"Bad Writing"

[Peter Kilander]

Today's (2/27/99) New York Times (accompanied by nice photo of a smiling Ms.
Butler):

When Ideas Get Lost in Bad Writing

By DINITIA SMITH

Ridiculing academic writing is becoming commonplace these days.


The journal Philosophy and Literature has taken to holding an annual Bad
Writing Contest, with prizes going to some of the country's top scholars.
Now there's even an Internet site that automatically creates a "post-modern"
essay, replete with bloated jargon and incomprehensible sentence structure,
every time someone logs onto it (www.cs.monash.edu.au/cgi-bin/postmodern).

"If one examines a post-dialectic conceptualist theory, one is faced with a
choice: either reject post-dialectic conceptualist theory or conclude that
culture is capable of truth," was a recent creation.

Yet the debate has taken a new twist recently with a decision by Edward
Said, the new president of the Modern Language Association, to use his first
official column in the association's newsletter to denounce bad writing. In
an essay on how science is growing at the expense of the humanities, he
accused literature departments of fostering incomprehensible writing and
factionalism, resulting even more in their "diminishment and incoherence."

It wasn't just Said's position as head of the largest and most influential
organization of literary scholars that caught people's attention, however:
Said himself is a progenitor of a new kind of literary and cultural
criticism that has frequently used difficult language.

One of the country's most prominent literary critics, Said concedes that his
own writing hasn't always been easily accessible, but he said in an
interview: "I moved away from that kind of thing many years ago, because I
feel myself that it's terribly important as an intellectual to communicate
as immediately and forcefully as possible.

"At some point critics and writers become parodies of themselves."

In 1996, Alan Sokal, a New York University physicist, tricked the journal
"Social Text" into publishing his parody of academic writing, filled with
nonsensical words and gibberish, as a serious article.

The argument over bad writing is more than a schoolyard spat. It is at the
heart of the continuing "culture wars," feeding conservative attacks on the
abandonment of traditional standards and subjects at universities. What's
more, it raises questions about the purpose of scholarship. What is the goal
of literary and cultural criticism? Who should the nation's educated elite
be talking to? Are scholars increasingly making themselves irrelevant?

The debate has energetic advocates on both sides.

In last week's issue of The New Republic, Martha Nussbaum, a professor of
law and ethics at the University of Chicago, wrote a long attack on Judith
Butler, a Berkeley professor and influential feminist theorist, for
"ponderous and obscure" writing.

Ms. Butler won first prize in this year's Bad Writing Contest with an essay
that said: "The insights into the contingent possibility of structure
inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony." Ms. Butler's writing, Ms.
Nussbaum charged, resorts to mystification in an effort to create "an aura
of importance."

"It is difficult to come to grips with Butler's ideas, because it is
difficult to figure out what they are," Ms. Nussbaum writes. "Hungry women
are not fed by this, battered women are not sheltered by it, raped women do
not find justice in it, gays and lesbians do not achieve legal protections
through it."

Ms. Butler declined comment.

But Jonathan Culler, a Cornell professor who edits the magazine Diacritics,
the original publisher of the "winning" essay by Ms. Butler, said of the
contest that it was "bad faith" to pick out a few sentences of a larger work
and ridicule them.

Joan Scott, a professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced
Study in Princeton, offered a more aggressive defense. When a scholar uses
difficult language, he or she is "not pretending to be a journalist" or to
be writing for the general public, Ms. Scott said. She argues that the
attack on academic writing is "a kind of anti-intellectualism that is
everywhere in the culture, a demand for things they already agree with."

Despite his recent criticisms, Said clearly has a soft spot for the writing
of some of his colleagues. He too said that difficult writing was sometimes
necessary in scholarly work. For example, Said said that Fredric Jameson, a
Duke professor who uses Marxist theory to study post-modernism and is a
two-time winner of the Bad Writing Contest, was "in his way a poet" whose
writing, though difficult, has a cumulative brilliance. When scholars
explore new areas, Said explained, they sometimes use language in new ways
"about which there is no consensus." He added that there was similarly no
consensus about the subjects they study either.

Homi Bhabha, a University of Chicago English professor who works on the
culture of post-colonial societies, is an example, Said said. Although he
called Bhabha an admired and gifted friend, he did say: "Writers like Bhabha
are looking for the occasion to work out ideas. There's something unfinished
about it."

Bhabha won second place in this year's Bad Writing Contest with an essay
that included the words: "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."

He responded to winning the bad writing prize with what his critics might
say was uncharacteristic brevity: "I'm trying not to write bad sentences,
particularly not ones that will be read in New Zealand," the home of Denis
Dutton, the editor of the journal that sponsors the contest.

Just why is there is so much of what some call "bad" or what others call
"demanding" writing?

Ms. Nussbaum says scholars are sometimes encouraged to write in obscure
language. "Graduate students in analytic philosophy often get the message
that if you write in a way that is accessible to nonspecialists, it means
you are going to hurt your career," she said.

Ralph Hexter, dean of humanities at the University of California at
Berkeley, who has written on difficult language in classics scholarship,
says that some scholarly language is the result of an effort to make
literary and cultural criticism "a human science." He said, "A more
scientific approach creates an expectation that there might be a scientific
vocabulary."

"If you define good writing as clarity, limpidity," he said, "most of this
will be by definition bad writing."

Both Hexter and Bhabha say that one reason academic writing is sometimes
hard to understand is that the work of the new generation of scholars is
heavily influenced by the Continental philosophers, Europeans like Sartre,
Hegel and Jacques Derrida, who are practitioners of difficult language
themselves. "The basic orientation of Anglo-American philosophy has been
very empirical," said Bhabha, who was born in India and trained at Oxford
University. But "South Asian and Continental traditions tend to be more
metaphoric and symbolic in their use of language."

Contemporary scholars, he added, are also "interested in the process of
language itself," that is, in the way in which words and sentence structure
can distort meaning to fit ideological or political agendas.

The current debate is as much about politics as it is about language. Dense,
difficult writing is most often associated with newer academic fields like
cultural studies, women's studies and "queer theory." These fields often
cast a critical eye on historical figures and received wisdoms, arguing that
our understanding of the "truth" is really a function of who holds power at
the moment.

Hexter says that an approach that opens Western values and history to attack
is discomfiting to many people. "One side of the culture wars thinks we
should read texts that ennoble us and show the strength of our
civilization," Hexter said. As Ms. Scott in Princeton argues, "Things that
are disturbing or critical or self-reflective are targets."

Conservative critics like Sanford Pinsker, editor of Academic Questions, the
journal of the National Association of Scholars, said that the subjects
being studied by the post-modernists "are hardly new."

"People used to discuss their disagreements in plain English," he said. But
now "you set up a whole new world of language and these people say they're
king or queen of it."

That's why Pinsker insists the bad writing contest is "a lot tougher than
the Oscars," adding, "There are just so many wonderful contributions by
people with tin ears for the sound of language and no capacity for clarity
of thinking."

Making fun of academic writing is part of a long tradition. As Hexter noted,
none other than Socrates himself was attacked for the difficulty of his
ideas. Even Aristophanes, in "The Clouds," Hexter said, "mocks Socrates for
his technical language."
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F*** yeah, Ms. Joan Scott! I couldn't have said it better.