Reign of Bullsh*t: On Academic Writing
Even those who criticize academic writing styles often accept them as the inevitable result of high intellectual ability and vast learning; they only ask of these high flying minds that they would occasionally sweep down and grace the masses with something their ignorance can handle. I’m writing to contest this assumption, to empower, to inform, and to aid the intellectually curious in making informed decisions about what texts are worth grappling with and which are careerist puffery.
To begin, a definition. Our topic is academic obscurantism, which I define as: “The deliberate use of needlessly difficult language in academia to make ideas seem deeper and more important while making criticism of those ideas as difficult as possible.”
It’s hard to discuss whether academic obscurantism exists or not, or to what extent it does or doesn’t exist, because many academics deflect this public discussion in a few predictable ways. I’ve tried to anticipate and deflect a few of these deflections.
“The work is for specialists not the general public, people shouldn’t expect to be able to jump into conversations they don’t have the prior knowledge for,”
This is fair to an extent, but it’s not the issue, or at least not the issue I’m looking at. The question of whether a paper or book presumes background knowledge, differs from the question of whether it is written as clearly as it could be, which is also separate from the question of whether it was deliberately not written as clearly as it could have been.
“What, so now everything has to be written at an 8th grade level?”
This one conveniently avoids the question of whether the world would benefit from the whole of human knowledge being available to 8th graders. It also ignores that there is a continent of real estate between what folks are criticizing and what 8th graders are expected to read. But even if literal 8th graders aren’t your target audience, if you can translate: “Transactible specie, or rather, commodified, fungible, fluid forms of low viscosity state power, with their hyper-motile commoditive schema, determine, indeed, over-determine; the habitus onto which sentient subjects may endeavor to map the emergent quality of structures, articulations, possibilities and modalities defining the phenomenological present; on which background, social ontogeny/ontology is exercised and eternally (re)constructed,” into: “cash rules everything around me,” why not do so? When did universal access to knowledge become something professional teachers were opposed to? Again, this may not always be a reasonable goal given the difficulties of knowledge production, but shouldn’t it be acknowledged as a positive wherever and whenever, it can be achieved?
Anybody is free to write for whatever audience they want, however they want. If somebody wants to write a 10,000 page book on Klingon literary conventions, in Klingon, they’re free to do so. But the whole premise of public funding and pubic support for academic research is that the work being done is some good to society, that it plays a role in making society better. So shouldn’t we all agree that, while balancing all the different considerations at play, the more accessible research is, the better?
Perhaps my favorite deflection comes when academic prose is critiqued on the premise that marginalized people, particularly poor marginalized people, would be more likely to read it if it were written more accessibly. In these cases, it’s common to deflect criticism by accusing the critic of doubting the intelligence of the poor and the marginalized. What fascinates me about this one is the scale of arrogance required to frame a critique of your writing style as a slur against the intellectual ability of the general reading public. It’s one thing to argue that your prose isn’t actually that difficult; but to argue that as a matter of their honor, readers should show their mettle by rising to meet its challenge veers into comedy. Imagine a documentary filmmaker being told that their film misrepresents the facts and responding “How dare you imply that the people who witnessed this event are too stupid to see how accurate my film is!” It takes for granted that the way any given academic writes can’t possibly be the problem, and that if there is a problem, it must belong to potential readers. This effectively elevates academics into givers of sacred script whose words are inviolable and beyond the reproach of mere mortals. It also ignores that reading is labor, that it requires effort, and that to outline the additional burden bad writing imposes on the already overburdened is not a slur against their intelligence, but an acknowledgment of reality. If you don’t care about your work having the broadest use for the widest range of people, or if you don’t think it important enough for its reach to matter, it is more honorable and honest to say that your concerns stop at the outer walls of the ivory tower. Better a cloistered scribbler than a false friend to the world’s oppressed in service to preserving your own ego.
