Then you must read Mark Bauerlein's absolutely smoking essay on bad academic writing. A review of Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena, Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb's belated collection of essays responding to Denis Dutton's infamous Bad Writing Contest, Bauerlein's article meticulously picks apart the academic defense of obscure and obfuscatory prose, and does so in clear, precise, scalpel-sure language.

We should apply the pragmatic test to today's theorists. What if in the end nobody abandons common sense and adopts the theory habit? Butler aims to "provoke new ways of looking" and Culler repeats Emerson's dictum, "Truly speaking, it is not instruction but provocation that I can receive from another soul," but what if nobody is provoked? This is not quite the same verdict that Leftist critics of bad writing such as Katha Pollitt, draw, namely, that the theorists' recondite language cuts them off from real politics. Rather, it recalls the simple truth that, as a matter of historical record, only certain disruptions thwart common sense and alter the world. In a word, the "anti-styles" only work if they create as well as destroy. If ordinary language is a repository of naturalized values, then the artist/critic's counter-language must supply other values in infectious, admissible ways: one common sense world collapses only if another takes its place. If you propose to explode certain attitudes and beliefs, and to do so by disrupting their proper idiom, then you must compose a language compelling, powerful, memorable, witty, striking, or poignant enough to supplant it. Your language must be an attractive substitute, or else nobody will echo it.

Needless to say, the theorists haven't achieved that and never will. A genuine displacement comes about through an original and stunning expression containing arresting thoughts and feelings, not through the collective idiom of an academic clique smoothly imitated by a throng of aspiring theorists. The writings of Pound, MallarmÈ, Faulkner, and H.D. each form a unique signature and inspire theorists to daring interrogations, but few idioms are as conventionalized as 1990s critical theory. In her op-ed, Butler mentions slavery as a common-sense notion that had to go (Warner echoes the self-inflating comparison), but none of the abolitionists followed the "difficult writing" strategy. Frederick Douglass was a dazzling rhetorician, and Warner's example, Thoreau, composed epigrams honored for their pithy brilliance. By comparison, theory prose is a clunker. Its success in the academy lies not in surprising conversions of common-sense minds, but in quick and easy replication by AbDs. If critics assume a duty to undermine common sense, very well, but they need to devise a different counter-speech, not insist on the value of their current one.

With this collection, theorists stay with the prevailing manner, and they'll probably continue to do so. Stuck in an attitude that combines the adversarial with the self-congratulatory, they mingle avant-garde visions with a protest conception of the university, turning crisis, notoriety, and alienation into a triumph and ignoring the diminishing status of the humanities. Here is Cathy Davidson, vice provost for interdisciplinary studies at Duke University, musing in the Chronicle of Higher Education (24 October 2003) on current conditions:

Even today, some of the best sellers at university presses are the ones that many (not I, by the way) would call "jargon-laden" and "narrow." . . . I find this to be one of the most interesting and vital times in scholarship in my career. I appreciate the melding of the theoretical with the historical, the turn to the genuinely interdisciplinary, the opening up of history to cultural studies and mass culture, and the very lively writing I am finding in so many first books, in particular.

So much for Leslie Fiedler, George Orwell, Raymond Aron, and dozens of other cultural theorists who preceded the theory revolution; so much for the hundreds of manuscripts that press readers return every year for developmental editing; and so much for the fact that, as a Yale Press editor admitted recently in a public lecture, twelve years ago university presses could count on 1000 guaranteed salesónow it's 200.

Until humanities professors acknowledge just how much the enterprise has dwindled, they won't regain outside respect. The Bad Writing Contest ran its course, but other undignifying stories will arrive in turn. This is the worst consequence of efforts like Just Being Difficult? They defend an endeavor that profits only theorists and that only theorists esteem. In crude terms, if these theorists win, the humanities lose. The more their practices spread among graduate students and junior faculty, the more irreverence creeps in among science faculty, university administrators, the media, and the interested public. Theorists may preserve their own standing among their colleagues, but what about tomorrow's needs? Every spring and fall, practitioners must justify humanities inquiry to people who haven't been acculturated to the theory outlook. When future professors present to deans their hiring plans, recruit undergraduates to the major, answer questions from journalists, and submit research proposals to foundations and government agencies, will today's theorists have supplied an effective, noble agenda?

Academia probably holds the prize for the worst writing, but there is a lot of bad writing in business, too. (Some of it can be found, amazingly, in press releases, which are supposed to be marketing documents.) Whatever the venue, it seems to me that today's lousy writing stems from 3 main sources.

