Jargone It!

[LARSSON at vax1.mankato.msus.edu]

Jean quotes Murthy and comments:
" 1) Do we have a right to expect the social scientists (and academics    
     in the humanities) to write their stuff in clear jargon-free English?
     Are they not entitled to their own jargon just as the physical
     sciences are? Should we conclude that just because a parody got past
     the editors of journal (which I'm sure can be done in physics too),
     they should abandon their language? Sure, clear English would be nice,
     but is that a reasonable expectation?
 
Yes, it is a reasonable expectation.  "Jargon" is extremely overused.
Obviously, there is some jargon that is necessary, because it describes a
specific item for which there's no other word.  Find a synonym for "binary
tree", for example.  BUT, increasingly, jargon is used by those who know
not of which they speak, so they hide behind a maze of polysyllabic
garbage, thinking to impress.  Here in the world of business where I live,
this is very prevalent.  (And don't EVEN get me started about the use of
impact as a verb, as in, "His paradigm of the seamless manufacturing
construct impacts upon the foundation of our business model . . .
AAARRRGGHHH!E#&*&!!(&!! )"


The exchange in PMLA that I mentioned a couple of days ago is a case in point.
The letters between attackers of Donald Morton's use of language in that
article and his responses have both gotten increasingly silly--like watching
an e-mail flame war in slow motion (a good way to empathize with Pokler
at Zwolfkinder!).

This is the sentence that set things off:
"In today's 'post-al' academy, the widely celebrated 'advance'
in the understanding of culture and society brought about by ludic
(post)modernism has been enabled by a series of displacements:
 of the signified by the signifier, of use value by exchange value,
of conceptuality by textuality, of the meaningful by the meaningless,
of determination by indeterminacy, of causality by undecidability,
of knowing by feeling, of commonality by difference, of political
economy by libidinal economy, of need by desire, and so on."


Now that isn't exactly Strunk and White's idea of "clear English," but
it is not incomprehensible in the way alluded to by the first letter to
attack the article.

(BTW, Citation Time: The article is "Birth of the Cyberqueer" by Donald
Morton and is in the May 1995 issue of PMLA.  The first exchange of letters
is in the  January 1996 article and a further exchange is hot off the press
in the May 1966 issue.)


A loose paraphrase of that sentence might be taken from Marx himself:
" . . . all that is solid melts into thin air . . . "  and Morton does
helpfully unpack a couple of terms in a footnote.

I find two things of particular interest about this episode:
1. The way the letters have tracked off onto the issue of "clear language."
One letterwriter paraphrased Fredric Jameson to suggest that Morton believes
that "clear" language=oppressor's language and reifies ideology by not
requiring us to work through and win meaning for ourselves.
	Morton did not contradict her but went on to lump the respondents
with "all conservative pedagogues and their allies in the culture industry"
(eg. Hilton Kramer and William F. Buckley!), even though one writer plainly
does not fit that description.  He further goes on to defend the "active
structuring role of language" as informing his own style.  (and even bites
the hand that feeds him by questioning the motives of PMLA in printing 
these letters!)

Now, all this ignores the entirely-clear language that Morton uses in his
own responses--and the fact that his article isn't all that hard to follow
in the first place!  (Maybe I've been corrupted, having just finished a
term teaching literary theory after a term of film theory--but he isn't as
dense to grasp as, say, Gayatri Spivak!)

2. The second point is the way these letters distract attention from the
main point of the article itself--a denounciation of a notion of "queer
studies" or "queerness" as opposed to the utopian political agenda of
"gay rights" that is much more in keeping with Morton's rather traditional
Marxist sensibilities.  In other words, we have an example of a debate
between two models of "liberation," one utopian and politically committed
(i.e., classic Marxist), and one anarchic, if not nihilistic, committed only
to dealing with power relations in provisional terms (along the lines suggested
by the later Foucault).  I would like to have seen some debate on those issues.
I have little to say about this queer/gay spit (which I didn't really fully
understand until Morton's article), but several of Morton's points seem
problematic to me.  I won't bore you with unwinding them now!

This--along with the Sokal Text issue--has confirmed some of my thoughts
about jargon in lit. crit.:

a. Jargon is sometimes a useful, if not necessary, component of academic 
discourse.  People reading it should expect to know that sometimes academic
literary and social critics talk to each other in these ways.  (And when did
someone complain about an episode of ER because the surgeon said "subdural
hematoma" instead of "bruise" or "myocardial infarction" instead of "heart
attack"?)

b. Jargon is sometimes a way of whistling in the dark--and no more meaningful
than the Star Trek engineers talking about "maximimizing the tachyonic flux field
to stabilize the bipolar thrust vectors."

c. As Gerald Graff and others have said, "humanist" academics are generally
pretty bad at communicating with the general public (or even undergraduates?),
and we need to adopt a range of rhetorical tools to explain what we do for
different audiences.
	(It is telling that Morton refers to "rhetoric" *only* as a matter
of "style.")


In the meantime, while Morton's attackers misread him as the kind of
(post)modernist he is himself attacking, George Will predictably leaps into
the fray, fangs bared for red, fleshy meat, of Sokal and The Controversy,
in today's newspaper column.

And so it goes.


Don Larsson, Mankato State U (MN)