On Jargon and "repressive lucidity"

The problem of jargon in transforming insightful ideas into opaque, indigestible syntactical and semantic sludge is not new. The apparently incurable disease of deploying jargon to elevate one’s personal status or that of a discipline presumably through expert, esoteric knowledge has been around for a long time. The emergence and popularity of fields such as certain extreme, perpetually on the cutting-edge postmodernist strains of “cultural studies” among others have only injected a new life force to an affliction that was never really in danger of extinction. One clear winner of an annual “bad writing contest” organized by the Australian journal Philosophy and Literature illustrates this point with unintended lucidity:

"If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to "normalize" formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality."

Not surprisingly, committed as he was to nudging meaningful democracratic practices along, C. Wright Mills - the man from Waco, Texas - not only fumed against a “serious crisis in literacy” but also offered some remedies for what he called “socspeak”. As he famously put it:

“It has been said with authority that there is a serious crisis in literacy, a crisis in which social scientists are very much involved. Is this peculiar language due to the fact that profound and subtle issues, concepts, methods are being discussed? Is it really necessary to your proper work? If it is, there is nothing you can do about it. If it is not, then how can you avoid it? Such lack of intelligibility, I believe, has little or nothing to do with the complexity of subject matter and nothing at all with profundity of thought. It has to do almost entirely with certain confusions of the academic writer about his(her) own status.

To overcome academic prose you have first to overcome the academic pose....clarify your own answers to these three questions:
(1) How difficult and complex after all is my subject?
(2) When I write, what status am I claiming for myself?
(3) For whom am I trying to write?

My first point, then, is that most "socspeak" is unrelated to any complexity of subject matter or thought. It is used – I think almost entirely – to establish academic claims for one's self;”

His solution, based on advice he received from his Columbia University colleague, the great literary critic Lionel Trilling was:

“You are to assume that you have been asked to give a lecture on some subject you know well, before an audience of a leading university, as well as an assortment of interested people from a nearby city. Assume that such an audience is before you and that they have a right to know; assume that you want to let them know. Now write.
Avoid the Byzantine oddity of associated and disassociated concepts and mannerisms of verbiage. Avoid using unintelligibility as a means of evading the making of judgements upon society – and as a means of escaping your readers' judgements upon your own work."

Mills’ diagnosis of the problem and his eminently sensible solution is unlikely to satisfy everyone. When called up on their compulsive use of totally avoidable jargon, many social scientists and humanities scholars predictably complain about alleged double standards. They argue that critics of jargon in the social sciences and the humanities dare not extend their critique to cover the natural sciences. Such arguments about unfair victimization is however demonstrably false. The use of “jargon” or “technical terms” in the natural sciences, quite unlike other fields, more often than not, does contribute to the reduction of ambiguity and contributes to relatively clear communication. For better or for worse, there is a shared understanding of the precise meaning of technical terms within specific scientific communities, even though these shorthands may indeed appear as opaque jargon to those not inhabiting the same social and cultural world the scientists. And yes, one need not minimize the real complexities and challenges of linguistically representing any object or idea. However despite these well recognized challenges, technical terms in the natural sciences do facilitate precise and effective communication. This is hardly ever the case for the the humanities and the social sciences. Such is the nature of the social world we inhabit. The repeated attempts at standardizing concepts and technical terms – the project of Walter Wallace a sociologist at Princeton University comes to mind - are designed to fail. Such is the very nature of the social world we inhabit and necessarily struggle with. Wallace's project of standardizing the precise meaning to concepts such as "alienation", "exploitation", "class", "status" etc. is non-starter - and if pushed through by some determined scholar-bureaucrats, will contribute to "one-dimensional" sociology.

Must we then avoid using “technical terms” altogether? As someone who struggled against the prevalence of "rationality without reason", Mills’ response to this eminently reasonable question was unsurprisingly, quite reasonable:

“But, you may ask, do we not sometimes need technical terms? Of course we do, but "technical" does not necessarily mean difficult, and certainly it does not mean jargon. If such technical terms are really necessary and also clear and precise, it is not difficult to use them in a context of plain English and thus introduce them meaningfully to the reader.”

Mills’ point is unlikely to appeal to those afflicted either with physics envy or its analogue, a certain extreme strain of “cultural studies”. The members of the latter community will no doubt gleefuly point to the complexities of language and the very real difficulties of representing complex ideas with any measure of clarity. In the past, some have even denounced “repressive lucidity” – the “idea” here apparently being that the social world is so complex that any attempt at lucidity would invariably lead to nothing but platitudes - possibly pre-digested rough drafts of the Reader’s Digest. It is true of course that the social world is more complex than what is conveyed by pre-fabricated, vacuous sound bites available through the mass media. However it need not be so. For those whose linguistic gymnastics are not motivated primarily by visions of academic career capital to be accumulated in a ruthlessly competitive environment might benefit from a re-reading of the above quote from C. Wright Mills. The irony of course is that those who rail against the spectre of “repressive lucidity” also happen to be the ones who are no doubt genuinely befuddled as to why the likes of reactionary right-right wing ranters such as Rush Limbaugh, Dinesh D’souza, Anne Coulter and Glenn Beck among others simultaneously attract large audiences and laugh all the way to the bank.

It is unlikely that Mills’ appeal for lucidity will appeal to everyone. Yet there is no shortage of scholars whose commitment to communicating their democratic ideals was never hamstrung by paralysis induced by anxiety over the alleged repressive qualities of lucidity. David Riesman, Richard Sennett, Terry Eagleton, Aijaz Ahmad, Perry Anderson, Orlando Patterson, Russell Jacoby, Edward Said, Vijay Prashad, Craig Calhoun, Tony Judt and Susan Sontag are not the only names that come to mind. Without questioning the genuine democratic and critical impulses that fuels the work of many of the scholars who insist on inflicting opaque, patently undemocratic texts on their potential readers, there is something to be said for sheer seductive emotion appeal of the sentiment so accurately identified by Mills:

"…to write in this way is to say to the reader (often I am sure without knowing it): I know something that is so difficult you can understand it only if you first learn my difficult language. In the meantime, you are merely a journalist, a layman or some other sort of underdeveloped type.”

Some of Mills’ colleagues did indeed refer to him as a “mere journalist” presumably to shore up their own sense of self as presumably real, professional scholars. Most likely, Mills took these put-downs as compliments. He no doubt wanted his work to be widely read, as indeed they were, but his ambition was not simply to acquire academic celebrity status. Unsurprisingly, he had no use for the one strategy adopted by would be vacuous prima donnas. As the sociologist Zygmunt Baumann pinpointed it, this strategy consists largely of the widespread phenomenon of “turning to the latest fads, exegesis of the pronunciamentos of the most recently crowned idols, chasing the themes everyone chases at the moment, only to join another hunt before the former is over, always the loudest barking hound” contributes to a heady intoxicating brew that perpetuates the proverbial vicious cycle – at least for those who disagree with the nonsensical claim about “repressive lucidity”. As for some self-obssessed postmodernists who insist on penning tortuous sentences, they need to be reminded of the fact that the term “postmodern” was coined by none other than C. Wright Mills!