Bad Writing, Part 4

 

[In “Bad Writing, Part 4,” I’m presenting a statement by Philosophy and Literature editor Denis Dutton, the originator of the Bad Writing Contest, from the Wall Street Journal and two groups of readers’ letters to the editor of the New York Times in response to “When Ideas Get Lost in Bad Writing” by Dinitia Smith (see Part 3).

[Since all of these pieces refer to articles I‘ve posted in earlier sections of this series, I strongly recommend reading Parts 1, 2, and 3, published on 19, 22, and 25 May, before reading the new installment.

[One comment concerning the reposting below of the Times letters: you will see that there are two dates accompanying the transcriptions.  The first one, in the introductions to each letter, is the date of its publication in the newspaper.  The second date is the date embedded in the published letter, presumably the date it was written, postmarked, or received.  (“Bad Writing, Part 5” will contain more Times letters; they will be similarly annotated.)]

“LANGUAGE CRIMES”
by Denis Dutton

[“Language Crimes,” Denis Dutton’s account of the evolution of the Bad Writing Contest, ran in the Wall Street Journal of 5 February 1999, in Section W (“Weekend Journal”), page 11.  The publication came two months before the published announcement in Philosophy and Literature (April 1999) of the winners of the 1998 competition, but two months after the release of the contest results in December 1998.]

A lesson in how not to write, courtesy of the professoriate.

Pick up an academic book, and there’s no reason to expect the writing to be graceful or elegant. Many factors attract people to the scholarly life, but an appealing prose style was never a requirement for the job.

Having spent the past 23 years editing a scholarly journal, Philosophy and Literature, I have come to know many lucid and lively academic writers. But for every superb stylist there are a hundred whose writing is no better than adequate—or just plain awful.

While everyone moans (rightly) about the decline in student literacy, not enough attention has been given to deplorable writing among the professoriate. Things came to a head, for me, a few years ago when I opened a new book aptly called “The End of Education: Toward Posthumanism” [University of Minnesota Press, 1993; by William V. Spanos (1924-2017)]. It began:

“This book was instigated by the Harvard Core Curriculum Report in 1978 and was intended to respond to what I took to be an ominous educational reform initiative that, without naming it, would delegitimate the decisive, if spontaneous, disclosure of the complicity of liberal American institutions of higher learning with the state’s brutal conduct of the war in Vietnam (U.S. troops present: 1955-75] and the consequent call for opening the university to meet the demands by hitherto marginalized constituencies of American society for enfranchisement.”

[The “Harvard Core Curriculum Report” of 1978 (Henry Rosovsky [1927-2022; Dean of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences], “Report on the Core Curriculum,” Harvard University [Cambridge, MA], 15 February 1978) was a significant document that outlined a revised curriculum for Harvard College, focusing on a more structured and coherent general education experience. It emerged during a time of shifting educational priorities, where vocational training was gaining prominence over general education and called for a renewed emphasis on core curricula, highlighting the importance of general education in shaping students’ intellectual growth.

[The report sparked extensive discussions within Harvard and influenced curriculum reform efforts at other colleges and universities. It emphasized areas like communication skills, literature, history, and the sciences and led to a revitalization of core requirements and a common educational experience.]

This was written by a professor of English. He’s supposed to teach students how to write.

Fed up, I resolved to find out just how low the state of academic writing had sunk. I could use the Internet to solicit the most egregious examples of awkward, jargon-clogged academic prose from all over the English-speaking world. And so the annual Bad Writing Contest was born.

The rules were simple: Entries should be a sentence or two from an actual published scholarly book or journal article. No translations into English allowed, and the entries had to be nonironic: We could hardly admit parodies in a field where unintentional self-parody was so rampant.

Each year for four years now the contest has attracted around 70 entries. My co-editors at Philosophy and Literature and I are the judges, and the winner is announced in the journal.

No one denies the need for a specialized vocabulary in biochemistry or physics or in technical areas of the humanities like linguistics. But among literature professors who do what they now call “theory” — mostly inept philosophy applied to literature and culture—jargon has become the emperor’s clothing of choice.

Thus in “A Defense of Poetry[: Essays on the Occasion of Writing” (Stanford University Press, 1996)], English Prof. Paul Fry [b. 1944] writes: “It is the moment of non-construction, disclosing the absentation of actuality from the concept in part through its invitation to emphasize, in reading, the helplessness—rather than the will to power—of its fall into conceptuality.” If readers are baffled by a phrase like “disclosing the absentation of actuality,” they will imagine it’s due to their own ignorance. Much of what passes for theory in English departments depends on this kind of natural humility on the part of readers. The writing is intended to look as though Mr. Fry is a physicist struggling to make clear the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. Of course, he’s just an English professor showing off.

The vatic tone and phony technicality can also serve to elevate a trivial subject. Many English departments these days find it hard to fill classes where students are assigned Milton or Melville, and they are transforming themselves into departments of so-called cultural studies, where the students are offered the analysis of movies, television programs, and popular music. Thus, in a laughably convoluted book on the Nancy Kerrigan/Tonya Harding affair, we read in a typical sentence that “this melodrama parsed the transgressive hybridity of un-narratived representative bodies back into recognizable heterovisual modes.”

[On 6 January 1994, while practicing for the U.S. Figure Skating Championships, Olympic figure skater Nancy Kerrigan (b. 1969) was attacked by a man named John Stant [b. 1971?] in Detroit, Michigan. The attack was intended to injure Kerrigan, preventing her from competing. The attack was planned by Jeff Gillooly [b. 1969?] and Shawn Eckardt [b. 1967], both of whom were connected to skater Tonya Harding (b. 1970), Kerrigan’s main rival. Stant and his uncle, Derrick Smith [b. 1964/65?], were hired to carry out the attack.

[Kerrigan suffered a severe bruise on her lower right thigh and quadriceps tendon, resulting in swelling and a cut, which required her to walk with a limp, but no fracture. She missed the 1994 U.S. Championship, but recovered from her injury and competed in the 1994 Olympics, winning the silver medal. Harding received three years’ probation and was banned for life from amateur skating competition.]

