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Wednesday, July 19, 2006
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Bad Writing Robert KC Johnson is convinced of the innocence of all the Duke players; UD is not. But UD agrees with Johnson's post today over at Cliopatria that the self-righteous and politically muddled rush to condemn the players by Houston Baker (who has left Duke in a huff) and the faculty signers of an open letter to Duke's president is a sorry thing indeed. Johnson quotes from one signer's description of his scholarship: "[U]nless we attempt to read racialized trauma according to a more Freudian, Lacanian understanding for subjectivity we will continue to misunderstand why racial stigma persists and, more generally, why the laws humans create to protect against forms of discrimination leave in place a notion of the racialized subject as emptied of interiority and the psychical." Stanley Fish may not like the essay, but the great merit of Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" is the point it makes about the connection between the inability to write and the inability to think straight -- and the way that inability degrades your political reasoning. Among the categories of bad writing Orwell features, the one above falls into vagueness-to-the-point-of-vacuity. Note that even innocuous words - "for," "as" - in this sentence become sowers of confusion. Note how redundant the sentence is, with variations of "racial" used three times, and "subject" two. Note how various pairings deepen the confusion: "Freudian, Lacanian," "interiority and the psychical." And note, finally, the simple errors: The writer first talks about the large subject of how we understand racial stigma, and then describes a consideration of discrimination laws as more general, when he means more specific. |