[Discussion] Wittgenstein's......

[laurence raw]

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 Plus ça change, c'est la meme chose.  I think much the same thing was said about "Ulysses" when it first appeared nearly eighty years ago ...
  hpaksoy@ttacs.ttu.edu wrote: Wittgenstein's Curse 
by Jay Tolson 

It's easy to go on about how bad most academic writing 
is these days, and how it became so during the past 30 
or 40 years. Curmudgeonly journalists have been 
pouncing on prof-prose at least since the days of H. L. 
Mencken. But now high sport is made of the subject even 
within the academy. One academic journal awards annual 
prizes in a Bad Writing Contest, causing pain and 
sometimes anger among the unwitting winners. Scholars 
agonize about the problem, too. Russell Jacoby, for 
one, links it to the disappearance of the great public 
intellectuals who once enriched the larger culture. And 
it seems clear that the decline of scholarly writing 
has widened the eternal divide between the world of 
scholars and the public realm, to the impoverishment of 
both. Just as bad, the pursuit of truth and knowledge--
an activity that should be charged with passion and 
engagement--now appears to the larger public to be an 
exercise in nonsensical irrelevance.

Perhaps nothing brought the whole sorry matter to a 
more dramatic head than the parodic gibberish-and-
jargon-filled article that New York University 
physicist Alan Sokal tricked the scholarly journal 
Social Text into publishing in 1996. 
Titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a 
Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," the 
essay argued that scientific knowledge was socially 
constructed, an argument very much in line with the 
journal's postmodernist agenda. What the editors failed 
to see, though, is that the piece was packed with 
illogic, non sequiturs, and nonsense, including an 
unargued rejection of the "dogma" that asserts the 
existence of "an external world, whose properties are 
independent of any human being and indeed of humanity 
as a whole."


On the day the article was published, Sokal let the 
world know that it had been a hoax, and an uproar 
ensued. Many of the more interesting contributions to 
that controversy were published last year in a book, 
The Sokal Hoax--and not all of them were critical of 
the journal's editors. In fact, literary scholar 
Stanley Fish made a plausible defense of the argument 
that Sokal had parodied: "What sociologists of science 
say," Fish wrote, "is that of course the world is real 
and independent of our observations but that accounts 
of the world are produced by observers and are 
therefore relative to their capacities, education, 
training, etc. It is not the world or its properties 
but the vocabularies in whose terms we know them that 
are socially constructed--fashioned by human beings--
which is why our understanding of those properties is 
continually changing."








hat is true and sensible and clearly put. 
Unfortunately, it's not a distinction the editors of 
the journal seemed to grasp, because what Sokal said in 
his trickster voice was precisely that there was no 
external world independent of human constructions of 
it. And the trickster didn't even make an argument for 
his outlandish claim. He simply tossed around the 
jargon, let it fall where it might, and concluded--
voilà--that there is nothing out there unless we 
construct it into being.

Maybe Fish failed to get the point for the same reason 
the editors didn't see it: because the writing was as 
impenetrably bad as most prose published in Social 
Text, and indeed as bad as so much current academic 
writing. The not-so-secret little secret, it turns out, 
is that no one really reads this stuff anyway, not even 
folks who produce reams of it for countless scholarly 
publications. And in truth, the stuff is not meant to 
be read. It's a form of professional feather display, 
the ritual gesturing by which scholars establish 
standing with others in their particular niche, or 
subniche, of the scholarly trade. Display the jargon--
feminist, neo-Marxist, postcolonialist, 
deconstructionist, whatever--and you're in, you're one 
of us, we want you on our tenure track.

If this seems to be a partisan slam against only the 
more progressive, left-leaning, and postmodern members 
of the academic community, let me second a point made 
by Patricia Nelson Limerick in the New York Times Book 
Review (Oct. 31, 1993): The more conservative 
traditionalists within the academy can often be just as 
bad as the Sado-Marxists and the Martian-Leninists (or 
maybe almost as bad). Limerick quotes a passage from 
that best-selling tract The Closing of the American 
Mind (1987), by the late Allan Bloom, a University of 
Chicago scholar who trained, and was subsequently 
revered by, a cadre of neoconservative thinkers now 
gone forth into the world to pursue an assortment of 
academic and nonacademic occupations:

If openness means to "go with the flow," it is 
necessarily an accommodation to the present. That 
present is so closed to doubt about so many things 
impeding the progress of its principles that 
unqualified openness to it would mean forgetting the 
despised alternatives to it, knowledge of which would 
only make us aware of what is doubtful in it.

