century philosophy, is written in a way not even other philosophers understand and makes sense only when explained in a Wittgensteinian tradition. Wittgenstein, being a bit of a bastard, quite intentionally wrote it this way to stop the riff-raff trying to interpret his work.)
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st_swithin
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10069
Nov 2002
time: 05:29
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Nuke you ler war.
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Az
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MACEDONIA - It's the name of the sovereign country to the north of Greece
Apr 2000
time: 07:29
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quote:
Originally posted by Buck Birdseed
The thing is, several of the terms used can, in the the correct context, be exceedingly meaningful. In the bit quoted from Empire, which lies closest to my own field of knowledge, every term used is usefully distinct- "identity" etc. are part of the sociologist vocabulary and entire books have been written on each single term. Sure, it's easy enough to explain each concept in a few words, but when you're writing for professionals there's absolutely no need. I suspect each of these sentences are part of a wider text explaining each part carefully too, so I wouldn't judge them before I've read the entire relevant paragraph.
That doesn't defend the sloppy construction of the sentences, nor the general pseudy pretension some of them radiate, but I personally believe that complex language does have a point and a place in writing.
(Also, although I'm uncertain of the quality of these examples, sometimes truly groundbreaking texts can be enveloped in utterly incomprehensible babble. Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, by many considered the most important work of 20th-century philosophy, is written in a way not even other philosophers understand and makes sense only when explained in a Wittgensteinian tradition. Wittgenstein, being a bit of a bastard, quite intentionally wrote it this way to stop the riff-raff trying to interpret his work.) |
did you just say riff-raff?
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Giant_Squid
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Fun Guy from Yuggoth
Jan 1970
time: 00:29
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Me use small words! Me good! Me no like when use big words!
quote:
"In the logic of colonialist representations, the construction of a separate colonized other and the segregation of identity and alterity turns out paradoxically to be at once absolute and extremely intimate." |
So how would you want to express something like that? "When one country takes over another country, and then some people are thinking about it, then when they try to think about it as separate and then at the same time try to prevent themselves from thinking of it as different and the same at the same time, which they do sometimes, then that turns out, which is kind of weird when you think about it, to be at the same time something considered important aside from anything else as well as something considered as very close and connected to the people trying to think about it" That's the best paraphrase I can come up with, and it's twice as long and three times as incomprehensible. But anyone who understands the words can tell that there is in fact a basic idea the first sentence is trying to communicate and which it communicates effectively, and that if there's a quicker and easier way to communicate it, it would take someone much smarter than either I or the original author to do.
Language exists to communicate ideas. If there's an idea that a first-grader couldn't understand, chances are you can't express it in language that a first-grader could understand. If there's an extremely complex idea, then it's probably best expressed in extremely complex language. It's not like these professors are taking the sentence "The dog went to the park" and expressing it as "A canine quadruped ambulated towards the urban recreational facility". You can't use the word "thingy" for "conceptualization" without a loss in meaning. Does that make it difficult for an uneducated person to understand the theories of decolonialism? Maybe. That's another good reason to be educated.
Look at this guy writing his little article. He uses the term "polysyllabic" to refer to this long words he doesn't like. Well now, he could have just used "long". "Polysyllabic"'s got five syllables, Greek derivation, and is incomprehensible to someone with less than a tenth grade or so education. "Long" has none of these disadvantages. Why does he use it, then? Because it expresses his point in a clearer sense, and because his target audience is one that knows enough to be able to read college-level writing. Well, if I'm a decolonialism theorist person, I'm going to want to express my point as clearly as possible, and my target audience is going to be one that knows what decolonialism is. Similarly, this writer makes up a new term (or copies it from John Leo, who proly made it up in a similar article) - "po-mo babble". This addition of a new term is the creation of a jargon restricted to people complaining about too much jargon - a four syllable term with a limited audience base when he could have just said "long words". But he wanted to be clear and to coin a term which exactly described what he was talking about. He's just not willing to let others do the same thing.
Also interesting is the contrast between science and the humanities he puts up. He's not just attacking the humanities' use of big words - I get the feeling he's mostly attacking their very existence as a real discipline. He says he has no problem with quantum physicists using long terms - apparently he doesn't mind using something like "radioactivity" rather than "little invisible ray thingies that kill you" - because he recognizes that radioactivity is something that exists and so you've got to have a word for it or things get kinda awkward. But he denies that "non-construction" exists, or that academics have the right to name it and avoid some sort of awkwardness like "a state where you're not constructing stuff". If he doesn't believe in the existence or importance of "non-construction", that's fine, but in that case his problem is people making up concepts, not people using big words.
If I had to pick a problem with academic writing, it would be enforced rigidity and lifelessness. No using first or second person, no digressions, no use of tones whatsoever - just an effort to guarantee a complete separation between the idea and anything human in the mind of whoever's writing or reading about it, which of course means that person's deluding themselves. For example, in a lab report, instead of writing in the experiment history "I tested the DNA" (which I did), it's got to be "The DNA was tested by the experimenter."
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st_swithin
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10069
Nov 2002
time: 05:29
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Programmers call it 'obfuscation'.
It's like writing comments is to programming as using a turn signal in your car is everywhere in the US except for Los Angeles.
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st_swithin
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10069
Nov 2002
time: 05:29
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Agathon, you honour me by quoting me at my most eloquent, and I daresay, befitting best.
BTW I have those principles in equation form, if you'd like.
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Buck Birdseed
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Khoon Ki Pyasi Dayan (1988)
Nov 2000
time: 05:29
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Agathon, don't mix up simplicity with transparency. A longer work may not have the same beauty, may often be more superficial and certainly doesn't make you pay attention as much, but it will certainly be easier to approach- if Wittgenstein had gone through the trouble of carefully explaining each point to the layman in a work of three times the length, it would still retain the content while being paedagogically much more smart. It would lack that Wittgensteinian flair, I suppose, but philosophers should spend as much time spreading their views as actually concieving of them. Philosophy isn't art!
I much prefer the approach of Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper- Write out your ideas in full in an almost textbook way, use literary analogies, funny anecdotes, examples, answer your critics, go through the trouble of explaining everything. It makes the reading experience so much more pleasant.
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Agathon
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Leafs 4TW!! - CPA
Dec 2002
time: 00:29
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quote:
Originally posted by Buck Birdseed
Agathon, don't mix up simplicity with transparency. A longer work may not have the same beauty, may often be more superficial and certainly doesn't make you pay attention as much, but it will certainly be easier to approach- if Wittgenstein had gone through the trouble of carefully explaining each point to the layman in a work of three times the length, it would still retain the content while being paedagogically much more smart. It would lack that Wittgensteinian flair, I suppose, but philosophers should spend as much time spreading their views as actually concieving of them. Philosophy isn't art! |
But he painstakingly defines all his concepts in the Tractatus. Admittedly, it's a long time since I read it cover to cover, but it is far more accessible than the Investigations.
quote:
I much prefer the approach of Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper- Write out your ideas in full in an almost textbook way, use literary analogies, funny anecdotes, examples, answer your critics, go through the trouble of explaining everything. It makes the reading experience so much more pleasant. |
If you want clarity I don't think you could do better than Hume; but for art Plato has no peer.
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19-07-2003 16:51
A good article on how humanities professors try to encrease the value of their work, to make it comparable with the value of their peers in the technological and scientific fields. They try to create and force new complicated words. While it is impossible to refrain from creating new terms in science, since new complex processes are discovered, in humanities, disciplines that describe things that are part of, or close to everyday life, such new terms and overcomplication is indeed nothing but showing off, and adding a fake sense of value to a subject. 
).
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