If it’s difficult, fix it
Time to get out the trusty old grain of salt, and put it to good use. It’s to do with Terry Eagleton again.
In the preface to his latest book, The Meaning of Life, Terry Eagleton writes that his subject matter is fit only for the crazed and the comic, and hopes that he inclines more towards the latter. “I have tried to treat a high-minded topic as lightly and lucidly as possible,” he says. He has certainly managed the light bit…But comic? Or lucid? There are precious few gags on offer – unless you count passing references to Monty Python and Douglas Adams – and the prose is so dense in parts, you can re-read a passage several times and still be none the wiser. The words make sense on their own, but somehow, when combined, they rather lose their meaning. But then, literary and cultural theorists tend to have different benchmarks of levity and clarity from the rest of us. As Britain’s answer to Derrida, Althusser and Deleuze, Eagleton has standards to maintain, and he doesn’t seem in the slightest bit bothered at the suggestion that – so it often appears to the rest of us – theorists are wilfully esoteric and exist only to talk to other theorists. If it’s difficult, it’s difficult, and it’s not the job of the theorist to make things overly accessible; it’s the reader’s job to put in the intellectual legwork to meet the writer on his or her own turf.
No. No no no no. All wrong. It’s not that it’s ‘difficult,’ it’s that it’s pointlessly difficult. It’s not that it’s difficult, it’s that it’s difficult way out of proportion to its merit or interest or significance, and that it’s difficult on purpose for the sake of being difficult, as opposed to unavoidably as a result of the nature of the subject matter. Got that? Terry Eagelton doesn’t write about anything that needs to be made incomprehensible, therefore he ought not to do so.
“The words make sense on their own, but somehow, when combined, they rather lose their meaning.”
Pretty much describes him – makes sense grammatically but no other kind of sense. Can seem quite lucid in a paragraph but no idea what he’s driving at.
Actually I’m bitter as I remember trying to read Notes on a Revolutionary Criticsm and failing to understand it at all.
See – what business does he have doing that? He’s not writing about particle physics; he has no reason to be difficult. It’s sheer damn self-display, of a peculiarly perverse kind. ‘Get me, I can make anything pointlessly hard to read.’
Yet he thinks he’s some kind of glorious radical. Oh it makes me tired, that kind of thing.
About 16 years ago I asked someone I respected what books he would feel poorer for not having read. Among them was Eagleton’s ‘Literary Theory’. I read it and large parts of it seemed very clear. I haven’t bothered to go back since studying reasoning and stuff, but I felt it was not at all obscure.
If I wasn’t just struck with glamour, he has had to go obscure maybe its because the ideas didn’t merit elaboration.
I’ve noticed for a long time that the “radicals” most interested, ostensibly, in rallying the proletariat are the most incomprehensible writers.
Exactly so JonJ.
I came to the same conclusion about 25 – 30 years ago after rereading the same page 6 times to understand it in a book by Pierre Bordieu about how the poor were excluded from success by the rich through the use of fancy language in education. Not that all of the book was like that.
A few more jargon-ridden texts by university lecturers and professors about how applying Paulo Freire and Marx would be the salvation of the poor in advanced Western societies’s education systems, but lacking any specific suggestions which schools could actually use, cured me of my infaturation for the many big words, few small facts school of social sciences.
‘infaturation’?
Write 100 times: “I must proofread before posting.”
And in fairness to Bordieu, the convoluted sentences could have been the translator’s fault. Nor should I imply that he lacked evidence; whether it was good evidence is another question.
And the exact OPPOSITE of what proper teaching. learning and practice of science should be, as well.
I know that, particularly in the sciences you need difficult-to-learn tools, usually mathematical ones, whether advanced calculus, 4-dimensional vector or set theories, Bayesin statistics and probability theory, etc…
BUT
It is supposed to be as easily understood as possible, otherwise other scientists, and later engineers and manufacturers will not be able to use it.
Look at the laser: “An application looking for a solution” it was called for over 15 years from its first making.
Look at lasers now – there’s one in every computer with a hard drive.
This could not have been done if the language and expressionof how they work, and for that matter, how they are constructed, was not as easily comprehensible as possible.
Why is it SO difficult to get this message across?
Or is it that genuinely Science (& Engineering) trained peole like me are really thin on the ground?
