Gerald Graff, "Scholars and Sound Bites: The Myth of
Academic Difficulty," PMLA 115.5 (October 2000): 1041-1052
[GERALD
GRAFF is associate dean of curriculum and instruction in the College of Liberal
Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois, Chicago. A version of this
essay will appear in his forthcoming book, Clueless in Academe: How
Schooling Mystifies the Life of the Mind.]
IS IT
POSSIBLE TO DO JUSTICE TO THE COMPLEXITY OF ACADEMIC SUBJECTS WHILE
COMMUNICATING CLEARLY TO nonspecialist audiences? Is respect for difficulty
compatible with accessibility? I have always assumed that the answer to these
questions is yes, but I may be in the minority. I have noticed that graduate
students
are
increasingly skeptical when I advise them that they do not have to write obscurely
to make a positive impact on professional audiences. Some go so far as to claim
that a certain amount of obfuscation is a prerequisite for professional
success. When students write ponderously and evasively, it is often not because
they could not do otherwise but because they are convinced that such writing is
what their professors want.
And of
course they may sometimes be right. In any case, students are not alone in
thinking that academic communication is inherently arcane. One of the most
pervasive beliefs in our culture--one that is found among academics and
nonacademics alike--is that the life of the mind is so difficult that only a
small minority can understand its concerns or take a serious interest in them.
They evidently assume that, like modern poetry as famously described by T S.
Eliot in 1921, serious scholarship "must be difficult." Eliot
reasoned that since modern civilization comprehends unprecedented "variety
and complexity," the modern poet had to become more and more
"allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary,
language into his meaning" (65). It seems a short from Eliot's view of
poetry to a belief in the necessary difficulty limited readability of literary
scholarship and, by extension, of any scholarship.
It is
certainly possible to adduce many examples of academic writing that bears out
such a belief. The world of knowledge and thought is indeed challenging and
difficult--if it were not, there would hardly be need for scholars to double as
teachers. And there is no disputing work in the more technical sciences is
inherently arcane. Here is an abstract submitted by a student for a recent
undergraduate symposium on my campus:
The AML
Tumor Suppressor Gene on Chromosome 5, Band 431: Localization and Evaluation of
Novel Candidate Genes Interstitial deletions or complete loss of the long arm
of chromosome 5, centering at 5q31, are seen in a variety of hematologic
malignancies, including acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and myelodysplasia (MDS)
[. . .].
Some
would argue that the inaccessibility of this passage--for better or worse--is
not in principle different from the kind of inaccessibility that marks much
research in the humanities and social sciences. In both cases, some who take
this view would claim, a serious engagement with the subject matter requires a
form of writing that is comprehensible only to specialists.
One
could reply, however, by pointing out that, though the passage just quoted is
opaque to nonspecialists in cancer genetics like me, I and other generally
educated readers can readily comprehend what the research is about and what it
will be used for--to treat malignant tumors. Furthermore, it can be argued that
most work in the humanities and social sciences requires far less technical
information and vocabulary for comprehension by nonspecialists. Then, too, I am
told that even the most esoteric science has to be translated into
nonspecialist terms to influence the field. A biochemist colleague tells me
that researchers with superior command of technical science often struggle in
their careers if they lack the verbal and rhetorical skills to explain the
significance of their research in a grant proposal.
In any
case, and I shall not try to discuss the technical sciences here, I would argue
that academics make their intellectual culture look more opaque, rarefied, and
remote from normal learning capacities than it is or needs to be.[1] In this
essay I want to suggest that the reputation for obscurity of academic writing,
though not without foundation, rests on a misperception and that such obscurity
is less frequent (or more peripheral and local) than we tend to think in work
that makes an impact on its field.
Underlying
the exaggerated perception of academic difficulty is the belief--found inside and
outside academia--that academic communication is fundamentally different from
everyday vernacular discourse and the "sound bite" communication of
the popular media. Since the modern research university and the popular media
emerged around the same time at the turn of the century, the very definition of
the academic has been derived from its presumed contrast with popular culture.
If something is accessible to nonacademics it can't be academic, and if it is
academic it can't be generally accessible. What defines academic discourse as
academic--or forbiddingly "intellectual''is p'esumably that it is
everything popular media communication is not, which is to say that academic
communication cannot be reduced to sound bites.
