Do we choose what to read?

In my last post I wrote: "usually people choose to read what they read ...".  But is this true for academic literature?

Students only get limited choices in their reading -- choice increases the further one progresses but doctoral candidates still get reading lists imposed by supervisors.  And then professional academics -- do they get much choice?  Not really; researchers always have to stay 'up to date' in their areas of expertise, which makes any notable publications in these areas required reading.  The only choice anyone has is in areas of general interest where one can pick and choose and needn't read everything -- which is exactly the sort of reading that many students and academics seem hard pressed to find time for.

All of which means that academic writers are writing for a largely captive audience.  And this makes the moral importance of writing well is even more pressing.

Incidentally, as neither an academic nor a student I get to read whatever I like!

Clarity in philosophical writing

While clarity is certainly a virtue in philosophical writing, all else being equal, I think there's a distinction to be made between writing clearly and writing well.  One can write clearly and still fail to write well.  Many philosophers manage to be perfectly clear but are stylistically drab, dull and ponderous.  Other philosophers may fail to be particularly clear but instead write enthrallingly.

The best writers can be clear and engaging at the same time.  There's a beauty and an elegance in really good writing that neither adopts the blunt, clunking, mechanical tone of a phone-book nor gives in to self-indulgent, quasi-poetic flights of fancy.  Neither extreme makes for good communication, which is what really counts.

As a rule of thumb I feel that a piece of writing is well written to the extent that it is rewarding to read -- consequently a lot of it depends on the quality of the ideas.  I've read many things that were perfectly clear but bored me to tears and, worse, lacked any redeemingly insightful content.  Equally, I've read things that I didn't immediately understand at all but which gripped me enough to make me do the hard work to come to understand them.

The very worst kind of writing is the sort that wantonly wastes its readers' time, mindlessly pummelling them with ugly, unnecessary, vacuous verbiage.  I find writing of this kind to be disrespectful and arrogant -- writing to be read is a privilege, not something to which anyone is entitled.  No one should have to wade through stodgy, artless, unedited word-stew just because the author can't write properly.

If your book takes 10 hours to read and 1000 people read it that's 10,000 hours of human existence -- of living, breathing human life -- that your writing has consumed.  Yes, usually people choose to read what they read but this is not always the case.  Regardless, I think it's the responsibility of the writer to make those 10,000 hours as rewarding and useful as possible -- and clarity is but one factor in that equation.

Fearing communication for the sake of communism

Levi Bryant writes:

For years I’ve been hearing off and on that there’s a school of thought that argues that the rhetoric of texts should be enigmatic and elusive so as to interrupt the logic of exchange characteristic of communicative capitalism.

I'm not sure who would actually argue this but it’s exactly the kind of thing ‘lost down the rabbit hole’ / ‘disappeared up their own arse’ academics come out with but I’m unfamiliar with any specific instance of the argument. (I’ve heard the one about how stating definite opinions or facts is committing ‘violence against the other’ but this seems to be another variant.) It’s rather a mad prescription. Capitalism isn’t ‘exchange’ itself, it’s a particular form of exchange. While it’s ‘capitalist’ to think of one’s communicative utterances as products to be distributed or conveyed like Amazon packages that neutrally ‘transmit’ a message, severing the social relationship between interlocutors, it’s not ‘capitalist’ to think in terms of exchange in general.

The essence of a capitalist exchange is that it abstracts from all other kinds of social relation besides the narrowly economic and legal ones. If you sell me bread today you’re under no obligation to sell me it at the same price tomorrow, only to ensure that the product you provide is as advertised and that I get what I pay for. Once the transaction is concluded to the satisfaction of economic and legal standards our relationship ends and any further transaction must (in principle) be negotiated as a new contract. This can be contrasted with other kinds of trade and exchange like, for example, gift giving where you give me a loaf of bread and, since we are bonded by this exchange, you can later ask for one of my chickens, or whatever.

Exchange can sever or bond, can be capitalist or communist (or anything else). Capitalism doesn’t own ‘exchange’ any more than it invented trade. Nor should it own clarity, honesty or straight-forward communication. Yes, you can’t have différence without différance and translation without transformation, blah blah blah. But whether or not one should write declaratively or suggestively has nothing in particular to do with capitalist ‘exchange’, even if that is the dominant mode of exchange in our societies.

Good writing can be beautiful in its elegance and simplicity or mesmerising in its depth and polyvalence. The best writing combines these virtues in varying proportions. There are some philosophers who are also good writers but they are few and far between. Most of the obscurantists remain stuck in a single mode that transcends any given situation and is fetishised, reified into being ‘what philosophy is’. It becomes an end in itself — and it’s not.

Rejecting communication qua exchange for fear of capitalist forms of exchange is cowardice. It may involve the discourse of the master but he’s a cowardly master, unwilling to take the much more radical and difficult step of engaging in a better form of communicative exchange, one that binds and builds and nourishes and flourishes according to its own economies and ecologies. The cowardly master renders undo Capital what does not belong to it. It’s the cowardly master that reinforces discourses of capital, precisely by granting it aspects of human existence that it dominates but cannot possess. The cowardly master concedes capital’s hegemony over everything that actually makes human life function, everything that actually keeps our bodies moving and breathing — everything except the nebulously intangible, the mystical, the religious, the ideal.

On 'On Writing Well'

Stephen Walt comments on the generally terrible quality of academic writing:

... the poor quality of academic writing is both aesthetically offensive and highly inefficient. Academics should strive to write clearly for the obvious reason that it will allow many others to learn more quickly. Think of it this way: If I spend 20 extra hours editing, re-writing, and polishing a piece of research, and if that extra effort enables 500 people to spend a half-hour less apiece figuring out what I am saying, then I have saved humankind a net 230 hours of effort.
... many academics (and especially younger ones) tend to confuse incomprehensibility with profundity. If they write long and ponderous sentences and throw in lots of jargon, they assume that readers will be dazzled by their erudition and more likely to accept whatever it is they are saying uncritically.

And he quotes Strunk and White:

"Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell."

I agree with most of this but I think it needs to be said that there's more to 'good writing' than clarity and parsimony. Academic writing should also be interesting and engaging. Clunky, plodding, dull, dry, unimaginative, artless prose can be just as hard to wade through as the meandering, pleonastic, self-important, jargon-stuffed kind. A telephone directory is clear and to-the-point but it isn't good writing.

Making a point in 100 words rather than 500 is certainly to be preferred, all else being equal -- but all else is not equal. It doesn't hurt to explain complex points in a few different ways. Nor are poetic devices or rhetorical or polemical flourishes in the least bit out of place in academic writing so long as they are used to emphasise, complement or punctuate the substance of the argument, rather than replacing or obscuring it.

For good writers clarity, parsimony, compellingness and elegance are not only uncontradictory -- they are concordant.

So, while I completely agree that academic writers should try to avoid wasting their readers' time they should also try to avoid boring their readers to death, if possible.