The pretentiousness of the worst academic writing betrays it as a kind of intellectual kitsch, analogous to bad art that declares itself “profound” or “moving” not by displaying its own intrinsic value but by borrowing these values from elsewhere. Just as a cigar box is elevated by a Rembrandt painting, or a living room is dignified by sets of finely bound but unread books, so these kitsch theorists mimic the effects of rigor and profundity without actually doing serious intellectual work. Their jargon-laden prose always suggests but never delivers genuine insight. Here is this year’s winning sentence, by Berkeley Prof. Judith Butler [b. 1956; see Parts 1, 2, and 3], from an article in the journal Diacritics:

“The move from a 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 [of or pertaining to Louis Althusser (1918-90; French Marxist philosopher; see Part 2)] 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.” [Citation is in Part 1]

To ask what this means is to miss the point. This sentence beats readers into submission and instructs them that they are in the presence of a great and deep mind. Actual communication has nothing to do with it.

As a lifelong student of [Immanuel] Kant [1724-1804; German philosopher], I know that philosophy is not always well-written. But when Kant or Aristotle [384-322 BCE; Ancient Greek philosopher] or [Ludwig] Wittgenstein [1889-1951; Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language] are most obscure, it’s because they are honestly grappling with the most complex and difficult problems the human mind can encounter. How different from the desperate incantations of the Bad Writing Contest winners, who hope to persuade their readers not by argument but by obscurity that they too are the great minds of the age.

[Mr. Dutton teaches the philosophy of art at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand.  Winners of the Bad Writing Contest can be found at www.cybereditions.com/aldaily.  (This link apparently no longer works; try web.archive.org/web/19990508111036/http://www.cybereditions.com/aldaily/bwc.htm.)]

*  *  *  *
“ACADEMIC JARGON IS A COVER”
by Paul Hollander 

[Below are a selection of letter to the editors of the New York Times from two issues that followed the publication on 27 February 1999 of Dinitia Smith’s column “When Ideas Get Lost in Bad Writing” (Part 3).  As you’ll read, the responses vary from pro to con.

[The first group are from the issue of 3 March 1999, Sec. A: “Editorials/Letters.”  Some of the letter-writers, from all over the country, are other academics, some are not.]

To the Editor:

Re “When Ideas Get Lost in Bad Writing” (Arts & Ideas pages, Feb. 27): An obvious explanation for the current popularity of obscure, pretentious jargon in academic writing is the pursuit of self-aggrandizement. Those who specialize in fields whose importance is dubious and who wish to improve their self-image or professional reputations often fall back on esoteric, ponderous, pompous language that is inaccessible to ordinary human beings. Flaunting such a style is a way of hinting at hidden profundities and the insider’s arcane knowledge.

Two contemporary circumstances stimulate this unfortunate phenomenon. First is the overproduction of academics in fields like English, in which the search for being original or trendy can become desperate. Second is that convoluted language is helpful in hiding the meager or unoriginal content it seems to convey.

Amherst, Mass., Feb. 28, 1999

[The writer is a professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.]

*  *  *  *
“UGLY MAY BE BETTER”
by Timothy J. Clark 

[New York Times 3 March 1999, Sec. A: “Editorials/Letters”: “Academic Jargon Is a Cover.”]

To the Editor:

Regarding attacks on the “ponderous and obscure” prose style of academics like Judith Butler, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley (Arts & Ideas pages, Feb. 27): Bad writing – in the academy or elsewhere – comes in all shapes and sizes. Limpid sententiousness is often more poisonous than ordinary turgidity. Nice turns of phrase paraded self-consciously – look at me, writing like Henry James! – can make one pine for a few ugly, flailing but genuinely exploratory neologisms. Readers wishing to compile a “sottisier” of academic loftiness, House-manager moralisms and banalities trotted out as difficult truths should start by browsing the works of Ms. Butler’s critics.

[A sottisier is a borrowed French word for a compilation of silly or foolish things, like a collection of stupid sayings or writings. In the context of literature, it might refer to a compilation of banal or objectionable snippets of text from various authors. The word derives from sottise, which is French for ‘stupidity,’ ‘folly,’ ‘foolishness,’ ‘silliness,’ or ‘ineptitude.’ In turn, sottise comes from sot, which means ‘silly,’ ‘foolish,’ or ‘stupid’ as an adjective, and ‘fool’ or ‘imbecile’ as a noun.]

Berkeley, Calif., Feb. 28, 1999

[The writer is a professor of art history at the University of California at Berkeley.]

*  *  *  *
“NOT ANTI-INTELLECTUAL”
by Leslie Peters 

[From the New York Times of 3 March 1999, Sec. A: “Editorials/Letters”: “Academic Jargon Is a Cover.”]

To the Editor:

Re “When Ideas Get Lost in Bad Writing” (Arts & Ideas pages, Feb. 27): Confused academic writing is the product of confused academic thinking.

Perhaps that's why Joan Scott [b. 1941; see Parts 1 or 3], a professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, argues that the attack on academic writing is “a kind of anti-intellectualism that is everywhere in the culture.”

It's a huge leap in logic to interpret criticism of academic gibberish as a rejection of new, challenging ideas. On the contrary, there is evidence everywhere in the culture of interest in new ideas, but before they can be embraced, they must be understood. If ideas cannot or will not be understood, what does it matter whether they exist?

Gaithersburg, Md., Feb. 27, 1999 

[The writer is a family law attorney, specializing in estate planning and probate.]

*  *  *  *
“FISH WRAP LANGUAGE”
by Brian Brennan 

[Published in the New York Times on 3 March 1999, Sec. A: “Editorials/Letters”: “Academic Jargon Is a Cover.”]

To the Editor:

The debate about bad writing in the academy misses the point (Arts & Ideas pages, Feb. 27). Is it a surprise that academics are drawn to writing as confusing and amazing as William Faulkner’s “my mother is a fish” or Judith Butler’s “insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony” when our popular discourse contains gems like “I did not have sex with that woman” or “Read my lips: no new taxes”?

[The Faulkner (1897-1962) quotation “my mother is a fish” is from his 1930 novel As I Lay Dying. The Butler quotation is from her first place-winning sentence in the 1998 Bad Writing Contest; the full, 59-word sentence appears in all three foregoing parts of this Rick On Theater series, plus Dutton’s Wall Street Journal column above.

[The line “I did not have sex with that woman” is infamous for being used by Bill Clinton (b. 1946; 42nd President of the United States: 1993-2001) during a televised address on 26 January 1998 during the Monica Lewinsky scandal (January 1998-February 1999). While Clinton later admitted to “having sexual relations” with White House intern Lewinsky (b. 1973), the initial denial was a major part of the controversy and led to Clinton’s impeachment on 19 December 1998 (at which he was acquitted).