Got that? And does it not read like something only 
barely translated from German, or a directive from the 
Department of Housing and Urban Development? 
Postmodernish, far-leftish types may commit more, and 
more grievous, sins against the ideal of clear prose, 
but they are not alone in their sins.





hy have so many been undone by willful obscurantism and 
given themselves over to cant and nonsense? So many 
reasons, so little time to state them all. In fact, 
many have already been stated, and many times over. But 
let me mention a couple that might not have received 
quite as much attention as they deserve, before coming 
to what I think is a fundamental cause.

First of all, academic writing has never been all that 
much fun to read. Mencken, as I mentioned earlier, went 
to town on the foibles of academese, focusing with 
particular viciousness on sociologist Thorstein 
Veblen's tortured, jargon-flecked prose. But does that 
mean that Veblen's theories about the leisure class and 
conspicuous consumption were unimportant? Not at all. 
Writing about difficult matters can be difficult--and 
often requires neologisms and complicated, subtle 
analysis. We have a hard time following the 
explanations of auto mechanics. Why should the 
explanations of a philosopher or sociologist be easier 
to follow? Clarity of expression should be a handmaiden 
of intellectual brilliance, but Veblen and many others 
demonstrate that often it is not.

That said, the rife obscurantism in scholarly 
publications today comports itself in a self-
congratulatory, almost arrogant manner. Its 
promulgators argue that the difficulty is essential to 
the gravity of their ideas or to an intellectual or 
political stance, and that clarity, in any case, is 
just some elitist, dead-white-male convention. 
In "Troubling Clarity: The Politics of Accessible 
Language," published by the Harvard Educational Review 
(Fall 1996), Patti Lather justifies the liberating 
complexity of her own feminist writings:

Sometimes we need a density that fits the thoughts 
being expressed. In such places, clear and precise 
plain prose would be a sort of cheat tied to the 
antiintellectualism rife in U.S. society that deskills 
readers. . . . Positioning language as productive of 
new spaces, practices, and values, what might come of 
encouraging a plurality of discourses and forms and 
levels of writing in a way that refuses the binary 
between so-called "plain speaking" and complex 
writing? . . . What is the violence of clarity, its non-
innocence?

Claiming that her book about women with HIV/AIDS, 
Troubling Angels, was aimed at a popular audience, and 
even intended to be what she calls a "Kmart book," 
Lather boasts at the same time that she refused to 
produce a "tidy book" or a "comfort text," with the 
kind of writing "that maps easily into our ways of 
making sense and 'giving sense.'" I have yet to 
encounter Troubling Angels on any of my visits to 
Kmart. I wonder whether any other Kmart shoppers have 
come across it.

Lather, like so many who proudly assert their 
obscurity, does not have the justification of a Veblen 
or a Hegel. There is no brilliance or insight or 
originality in her work. There is only a thicket of 
nonsense, faddishness, and claptrap. But Lather wears 
her opacity proudly, like a badge, and no doubt enjoys 
tenure at Ohio State University because of it. And she 
is no rarity, no exception. Her kind are everywhere--
troubling texts, troubling clarity, troubling the 
hegemonic hold on beauty and truth--and the sheer 
quantity of the drivel they produce is another big part 
of the problem.

The endless production is a matter of necessity and 
survival, of course. The academic professions require 
it--and not just the noble drudgery of teaching, 
research, editing, and monograph writing that engaged 
more modest scholars in the past (particularly those 
who recognized their intellectual and writerly 
limitations). No, the professions today demand 
substantial "original" works by all members of the 
professoriate who hope to rise to tenure. And that 
demand is simply unrealistic. For how much new is there 
under the sun? Not much--in scholarship or in any other 
human pursuit. Yet never have so many words been used 
so badly, and to say so little, as in these works of 
professedly original scholarship. Yes, there are still 
scholarly writers who produce truly groundbreaking work 
that reaches, informs, and enlightens not just other 
scholars but popular audiences as well. But beneath 
that apex, how enormous is the mountain of entirely 
superfluous scholarly prose!

One remedy seems obvious: more modesty on the part of 
the academic professions and a return to other 
scholarly tasks, including teaching, greater mastery of 
the core subject matter of a field, and recognition 
that in the realm of "original" work, less is more. But 
the obvious solution is no easy solution. It may even 
require coming to terms with a difficult matter indeed--
the very character of the modern scholarly enterprise. 
The formation of that character has a complicated 
history, which has already been the subject of many 
works of scholarship. Let me attempt to make sense of 
the problem by blaming it, only half facetiously, on 
one of the more brilliant minds of the past century.

Great minds can do great mischief, and few minds have 
been greater than that of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–
1951), the Vienna-born philosopher who spent some of 
his productive years disturbing the donnish waters of 
Cambridge University. Wittgenstein first decided to 
establish very precisely, in his Tractatus Logico-
Philosophicus (1922), what philosophy should and should 
not discuss. He then all but reversed the conclusions 
of that book to develop his notion that human language 
has a fundamentally gamelike quality--a notion that 
implied a far less restrictive view of philosophy's 
mission. Though he accomplished those feats in a prose 
so gnomically stringent that it almost defies 
comprehension, he left a deep imprint not just on 
philosophy but on 20th-century intellectual life in 
general. But that influence, alas, was not wholly 
benign.