Greg, they are very thin on the ground in Parliament and perhaps having noticed that is one reason why fewer and fewer students take up science and engineering. My son is reading chemistry and, whilst I am pleased, I half wish he had chosen to read law or economics.
Eagleton…. meretricious.
Eagleton fools you as he doesn’t use jargon and his sentences aren’t convoluted in the true post modern style. His prose is trenchant and readable. But at the end of an article – I haven’t the energy to read a book – I think, what was that about? He writes to perform rather than explain.
GT, never mind the hard stuff I get despondent over people’s common reluctance to apply basic set theory when discussing politics… cartoons ‘offending a billion muslems’ etc
GT, I think you’ll find the laser in your PC is in the CD/DVD drive, not the hard drive, which operates on a magnetic principle little different to old-fashioned cassette-tape [ceteris paribus, of course].
But don’t mind me, I’m only a historian, what do I know… ;-)
And pardon me for saying so, to go further, but have we not seen that a lot of fanatics in various areas, from ID to Al-Qaeda, turn out to be engineers? I speak only from vague memory. Maybe there’s something in the mindset of those who only need to know how it works, that closes them off to questions of what it should do?
I have on my shelves, but soon to be sold on eBay, if anyone will buy it, a book on ethics, which is supposed to be of an introductory nature, but I’m buggered if I can understand a phrase of it. I can’t find it now, so can’t site it, but the author, an American, also uses Greek. What is the sodding point of using Greek, and cutting down your potential audience by goodness knows how many? It’s pisspotical. (Now there’s a bit of Greek! Perhaps it should be spelled ‘pisspotikal’.) But, generally, his language is just so dense that he can only be writing for others who can understand him, again cutting down his potential readership. It has a self-regulation about it, I suppose: he gets to show off by looking ever so clever, but by doing that he shows off to fewer people because those who have glanced at it on the bookshop shelves have rejected it. I bought it online, so couldn’t read some of it first. More fool me!
Well, there are writers in the humanities who are difficult to read because the subject matter is, and yet extremely worthwhile. One reason, I guess, is that since the mental model people have of inquiry is based on the physical sciences, any discipline departing from that (such as the humanities) will need to spend a lot of time explaining the basics (e.g. what is ’cause and effect’ in terms of the human sciences etc.). With historical linguistics, we have an abstract and structural enough system that most people can forget about the basics and do their work with whatever phil.of.science model they have – but I would gather that things are different if you move in the area of linguistic pragmatics, literary theory, etc. Lack of difficulty in the text itself is often paid back in another way: i.e. Peirce is a wonderful writer, witty, enjoyable to read – but because his works have been put together by published and unpublished manuscript, letters, encyclopedia entries, etc. you see the same things returned to time and again in different contexts and it becomes very hard to build a picture of what he is saying as a whole.
Usually, some kind of gut feeling is enough to tell me whether a writer is being difficult for the sake of it or being difficult because the subject needs a lot of precise clarification and reflection. A “normal reading” of a paragraph will usually tell me if it seems coherent and in a general way “sensible” enough to make a closer reading warranted.
I’ve steered cleared of most postmodernist theory/philosophy so far – it’s at most marginal in my subject area anyway. But I’ve read writers in my own field who I think are excellent and exactly right being accused of impenetrable, vacuous prose etc. The fact that there are theorists out there who write impenetrably to fool the reader does not mean that all difficult writing in the humanities is worthless. And it’s exactly those who are a bit on the borderline between wonderful, creative thought and vacuity who are the most interesting.
Yes – got it wrong in a hurry typing – the laser is on/in the CD/DVD read/write mechanism.
And, we’ve been round the PoMo thing before – you just will not get anyone in the sciences susbscribing tho the complete and utter load of posturing bullshit that PoMo is …..
I do, sometimes wonder about some engineers, since my own highest qualification is in that area, though I started in Physics …..
II suppose the most egregious to mind is the deluded one of Leeds, Andy MacIntosh – usually referred to, I think, as just “Tosh”
I’m not at all confident that all of PoMo is an “utter load of posturing bullshit”. It’s a rather broad term. And I am not confident that PoMo is bullshit when applied to “interpretation” disciplines, i.e. humanities, academic disciplines engaged in interpreting texts, etc.
