i can see that i won't have time to write anything longer if i wish to respond to this thread, so here's a quick one
it isn't a question of making complex what is simple, it isn't a question of trying to impress people by obfuscation, it isn't a question of making something more complicated and difficult than it needs to be.
frankly, that would be silly. not that some people won't do that. i believe as grad students enter the professoriate there might be some wishing to impress who will do so.
it is simply whether you are using theory or not, and if you use theory, you use its language.
i am not a great theoretician, but i do try to keep up with my field. when i use a theoretical terms--be it from postcolonial, feminist, or film theory, the areas in which i work--i use the terms employed by the theoreticians i am citing. sometimes i am asked by editors of my articles to explain a given term. sometimes i do so, sometimes i refuse because i don't wish to be talking down to my readers, assuming they aren't familiar with what should be a common vocabulary.
people who don't work with spivak, bhabha, derrida, butler, or lacan--to mention the most difficult i can think of--have to work really hard to understand them. i have worked with one or the other of those theorists over the years, and sweated bricks to understand them. but as it came, it was worth it.
all the rest, the notion that you have to try to write at their level of discourse to be respected, i mostly don't agree with. that assumes that the readers--either the editors of a journal, say, or the profs who are reading the piece to evaluate it, are nitwits who can't understand the difference. i believe the difference is patently obvious--that is, the difference between an article that is pretentiously larded w theory terms, and one which utilizes them organically and effectively.
listen, stuart hall, el grande, just died, and i am teaching his famous essay on identity and culture this week. he utilizes theory terms throughout. it isn't as dense as spivak can famously be, but that's because he is grounding it less in philosophical notions than psychoanalytical and cultural notions. but he doesn't speak down, shy away from theory terms. if needed he will explain a complex term here or there, but he writes within the orbit of theory, not outside of it, not addressing a general newspaper culture, not addressing people in other disciplines.
when he or gates, or appiah, or west, decide to address the public and write opinion pieces, the don't use theory terminology.
i guess what i am saying is that we should write differently depending on our audience. when we address an academic audience within our discipline, we do have a choice to opt for clarity or uncertainty in what we write. some theorists, masters of theory like culler or eagleton, can render the difficult clear; others like lacan or derrida opt for a vocabulary that is uncertain. lacan famously believes that it is more profitable for us to struggle with a text whose meaning is opaque that one which is transparent. that can make for a challenge. however, if a grad student were to attempt to imitate this, without having mastered the discourse, it may look like a parody, and do the opposite of impress the informed reader.
two last points. the day of high theory has passed, so we are debating something that is over.
secondly, the dismissal of theory has often taken the form of, it is western and therefore has nothing to do with africa.
all is can say is, tell it to mbembe; tell it to gikandi; tell it to irele, who brought structuralist thought to african studies; tell it to mudimbe.
and then, stop telling it. use what works best, that should be the rule.
ken
--O.K. OA, consider this.
Professor xyz had sent in a certain seminar proposal for consideration by a certain committee. It was found very interesting; except that members of the committee who happen to not be conventional historians like her did not see in it trans-disciplinarity, complexity and hybridity. So she got back the proposal and worked some cross disciplinarity into it. She disambiguated a few concepts and excavated the genealogy of others. She included a goal that shows the need to complicate reality that current literature has oversimplified. When she gave it back to them, they liked it.
In the first place, I see in that story the need to use a language that confirms that the professor belongs and that she has some mastery of the lingo of the cult. The prof needs this, at least because a successful proposal adds a paragraph to her cv [promotion]; secondly, the outcome from the proposal likely fetches her a some extra dollars beyond regular pay.
so these professors have a ready market for the lingo and until the market changes or the demand of the market requires a different lingo, why do you think that they wont abide by the specific requirements of the market.
