As the fascist octopus of academia gently sings its swansong in the West...
"No. Somebody put a drop [of Casaubon's blood] under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses," said Mrs. Cadwallader.
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Jarrow, New Year's Eve 1911
There is a knocking at the door
- Come in!
- Trouble at mill!
- Oh no! What sort of trouble?
- [In silly 'Northern' accent] One o't cross-beams come out of skew on the treddle.
- Pardon?
- One o't cross-beams come out of skew on the treddle.
- I don't understand what you're saying.
- [In RP, slowly] One of the cross-beams has gone out of skew on the treddle.
- But what on earth does that mean?
- I don't know, Mr Wentworth's just told me to come in here, and say that there was trouble at the mill, that's all. I didn't expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition [etc]
I've a feeling[1] that there may be a certain demand for this post. But I'm not going to argue with Nick Cohen's assertion that bad prose is a first-world problem since 1968. I'll leave that to you. Orwell suggested in 1946 that the sort of prose Nick excoriates could just as well have come from a Communist pamphlet or a letter to Tribune.
There's a bit of sensible Tory-bashing at the end, although I'm unsure how Nick gets there from saying that academics can't write for toffee. (I thought they were separate essays, but he comes back to his first theme, so they can't be.)
Bonus points to Nick for squeezing in 'clerisy' which is the sort of word a man may well feel entitled to light up a cigar after using. Points snatched away again for the following.
It is? Perhaps the sentence could be improved by adding "I wish that" at the beginning, and changing 'is' to 'were'.
[1] My feelings are often wrong, BTW.[2]
[2] This is a needless footnote.
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Jarrow, New Year's Eve 1911
There is a knocking at the door
- Come in!
- Trouble at mill!
- Oh no! What sort of trouble?
- [In silly 'Northern' accent] One o't cross-beams come out of skew on the treddle.
- Pardon?
- One o't cross-beams come out of skew on the treddle.
- I don't understand what you're saying.
- [In RP, slowly] One of the cross-beams has gone out of skew on the treddle.
- But what on earth does that mean?
- I don't know, Mr Wentworth's just told me to come in here, and say that there was trouble at the mill, that's all. I didn't expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition [etc]
I've a feeling[1] that there may be a certain demand for this post. But I'm not going to argue with Nick Cohen's assertion that bad prose is a first-world problem since 1968. I'll leave that to you. Orwell suggested in 1946 that the sort of prose Nick excoriates could just as well have come from a Communist pamphlet or a letter to Tribune.
There's a bit of sensible Tory-bashing at the end, although I'm unsure how Nick gets there from saying that academics can't write for toffee. (I thought they were separate essays, but he comes back to his first theme, so they can't be.)
Bonus points to Nick for squeezing in 'clerisy' which is the sort of word a man may well feel entitled to light up a cigar after using. Points snatched away again for the following.
Civil society is fighting with heartening gusto to protect British culture from the assault from the right.
It is? Perhaps the sentence could be improved by adding "I wish that" at the beginning, and changing 'is' to 'were'.
[1] My feelings are often wrong, BTW.[2]
[2] This is a needless footnote.
posted by Chardonnay Chap at 1/31/2011 04:09:00 PM
41 Comments:
I could whinge about this column all day... but 4 things for now.
1) Cohen has only interviewed people with whom he was likely to agree. John Carey is pretty much defined by his anti-academic stance and was never likely to do anything other than offer Cohen exactly what he was looking for. Sandbrook is a fairly decent TV historian but his books don't say anything particularly interesting, and make lots of generalizations that don't really stand up to scrutiny. Cohen has a habit of liking populist, not-especially-serious writers - witness his preference for historians like, er, john o'Farrell, and 'anthropologists' like Kate Fox (who he amusingly called an 'Oxford Anthropologist').
I've no doubt that a lot of academic prose is hard to understand. But Cohen's idea that somehow Judith Butler is to blame for nobody speaking out over teaching funding cuts is ludicrous. Why didn't Nick speak out back when the cuts were first announced?