[“Read my lips: no new taxes” is a phrase spoken by American presidential candidate George H. W. Bush (1924-2018; 41st President of the United States: 1989-93) at the 1988 Republican National Convention in New Orleans as he accepted the nomination on 18 August. The pledge not to tax the American people further had been a consistent part of Bush’s 1988 election platform, but later hurt Bush politically. As president, Bush compromised with congressional Democrats to increase existing taxes. In the 1992 presidential election, Democrat Clinton cited the “no new taxes” pledge and questioned Bush’s trustworthiness. When Bush lost the election, observers suggested his failure to keep his 1988 promise the was the principal reason.]

Academics struggle to imbue language with meaning when it no longer has any; part of that meaning comes from its seeming complexity.

Rather than give in to the culture of the sound bite, most serious writers seek to rehabilitate a language that, though crystal-clear, has become valuable only as fish wrap.

Pittsburgh, Feb. 27, 1999

*  *  *  *
“WRITING WELL IS HARD”
by Ellen Willis 

[This letter ran in the New York Times of 6 March 1999, Sec. A: “Editorials/Letters.”]

To the Editor:

None of your March 3 [see above] letter writers on obscure academic prose acknowledged what is most obvious to me as a writer, a teacher of journalism and a former editor: expressing complex ideas in clear and accessible prose is a difficult task that few people can do well.

The assumption that academics write badly on purpose stems from the widespread cultural myth that anybody with something to say can be a writer. Like Joe DiMaggio [1914-99; Major League Baseball center fielder known as “Joltin’ Joe” and “the Yankee Clipper” who played his entire 13-year career with the New York Yankees; set the still-standing record for the longest hitting streak; considered one of the greatest baseball players of all time] catching a fly ball, good writers make their craft look easy; but that brilliant paragraph of social analysis that sounds as if it flowed directly from the writer's spontaneous perception to the page has likely taken hours, if not days, of hard work.

New York, March 3, 1999

[The writer is director of cultural reporting and criticism at New York University.]

*  *  *  *
“WRITING WELL IS HARD”
by Matthew R. Kerr 

[From the New York Times of 6 March 1999, Sec. A: “Editorials/Letters.”]

To the Editor:

As a doctoral student in history, I welcomed a Feb. 27 Arts & Ideas pages article documenting the rise of incomprehensible academic writing. Many academics do indeed risk making themselves irrelevant unless they learn to write in a way that is understandable to educated society. This does not mean, as Joan Scott of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton says, that professors should pretend to be journalists, but it does mean that they should obey the principles of clear writing.

Academics lament Americans’ lack of appreciation for subjects like history, politics and economics, but then write needlessly difficult monographs that do very little to encourage an average educated reader’s interest.

Athens, Ohio, March 2, 1999 

*  *  *  *
“WRITING WELL IS HARD”
by Harold Gotthelf 

[Published in the New York Times on 6 March 1999, Sec. A: “Editorials/Letters.”]

To the Editor:

Re “When Ideas Get Lost in Writing” (Arts & Ideas pages, Feb. 27): Roy Bhaskar [1944-2014; English philosopher of science; see Part 3], a professor who won first prize in the 1996 Bad Writing Contest, wrote “of the unholy trinity of Parmenidean/Platonic/Aristotelean provenance; of the Cartesian-Lockean-Humean-Kantian paradigm.” In Voltaire’s “Candide,” Mr. Bhaskar’s fictional ancestor, Dr. Pangloss (meaning “all-tongue”), is cited as a teacher of “metaphysico-theologo-cosmolo-nigology.”

[The quoted phrase above is part of a single sentence from Roy Bhaskar’s Plato Etc.: The Problems of Philosophy and Their Resolution (Verso, 1994). The entire sentence, which has a word-count of 152 words, was the winning entry in the 1996 Bad Writing Contest.

[I couldn’t interpret Gotthelf’s comment about a connection between Dr. Pangloss and Bhaskar; I assume the writer meant a metaphorical “fictional ancestor.”  Voltaire (1694-1778) was a French Enlightenment writer, philosopher, satirist, and historian; Candide (1759) is his best-known work, a novella that comments on, criticizes, and ridicules many events, thinkers, and philosophies of his time.]

After two centuries it seems as if some people still don't understand the difference between pretentious nonsense and effective academic writing.

Jersey City, Feb. 27, 1999

[The writer is a professor of English at New Jersey City University in Jersey City.

[The “pretentious nonsense” Gotthelf quotes above goes back at least another 160 years, to Polonius’s list of types of plays in Act 2, scene 2 of Hamlet: “tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral.”]

*  *  *  *

[In “Bad Writing, Part 1,” I made some remarks in my afterword about what I feel are some writing truths, and I quoted writing teacher William Zinsser (1922-2015) on one of his writing principles, “humanity.”  It’s the writer revealing who she or he really is in the prose—because, Zinsser admonishes us, “Writing is an intimate transaction between two people on paper” (On Writing Well).

[When I read Butler’s New York Times column in Part 1, I felt that even there she was speaking through a mask, playing a role she’d devised for herself years ago.  I felt that again reading Steve Fuller’s response to the Bad Writing Contest (Part 2).

[Martha Nussbaum’s essay in Part 2 was largely a different experience.  Even though she, too, was writing about philosophy, a difficult subject on which to write simply, I didn’t feel so much that she was falling into that William F. Buckley Syndrome I described in the Part 1 afterword.  She didn’t succumb at every turn to the temptation of using jargon and choosing the $50 word over the $5 one.  She let her humanity come through—a person talking to me.

[When I was in college, I’d characterize my prose style, when I thought about it later, as “pedantic.”  My writing always sounded pompous and pretentious—because that’s what I’d been led to believe college writing was supposed to be.  Most students thought that way.

[My first encounter with writing that meant something to me was my master’s thesis.  I’d been out of school for seven years by then, and I knew I wanted to write more conversationally—even though I was getting an MFA in acting, not a particularly literary field.  (The written thesis wasn’t the important part of the thesis work—the performance of the thesis role itself was.)  After all, the thesis would be put in the university library for posterity.  I’d be “on record” for anyone to read!

[I had no idea how to accomplish this, however.  I managed to find a way to get it done, though, and I sounded like a civilian rather than an actor talking shop to directors and other actors.  After that, I did little writing until I decided, after about another seven years, to go back to school—the Department of Performance Studies at New York University.

