[This is the last installment of my “Bad Writing” series on Rick On Theater. It contains two more groups of letters to the New York Times editor, these spawned by Judith Butler’s self-defense in “A ‘Bad Writer’ Bites Back” (Part 1), and two additional pieces, including an interview with Bad Writing Contest originator Denis Dutton and an opinion column from the Irish Times of Dublin.
[As I have consistently, I recommend returning to Part 1 (19 May) and reading the first four installments before diving into Part 5. Many questions raised below are, if not answered, at least explained in earlier segments.]
“‘BAD WRITING’ HAS
NO DEFENSE”
by Stanley N. Kurtz
[Stanley Kurtz’s letter ran in the New York Times of 24 March 1999 (Sec. A: “Editorials/Letters”).]
To the Editor:
Re “A ‘Bad Writer’ Bites Back” (Op-Ed, March 20): Judith Butler’s work reveals to the cognoscenti an intelligence of great power. But that’s the problem. You’ve got to be on the inside to make sense of what she says.
Ms. Butler argues that her unconventional prose helps to change society by undermining its common sense. It would be more accurate to say that her difficult prose helps to forge an academic subculture whose own common sense is impervious to change by outsiders.
I’ve found that Butler aficionados generally refuse to assign their students contemporary thinkers from the cultural center (much less the right). For scholars like these, obscure prose serves more to protect their own comfortable assumptions from challenge than as a tool of social change.
Chicago, March 20, 1999
[The writer is a fellow in human development at the University of Chicago.]
* *
* *
“‘BAD WRITING’ HAS
NO DEFENSE”
by Edmund Blair
Bolles
[This letter appeared in the New York Times of 24 March 1999 (Sec. A: “Editorials/Letters”).]
To the Editor:
Judith Butler’s point that radicalism requires challenging, if not obscure, language cannot stand (Op-Ed, March 20). There are too many counterexamples. Thomas Paine’s [1736-1809; English-born American Founding Father, French Revolutionary, inventor, and political philosopher] “Common Sense” [1776], [Thomas] Jefferson’s [1743-1826; American Founding Father and the 3rd President of the United States: 1801-09] introduction to the Declaration of Independence [June 1776], [Abraham] Lincoln’s [1809-1865; 16th President of the United States: 1861-65] Gettysburg Address [November 1863], the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s [1929-1968] sermons and Betty Friedan’s [1921-2006; feminist writer and activist] “Feminine Mystique” [February 1963] were all clearly written radical documents.
Ms. Butler defends the language of people whose radicalism is aimed at an elite vanguard, not at the masses. A slogan like Theodor W. Adorno’s [1903-69; German philosopher; Parts 1 and 3] “Man is the ideology of dehumanization,” which Ms. Butler cites [from The Jargon of Authenticity (Northwestern University Press, 1973)], is the verbal equivalent of a secret handshake. It seems disingenuous for Ms. Butler to complain that her political enemies point to her secret signs to tell people that she is not like them and does not want to be part of them.
New York, March 20, 1999
* *
* *
“‘BAD WRITING’ HAS
NO DEFENSE”
by David Sundelson
[From the New York Times of 24 March 1999 (Sec. A: “Editorials/Letters”).]
To the Editor:
Judith Butler (Op-Ed, March 20) suggests that only difficult language “can help point the way to a more socially just world” and offers the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno to support her case.
However, the fact that one philosopher used difficult language to promote progressive and difficult ideas hardly implies that such language is necessary or even useful. Bad writing is just as likely to camouflage a reactionary agenda, “the defense of the indefensible,” as George Orwell [1903-50; English novelist, poet, essayist, journalist, and critic] put it in 1946 in “Politics and the English Language.”
Ms. Butler claims that Adorno’s sentences “made his readers pause and reflect on the power of language to shape the world.” Some readers, perhaps. Others, less patient, are no more likely to pause over such sentences than they are to reflect on the fine print on their credit card statements.
Berkeley, Calif., March 21, 1999
[The writer is an appellate lawyer.]
* *
* *
“‘BAD WRITING’ HAS
NO DEFENSE”
by Alan Sokal
[Published on the New York Times on 24 March 1999 (Sec. A: “Editorials/Letters”).]
To the Editor:
Judith Butler’s defense of “bad writing” (Op-Ed, March 20) twists the issues. No one seriously insists that all academic prose be immediately understandable to someone in the street or even to the professor down the hall.
What some of us do believe, however, is that writers should strive to be as clear as possible and that jargon should be used to summarize complex concepts in a few words, not the other way around.
Ms. Butler’s implication that challenging hegemonic (yes!) notions of sexuality, race and capitalism requires – or is even aided by – inscrutable prose is refuted daily by the dozens of “scholars on the left” who combine intellectual rigor with a lucid expository style.
