Author: Ophelia Benson

Oh dear – that’s one of the best laughs I’ve had in – well, a few hours, anyway. It was the surprise, partly. You know how a surprise can yank a loud sudden blurt of laughter out of you without your consciously intending it. It was that kind.

What, what, you eagerly cry, tell us so that we can laugh too. It was just a letter on the Letters page about my silly parodic wall article, which said ‘This is one of the silliest things I have ever read.’ Well good! That was the idea, so I’m delighted he thinks so! Mind you, he seems to have missed the fact that the silliness was intentional, but that’s all right – all the better in fact. Shows that it’s plausible enough. That was intentional too – I did try to make it enough like the real thing that the parody would be about something as opposed to merely absurdist. (That’s the basic thinking behind the entries in the Dictionary, too, I suppose. They’re meant to be hooked onto the real thing enough that they’re not just random cartoons. In fact my co-author often had to check a tendency in me to go past the borders of credibility. ‘I just don’t believe that one,’ he would say coldly. I would argue and shout and throw things, but in the end I usually gave in. I put most of the rejects on the B&W version of the Dictionary. I finally removed one of those a few days ago, after the fourth or fifth person emailed to tell me that I had ‘Chinatown’ and ‘The China Syndrome’ confused. I knew I did, that was the joke, but if so many people didn’t realize that – well that must have been a joke that didn’t work.) Mind you, I also included one or two fairly broad hints that it was a joke. The bit about decaying corpses, for instance – I’d have thought that was a bit of a giveaway. But probably the reader was so irritated and incredulous by the time he got to that part that he didn’t quite take it in. And rightly so! If you’re not already familiar with B&W, you wouldn’t asume that it’s a joke, so irritation in that situation is the correct response.

All this reminds me of an article Ellen Willis wrote in the Village Voice in response to the Sokal Hoax. I like her writing, but her partiality for the hoaxed Stanley Aronowitz may have clouded her perception on this occasion. Whatever the reason, she made a surprisingly glaring error:

Roger Kimball, who himself had been totally fooled by Sokal’s parody and blasted it at length in an anti-Social Text polemic in the new Criterion…

But – Ellen – oh dear, don’t you see, don’t you get it? The fact that he blasted it means he wasn’t fooled by it, not that he was! The fact that he thought Sokal meant it literally is not the point, the point is that he recognized what Sokal wrote as bullshit, which Aronowitz signally failed to do.

Quite an embarrassing mistake, that.

H. E. Baber reminds us of this splendid item, which I’d read before but forgotten.

Go into any of the little cafés or horlogeries on Paris’s Left Bank (make sure the Seine is flowing away from you, otherwise you’ll be on the Right Bank, where no one is ever seen) and sooner or later you will hear someone say, ‘Les choses sont contre nous.‘ ‘Things are against us.’ This is the nearest English translation I can find for the basic concept of Resistentialism, the grim but enthralling philosophy now identified with bespectacled, betrousered, two-eyed Pierre-Marie Ventre.

All accidentally (as Henry James might have put it), I was gesturing toward the same idea – but not because I remembered Resistentialism. The inspiration was that review of a history of barbed wire we were discussing last week. I was trying to inflate the element of paranoia as much as possible – and ended up in much the same place. Which is quite funny, really.

Clark-Trimble was not primarily a physicist, and his great discovery of the Graduated Hostility of Things was made almost accidentally. During some research into the relation between periods of the day and human bad temper, Clark-Trimble, a leading Cambridge psychologist, came to the conclusion that low human dynamics in the early morning could not sufficiently explain the apparent hostility of Things at the breakfast table…

I have a longstanding, consuming interest in human bad temper. I consider myself an expert in the field.

And speaking of writing and thinking – as we so often are, one way or another – here is a good article on the subject. Unfortunate that it was first published in the Weekly Standard, but sometimes things fall out that way. It is republished in Theory’s Empire.

…bad academic writing nowadays has become something worse than an aesthetic offense…Academic writing in our own time, however, exhibits a disregard, not merely for style, but for truth. Once upon a time, no matter how badly they wrote, scholars imagined that they were contributing to knowledge. But no longer. Much of the scholarship now published in the humanities—primarily in English and comparative literature, but increasingly in history, musicology, art history, and religious studies—has no other purpose than to confirm the scholar’s own status and authority. It is not a contribution to knowledge, but to political power.

A harsh comment, but all too believable. I say ‘believable’ in that waffly way because obviously one can’t know for sure – we have no way of knowing for certain what people’s motivations are for writing what they do. But it is believeable, because when you look at the actual work in question, it simply is very difficult to think that anyone writes it in order to contribute to knowledge. That just doesn’t seem to be what’s going on – what’s going on looks like something else entirely.

Although she agreed that even leftist scholars “should be able to clarify how their work informs and illuminates everyday life,” Butler insisted that academic writing needed to be “difficult and demanding” (her words) in order to “question common sense”—the truths which are so self-evident that no one thinks to question them—and so to “provoke new ways of looking at a familiar world.” If the only choice is between academic obscurity and the pseudo-clarity of “common sense,” who wouldn’t choose the former? But who said that’s the only choice? In the limited range of options she offers us, Butler reveals much about the real politics behind bad academic writing.