[It turned out that one of the main emphases at DPS when I was there was a clear, readable writing style.  All the faculty specifically stressed it in their classes.  All our written work was expected to be of publishable quality whether or not we intended to submit it to a journal.  My principal instructors all were editors or former editors of The Drama Review, one of the premier academic theater journals in the country, which was published out of the department.

[The constant emphasis on our writing by the faculty couldn’t help but make us conscious of our prose.  Every course had a term paper and three or four smaller papers during the semester.  I’d never done so much writing in my life to that point (not counting the army, with multiple reports daily—but all formulaic and codified). 

[I never received written comments on my papers concerning my writing, but I saw it clearly criticized on classmates' work from time to time.  One fellow student was dismissed from the program because his writing wasn’t up to departmental standards.

[Another student left the department because he wanted to be a playwright, and DPS isn’t a fine arts program—it was co-located with departments of the Tisch School of the Arts, but it was actually part of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at that time (though I believe it’s now in TSOA).  It’s academic methodology was modeled after the social sciences and it demanded writing to meet that scholarly standard.

[At the same time that I started at Performance Studies, I also began teaching writing to undergrads in the Expository Writing Program, teaching two sections of the twice-weekly Writing Workshop.  Having the responsibility to guide and train students in a field in which I never before considered myself even a practitioner, much less an expert, made me examine and question my own writing even more critically.

[Teachers like Richard Schechner (b. 1934) insisted on our avoiding Latin- and Greek-based words when an Anglo-Saxon one is available.  Why write utilize when there’s use?  Zinsser’s On Writing Well (1976) was the writing text for the required course Resources and Methods for the Study of Performance, which was partly a writing class for DPS grad students.

[As several respondents to the Bad Writing Contest results pointed out that some subjects, philosophy prominently among them, are difficult to write about.  They require, therefore, difficult language.  There’s probably some truth in that, but it becomes an excuse for not trying to speak to the non-philosopher—like me.

[I took a philosophy class in high school, and I remember that I really loved that course.  I felt as if I were learning not so much how to think, by why we think the ways we do.  Years later, when I was at the end of my college years, I took a course in basic psychology.  (I also took a college philosophy course.)  I decided that while psych explained how our brains worked, philosophy endeavored to explain how our minds worked. 

[I do, though, only remember the fundamental stuff about philosophy—the basics.  If you’re going to throw a lot of inflated language at me, I’ll be lost—and you’ll lose me.  What’s the good of that?

[To those who say that writers who make a difficult subject accessible to the non-specialist demean and diminish it, I invoke the late Carl Sagan (1934-96; astronomer, planetary scientist, and science communicator), who was chastised by some of his colleagues because his books and articles, and especially his well-received TV series Cosmos (1980-81), popularized science for the layman.  Far from opprobrium, I say that’s cause for praise and gratitude.

[At bottom, all writing is basically the same: an attempt to communicate something to someone.  The only practical differences between one type of writing and another are the purposes (the “something” to be communicated) and the audience (the “someone” for whom it’s intended).  But provocative writing goes beyond this preliminary task.  I used to explain to my students that writing is a kind of conversation in print.  One writer says something and another picks up the idea, or a part of it, and says something else, and so on.  That’s how new knowledge is created, I told them.

[But here’s the most important reason for writing clearly and accessibly:

Writing well is the same as thinking well.  Writing clearly is the same as thinking logically.

[Q.E.D.]

Bad Writing, Part 3

 

[This is the third installment of my series on “Bad Writing” in academia, presenting two responses to Philosophy and Literature’s contest and the writing of the first prize winner.  The first commentary is from a reporter for the New York Times and the second is from another academic in the field of philosophy. 

[This is Part 3 of the series; I recommend reading Part 1 and Part 2, published on 19 and 22 May, before reading the new installment.]

“WHEN IDEAS GET LOST IN BAD WRITING”
by Dinitia Smith

[Dinitia Smith’s column appeared in the New York Times on 27 February 1999 (sec. B [“Arts & Ideas”]), the same month as Martha Nussbaum’s critique of Butler’s writing in “Professor of Parody” (Part 2), about two months after Philosophy and Literature’s announcement of the Bad Writing Contest winners (Part 1), and a month before Judith Butler’s riposte, “A ‘Bad Writer’ Bites Back.” in the New York Times (Part 1).]

Attacks on Scholars Include a Barbed Contest With ‘Prizes’

Ridiculing academic writing is becoming commonplace these days.

The journal Philosophy and Literature has taken to holding an annual Bad Writing Contest, with prizes going to the work of some of the country’s top scholars. There is even an Internet site that automatically creates a “post-modern” essay, replete with bloated jargon and incomprehensible sentence structure, every time someone logs onto it (www.cs.monash.edu.au/cgi-bin /postmodern [this link longer works; it belonged to Monash University in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia]). (“If one examines a post-dialectic conceptualist theory, one is faced with a choice: either reject post-dialectic conceptualist theory or conclude that culture is capable of truth,” was a recent creation.)

Yet the debate has taken a new twist recently with a decision by Edward Said [1935-2003; Palestinian-American academic, literary critic, political activist, and a professor of literature at Columbia University], the new president of the Modern Language Association [1999-2003], to use his first official column in the association’s newsletter to denounce bad writing [I couldn’t find a source for the MLA Newsletter, online or print]. In an essay on how science is growing at the expense of the humanities, he accused literature departments of fostering incomprehensible writing and factionalism, resulting even more in their “diminishment and incoherence.”

It wasn’t just Mr. Said’s position as head of the largest and most influential organization of literary scholars that caught people’s attention, however: Mr. Said himself is a progenitor of a new kind of literary and cultural criticism that has frequently used difficult language.

One of the country’s most prominent literary critics, Mr. Said concedes that his own writing hasn’t always been easily accessible, but he said in an interview: “I moved away from that kind of thing many 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.”

Indeed, in 1996, Alan Sokal [b. 1955; American professor of mathematics at University College London and professor emeritus of physics at NYU; a letter by Sokal will be in a later installment], a New York University physicist, tricked the journal “Social Text” [academic journal that addresses a wide range of social and cultural phenomena; see my commentary on “Sokal Hoax,” in Steve Fuller’s essay below] into publishing his parody of academic writing, filled with nonsensical words and gibberish, as a serious article.

The argument over bad writing is more than a schoolyard spat. It is at the heart of the continuing “culture wars,” feeding conservative attacks on the abandonment of traditional standards and subjects at universities. What’s more, it raises questions about the purpose of scholarship. What is the goal of literary and cultural criticism? Who should the nation’s educated elite be talking to? Are scholars increasingly making themselves irrelevant?

