All In The Mind

Ever picked up a fat textbook, only to throw it down again after trying to hack your way unsuccessfully through the dense forest of jargon? Confusing and alienating language has long been the scourge of academia, both in the Sciences and the Humanities. But perhaps jargon is more than just the enemy of clear communication. Could it be that new ways of thinking require new languages? Perhaps we should approach jargon as a species of poetry? Join us for a trip to the shadowy underworld of obscurity.

Transcript

Natasha Mitchell: Hello, Natasha Mitchell here, and thanks for joining me this week for All in the Mind. And to give you perhaps only a moments relief from the distressing events in our region this week, today we're confronting a more cerebral minefield - that of intellectual jargon, and the confusing and alienating languages that big brains and academics alike can get tangled up in when they try to communicate the contents of their minds.

But consider this: maybe they use jargon when they are trying not to communicate. One of the sneaky things about jargon is that it's a useful cover. If you're not quite sure what you're trying to say, then a few big long words should be enough to keep everybody else from suspecting. But on the other hand, perhaps jargon is a necessary evil. If the job of our intellectuals is to think new and original thoughts, then maybe those new thoughts need new vocabularies. And so that means, for the rest of us, it's our job to just grit our teeth and learn the language.

It's all pretty problematical - or "problematised", if you like. And so this week, David Rutledge is strapping on his thinking cap and venturing into the shadowy realm of obscurity.

William Burroughs: [chanting] Lock them out and block the door, smear them out for ever more. Lock them out, lock their minds, three times three to make up nine.

David Rutledge: Every culture has its avant garde, and every avant garde has its own occult language. Which is harmless enough when we're talking about aesthetics and the arts - but when it comes to arts with a capital A, that's Arts the university faculty, then things get a lot more controversial. To many people, there's nothing more aggravating than an avant garde university professor, and the language of avant garde academia has been attracting fear and loathing for decades. Or at least, it's been feared and loathed when it comes from the Humanities.

The interesting thing about obscure technical language is that scientists are allowed to get away with it all the time. But in disciplines like Sociology and Cultural Studies, for example, jargon is constantly attacked as a lazy substitute for clear thinking and common sense. Meaghan Morris is Chair Professor of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. She gets to hear a lot of jargon, and so she's developed a keen radar for spotting it.

Meaghan Morris: Well, I think there's no difference at the level of vocabulary or terms, between a specialised language and jargon. People do use big words, and ugly words, and long Latin words very often, because it's easier than finding a more humane, ordinary language way of putting things. That's not a problem in a professional context; it is when you're talking to a more mixed public.

David Rutledge: What you're implying, then, is that pretty well anything is capable of being expressed in plain everyday language - it's just a question of whether or not you can be bothered to make the effort?

Meaghan Morris: I wouldn't go that far. I think there are some things, even in the Humanities, that aren't useful or interesting in ordinary language, because they just are difficult and specialised. Some of the most difficult work in Cultural Studies right now, is work that is trying to understand new media and the internet, by building in understanding from science about colour and new media forms. I can't understand that work, you know, I find it jargon-ridden, because I don't have the training to read it. But that doesn't mean that I think those people should stop. And I think in 10 or 15 years, they will have changed how we understand computers and digital forms.

David Rutledge: I guess what's interesting there, when you mention new media and the internet, is that you're talking about technology. And I suppose what you notice is that people generally have no problem with scientific jargon. It's accepted that physicists are going to speak to each other in arcane terms. But when academics from the Humanities start doing it, everybody gets very upset.

Meaghan Morris: That's a very interesting question, and I suppose the easy way out is to say that science broke with the public a much longer time ago - and I'm not sure that that's necessarily a good thing. It could be that people have just given up on science, and don't try, or don't pester scientists very much any more to give popular explanations of what they do. But I think it's also the case that because the Humanities claim to talk about people's everyday lives, about the social and cultural experiences that most of us share, there is a lingering, very strong feeling that we ought to be able to "report back", as it were, to our subjects. We study human beings, so we should be able to talk to other human beings about what we do.

Richard Freadman: Well, I think the tendency to use needlessly obscure and exotic language has got a bit out of hand in recent decades. But people sometimes talk as if this is a problem that's only set in in recent decades - and that prior to that, people talked about literature, for example, in a way that anybody who had no specialist academic learning could readily understand. And that's not always the case.

