[lbo-talk] Re: No cock left behind

joanna 123hop at comcast.net
Fri Nov 18 18:22:36 PST 2005


Etienne wrote:


>Quite right. And the working class never read Capital either (or, for
>that matter, the Bible).
>
Marx wrote Capital for one audience and Communist Manifesto for another. Clearly, he saw the need to alter his style to suit his readers. The PoMo folks talked endlessly about their radicalism, but this radicalism never extended to question the conditions under which work in the academia was done nor did it extend to writing stuff that non academics could understand. So, what was that radicalism, other than a pose?


>I agree that clear writing is admirable.
>
It's not that it's admirable; it's that it is effective, courteous, and it forces you to get the bullshit out of your mind and out of your verbiage. It's good all around.


>However, I'm suspicious of this
>attack on complicated writing in the name of some imagined working class
>other who, poor simpleton that they are, couldn't possibly understand
>it. It strikes me as both lacking in historical perspective and, well,
>pretty damn patronising.
>
The attack is on obfuscation, on self-deception, on discourtesy. If your full time job is to decipher stuff like this, if you get paid for deciphering, well, whatever. But if your full time job is something else and you come to an intellectual to understand how you're being brainwashed, then you deserve better. Much better.

Joanna


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