2) Cohen seems to have not interviwed anyone who's heard about the REF, which will reward populism (or 'impact') in exactly the ways he's discussing. This is especially weird since one of his interviewees is married to an academic.
3) If any student reused a quotation they'd already whinged about at length in a previous essay, they would be castigated for unoriginality, if not plagiarism. In the 5 years between What's Left and this column, Nick's not managed to read another word by Judith Butler, and has also failed to notice that the 'bad prose award' (or whatever it is) was an 'award' (or in fact publicity stunt) hosted by a fairly hardcore academic journal, and was voted for by... academics.
4) and this is where i disagree about the quality of Cohen's tory-bashing:
For all the leftish positioning of "transgressive" academics they have been naive to the point of stupidity about the right. They assumed that Conservatives did not mean what they said and would not take money from institutions which have gone out of their way to alienate the intellectually curious.
Cohen has no evidence at all about this 'assumption', and thus about naivety and stupidity. Every academic I know was well-aware of what the Tories were proposing for higher ed. He doesn't make any reference to the 'assumption' anywhere else in the essay. Introducing new material in a conclusion? He'd be marked down... but not as much as he'd be marked down for presenting his prejudiced opinions as fact.
And this is the problem. Nick is writing form a position of prejudice. he hates all academics and is fitting the 'evidence', such as it is, around his pre-existing ideas.
As I said on my own blog, I think it's rather heartening that apparently nothing particularly objectionable or obscurantist has been written in the humanities in the last fourteen years.
Seems relevant:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/nov/22/we-will-fight-with-students
Nick's now standing with the almost universally despised Aaron Porter... what a surprise.
DSquared i saw yr comment on the Cohen thread on CiF too, ace.
I still don't get Cohen's point, other than that he hates 'Theory' and thus all academics. If he chose a sentence or two from a specialist physics of medicine journal, he'd likely not understand a single word. But there are lots of people working on science communication, and lots of people working on humanities communication too.
On a more general note, I guess he has one point in his article, which is that people who could have spoken out, and got media attention, over the cut to the teaching budget have remained silent. People who owe their careers and fame to a humanities education don't seem to be interested in making the case for future generations having anytihng close ot the same opportunities. And that really is a shame; it's much more important than the relatively minor Bookstart issue.
"No. Somebody put a drop [of Casaubon's blood] under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses,
I knew a girl whose father gave their dogs names like that. They were apparently always named after punctuation marks.
I try not to read the comments on CiF. They go from 'amusing' to 'tiresome' shortly after the first 10. BTW, a MichaelBulley has replied to D2: he seems to be an academic, and very much on Nick's side. I can't say that I'm any more convinced by his position. This is his best expressed comment (pre-Dan). It's common knowledge that academic books aren't written in deathless prose, and no one expects them to be.
I was tempted to write a much longer post, but I thought the title said most of what I wanted to say, and I wanted to throw in Casaubon from Middlemarch because Nick seems to have a view of history which goes like 'Middle ages--obscurantism, clerisy: Enlightenment--clarity and common sense: Very recently--sudden decay, new dark ages. Monty Python are always good for language.
Specialist subjects require their own argot, and it just seems as silly to expect a well-educated adult to know PhD level humanities talk as to expect them to know the names for the working parts in a factory.
As I think one of my old lecturers put it, "If it wasn't difficult, you wouldn't have to go to university to learn it!" Besides, the job of academics isn't just to explain their subject to the people, it's to take it further.
My first reaction, after reading Chris Dillow tweet that he agreed with Nick was that some fucking journalists are terrible too.
I deliberately left out my thoughts on Nick's apparent assumptions that 'the right' is not part of 'civil society' (is 'the left'?) and that this island is 'overcrowded'. (Should we invade Poland for more room?) Finally, there was this:
I am not disputing it, merely saying that those who struggle to communicate what they think and know are outside the prevailing academic culture.
This may be true of Dominic Sandbrook, but I don't think it's true at all. John Carey isn't outside academic culture is he? I can think of lots of bloggers who communicate their specialist fields who are academics.There are other reasons why "crowd-pleasing vulgarian[s]" may be unpopular, as illustrated by the old University of East Anglia joke. "What's the difference between Malcolm Bradbury and god? God is everywhere, and Malcolm Bradbury is everywhere but here."