The baleful part of Wittgenstein's legacy is not so 
much a matter of strict logical-philosophical 
inadequacy as it is a problem of intellectual style--a 
certain prejudice, expressed both in his personal 
dealings with people and in his work, about what the 
life of the mind should be. One way to get a sense of 
this style is through an anecdote recounted by one of 
his Cambridge friends, the literary critic F. R. 
Leavis. In a short memoir about their friendship, 
Leavis told how Wittgenstein came to him one day "and, 
without any prelude, said, 'Give up literary 
criticism!'" Cambridge being a relatively civil place, 
Leavis didn't assault the brash Austrian. He didn't 
even make the obvious retort--"Give up philosophy!"--in 
part because he thought that Wittgenstein had fallen 
under the sway of John Maynard Keynes and other 
Bloomsbury wits who liked to toss off facile putdowns 
of people or ideas they disagreed with. More to the 
point, Leavis noted that Wittgenstein had only 
a "rudimentary" sense of literature, and so was 
incapable of thinking that it (much less literary 
criticism) "might matter intellectually." Such a view 
could not have been more inimical to Leavis's 
conviction "that the fullest use of language is to be 
found in creative literature, and that a great creative 
work is a work of original exploratory thought." And to 
validate his conviction, Leavis adverted to his view 
about the inadequacy of philosophers: They were, he 
said, "weak on language."

What confidence! Had it endured within the precincts of 
higher learning, it's fair to ask whether we would have 
avoided the current parlous state of academic letters. 
I think so, even as I acknowledge the overstatement 
implicit in my assertion, and even as I allow that 
Leavis's confidence was itself a little shaky.



any factors share responsibility for the deplorable 
condition of academic writing, but none is more 
fundamental than the fatally mistaken view that 
intellectual work must be "serious." By claiming that 
literary criticism was serious in a way that 
Wittgenstein should have been able to appreciate, 
Leavis all but embraced, however unwittingly, 
Wittgenstein's definition of seriousness: a rigorous 
way of thinking and proceeding intellectually, rooted 
in the assumedly clear procedural ways of the inductive 
sciences and leading to objective truth about the 
world, people, and what Wittgenstein called "everything 
that is the case." That is scientism, of course, driven 
by a Protestant intentness on having one's subjective 
perceptions validated by claims to the kind of 
objective truth that can be revealed by the scientific 
method. No, I am not attacking science, the scientific 
method, or the many real and obvious blessings that 
have resulted from them. Nor am I attacking the notion 
of objectivity or the laudable goal of objective truth. 
I am merely pointing to the misapplication of the 
scientific idea, and to the consequences of the same.

Wittgenstein's early philosophy led him to the 
conclusion that we cannot talk rigorously or precisely 
about most things that humans deem of ultimate 
importance: truth, beauty, goodness, the meaning and 
ends of life. We can speak precisely and meaningfully 
only about those things that objective science can 
demonstrate. In his view, philosophy was to be a 
helpful tag-along of science: It can paint clear verbal 
pictures of what science divulges. But even 
Wittgenstein recognized that this understanding of the 
limitations of language was too limiting, and he became 
more and more interested in the provisional and social 
character of language, and in how the mystery of 
meaning emerges out of the shared play of making worlds 
out of words. He was struggling beyond scientism, and 
his final book, Philosophical Investigations (1953), 
posthumously assembled, seems to point suggestively 
away from the narrowness and inconsequentiality of his 
earlier position.

But if Wittgenstein struggled against the conclusions 
of his early work, I fear that the Western academic 
world increasingly succumbed to a desire for the kind 
of dubious seriousness that enticed the young 
philosopher. Scholars of literature and the arts, 
historians, philosophers, and other academic humanists 
joined sociologists, anthropologists, and political 
scientists in trying to make their fields as "serious" 
as the hard sciences. They grew obsessed with theory 
and methodology, and particularly with the most 
abstract issues of epistemology--how we know what we 
know. This is largely the story of professionalization, 
of course, of how professional standards and approved 
behaviors got established in the academic realm. It was 
Wittgenstein's curse upon the professionals of the 
humanistic and social science disciplines that they 
took his kind of seriousness as an essential goal.