But, quite apart from this, writing for the public and making ones work accessible to the public is being done by public intellectuals. Also most scholars that are also activists have alternative platforms that allow them render their mysterious knowledge into much more understandable public messages. Not everybody professor is or can be an activist or a public intellectual and not everyone has to be, though there are people who think all should be. But certainly there are tons of scholars out there who are and are so good at simplifying the arcane languages of the academe and translating them into some popular prose or fiction or feature articles that catch public attention. Is part of the problem that we do not consider these latter category of people scholars and academics?
Also, languages certainly come in different forms and have different styles and conventions of delivery and different academic disciplines have acquired theirs and continue to socialize students into them in the course of many years of schooling. I think of Law and Economics and wonder how they can survive as they are currently conceived if we are to rob them of their specific language styles. Its a huge market out there, in fact, many markets, and all kinds of sellers should be allowed to ply their wares.
Theres a lot to be said for simplicity and I do agree that scholarly work should have some relevance. But it has been argued on this forum before that relevance comes in different forms and may be achieved by proxy. But seriously, isnt simplicity only a part of a larger reality. When you listen to some complex speakers, you realize that in some paradoxical way, plain speaking can be boring. While I find some authors of post-coloniality and post modernism difficult to digest, I often feel greatly enriched by people who use proverbs and adages and concepts and models (some though), even outside of the academe. Of course, it can be argued that these proverbs and adages and concepts help to simplify for their ideas for the listeners.
From: "Ogugua Anunoby"<AnunobyO@lincolnu.edu>
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Sent: Monday, February 17, 2014 5:48:00 PM
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - NYTimes.com: Professors, We Need You!--
"I don't understand why we scholars should be afraid to share our insight with a wider public in a language that is accessible to that public without undermining the points being made."
meo
I share this difficulty too. Academics tend to write for other academics first. They seem to be intent on impressing fellow academics with perplexing phrasing and iconoclastic vocabulary. The best applause many academics think, is the applause of their peers. Rigor tends to be preferred to simplicity. Obfuscation is preferred to clarity. Boggling the mind becomes an objective. The danger with this posture is that expensive labor and time may be expended by academics on low value or even "useless' work. This may help to explain why not-understood or misunderstood work is characterized as "academic" by many outside the academies. Academics should be worse than concerned about the ease, frequency, and speed with which many of their ideas, thought, and works are unappreciated or even disregarded by non-academics. Is it any surprise therefore that 'street literature" enjoys wider readership and sometimes better credence than many classic works. The former's writers sell more books, are more widely known in society, and are arguably more influential on and determinant of popular culture. Who, if not for the pressures of academe, would want their work to be appreciated by an not eclectic few and then stored away in a dusty backroom library shelf, when the same work written in plain prose, will attracting a wide field of readers standing in line, to buy or borrow it and read/use it. In Economics for example, Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations…" and J. M. Keynes'"The General Theory of…" are a lot more readable than many of today's so-called standard economics textbooks. Is it time for academics to walk back, if only a little?
oa
From:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com [mailto:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Moses Ebe Ochonu
Sent: Monday, February 17, 2014 11:39 AM
To: USAAfricaDialogue
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - NYTimes.com: Professors, We Need You!
Ken and all,
I have a slightly different take. Surely, a call for greater intelligibility is not a call to abandon discipline-specific vocabulary or lexicon, is it? Yes, you're right that sometimes the critique of the language of academe is overdone and tendentious. The piece by Kristof is, however, actually quite measured and well-reasoned. He doesn't call for a dumbing down of the insights and knowledges being produced; he calls only for them to be better communicated beyond the incestuous arenas of the academy. I don't know many academics who will not sympathize with that sentiment, or who have not wrestled with anxieties of being (un)intelligible to a wider audience of knowledge consumers beyond the immediate circle of their peers.
The issue assumes a more serious frame when one realizes that, in many cases, what is being celebrated and normalized is not superior insight or ideas with potential for social impact or influence but a obscurantist phraseology, bombast, and esotericism. The equation of insight with hifalutin expression needs to be deconstructed, and it is one of the things that Kristof is signaling and critiquing. These specialized, faddish tongues are often legacies of moments in the history of certain disciplines, not the constitutive, organic vernaculars of the fields. These are often not languages integral to, or inherent in, the disciplinary practices. Linguistic and lexical flexibility and evolution should certainly be one of the referents when we say knowledge is incremental and changing.