David Rutledge: That's Richard Freadman, Professor in English at La Trobe University in Melbourne. Richard Freadman says that jargon has always been around, because of the age-old human desire to organise ourselves into tribes, with a clear boundary between insiders and outsiders. And that's a danger, not just for the Humanities, but for the Sciences as well.

Richard Freadman: If you look historically, it's surely the case that through the ages, there's always been a tendency for people to form themselves into sort of priestly sects, with their own esoteric vocabularies, their own esoteric languages, and there are some very deep psychological motivations behind this tendency. There's for example a very strong need, on the part of many people, to feel that they are somehow part of an elect, or that they've somehow been delivered from the ordinariness, or the fallenness, of general human existence. So the tendency for people to form themselves into sects with dialects is age-old, really. But there are certain areas of scientific activity which, very clearly, must be made intelligible - at least to some reasonable degree - to a wider public. I take, for example, AIDS research. One imagines that someone who's HIV positive will have been aware hitherto that they have this thing called an immune system. But if they are diagnosed as positive, suddenly the possession of an immune system becomes something that urgently needs to be understood. And we need scientists who can explain to us, at least in reasonably intelligible terms, what an immune system is, how it functions, what happens to these cells when that virus is present. And it seems to me that there isn't any one requirement as to how broadly intelligible a particular discourse should be, whether it's a Science discourse or a Humanities one. The question is really one of the public need - if there is a public need to have something explained in a way that's intelligible, then efforts should be done to do that. And the AIDS case would be a case in point.

David Rutledge: Richard Freadman. Well, perhaps another less commonsense objection to jargon, is that it marks you out as an intellectual. And intellectuals are a bit like insurance salesmen - they perform a necessary social role, but they're often regarded with suspicion. Even the world "intellectual" can function as an abusive term. Meaghan Morris.

Meaghan Morris: That's true in some places, it's obviously the case in Australia. I think it's less the case in the United States. It is the case in Britain, it is certainly not the case in Hong Kong, or indeed in China at large. Anti-intellectualism is, I think, an intensely English-language formation, and it's a real pain. It's long past its use-by date, I think, and it does tend to be expressed through the endless, wearying, repetitive jargon jokes and obscurity jokes that one comes across. You just have to live with it if you work in the English language.

David Rutledge: I suppose it's also that it's always only a very short step from talking about "intellectuals" to talking about "intellectual elites". And of course, the thing about elites is that they use language as a means of identifying and excluding outsiders. Do you think that there is a point there - that jargon, in academic circles, is often used as a means of keeping people out?

Meaghan Morris: I honestly don't think so. The closest I've seen to that really happening would be in postgraduate seminars in United States universities, where the students are trained to be competitive. And they compete, you know, in who can sound most pompous and obscure - and these are problems of immaturity. I don't think most academics today want to keep people out - I think on the contrary. We've been through a period of 10, 15 years now, of humanists generally bending over backwards to not just reach a wider audience, but to diversify the kinds of people that we can speak to. The real danger, it seems to me, is when you have an academic who is very sincere, who genuinely does not understand that their language is not widely accessible. That happens quite frequently. And you see it when academics write five-page letters to the newspaper in, you know, densely written theory-speak, without having noticed that most letters in the newspapers are three paragraphs long with words of one syllable. That comes out of naivety, not out of deliberate desire to exclude.

David Rutledge: And maybe out of the fact that, like scientists, they're researchers, they're specialists - maybe they just don't get out much?

Meaghan Morris: They don't get out much; we live in a very intense world. I think that's something people who are not academics don't understand: it is all-consuming. When people look back to the golden era of great public intellectuals, who could speak at a union meeting one day, and meet the Prime Minister the next, and write for the newspaper in between, they tend to forget that those people taught, at most, often six to eight hours a week. We teach 17 to 20, and we have many, many, many more bureaucratic and generally managerial jobs to do. When you work a 70-hour-week, whether it's in business or in science, or in the Humanities, it sometimes is hard to get out and to remember that the rest of the world is not at all interested or aware of you and what you are doing.

The problems we have in universities now, are created by the move to professionalise our lives, to disregard undergraduate training at the expense of income-producing research activity. You know, the fact is that a young scholar can't even get their nose in the door, these days, without producing so-called "international refereed journal articles". Now, when an article is sent out for refereeing, the referee has to answer a whole range of questions. And one of those questions is usually something like "has this person referred to an appropriate range of theoretical literature?" Now, if the answer comes back No, you don't get published. And that usually means you don't keep your job. These are very practical constraints on people to produce highly technical articles. Our Australian Research Council rewards publishing those articles, in ways you are not rewarded for publishing in a newspaper or a magazine. Indeed, you can be punished for that.