Why a curse? For one thing, because it burdened those 
professions with a narrow-spirited utilitarianism. In 
his early work, Wittgenstein believed that his job was 
to make philosophy useful. He wanted to clear out, like 
so much underbrush, all the metaphysics and other 
matters that couldn't be resolved the way a problem in, 
say, engineering (in which he had had training) can be 
resolved. In his early view, remember, philosophy was 
supposed to become a helpful user's manual for the hard 
sciences. For it to be anything else was frivolous, an 
indulgence, unserious. Wittgenstein, as many of his 
contemporaries noted, had a genius for making 
colleagues and students feel guilty about not doing 
useful, productive work. He urged a number of his 
students to abandon scholarship altogether and become 
car mechanics or hospital orderlies. Some took his 
advice--to the shock and sorrow of their parents.

The compulsion to prove the utility of ideas spread 
through the humanities and social sciences like a 
contagion, assuming a variety of political, 
ideological, and theoretical colorings. It was no 
longer sufficient to master and convey the great 
historical record, or to locate and celebrate the 
pleasures of great works of literature or painting or 
music. Even the pursuit of wisdom was not enough, once 
wisdom got problematized. Theorizing took over. 
Elaborate theorymongering, often French- or German-
inspired, displaced the mastering of subject matter, so 
that fledgling literary scholars, for example, ended up 
knowing more (or thinking they knew more) about Bakhtin 
than about Chekhov, more about queer theory than about 
any literary tradition. The pretense of helping the 
working class, or liberating gays by deconstructing 
texts, or doing meta-meta-interpretations of historical 
questions appeared to be the really serious work. No 
matter that such seriousness arguably achieved no 
serious real-world consequences. No matter that it 
became increasingly irrelevant to the real world--and 
completely impenetrable to most people in that world.

There's an additional problem. The drift of much 
postmodern thought has been toward the conclusion that 
there is no absolute or objective truth; there are only 
constructions of the truth, influenced by power and 
power relations within society (might makes right--and 
truth) or by unacknowledged biases rooted in, say, 
gender or race. This radical skepticism, elaborated by 
such thinkers as the pragmatist Richard Rorty, holds 
that the pursuit of truth is essentially bootless. 
Whether such skepticism is itself simplistic (and, in 
Rorty's case, whether it's a misreading of the far more 
complicated view of truth held by earlier American 
pragmatists such as Charles Sanders Peirce) is beyond 
discussion here. But skepticism's almost dogmalike 
standing within much of the academic community 
introduces a rich irony: Whereas skepticism would seem 
to invite scholars within the humanities, and even the 
social sciences, to abandon their reliance on 
pseudoscientific theories and methodologies and become 
truly independent thinkers and writers, it has in fact 
enslaved them all the more to pseudoscientific 
doctrines.

And make no mistake: The doctrines are pseudo. The same 
Sokal who fooled the editors of Social Text 
subsequently teamed up with philosopher Jean Bricmont 
to write a book, Fashionable Nonsense (1998), that 
showed the absurd and often hilarious efforts by 
leading postmodern thinkers to dress up their theories 
with scientific terminology and even mathematical 
formulas. (The highly influential Jacques Lacan, for 
example, boasted that his theories drew from "the most 
recent developments in topology.") On close inspection, 
the terminology and the formulas make no sense at 
all. "They imagine, perhaps, that they can exploit the 
prestige of the natural sciences in order to give their 
own discourse a veneer of rigor," write Sokal and 
Bricmont. "And they seem confident that no one will 
notice their misuse of concepts."



uch dishonesty is bad enough in itself. But the effect 

=== message truncated ===

Dr. Laurence Raw
Senior Lecturer in English
Department of American Culture and Literature
Baskent University
Baglica Kampusu
Eskisehir Yolu. 20 Km.
06530 Ankara, TURKEY


