My point is simply this: the justification of urbane cosmopolitanist rhetoric as a sign of one's sensitivity to the world's complexity doesn't wash. Academics who do so are basically casting themselves as world-historical Hamlets, justifying their own pedantry by whining about the time being out of joint. "Clarity" in one's prose or linguistic register--even granting the ideological character of the term--doesn't mean stupidity or simplemindedness, or any kind of lack of sensitivity to complexity. Just the opposite. (And I take our eminent listowner and most of the list's members as examples of this.) Only those who have no faith in their audiences insist on their difficulty as a badge of honor--it keeps the wrong sort of readers away.
Christian
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`Clarity in one's prose or linguistic register--even granting the ideological character of the term--doesn't mean stupidity or simplemindedness, or any kind of lack of sensitivity to complexity...'
Why not re-consider what clarity does imply or carry with it?
If you go back and read say Shakespeare or Donne, you should notice much of what they wrote is not at all clear, but rather qualitatively different. They are not murky or obtuse. The difference between them and us, among many other things, is the multiplicity of potential meanings, analogies, and metaphors that are available to them in just about any word or turn of phrase. In other words, our language has been stripped of much of its breadth and depth. It was probably the first location of rationalism, systemization, simplification, and homogeneity. It's uniformity of spelling is just one example. We are not allowed to flex the meaning of a word by subtly altering its spelling---which Donne does incessantly. Through this and many other ways English has been rendered emotively, symbolically, and to a great extent cognitively neutral and insensitive to its own expressive qualities and drastically narrowed in its comprehension. We have had to shift those qualities into intonations, inflections, context, and obscenities, along with vast changes and extensions in vocabulary. We now have to make literal, what could just as easily be implied as an auxiliary and ancillary reading. And, the over all effect of these dessications and deprecations, is what we call clarity. But in fact, it is the form that results, by default, from a systemic disuse and atrophy. Whatever was the reason for insisting that language must be reduced so drastically that it could only render identical readings in the first place? Law? That is to say, the needs of tyranny?
[I am going to quote myself, because I worked hard on this sentence, and it seems a shame to waste it after just one use.]
While I could subscribe to the keep it simple theory of writing, and I concede it takes considerable skill to put an idea into words in as plain a manner as possible, that technique also limits what can be put into words, in some cases excluding entire realms of nuance, ambiguity, exception, and tonality that when combined and included, lend a kind of polyphony and harmonic depth as each thread in a contrapuntal arrangement is woven into a much broader texture of meaning than would be otherwise possible if writing were to remain imprisoned by the single strand of the plain song and declarative sentence.
Obviously, there are bad writers who use an obscure jargon and elliptical syntax. That's not what I am defending. Actually I am not interested in defending anybody. I am trying to point out that what passes for clarity, isn't particularly worth celebrating.
Consider this passage, which is from A History of Disability, which I am reading at the moment:
``...I have already insisted on the importance of naming. To name, designate, point out, is to make exist. Our natural assumption is to believe that language expresses the real, that it duplicates reality so that we can think about...and manipulate it, in our minds and in our conversations! But, quite the contrary, language operates, transforms, creates. In one sense, there is no other reality than language. The institution of language is the primary social institution in which all the others are inscribed and, indeed, where they originate. This is doubtless the gain---and the principle gain---from what is called structuralism, and this is where the great writers of our generation come together, beyond their diverse and contradictory analyses or options. Not that language has a life of its own: such an expression is not adequate to the circumstances and makes one think of a biological organism. Language is an _institution_, in the double sense that it is socially established and that it arranges the social fact...'' (Henri-Jacques Stiker, 153p)
So then, consider the movement of English away from its rich fullness of expression and nuance, its multiplicity of spellings, the subtle estrangement between its spoken and written forms, and toward what we have now in its place. Clarity. There is a kind of wretched wholesomeness to the word that bespeaks a certain institutionalized cleanliness of lye soap, hard water, and stiff brushes applied to the sweetened flesh of expression, and there to be scrubbed away with sufficient vigor to reach the bloodied and lifeless bone.
And this wretched wholesomeness is no mere preference for a particularly bland style of writing. Rather, it acts as an abominable censorship, exorcizing and effacing all manner of differences, elaborations, and extensions under the pretense of democratic equality, which is in fact, nothing more than an enforcement of homogeneous identity and sameness---which I might add has replaced the concept of toleration for difference. So, that instead of toleration in and enjoyment of variation, we have substituted mandatory homogeneity, and therefore escaped the need to develop more flexible and supple minds---not to mention a more sophisticated and articulated sense of judgement.
Chuck Grimes