Author: Ophelia Benson

The ‘bad writing’ discussion continues. A reader wonders in the Guestbook if ‘bad’ is the best word to use.

OB, very ascerbic, very plain and right on, on the Bad Writing theme. But I think the very the phrase itself needs a housecleaning (or maybe a whole renovation), since “bad” can mean a splay of things: bad-ass, bad-as-evil, bad quality, bad as in WRONG, bad as in naughty … I think YOU mean “bad” as in convoluted, arrogant, obfuscatory, and Wizard-of-Oz academic, no?

Yes. Good point, FK. But I still like the word ‘bad’ for the purpose, and I think the possible other meanings are eliminated by the context. Even the headline on the In Focus makes explicit what kind of bad writing is at issue. And I’m fond of the word ‘bad’ for a number of reasons. The first is its bluntness, simplicity, clarity – how very unlike it is, in fact, the fog-generating unclarity of jargon-mongering. Then there’s its non-euphemistic aspect. I detest the widespread use of the word ‘poor’ as a substitute for bad when people (apparently) don’t want to hurt the feelings of whatever it is they are calling not-good – even if the thing in question is an inanimate object not created by a human. People say things like ‘It’s poor weather for sailing.’ Because – ? Who exactly is going to be offended if we say it’s bad weather for sailing? Poseidon maybe? But that’s a digression – and yet it’s not, not entirely, since language is the subject under discussion. Euphemism tends to obfuscate and should be avoided when possible. (When possible – thus obviously if your best friend asks you ‘How do I look?’ you should not answer, briefly and to the point, ‘Bad.’) Then there’s the fact that ‘bad writing’ means ‘writing that is bad as writing.’ Writing that doesn’t do the job writing ought to do, or any one of the many jobs writing can do. Bad engineering is a bridge that falls down, bad architecture is a house that falls down, bad running is a runner that falls down, and bad writing is writing that makes one long to be illiterate again.

And then there are various resonances – such as Paul Fussell’s amusingly vituperative book Bad, from which I got the phrase (one that he quotes from an old professor of his) ‘Bad, bad, very bad.’ It seems so obvious, and yet people don’t say it enough. I say it all the time. Another resonance is with Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, who filled their correspondence with pointing out how bad a lot of things were. David Lodge once remarked somewhere (sorry I can’t remember where) that the amusingly blunt, direct language of Lucky Jim may have come from the Ordinary Language philosophy that was all the rage at Oxford when Amis and Larkin were there. So perhaps there’s that resonance too, at several removes. And then of course there’s Denis Dutton’s Bad Writing contest, which I think he probably named that for much the same sorts of reasons I adduce here. The writing in question is bad, it’s not poor or weak or unfortunate or regrettable or infelicitous, it’s just plain bad. It doesn’t do what writing ought to do and it does do what writing ought not to do – hence it is bad.

And people go on making the ‘It’s not bad it’s difficult’ defense. The ‘No one expects physics or botany or philosophy to be instantly understandable so why do people expect theory and essays on theories written for theoreticians and theoretical analysis to be instantly understandable?’ defense. Which of course rests on the belief that theory is saying something inherently difficult that can’t be expressed in any other way, but one has only to read the examples I gave (the whole thing will do just as well as the samples) to see that that is simply not the case. No need to take my word for it; by all means read the whole thing. What can I tell you – it’s bad.

Want more? Want more bad writing combined with bad thinking? Right then.

This is from a review by Azfar Hussain of Dis/locating Cultures/Identitites, Traditions, and Third World Feminism by Uma Narayan.

Narayan’s preoccupations with the problematics of the representations of sati in Western feminist discourse indeed remain intimately connected to other representationalist discursive areas, namely dowry-murders in India and domestic violence-murders in the United States — issues that she takes up in the third chapter of her book. Narayan takes a hard, critical look at the ways in which dowry-murders in India are framed, focused, and even formulated in US academic feminist discourse, while pointing up the dangerous problems kept alive by Western culturalist epistemological approaches to Third-World subjects, identities, traditions, and cultures. She argues that while crossing “borders” in the age of globalization, images, narratives, and the entire chain of events pertaining to the Third World lose their national and historical differentia specifica under the homogenizing epistemic logic of some readily available connection-making apparatuses. As Narayan further argues, such apparatuses — informational, ideological, and mediatic as they are — continue to provide visibility to dowry-murders in India and relative invisibility to domestic-violence murders in the US, thereby serving the hegemonic.

Thereby serving the hegemonic, you see. Perhaps if Hussain had said what he says more clearly, he would have been too embarrassed to say it – which is one use of jargon: it makes it easier to say absurd things. But then one has to wonder why people want to say absurd things. Why do Hussain and Narayan want to argue that Western feminists should not ‘frame, focus and formulate’ dowry-murders in such a way that they are made more visible? Why do they want to summon all this portentous suspicion about the whole thing? Isn’t there enough real oppression and racism and colonialism in the world, without going to all this trouble to translate moral or humanitarian attention into something that ‘serves the hegemonic’?

Just a bit more, by way of edification and entertainment.

Such a self-critical interrogation begins to complicate the very question of identity itself in ways in which the continuing “colonialist” process of constructing “Third-World” identity and also even the practice of conjuring the ghost of authenticity haunting that very identity (as exemplified in various brands of counterproductive, essentialist identity-politics these days) are all brought into productive crises. For Narayan, indeed, the question of identity continues to constitute a predominant concern throughout the book. And her insistence on historicizing and contextualizing identity and difference within the deeply specific national contexts — instead of just celebrating or, worse, fetishizing them — seems right on the mark. According to her, the fetishization of difference and identity only renders them vulnerable to ongoing hegemonic appropriations in the metropolis.