I decided to get out the old cast iron mallet and hammer this joke into the ground
Specialist subjects require their own argot, and it just seems as silly to expect a well-educated adult to know PhD level humanities talk as to expect them to know the names for the working parts in a factory.
But do they really though?
Does a fair portion of that Cultural Studies or Literary/Critical Theory really need to be expressed in such obscurantist prose? A lot of the ideas aren't that profound - the Butler quote that won the bad writing prize isn't. I also think he is right to say that some of the writing adopts a style that is highly elitist.
That point aside what is Nick ranting on about? What's this got to do with cuts? It feels like he's just shoehorned in a bit of recycled What's Left into a column.
If I wrote about chess so that you people could understand it (well, most of you) then a lot of what I wrote wouldn't be worth reading.
Does a fair portion of that Cultural Studies or Literary/Critical Theory really need to be expressed in such obscurantist prose?
they don't have to, but it's *difficult* to write clear prose - that's why people who are capable of doing it are so well paid, and why they hang on to their Observer columns long after the actual content has turned to drivel.
There's also the danger that the appearance of clarity and lucidity can often be given by oversimplification and glibness. One doesn't want to valorise difficulty for its own sake, but lots of things are difficult because they're difficult, and hard for the layman to understand because someone assessed (correctly) that it wasn't worth the time and effort to write it simply.
I think its a bit of a stretch to argue that Nick Cohen writes clearly. I think his writing style is pretty dreadful.
I am also not sure about that the argument that difficult concepts need to be written in really impenetratable prose. Certainly the ability to express complicated ideas in easy to understand language is a real skill.
But I not convinced that someone like Judith Butler is dealing with more difficult concepts than someone like C. Wright Mills, Zygmunt Bauman or Max Weber.
On the contrary I can't escape the suspicion that the impenetrable writing style is intended to hide either the slightness of the contribution to scholarship or the logical inconsistency of many of the arguments.
I'm definitely with dd here, bubby. I don't think difficult ideas have to be written in impenetrable [sic] prose either, but I do think they need to be written using the appropriate specialist terminology and references. That almost always means that they will not be accessible to the mythical 'intelligent reader.'
Yes, some difficult ideas can be expressed clearly. However, that's what encyclopaediae are for, and if you study anything seriously the gloss in the Britannica will seem almost comically superficial.
There was a famous example in the late 80s when William Waldegrave offered some prize to whoever could explain the Higgs boson on one side of A4. The winning entry compared it to Mrs Thatcher moving through through a room and attracting a constant crowd of admirers. This may have explained sub atomic physics to Mr Waldegrave, but I know a little about the subject, and Higgs bosons are not like Mrs Thatcher at all. I've forgotten for the moment whether it was Einstein or Wittgenstein who said that things should be stated as simply as possibly, but not more so. (Or words to that effect, and probably in German.) He was right, whoever he was.
But I not convinced that someone like Judith Butler is dealing with more difficult concepts than someone like C. Wright Mills, Zygmunt Bauman or Max Weber.
I'm sure she isn't. But look at some of the stuff written exactly about those concepts by ... well by almost every other sociology academic other than those three guys. Even Weber can be heavy going sometimes.
it's *difficult* to write clear prose - that's why people who are capable of doing it are so well paid
Hmm. There are many reasons why I'm a part-time lecturer in Criminology rather than a broadsheet columnist, but I really don't think inability to write clear prose is one of them.
Cohen apparently didn't even try to read the passage from Butler that he quotes, or he would notice that he'd misquoted it. As it is presented in the article, it really doesn't make sense, because it is ungrammatical; the original has "as" where the Guardian writes "is." With that fixed, the sentence isn't especially impenetrable if you're familiar with the jargon, although it is obviously too long.
