Response to Professor Schaffer
As a speaker (through the speech-act of the article published in The Montana Professor), I received my own message from the "hearer," Professor Schaffer, but in an "inverted way," would Jacques Lacan say. It seems that my own message, and the one of my co-author, became unacceptable to her on the basis of a misprision of language. The casting of our text in the category of an alien, disgusting body mixed with indistinct secretions or foul liquids ("bloated, gobbledygook...murky water") through which one must "plow doggedly" is highly problematic. It becomes incumbent upon myself and co-author to return to her the letter she sent, but also, in an inverted position.
Instead of engaging the text on a theoretical or metatheoretical level of analysis, Professor Schaffer chose to focus her attention on its alleged lack of clarity and an isolated syntactical error. We contend that Professor Schaffer is focusing on one example and attempting to discredit the value of the text on the basis of this error she "discovered" while glancing over the article. In inflating the importance of this item, she negates the very Aristotelian models of expository principles she wishes to uphold; she chooses to limit us stylistically and semantically. Professor Schaffer is a firm reductionist.
Were she to review her principles of argumentation, she might discover that one example does not provide sufficient premise for a whole argument and a sentence does not stand for a whole article. She further deflates her own critique by adding the evidence that "I never finished reading it...I gave up." Her predication is pared down to key words, "simplicity" and "clarity," and does not address the style of the whole, but the style of one sentence that she ideologically, but not logically, chose to magnify. Professor Schaffer takes the part for the whole in the same way as traditional literary critics used to compare style to clothes...as if we (myself and my co-author) did not dress up our thoughts enough with transparent clothes to present un-convoluted naked ideas. Professor Schaffer understands style to be the dressing up of ideas.
Nothing can be shown clearly except for clarity itself. Professor Schaffer mixes up the meaning of the signifying chain with the expression of meaning, the lack of "proper" clothes for a lack of clothes, if one wants to use her metaphor 'in other words, the emperor truly has no clothes on." If style is just the dressing up of our ideas, of what makes them attractive, or seducing through simplicity and formal clarity (the old classical ideals), then it is situated, like clothes (like beauty also) more on the side of the gaze. It is located in the eye of the beholder. But if style is the very expression of what makes us human beings (in the acception of écriture), then its question and problematics cannot be reduced to a question of taste. More precisely, although one can use style and write "stylishly" (in the way one says "artsy," or the way one dresses), one does not "write style" the way one dresses accordingly for a luncheon for instance, unless one wants to stick to a classical, bourgeois definition of style, which understands style as either the mere decorum/adornment or stuffing of ideas (the way one dresses a turkey for instance) or as the mere container of ideas, transparent as a glass sarcophagus. In both cases style is seen as being a "dangerous," "enervating," supplement whose more or less obfuscating density, which belongs to the written dimension, has to be clarified by a more or less immediate, clarity. This clarity is fantasized as belonging to speech. It means that the excess inherent to the concept of style has to be controlled by rationality and the pragmatism of a conception of language reduced to oral communication. I would here refer Professor Schaffer to a few key texts which should be used as biblical or canonical textbooks in English Composition classes, works such as Roland Barthes's Pleasure of the Text and Degree Zero of Writing or Jacques Derrida's Writing and Difference or Spurs (on Nietzsche's style).
Her conception of style, which amounts, in fact, to an anti-style or reductionist conception of style, bases its premises on instrumentality, an instrumentality that Professor Schaffer so vividly asserts by using toponyms borrowed from the vocabulary of agriculture, banking, and psychometrics: "after plowing doggedly through the first three pages, I gave up and turned to other articles likely to offer greater-return on my investment of time and mental processing." "Mental processing" here has to be understood as a descriptive process streamlining cognition along behavioristic and functionalist lines. It is typical of a certain U.S. academic use of psychology or pedagogy.
