[lbo-talk] Time to Get Religion

andie nachgeborenen andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com
Wed Dec 6 08:53:34 PST 2006



> >
> > The fetish for "clear speech" is yet another
> ideology. It assumes
> > that truth can be made easily transparent. But, as
> the Old Man said,
> > "There is no royal road to science, and only those
> who do not dread
> > the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a
> chance of gaining its
> > luminous summits."

This is odd from you, Doug, but it highlights a contradiction that contrasts your taste with your style. Your own prose is absolutely crystalline. You are one the clearest writers I have ever encountered who deals with difficult and technical subjects. I know how hard it is for me at least to write a tenth so clearly, so I cannot help but think that you have a tremendous dedication to making the truth transparent. at the same time you like obscurantists like Butler, who seem to be committed to making whatever they say so totally opaque that no one could tell whether it is true or not, assuming, what may not be the case, that they care whether it is true, since I believe some of these writers don't believe in truth.

Now the Old Man's a different kettle of fish. He could write with absolute transparency when he wanted to -- the Manifesto, to take one example, is not only a masterpiece of polemic, it is a masterpiece of windowpane prose. There is virtually no mistaking what he means at any point in the text. (Enough so that you can see all the places where he doesn't know what he means.) On the other hand, there are subjects he takes on -- the nature of commodities, and the fetishism of commodities in particular, where there is no way that anyone, including Old Chuck, has found to write thinks that are (a)true, (b) deep, and (c) clear all at once. Or value theory, maybe, or perhaps that is just because the fundamentalists have to keep twisting ideas expressed in prose that is fairly straightforward but either untrue or not very useful into interesting pretzel shapes to make them seem plausible.

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