New York, March 20, 1999
[The writer is a professor of physics at New York University. He is the perpetrator of the so-called “Sokal Hoax,” referenced in Part 3.]
* *
* *
“‘BAD WRITING’ HAS
NO DEFENSE”
by Julius Novick
[From the New York Times of 24 March 1999 (Sec. A: “Editorials/Letters”).]
To the Editor:
Judith Butler (Op-Ed, March 20) takes a sample sentence by the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno that she admits is “hardly transparent in its meaning” and goes on to make its meaning quite clear in ordinary language, casting doubt on her subsequent quotation from Herbert Marcuse [1898-1979; German-American philosopher; see Part 1] that if what a radical intellectual says “could be said in terms of ordinary language he would probably have done so in the first place.”
Ms. Butler then writes: “Understanding what the critical intellectual has to say, Marcuse goes on, ‘presupposes the collapse and invalidation of precisely that universe of discourse and behavior into which you want to translate it.’” In other words, you can’t understand it unless you already agree with it. Thus, any attack against intellectuals of this school is ipso facto invalid. How convenient!
New York, March 20, 1999
[The writer is a professor of literature and drama studies at Purchase College, SUNY (now emeritus), and a former theater critic for New York City’s Village Voice for three decades.]
* *
* *
“CLEAR WRITING CAN
CHALLENGE STATUS QUO”
by Robert E. Clark
[From the New York Times of 27 March 1999 (Sec. A: “Editorials/Letters”).]
To the Editor:
Judith Butler (“A ‘Bad Writer’ Bites Back,” Op-Ed, March 20) argues that “difficult and demanding” scholarly writing stems from questioning “common sense,” which she says must sometimes be done with specialized vocabulary, and that such language is necessary in order to question the status quo.
But graceful, clear writing and left-of-center polemic from writers like John Dewey [1859-1952; American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer], Herbert Marcuse and Jurgen Habermas [b. 1929; German philosopher and social theorist] has been published in general-interest periodicals and has effectively battled perceived wisdom.
The trouble comes when scholars rely on vocabulary and ideas understood mainly by other professors and insist that colleagues and students couch their thoughts in those terms, creating a self-perpetuating and insular game.
The problem isn’t that some academic thinking is too radical for lucid statement and argument but that at times even professors who frequently write well get caught up speaking only to and for their colleagues.
New York, March 21, 1999
* *
* *
“FOOD FOR THOUGHT”
by Matthew Gartner
[From the New York Times of 27 March 1999 (Sec. A: “Editorials/Letters”: “Clear Writing Can Challenge Status Quo”).]
To the Editor:
Judith Butler (Op-Ed, March 20) argues that “difficult and demanding” language is necessary to bring about social change.
But the time-honored way inventive writers have made revolutionary concepts available to readers is through metaphorical and figurative language. Indeed, the most deeply original writers, like Shakespeare [1564-1616] and [John] Milton [1608-74; English poet], have always found ways to dress up their insights in sensuous natural images that readers can see, hear and feel, thereby making them accessible. That is how one makes a difference with words.
Remote and rigid jargon will never have any real impact because it does nothing for the imagination.
New York, March 21, 1999
[The writer is a literary scholar
and writer.]
* *
* *
“WHOSE COMMON
SENSE?”
by David Orr
[This letter ran in the New York Times on 27 March 1999 (Sec. A: “Editorials/Letters”: “Clear Writing Can Challenge Status Quo”).]
To the Editor:
Judith Butler (Op-Ed, March 20) believes language that is “difficult and demanding” may be necessary to undermine injustices perpetuated by “common sense.” But “common” to whom?
The essay for which Ms. Butler won an award for bad writing appeared in an academic periodical in which prolixity (and radical politics) are the rule, not the exception. Is it only the “common sense” of “common people” that needs questioning?
New Haven, March 21, 1999
[The writer is a journalist, attorney, and poet who is noted for his reviews and essays on poetry.]
* *
* *
“PROFESSOR DENIS
DUTTON ON
Brooke Gladstone,
Host
[Brooke Gladstone’s interview with Denis Dutton aired on Weekend All Things Considered on NPR (National Public Radio) on 6 March 1999. (I have corrected some of the mistranscriptions in the online version of this text.)]
BROOKE GLADSTONE, host: And you’re listening to WEEKEND EDITION.
Did you ever have a professor in college who talked and talked and never made any sense? Some of the most respected scholars in American academia can be even more unintelligible in writing. Bad academic writing is becoming so common that the journal Philosophy and Literature have [sic] a Bad Writing Contest. Professor Denis Dutton founded the contest four years ago, and he’s on the phone with us from his home in New Zealand.
