Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena.

JUST BEING DIFFICULT? ACADEMIC WRITING IN THE PUBLIC ARENA

Ed. Jonathan Culler and Kevin lamb. Stanford University Press, 2003.

The 1990s were challenging years for the humanities. At the beginning of the decade, a cadre of senior literature professors established the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, declaring its mission to "uphold broad conceptions of literature, rather than narrow, highly politicized ones often encountered today." Quickly launching its own annual conference and journal, the ALSC sought to establish at the outset a difficult balancing act: providing a space for an older generation trained in New Criticism whose interests ranged from an analysis of "Goethe's love of the Greeks" to a "close reading of the full Spanish tide of Don Quixote," while also appealing to graduate students who might be interested in practicing a kind of "theoretically informed formalism" (Kachka 1999).

At the end of the 1990s, University of Chicago law professor Martha Nussbaum published a scathing critique of Judith Butler's work on gender. Arguing that the sole test for a theory's value should lie in its expression of practical political commitments, like those of Andrea Dworkin or Catharine MacKinnon, Nussbaum concluded that Butlers' seemingly" untethered theories collude "with evil" (Nussbaum 3). They also, according to Nussbaum, did not amount to much when "stated clearly and succinctly"; Butler's prose, she argues, "'bullies the reader into granting that, since one cannot figure out what is going on, there must be something significant going on'" (qtd. in Leo 16).

Linking the founding members of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics to a professor of law, other than the latter's occasional foray into the study of literature, is a common concern with what they perceive to be the utter opacity of much academic writing. This concern has not been limited in academic circles. Instead, the media popularized such concerns when the academic journal Philosophy and Literature began issuing "prizes" to intellectuals who had written, according to its website, "the most stylistically lamentable passages ... in scholarly books and articles" each year.

The thirteen contributors to Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena respond to these charges by taking up the theoretical and philosophical issues involved in academic writing. As Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb point out in their introduction, the disparate essays share a common concern in that they are "less about proving innocence than contesting the terms of the allegations, exposing to interrogation the history, conventions, and assumptions underlying the designation 'bad writing' and its almost inarguable efficacy." Just Being Difficult? thus places the issue of linguistic transparency in a wider context by considering the relationships among difficult writing, radical teaching and thought, and gender and race.

The development in the 1960s of what we now refer to as "theory"--with, as the editors note, "its odd cachet of both political radicalism and intellectual abstraction"--rendered literary studies more specialized. Theory, as Gregg Lambert has pointed out, provided humanities scholars with a technical vocabulary at a time when higher education was dominated by scientific study and invention. Indeed, the ascendancy of the hard sciences following the conclusion of the World War II rendered the liberal arts less relevant. The advent of theory, whether celebrated or mourned, had the "practical effect of making the knowledge of literature ... more of an object of expertise--a correlative of scientific specialization--than a discipline based on subjective and aesthetic form of judgment" (Lambert 28-9).

Those who insist on clarity and transparency as the norm in humanistic discourse question the legitimacy of increasing specialization. Such a position is premised on a view of the humanities as a cultural heritage transmitted from generation to generation. This assumption manifests itself both in the appeals to "literature itself," against various forms of commentary about literature, and in the demands for the transparent communication of ideas. As Rey Chow points out, "Disciplines built on opaque, impenetrable languages that are admittedly incomprehensible to the layperson, but that are based in science and technology (such as medicine, computer technology, engineering, and biochemical research), or in law, seem not to have this continual stigma attached to their obviously specialized linguistic usages." Indeed, the insistence that specialized language does not belong in the humanities--summed up in the derisive comment by the editor of Philosophy and Literature that one bad writing finalist was acting "'as though' he were a physicist when he is 'just an English professor'"--demonstrates that more is at stake in debates over academic writing than simple considerations of grammar and style.

Disputation over "jargon," then, is never about specialized language alone. Instead, critics of jargon perceive it to be a barrier to a kind of universal right to humanistic knowledge. "Humanists should not have a technical language," Chow writes in summarizing the antitheory position, "because the humanities are not about anything technical; they are about general human things." If the humanities are a cultural heritage enshrining universal human truths to which all should have equal access, then, so this line of think ing goes, specialized language is antithetical to literary study; it is, therefore, incumbent on the literary critic to be comprehensible to the general populace. The modes of intellectual abstraction that theorists have adopted and the complicated syntax they employ in their writings have led to various interrelated and at times contradictory charges, including intellectual vacuity, elitism, and collusion with repressive forces.

