perfidy

Long-time readers of this website, as well as those certain friends unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end of my endless beery grad-school screeds against the perils and pitfalls of academic jargon run amok, will know that I have it in for theory.

That is, I have it in for academics who use theory for its own sake without a hope or thought of applying their lovingly modelled ontological meanderings to actual evidence drawn from the world as lived by actual people. For me, the moment of apostasy came in a discussion of George Chauncy's book, "Gay New York," which used boatloads of primary evidence to describe how the idea of "gayness" as in homosexuality became defined in the early 20th century. It's a giant of modern cultural history, and a thought-provoking book for graduate students.

The ensuing discussion, which ranged far and wide, featured several theory-mad members of the class postulating at length about the political motivations of the titular gay New Yorkers who, in the bars and bathhouses of the city gave rise to gay culture and indeed, the very idea of gay as a separate thing from straight. "Oh, they were asserting their otherness." "Oh, they were subverting gender norms." "No, they were subverting sex norms." "No, they were finding alternative avenues to power in a world that systematically denied them voices."

All fine, all possible. But the the theorists never once suggested that men who went to bathhouses in New York in 1910 may just have been horny and maybe a little lonely sometimes too. Is it even possible to talk about why people have sex, without discussing desire? You bet, in crazy theory-land!

I bring this up to talk about the often-assumed connection between bad writing and bad thinking. Theorists are often totally impenetrable, with some offenders famously so (Judith Butler, Stanley Fish). Their critics assert that their tortured language suggests an unclarity of the underlying ideas.
Well, that's often true enough. The above example is a shining exemplar, and anybody who peer-reviews papers will come across howlingly bad writing that clearly is the product of a person who should probably give it up.

Many weblogs (Butterflies and Wheels, Critical Mass) spend time drawing out and justly ridiculing the densest examples of academic writing. Recently, Crooked Timber has joined in, and it's been fun. Bad writing sucks! But "Daniel" at CT has weighed in with a counterargument that I agree with entirely. I've always felt that theory and jargon are necessary (evils?), and all disciplines have to hash things out at that level, among themselves, before translating the results into English for lay people to see.

Daniel, who's an economy geek by training, writes:

typically, the formal language of a discipline (its jargon) has, among its other functions, the function of making it more difficult to make the characteristic mistakes of that discipline.

In economics, it’s politically convenient adding-up errors. In literary criticism …. well, I don’t know enough about criticism to be sure, but if I know properly the little bit I do know, one of the things that at least some of them are all about is careful analysis of the implicit assumptions of common language. And it strikes me as not on the face of it unreasonable to suggest that the most common mistake in this kind of analysis would be to make arguments which unconsciously rely on an unanalysed implicit assumption, and that one way to avoid this common mistake would be to adopt a formal use of language which made it more difficult to rely on the common meanings of words. So the defence of Bad Writing on the grounds that “some subjects can only be written about in unclear terms” actually encapsulates an important truth about the subject; it’s probably possible to write about the implicit assumptions of everyday terms without falling into exactly the same kind of mistake yourself, but it might take a hell of a guy to do it. Just as it is possible to write in a sensible and apolitical way about economic matters, but it takes a hell of a guy to do it.

Furthermore, it’s much more difficult to write economics in a manner comprehensible to laymen (and check by hand that you’re not making the mistakes) than to write in the mathematical style (when the maths basically does half of your checking for you). So the progress of the subject at anything like its current rate depends on the ability of professionals to use the formal language when talking to each other, and to only use Good Writing when expressing ideas to a non-specialist audience which have already been judged as worthy of the extra effort.

Read the whole thing-- it's worth it. Seen in this light, bad writing is not so automatically an indicator of cottonheaded thinking. Instead, it's a tool like many others that can often be put to bad ends. Moreover, when you drag the pale pointy-heads in the back room blinking into the sunlight, they're bound to come off badly. Out of context, academic writing has all the appeal of a wet towel on a cold day. But judgements have to be made in context, because, as they say in history, context is everything.