[lbo-talk] clarity

Dennis Claxton ddclaxton at earthlink.net
Wed Mar 28 17:08:31 PDT 2007


I was opening the lbotalk archives and realized this list is almost ten years old. Checking to find out what the first month was, I found this post from the day after xmas 1998. Plus ça change:


>William S. Lear wrote:
>
> >Thus the jargon-infested defend themselves. Sure, sometimes you
> >have to use four syllable words, but Jameson's facile equation of
> >simple writing with shallow thinking, and opaque writing with deep
> >thinking is preposterous.
>
>I'm half with Fred here, and half against, which seems to be my default
>position on nearly everything. This is from his chapter on Adorno, and Fred
>emphasizes TW's view of high art using difficulty as an antidote to the
>products of the culture industry. Now Adorno could be a terrible snob and
>stick-in-the-mud, for sure. But on the other hand, FJ's explanation of
>"difficulty" is an attempt to explain it as something other than contrived
>obscurantism. Many - most? - of the canonical works of Western literature
>and music from the first half of this century aren't a walk in the woods,
>understanding-wise, whether we're talking about Stevens or Schonberg. Why
>is that? Certainly an element of it is trying to distance the work from
>what Alex Cockburn once called the garbage factory.
>
>Obscurity as a phony marker of seriousness sucks, of course, but on the
>other hand, the anti-obscurity crowd neglects the difficulties of, say,
>Marx's Capital, or Hegel's Phenomenology, or even Milton's Paradise Lost.
>Just how many examples are there of simple writing combined with deep
>thinking? Wordsworth's Lucy poems look simple on the surface but
>psychologically they're complex as hell. Just because something's hard to
>read doesn't mean it's profound, of course, but how many profound things
>are easy to read?
>
>Doug

http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/1998/1998-December/013072.html



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list