There’s no use pretending this criticism gets lobbed at all researchers equally. As also gets pointed out, natural science researchers rarely get this criticism. This fails to consider that natural scientists, in many cases, study a world that is legitimately foreign to the world most of us directly experience, whether they’re studying the internal world of the cell or the fluctuations of quantum space-time, and many use a language that most people don’t speak at all beyond the 6th grade level: Math.
Humanists and social scientists, on the other hand, make sense of human experience. Many do so as part of explicit political projects, projects that get their fire and sense of urgency from the lived experiences and resistance of oppressed people, including, even particularly, folks who will never see the inside of a graduate seminar. This urgency can then translate into job tenure, book deals and speaking fees for those whose scholarly work claims to be rooted in these movements. Why shouldn’t work claiming to theorize the suffering of the poor, working class or oppressed be readily accessible to them if it possibly can be? Is it even possible to theorize human experience in a way that can’t be rendered understandably to the people having the experience?
The word “possible,” returns us to the specialized language specialists use when speaking to specialists. If the language being critiqued is just the necessary shorthand of the field, it’s fair to ask if outsiders have any right to demand inclusion on their own terms. Those who try to deflect criticism of academic writing tend to talk as though all the specialists were gathered together on one side, with critics all on the outside trying to break in. The reality is, that this is a discussion among academics as well and has been for decades.
Consider this from a February 1999 article in The New York Times entitled: “When Ideas Get Lost in Bad Writing,”: “One of the country's most prominent literary critics, [Edward] Said concedes that his own writing hasn't always been easily accessible, but he said in an interview: ''I moved away from that sort of thing years ago, because I feel myself that it's terribly important as an intellectual to communicate as immediately and forcefully as possible.” ''At some point critics and writers become parodies of themselves.''
When Said offered this thought, well-known feminist theorist Judith Butler had just “won,” the inaugural “Bad Writing Contest,” held by a New Zealand journal called “Philosophy and Literature,” and the passage that gained her this honor was also quoted in the Times piece:
“The move from the structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”
The New York Times Piece came out exactly five days after The New Republic had published a piece by Martha Nussbaum, another well-known feminist theorist, in which Nussbaum excoriated Butler’s prose style:
“Why does Butler prefer to write in this teasing, exasperating way? The style is certainly not unprecedented. Some precincts of the continental philosophical tradition, though surely not all of them, have an unfortunate tendency to regard the philosopher as a star who fascinates, and frequently by obscurity, rather than as an arguer among equals. When ideas are stated clearly, after all, they may be detached from their author: one can take them away and pursue them on one’s own. When they remain mysterious (indeed, when they are not quite asserted), one remains dependent on the originating authority. The thinker is heeded only for his or her turgid charisma. One hangs in suspense, eager for the next move. “
Nussbaum’s essay is thorough on this and other points and worth a read in its entirety. Butler doesn’t appear to have ever responded to Nussbaum directly, but she did respond to the New York Times piece in an essay where she seemed to conflate powerful, revolutionary insights with prose that’s hard to understand:
“If common sense sometimes preserves the social status quo, and that status quo sometimes treats unjust social hierarchies as natural, it makes good sense on such occasions to find ways of challenging common sense. Language that takes up this challenge can help point the way to a more socially just world.”