Does a fair portion of that Cultural Studies or Literary/Critical Theory really need to be expressed in such obscurantist prose? A lot of the ideas aren't that profound
The problem with this is that, like Cohen, so many people seem to think that jargonistic, complex prose is somehow only the domain of Cultural Studies / Critical Theory. I'm good friends with a non-continental philosopher and the stuff he writes is just as dense and complex. i taught a course last year which included extracts from Judith Butler, Hume and Locke. The students had problems with all of them in terms of prose style and complexity of ideas. BUT - on the other hand - 'Theory', because it is a relatively new field as a 'separate area' (ie barely tethered to literature / culture at all now), has worked hard to establish itself as, well, difficult. The image undergrads often have of postgrad study is of a new world of theory that they'll have to get used to, because it's too hard for undergrads. But the same is true of lots of contemporary philosophy, of the non-relativist kind as well. Cohen's logic would see him implicitly preferring Alain De Boton to Roy Sorensen. His apporoach to Sandbrook is instructive; in order to be a historian with a big-name book deal, you have to effectively become non-academic, which means you sell, and you're popular and famous, but it also usually means that your books aren't worth much in the long term.
Nick's not exactly unguilty of complicated, difficult writing either. witness, from cruel britannia:
Shallow uniformity is not an accident but a consequence of what Marxists optimistically call late capitalism
The idea does make sense, but the progression of ideas is complex and hard to follow. It's hgard to tell if he's with the Marxists or not; and 'accident' there is undefined. an 'accident' of capitalism?
overall, i can't shake the feeling that academia is, in general, a pretty unloved place. most people i know who are outside the 'industry' view academics with suspicion and at times hostility. When school funding was cut in the 80s, people allowed cameras into schools to demonstrate classroom overcrowding. If you did the same with seminar rooms, it'd be blamed on the university, not the govt policy.
Nick's problem with academics seems linked to his philistinism, and his lack of intellectual curiosity in general - there's no one 'academic style', just as there's no one journalistic style. I find a lot of finncial journalism hard to follow, for example; I have trouble reading my friends' articles who write for trade magazines.
Rather than, ahem, engage with Butler's ideas, Nick derides her style and dismisses her ideas as a result. The fact that he never consults any academic research for his articles isn't a failing of 'academia'.
"But I not convinced that someone like Judith Butler is dealing with more difficult concepts than someone like C. Wright Mills, Zygmunt Bauman or Max Weber."
What do you mean? Weber wrote in German - I couldn't read a word that impenetrable gibberish until Talcott Parsons, that lauded master of efficient prose, brought his work into Anglophone sociology.
Seriously though, academics, despite appearing to write for a living, are not necessarily good writers. And they don't need to be, because they are writing, primarily, for their peers. It isn't so much that good, clear writing equals dumbed-down content, but that good, clear writing has no direct relationship with the quality of the ideas.
Evidence: newspaper columnists.
So if we set up a system of assessment in which academics were rewarded on the quality of their writing over and above the quality of their ideas, we risk rewarding those handy with a turn of phrase over those with genuine insight, mastery of theory, or the ability to analyse evidence.
Also, Weber, yes. Mills, yes. But Bauman, of late at least, seems to me like a 'Guardian' sociologist, in that his evidence of social change seems to be drawn from Guardian supplements, allowing him to write (well) about things, like 'Liquid Modernity' without leaving his study, producing social theory that is applicable only, in my opinion, to the lives of (some of) the middle-classes.
I don't really care too much about Judith Butler, but the quoted paragraph just looks to me like an introductory paragraph. one of those things that you write so that people know where you're coming from/points of reference. They're always badly written, mainly because they're not really meant to be read, but skimmed fast for orientating jargon.
"Following in the blah blah, using the concepts of blah blah I blah, blah".
This is also discussed on Harry's Place by Sarah AB.
I've largely forgotten Francis Wheen's 'Mumbo-Jumbo' book, but Nick's argument really does sound like it. I've never quite got their hatred of po-mo. It's not as if Marxists (esp continental Marxists) were models of limpidity and sometime in the 80s, round about when Nick left Oxford, the obscurantists took over.
And I still don't know how this relates to the cuts.
