Bad Writing, Part 5

[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
PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE’S BAD WRITING CONTEST”
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.] 

*  *  *  *
“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.]

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. (I couldn't identify the source of the quotation.)]

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 in Christchurch, 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 letters 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 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.

[(By the way, Voltaire’s label for Pangloss’s métier is meant to be silly and belittling. It might be interesting to note, therefore, that ‘nigology’ is derived from the French word nigaud, which means ‘fool’ or ‘boob.’  ‘Nigology,’ then, would be the study of foolishness or stupidity!)]

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, though, 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'?  Or 'absentation of actuality' when it's simpler and clearer just to write 'absence.'  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 1

 

[As readers of Rick On Theater will know, writing is a focus of mine.  I’ve taught it and blogged on it frequently.  While I was still teaching the subject, I collected articles from many sources on the subject of writing and teaching writing, so, when I read about the 1998 Bad Writing Contest, I sought out some of the coverage of the “award.”  Two recent posts on Rick On Theater related to writing are “Peter Elbow and Freewriting,” 12 March 2025, and “Two Passings: Peter Elbow and Athol Fugard,” 17 March 2025.] 

“BOOKMARKS: THE SOMEWHAT EXAGGERATED
DEATH OF PRIMITIVE ART”
by Denis Dutton 

[This announcement was published in the Philosophy and Literature issue of April 1999 (vol. 23, no.1): 251-55.  (This is an excerpt.  It’s part of a regular omnibus column by the journal’s then-editor, Denis Dutton [1944-2010], an American philosopher of art who was a professor of philosophy at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, at the time.)

[On 22 December 1998, Dutton announced the winners of the fourth (and final) Bad Writing Contest which he’d initiated at Philosophy and Literature in 1995.  Each year since then, the academic journal, which explores the connections between literature and philosophy, ran the contest to celebrate “the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles.”  The only condition for eligibility was that entries be non-ironic.  

[“Deliberate parody cannot be allowed in a field where unintended self-parody is so widespread,” the rules explained.  Anyone could send in a sample to compete for the “prizes.”  Third prize in 1998 went to Steven Z. Levine, a Harvard Ph.D. who’s now the Leslie Clark Professor in the Humanities Emeritus at Bryn Mawr College in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, where he taught since 1975.

[The second prize winner was Homi K. Bhabha, an Indian scholar and critical theorist who taught English at the University of Chicago in 1998.  Today, he’s the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University, with a D.Phil. in English Literature from Christ Church, Oxford University.

[But it is the winner of the first prize with whom we’re concerned in this series of posts.  They’re Judith Butler (b. 1956), a feminist philosopher and gender studies scholar.  They were a Guggenheim Fellowship-winning professor of rhetoric and comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley when the contest ran.  (Butler is non-binary and since 2020 prefers to use singular ‘they/them’ pronouns.)

[Butler is currently Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley.  They have a 1984 Ph.D. from Yale University.

[The sentence for which Butler was awarded first prize in the Bad Writing Contest was published in their essay “Further Reflections on Conversations of Our Time,” which appeared in the journal Diacritics 27.1 (Spring 1997): 13-15.  (The passage is on p. 13.  The only online version of this essay that I found is on Project Muse, a database from Johns Hopkins University Press [https://muse.jhu.edu/], which is only accessible by fee or subscription; it is, however, available from many libraries, such as New York Public Library and most university libraries, if you check your local system’s databases.  By the way, Philosophy and Literature is also on Project Muse.)

[The announcement of the award ignited a level of critical scrutiny that attracted a lot of public, journalistic, and academic interest, as Dutton notes below.  (I’ll be reposting some of that coverage.)  It eventually led to a lengthy critique of Butler’s work in the New Republic by professor of law and philosophy at the University of Chicago Martha Nussbaum, which focused on their writing, spurring more interest.  (Nussbaum’s article will be Part 2 of this series.]

The latest Philosophy and Literature Bad Writing Contest has received extraordinary media attention. Reporters and editors kept picking the contest up from each other, and by the time this column went to press, coverage which began in the Guardian had been carried on by the Associated Press, and then in feature articles and columns in the Chicago Tribune, Lingua Franca, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Toronto Globe and Mail, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, US News and World Report, the Irish Times, various Australian dailies, and National Public Radio. Much of the commotion was generated by the New York Times article on the contest and bad academic writing in general (February 27, 1999 [Dinitia Smith, “When Ideas Get Lost in Bad Writing; Attacks on Scholars Include a Barbed Contest With ‘Prizes’”; coming in a later part of this series). This included news that the deplorable state of scholarly prose has recently become a source of concern to none other than Edward Said [1935-2003], the new head of the MLA [Modern Language Association, widely considered the principal professional association for scholars of language and literature in the U.S.; it aims to “strengthen the study and teaching of language and literature”]. “At some point,” he told the Times, “critics and writers become parodies of themselves.” Indeed, this explains why the rules of our contest have, as we have restated them every year, insisted that “entries must be non-ironic, from serious, published academic journals or books. Deliberate parody cannot be allowed in a field where unintended self-parody is so widespread.” How heartening that Professor Said now shares our worries, although we note that his solidarity comes none too soon.