The debate has energetic advocates on both sides. In last week’s issue of The New Republic, Martha Nussbaum, a professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago, wrote a long attack on Judith Butler [“Professor of Parody”], a Berkeley professor and influential feminist theorist, for “ponderous and obscure” writing. An essay by Ms. Butler that won first prize in this year’s Bad Writing Contest said in part: “The insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony.” Ms. Butler’s writing, Ms. Nussbaum charged, resorts to mystification in an effort to create “an aura of importance.”

“It is difficult to come to grips with Butler’s ideas, because it is difficult to figure out what they are,” Ms. Nussbaum writes. “Hungry women are not fed by this, battered women are not sheltered by it, raped women do not find justice in it, gays and lesbians do not achieve legal protections through it.”

Ms. Butler declined comment. But Jonathan Culler [b. 1944; literary critic], a Cornell professor [1977-present; now emeritus] who edits the magazine Diacritics [academic journal that covers literature and literary criticism], the original publisher of the “winning” essay by Ms. Butler [“Further Reflections on Conversations of Our Time”; see Part 1], said of the contest that it was “bad faith” to pick out a few sentences of a larger work and ridicule them.

Joan Scott [b. 1941; American historian of France with contributions in gender history], a professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton [now emerita], offered a more aggressive defense. When a scholar uses difficult language, he or she is “not pretending to be a journalist” or to be writing for the general public, Ms. Scott said. She argues that the attack on academic writing is “a kind of anti-intellectualism that is everywhere in the culture, a demand for things they already agree with.”

Despite his recent criticisms, Mr. Said clearly has a soft spot for the writing of some of his colleagues. He too said that difficult writing was sometimes necessary in scholarly work. For example, Mr. Said said that Fredric Jameson [1934-2024; literary critic, philosopher, and Marxist political theorist], a Duke professor who uses Marxist theory to study post-modernism and whose work has won the Bad Writing Contest twice, was “in his way a poet” whose writing, though difficult, has a cumulative brilliance. When scholars explore new areas, Mr. Said explained, they sometimes use language in new ways “about which there is no consensus.” He added that there was similarly no consensus about the subjects they study either.

Homi Bhabha [b. 1949; Indian scholar and critical theorist; won second place in the 1998 Bad Writing Contest; see Part 1], a University of Chicago English professor who works on the culture of post-colonial societies, is an example, Mr. Said said. Although he called Mr. Bhabha an admired and gifted friend, he did say: “Writers like Bhabha are looking for the occasion to work out ideas. There’s something unfinished about it.”

Mr. Bhabha’s work won second place in this year’s Bad Writing Contest with an essay that included the words: “If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to ‘normalize’ formally the disturbance of a discourse.”

He responded to winning the bad writing prize with what his critics might say was uncharacteristic brevity: “I’m trying not to write bad sentences, particularly not ones that will be read in New Zealand,” the home of Denis Dutton, the editor of the journal that sponsors the contest [see Part 1].

Just why is there is so much of what some call “bad” or what others call “demanding” writing?

Ms. Nussbaum says scholars are sometimes encouraged to write in obscure language. “Graduate students in analytic philosophy often get the message that if you write in a way that is accessible to nonspecialists, it means you are going to hurt your career,” she said.

Ralph Hexter [b. 1952; currently distinguished professor of classics and comparative literature at the University of California, Davis], dean of humanities at the University of California at Berkeley, who has written on difficult language in classics scholarship, says that some scholarly language is a result of an effort to make literary or cultural criticism “a human science.” He said, “A more scientific approach creates an expectation that there might be a scientific vocabulary.”

Mr. Hexter conceded that sometimes a scholar who uses difficult language makes it “harder to recognize good writing or bad writing.”

“If you define good writing as clarity, limpidity,” he said, “most of this will be by definition bad writing.”

Both Mr. Hexter and Mr. Bhabha say that one reason academic writing is sometimes hard to understand is that the work of the new generation of scholars is heavily influenced by the Continental philosophers, Europeans like Sartre, Hegel and Jacques Derrida, who are practitioners of difficult language themselves. “The basic orientation of Anglo-American philosophy has been very empirical,” said Mr. Bhabha, who was born in India and trained at Oxford University. But “South Asian and Continental traditions tend to be more metaphoric and symbolic in their use of language.”

•  Jean-Paul Sartre – 1905-80; French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic; considered a leading figure in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism

•  Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel – 1770-1831; German philosopher; proponent of 19th-century German idealism, which claims the true objects of knowledge are “ideal,” meaning mind-dependent, as opposed to material, as derived from Plato’s view of “Ideas”

•  Plato – b. ca. 428-423 BCE, died 348/347 BCE; ancient Greek philosopher who’s considered a foundational thinker in Western philosophy

•  Jacques Derrida – 1930-2004; French Algerian philosopher who developed the philosophy of deconstruction

Contemporary scholars, he added, are also “interested in the process of language itself,” that is, in the way in which words and sentence structure can distort meaning to fit ideological or political agendas.

Indeed, the current debate is as much about politics as it is about language. Dense, difficult writing is most often associated with newer academic fields like cultural studies, women’s studies and “queer theory.” These fields often cast a critical eye on historic figures and received wisdoms, arguing that our understanding of the “truth” is really a function of who holds power at the moment.

Mr. Hexter says that an approach that opens Western values and history to attack is discomfiting to many people. “One side of the culture wars thinks we should read texts that ennoble us and show the strength of our civilization,” Mr. Hexter said. As Ms. Scott in Princeton argues, “Things that are disturbing or critical or self-reflective are targets.”

Conservative critics like Sanford Pinsker [b. 1941; professor of English, Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, Pennsylvania], editor of Academic Questions, the journal of the National Association of Scholars [politically conservative education advocacy organization], said that the subjects being studied by the post-modernists “are hardly new.”

“People used to discuss their disagreements in plain English,” he said. But now “you set up a whole new world of language and these people say they’re king or queen of it.” That’s why Mr. Pinsker insists the bad writing contest is “a lot tougher than the Oscars,” adding, “There are just so many wonderful contributions by people with tin ears for the sound of language and no capacity for clarity of thinking.”