What I guess the primary issue is is the following:
A) We have a real world out there, existing independently from our observations
B) We have our sum-total of knowledge about the world out there, of which scientific knowledge forms the core
C) We have interpretations of scientific results in the sense that we derive meaning from them. Happens all the time, and nothing wrong with it. A lot of atheists regard Darwinism as meaningful far beyond the strictly biological: it becomes an icon for the world in general (blind, natural forces giving yet rise to beautiful things). At the other end, there are theists deriving meaning from things such as the regularity of the universe, apparent cosmic fine-tuning etc.
D) We have interpretations of the strictly human world. History, linguistics, etc. are all based on such interpretations: human actions can be understood to the extent that they are reasonable.
C) and D) belong to the domain where postmodernisms (deconstructionism etc.) would have their place – or not. But the problem is of course drawing a line between B) and C). Ideologies such as that underlying eugenics, social Darwinism, etc. need close analysis and criticism from a humanities perspective. But the same does not go for Darwinism-qua-biological theory. And this is all too often forgotten.
The problem being of course that A) is by its nature unknowable in itself, B) runs into the philosophical problem of yet accounting for our knowledge, and a lot of “basic epistemology” has holes in it if you look carefully – so it’s all too tempting to toss in B) with C). And that’s where postmodernism turns into an “utter load of postulating bullshit”.
Merlijn…which leaves us with the recent attacks by some academics on fascistic “Evidence-Based Medicine”, reported on and discussed here recently.
Merlijn,
A lot that’s questionable there, I think…
“Well, there are writers in the humanities who are difficult to read because the subject matter is, and yet extremely worthwhile.”
Of course there are. But there are also writers in the humanities who perhaps want to imitate writers of that kind but don’t have difficult subject matter, so they do the imitation via difficulty of language as opposed to substance. Eagleton sometimes resorts to that ploy, I think.
“One reason, I guess, is that since the mental model people have of inquiry is based on the physical sciences, any discipline departing from that (such as the humanities) will need to spend a lot of time explaining the basics”
Is the mental model people have of inquiry based on the physical sciences? Is none of it based on, say, history? And do all the humanities depart from that model? History is empirical as well as interpretive, as far as I know.
“The fact that there are theorists out there who write impenetrably to fool the reader does not mean that all difficult writing in the humanities is worthless.”
Of course it doesn’t. But that was exactly my point – at least I thought it was. Maybe I wasn’t clear enough.
His Enlightenment conflation of truth, language, clarity and moral integrity may have involved some questionable epistemology, but politically speaking it is worth a lot more than the work of those whose contribution to the subversion of Western Reason is to write unintelligibly.
-Terry Eagleton on George Orwell
OB:
Agreeing some writers are obtuse for the sake of it. Can’t say whether Eagleton is one of them, since I haven’t read much of him beyond the one Dawkins review.
“Physics envy” is I guess more of a problem in the more abstract, structuralist discipline of linguistics than in history and literary theory – where something like the deductive-nomological model of inference wouldn’t even come into question. This is probably a case of bias on my part. As a linguist, I am much more ready to stress the differences between the humanities and the natural sciences than a historian may be – because in my field, they are so often misunderstood.
I agree that humanities disciplines are empirical in the sense that experiential data are taken into account. But I would argue that induction is a bit more relegated into the background in the humanities: we cannot generalize and posit a law, and deduce further cases from the law. Rather, it’s about finding the most plausible explanation for an existing state-of-affairs – but usually, confirming the explanation by experiment is undoable. In that sense, philosophy is a humanities discipline – and the natural sciences would be methodologically an exception to the humanities model rather than the other way around :-)
It seems to me that twenty or thirty years ago, many humanities writers realized that pretty much everything that could be said about the canon had been said, and they were forced to write about something else, and turned to pop culture.
I suspect a lot of them write inpenetrable prose because they’re trying to hide the fact that they’re saying something pretty obvious. Pop culture is pretty superficial, so they have to complicate it to sound deep and intellectual.
At the same time, postmodernism (is that any different from “cultural studies”?), the tool they’ve adopted, offers an interpretation of why this apparently superficial pop culture is important: it contains a political message about oppression in terms of what some call race, class and gender. Race seems to mean any race but white, class means the lower class, and gender means not only women but also gays and occasionally the transgendered.
Not to make light of the suffering of these groups, but is that all there is?
And in fact, although these critics seemed to have assumed that pop culture would be enlightened or progressive or revolutionary, in fact it is all too often not only reactionary but also racist and sexist.