Dare to Be Reductive
The
pervasiveness of this belief among academics explains why "reductive"
is felt to be just about the worst charge-this side of an accusation of
plagiarism or sexual harassment--that can be leveled at an academic author. I
share this antireductive attitude up to a point, feeling abused when my own
ideas are reductively caricatured by critics and contrite when I realize I have
sinned against others. What I object to, however, is knee-jerk antireductivism,
which refuses to see that there are legitimate reductions, useful and necessary
simplifications that can be distinguished from simplifications that seriously
misrepresent and mislead. What troubles me is undiscriminating suspicion of
simplification and reduction as such--as if writing could not be reductive and
nonreductive at different moments. George Steiner exemplifies this suspicious
out- look when he states categorically that "simplification, levelling,
watering down, as they now prevail in all but the most privileged education,
are criminal" (B6). In fairness to Steiner, he is answering the false
populism that equates intellectually challenging education with elitism. But Steiner's
equation of simplification with bad forms of leveling and watering down is
equally harmful, for simplification is not only crucial in teaching beginning
students but (as I hope to show here) also a necessary aspect of any effective
intellectual communication, even when we address other experts in our fields.
Blanket suspicion of anything that might be called reductive-which often translates
into a fear of making an assertion lest one be criticized--is probably far more
to blame than opaque jargon for obfuscatory academic writing and teaching.
Academics'
anxiety about being reductive is an overlooked aspect of the notorious conflict
between research publication and teaching. The conflict becomes difficult to
overcome, after all, if reductive simplifications are presumed to be
necessarily vulgar and demeaning. Since beginning students need reductive
simplifications be fore they can move on to the complications of a text, an
issue, or a field, the pressure on academics to avoid being reductive, to
eschew sound bites, to complicate as much as possible and at all times clashes
with the interests of good teaching. Indeed, as long as we operate with this
understanding of academic research, teaching can only remain a low-status
activity despite the best efforts to honor and reward it. For if the
reductiveness necessitated by teaching is seen as incompatible with scholarly
integrity, it follows that teaching is irrevocably wedded to inferior modes of
thought and expression.
It is
not surprising, then, that some instructors resist being reductive in their
teaching. A graduate student friend describes a history course he took in which
the professor's daily monologues were incomprehensible. One day, when my
informant could stand it no more, he interrupted the stream of obfuscation and
asked the professor to please stop and clarify his point. At first the
professor responded defensively, but he finally proceeded to draw a chart on
the blackboard that reduced the two hundred years of cultural history he had
been covering to a few simple dichotomies. In a flash, the shape and point of
what the professor had been laboring to get across became clear. Yet what
struck the student was how ashamed and embarrassed the professor was as he
schematized the material: "I can't believe I'm doing this," he
muttered several times. For the student it was the most illuminating class of
the semester, yet the professor felt ashamed. He had been reductive.
The
Gist Business
The
prospects of improving teaching depend greatly, then, on how we respond to the
proposition that "academic" and "popular" occupy opposing
ends of the communication spectrum. If American education is serious about its
claims to be democratic, it is implicitly committed to translating and
popularizing the esoteric and the difficult. But insofar as educators assume
that reductive communication is incompatible with intellectual complexity, we
doom ourselves to be poor translators, which is to say poor teachers. I want to
go further, however, and argue that it is not only the interests of teaching
but those of academic research as well that are compromised by the opposition
of reductive popular discourse to antireductive academic discourse. I submit
that when academics translate their ideas into terms accessible to
nonacademics, their research profits as much as their teaching. Reductive
moments are as important to effective communication among academics as they
are to effective communication between academics and the non-academic public.
In 1996
the University of Chicago sponsored a symposium, "The Public
Intellectual," that directly addressed these questions about the extent to
which academic work can and should be made accessible to popular audiences. At
one point in the proceedings an audience member asked a speaker why academics
did not make clearer "the gist" of their research. The speaker's
reply was immediate and blunt: "We're not in the gist business," he
said.
His
point was that if it is the reductive gist of an academic argument that we
want, we can call the university public relations office or take out a
subscription to the Chronicle of Higher Education or Lingua Franca, but
we should not expect academics to lower themselves to reductive popularization.