Perhaps Professor Schaffer is not conscious of doing the same thing other professors do when they attack "modern and postmodern criticism" on grounds of ultra-complexity, obscurity, and difficulty of reading. In fact, these professors criticize that which they do not essentially know because they did not have the courage, the patience, the time, and/or the humility to read those "impossible texts." It is also the same type of criticism we hear from our very own students when they do not want to read a text.
Professor Schaffer represents the fundamental tenet of a strategy often found at the university level, consisting of the imposition of a dominant mode of political interpretation through the habit-formation of a certain understanding of "composition." According to her letter, "good writing" corresponds to something easily (how fast?) understood, leaving aside such key questions as "Understood by whom?", "Who is the model reader-hearer de-coder?", and "Who decides upon the criteria and the choice of the value-laden indices hierarchically ordered on axiomatics of facility?"
Composition, in this case, is understood as the equivalent of a prosthetic pedagogy of expressive form, prescribed by proscribing. The incorporation of meaning by the scrutinized text must "express" and in turn "impress" the reader by its clarity. Most of the time, meaning, in this case, is seen as reinforcing and reassuring the reader in her/his non-reading activity, i.e., complacency, prejudices, and certainties. The clarity of meaning for such a reading more often translates into an ideology of proper or "acceptable" meaning. It expresses the acme of a non-avowed ecstasy of tautology. Clarity as style becomes the transcendental signifier of intelligence.
It is my experience that an excessive concern with, and emphasis on, clarity and/or organization betrays a characteristic which of necessity must remain hidden...the need of the perceiver to remain in control or "on top of the situation." Contrary to Professor Schaffer's opinions, I would contend that a certain richness, complexity, or mind-engaging convolutedness (do I dare to say "convolvulaceousness" without irritating Professor Schaffer?), and even a calculated obscurity of style rarely conceal a conceptual nakedness. Simplicity and clarity often mean what they want to mean, i.e., nothing, as if the seemingly and ostentatiously objectively clear packaging of ideas had reached a ratio inversely proportional to the value of its content or message.
The obsession with the style of clarity often belies the fact that interpretation is at once transparent and opaque as in the expression "visualize whirled peas." Expression and interpretation are never spontaneous acts. They are complex, adventurous, and uncertain. They represent the frontier of de-construction. God knows how we do know, as teachers, that texts are not necessarily clear and immediately accessible. In fact, it seems that, very often, an inverse ratio seems to exist between the ready-made complexity of a text and the complexity of its meaning. It is perhaps the price one pays to go beyond matters already understood, be they simple or complex.
Our intention, and our meaning, and unfortunately, the only meaning for Professor Schaffer, was interpreted by her as nonsensical "gobbledygook" which induces in Professor Schaffer nausea, or at least a strong repulsive reaction. She confesses that she felt (as we all did at one point or another) ostracized, left out, isolated: "In graduate school, I used to feel inadequate about my failure to fully grasp academic prose of this sort, often feeling in murky waters." Consequently, the significance of Professor Schaffer's refusal to understand appears located in a non-meaning which originates within herself, and not (solely) in the incriminated/discriminated text. Her symptomatic reading is critical in more ways than one; it encodes her reading as a symptom of the other, to use a Lacanian term.
The teaching of writing, composition, and style must stop offering as ostensory modes of writing which privilege the imperialism of empiricism--a critique which could also be addressed to many a writing school in U.S. academia obsessed with an excessive referentiality to reality, concreteness, life, etc. We must refuse to function as petty civil servants of a pedagogy at the service of some "orthopedics" of correctness, whether it be political, ethical, religious, or more insidiously...functional.