Two of the most popular and influential literary scholars in the U.S. are among those who crafted winning entries in the latest contest. Judith Butler, a Guggenheim Fellowship-winning professor of rhetoric and comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley, wrote the sentence that captured the contest’s first prize. Homi K. Bhabha [b. 1949], a leading voice in postcolonial studies, produced the second-prize winner.

Professor Butler’s first-prize sentence appears in “Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time,” an article published in Diacritics 27 (1997): 13-15. It’s on the first page of the article, and is not, as someone told the Chronicle of Higher Education, part of an abstract:

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. [Since the point here is obscurity and impenetrability, I won’t clarify any of the quotations. You’re on your own!]

This year’s second-prize sentence was written by Homi K. Bhabha, who teaches English at the University of Chicago. It appears in The Location of Culture (Routledge, 1994):

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 of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality. 

This passage was entered by John D. Peters of the University of Iowa, who describes it as “quite splendid: enunciatory modality, indeed!”

Ed Lilley, an art historian at the University of Bristol [England], supplied a sentence by Steven Z. Levine from an anthology entitled Twelve Views of Manet’s “Bar” (Princeton University Press, 1996):

As my story is an August tale of fathers and sons, real and imagined, the biography here will fitfully attend to the putative traces in Manet’s work of “les noms du père,” a Lacanian romance of the errant paternal phallus (“Les Non-dupes errent”), a revised Freudian novella of the inferential dynamic of paternity which annihilates (and hence enculturates) through the deferred introduction of the third term of insemination the phenomenologically irreducible dyad of the mother and child.

Stewart Unwin of the National Library of Australia passed along a gem from the Australasian Journal of American Studies (December 1997). The author is Timothy W. Luke [b. 1951; professor of political science in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg], and the article is entitled, “Museum Pieces: Politics and Knowledge at the American Museum of Natural History”:

Natural history museums, like the American Museum, constitute one decisive means for power to de-privatize and re-publicize, if only ever so slightly, the realms of death by putting dead remains into public service as social tokens of collective life, rereading dead fossils as chronicles of life’s everlasting quest for survival, and canonizing now dead individuals as nomological emblems of still living collectives in Nature and History. An anatomo-politics of human and non-human bodies is sustained by accumulating and classifying such necroliths in the museum’s observational/expositional performances.

The passage goes on to explain that museum fossils and artifacts are “strange superconductive conduits, carrying the vital elan of contemporary biopower.” It’s demonstrated with helpful quotations from Michel Foucault’s [1926-84; French historian of ideas and philosopher] History of Sexuality [London: Allen Lane (4 vols.), 1978-2021].

Finally, a tour de force from a 1996 book published by the State University of New York Press. It was located by M. J. Devaney, a member of the editorial board of this journal who also edits books at the University of Nebraska Press. The author is D. G. Leahy [1937-2014; philosopher and philosophical theologian; professor of classics at New York University], writing in Foundation: Matter the Body Itself [State University of New York, Albany, 1996].

Total presence breaks on the univocal predication of the exterior absolute the absolute existent (of that of which it is not possible to univocally predicate an outside, while the equivocal predication of the outside of the absolute exterior is possible of that of which the reality so predicated is not the reality, viz., of the dark/of the self, the identity of which is not outside the absolute identity of the outside, which is to say that the equivocal predication of identity is possible of the self-identity which is not identity, while identity is univocally predicated of the limit to the darkness, of the limit of the reality of the self). This is the real exteriority of the absolute outside: the reality of the absolutely unconditioned absolute outside univocally predicated of the dark: the light univocally predicated of the darkness: the shining of the light univocally predicated of the limit of the darkness: actuality univocally predicated of the other of self-identity: existence univocally predicated of the absolutely unconditioned other of the self. The precision of the shining of the light breaking the dark is the other-identity of the light. The precision of the absolutely minimum transcendence of the dark is the light itself/the absolutely unconditioned exteriority of existence for the first time/the absolutely facial identity of existence/the proportion of the new creation sans depth/the light itself ex nihilo: the dark itself univocally identified, i.e., not self-identity itself equivocally, not the dark itself equivocally, in “self-alienation,” not “self-identity, itself in self-alienation” “released” in and by “otherness,” and “actual other,” “itself,” not the abysmal inversion of the light, the reality of the darkness equivocally, absolute identity equivocally predicated of the self/selfhood equivocally predicated of the dark (the reality of this darkness the other-self-covering of identity which is the identification person-self).