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<P> Plus ça change, c'est la meme chose.&nbsp; I think much the same thing was said about "Ulysses" when it first appeared nearly eighty years ago ...
<P>&nbsp; <B><I>hpaksoy@ttacs.ttu.edu</I></B> wrote: 
<BLOCKQUOTE style="BORDER-LEFT: #1010ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px">Wittgenstein's Curse <BR>by Jay Tolson <BR><BR>It's easy to go on about how bad most academic writing <BR>is these days, and how it became so during the past 30 <BR>or 40 years. Curmudgeonly journalists have been <BR>pouncing on prof-prose at least since the days of H. L. <BR>Mencken. But now high sport is made of the subject even <BR>within the academy. One academic journal awards annual <BR>prizes in a Bad Writing Contest, causing pain and <BR>sometimes anger among the unwitting winners. Scholars <BR>agonize about the problem, too. Russell Jacoby, for <BR>one, links it to the disappearance of the great public <BR>intellectuals who once enriched the larger culture. And <BR>it seems clear that the decline of scholarly writing <BR>has widened the eternal divide between the world of <BR>scholars and the public realm, to the impoverishment of <BR>both. Just as bad, the pursuit of truth and knowledge--<BR>an activity that should be charged with passion and <BR>engagement--now appears to the larger public to be an <BR>exercise in nonsensical irrelevance.<BR><BR>Perhaps nothing brought the whole sorry matter to a <BR>more dramatic head than the parodic gibberish-and-<BR>jargon-filled article that New York University <BR>physicist Alan Sokal tricked the scholarly journal <BR>Social Text into publishing in 1996. <BR>Titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a <BR>Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," the <BR>essay argued that scientific knowledge was socially <BR>constructed, an argument very much in line with the <BR>journal's postmodernist agenda. What the editors failed <BR>to see, though, is that the piece was packed with <BR>illogic, non sequiturs, and nonsense, including an <BR>unargued rejection of the "dogma" that asserts the <BR>existence of "an external world, whose properties are <BR>independent of any human being and indeed of humanity <BR>as a whole."<BR><BR><BR>On the day the article was published, Sokal let the <BR>world know that it had been a hoax, and an uproar <BR>ensued. Many of the more interesting contributions to <BR>that controversy were published last year in a book, <BR>The Sokal Hoax--and not all of them were critical of <BR>the journal's editors. In fact, literary scholar <BR>Stanley Fish made a plausible defense of the argument <BR>that Sokal had parodied: "What sociologists of science <BR>say," Fish wrote, "is that of course the world is real <BR>and independent of our observations but that accounts <BR>of the world are produced by observers and are <BR>therefore relative to their capacities, education, <BR>training, etc. It is not the world or its properties <BR>but the vocabularies in whose terms we know them that <BR>are socially constructed--fashioned by human beings--<BR>which is why our understanding of those properties is <BR>continually changing."<BR><BR><BR><BR><BR><BR><BR><BR><BR>hat is true and sensible and clearly put. <BR>Unfortunately, it's not a distinction the editors of <BR>the journal seemed to grasp, because what Sokal said in <BR>his trickster voice was precisely that there was no <BR>external world independent of human constructions of <BR>it. And the trickster didn't even make an argument for <BR>his outlandish claim. He simply tossed around the <BR>jargon, let it fall where it might, and concluded--<BR>voilà--that there is nothing out there unless we <BR>construct it into being.<BR><BR>Maybe Fish failed to get the point for the same reason <BR>the editors didn't see it: because the writing was as <BR>impenetrably bad as most prose published in Social <BR>Text, and indeed as bad as so much current academic <BR>writing. The not-so-secret little secret, it turns out, <BR>is that no one really reads this stuff anyway, not even <BR>folks who produce reams of it for countless scholarly <BR>publications. And in truth, the stuff is not meant to <BR>be read. It's a form of professional feather display, <BR>the ritual gesturing by which scholars establish <BR>standing with others in their particular niche, or <BR>subniche, of the scholarly trade. Display the jargon--<BR>feminist, neo-Marxist, postcolonialist, <BR>deconstructionist, whatever--and you're in, you're one <BR>of us, we want you on our tenure track.<BR><BR>If this seems to be a partisan slam against only the <BR>more progressive, left-leaning, and postmodern members <BR>of the academic community, let me second a point made <BR>by Patricia Nelson Limerick in the New York Times Book <BR>Review (Oct. 31, 1993): The more conservative <BR>traditionalists within the academy can often be just as <BR>bad as the Sado-Marxists and the Martian-Leninists (or <BR>maybe almost as bad). Limerick quotes a passage from <BR>that best-selling tract The Closing of the American <BR>Mind (1987), by the late Allan Bloom, a University of <BR>Chicago scholar who trained, and was subsequently <BR>revered by, a cadre of neoconservative thinkers now <BR>gone forth into the world to pursue an assortment of <BR>academic and nonacademic occupations:<BR><BR>If openness means to "go with the flow," it is <BR>necessarily an accommodation to the present. That <BR>present is so closed to doubt about so many things <BR>impeding the progress of its principles that <BR>unqualified openness to it would mean forgetting the <BR>despised alternatives to it, knowledge of which would <BR>only make us aware of what is doubtful in it.