Sorry - I think I should have linked here in my post - I agree with many of the points made here. I think maybe people resent humanities lecturers (and what they write) because they feel they should understand stuff about how books work and how society works (by contrast with their acceptance that quantum physics is extremely difficult to understand.) This is true up to a point - the intelligent general reader really can appreciate literature and write about it effectively. It's harder to show what academics add, and if what they add seems 'difficult' it seems to iritate people. I enjoyed discussing this here recently.http://www.friendsofthetext.org/?p=318
I've never quite got their hatred of po-mo.
yeah me neither. it's produced some ropey art, and ropey writing, but so has every 'movement' before it, including their beloved enlightenment. And i know i'm forever making this point, but the novelists whom Decents most love owe their entire careers to postmodern writing - Amis and his self-awareness and unreliable narration, and his lack of any real reference to the real world, is a quintessentially postmodern novelist; McEwan too, in his pseudo-scientific approach in Enduring Love and his metafiction in Atonement. Both those novelists would probably deny their postmodernity, but they are always going to be described as such in, er, academic texts.
It might be worth noting when Cohen was at uni. This was at the height of the 'theory wars', or whatever they were called, and Nick's approach bears the hallmarks of his having studied under someone who was strongly resistant to continental philosophy.
part of that is because postmodernism, among other things, aimed to expose the postures behind much 'rational' and 'empirical' writing. some of the theorizing, taken to its logical conclusion, is worrying, but it's hard to argue with the core ideas - for example, that anything mediated textually will inherently be part of a wider ideology which carries assumptiosn that are open to question and challenge. That, in itself, is not a uniquely postmodern idea, and it's equally very hard to disagree - it's pretty much the HP Sauce raison d'etre, with all the 'you might say that, but look at some bloke you once talked to in the street' etc.
PS Sarah i'm personally glad you didn't link directly here from HP Sauce, it keeps the trolls away.
I've never quite got their hatred of po-mo.
I don't think much of Francis Wheen or Nick Cohen but I think post-modern ideas have had a damaging impact on parts of academia. I haven't got time to list all the intellectual problems with the approach or the social consequences that follow from this way of looking at the world but they are myriad.
I don't suppose anyone here will agree with it but I think this academic does a good job of explaining some of the problems this approach created in the area of media studies.
I think it would help me enormously if the critics of post-modernism could actually distinguish between post-structuralism, phenomenology and yer actual post-modernist thinkers.
It would also help my general disposition if some of these critics showed any sign of actually have read the stuff they critique properly (I'm looking at you Sokal. Man up).
Bubby, having only skimmed the PDF, I think the truth is probably in the middle ground. You can't do an objective analysis of media, and you do have to take into account how its interpreted/re-purposed. I like the GMG, but I've always had a problem with their approach. On the other hand, the "anything goes" approach of some vulgar post-modernists is dire. Obviously one can interpret a text in absolutely any possible way if you're insane. But people don't. The interesting questions become how, why, etc.
But then I'm heavily influenced by phenomenology so I would say that.
Obviously one can interpret a text in absolutely any possible way if you're insane. But people don't. The interesting questions become how, why, etc.
Well yes exactly I think that is the point the guy in the article is trying to make. However to do that you need to spend lots of time actually looking at how people understand the world. You need to do lots of very time consuming audience research and then try and look at where people are getting their knowledge from. Obviously most of this is socially patterned. It comes from the mass media, direct experience, social networks, books, films, culture more generally. Much of it is confused and frequently contradictory - and its very, very hard to try and trace the source of audience beliefs. But my problem with most post-modernism is that it doesn't bother with this empirical base of evidence. It makes some massive assumptions about audiences relate to media and the social world and many of them are incorrect.
Well I wouldn't know. I'm just a bit wary of making these generalisations due to the number of people who are (wrongly) accused of being post-modernists, and not doing research. Bruno Latour, for example. Or Foucault for that matter (whatever one might think of his methodological failings).
Bruno Latour has gone off the deep end and abandoned sociology for the promotion of a study of associations - and some of his followers, at least, seem to take this as saying that we ought be studying associations of non-human things without placing the meaning-making (and association-making) of human beings at the core.
