I was taking to an editor today and he was bemoaning architectural lingo. He's expressed, at great length, his hatred of 'jargon' before. I agree - at least I would if he was talking about actual jargon, which *some* architetcure-speak is. I'm all for clarity in expressing ideas but sometimes concepts are just complicated. Rumsfeld's famoud 'known-unknowns', for example, makes perfect sense to me. That he's wrong about so very much doesn't mean that that argument is spurious.
Sometimes I think the desire for simple language relfelcts a desire for simple people. Many years ago I read the list's own Mr. Heartfield's booklet, 'Need and Desire in the Post-Material Economy', and it very nearly gave me a headache. Older and wiser as I now like to think I am, it reads perfectly well. Zizek, on the other hand, I still wonder about... If I didn't know better I'd think that Dirty Slavoj was who Martin Amis had in mind in 'The Infomation' - a book that makes people's noses bleed.
For the recond, I myself once spoke fluent art-speak but, alas, it's mostly gone the way of my knowedge of Irish.
Jason.
On 2007-03-29 01:08:31 +0100 Dennis Claxton <ddclaxton at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>
>> 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?
-- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.