The first charge--that theorists "write obscurely in order to sound profound when in fact they have nothing to say"--is grounded primarily in critiques of grammar and style. Critics of theoretically inflected prose tend to highlight run-on sentences and subject-verb disagreements as if theorists had a monopoly on bad grammar. Many of the contributors to Just Being Difficult? point out the fallacy of conflating critical theory (or what the contributors generally refer to as difficult writing) with stylistic and grammatical deficiency (or bad writing). That is not to say that the two never overlap. As Margaret Ferguson, Michael Warner, and Peter Brooks point out in their respective essays, literary study, like most disciplines, has its share of poorly conceived, inadequately researched, and sloppily written articles. But these are not bad, as Brooks points out, because they are "'doing theory.'" They are simply poorly written.

When critics of literary study, both within and outside the academy; cede the argument over grammar, taking theorists at their word that what they write qualifies as difficult rather than bad, they advance a somewhat contradictory charge: theorists may very well be doing important work but, because their ideas are articulated in a specialized manner, they are inherently elitist and not in keeping with the spirit of the humanities as a cultural heritage. Indeed, those arguing for linguistic transparency often insist that they do not object to the content of what is said but how it is said. To place emphasis on the means by which ideas are expressed is, however, to link rather than uncouple content and its expression. To claim that certain modes of expression are more correct than others is to circumscribe other ways of knowing "truth" beyond those configured notions that particular modes of expression are used to convey. In other words, as Jonathan Culler observes, complaints about obscurity and unintelligibility are "generally complaints about a philosophical mode: a mode of thought one finds uncongenial, concerns of which one doesn't see the pertinence, so that the writing seems pointless and pretentious in its flaunting of specialized language." Hence the frequent appeal by some scholars for a return to the study of literature itself, which is seen as more democratic, than the study of theories about literature. Such appeals, of course, are hardly new. They have recurred in various historical moments in the last 150 years--in the humanist desire to save literature from philological and historical literary scholarship that characterized the early years of the English discipline; in the turn to New Criticism, with its emphasis on direct contact with texts, against contextualization, as a response to the positivistic literary history that preceded it; in the current pleas to turn away from contemporary theory and back toward the text itself. One of the essential differences, however, between the earlier pleas for a return to literature and the arguments against theory today is that critical theory makes socially, culturally, and politically interventionist claims.

Those who reject theory, the contributors to the volume assert, do not simply fear that it leads to the devaluation of a text's aesthetic properties. Antitheorists often imagine the loss of disciplinary cohesion. David Palumbo-Liu in his essay rightly calls attention to the sense of "spiritual loss, a loss of kindred community" on the part of many in the humanities. They fear that various discursive communities organized according to political interest have replaced a general and democratic community of professional discourse; theorists are seen not only as spoiling the purity of English studies through the importation of critical vocabularies suitable to other disciplines (e.g., philosophy, film) but as analyzing literature within particular social, political, or ideological contexts (e.g., multiculturalism, sex, gender) separate from literature itself.

The commitment on the part of theorists to focusing on the political and ideological aspects of literature has emerged coeval with an increase in the number of literary critics from the ranks of the traditionally excluded. John McCumber points out that the assumptions behind clarity and transparency are inadequate to "the experiences of women and minorities"--those, as he terms them, "newly speaking bodies of the third millennium"--for whom the politicization of literary studies has been an enabling force. In recent years, Michael Berube and others have called attention to the ways in which race, gender, and age factor into debates on theory: racially mixed junior scholars, and increasingly women, working on topics informed by critical theory come up against older, primarily white males, who were never subjected to the publishing expectations that currently dominate the academy (see Berube). There are, of course, any number of variations to this schema. The point is that what may appear as a simple request for clarity has social implications. An example provided by Gayatti Spivak, in her somewhat digressive interview with Stuart Murray in Just Being Difficult?, helps to illustrate this point. In a recent work, Spivak coined the neologism geo-graphy. She notes that she was "ridiculed" by someone "absolutely unsympathetic to the fact that ... I was asking the reader ... to understand that I was talking about the fact that when we look at a map, we are looking at stuff that has been--literally!--written, written on, an imagined surface of the earth. My argument was about the disappearance of the aboriginal."