1)Buzzwords..people feel like they have to put together long strings of whatever buzzwords are current in their field, whether it's "the Other" or "industry-leading world-class state-of-the-art object-oriented."

2)False conceptualization..people who use abstractions as concretes, without understanding what an abstraction really *is*. This phenomenon is usually due to people being educated and employed beyond their intelligence.

3)Lack of empathy..failure to put oneself in the reader's place.

He has a point. This Bauerlein piece is much more convincing to me than his recent 'groupthink' essay, discussed a couple of weeks ago on this site.

Still, his point about declining academic book sales doesn't seem quite right to me. Most academic books aren't "theory" of the sort he's condemning, and anyway, the decline in sales is largely due to the fact that university libraries are buying fewer books (their budgets are being swallowed by an explosion in journal subscription costs).

Also, it's interesting that he mentions difficult writers like Pound and H.D. Most interpretive criticism that looks at their work closely is itself quite difficult to follow. Would he find that to be justified-- complexity breeds complex intepretations? But here I am referring to "interpretation," not so much "theory."

Isn't it ironic that, with all the talk in Bauerlein's essay about jargon, Judith Butler's winning "Bad Writing" sentence contains not a single term of jargon? I don't think it's a fabulous sentence; basically, it's too long. But I don't think it necessarily obscures its topic. Here's the sentence:

"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."

This is not an obscure sentence, but rather a sentence with obvious meaning to anyone interested in the shift from a structuralist model to a Gramscian model of the relation between culture and economy.

Critics of bad writing want it both ways. They want a relevant humanities mode of writing, but they criticize those writers who claim to have social import. They want clear writing from the humanities because they think the humanities should be understandable by all. They defend Pound's obscurity but attack the obscurity of those theorizing about poetry -- all the while, if you can understand the *Cantos*, you won't have much problem with Butler or Derrida. Bauerlein's argument is circular: Butler's work can't change the world, so her difficult style can't be justified by an attempt to challenge common sense, and anyway such big claims are pompous and radical chic, and so we need clear writing so that the humanities can appeal to a larger public. The larger question is one of intention: Bauerline believes humanities professionals should be "selling" their work to the wider public, while theorists like Butler are seeking to question the assumptions of that public. He also has no sense of genre: the professional essay is different than the literary essay (or "creative non-fiction" as it's awkwardly called these days). Butler of course knows genre well: read her TLS essay about Israel, and you'll find a crystal clear, rhetorically sophisticated, powerful piece of popular literary essay writing.

Supposedly, scientists are allowed to write only to an audience of other scientists in their specific specialization because their work is bettering human life. But isn't that the exact reason why scientific discourse should be far clearer than anything emerging from the humanities? Major political decisions are built around scientific studies understandable only by an elite of professionals. The MMR debate in Britain is a perfect example: because of the total obscurity of medical studies, and the lack of democratic accountability on the part of drug manufacturers, very few parents know whether or not the MMR combined vaccine will hurt their children.

To understand Butler's "evil sentence," one need only be familiar with Althusser's ISA essay and Laclau and Mouffe's quite readable work in political science. Those are two common reference points in European political science and American cultural studies. I wonder if those who claim not to be able to follow Butler's writing even bother to make themselves familiar with the writers she is discussing. Why should an advanced analysis of, say, Aristotle be understood by someone who hasn't put in the hard work of reading Aristotle? And why should an advanced reading of post-Marxian thought be easily consumed by readers who would never bother to familiarize themselves with that tradition in the first place?

"Not a single term of jargon"?

structuralist account; convergence; the question of temporality; Althusserian theory; structural totalities; the contingent possibility of structure; the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

Postmodern obscurantists are utterly irrelevant but do offer occasional unintended hilarity. I can imagine that it would be fun to speak postmodern as a sort of parlor game.

Thus in A Defense of Poetry, English Prof. Paul Fry writes: ìIt 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 ó rather than the will to power ó of its fall into conceptuality.î

Well, Reader John, if that's jargon, I don't know how anyone can write about any intellectual topic without using jargon. "Structuralist" is no more a jargon term than Romantic, Classical, Empirical, etc. "The question of temporality" could only be made simpler by subtituting "time" for "temporality," and the phrase "the question of time" changes the meaning: Domino's Pizza boys face "the question of time," while philosophers of history face the "question of temporality." "Structural totalities" are exactly that: aspects of social structure taken as totalities, as coherent, singular wholes, as opposed to pieced-together, historical phenomena.