Yet there was something odd about the professor's comment: in disavowing his
involvement in "the gist business:' the professor demonstrated the very
opposite of his claim. For his retort provided a usefully succinct description
of what the academy--according to him--does not do, useful because it summed up
a more complicated position. Far from closing off complications, moreover, the
professor's reductive statement created an opening in which they could be
pursued, which is what took place in the discussion that followed his remark.
If there was a problem with what the professor said, it was not that it was
reductive but that it was wrong.
What was
wrong was the opposition the professor assumed between academic complication
and "the gist business" ofreductive sound bites. Once we accept this opposition, the
discussion of academic writing becomes caught in an either-or box, in which the
only options are either to write like George Orwell or to contend in the annual
Bad Writing Contest sponsored bythe journal Philosophy and Literature.[2]
In fact, any effective discourse necessarily has its reductive moments, but
this necessity does not prevent writers from going on to complicate their
arguments as much as they can. Reduction and complication are not opposites but
both legitimate moments in communication.
I would
argue that academic discourse does not make an impact even on academic
audiences, much less on the nonacademic world, without considerable reliance on
sound bites and the vernacular. Effective academic writing alternates between
simplicity and complication, the general rule being Simplify before or after
you complexify. For ideas cannot circulate in a complex society unless they can
be reduced to concise formulations that sum up a concept or an argument in the
speech genres of the vernacular. "Let there be light" was the first
sound bite.
Good
academic writing, I am suggesting, tends to be "bilingual:' making its
point in the complicated language of academese and then restating it in the
vernacular (which, interestingly, alters the meaning). Here is an example, from
a review by a professor of ecology and evolution, Jerry A. Coyne, of a book on
evolutionary biology. Coyne is explaining the theory that men are biologically
wired to compete for women:
[I]t
is this internecine male competitiveness that is assumed to have driven not
only the evolution of increased male body size (on average, bigger is better in a
physical contest), but also of hormonally mediated male aggression (there
is no use being the biggest guy on the block if you are a wallflower). (28)
Coyne
here makes his point first in academese (which I italicized) and then in the
vernacular, setting up a dialogue i, the text between the writer's (and the
reader,,) academic self and "lay" self. The review appeared in a
nonacademic journal, the New Republic, but there is nothing in the
passage that could not appear in academic journal or book.
The
argument I am making parallels the thesis of Bruce Robbins's book Secular
Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture, in which Robbins
questions the widespread view that professionalism is intrinsically
narcissistic, cutting itself off from accountability to the nonprofessional public.
Robbins answers critics of professionalism like Louis Menand, who argues that
"as humanistic study has become increasingly professionalized, its
practitioners have become less and less disposed to respond to any intellectual
challenges except those presented by the work of colleagues within the
discipline" (qtd. in Robbins 87). Though Robbins concedes a grain of truth
to Menand's critique of academic disciplines "in the name of outsiders,"
he points out that such criticism has long been pervasive among
disciplinary insiders. Robbins concludes that
Menand
is wrong, after all, to rely on the familiar assumption that professional means
private, exclusive, esoteric, inaccessible. For the easy, habitual antithesis
between the professional and the public excludes just what Menand himself
exemplifies: the professional's own will, as professional, [...] to take
over and mobilize the point of view of "people outside the
profession," to enter into some sort of dialogue with the
extra-professional public. (87-88)
As
Robbins goes on to argue, the history of professionalism suggests that
professions fail to survive unless they enter into a dialogue with the
extraprofessional public.
Citing
Thomas Haskell's The Rise of Professional Social Science and other
histories of professions, Robbins argues that "professions are not
hermetically sealed, but porous. [. . .] Address to outsiders, according to
these histories, is indispensable to professional speech" (91). The
discourse of the "outside" public is already "inside"
professional discourse. Robbins's point supports my claim that incorporating
the voice of the outside public makes professional writing more rather than
less effective with other professionals. To translate Bobbins's terms into mine,
academics advance not by turning their backs on the perspective of those
outside their immediate fields but by writing that perspective into their
scholarship, creating a dialogue with a more academic register like the one the
ecologist Coyne produces above.