The ridicule heaped on Spivak may have to do with the perception of bad grammar or needless obscurity. But behind these complaints there is often a charge of political ineffectiveness. Difficult writing, as Nussbaum charges of Butler's work, is politically irresponsible because under the guise of "claim[ing] to be furthering justice through their work they take on obligations that go beyond their own profession." Because theorists do not write in a way that is immediately accessible to everyone, they are perceived to be part of a cultural elite or an academic star system.

As Judith Butler has noted, however, it is highly significant that those scholars who are singled out as writers of unintelligible prose have been limited to "scholars on the left whose work focuses on topics like sexuality, race, nationalism, and the workings of capitalism" (Butler 15). Charges of cultural elitism against scholars on the left are successful because they tend to play on American anti-intellectualism. Antitheorists claim that jargon produces an aura of authority--nonsense masquerading as thought--whereby scholars appear to have radical insights into such issues as gender, race, or sexuality. Thus, antitheorists contend that if specialized language is revealed to be nothing more than pretentious jargon, then the elitist ideas that challenge commonsensical notions can be shown to be invalid. When grammatical, stylistic, and conceptual difficulty "is seen as elitist, inimical to the ideal of democracy," Culler and Lamb write, "a disinclination to try to understand anything complicated can readily cloak itself in self-righteousness."

This tendency toward self-righteousness (though it is important to add, as the contributors do not, that self-righteousness manifests itself on both sides of the debate), intertwined with anti-intellectualism, manifests itself not only in the refusals to work through abstract ideas and syntactically-challenging prose but also in the charge that theorists collude with the repressive forces they claim to critique by emphasizing philosophical reflection at the expense of practical political commitments. Either theorists are, in Rey Chows words, "portrayed by antitheory moralists more or less as enemies of the people, whose sufferings they appear not to be attempting to resolve" or their work is represented, as Michael Warner observes, as "a hollow substitute for political engagement, no matter how radical the claims."

Such criticism, however, does not engage with the premise of the materiality of language. Antitheorists see language solely as a mode of communication. "Language exists," Chow observes in glossing this view, "only in order to be a conduit, whose function is to transmit information about the world, its events, and its problems but never to convey anything about language itself." Poststructuralist theory, however, attempts to challenge commonsense assumptions about language and "make apparent the role of language in relaying, producing, and structuring everyday phenomena understood as reality." Consequently, theory may at times distort and deform language--in, for example, Spivak's neologism geo-graphy--"to render discernible the contours of language itself."

In an op-ed piece in The New York Times after it was reported that she was a recipient of one of Philosophy and Literature's bad writing awards, Judith Butler writes, "No doubt, scholars in the humanities should be able to clarify how their work informs and illuminates everyday life. Equally, however, such scholars are obliged to question common sense, interrogate its tacit presumptions and provoke new ways of looking at a familiar world." As she points out, what passes for common sense in one era becomes utterly unacceptable in another--the ownership of slaves or the denial of women's right to vote are only two such examples. Common sense is often simply an extension of prevailing ideology that can only be undermined or destabilized through linguistic defamiliarization. Since language plays a significant role in making our world, to defamiliarize commonsense assumptions is, at times, to distort and deform language itself as a means of challenging the thought that lies behind linguistic expression.

While Just Being Difficult. is promoted as a book whose contributors will both "inform and deepen" an ongoing discussion, the contributors themselves largely convey the sense that they really do not believe a debate is taking place--though many go through the rhetorical moves as if it were. For the most part, the essays are dense, ranging from analyses of Hume's writing style to the theories of key members of the Frankfurt School. This is, of course, perfectly suitable--and entirely welcome, even thrilling--for an audience that already agrees with the political imperative of difficult, challenging prose and the grounding of such writing in a philosophical tradition. But if this is the audience, then we are no longer talking about an exchange of ideas about language and the extent of its role in shaping the world in which we live.

WORKS CITED

Berube, M. (1998). The Employment of English: Theory, Jobs, and the Future. New York: New York University Press.

Butler, J. (1999). "A 'Bad Writer' Bites Back," New York Times 20 March.

Garber, M. (2001). Academic Instincts. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Kachka, B. (1999). "On Closer Reading". Salon.com. www.salon.com/books/it/1999/11/17/litconference.

Lambert, G. (2001). Report to the Academy (Re: The New Conflict of the Faculties). Aurora, CO: Davies Group Publishers.

Nussbaum, M (1999). "Martha C. Nussbaum and Her Critics: An Exchange" New Republic Vol. 220, Issue 16, April 19, pages 43-55.

--. qtd. in John Leo (1999). "Tower of Pomobabble." U. S. News & World Report 15 March, p. 16.