Oh, those ongoing hegemonic appropriations in the metropolis. Don’t you just hate that? You know, you can’t get a cab, and the restaurants are all booked, and everything is so expensive, and then on top of all that – ongoing hegemonic appropriations! It’s unbearable!

A reader of ours seems to think I haven’t actually read any bad writing. He’s wrong about that. He tells me to quote some that’s recently published. Very well. Mind you, I wouldn’t do it just to please him, but I’ve been meaning to anyway, when I got around to it, so I’ll get around to it now.

This is from a book published this very year, 2003. It is called, elegantly, The Futures of American Studies, and is edited by Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman. Here is a sample – highly representative, I assure you – from the Introduction:

Like most founding gestures, this one gave monumental status to an origin retrospectively invoked, thereby giving the past authority over the present in a management strategy that seemed aimed to contextualize, if not override, the present threat of rupture and incoherence. In so doing, Wise sought to repair the conceptual ground of a field whose fissuring into multiple programs and subfields at once reflected and gave expression to the aspirations of social movements that had exceeded the ‘founding’ field’s epistemological grasp. The canonical objects of analysis, protocols of reading them, and the interpretive narratives that had secured Wise’s field identity were brought into the ambit of the crisis he diagnosed. In the wake of this encounter, Wise strained to invent a paradigmatic drama that would enable him to feel at home in any of the possible trajectories of the emergent field.

Stop, that’s enough! I want to go on, each sentence is more delicious than the last, so I keep typing, but there is such a thing as copyright, after all. So there you are. I must say, breathes there a soul so dead that that passage doesn’t inspire it with uncontrollable mirth? And it’s all like that. The intro is 38 pages long and it’s all full of that dark suspicion, that insistently paranoid rhetoric, that fatuously portentous jargonization of nothing very much, that wishful mention of ‘social movements’ as if this kind of thing were sort of the academic version of the Flint sit-down strike.

This bit is from the article by Robyn Wiegman, ‘Whiteness Studies and the Paradox’:

I am interested in Forrest Gump as the specific instance and the popular imaginary as the general context for thinking about the academic emergence of an antiracist knowledge project designed to interrogate and historicize whiteness: whiteness studies…If social construction has been used to de-essentialize the racially minoritized subject – to wrestle subjectivity from its oversaturation, indeed reduction to embodiment – then whiteness studies evinces the anxiety of embodiment on the other side of racial power hierarchies, an anxiety that is in itself the consequence of counterhegemonic race discourses that have put pressure not just on what but on how the white body means.

Again – it’s all like that. Page after page of it, treading water, going nowhere. Straining after profundity until the veins stand out on its poor hot forehead, and achieving only polysyllabicality. And then thinking there’s something radical about the whole thing! And there’s something so cringe-making about the sheep-like adoption of Lacanian terminology for no apparent reason, and something so risible about the conjunction of Forrest Gump with a project to historicize something. But there – perhaps I’m just dense, and this sort of thing is terrifically profound.

The Ruddick essay I discussed in the last N&C was published, as I mentioned, in November 2001, but it was revived and discussed again on several blogs last July. This comment or brief essay by Timothy Burke is particularly interesting.

It’s noticeable what a lot of words there are in both pieces that have to do with social pressure, conformity and group-think. From Ruddick’s article: accusations; how inhibiting these tensions can become; the necessity of adhering to the critical norms of the moment; dominant thinking; rules that I thought were very limiting; disgrace; I was still afraid I’d be attacked; this fear of attack can be utterly compelling; a caution bordering on ventriloquism; disciplinary taboos on certain words and ideals; the threat of ostracism by the group; subtle regulations for speech and thought that are pervasive. From Burke’s essay: the game being played is theoretical one-upmanship; the tyranny of theory; it somehow became shameful to say that I had been drawn to African history simply because it seemed interesting.

Why is that, one wonders. Of course, naturally, there is always some of that in any field, and academic fields are no exception. There are norms and standards and conventions, there is a right way to do things and a wrong way, there is pressure from colleagues to do things the right way – and a good thing too. It’s no good pretending pure anarchy would be preferable. It’s a fine and desirable and necessary thing that scientists should teach and shame each other not to fake their evidence, not to ignore disconfirming data, not to cherry-pick only the studies that support their hypotheses. Same with historians, sociologists, inquirers and researchers of all sorts. It’s fine that philosophers point out logical errors, and chastise confusion of rhetoric with argument. But when necessary demands for rigour and good evidence devolve into heresy-hunting and orthodoxy-enforcing, that’s another matter.

And of course literary ‘theory’ is exactly the sort of discipline where heresy-hunting will flourish – because what else is there? One can present quotations, of course, and say ‘There – you’ve misinterpreted that.’ But it’s always open to people to say simply ‘No I haven’t,’ and that’s that. Especially in a field where deconstruction has dismantled binary oppositions and postmodernism has revealed the futility of Grand Narratives, where Foucault has shown that everything is a power-play and Derrida has undermined phallogocentrism. So all is opinion, and you can’t tell me I’ve misunderstood or misinterpreted or got my facts wrong, but I can tell you that your approach is positivist or Eurocentric or bourgeois or Orientalist and at any rate conservative, and you will feel shamed and guilty and I will not.

So a boring repetitive parochial uniformity is imposed, and some people get out and others censor themselves, and students shrug and sign up for business administration or law instead, and it all seems very unfortunate.