> There is a awful lot of good stuff to be read out there, written by people
> who have sweated blood to try to make it as easy as possible for readers to
> learn what they know. Why should anyone waste their time reading your works
> if you haven't sweated blood to make your stuff as easy as possible to
> read? To not make the attempt at clarity is to show disrespect to your
> readers.
Such sweating is in vain. The question is, what is clarity, anyway? What's clear to me -- namely, that capitalism sucks, or that Adorno's concept of the constellation in science has a profound affinity to Stephen Jay Gould's recasting of evolution as mass contingency -- is by no means clear to everyone else. I have the advantage of six years of grad school training; few other people do (but if they did spend the time I did in the field, they'd likely come to similar conclusions; in that sense the humanities aren't any different from the sciences, knowledge is always a collective process).
Communicating ideas is one thing; but thinking them through, or creating new ones, is quite another. Sure, as a teacher, of course you need to make things clear at first, but true learning is the mastery of complexity, of thinking against the grain and transcending, laborious and painful as this might be, what we already know (or thought we knew). If you've ever read Richard Feynman's wonderful books, you'll discover that the true art of thinking is being simple *and* stupendously complex at the same time.
And Althusser *is* worth reading, because the notion of overdetermination was the first step the post-Sartrean Left took towards a post-1968 micropolitics. That opened the door for Irigaray, Kristeva, and in many ways Derrida and Foucault, who carried Althusser's notion forwards in more specialized fields (literary theory, sociology etc.).
-- Dennis