Thus – and so soon, too – we meet the false dichotomy again. Who, indeed, said that’s the only choice?

The desire to “question common sense” is merely the self-congratulation of someone whose “sense” is different, but no less “common.” Although Butler wishes to disrupt “the workings of capitalism,” the effect of her writing is exactly the opposite. Its effect is to safeguard the power and privilege of academic capitalists—among whom she is one of the great robber barons.

Wishes, or perhaps claims to wish to disrupt those workings. I myself (suspicious rat that I am) tend to think it’s far more of a claim than a wish.

What Butler’s writing actually expresses is simultaneously a contempt for her readers and an absolute dependence on their good opinion. The problem is not so much her lack of concern for clarity; it’s her lack of concern for clarification. If Butler took seriously her academic responsibility—her duty to teach—she would take pains to make herself clear. Her concern, though, is not to clarify a difficult subject but to justify her position in the front ranks. Hers is not writing to be read and understood; it is a display of verbal majesty, which is to inspire awe and respect. Its one purpose is to confirm Butler’s authority as a leader of the academic left.

A knock-down point, I think. The lack of concern for clarification is telling.

But you can sense the strength of Butler’s party even more strongly among those who support the Bad Writing Contest. In the last two years, at least five young scholars have submitted entries, asking that their names not be released if they should win. In an unsigned June 1997 letter, one entrant confessed that he was “loathe to upset senior scholars in my field,” since alienating them could do “significant damage” to his career…In the current crisis of hiring freezes and intense pressure for tenure, the need to publish is perhaps greater than any time before. Yet to publish in most journals means flinging the jargon, toeing the party line (which is somewhere to the left of gibberish), and quoting the usual suspects (Benjamin, Foucault, Derrida, Said, Jameson, Butler, etc.). I’m often appalled at my own writing, but since jargon, rather than substance, gains a publication, I succumb to verbiage.

Maybe they all hate it, maybe even Butler does, maybe they’re all caught in a trap of their own making. Let’s hope they find the way out soon.

Let’s test our writing skills, shall we? Let’s write an essay on one of these questions:

“Is it more important to follow the rules exactly or to base your actions on how other people may be affected?”

”Are people motivated to achieve by personal satisfaction rather than by money or fame?”

Okay let’s not. Let’s instead curl a lip at the stupid impoverished vacuous questions, and do something else instead. For instance we could wonder why those are the only possibilities on offer, and why the terms are so undefined, in fact meaningless. ‘More important’ – to whom, when, where, in what context? What ‘rules’? Rules pertaining to what? Football? Taking an aptitude test? Morality? If the latter, what rules are meant? What ‘actions’? What am I doing, and what rules apply to what I’m doing, and how do I know, and who issued them? Where are we? What ‘other people’? ‘Affected’ in what sense? To ‘achieve’ what? What kind of achievement are we talking about? What kind of ‘personal satisfaction’? What if ‘money’ and ‘fame’ aren’t real options? Where (again) are we? And why such incomplete choices? The best answer to both questions would be simply ‘No.’

The author of the article points this out.

The real problem with the SAT persuasive essay assignment isn’t what it conveys about spontaneity or style but what it suggests about how to argue. Students are asked to ponder (quickly) a short excerpt of conventional wisdom about, say, the advisability of following rules, and they are then instructed to ”develop your point of view on this issue.” But if the goal of ”better writing” is ”improved thinking,” as the College Board’s National Commission on Writing in America’s Schools and Colleges has pronounced, perhaps it’s worth asking whether practice in reflexively taking a position on any potentially polarizing issue is what aspiring college students — or the rest of us — need most. As those sample essay questions at the start reveal, and as any test-prep book will confirm, at the homiletic heart of the SAT writing assignment is the false dichotomy. The best strategy for a successful essay is to buy into one of the facile premises that inform the question, and then try to sell it as if it were really yours. Essayists won’t be penalized for including false information, either, according to the official guide for graders. ”You are scoring the writing,” it instructs, ”and not the correctness of facts.”

Ah. The point of the test is to score how closely students resemble Bill O’Reilly. Wonderful.

…the test-prep industry bluntly says that a blinkered perspective pays off on the essay — and nobody knows better than the professional SAT obsessives. ”It is very important that you take a firm stance in your essay and stick to it,” insists Kaplan’s ”New SAT.”…”What’s important is that you take a position and state how you feel. It is not important what other people might think, just what you think.” This doesn’t bear much resemblance to an exercise in critical reasoning, which usually involves clarifying the logic of a position by taking counterarguments seriously or considering alternative assumptions…In fact, self-centered opinion is exactly what the questions solicit…You have to hand it to the College Board: the new essay seems all too apt as training for contemporary social and political discourse in this country, and for journalistic food fights too. But don’t colleges want to encourage the ”strengths of analysis and logic” that the Board itself has said are so important to ”the citizenry in a democracy”?

It doesn’t appear so.