But no-one can deny that he has done some pretty heavy going research.
And that is one of my big problems with the Enlightenment fetishists - THEY are the ones who haven't done any research. I mean, all the time they are bashing sociology of science by quoting this or that wacky paper, they ignore the evidence from detailed ethnographic studies of science that access to the literature alone will not allow you to properly understand the discipline in question. There is the grey literature, there are is what takes place at conferences (on stage and off), there is what takes place in labs, hell, there is what takes place in bars. How do members of a discipline learn which research - which scientists and laboratories - to trust, to take seriously? How do they learn to produce their knowledge claims in forms acceptable to the community? Etc. Etc. It isn't by a cursory skim of the literature.
No, but Enlightenment fetishists expose themselves when they think that they can know a discipline by a reference to a few papers or books that, often, are as ignored, or even derided, as they are seriously used.
I don't want to invent a new form of Godwin's Law where every conversation on the Internet has to end up discussing Israel, but can I suggest a couple of other reasons for Nick to pick on Judith Butler.
1. She opposed the invasion of Iraq.
2. She's Jewish and supports the BDS campaign against Israel.
Just a thought.
nah, it's not that. Nick hates all academics for having a hive mind (in a piece published a while back, he claimed that he could predict every single thing about every academic's politics - which actually meant, academics tended to oppose Iraq), but he dislikes Butler because she's a representative of 'difficult', 'postmodern' theory.
going along with the 'enlightenment' stuff above, Nick wouldn't have even noticed her Israel stuff cos a) it came quite recently and that would involve him keeping up with her work and b) he's never actually read her anyway. You can tell that from the way he 'coincidentally' keeps using a mistranscribed sentence in everything her ever writes about her.
As far as what this all might tell us about cuts; i think all it tells us is that Nick hates tehacademicz cos they're lal part of teh liberal left or some shite. His writing on this, and the arts more generally, is at its absolute worst.
Simpler even than that: Judith Butler's writing - and when I say 'writing' I mean 'that specific paragraph' - won first prize in the fourth and final Bad Writing Prize, organised by the academic journal Philosophy and Literature in 1998. More here.
As for the GUMG, I've never felt quite the same about them since I read something of theirs about media coverage of the kidnapping of Aldo Moro, which (the authors argued) described the Red Brigades using pejorative and delegitimising terms such as 'killers', 'urban guerrillas' and 'Marxist revolutionaries'. This strategy "ensur[ed] ‘the isolation of the Red Brigades from
“everyday” explanations'" and obscured the fact that "the activi-
ties of the armed groups [were] one expression of quite general opposition to unresolved social issues". This second point is valid, and does tend to get obscured - I've just written a blog post about this very point, as it happens - but the main thrust of the argument strikes me as misdirected and vaguely naive. I mean, the Red Brigades were 'urban guerrillas' and 'Marxist revolutionaries' - and they had at this point just carried out a killing in cold blood. There's manufacturing consent and then there's telling it pretty much how it is.
That does sound rather niave and a bit out of character. Have you got a reference for that Phil?
Why certainly.
Davis, H. and P. Walton (1983), ‘Death of a premier: consensus and closure in international news’, in Davis and Walton (eds), _Language, image, media_, Oxford: Blackwell
I can send you the full version of my comments, if you can't find a library that's got my book (it's all in there).
Cheers Phil. Much appreciated. It's in my university library so will have a look when I get back on Monday.
The way in which conformist dress-styles are likely to increase.
What?
Where?
In Philo's piece, though not in reality.
Ok so you disagree with the point about style becoming more conformist since the 1970s. Fair enough. I can't really comment because I was too young to really notice such things during that decade. But what about the general thrust of the piece - the argument that a great deal of work in media/cultural studies has lost its ability to critique some of the more brutal changes in society post 1979?
To be honest, I'm not sure I have the knowledge of the field to usefully comment.
I see Judith Butler was speaking at the British Museum tonight. I wonder if Nick turned up to listen?
Funny sketch, but they don't speak like that in Jarrow.
Guano
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