<BR><BR>Got that? And does it not read like something only <BR>barely translated from German, or a directive from the <BR>Department of Housing and Urban Development? <BR>Postmodernish, far-leftish types may commit more, and <BR>more grievous, sins against the ideal of clear prose, <BR>but they are not alone in their sins.<BR><BR><BR><BR><BR><BR>hy have so many been undone by willful obscurantism and <BR>given themselves over to cant and nonsense? So many <BR>reasons, so little time to state them all. In fact, <BR>many have already been stated, and many times over. But <BR>let me mention a couple that might not have received <BR>quite as much attention as they deserve, before coming <BR>to what I think is a fundamental cause.<BR><BR>First of all, academic writing has never been all that <BR>much fun to read. Mencken, as I mentioned earlier, went <BR>to town on the foibles of academese, focusing with <BR>particular viciousness on sociologist Thorstein <BR>Veblen's tortured, jargon-flecked prose. But does that <BR>mean that Veblen's theories about the leisure class and <BR>conspicuous consumption were unimportant? Not at all. <BR>Writing about difficult matters can be difficult--and <BR>often requires neologisms and complicated, subtle <BR>analysis. We have a hard time following the <BR>explanations of auto mechanics. Why should the <BR>explanations of a philosopher or sociologist be easier <BR>to follow? Clarity of expression should be a handmaiden <BR>of intellectual brilliance, but Veblen and many others <BR>demonstrate that often it is not.<BR><BR>That said, the rife obscurantism in scholarly <BR>publications today comports itself in a self-<BR>congratulatory, almost arrogant manner. Its <BR>promulgators argue that the difficulty is essential to <BR>the gravity of their ideas or to an intellectual or <BR>political stance, and that clarity, in any case, is <BR>just some elitist, dead-white-male convention. <BR>In "Troubling Clarity: The Politics of Accessible <BR>Language," published by the Harvard Educational Review <BR>(Fall 1996), Patti Lather justifies the liberating <BR>complexity of her own feminist writings:<BR><BR>Sometimes we need a density that fits the thoughts <BR>being expressed. In such places, clear and precise <BR>plain prose would be a sort of cheat tied to the <BR>antiintellectualism rife in U.S. society that deskills <BR>readers. . . . Positioning language as productive of <BR>new spaces, practices, and values, what might come of <BR>encouraging a plurality of discourses and forms and <BR>levels of writing in a way that refuses the binary <BR>between so-called "plain speaking" and complex <BR>writing? . . . What is the violence of clarity, its non-<BR>innocence?<BR><BR>Claiming that her book about women with HIV/AIDS, <BR>Troubling Angels, was aimed at a popular audience, and <BR>even intended to be what she calls a "Kmart book," <BR>Lather boasts at the same time that she refused to <BR>produce a "tidy book" or a "comfort text," with the <BR>kind of writing "that maps easily into our ways of <BR>making sense and 'giving sense.'" I have yet to <BR>encounter Troubling Angels on any of my visits to <BR>Kmart. I wonder whether any other Kmart shoppers have <BR>come across it.<BR><BR>Lather, like so many who proudly assert their <BR>obscurity, does not have the justification of a Veblen <BR>or a Hegel. There is no brilliance or insight or <BR>originality in her work. There is only a thicket of <BR>nonsense, faddishness, and claptrap. But Lather wears <BR>her opacity proudly, like a badge, and no doubt enjoys <BR>tenure at Ohio State University because of it. And she <BR>is no rarity, no exception. Her kind are everywhere--<BR>troubling texts, troubling clarity, troubling the <BR>hegemonic hold on beauty and truth--and the sheer <BR>quantity of the drivel they produce is another big part <BR>of the problem.<BR><BR>The endless production is a matter of necessity and <BR>survival, of course. The academic professions require <BR>it--and not just the noble drudgery of teaching, <BR>research, editing, and monograph writing that engaged <BR>more modest scholars in the past (particularly those <BR>who recognized their intellectual and writerly <BR>limitations). No, the professions today demand <BR>substantial "original" works by all members of the <BR>professoriate who hope to rise to tenure. And that <BR>demand is simply unrealistic. For how much new is there <BR>under the sun? Not much--in scholarship or in any other <BR>human pursuit. Yet never have so many words been used <BR>so badly, and to say so little, as in these works of <BR>professedly original scholarship. Yes, there are still <BR>scholarly writers who produce truly groundbreaking work <BR>that reaches, informs, and enlightens not just other <BR>scholars but popular audiences as well. But beneath <BR>that apex, how enormous is the mountain of entirely <BR>superfluous scholarly prose!<BR><BR>One remedy seems obvious: more modesty on the part of <BR>the academic professions and a return to other <BR>scholarly tasks, including teaching, greater mastery of <BR>the core subject matter of a field, and recognition <BR>that in the realm of "original" work, less is more. But <BR>the obvious solution is no easy solution. It may even <BR>require coming to terms with a difficult matter indeed--<BR>the very character of the modern scholarly enterprise. <BR>The formation of that character has a complicated <BR>history, which has already been the subject of many <BR>works of scholarship. Let me attempt to make sense of <BR>the problem by blaming it, only half facetiously, on <BR>one of the more brilliant minds of the past century.