Dr. Devaney calls this book “absolutely, unequivocally incomprehensible.” While she has offered to supply further extended quotations to prove her point, we have begged her to forbear.

The Bad Writing Contest was devised to create some needed debate on the topic of academic prose style. It was in that spirit that when we heard Professor Steve Fuller [b. 1959; social philosopher in the field of science and technology studies; now Chair in Social Epistemology at the University of Warwick, England] had criticized the contest on the Internet, we invited him to write the article we are pleased to publish in this issue [“Whose Bad Writing?”; coming up in a later part of the series]. Other responses have been more angry. Joan Scott [b. 1941; American historian of France with contributions in gender history], described by the Times [in Dinitia Smith, referenced above; coming up] as a professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, said that a scholar who uses difficult language “is not pretending to be a journalist,” and that our attack on academic writing is “a kind of anti-intellectualism that is everywhere in the culture, a demand for things they already agree with.” This strikes us as merely desperate. On the other hand, a more interesting counterattack came from Judith Butler, who defended so-called bad writing in the Times (March 20 [see below]) on the ground that humanist scholars “are obliged to question common sense, interrogate its tacit presumption and provoke new ways of looking at a familiar world.” She is exactly right, and the common sense in some academic fields that equates obscurity with profundity, jargon and phony technicality with sophistication, is what the Bad Writing Contest sets out to interrogate. It is not just the ordinary world outside the academy that needs to be shaken out of its complacent presumptions. We believe the academic world itself sometimes needs a good kick in the pants. We were gratified that Professor Butler was given the opportunity to respond to the contest in a major public forum. Nor is it proof that she is wrong that every one of the many letters her essay provoked disapproved of her argument. At least the issues are being openly disputed, which is about as much as we can ask for.

In an intriguing new development, the editors of Lingua Franca [magazine about intellectual and literary life in academia; 1990-2001] have announced a new contest [“Contest,” Lingua Franca 9.3 (Apr. 1999)]; we think of it as Son of Bad Writing Contest. They note that our award winners “have tended to come from the postmodern wing of the academy, where scholars like Bhabha and Butler have displayed an affinity for contorted syntax, a love of neologisms [a word or phrase which has recently been coined; an existing word or phrase which has gained a new meaning], and a weakness for the notion that to deconstruct linguistic categories is to reconstruct society.” But bad writing has a long history in universities, and they prove the point by quoting a sublimely awful sentence written decades ago by Talcott Parsons [1902-79; sociologist]. They therefore invite their readers to submit favorite examples of bad writing “in a non-postmodern idiom.” We look forward to the results. Prizes include a collection of George Orwell’s [1903-50; English novelist, poet, essayist, journalist, and critic] essays.

Denis Dutton

University of Canterbury, New Zealand

[Unfortunately, Lingua Franca, which received the National Magazine Award for General Excellence in 1993, ceased publication in October 2001, during the recession in March through November, after a financial backer withdrew support.  University Business L.L.C., the company behind the magazine, declared bankruptcy in April 2002.]

*  *  *  *
“A ‘Bad Writer’ Bites Back”
by Judith Butler 

[Judith Butler responded to the attention, including Nussbaum’s critique, on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times of 20 March 1999 (sec. A [news]).

In the last few years, a small, culturally conservative academic journal has gained public attention by showcasing difficult sentences written by intellectuals in the academy. The journal, Philosophy and Literature, has offered itself as the arbiter of good prose and accused some of us of bad writing by awarding us “prizes.” (I’m still waiting for my check!)

The targets, however, have been restricted to scholars on the left whose work focuses on topics like sexuality, race, nationalism and the workings of capitalism – a point the news media ignored. Still, the whole exercise hints at a serious question about the relation of language and politics: why are some of the most trenchant social criticisms often expressed through difficult and demanding language?

No doubt, scholars in the humanities should be able to clarify how their work informs and illuminates everyday life. Equally, however, such scholars are obliged to question common sense, interrogate its tacit presumptions and provoke new ways of looking at a familiar world.

Many quite nefarious ideologies pass for common sense. For decades of American history, it was “common sense” in some quarters for white people to own slaves and for women not to vote. Common sense, moreover, is not always “common” – the idea that lesbians and gay men should be protected against discrimination and violence strikes some people as common-sensical, but for others it threatens the foundations of ordinary life.

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. The contemporary tradition of critical theory in the academy, derived in part from the Frankfurt School of German anti-fascist philosophers and social critics, has shown how language plays an important role in shaping and altering our common or “natural” understanding of social and political realities.