Burying the Point
Consider
the following incomplete list of intellectual sound bites and the consequences
for the intellectual world if scholars could not take them as points of
departure:
One
cannot step twice into the same river.
I
think, therefore I am.
Hell
is other people.
A
poem should not mean / But be.
The
best of all possible worlds
The
mind-body problem
Blurred
genres
History
is written by the winners.
The
personal is the political.
Bad
money drives out good.
There
is nothing outside the text.
The
master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.
Always
historicize!
Social
constructionism
Philosophers
until now have sought to under stand the world. The point is to change it.
There
is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of
barbarism.
What
do women want?
The
will to power
The
other-minds problem
This is
in no way to propose an Oxford Book of Quotations view of the
intellectual world, in which Great Thoughts are lifted out of their complex
contexts. On the contrary, none of the propositions and concepts listed above
can be adequately understood or discussed without setting them in those
contexts. But neither can these concepts and propositions be understood and
discussed without recourse to such shorthand. Again, it is not that
complication is unimportant but that moments of reduction are necessary for
dealing with complication. Again, reduction and complication are not opposites
but moments in one process.
To be
sure, if "Always historicize!" is a kind of sound bite, it is one
that only the intellectually initiated are likely to understand. Fredric
Jameson's maxim is accessible to academics and intellectuals outside literary
studies, but to circulate in the nonacademic world it would need translation.
The point is that even initiated audiences understand such academic
communication by translating it into terms familiar to outsiders. To understand
"Always historicize!" we translate the maxim into the kind of
formulation we would use to explain it to someone unacquainted with arguments
like Jameson's: "in dealing with any text or event, always examine the
history that made it what it is."
When
academic writing is obscure, the reason often lies not in excessive
complication but in the relative infrequency of reductive moments when
academese is translated into terms intelligible to the uninitiated.
Alternatively, even when such reductions appear frequently, they may come at
the wrong times in the text, perhaps too late to help. These are among the ways
academic writing makes itself look more forbidding and incomprehensible to
uninitiated readers than it needs to be.
To
illustrate, I want to look at some passages from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology
of the Closet, a pioneering work in what has come to be called queer theory.
Sedgwick's very title constitutes a kind of caution flag, as if to warn readers
not to expect any compromises with reductive vernacular discourse. And much of
the writing in the opening pages of the book seems to bear out the warning:
For
meanwhile the whole realm of what modern culture refers to as
"sexuality" and also calls "sex"--the array of acts,
expectations, narratives, pleasures, identity-formations, and knowledges, in
both women and men, that tends to cluster most densely around certain genital
sensations but is not adequately defined by them--that realm is virtually
impossible to situate on a map delimited by the feminist-defined sex/gender
distinction [. . .].
(29)
This is
the kind of prose that discourages casual readers and seemingly supports the
belief that academic writing is only for the initiated. Indeed, Sedgwick's
vocabulary-"identity-formations," "the feminist-defined
sex/gender distinction"--is specialized to the point of sounding clinical.
Yet if one can get to the issues raised in the passage, they turn out to
be broad and general: How secure is the standard division of the sexes into
male and female? Is this division grounded in biology, or is it socially
conditioned? Sedgwick's language obscures the fact that the questions she
raises about the nature of sex and gender are potentially of general interest
to nonspecialists.[3]
Even
more interesting, some fifty pages into the book the prose clouds suddenly
part. This occurs when Sedgwick turns to summarizing and answering the hostile
questions about gay studies posed by journalists and other lay people as well
as academics:
Has
there ever been a gay Socrates?
Has
there ever been a gay Shakespeare?
Has
there ever been a gay Proust?
Sedgwick
replies:
Does
the Pope wear a dress? If these questions startle, it is not least as
tautologies. A short answer, though a
very incomplete one, might be that not only have there been a gay Socrates,
Shakespeare, and Proust, but that their names are Socrates, Shakespeare, and Proust;
and beyond that, legion-dozens of the most centrally canonic figures in what
the monoculturalists are pleased to consider "our" culture, as
indeed, always in different forms and senses, in every other.