Actually, "rearticulation" is perhaps the only truly jargon term here; otherwise, Butler's simply using fairly normal academic language, which necessarily involves some degree of abstraction. And the idea of "articulation" is quite simple. Laclau and Mouffe use it to describe the contingent, as opposed to necessary, ties between political or social groups, discourses, etc. So that the New Left or the neo-cons are articulations of power, stitched-together groups of interest, and not necessary historical formations a la Marx.

And anyway, to use Butler or Bhabha as synecdoches for all academic writing is pretty crazy. Peter Brooks, one of the defenders of difficult prose, is actually a very rigorous stylist. Or W. Lhamon. Or Andres Huyssen. Or Franco Moretti. Or Susan Buck-Morss. For every abstract theorist I'll see you a witty stylist and raise you another. But then again, Bauerlein allows the "Bad Writing Award" morons to hide behind the worst cover of all: "It's only a joke, dude." So that any reasoned response is viewed as hubris. When every ironist worth his Leonard Nimoy LPs knows that it's never just a joke.

One final irony: in writing about "bad writing," Erin's own writing gets carried away. Here's anti-Orwellian sentence: "When the academic humanities are finally, definitively destroyed by the studied, self-important irrelevance of theorists' dogmatically inaccessible progressiveist stance, no one will be able to complain that there were not cogent warnings of what was to come."

Sounds studied and dogmatic -- if not down right purple -- to me. Why use one adjective when three will do? Why be "progressive" when you can cry altitudo in a Harold-Bloomian tragic swoon? The barbarians are no longer at the gate; they were within the city walls the whole time. But I'll take a barbarian in an Ivory Tower over this pseudo-populist University of Phoenix model Bauerlein is pitching to the rubes. Let's all be academics who write for a general audience; and I've got a plan for a monorail that will knock your socks off!

How 'bout let's stop telling people how to express themselves? Or is bad style the libertarian limit of free speech?

"When the academic humanities are finally, definitively destroyed ..."

I hope not, but that prospect grows daily more likely. The academic humanities are becoming intellectual backwaters where little of interest occurs. As the rest of the world demands accurate information and effective ways of organizing and presenting it, the academic humanities have little to offer in response. Why would the world have any interest in useless rearrangements of vaporous abstractions, the sneers of politically-obsessed bores or cheap jokes?

The erosion of the humanities' past prestige now is accelerating rapidly. The Ph.D pyramid scheme, and its production of gullible "invisible adjuncts," cannot continue much longer. Momentum likely will continue to generate interest in studying humanities in academic settings for a few more years. After that, the fates of individual disciplines probably will depend largely on the extent to which they can convince students that they offer mastery of a useful skill or body of specialized information. Foreign languages and literatures, especially Asian, probably will have a bright future. History too will likely survive because of its variety of potential focuses. The rest of academic humanities had good runs for much of the 20th c., but seem unlikely to survive the disciplinary suicide of the current professoriate except, if at all, in scattered, marginal departments.

The humanities, however, have too much inherent interest to perish with the academics. What will be needed will be new enterprises that we can't yet foresee. Who could have imagined in late antiquity, e.g., that Cicero and Virgil would survive because Christians too fervent for conventional ecclesiastical organization were creating monastic institutions?

How 'bout let's stop telling people how to express themselves?

So you want a moratorium on criticism, Luther? Or are you unable to understand the distinction between critique and "telling people how to express themselves"?

You confidently assert what critics of prose like Butler's say as though they all say the same thing. They do not. The most trenchant critique of Butler, to my mind, is the one that says, "Write like that if you want to, but please spare us the pretense that your style is politically subversive. It is, rather, politically irresponsible -- as are your key ideas about gender politics, which, as Martha Nussbaum has pointed out, constitute a 'counsel of despair.'"