There is, of course, no reason for academics and intellectuals to sit around rehashing common sense, but that’s not really the discussion. Butler seems to link “common sense,” to “common language,” and “common language,” to clear writing, when these just don’t go together. People use clear language in uncommon ways all the time, they also use common, even colloquial language to express ideas that unsettle received notions. Ideas and the language used to express them are closely linked, but they aren’t identical. You can express banalities in dense, tortuous prose; and you can outline transgressive, subversive notions in terms an 8th grader could grasp. On the other hand, if one is going to argue that difficult language in and of itself is a form of transgression, it seems somebody should explain and articulate precisely what, about which forms of difficult prose, makes those forms transgressive and how: because we can’t seriously be arguing that the average apartment lease is transgressive or holds latent liberatory potential simply because it is written so that the average signer would have a hard time understanding it. In fact, in much of the legal field, difficult language is deliberately used as a tool of power to help keep the masses ignorant and preserve the power of a privileged elite.1
In this line of thought, I’ve also heard it said that “grappling,” with a text can be useful. I won’t deny this, but I must again ask, is it the prose that is grappled with or the ideas in it? These work closely together, but I think it’s important they be acknowledged as entangled but distinct. I leave open the door to the liberating power of prose that is difficult to understand, not just at certain key points where a writer might find it useful to use an uncommon turn of phrase or an unusual word or a common word in an unusual way, but from beginning to end, even across hundreds of pages. I simply ask for evidence that such a writing style has served to help rather than hinder political engagement and action. If spurring political action isn’t the scholar’s goal in writing, then in what sense does such language work against the oppression being endlessly diagnosed? It can be argued that an academic’s job is not to prescribe political programs but to create useful knowledge, but then, useful to whom? A small community of specialists? Why should the rest of us fund that? It seems hard to argue that academics are to produce knowledge for its own sake then argue they don’t have an obligation to make it as available as possible since, otherwise, of what possible use can it be? Knowledge need not necessarily be useful in any immediate way, but even at its most abstract, to be useful it must be understood, or as understandable as it possibly can be.
I’ve focused on just a few theorists in the context of a period when this debate was, for whatever reason, much more front and center than it is now, the late winter and early spring of 1999. This same period saw literature professor Terry Eagleton say of Postcolonial theorists in a review of Gayatri Spivak’s “Critique of Postcolonial Reason,” that: “Post-colonial theorists are often to be found agonising about the gap between their own intellectual discourse and the natives of whom they speak; but the gap might look rather less awesome if they did not speak a discourse which most intellectuals, too, find unintelligible.”
Nor is this critique uniquely an artifact of the late 1990s. In 1959, pioneering sociologist C. Wright Mills criticized his colleagues: “Such lack of ready intelligibility, I believe, usually has little or nothing to do with the complexity of subject matter, and nothing at all with profundity of thought. It has to do almost entirely with certain confusions of the academic writer about his own status.” He goes on to observe that some academics not only fail to place a high value on clarity and accessibility, but that some actively look down on an academic who practices it as “a ‘mere literary man,’ or, worse still, “‘a mere journalist.”2
Let it then be considered established that this debate is not between so-called laypeople and academics. My goal is not to offer an argument from authority. But, now that we’ve established that academics have seen this problem among themselves, we can ask where it came from.
This I do in a subsequent essay, by investigating academia as a capitalist enterprise, to understand how capitalism influences what academics produce. But before we go, a parting word from Edward Said:
“There are too many available models of intelligible language all around us whose basic graspability and efficiency goes the whole range from difficult to comparatively simple, between the language of, say, Henry James and that of W E.B. DuBois. There is no need to employ preposterously outre and repellent idioms as a way of showing independence and originality. Humanism should be a form of disclosure, not of secrecy or religious illumination. Expertise as a distancing device has gotten out of control, especially in some academic forms of expression, to the extent that they have become antidemocratic and even anti-intellectual.”3
I wish to be perfectly clear, lest anyone thing this is some kind of attack on Judith Butler, particularly in light of her recent public writing on Trans rights; that Butler is only the central example of this piece because she happens to have both been widely cited as an example of a “Bad writer,” and because Nussbaum happens to have written such a penetrating critique of her work. Also, that Butler’s public writing bears, in my opinion, no relevance to the charges leveled here about her academic writing. It is quite possible to aggrandize yourself using convoluted writing only to then use that “turgid charisma,” to make grand pronouncements in popular publications.
Mills, C. Wright. “Appendix: Intellectual Craftsmanship.” Essay. In The Sociological Imagination, 217–18. New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 1959.
Said, Edward W. “The Return to Philology.” Essay. In Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 72–73. New York, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
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