What's now in place, in contrast, in most scholarship
and most curricula is an even briefer response to questions like these: Don't
ask. Or, less laconically: You shouldn't know. (52)
"Don't
ask. You shouldn't know" is about as vernacular as you can get, echoing
the Jewish mothers of popular culture, including (for those old enough to
remember) Gertrude Berg on The Goldbergs. The passage illustrates how
even the most intellectually challenging academic writing often translates its
arguments into folk maxims recognizable to a lay audience.
In this respect,
the rhetorical ballpark of academic writing is not as far removed from that of
popular editorial writing as we might think. Compare Sedgwick's encapsulation
of her opponents' view as "Don't ask. You shouldn't know" with the
lead paragraph of an op-ed piece by William Safire about the congressional
debate on the impeachment of President Clinton: "In blowing off the House
Judiciary Committee's 81 interrogatories, a mockingly evasive Bill Clinton told
the Congress of the United States: Take your impeachment process and stick it
in your ear." Sedgwick goes on to complicate her point far more than
Safire does his, but her complications are set up by the same kind of reduction
employed by Safire. The difference between Safire and Sedgwick is not that one
uses sound bites while the other does not but that the editorialist puts his
best sound bite up front, where it will control how readers process the rest of
his text, whereas the academic buries her most effective sound bites fifty
pages into a denser prose that prevents some readers from ever reaching them.
I
stumbled onto this problem when I assigned Epistemology of the Closet in
a graduate course several years ago and got several complaints from students
that the book was unreadable. I pointed these students to the "Don't ask.
You shouldn't know" passage, asking if they did not at least find this
material as reader-friendly as they could wish for. To my surprise, the
students seemed not to have noticed the passage nor its change of style. My
first thought was that the students had been so stupefied by the impenetrable
opening pages that they stopped reading before they got to the more readable
part. I became convinced, however, that like many who are frustrated by
academic writing (especially when it is "theory"), the students more
likely so expected Sedgwick's text to be unintelligible that they failed to
notice that part of it was not, figuring that if they seemed to understand it
they must be missing something.
To be
sure, a conservative journalist like Safire can take for granted a consensus on
his assumptions that an academic queer theorist cannot. Some will say that this
is simply the nature of things, that poststructuralism and queer theory are too
subversive of received common sense to attract many general readers, that there
is nothing to be done. Yet if Sedgwick could translate her points so
effectively into the vernacular in one part of her text with no loss of
complexity (as I believe she does in the "Don't ask" passage), it is
hard to see why she could not have done so in other parts as well. At the
least, Sedgwick could have moved some of her vernacular moments up to the
front, where they would have had a chance to control the reader's reception of
the denser material.
Jameson
(despite having copped some bad-writing awards) provides an interesting
counterexample in The Political Unconscious, which he front-loaded with
the memorable "Always historicize!" (9). Furthermore, Jameson makes
clear early on that to always historicize well we need Marxism, which he calls
"that 'untranscendable horizon' that subsumes such apparently antagonistic
or incommensurable critical operations, assigning them an undoubted sectoral
validity within itself, and thus at once canceling and preserving them"
(10). To be sure, phrases like "untranscendable horizon,"
"subsumes," "incommensurable," and "sectoral
validity" are far from anybody's vernacular except for theoryheads and
cultural studies specialists. Nevertheless, such phrases are not exclusive to
any single academic field. And despite the tirgid diction, the claim being made
is helpfully reductive: Marxism trumps and includes all other isms.
The
point is that Jameson's writing differs crucially from merely obscure writing
in the same intellectual vein by frequently packaging itself in reductive
formulations, without which his book would not likely have become one of the
academic best-sellers of our era. Because Jameson has said up front what the
big point of his book is, readers can slog through lengthy sections that they
may only partially comprehend-like the eighty-five-page heavy lifting of the
introductory chapter, "On Interpretation," with its formidable
analyses of Hegel, Althusser, Greimas, Freud, and numerous other thinkers
themselves noted for their difficulty.
Jameson
has followed some of the oldest and simplest rhetorical advice: "First,
tell 'em what you're going to tell 'em; then tell 'em; then tell 'em what you
told 'em." Though readers may get lost, as I at times did, attempting to
keep up with the details, they will know where they are if they keep in mind
the reductive meta-argument given in the opening pages--always historicize;
always see that Marxism "subsumes" other ways to historicize. I am
suggesting not that such writing should be skimmed in Cliffs Notes fashion but
only that its difficulties are local, subsumed, as Jameson might say, by a
metacommentary that is presented reductively up front. This procedure is very
different from that of academic texts without such metacommentary, where one
gropes for pages trying to figure out what the author's point is and why he or
she is impelled to make it. There is certainly plenty of this latter kind of
academic writing around, but I submit that it does not get into circulation.
