Carrol, In my former life I have often been hired to line edit technical papers, dissertations, etc.  I used to ghost write technical papers in science.  There have been times when I have cleaned up prose for philosophy papers and have been told, by the writer something to the effect, "If I write in this way, I will not be using the code words that are required for this kind of writing."  Perhaps it is because I don't believe that there is anything theoretical or profound about most literary theory, (for example) or psychological theory for that matter, that makes me suspicious of this kind of writing.  As I said, I don't think that technical language is wrong or bad.  It is often necessary.  But the burden of proof that obscure language is necessary is on those who use it, as the burden of proof that a theory is useful to understanding significant portions of the world is on those who propound such theories.  Not long back I read at the beginning of a paper the following, "While the grotesque body of Bakhtin's theory has been taken up in feminist discourse on both camp and the abject, particular political and potentially feminist dimensions of the grotesque body as a site of communal transformation and liberation have yet to be elucidated." from- Sherman, Yael. "Tracing the Carnival Spirit in Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Feminist Reworkings of the Grotesque." thirdspace 3/2 (March 2004): 89-107 (print), 25 pars. (web). [<a href="http://www.thirdspace.ca/articles/3_2_sherman.htm">http://www.thirdspace.ca/articles/3_2_sherman.htm</a>]. <a href="http://www.thirdspace.ca/articles/3_2_sherman.htm">Tracing the Carnival Spirit in Buffy the Vampire Slayer : Feminist Reworkings of the Grotesque </a>by Yael Sherman. I could come up with hundreds of such quotes.  I contend that such quotes do not indicate bad writing or good writing but simply that "jargon" is more valuable to the writer than clear writing.  Will you address this, please? I could also select hundreds of quotes from Zizek or Derrida that are no better.  Why?  Frankly, perhaps I am to blame because I actually want to read this stuff.  That I think that it is better for us who wish to communicate to model ourselves after a writer such as E. P. Thompson rather than Althusser (even though I am one of those people who find Althusser interesting) is not only a personal preference about style, but a belief that we on the left have a _self-imposed_ project to try to educate and reveal, and not engage in intellectual one-upping of "outsiders", of people not privileged with the time to read and write and time in academe.  Further, it is an historical fact that the use of the vernacular has often been opposed by rulers of all kinds, that obscurantism has protected the elite. The truth is I don't think that you address the specific issues I address.  It would be rather remarkable if a group of people in an institution did not use specialized and esoteric styles as part of their entry tickets into the group. In many fields the technical language is not only helpful but it is necessary.  It is neither necessary nor helpful in the case of the followers of Lacan and Derrida or for that matter in the case of the way that most academic departments that promote logical positivism.  I know how hard it is to write well, simply because I am not very good at it.  As I said I am not arguing that people shouldn't be inarticulate, 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 I think that clear writing is something good to aim for.  I don't think that it is necessarily easy to achieve.  But in order to achieve it you have to value it in the first place.  I think the evidence is that many of the followers of Derrida and many other literary "theorists" and philosophers simply don't value clear writing.  It is not that they try and fail, it is that trying is not at issue at all.   I began at the U of C studying physics.  Do you think that I "grudgingly admit" that technical language is necessary in this area.  Or that someone engaged in studying Thucydides and his relation to the Athenian _demos_ must write differently than someone engaged in studying Shelley and his relation to radical politics?  But a person who _tries_ to write like Josiah Ober will be better at explaining the Athenian polis than a person who aims to write like Foucault will ever be.  A person who _tries_ to write like E. P. Thompson or Richard Holmes will be better at explaining Shelley or Blake than a person who _tries_ to write like Derrida.  This is apart from whatever evaluation I have of the _world view_ of Ober, Thompson, Derrida, or Foucault.  And it is also apart from what ever evaluation I have about the talent of the individual person or whether the person is successful or not at what she aims at, when she tries to write one way or another. Yes, I believe that the technical concepts of Lacanian psychoanalysis were deliberately created for rather "cultish" reasons.  I also think that the Strauss-Cropsey notion of "irony", that philosophers never say what they are saying, that their is an "exoteric" reading of all texts and an "esoteric" reading of all texts, is another example of a deliberately created school, that was meant to test for "admit-able" people into an academic world-view.  Again, I don't think that this was necessarily a motive, or happened on purpose.  It is just the way these institutions function, the way they filter out the people that don't fit. Given the heat or our responses I feel the need to say, Comradely greetings for the solstice season, Jerry Monaco <div>On 12/7/06, Carrol Cox <<a href="mailto:cbcox@ilstu.edu">cbcox@ilstu.edu</a>> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">Most arguments about "obscurantism" have the hidden premise that people write obscurely ON PURPOSE. That they _could_ write clearly but do not because of improper motives. But no one has provided one iota of EVIDENCE for this. An attack on the morals of 10s of thousands of people (without evidence) is being disguised  as a discussion of rhetoric. There has been no recognition at all of how fucking hard it is to write well. There has been instead the arrogant assumption that the _critic_ has an infallible knowledge of what is clear and what isn't clear and that all the people who are not clear are trying on purpose to make the poor critic sweat. And there has been only the most grudging admission that there are hundreds of different genres of writing and that each one calls for different skills. The critics remind me of sports writers, who spend their lives nagging at various athletes for refusing to bat as well as they could if they weren't maliciously trying to spoil things for the fans. CArrol ___________________________________ <a href="http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk">http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk </a> </blockquote></div>