Of course, making fun of academic writing is part of a long tradition. As Mr. Hexter noted, none other than Socrates [ca. 470-399 BCE; Greek philosopher who is credited as the founder of Western philosophy] himself was attacked for the difficulty of his ideas. Even Aristophanes [ca. 446-ca. 386 BCE; Ancient Greek comic playwright], in “The Clouds,” [original 423 BCE, incomplete revision from 419-416 BCE survives] Mr. Hexter said, “mocks Socrates for his technical language.”

[Dinitia Smith was a reporter for the New York Times for 11 years (1995-2006).  She wrote for the Times about literature and intellectual trends and has also been a contributing editor at New York Magazine during that same period.  Smith’s writing has also appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, Simon and Schuster, Literary Hub, Kirkus Reviews, RealClear Books; she’s the author of short stories and five novels.  

[Smith is also an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, and a drama she wrote and directed, Passing Quietly Through, was chosen for the New York Film Festival in 1971.  She’s taught fiction writing at numerous institutions including Columbia University, Barnard College, the Center for Fiction, and to prison inmates through the Bard College Prison Initiative.]

*  *  *  *
“WHOSE BAD WRITING?”
by Steve Fuller 

[Steve Fuller’s response to the 1998 Bad Writing Contest, published in Philosophy and Literature 23.1 (April 1999): 374-78, was accompanied by an “Editor’s note.”  Denis Dutton stated, as he had in the announcement of the contest’s results (in the same issue as this essay), posted in Part 1 of this series: “Many of the debates generated by the Philosophy and Literature Bad Writing Contest have been carried out on the Internet.  One especially incisive critique that came our way was by Professor Steve Fuller.  We invited him to elaborate on his comments for our pages.” 

[Below is Fuller’s (b. 1959; American social philosopher in the field of science and technology studies; now Chair in Social Epistemology at the University of Warwick, England) reply.  (I don’t usually use footnotes on Rick On Theater, but there are a few embedded in Fuller’s text, and I have left them.)] 

What exactly is the point of Philosophy and Literature’s Bad Writing Contest? Undeniably it helps puncture inflated egos, as the nominees are usually big time academic players and the nominators obscure scribes. In that case, the awards would seem to be a welcomed bit of academic populism. However, I am disturbed by what those less charitable than I may regard as the irresponsible character of the contest, since the nominators are not compelled to advance a proper diagnosis of the nominated pieces of “bad writing.” Is it that their authors are literally talking gibberish, as was allegedly demonstrated in the Sokal Hoax, or are they simply in need of stricter editors and less indulgent audiences? These are two very different diagnoses, the blurring of which has also been characteristic of the more mischievous attacks launched on trendy forms of critical theory in the overlapping skirmishes known as the “culture wars,” the “canon wars,” and most recently the “science wars.” While I have no reason to believe that either the readers or editors of Philosophy and Literature wish to add fuel to these fires, the type of textual engagement fostered by the contest does not inspire confidence. Could it even be that the nominators shy away from attempting to explain the bad writing because they are not themselves certain what lies behind it but are afraid to reveal their own ignorance in the process?

[New York University physics professor Alan Sokal (see Dinitia Smith’s “When Ideas Get Lost in Bad Writing,” above) submitted an article entitled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” to the humanities journal Social Text, an academic journal of cultural studies, in 1996. This act initiated what’s come the be known as the Sokal Hoax or the Sokal Affair.

[The essay was a parody of postmodern thinking, containing just enough legitimate physics to satisfy a non-scientific eye, but liberally sprinkled with nonsense and absurdities so that a physics student would spot it instantly as a prank. At that time, however, Social Text didn’t use a peer review in selecting articles for publication, so no physicist saw the essay before it appeared in print.

[After the article was published (in the May 1996 Spring/Summer “Science Wars” issue [no. 46/47]), Sokal exposed the hoax via an essay in Lingua Franca (“A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies,” May/June 1996 [6.4]). He has said that he did it to expose the fuzzy thinking and lack of academic standards in certain cultural journals. The editors of Social Text printed a work on quantum physics—about which they knew nothing—without consulting even one physicist. Had they done so they would never have published Sokal’s essay.

[The editors of Social Text were awarded the 1996 Ig Nobel Prize for Literature for “eagerly publishing research that they could not understand, that the author said was meaningless, and which claimed that reality does not exist.” The award is given by Improbable Research, Inc., the publisher of the bimonthly magazine Annals of Improbable Research, which promotes its focus as “research that makes people LAUGH, then THINK.” (After the Sokal debacle, Social Text instituted the practice of submitting proposed articles for peer review before publication.)

[A considerable body of writing had been published since the Sokal Hoax, including several follow-ups by Sokal himself, often with various collaborators. For a more complete rundown of this still-resonating event, see the Wikipedia article, “Sokal affair.” (If you google “Alan Sokal,” “Sokal affair,” or “Sokal hoax,” you will discover hundreds of hits.)]

In what follows I concentrate on the 1998 winning entry because while I think it is legitimately regarded as bad writing, its selection raises some deeper issues that the contest might usefully address in the future. But to give the reader a sense of how I think about these things, I shall briefly deliver my own verdicts on the previous two years’ winners, sentences taken from Fredric Jameson’s Signatures of the Visible [Routledge, 1990] and Roy Bhaskar’s Plato, Etc.[: The Problems of Philosophy and Their Resolution (Verso, 1994)].

Jameson’s award winner began notoriously, “The visual is essentially pornographic” and then continues in a vaguely menacing manner.[1] I would say that this is “bad” only in a rather old-fashioned sense: the extent to which the visual is pornographic is never made entirely clear, and so the reader remains unsure whether the metaphor is meant to be deep or superficial. I say “old-fashioned” because academics inhabiting the postmodern condition should be used to reading “into” such a semantically underdetermined text as much or little depth as would enable them to continue to engage with what the author has to say—especially given that the sentence is the first in the book!

Bhaskar’s passage, which attempts to compress the entire history of Western philosophy into a sentence, is somewhat more difficult to evaluate.[2] However, it appears to be a clumsy instance of what [Theodor W.] Adorno [1903-69; German philosopher, musicologist, and social theorist] called “combinatorial writing,” namely, the attempt to capture the totality of a complex thought by beckoning the reader to reflect off its various parts.[3] Bhaskar [1944-2014; English philosopher of science, best known as initiator of critical realism (CR)] does not simply want to survey the history of Western thought in a hurry. Rather he aims to highlight the ways philosophers have resolved the age-old ambivalence between the actual and the real. For Bhaskar, the two must be kept separate in order to underwrite an “emancipatory epistemology” in which “the ought” (a.k.a. the real) transcends “the is” (a.k.a. the actual). The defense of this sort of writing, in Bhaskar’s case, is that it may be the only means at his disposal to philosophize radically—that is, conjure up in one thought that positivism, existentialism, and postmodernism are successive historical moments of the objectionable “actualist” philosophy. I am not necessarily persuaded by this view, but it has the virtue of problematizing the grammarian’s cliché that a sentence expresses a complete thought.