[Frankfurt School, group of researchers associated with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, who applied Marxism to a radical interdisciplinary social theory. The Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung) was founded by Carl Grünberg in 1923 as an adjunct of the University of Frankfurt (today known as Goethe University Frankfurt); it was the first Marxist-oriented research centre affiliated with a major German university. Max Horkheimer took over as director in 1930 and recruited many talented theorists, including T. W. Adorno [1903-69; German philosopher, musicologist, and social theorist], Erich Fromm [1900-80; German-American social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist], Herbert Marcuse [1898-1979; German-American philosopher, social critic, and political theorist], and Walter Benjamin [1892-1940; German-Jewish philosopher, cultural critic, media theorist, and essayist].

[Most of the institute’s scholars were forced to leave Germany after Adolf Hitler’s accession to power (1933), and many found refuge in the United States. The Institute for Social Research thus became affiliated with Columbia University until 1949, when it returned to Frankfurt. (“Frankfurt School,” Encyclopædia Britannica Online).]

The philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, who maintained that nothing radical could come of common sense, wrote sentences that made his readers pause and reflect on the power of language to shape the world. A sentence of his such as “Man is the ideology of dehumanization” [from The Jargon of Authenticity (Northwestern University Press, 1973)] is hardly transparent in its meaning. Adorno maintained that the way the word “man” was used by some of his contemporaries was dehumanizing.

Taken out of context, the sentence may seem vainly paradoxical. But it becomes clear when we recognize that in Adorno’s time the word “man” was used by humanists to regard the individual in isolation from his or her social context. For Adorno, to be deprived of one’s social context was precisely to suffer dehumanization. Thus, “man” is the ideology of dehumanization.

Herbert Marcuse [1898-1979; German-American philosopher, social critic, and political theorist] once described the way philosophers who champion common sense scold those who propagate a more radical perspective: “The intellectual is called on the carpet. . . . Don’t you conceal something? You talk a language which is suspect. You don’t talk like the rest of us, like the man in the street, but rather like a foreigner who does not belong here. We have to cut you down to size, expose your tricks, purge you.”

The accused then responds that “if what he says could be said in terms of ordinary language he would probably have done so in the first place.” 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.”

Of course, translations are sometimes crucial, especially when scholars teach. A student for whom a word such as “hegemony” appears strange might find that it denotes a dominance so entrenched that we take it for granted, and even appear to consent to it – a power that’s strengthened by its invisibility.

One may have doubts that “hegemony” is needed to describe how power haunts the common-sense world, or one may believe that students have nothing to learn from European social theory in the present academy. But then we are no longer debating the question of good and bad writing, or of whether “hegemony” is an unlovely word. Rather, we have an intellectual disagreement about what kind of world we want to live in, and what intellectual resources we must preserve as we make our way toward the politically new.

[This discussion of good (academic) writing will continue with many commenters adding their opinions, and I don't want to short-circuit that debate--but I will pause here and make a couple of points at this juncture nonetheless.  These are in response, specifically, to Judith Butler’s self-defense above, but they are good advice in any case.

[In “William Zinsser on Writing: Harnessing the World We Live In,” 28 July 2015, I quoted the great writing teacher:

His fourth fundamental principle of good writing was what he called “humanity—underlying all the others.” Zinsser explained: “If you’re not coming across as who you are (writing is talking to someone else on paper), I think you almost might as well not write, at least if you’re writing for the general public”—as opposed to, say, academics who write for other academics.  In their cases, and by implication, anyone who writes solely for others in the same field as they are, “who am I to say that they couldn’t write in the murkiest possible way,” granted Zinsser, “but they shouldn’t inflict it on the rest of us, nor should they think it’s good writing.”  

[I then added some remarks from my own experience reading—or trying to read—some academic works for my own research:

When I was doing some extensive research on some writers, I tried to read an essay called “The Crisis of Narrative in the Postnarratological Era: Paul Goodman’s The Empire City as (Post)Modern Intervention,” which was so thickly written that even once I got past that title—a classic of academese, in my opinion—I got very little out of it that was comprehensible.  I also bought a book called Toward a Theater of the Oppressed: The Dramaturgy of John Arden—I believe it was a published dissertation—that was so impenetrable that I returned it to the publisher.

[The essay on Paul Goodman’s 1959 novel was by Donald Morton, published in New Literary History 24.2 (Spring 1993).  The John Arden book was by Javed Malick, published by University of Michigan Press (1995).

[What these writers, as well as the honorees of the Bad Writing Contests, were afflicted with I came to call the William F. Buckley Syndrome: the compulsion deliberately to choose a $50 word or an arcane reference when a $5 word or accessible allusion is available, just to show off.  

[In the case of the late Buckley (1925-2008), the politically conservative writer, public intellectual, political commentator and novelist, I always thought he did it to make the readers stop and look stuff up—just to show he could.  It meant he was smarter than we were . . . and I hated when he did it!

[“Bad Writing” continues with Part 2 (Martha Nussbaum’s critique) on Thursday, 22 May.  I hope you will all come back to Rick On Theater to see where this goes.]