And the idea that Butler's sentence has "an obvious meaning" to anyone is absurd. Take one of the phrases you defend: "the question of temporality." You rightly say that "temporality" is not equivalent to "time." But your implication that there is a single unified matter called "the question of temporality" that philosophers of history consider is naÔve at best. The philosophy of history raises many questions about the movement of historical time. Which one does Butler refer to here? I very much doubt that she knows. Since "temporality" is not even a term used consistently, or even frequently, in the philosophy of history, it is more likely that Butler is taking the term from Paul de Man's famous essay "The Rhetoric of Temporality," where it is used in a context very different from the neo-Marxist one she invokes in her prize-winning sentence. She is throwing together in a single sentence terms from disparate, on some points opposing, intellectual and ideological traditions. The impression this gives to anyone who knows those traditions is that of a bright undergraduate trying to impress with her range of vocabulary rather than undergoing the disciplines of critical thinking. Wasn't it Melville who cautioned us against the temptation to believe that if we can pronounce hard words we can understand hard thoughts? Fortunately for Judith Butler, English studies is filled with people who have succumbed to that very temptation; as a result they think the meaning of sentences like that one is "obvious" when in fact it is nonexistent.

"..is bad style the libertarian limit of free speech?" You seem to have a rather strange idea of free speech. If the professors you admire so much have the right to express themselves, don't the rest of us have the right to criticize them?

Nowhere in the Constitution is there a right not to be offended or not to be criticized.

And why do you assume that everyone here is a libertarian?

There's a difference between criticism and Cassandra-like warnings that a certain style will somehow destroy the humanities. The latter mode is a type of fantasy: if I can't have the humanities the way I like it, I'll imagine them in ruins, a ghost town with tumbleweed tumbling down the empty Main Street. It's a scare tactic meant to police and dictate how people should express themselves.

I agree that the claim of difficult stylists to political subversion is a tenuous one. But take Derrida at his best: reading him will change the way you read forever, much like reading late Joyce or Gertrude Stein will change the way you approach any words. Nothing seems "transparent" anymore. I don't think Butler is ultimately successful, but I do think too much is made of her supposed opacity.

Finally, on the "question of temporality." Perhaps she's referencing De Man, but more likely, she's simply referring to the difference between synchronic and diachronic approaches to social structure. Althusser treated institutions as ahistorical totalities, and Butler is writing about what happens when change and history is taken into account in the analysis of social structure.

Her terms may come from different disciplines, but let's be honest: the "real world" isn't separated into different disciplines. In my classes, I always use the example of a loaf of bread: to understand how a loaf of bread got from the baker to you would require analysis from nearly every academic discipline at once. That fusion might be awkward at times, even contradictory insofar as the different lenses brought to bear on the subject might distort matters. But to say that everyone should stick to their own language, and then to dictate what sort of language everyone should use, makes for a terribly boring world.

Finally, the major point that no one ever addresses is that Judith Butler's are few and far between. In English, for instance, the majority of academic work is readable. Even much of the so-called theory is written in a prose far different that Butler or Bhabha. Take Kaja Silverman's work on Lacan and Heidegger, for instance. Two notoriously difficult thinkers, and Silverman discusses them in tight, nearly luminous, sentences. Or Andreas Huyssen's work on memory. Or Peter Brooks' *Reading for the Plot*. Other "public intellectuals" are totally readable: Cornel West, Henry Louis Gates, Richard Rorty, Slavoj Zizek, bell hooks, Michael Berube, etc.

Butler and Bhabha are used to discredit the humanities wholesale, when they are exceptions (and exceptional -- brilliant thinkers, but also deeply problematic thinkers). Such a strategy is disturbing: it *is* anti-intellectual, it *is* culturally reactionary, and, finally, it *is* just plain wrong.

Luther, no doubt there are people who use the writing of Butler and Bhabha "to discredit the humanities wholesale," but obviously Mark Bauerlein -- whose essay prompted Erin's post -- isn't one of them. So the claim relevant to this thread is that writing like Butler's and Bhabha's endangers the humanities. I think it does, but not because it is difficult. I completely agree with you about Derrida: Derrida is a great critic and thinker, whose work is difficult because it is so deeply engaged with the texts he reads. One of the defining moments of my intellectual life was reading (in graduate school) ìPlatoís Pharmacyî from Dissemination: I was then, and I remain now, awestruck by the rigor and discipline of Derridaís thinking, the depth of his scholarship, the sheer attentiveness which I knew even then I would never be able to match but which I also knew should be my goal. Derrida (almost always) earned his difficulty with plain hard intellectual work.

I also admire the more accessible and wide-ranging work of the best ìpublic intellectualsî; to your list I would add people like Martha Nussbaum, Andrew Delbanco, and Roger Shattuck.