My concern with the phenomenon of bad writing extends more than fifteen years to the very beginning of my academic career. While writing my doctoral thesis under the watchful gaze of positivism’s last stand in American philosophy, I published several articles—including in this journal—that attempted to translate French poststructuralist thought into an idiom that analytic philosophers might appreciate.[4] In fact, it was this work, not my dissertation, that landed me my first academic appointment—as a “continental philosopher.” Back in those days, poststructuralism was said to be hard to fathom because of its “literary nihilism” that deliberately subverted the idea that reality could be faithfully represented in language, an assumption of normal prose conventions. To be sure, [Jacques] Derrida did not invent this stylistic strategy—not only is [Martin] Heidegger [1889-1976; German philosopher and Nazi Party member known for contributions to phenomenology, hermeneutics, and existentialism] the obvious precedent but also a version of this strategy, deployed to quite different effect, can be found in Adorno’s mature work. My view then (and now) is that as long as language remains the principal means by which philosophers probe the limits of reality, the taken-for-granted forms of expression that pass for clear writing will always be problematic. Of course, this point implies nothing in particular about how philosophers should allow it to be manifested in their texts.

Given the remarkable institutional robustness of poststructuralist thought in the United States over the last two decades, I have shifted my views on these matters in one important respect. I now believe that it is possible to identify “good” and “bad” versions of what might be called “philosophically difficult” writing—and to do so in a way that does not guarantee that the guru will always appear a better writer than the “gurued.” For example, I happen to believe that the winning entry for 1998’s Bad Writing Contest is, indeed, a bad version of philosophically difficult writing. Here is the passage:

The move from a 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 [of or pertaining to Louis Althusser (1918-90; French Marxist philosopher)] 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 writing is “bad” for the usual banal reasons. This one sentence could either have been broken down to two or three or, better still, compressed into one that actually brought the entire thought out at once. The author appears to be contrasting a classical Marxist view whereby social relations are mere reflections of relations of production with a more postmodern view whereby the two sorts of factors interact with each other in rather unpredictable ways. This, in turn, opens up the possibility that the power relations in society may be subverted by challenging an officially noneconomic realm like culture. I imagine that very few readers of Philosophy and Literature would want to gainsay this sentiment. True, it is neither the original nor the clearest expression of this thought, but it is also neither offensive nor nonsensical.

But why was this relatively pedestrian passage—as opposed to many others that suffer similarly—given such prominence in the competition? It is striking, for example, that no one has bothered to nominate a sentence or two from the Oxford philosopher Michael Dummett [1925-2011; English academic who made original contributions in the philosophies of mathematics, logic, language, and metaphysics] or one of his more eminent students. Here too one could find repetitious streams of colorless abstractions in search of punctuation. To be sure, no one would dream of accusing an adept in “analytic philosophy of language” of writing nonsense. But once the relevant hairs were split, one might reasonably wonder whether the sense made in a given Dummettian sentence was worth making. However, in the case of the winning passage, the social context is quite different. We are not talking about a representative of an obscure inbred elite. Rather, the offending author is such an icon among poststructuralist feminists that she has her own fanzine. Consequently, the contest invites consideration of how such bad writing can enchant such large numbers of intelligent people.

It would be interesting to learn both how a certain passage comes to be nominated for this contest, and then how it comes to win. If Judith Butler were not held in high esteem by a significant minority of academics, I doubt that the passage would have merited the scorn heaped upon it. But Butler enjoys just this status, and the question implicitly posed by her award is: why? There is a fairly straightforward sociological explanation that makes it appear that if she did not exist, some enterprising dissertation director would have had to invent her.[5] Over the last two decades, the major works of French poststructuralism have been translated into English. Because of their common Parisian provenance, they are easily taught as a relatively self-contained body of thought. Moreover, gender politics being what it is, even in ostensibly progressive academic cultures, there is a significant time lag between the translation of relevant works by male and female French poststructuralists (i.e., Luce Irigaray [b. 1930; Belgian-born French feminist, philosopher, linguist, psycholinguist, psychoanalyst, and cultural theorist], Helene Cixous [b. 1937; French writer, playwright, and literary critic], and even Julia Kristeva [b. 1941; Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, semiotician, psychoanalyst, feminist, and novelist]). This made it possible for someone well-versed in the French male poststructuralist literature to address, in an “original” way, a largely female anglophone audience on the deconstruction of gender even before the works by the relevant female poststructuralists were widely known: hence, Judith Butler’s significance on the anglophone academic scene.

If we dig a bit deeper, this explanation may also help illuminate the winning passage. Because poststructuralism leans so heavily on “strong” (i.e., revisionist) readings of classic works of philosophy and literature, many teachers find it not worth the trouble to introduce students to “straight” readings of, say, Plato or even Freud before launching into Derrida and Lacan. Most of Butler’s writing consists of strong readings of the poststructuralist masters, done in aid of keeping open possibilities for social and personal change that tend to be left unexplored, if not actively discouraged, by our cultural conventions. I believe that her project is a worthy one, especially given the strange mystiques that continue to surround sex and gender. However, her writing suffers stylistically—and perhaps more deeply—from its captivity to the body of work from which it was generated. Consequently, one is easily left with the impression that the only way to launch a strong political challenge to gender oppression is by “thinking through” the poststructuralist masters, which invariably means sounding like them. While this may have been Butler’s own route to self-discovery, I wish humanists were more sensitive to the distinction my positivist forebears made between the contexts of discovery and justification.

In short, why must Butler’s politically powerful sentiments continue to be expressed in the cramped academic discourse in which they were first articulated? One possible answer is insecurity: one fears that the sentiments might be trivialized or coopted if they are not expressed in forbidding language. Many of Butler’s sympathetic readers would probably agree. Less sympathetic readers might conclude that Butler has a rather superstitious belief in the anti-oppressive power of poststructuralist incantations. I happen to think her language is designed to do two things at once, neither of which is done effectively, yet the result of which is exciting to those who are unlikely to excel in either task themselves. One is the philosophical exercise of critiquing the foundations of poststructuralist thought, the other the political exercise of combating oppressive gender practices. The only rhetorical context in which the same piece of writing might conceivably perform both functions equally well is the unjust discrimination of academics who do not happen to be heterosexual males. To be sure, this is a far from trivial group but equally, a far from representative group of oppressed humanity. 