<BR><BR>Great minds can do great mischief, and few minds have <BR>been greater than that of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–<BR>1951), the Vienna-born philosopher who spent some of <BR>his productive years disturbing the donnish waters of <BR>Cambridge University. Wittgenstein first decided to <BR>establish very precisely, in his Tractatus Logico-<BR>Philosophicus (1922), what philosophy should and should <BR>not discuss. He then all but reversed the conclusions <BR>of that book to develop his notion that human language <BR>has a fundamentally gamelike quality--a notion that <BR>implied a far less restrictive view of philosophy's <BR>mission. Though he accomplished those feats in a prose <BR>so gnomically stringent that it almost defies <BR>comprehension, he left a deep imprint not just on <BR>philosophy but on 20th-century intellectual life in <BR>general. But that influence, alas, was not wholly <BR>benign.<BR><BR>The baleful part of Wittgenstein's legacy is not so <BR>much a matter of strict logical-philosophical <BR>inadequacy as it is a problem of intellectual style--a <BR>certain prejudice, expressed both in his personal <BR>dealings with people and in his work, about what the <BR>life of the mind should be. One way to get a sense of <BR>this style is through an anecdote recounted by one of <BR>his Cambridge friends, the literary critic F. R. <BR>Leavis. In a short memoir about their friendship, <BR>Leavis told how Wittgenstein came to him one day "and, <BR>without any prelude, said, 'Give up literary <BR>criticism!'" Cambridge being a relatively civil place, <BR>Leavis didn't assault the brash Austrian. He didn't <BR>even make the obvious retort--"Give up philosophy!"--in <BR>part because he thought that Wittgenstein had fallen <BR>under the sway of John Maynard Keynes and other <BR>Bloomsbury wits who liked to toss off facile putdowns <BR>of people or ideas they disagreed with. More to the <BR>point, Leavis noted that Wittgenstein had only <BR>a "rudimentary" sense of literature, and so was <BR>incapable of thinking that it (much less literary <BR>criticism) "might matter intellectually." Such a view <BR>could not have been more inimical to Leavis's <BR>conviction "that the fullest use of language is to be <BR>found in creative literature, and that a great creative <BR>work is a work of original exploratory thought." And to <BR>validate his conviction, Leavis adverted to his view <BR>about the inadequacy of philosophers: They were, he <BR>said, "weak on language."<BR><BR>What confidence! Had it endured within the precincts of <BR>higher learning, it's fair to ask whether we would have <BR>avoided the current parlous state of academic letters. <BR>I think so, even as I acknowledge the overstatement <BR>implicit in my assertion, and even as I allow that <BR>Leavis's confidence was itself a little shaky.<BR><BR><BR><BR>any factors share responsibility for the deplorable <BR>condition of academic writing, but none is more <BR>fundamental than the fatally mistaken view that <BR>intellectual work must be "serious." By claiming that <BR>literary criticism was serious in a way that <BR>Wittgenstein should have been able to appreciate, <BR>Leavis all but embraced, however unwittingly, <BR>Wittgenstein's definition of seriousness: a rigorous <BR>way of thinking and proceeding intellectually, rooted <BR>in the assumedly clear procedural ways of the inductive <BR>sciences and leading to objective truth about the <BR>world, people, and what Wittgenstein called "everything <BR>that is the case." That is scientism, of course, driven <BR>by a Protestant intentness on having one's subjective <BR>perceptions validated by claims to the kind of <BR>objective truth that can be revealed by the scientific <BR>method. No, I am not attacking science, the scientific <BR>method, or the many real and obvious blessings that <BR>have resulted from them. Nor am I attacking the notion <BR>of objectivity or the laudable goal of objective truth. <BR>I am merely pointing to the misapplication of the <BR>scientific idea, and to the consequences of the same.<BR><BR>Wittgenstein's early philosophy led him to the <BR>conclusion that we cannot talk rigorously or precisely <BR>about most things that humans deem of ultimate <BR>importance: truth, beauty, goodness, the meaning and <BR>ends of life. We can speak precisely and meaningfully <BR>only about those things that objective science can <BR>demonstrate. In his view, philosophy was to be a <BR>helpful tag-along of science: It can paint clear verbal <BR>pictures of what science divulges. But even <BR>Wittgenstein recognized that this understanding of the <BR>limitations of language was too limiting, and he became <BR>more and more interested in the provisional and social <BR>character of language, and in how the mystery of <BR>meaning emerges out of the shared play of making worlds <BR>out of words. He was struggling beyond scientism, and <BR>his final book, Philosophical Investigations (1953), <BR>posthumously assembled, seems to point suggestively <BR>away from the narrowness and inconsequentiality of his <BR>earlier position.