Miles,
This just makes me think that you either haven't read what I wrote or that you wish to ignore what I wrote in order to make points. It gets to be fruitless when I have to go back to previous posts and simply excerpt quotes. I have given (much too) lengthy descriptions on the need for technical language, on the need for language that approaches the preciseness of a Fregean artificial language, on the need for theoretical models, on the need for expertise and excellence.
In short Miles, it depends on your audience. But who your audience is and why you aim to be understood by this audience and not another also depends on you. And if your audience is only CEOs and you are explaining to them that arcana of how to twist the law to bust unions, then I will say you have made the wrong choice of audience and of technical subject and probably the wrong choice of profession.
Not only do you have to take into account your audience, when "framing" your message, you also have to ask: "Why do you have the audience you have in the first place? What interests are you serving when you write this or that? What and whose interests does your audience serve? How was your audience constructed in the first place?
Why are you privileged to stand on this podium, to have this publication publish your work, to have this book distributed?"
All of these questions are part of the answer to your question about when you use a "technical" lexicon or not. I take such questions and more to be part of an elementary _ethics of rhetoric_ required by any intellectual on the left. In short any writer or intellectual who is actually concerned with participating in movements that attempt to understand the problems of our world and attempt to promote democracy has a duty to use his or her privilege to ask such questions of her/himself. As I said before, I am not arguing that people shouldn't use technical language, "I am just arguing that one of our goals -- those of us who care about democracy and socialism -- should be to communicate and not obfuscate."
Now you think that I am setting up a priori rules of how and when to use technical language or not. Where in the world do you get such an idea? Not from me.
So let me repeat: You use the lexicon and rhetoric appropriate to your audience. If your audience are engineers or theoretical physicists then you use the lexicon and techniques appropriate to these groups.
If you are a Ph.D. candidate and your audience is University of Chicago economists then you use the lexicon and rhetoric appropriate to them. But I would also say in this case, as far as I am concerned, you are headed down the wrong road intellectually and morally. There is always a chance at redemption, Miles, but this particular "interpretive community" has blood on its hands. The obscurantism of economics of the Chicago boys only serves to justify and hide the blood on their hands. Further, if your audience is only University of Chicago intellectuals, and your aim is only to impress them, then my conclusion would be, we are not participating in the same conversation.
Or if your audience is only a gaggle of poststructuralists, post modernists, and post-marxists, and your goal is to impress them then I would say you have made your choice and you have a right to make that choice. But don't expect me or the people I care about to necessarily understand what you are talking about. You have chosen the audience you care about and maybe, elsewhere in your life you can choose another audience, but don't expect me to give you kudos for _that_ audience, and don't expect me to believe that you are saying anything that couldn't be said better in other ways and in a way that is both easier to understand and more descriptive of reality. And if in the course of trying to impress Paris intellectuals, you enter into a competition for who can distinguish himself the most, and if in that competition the one who "wins" the award of "alpha-star" is the one who impresses an audience with the most rhetorical pyrotechnics, then that is fine, you can play those games of priority and have fun at it.
Now nobody blames a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at some department specializing in logical positivism for producing and reproducing the lexicon and technical goop of her supperiors. A gal has to make a living after all, and in general it is a better life if you can get a job as a professor than it is working as a taxi driver. But don't try to sell me on the fact that in doing this you are striking a blow against hierarchy. The same goes for any other specialized lexicon, but especially the ones that don't provide light on their subjects. If you can conform to such jobs and also maintain your integrity, then you can divide your time between the dark and the light, the obscure and the clear. I know of many law professors who in their own way do just this.
I make quite a few assumptions that you may want to reject, but I want to make them explicit. I assume that people who are writing about physics or romantic poetry or classical Greek history can set me on a course of study where I will reach a level of expertise that will allow me to read and/or understand the most technical theories of of Quantum Mechanics (QM), the most esoteric of romantic poetry, and the toughest texts of classical literature. I also assume that both romantic poetry and classical Greek history can be talked and written about in the common tongue, without loosing depth of understanding for lack of "theoretical concepts." Of course maybe I will have to learn about prosody or about the difficulty of interpreting a word such as "pharmakon", but that is what I call learning. I do not assume the same for QM, but I do assume that many good scientists do not wish to hide their theoretical conclusions from the public at large and will attempt to communicate their insights to those of us who do not understand the technicalities.
When it comes to reading Derrida, nobody I know has been able to help me to decode him. As far as I can see he wrote the way he wrote as part of an intellectual star system that rewarded obscurantism. There are many such institutional systems that reward certain kinds of writing. Not all of them are set-up to be anti-democratic but many of them are. The ones that are not for the sake of excellence or the increase of knowledge, but for the sake of the exclusivity of a secular priesthood, I am against. In this respect I don't find that our period of history is essentially different from previous periods. Intellectuals have always set up institutions to guard their knowledge and to make it seem more esoteric than it actually is. Why should we expect it to be any different in a commodified class system?
It is my experience there is nothing about history, the class system, the division of labor, racism, gender division, economics, law, international relations, and literature, that cannot in principle be discussed in the vernacular language... and that there are no specialized theories of these areas of human life. So far in my life no one has shown me otherwise. I am open to be shown otherwise. Given my experience I think it is the best assumption to assume that these non-theoretical areas of the world can be understood by everyone who cares and that they are not areas of specialized expertise. Therefore I come to the tentative conclusion that people who talk and write about these areas of life as if they are exclusive areas of expertise are doing so for reasons other than communication. My experiences in life may have led me to the wrong conclusions or these assumptions may be misguided, but nobody as of yet has shown me otherwise.
In general I agree with Justin's very moderate defense of me above and you can take portions of answers as my answer to the question of when technical language is best to use. I even agree with Ravi's distinctions from what he calls my "critique of obscurantism" position. When using technical language or presenting a theoretical explanation of any kind, you have to take into account your audience and that is that. It is perhaps that the pleasure of Derrida or Zizek is the pleasure of the cross-word puzzle or the acrostic. Well and good. These games can be cute and a form of entertainment, but don't make them any bigger than they are and don't tell me that the aim is to undermine "systems of domination" or "the violence of the word".
But don't mistake the star system or institutional hierarchy in any field of endeavor with the pursuit and spread of knowledge (a very old fashion notion) or with giving people the tools of thought to help them understand the world.
What you refuse to answer Miles is whether you think that these forms pf elitism exists at all. You refuse to answer the question of whether you think that exclusive and esoteric knowledge and information, when guarded by a priesthood of intellectuals, is something that is worth fighting against, especially when the intellectual priesthood mainly exists to petrify democratic education or facilitate the dominance of various ruling classes.
Jerry Monaco
Miles wrote: You can't really believe this. This means that all specialized scientific research and theory in fields like medicine, physics, biology, geology, statistics, and chemistry has to be chucked out. Writing every text "to make it readable for the largest number of people" would bring scientific progress to a screeching halt. Is this your intent? If not--and this is the important question that you and Jerry keep sidestepping--what are the conditions under which it is okay to use specialized language? And how on earth can these conditions be identified a priori?