According to Barthes, writing implies an opacity of form and presupposes a problematic of language and society. As for those who are supposed to write with simplicity and clarity, I (we) contend that it is simpleminded! We defy you to find a writer or an article tackling problems in all their complexities delivering them to you, the reader, on a platter of slick nuances, and demonstrating "clarity," "ease of entry," and "simplicity." These are ideals anchored in a certain understanding of society, linked to privilege, notions such as the Canon, a "certain classicism," etc., which abolishes differences in favor of "a neutral and inert state of form...the zero degree of writing" (Barthes) which is good for practically everything except "complex articles writing." The transparent form of speech applied to writing achieves a style of absence. In fact, what you reproached us for, Professor Schaffer, was our being too conspicuous in our style: being "too thick in figure" to use a metaphor from Montaigne. What you suggest would correspond to an excision of our language to render it clean and proper for the task of safe communication and immediate consumption. You even deliver it as necessary on the basis that "you don't have time." With our regrets, we would like to illuminate you to the reality that literature and/or complex problems are not written in the manner of an insurance policy. The fact that there are different levels of language, from expressions as clear as a baby's breath to others as dark and obfuscated as an Irish brew in a dimly lit pub of Dublin, is an excellent thing...and a reality we can do nothing about. Even Nietzsche concluded that the question of God was a question of grammar.
Our students do not write well because they do not write "clearly." They do not write well because they do not read--semiotic meaning of reading--whatever the text is, filmic, video, televisual, etc.). And they do not know how to read because they are taught to "read speech," which invokes the reduction of writing to speech and by speech. Writing is a parasitical mechanism of the intellectual function as you very astutely discovered while seeking to "offer greater return on [my] investment of time and mental processing."
We were taken by the beautiful metaphor you used when qualifying the feeling one has in graduate school reading "academic prose"--could you mean post-structural or postmortem criticism?--"As if I were in murky water with the bottom just out of reach of my toes..." which you equivocate as the one that comes to mind while reading our article. It is the same metaphor Descartes used at the beginning of his Third Meditation. If Descartes had only known how to swim and let go of his fear of murkiness, depth, and "unclearness," he would have been a baroque thinker; we wouldn't, perhaps, have been stuck with his gift to the Occident of the concept of the male ego self--present in his clarity, with his consciousness firmly grounded on a clearly sighted sandy bottom and transparent to himself in his way of thinking...and ignorant of language and its complex obfuscation.
Lastly, it is necessary to split asunder the seeming authority of spoken language, the hidden veil of voice (logocentrism as Jacques Derrida would say) and transparent in order to avoid the illusion/fallacy of recapturing a lost innocence which corresponds to a state of affairs when things were supposed to be said in a simple and direct manner or fantasized to be simpler. Professor Schaffer would prefer transcendental reference ensconced in spontaneity and immediacy guaranteeing unity and homogeneity. Ideally, [she] would prefer that the image of the things would correspond to a table of signs (elements) in which meaning could be unequivocally represented. It is the positivist dream of a language that it should say what it means directly, at the level of the signified and with the metalanguage corresponding to the imperative of generality, as if writing was the mundane auxiliary of a truth whose meaning was obvious. To privilege the communicative function of language is fine, but that must not translate into a reduction of communication to the lowest possible denominator, to the law of "ordinary," non-performative conversation.
As readers, speakers and writers, do we want a phrase whose boundaries are as secure as the watertight door of the Titanic? Language wraps itself around one's neck as a boa constrictor, except that it is full of prickly spines and thistles. These zones of reticence and constriction to meaning are perceived as zones of resistance to a certain complacency. If one does not understand, one opens the great book of words.
In conclusion, I apologize to you, Professor Schaffer, for not having "enjoyed" Hate Speech and Censorship, especially having approached the article with "considerable anticipation." If there is such a thing that the masters and mistresses of postmodern criticism have taught us, it is the pleasure of the text. And as French-born and educated, I feel a special devotion to the pleasure of giving pleasure. I wish we had a blind textual encounter (non-sexist meaning, if you please!). I can imagine us; I, groping out of this obscurity you so rightfully sensed in me, and you, guiding me toward the light of your "clarity."
In spite of all, with kindness and gentility...for we both fight in the same trenches with the same lack of ammunitions and a pathetic absence of tactical as well as strategical support.
Yours sincerely,
Michel Valentin
Foreign Languages & Literature
University of Montana-Missoula