I don't understand why we scholars should be afraid to share our insight with a wider public in a language that is accessible to that public without undermining the points being made. Are we saying that these two goals (erudition and communicative reach) are incompatible, or unachievable? If so, that would be a shame, for academics should not run away from challenges but should evolve and confront the problems that restrict their impact and influence in society.
By the way, here (below) is a relevant Facebook update I posted sometime last year. Several members of this list actually participated in the discussion that ensued on my wall.
"The politics of difference lives on to rethink the minority not as an identity but as a process of affiliation ... that eschews sovereignty and sees its own selfhood and interests as partial and incipient in relation to the other's presence."
--Homi K. Bhabha ( A distinguished Harvard Professor of English and American literature)
What the heck does this jargony babble mean? Exhibit A for why there is such a divide between town and gown, between academic writings and the general reading public. Folks are complaining that academics are increasingly writing for one another, alienating the public with their esoteric ways of writing and presentation, and engaging in incestuous conversations among themselves--conversations that are so abstract they have no bearing on or relevance to the real world. How do the Bhabhas of the academy respond? More jargon, more "academic gibberish" (apologies to Russell Jacoby). We talk and write ourselves out of reckoning outside the academy and we complain when people say we're irrelevant or stuck-up intellectual nutcases. As Saleh Abdu, my undergraduate English professor and one of the best teachers I've ever had, used to say, what's the point of speaking when you deliberately make yourself difficult to be understood? At what point do we just say someone is a bad writer masquerading behind hifalutin phraseology? At what point do we call out those who equate verbosity and inaccessible writing with brilliance?
On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 10:16 PM, kenneth harrow <harrow@msu.edu> wrote:
it's hard for me to read this through. nothing we haven't heard forever, since existentialism was born, since post-structuralism was born, since deconstruction was born, since postmodernism was born, since every philosophically grounded body of knowledge was born we have heard this cries to make the language comprehensible to the non-specialist. and anyone who has worked to understand the specialized discourses realizes what is lost when trying to translate the complex into the simple and straightforward. same for psychoanalysis. same for physics, same for every science on earth that developed its own specialized vocabularies in order to meet the intellectual needs of its discipline. medicine; even sports has its own discourse.
that's really what it is all about. no more than that; no snobbism, no elitism, no disdain of anybody. just simply work.
and then this politics that says, the only language that matters is the language of politics.
well...duh (how about making poetry accessible and intelligible? ok, mr. chinweizu, it's you or soyinka all over again) (how about the complexities of rhythm; let's make all rhythms one, something we can all play, all follow. how about making all architecture simple so we can all fix our broken walls, why should we have architects? why should we have thought? we can let politicians think for us. wait....what shall we call their language? the common language for the common man? why should we have more than one language anyway? nothing is harder than learning two languages, nothing is harder than learning a foreign language. africa has 2000 languages, polyrhythms. time to throw out 1,999 of them, and learn to speak the ONE TONGUE of pragmatism: Realism.
enough.)
ken
On 2/16/14 10:17 PM, emeka194real@gmail.com wrote:>From The New York Times:
Professors, We Need You!
Academics are some of the smartest minds in the world. So why are they making themselves irrelevant?
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/opinion/sunday/kristof-professors-we-need-you.html
Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone provided by Airtel Nigeria.
--kenneth w. harrow
faculty excellence advocate
professor of english
michigan state university
department of english
619 red cedar road
room C-614 wells hall
east lansing, mi 48824
ph. 517 803 8839
harrow@msu.edu
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-- kenneth w. harrow faculty excellence advocate professor of english michigan state university department of english 619 red cedar road room C-614 wells hall east lansing, mi 48824 ph. 517 803 8839 harrow@msu.edu