[lbo-talk] Prose Style, was Time to Get Religion

[Tayssir John Gabbour]

By the way, I hope I didn't sound too glib; I realize there's many
things aimed at highly technical audiences which just look like
impenetrable notation, despite being honestly written. But in those
situations, there are people who try explaining them to less
sophisticated audiences.

Take the Nobel-winning physicist Feynman. People love his _Lectures on
Physics_ because it makes people feel like they can understand it if
they devote the time. When discussing something actually hard for
humans to grasp, Feynman says things like, "If you think you
understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics."

In programming, it's legitimate to criticize someone for writing
something impenetrable code. A well-known quote is: "Programs must be
written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to
execute."

With Zizek, I watched the documentary "Zizek!" and even he criticized
Lacan (I believe it was Lacan) for the mystery and false profundity
with which he spoke on TV. I vaguely recall that Zizek mentioned the
pressure on him to just keep saying something, to maintain the image
of the hyperkinetic intellectual. (Please correct me if I'm wrong -- I
stopped watching after a while, as it was kinda depressing.)

Certainly, a given critic might arrogantly underestimate the ease of
something. But in general, I do think unreadability it's a legitimate
criticism to seriously consider. It may point to a lack of good
introductions and popularizations.

Tayssir

On 12/7/06, Tayssir John Gabbour <tayssir.john at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On 12/6/06, Miles Jackson <cqmv at pdx.edu> wrote:
> > 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.
>
> Books on chess theory often seem pretty clear to me. Authors like Mark
> Dvoretsky, Nimzowitsch, Kotov, Znosko-Borovsky, etc, write openly, and
> I don't even find chess particularly exciting. (I don't have the
> interest in memorizing openings or calculating long variations.)
>
> So if you start out reading Nimzowitsch's _My System_, an early
> introduction to hypermodern theory, he uses all sorts of metaphors
> like, "When a merchant sees his business is not succeeding, he does
> well to liquidate it, so as to invest the proceedings in a more
> promising one."