But
surely that claim, you will say, is resoundingly refuted by the popularity and
professional visibility of "theory:' which is simultaneously academically
influential and unreadable. Theory is influential despite--or, some would
argue, because of--its obscurity, thereby proving that if you want to get ahead
in the academy, you must avoid sound bites, vernacular, and clarity and make
your writing as difficult as possible, if not opaque.
One way
to reply to this argument is simply to list the many prominent literary and
cultural theorists who write an accessible, even entertaining, form of
"vernacular theory": Roland Barthes, Terry Eagleton, Stanley Fish,
Henry Louis Gates, Bruce Robbins, Jane Tompkins, Wayne Booth, Jonathan Culler,
Marjorie Garber, Michael Berube, W. J. T. Mitchell, Nancy Miller, Sandra
Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Robert Scholes--the list could go on and on. (Even Homi
Bhabha, Jameson's frequent rival for bad-writing awards, writes very readable
journalism for the New Statesman whose ideas overlap with those in his
academic books.) To illustrate these theorists' reliance on the vernacular, one
could list titles of theirs drawn from popular songs ("Short People Got No
Reason to Live" [Fish],"Me and My Shadow"
[Tompkins],"What's Love Got to Do with It?" [Gates], and from popular
films ("The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" [Mitchell]. Eagleton has set
theory into song lyrics, as in his parody of vulgar-Marxist criticism,
"The Ballad of English Literature":
Chaucer
was a class traitor
Shakespeare
hated the mob
Donne
sold out a bit later
Sidney
was a nob
[· ·
· · · · ·
· ·]
There
are only three names
To
be plucked from this dismal set
Milton
Blake and Shelley
Will
smash the ruling class yet
That
theory has become synonymous with obscurity even though much of it is more
lucidly written than most average academic prose is further testimony to the
myth of academic difficulty. The myth obscures from us what is before our
eyes--promoting the kind of misrecognition that current theory tries to
understand.
Where You Say It
When I
served in the early 1980s as the director of a university press, I became aware
that academic writers often give little thought to rhetorical matters like
where one places one's points in a text. In reviewing and editing manuscripts,
I repeatedly came on central arguments hidden in mid-paragraph or mid-sentence,
obscured by surrounding subordinate clauses, or inserted too late in the text
to be readily noticed, much less to control how readers processed the book. (I
recognized these features in my own writing, as I had learned to write in
graduate school, and they are not easy to change even now.) I also found
repeatedly that the argument the author had chosen to make central was less
interesting or important than arguments that were subordinate or marginal.
Some--by no means all-university press and journal editors let such problems
pass without comment. In part this is because academic editors are overworked
(and underpaid), but I suspect it is also because some editors, like other
people, expect academic writing to be unintelligible to all but a few experts.
Some of
the rhetorical misjudgments I just cataloged are inevitable in any piece of
writing (I don't want to think about those I may be committing in this essay).
But often academic writers simply do not think much about these matters (an
argument for not exempting professors from the teaching of composition),
perhaps because they are not confident that their work will ever be read.
And
until recently, most academics had good reason to think this way. Zachary
Karabell is right when he says in his recent book What 's College
For? that "people outside the university rarely care, and even more
rarely can understand, what academics are talking about." Yet Karabell
adds that "people do care about [. . .] issues" similar to those
raised in academic work (73). As many academic fields have come to be concerned
with contemporary culture (including the relation of the past to contemporary
culture) and with issues of politics and cultural representation of the kind
with which Sedgwick and Jameson deal, larger numbers of people outside the
academy are now interested in "what academics are talking about:' even if
the interest is hostile. It is as if the rhetorical climate had changed so
quickly that academics had not yet adjusted. We go on writing as if nobody out
there cared, and we are surprised and hurt when it turns out they do care and
blast us for being opaque or politically correct. (The recent "science
wars:' epitomized by Alan Sokal's parodic article in Social Text, are
but one example of the way intellectual disputes that would once have been
conducted in the privacy of the seminar room today tend to be fought out in the
public spotlight.)
