Not everything is for everyone

So I wanted to talk about writing for a minute. I came across an interesting little kerfuffle online this weekend as I read ArtFag City. It seems that Paddy Johnson has been mixing it up with a writer who posts as Tremblings. At issue is Johnson's sense that Tremblings' writing engages in "linguistic privilege — the practice of using big words as means of ensuring the reader (and typically the author) doesn’t know the essay lacks substantiated ideas".

In an effort to restrain this sort of excessive privilege-taking, Johnson proposes changes, and asks a 'friend in academia' to propose further edits. In the process, words are changed, avenues of investigation are pared down, and whatever they essay's original content was is redirected in the interest of some unarticulated ideal of 'readability'.

Johnson's bias against academic writing is so obvious (the story ran under a headline "The Problem with Academic Writing Isn't Big Words") as to be not worth discussing. What is interesting is the notion - proposed here by a writer in a popular media - that an idea occurring in writing should be accessible to readers. This is opposed to another idea - that what is being written should be understood by those for whom it is written. Tremblings gets at this fine distinction in a very interesting passage:

I have to be incredibly specific in the words I use because remembrance means 35 different things to the scholars in my field. Same goes for memory, repetition, performance, etc. I have to take the time to say more than what might be necessary in some circles in order to not be perceived as misrepresenting the people I cite or the theories I believe in.

Much of this semester, I have tried to wave the banner of readability and be an advocate for prose that engages the reader. I have recited the journalistic dictum, "You are writing for an educated and curious reader who has no idea what you're talking about" as a model to which one might subscribe. But that model applies well to criticism, especially of the journalistic stripe, and not so well to other forms of academic writing.

I spent much of the day fuming about this problem inclusive and exclusive writing because it is so easy to attack exclusive practices as elitist that their value has become obscured. At the end of the day, not everything is for everyone. Some writing is for 35 peers and colleagues who are going to take issue with the ideas it contains and use those as grist to teaching seminars of 10 - 15 graduate students. Subsequently, those 350-525 graduates are going to go into their profession talking about these ideas and their audiences, students, and peers are going to form opinions about them. Gradually, the idea will move through the culture, growing and diminishing in importance as it does. All too rarely, a truly gifted scholar (a Louis Menand or Lewis Hyde or Lawrence Weschler, for instance) will figure out how to communicate directly with a larger community.

Communicate - which is to say, figure out how to make subjects relevant to that larger community so they will engage in discussion. Honestly, when is the art world going to be okay with the fact that there are differences among our interests and that not everything  is okay with everybody? Somethings may never be relevant to some people (I am struggling to figure out why Marina Abramovic, whose exhibit at MoMA started the Johnson/Tremblings argument, matters in the first place).

So what we have in academic writing (aside from the obvious allusion to Cool Hand Luke) is an opportunity to define and address one's audience, to think about community in narrower terms than the art world usually does (a dear friend of mine laments the way the artists always say 'community' when 'industry' is more appropriate) and to speak to the people who need to understand what you're doing because they're invested in the same conversation. Academic writing is not intended for everyone, but when it's done, its ideas can be examined, evaluated, disseminated, or critiqued. It is - in the most real sense - writing for a community because communities have boundaries, shared interests that place them in genuine opposition to other communities' interests. Such writing requires precision, insight, depth, and conviction.

Readability can be helpful, too. But there's a time and place for it.