Hello, Professor Dutton.
PROFESSOR DENIS DUTTON (FOUNDER, Bad Writing Contest): Greetings from a very hot and sunny New Zealand.
GLADSTONE: Now this isn’t just any old bad writing you’re talking about. You don’t allow poems, fiction or office memos, and you don’t allow irony either. You’ve said that ‘deliberate [parody] cannot be allowed in a field where unintended self-[parody] is so widespread.’
PROF. DUTTON: Yeah. Actually, the whole situation is the point now where the most pretentious, swaggering gibberish is what counts as scholarship, and we’d like to see that exposed. We’d like to cut through it and have people understand that it is possible for scholars to express themselves in ways that are intelligible and clear and lucid, and let’s bring back some lucidity and grace and prose.
GLADSTONE: Now writers can’t enter themselves in your contest, right?
PROF. DUTTON: No. Other people enter passages that they find in recent scholarly books and journal articles.
GLADSTONE: Could you please read from the winning entry?
PROF. DUTTON: Well, this year the winning entry, from a journal called Diacritics goes as follows: ‘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 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.’
GLADSTONE: This is by Judith Butler. She’s a famous feminist scholar, but she has been criticized for writing like this before. Can you explain, why do academics write this way?
PROF. DUTTON: A lot of academics are striving for originality. They’d like actually to convince the world that they have lots of new ideas, and by actually redressing everything up in this pretentious jargon, people imagine that they’re making new discoveries. So it’s a sort of a sense of wanting to present scholarship and research as new when there may be much less to it than that.
GLADSTONE: Well, thank you very much, Professor Dutton.
PROF. DUTTON: Thank you very much for having me on.
GLADSTONE: Denis Dutton is a professor of philosophy at the University of Canterbury [Christchurch, New Zealand] and editor of the journal Philosophy and Literature.
And you’re listening to WEEKEND EDITION.
[Brooke Gladstone joined National Public Radio in 1987, first as editor of Weekend Edition with Scott Simon, and later she became senior editor of All Things Considered. In 1991, she received a Knight Fellowship to study Russian language and history, and a year later, she was reporting from Moscow for NPR. In 1995, Gladstone returned to the United States and was hired as NPR’s first “media reporter,” based in New York City.]
* *
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“BAD BLOOD OVER
BAD WRITING”
by Richard Kelly
[Richard Kelly’s column ran in the “Features” section of the Irish Times (Dublin, Ireland) on 8 April 1999.]
Critics say US academic language has become so convoluted that it is largely incomprehensible – to the point where argument is becoming impossible.
It isn’t easy winning the Journal of Philosophy and Literature’s Bad Writing Contest [nb: the title of the journal is just Philosophy and Literature]. “It’s tougher than winning the Oscars,” says Sanford Pinsker [b. 1941; professor of English, see Part 3], editor of Academic Questions, the journal of the US’s National Association of Scholars. “There are so many worthy contributions out there.”
Dense, obscure, often incomprehensible writing has long been a part of higher learning in the US, but a new war is being waged against academia’s most ponderous. Open season was officially declared after the “Sokal Hoax” in the spring of 1996 [see letter above, and Part 3]. Distressed by what he saw as increasingly lightweight ideas wrapped up in indecipherable prose, New York University physics professor Alan Sokal wrote a parody piece to “reveal that the emperor wore no clothes”. The paper eventually published in a respected journal, Social Text [May 1996 (Spring/Summer issue, no. 46/47)], was thoroughly researched and footnoted, but was essentially nonsense.
The premise of the piece — called “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” — was that the laws of physics are rife with political implications and do not apply to everyone in the same way. Sokal believed either editors would be so bamboozled by the mind-numbing rhetoric, or the editing would be so lacking in academic rigour that the piece’s absurd thesis would go unchallenged. He was right.
As Sokal later wrote in the journal Lingua Franca [“A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies,” vol. 6, no. 4 (May/June 1996)]: “Fair enough: anyone who believes the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment (I live on the 21st floor)”.
The story was front-page news across the US, made the newspapers in other countries, and focused attention on the chronic question which has nagged the work of humanities professors for years: is it deep or just impossible to understand?
“If such a sublime cyborg would insinuate the future as post-Fordist subject, his palpably masochistic locations as ecstatic agent of the sublime super-state need to be decoded as the `now-all-but-unreadable DNA’ of a fast de-industrialising Detroit, just as his Robocop-like strategy of carceral negotiation and street control remains the tirelessly American one of inflicting regeneration through violence upon the racially hetero-glossic wilds and others of the inner city” — Prof Rob Wilson from a collection entitled: “The Administration of Aesthetics: Censorship, Political Criticism and the Public Sphere” (Bad Writing Contest, Second Prize 1997).