Sedgwick
(like the editors of Social Text) has received numerous bashings from
journalistic reviewers, who have generally misunderstood her work. (One of the
nastiest, meanest, and most uncomprehending recently appeared in the New
Republic, by Lee Siegel [30].) I don't claim that these bashings and
misunderstandings would not have occurred had Sedgwick brought her most
accessible pages to the front of her major book instead of burying them or had
she made more use of her vernacular skills. At the least, however, she would
have made her book harder to trash and misrepresent with impunity.
Though
avant-garde academics are often right when they complain that they have been
grossly misrepresented by their critics in the culture war (Berube; Felski),
their training in rhetoric should by now have taught them the hard rule of
public communication: to decline to use sound bites (or to bury them from view
or muffle them beyond recognition) is to become vulnerable to the sound bites
of others. The most salient recent example of this rule is the popular
misunderstanding of deconstruction, an ironic outcome since the problem of the
sound bite is one that deconstruction helps illuminate. One of the most widely
ridiculed deconstructionist ideas is that in an important sense texts are
"unreadable," as Paul de Man frequently argued. Such a claim
seemingly confirmed the criticism of detractors like David Lehman, John Ellis,
and Dinesh D'Souza, whose accounts have established in many minds that, in
D'Souza's words, "deconstructionists hold that all literature is empty of
meaning" (178) or that words can mean anything we want them to mean.
J.
Hillis Miller, however, argues that when de Man writes of "the
unreadability of the text," he means not the text's lack of meaning but
"the text's inability to read itself" (38). What de Man is getting at
is a discrepancy between what a text says and what it says it says when it
summarizes its own meaning, as in a sound bite. Every writer has had the
experience of becoming aware, deep into preparing an essay, that the amassed
examples and evidence not only do not clearly support the writer's thesis but
could also be used to support an opposing thesis. Reformulated this way, the
deconstructive idea of the unreadability of the text becomes less obscurantist
and more interesting (and, in my experience, pedagogically useful) than it
appears.
Deconstructionists
argue that this discrepancy between what a text means and what it says it means
is not a mistake, an accident, or an aberration but rather a structural feature
of all communication. The lack of a perfect fit between our examples and what
they are supposed to exemplify, a fit with no residue of unwanted implication,
cannot be eliminated through further revision, since it is rooted in divisions
that are sedimented into language--or rooted in the reality that the same set
of facts can always be used to demonstrate opposing conclusions. When we adduce
evidence for a claim, what it is evidence of or for is always contestable,
which is why policy debates so often take the form of battles between competing
applications of the same agreed-on facts. This is to say not that we have to
give up (or could give up) trying to control our meanings but rather that there
are limits to that control.
Unfortunately
for the fate of deconstructionism, the clarifying sound bite I quoted above
from Miller (which caused the scales to drop from my eyes) appears in the
middle of a long paragraph about something else on page 38 of a book whose main
topic is or claims to be "the ethics of reading." Would the reception
of deconstruction have been friendlier had Miller moved his sentence up to page
1 and then proceeded to write a book about how the sentence's point has been
missed: that deconstruction is not about how texts are meaningless or literally
unreadable but about the ways texts systematically misread themselves? Perhaps
the reception would not have been different--we don't know because nobody has
yet written such a book.
Let me
try to say exactly what I mean (though de Man says I can't quite). I do not
underestimate the difficulty in bridging the enormous gap between academic and
nonacademic communication (or even the large gaps between the discourses of
academics in different disciplines). But neither should we exaggerate the
distance between the academic and the popular, especially if doing so excuses
bad academic habits of communication. What has obscured the passages in which
intellectual discourse and the discourse of everyday intersect is not just the
necessarily specialized vocabularies and conventions of the intellectual world
but also our assumption that these discourses have nothing to say to each
other. Such an assumption keeps us needlessly pessimistic about the chances of
bridging the gap between research and teaching, about the potential of academic
institutions to reach students, and about the academic potential of students
themselves. We also mislead those students into thinking that the forms of
thought and expression they learned while growing up have to be abandoned if
they hope to do well in school.