So on the one hand, you know, the government that sometimes is publicly bemoaning the madness of cultural elites, is the very government that has forced the professionalisation of humanists to such a point that it is career-threatening for a young scholar to do some of the things that I was able to do quite gladly. You know, run away and spend a few years writing for newspapers.

David Rutledge: On ABC Radio National and Radio Australia, you're listening to All in the Mind, with me David Rutledge. Our guests this week are Meaghan Morris and Richard Freadman, and we're exploring the dark underworld of intellectual obscurity.

Speaker: The move from a structuralist account, in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways, to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence and rearticulation, brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects, to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed perception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

David Rutledge: That's a passage from the work of US academic Judith Butler. Judith Butler is a Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California in Berkeley, and over the years she's been one of the favourite targets of anti-jargon campaigners. And it's not entirely impossible to see why. In 1995, the journal Philosophy and Literature established its annual Bad Writing Contest, in which a prize is given for the "ugliest, most stylistically awful passage found in a scholarly book or article". Judith Butler won in 1998, with the passage you've just heard.

The charge that you often hear against Judith Butler - and against more notorious philosophers like Jacques Derrida - is that their style of writing is perversely obscure, it's intended to prevent communication rather than disseminate knowledge. If you can read their books and speak their language, then you've got a key to that ivory tower, where all students who enter in are lost forever. On the other hand, Judith Butler's supporters say she writes the way she does because she's a feminist, she's a theorist of sexual politics, and her work is all about the ways in which language constructs reality. So if you want to change the world - to make it less sexist and less homophobic, for example - then you have to change the language as well. Richard Freadman.

Richard Freadman: I do like things to be put as intelligibly as possible. It doesn't even necessarily mean as intelligibly as possible. It might be, for example, if I read a paragraph of Derrida - and yes, sometimes with Judith Butler - that I'd like greater precision in the way things are formulated, in the way transitions are made from point to point. I guess one of the arguments that would be made by someone who embraced Judith Butler's way of doing things, would be that the idiom she uses isn't just making, as it were, intellectual moves. It's providing a way of thinking and feeling for a particular constituency, and that to become inward with that idiom is to identify with a particular political constituency - and to feel its needs, to partake of its "project", as it's often called. And that may be a benefit, in itself, for those who are being represented by, say, Judith Butler's views.

Sometimes, to have a language for an in-group - if the group is some way marginalised or otherwise victimised - then sometimes it's very necessary to have an in-group language which enables people to identify, to solidify as a group, to have the sort of emotional connection to a particular orientation from which they can then launch various kinds of political action, political resistance and so on. And, I mean, in the case of Judith Butler: as a male, I'm hesitant to say "well, she mustn't do that". Because perhaps if I were female, I'd feel that there was some real personal imperative about being able to partake of that particular group idiom.

Meaghan Morris: I think probably, like all of us, she loves the kind of language she writes. You know, I mean, there's often a terribly humourless, puritanical approach to other people's language, that forgets many of us write the way we do because it deeply expresses our desires, in relation to words, and sentences, and forms, and the kind of reading we've done in the past. Our language is very close to who we are. And I don't know her personally, so I can't speculate on that, but I'm sure she writes quite deliberately, and with pleasure, the way she does.

David Rutledge: It's interesting when you mention self-expression, and pleasure, and desire, I mean we're sort of straying into the realm of poetry here, aren't we?

Meaghan Morris: Well, we are. And I think that most of the work in the Humanities and Cultural Theory generally, that has upset people over the last 20 or 30 years, has taken the poetic function of language very seriously. Now, we don't all write well. And it is true, it's mundane and unfortunate but true, that some people try to write poetically, or expressively, or experiment with language, and they fail miserably. But it's not necessarily a catastrophe that this occurs. And in fact, I think it would be more catastrophic if people stopped trying to experiment with language. Language is life, and language change is part of the magic of learning and creating. And it's, not least, one of the things that we should most be working to share with undergraduate students, I think.