I hope to have illustrated how the Bad Writing Contest could be used as a springboard for “critique” in the original Enlightenment sense that currently lacks a home in academic journals. However else he may be criticized, Alan Sokal at least took off his joker’s mask long enough to explain what he thought was wrong with the writing he parodied in his Social Text article. Consequently, he exposed himself to charges that he did not understand the bad writing he simulated and scorned. Moreover, after his book-length consideration of the offending passages, Sokal had come to realize that what he originally advertised as errors of fact and conception were now better cast as profound philosophical disagreements over the nature of scientific knowledge.[6] Many of the more absurd French pronouncements turn out to be absurd only if social constructivism or cultural relativism is false. Perhaps a head count would quickly decide the matter in Sokal’s favor, but given that his fears were ignited by the popularity of the offending authors, he would be on rhetorically shaky ground suddenly appealing to the masses. In any case, by rendering his literary gesture accountable, Sokal has not been silenced but rather forced to articulate his views in increasingly civil and illuminating ways. Thus, it is possible to take the bitter with the sweet in the original eighteenth-century way: to indulge first in satire and engage then in argument.

[In 1997, Sokal and Jean Bricmont (b. 1952; Belgian theoretical physicist and philosopher of science) co-wrote Impostures intellectuelles ([Intellectual frauds] Paris: Odile Jacob, 1997) published in the US, with revisions, as Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science (New York: Picador, 1998) and in the U.K. as Intellectual Impostures (London: Profile, 1998). The book featured analysis of extracts from established intellectuals’ writings that Sokal and Bricmont claimed misused scientific terminology and closed with a critical summary of postmodernism in academia.]

In conclusion, I offer the following advice for improving the Bad Writing Contest. The nominators should append a brief critique (an upper word limit would be most advisable) that diagnoses the writing in question. The following issues are fair game to raise in such a critique:

1. The writing is gibberish because it confuses concepts and/or misuses facts—the corrected versions of which, à la Sokal, are provided by the nominator.

2. The writing exhibits a spurious novelty or excitement that reflects the peculiar relation in which the -author stands to his or her intended audience. My critique of 1998’s winning passage was an example of this.

3. The writing is needlessly obtuse as an accompanying streamlined translation easily shows. This was the strategy behind C. Wright Mills’s [1916-62; sociologist, and professor of sociology at Columbia University] deflation of Talcott Parsons’s [1902-79; sociologist] pretensions to “grand theory.”[7]

To be sure, the nominators may think twice before submitting an entry, but then one can never think too much.

Steve Fuller

University of Durham [England]

[Denis Dutton, the editor of Philosophy and Literature and the originator of the Bad Writing Contest, never had the opportunity to consider or test Fuller’s recommendations for improving the contest.  It was discontinued after its fourth edition in 1998.

[I looked for an announcement from the journal stating why it was ending the contest, but I never found one.  Speculation by others, however, suggests two reasons.  One was that the contest was perceived to have a bias afainst the left, which led to a backlash from the targeted academic community, and generated concerns about the contest's potential for academic intimidation and the promotion of a narrow view of “good” writing.

[Another suggested reason was the journal believed that bad writing had become too prevalent in academia and the contest was no longer serving its intended purpose.  The publishers felt that the contest had inadvertently contributed to the very phenomenon it was criticizing and some critics of the contest argued that it had become a tool for ridicule rather than a critical examination of academic writing.

[The next installment of “Bad Writing” will be posted on Wednesday, 28 May.  It will contain some letters from readers with their responses to both the contest and its “winners,” and to the analyses by other academics and writers and the defenses of the “honorees.”]

Footnotes

[1] “The visual is essentially pornographic, which is to say that it has its end in rapt, mindless fascination; thinking about its attributes becomes an adjunct to that, if it is unwilling to betray its object; while the most austere films necessarily draw their energy from the attempt to repress their own excess (rather than from the more thankless effort to discipline the viewer).” Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 1.

[2] “Indeed dialectical critical realism may be seen under the aspect of Foucauldian strategic reversal—of the unholy trinity of Parmenidean/Platonic/Aristotelean provenance; of the Cartesian-Lockean-Humean-Kantian paradigm, of foundationalisms (in practice, fideistic foundationalisms) and irrationalisms (in practice, capricious exercises of the will-to-power or some other ideologically and/or psycho-somatically buried source) new and old alike; of the primordial failing of western philosophy, ontological monovalence, and its close ally, the epistemic fallacy with its ontic dual; of the analytic problematic laid down by Plato, which Hegel served only to replicate in his actualist monovalent analytic reinstatement in transfigurative reconciling dialectical connection, while in his hubristic claims for absolute idealism he inaugurated the Comtean, Kierkegaardian and Nietzschean eclipses of reason, replicating the fundaments of positivism through its transmutation route to the superidealism of a Baudrillard.” Roy Bhaskar, Plato etc: The Problems of Philosophy and Their Resolution (New York: Verso, 1994).

[3] Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: Continuum, 1979).

[4] Steve Fuller, “The ‘reductio ad symbolum’ and the Possibility of a ‘Linguistic Object,’” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 13 (1983): 129–56; “A French Science (with English Subtitles),” Philosophy and Literature 7 (1983): 3–14; “Is There a Language-game That Even the Deconstructionist Can Play?” Philosophy and Literature 9 (1985): 104–9; “When philosophers are forced to be literary,” in D. Marshall, ed., Philosophy as Literature/Literature as Philosophy (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1987), pp. 24–39.

[5] As background to this argument, see Michele Lamont, “How To Become a Dominant French Philosopher: The Case of Jacques Derrida,” American Journal of Sociology 93 (1987): 584–622.

[6] Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Intellectual Impostures (London: Profile Books, 1998).

[7] C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 33–59. Mills alleged that Parsons was able to get away with writing this way because he never expected his claims to be tested, partly because of his institutional clout but also because no one would bother. [In chapter two of The Sociological Imagination, Mills seems to be criticizing Parsonian Sociology, directly addressing Parsons’s The Social System (The Free Press, 1951).]

 Copyright © 1999 The Johns Hopkins University Press