<BR><BR>But if Wittgenstein struggled against the conclusions <BR>of his early work, I fear that the Western academic <BR>world increasingly succumbed to a desire for the kind <BR>of dubious seriousness that enticed the young <BR>philosopher. Scholars of literature and the arts, <BR>historians, philosophers, and other academic humanists <BR>joined sociologists, anthropologists, and political <BR>scientists in trying to make their fields as "serious" <BR>as the hard sciences. They grew obsessed with theory <BR>and methodology, and particularly with the most <BR>abstract issues of epistemology--how we know what we <BR>know. This is largely the story of professionalization, <BR>of course, of how professional standards and approved <BR>behaviors got established in the academic realm. It was <BR>Wittgenstein's curse upon the professionals of the <BR>humanistic and social science disciplines that they <BR>took his kind of seriousness as an essential goal.<BR><BR>Why a curse? For one thing, because it burdened those <BR>professions with a narrow-spirited utilitarianism. In <BR>his early work, Wittgenstein believed that his job was <BR>to make philosophy useful. He wanted to clear out, like <BR>so much underbrush, all the metaphysics and other <BR>matters that couldn't be resolved the way a problem in, <BR>say, engineering (in which he had had training) can be <BR>resolved. In his early view, remember, philosophy was <BR>supposed to become a helpful user's manual for the hard <BR>sciences. For it to be anything else was frivolous, an <BR>indulgence, unserious. Wittgenstein, as many of his <BR>contemporaries noted, had a genius for making <BR>colleagues and students feel guilty about not doing <BR>useful, productive work. He urged a number of his <BR>students to abandon scholarship altogether and become <BR>car mechanics or hospital orderlies. Some took his <BR>advice--to the shock and sorrow of their parents.<BR><BR>The compulsion to prove the utility of ideas spread <BR>through the humanities and social sciences like a <BR>contagion, assuming a variety of political, <BR>ideological, and theoretical colorings. It was no <BR>longer sufficient to master and convey the great <BR>historical record, or to locate and celebrate the <BR>pleasures of great works of literature or painting or <BR>music. Even the pursuit of wisdom was not enough, once <BR>wisdom got problematized. Theorizing took over. <BR>Elaborate theorymongering, often French- or German-<BR>inspired, displaced the mastering of subject matter, so <BR>that fledgling literary scholars, for example, ended up <BR>knowing more (or thinking they knew more) about Bakhtin <BR>than about Chekhov, more about queer theory than about <BR>any literary tradition. The pretense of helping the <BR>working class, or liberating gays by deconstructing <BR>texts, or doing meta-meta-interpretations of historical <BR>questions appeared to be the really serious work. No <BR>matter that such seriousness arguably achieved no <BR>serious real-world consequences. No matter that it <BR>became increasingly irrelevant to the real world--and <BR>completely impenetrable to most people in that world.<BR><BR>There's an additional problem. The drift of much <BR>postmodern thought has been toward the conclusion that <BR>there is no absolute or objective truth; there are only <BR>constructions of the truth, influenced by power and <BR>power relations within society (might makes right--and <BR>truth) or by unacknowledged biases rooted in, say, <BR>gender or race. This radical skepticism, elaborated by <BR>such thinkers as the pragmatist Richard Rorty, holds <BR>that the pursuit of truth is essentially bootless. <BR>Whether such skepticism is itself simplistic (and, in <BR>Rorty's case, whether it's a misreading of the far more <BR>complicated view of truth held by earlier American <BR>pragmatists such as Charles Sanders Peirce) is beyond <BR>discussion here. But skepticism's almost dogmalike <BR>standing within much of the academic community <BR>introduces a rich irony: Whereas skepticism would seem <BR>to invite scholars within the humanities, and even the <BR>social sciences, to abandon their reliance on <BR>pseudoscientific theories and methodologies and become <BR>truly independent thinkers and writers, it has in fact <BR>enslaved them all the more to pseudoscientific <BR>doctrines.<BR><BR>And make no mistake: The doctrines are pseudo. The same <BR>Sokal who fooled the editors of Social Text <BR>subsequently teamed up with philosopher Jean Bricmont <BR>to write a book, Fashionable Nonsense (1998), that <BR>showed the absurd and often hilarious efforts by <BR>leading postmodern thinkers to dress up their theories <BR>with scientific terminology and even mathematical <BR>formulas. (The highly influential Jacques Lacan, for <BR>example, boasted that his theories drew from "the most <BR>recent developments in topology.") On close inspection, <BR>the terminology and the formulas make no sense at <BR>all. "They imagine, perhaps, that they can exploit the <BR>prestige of the natural sciences in order to give their <BR>own discourse a veneer of rigor," write Sokal and <BR>Bricmont. "And they seem confident that no one will <BR>notice their misuse of concepts."<BR><BR><BR><BR>uch dishonesty is bad enough in itself. But the effect <BR><BR>=== message truncated ===</BLOCKQUOTE><BR><BR>Dr. Laurence Raw<br>Senior Lecturer in English<br>Department of American Culture and Literature<br>Baskent University<br>Baglica Kampusu<br>Eskisehir Yolu. 20 Km.<br>06530 Ankara, TURKEY<p><br><hr size=1><b>Do You Yahoo!?</b><br>
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