Some Dos and Don'ts
for Academic Writers
1. Be
dialogical. Begin your text by directly identifying the prior conversation or
debate that you are entering. What you are saying probably won't make sense
unless readers know the conversation in which you say it.
2. Make
a claim, the sooner the better, and flag it for the reader by a phrase like
"My claim here is that [...]." You don't have to use such a phrase,
but if you can't do so you're in trouble.
3.
Remind readers of your claim periodically, especially the more you complicate
it. If you're writing about a disputed topic (and if you aren't, why write?),
you'll also have to stop and tell readers what you are not saying, what
you don't want to be taken as saying. Some of them will take you as saying that
anyway, but you don't have to make it easy for them.
4.
Summarize the objections that you anticipate can be made (or that have been
made) against your claim. Remember that objectors, even when mean and nasty,
are your friends--they help you clarify your claim, and they indicate why it is
of interest to others besides yourself. If the objectors weren't out there, you
wouldn't need to say what you are saying.
5. Say
explicitly--or at least imply--why your ideas are important, what difference it
makes to the world if you are right or wrong, and so forth. Imagine a reader
over your shoulder who asks, "So what?" Or, "Who cares about any
of this?" Again, you don't have to write in such questions, but if you
were to write them in and couldn't answer them, you're in trouble.
6. (This
one is already implicit in several of the above points.) Generate a metatext
that stands apart from your main text and puts it in perspective. Any essay
really consists of two texts, one in which you make your argument and a second
in which you tell readers how (and how not) to read it. This second text is
usually signaled by reflexive phrases like "I do not mean to suggest that
[. . . ]," "Here you will probably object that [. . . ],"
"To put the point another way [...]," "But why am I so emphatic
on this point?:' and "What I've been trying to say here, then, is [. .
.]." When writing is unclear or lame (as beginning student writing often
is), the reason usually has less to do with jargon or verbal obscurity than
with the absence of such metacommentary, which may be needed to explain why it
was necessary to write the essay.
7.
Remember that readers can process only one claim at a time, so there's
no use trying to squeeze in secondary and tertiary claims that are better left
for another book, essay, or paragraph or at least for another part of your book
or essay, where they can be clearly marked off from your main claim. If you're
an academic, you are probably so eager to prove that you've left no thought
unconsidered that you find it hard to resist the temptation to say everything
at once, and consequently you say nothing that is understood while producing
horribly overloaded paragraphs and sentences like this sentence, monster-sized
discursive footnotes, and readers who fling your text aside and turn on the TV.
8. Be
bilingual. It is not necessary to avoid academese--you sometimes need the
stuff. But whenever you have to say something in academese, try to say it in
the vernacular as well. You'll be surprised to find that when you restate an
academic point in your nonacademic voice, the point is enriched (or else you
see how vacuous it is), and you're led to new perceptions.
9. Don't
kid yourself. If you could not explain it to your parents or your most mediocre
student, the chances are you don't understand it yourself. None of what I have
said in this essay should be mistaken for the claim that all academic
scholarship can or should be addressed to a nonacademic audience. The ability
to do advanced research and the ability to explain that research to
nonprofessional audiences do not always appear in the same person. To adapt a
concept from the philosopher Hilary Putnam, there is a linguistic division of
labor in which the work of research and that of popularization are divided
among different people, as Friedrich Engels was rewrite man for Karl Marx. Yet
even Marx's most difficult and uncompromising texts have their Engels
moments--Engels could not have summarized Marx's doctrine if they did not. In
short, it is time to rethink the view that the university is not in the gist
business.
NOTES
[1] Why
this mystification of our expertise occurs--whether through a silent conspiracy
of academics to keep the public dependent on us or (as I believe) through more
complicated causes--is an important question, but one I am not able to pursue
here.
[2] The opposition is actually circular, a self-fulfilling
prediction. The sociologist Howard Becker wittily observed (in conversation)
that there is something tautological about the common view that sociologists
write badly, since the work of anyone who writes well is not considered
sociology. Becker's own work and career refute the belief that social
scientists must write obfuscatorily to be influential. See his useful guide, Writing
for Social Scientists.
[3] I have made this argument at greater length in two
essays.
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