The problem with Butler (and, I think, Bhabha) is that she is neither of these things: her work is neither disciplined nor accessible, neither rigorous nor useful. You say she is a brilliant thinker; I say she is anything but. You say, ìHer terms may come from different disciplines, but let's be honest: the ëreal worldí isn't separated into different disciplines.î But I didnít complain that her work draws on different disciplines, I complained that her work invokes divergent and even contradictory intellectual traditions with no indication that she is even aware of the differences. She tosses in some Althusser here, some Gramsci there, some de Man over here, and, oh yes, a generous dollop of Lacan right in the middle -- as though thereís no difference between thinking and making a stew. Even leaving aside its political ìcounsel of despair,î her work is completely incoherent. Again, letís go back to the ìquestion of temporalityî phrase: having first said that the meaning is obvious, you later acknowledge that maybe itís not so obvious, that she may indeed be invoking de Man, though you think it more likely that ìshe's simply referring to the difference between synchronic and diachronic approaches to social structure.î Letís assume youíre right about that: if so, then all that Butler is managing to say in that sentence is that at some undefined point in recent intellectual history there was a move from the ahistorical structuralist approach to social theory to a historicist model. Like we didnít know that already. The rest is just window-dressing -- e.g., using ìcontingentî twice in the latter part of the sentence as a hat-tip to Rorty even though the word does zero intellectual work (the sentenceís meaning, such as it is, would be no different if ìcontingentî did not appear in it).

This isnít brilliance, itís just -- at best -- the sesquipedalian rehashing of a handful of clichÈs of recent intellectual history. Its value is negative, in that the example it sets for young scholars is horrific: it tells them that successful scholarship is simply the mastering of a certain rhetorical stance, not actually knowing anything. The humanities need the rigorous difficulty of Derrida; they need the winsome cultural critiques of Rorty and Nussbaum; they do not need the impenetrable insipidities of Judith Butler. Prose like hers needs to be laughed out of town, and the Bad Writing Award was at least a step in that direction.

Stop 'foot-noting' bad criticism and bad research!

I have been doing research recently for a paper that I am writing on King Lear and I have been rather put off by the criticism which has come out in the past 20 years. Indeed, it seems as though Humanities journals and academic publishers have chosen to reward 50-cent words and convoluted syntax with a place in the literature. What is most troubling is that "placing myself in the conversation" requires that I respond to authors whose work I believe does not merit my attention......But bleakness is not all. I have decided (at the cost of upsetting a few) to engage in conversation with those who make interesting and compelling arguments, regardless of whether Yale or Johns Hopkins have blessed them recently. The Booths and Cavells and Bevingtons and Bradleys and Hazlitts and Greenblatts of the world therefore will be found in my footnotes in great abundance and will hopefully influence scholars down the road. I refuse to give a place in my bibliographies to bad work by marginal critics.

In my other life, I do a lot of work in Political Science. More often than not, I find that the writing is clear and concise; however, breaks in logic and evidence occur far too often. It seems that placing oneself in the conversation does more damage to graduate students than a strict regime of good books. It seems that in every seminar room I have ever found myself in there is greater knowledge of current commentary than there is of foundational works. How many Political Science students know what Smith was arguing in the Wealth of Nations? or the implications of Marx's theories? A few......and these students were lucky enough to have good teachers.

Revolution begins with the syllabus. We need to get Bordieu and Marx off of the syllabi in English departments unless we can ensure that students can work through the problematics of their theories before applying them to Dickens, Eliot or Defoe.

As for the world of Poli Sci, we need to make sure that students of Political Science understand the modern philosophy behind the contemporary methodology of Economics before applying Economic arguments to their models and theories. There are no universal laws and if a student believes differently I suggest it be demonstrated.

Yikes! I sound like an angry hack, but I hate the enormous time waste I find in the academy. I am not advocating strict specializstion in one's field, I am advocating specialization in one's line of argument. Demonstrate that you know what you ask us to assume and perhaps your theories will be worth teaching.

Speaking as a historian, I would agree that the humanities' preference for jargon and clotted writing has made them less relevant and their academic future dimmer. Let me suggest that there's not much novel here, however; the study of philosophy used to be quite significant in academe, but since the turn of the 20th century its predilection for jargon and clotted writing, as well as its self-imposed restriction of topics, has made it a pale shadow of its former self.

Now, scientists develop their own philosophy of science; economists, their philosophy of political economy; they may be lazy about it and say that they're uninterested in doing that -- but they sure do not look for it from the philosophers!

Writers of creative literature will soon regard it as laughable to ask an academic to supply a critical analysis of a literary work, since academic critics write and talk only to themselves. And yes, there will be smaller English departments as a result.