Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing and the Ethics of Complexity

Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena

Publication and Institutional Context

• Editors and Series: This volume is edited by Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb. It is part of the "Cultural Memory in the Present" series, edited by Mieke Bal and Hent de Vries.

• Publishing Information: Released by Stanford University Press in $2003$. The work is copyright of the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Various essays within the volume appear in other forms; for instance, Margaret Ferguson's work is linked to "Dido's Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France" ($2003$), and Michael Warner's contribution is a version of work in "Publics and Counterpublics" ($2002$).

• Technical Specifications: The book was designed and typeset in $10.5/12$ Bembo font. Identified by ISBN $0-8047-4709-1$ (cloth) and ISBN $0-8047-4710-5$ (paperback).

Comprehensive Guide to the Textual Inquiries

Part $1$: In Search of a Common Language; or, Language Debates and the History of Philosophy

• Difficult Style and "Illustrious" Vernaculars: Margaret Ferguson provides a historical perspective on complexity ($p. 15$).

• Hume's Learned and Conversable Worlds: Robin Valenza and John Bender examine the intersection of scholarship and conversation ($p. 29$).

• Bad Writing and Good Philosophy: Jonathan Culler addresses the aesthetic and functional judgments of academic prose ($p. 43$).

• The Metaphysics of Clarity and the Freedom of Meaning: John McCumber explores the philosophical implications of clear vs. opaque communication ($p. 58$).

Part $2$: Institutions, Publics, Intellectual Labor

• Feminism's Broken English: Robyn Wiegman looks at the linguistic challenges within feminist theory ($p. 75$).

• The Resistance of Theory; or, The Worth of Agony: Rey Chow evaluates the necessity of difficult theoretical labor ($p. 95$).

• Styles of Intellectual Publics: Michael Warner analyzes how different publics are formed through specific rhetorical styles ($p. 106$).

Part $3$: Modernist Poetics and Critical Badness

• On Difficulty, the Avant-Garde, and Critical Moribundity: Peter Brooks considers the role of difficulty in avant-garde movements ($p. 129$).

• Difficulty in Modern Poetry and Aesthetics: Robert Kaufman examines aesthetic challenges ($p. 139$).

• Bad Writing: Barbara Johnson offers a critique and defense of what is labeled "bad writing" ($p. 157$).

Part $4$: Address to the Other: Ethics and Acknowledgment

• The Morality of Form; or, What's "Bad" about "Bad Writing"?: David Palumbo-Liu questions the ethical weight assigned to stylistic choices ($p. 171$).

• The Politics of the Production of Knowledge: An interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak by Stuart J. Murray ($p. 181$).

• Values of Difficulty: Judith Butler explores the ethics and politics of intelligibility ($p. 199$).

Values of Difficulty: The Paradox of Intelligibility

The Rhetorical Predicament of the Scholar

• Writing scholarship in the humanities presents a fundamental dilemma regarding intelligibility. If a text is intelligible, it is often viewed as a success; if it is not, it is viewed as a failure of communication.

• The challenge lies in making academic work clear without denying the inherent difficulty of the work itself. When presentation conforms strictly to familiar and consoling modes of communication, it may fail to perform its critical function.

• Norms governing communicability are not singular. A critical approach to language asks what constitutes these norms and what challenges them. This inquiry is central to comparative literature and the study of rhetoric.

• Exposing oneself to the difficult and unfamiliar is an essential condition of modern academic communication, especially for those seeking to maintain a link between the humanities and social transformation.

Theoretical Conflicts on Political Language

• The Popular Left Position: This view holds that to be politically effective, language must be accessible to the widest possible audience. It asserts that progressive politics must use a rhetoric with popular appeal, reaching people where they live. Academics on the left are encouraged to speak in a way that avoids the insulation of academic jargon and addresses popular culture directly.

• The Critical Theory Position (Adorno): Theodor Adorno argued that everyday language is not neutral but contains sedimented assumptions about the status quo, such as the natural status of class structure, money, and who constitutes "the human." To speak in familiar, intelligible ways is to risk reproducing these uncritical assumptions.

• The Conflict: The first view labels the second as elitist or intellectualist, while the second view accuses the first of "selling out" thought to uncritical consumerism or dogmatic anti-intellectualism.

Adorno's Critique of Communicability

• In "Minima Moralia" ($1951$), Adorno expressed a deep distrust of communicability. He argued that the more precisely a writer expresses themselves, the more obscure they are perceived to be. Conversely, "shoddy" or loose formulations are rewarded with quick understanding.

• Rigor in language creates a vacuum that residents of the status quo resist. Adorno claimed that people often only consider "understandable" that which they do not first need to understand—namely, language already coined by commerce and alienation.

• Critical theory, in its pre-Habermasian phase, held that social criticism should not be separate from aesthetics. The world is given through language; therefore, altering language is a method of transforming the world and intervening in the repetitive use of language that naturalizes subordination and exclusion.

Translation as a Political and Ethical Predicament

The Limits of a Shared Language

• Effective activism should not assume the existence of a shared language. True non-imperialist communication requires accepting the heterogeneity of language and the necessity of translation.

• The AIDS Outreach Example: In the $1980$s, activists in Spanish-speaking communities found that asking individuals if they were "homosexual" yielded few results. However, when asking who practiced anal sex with other men, the response was significantly higher. This demonstrates that communication often occurs only when terms are expropriated or abandoned in favor of terms suited to local conditions.

• The Contestation of Core Terms: Terms like "universality," "justice," and "equality" have no pre-cultural, fixed semantics. They are constantly contested in the political field. If the term "universality" cannot be translated into a specific context, it may serve as a sign of colonialism or an epistemological limit.

Ethical Opacity in Henry James

• Washington Square Analysis: Catherine Sloper's refusal to marry Morris Townsend or promise her father that she will never do so makes her incomprehensible to both characters.

• The Inadequacy of Explanation: At the end of the novel, Catherine does not offer a linguistic reason for her actions. She takes up her embroidery "for life, as it were." This silence marks the limits of language and judgment.

• The Ethics of Judgment: Forcing a motivation or a judgment upon Catherine's silence is a failure to respect her autonomy. Ethics requires honoring what cannot be fully known or captured about the Other. Suspended judgment allows for the experience of the unfamiliar and the radically unknown.

The Relationship Between Adorno and Benjamin

The Baudelaire Manuscript Dispute

• In October of $1938$, Walter Benjamin sent his Baudelaire manuscript to Adorno for publication in the journal of the Institute for Social Research. At the time, Benjamin was in exile in Paris, facing financial desperation and the threat of the German advance.

• Adorno responded with disappointment, criticizing Benjamin for assembling motifs without "elaborating" (durchgeführt) them. Adorno argued that Benjamin's material—the flâneur, the arcades, modernity—lacked theoretical interpretation and was being "consumed" in its own aura.

• This highlights a paradox within critical theory: while Adorno advocated for difficulty and the rejection of common clarity, he simultaneously demanded a specific kind of theoretical rigor and interpretative framework from Benjamin.

Historical Stakes

• The Institute, including Max Horkheimer, eventually assisted Benjamin with a visa for Marseilles in September of $1940$. However, the intellectual tension remained, as Horkheimer favored more traditional social science over Benjamin's obscure literary-social motifs.