Reader: O, never will I trust to speeches penn'd
Nor to the motion of a school-boy's tongue
Nor never come in vizard to my friend
Nor woo in rhyme, like a blind harper's song
Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise,
Three-pil'd hyperboles, spruce affectation,
Figures pedantical - these summer-flies
Have blown me full of maggot ostentation.
I do foreswear them; and I here protest,
By this white glove - how white the hand, God knows! -
Henceforth my wooing mind shall be express'd
In russet yeas, and honest kersey noes.

David Rutledge: A passage there from Shakespeare's comedy Love's Labours Lost, in which one of the characters vows to speak in plain English from now on. Well of course, the language sounds strange to us, but it's interesting to consider that a lot of Shakespeare's language sounded unfamiliar to his 16th-century audience as well. In fact, Shakespeare positively revelled in what we now call intellectual obscurity. He was playful, he was experimental, he ransacked the vocabulary of all kinds of unrelated disciplines, he made up weird-sounding words. But nobody ever called Shakespeare a pretentious intellectual. Maybe Shakespeare's society didn't as many problems with mixing different cultures as our own seems to do. Here's Richard Freadman again.

Richard Freadman: One of the things, precisely, that makes Shakespeare so great, is his ability to work at these different levels, and to somehow bring them into contact with one another. So that, you know, Shakespeare had esoteric knowledge about various things - as you say, he would do unprecedented things with the language - and yet he was able to do this without losing connection with the experiential world of his audience. And this is one of the phenomenal things about Shakespeare, that he was able to operate simultaneously at these levels, and somehow fuse them in the language and the drama that he created. And I like to think of Shakespeare as a kind of ideal in this. And the Shakespeare example, exceptional though it is, does seem to tell us that it's not just an either/or situation - that either we have to be right out there with an esoteric vocabulary, and out of touch with ordinary people, or we have to be ordinary and unsympathetic towards those who are using esoteric vocabularies. There is a kind of meeting-point, hard though it is to get to.

David Rutledge: I wonder if it also has something to do with the audience that he was writing for? Shakespeare was writing at a time when human knowledge was exploding in all directions at once, and so of course the language was blowing out as well. And maybe people were just more open to novelty and the marvellous than they are today?

Richard Freadman: Well, I think that was certainly true of his time. I don't think it's untrue of our time, in some ways. I mean, you know, with our global village communications, we're constantly being exposed to new cultural idioms, and we're getting them simultaneously down through cable and ordinary TV and the internet and so on.

David Rutledge: It's a revolution in technology and communication, which is in many ways what the English Renaissance was.

Richard Freadman: I think that's absolutely right. And given that that's going on now, I don't think we have to be entirely pessimistic about our own ability to be the kind of responsive audience that could accommodate a Shakespeare, if a Shakespeare came along - and wouldn't it be great. I think that we probably need to look at some broader cultural tendencies which make that difficult, at the moment. I think our cultural worlds are fairly fragmented, at the moment. I think a very high degree of intellectual specialisation came about during the 20th century, it was a century in which all kinds of confidence was lost: confidence in widely-shared stories about the world, confidence in our capacities to live harmoniously, and to communicate, and so on. And so while our technologies give us the capacity to bridge cultural worlds, the fragmentariness and the loss of confidence in contact, is the thing I think that needs to be tackled. And I actually think that the universities, and that the intellectuals inside and outside the universities, have a big part to play in that.

Natasha Mitchell: Richard Freadman there, Professor in English at La Trobe University in Melbourne. And we also heard today from Meaghan Morris, Professor of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. And that feature was produced by David Rutledge.

Thanks this week to Donna McLaughlin, and to Jenny Parsonage for studio production. I'm Natasha Mitchell, wishing you a good week.

Guests

Meaghan Morris
Professor of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University, Hong Kong

Richard Freadman
Professor of English, LaTrobe University, Melbourne

Further Information

Meaghan Morris online

Richard Freadman online

Music

CD Title: Break Through In Grey Room
Track & Title: Curse Go Back
Artist: William S. Burroughs
Record Co & CD No: Sub Rosa (SUB CD006-8) 1987
URL: http://www.hyperreal.org/wsb/

CD Title: Autoditacker
Track & Title: Tux + Damask
Artist: Mouse On Mars
Record Co & CD No: Thrill Jockey (thrill 045) 1997
URL: http://www.mouseonmars.com/

CD Title: An Uncertain Animal, Ruptured; Tissue Expanding in Conversation
Track & Title: Lingual Milk Salts
Artist: irr. app. (ext.)
Record Co & CD No: Fire, Inc. (CD f-7) 2000
URL: http://www.misanthrope.com/irr/