[The book referenced above is edited
by Richard Burt and published by the University of Minnesota Press (1994). Wilson’s
essay is “Cyborg America: Policing the Social Sublime in Robocop and Robocop
2,” Chapter 11 in The Administration of Aesthetics.]
Hitting back in a New York Times opinion piece last month, Judith Butler — winner of 1998 Bad Writing award — claimed the journal’s award targeted left-wing scholars “whose work focuses on topics like sexuality, race, nationalism and the workings of capitalism”.
In fact Denis Dutton, editor of Philosophy and Literature, admits most of the contest-winners have been from the left, but claims that is merely a reflection of the times: the left, he claims, is now home to academia’s most turgid writers. “We receive nominations from all over the world and judge them without fear or favour,” says Dutton, professor of art philosophy at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch. “At this time bad writing is the stronghold of the post-structuralist left. We wish we could find more right-wingers who wrote as badly.”
Butler has been hit from all sides this year. A University of California professor and influential feminist theorist, she was excoriated in a recent article in the New Republic for “ponderous and obscure” writing. She has been called one of the 10 most intelligent people on the planet by one academic, but the New Republic piece argued Butler’s writings were virtually unintelligible. As such, said University of Chicago law professor Martha Nussbaum, Butler’s work was of little value to feminism or women in the real world [see Part 2].
Difficult prose does have its defenders: many feel the passages Dutton lampoons appear incomprehensible because they have been taken out of context. Further, they say, it is easy and irresponsible to humiliate professors for their jargon-filled prose which, though difficult, is widely understood by its target readership.
“It’s interesting that we expect scientists to have a technical vocabulary, but when it comes to the most complex system we know of — namely, human social existence — we somehow think we don’t need a technical vocabulary to describe it,” says Larry Grossberg [b. 1947], communications professor at the University of North Carolina [Chapel Hill].
Nonsense, says Dutton. “In the sciences jargon is helpful because it uses simple terms to stand for complicated phenomena whereas in the humanities it’s the opposite: people use complicated terms to express simple things.”
Case in point: 1996 third-place winner Paul Fry [b. 1944; Part 4] of Yale University, who said something displayed an “absentation of actuality” to describe that it no longer existed.
Says Dutton: “That may look like the work of a physics professor, but it’s actually an English professor, showing off.”
So how did academic prose become so obscure? According to Sanford Pinsker, many academics have simply become the bad writers they set out to be. Without the jargon and ponderous content, he says, students quickly find themselves on the fast track to academic oblivion. “They learn to talk the talk,” he says.
Prof Michael Berube [b. 1961; teaches American literature, disability studies, and cultural studies] of the University of Illinois, who has written extensively for the mainstream press, agrees that clear writing can spell trouble in academic circles. “I have been called ‘under-theorized’,” he says.
[I feel called upon to reiterate here something I wrote in my afterword to Part 4: Carl Sagan, the astronomer and science communicator, was chastised by some of his fellow scientists because his books and articles, and especially his well-received 1980’s TV series Cosmos, popularized science for the layman.]
Berube asserts a major factor in tolerance of bad writing has been a lack of hard-nosed editing by academic journals. “There is no sense that these journals want to make writing any clearer.”
At its heart, the criticism reflects a belief that all too often impenetrable prose hides dubious scholarship. It raises question: does the language serve as a smoke-screen through which no argument — not even one as patently absurd as Sokal’s hoax — can be seen?
“You can’t disagree with something unless both sides know what they are talking about,” Pinsker says.
[This concludes my series for ROT on “Bad Writing.” As I said in the introduction to this collection, I’ve blogged on writing a number of times. I wasn’t pointing specifically at academic writing, but since I had spent so much time and effort doing just that, and that kind of work was what made me think about writing—my writing, I mean—that’s what informed my writing about writing.
[(If you look into these posts, you’ll learn that I not only taught college writing—as well as a year of high school English—but that I also took an ed-school class in teaching writing.)
[The posts on Rick On Theater that are about writing, in addition to the two I mentioned in that introduction in Part 1, are: “How I Write” (25 February 2022). “William Zinsser on Writing: Harnessing the World We Live In” (28 July 2015), “Why Write?” (4 March 2013), “Writing” (9 April 2010), and “On Reviewing” (22 March 2009).
[In all these posts, at the bottom, there’s a list of “Labels.” Among them are “writing” and “writers.” If you click on either of those, you get all the posts on ROT on those topics—some are other posts by me, some by guest bloggers, and some reposts from other outlets. Some are serious comments, but some are just silly (intentionally) and some are intended to be lighthearted. Check them out.]
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