> That said, I want to join Carrol in a rejection of the demand for
> "clear writing". The clarity of a text is not a product of the text;
> rather, clarity is a product of people in a given social context who
> share the same background of knowledge and interest and then use the
> text in their ongoing interactions. Thus a computer programming text
> is not clear to me at all, but it could be a clear text in the culture
> of computer programmers. A chess book using algebraic notation may
> be a fascinating topic of discussion for me and ravi (/Life and games
> of M. Tal /rocks!), but it's just gibberish to people who don't
> participate in the chess culture. In sum: you can't say a text is
> "unnecessarily obscure" until you participate meaningfully in the
> culture that created it.
If you're talking about low level debugging or how to solve partial differentials you need a specialized vocabulary.
If you're talking about social justice, you need to use words everyone can understand. You need to use words that everyone can understand because if everyone does not participate in creating social justice -- which is a never-ending and a common project -- then you will not get it.
The obscurity of prose in the humanities rose as jobs got scarcer. It was a way to distinguish yourself and lay claim to a certain amount of intellectual capital.
I can go back to ANY literary criticism book written before 1970 and figure out pretty quickly whether the writer has something to say or whether it's bunk. This becomes impossible starting in the late seventies with a lot of "critical" writing.
Joanna